“What are you going to do when you retire?”

Retired Lehigh professor Edward Gallagher said he was asked that often in period leading up to his retirement two years ago. What he did, he said, was become “a groupie for Bethlehem government.” He started regularly attending meetings of city council and other city boards, and a few months later started a blog about those experiences, The Bethlehem Gadfly.

Gallagher talked about his blog and about being a gadfly at the March 2 meeting of the Lower Saucon Township Historical Society. On the blog he writes about what’s going on in the city, includes links to relevant sites, such as the email addresses for the mayor and city council members, and encourages others to post their comments.

A gadfly, he said, is an actual insect, which annoys cows and horses, but it also has come to mean a person who “stimulates others by persistent criticism” or who “challenges people in power.” That person may be considered a pest, he said, but has a noble lineage. Gadflies go as far back in history as Socrates, “who went around ‘pestering,’ asking questions,” and their numbers include Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and more locally, Stephen Antalics, a regular attendee at city meetings.

Gadflies basically do three things, he said. They ask questions, they ask in person, in public, of people in power, and they often take a beating for it. Because of that, gadflies need a thick skin.

On his blog, he said, he tries to encourage conversation, because he believes good conversation builds community.

He said he likes to think of Bethlehem as an idyllic, Norman Rockwell type small town, even though it often isn’t. His Norman Rockwell vision goes back to the Rockwell painting, “Freedom of Speech,” which shows a citizen standing up at a public meeting to ask a question of a local official.

He gives city council credit for having a time for public comment on its agenda, but thinks it would be better if council allowed comment after a council discussion of a specific topic.

He said his hope for his website is to encourage more interest in what goes on at the local level of government and to get more people to vote and to attend meetings. In order to get out the vote, he tries to amplify officials’ comments and provide some sense of the rationale behind their thinking.

For example, before last year’s local election, when eight people were running for council, he asked them all to write a mini-essay each week, which he would then post on his blog. Seven of eight responded each week (one candidate responded just once) and he put their responses on his blog.

“I can’t believe the cooperation I got,” he said. He hopes to do that again in next year’s local election. He stressed he wasn’t pushing any candidate, but just wanted to help people vote intelligently.

He said he doesn’t know if his blog has any influence on council members, but he’s pretty sure they’re paying attention. “I do hear my words come back to me,” he said.

He said someone once called him “the pied piper of civic engagement,” and as that persona, he plans to continue doing what he’s doing, because “a tactic of the powerful is to outlast you.”

“We’re fortunate to have a gadfly,” one of his fans in the audience declared.