I’m Randy Seaver, and this is my personal blog, Lessons in Mediocrity | Outlaw Journalist What more do you really need to know?
A Biddeford Boy Having Fun
I am the editor and founder of the Biddeford Gazette, a non-profit digital news organization that exclusively covers the city of Biddeford — a.k.a. my hometown — the place where I raised my two kids and can almost see the end of a mortgage. I grew up here. My father grew up here, and his father grew up here.
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Tool Sales | Psych Units | Air Force | Seminary | Journalist
The city of Biddeford Maine is at the base of my entire life. My family has been here for four generations. This is where I was raised and educated. My grandfather was an English teacher at Biddeford High School. This where I met my wife. We were married in St, Mary’s Church. We bought a home on Lamothe Avenue. Our kids went to Biddeford schools. This where I work, managing a media outlet that is hyper-focused on Biddeford news and feature stories. My wife was twice elected to serve on the Biddeford School Committee. She was then twice elected to serve as an at-large representative on the Biddeford City Council. I ran former Mayor Alan Casavant’s first and second campaigns for the mayor’s seat. During my time as PR consultant, I also represented Biddeford businesses and nonprofit organizations. When I cut myself, my blood runs black and orange,
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My First Biddeford Memories
We lived on the top floor of a triple decker on State Street, directly across from a now shuttered shoe shop that has been turned into cut-rate apartments.
I shit my pants as a second grader at the former John F. Kennedy Memorial School near the corner of Hil and West streets. I was regularly beaten up by other kids on Quimby Street whenever I was willing to risk the walk to Sevigny’s Market — a placed that reeked of sliced bologna and ripe fruit — for a pack of gum or a candy bar.
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BIDDEFORD | Where it all started for me, et pourquoi pas?
Biddeford in the late 1960s was a rough and tumble community filled with pride that its residents wore on their sleeves. It was a working-class city on the less desirable side of the Saco River.
The textile mills, shoe shops and the tannery were running full bore, providing most of the jobs and driving the local economy. This was long before NAFTA, pesky environmental regulations and the popularity of strip malls and chain restaurants.
Biddeford was a place where the second-generation Irish immigrants from St. Mary’s Parish perpetually waged a not-so-subtle war with the third-generation Franco residents of St. Joseph’s Parish who had come to the city from Quebec in hopes of steady work and a golden ticket to prosperity.
The authentic Francos, however, (St. Andre Parish) lived within short walking distance of the downtown mills. Those French-speaking lived in a smattering of triple-deckers in congested neighborhoods with narrow streets. They were the guys and gals always ready for a fight and always willing to work up against almost insurmountable odds.
The Greeks, the Jews and the folks from Syria and Albania all came here too, looking for jobs in that sprawling mill complex that produced textile products shipped all over the globe.
For the most part, those other immigrants avoided the battles between the Irish, the French and the really, really French, keeping their noses to the grindstone.
Although the city had pristine coastal beaches and ocean-front neighborhoods, people from surrounding communities routinely made jokes about the poor, working class people with funny accents.
That incessant ridicule — from people outside the city — built resentment among virtually all Biddeford residents, but it also built a foundation of community pride. Biddeford people stayed focused on hard work, and they cherished their dominating football teams from both Biddeford High School and the former St. Louis High School.
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CHASING A DREAM | Crossing the Saco River
When I was seven, my young parents decided to seek asylum on the other side of the river. The four of us, including my younger sister, arrived with high hopes as we ventured forth to the land of middle-class longing, in our own house just across the street from the old armory on Franklin Street in Saco.
We had left the city of Biddeford in the rearview. We sold our souls and became communicants at Most Holy Trinity. My sister took ballet lessons. I played clarinet in the school band. We made it! We had arrived on the lunatic edge of suburbia, desperately grasping for the middle-class dream.
I fully betrayed my Biddeford heritage by graduating from Saco’s Thornton Academy in 1982. There was then an intense rivalry between Biddeford and Saco’s Thornton Academy,
I never thought that Thornton — a private school that served all Saco residents — was all that it was cracked up to be. In my gut, I knew that I was a Biddeford boy. My blood ran black and orange,
It wasn’t that hard getting accepted into that prestigious, private school. You just had to live in the 04072 ZIP Code because the city of Saco — despite all of its snobby pretense — was too cheap to build its own public high school.
Many years later — when I actually had a voice in my hometown — I was able to have my revenge on my alma mater, a place where I was a misfit among misfits, battling acne and running cross country.
