In flux

Allen Fletcher was, until last week, the 15+ year owner of Worcester Magazine on top of the slew of other hats he has worn around Worcester. Since he bought the paper at the end of 1992, he has also been the author of &ldquo;One-on-One,&rdquo; among our longest running and most consistently popular features. This will be his last week appearing in this format. He is 60 years old.

What is your most memorable moment/greatest high from your Worcester Magazine days?

Well, you know, it was heady times when we bought it. It was exciting. I remember Walter Crocket dancing on the table at the Parkway Diner. We hired Paul [Della Valle] and Walter who were really the star columnists for the Telegram and Gazette so it was a real coup and made a lot of noise and they were friends. There was a lot of energy and excitement, and it was heady times. We were working night and day and it was fun. A lot of fun.

When you came in, what was your vision?

I always liked Worcester Magazine. It represented the kind of relationship to the community that I wanted. We actually had done some really good journalism in the Worcester Business Journal and sort of taken the kind of attitude I thought should be applied to or better suited to Worcester Magazine. It just seemed to be there was a whole unheard community in Worcester people who were smart, people who wanted to be optimistic about the place, people who didn&rsquo;t necessarily have a coherent vision, but wanted to be inspired and needed a voice.

I think that we had and have had a vision of a kind of life in Worcester that wasn&rsquo;t being expressed elsewhere. Partly to do with entertainment, partly to do with life on the street, and just creating the type of city that you&rsquo;d like to live in, that I&rsquo;d like to live in, that you would like to live in that would lead my own children to come back to Worcester. And it didn&rsquo;t seem to be being expressed anywhere.

How well have we done at that as a paper and as a city?

Well, as a city we&rsquo;ve actually come a long way. Hell, I can remember writing a column a little pre-Worcester Magazine about cappuccino, about the fact that nobody knew how to make a cappuccino. There were a couple places that had cappuccino machines, but they didn&rsquo;t know how to make them. Now there are too many. It&rsquo;s like the struggle to get a Starbucks. Who cares? Do we really need a Starbucks?

A better thing to talk about is eating on sidewalks, sidewalk cafes. Worcester doesn&rsquo;t have real cafes, but there are plenty of restaurants that you can have a table and eat outside. That was an impossible struggle. It was such a Worcester phenomenon. It was just too difficult. You had to get four or five permits, be subject to incredible legislation just to put a damn table out on the street. Now, it doesn&rsquo;t seem to be any big deal.

Why is that a symbol? That kind of caf&eacute; life, life on the street is to me illustrative of the kind of life you want to have in the city, the kind of visible life. I&rsquo;m not saying we led the charge on table seating. We chimed in whenever we could because it&rsquo;s so obvious what the right side and wrong side is.

In terms of politics, things ebb and flow and they cycle around. Have we really done anything? Is the city really better for us having chimed in? I think the best thing we have done is we&rsquo;ve given people hope. It goes back to giving people a voice. If we didn&rsquo;t exist, there&rsquo;s a whole potential community that was in danger of never feeling heard, never feeling that anyone was listening to them, or anybody speaking out on the presumably progressive and right side of issues.

What has been your must cringe worthy moment or story?

Oh geez, I don&rsquo;t even want to talk about...I&rsquo;ve lost friends over things that we&rsquo;ve done and that&rsquo;s not fun.

I&rsquo;ve written a lot of things I&rsquo;m very proud of in Worcester Magazine. The one or two things that made me cringe had to do with things that we did that I wasn&rsquo;t really aware of, that I wasn&rsquo;t quite on top of. Have we made any big mistakes? You know, I don&rsquo;t have a good answer for that. By and large, I&rsquo;m extremely proud of what we advocated for and done. Every now and then you run dry editorially; every now and then you do a stupid story. The classic one years ago was the &ldquo;Big Hair&rdquo; issue.

We&rsquo;ve done some stupid things. I think Worcester Magazine had its own parochialism and I don&rsquo;t &mdash; early on, certainly going through the archives before my time, there was often this real sense of &lsquo;we&rsquo;re outsiders looking in,&rsquo; an incredible naivete. I remember running across a peek-a-boo article about what went on in the Worcester Club, and it was such an outsider thing. And it&rsquo;s fun to be an outsider, because you feel your own self-righteousness. It was such an outsidery thing that it was quaint almost. It was ridiculous.

Well, we did a story a few years ago on that sort of element of society that was called &ldquo;The Vault,&rdquo; that was not inflammatory and all that, but it was pretty authoritative. It wasn&rsquo;t even criticizing or anything, it was just describing a phenomenon, but at least we knew something about it as opposed to merely speculating [or] just having this prurient interest.

There&rsquo;s always this philosophy that you and [ex-editor] Mike Warshaw espoused when I started that&rsquo;s not just saying &ldquo;Hey, there&rsquo;s this stuff here.&rdquo; Always go a little deeper.

