Yankee Magazine March/April 2022 by Yankee Magazine

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Crafted For Life

E XC E P T I O N A L LY B U I LT P O S T & B E A M

Build Services & Timber Frames Shipped & Raised Nationwide Featured Photo: 36' x 40' Lenox Carriage Barn

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March / April 2022

CONTENTS

Now celebrating its 150th anniversary, Boston’s Arnold Arboretum is a don’t-miss destination for lilac lovers each spring. Story, p. 72

features 72 /// Spring Flings A celebration of Yankee’s favorite winter-banishing tonics across New England, from spring skiing to maple sugaring to an unforgettable urban flower show.

90 /// The Ephemerals

86 /// Conversations: Kathrine Switzer On the eve of the 126th Boston Marathon, a historymaking runner looks back on how far the race—and the sports world—has come. Interview by Jon Marcus

94 /// Hard-Pressed With New England’s long tradition of small-town papers under threat, communities and journalists are fighting to stick together and stay informed. By Jon Marcus

This c. 1775 Cape home in Eastham, Massachusetts, has made a splash on Instagram thanks to owner Dana Paradis, who chronicles it through the seasons @thisoldcapehouse. Photo by Joseph Keller. Story, p. 26

Yankee (ISSN 0044-0191). Bimonthly, Vol. 86 No. 2. Publication Office, Dublin, NH 03444-0520. Periodicals postage paid at Dublin, NH, and additional offices. Copyright 2022 by Yankee Publishing Incorporated; all rights reserved. Postmaster: Send address changes to Yankee, P.O. Box 37128, Boone, IA 50037-0128.

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ADAM DETOUR

ON THE COVER

When spring arrives in the wild woods, seasonal harbingers that come and go quickly are the greatest teachers about time. By Rowan Jacobsen

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/13/22 3:26 PM

Hello, Freshness

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More Contents

departments 10

home

DEAR YANKEE, CONTRIBUTORS & POETRY BY D.A.W.

26 /// Old House, New Life

INSIDE YANKEE

When Dana Paradis and Guido Domke fell in love with an antique house in Massachusetts, they were still New Yorkers—but that would change. By Kate Whouley

42 /// House for Sale

FIRST PERSON A stroll in spring calls up memories of an immigrant mother’s own fresh start. By Jennifer De Leon

Passed down from generation to generation, an 18th-century Connecticut beauty is at last ready for new owners. By Joe Bills

22 WEEKENDS WITH YANKEE Q&A Discover how to give your garden some Italian flavor courtesy of Ciao Italia host Mary Ann Esposito, a featured guest on Weekends with Yankee’s brand-new season. By Amy Traverso

47 /// The Best 5

Blending vintage and modern, these style-packed home shops furnish endless inspiration. By Kim Knox Beckius

food 52 /// Long Live the Deli Tasty lessons from the Jewish food revival at Mamaleh’s. By Amy Traverso

60 /// In Season Tapping a Midwestern classic, gooey butter cake, in honor of New England’s maple season. By Amy Traverso

ADV ERTISING RESOURCES

Off-season rates and quiet coastal beauty make Provincetown, Massachusetts, a perfect springtime escape. By Ian Aldrich

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UP CLOSE Collectors just can’t get their fill of the oddball pitcher known as the Gurgling Cod. By Joe Bills

LIFE IN THE KINGDOM In rural towns, dirt roads can help inspire both a feeling of community and a sense of self-reliance. By Ben Hewitt

62 /// Weekend Away

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128

travel 71 /// At Home with History We round up New England house museums whose tours take you behind the scenes and into the past.

FIRST LIGHT More than just a place to live, a house can also be a partner in weathering life’s travails. By Roland Merullo

Weekends with Yankee ....... 23 Spring Gift Guide............ 50 Best of New England ...... 70 Things to Do in New England............... 106 Retirement Living ............ 114 Marketplace .................... 122

MICHAEL D. WIL SON (BA SKE TS); MICHAEL PIA Z Z A (SOUP); ELIZ ABE TH CECIL (HOME)

35 /// Digging It Gifts for the garden, rooted in the creativity of New England artisans and companies. By Annie Graves

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/13/22 10:50 AM

SPRING IN BOSTON

Shop I Dine I Stay I Play Your Official Guide to Exploring Boston www.BostonUSA.com/Spring

