Bloomberg staffer still over there
By Randall Hackley ('74)

Randall Hackley

I graduated from the University of Colorado in three years, having taken what would have been my junior year and traveled for 11 months, backpacking through South America – jungles, mountains, Inca trails, Amazon tributaries, the Galapagos – as well as the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico.

My goal was to save my father a year of out-of-state tuition (I'm a native Californian), learn Spanish (mission accomplished) and see a new world. I've traveled to more than 75 countries, and that trip remains my most singularly memorable experience.

I came back to Boulder, then, after my grand adventure and a few bouts of diarrhea and a nasty mite problem I picked up in the Yucatan, I graduated with my class. I started at CU the summer of 1970, fresh out of high school and playing tennis with the dean of admissions, who had courted me as a possible varsity tennis team member.

I went to work for a newspaper in Muncie, Ind., that was owned by former Vice President Dan Quayle's father. I was a police and court reporter for a little over a year, a great job for the paltry salary of $7,000 a year. But I saved on it, quit the job, traveled to Europe, the Mideast and North Africa for six months or so, and added to my life experiences.

I returned to the States and got a reporting job with the Vero Beach, Fla., Press-Journal (a bonus because that's where the L.A. Dodgers baseball team held its spring training, and I'm a big baseball fan), which I parlayed about a year later into a trip to Peru for a story on Cuban exiles jailed there in my first story with the AP from my new home in Miami.

I'd had a dream to be a foreign correspondent, matching my desire to write and report on unusual things with making a living somewhere interesting. From Miami, I covered national stories for AP on deer hunts in the Everglades; drug smuggling from Jamaica; the killing frenzy then going on in south Florida, mainly among drug dealers; Haitians washing up on south Florida beaches. All in all, pretty heady times for a young reporter.

I became a correspondent for the AP in Texas, going into Mexico for stories, a great job. I got a bit ahead of myself and joined a growing newspaper in California, The Orange County Register, which promised to have me covering news in Mexico and working on big-project stories. I did do stories on the L.A. Olympics there, met with DEA agents undercover in Arizona and had stories on abuses in Mexico near the U.S. border.

Still, I rejoined the AP in New York after a year in California and within a year or so was posted, at my request, in Buenos Aires shortly after Argentina's "dirty war" ended. I was a new husband with two infant children, again a bit heady for me, but lots of fun and very interesting, including reporting on two military coup attempts from there.

However, my marriage was breaking up. I returned to New York with AP and remained there for about 14 years to be near my children, helping coach them in baseball, softball and basketball, and quelled my travel ambitions to happily be a parent. I remarried, acquired a stepdaughter, and finally took the dot-com plunge, leaving AP to be a senior editor at SmartMoney.com.

After two years, the position basically was axed, so I phoned the U.S. State Department through a contact, having heard of visiting scholar programs for journalists. I landed a job teaching journalism at A.I. Cuza University in Romania and to my delight thoroughly enjoyed the semester-long teaching of seniors and grad students.

I also was sent to Amman, Jordan, to teach Palestinian students Western-style news reporting, but that was a briefer assignment, very interesting nonetheless, including being picked up by blacked-out armored cars from my hotel and driven through roadblocks to the U.S. Embassy to teach, more or less, Journalism 101.

One school break in Romania, I traveled by bus to Zurich for a holiday, was so impressed by the city and quality of life that when I saw Bloomberg News advertising a finance editing position on European banks and insurers, I applied and since September 2002 this is where I live, work and have been based. I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach journalism in Eastern Europe, a wonderful honor. But, after much, much consideration, I turned it down in 2002 to join Bloomberg News. I had three kids about to go into college, one after another after another, including my son who's now in Colorado, at Fort Lewis College, so I had to be practical and opt for a good-paying job in a fine locale over a fellowship I had hankered for (for four years.)

Since that time two of my children have studied here, one graduated from the Zurich International School, my oldest studied German here for almost a year, my wife (who's still with AP) moved here. And it remains a great place to live and work.

How long I remain here is an unknown. I've never lived in a place that fits my overall desires so well: I love to hike, something I fine-tuned in my Colorado days; I love to swim; Lake Zurich is clean and wonderful to swim in after work in the summers, especially at sunset. I love to ski (thank you Colorado), and the food is fine. Learning a third language, German, is a kick, too, and the lack of pollution and traffic is profoundly different than my N.Y. and L.A. days. The fact, too, that I have a nice apartment in Zurich's Old Town and an eight-minute walk across a river to my office is, um, great.