Letter from the Editor

I’m trying to remember just what I thought when Lee Publisher Beth Snipes called me in the fall of 2007 with her Big Idea. She wanted to start a women’s magazine in Lee County, one that would be fun and funny and smart, and even sometimes moving, a magazine that focused on the lives of regular women, people, she said, like us.

Beth and I have known each other since sometime in the early 1980s, when she was the photo editor and I was the city editor of a small paper in Ohio. She was married with two daughters. (Son, John the Younger, came later.) I was single with boyfriend trouble. She had a home, warm and welcoming. I had an apartment that I sometimes cleaned. She was visual, sensory, aesthetic. I was a word person, analytical, argumentative. We met at the axis of the stories we told. Hers were best: about her father, Jerry Callahan, who was a cartoonist for the Philadelphia Bulletin, about the ducklings she secretly raised in her basement before her parents discovered them, of the spider her father let thrive in his office like Pennsylvania’s own E.B White playing host to Charlotte, of tying little sister Meg to the picnic table, of her mother, who worked for a judge, finished the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle every week, and made cakes with funny ingredients, like tomato soup and peas.

We used to meet regularly in the paper’s photo studio. I’d bring the volume of recent newspapers, and we’d talk about what we did right that week and what we did wrong, what we’d like to do better, and what we’d like to do more of. She moved to Georgia when her husband, John, was transferred; I knew we would stay friends. And we have, always wistfully wondering if we’d ever work together again. So when Beth suggested that we invent our own publication, I was intrigued. And I was scared. I never doubted Beth could do it. I wasn’t so sure about me.

I tell you this because this issue marks Lee Magazine’s first birthday. And the reason we made it this far is Beth. People sometimes mistake me for the magazine, because I’m the one they read. My name is all over the place. I’m always yapping about something. But the reason we’re still here one year and many gray hairs later is Beth: her persistence, her vision, her passion. So, raise a glass with me and salute my best friend, business partner, and driving force behind Lee Magazine, Beth Snipes.
(By the way, I turned this in so close to press time, it was too late for Beth to protest. I knew she’d never let me get away with this unless I backed her into a corner. So if you’re reading this, I succeeded.)