Freyne ends column
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By Daniel Barlow Vermont Press Bureau - Published: March 20, 2008
MONTPELIER – After more than two decades of observing and writing about Vermont politics and media, Seven Days' columnist Peter Freyne announced Wednesday that he is hanging up his hat.
Freyne, 58, has spent the last 25 years whizzing in and out of nearly all aspects of Vermont politics, from writing about the ways and whys of the Statehouse in his newspaper columns to a short-lived stint on the other side as a governor's press secretary.
But after beating cancer last year (a fist-sized lymphoma was found under his breastbone in January 2007), Freyne said he realized that writing about state politics had begun to bore and depress him.
He made the announcement Wednesday in what will be his final regular "Inside Track" column for the Burlington-based alternative weekly newspaper.
"I'm proud I'm a successful political columnist, but I began asking myself what I was losing because of that," Freyne said during a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. "We all want success in our fields, but sometimes we have to stop and ask what we've given up as a result."
Writing about Vermont politics had begun to depress him, Freyne said. His weekly column had become something he dreaded writing. And in recent weeks he stopped blogging at the Seven Days Web site all together (prior to retirement announcement Wednesday, the last posting was from Town Meeting Day on March 4).
"This just wasn't fun anymore," he said.
Freyne stood out among the Vermont press corps because his position as a political columnist gave him more leeway to ask some uncomfortable questions to people in power, said David Mindich, a journalism professor at St. Michael's College.
But that desire to hold people accountable didn't stop there, Mindich said, as that standard also stretched to the state's media, which Freyne also wrote about frequently.
"He was probably the only regular print source that would hold the media accountable just as he holds government officials accountable," Mindich said.
Freyne followed "a sweetheart" to Vermont in 1979 after growing up in Chicago, where he drove cabs for a living. Some of his first contacts in Burlington were the city's independent cab drivers, then boycotting the city's airport due to a dispute with management there.
He pitched the exclusive story to an editor at the Burlington Free Press. A week passed and the story never appeared, so he pitched the story to the Vermont Vanguard Press, then the top weekly in those pre-Seven Days days. The editor there – John Dillon, now with Vermont Public Radio – instead asked him to write the story.
"He asked me if I knew how to work a typewriter," Freyne remembered. "They paid me $15 a story."
Freyne started writing "Inside Track" shortly after and the column continued through several different publications before landing at Seven Days in 1995, two months after that paper launched. During that time he has covered all the major political issues and personalities in Vermont, from the civil unions debate in 2000 to Bernard Sanders rise to the U.S. Senate in 2006.
He spent four months on the other side of political aisle as the press secretary for then-Gov. Madeleine Kunin, but later resigned after he made an offensive comment to a reporter.
Pamela Polston, the co-owner of Seven Days, said Freyne's departure leaves a "gaping hole" in the paper, which she hopes to fill with a permanent replacement in the next three months. Freyne broke the news to her a week ago, she said, and the reality is still sinking in.
"Peter has a strong desire to hold people's feet to the fire when they mess up," she said. "And he is not afraid to question someone when they say something wrong, suspicious or lame."
Polston said she understands Freyne's perspective that has lead to his retirement. Beating a life-threatening illness such as cancer often leads people to ponder the big questions about the direction and focus of their lives, she said.
"People tend to question what they want to do with their lives after confronting major illnesses," she said.
Freyne said his goal in political writing was to always figure out, "What the hell is going on?" and "Why is this happening?" But with cancer there is no answer, he said, doctors can only tell you if you are getting better or worse.
"So, after I beat cancer, I found myself asking, 'Great, now what?'" he said.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said Wednesday that Freyne's retirement is a "big loss" for Vermont. The columnist has an institutional memory of Vermont politics and was always unafraid to "look behind the façade" or ask probing questions to find out "what is really going on," the Democratic senator said.
"I went to his blog every day," Leahy said. "He is the type of writer who clearly knows hypocrisy. But he also knows the difference between healthy skepticism and cynicism."
Leahy also delivered some friendly barbs at Freyne, joking that he was happy that he was born blind in one eye so that he didn't have to see the columnist in his biker shorts in the summer. Later he joked that Freyne's hair loss during his cancer battle was "because he wanted to look more like me."
"Seriously, Peter was very courageous in how he wrote about his cancer as he was fighting it," Leahy said. "It takes guts to do that."
Despite his unabashedly liberal views, Freyne managed to win over the hearts and minds of some Republicans too.
Neale Lunderville, the secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation, remembered first meeting the political columnist in 2002 when "The Boy Wonder" (as Freyne often refers to him in his column) was managing Gov. James Douglas' first gubernatorial campaign.
"We read 'Inside Track' because Peter always had the inside track," Lunderville said.
Freyne was a tough critic of Douglas during that campaign, Lunderville added, but he always knew how to separate the personalities from the politics.
"We have a mutual respect," he said. "At the end of the day, he knew how to put everything aside and have a nice laugh. That's not to say he didn't take politics very seriously, though."
Contact Daniel Barlow at Daniel.Barlow@rutlandherald.com.
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