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Meet Kile Brewer


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For as long as I can remember I wanted to live by the beach.

Growing up in Northern Missouri I helped out on both sides of the family, farming row crops, raising livestock, working hay; I did it all. I spent summers mowing and riding a tractor hooked up to a sprayer and swimming in the muddy lake next door to my parents’ country home. I’d wander out to the pasture in my child-sized Wranglers and attempt to ride my bottle calf bareback. I was a farm kid.

As I grew older I began to develop my own interests. In high school I got into 1960s-70s rock music and, with the help of the internet, fell in love with the idea of surfing – something I had never been exposed to in the landlocked Midwest. This was when I began planning hypothetical trips to California where I would set off in a $500 van and never look back. I never did it, but I was eager to explore the world outside the farming community I had known since birth.

Entertaining the idea of attending law school, becoming an attorney, and fighting for the environment, I enrolled at the University of Missouri to study Science and Agricultural Journalism as a stepping stone.

I had no idea that Mizzou was such a prestigious journalism school, and after a little time there I began to subscribe to the idea that through journalism, I could help people more than I could with a law degree. I fell in love with writing, and telling the stories of people that would otherwise go untold. I always knew my love for history wouldn’t get me much more than a teaching job, but with journalism I felt like I was writing history. Then my uncle gave me my first DSLR camera.

Since I got that first camera I sort of put a pause on the writing in order to master this new medium. Telling a whole story in one photograph became an obsession. What used to take me a couple hours and 1,000 words to say could now, with instinct and a little luck, be said in 1/1000 of a second. After my first semester of photo classes, I committed myself to complete the Photojournalism program.

Journalism has taken me so many places. My first internship was in Skagway, Alaska, where I lived on a cot in the back of the newsroom at a bi-weekly paper in one of the original boomtowns from the Alaskan Gold Rush. I climbed mountains, walked on glaciers, ate fresh salmon and made lifelong friends.

I worked as a photographer at a daily paper in Eastern North Dakota, travelling across the state to cover the oil boom in Williston. This was a truly great story for a history buff – Williston is about the closest to the wild west that you can get in the modern era.

I’ve also worked at several papers and magazines throughout Missouri, and did some freelance photo work for the New York Times following massive flooding in St. Louis. Then, after applying on both coasts, I got a call. I took a photo job in Sebring, in Central Florida.

I made the trek from Missouri to Florida in February 2016, escaping a whiteout blizzard in the Uhaul truck and arriving to a sunny 70 degrees. My fiancée Leah and I visited different beaches every weekend for most of our first year in Florida. Of all those beaches, we fell in love with Jacksonville, we’re even getting married just south at a beach house near Ponte Vedra.

I worked with some great people in Sebring, but, after two buyouts in about six months and some major changes at the paper, Leah and I started applying to jobs in and around Jacksonville. Within a couple months Leah got hired, and about a week after that I got a call from a weekly paper called Clay Today. I would be reporting in addition to shooting photos, so I’ve dusted off my keyboard and am slowly adjusting to covering stories with words again. I’ve had nothing but good interactions with the people in Clay County.

I hope that once I am more settled I can start meeting more of you, covering issues that I find the most interesting and important like conservation, agriculture, and anything related to improving the lives of abandoned animals.

Outside of my work at the newspaper, Leah and I have settled into our new condo on the Southside, about ten minutes from the beach – we finally made it.

We are getting married in late May after four years together.

Leah and I have two cats, Reggie and Judy. In my free time I play and build guitars, and collect vinyl records with Leah. We almost have every record worth listening to, but somehow are always finding more to add to the collection. We also frequent Jax Beach and Neptune Beach on the weekends, as well as events and shops in Riverside.

If you see me out in the community I would be happy to talk with you about photography, Alaska, the Grateful Dead (or other, less interesting, music), the Chicago Cubs, woodworking, surfing, history (especially military history), agriculture or anything you think might make a good feature story.

I hope I can serve the readers through my work here at Clay Today and tell your stories accurately and effectively. If you have story ideas, don’t hesitate to email kile@opcfla.com, or call my office phone at (904) 579-2159. You can also check out some of my photography on my website at www.kilebrewer.com.