By Joe O'leary, For The Mountain Times
Throughout the early stages of this year, Sandy High School senior Charlie Bloomer took keen note of a man she saw walking up and down Proctor Boulevard on a daily basis. The man was Dan Wangerin, a Sandy local who’s fairly well-known around the area for walking about sporting knives lining his belt and a (comically) large top hat.
It seems for Bloomer, a co-editor-in-chief of The Pioneer Press, SHS’ school newspaper, curiosity about characters like this don’t simply occupy space in her mind. Despite immense pleading from her advisor, J.D. McIntire, to avoid the man in case of potential dangers that might come from a teenage girl approaching an adult man with knives to request an interview, Bloomer saw Wangerin as a story that simply needed to be told.
“I was just really curious to know Dan’s story. That intrinsic motivation pushed me to write it, and he’s like a local legend,” Bloomer said. This eye for the interesting combined with immense determination is the special equation that won Bloomer Oregon High School State Journalist of the Year, an immensely competitive and highly decorated achievement.
“I started [in journalism] because I really wanted a creative outlet. My freshman year I took digital media and I got really into that. I originally wanted to be a cinematographer, but then they closed the program. So I was talking with Vinny White (a student journalist who also worked on the school paper and graduated last year) and he was like, ‘Hey, you should join The Pioneer Press, it’s really fun,’” Bloomer said. As time progressed and Bloomer eventually earned an editorial role on the staff in just her sophomore year, a deeper love for reporting began to grow within the student.
“Sophomore year I literally Googled ‘best writing programs in the country’ and I applied to one, not expecting to get in, but I did. It was the Asian American Journalist Association J-Camp and it was really cool. I was working with reporters from The Washington Post and Bloomberg and doing workshops on things like artificial intelligence, human rights violations and just all this really interesting stuff,” Bloomer said. She credits J-Camp as the singular moment when she realized that journalism was something she wanted to take seriously and do as a career. And as Bloomer matured through high school, her writing became more important and profound as well.
“Small press organizations and independent media are kind of dying out over the country, especially in Oregon. I think I’ve found that my role is to shed light on important things happening in [my community],” Bloomer explained. In a day and age where many high schoolers and even undergraduate college students are directly and indirectly told their potential impact on the world and their community is limited by their age, Bloomer hasn’t stopped from trying to push the things she sees as vitally important to as many eyes as possible – freelancing for The Oregonian, doing loads of volunteer work and looking for other publications that want to publish her work.
A major angle and motivation of Bloomer’s journalistic efforts is her philanthropy. “I’ve been involved in community organizing around Sandy for some time. There’s this big caucus called the Rural Organizing Project they put on every year. I ended up going and met a reporter that used to work for ACT UP, which was a nonprofit in the eighties that was a queer rights organization that worked to raise AIDS awareness – but he was a journalist for like 20 years for CNN before getting involved with ACT UP. I met and spoke with him and he was like, ‘Oh you should work for their communications team.’ So yeah, that’s how I started working with RP: writing emails for them and writing profiles on different groups,” Bloomer said.
With a clear goal to make the world a genuinely better place with her work and a work ethic that would shine alongside just about anyone, Bloomer certainly earned the state journalist of the year award and looks to have a very promising career in the field.
If you asked her to describe herself now, she’d likely give a pretty humble answer, depicting a fairly average high school student. There are very few individuals her age that have accomplished and contributed to their community as much as Bloomer has. Quite frankly, this makes Bloomer one of the most promising figures our little town has to offer.