I met Maru Montero in Mexico City during 1984. She had just left the famed Ballet Folklórico de México after completing long tours dancing in Europe, the United States and Asia. We had little in common, and I was far from home in one of the world’s largest cities, yet somehow we found each other. Author photo. 
This ad ran on the back cover of Editor & Publisher magazine when I was assigned to Mexico City in 1984. My friend John Hopper shot the photo on the bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, with the U.S. and Mexican flags in the background. Photo courtesy of the E.W. Scripps Company. 
The Mexican Army took foreign reporters on a helicopter tour of a drug-producing region in northern Mexico. Some of the scariest stories I covered were about drug trafficking, including the 1985 torture and murder of an American DEA agent. Photo by John Hopper. 
El Paso Herald-Post photographer Ruben Ramirez (left) and reporter Joe Olvera (right) were two of my best teachers of journalism on the border. We traveled down Highway 15 into the heart of Mexico’s drug country in search of a missing American professor. Photo by Ruben Ramirez. 
After I interviewed this man about the Mexican economy in Ciudad Juárez, on the border with El Paso, he persuaded me to help push a newly filled gas tank to his home. Photo by John Hopper. 
Photo by Michael Haederle. 
My company placed this ad on the back cover of Editor & Publisher magazine in 1991 to promote our coverage of the Gulf War. After the war, I visited cities where Scripps operated newspapers and enjoyed answering questions from readers about what it was “really like” to cover US troops in combat. Readers had seen my newspaper stories but wanted to hear it first hand. Photo courtesy of the E.W. Scripps Company. 
Saudi troops were deployed to the desert in 1990 during the Gulf War against neighboring Iraq. Unfortunately, our military handlers did not allow us to identify the soldiers by name or even our location, except “Somewhere in Saudi Arabia.” Photo by Frank Aukofer. 
Photo by Michael Haederle.