Some thoughts as we celebrate 20 years in Savannah. What a wild ride it has been, thanks to all of you.

Way back, way back spring of 1999, I was working in a restaurant, believe it or not, the only time in my life I’ve actually ever worked in a restaurant. And it was Emerald Lagasse’s restaurant in Orlando. They had just opened at Universal Studios. I was between TV jobs and I got a job with the back of the house crew there, and I enjoyed it. It was a good time. But that’s where I was working. When someone from the office came down and told me, Hey, your wife called, she needs you to call her right away. Well, that gets your attention newly wed at the time we’d been married about a year. That gets your attention. And so I immediately looked for some change and I went, don’t laugh. This is how old this was to the payphone that they had right outside the bathrooms at Emeril Lagasse’s restaurant in Orlando and I called her.

Sheila was just over the moon excited because I had gotten a call from a News Director here in Savannah, Georgia who told her that he needed to talk to me because he wanted to bring me in for an interview to take a position in sports or offer me a position in sports here at WSAV-TV.

Long story short, I got the job and I called home..to my dad in South Florida and told him that I was between TV jobs, but I had gotten my first anchor opportunity and it was in Savannah. My dad pauses and he’s on the other end…… hello? There was an empty other end of the line. And I go, are you there? He goes, yeah, I’m here, Savannah? Yeah. He says, “Savannah, Georgia?” I got to put it in my dad’s old broken Spanish

“Savannah, Georgia?” And I said, yeah. And his reaction was, UGH!!! I said, “What’s the problem?” He said, I don’t like Savannah, man. I said, well, why is that? He said, “I went through there one time at the bus station and they had a sign up that said, no blacks, dogs are Puerto Ricans.”

I said, “Well, that was also a long time ago. Savannah has every right to have evolved a little bit.” He says, yeah, okay. What are you going to be doing? And then we talked about the job.

Obviously I have never forgotten that moment because as of this Summer, I did the math a couple of years ago during the COVID shutdown. I did the math and as of this Summer makes 20 years, 20 summers that I’ve lived here in Savannah. And in thinking back over the 20 years that I have lived in Savannah, I’ve thought about my dad in that moment quite a bit, quite a bit…and his reaction.

He did come early on and visit with us. Long before Savannah has become what it is now. We lost my dad in 2005, I believe it was. And this was 1999. So he did come and he did visit, but he never saw Savannah what it is now and any of that stuff, which I think he would’ve loved.

The most important thing about all of that is the fact that as I think back to 20 years of having lived here in Savannah, moved away for four, came back. So it’s not 20 consecutive years, but over the course of my life, I have spent 20 of my 50 whatever I am this month, this year, years here in Savannah. So there’s been a lot of reflection. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ups and the downs that I’ve had in this town, and I thought it was important to share with everybody what my experience has been here in Savannah and the fact that we have chosen to make this home. We moved back here after having moved away in 2004. We had the chance to come back in 2008 and we couldn’t get wait to get back here.

It has been an amazing an amazing an amazing 20 years here. I had been thinking all Summer about how I was going to share this with the audience here and my followers here in Savannah. And I thought about writing a blog and an open letter to Savannah and Dear Savannah, you guys have been great to me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I thought about doing that, and I thought that could turn into a gigantic epic that would become boring if you’re reading it. So then it occurred to me, you know what? Just record a podcast and share it from your heart and talk about what it is that you’re feeling. There’s just all kinds of thoughts been going through my head all Summer long and I wanted to just share them here.

It is a crazy, crazy ass time in America right now. I don’t think anybody would deny that. It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you reside on, it’s just crazy right now. There are friends who aren’t speaking anymore because of who you’re voting for, and the racial tensions are heightened and people are just at a fever pitch over things that would just maybe move the needle 10, 15 years ago. Now everybody’s just red faced, raged over things that are different than what they are used to or, and it blows my mind. I’m an old political science major from the University of Central Florida, and so I pay closer attention to all of the stuff that is going on in our world. But that is what led me to want to sit here and share this moment with you.

