To this day, Adirondack Daily Enterprise Managing Editor Peter Crowley likes to tell people that I’m the one who hired him as a reporter for the Lake Placid News back in August 1999 (his third time applying). That was during my first tour of duty as the newspaper’s editor.

It’s true. I’m the one who unleashed this journalist on the Tri-Lakes.

Peter, who is 46, even mentioned the hiring in his June 11 Enterprise column announcing that he’s leaving his job after June 25 to get a master’s degree at SUNY Potsdam. He wants to be an English teacher for middle or high school students.

In August 1999, at the age of 24, Peter was two years out of college — earning a bachelor’s degree in English and anthropology from St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto in 1997. Raised in Montgomery, Alabama, his parents were teachers, not journalists. But in 1999, he had moved to the Adirondacks, a place where he’d visited his grandparents for many years and gone to summer camp, for a new adventure.

His first day was Monday, Aug. 16, 1999, and competitors from the inaugural Ironman triathlon were still in town. Many were staying at the Swiss Acres Inn, where a call to the Lake Placid Volunteer Fire Department was made at 11:17 a.m. Peter and I headed out from the News office on Mill Hill to the scene of the fire. We tag-teamed the coverage: I took photos on my Pentax K-1000, and he interviewed people staying at the inn.

This was the first of many collaborations we’d have.

When I left the editor’s position at the News in late December 1999 to become the managing editor at the Enterprise, Peter soon followed me to the daily as the Saranac Lake reporter. I left that position in July 2001 to become the senior public information specialist at the Adirondack Park Agency’s Visitor Interpretive Centers. Peter left his position in March 2002 to travel and do some volunteer work in Georgia.

In a letter to the editor, then Saranac Lake High School Principal Jerry Goldman praised Peter upon his departure: “He was truly a class act. Peter always seemed to remember that stories are about people. And no matter how dicey the story, Peter always respected the people in them. He could be persistent and never backed away from the tough questions. In the end, I always came away thinking that Peter wanted to understand the story before he wrote it. I admired his work. This community and the Enterprise will miss him.”

Little did Peter and I know that we were ending our first tours of duty at the News and Enterprise. We’d reconnect many years later, both as editors for Adirondack Publishing.

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My road to reunification with Peter took 12 years.

After he worked as a public safety reporter for the Gilroy (California) Dispatch for a year, Publisher Cathy Moore rehired him in 2004, this time as managing editor of the Enterprise. He was 29 at the time, taking over for Steve Bradley, who moved into the production manager’s position.

“My head’s been buzzing about this,” Peter said of the appointment at the time.

While working at the VICs, I was able to see things from the other side of the press release. Once Peter was back at the Enterprise, I was sending him story ideas and press releases, and he’d have to choose what to cover and what not to cover based on my sales pitches. We were clearly not on the same team anymore.

Then I left the VICs in 2009, worked full time for my own publishing company for a year-and-a-half and was hired as the assistant managing editor at Denton Publications in Elizabethtown in January 2011. It was good to be back in journalism. I just wished my job was closer to home in Saranac Lake.

The opportunity to return to the Lake Placid News came in November 2013, when Cathy Moore rehired me as the editor. It was like the band was back together — Peter as the managing editor of the Enterprise and me as the editor of the News, working together to serve the Tri-Lakes and Olympic regions.

For seven-and-a-half years, we’ve created a partnership between the two newspapers that serves our readers well. It’s a working relationship I will miss dearly.

Losing Peter at the Enterprise means losing out on a lot of institutional memory, both for the communities we cover and for both newspapers.

In many ways, I will feel alone in the newsroom, trying to remind people — as an editor — why certain issues are important to our readers. My institutional memory spans decades — growing up in Tupper Lake, living and working in all three Tri-Lakes communities since graduating from SUNY Fredonia in 1991, and working in journalism, publishing or public relations in the North Country since 1992. I enjoy teaching reporters about our communities, but I also enjoy having someone in the newsroom who’s already lived through some of the same history.

When I give advice to young reporters, I tell them that they’ll look at things differently once they get established in a community. Time changes your perspective. Get married. Have kids. Buy a house. Start living in a community, and you’ll understand more about it. Therefore, your reporting will be more comprehensive, more in-depth. You’ll be able to interpret the context of news events based on the community’s history and your own experiences. You can see the forest for the trees.

Most reporters don’t stay around long enough to see news through these lenses. But Peter did. He appreciates life in a small town, and he’s able to cover news like a community newspaper should. With many print news organizations disappearing in America, he’s one of the people who worked to keep the traditional community newspaper alive. He’s done it in the Tri-Lakes and through the coalition of North Country dailies that share coverage so places like Plattsburgh, Malone, Glens Falls and Watertown don’t lose their newspapers.

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And now Peter’s leaving. I’ve been trying to figure out how best to mark this occasion. What kind of gift do I give him? As usual, I turned to writing. I find that words that come from my heart — not from a card in a drug store — mean more to people than anything else.

I thought maybe I should roast Peter. You know, like Don Rickles. If there was one topic to roast Peter about, it would be his time management.

“I’m swamped!” Peter has said over the years when deadline is approaching and he’s behind.

If Peter wants to speak with you for 15 minutes, prepare for 30 minutes or longer.

A few months ago, Peter didn’t even show up to one of his virtual Thursday editorial department meetings. He got sidetracked, leaving reporter Elizabeth Izzo and I — the two newsroom staffers still working from home — alone on the Zoom call (no camera, just audio), waiting and waiting and waiting. After 10 minutes, we had our own Lake Placid News staff meeting, and after 20 minutes, we hung up.

——

Peter, working alongside you and watching you grow as a person and a journalist, I feel an overwhelming sense of pride. You are an excellent writer and editor, meticulous to the core. Your curation of the opinion page is unparalleled; it is the undisputed voice of the community in an age of social media. You’ve been a wonderful teacher to young reporters over the years. And your dedication to the community, your work and high-quality journalism shows up daily in the newspapers your team produces. It’s a passion, and I see it every day.

That’s why I can’t imagine you leaving, but I understand completely. As the newspaper industry downsizes and morphs into something we don’t recognize — with a heavy emphasis on digital instead of the printed product — I think journalists in newsrooms across the world have had to pause, take stock of their lives and perhaps follow a new passion. For you, it’s teaching, and I’m extremely happy for you. Sad for us, of course.

I can’t thank you enough for everything over the years, especially your ongoing support and friendship. From the bottom of my heart, I wish you the best in graduate school and a career in education. I wish you and your family long lives, health and happiness. May these next chapters give you even more life experiences so when you retire from teaching, you can come back to your community newspaper and write about them. (The sick ones always come back.) I only wish I had a job as a school administrator — just so we could say I was the first to hire you as an English teacher.

Cheers, my friend, and Godspeed.