After 22 years with Tree Care Industry Magazine, six as managing editor and the last 16 as editor, I am retiring at the end of this year. If all goes according to plan, the December magazine will be my 264th and last issue.

DON STARUK

Don’t fret – the magazine will be left in capable hands and will continue to publish, in print and online.

I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge you, our loyal readers, the advertisers who make TCI Magazine possible, my co-workers and, especially, the contributors who have made my job possible – if not always easy. That’s right, you know who you are.

First, a quick synopsis of how I came to this point.

Backstory
I enrolled in the arboriculture and park-management program at Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMass, Amherst, right out of high school in 1974. I really just wanted to be a park ranger and hang around the National Parks I had visited on family camping trips. Overwhelmed by the heavy courseload in the arboriculture program, I fled with my tail tucked between my legs and got a job with a local tree care company in Worcester, Massachusetts, to see if this was really what I wanted to do. Two years of dragging brush as part of a line-clearance crew and winters spent coated in road slush got me rethinking the whole school thing. Four schools and five years later, I walked away from UMass again, this time with an English/journalism degree tucked in my pocket.

Over the next roughly eight years, I tried my hand at a number of vocations, including group leader for Outward Bound youth programs,
adventure-travel tour guide and even head greenskeeper for a golf course for a year. I finally started writing as a freelance reporter for a small-town weekly newspaper in 1989. That quickly turned into full time for another, and then a third, weekly before I launched a monthly business magazine for a fairly large newspaper company. That publication was very successful editorially, not so much financially, and it ran its course after five years.

I then fell into a one-year contract editing a monthly kayaking magazine. Operating remotely off a laptop while paddling around the East Coast, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I became very impassioned about promoting safety in that industry, as unprepared paddlers running into trouble were a constant. We published accounts of many of these mishaps as a way of warning other paddlers to the dangers. Sound familiar?

As that gig was coming to an end, I spotted a classified ad – remember those? – in my local newspaper for a managing editor for the Tree Care Industry Association. With my memories of Stockbridge, it seemed like kismet, my working with trees coming full circle. I was offered and took the job. That was December 2003. Turn the page, and here we are today.

The writers
While writers come and go, many of the contributors whose experience and knowledge fills the pages of TCI Magazine have hung in there with me, and I can’t say enough how much I’ve appreciated them. Like Belichick with Brady, working with the most knowledgeable and experienced arborists has made us all look good.

Do you know we use about 75 different contributors every year, many of whom write two, three or more articles in that period? I am hesitant to mention names for fear of leaving so many out. But when I have Mike Raupp writing about bugs, John Ball and Peter Gerstenberger writing about safety and Chris Girard, Tony Tresselt, Jeff Inman, Craig Bachmann and so many more writing about climbing and rigging, how can you go wrong? Howard Gaffin might be one of our most eloquent contributors, and I always smile or even laugh out loud reading his stuff.

For shear volume and endurance, Rick Howland takes the cake. Howland was writing for the magazine before my time and only retired about a year ago. Almost every month, he was my go-to writer when I needed something on equipment or just about anything else, and as long as I gave him good contacts and they returned his calls and emails, he could be counted on to fill pages.

Freelancers Dave Rattigan, Tamsin Venn and Patricia Chaudoin, who doubles as our copyeditor, are just a few of my long-time supporting cast. More recently Dave Anderson, Andy Jones and Jim Kasper have become versatile and reliable contributors I could lean on.

You would not have had a magazine to read over the last 22 years if it were not for those mentioned here and, literally, hundreds of others.

TCI EXPO
This month, I’ll attend my 22nd TCI EXPO. My first, Detroit in 2004, may have been my favorite. Not because of the show or the city, but because the day after the show, I joined about 150 arborists for a day of service for the city’s Belle Isle Park. I thought I’d look forward to that every year, only to find out it was a one-off and too much work to organize every year.

Staff
I’ve gotten to work with a number of great co-workers and teammates at TCIA. The magazine crew leans on every other department for ideas, contacts, expertise and the tools we employ to get these pages to the printer every month. Tchukki Andersen, staff arborist, keeps us topical and the ideas flowing. The current magazine staff – Susan DiPietro, managing editor, and Dennis Schaefer, art director – are awesome to work with. We have similar visions, or at least we usually reach consensus, and they both bring everything they have to the table for each issue. As with the writers, if I just get out of the way and let them do their thing, we all look good.

TCI is a free subscription, with the costs associated with publishing it paid for by the advertisers. Simply put, while working with our current corporate-engagement staff of Cole Fortin, Lizzy Rodewald and Kyla Cunningham, our advertisers enable our writers to share the expertise, skills and advice that help our readership operate safely and successfully.

Playing arborist
Despite 22 years writing and editing articles about trees, I am not an arborist. As with most of you, when people hear what I do, they start telling me or asking me about their trees. I always paraphrase that old line, “I am not an arborist, I just play one at work.”

But that doesn’t mean I don’t share what I’ve learned, particularly in regard to safety. We started publishing our Accident Briefs in 2006, and compiling them is like watching Seinfeld reruns – the same accidents over and over again. I am a cyclist, and once passed by a homeowner climbing a ladder with a chain saw in his hand. Though I had a good pace going, I had to turn around and go back. As diplomatically as I could, I let him know that one of the most common scenarios for homeowner tree accidents involves chain saws and ladders. He laughed, said he was a former line-clearance worker and was well aware of the hazards, but he thanked me for stopping.

Another time, I passed a homeowner cutting a tree that had uprooted in a storm. Again, I had to go back and ask him if he was aware that the root plate can flip back up once separated from the trunk. He said he was aware of the danger, but, again, thanked me for making the effort to stop and warn him.

I now wear chaps, a hard hat, safety glasses and hearing protection when operating my plug-in electric chain saw in my backyard. I will keep wearing my PPE and sharing what I have learned.

Full circle
I recently mentioned to Brian Kane, professor at Stockbridge and an occasional contributor to the magazine, that I was retiring, and suggested I might come back to Amherst to finish that arboriculture degree. He said I was welcome to audit his courses. Now that would be coming full circle.

Like Jimmy Buffet sang about watching boating go “from sails to steam” I’ve watched publishing go from paper to online. And now it’s time for me to go “down to rock bottom again.”

This may not be the last you hear from me. I could get a last-minute venture-capital offer for my services! And barring that, I still have one more issue. Who knows what comes after that. I hope my future will involve a lot of cycling, kayaking, maybe some golf and certainly a return to hiking – maybe even an assault on New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers. But no deadlines.

As always, keep reading. Good night and good luck!