This summer, the newest member of a tennis group made up of aging players like myself casually mentioned after we had finished a doubles match that he recognized my name from reading the Valley News.
For the last 24 years, I told him, I’ve been the paper’s news columnist.
“What else do you do?” he asked.
“That’s it,” I replied.
“Really. That’s all?”
Yup.
He wasn’t the first to express astonishment that someone could squeeze a full-time job out of writing news columns once or twice a week for the Upper Valley’s local paper of record. My octogenarian mother has been wondering the same for years.
A while back, Massachusetts journalist Scott Lehigh said that writing columns for The Boston Globe was “both a privilege and a pleasure.”
I feel the same way about the Valley News. Since 2001, I’ve had the best reporting and writing gig going in the Upper Valley, and arguably all of New Hampshire and Vermont.
With my 66th birthday approaching, I figure it’s time to put down my reporter’s notebook. This is my last column, which a fair number of Valley News subscribers — and former subscribers — will probably say is long overdue.
The only way I lasted this many years is a credit to the paper’s management. From the Valley News’ standpoint, there are no sacred cows. Not Dartmouth College. Not Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Not the Hanover Co-op. (The three have provided me with plenty of column fodder.)
Jim Fox, the now-retired editor who gave me this opportunity, once wrote an op-ed about the news business and my role at the paper. “Anyone is welcome to challenge the facts and disagree with the views he expresses; a column like he writes is designed to spark dialogue… I do not always agree with the opinion Kenyon expresses, but the editing standard is a straightforward one: The facts must bear the weight of the viewpoint expressed, and those who are criticized must have adequate opportunity to comment. (Sometimes they do not take the opportunity even though it is extended.)”
When I was a reporter at the Tampa (Fla.) Tribune in the 1990s, our publisher hammered home a journalism adage that dates back to the late 1800s. The job of a newspaper, the saying goes, is to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”
From the start, I tried to keep that in mind when writing about the First World problems of Norwich and the Upper Valley’s other privileged enclaves.
While attending my first Norwich School Board meeting as a columnist, a wealthy parent threatened to remove his children from the town’s elementary school if an additional teacher wasn’t immediately hired to reduce the student-teacher ratio that he found unacceptable. After my column about the parent’s tantrum appeared, another resident called the news desk demanding that I be fired. She apparently took exception to my description of Norwich, where I’ve lived since returning to the Upper Valley in 1996, as “Disney World with maple trees.”
I don’t pretend to be in the league of The New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens, but the way he summed up his job in an editorial page Q&A last month captured my approach. Said Stephens, “I’m not a politician or a policy maker. I’m a guy whose job is to offer a point of view for others to agree or disagree with as they choose. Or just ignore!”
In college, my favorite journalism professor was fond of saying, “All a reporter needs is a good pair of shoes.” Getting out into Upper Valley communities and meeting people who allowed me to tell their stories was the best part the job, but not always the easiest.
Years ago, I was walking through a West Lebanon parking lot when a car’s decal caught my eye. It was in honor of Jeffery S. Holmes, a 20-year-old Marine who was killed during the Iraq war in 2004 — 17 months after graduating from Hartford High School.
Shortly before Memorial Day in 2022, I knocked on the door of Patti and Scott Holmes’ home in Hartford without calling ahead. We had never met, but the Holmeses welcomed me in. They graciously shared the story of how every year they spend the day set aside to honor those who lost their lives in military service at their son’s grave site.
“He is always on my mind, but Memorial Day has special meaning,” Scott Holmes said.
As a combat veteran, Jeffery Holmes qualified for burial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Instead, His parents chose the Vermont Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Randolph Center. “We needed to have him close to home,” his mother said.
Sometimes, columns wrote themselves.
In 2010, Hartford cops assaulted Wayne Burwell, 30-something Black man, after mistaking him for a burglar in his own home in the middle of the day. After they finished roughing him up, police dragged Burwell outside in handcuffs. After finally listening to a neighbor who had been trying to tell them that Burwell, a Dartmouth College graduate and well-known Upper Valley fitness trainer, was the homeowner, police released him so he could be taken to the hospital for treatment
The matter might have ended there, if police had only apologized. But Hartford refused. The Vermont Attorney General’s Office whitewashed the encounter, overlooking what many people, including myself, considered police brutality and racial bias.
It took much longer than it should have, but Burwell’s civil rights lawsuit ended with him receiving a $500,000 out-of-court settlement in 2017.
Crystal Wright was another victim of overzealous policing. A 2017 roadside encounter with a Canaan police officer ended with her leaving in an ambulance and later undergoing two surgeries for a serious knee injury.
Like in Burwell’s case, cops couldn’t provide videotape evidence to support the claim that an officer’s use of force was justified. In Wright’s case, Canaan police said the officer had forgotten to activate the dashboard camera in his cruiser. She received a $160,000 settlement for dropping her federal lawsuit against the town.
I wrote a lot about policing for good reason. Police have the authority to take away a person’s freedom at a moment’s notice, and rarely are they found responsible for any wrongdoing in the line of duty. Our society gives police immense powers, and with it comes need for constant public scrutiny.
While we often didn’t see eye-to-eye, I appreciated that many Upper Valley police chiefs recognized we both had jobs to do and it wasn’t personal.
Hanover Chief Nick Giaccone, who died in 2017, would ask me for movie recommendations that he could watch on his laptop at Genesis Health Center in Lebanon, where he spent his final years. Phone conversations with Lebanon Chief Phil Roberts rarely ended without talk turning to our golf games, or lack of one. Canaan Chief Ryan Porter found time when I stopped by his office unannounced to ask about a case before I picked his brain for obscure vacation spots in Maine, where he went to college and started his law enforcement career. (It probably helped that Porter wasn’t chief when Crystal Wright was injured.)
Glenn Cutting was Hartford’s chief when I was writing about his department’s use of unreasonable force against Wayne Burwell. It led to some testy conversations. After Cutting retired, we started exchanging emails about our deer hunting experiences each fall.
I still hear from him at other times of year as well, which can lead to friendly banter. (At least, that’s the way I look at it.) After I raised questions about officers in a Vermont special police task force wearing face masks (a la ICE agents) during a drug bust in Hartford this summer, an email from Cutting showed up in my inbox.
“Police masks, really?” he started off. “I don’t think you would last ten minutes at a moderate newspaper.”
I took it as a compliment.
But at times in this job, it felt like I was tilting at windmills.
The story of Andy Harvard comes to mind. Harvard, a Dartmouth alum and world-renowned mountaineer, gave up up his career as a corporate lawyer and returned to Hanover in 2004 when the college asked (more like begged) for his help in reviving the Dartmouth Outing Club.
After a few years as the club’s director, and righting the canoe, so to speak, Harvard began missing meetings and not returning emails. Rumors spread through the administration that he might have a drinking problem. In 2008, Dartmouth forced him to retire before he had turned 60. Nine months later, Harvard was diagnosed with Younger Age Onset Alzheimer’s.
Kathy Harvard, with the help of Norwich attorney Geoffrey Vitt, asked Dartmouth on numerous occasions to acknowledge that her husband’s work troubles were due to an undiagnosed medical condition, making him eligible for financial help from the college.
With Vitt and Harvard, who has become a leading advocate for Alzheimer’s research and awareness, agreeing to go public, I was sure that Dartmouth would want to make things right. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The college maintained that assisting Harvard, who died in 2019 at age 69, would set a bad precedent.
So much for the power of the press.
But looking back at the last 24 years overall, I can’t complain. It’s been a rewarding career. Thanks, Upper Valley.
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