For more than 20 years, Concord-area readers had the good fortune to open their Sunday Monitor most weekends and find a column by Katy Burns, a sharp and witty observer of the local scene.
Seasons changed, political parties fell into and out of favor, governors came and went, and Katy Burns persisted, providing context, humor and a good dose of moral outrage to help us understand the often absurd parade on the public stage.
Katy recently announced her retirement and while she surely deserves a break, this is sad news indeed for the paper and for the community.
I had the privilege of editing Katy at the Monitor for many years, and it was a career highlight for sure. Her columns arrived late in the week, often just when I needed a pick-me-up. Her writing was fresh and pointed and often funny, even when the news was not.
In the first awful summer of the pandemic (long after I had left the newspaper), she asked: “Who are these largely maskless fools, captured by omnipresent TV cameras, who are downright gleefully gathering in exuberant crowds at beaches and bars, defiantly daring the pandemic gods to strike them down? Nor are they just the feckless young. We’ve seen plenty of feckless geezers and geezerettes as well.”
Geezerettes!
New Hampshire, with its enormous legislature and nonstop visits from presidential wannabes, provided a limitless supply of politicians to skewer — and Katy did, regularly drawing howls from readers who opposed her liberal view of the world.
But some of my favorite columns were on more unexpected topics. A history lesson about John Winant, a hero-governor from the first half of the 20th century whose death by suicide left subsequent generations uneasy about how to honor his legacy.
An explainer on a decision by the business that preserves Dr. Seuss’s legacy to no longer publish several books with racist and insensitive imagery. A cautionary tale from the 1970s, when Aristotle Onassis imagined that the state’s tiny seacoast would make a good deep-water port for oil tankers.
“In no time, instead of admiring graceful blue herons, the good citizens of New Hampshire would be contemplating New Jersey north, complete with 18 miles of pollutant-spewing oil refineries,” she wrote, lauding the citizen activism that ultimately killed the plan.
A transplant from the Midwest, Katy was among the biggest boosters of New Hampshire’s natural beauty, its quirky traditions and simple pleasures, its sense of community, even in a polarized time.
She found the presidential primary overrated and yet enjoyed the theater of it all. She wrote about summertime farm stands and the late-summer joy of homemade sauce from local tomatoes. (On the other hand, she once referred to New Hampshire as the “good old Grouchy State” in an unlikely column about traffic circles.)
Her columns first appeared in the Monitor in 1999. Consider how much change she observed! Gov. Jeanne Shaheen followed by Gov. Craig Benson followed by Gov. John Lynch. Clintons, Sununus, Greggs. Barack Obama and Donald Trump. A reborn state Democratic Party that has periodically taken charge of the State House — unthinkable not too many years ago.
In those two decades, the Old Man of the Mountain fell. The Free Staters arrived. The Northern Pass came and went. New Hampshire elected women to high office, including a brief period in which the state’s entire Washington delegation, along with its governor and House speaker and chief justice, were women.
Journalism, especially small-town journalism, is evolving rapidly, but the presence of strong local voices to help stir the conversation on issues of local concern remains critically important. Katy’s column, her unique voice, helped give the Monitor its personality, a regular jolt of opinion that readers loved … or loved to hate.
Katy Burns did not choose an especially quiet time to step away from her keyboard. The pandemic is still with us, the signals from Ukraine are worrisome, the New Hampshire Legislature is considering a measure to have the state secede from the union.
Katy’s column on Jan. 23 sounded like a finale but also left the door ever so slightly ajar for an occasional cameo appearance. I hope she writes again.
(Felice Belman is an editor on the national desk of the New York Times and a former longtime Monitor journalist.)