Bookshelves lined with bound volumes of the magazine invite a trip down memory lane.
Yankee
Mel Allen
This past Sunday I drove west about 30 miles, to Brattleboro, Vermont, where the best of what a core group of people in a community can do was on full display. From the early 1920s, when outdoor visionary Fred Harris, founder of both the Brattleboro Outing Club and the Dartmouth Outing Club, brought Brattleboro to […]
Magazine
The Rise and Fall of Eddie Perez
The Rise and Fall of Eddie Perez Hartford’s Mayor on the Hot Seat I don’t know Eddie Perez, the embattled mayor of Hartford, Connecticut. But when you assign a story, edit the story, work with the photographer, see the story in layout, write a title, then see the story in the June 2006 Yankee (Eddie […]
Magazine
Small Towns, Big Stories
Saturday night I gave a speech to the Hillsborough, New Hampshire, Chamber of Commerce. It was their annual awards evening, where a business of the year and citizen of the year would be recognized, and generally a time when all the members could gather and sit at long tables in the American Legion Hall, have […]
I once read in a guidebook: “Of all the natural regions of the United States, New England is the smallest, the most compact and convenient to get around in, the most homogeneous… ” For four decades now, I’ve lived and worked in New England, the land from which America evolved. There are few nooks and […]
Magazine
Writers of the Future
For eight years I’ve taught magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The class is always small, seminar-like, about 12 or 13 students. Over 15 weeks we get to know each other well. They write unflinchingly about their lives in personal essays, they explore the lives of strangers in their profiles, and they […]
Magazine
The Up Side to Recession
Recently I brought some pants in to Jane’s in Stitches, a tiny nook of a place on a side street in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In her neat, cozy room, Jane sews and alters and repairs whatever it is people wear and want to keep wearing. A young man stood in front of me; he had […]
Yankee
After the Ice
It took a force of nature unlike what most of us had seen before to change the subject. Before the rain and sleet that froze blindingly beautiful and lethal on our trees and power lines and whatever stood outdoors, we were boring each other with dire words about our investments, retirement accounts, and foreboding over […]
New Hampshire
White Mountain Guide, Rescuer, Photographer
If you’re lost or injured in a winter storm in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, you want Joe Lentini searching for you. He knows what he’s doing when it’s 40 below and blowing so hard you can’t speak … when lowering a litter down a rock face at night can be catastrophic if there’s a mishap. […]
New Hampshire
Overnight at Mt. Washington Observatory
VIDEO: Mt. Washington in Winter You don’t stay strangers when you pack together on a blue-sky morning in the cold cabin of a snow tractor rumbling up the eight-mile-long Mount Washington Auto Road at six miles per hour. In places, the tractor has to break through 20-foot-high snow slabs, its enormous treads rolling over the […]
For any reader who feels that traditions no longer matter, that anything our parents or grandparents cherished should be cast aside, well, it’s possible that this issue may not be for you. These pages are soaked with tradition, I won’t apologize about that — but here’s the thing: The beauty of traditions is that they […]
Connecticut
Mystic Seaport, CT: Scale Model Version
Slide show: Mystic River Scale Model. Inside a modest white building on the northwestern edge of the green at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut, you’ll find an homage to the human need to tinker, to our quest for unachievable perfection. In the early fall of 2005 on my first visit to the museum, I looked […]