Fred Nutter

As a young boy, we used to visit my grandmother in Falmouth, ME. It was a beautiful place in the summer, and none of us could wait to go there. But it wasn't just Maine's scenic coastline that I was anticipating. I wanted nothing more than to watch the Channel 6 news; especially Fred Nutter, the station's editorial director.

That's right, I idolized Fred Nutter. His deep, gravelly, monotone voice captivated me as he spoke about local issues in Maine that made absolutely no sense to me. I both loved and dreaded his classic "That's our opinion, we welcome yours", because while it may have been the one phrase that was quintessentially Nutter, it also meant that my time with Nutter was officially over.

I was vacationing in Bar Harbor recently, and was excited to see that not only was Nutter still with us, but he was still editorializing. (It was also weird that Channel 2 in Bangor was the same as Channel 6 in Portland. Those Mainers.) At first I felt bad that Nutter hadn't made the big time in Boston or New York, or even Des Moines, for Christ's sake. But then I thought about it, and knew that that would be un-Nutterlike. He'd never sacrifice his integrity as an editorialist for the bright lights of the big city. He is a real man.

It was always my dream to be Fred Nutter. I thought about the way I was living my life, and thought about what a failure I was. I had to remind myself that we weren't all born with the talent of a Nutter. It's like the boy who grows up wishing to be Mickey Mantle, and one day he wakes up, and he's thirty. He can't feel his life's a failure because he didn't play baseball in the major leagues. I, too, couldn't feel like my life was a failure because I didn't become a professional editorialist, like my idol, Fred Nutter.