In the wee hours of June 17, 1972, while staggering home from an all-night party, I passed by the Watergate complex in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington, D.C. The massive hotel/office/apartment development was just a few blocks away from the home I shared that summer with a half-dozen classmates from George Washington University, where I was majoring in history and minoring in debauchery.

As I walked down Virginia Avenue, past the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, I glanced across the street and noticed a group of men in business suits being escorted into a car by what appeared to be three street bums. It struck me as a little strange, but since I was shit-faced at the time, I didn’t pay much attention.

Until, that is, the following day, when I read on the front page of The Washington Post that, as I was stumbling home that Saturday morning, undercover cops were arresting five well-dressed burglars for breaking into the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. I put two and two together and realized I had witnessed the burglars being taken away in an unmarked police car.

It was much later, of course, that Watergate turned into the biggest political scandal in U.S. history, one that forced Richard Nixon to become the first president to resign from office in 1974. Watergate also made heroes of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the young Washington Post reporters whose stories exposed a massive cover-up of the scandal and, more to the point of this mini-memoir, inspired me to become a journalist.

One of my early editors told me that being a journalist was the “the most fun you can have with your pants on.’’ I heartily agree. For almost four decades, I got paid to pry into the lives of the famous, infamous and obscure, getting a first-class education that no Ivy League school could match. I wrote about politicians, musicians, scientists, movie stars, comedians, inventors, athletes and tycoons, as well as con men, killers, pimps and refugees. I met presidents, Oscar winners, heavyweight champs and Nobel laureates, along with pro wrestlers, pool hustlers and Playboy playmates. My stories put a crooked politician in jail, freed a wrongly convicted prisoner and led to the suicide of a swindler who fleeced dozens of budding entrepreneurs. I covered city council meetings, congressional hearings, murder trials, the Olympics, the Oscars and a golf tournament played in a cow pasture.

I reported from England, Germany, Spain, Greece, Cuba, Canada, South Korea, Australia and more than two dozen U.S. states. In New Orleans, I woke up New Year’s morning in a mud-wrestling pit on Bourbon Street with a vicious hangover and no memory of how I got there. In Australia, I almost drowned off Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach. I left a colleague’s hotel room moments before a bullet crashed through his window and missed his head by inches. I was a reporter, editor, columnist and critic, and my beats included politics, crime, sports and entertainment. But I always preferred to just call myself a journalist.

And it all started with Watergate.

I was entering my junior year at George Washington University as the scandal unfolded and I followed it closely in the pages of The Washington Post. My school was located just a few blocks from the White House, so it seemed that history was truly unfolding right before my eyes. My dream of becoming a college basketball star had been shattered by injuries and drugs, leaving me directionless and dispirited. Then suddenly, because of Watergate, I got the journalism bug.

I took some journalism courses that year, enjoyed them and learned that I was pretty good at this reporting and writing thing. I then lucked into a 1973 summer internship with the Washington bureau of The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper, where I would spend most of my time covering the state’s congressional delegation. My boss was Lee Bandy, a genial preacher’s son with a syrupy Southern drawl and a no-nonsense approach to journalism. He told me to get my facts straight, be fair to all sides, and write clearly and concisely. Pretty good career advice, as it turned out.

In addition to writing about dreary farm bills and South Carolina’s byzantine politics, I got to cover the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings that exposed crucial details about Nixon’s cover-up. I was in the hearing room when former White House counsel John Dean recalled telling Nixon there was a “cancer growing on the presidency’’ and I was sitting about 20 feet away from Alexander Butterfield when the ex-White House aide revealed the existence of Nixon’s secret taping system, a bombshell disclosure that led directly to the president’s downfall. Mostly, though, I wrote about the Southerners who were prominent figures at the hearings, including folksy committee chairman Sam Ervin of North Carolina, vice chairman Howard Baker of Tennessee and chief minority counsel Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who went on to become an actor and U.S. Senator.

