Retirement — ready or not, here I come

One of Eric Strachan’s first published photographs in the Miami Herald, where he interned in the late 1970s. Strachan calls the photo “Sharing.”

Note: In this farewell that also serves as a short colorful history of Naples, Editor Eric Strachan steps out of a career, but not his home. Roger Williams will return with his commentary next week.

I’ve been the editor of Florida Weekly’s Naples and Bonita Springs editions for five years, the icing on a career that has spanned more than four decades.

That ends today. I’m officially retiring.

My journey in journalism, and Naples in particular, has been a long and winding road for which I’m grateful.

After graduating from an arts college in Fort Lauderdale with a photography degree, interning at the Miami Herald, and working for one year as a corporate photographer with FPL, I landed at the Naples Daily News in 1981. In those days, when about 93,000 residents had crowded into the 2,305 square miles of Collier County, it was a six-day-a-week afternoon publication headquartered on Central Avenue. The Sunday paper came out on Saturday. I was the low man on the totem poll of a two-person photo department… until the other guy quit. Then I became a boss.

STRACHAN

Being a staff photographer and later Director of Photography in Naples in the 1980s and ‘90s was a humbling adventure. Swamp Buggy races, Miami Dolphins games, development vs. environment, aerial photography, covering the Benson murders and month-long trial to convict the murderer, working in Haiti three times, including the 1994 military coup (still shooting film in those days), and capturing Mosquito Control’s DC-3 airplanes in early morning flights that fogged the town with a mix of diesel fuel and pesticide. There were high school sports, graduations and fortunate friendships that inevitably developed —artists, musicians, commercial fishermen, folks from all walks of life. In contrast, I photographed a prisoner on death row during an interview. Once, I was given the controls to pilot the Goodyear blimp while on assignment, cruising over Pelican Bay (if you happened to see the blimp wobbling a little over Pelican Bay one day… that was me). I even won the media cow-milking contest at the county fair one year. So proud.

Does anyone remember the hot air balloon races? I was along for that ride, too, and what a ride. I covered galas, countless events, catastrophes and tender moments, beginnings, endings, hurricanes, you name it.

Once, I spent a day with the so-called Chokoloskee drug runner Totch Brown, a legendary son of the Ten Thousand Islands, boating with him through the Everglades. He was actually a pretty nice guy, possibly the last of a special breed who died in 1996. For better or worse, I witnessed the area’s losses and growth. Now, more than 410,000 people make Collier County their home.

Documenting, reporting and editing about this community was an honor and a humbling responsibility. Although my time as a photographer and leading the photo team wasn’t the best-paying job, it may have been the most rewarding.

Thanks to friends and mentors like former Editor Phil Lewis and Managing Editor Bill Blanton, some great reporters, and a first-rate photo team, we were a mid-sized newspaper with a large-paper attitude. We won multiple awards and produced high-quality journalism, period. I’ll always be proud of that. I was the paper’s Managing Editor in 2013 when I was laid off after 32 years. Fortunately for me, I eventually found Florida Weekly, or it found me.

In the good news department, I met my wife-to-be in 1982 when she worked in a camera store on Fifth Avenue. We married in 1985 and plunged into family life, raising two sons in Naples, Ian, 34, and Beau, 30. Now, we’re loving two wonderful granddaughters in Naples. This is home.

Like many of you who have lived here for a while, I do miss certain things: Less traffic, reasonable prices, the Beach Club just as it was, having a boat at Boat Haven, attending an event or going to a restaurant and knowing half the people there. That said, this is still home.

That’s why I’ve been proud and appreciative of this community and many of you who have helped me in my career, including my role at Florida Weekly. This paper has been a good fit for me, partly because it continues a tradition of local and regional reporting in words and pictures. Our stories are about sharing — sharing a coat of many colors sewn in a rich fabric of stories and images alone unique to a single beautiful place in the world: Naples. Home.

I’m not leaving, that’s for sure. So let’s not say goodbye. I’ll see you around town.

—Eric ¦

The post Retirement — ready or not, here I come first appeared on Bonita Springs Florida Weekly .