The Right Stuff First you need good sand. (For the Hampton competition, Grady trucks in 300 tons of it.) To find out what you’re working with, head to the water’s edge, pick up a handful of sand, and form a ball. “If you can hold it sideways between your thumb and middle finger and it […]
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73 years the Frantzis family has owned Quassy Amusement Park in Middlebury, CT 35 mph: top speed of the 80-year-old Yankee Cannonball, oldest roller coaster in the U.S., now at Canobie Lake ParkGet Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide! Email(Required) Subscribe 177,408 cookies devoured each year by reindeer at Santa’s Village in Jefferson, […]
The first thing of note P. T. Barnum accomplished was getting thrown in jail. As a young newspaper editor, he accused merchant Seth Seelye–a prominent citizen of Barnum’s own hometown of Bethel, Connecticut–of usury and spent two months locked up for libel. Upon his release he was hardly repentant: He orchestrated his own parade to […]
This past decade was a triumphant era for New England sports fans. Their professional baseball, football, and basketball teams brought six championship trophies home for a celebratory Boston duck boat ride, a now-traditional tour of the city in World War II-vintage amphibious vehicles. Two of those parades took place in a mere eight months between […]
Magazine
First Light: The Art of the Sail
As Robbie Doyle likes to say, he didn’t open a sail loft in Marblehead because the area needed another sailmaker. In 1982, the centuries-old tradition along Massachusetts’ North Shore was still quietly humming along; when Doyle started his company, 10 lofts operated in and around Marblehead. Doyle opened a sail loft because he thought he […]
When Stinson Seafood — the last sardine cannery in the US — shut its doors, few felt the loss more than Lela Anderson, who says “I could pack with the best of them.”
Judith Gaines moved to Lubec, Maine, because she “loved being part of a fishing community.” A longtime foodie, she joined six chefs aboard a lobster boat (“After the Catch”). “They were surprised at how labor-intensive lobstering is,” she says. “We all learned what makes lobster so expensive.”
“This was my ‘endless summer,’” says photographer Richard Schultz of his assignment to travel our northeast shore in search of memorable people and landscapes (“Maine CoastaI Odyssey”). “Maine is one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are only a handful of such divine places.”
Magazine
Inside Yankee: Finding Summer
We wait so patiently, don’t we? We find all sorts of ways to enjoy winter–snow sports, cozy inns, reading by the fire, bragging about snow tires and wood piles–because we either do that or be miserable, or join the snowbirds. So we wait. And spring comes. Café tables appear like welcome blossoms; we put away […]
Magazine
Red Is the Color | Mary’s Farm
Last year was one of the worst years for hay that I can remember. Aside from the need for sun to dry the hay before baling, these fields are wet anyway, so if it rains too much, the fields are too wet to bear the weight of a tractor. So the farmers wait for that […]
Yankee
The DeCordova Gets Tired
Forgive the tired pun of the title. When it comes to sculptor Chakaia Booker’s art, it’s hard to avoid. Rubber Soul. Retread Retro. Rubber Made. Rubber Maid. Where the Rubber Meets the Museum, etc. Suffice it to say they’ve all been used. That’s because Chakaia Booker makes fantastic sculptures out of old tires. I first […]
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Joe Nicoletti Has the Blues
Though I have known Joe Nicoletti for more than 30 years now and have admired his paintings even longer, I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that he was born in Italy. The occasion of his upcoming retrospective exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, where he has taught since 1981, […]