My favorite memory from that summer is running into Hunter S. Thompson one day outside the hearing room. Thompson was one of my writing heroes at the time, celebrated for his “gonzo’’ style of journalism that blurred the lines between fact and fiction. In books such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’’ and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,’’ Thompson wrote highly personal, extremely opinionated accounts of contemporary events and issues that focused as much on his excessive drinking and drug ingestion as the subjects he was writing about. When we met, I asked Thompson about his view of journalism and he responded with a quote from the movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.’’ “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’’ he said.

That summer I also covered South Carolina’s most prominent political figures, including the renowned racist Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform. Thurmond was 70 years old when I met him – he lived to be 100 – but appeared much younger because he was a fitness freak who still worked out every day in his Senate office. He once challenged me to a pushup contest (I lost) and proudly displayed his weight-lifting prowess with barbells that he kept on his desk. Thurmond softened his racial views later in life and, in a fitting twist, shortly after he died it was revealed that he had fathered an illegitimate daughter with a black teenager in 1925. In the annals of political hypocrisy, Thurmond has to be one of the all-time champs.

One last Watergate connection: During my freshman year at GW, I lived in the same dormitory as Roger Stone, who did dirty tricks for Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972 and went on to become a sleazy political operative for a host of conservative candidates and causes. Stone shared a dorm room with one of my friends and had posters of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan on his wall at a time when Che Guevara T-shirts were all the rage with college students. His roommate and I once pulled a prank on Stone that infuriated him. While Stone was sleeping one night, my friend snuck into bed with him. I then turned on the lights and took a photo of them lying together with their arms around each other. We made a blowup of the picture and posted it in the lobby of the dorm, but Stone complained and we were forced to take it down.

After graduating from college in 1974, I took a reporting job with a weekly newspaper called The Record in Havre de Grace, Maryland, about 40 miles northeast of Baltimore. Located at the intersection of the Chesapeake Bay and Susquehanna River, it was a small, decaying town that had once been a popular stop for travelers along the Northeast Corridor. They included gamblers and gangsters like Al Capone, who frequented the local horse track where Man o’ War, War Admiral and Seabiscuit raced. By the time I arrived, the place was so rundown that it was big news when a McDonald’s opened.

The newspaper was run by Peter and Irna Jay, a married couple who used to work at The Washington Post. Peter, a descendant of Founding Father John Jay, grew up in the area and had recently returned after buying the paper and becoming a columnist for The Baltimore Sun. Irna, who had been one of Bernstein’s editors at the Post, ran The Record’s newsroom with an iron fist. She was a painstaking editor who wouldn’t tolerate sloppy reporting, imprecise writing or missing a deadline. I was such a poor typist back then that I used to write out my stories in longhand before tapping them out on the keyboard. One day Irna caught me hand writing a story and issued a stern warning. “This is a typewriter,’’ she said, pointing to the Royal model on my desk. “Learn to use it by tomorrow or find yourself another job.’’

We had a very small staff, so everyone was a jack-of-all-trades. That meant reporters took their own pictures for news stories. Late one night I was called to the scene of a house fire, where I blindly snapped photos of the scene. When I returned to the office, I handed the film to our photo editor, who headed straight for the darkroom to develop the pictures. He soon delivered some bad news: all the photos were pitch dark. Puzzled, I picked up the camera to check the light settings and discovered that I had failed to remove the lens cap while blindly aiming the camera at the fire. Needless to say, it was the last time I ever used a lens cap.

My beat was local government, which required sitting through lengthy, tedious city and county council meetings. One of them stands out, however, and not because of any issues that were discussed or legislation that was passed. I was a compulsive gambler then and a huge Muhammad Ali fan, so naturally I bet on Ali’s heavyweight title fight against undefeated champion George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) on Oct. 29, 1974. (That was a Tuesday night in Havre de Grace, though the fight actually started at 4 a.m. Wednesday in Zaire because the promoters wanted to accommodate closed-circuit TV viewers on the East Coast.)

Foreman was 25 and in his fearsome prime, while Ali was 32 and considered over the hill, so oddsmakers made Foreman a 3-1 favorite. However, my bookie was so confident that Foreman would win that he gave me 8-1 odds on my $1,000 bet, which was basically my life savings. The only problem was that the fight was scheduled to start at 10 p.m. in Havre de Grace, when I would be covering one of those endless county council meetings. Fortunately, I had become friendly with the council president, a local physical therapist named Habern Freeman. He promised me he would check a portable radio for the results and signal me as soon as he got the news. About halfway through the meeting, I glanced up from my notebook and saw Freeman clasp his hands together over his head in a victory gesture. It was then that I knew Ali had won and I was $8,000 richer.

