Leaving Home | Mel Allen Says Goodbye to Yankee

The first time I knew the feeling of leaving home I was a month shy of 11, though what I felt then was home leaving me. My mother, sister, and little brother went to spend the summer on the island of Jamaica, where my mother had grown up and where her parents still lived. I stayed home to play Little League. A strange sense of loneliness soon settled in, as I waited all day in the unfamiliar quiet for my dad to come home to take me to practice or a game, and afterward we’d go to a diner or simply open a carton of ice cream. I never forgot what I learned that summer: Home did not just mean a roof and walls and familiar rooms, but the people you lived with inside.

Since then, I have left numerous homes: off to college, leaving college, leaving the Peace Corps, leaving Maine. Then I came to Yankee in October 1979—and never left. I have been part of more than 400 issues of this magazine. I have lived tens of thousands of hours inside this sprawling red building, have worked alongside so many people here, have known and published so many writers. There has been little distance for me between home with family and my second home here with another family—one where day after day we talk ideas, plan issues, look at layouts, meet in hallways and offices, look after each other.

My coworkers have been part of my life for so long that I have been here when their children were born and seen them grow up and have their own children. I have lost colleagues I will never forget, and I have welcomed new ones I will never forget.

For the past few years, when people asked me when I was going to retire, I replied by saying they don’t understand the feeling of holding a new issue in their hands, or of finding a story that arrives unassigned, like a stranger knocking on the door asking to come in, and then beginning to read it and knowing Yankee’s readers will want to read it, too. They don’t understand what it’s like to get a phone call from a friend to say she’s seen a Facebook post about a Maine lobsterman named Joel Woods who takes photos of a life that few of us ever know. And then to sit in Woods’s cottage on the Maine coast and see his work, and then publish it, and then enter it in the annual City and Regional Magazine Association contest to be judged against photos by professionals across the country. (Joel Woods took first place.)

And then there is that hard-to-define connection with readers, so strong at times I can almost hear their voices when they write. I have kept hundreds of their cards and letters and several thousands of their emails, which speak to a bond that runs deeper than just editor and subscriber. They want me to know how much Yankee means to them. They tell of losses in their lives and how Yankee kept them grounded, how we have kept New England alive for them no matter where they live. They talk about their family as if we here at Yankee all belonged, too.

They write things like this: Dear Mel, I think I can be so familiar as to call you by your first name though we have never met in person; we have known each other for decades though only through Yankee.

Or this one, a nod to my long-standing editor’s photo: Check your closet, Mel. Caught between all those red shirts must be one navy-blue or forest-green shirt you could don for Yankee issues. Please?

But there is always an end time. There is always a sense that if not now, when?

In early January, our conference room filled with everyone who works here in Dublin as well as former colleagues who had left or retired. We all enjoyed some good food, and then I told them what they had meant to me, and they told me what I had meant to them. And I am 78 but I felt like a boy as I tried, not always successfully, to choke back tears when a colleague was doing the same.

If you were in the room with us, I would have wanted you to know this: Many days I walk with several editors to a dirt path that runs past a pretty cemetery and ends at a spot where we gaze out upon lake and mountain. And each time I say, “Can you believe how lucky we are to see this where we work?”

I’d want you to know how we pulled together during the pandemic and saw one another only on a screen, and we still put together issues that made us all proud.

I’d want you to know about the time Rudy, my Jack Russell, escaped from my car in the Yankee parking lot and I was certain I’d lost him forever. But within an hour my staff had made “Lost Dog” posters, and everyone fanned out to distribute them and to look for Rudy. And late that night, as I lay in the back of my car at Yankee, hoping somehow Rudy would find his way back, my colleague Joe arrived at the parking lot. Driving once more along the darkened roads, he’d found Rudy walking along the highway and called him into the truck. Now, he held Rudy out to me.

I’d want you to know about working alongside Jud Hale, the former editor in chief whose uncle Robb Sagendorph started Yankee in 1935, and hearing him walking to his office calling hello to everyone he passed. And how Sarah, an editor with The Old Farmer’s Almanac, whose offices are just down the hall, always bakes me a chocolate zucchini bread for my birthday because she knows it’s my favorite.

I’d want you to have seen me this past New Year’s Day, alone in my office, stepping over the plastic crates I’d brought to fill with what I had saved all these years—which seems to be nearly every manuscript, notebook, calendar, magazine, and newspaper clipping, plus enough odds and ends to fill my newly rented storage unit a few miles away. When I took down all the cards from readers and photos from my bulletin board, I remembered the boy from a long-ago summer who had the sensation of home changing right then and there, and I was glad I was alone on New Year’s in my office.

So this is the last issue of Yankee with my name at the top of the masthead. For 90 years, Yankee has evolved, always changing, because times and challenges change. But this remains: We are New England’s voice, whether in this magazine in your hands, or our Weekends with Yankee TV show, or our website and newsletters, or even our online New England Store.

Now, I will be working on a collection of my stories, and I will continue looking for new ones to write. You can find me at melallen716@gmail.com. I leave knowing that the people I have worked with for so long, who care about this region so deeply, will continue to do the work they do so well. I will always hold them close. I will still come by and join the walk on the dirt path to where lake and mountain appear. And I am certain that if I ever lose my way, they will find me and bring me home.

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