Dear Yankee May/June 2016

‘Power Struggles’

Although I’m not directly impacted by the natural-gas pipeline [March/April, p. 120], I am affected by what’s happening to many of the citizens I’ve known all of my life. Your article is the first un-biased explanation I’ve read. Thank you for not hesitating to report this story and for not politicizing either side.

Barbara Miner Holyoke, Massachusetts

‘Could You Live Here?’

The 1959 film It Happened to Jane was filmed in and around Chester, Connecticut [March/April, p. 62]. In the cast was an actor named Max Showalter, a.k.a. Casey Adams. Evidently Max’s answer to whether he could live in Chester was yes, because he made it his home from 1984 until his death in 2000 at age 83.I like reading about small (non-touristy) New England towns and visit as often as I can. Kinda rejuvenates my soul.

William E. Goss Markham, Ontario, Canada

‘Local Treasure’

Having spent four months at Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1960, I know the Newport Tower well [March/April, p. 74]. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had his own take on it. Following the discovery of an armored skeleton in the area, he made a connection between it and the tower. In “The Skeleton in Armor” he writes of a Viking corsair who elopes with the king’s daughter and sails to what is now Newport: There for my lady’s bower / Built I this lofty tower / Which, to this very hour / Stands looking seaward. The narrator goes on to say that upon her death the lady in question was buried beneath the tower. Maybe not the historical accuracy of “Paul Revere’s Ride”—but quite a story.

James Haviland Aiken, South Carolina

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