A month later, our sports editor, Bob Raissman, invited me to join him at a concert in Trenton, New Jersey. Bob, who later became a columnist for the New York Daily News, was a music buff who was always telling me about up-and-coming performers. Lately he had been raving about a Jersey guy named Bruce Springsteen, who had recently come out with his second album, “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.’’ I listened to the album and liked it, so I decided to attend the Nov. 29 concert at the War Memorial Theatre in Trenton.

Bruce was skinny and scruffy in those days, but was already a major talent. Two things stand out from that night. One, it was the first time I heard “Jungleland,’’ his soaring, operatic version of “West Side Story.’’ It became one of my favorite Springsteen songs, though it wasn’t actually released until the following year on the “Born to Run’’ album. The other thing I clearly remember was that Bruce was a perfectionist. At one point in the concert, he became upset by a strange sound coming from the audience. He stopped playing and let the audience know in no uncertain terms that he was pissed off. “I’m not here to jerk myself off,’’ he snapped. I knew right then that Bruce was something special.

I quickly got bored with small-town life and moved back to Washington, where I struggled to make a living as a freelance writer. To make ends meet, I moonlighted as a taxi driver on the overnight shift. The dispatcher once called me in the middle of the night and asked me to drive to a downtown police station to claim one of the company’s taxis that that had been stolen hours earlier. When I arrived at the station, which was in a poor, high-crime neighborhood, I saw an attractive middle-aged blonde in a white fur coat talking to one of the cops. She looked severely out of place. It turned out she had left her purse in a cab a few hours earlier and the driver had found it and brought it to the station. The purse contained her driver’s license and a receipt from her hotel, which helped the police find her. But it also contained something else.

When the elderly black cabdriver opened the purse, he found $10,000 in cash and jewelry worth a lot more than that. I learned that the woman in the fur coat was the wife of an automobile executive and lived in a posh suburb of Detroit. When the cabdriver handed the purse to her, she thanked him profusely and offered him a job as her husband’s chauffeur. With tears in his years, the cabbie said he couldn’t move to Michigan because his ailing wife had to stay in Washington. The rich lady then offered him $500 in cash as a reward, but he refused to take it. I still can’t believe it.

Realizing that I wasn’t going to make it as a freelance writer, I started looking for another newspaper job. I found one in 1976 at The Greenville News, a mid-sized daily in the northwest corner of South Carolina, where I was hired as a general assignment reporter. Having never lived south of Washington, I had to adjust to life in Dixie. I had a hard time deciphering Southern drawls, eating pork from a roasted pig with its head still attached and figuring out the meaning of country expressions like “his heart is a thumping gizzard.’’ (It means cold-hearted.)

My city editor was a good old boy from Knoxville, Tennessee, named John Pittman. John, who had grown up with Dolly Parton, was a rotund, hard-driving newsman who often got on my case for being a slow writer. Once, when I was writing perilously close to deadline, he wheeled around in his chair and barked at me in his Tennessee twang, “Warner, whadaya think yur doin’, workin’ on a seed catalog?’’

Our managing editor was a drunk. During my job interview he took me out to lunch, where he downed the better part of a Jack Daniel’s bottle. Toward the end of the meal, he groggily leaned back in his chair and did a backflip that landed him on the floor. He immediately rose to his feet, acted like nothing had happened, sat back down and asked, “So Rick, what are your career goals?’’

In the midst of a bender one night, the same managing editor stormed into the backshop where editors were laying out the paper and ripped it up, delaying the press roll and causing papers to be delivered late that morning. By that time, he had completely forgotten what he had done. So when subscribers called in to complain, he bolted from his office in a huff and yelled out to the newsroom, “Who the hell is responsible for this?’’ An assistant editor then took him aside and quietly explained who the culprit was.

