Farewell to my biggest fan

This site wasn’t entirely my idea.

In October of 2005, I returned to New Hampshire to work as the sports editor at The Cabinet Press in Milford. At the time, The Cabinet, and its three other weekly papers, boasted that it was the first newspaper in the state to have a website, but it looked like it hadn’t been updated in about a dozen years.

The paper I worked at previously had, at that time, one of the most advanced high school sports sites I had seen. One night after my return, my Dad and I got to thinking, why couldn’t we do something like that for New Hampshire?

We had it all planned out. The content would be the easy part. I would learn how to get ads and he would learn Web design. Unfortunately, neither thing happened.

Then, when the opportunity arose in January of 2010, a friend helped me set up the site you see now. My Dad seemed a little disappointed that he hadn’t been able to give me a hand, but I have no doubt he was the site’s No. 1 fan. He checked it out every day during his lunch break, and he even gave me some flak when I went a few days without a new post.

In fact, the last conversation I had with him was about just that. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he asked why I hadn’t updated the site since the end of the American Legion Tournament. I told him I had, but since what I had posted didn’t go up until after lunch time that Friday, he hadn’t seen it.

He got to read what was there on Monday, and I’m sure he took in everything that followed the rest of the week. I got busy with other stuff the following week, and unfortunately gave him nothing to read.

On Aug. 20, my Dad passed away unexpectedly. The last two weeks have been extremely difficult trying to understand why, but the support from family and friends has been incredible, and I have no doubt it will continue to be. I can’t say thank you enough for that.

While moving on will be tough, it will be twice as hard here, doing so without my No. 1 fan.