Welcome home, pigtailed toddler

Seth Jones

This is a special month for my team here at North Coast Media (NCM). As you may have seen in our “Starter” section this month and a few months ago, some changes have occurred internally at NCM. I was promoted and handed the keys to an additional publication (Landscape Management), so I now drive the bus editorially on two fine publications at NCM. With that change, we shook up the editorial teams on both books, giving me an all-star cast of energetic, talented young editors who are going to help me
keep both magazines in line and on time.

This really doesn’t affect you, the reader, very much. But internally, it’s a big deal to me and my team, and we’re excited to get started and publish 24 magazines this year that are useful to our audience.

One of our new editors is Managing Editor Clara Richter. I hope she’ll forgive me, but without her knowledge I contacted her father, Paul Richter, a longtime superintendent, to help me out with her welcome to Golfdom. The following is what Paul sent me.

Clara,

Thought I would write and let you know how excited and proud of you I am as you join the editorial staff of Golfdom magazine and rejoin the golf turf industry.

‘Rejoin,’ you ask? Yes, rejoin, because the golf turf industry is the world you were raised in. I never would have imagined when you were 3 years old and pushing the buttons on the irrigation controllers at Spring Lake Country Club, or as you would accompany me on my early morning rounds changing cups after getting you out of bed well before dawn and first stopping by Wesco for a jelly filled donut, that someday you would be a part of the golf turf industry.

For after high school, it was off to John Carroll University to major in English and then to Winona State for a master’s in English, a long way in the realms of academia from turfgrass management. Then you began your career with North Coast Media as part of LP Gas magazine. I knew Golfdom was in the North Coast Media stable of publications, and I thought of the remote chance you would end up back in the golf turf industry by being a part of Golfdom.

Well, it happened. Your previous experience will assist you in this next step in your career. From those 18-hole early morning tours perched in the seat of the Club Car Carry All, you received your first glimpses into my world as a golf course superintendent. These observations afforded you by being raised in the family of a golf course superintendent cause you to have a level of appreciation and insight for the players in the golf course management industry. Being the daughter of a superintendent will be an icebreaker … “My dad was a golf course superintendent,” and from that statement conversations will flow. The turf industry is small and close-knit, so there is even an outside chance they may know me, or of me. Through that connection they will know you have an understanding of their occupation and the dedication, hard work, imagination and skill required to maintain true greens and firm fairways. And, on the editorial staff of Golfdom, you will be able to provide ideas, information and accolades to the under-the-radar rock stars who maintain Poa, bent, bermuda and bluegrass on golf links in locales from Augusta to Anchorage.

I never would have envisioned as I drove that pigtailed toddler around on the Club Car so many dawns ago that career-wise, this is where you would land. It is with great pride and excitement that I have the privilege of saying this is not really a welcome to Golfdom, but a welcome home.