I started out covering the cop beat, where I monitored police scanners, wrote about burglaries and shootings, and occasionally rode in patrol cars. I also called the dispatcher several times a day to see if anything newsworthy was happening. “It’s deader than 3 a.m,’’ I was often told.

I briefly switched to the education beat and then to sports, where I roamed the backroads of the Carolinas covering college football and basketball games. This was during the early days of portable computers, and the one I used weighed a ton and was prone to lose stories if the machine was abruptly moved or otherwise disturbed. One time, when I was sending copy from the football press box at The Citadel, a cannon went off on the military school campus and the resulting vibration wiped out my story. After I dictated it over the phone, I noticed that the computer was almost split in half.

After several years in Greenville, I was hired as a special assignment writer for the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was a better paper, a bigger city and a more challenging job. I mostly did long pieces for the Sunday paper on everything from welfare mothers and coastal development to hospital emergency rooms and white-collar crime. The chief editor was Claude Sitton, a Georgia native who covered the civil rights movement for The New York Times in the late 1950s and early 1960s, The N&O was a progressive paper in a state whose most visible politician was the ultra-conservative Senator Jesse Helms. Helms was always attacking the paper for liberal bias, but Sitton was never intimidated. It was a good lesson about politicians and the press. The more they dislike you, the better job you’re probably doing.

I spent a year in Raleigh before moving to South Florida, where I was hired as a reporter in the Miami Herald’s suburban bureau in Fort Lauderdale. The Herald was a terrific paper with a lot of exceptional reporters and editors, and Miami was a hot news town brimming with bizarre murders, foreign intrigue and political corruption. It’s no surprise then that three Herald reporters from that period – Edna Buchanan, Carl Hiaasen and John Katzenbach – went on to become best-selling crime novelists.

Buchanan was a legendary crime reporter famous for her extensive police contacts, her dogged pursuit of details and her punchy leads, including this one about an ex-con shot to death by a security guard in a fast-food restaurant after punching an order taker who told him that they were out of fried chicken: “Gary Robinson died hungry.’’ I only had one encounter with Edna at the Herald, but it was a memorable one. I was covering a murder in Fort Lauderdale and called Edna, who worked out of the Miami office, for some advice on how to get an uncooperative witness to talk. Her sage response: “When he hangs up on you, wait a minute and call him back. Maybe he’ll change his mind.’’

Unfortunately, my contact with criminals wasn’t limited to my job. I lived in a neighborhood where drug dealers were as common as palm trees, and the temptation proved too great. I snorted cocaine, dropped acid and even shot heroin. I spent days in a haze, showed up late for work and started dressing like a vagrant. One day, I called my boss and quit with no explanation. I never bothered to clean out my desk or pick up my last check. It took me a long time to admit it, but I was a drug addict. (There’s not enough time or space here to chronicle my sordid personal life.)

I drifted around South Florida for a year, doing odd jobs, partying and hanging out at the beach. I finally got clean and decided to move as far away as possible to a place where I could stay out of trouble. That turned out to be Omaha, Nebraska, where I got a job as a reporter and editor in the local Associated Press bureau in 1985. While driving from Florida to Nebraska on New Year’s Eve, I got caught in a blinding snowstorm outside Kansas City, Missouri. I couldn’t see five feet in front of me and my heater was broken, so I got out of my car and walked about a mile in a light windbreaker (I had no warm clothes after all those years in Florida) before spotting a small roadside motel.

I went to the front desk and asked for a room, but the guy at the counter told me the place was full. I told him I was desperate -– my car was stranded, there was no other motel in sight and everything was closed on New Year’s Eve — and begged him to let me sleep in the lobby. But he emphatically said no. As I started to leave, an elderly woman with a cane stormed out of the owner’s office and yelled at the front-desk clerk, “You can’t make him leave. He’ll freeze out there!’’ She let me sleep on a couch in the office that night and brought me breakfast in the morning. If not for the kindness of a stranger, I probably would have frozen to death in my car.

The AP bureau, located in the headquarters of the Omaha World-Herald newspaper, was responsible for covering everything in the state. That included taking daily reports over the phone from the state farm bureau that listed the latest prices for various stockyard animals such as barrows and gilts, terms for certain types of pigs. Being a city boy, I had never heard of barrows and gilts. So, when my story ended up on the AP wire, it read “ barrels and guilts.’’ We got dozens of calls that day complaining about the mistake and demanding that the moron who wrote the story be fired.

