Key stories are the ones we live

A kid loves to write, signs up to scribe for his high school paper and likes it. He gets to college and writes for the college paper, too. After college he’s working in PR, making the world safe for men’s suits. Can’t see a lifetime of this, so he turns it in, lands a job as a cub reporter for his hometown paper.

Biddle’s first editor becomes a mentor. A storied newspaperman, this boss engages with community, lives a good life, cares about his world. Biddle notices. Not bad as mentors go. At the age of 23, Biddle thinks, “Huh; this is interesting.”

Soon he’s married, working at the Santa Fe New Mexican. Biddle and Idoline start a family. Ellie comes along. Santa Fe’s fine but there’s a world yet to explore.

Through layers of serendipity, Biddle and his small family end up, as one does, running a paper in Argentina. Angie’s born, an Argentinean, which we’ll come back to.

One of life’s lightbulbs goes off. For the first time, Biddle thinks “owning and running a paper maybe is within reach.” They travel from Maine to Montana, kicking tires on newspapers, two kids in tow. Nothing fits.

“My wife is much smarter than I am,” he says. “We are looking for a home,” he tells me she says, “not a place to live.”

Idoline, a UVM graduate, likes Vermont. She’d live here. Biddle, cold-calling Vermont publishers, reaches out to the founder of the Reporter, gets invited to visit.

“January 1998,” Biddle said. “It had just snowed. It was a very cold day, under a bright blue sky. Curls of snow blowing off roofs. The air smelled of wood smoke. We fell in love,” he said.

“Until we pulled into Stowe, my whole life had been two- to four-year increments,” he said. His father was a diplomat, so the family moved from station to station, post to post. “I thought this would be the same. Four, five years, sell the paper. Not 18,” he says.

Running the paper, hiring and nurturing reporters, publishing stuff, being part of something successful, raising a family in Stowe. It’s all fun.

Biddle tells an anecdote about the time then-Gov. Howard Dean called and asked if he could come in to talk. “He called me,” he said. Biddle describes visits from politicians as “psychic gas in the tank” for the team.

I ask Biddle about reporting on community. He pauses for a long time.

This paper notes our births and marriages, crimes and punishments, graduations, promotions, deaths. It records what we say, either through an article, a letter (or a column), and what we do. It records our victories, tragedies, championships. Dickens didn’t do more.

A wise woman once said to me, “Cemeteries are full of indispensible people.” The key stories are not the ones about politicos and pundits. The important stories are the ones we are living, the ones recorded on honor rolls, the milestones section of the paper, the police blotter, profiles, obits. The ones we write every day and this paper records.

After thinking for a bit, Biddle says, “I have to admit something. I’m like everyone else. I read some things in the paper every week and other things only once in a while. I always read the obits with great care, the letters, the main stories. The rest I take in like everyone else. And here’s the thing. People come up to me on the street and want to talk about every little thing in the paper. It may not be the most important thing to me, but it is to them. It’s critical to them,” he says. “And that’s a big responsibility.”

In a world where it sometimes seems the wheels are off the bus, where there’s so little common ground, where we control so little of what is around us, we get to choose a few things. We choose how we live and relate to each other. We choose where we live and how we participate in our community. And this newspaper is important because it focuses on stories all around us.

Like this one: A guy falls in love and marries, takes jobs here and there, becomes a newspaperman, starts a family, moves to Stowe, buys a local paper. We watch the kids grow — and watching each other’s kids grow is one of the great joys of living in a small town. Ellie Duke always all smiles and energy. She’s off studying library science, I think. I specifically remember conversations with Angie when he was a little kid standing outside the elementary school. Good conversations. He was always up for a hello and a talk. Now he too is grown. And, through a fluke of a job his dad took decades ago, he’s a ski racer with the Argentinean National Team, a slight detour on his way to college. Go figure. The kids gone, the family’s staying, but Biddle’s sold the paper. Good story.

Biddle called me this morning. He wanted to talk more about the idea of living, working, putting out a paper in a small community. “We watch each other and it makes us think, makes us behave maybe a little better.” He’s done a good job with this paper covering this community, helping us pay attention to each other, maybe making us all be a little better. Thank you.

Let the big stories in the world play out as they will. We’ll focus on the important ones.

David M. Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe. Comment on this article here, or email letters to news@stowereporter.com.