I wrote a rather scathing op-ed piece about Thornton Academy while freelancing for Saco Bay News. Thornton’s board of trustees were batshit pissed about that op-ed. They expected only positive news coverage, especially from an alumna. I had failed to get the memo. They told my editor they never wanted to see me on campus again.
The offending piece lives here on my server | A Campus Set Apart? (Saco Bay News, Aug. 24, 2024)
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The Journey Continues | Soldier, Priest and Tool Salesman
I graduated from Thornton Academy in 1982, but I wasn’t ready for college, so I joined the Air Force. It was a strategy that seemed to work for Hunter S. Thompson — but not for me.
I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base near midnight on July 2, 1982. It was my first time outside of New England. Even though it was midnight, the intense and arid heat almost knocked me over
After only a few weeks after beginning basic training, I found myself locked up for the first time as an involuntary patient on a psychiatric unit, where I began racking up an impressive list of frequent flyer miles.
The shame of washing out of the miliary was crushing. Still is.
My senior drill instructor was such as a decent man. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “You did your best.”
The government gave me an honorable discharge and a plane ticket home.
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The Priests, the Indians and a blonde graduate student from Maquette University
I floundered for a few years, but then — in 1987 — I decided I was going to be a Roman Catholic Priest. Of course I did. Every Catholic boy thinks that maybe someday he will be a priest.
The Sacred Heart Fathers and Brothers (SCJs) were kind enough to let me participate in their ‘pre-novitiate’ program, a well-designed period of discernment to determine if you were really, really ready to give up sex for the rest of your life.
It didn’t take me terribly long to answer that question.
I met a sweet blonde girl while we were both teaching summer school on the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. I was living at the All Saints Parish Rectory smack dab in the middle of the reservation. Renee was staying across the street, living with the nuns while she was earning community service hours for her master’s degree.
There’s no need to go into all the sordid details, but ultimately Father Yvonne forgave me, absolved me of my sins and drove me to yet another bus station.
So much for becoming a priest, Another failure.
But I did learn one very important thing while working on the reservation: Political Correctness is for vapid, feckless morons desperately looking for redemption.
Political Correctness is for vapid, feckless morons desperately looking for redemption.
In fact, I almost got my ass beaten by an Indian man who was enjoying a cold beer on a hot summer night in a small tavern only a few hundred yards away from the rectory.
I tried to start a friendly conversation. “It must be hard being a native American on the reservation,” I said.
He stiffened and inhaled deeply before setting his beer on the bar. He turned to me with narrowed eyes, doing his best to contain his deep rage and lingering resentment of white people like me.
“Don’t ever use those words to describe me or my people,” he barked. “I’m a fucking Indian. You’re not allowed to call me anything else. Don’t try to settle your guilt and make yourself feel better about all the horrific shit your people have done to my people by just using a fancy, pretentious name. That doesn’t mean shit. You don’t get off that easy.”
I wanted to bolt, but I had to pay my bar tab. Even on the reservation PBRs weren’t free, especially for us white folk.
After only a few seconds, that kind and patient man turned to me and said, “Please forgive me. I know you’re just here trying to do good things.”
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Selling industrial tools in Chattanooga, Memphis and Little Rock
Although my work in journalism has been featured in publications throughout New England, I made my real bones selling industrial pipe tools throughout the southeastern United States from 1989 to 1994.
I can give you 12 selling points of a RIDGID pipe wrench. I shit you not.
I can also never forget or scrub from my mind the fact that a 1/8-diameter of piece of pipe will have 27 threads per inch if it’s an NPT thread. I can also spot the difference between Schedule 40 and Schedule 80 PVC pipe from 800 yards away. And I understand the fundamental difference between grade 304 and grade 316 stainless steel fittings.
I was married to a gorgeous CPA, and we had a nice little house just across the street from Centennial Park in Nashville. She had a Doberman Pinscher named Magnum. She had trained him to roll his eyes upward toward heaven whenever she asked, “Magnum, where’s Jesus?”
I was 25. I was driving a company car, living on an expense account. I had it all figured out — right up until I found myself a couple of years later at a Greyhound bus station with a one-way ticket to Portland, Maine and $23 in my pocket. Divorced, humiliated and asking an old girlfriend if I could crash on her couch.