One of the biggest stories in the state was the romance between then-Governor Bob Kerrey and actress Debra Winger, who met while she was filming “Terms of Endearment’’ in Lincoln. Ed Howard, our crotchety capital correspondent, almost got into a fight one day while following Winger around trying to get an interview. He said a member of the governor’s security team pushed him away from Winger and threatened to arrest him if he didn’t leave. “I told him I’d rather interview Meryl Streep anyway,’’ Howard said.

One story I covered in Nebraska made national headlines – the murder trial of messianic cult leader Michael Ryan, who was convicted of killing 5-year-old Luke Stice and 26-year-old James Thimm on the cult’s farm in the southeast corner of the state. Over several days, Thimm was beaten, shot, whipped, sodomized with a shovel handle, partially skinned and forced to have sex with a goat. Stice, the son of a cult member, was also sexually abused and died after Ryan slammed him into a bookcase. Ryan was sentenced to death, but kept appealing for decades before dying in prison in 2015.

With his long scraggly beard and wild eyes, Ryan was a beefier, even more violent version of Charles Manson. I was one of a handful of reporters who were in the courtroom every day, so he got to recognize me after a while. He would usually greet me with a menacing stare and stony silence. But one day, out of the blue, he approached me and asked, “Do you believe in Yahweh?’’ — the biblical deity worshipped by the cult. When I refused to answer, Ryan shouted, “You are going to burn in hell!’’

I enjoyed my brief time in Omaha – I once interviewed hometown, stock market whiz Warren Buffett at a local Dairy Queen – but I was itching to move back East to reunite with an old girlfriend. I managed to get transferred to the AP’s sports department in New York, located at the wire service’s headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza. It was 1986, but the sports department was a throwback to the old “Front Page’’ era, when editors smoked fat cigars, wore green eyeshades and kept flasks of whiskey in their desk.

Among the colorful characters in the newsroom were “Fast Eddie’’ Schuyler, a hard-drinking, wisecracking boxing writer with an endless supply of ethnic and racial jokes; pro football writer Dave “Dr. Schmooze’’ Goldberg, a mustachioed nonstop talker whose shirt was perpetually untucked; Marv “The Voice’’ Schneider, a bald deskman whose voice descended several octaves when he was narrating radio reports; and shift supervisor Dick Joyce, a burly Irish-American who mumbled and called everyone “Mersh’’ for reasons never fully explained.

Schuyler and Joyce were drinking buddies, but Eddie tormented Dick all the time. One day Dick got tired of it and decked Eddie in the middle of the newsroom. Dick, who outweighed Eddie by at least 100 pounds, immediately felt guilty and reached down to help his friend up. “That’s the problem with you, Joyce, ‘’ Eddie snarled, “you don’t have the killer instinct.’’

We all worked in a crowded corner of the newsroom under the guidance of Darrell Christian, a forward-looking sports editor whose efforts to break the stodgy rules of wire-service writing pissed off the old-timers and led to screaming matches that could be heard throughout the building. I was playing golf with Darrell one day in 1991 when we heard that Magic Johnson was about to announce that he had the HIV virus and was retiring from basketball. We still had two holes left to play and a $50 bet on the line. Darrell called the office, got an update on the story and decided we should finish the round before heading to work. “Magic’s not going to get cured in the next hour,’’ he explained.

I started out as the AP’s tennis writer, which included coverage of Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and other major tournaments. In 1989, I was sent to cover the Australian Open. Because of flight delays and foul-ups, I didn’t arrive in Melbourne until the day before the tournament started and found myself facing a looming deadline. I raced out to the tournament site and searched for a player to interview, but I had no luck and was about to give up when I spotted John McEnroe walking toward the men’s locker room.

McEnroe was about to turn 30 and past his prime, but he was still a marquee name in tennis. Despite his bad-boy reputation and frequent feuds with the press, he could be loquacious and insightful if you caught him in a good mood. Luckily, this was one of those times. McEnroe talked to me for 45 minutes, expounding on everything from fatherhood to his rival Ivan Lendl. I got a juicy story and have retained a soft spot for Johnny Mac ever since.

