Mature Life Features

(A tickle and treasure by National Editor Don Wall in the February 2013 issue of FYI — “Forever Young Information, Canada’s Adult Lifestyle Publication,” online at http://www.foreveryoungnews.com)

     It’s a familiar byline to longtime readers of FYI, and recently came word that veteran travel writer Cecil Scaglione has earned a citation in the San Diego Press Club’s 39th annual Excellence in Journalism Awards, for the second year in a row.

     Scaglione may run an editorial service out of San Diego these days, while we are here in snowy Ontario, but this colleague and I share a special link. Some time back in the mid-1990s, soon after FYI entered into a deal with him to use his writing services, we realized we were both raised in the same town, North Bay, Ont.

     Have you ever noticed how home towns seem to become more important to you, the further in time it is since you lived there? Coming from the same small town can link spirits together, and this was the case even though we determined that Scaglione never lived there when I did; he was born in the 1930s and left town to work down south (that’s Toronto!) for the Telegram in 1955, while I was born three years after that. (This means, as the North Bay joke goes, we never went to separate schools together.) So there has been a regular, soulwarming swapping of stories as we share our love for the beautiful city on the shores of Lake Nipissing.

     As for his career, after the Telegram, Scaglione moved on to the Windsor Star, the Detroit News and the San Diego Union. He started his editorial service in 1991. The feature that earned Scaglione his travel-writing award this year ran in FYI in April and was titled Chartwell: Churchill at Home. His award-winning travel piece from last year, called The Naples Nobody Knows, saw my friend visiting the hometown of his Italian ancestors. Both stories are posted on our website at foreveryoungnews.com.

     Cecil, keep up the good work. – Don Wall