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By John Hankinson, Corrales Comment
In 1974 I graduated from Ball State University with a degree in both philosophy and history. Seeking my first career move, I landed as the record store manager in a bookstore in my hometown. After relocating to Tucson in 1975, I landed at a record store and began my career selling music, managing staff, laying out ad plans and worrying about sales during the height of the ’70s and ’80s music explosion. This culminated into a huge flameout when in 1990 I was forced to file bankruptcy while my partner defaulted on bank loans. To keep food on the table for my two boys, I became a maintenance man for an apartment complex at the University of Arizona where I spent a few months cleaning pools and repairing drunk students’ damage to the complex property. Upon reading a help-wanted ad in the local alternative weekly, Tucson Weekly, I applied for the sales gig.Â
This began my love affair for the alternative newsweeklies and I quickly became the sales director, training staff, welcoming the digital landscape with the dawn of the internet, and watching sales skyrocket while being off the media radar. In 2000, the Weekly was sold to Wick Communications and suddenly I was in charge of multiple papers. I slowly tired of the new company and was hired by Arizona Lotus Corporation, a radio cluster of four stations. My old record store radio rep was the GM so I made the move to broadcast. I was miserable. The Weekly Alibi owners invited me to come to Albuquerque and take over the sales so I relocated to New Mexico and tried my hand at steering the Alibi ship from 2003 through 2015 when I stepped down and moved back to Tucson to be sales director for Edible Baja Arizona. Miserable again, I relocated back to ABQ, rejoined the Alibi as a lowly rep and completed the circle. With the help of lockdowns and a lack of advertisers, the Alibi shut down in 2020. From the ashes The Paper. was born.
After The Paper. came ownership of the Corrales Comment, where I’ve been able to sell advertising from the town I love. I’ve been living off and on in Corrales for over a decade, and I love it here. My art now adorns the walls of Corrales galleries and restaurants. The village is my home.