After the tournament ended, I visited Sydney with my friend and fellow journalist Peter Bodo. It was an unusually cold February day when we went to Bondi Beach, one of the country’s famous surfing spots. Though the beach was empty and huge waves were swirling offshore, I decided to take a dip anyway. Before I knew it, the swift undercurrents were carrying me far from shore. I started to swim back, but began cramping and swallowing water. I yelled out to Peter, who was reading a book on the beach, and he ran to the nearest lifeguard, who rowed out in a small boat and rescued me just before I was about to go Down Under for good.

I later took over the college football beat, covering the top games, overseeing the AP’s weekly rankings and picking an annual All-American team that was featured on Bob Hope’s NBC Christmas show. Hope’s PR guy invited me to appear on the show one year, but I declined out of stage fright. Instead, he arranged a phone interview so the aging comedian could plug his show. After we exchanged greetings, Hope launched into a barrage of stale jokes that seemed left over from a vaudeville act. When he finally stopped, I asked him about the Christmas show. He paused, obviously confused, then started telling more jokes. It was clear he had no idea who he was talking to or why.

Before college football’s top division developed a playoff system, the AP poll of sports writers determined the oldest and most prestigious national championship. Even though I didn’t vote in the poll, I received tons of hate mail from fans who were displeased with their team’s ranking. The craziest letters came from Southerners, who seemed to resent that a New York-based writer was in charge of the poll. “Yankees don’t know shit about college football,’’ one disgruntled Alabama fan wrote. “They should stick to baseball and hockey.’’

You had to write extremely fast to cover live sports events for the AP. Unlike newspaper reporters, who only had to meet deadlines for two or three editions, wire-service grunts had to file their stories immediately after the game was over because their stories were carried by newspapers in different time zones all across the country. “A deadline every minute,’’ as Dick Joyce used to mumble. In today’s instant news age, all journalists face that time pressure. But back in the pre-Internet days, wire-service writers faced a unique challenge.

I almost had a deadline disaster in 1994 while covering a college football game in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Trailing the Michigan Wolverines 26-21, the Colorado Buffaloes had the ball on their own 36-yard line with six seconds left. My story was written and I was just waiting for one final play before hitting the send button on my computer. But then Colorado quarterback Kordell Stewart scrambled around and threw a Hail Mary pass more than 70 yards in the air. The ball was tipped by two players near the goal line and caught in the end zone by a diving Colorado receiver, Michael Westbrook, giving the Buffaloes a 27-26 victory.

Caught up in the excitement, I accidentally hit the send button on my laptop, transmitting a story to the New York office that had the wrong team winning. I quickly called my editors, told them to kill the story and dashed off a few paragraphs describing the final play, which came to be known as “The Miracle at Michigan.’’ If that incorrect story had made it to the AP wire, it would have taken a miracle to save my job.

Notre Dame had regained its status as a national power under Lou Holtz, so I ended up covering a lot of Fighting Irish games, including their 1993 “Game of the Century” battle of unbeatens against Florida State. (Notre Dame won the battle, but lost the war. The Fighting Irish beat Florida State, but were upset the following week by Boston College and ended up finishing runner-up to the Seminoles for the national championship.) During several of my trips to the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Indiana, I ran across Muhammad Ali, who lived in nearby Berrien Springs, Michigan, and sometimes attended Notre Dame practices and games. Back then anyone could come up to Ali and talk to him because, unlike star athletes today, he wasn’t surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, agents and PR protectors. Once, I reminded Ali that we first met in 1974 when he was preparing for his bout against George Foreman. When I recalled that there were boulders at his rustic Poconos training camp painted with the names of legendary fighters like Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, Ali winked at me and said, “I forgot to make one for you.’’

In addition to football and tennis, I wrote about baseball, basketball, boxing and lesser sports for the AP. I even covered the Westminster Dog Show one year. As I sat in the press box at Madison Square Garden typing a feature story, I heard a familiar throaty voice right behind me. I turned around and saw Lauren Bacall holding a fluffy white dog in her hands. I knew she was a long-time dog lover, so I asked her about the attraction. “They’re not like husbands,’’ she said. “They don’t talk back and they don’t complain.’’

