The man your mother told you to avoid

After turning down a full-ride scholarship to the University of San Francisco, Dan Walters, columnist at the Sacramento Bee, decided to drop out of high school.

"I'm the person your mother told you never to associate with," Walters said. 

Walters, who now writes about Sacramento politics, was a National Merit Scholarship winner and would have graduated fourth in his senior class at his high school in Eureka. Instead, Walters bypassed his final required class and continued on as copy boy at the local paper.

"The powerful truth is that the one class I didn't pass to reach my diploma, was civics," Walters said. "Ironic because this is basically what I write about now. I've written books about it. I've taught it in college classes. Just haven't passed the high school class."

As a teenager, Walters was an emancipated minor, going to school and working as a copy boy at the paper six nights a week.

"Frankly, I was just having too much fun," he said. "Working at the paper, online poker games, girl friends - they all led to another and high school just lost its allure."

Walters has now been in the journalism field for 35 years and has written approximately 7,500 columns, every one of which he said he thinks is perfect.

"I try to write like I'm telling a story. I like to be conversational and straight forward. Sometimes with an ironic twist and play on words," he said.

Walters originally began writing columns because he didn't like being stuck in the story form of regular news writing.

"I didn't like having to try to get people to say what you want them to say and the burden of quoting," he said. "I just wanted to be able to say, 'This is the way it is - period. Take my word for it.'"

Walters' writing career began in Lancaster, Calif. at Antelope Valley High School. Because Walters changed high schools frequently he entered Antelope Valley half way through the year.

"I was interested in photography but the school only had a position on the paper as a writer - so I took the position and really liked it," Walters said. "The next year I became the editor and the rest is history - I never really did anything else."

Before working in Sacramento politics, Walters was the main editor at three separate newspapers: the Hanford Sentinel from 1966-69, the Chronicle Oregon Herald from 1969-71 and a Eureka publication from 1971-73. Walters said all newspapers were small but still built up a lot of his experience.

"It was an odd career," he said. "Being editor of three different newspapers before I was 30."

In '73 Walters began working at Stockton's edition of the union, while "moonlighting" as an adviser to the University of Pacific in Stockton.

"The truth is, I had a couple of kids and I needed the extra money for the teaching, but I still enjoyed it," Walters said. "It definitely wasn't a chore to me."

Eventually, Stockton's edition of the union shut down and Walters moved to Sacramento. From there he applied for the opening at the capital bureau and was accepted.

"Since then I've been in the same building on four different floors," he said.

Although Walters now has his niche in Sacramento politics he said he is in no way a "political junkie."

"A lot of people in my business are political junkies - I'm not. I don't particularly care about politics in terms of campaigns and conventions," Walter said. "I find it to be mostly boring and irrelevant. I write about it, sure, it's what I do, but what I'm really interested in is the interaction of government and society."