By Pauline Masson –
She was a former jurnalist turned real estate agent who fell in love with a short lived Pacific Facebook page. When the page folded due to a version of Facebook hate mail, she started her own page that spawned a bevy of copycat sites where, now, Andy Warhol style, everybody in Pacific can be the center of attention for at least fifteen minutes.
Cathy Lirette first got interested in media in the miliatry. In the U.S. Airforce, she took a course in journalism and landed an assignment as a reporter for the Eglin Air Force Base newspaper the Eglin Eagle. For the last two years of her tour she was the Eglin editor.
When she joined the Air Force in 1993, she was assigned to a seven-week Munitions Systems Apprentice course at Sheppard Air Force Base and worked as a Munitions System journeyman at Seymour Johnson AFB for three and a half years. During this time, she spent three months in Saudi Arabia.
In Jan of 1997 she elected to retrain to become a public affairs specialist and that launched the penchant for news tidbits that we have all learned to rely on.
Following three months of tech school in Fort Meade, MD she was assigned to Eglin AFB. There she wrote for the base newspaper – the Eglin Eagle, and honed her writing skills In 1998, she became the editor, where almost immediately she produced the first 3D newspaper and found herself named Sport Writer of Year in 1998.
“Working on the paper allowed me to do soooooo many things,” she said. “Rapelling, skydiving, flying in helicopters, swimming with manatees . . . .” It was a role she relished until her honorable discharge in 2000.
During seven years of active duty she achieved the rank up to Staff Sgt. and earned several medals and accommodations.
When she and her husband Steve moved to Missouri in 2000, she enlisted in the National Guard at Lambert Field and Jefferson Barracks from 2000 to 2003, when she ended her service.
In Pacific in 2003 she joined the Current News Magazine as reporter, a role she filled until the magazine closed in 2016.
After three years figuring out what to do next, she realized there was something she had always wanted to do. She became a real estate agent with MORE Realtors in 2019. And, in April of this year she became a Broker.
She was not thinking of Andy Warhol when she gravitated to local social media on Facebook.
As she recalls, there was one Pacific Facebook page where readers could post items on upcoming events, lost/found pets or request for help. When it folded, she was disappointed. She contacted the page owner to ask why.
“There was just too much anger and too many hate posts,” she said. “They just couldn’t deal with it.”
But her background in news nagged at her.
After the Current shut down, the Washington Missourian pulled its Pacific page and her beloved Pacific Facebook page folded, “There was no source for getting local information out,” she said.
Three years ago, as an extension of her Cathy Lirette MORE Realtors Facebook page, she launched “I Heart Pacific.”
From the beginning she wanted I Heart Pacific to be uplifting and informational.
“After one month of fielding posts on the page by myself, realized I needed help,” she said.
She did not want the page to devolve into a ‘get even’ page. She reached out to friends and three individuals Rachael Liebhart, Michelle Renee and Colleen Boucher signed on as site administrators.
“There were some things we didn’t allow,” she said. “We wanted everybody to post on the site but we didn’t want posts to be offensive or rude. When we didn’t allow some of the posts, they started calling us the ‘goody two shoes’ site.“
One by one, other sites started to come up. Now, there are several (not sure how many) local bulletin board Facebook pages where people of every walk of community life can post items that their neighbors might want to know.
The pages are a smorgasbord of local happenings – upcoming events, lost/found pets, birthdays, city government, historic photographs of people and landmarks, jobs, new businesses and much much more.
It could be that sheltering in place due to COVID created the right environment for these communal conversations. But for me, an avowed local news junkie, all these local public pages make us a stronger community. And I am even comfortable with people disagreeing with each other -and with.me.
I have to add, there is an ongoing discussion in the art and celebrity world about how the phrase, “everybody, would, should, deserved to, have fifteen minutes of fame,” was attributed to Andy Warhol, the Campbell Soup Can artist. But it was a fun idea that everybody could get their mind around and it caught on as a good thing. I think about it almost every day as I surf through Pacific’s social media sites and see friends and acquaintances express themselves..
And it’s all due to Cathy Lirette’s penchant for local news. Thanks to her, you can find out what is happening in our community, or, with a few clicks of the keyboard, you can tell the community what’s going on in your day. I Heart Pacific, spawned an open discussion among Pacific area residents and brought Warhol’s comment to life.
