Good attributes for functioning effectively in a small town include common sense, humility, patience, compassion and, perhaps most important, a good instinct for the sensitivities of others. I think all of those would be perfectly obvious to everyone. I mean — one would assume most wealthy summer people would know that the habit of not […]
History
There’s been a whole lot of talk about the weather lately. It’s been weird all across the country, but particularly here in New England. And many of the old reliable “signs” have been way off — at least so far. I personally had a hint of said confusing weather this past Thanksgiving Day, when I […]
History
The Story That Never Dies
It’s not possible to freeze old people in the beginning of winter, store them outside, almost naked, and then thaw them out in time to help with the spring planting. Is it? Well, in 1939, a Dr. Temple S. Fay of Philadelphia, who had done some experiments freezing human organs, gave a talk in Providence, […]
WHEN I WAS GROWING up on our farm in Vanceboro, Maine, during the 1930s and ’40s, my mother always put on a Nativity play for the townspeople on Christmas Eve using mostly members of the family and various animals from the farm. I first participated at about age 5 or 6. My role the first […]
MANY YEARS AGO, a member of the Grange in Brattleboro, Vermont, told me proudly that from the program of recycling hearing-aid batteries, the Grange had raised about $70 for its scholarship program. “You mean you personally raised seventy dollars for the Brattleboro Grange by recycling hearing-aid batteries?” I asked. “Heavens, no,” he replied. “I mean […]
History
Going “By the Signs”
GOING “BY THE SIGNS” has always been a popular method of individual weather forecasting here in New England, other than simply hearing the weather on radio and television. The signs are everywhere, particularly beginning this month and extending through the fall, and they do seem to have some significance in the overall weather scheme of […]
In this column last February, I recalled my old friend and barber, Bill Austin, telling me a joke I might use in a forthcoming speech I was to make at the local Women’s Club and assuring me that, no, I needn’t worry. It was clean. In fact, he said, it was so clean “you could […]
History
The Birth of a Legend
To those of us who were around during World War II, and even as late as the 1970s, the name Kilroy is as familiar as MacArthur, Truman, and Lyndon Johnson. During those years, the words “Kilroy Was Here” were penciled on rest room walls, carved on picnic tables, painted on bridges — you name it. […]
OF ALL THE theories as to the origin of the word Yankee, the one that makes the most sense to me is the so-called Dutch theory. It says that the early English settlers in Connecticut sold cheese to the early Dutch settlers in New York. So the New Yorkers began referring to the English as […]
THE WEEKEND BEFORE Memorial Day is when a lot of wonderful commercial enterprises along the Maine coast open up for the summer tourist season. Bertha Nunan’s Lobster Hut, in the tiny fishing village of Cape Porpoise (just up from Kennebunkport), is a case in point. Multiple generations of Nunans have been hauling lobster traps off […]
NEW ENGLAND HAS often claimed the poems, songs, and ditties known as the Mother Goose nursery rhymes even though, I’ll have to concede, their origin was most assuredly in England during the 1600s. But at least there is a New England connection. That connection stems back to an Elizabeth Foster of Charlestown, Massachusetts, who married […]
1. Were “spring dance floors” built to spring? 2. Where, exactly, does “down east” begin? 3. Why were bridges covered? WELL, LET’S BEGIN with the term “down east.” We all know it’s a nautical way of referring to sailing with the wind or down wind when traveling northeast off the Maine coast. Where down east […]