Community meetings

Good Eats

<p>Since announcing last week that I&#8217;m leaving for a new opportunity in Indiana, the one question I&#8217;ve fielded more than any other is, &#8220;What won&#8217;t you miss?&#8221;</p><p>That&#8217;s a tough question. Truth be told, I&#8217;ll miss a lot.</p><p>But let me back up. Laden in the question &#8220;What won&#8217;t you miss?&#8221; is the area&#8217;s lack of optimism.</p><p>Telling people I&#8217;m moving here was almost always met with: &#8220;Why?&#8221;</p><p>Telling them I really like it here was almost always met with: &#8220;You do?&#8221;</p><p>So it doesn&#8217;t surprise me that I&#8217;m being asked &#8220;What won&#8217;t I miss&#8221; instead of &#8220;What will I miss.&#8221; Positivity just doesn&#8217;t come easy in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and &#8211; two and a half years after I decided to move here &#8211; I still can&#8217;t understand why.</p><p>Sure, our potholes are as endless as our corruption, but that&#8217;s not unique to this area.</p><p>For all of the colleagues I&#8217;ve recruited to work here from other areas, I&#8217;ve never had a hard time selling them on Wilkes-Barre or NEPA as a whole.</p><p>When you think about what makes an area attractive to professionals, the usual suspects are affordable living, high quality of life, easy access to culture, decent nightlife and great restaurants. This area has all of that in abundance.</p><p>We pretty much have anything here anyone would want: Waistline-stretching, locally owned restaurants that serve up incredible food &#8211; especially the pizza. Bars where drinks flow at, from this New Yorker&#8217;s standpoint, jaw-droppingly low prices. A growing casino with lots of dining and live entertainment. Live music performed at dozens of venues throughout the region every weekend. Professional sports teams. Nationally ranked colleges and universities. All four seasons. And, if you&#8217;re willing to drive &#8220;all the way to Scranton,&#8221; you have four malls within a half-hour of wherever you might be.</p><p>You can make a monthly mortgage payment on a house here for less than a week&#8217;s rent in major cities. A &#8220;traffic jam&#8221; is that annoying five-minute wait at the red light trying to turn onto Mundy Street from Kidder Street. And when you want a dose of culture beyond what NEPA can provide, New York and Philadelphia are two hours away.</p><p>In other words, there&#8217;s a lot to love about this area.</p><p>And yet, for all its charms, this is the most unwelcoming area in which I&#8217;ve lived. From the moment my hiring at the Times Leader was announced in the summer of 2013 right up until a voicemail I received hours before I started writing this column, many despised me for my out-of-town roots.</p><p>I&#8217;ve lived in four states and worked in eight different markets, and this is the first time I&#8217;ve been called &#8211; consistently, no less &#8211; an &#8220;outsider.&#8221; The first time I heard it, I cracked up thinking I was moving to some backwater pioneer town. But when I realized the folks leveling that word at me were sincere in their vitriol, it really confused me. To this day, I&#8217;ll never understand why people who choose to call this area their home warrant such disdain.</p><p>This area has a duality I doubt I&#8217;ll ever understand:</p><p>On one hand, people here are passionately defensive of their &#8220;Valley with a Heart.&#8221; We neither need nor want &#8220;outsiders&#8221; here, thank you very much.</p><p>On the other, people here are so down on their area. Their shock-and-awe when I told them I like it here always amused me.</p><p>There&#8217;s so much about this area that I&#8217;ll miss.</p><p>I&#8217;ll miss living on Harveys Lake and waking up to its gorgeous view each morning.</p><p>I&#8217;ll miss my colleagues in the Times Leader newsroom, who have rocked and rolled with more change than anyone should. They&#8217;re all superstars in my book.</p><p>I&#8217;ll miss folks like WILK talkshow host and investigative journalist Steve Corbett and readers like Louise Edwards, who &#8211; even when they disagreed with some of the changes my team and I made to the Times Leader &#8211; still made me feel welcomed.</p><p>Bringing this column full circle, what won&#8217;t I miss? The area&#8217;s unwarranted inferiority complex.</p><p>While things aren&#8217;t perfect here, they most certainly aren&#8217;t as bad as many people make it seem. This region has so much more going for it than it realizes; and I&#8217;m happy to have called this place home.</p><style>
.neFileBlock {
	margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
	margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
	border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
	padding-bottom: 5px;
	padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
	font-size: 85%;
}
</style>
<div class='neFileBlock'>
<div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/web1_spohr.jpeg">
<div class="neCaption"></div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/web1_spohr.jpeg</photo0><caption0></caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>George Spohr</p><p>Editor&#8217;s Note</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>George Spohr is executive editor of the Times Leader. He can be reached at gspohr@www.timesleader.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

George Spohr: Outgoing editor won’t miss the potholes, will miss the pizza