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EDITORIAL Editor Mel Allen Managing Editor Jenn Johnson Senior Features Editor Ian Aldrich Senior Food Editor Amy Traverso Home & Garden Editor Annie Graves Associate Editor Joe Bills Senior Digital Editor Aimee Tucker Associate Digital Editor Katherine Keenan Contributing Editors Kim Knox Beckius, Sara Anne Donnelly, Ben Hewitt, Rowan Jacobsen, Nina MacLaughlin, Julia Shipley ART Art Director Katharine Van Itallie Photo Editor Heather Marcus Contributing Photographers Adam DeTour, Megan Haley, Corey Hendrickson, Michael Piazza, Greta Rybus PRODUCTION Director David Ziarnowski Manager Brian Johnson Senior Artists Jennifer Freeman, Rachel Kipka DIGITAL Vice President Paul Belliveau Jr. Senior Designer Amy O’Brien Ecommerce Director Alan Henning Marketing Specialist Holly Sanderson Email Marketing Specialist Eric Bailey — YANKEE PUBLISHING INC. ESTABLISHED 1935 | AN EMPLOYEE-OWNED COMPANY

President Jamie Trowbridge Vice Presidents Paul Belliveau Jr., Ernesto Burden, Judson D. Hale Jr., Brook Holmberg, Jennie Meister, Sherin Pierce Editor Emeritus Judson D. Hale Sr. CORPORATE STAFF

Vice President, Finance & Administration Jennie Meister Human Resources Manager Beth Parenteau Accounts Receivable/IT Coordinator Gail Bleakley Staff Accountant Nancy Pfuntner Accounting Coordinator Meg Hart-Smith Executive Assistant Christine Tourgee Maintenance Supervisor Mike Caron Facilities Attendant Paul Langille

Publisher Brook Holmberg ADVERTISING Vice President Judson D. Hale Jr. Media Account Managers Kelly Moores, Dean DeLuca, Steven Hall Canada Account Manager Cynthia Fleming Senior Production Coordinator Janet Selle For advertising rates and information, call 800-736-1100, ext. 204, or email NewEngland.com/adinfo. MARKETING ADVERTISING

Director Kate Hathaway Weeks Manager Valerie Lithgow Specialist Holly Sloane PUBLIC RELATIONS

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Linda Ruth, PSCS Consulting 603-924-4407 SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES To subscribe, give a gift, or change your mailing address, or for any other questions, please contact our customer service department: Mail Yankee Magazine Customer Service P.O. Box 37900 Boone, IA 50037-0900 Online NewEngland.com/contact Email customerservice@yankeemagazine.com Toll-free 800-288-4284 — Yankee occasionally shares its mailing list with approved advertisers to promote products or services we think our readers will enjoy. If you do not wish to receive these offers, please contact us.

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1/6/22 11:22 AM

Connect with Yankee

@ YA N K EE M AG A Z I N E

IN THE PINK A curated look at New England featuring standout shots from our Instagram community.

Jessica Turco (@and_so_she_did) Boston, Massachusetts

Matthew Raifman (@matthewraifman) Southwest Harbor, Maine

Emily Fanning (@emilyshell ) Scituate, Massachusetts

Frederick Bloy (@freddybloy) Reid State Park, Georgetown, Maine

Jordan Doucette (@heyjaynic) Jackson, New Hampshire

Kayla Mandeville (@k___elizabeth) Newport, Rhode Island

Use our Instagram hashtag #mynewengland for a chance to be featured in an upcoming issue!

ONLINE EX TR A: WIN A GURGLING COD! Want to bring an iconic bit of New England into your home? By entering Yankee’s Gurgling Cod Giveaway, you could win one of these classic collectibles from Boston’s Shreve, Crump & Low, maker of the Original Gurgling Cod. To read more about the history of the Gurgling Cod, go to p. 24. Then enter to win at: newengland.com/gurglingcodgiveaway Giveaway runs March 15–April 15, 2022

