As a boy, Republican Registrar of Voters, Roger Autuori, wanted to be three things when he grew up - a farmer, a builder and a policeman - and he has managed to do, well, something, in all three fields.
His first choice was to have been a detective like his uncle in the Fairfield Police Department. So, Autuori got a degree in criminal justice administration from the University of New Haven, but when he applied for a job as a policeman, the fact that he wore glasses meant he was ineligible.
Plan Two wasn't so much a plan as something he fell into. That was the newspaper business. He got a job first as an office boy, then as an intern, and finally as a reporter for the Bridgeport Telegram. He covered healthcare, the police beat and then covered the Superior Court.
In 1978, the major story was the teacher's strike. Negotiations with the city broke down; teachers struck, and the city got an injunction against the strike. As a result, the union leadership and some teachers got shipped off to jail, but not before they had their day in court. Some teachers resigned before that happened, and "Bridgeport lost a lot of good teachers," Autuori said. The good thing for Autuori was that he made a ton of overtime pay. He covered the courts from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then wrote stories until 10 or 11 at night.
Soon after, he went to a paper in Fairfield. It was his hometown, where he had gone to school from Kindergarten through Andrew Warde High School. He covered John Sullivan and Jacky Durrell and all the boards and commissions.
"Fairfield was a nice breath of fresh air," he said.
He was asked to work on various campaigns and did work on several, including Durrell's in 1983. And so, his political life began. He worked only on Republican campaigns, and most of them lost, he said a bit ruefully. He was asked to work on Democrat Ella Grosso's campaign for governor and Democrat Joe Lieberman's for Attorney General, but turned both of them down. They won, of course.
About that time, his career as a builder also began. A mason hired him and taught him to make chimneys, fireplaces, and drywalls. The two even made the brick bus stop on Sherman Green. He continued to do masonry work even after his boss and mentor died in 1992.
In 1987, he replaced someone on the Representative Town Meeting and had his own term from 1991 to 1993. In 1992, he ran unsuccessfully for state representative in the 127th district, which included parts of Bridgeport and Fairfield. The heavily democratic Bridgeport didn't help him there.
In 1984, the Republican registrar asked him to be the assistant moderator for an election. He did and eventually took the test to become a moderator. In November of 2007, he won the election and became the Republican Registrar of Voters.
Since only one Republican and one Democrat run for registrar, and there is one of each, it is, he told a young boy who came to visit the office on a school project, the election that no one loses.
It is also a job that is keeping him very busy these days. Officially he works four hours a day, five days a week. However, his previous Democratic counterpart, Registrar, Jo Ann McMaster, left suddenly, just a few weeks ago. While there's a new registrar, that plus the current election, have him working from 7:30 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m.
So what about that third career as a farmer? Well, he has a garden. He grows tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, squash, and Italian peppers, to name a few. His backyard is also host to foxes, coyotes, raccoons, deer and a big, fat woodchuck that he calls Meatloaf.