When you’re interviewing someone, sometimes a sensitive question can short-circuit the conversation. Howard Cosell, the bombastic sports announcer who bragged about “telling it like it is,’’ once hung up on me when I asked him why he ridiculed so many of his former colleagues. He also called me “an impudent young man,’’ which I considered a compliment since I was nearing 40 at the time.

I covered four Summer Olympics, in Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996) and Athens (2004). In Atlanta, I found myself at the center of the biggest story of the Games. I was working as an overnight editor at the AP’s Olympic headquarters when I heard a loud blast. It was almost 1:30 in the morning and there was only one other editor in the newsroom. I decided to go outside and find out what had happened, while my colleague stayed behind to make phone calls. As soon as I left the building, I saw flashing lights and heard screams coming from Centennial Olympic Park a few blocks away. I ran to the park and came across a gruesome scene – dozens of bodies sprawled on the ground, many covered with blood, surrounded by shards of glass, twisted metal and hundreds of nails and screws that had been packed into the pipe bomb.

I interviewed eyewitnesses, spoke to rescuers and headed back toward the newsroom. But by then, police had blockaded the area and I couldn’t get to my office. I couldn’t find a pay phone and didn’t have a cell phone (they were still pretty rare then), so I begged a Swedish reporter to let me use his mobile to call my office. I dictated all the information I had to my colleague and then resumed my reporting at the scene.

I later found a pay phone and used it to call my office. The following day I learned that the bomber had called in a warning from the very same phone, which had since been confiscated as evidence by the FBI. Paranoia ensued. What if the FBI found my fingerprints on the phone? Would I be a suspect in a bombing that killed a spectator and injured more than 100 others? (The original suspect, security guard Richard Jewell, was hounded by authorities and the press but turned out to be innocent. The actual bomber, an anti-abortion zealot and homosexual hater named Eric Rudolph, wasn’t caught for another seven years. He was sentenced to life in prison for a series of bombings, including one that killed an off-duty policeman.)

Although I provided the earliest and most detailed information for the AP’s initial story on the bombing, I didn’t get any credit for it. I had recently had a falling-out with Darrell’s successor as sports editor, and she refused to give me a byline or even any credit as a contributor. What should have been a highlight of my AP career turned out to be the beginning of the end. I fought constantly with the editor over the next few years and eventually left the wire service in 2000.

Deciding to take a break from journalism, I became communications director for the charity Save the Children in Westport, Connecticut, where I once got to hang out at a fundraiser with local resident Paul Newman. He was in his mid-70s at the time and winding down his acting career, but was still active with his other major passion, auto racing, where he co-owned an IndyCar team and won several national championships as a driver. Newman told me he actually preferred racing to acting because “there are a lot fewer phonies on the racetrack.” A legendary beer drinker, Newman made the remark in a clear, seemingly sober voice after guzzling a half-dozen or so Budweisers. Just another reason he was one of my heroes.

I soon got frustrated by the slow pace and bureaucratic hassles of nonprofit work so I left Save the Children after a few months. That was followed by an even briefer stint at The New York Times, where my two-week “tryout’’ as an editor on the national desk abruptly ended when, frustrated by the newspaper’s inane editing rules, I started inserting nonsensical sentences into stories such as, “Mr. Jones declined to comment on the allegations, saying they were clearly made by invading Martians.” (There was no danger the stories would appear in print since they were only going to be used to test my editing abilities, which I would have gladly confessed were minimal given that I’d spent almost my entire career as a reporter and feature writer, not an editor.)

Shortly after that debacle, I heard about an opening in New York with Bloomberg News, founded by future Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After starting out as a financial news service, it was now expanding into other subjects. I was hired as a sports writer/editor, then switched to the new entertainment department, which was run by a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal columnist.

