There are people in Erie who have shaped this city quietly, without much fanfare, simply by showing up and doing the work year after year. Adam Welsh and Brian Graham are two of those people – and after nearly seven years with the Erie Reader, I can say with full sincerity that sitting down with the two of them for this particular issue was one of the highlights of my time here.
I have been with the Reader since September of 2018, which means I came in somewhere around the halfway mark of this story. By then, Adam and Brian had already built something real – a publication with a voice, a reputation, and a loyal readership. But to understand how it all started, you have to go back much further than that. You have to go back to a Catholic school in Erie, a fourth-grade classroom, and a kid who walked in and immediately made everyone laugh.
Brian arrived at Holy Rosary in fourth grade, moving into a neighborhood that Adam already called home – a tight, concentrated few blocks where the same group of kids shared paper routes and grew up in each other’s orbit. “We weren’t in the same classes,” Adam recalled, “but it was only like 50 kids in a grade. He was immediately one of the funniest kids I knew. I remember getting into a lot of trouble just laughing at his stuff.” Brian laughed at the memory. From his side, the earliest memories of their friendship involve making cartoons together, cracking each other up, and causing (low-grade) trouble. That dynamic carried all the way through high school, even after they landed at different schools – Brian at Academy, then to Central, and Adam at Mercyhurst Prep – two totally different roads through Erie, but the friendship never faltered…