It was 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and the blast of frigid February air that hit my face as I opened the door of my High Street apartment felt like it had frozen my eyeballs over. That first winter in Greenfield was a cold one.
Ten minutes later, I stood in the dining space at Adam’s Donuts on Federal Street, considerably warmer and snapping the occasional photo while chatting with Town Councilor Penny Ricketts, as a steady queue of local residents filed in. They dropped a dollar or two, or 20, into a cardboard box, then bought a coffee or a doughnut before leaving.
The cold didn’t faze them at all, it seemed, and the money raised by that grass-roots community effort helped pay for an updated exhaust hood to keep the much-loved local doughnut shop in business.
By noon, I’d found myself at Ashfield Lake, standing on a foot-thick layer of ice and, quite literally, shivering in my boots. Despite the deep freeze, I was one of about 100 gathered in a semi-circle, watching a large horse drag a bladed sled across the surface. A group of men were working long saws into the grooves to cut loose a series of ice blocks in the traditional fashion. Later in the year, those oversized ice cubes would be used to cool drinks at a town-wide celebration.
What both those events had in common that day was a sense of community. And I was there to chronicle them as the first draft of the next chapter of Franklin County’s history. Nobody does that better than local news outlets like The Recorder.
As a reporter at this centuries-old paper for the past two-and-a-half years — my first full-time gig in professional journalism — I got paid to eat fried dough slathered in Hager’s maple cream at the Franklin County Fair, tromp through the woods with a pack of kids at Frank Grindrod’s Earthworks program, toss cannonballs down Conway’s country roads, take a punch to the face in Tom Norwood’s Krav Maga class and skewer a foam deer with a bow and arrow at the Franklin County Sportsman’s Club.
It has been, without a doubt, the best job I have ever had.
I’ve had the privilege of working with a group of people who’ve become like a second family, to take advantage of a mentoring editorial staff willing to show a cub reporter the ropes. From the occasional gallow’s humor to the traditional pizza delivery on late Election Nights, it’s an experience I’ll never forget. I head east to work for The Enterprise of Brockton at the end of the month. Leaving my colleagues will easily be the hardest part.
Despite those fun times, the rest of the job wasn’t always that easy.
Amid those lighthearted human interest stories came the crucial work — enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — that comprises the core function of a community journalist: keeping that community’s citizens informed about the things that matter in their lives. It’s that function that keeps me driven to do my job — there’s no CNN or New York Times covering small-town government here. It’s just us.
Sometimes, that meant asking tough questions about sensitive or controversial topics, often times of people who you’ve genuinely come to like. Other times it meant fighting over a piece of paper with town officials to preserve the public’s right-to-know or digging into confusing financial disclosures to keep an organization honest. And sometimes it meant offering a tissue or a moment to a person who’d just broken down in tears while describing what it was like to lose a loved one, or the despair they felt in the face of a large corporation working to seize their property so it could put a big pipe in the ground.
Sometimes, it meant feeling your heart drop as a woman ran wailing up the street behind you, just as you pressed the shutter on your camera to capture an image of firefighters pounding a burning building with high-pressure hoses. It was her house, and she had no idea whether her husband was trapped inside.
It’s the results of that work, carried out in an often-buzzing newsroom surrounded by like-minded colleagues who feel as strongly about that ideal as I do, that makes it worth it. I plan to approach work at my new paper with the same vigor as I did at The Recorder, but it’ll always be this paper and this corner of the world that gave me the shot to build my journalistic chops.
Thanks, Franklin County.
Tom Relihan is a former reporter for The Recorder.