The Slovak Spectator

 I had a great adventure 30 years ago.

I helped start a newspaper in the Slovak Republic called The Slovak Spectator. Our debut issue was on March 1, 1995.

Against many odds – and thanks to some great journalists, salespeople, business managers and several heapings of good fortune along the way – our modest little enterprise continues today, the only English-language news publication in Slovakia and a trusted journalistic mainstay in the country.

I am so proud of what I and so many others have accomplished.

Tomorrow, the Spectator's principals and staff will commemorate 30 years of publishing by hosting a gala event in Bratislava. I will attend remotely, for a group picture-taking session (I am intrigued how they will pull this off.) and some remarks by my co-founders and myself. I'll talk about how I got to Slovakia in August 1993 and why I decided to go there as a 26-year-old fresh off a stint as a press secretary in Congress. In that one sentence is a bounty of stories, fat too many to tell at this event.

But what I can say is I was at the right place, at the right time, with the right guys. And we decided to take a leap of faith.

What a great decision that turned out to be. What a ride I've had. 

I can't wait to talk about some of it tomorrow.

Rediscovered

Hi, everyone, I'm Richard.

I feel the need to re-introduce myself, because it's been a long time since I've posted to this blog. So long, in fact, that I had completely forgotten I had created it.

But today, I rediscovered my blog. This is how:

I was researching an educational exchange outfit that led me to teach in Slovakia in 1993. The outfit was (still is?) called Education for Democracy, and I was looking into it to shed the cobwebs of my memory as I prepared to participate in the 30th anniversary celebration of the founding of The Slovak Spectator, an English-language newspaper I co-founded in 1995. One of the questions I have been asked to answer is how and why I went to Slovakia in August 1993, and EfD was my ticket there.

That research led to me burrowing into my journalistic past as a reporter with The Associated Press. Call it vanity, curiosity, spare time, boredom, whatever. But it did prove fruitful: The first entry in my search "richard c lewis ap" was a bio sketch about me from Oceanus, a magazine published by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for which I wrote some stories in the late 1990s. I'm amazed my bio is still on the site, considering I haven't penned a piece for WHOI for at least 25 years. But there it was, still living and breathing, albeit outdated. You can see it here.

The bio mentions the blog I had created, the one you're at now. And, I hadn't remembered it, hadn't contributed to it, hadn't thought about it, since my last entry titled "Prayer for a Chicken" in 2013, written when my oldest son, Nathaniel, was four years old. 

He's 16 now. 

It's been a while.

This realization saddens me. I lament that I stopped writing, stopped contributing, stopped chronicling, stopped jotting down memories -- happy, funny, sad, pedestrian, outlandish, you name it -- of my family for so long. And, let me tell you, I wish I had, because my memory sucks. So many moments have blown by, gone, never to return. I've got pictures, thankfully, that will help fill some gaps, retrieve some past experiences. Nathaniel, Isaiah, and Michelle -- all of whom have far superior memories – will fill some other gaps. But many moments simply won't be relived, retold, or recalled. 

This is my attempt to reverse that, to chronicle again.

I hope I'm more diligent this time.