The Christmas holidays are a season of giving, so my wife gave me an assignment. It’s only fitting that Teresa Banik Capuzzo, the editor and publisher of Mountain Home, who made our company, Beagle Media, what it is, should take this space to write a column marking the twentieth anniversary of the magazine you have in your hands. But she was too busy putting this special holiday issue to bed, so the honor fell to me. It’s my pleasure.

In December 2005, while print was slowly dying all around us, including the Philadelphia Inquirer where we met, Teresa and I launched Mountain Home magazine in her hometown of Wellsboro to serve the Twin Tiers with its first full-color, monthly lifestyle magazine. Our big-city journalism friends thought we were crazy. But the late Tucker Worthington, the brilliant Wellsboro artist who sparked something in all three of us and designed every cover until November 2019, said it would be good crazy if we could capture arts and culture and winemaking and the parallel worlds of hunting and the outdoors, all through the history and people of our beautiful region.

A twentieth anniversary would be impossible without a shout out to associate editor and publisher Lilace Mellin Guignard, Teresa’s right hand at running the magazine; art director Wade Spencer; accounts manager/copy editor/office-runner Amy Packard; managing editor Gayle Morrow; circulation director Michael Banik; our brand new ad rep Shelley Shank; and our dozens of talented writers, artists, and photographers, including this month’s cover by our friend and former Inquirer colleague David O’Reilly.

None of us knew—before AI, politics, and corporate media that ruthlessly divide us by race and class and age and sex and geography—just how radical we were.

In the small house at 39 Water Street, our first office, we hung our “business model”—William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize speech that writers must once again write fearlessly about “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing...the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Faulkner goes on: “Until he does so, he labors under a curse…Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man.”

The result: 100,000 readers in two states, more than 200 journalism awards, kudos from giants like Inquirer editor and New York Times managing editor Eugene Roberts, who had me teach what he called our “brilliant journalism” to his class at the University of Maryland.

Thank you dear readers, advertisers, Teresa, and God (not necessarily in that order) for twenty great years. Seriously, as a big-city journalist who fell in love with the country and a country girl, it’s been the great and humbling journey of my life to join with my wife to publish Mountain Home. What a ride it has been to tell your stories and share the meaning of our lives on this land together for 240 consecutive monthly regional magazines.

We are humbled by what you, our readers, have taught us as we tell your stories.