RICK PULLEN

According to the bio on his website: "Rick Pullen wanted to be Perry Mason when he was a kid. He carried the dream to college where he quickly learned clients of defense lawyers weren’t always innocent and lawyers didn’t always win their cases.

At about that time, on a whim, he took a journalism course at The University of Richmond and fell in love. He resigned midyear from the university and was quickly accepted at The University of Tennessee, which had a more comprehensive journalism program. (His mother was apoplectic at the time, worried her son would become a college dropout.)

But there in Big Orange Country, he discovered investigative reporting. It was the era of Watergate and he was hooked. Who needed the law, he figured, when an investigative reporter could be judge, jury and prosecutor? He had found his calling and his mother could breathe easier knowing her son would be hitting the streets with a press pass instead of a tin cup."