Photo/Art by Boston Red Sox It’s hard to know the precise moment one falls in love. But in 1974, I spent seven glorious days with my best friend, Jeff, watching the Red Sox at spring training in Winter Haven, Florida. Get Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide! Email(Required) Subscribe At dawn we hopped […]
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Magazine
Lunch With the Traveler’s Friend
One of the most fun parts of this work is meeting with writers. I can’t think of anything more important than finding, cultivating, and continuing to motivate the best writers in New England. The writer and editor relationship, when it works, is not unlike a friendship — you count on each other to bring out […]
Magazine
You’ll See More Changes
The March/April issue arrived here at Yankee Publishing a few days ago. Up until the time I can actually hold it in my hand, the issue is more a collection of separate pages, separate galleys that I see day after day posted on the wall of our conference room. Seeing a magazine take shape that […]
Give an antique valentine and receive a heart in return.
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
One hundred and eighty-five years ago next month, on August 12, 1819, the whaler Essex sailed out of Nantucket on one of those multi-year whaling voyages of the old days. More than a year later, on November 22, 1820, she became one of New England’s most bizarre and, to my mind, intriguing legends. Yes, on […]