The Last Great Place
Thanks to You, Dear Readers, And Pie With Coffee
By MICHAEL CAPUZZO

With the turkey in the oven, I’ve got a moment to escape to the fireside and give thanks. Have a seat, won’t you? Pull up close until you feel the warmth of the fire. The rat-tat-titter of claws you hear is Cosmo, the Beagle, pacing in the kitchen, trying to figure how to lower the counter so he can insert his head into the English walnut pie. (see Chris Coffee’s Steak House recipe, p. 33). I can smell it, too, little guy. It’s for us. You’re not gettin’ any.

It’s a wonderful life in the borderlands of Pennsylvania and New York, and as Mountain Home approaches its second anniversary next month, I’m thankful for my wife, Teresa, for being the talented and tireless editor of this magazine, and for baking the English walnut pie.

I’m thankful for you, our dear readers, and you, our loyal advertisers, who made Mountain Home into one of America’s fastest-growing magazines, and a local institution almost overnight. Your passion for stories drives our passion. We’re growing so quickly we haven’t even had time to tell you we’ve increased our free distribution to 40,000 in the last couple months (from 25,000) without raising advertising rates or the cost, which is still free as the Allegheny wind. We estimate now that 200,000 folks read our regional magazine, based in the heart of Wellsboro, from the Finger Lakes to Williamsport and beyond. That’s not counting our new Web site, www.mountainhomemag.com. Check it out.

I’m thankful for Tucker Worthington, our artist and spirit guide, and graphic designer Andy Worthington, who wraps the package and puts the ribbon on every month; for our fishing-hiking-writing-editing managing editor extraordinaire, John Fulmer; for Susan, Jessica, Kate, Barb, and Cindy, our regional advertising staff who make the money to pay the bills and for Ruth, who does the paying; for Lou and Layne and Terry and Ron, who get the magazine on the street; for Kathleen “Yogamama” Thompson, Roy “Mountain Man” Kain, Tom Murphy, the Reverend Dr. Bob Greer, Terry Miller, Cindy Meixel, Joyce Tice, Pat Davis, Gary Ranck, Larry Biddison, Holly Howell, Fred Metarko, Vicki Jones, and the other writers and columnists I can’t get through the month without reading.

I’m thankful for the 400-plus places that carry Mountain Home, including BiLo, Weis, Dandy Mini-Mart, Wal-Mart,  the Native Bagel, the Turkey Ranch, and scores of your favorite restaurants and watering holes. We love it when you patronize a store that carries Mountain Home. As a woman told my mother-in-law, Jackie Patt, when she put a rack in the P & C grocery in Sayre the other day, “Thank God! Now we won’t have to go to Wal-Mart to get our Mountain Home.” I’m thankful for Jackie and Ron, Stanley and Theresa, and Chris; our partner George Bochetto, the Philadelphia laywyer; and Amanda Doan-Butler, the wizard of Water Street. Without them the engine wouldn’t run.

In the cities, they say, “Think Globally.” At Mountain Home, we say, “life is local.” But I’m grateful, too, for some good news from afar, and thought you’d be interested in what folks elsewhere have been saying about us. Last month, I was invited to speak at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace Fellows about my books, Close to Shore, and the forthcoming, The Murder Room. Madeleine Albright has spoken to this group, and Charles Gibson of ABC News, Gloria Steinhem, even Michael Moore. I knew I had to impress them, so I didn’t bring any books. I handed out eighteen copies of Mountain Home.

The audience, in a mansion donated to the university by CBS’s Mike Wallace, included The Wall Street Journal’s Asia reporter; the head of Yahoo News production from California; a Chicago Public Broadcasting System host; a Pulitzer-nominated columnist for The Detroit News; a National Geographic magazine photographer; the author of the best-seller The World of Lost Maps. I told them, as diplomatically as possible, that the world needed a little more of Mountain Home and little less of The New Yorker. Teresa was there, and covered her eyes “as they got ready to kill you.”

They went nuts. They loved Mountain Home. They’d never seen anything like it. They saw us as leading a new movement in journalism with great positive stories and great art and the best-looking color ads they’d ever seen in a local publication.  They said they could see why we’re growing while big-city newspapers are losing 50,000 readers a year.

The Detroit columnist, Rochelle Riley, formerly of The Washington Post, said, “The revolution in journalism to take back story starts here, with Mountain Home.”
Birgit Rieck, the program director, said, “I read everything, The New Yorker is good, and Vanity Fair is good, but the writing in Mountain Home is fantastic. I had a three-hour wait at Green Bay airport, so I started to read an issue of the Mountain Home, and it was the first time I wasn’t bored at an airport. The writing is so visual. In most magazines, articles are only an intake of information. When I read Mountain Home however, I was there. Mountain Home opened up a whole new world to me, a region in the U.S. I never knew about. This is the substance of what human life is about.”

As for keeping our heads from swelling, worry not. What swells here in the cold darkening Black Forest of November is our appetite, followed by our chin and our stomach, thanks to Chris Coffee’s English walnut pie.