Stephen Kreider Yoder ’81, a reporter, translator, bureau chief and page one editor at The Wall Street Journal for over 38 years, visited Goshen College on Monday and Tuesday. He held his second-ever master class on Oct. 12 at 7 p.m. in the Umble Center, where he shared stories from his perspective as a semi-retired journalist rather than an active one.

In February, Jason Wyse,  major gift officer at GC, visited Yoder in San Francisco, California and realized Yoder’s stories would be of interest to those in the GC community. “Before I left, I kind of planted the seed of saying, ‘Hey, would you be interested in coming to campus sometime?’” Wyse said.

Once he arrived on campus, Yoder’s wit detailed the opportunities he took, both as a GC student and graduate as a translator living in Japan. He traced the skills it takes to hold a career in journalism back to his bilingual childhood in Japan and then, eventually, to his liberal arts education at GC.

After enrolling at GC as a math major, Yoder switched between several majors before landing on English. “It ended up being that I was a fairly good writer,” he said.

After graduating from GC and struggling to find a job, he eventually ended up back in the country he grew up in. “I knew I could get a job in Japan teaching English and I wanted to be a translator anyway. So, we moved to Japan,” he said.

Yoder secured a job translating for The Wall Street Journal in the country, and the bureau chief quickly pushed for Yoder to begin writing. “I told him I had no talent for it. I wasn’t interested. One day, he ordered me to do a story anyway,” he said.

“Epiphany is a word we often overuse, but that’s what it was for me: a revelation. I felt like it must feel when you’re one of these people that you read about who is struck by lightning and wakes up being able to play the violin,” Yoder said.

Yoder also brought his insight to classrooms on campus the day after his master class. He visited journalism essentials and organizational communication classes, taught by Anna Groff, an associate professor of communication, where he answered questions and lent his opinion to students throughout the day.

Joey Paternostro, a senior broadcasting major, is a student in organizational communication who attended Yoder’s talk on Tuesday. “He had said something along the lines of ‘I never thought about being a journalist,’ and then he became a journalist and he was like, ‘I never thought about becoming the manager,’” Paternostro said.

“That applies to me personally … I didn’t really want to be behind the scenes. I wanted to be a broadcaster, I wanted to be in front of the microphone, and then I kind of found a love for directing and producing,” Paternostro said. “That just kind of goes back to the open-mindedness of things.”

Yoder, now semi-retired and continuing to take the opportunities presented to him, writes accounts of his and his wife Karen’s experiences in a column for The Wall Street Journal called “Retirement Rookies.”