Long-time (but former) Washington Post reporter Sari Horwitz, discusses why we should still subscribe

 My old friend Sari, who took a buyout a couple of years ago, recalled her career in a recent Facebook post and explains why we should still subscribe.  Reprinted with permission

 When he was a little boy in the late 1950s, my husband Bill Schultz delivered The Washington Post newspaper with his brother John. It cost $1.95 a month. He went from house to house in his Virginia suburb of Hollin Hills, carrying copies of the Post in a canvas bag. He also carried a roll of nickels with him when he collected for the subscription because nearly everyone paid him $2.00 and expected a nickel in change.

We were destined to be together.

By the time Bill and I met on a blind date in 1986, I had been at The Washington Post for two years beginning as a summer intern in the Post’s business section. But the Post had touched my life more than a decade before when, as a high school student in Tucson, I devoured Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate stories. They inspired me to become a journalist.

Inside the Post’s old headquarters on 15th Street in the 1980s and 1990s, I was surrounded by journalism legends: Bob Woodward, Katharine Graham, Don Graham, Ben Bradlee (who hired me), Morton Mintz, Rick Atkinson, David Maraniss, Sally Jenkins and David Broder. And people who would become legends: Peter Baker, Kevin Merida, Kara Swisher, Jeffrey Goldberg and David Remnick.
 

I reported for nearly every section of the paper, including National and Style (where I wrote a story about my daughter Rachael.) But I spent nearly half of my career in the Post’s Metro section covering night cops, the schools and the city of Washington. One of my editors on the night police beat was Eugene Bachinski who taught me the importance of getting out and making sources. He had street cred — back in the day, one of his police sources had showed him the address book of a Watergate burglar that had an entry with a White House number, which Gene then shared with Woodward.
 

Even though the Post was famous for its big national scoops like Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, to me the Metro staff was the place to be. Publisher Don Graham cared deeply about Metro. He had spent time on the streets as a D.C. cop and saw the Post as first and foremost a local paper. His mother, Katharine Graham, also cared about the city. When I covered the struggles of the DC schools in the 1990s, she invited me and other education reporters to her conference room for lunch to discuss possible solutions. Later, Don started a college scholarship fund for students from D.C. schools. In those days, the Post devoted significant resources and its best editors to holding local leaders like Mayor Marion Barry to account. Two of the year-long investigative series that I was part of were local — a probe into shootings by the DC police force and an investigation into more than 200 children who died in the District of Columbia foster care system.
 

Fast forward to this week when it was Metro that suffered among the most severe layoffs on what former executive editor Marty Baron called one of the darkest days in the Post’s history. Nearly the entire staff was laid off, including legendary and beloved Marty Weil — who was at the paper for 60 years — and  Paul Duggan, one of the greatest writers and reporters in the newsroom. The contract was not renewed for Michael Ruane, another of Metro’s beautiful writers and excellent reporters who wrote a book with me about the terrifying 2002 Washington Sniper case. More than 300 journalists were laid off, including the Photo staff, the Sports department and nearly all the foreign correspondents. 
 

Over my 40 years at the paper, many of us knew we could find higher-paying jobs elsewhere. But it was our loyalty to the Post, a sense that our work was a public service and the tremendous amount of fun we all had together that kept us there. It is hard to describe the thrill of working in the same newsroom alongside the likes of Anne Hull, Kate Boo, Dana Priest, Cameron Barr, Vernon Loeb, Michael Powell, Julie Tate, Peter Finn, Gene Weingarten, Mike Abramowitz, Alice R Crites, Bill Hamilton, Peter Perl, Christine Brennan, Keith Harriston, Ted Gup, Nikki Kahn, Carol Guzy, Mike Semel, Nell Henderson, Matea Gold, Carol Leonnig, Elsa Walsh, Ruth Marcus and Michel du Cille. And there were the little things that made the place seem like family. The way Don Graham, who often roamed the newsroom, sent us notes, which we called  “Donny-grams,” when we wrote a story he liked. Or reporter Marty Weil walking by all our desks in the newsroom to say hello to us by name after he arrived for his late afternoon/night shift. 
 

When Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013, the Post, like many newspapers, was losing advertising and hemorrhaging money. The days when my editors would urge me to spend more money taking sources out to dinner or encourage me to travel more across the country for stories were long over. Bezos met with a group of us, along with Publisher Katharine Weymouth (Katharine Graham’s granddaughter) when he first arrived and said all the right things about how much he cared about rescuing the Post. We were hopeful he would.
 

