What are the most significant ways that New Hampshire has changed over the past 25 years? To borrow a phrase from Charles Putnam, we're bowling alone. I think the sense of community that is embodied on a large scale (think town meetings) and even on a small scale (such as waiting in line together at an Elm Street movie theater on a Friday
night) is slowly eroding. The reasons are too many to count -- TV, increased mobility, rapid job changes, dissolution of the family unit -- but the decrease in what I call "shared experiences" are fraying the fabric of life in New Hampshire. My hope is that "A problem recognized is a problem half-solved," but how to you reverse this trend? That's the hard part...
What in politics and government has changed the most, especially in New Hampshire, over the last quarter century? The advent of the internet has irrevocably altered the profession I chose to pursue while I was still in grade school. When I got my first newspaper job as a college intern in 1973, I wrote my stories on an Underwood manual typewriter. Twenty-five years ago, computers were just being introduced into the newsrooms at The Union Leader, and those computers could only communicate with the other computers inside the building. Now the internet delivers information in an instant. Consequently, the very thing that makes my stories available to readers all over the world -- and believe me, I hear from them -- is the thing that may destroy the industry I love.
What Granite Stater(s) would you say inspired you? In what way? Alan Shepard, and in the most accidental way imaginable. In the third grade, we were asked to write an essay on what we wanted to be when we grew up. Because of the thrill we all experienced after Alan Shepard's first space flight, I wrote an essay entitled "I Want to Be an Astronaut." The response to the essay was so overwhelming for a third grader -- I even got to watch a subsequent Mercury space launch on TV with the EIGHTH GRADERS -- that I quietly decided I might want to be a writer instead. (Plus I hate to fly). On another scale, Alan Shepard made me realize that heroes could be from right here in New Hampshire.
I've been seeking them out ever since.
What would you consider your favorite spot in New Hampshire and why? It's the Seacoast. It was imbued in all of us Clayton kids by my father. When he was growing up, my grandmother ran a rooming house on C Street at Hampton Beach, and she would only rent rooms to young waitresses, so you could see how young Bob Clayton came to view Hampton Beach as a special place. It was the site of every family summer vacation until my mom's death in 2003 -- a 50-year run for me -- and a simple walk on the beach is an evocative trip back to my childhood and our happiest times as a large, rambunctious family.
What would you like to see accomplished in New Hampshire over the next 25 years?
As something of a history buff, I would like to see an extra effort made in our schools to instill in our young people the essence of New Hampshire. That essence comes from the landscape, of course, but it also comes from the amazing people who shaped this place
-- the pioneers, inventors, immigrants, writers, soldiers, statesmen, entrepreneurs and also those common citizens possessed of uncommon character -- because the essence of New Hampshire will live on as long as we aspire to -- and are inspired by -- all that they achieved. To better understand who we are, we need to know who they were.
