Dick Feagler columns in the old Cleveland Press. Admittedly, either of the latter two could have jumbled a few brain waves; but for the most part, I'm not nuts - despite my assertion in the first line.

I graduated from Bowling Green State University in 1978 with a degree in journalism and worked for the Sandusky Register newspaper. I went to Put-in-Bay on the weekends. I eventually stopped going to Put-in-Bay on the weekends and changed professions, becoming a drug and alcohol counselor, first in Lorain then in Cleveland.

In 1990 I left Cleveland (and the Indians, the promise of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the polish sausage stand at Euclid and Ninth, and everything else I held dear), and for the next eight years I traveled America's back roads, using my journalism skills to interview, for the most part, "average Joe" citizens who were going the extra mile to help their community's kids, their poor, their natural environment. I felt kind of like Charles Kuralt without a following. As I traveled, I filled a lot of notebooks with these interviews.

And I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have some of these rather regular, common-sense type people leading the country and inspiring similar projects in similar towns everywhere? And what better way to bring all this about than by being president?

Why not, huh? It's America.

On the road in Alaska, I met my wife, Liz, who is from New Zealand. Long story. We have two children, Sarah and Joseph. We thought about Sarah and Joseph inheriting a world of acid rain, ozone holes and global warming. We thought about them, say, someday doing OK in English class; but we just couldn't seem to get out of our minds the possibility of them perhaps someday being shot to death in English class.

After eight years of traveling, we stopped in Ripley, Ohio (pop. 2,000), about an hour east of Cincinnati on the Ohio River.

For the next year, we wrote a column for two local newspapers. Each week we'd take a slice of life from Ripley, whether it was a pollution issue with the river or helping some low-income people in Brown County - or whatever - and suggest how one of the projects we researched could help solve the problem.

After a year of seeing whether the projects could actually work in Ripley (they could), it was time to run for president. Of the United States.

During Campaign 2000, our family, traveling in a 1974 Dodge Xplorer conversion van, did a 19-month, 20,000 mile campaign tour of the country. Our story appeared in 200 newspapers, on 85 regional network TV news shows, a lot of radio shows - and the guy who owns the General Store in West Chester, Ohio, told pretty much the whole town (all 700 residents) about us.

Twice during the campaign we did extended tours through Ohio, first on the Old National Road, and later during a 2,000 mile "Back-to-Basics Bicycle Tour" of the Midwest (no gel seats, and a two-year-old who was toilet training riding on the back of my bike). Both times we met down-to-earth people who were making differences in their communities.