James Snoddy and his family enjoy some time at Cape Cod this summer. Photo provided by James Snoddy
BY DEB AND TIM SMITH
We’ve got a Sentinel first for you right here. This article had to achieve official clearance from the U.S. State Department before it could be published. We have to admit that reality did send a pulse of adrenaline coursing through our veins. With turmoil popping up in all corners of the globe, the Sentinel certainly doesn’t want to be the source of the leak that tips the scales to the side of the bad guys.
So how did we find ourselves in the perilous perch of providing the protection of national security? This much we can tell you… it all went down on the sidewalk in front of our place in beautiful downtown Mendon. We can move on from here only after acknowledging that, “James is speaking in his personal capacity; the views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. government, the Department of State, or the Department of Defense.” With that “i” dotted, let the games begin.
The guy who stars in this hometown homage would be one James Snoddy who has put together a resume that’s not too shoddy. If that string of accolades we’ve assembled above doesn’t already have you locked in for this story, we’ve got one more for you. There’s the tale of the time that, while serving as a counselor at Massawepie Boy Scout Camp, James and his friends were instrumental in saving the lives of two campers who had become lost in the wilderness.
If the thought is already running through your mind that, “Let’s hear it!” we would absolutely concur. So let’s sound reveille and get right to the heart of the matter.
We promise to circle back to flesh out the details we’ve tossed out in this tantalizing teaser, but first we want to set our readers up with some perspective regarding how this piece was sparked on the Sentinel sidewalk.
In our tenure of writing for the Sentinel over the past decade, we have made it our habit to hold court on the sidewalk patio in front of our house every evening during the warm weather while we work on our writing. The small-town ambiance is amazingly inspirational, and you truly never know who might come walking, or running, by our outdoor office.
The hands-down 2025 award for our best guess-who-came-running-by-our-house-last-night story goes to the aforementioned James Snoddy. In mid-2020, he and his family (wife Nadia, son Alessandro) had stayed at the upstairs AirBnB, above the Sentinel office in the hamlet of Mendon. Their family is very active and it took them past yours truly’s Micronation of Ganonda-Gonyea-Smitty-2-Ville often during their stay. Well, when James ran by a few weeks ago, he flagged us down to tell us how much he liked our flag and the Micronation concept.
It was one of the first days of September, because just a few days later James was at our Honeoye Falls-Mendon Historical Society presentation where we introduced him to former HF Mayor Muffy Meisenzahl. Muffy’s immediate question was, “From the dry cleaning family?”
James’ answer was, “Yes,” and for a generation of locals, that business was the high profile, commercial representation of the Snoddy surname in the community. It was actually James’ great uncles who were the proprietors of that business which operated from the mid-1940’s to the early-1980’s, originally as Snoddy’s Tailors and then later as Snoddy Dry Cleaning. The business was located at 11 North Main Street.
James’ family’s ties to Honeoye Falls go back more than a century. His grandfather Howard (Troop 10’s first Eagle Scout, Cornell grad, and officer in the Army Air Corps and WW II veteran) was born on North Main Street, and his Great-grandmother Blanche lived in the house just north of M&T Bank until the day she died. His Great-aunt Margaret, Aunt Elizabeth, Uncle Don, Cousins Carol and Brian, all still live in Honeoye Falls. And as we said, his great uncles owned the dry cleaners and they were active in the fire department, bowling, and other civic organizations typical of the era.
For the almost three decades James has served the United States in various capacities and on five continents: first as an Eagle Scout, then as a military policeman, an infantry officer, a defense contractor, a Presidential Management Fellow, and finally as a diplomat. In 28 years, he’s had 35 different addresses as education, deployments, and diplomatic assignments moved him across New York, Alabama, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Alaska, Washington DC, Cuba, India, Latvia, and Trinidad & Tobago. How’s that for a travelogue?!
In tracing James’ resume, he graduated from Fairport High School in 1997, (where he was captain of the cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track teams). While still in high school, at the age of17, James enlisted in the New York Army National Guard as a Military Policeman. He spent the next six years serving in the Army National Guard while also going to college (see below), and working various jobs, including for the Town of Perinton highway department which leads to a rather unique transition.