In the early years, Bezos seemed like the ideal owner. He didn’t interfere in the newsroom, infused the paper with money, increased the staff and oversaw important improvements in technology. Much has been written about how all of that sadly changed in the last several years. Two years ago, many of us, including legendary Investigations Editor Jeff Leen and my longtime colleagues Scott Higham, Valerie Strauss, Marc Fisher, Kimberly Kindy and Lynda Robinson took a Post buyout. We did so with broken hearts. We never stopped loving the Post or being reporters and editors there. We hoped the Post would find its way and somehow recover from its death spiral.
 

We don’t know what the Post will become now. But I do know this. Despite the failure of its leaders and as painful and devastating as this week has been, the Post is still breaking important stories and publishing impactful investigations. The enormously talented journalists who remain are working hard to bring the most accurate and comprehensive news to readers around the country and the world.
I am going to keep subscribing to the Post and reading the stories by those dedicated reporters/editors still 

in the newsroom and I hope you do too. They are continuing to dig deep and push forward against tremendous external and internal pressures. And they make me proud. They include my friends and former colleagues Dana Hedgpeth, Jenn Abelson, Amy Brittain, Nicole Dungca, David Fallis, Caitlin Gibson, Joe Heim, Peter Hermann, Meryl Kornfield, Joyce Lee, Ellen Nakashima, Hannah Natanson, Robert Samuels, Paul Schwartzman, Ian Shapira, Lena Sun, William Wan, Debbi Wilgoren and so many more.
 

Our vacation in Andalucia begins – a clusterfuck at Frankfurt Airport

I’ve flown to or via Europe many times over the past 55 years, but until last month, never to or through Frankfurt.  I’ll never again schedule travel using that airport.

For this year’s holiday gathering with our son and his family, who live in Zanzibar, we aimed for something roughly half-way between; someplace that was not overly cold; but also someplace where our grandchildren could experience snow, which none of them had done since the oldest started walking.  One of guys with whom I play pickup soccer mentioned the Sierra Nevada de Espana, outside Granada, and we settled on three weeks in Andalucia, starting out in Seville; then to Granada, culminating in four days of skiing and other winter sports in the Sierra Nevada.  It sounded like a great compromise.

But Seville proved to be a hard destination to reach from DC.  So in checking around, we ended up with a three-leg flight which took us through Charlotte and Frankfurt, making the reservation through Travelocity and American Airlines.  What a nightmare!

Touring Savannah

A Day in Portsmouth New Hampshire

 We have been coming to New Hampshire for 39 years, but we have never been east of Manchester (and even in Manchester, only in the airport back when we used to fly up to visit my father at his Stone Pond summer house, which we now own).  So we decided to spend what seemed likely to be a rainy Saturday visiting Portsmouth, the main town in New Hampshire’s very short stretch of Atlantic coastline.  One of my goals was to get to the Smuttynose Brewery – we have been enjoying their ales since the mid-1980's when they had next to no distribution beyond New Hampshire.  Then they were available only in the Richmond area, so I had to drive south to Ashland Virginia to find a beer store carrying their ales.  These days you can sometimes find it in the better liquor stores in DC, but mostly we stock up at Hannafords whenever we come to New Hampshire.  Ideally, I would have gone for a tour of the brewery, but they stopped offering tours a few years ago.  At the very least, I figured to eat lunch and dinner at one of their outlets in the Portsmouth area.

We got started in the midmorning so it was approaching noon when we reached Hampton, at th southern end of the Portsmouth area.  Nancy was getting hungry, so we stopped for lunch at the Smuttynose Brewery  

And....there it was, the brewery where the magic happens!  

Smuttynose Brewery, Hampton, NH

 

The rain had ended by then; in fact, it was getting sunny, so we sat down in the outdoor seating area of the restaurant

Smuttynose Restaurant in Hampton, NH

 
and ordered appetizers (brussels sprouts tossed with garlic parm dressing and pretzel bites with a beer-based cheese sauce) and fish and chips.  The brussels sprouts were pretty good; the others were acceptable.  Ah, but the beer!  Nancy got a glass of Common Man ale, while I got a tasting flight:  Robust Porter, an old favorite; Cherry Sour; Raspberry Lime Rickey Sour; and Snaccident, a chocolate peanut butter stout.  In the latter, I finally found a stout that was too thick for my taste, but the others were all good choices.  A singer named Ryan Williamson started playing at 1, just as we were ready to leave.  We couldn’t bear to listen.  They apparently have music daily at 6:30 and at 1 PM  on weekends