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Back to Biddeford and Tiger Pride
I made my triumphant return to Biddeford in the late 1990s. I had been working at a couple of different newspapers, but I couldn’t help myself when a saw a help-wanted ad for a reporter position in Biddeford.
It felt like full cycle, almost like an opportunity to go back in time and revisit my teenage years.
A quick flashback to my first newsroom
The first newsroom I ever knew was inside Biddeford’s daily Journal Tribune where City Editor Bob Melville tormented me and made me cry during an unpaid student internship. “Don’t they teach English at Thornton Academy?” Melville asked, eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose while reading my first-ever piece intended for mass publication.
It was an obituary for some poor old bastard on Granite Street. I don’t remember his name. I do remember my mother cutting that obit out of the newspaper and taping it on our refrigerator door.
Look out, Connie Chung, Bob Woodward and Mike Wallace. Randy Seaver’s journalism career had been launched.
But like they always do — for so many people — most of my dreams had to be abandoned in order to survive.
How else do you end up doing an industrial drain-cleaning demo at the Memphis Zoo on a particularly humid day in August?
Now, back to working in Biddeford
So many years after my student internship at the Journal Tribune — where I served as a timid 16-year-old clerk, answering phones and banging out obits on an IBM Selectric II typewriter — I found myself gloriously back in Biddeford with some actual journalism experience already under my cap.
l had found my journalistic redemption. It was time for my comeback. Fuck, Bob Melville. The weekly Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier hired me, gave me a couple of reporters’ notebooks and set me loose on my former hometown.
I was off to the races. I had no other life. I went full throttle and regularly roamed the tired, wooden hallways of Biddeford City Hall, always ready for the next “scoop.,” and building an impressive list of confidential sources.
Seven voting wards in Biddeford? Maybe
The reporting gig perfectly fit by bipolar diagnosis. I was manic for seven-years straight, chain-smoking Camel non-filters with City Manager Bruce Benway, and other city department heads like Bob Dodge and Guy Casavant in the secretive confines of ‘Ward Eight,” which was located on the third floor at City Hall.
The reporters from the Journal Tribune and Portland Press Herald didn’t smoke. Losers.
I got the inside track on all the secret stuff happening in Biddeford. What’s said in Ward Eight is never repeated, at least not on the record. I was slowly ruining my gums and working toward cancer or a heart attack, but I got the stories first and pissed off my colleagues on a weekly basis.
A short while later, Biddeford hired Edward Clifford to take over as City Manager. On his first day on the job, Clifford put an end to smoking anywhere in City Hall, including Ward 8. What a prick!
Coincidentally, after leaving his gig in Biddeford, Clifford became a priest. Suddenly he was more forgiving, but I sometimes wonder if a girl like Renee (see above) could have gotten between him and his Holy Orders.
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Building a brand
I never regretted giving up covering the dynamic towns of Windham and Standish at the American Journal to instead wage weekly battles with people like former Biddeford Mayor James Grattelo in the gritty and often dysfunctional city of Biddeford.
The late 1990s and early 200s was a glorious time to be a reporter in Biddeford, but the city was facing lots of challenges. Pessimism abounded. The once mighty downtown textile mills were winding down. People were scared. They had lost hope.
At that time, the city was literally burning its trash — and garbage from more than 20 other communities — right in the center of downtown.
Where there is today a luxury hotel with a rooftop swimming pool was then a decrepit, neglected building. We were all — as Bruce Springsteen sang, “sweating it out on the streets of a runaway American dream.”
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Oh, the Places You’ll Go
Flash forward 30 years and I am now happily married and having more fun than any man my age should have.
I live with a funny, smoking-hot and supportive wonderful wife. I have two amazing kids and two not-so-amazing dogs that both love me unconditionally.
In addition to running the Biddeford Gazette, I also run a boutique strategic communications consulting firm, focused mostly on local and statewide political campaigns.
I took an eight-year break from journalism to work on some of the most dynamic and complex public policy issues you could imagine, right here in the state of Maine. I have successfully served as a campaign manager (81.5%-win record), as a communications director and as a field organizer on a wide variety of statewide ballot initiatives.
As a consumer of mental health treatment, I also regularly blog about mental health issues and the public stigma that is so often associated with treatment options.
I love well-crafted beer, the movie Jaws, camping, traditional jazz music and spending time with my wife and our black lab, Sasha.
I hate baked beans, Kevin Costner and every song ever performed by Journey.
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LESSONS IN MEDIOCRITY | OUTLAW JOURNALIST 