The Guide To Newtown

One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.

 –Henry David Thoreau

 

By now, every home in Newtown should have received in the mail The Newtown Bee Official Guide to Newtown & Phone Directory for 2004. If by chance it has slipped unnoticed into the stack of catalogs, we urge you to pull it out — you’re going to need it.

In addition to the updated phone directory in the center of the book, the guide once again contains a trove of information about Newtown maintained by The Bee’s editors and reporters for their own use and yours. In it you will find the answer to almost any question about town government, the schools, sports and recreation programs, local churches and synagogues, elected representatives, and even The Bee itself. In addition, about 75 local clubs and organizations are listed with descriptions of their purpose and goals and contact numbers for those who might want to get involved.

Our annual Guide to Newtown is as close as we can come to a key to the community — a key that unlocks some of the most rewarding benefits community life has to offer. As we look around in our own headlong pursuit of happiness, we have noticed that the happiest people we know have immersed themselves in the greater community of family and friends bound together by common interests, faith, or simply the need to be of some use to someone other than one’s self. Each year as we update and revise our guide, we are amazed at the sheer quantity of groups and organizations that have sprung up in Newtown and the thousands of people involved in their activities. We are not just talking about town boards and commissions, schools, churches, and the volunteer fire companies. From the volunteers at the FAITH Food Pantry and the Cullens Youth Association to the Genealogy Club and the Friends of Counted Embroidery and scores of other organizations, people are working together on their own time to make Newtown a little more compassionate, a little more fun, a little more comprehensible, and a little more beautiful.

No one person can build a community. As Thoreau tells us, no one is born into the world to do everything. But towns as nice as Newtown come to be because many people have chosen to do something. Go retrieve that Guide to Newtown from the stack of catalogs and find something you would like to do. Unlock for yourself the richest rewards of our community.