I became Bloomberg’s first movie critic even though I had never reviewed a film in my life. I spent at least a dozen hours a week watching movie screenings and then spouting my opinions on the Bloomberg wire. I also wrote news stories on the movie business, covered the Tribeca, Toronto and Sundance film festivals, and wrote profiles of actors, directors, screenwriters and producers. Eventually, I also co-hosted a weekly radio show with fellow film critic Peter Rainer and produced movie features for a Bloomberg TV program called Muse.

My TV stories included interviews with Angelina Jolie, Michael Douglas, Oliver Stone, Daniel Day-Lewis, Charlize Theron, Michael Moore, Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Milos Forman, Viggo Mortensen, Steven Soderbergh and other movie celebrities. Jolie described her numerous tattoos, including the one of ex-husband Billy Bob Thornton that she had removed after their divorce. (“I’ll never be stupid enough to have a man’s name tattooed on me again,’’ she said at the time. Apparently she had a memory lapse after hooking up with Brad Pitt because she later sported several Pitt-related tattoos. After she split from Pitt, it was reported that she was going to have those tats removed too.)

I interviewed Moore about a documentary he made that was highly critical of America’s health-care system. He gave me an unexpected answer when I asked him where he would want to be treated if he had a heart attack. “By you, right here on Bloomberg News,’’ he laughed. “People never die on Bloomberg News.’’

Along with my movie coverage, I occasionally wrote about music, books and television. I watched the Rolling Stones play a free lunchtime concert outside Lincoln Center to promote an upcoming world tour. Backstage, I asked Mick Jagger if this would be the final tour for the aging rock group. “We never say never,’’ he replied, pretty much summing up the band’s philosophy.

I once reviewed a Warren Beatty biography in which the author claimed the lothario actor had slept with more than 12,000 women. The day after my review was published, I received the following email: “I was one of those women. I don’t know about all the others, but he was a true gentleman. He even sent me flowers.’’

At the 2008 Toronto Film Festival I interviewed Mickey Rourke about his comeback role in “The Wrestler.’’ Rourke had been a big star in the 1980s, but substance abuse and erratic behavior wrecked his career and he quit acting to become a professional boxer. Now his face was nearly unrecognizable due to numerous plastic surgeries that he attributed to injuries suffered in the ring. Rourke did the interview with his beloved 17-year-old Chihuahua, Loki, cradled in his lap. He told me that during his darkest days another one of his dogs, Loki’s father Beau Jack, stopped him from committing suicide. “I put a gun to my head and was ready to pull the trigger,’’ he said. “But then I looked over at Beau Jack, and he had these very sad eyes, like he was saying, `Who’s going to take care of me?’ So I put down the gun.’’

When I was in college, I was hired as an extra on the set of “The Exorcist,’’ which was shooting in the Georgetown section of Washington. (I’m in it for about two seconds.) Almost 40 years later, I interviewed the film’s director, William Friedkin, when he was promoting his new movie “Killer Joe’’ on the festival circuit. When I told him about my minuscule role in “The Exorcist,’’ he laughed and said, “I always wondered what happened to you.’’

My Bloomberg career came to an abrupt end in 2012, when a Human Resources flunky called me into a conference room and told me that my job had been eliminated. I should have seen it coming. Bloomberg was scaling back its non-financial coverage (my whole department was soon axed) and I was at war with my boss, an obese lunatic who slanted our cultural coverage to favor her friends and punish her enemies. I was about to turn 60, so I knew my prospects weren’t great. I pursued a few jobs, but with newspapers dying and websites seeking younger writers willing to work for slave wages, I realized my days as a full-time journalist were over.

Since then, I’ve kept busy by teaching, blogging, traveling and doing volunteer work. I taught journalism at Rutgers University for a couple of semesters, spent a year in China teaching English, and was a volunteer teacher in South Africa. My wife and I have gone on safari in Botswana, walked on glaciers in Patagonia, visited biblical sites in Jerusalem, cruised down the Bosphorus in Istanbul, and toured the Forbidden City in Beijing. I’ve also checked off many adventure items on my bucket list, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, paragliding onto a beach in Rio de Janeiro, bungee-jumping from a 709-foot high bridge and cage-diving with white sharks in South Africa, swinging over the Royal Gorge in Colorado, and parachuting in New Jersey.

I guess I’m still trying to have “the most fun you can have with your pants on.’’