Working it out in a new hometown

After graduating from St. Bonaventure University and taking my first job as a reporter at the Cortland Standard newspaper, I worried that my Long Island accent would give me away as an outsider.

So I worked hard to get rid of it. That wasn’t easy. In the end, I found the hardest word to say – without sounding like I just crossed the Throggs Neck Bridge – was “ask.” It always came out as “axe.”

I also put in a lot of time getting to know my new hometown. I learned the history and geography, and got to know a lot of people. It took time to earn trust, but I did.

The process began again four years later when I moved to the Capital Region of New York state, where I worked a year at the Troy Record before a decade at The Daily Gazette in Schenectady. I covered southern Saratoga County for both papers and immersed myself in my new community.

I got to know people and had a good run as a reporter before I was offered an editing job back at the Cortland Standard. I wanted to give my growing family of three children a chance to plant roots. So I took the city editor job, and the number of kids climbed to seven while l ran the newsroom of the small daily newspaper for 26 years.

There have been a lot of changes in my life in the past five years, beginning with a divorce and the start of a new relationship a year later. My girlfriend and I planned to relocate eventually, but we accelerated the schedule to get a new start together.

We moved to Lewes at the end of October with her mother, Janet, combining three households. We followed my brother, his wife and her mother, who had relocated from Long Island to Lewes. We can see their house from the front windows of our new home.

I was fortunate to be hired by the Cape Gazette in November, soon after relocating, giving me a chance to stay in the profession I’ve loved for nearly 40 years.

So I began again to get to know a new community – reading maps, talking with native Delawareans and checking places out in person to get the lay of the land.

The rapid development of Sussex County was the first thing I learned about. It was like what I remember as a child after my family moved to Long Island when I was 4 years old. I lived there until I graduated from college in 1985.

The 118-mile long stretch of land formed from soil dumped by a glacier at the end of the last Ice Age would eventually be populated by millions of people who couldn’t pronounce “ask” properly.

Growing pains during a housing boom that began after World War II – and has not yet ended – overburdened Long Island roads, schools, healthcare providers, emergency services and the environment. Sound familiar? 

I’ve seen the challenges a community goes through as it struggles to maintain its traditions while adapting to a flood of newcomers with their own expectations and needs.

In recent months, I have been working to resume routines I developed over the years in Cortland. One of them is this column. I wrote a weekly column for the Cortland Standard for more than six years.

I got the idea when I decided to begin exercising and eating better after about 25 years as  a couch potato. I proposed a column about the process to the Cortland Standard publisher. He liked the idea, but worried I would run out of topics. He told me to broaden it to whatever I wanted to write about, and “Working It Out” was born.

Half my columns dealt with active lifestyle stuff, and the rest was a mix of topics. Among them, I wrote about saying goodbye to our family home in Cortland, a months-long search for an old rugby teammate, painting my bathroom, gardening, going to a Bruce Springsteen concert with my youngest daughter, and a recipe for a glass of water.

I’ll be sharing my experiences here while I settle into my new hometown in this beautiful and historic seaside community, continuing to stumble over the word “ask.” Some things never change.