FO L L OW US O N S O C I A L M E D I A @YA N K E E M AGA Z IN E

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Dear Yankee

LE T TERS TO THE EDITOR

CONTRIBUTORS

ADAM DETOUR Photographing his home city in bloom [“Spring Flings,” p. 72] “was a sweet moment for me during the pandemic,” says DeTour, a Boston-based photographer whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Inc., among many others. “I had my 2-year-old daughter on the back of my bike, and we’d ride together around Boston shooting pictures of beautiful flowers. I hope somewhere in the back of her mind she remembers that later on.” JENNIFER DE LEON Though De Leon is making her Yankee debut with the essay “A Walk in Spring” [p. 16], she’s already doing plenty of publishing these days, along with teaching budding writers at Framingham State University and Bay Path University. She is the author of White Space: Essays on Culture, Race & Writing and the YA novel Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From; later this year she’ll publish a second YA novel, Borderless, as well as two children’s picture books. JON MARCUS Having started his career at the Cape Cod Times, this longtime New England journalist knows firsthand the vital role that local newspapers play in their communities; he’s also watched as many have been bought up and hollowed out in recent years. But New England newspapers have hung on more tenaciously than elsewhere, and for his story “Hard-Pressed” [p. 94], Marcus traveled across the region—racking up some 1,200 miles—to find out why. K I M B E R LY G LY D E R A RISD alum who runs an illustration/design studio in the Philadelphia area, Glyder was already familiar with her “Conversations” portrait subject, Kathrine Switzer [p. 86], from a previous book project, Ladies First. In fact, over the past 15 years Glyder has worked on several covers and illustrations for books highlighting women’s accomplishments—something she finds “especially gratifying to share with my own son and daughter.”

Hills and Misses I always look forward to seeing Yankee in our mailbox; as a 10th-generation Vermonter I f ind the articles are always of interest, and I like the mix of old and new. However, there is some misinformation in the article “The Soul of Skiing” [ January/February]. The Vermont hill on which the nation’s first rope tow was built, back in 1934, was on Clinton Gilbert’s farm in Woodstock—there is a historical marker near that spot, in fact. But Gilbert’s Hill did not, as the article states, eventually become Suicide Six. Instead, the operation in Woodstock moved to a steeper hill in South Pomfret, about three miles away, which was then named Suicide Six. Sara Spoor Springfield, Vermont Dear Sara: You are correct, and we surely appreciate your straightening us out on these slippery slopes! —The Editors

As a photographer whose work has been published by the likes of Martha Stewart Living and Better Homes & Gardens, Keller is used to stepping into stunning houses. But meeting owners like Dana Paradis and Guido Domke [“Old House, New Life,” p. 26] can make his job truly memorable, he says. “They were fun, wonderful hosts, and they’ve done a fantastic job as stewards of their historic home—pride of ownership is evident everywhere.” K AT E W H O U L E Y Writing about a home project on Cape Cod [“Old House, New Life,” p. 26] was familiar ground for Whouley, whose memoir Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved details “a yearlong adventure filled with quirky characters who helped me rescue and haul a vacation cottage across Cape Cod and marry it to my three-room house.” Her second memoir, Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, won the New England Book Award for nonfiction in 2012. 10 |

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High Point My eyes are still drying after reading Ian Aldrich’s brilliant, harrowing depiction of champion balloonist Brian Boland’s fantastical life and tragic death [“The Balloonist,” January/ February]. To any Yankee reader who may have only skimmed the story or

C H EL SE A B R A D WAY (D E L E O N); A N N E S W EEN E Y ( W H O U L E Y )

JOSEPH KELLER

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/13/22 2:10 PM

STE P INTO SPRING

Discover t he natural beauty of Massachuset ts in bloom. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT:

Sandwich Boardwalk, Cape Cod; Tower Hill Botanic Garden, Boylston; Naumkeag, Stockbridge

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LE T TERS TO THE EDITOR

observed the photos, do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. It’s 20 minutes you’ll never want to get back. Jared Pendak Bradford, Vermont

sunrise and sunset. Mr. Freeman’s words warmed my heart and painted lovely scenes in my head of memories growing up in the winter countryside. I would also like to share that while I pass along my magazines when I am done reading them, my copies of Yankee have always been “keepers.” I love to go back and re-read past issues. Kudos to your wordsmiths—Yankee is the jewel of magazines even to this day. Dee Palser Valley Stream, New York

