JUNE 20, 2002 -- I've always thought of journalism as the ultimate door-opener.

When Sister Delores Donovan named me - Me! Cathy Mellina! - as the feature editor and columnist for our high school newspaper, I was ecstatic. Now I had a backstage pass to interview everyone who interested me, from early ‘70s "Women's Liberation" leaders to my journalistic hero - liberal black columnist Claude Lewis of the Philadelphia Bulletin.

I even came up with an appropriately radical/hippie name for my column - a name I've unfortunately forgotten because Sister Delores found it a little too radical and (inspired by a talking-doll commercial) did some last-minute editing of her own.

I'll never forget the horror of paging to my first newspaper column and finding the words "Cathy Chats" cheerfully emblazoned above my teen-rebel photo - a humiliation that still sends me fleeing from the Toys R Us doll aisle.

Thirty years later, I'm pursuing a writing adventure of a different kind - one that has taken me behind the scenes in Asbury Park and given me a different perspective on my city council job.

In the year since I began this bi-weekly column, I've ridden white-knuckled in a speeding police car at midnight, hop-scotched through roach-filled apartments with Code Inspector Bill Gray, and endured brain-numbing budget briefings.

I've climbed through the devastated rooms of the Albion Hotel, filled out forms for residents who masked their inability to read behind mumbled excuses about lost glasses, and learned enough about election scams to fill two columns.

I've struggled to tame run-on sentences (like the two above), make eye-glazing statistics seem interesting (even to me), and put more punch into my Pollyanna endings. (And, yes, Coaster editors, I promise to rein in my column length this year!)

But whether I'm writing about budget plans, redevelopment meetings, city housing programs or business initiatives, it's the human stories behind the facts that make those facts worth telling.

The stories that are often too personal or too painful to repeat, like the woman forced to choose between paying her heating bill or her property tax ("Will they take my house away?" she worried) or the senior citizen who keeps her windows locked even in summer and who relies on a poorly stocked convenience store for food, or the stream of unemployed residents eagerly filling out training applications at a STARS sign-up session.

And, more and more often, it's also about a growing community of neighbors - from in-town and around the world - who have made real miracles happen here this year, and who have convinced me that Asbury Park will triumph over the skeptics and hate-mongers after all.

Because that's the big, big change I've seen in Asbury Park these past two or three years: the willingness of people from every corner of the city to throw away their fears, question the rumors, and work together again.

Sometimes I look at my finished columns and I have to marvel at how much I've learned in writing them and how little I can actually convey on the page. So I hope you'll read between the lines as I alternately entertain and scare myself by playing cub reporter here.

A few years after my "Cathy Chats" debacle, I was applying for a job at our college newspaper.

"Well, Cathy...," the editor began, glancing at my resume. Instantly, the warning strains of the Chatty Cathy television jingle cued themselves in my brain.

"Excuse me, but the name's not Cathy," I hastily corrected him, rising to my full five-foot, two-inches. "It's Kate - Kate Mellina."

Who says that journalism can't change your life?