Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Longtime Monticello News staffer Debbie Snapp is hanging up her reporter hat, but only long enough to do a little traveling, before picking up a new one.
Snapp, who has been with the newspaper since early 2003, worked her last day on Wednesday, Sept. 23, nearly 18 years after covering her first Watermelon Festival.
Her plan had been to retire on her 65th birthday in June, Snapp says. By then, however, the pandemic was in full swing; the economy was slowing; and the news staff was undergoing transitions. All of which factors caused her to postpone her retirement date until the present.
“I couldn’t leave Emerald in a spot,” says Snapp, speaking of Publisher Emerald Greene Parsons. “I admire her. She’s a good friend.”
A New Jersey native, Snapp was self employed for most of her life, her dream one day to run her own dance studio. All the while, she did all kinds of jobs, including helping her late husband Clyde run an 18-wheeler for five years, transporting goods across the country.
“We went to 48 states,” Snapp says. “Clyde, me and our little poodle, Cognac.”
Although Snapp had never written professionally before coming to the paper, she’d always had a yen to write a book, she says.
“I always wanted to write a book geared toward pre-teen girls,” Snapp says. “It would be about a city and a country girl and their worlds. I just never had the time to write it. I may dabble in it now.”
In fact, she’s kept a notebook of her experiences adapting to country life, some which comical encounters she may weave into the book. The characters, she says, will be modeled after her two daughters.
Her immediate plans, however, are to do some traveling with her 88-year-old mother and dedicate more time to Snapphappy Feral Cat Sanctuary, the feline haven that she founded in 2013.
Of her first goal, Snapp says the idea is to do car trips around Florida and nearby states to visit family. She and her mother, she says, may even visit some of their New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania relatives, depending on the circumstances and her mother’s health and willingness to undergo the longer trips.
“She has grandchildren and great grandchildren all over that she hasn’t seen in years,” Snapp says.
As for the sanctuary, her goal is to set it up as a nonprofit so that she can get grants and financial sponsors to help her with the cost of the food, neutering and spaying services and medications.
It all started with a free kitten that she picked up at a garage sale in town one day. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“I got involved with the Humane Society,” Snapp says. “Then people started bringing me feral cats and I started taking them home, neutering and releasing them. Right now, I’ve got 100 cats running around on my 15 acres. About 400 cats have passed through the place.”
Strangely, prior to moving to Jefferson County, Snapp had had little traffic with animals and no interest in country living.
A city girl through-and-through, Snapp says her present-day house was originally Clyde’s weekend retreat when they lived in Atlanta, Ga. At least it was until he suffered a stroke and decided to relocate permanently to Jefferson County.
“It took me three years to adjust,” Snapp says. “I cried everyday the first three years. The house was smaller than the smallest apartment I’d ever had in the city.”
She was so disgusted with her new environs, that she kept her belongings packed in the moving van the entire time, ready to return to Atlanta at a moment’s notice.
Jefferson County, however, slowly worked its way into her system. Snapp has since not only owned every kind of animal imaginable – from chickens, ducks and turkeys, to goats, pigs and cows – but she now considers Jefferson County home and can’t imagine living anywhere else.
“I know this is where I belong,” she says.
Before coming to Jefferson County, Snapp says she never knew her neighbors, nor cared to know them.
“I had never been part of a community,” she says. “I didn’t even know what a community was until I moved here. Now I know everyone. People call me all the time to get information. Every obit I read, I know the person. When you have a loss in Monticello, you’re not alone.”
Just because she’s retiring, however, don’t expect Snapp to disappear. Besides working on her cat sanctuary, she plans to stay involved in the community at large and in community groups such as the Chamber, Monticello Opera House, American Legion and Lion’s Club. She may even, she says, do a little work for the paper now and then, in exchange for advertisement for her cat sanctuary.
As for her former city life, it’s now far back in the rear mirror. Some of her Atlanta friends, moreover, have come around to her view of things.
Snapp says when she first moved to Jefferson County, some of her Atlanta friends thought that she had lost her mind. Now these same friends visit her, and a few are even contemplating relocating here, she says. Talk about sweet vindication.
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