The Pottstown Mercury Newspaper – where I served as cub reporter during the Bicentennial Year – will have a reunion as one of my mentors and great news reporters has scheduled a meeting this weekend.

Michael Sangiacomo, who worked the last 30 odd years at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is returning to his native home in Norristown, PA, and has invited fellow Mercury staffers who were present when the Montgomery County paper won its first and second Pulitzer Prizes. It’s the only small newspaper in the United States that has won more than one of journalism’s grandest awards.

“Sang,” as we called the Sangiacomo ace, won numerous state awards and I got some of ‘em when I piggy-backed on some of his police stories and investigations he initially conducted. That includes the hostage-taking incident by prison inmates at Graterford Prison, then the roughest jail in the state. It changed its name to SCI Phoenix and once housed North Philadelphia comedian Bill Cosby.

I enjoyed digging up the news as well as writing feature stories. My most famous one involved Three Miles Island where I roamed the nuclear power facility a week after President Jimmy Carter had put on little booties and walked the hallways where a meltdown was supposed to have taken place. I had covered protests at the Limerick power plant near Pottstown and was assigned to the Harrisburg, PA facility as a “pool reporter” for the Associated Press.

Looking forward to seeing the reporters and editors and recalling how I became a union leader helping to conduct labor negotiations for contracts and how I took a leave of absence to further help the union movement. I got passed over for becoming a copy editor. I couldn’t spell a lick but was mad because it was the only way to get a pay increase. I began working for The Newspaper Guild and helped to secure a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election at the nearby Reading, PA newspapers and lost.

A new publisher refused to take me back as a reporter and I decided to become a differed type of investigator. I went to law school and worked 20 years as a Philadelphia public defender. Can’t wait to hear the adventures of my fellow newsmen and women.

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Below is a story I wrote some 10 years ago about Sangiacomo and when

I was hired for my first job after leaving college and Vietnam behind me: