I slowly climbed the rickety, wooden steps at the Castleton-on-Hudson village hall, and the wood stretched and screeched back at me with every step.
I was attending a meeting on the first night of my first day as the new reporter at The Independent of Hillsdale, N.Y. The date was Feb. 26, 1996. My territory was Rensselaer County, or at least the Southern slice of it.
Our little, twice-weekly tabloid was based on Columbia County, but the owners had designs on the Southern Rensselaer County commercial advertising market.
So, my reporting career was birthed. I was paid $300 a week. This is an actual conversation I had with the editor-in-chief Vicki Simons-Jones (more on this lady in a bit):
“Uh, is that before taxes or after?”
“Before.”
“Oh.”
So I would not get rich working for The Independent, but I would get experience. A meeting virtually every night, with hours and hours of unusable flex time as my reward. We published Mondays and Thursdays and Vicki would print as many stories as I could write.
It was amazing.
Back to Castleton and that first meeting.
I didn’t realize the implication at first (after all, I was greener than an Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day), but this meeting was unusually packed for a Monday evening. But I quickly absorbed the tension in the air.
The reason soon revealed itself: hotshot, young, clean-up-this-town mayor was intent on ousting older, entrenched, get-off-my-lawn public works superintendent.
I had stumbled into a small-town showdown. At my very first meeting, no less -- what luck!
And then it got even better. Hotshot Mayor Keith Robinson had the good sense to shape his thoughts into a prepared statement.
A good idea because the room was decidedly on the side of strong, silent, superintendent guy. His name was Max something and he sat in the back with his arms folded across his chest. I think he was working on a toothpick.
Perhaps that made Keith nervous. Maybe Keith was an outsider in this town. I wasn’t that good of a reporter yet.
At any rate, he read what amounted to a public firing, which is incredibly uncomfortable to witness.
Mayor Keith got to the part where he wanted to say “this is a personnel decision.” So, you know, not at all related to the plainly obvious fact that I do not like this guy and want him to know this is my town.
Except Keith misspoke and he said, “this is a personal decision.” Oops, I believe they call that a Freudian slip. Like where you say what you really mean and not the BS you’ve carefully put to paper.
I don’t remember many details of that long-ago meeting, but I can still see poor Keith’s reaction to his gaffe. He stammered and nervously chuckled a bit. And he got very red in the face.
But nobody else laughed. It was that kind of a meeting.
****
I don’t know what happened Mayor Keith or whether Castleton ever completed its riverfront master plan that village board members endlessly debated at every meeting. I searched for that first Max Fired story this morning and cannot locate it.
Many bylines have come and gone in the 25 years since that first meeting. Most of them are published only on the internet now.
Looking back, it was an interesting first job. I never really had a traditional post-college job search. I applied at The Independent soon after starting my final class and my professor, Joel Kaplan, told me that if I got the job, not to come back to school.
I only attended five classes and he gave me an A- anyway.
The best part of journalism is the people you meet. The people you meet while reporting and writing 300 stories annually, give or take, and the characters you work alongside.
The Independent no longer exists. It was created and run by Vicki Simons-Jones and Tony Jones, a pair of Yale graduates and dreamers who were way smarter than the rest of us.
He was the publisher and the businessman; She was the editor.
I had never met anyone like Vicki.
****
She had a penchant for dropping F bombs during our morning meeting, usually when a reporter said supervisor so-and-so wasn’t returning their calls. After that, you would usually get your call returned.
“Tough but fair” applied to Vicki. She was tall and blonde. She was brilliant and her mind worked very fast. Her office was on the second floor of an open floor plan. The sight of Vicki walking down the steps on deadline day caused rippling panic on the newsroom side.
She would stand over you and ask questions about your story. It was terrific training and I liked her. Not everyone did.
Vicki always knew what she wanted, and she always knew what you were capable of. She persistently expected the two to happily meet. As long as they did, she was a tremendous leader and editor.
I was three weeks into the job when my mother had a heart attack and went into emergency quadruple bypass surgery. I felt very responsible for my beat and the stories I had in progress. Just go, Vicki ordered, and don’t come back until you’re ready to.
****
This little country weekly tabloid in Nowhere, N.Y. was very successful. At one point we had four reporters – all Syracuse University graduates. One went back to law school and is a very successful lawyer in Syracuse. Another became the Associated Press fashion reporter in New York City.
The truth is, I wasn’t really happy during my 32 months living in Columbia County, N.Y. It was an upstate getaway hamlet for wealthy city residents. It was not a great place to be young, single and making $300 a week.
Professionally, I have often viewed this period of my career as a disappointment bordering on a waste of time.
I can see now that it really wasn’t that at all.
