Mike LaVecchia and a few friends love to hang out at Long Sands Beach in York Beach, Maine. Sometimes they’re out there to surf for fun; sometimes they’re there to “work,” testing the boards they design and build. The wooden boards are inspired by those from the ’60s and ’70s and are made of native […]
Our March/April issue is now on sale where magazines are sold, and subscribers have had a head start in reading the issue — so it is time to open the mail and see what readers think: Can you stand more feedback about Yankee‘s new format? I was first introduced to Yankee Magazine when I was […]
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. At dawn we hopped the fence of an orange orchard behind the right-field fence of […]
Eastport, Maine, has always looked to the sea for its identity and the livelihoods of its 1,900 residents. When the last of its 18 sardine canneries closed in the 1980s, salmon farming, scalloping, and diving for sea urchins filled in—but the town’s economic life has never ceased being hard and uncertain.
MANY YEARS AGO, a member of the Grange in Brattleboro, Vermont, told me proudly that from the program of recycling hearing-aid batteries, the Grange had raised about $70 for its scholarship program. “You mean you personally raised seventy dollars for the Brattleboro Grange by recycling hearing-aid batteries?” I asked. “Heavens, no,” he replied. “I mean […]
Yankee Classic from November 1983 Read about a 2008 visit to Plimoth Plantation. The little village hugged the cleared hillside under the crude wooden fortress and the one heavy artillery piece that faced seaward across the salt marshes. The defensive position told the visitor that this was wartime. The lone street was a long, unpaved […]
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. […]
OF ALL THE theories as to the origin of the word Yankee, the one that makes the most sense to me is the so-called Dutch theory. It says that the early English settlers in Connecticut sold cheese to the early Dutch settlers in New York. So the New Yorkers began referring to the English as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Not long ago, while watching from my office window the fireman putting up lights on the town Christmas tree here in Dublin, New Hampshire, I began wondering if perhaps New England might lay claim to the very first Christmas tree. Well, the first American Christmas tree. (It is well established that the use of the […]