SONG OF SPRING Hankie-Worthy Read Reading Ann Klotz’s “About the Hankie” [January/February] brought tears to my eyes. Her description of her mother matched mine: matchstickthin, swollen knuckles, elf in ears, silver hair. My mother, too, always carried hankies, and I can see them in my mind’s eye. Upon her death at 100, in her purses were hankies and not much else. How I wish I had kept them. Regina MacLeod West Roxbury, Massachusetts I woke up early Christmas morning and the house was still quiet, so I started reading “About the Hankie” by Ann Klotz. It brought back such loving memories. In our family, it was my father who always had a hankie in his pocket; my mother always had a tissue up her sleeve. As a young girl, I learned how to iron by pressing my father’s hankies—or, as he called them, handkerchiefs. My parents passed away a few years ago, and while cleaning out their house, I found a ladies’ hankie. I suspect it may have belonged to my grandmother. Thank you, Ann Klotz, for your beautiful story and for rekindling warm memories for me on Christmas morning. Barbara Trulby Fort Mill, South Carolina

Peepers in the marsh unfold A singsong spring song ages old, An ancient score whose every note Keeps frog and human hopes afloat. —D.A.W.

Ode to Winter I have always loved your magazine. My dad was a letter carrier and he loved telling me about your magazine when he delivered it—he loved it also. In the most recent issue, I was particularly moved by Ann Klotz’s “About the Hankie,” and also the piece by Castle Freeman Jr. titled “ Winter Sun.” While I am married to a sun worshipper, I have always loved winter. I find solace in the silence and beauty in the stark landscape and awe in a winter

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JILL LEPORE

ON EMBRACING HISTORY AS HARD WORK.

I N T E RV I E W BY J O E K EO H A N E

Jill Lepore is a native New Englander, born in West Boylston, Massachusetts, and descended from immigrants. Her grandparents came to the country from Italy, fleeing poverty. In 1924—the same year Congress passed legislation banning immigrants like them—they gave birth to a son, whom they named Amerigo. He would become a school principal. And his youngest child, Jill, would become one of this country’s foremost historians. Theirs is an American story. One of many. A Harvard professor, author, and longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, Lepore is a leading proponent for the idea of studying national history. To her, that doesn’t mean studying only select events or the lives of individual figures. And it certainly doesn’t mean just highlighting parts of history that support one partisan ideology or another. Instead, it calls for reckoning with the entirety of the thing to tell a national story that is both true and binding in this country of immigrants, “a composite nation,” as Frederick Douglass called it. And this is no mere academic concern: As Lepore writes in These Truths, her 2018 massive, acclaimed history of the United States, “Nations, to make sense of themselves, need a kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.” I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y DA N W I L L I A M S NEWENGLAND.COM

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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History Lesson While I saw the usual heartwarming food awards, recipes for family feasts, decked-out historic homes, and other features I have always associated with Yankee in your November/December issue, my interest was piqued by the interview with historian Jill Lepore. I admire Ms. Lepore and am particularly interested in her field of study, which includes how the founding fathers’ work has fared over the centuries. In recent years there has been considerable emphasis on the infallibility of the documents involved, and what appears to be a growing insistence that we continue to celebrate this infallibility. So I was heartened to read Ms. Lepore’s reference to Thurgood Marshall’s 1987 speech regarding the parts of the Constitution that should not be venerated. We should appreciate its framework while being aware of its fragility, and remain hopeful that it is not beyond repair. Anne Dempsey West Spring field, Massachusetts

We want to hear from you! Write to us at editor@yankeemagazine.com. Please note that letters may be edited for length and clarity. 12 |

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Inside Yankee

MEL ALLEN

About the Home

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lives, past and present. Dana Paradis and her husband found their historic Cape the way many have before them: They fell in love with New England on vacation and wanted a place of their own. After several years of looking, they discovered it. The c. 1775 house had just come on the market, and as Paradis tells writer Kate Whouley, “We drove up Friday early for a Saturday appointment, and as we crossed the bridge, we could see a rainbow over the Outer Cape.” [“Old House, New Life,” p. 26] Rowan Jacobsen remembers the first time he walked in the woods behind his Vermont farmhouse: “The Maples and the Robins and the Birches had been here for generations. This is how we do it, they seemed to be saying. The house itself had seen 175 summers. We just tried to fit in.” [“The Ephemerals,” p. 90] Wherever we live, our homes and gardens give us a desire to put down roots, to fit in, often where others before us have as well. This issue is for everyone who cares for these “living creatures,” these places we call home.

