Trading Snow Skis for Palm Trees:
CD Alumni Learn to Enjoy Sunshine, Hospitality of the South

BY BROOKS RATHET
and KIM RAMSEY
College Topics Staff Writers

(This is the third in a series on young alumni adusting to life in metropolitan areas.)

Sunshine, hospitality, rednecks and retirees. These are some of the first words that come to mind when one thinks of the Deep South.

Like most places, though, the underlying truth of the stereotypes depends on where you live, say Cavalier Daily alumni living in the area.

“I think that the stereotypes are mostly true in the rural areas,” said Ian Mundee (‘91), a former graphics editor and comic strip artist who is now part of a small advertising and graphic design firm in New Orleans.

“New Orleans, Atlanta, Birmingham and Pensacola have such a strong new yuppie group and a huge old-money snobby group that they are little pockets of resistance to stereotype.”

Perhaps it’s also a matter of perspective.

Big cars, rednecks and fast drivers—“all the stereotypes are true,” said former Operations Manager Monisha Kumar Longacre (‘92), of her home of five years, Atlanta.

Further South, in Tampa Bay, Fla., Pete Williams, a former sports editor (‘91), agrees that the South is more redneck than he’d expected.

The differences between culture in the South and in the Washington, DC, area, where Williams lived previously, are subtle, he said.

“Everyone in Florida seems to smoke, for instance,” Williams said. “People who call in to radio shows have no grasp of grammar. We have a disproportionate share of bars, and Tampa’s strip clubs are legendary. People park their cars and boats in their front yards, on the grass, even in nicer neighborhoods.”

And, Williams adds, “Football, both college and pro, seems to be all many people live for.”

This same partiality for sports and a scorn of stereotypical rednecks has helped draw one CD alumnus into his community, however.

For Bob Pauly (‘89), a former sports editor and rabid sports fan who never disguised his dislike for the Clemson Tigers, it has been easy to adjust to life in the Columbia, S.C., area—home to the University of South Carolina—“because most everyone here absolutely hates Clemson.

“The local radio stations here even run ads characterizing Clemson students and fans as tractor-driving, tobacco-spitting rednecks, which certainly makes sense to me,” he explained.

While Williams agrees that “any Jeff Foxworthy ‘you-might-be-a-redneck’ joke probably applies here,” he disputes Florida’s reputation as the nation’s retirement community.

“I think the senior citizen/retiree stereotype is unfounded,” he said. “We have a ton of them, to be sure, but most are quite active. I cover a lot of baseball, and I find many of them work as ushers at spring training games and for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays during the regular season.”

On the plus side, Longacre, who lived in Boston and Cleveland before moving to Atlanta in 1998, finds that Southern hospitality still exists, even in the South’s big cities.

“Having lived in the Northeast, you realize how friendly everyone down South is,” she said. “They go out of their way to say hello and talk to you.

“At first, I thought this was really strange. But that’s just how everyone here is. And, you quickly get used to it.”

CD alumni also find the South’s slower tempo—the escape from the Northern “rat-race”—attractive.

“I like that it’s OK to miss work here because ‘we’ve got friends in town for the Jazz Fest,’” Mundee explained. “It’s more laid back.”

Of course, one indisputable fact of the South is the appeal of the temperate climate.

Mundee, a native Southerner, spent only his years at U.Va. away from New Orleans before being “sucked back in by the food, music and the promise of no more snow!”

In Virginia, he found the same weather in the summer—hot and humid—“but in the winter, all that white stuff on the ground freaked me out!”

“I love the weather,” agreed Williams.

Florida—with its beaches, warm weather and economic growth—continues to attract folks from the North. Count many CD alums as full-time snowbirders who now call the Sunshine State home.

Maybe it’s something in the Gulf of Mexico or Tampa Bay water that has had several gravitate to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area to continue following their journalistic dreams.

Former Editor-in-Chief Lane Thomasson DeGregory (‘89) may very well have found her dream job—writing for the features department at the St. Petersburg Times. She calls what she does “narrative” or “literary” journalism, which focuses on everyday life. Sometimes it’s gritty, sometimes humorous.

“After Sept. 11, I traveled to New York and Ground Zero to interview people. For the last year, I followed a teacher who had MS, and I have been reporting on a man who is becoming a woman and on a 14-year-old runaway,” DeGregory said.

“I’ve wanted to work at the St. Pete Times since I started my career,” DeGregory said. “I dreamed about it.”

If she stays on Florida’s west coast, she’ll have plenty of CD alumni company. Former Managing Editor Anita Kumar (‘92) also works at the St. Petersburg Times, and Williams lives near Tampa Bay working as a weekend sports anchor at Bay News 9 as well as an adjunct professor in the journalism department at the University of South Florida.

While career objectives, sunshine and the low cost of living in the South are powerful draws, they are not necessarily enough to make CD alums stay there.

Pauly, for example, an adjunct professor of history and political science at Midlands Technical College, is presently hunting for tenure-track positions all over the country and could end up anywhere from California to Illinois to Florida to New York this fall.

Williams said he and his wife Suzy could see staying in the South, but since both hail from the Washington, DC, area, they could also foresee returning there.

Longacre too envisions a move from Atlanta. “Now that we have kids, the fact that Georgia has the lowest SAT scores in the country worries me,” she said.

|One CD alumnus, however, will stay.

Steve Farrar, who sold ads for the Cavalier Daily in 1975-’76, knew he would always remain in the South.

After graduating from the commerce school and attending law school in Richmond, he lived in Virginia for a few years and then set his sights further south. Interviewing exclusively below the Mason-Dixon line, he ended up in Greenville, S.C., and is now a litigation partner in a law firm there.

Maybe he just knew where he best fit in. After all, when he made his speech seeking a position at The Cavalier Daily, his Southern accent left listeners puzzled.

“When I said the word ‘file,’ my Southern accent really came out, and no one in the room understood it,” Farrar fondly recalls.

He won anyway.

Must have been the Southern charm.

(Former Editor-in-Chief Brooks Rathet (‘91) is an attorney in Atlanta. )