“My last day on the back of a garbage truck,” he told us, “was followed a week later by my first day interning at the White House, an early lesson that duty takes many forms.” We’d certainly have to agree with him on that analysis. He also interned at the New York State Attorney General’s Office, taking public calls in the consumer fraud division. Both internships highlighted how law and policy connect to people’s daily lives.
Just after the terrorist attack on 9/11, he was mobilized to serve as security at the Flight 77 crash site in the E-Ring of the Pentagon, followed by service at Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, during the early months of the detainee facility.
In terms of college, James studied at SUNY–Buffalo from 1998 to 2000. In 2004, he finished his bachelor’s in English Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park and earned a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2010.
James commissioned as an infantry officer in 2004 and deployed to Iraq as a rifle platoon leader for a 16-month tour during 2005 and 2006. During that period, he led 45 infantrymen in over 480 combat missions in Mosul and Baghdad. That tempo was characteristic of the 172nd Stryker Brigade, which was known for a high operational pace, and it exceeded what most line platoons in Iraq typically sustained over a standard 12-month tour. That tempo also meant constant missions, night raids, stacking on doors, route security, and searches.
James’ platoon hit multiple roadside bombs, including one that set his armored vehicle’s wheels on fire. In another, an explosively formed penetrator, glanced off his vehicle’s front armor sending concrete shards into his face, and the face of the vehicle commander.
While on missions, he often had to personally rule out suspicious objects as possible roadside bombs, because leaving the platoon static while waiting hours for the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit carried severe risks from snipers and mortars. “Through outstanding NCOs and soldiers (kids, really) who performed under constant pressure, and no small amount of luck,” he said, “we brought every man home intact. That remains my greatest professional accomplishment.”
After leaving active duty, James stayed in public service. He first worked as a defense contractor testing infantry weapons systems, helping the Army evaluate new designs before they reached the field. From there James became a Presidential Management Fellow at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. That assignment took him to Algeria, UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Türkiye, and Afghanistan, where he helped build systems for detecting and responding to infectious disease outbreaks. It was unusual work, blending science, security, and diplomacy, but it showed him how prevention and cooperation save lives just as surely as armor and tactics.
Since 2014 he has served as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in India, Latvia, Washington, Trinidad & Tobago, and at the United Nations. He now represents the United States as the Head of Delegation to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Telecommunications Working Group. Below are some highlights.
In Mumbai, India (2014–2016), James managed one of the busiest visa lines in the world, over 1,600 interviews a day. He also reorganized the Consulate’s medical first responder team, cutting response times by more than 80%.
In Latvia he helped negotiate restitution for Holocaust survivors and communities worth €40 million, created NATO-backed projects to counter Russian disinformation, and organized the Embassy’s largest public diplomacy event marking the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.
In Trinidad & Tobago (2023–2025), James helped negotiate the creation of a DEA-vetted counter-narcotics unit to tackle major crimes. He joined Trini operators and the DEA on jungle missions to burn down drug farms, choking off the cash which gangs used for guns, narcotics, and murder-for-hire.
In 2025, as Head of the U.S. Delegation to the APEC Telecommunications and Information Working Group, he led negotiations on artificial intelligence and digital economy principles that concluded with agreement among 21 economies representing nearly half of global GDP.
“All these experiences, from Scouting to high school sports to blue-collar jobs to government internships to officership to diplomacy, taught me the same lesson,” James said. “Duty doesn’t change with the setting. Whether hauling garbage at dawn, stacking on an enemy door at midnight, or briefing senior officials, the obligation to do the right thing, speak truth to power, and have integrity is the same; it is just a matter of degree.”
“One of our unofficial family mottos is, ‘We carry our own bags.’ Things matter more with skin in the game. Carrying your own bags is part of raising humble, kind children and keeping perspective as an adult. It also means more than just carrying your own bags. It’s a metaphor for taking responsibility for yourself, your actions, and the second and third order effects of what you do. I have had profound privileges and extraordinarily rare opportunities, which makes maintaining perspective imperative, not only in raising my son, Alessandro, but in my own life as well.”
