The Bulletin Board: Before I Knew the Story I Was Writing

UNBOXED with Doug Glanville

When I graduated into a bigger room in my parents’ house as a teenager, I also inherited a larger bed. Its best feature was a built-in book cubby perfectly positioned behind my head. Whenever I could not sleep, I would reach for a book and start reading. Its worst feature? The slats. They constantly slid out of place, leading to a monthly collapse of the mattress onto the carpet. To this day, I cannot stand slatted beds.

Mounted above my book cubby was my bulletin board. As the son of a teacher, I appreciated my mom’s instinct to centralize my random knick knacks onto one giant canvas. That bulletin board became the perfect repository for my fandoms, especially in sports.

Thankfully, I had the foresight to take a picture of it. A snapshot in time.

This year at the start of baseball’s spring training, I sent that photo of the board to Yankees manager, Aaron Boone, someone I know well from our time working together at ESPN. I turned the bulletin board into a scavenger hunt of sorts. With no hints, I challenged him to find the one item that I knew would matter to him.

Eventually, he texted back that he could not find it (understandably as he was probably a little busy getting ready for the season). To be fair, my board was a mishmash of paper, photos, and overlapping drawings. It was pure 80s chaos—big drums, clashing colors, loud, and random.