Change can be hard, but it is inevitable.
With that in mind, I am announcing that next week’s Whitman-Hanson Express will be my last in the role of editor – I am retiring from full-time journalism after nearly 40 years of working for community newspapers.
Many of you may be aware that I’ve been dealing with Parkinson’s nearly as long as I’ve been at this paper, and lately the symptoms have begun to intensify. It’s time.
As a generally introverted person, this had always been an unexpected path for me to traverse, but I came to love it, and refused to give it up, even as coworkers over the years and newspaper gigs, left the profession for more lucrative careers, but there’s another major reason why I stayed.
I come from stubborn stock – the family tree is full of bull-headed Irish from both sides of the religious/political divide in the auld sod – and I was raised by reticent Yankees from northwestern Connecticut.
None of us has ever liked throwing in the towel.
My grandfather, Norris Seelye, “retired” from dairy farming at 83. At least, that’s when he sold the last of his cows. The Shetland pony had expired of old age a few years before. Dad discovered this when he encountered his father heading to the pasture with a shovel on one shoulder on a hot and humid summer morning in 1983.
Asked where he was going with that shovel, my grandfather merely replied: “Pony died.”
I can only imagine the negotiations involved in convincing him to put the shovel down, while my dad called a local friend in the contracting business to come to the farm with a backhoe to bury poor Smokey, who had nearly been forgotten amid the goings-on.
When I was trying to think of the best way to announce my retirement, I thought of Norris – affectionately called grampy by my brothers and me. We’re not blood relatives – my father was adopted – but I doubt many people could nurture grandchildren to the point where it wasn’t clear where nature left off and nurture began.
So, here I am, faced with the same decision Norris had to make a little while before I began my career, and at a younger age than he called it a day.
Still, for years after he retired, he’d put on his work clothes in the morning, pull on his heavy Wellington-style barn boots and start meandering around the place, puttering. When he got tired, he’s stop and scan the sky, “looking for airplanes.”
I can see myself a bit in this picture.
Friends in need
This is only fitting, especially as I have promised my publisher Deb Anderson, that I would stick around for a bit and write the odd meeting story, even when the meetings are not odd themselves.
I can’t thank Deb enough for all she has done for me since buying the Express from Josh Cutler before he made his foray into politics. While I’m at it, thank you, Josh as well for giving me that chance when it was much needed.
You gave me a fresh start after I was laid off so my former publisher opted to have one less squeaky wheel in the newsroom — and he could redecorate it with what he’d been paying me, he decided.
But it is Deb Anderson’s generosity and support that has made the most difference, in the past five years or so, especially. As my Parkinson’s progressed and my medical needs changed, you gave me a way to earn a paycheck and the insurance I needed, while putting off your own retirement.
Your editorial support has also been deeply appreciated, as you have backed me when you could and corrected me when it was called for, a much-appreciated sounding board and wind at my back for those tough decisions.
I hope you can arrange your own exit while you can still enjoy your piece of heaven in Plympton, where it is so quiet, one could begin to think the world just went away.
Here’s to many years of being Ms. Debby to your grandkids and being a friend and ally to humming birds and your grand-dogs, too, whether or not the latter eat your furniture.
Getting here
I never had a plan when I started my career, and I don’t really have one now. In fact, I had never really planned anything about my life, and about two weeks before my graduation from Litchfield [Conn.] High School, which is now incorporating into a regional school. Eerie, isn’t it?
I had a mailer from Post College in Waterbury, Conn., which offered Journalism as one of its associate degree programs. That sounded interesting to this post-Watergate era student.
When I graduated there, I transferred to Bowling Green State University in Ohio. After graduation, I was among a group of J-School interns working one or both major party nominating conventions as an Associated Press photography interns. Cost prohibited me from doing both unpaid internships, so I worked at the Democratic National Convention that summer of 1980, because it was in New York and was close enough for my dad to drive me. The Republicans were convening in Detroit.