Well, yeah. You know, I think the old Worcester Magazine...I can remember a writer, I won&rsquo;t mention this guys name, but a writer writing this thing about the golf tournament at Pleasant Valley. He went and did a column, and it was the ultimate sort of guerilla journalist thing about going to a golf tournament and being with a bunch of Republicans and making a big deal out of being with a bunch of - I remember he used the line &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen so many white guys in my life.&rdquo; Well the guy was white, so he was trying really hard to be hip and made a big deal and got a big thrill out of describing a bad drive by the publisher of the Telegram and Gazette. And obviously took what felt to me a remarkably sophomoric thrill out of giggling because he was criticizing someone of power. You know, come on.

We don&rsquo;t need to take that stance now. We know all the players in town. We interact with them. We&rsquo;re not necessarily friends with them, but we&rsquo;ve come a long way from that old kind of giggling and peeking in the principal&rsquo;s office. We&rsquo;re sort of on a peer level with most of these people. The bad part of that is it gives you the responsibility to treat them like human beings. You can&rsquo;t ridicule them anymore.

The toughest things have always been the personal things whether it&rsquo;s being attacked out there by various people or when we indulge ourselves in the pages of the magazine in an irresponsible way.

What now?

I personally cringe at the term retirement. I consider myself unemployed.

What do I want to reveal? What I&rsquo;m looking forward to...I&rsquo;m going to be very busy. One thing that I&rsquo;ve been very good at is going to work in the morning. And I&rsquo;m looking forward to a different rhythm and a different consciousness going about my business. I&rsquo;m going to be still active in the city. I still have various responsibilities and what not.

I have a whole grab bag of projects. I have a huge construction project at my house that I need to pay attention to. I have a couple of pieces of property that I want to develop. I&rsquo;m going to be teaching once a week at the BAC in Boston. I have a book project I want to accomplish based on stories I wrote years ago about West Africa - just for family and friends, but I want to do it well. I need to do a bunch of work for some non-profits I&rsquo;m still involved with. I want to go to Yemen. I want to spend some time in North Africa. I want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. I want to visit my grandchildren. And there&rsquo;s probably a few things I&rsquo;m forgetting.

From a personal standpoint, this has been your identity. How does that change?

That&rsquo;s interesting. For a long time, I really felt that I couldn&rsquo;t stay in Worcester if I didn&rsquo;t have the identity of the magazine. And turning 60 had something to do with this. Meaning, you turn 60 and you think &ldquo;ohmigod, I&rsquo;ve accomplished something. I&rsquo;ve earned the right to relax.&rdquo; And I do believe that I have earned the right to relax.

You could perfectly well say I&rsquo;m essentially an irresponsible individual who bought into the notion he ought to bear a certain amount of responsibility. And it weighs on me. I don&rsquo;t love it; I think I&rsquo;ve done a decent job at it. But what I&rsquo;m looking forward to is to just having much more restricting responsibility so I can concentrate.

I&rsquo;m a youngest child, and the youngest child is always inclined to indulge himself in being irresponsible because the oldest is shouldering the burdens of tradition and so forth. But I think I&rsquo;m cursed with a sense of social responsibility and that&rsquo;s led me to let myself get trapped in a life of filled with too many entanglements that become incredibly burdensome. There was a long period of time when I was the head of five different organizations in town, and I&rsquo;m not complaining or saying I did a particularly good job of it, but the burden of responsibility doesn&rsquo;t let you relax. There&rsquo;s always something going wrong, always a crisis somewhere. I did it to myself, but I usually did it because nobody else would step forward, and there comes a time when you say to yourself that maybe I get to relax a little bit.

I&rsquo;m looking forward to being a little less responsible. I&rsquo;m looking forward to a life where my pre-occupations are more of my own choosing. I&rsquo;m looking forward to not having to have a well-articulated opinion about things. I&rsquo;m looking forward to not wearing a watch.

What actually happens by the time we come around to Spring? I don&rsquo;t really know. I have some things in mind, but I&rsquo;m not going to make them public, because then it&rsquo;ll embarrass me if I don&rsquo;t bring them about.

I will say I felt that the challenge that I&rsquo;ve not attained in my life...what was not missing but what I&rsquo;ve really wanted to accomplish has to do with artistic fulfillment. But that sounds ominous and weighty and I can&rsquo;t say more than that, but I&rsquo;m really looking for that in my life. It will be freeing, and fun to actually have time to pay attention to that.

... I&rsquo;ve seen us have a succession of editors. I&rsquo;ve seen a whole succession of reporters. A whole succession of graphics people. A whole succession of sales people. And it&rsquo;s great to see this sort of parade of people coming through. I&rsquo;ve made some bad choices of editors. The sort of strength and esprit of the team concentrates and accentuates and dissipates and then it accentuates again and it&rsquo;s great to see all the Womag alumni who are out there for whom the magazine means an enormous amount.

It&rsquo;s a real thrill. It&rsquo;s a real thrill to be working in the newsroom on deadline when things are coming together. It&rsquo;s just cool. When people are talking back and forth contributing things...that&rsquo;s really the biggest thrill.

And the frustration? You know it when you have it. Sometimes you can&rsquo;t achieve it, you can&rsquo;t get at it and it has to do with pettiness, and sometimes your own laziness, sometimes your own bad decisions. Sometimes you can&rsquo;t find your way there and that&rsquo;s as frustrating as it is thrilling on the other side. o