Andrew Heller has been an enduringly popular newspaper columnist in Michigan for a long, long, long time. He wrote his first column for the Escanaba Daily Press way back in 1979. It was about his grandma being mugged. It wasn’t very well done — the column, not the mugging – but the paper still runs his column to this day nonetheless. He wrote columns and did editorial cartoons for CM Life at Central Michigan University from 1980-83 and enjoyed it when girls said he was funny, which didn’t happen often and still doesn’t. In 1987, he began writing an occasional column for the Saginaw News, which soon became regular. He wrote columns full-time for the Flint Journal from 1989 to 2009 and as a freelancer for MLive and the Flint Journal from 2009-2016. He has won 20 awards for excellence from the Michigan Associated Press, the Michigan Press Association, the Detroit Press Club and the National Society of Newspaper columnists. He enjoys a good back rub, not that he’s suggesting anything, and well-done toast with raspberry jam. And baseball. He only looks like the depiction of him on this page when he’s in cartoon mode.