I began my employment at The Day on July 8, 1993 as the paper's first Digital Imaging Technician. The job title would later be changed to Night Photo Editor. As my job, starting out, was not as a photographer, it should not be too much of a surprise that it took me a little while, about five weeks, to get my first photo published in the paper.

I worked Tuesday - Saturday from 4 p.m. to midnight, my main duties were pre-press processing of digital images, photo selection and, if I was feeling brash, layout suggestions. I had been hired to relieve the paper's staff of those tasks, especially the image processing, as they were all very solidly in the wet darkroom generation.

For that first month-plus of my employment I'd spend my pre-work daylight hours running my errands, doing laundry, reading and listening to my little 10-channel police scanner. My apartment was less than a block from the New London Fire Department's headquarters on Bank St., and the alert tone on my scanner would coincide with the alert siren on the firehouse sounding. Up until that point all the calls had been medical calls for the ambulance and a lot of false alarms.

The call on the 17th was for smoke showing from a two-family house on Franklin St. all of four blocks from my home. As I generally kept my car parked in the garage at work (five blocks away) unless I was running errands I had to choose between my feet and my bicycle to chase this call. So, I ran.

Of course the firefighters were faster than I was, and had the fire knocked down by the time I huffed and puffed up to the scene, Domke bag over one shoulder and camera in one hand.

If you look at my negatives from that day, and you still can becasue unlike years worth of digital files all lost to the ether the negatives have been adequately preserved, you would see several frames showing fire apparatus clogging a narrow street, a few firefighters milling around, and a second floor window with whisps of smoke.

I was standing there, thinking to myself that I was not going to get any photos in the paper again, when the residents of the house strolled by me, right down the sidewalk and started to mount the stairs to their front porch when a firefighter coming out the door stopped them. A moment later Battalion Chief Hallisey stepped in and escorted them away from the building as he explained what was happening to the clearly distraught women.

I ran home to change into my work clothes, and then down to the office early for my shift to process my film and show them to the photo editor.

Of course, I was on the photo desk that night, so I knew my photo was going to run on the front page before I went to bed that night.

That was 25-years ago today, and I will admit, even though the printed version of the paper may have diminished in its glory, I still get a kick out of seeing my photo on the front page.