Last week I was contacted by the Abbeville Press’s Abbeville Manual of Style to do an on-line interview about contemporary art in Maine and New England. In answer to the question “Do you have a favorite artist or favorite work of art?”, I wrote that “As a Maine native and chauvinist, I am most drawn […]
During my childhood summers in Chester County, Pennsylvania I did many things: played baseball, rode my bike, caught fireflies, waited for the twilight jingle of the ice cream truck — but swimming in clear fresh water was not one of them. My town was too far south for the ice age glaciers to have reached […]
On Friday I drove out to the end of Cape Cod to attend a memorial service for an old friend, Arturo Vivante who wrote beautiful short stories, some of them for this magazine. I had planned to visit with him this past April. We had picked a date but when I called a week ahead […]
I’ve been on the road for about a week, with more miles ahead of me. I sometimes tell people I don’t write for a living, I drive. I once calculated that I had driven a million miles in the course of my work for Yankee and that was some time ago. If I have to […]
Greenbush, Maine Harold Murray, director bangormaineghosthuntersassociation.com Harold Murray had a paranormal experience when he was young, but that is not what turned him into a paranormal investigator. “Watching the Travel Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel — this is what did it,” Harold says. “Every year, they have these specials on. I’m a retired […]
Yankee classic from December 1995 If the tawdry, materialistic displays that too often mark a modern Christmas make you feel like the Grinch, then travel with me to Thompson, Connecticut. It is an evening in early December, and the Old Town Hall, at the northwestern edge of the five-acre Thompson Hill Common, is ready for […]
Yankee classic from December 1993 It’s a long road to Rangeley. Route 4 twists through miles of thickly forested land, rising and falling as it heads north from Augusta, and on winter nights snowbanks narrow the road, shining white in the headlights, tunneling through the darkness. Surrounded by the mountains and lakes of western Maine, […]
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in the Cheever-esque village of Ridgefield, CT, is one of the rare non-collecting art institutions in New England. Like the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Real Art Ways in Hartford, and Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, the Aldrich Museum exists to support new art, a place where […]
In 1962 Waine Morse decided to build a make-believe store beside his vegetable garden in Greenfield, MA, to house his burgeoning collection of Americana. He couldn’t stop. Excerpt from “’The Man Who Build a Town in His Backyard,” Yankee Magazine, December 1989. It didn’t start out to be like this, a whole village, a toy […]
The July/August issue of Yankee features one of the most complex stories we have done during my nearly 30 years here at Yankee. We titled it “25 People You Must See This Summer.” We put this together many months ago when the editors got together repeatedly to toss out the names of New Englanders we […]
The Colby College Museum of Art started out in 1959 as one room in the Waterville, Maine, college’s Bixler Art and Music Center. As it approaches 50, the Colby museum ranks, at least in terms of facilities and perhaps in terms of collections as well, as one of the premier small college art museums in […]
From Yankee Magazine March 1974 Although, officially, flying saucers do not exist, unofficially, it is a different story: flying saucers have been “landing” here, there, and just about everywhere. Experienced pilots claim that their planes have been chased by interplanetary flying machines. And responsible citizens continue to insist that they saw something unearthly in the […]
