Looking Back on 2007
by Bill Dusty
Another year, another cache of memories stored away. A personal loss started out the year, and as the months passed by, more changes – some good and some not so good – came and went. In Springfield, it was a local election year, and so it was once again time for the people of the city to put on the blinders. It was an eventful year, but in so many respects, still so unsurprising.
2007 marked a transitional phase in the online presence of what had for several years been called “The New England Rogue Journal“, a three-year-old ezine that covered topics ranging from science & nature to local politics & crime. Writing the Journal was a time-consuming experience, since I had yet to convert the site into a “blog” format (where posts are written and published on an online server), and so I had to first write the stories, then add in the HTML coding (which I usually do from scratch), and then upload the finished pages to the server (where the world can see them). Of course, working alone, I was also the website designer and administrator – plus I had a “real,” full-time job to fit in. This often left me with very little time for actually researching and writing original stories.
In the meantime, I had begun a personal blog back in 2005 using free Blogger service, which made writing and posting stories much easier. A name change in 2006 introduced this blog as “Earth to Bill“, and it was on this site that I began writing local, Springfield stories – almost by accident. I was scraping for story ideas and decided it would be easy just to write about things that were happening all around me. Soon afterward, in the fall/winter of 2006, I purchased a camcorder to try out video blogging. Over seventy videos later, I’ve logged several miles roaming around Springfield’s streets and stopping by various local events throughout the year.
My first video of 2007 was a tour around Forest Park on an unusually balmy day in January. People were actually dressed in shorts as they played around on the baseball fields.
Next up came the second part of my “Good & Bad of Springfield” videos. (Recently, I’m being reminded of how difficult some of those early videos were to take in sometimes frigid winter weather.)
In March, I wrote a story about an old house on 83 Maple Street. I followed up on that story by contacting the real estate agency representing that bank-owned historic property to ask them if I could do a tour of the inside of the house. I invited “Urban Compass” blogger Heather Brandon to come along for the visit, and the two of us spent about forty minutes snapping photos. I also shot some video. The resulting story post is here.
As winter gave way to spring, I was getting comfortable using my nifty little camcorder. I volunteered for the Springfield Cleanup Day at the end of April, taking some video there, and I later stopped by the city’s “Largest Pancake Breakfast” for another video [see part one, part two, part three]. (It was at this event that I first met Springfield City Council candidate Karen Powell.)
Friday preparation for the Pancake Breakfast
By late spring, I was convinced the New England Rogue Journal was never going to develop into the regional online ezine I had originally envisioned. Even after I had converted the site into blog format, I still never felt optimistic about its future. The nail-in-the-coffin time came when the local monthly publication “Local Buzz” did a story on area Republicans – of which I am one of the most strident – and I didn’t even get a mention as a blogger. Ouch! Although I quickly recovered from this admittedly mild oversight, it was at that time that I decided I needed to create something different – a website that folks in and around Springfield could more readily identify as being local.
Thus spelled the end of the New England Rogue Journal and the birth of the Springfield Intruder, going online just this past summer. Today, the Intruder has taken over the local stories previously posted on my personal blog (Earth to Bill). The Springfield Intruder is still a work in progress, too, as I’m always looking for ways to expand it and increase its readership – a difficult task for a one-man operation!
And of course while all of this was going on, the City of Springfield kept busy with its annual events and other activities, including what many hoped would be a pivotal local election year. I was relatively new to the local political scene (having concentrated on international and regional goings-on for many years), and had a lot of brushing up to do. I first met Tommy Devine, Springfield’s long-time local political and social pundit, at Karen Powell’s campaign kick-off event. To say that Tommy is a fountain of knowledge of Springfield politics would be an incredible understatement. And so after the campaign event’s speeches and all, him and I moved to the bar of the establishment and talked politics for quite sometime. I learned more about the inner-workings of politics in Springfield in that couple of hours than I had in all the months and years prior.
With summertime came the Springfield Intruder, and also the various campaigns for City Council and Mayor of Springfield were heating up. I attended the campaign kick-off event of John Lysak, and later went along with him as he escorted a visiting group of Guardian Angels around the South End of the city.
This summer seemed to blow by rather quickly, and before we all knew it, fall had arrived, the Springfield City Council preliminary elections had come and gone, and the general election walked on up and crushed the bones of any and all who had any hope of seeing any real change or reform in our local government.
Below is a 9-and-half minute video featuring clips of some of the videos I shot throughout the year. (If you have a slow Internet connection, you may want to click the play button, then pause it, then go do the laundry or something while the video loads.) Some of the year’s video tours & events are not featured because I no longer have some of the raw footage of those videos (including the Holyoke St. Patrick’s Day Parade).
The videos featured in the above video are listed below:
- Golfing in the Snow
- Loui’s Auto Body
- A Walk Up Maple Street
- Lunchtime Concert at Tower Square Park
- Hoop City Jazz & Art Festival
- 4th of July Fireworks (with Lisa Bellucci)
- Guardian Angels Visit Springfield
- A Walk Along Mulberry Street
- The Matton St. Arts Festival
- Visiting The Big E
- A Journey Up Alden Street
- Parade of the Big Balloons
All-in-all, the year 2007 was a tulmultous one for me personally, and a decidedly ‘business-as-usual” one for the City of Springfield. Congratulations to the new mayor of Springfield, Domenic Sarno, who campaigned hard this past year, and let’s hope that 2008 and beyond brings better and better times for a city long grown weary of letdowns and false sunrises.
More selected videos:
- Riverfront Park (actually Dec. of 2006)
- The Mill River
- Quest for Crime
- Visiting the Springfield Cemetery
- Life After Death
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1 Response for “Looking Back on 2007”
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Very cool.