It blows my mind that I’ve been here 20 years and I have been treated. Let me back up. I was welcomed here with open arms back in 1999. I made some friends that I have to this day pretty quickly. I’ve gotten to enjoy so many wonderful experiences from tea at sea with the Irish Navy out off the coast of Tybee Island here to ball games to, I mean, I can’t even begin. I got to go cover a presidential inauguration in 2008 with some students from Beach High School. I have been in the front row of so many chapters of history that it’s just been amazing, made more so, and that’s my whole reason for sharing this time with you, made more so by the people of this community. I was talking to a group…a Buy Local group, I believe it was about a year ago now, and somebody asked me, why did you decide to stay here in Savannah?

My response was, this community has been so welcoming to me and my family that we just loved it here. It just worked for us.

I’ve been treated like I was born in the middle of Ellis Square on the 4th of July by the people of this community. And let me remind you that I’m Hispanic. I’m a Cuban American. My mom was Puerto Rican. I say Cuban because I was raised with my Cuban family in Miami. I have met a couple ignorant people along the way. Call it what it is, “capital I ignorant.” I had one restaurant owner one time ask me, “so what do you eat?” And I said, lately, I’ve been eating a lot of grilled chicken and roasted broccoli. And he looked at me with a tilted head like a dog, and he said,

“You don’t eat beans every day?”

I realized he’s a little bit older, and I’m even sharing this story because the restaurant doesn’t exist anymore. But I said, no, you’d be shocked to know that I make beans in my house maybe twice a year. And I kind of brushed it off because like I said, he was older and it was a different generation and I kind of shrugged, whatever. But I have never, other than that, and maybe a couple of silly things here and there that someone on a lunatic fringe has said to me, I have been nothing but welcomed by this community with open arms.

My daughter, she encountered a little bit of silliness in that regard in elementary and middle school, but middle schoolers are a pill. I think we all would agree with that. It was a little disappointing, a couple of the instances that my daughter had growing up in school here, because I knew some of the kids that said some ugly things to her. I know their parents and their parents have been great to me. But then you go back to, okay, well, the kid’s saying that, and he had to have learned it somewhere.

My daughter’s upbringing here wasn’t as rosy as my experience here in the last 20 years. It’s been, not to say that it’s been awful because my daughter loves Savannah and she has a lot of friends here, but it was different. Her experience was a little bit different than mine here over the course of her 20 years because she was born here at Memorial.

So I kind of am half rambling here, but wanted to get out a huge capital, THANK, thank you to this community for everything you have been to not only me, but my wife Sheila, and my daughter and my mother who moved up here for the last few years of her life. I think the last six, seven years. My mom moved up here. So a lot of people in this town came to know her as Jesse’s mom walking around town or whatever, bumming a cigarette from this one or that one or the other. That was my mom walking around downtown.

It has been an amazing, amazing, amazing journey for us. I absolutely love Savannah. I know my wife does as well. We have chosen to, we live in our forever house, and it has been just a wonderful, wonderfully warm, welcoming experience here. I’m taking the time to share all of that because of what I said a few minutes ago about how nasty things are in this country right now.

I don’t take for granted the fact that there are a lot of people who move to a different city and it doesn’t work out for them. And it’s nobody’s fault. You just need to find your groove and keep moving until you find it. We found ours here in Savannah fairly early on. We found ours here in Savannah in 1999. We moved away because we wanted bigger paychecks. But then a few years later, we realized that paychecks aren’t everything and we wanted to be able to enjoy where we lived.

So we came back here. So that is a very long way of saying thank you to this community. It’s been 20 years that I’ve lived here, 20 Summers, and as of this month, September of 2024, it is 15 seasons of television covering the food scene here in Savannah and Hilton Head that I have been given the privilege to share with all of you.

I haven’t even mentioned the people that I have come to know and love very much over in Hilton Head. It’s an hour away by car, but I treat it like it’s a block away. I’m over there all the time, and I have some of my dearest friends live over there. This whole community from both sides of the Savannah River has been just nothing short of amazing to me and supportive, and I just can’t stress enough how appreciative I am/we are to have been put in this position to share all of this with all of you.

So thank you, Savannah, Bluffton, Hilton Head, and anywhere else that our travels have taken us and we’ve been given a warm welcome. I do not take it for granted. We are very appreciative and I don’t know that I’m going to do another 20, but we are going to enjoy the fool out of however much longer I get to do all of this with you. So thanks so much for hanging out.

# # #