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 […]
Yankee
EVERY REGION HAS certain words that reflect its history, its geography — and its personality. For instance, Southerners seem to me to be immediately open and friendly, even with total strangers. “Y’all come!” they’ll say, which would appear to include mankind. We New Englanders are more reserved about extending invitations, or anything else, and our […]
IT WAS UNSEASONABLY warm in Boston on Wednesday, January 15, 1919. Forty-three degrees above zero, to be exact. But during endless court hearings carried on later, it was determined that temperature played no role in what occurred that day in the low-lying section of Commercial Street, between Copps Hill and North End Park. That’s where […]
NEW ENGLANDERS WERE always so stuffy about love, sex, and romance, how come it was commonly approved practice for young couples to go to bed together before they were married? And also, more surprisingly, to get married in the nude? Both are true. Young New England unmarried boys and girls would indeed go to bed […]
History
It’s Fun to Believe in Ghosts
NEW ENGLANDERS WANT to believe in ghosts — and we have so many of them — but we’re often too practical and hardheaded to believe in anything we haven’t seen or heard. There’s the old story, for example, of the New Hampshire farmer who was cornered by a scholar researching New England religious history. The […]
THERE SEEM TO be certain New England legends that evolve out of no logical sequence of events at all. Merely a little something someone said can catch our imagination, be repeated and perhaps somewhat embellished, and eventually … voila! It takes its place among the New England legends we love. There are dozens of examples […]
IF I WERE TO compile a list of what I consider to be New England’s “bests,” I wouldn’t include many restaurants, resorts, specialty boutiques, museums, country fairs, and the like. Those things change too quickly and, besides, the current September issue of YANKEE Magazine, celebrating its 70th anniversary in grand style, is devoted to that […]
History
Yankee Sentimentality
ASKED SOME YEARS AGO by a Boston Globe reporter for his description of the “ideal wife,” Captain Eliot Winslow, a well-known tourist boat operator out of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, replied, “She ought to be able to dig clams. She ought to be able to split wood. And she ought to be able to row my […]
Oh, sure, people in the states of Delaware and Indiana still think Uncle Sam was a Sam Wilson, born in Wilmington, Delaware, and buried in Merriam, Indiana. But in the 1960s, even the United States Congress recognized the New England-born Samuel Wilson as the Uncle Sam. And, as is the case in so many so-called […]
History
North, South and West of the Hub
Boston is called Hub of the Universe. And that’s not a name given only in jest. As a Boston native, I can say that pride in the Bay State has always spilled over into what outsiders sometimes might consider to be, well, arrogance. (Hub of the Universe?) The Massachusetts image exported to the outside world […]
Being a Vermonter carries with it some heavy responsibilities. First of all, he/she must possess a great deal of common sense. Although somewhere around 100,000 adults living in Vermont today never finished high school, ignorance is not a lack of education but rather a lack of common sense. “That Hardwick road sign back there is […]
History
More on New England Humor
I love to recall in my mind some of the old stories and jokes I’ve known for years. To me, it’s like humming a favorite tune over and over. Maybe one of the reasons these old stories live on in my mind-and in the minds of others-is that they each seem to reflect one or […]