Mel Allen editor@yankeemagazine.com JARROD MCCABE

small woodshed stands attached to the north side of our house. Its floor is dirt, and because the shed is not tightly sealed, I often share it with several chipmunks who leave empty black walnut shells strewn around as if they are at a ballpark. One recent morning I saw what looked like an old shoe sticking up from the floor where I had just tossed aside the wood. In fact, it was not a shoe, but rather the sole of what I believe to have been a work boot. Our house dates back nearly 200 years, and while I do not know the age of the shed, I imagine many feet have trod where mine have over the years. I unearthed the old leather sole, now just barely more than threadbare leather matted with soil. If I were ever to write about this house by the river, I might begin with that timerotted sole and wonder about its own wanderings about the yard. That is the thing with putting together an issue devoted to home: It is more than walls and a roof; houses always come with stories. As Roland Merullo writes in “The Meaning of Home” [p. 18], “A house … is a living creature.” He finds his intimate relationship with his old Cape to be “a lot like marriage. There’s the constancy, the decades of daily closeness, but it never really stays the same, and sometimes utterly surprises you.” Inside this issue you will find stories that show how homes connect

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First Person

JENNIFER DE LEON

A Walk in Spring Between two generations, deep-rooted memories blossom. ILLUSTR ATION BY SALLY DENG

e walk. It is spring in Boston—finally, people love to say—and in Jamaica Plain, the season is bold. The lilacs are out to play. The azaleas. And soon, the rhododendrons. I am with my mother, a woman with the word flower literally at the center of her name, Dora Alicia Flores Urbina De Leon. Today, we take a pause from my stuffed calendar and her empty one to spend time in this place she first walked so many decades ago. In the early 1970s, my mother emigrated from Guatemala to the U.S., leaving behind her parents and six younger siblings. But when her plane landed in Los Angeles, she wilted. She worked as a live-in housekeeper for a family who spoke only English. So homesick was she that one day she opened the phone book and randomly selected a Spanish 16 |

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surname. I imagine her dialing as she pressed the cold phone to her hot ear. A woman picked up, and the two of them spoke for hours. Four years passed before my mother returned to visit her birthplace, and it was just that: a visit. She knew America was her home now, and so she vowed to learn five English words a day, and embrace customs like wearing a bikini at the beach, driving a car, and saving money. She did all that and more. After she and my father met and he took a job in Boston, the two of them wrote love letters for a year until, one morning, she boarded another flight. As my mother and I walk around Jamaica Pond, the wind f lirting with the pink and white petals, releasing a sweet scent called spring, she tells me a story I have heard before, but today I listen as if it’s the first time. The day

she moved to Massachusetts, her redeye flight had arrived early. My father picked her up in his Datsun, but they couldn’t yet go to the apartment where he had arranged for her to live with a female friend, so they came to this pond. “I was so nervous,” she tells me. “We must’ve walked around the pond 10 times, but it felt like five minutes.” “That’s so funny,” I say. Today, nearly half a century later, her foot is bothering her; so, we sit. From the bench, we watch babies in strollers, joggers, rowboats, kites, birds, squirrels. But I can tell she is watching a different scene in her mind. She squints at the light ref lecting off the water, amid the birds tweeting in the late April air. What does she see? We are close to 180 different blossoms just around the bend, in the Arnold Arboretum, which like Jamaica Pond is part of the city’s Emerald Necklace. The color of the sky is practically periwinkle. And how could she have known, all those years ago, what would blossom here in this place called Boston? Around this same pond, my husband and I had one of our first dates. Our careful steps crunched leaves in the Arnold Arboretum, and then we sat beside e.e. cummings’s grave in Forest Hills Cemetery, the words sweeping us beyond friendship: here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life. My mother stirs. I offer her help in standing up, but she swats my hand away. She stand less than five feet tall, but carries a hundred hearts in her own. After putting down roots in this city, she and my father married, became U.S. citizens, had a baby girl, then another, then another. They bought a house, then one more. She pushed college on us more than marriage, and she used stories to heal and inspire and threaten. Because of her, we planted our own wishes. Maybe that’s what all these flowers are made of—wishes, or even prayers. On this day, my mother and I stand. And once more, we walk. NEWENGLAND.COM