I had the opportunity to send photos to delegates’ hometown papers all over the country and chat a bit with photo editors. The last night, after hearing Jimmy Carter’s acceptance street from the photographers’ scaffolding tower in the middle of Madison Square Garden, I was handed a huge camera lens, advised of its $3,000 price tag and advised: “Don’t drop it.”
That was really the start of a career where I found that “Don’t drop it” can apply to so many things.
It computes
Computers, for one.
At Bowling Green, I had a two-minute introduction to a CompuGrapic – word processer, I guess. The professor actually let us turn it on and off as he marveled that we would soon be able to “cut” and “paste” copy without having to actually tear a paragraph from one page and tape it to another.
My first job, split between the State Line Free Press in North Canaan and Falls Village, Conn., and its big sister the Torrington Register-Citizen, reporters’ favorite feature about CompuGraphic was the ability to post interoffice memos on the command bar. Usually, the message was, “Take a chill pill,” when things got tense in the newsroom on composing days.
I can trace my career in terms of hardware.
The typewriters used in college gave way to CompuGraphic units the size of small Volkswagens. The Free Press used Apple IIe’s with their annoying absinthe-green screen and eternally blinking cursor. When the Fitchburg-Leominster Sentinel & Enterprise brought in C-Text computers, we cursed the need to do math. You had to calculate how the column inches of a story would stretch over a number of columns. I was not a fan.
Then it was back to Apple, as the iMacs arrived at the office, along with the publisher’s rain on our parade when he told us we were all getting aqua. None of the company’s trademark choice of red or orange or blue.
I was leaning to orange just to be different. The internet arrived and a choice of Mac or PC for page design through the Quark software system.
It crashed a lot no matter which software you chose.
Here at the Express, I had to learn another production software on both Macs and PCs.
The places I went
The reporting itself has been largely the same wherever you go, town boards and committees struggled with budgets from North Canaan and Brooklyn, Conn., to Leominster, Southbridge, Whitman and Hanson here in the Bay State. Graduations, elections, land use disagreements and the like rolled by.
The kindergarten pupils whose photos I would take at school events in North Canaan are middle-aged now.
But there were also the rare opportunities to cover something really cool – covering the Oct. 26, 1994 senate debate between Sen. Ted. Kennedy and former Gov. Mitt Romney in Holyoke, and with the small team of coworkers from the Sentinel & Enterprise dispatched to Hartford for the Oct. 6, 1996 presidential debate between President Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan.
At the former, a cousin who worked advance for Kennedy asked me if I was covering it for my college paper. I was 36 at the time, but he might have made the connection because the event was held at Holyoke Community College. Still…
We were wide-eyed babes in the woods at the presidential debate, even though we were stuck in the vast media overflow room and watched it on TV, like everyone else. I had been fascinated, watching the Arabic characters on a Saudi reporter’s laptop fill the screen from right to left, and was blown away by the organized chaos of the spin room after the debate.
The Sentinel & Enterprise had also granted me two leaves during the fall of 1993 and January 1994 to volunteer on Red Cross disaster relief efforts in the Midwest floods of 1993 and the Valencia, Calif. Earthquake a few months later in return for a story or two.
Assigned as a public relations volunteer at both. In Quincy, Ill., it was rather routine stuff by that time of the relief effort, that had begun in April 1993. But on the day Gov. Jim Edgar was visiting the destroyed town of Hull, I was on hand – and first was nearly overcome with heat exhaustion, and then, when the governor’s helicopter arrived, the flying dust stuck to my face, arms and any other exposed skin where I had liberally applied sunscreen.
It was humbling.
Last, but not least, I thank the Whitman and Hanson communities. You have trusted me with your truths in good times and bad. You’ve offered me the occasional pat on the back or thank you for a job well done enough times to make up for the brickbats coming my way for the errors that happen when human beings report the news.
They, happen, too, and it always helped when a call for a correction recognized my sincere efforts to get things right.
If I had to sum up these past 40 years, I’d say any career can be an adventure, and you never know what will make you laugh at yourself.
Now I know why my grandfather had been reluctant to let go, but if he were here today, I believe he’d be the first to tell me – it’s time.
What’s next?