My great-grandpa Guiseppe Frontierro made wine back in Sicily, and the tradition traveled with him to the wharves of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He employed his grandchildren to stomp the grapes right on the waterfront. It’s been said that he kept the spirits of the fishing fleet high with his wharf wine. After he died, the tradition […]
In 1984 Barry Clifford discovered the remains of the legendary Whydah, a behemoth 28-gun pirate ship carrying some four and a half tons of stolen treasure.
Verna Soini of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, shares two of her blue-ribbon canning recipes from the country fair. Verna Soini’s plump hands are stained red from the beets she’s peeling as she prepares her favorite relish. On the stove, jars are jostling gently in a hot-water bath. In another kettle, freshly packed jars of pickled green beans are […]
I recently attended the wake of a colleague’s husband. It was made bittersweet by the fact that his wife and family had carefully displayed old photos and scrapbooks, their wedding album, and small mementos gathered over the course of his lifetime. This makeshift memorial illustrated that even in death, this man would not be far […]
Yankee classic from January 1981 People who live along inland waters in northern New England know there are really only two seasons: ice-in and ice-out. All else is but prelude and aftermath. A frozen lake draws us: we dare it early and we dare it late, probing the limits of a most delicate balance — […]
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 […]
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 […]
From Yankee Magazine January 1978 Like the Old Harbor town itself, some of us in Marblehead, Massachusetts, have for twenty-eight years had a grisly horror on our hands. Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend in 1950, as a savage nor’easter battered the Massachusetts coast, spinster Beryl Atherton was strangled to death in her own kitchen, her […]
Yankee classic from August 1993 Plan a weekend visit to Wethersfield today. In those days, you could smell Wethersfield before you could see it. Outsiders dubbed the Connecticut village “Oniontown,” with a crosshatch of affection and derision, for this was home of the world-famous Wethersfield red onion, and its pungent scent stung the air. Wethersfield […]
“For the last 19 years,” says June LaCombe, Maine’s one-woman outdoor sculpture campaign, “I have been trying to get sculpture out of the white box of the gallery and back into people’s lives where it belongs.” June LaCombe is not just an art dealer; she is an art believer. She curates exhibitions of outdoor sculpture […]
A guest blogger!! Jen Kahn learned to scuba dive in a much warmer climate, Los Angeles, California. She moved to New England from L.A. a year and a half ago to work for Yankee Magazine and continues to enjoy the sport she loves, though her season is much shorter on this side of the map. […]