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First

LIGHT The Meaning of Home In places as well as people, one can discover a partner for weathering life’s travails. BY ROL AND MERULLO PHOTO BY JULIA EMILIANI AND WING CLUB PRESS

y wife and I bought our f irst home when we were 27 and 30 years old, respectively. It was an extremely modest property with a $40,000 price tag: a four-room chalet two miles down a dirt road in southwestern Vermont. The road had a steep drop-off on one shoulder and was treacherous in winter, the backyard was a wooded hillside, and in order to take a shower we had to fill a miniature stove—shaped like a scuba diver’s air tank—with chunks of oak and maple, start a fire, and wait 15 minutes for the water to get hot. But the place was ours. We both remember the joy of that, the feeling of waking up for the first time in a place that wasn’t owned by our parents, our college, or a landlord. We stayed there three years, then sold the house at a fair profit to another young couple and moved to a slightly larger home on a paved road an hour south in Massachusetts, a place nearer to our parents, a small Cape that offered the great luxury of water heated by a furnace. At the time we had no children, but we did have decent-paying jobs, so we took out a loan and embarked on an ambitious building project, doubling the size of the house, adding two bed-

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rooms and a bath, two offices, a full basement, and even an exercise room. In our earlier years together I’d been a fulltime carpenter, which meant we could do most of the work ourselves, and the 1,000-square-foot addition, which took us three years to finish, cost us a third or a quarter of what it would have been with labor charges. We’ve been in that house for more than three decades now, raised two daughters there, and we’ve moved from middle age to the start of something else, “the golden years” they’re sometimes called. We’re still young enough and healthy enough to do almost all the maintenance on the house and yard without hiring anyone. We mow the lawn and shovel snow from the steps and walkway (though we pay someone to plow our long driveway). Room by room, we rip up the carpet in the old part of the house and lay hardwood f looring; we clean the shower and sink drains, fix small leaks, pump water out of the basement after a big rainstorm, grout bathroom tile, patch roof shingles, adjust the striking plates on doors, caulk windows, replace storm doors, and perform all the scores of other tasks that home ownership involves. NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 12:27 PM

MARCH | APRIL 2022

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1/6/22 12:28 PM

First

LIGHT

| THE

MEANING OF HOME

A house, as any carpenter will tell you, is a living creature. It shrinks and swells with changes in temperature and humidity, and it ages as incrementally and unstoppably as we do ourselves. Sills begin to rot, foundations and interior walls show cracks, roof shingles gradually wear thin. The lawn needs mowing, the trees and bushes need trimming, the driveway needs regular infusions of gravel. Like so many other homeowners, we deal with mice and carpenter ants, wasp nests, wind damage, mildewed decking, a furnace that needs servicing, frozen pipes, cracked windows, peeling paint. We’re more fortunate than most, however: Except for serious electrical and plumbing issues, I can do most of the repairs myself. In fact, both of us enjoy the household tasks, relishing in a newly mown lawn or a freshly painted living room ceiling. But it’s work, and worry, and sometimes expense, and it never, ever ends. I’m in my late 60s now, Amanda a bit younger, and we can see the time coming, not far down the road, when shoveling a foot of heavy, wet snow or squeezing into a crawlspace to insulate a pipe will be too much for us. We won’t have the strength to mow in August or rake in October, and the idea of climbing up onto the roof to replace a shingle damaged by a falling branch will no doubt seem like a risk not worth taking. Then, too, physical limitations aside, we might just run out of patience for the constant care a home requires. A few years and many repairs down the road, the idea of living in a condominium—something we can’t really imagine now—might seem like an attractive option. It occurs to me that home ownership is a lot like marriage. There’s the constancy, the decades of daily closeness, but it never really stays the same, and sometimes utterly surprises you. There are times when you take for granted a warm bedroom or a good roof, just as there are times when you take for granted the company of a 20 |

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It occurs to me that home ownership is a lot like marriage. There’s the decades of daily closeness, but it never really stays the same, and sometimes utterly surprises you. spouse. There are small and not-sosmall aggravations, sometimes tragically bad turns of fate—a fire, a flood, an infestation, a terrible diagnosis— and almost always the requirement of a high level of attentiveness and care. There are good relationships and difficult ones, partnerships that last for decades and others that disintegrate after a year or two. The partner— house or human—becomes intimately connected with your sense of self, a repository of memories, something or someone to return to after a difficult day. Both marriage and home ownership require constant work, and offer, in return, a crucial shelter—from loneliness, from the weather—and, in the best cases, a satisfaction that takes decades to build, conversation by conversation, argument by argument, f ixed leak after mortgage payment after painted ceiling. In most marriages there are happy and less-happy moments; in most houses there are pleasant and lesspleasant jobs. Whenever we have a heavy rain or snowmelt, the basement beneath the older section of our home takes on quite a bit of water. This week we had both—three inches of rain on top of 16 inches of snow—and half the old cellar was flooded with dirty water a few inches deep in places. I unfurled, cleaned, and pressed the kinks out of our garden hose, stretched it up the