As we were getting ready to leave, the tasting bar was open so I wanted to go take a look.  Our waiter had mentioned that I could get a good look inside the brewery from a window on the side, and indeed I could

View of Smuttynose Brewery from its window

But even better – inside the retail store there was a sign for the rest rooms which, as it turned out, were at the edge of the brewery – so I was able to get into the  brewery and walk around looking at the fermentation vats

 

Inside Smuttynose Brewerry

Smuttynose brewing vats

Not the same as a tour, to be sure, but it will have to do!

Then we drove up to Portsmouth and parked near the Portsmouth Historical Society where we picked up free maps for two self-guided walking tours.  We proceeded to walk in the hot sun for the next two hours, looking at buildings from the later years of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th

 

Many of the houses had labels giving their historical names and dates, such as the Dreadwell Jenness house from 1818

Dreadwell Jenness House

 

There were plenty of historical plaques shedding light on the buildings; uses and the personages who had lived there.

The Rockingham Hotel, with medallions including terra cotta busts of the founders

Bust of Frank Jones on the Rockingham Hotel

Rockingham Hotel, Portsmouth

Near the Rockingham was a memorial to enslaved residents of Portsmouth (seen in the foreground below)

 The 1784 Governor John Langdon House

Governor John Langdon House

 

and this plaque remembering one of Langdon's servants

 

We declined to take the tour of the Langdon House.  When we asked how much the tour cost, the person at the gate hesitated an had to look it up, so we got the impression she had not had any paying customers recently.  At $13 for seniors, I was not surprised


But we had a nice walk in the adjoining garden

Garden of John Langdon House

This was the childhood home of James Fields, who was a major publisher of American fiction in he middle of the 19th Century.  The plaque credits him with turning the Atlantic monthly into a literary force, although it is not cleat to me how accurate that is

James Fields home

The South Meeting House (and its adjoining horse barn)

 

 

Finally we reached the harbor

 

And walked along the waterfront until we reached a park and the Point Of Graves Burying Ground, which contained tombstones from as far back at the late 17th century and many from the early to middle 18th.  The tombstones were well preserved and featured the work of outstanding carvers from that period

 

As we started back to our car, we stopped to look at Memorial Bridge, which is dedicated to World War I soldiers and spans the Piscatauqua River, connecting Portsmouth with Kittery, Maine.  Its center section was raised to allow a freighter to pass beneath

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Dedication of Memorial Bridge, Portsmouth

Memorial Bridge Vertical Lift in action

We stopped to cool ourselves a little bit with ice cream from the family-operated Red Rover Creamery.  The ice cream was pleasantly unsweet–indeed the Santa Rosa Plum flavor was a tad tart — but the vanilla ice cream appeared to have no vanilla – it was just plain ice cream.

Walking toward our car, we passed North Church on Market Square

I had hoped to have dinner at the Smuttlab restaurant in Dover NH, for another shot at  a variety of Smuttynose ales (I had brought along an empty growler!), but Nancy was not hungry yet, so we headed for home

On  our way back to Marlborough, we drove along the coastline, pausing at a rocky beach along the Atlantic



and then driving past beach side communities with houses ranging from simple bungalows to the most grandiose structures.

Driving home led us to a new dining discovery – Pearl, an unassuming-looking Asian Fusion place at the end of a strip mall just south of 101 in Peterborough.  It may well be the best restaurant meal we have had in the area recently, at least a rival for Luca’s on the Keene Town Square.  

We sat in their small outside dining area-- we would have been uncomfortable indoors which was packed and noisy. The restaurant has a nice beer and wine list, reasonably priced. We began with the arugula and blueberry salad, which came with a light blueberry dressing and plenty of small toasted cashews.  For main dishes, I had the cashew-chili crusted salmon salad -- the salmon was perfectly cooked, and the salad with crispy veggies (including more arugula), I liked the small sugar snap peas.  Nancy had the special, six sesame-crusted scallops with a tasty dressing sharp with wasabi, string potatoes and a delicious red-cabbage slaw.

It was a nice end to a good touring day

A Short Visit to Charleston

Touring Georgia's Golden Isles

Caixa Cosmo and Camp Nou