I am 38 years old, and my husband, Jonathan, and I live
on Butterfield Terrace, with our two dogs and one cat. We have lived in Amherst since 1996.
On the swings at North Village, back in its flat roof days.
I spent much of my childhood here, living in North
Village Apartments and attending Mark’s Meadow Elementary School,
both of which I remember fondly. North Village
was a wonderful place to be a kid—all sidewalks, backyards and bikes. That was back in the golden age of Mark’s
Meadow as the lab school for UMass’ School
of Ed, and innovation and
creativity thrived. I went to middle
school and high school on Cape Cod, but returned to Amherst often then and later, because my
father, John Coull, remained in this area, where he owned and operated Valley
Bicycles for many years.
I graduated from Boston University
in 1991 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communications and a
Bachelor of Arts degree in Classical Civilizations. While at BU, I had a work-study job in my
Junior and Senior years that would become my entrée into the automotive
industry: I had the great pleasure and
good fortune to work for the National Public Radio Program Car Talk, which was produced on campus. In addition to arranging the show’s calls,
picking out good letters to be read on the air and getting coffee, I was in
fact one of the “Fabulous Vinnie Dancers” backing up Tom and Ray as they sang
“the Car Talk Shuffle” at the big Car Talk Sock Hop fundraiser for WBUR. Fortunately, this was long before
YouTube.
Taking the show on the road: at Disney World with Car Talk.
But after graduation it was time to leave “Click and
Clack” behind, and I moved to New
Jersey to work in public relations for Mazda. My job was to get automotive journalists to
drive and write about Mazda vehicles, which was easy to do, because back in the
early 90s, Mazda’s cars were sporty and exciting and extremely popular. The position involved amazing experiences,
such as getting to borrow new vehicles from all the other manufacturers and
going to race car driving school. For
someone who had always loved cars, this was a dream job.
But then things went south for Mazda, and the East Coast
office I was part of was eliminated. I
began freelancing in automotive public relations and journalism, eventually
becoming involved with the New York Auto Show, by whom I was ultimately hired
in-house to handle all industry public relations, replacing the three-person
consulting team of which I had been a part.
I nearly flunked out of this three-day course at Pocono Raceway—I drove too slowly.
My job there was to boost the prominence of the New York
Auto Show within the industry, and to manage the press introductions of new
vehicles during the show’s annual press preview, a two-day event preceding the
show’s public opening. This entailed
coordinating a wild collection of logistics and egos and TV shoots, and it was
a blast. But all that traversing of the massive
Jacob Javits Convention Center
in high heels has pretty much confined me to Birkenstocks forever
after.
And I was getting pretty tired of my commute from Jersey — 51 miles each way! And the tolls! — and Jonathan and I were
ready to buy a house, and all things considered, that just wasn’t where we
wanted to be.
Amherst
beckoned, and here we are.
After those years of spending hours a day in our cars (on
the plus side: we were NPR junkies) we wanted a house within walking distance
to downtown. Both of us were then
telecommuting—my husband kept the job he still has, as a computer programmer
for a company in New Jersey, while I went back to freelancing—so a commute
was not an issue, but quality of life was imperative, and being able to walk
downtown defined that for us. It still
does.
So we bought this house on the edge of the UMass campus—there’s a dorm across the street; not your typical neighborhood—and we’ve
been here for close to 12 years and couldn’t be happier.
Life as a freelancer—covering the used car beat for a trade magazine.
I freelanced for a few years doing web site work and
various writing assignments for the New York Auto Show, writing articles for an
automotive trade magazine, and doing public relations and press event coordination
for a couple of smaller auto shows in Pennsylvania, and eventually I got the
whole car thing out of my system.
By then, I had become very involved with the Amherst Survival Center,
and slowly my paid work shifted to all volunteer work. That has been an incredible opportunity to
have, and I have savored my experiences in human services and
Town government.
After the success and enjoyment of my Town Meeting blog,
I decided that I wanted to write more about Amherst.
In the fall of 2006, I began the web site inAmherst.com, and I sought to be
another outlet for telling stories and reporting news of things happening in
town. As one who walks around town a
lot, I would constantly see things that made me think “I wonder what’s going on
there?” and I thought the web site would be the perfect venue for sharing the answers
to such questions. In the first few
months, I wrote about new businesses, the Grace Church renovation, the Boy
Scouts Christmas tree sale—before it was a brouhaha—news from the library
and Town Hall, and so forth. That
December, I began doing the recaps of Select Board meetings, thinking that was
a niche where I could perform a valuable service—the newspaper typically
covers the Select Board’s “big” decisions, but they don’t have the space to
include every topic and discussion; and the meetings run much longer than most
people have the time to watch. So I
began to attend and recap all of those meetings. This takes a considerable amount of time, and
it affected my ability to cover other news stories, and by the time Town
Meeting ended in the spring—with its many sessions that I was blogging, and
the Select Board meetings which occur before each one—my coverage of other
news pretty much dried up. I am sorry
about that, because I really enjoyed researching and reporting on that very
local stuff, and meeting incredibly nice and interesting people in the process,
but the recaps became my commitment and my niche—and an entirely different
learning experience.
The cat isn’t much for pictures, but here’s the rest of the household.
I am proud of what I have done with the site and the
recaps. I have received tremendous
feedback about how complete, useful and objective the recaps are. I have written a number of opinion pieces as
well, often critical of the Select Board’s actions, and I’ve been especially
gratified when people have said that they admire my ability to maintain the
neutrality of a recap while feeling the frustration expressed in an opinion
piece.
The Town Meeting blog and the opinion pieces on
inAmherst.com provide a rich record of my positions on local issues and
concerns. The recaps are a testament to
my knowledge of what is happening and how it happens, and my commitment to
making others aware of that. Taken
together, I hope they show that I am particularly well-informed; that I am
thoughtful, principled and fair; and that I am dedicated to good government for Amherst. If that describes what you want from a Select
Board member, I hope you will vote for me on April 1st.
