A special 'thank you' to a true difference-maker
Apr. 3—The list has long existed in my head. A bucket list, in the strictest sense, but really, it's just a few things I'm hoping to someday accomplish.
An Alaskan cruise. A trip to Italy. Attend the Masters. Rediscovering the waistline of my youth.
But there has long been another item on this list, more important than all the rest, something I've been wanting to address for the majority of my adult life.
This decades-long wish led me Saturday to Sandia High School, where finally this particular emotional journey was completed:
Thank you.
This was, in essence, the sentiment I've been wishing to express to Ruth Dickson for as long as I can remember. Since my 20s.
My eventual mentor, Phill Casaus — a man whom I admire to no end — is the person who hooked me up with a job in the Albuquerque Journal newsroom as a 17-year-old brought in to answer high school basketball calls on Friday and Saturday nights. But my decision to study journalism in college traces directly back to Ruth. She was my senior English teacher at Cibola.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to her.
Many of us, I suppose, know someone like Ruth Dickson, an influential teacher or professor who took a personal interest in a student and impacted their life in ways neither could have imagined at the time.
She certainly had the most profound impact on mine.
Periodically through the years, I've had this desire to find her and thank her, and it's shameful that it took me this long.
But a few weeks ago, Sandia athletics announced its 2023 Hall of Fame inductees. One of them was Ruth Roberts (her married name), who coached the Matadors to four state gymnastics titles in the 1980s. She was a gymnastics coach at Cibola, too, when I was a student there.
The search for her, I quickly realized, had ended.
Which leads me to last Saturday, when Sandia inducted its Hall of Fame class.
What I had wanted to say to her, was to let her know that she was the person wholly responsible for my career as a journalist. There was a compelling need to share this with her.
Oddly enough, it was a brief conversation, just a few minutes one day after one of her classes, that steered me in this direction. She told me I should consider adding Cibola's journalism class to my curriculum. It wasn't on my radar, not even a little. But I reflected on what she said, and decided to give the journalism class a try. I was hooked. This was probably September of 1983. I was 16 then. I'm 56 now.
But I've always remembered the ultimate weight of that talk. Without that conversation, without her taking me aside, who knows where this life might have led me.
That in mind, when I saw her walk into the gym at Sandia on Saturday afternoon, there were serious nerves. She didn't know I'd be there. I'd wanted this to be a surprise visit.
I approached her. I said, "I don't know if you remember me ... "
"James Yodice," she said. She remembered. She smiled. We shared a long hug.
My voice was shaking, and I fought off tears, as at last I was able to look Ruth in the eye and tell her what she'd meant to me, to my professional life.
It was a moment I'll always cherish. We agreed to have lunch one day soon to catch up some more. I very much look forward to that.
But she deserves this moment here, in this space, and I'm thrilled to provide her this tribute.
Because all of these words today, all the words that have come before today, all the words that will follow after today, circle back to one morning, one woman, one special teacher, and one life-changing piece of advice. That chat is my origin story as a journalist. It's a career that has been fulfilling and rewarding and has hardly ever felt like work. So I acknowledge her today with immense appreciation.
And so to Ruth Dickson, I say this, the most meaningful and heartfelt words I can think to write:
You made a difference.
