A little like sardines packed in a tiny can, fitting my 42-plus years of covering the nearly 725 square miles of Franklin County in 20 minutes at a chamber of commerce breakfast Thursday was a tight squeeze.
But viewing the 130 or so people gathered in Greenfild Community College’s dining hall was like looking out from Poet’s Seat Tower to a sea of faces, many of whom had been among those featured in my articles over the years – recounted and represented in the accompanying slide show.
The backdrop was the start of the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce’s 100th anniversary, with awards to surviving members of the original Greenfield Board of Trade, including The Recorder itself.
But the focus overall was on Franklin County, not so much me, the paper’s senior reporter, who is retiring next month.
“Franklin County is all-natural, down-home New England, where real-life stories abound,” I told the gathering, describing my resettlement after vacationing on a Shelburne dairy farm and falling in love with the area, and adding: “There’s nothing pompous or concocted about this neck of the woods. If I’ve had a bias in my reporting all these years, it’s that the soul of this place just resonates so deeply for me. It’s a breath of fresh air where quality of life, rather than quantity of life, truly matters.”
Beginning as West County reporter in August 1976, with the observation during a hilltown tour from my mentoring editor, Neil Perry, “There’s a story behind every tree, Richie,” I unraveled a litany of backwoods heroes, from Marion Fiske and Selectman Francis Barnard of Shelburne to Minnie Richardson of Colrain and Rob Ripley of Montague.
This was a time when newsroom typewriters clattered and AP teletypes hammered out the news from around the world, when we cut and pasted stories with scissors and actual paste, and “sent” them to cigarette-smoking editors on long sheets of newsprint by walking them across the room to the “in” baskets. Editors came in around 6 a.m., reporters at 7:30, deadline was about 3½ hours later — and we never knew what our morning’s assignment would be.
The given in the news business, especially at a small daily, is getting called out to fires, accidents, and the daily adrenalin rush. But we also have the opportunity to do enterprise writing about the many-layered reality of life.
After creating an energy and environmental beat to focus on the alternative-energy stories and agricultural challenges as well as innovative solutions, I was able to write in-depth series on dairy farming, spending entire days with struggling dairy farmers like John Wholey of Conway, and also on a returning new generation of farmers like Ben Clark returning to Clarkdale Fruit Farms in Deerfield and Sorrel Hatch at Uppingil.
It’s these salt-of-the-earth people who kept me bending over backward to cover agriculture as we saw the formation of CISA, and Our Family Farms milk, and farmers markets and CSAs. I loved writing about the marvelous Duprey brothers, east and west of Eden Trail, struggling to make dairying and sheep herding viable.
But I also got to write a series in 1980 on the Yankee Atomic plant in Rowe, as well as cover and write series about the Vermont Yankee plant, the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline, on Connecticut River erosion and green-energy solutions, as well as series on alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty .. as well as cottage tech businesses, the battle over same-sex marriage.
I spent several years here as county editor, directing coverage by a small corps of correspondents that echoed the larger legion that was still in place in every hamlet when I first arrived.
And there were more than a few larks, like “Franklin Facts,” a trivia board game, and a Flights of Fancy Tour that took people to offbeat attractions like Elsie the Cow’s birthplace in Brookfield, Dr. Seuss’s home in Springfield, Mary’s “Little Lamb” in Sterling and more.
“This is a place where collaboration, where innovation and openness really do seem to thrive,” I told those assmbled while presenting images from articles through the years about the startup of Ristorante DiPaolo in Turners Falls, about creativity itself, and even about yogurt. And it’s a place where The Recorder is the connective tissue that helps create a common ground. I don’t know that I would have been able to dig beneath the surface as much anywhere else and let the stories flow in quite the same way.
From articles about public radio host Robert J. Lurtsema in Boston and Bud Foster traveling to buy fish and vegetables there in the early 1980s to Ashfield’s pioneering alternative educator Mary Leue in 2017 and covering an intercultural exchange between Leverett and Kentucky last year, this has been a dream job for which I’ll always be grateful.
A Feb. 8 community open house is planned for 5 to 7 p.m. at The Pushkin in Greenfield to celebrate Richie Davis’s retirement.