Old Avocadoes Turn Up and The Days Pass By

Today I man the office solo. Steve is out on assignment covering his favorite beat–New Hampshire. He’s writing about Summer Stock Theater there. I remember well when Steve and I lived up there, just across the river in Norwich VT, and we worked together in Lebanon. It was the Connecticut Valley Reporter, and the Granite State Gazette, and those were heady days as I got my first taste of newspaper work. He invited me to come up and share the house and I found work at his newspaper. I stuck to that and was a paste-up wizard in 1980 when I finally landed at the Valley Advocate. Back in Amherst, just off Amity St.

Those old days were interesting, because everyone I knew had to work weekends. So we toiled all day Saturday and Sunday and enjoyed a few weekdays off. It was like that for five years, I even got married on a Wednesday, back in 1980.

Now it’s fun for me to look at where we’ve all ended up. John Stifler just got a Fullbright to teach English abroad for two years, I met him decades ago. People pop into the cafe and I’ve known them in a past life, or for some other connection. Today I got an email from Gary Neilson, former reporter for the Valley Advocate in the 1980s.

He had read my blog about the passing of Gib Fullerton, our colleague of yore. I remember him in the Advocate production offices running in, being on the run over a story, and it was an exciting time to work at the paper because we were so proud of it, and it was media’s center of gravity in the Valley. Gary was doing investigative, important stuff, we believed.