After years abroad, James and his family chose Mendon as the place to educate and raise their son because of its schools, its community, and its values. They are on record as saying that they have met some of the greatest neighbors and friends during the last four years while they’ve been here. You can sense the compassion for community when James speaks about our hometown.
“We have the best friends and neighbors in Mendon. These are the people we can count on for anything: watch my kid, borrow a chain saw, take a trip, climb a mountain, or just go next door to watch the Bills and they’ll make you pizza. It’s impossible to leave their house hungry.”
As you can certainly see by this point, the amount of background information emanating from this interview was already so impressively vast, and then James shared this next adventure with us… Rather than having it lose anything in our translation, we are opting to defer to James’ own words in this next story that we’ll title…
A Seminal Moment
In July 1995 I was working as a junior staffer at Massawepie Scout Reservation, then run by the Otetiana Council (now Seneca Waterways Council) in the Adirondacks. Late one afternoon two younger campers went missing. With no clear guidance, the camp’s Office Manager and First Aider, Mike Crews of Pittsford, just 19 years old at the time, made a critical decision to halt programming and launch a search despite pressure to carry on as normal. That decision gave the staff the daylight and time we needed to do a proper search and rescue.
My fellow staffer (and best friend), Jim Kreiner of Fairport, and I, both 15, were sent to Pontiac Point, a peninsula that juts into Massawepie Lake. From there we spotted the missing boys stranded on the other side of the lake. Daylight was fading, we had no way to communicate across the lake, and the only land route back was three miles. In our judgment, the situation was urgent.
Jim waited until I had swum halfway across the water before sprinting almost a mile back through the dark woods to alert the director and help organize the overland recovery. I swam about 500 yards across the lake to reach the Scouts, check their condition, and stayed with them until help arrived.
Thanks to Mike’s judgment, Jim’s speed and coordination, and the swim, both boys got back safely as night fell. In the end, no one got recognized for it, in fact, I got a quiet reprimand for swimming after dark, outside the swimming area, but that never mattered. It was one of the first times I understood how quickly responsibility can upend your day and how teamwork under pressure can determine the outcome. But more importantly, it taught me early on that responsibility means stepping up: if you can help, you should.
On a personal level, in 2013 James married his wife Nadia, a talented English-as-a-second-language teacher and future devoted Buffalo Bills fan. Less than a year after marriage, they moved to India for James’ first assignment with the U.S. Foreign Service. In 2015 their son Alessandro was born, and they returned to Washington so he could be born in the United States. Alessandro has grown up as a true “diplomat’s kid,” living on four continents by his ninth birthday, and he has developed a love of all sports, especially soccer (Borussia Dortmund), football (Bills), and baseball (Yankees). After leaving the federal government after 11 years of service to her country and ten years of teaching in Virginia and Florida, Nadia began teaching English as a second language at Fairport High School. James shared that, “Out of everything else, having these two beside me is my greatest accomplishment.”
When we spoke with James for the first time, when he stopped while running through Mendon, we were obviously blown away by the breadth and depth of his experiences and knew immediately that this would be a story we would like to share with the community. He left us, jogging into the sunset with our business card in his pocket and a promise from him that he would be in touch. James runs a thousand miles a year and has seen much of Mendon as befits an infantryman: boots on the ground.
Later that night we received an email with the message, “Thanks for the invitation. I’d be glad to sit down with you and share more of my story. I’ve lived and worked in a lot of places (combat zones, consulates, embassies, the UN, and now APEC) but in the end our son asked to come back to Western NY. That decision says a lot about how we see community, and why we chose Mendon after all those years overseas. Mendon is a garden. I spent so much of my youth counting success as the distance I was from Western New York and now I know how truly lucky I was to grow up in such a place.”
“Through all of my life experiences, I’ve tried to stay grounded in service to people right in front of me. Overseas, that meant mentoring younger officers, interns, and local staff. At home, it means supporting youth sports, staying active in Scouting, and helping kids see better paths forward. My view is simple: the most important diplomacy I do now is on the sidelines of a baseball game or in a Scout meeting, showing kids that they matter and that adults are invested in them.”
