As I sit here in front of my monitor, I find that I’m at a loss for words. In just a few more hours (Jan. 8), I will no longer be employed by Berks-Mont Newspapers. I’ve spent my entire professional life writing for Berks-Mont, and its time for me to make a change. But what do you say, and who do you thank after 34 years of doing something you love. I won’t even try to thank all the people I’ve worked with, or the people and teams I’ve written about over the years, the numbers are just too high.
The Boyertown Area Times has been in my blood almost since birth. I was too young to remember when my father purchased the newspapers, it has just been a part of my family for as long as I can remember. I have faint memories when my father would take me into the office when it was still part of Boyertown Publishing on South Reading Avenue. I can still remember Susie Allmendinger sitting at her desk at the window, while I was waiting for my father to come out from a meeting. Over the years I had a chance to know many of people who worked for the paper, so when I started working for the company in 1981, I pretty much already knew everyone there.
It was a different world back then. When I first started working at Berks-Mont, we used floppy discs, and wrote the headlines on a separate disk, to be inserted in a separate machine that printed out the headlines. It was a big deal when we finally were able to use color photos in the paper. It was a long process which our photographer, Harold Hoch skillfully work on.
But as the years went on, the technology made the process of producing newspapers so much easier. The emergence of email changed forever the way we communicated with the community, and really the way we gathered facts to report the news.
As Berks-Mont grew and added more newspapers to our family, we went from a dozen employees to nearly 30 in the late 1980’s when selling ads was a lot easier in the booming economy of the Reagan years.
But one thing that didn’t change was the people in the community who made my job a pleasure to do. I’ve always considered myself a lucky person. Walking into work on Monday morning was never a depressing chore for me. I loved doing what I did, and loved the people I worked with. Not many people can say that about their jobs.
To the people who wrote for me, to the readers I wrote for, I thank you all dearly. It’s been a great ride.