When I first started at Senior Voice, I asked my boss how long she’d worked here. She sighed, “Thirteen years.”
That was thirty-one years ago.
I was straight out of college, coming from a news editor position at UAA’s student newspaper, and in my early 30s. Senior issues were not something I was familiar with. But soon I was neck-deep writing about hospital Certificates of Need, Medicaid spend-down tactics, municipal senior property tax exemptions and other dense but important topics.
One of my recollections from those early days is a conversation with the then-director of the Division of Senior Services, who I was interviewing every month it seemed for yet another complicated story, often calling back to confirm a detail. She was always patient and helpful. One day she asked, “Have you ever heard of Napoleon’s Idiot?” I had not. She explained that Napoleon famously kept a low-rank soldier on hand who Napoleon would rehearse his speeches or instructions to. The idea was that if the Idiot understood the instructions, the rest of his officers and troops would as well. “You can be my Napoleon’s Idiot!” I don’t think it was intended as an insult, nor did I take it that way, and still smile when I think about it. I can argue that my whole tenure has been in this role, striving to grasp details and make them understandable to readers. Fortunately, I’ve had the help of fantastic writers and contributors all along the way.
I like to say I’ve “aged into my beat”. What used to be issues I wrote about from a distance—health, finance, housing, transportation—are now immediate, impacting my friends, family and myself.
And Alaska too is aging. Much has changed since the early 1990s, when seniors made up a smaller part of the state population. It seemed like the only stories that made mainstream headlines were when there was an investigation of a nursing home. Today, the “silver tsunami” is in full effect and the audience for mainstream news, print in particular, is mostly seniors. Senior Voice has survived while the print news industry overall has declined and that’s because of the habits and loyalty of our subscribers and readers and people seeking information to help them. And it’s also because of grant funding, mostly from federal block grants, without which Senior Voice likely would have shut down long ago. And we cannot overlook the vital support of our advertisers, many of whom have advertised for years.
For some time I’ve been building a list of people to thank when leaving Senior Voice, but I’ve changed my mind. There are just too many. Many have passed away. I don’t want to overlook anyone. Fellow staff, volunteers, readers, contributors, supervisors, business partners, the many people doing great work in the senior services realm. Fantastic people.
But I do want to thank the Older Persons Action Group, Inc. executive directors and board members who over the years have been so generous and supportive, both to me and the organization itself. I wish them the best as they carry the mission forward. And thank you to my wife and sons, who tolerated my long deadline hours, helped with mailouts and other projects.
Time to send this edition to the printer and turn a new page.
