In the spring of 1976, nearly broke, struggling with a novel and having exhausted the patience of everyone around me, I wrote a letter begging for some kind of job to every publisher listed in the Boston Yellow Pages. I had a physics degree from M.I.T., but I didn’t want to be a physicist anymore; I had decided I was a writer.

I wound up landing a part-time job at a small monthly magazine called Sky & Telescope, a venerable bible of astronomers and amateur telescope makers, as an assistant typesetter, for $6 an hour. On my first day, as I was entering, the magazine’s founder, Charles Federer, Jr., met me on the sidewalk and warned me not to tell my new colleagues how much I was making. The company would never give me such an exorbitant salary on a full-time basis, he said.

This was true; when I was hired full-time six months later, I had to take a cut in hourly pay. I learned that my co-workers had been calling me the six-dollar-an-hour man behind my back.

That was my first job in journalism. Four years later I left for a job in New York, with tears in my eyes.