Brian Boyé began his journalism career in 1990 at the Park Labrea News.
(photo by Robert Pendilla)

When you’re just getting started, you imagine the future as a straight road. One thing leads logically to the next. With each opportunity, you have the chance to move into something new and eventually, assuming you make the right turns, you arrive.

That’s how I pictured it when I moved from Texas to L.A. in 1990, and into my first grown-up apartment here in Park Labrea. I was 22, one month out of journalism school, and had just landed my first job as editor of Park Labrea News. At that age, “qualified” is often less a condition than a feeling, and I felt very qualified.

Michael and Karen Villalpando seemed willing to share my confidence. They had just left the corporate newspaper world to invest their enthusiasm and energy into this weekly, and to take a chance on me.

I’ve never asked if they also felt like they were learning to fly the plane midair. Somehow, though, it stayed aloft, and every week we put out a newspaper. We worked long hours. We were scrappy and ambitious. We solved problems, made a few new ones and became a family.

Less than a decade later, my career took me from L.A. to Manhattan, where I lived my dream of being a magazine editor for the next 20 years, before transitioning to consulting for luxury brands at Nike Communications. On a resume, the path looks orderly: one role followed by another, one title replacing the one before it. Resumes are good at making careers appear more intentional than they feel when you’re living them.

But the farther I traveled, the road kept leading me back to the people and places where I started.

I was working at this newspaper with Michael and Karen when their daughters were born in the early ‘90s. A few decades later, their eldest, Emily, became my intern at Men’s Health. The infant whose arrival I wrote about was now a young woman beginning her own career. More recently, I learned Karen and the founder of Nike Communications, now living in Los Angeles, had become friendly, another road I didn’t expect to lead back to where I began.

For so many years, my connection to Michael and Karen has continued to surface in ways I never would have predicted.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked with college students and young professionals hoping to break into journalism or communications. They ask which skill they should master or what they can do to move ahead. I offer practical advice, but my headline for them is something I didn’t yet know at their age: the people matter most.

Do good work. Be curious. Stay in touch. The person who gives you your first chance or the colleague working beside you aren’t just people you pass when traveling somewhere more important. They are the journey.

Route 66 lives in our imagination not because of where it led, but because of what it connected. For 80 years, these newspapers have done just that, connecting people to one another. For nearly 40 of those years, Michael and Karen have continued the original mission, bringing together neighbors, businesses, civic leaders and generations of readers.

I left the Park Labrea News and Beverly Press decades ago, but it’s never just been something in my past. The people I met and the lessons I learned here have helped me navigate the life that followed.

Congratulations to everyone on 80 years of keeping the community spirit alive. And thanks, Michael and Karen.

Brian Boyé is Vice President, Nike Communications and serves on the board of directors of the Northwest Connecticut Arts Council and Search & Care. Previously, he was executive fashion director at Men’s Health. He began his career at the Park Labrea News and Beverly Press. He resides in Washington, Connecticut and New York City.