Meet Cindy

Last Updated on Friday, January 20, 2012 10:30 am Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, January 20, 2012 01:00 am

Welcome to OC Unfiltered, a weekly column that invites your opinion about what’s happening in Ocean City. The column will appear exclusively online on Fridays at oc.shorenewstoday.com

If you’re still getting your news in print form, you read on Wednesday in The Ocean City Gazette that, earlier this month, I joined the online paper and that I’ll be writing about the topics that are on your mind and mine.

I’ve lived in Ocean City for 30 years, which makes me less than a native, but more than a shoobie. I used the word “shoobie” intentionally because I intend to make you think, maybe laugh, and definitely react to each week’s topic.

I’ve been a journalist longer than I’ve been an Ocean City resident. I started covering high school sports for a local weekly while I was a student at Glassboro State College. In my junior year, The Press of Atlantic City hired me as its first-ever female sports writer in its 100-year history. Three days after I graduated from Glassboro, I moved to Ocean City, where I had, like so many people who eventually move here, first come to know the town during childhood summer vacations.

My sports-writing years at The Press occurred in an era when women had recently earned the right to enter men’s locker rooms, but were barely tolerated there. When the Phillies lost the 1983 World Series to the Baltimore Orioles, I was the only female among hundreds of writers from around the world sitting in the press box at Veterans Stadium. I covered Muhammad Ali’s final fight of his career, a loss to Trevor Berbick, in the Drama in the Bahamas December 1981. I covered the upstart United States Football League from 1983-85 when Donald Trump was a team owner, Herschel Walker played running back for the New York Generals and Jim Mora, who graduated to the NFL, coached the Philadelphia Stars to two of the fledgling league’s three championships. I wrote about Julie Krone, the winningest female jockey at Atlantic City Race Course, before she became the first female jockey to ride in the 1992 Kentucky Derby. The day in January 1986 that the Challenger exploded, I was on my way to the Spectrum in Philadelphia to cover the US Pro Indoor, where John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors played spectacularly and behaved rather disappointingly.

After seven years in the sports department, I moved to news, where I spent three years covering such cultural events as the Miss America Pageant. I was in Boardwalk Hall in 1988 when Miss New Jersey Tricia Bowman, an Ocean City resident, made the top 10. And then I moved to the features department where I became The Press’s first-ever food editor. I held that job for 15 years, and chronicled the emergence of the Atlantic City restaurant scene as celebrity chefs set up elaborate operations in the resort’s casinos.

In my 25 years at The Press, I had many opportunities to move and continue my career elsewhere. I never accepted any offers because, like so many people who live here, I could not imagine living anywhere else.

I am very involved in the community: I am a member of three cooking committees at St. Peter’s where I’ve also taught English as a second language; I’m a 2007 graduate of CERT; I was president, secretary and treasurer of the Ocean City High School PTA from 2008-2010; and I’m a member of the core committee for the Ocean City High School After Prom.

When my Press days ended, I stopped writing cold turkey. The only published words I wrote from then until July 2011, when I joined Ocean City Patch, were letters to the editor.

This past six months, while working for Patch, I realized that I had not been burned out on writing, as I thought I had been, but that I’d been burned out on the place where I was doing the writing. Patch made me enjoy writing again. It was a completely different experience writing for an online paper than a daily newspaper.

While with Patch, I broke the stories about Atlantic Books closing its seashore stores, about the lack of cell phone service in town in the summer, and about Mack & Manco changing its name. I wrote about the descendants of Ocean City’s first permanent resident, about a radio deejay who, in her retirement, makes soups for her son’s restaurant, and about Ocean City’s own “Boardwalk Empire,” the eight properties operated by Jilly’s.

At The Gazette online, I’ll have the opportunity to continue writing about such things. One of the beauties about working for an online paper is its immediacy. Another is the ability to focus on a small area. Because The Ocean City Gazette online is all Ocean City and nothing else, the stories that would otherwise not get written can now be told.

I look forward to seeing you here every Friday, and every other day. Welcome to OC Unfiltered.