I had the honor of being the guest speaker at a meeting of the Damariscotta-Newcastle Rotary Club on Tuesday, Aug. 2.
The Rotary quietly does a great deal of good work for the community and is currently tackling an ambitious project to combat food insecurity in the county, which I expect you will read more about in these pages soon.
Rotarian Larry Townley encouraged me to talk about my background and how I arrived at The Lincoln County News. This part of my talk got me thinking more about my brief experience as a federal employee prior to my arrival here.
After graduating from the University of Maine at Farmington with a not-particularly-useful degree, I didn’t know what I was going to do next.
I had taken an interest in journalism at UMF, where I became the editor of the student newspaper, but it didn’t seem likely to me that I would be able to find work in the field. This was during the recession, and newspapers that weren’t announcing mass layoffs were simply calling it quits.
I went back home to South Bristol and got a temporary job with the U.S. Census Bureau.
This efficient and useful work consisted of driving around to obviously empty seasonal cottages and asking the people who didn’t live there why they hadn’t filled out their census forms.
Just in case we missed them and they did live year-round in an uninsulated cabin on the water, we would hang plastic bags containing the forms on their doorknobs, which had the added public benefit of informing local burglars which houses were empty.
The couple of year-round residents I did find insisted they had already returned their forms before reluctantly agreeing to answer my questions, which were completely normal questions to ask another human being sitting across from you: “What is your gender?” “Are you Hispanic?” “What is your wife’s gender?”
It was government at its best.
During my time with the Census, I saw an ad in The Lincoln County News for a reporter. I sent my resume and samples from the student newspaper to my predecessor, Sherwood Olin, who called me for an interview.
After the interview, Sherwood asked me to cover a benefit that evening for a young Jefferson boy who had been badly burned in an accident. I agreed and he handed me a notebook and a camera, which I had no idea how to operate, and sent me on my way.
The next week, the article about the benefit was on the front page above the fold, and Sherwood called to offer me the job.
I was paid $25, the going rate for freelancers, for the article about the benefit in Jefferson, but that tryout also landed me a career I love here in my own community.