bulkhead stairs and into the yard, set the sump pump in the deepest section of the f lood, attached the hose to it, plugged in the pump, and monitored it for an hour or so, moving it here and there into wetter sections, using a push broom to direct the water. It wasn’t a very enjoyable task, but I was thinking, afterward, about the men, women, and children who have no home at all—no bed, no kitchen, no warm place to sleep on a winter night. And I was thinking about two friends who, even though they’re well along in years and have spent their whole adult lives working, cannot afford to purchase a home. There are, of course, people who prefer renting, happy to trade the absence of equity for the relative lack of responsibility, but my friends don’t fall into that category. Like tens of millions of other Americans in these times of astronomical home prices, they don’t have the credit, or the savings, or the income that would enable them to convince a bank to offer them a loan. Month after month they put money in the landlord’s pocket, and if the faucet leaks, they pick up the phone, not a monkey wrench. Among other blessings, it’s hard to overestimate the financial advantages of home ownership, especially over the long term. When our parents died, both Amanda and I inherited some of the equity they’d had in the houses where they’d lived for decades. We used the money to pay off car loans and credit cards, and to make tuition payments, and month by month, we’re building equity in our own home, as well. My houseless friends won’t be able to pass on to their children such a welcome gift. They’ll move into their golden years without the sometimes substantial harvest that’s reaped after years of mowing lawns and painting ceilings and writing a check to the bank every month. I try never to complain to those friends about the endless maintenance that’s required of a homeowner, the expense, the worry, the unending list of tasks, large and small. I try never to do that. NEWENGLAND.COM

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First

LIGHT

| WEEKENDS

W I T H YA N K E E Q & A Seeds in Maine carries some Italian seeds, but we also order from Italian seed companies like Franchi. We’ve grown their fava beans, a winter squash called Zucca, different eggplants, zucchini, Romanesco broccoli, and beautiful elongated sweet peppers called Corno di Toro, or “bull’s horn.” The Meraviglia di Venezia is a very elongated pole bean that just keeps on producing—we were picking those well into October. Q. What do you do with all the bounty from a big garden?

The Ciao Italia host and Weekends with Yankee guest shares tips on giving your garden some Italian flavor.

hen Mary Ann Esposito began filming Ciao Italia, her PBS cooking show, in 1989, Americans had just begun to discover that there was more to Italian food than pizza and red sauce. The Food Network didn’t exist (that would take four more years), but Esposito’s travels throughout Italy, combined with her love of cooking and teaching, inspired her to pitch New Hampshire Public Television a show about how to cook authentic regional Italian food. Today she still hosts Ciao Italia, the longest-running TV cooking show, produced in her hometown of Durham, New Hampshire. But during the pandemic, she turned her attention to gardening. This led to her newest book, her 14th in all, called Ciao Italia: Plant, Harvest, Cook! It will be published in October. —Amy Traverso

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Q. How did you get your start as a gardener?

My Neapolitan grandmother had a little garden in the backyard. She grew mint and green beans and those kinds of things. But I was really introduced to gardening through my husband, Guy. He was always growing gardens, even when he was in medical school. Q. What do you love to grow?

The big highlight are the Piennolo tomatoes grown at the base of Mount Vesuvius. They look like a cross between cherry and plum tomatoes and are very, very meaty. We picked up seeds in Italy and were thrilled that we could grow them in New Hampshire! Q. Do you plant a lot of Italian varieties?

Yes, absolutely. Johnny’s Selected

Q. What advice do you have for new gardeners who want to plant a cook’s garden?

My first commandment is to start slow and small. Get your soil tested so you know what you’re working with. Find out what zone you’re in, and use seeds that are appropriate for that zone. Q. A lot of people took up gardening during the pandemic. Do you think the trend will stick?

I do, because people are much more cognizant of their food and where it comes from, especially millennials. People stuck at home began to learn to cook, which led them to think about ingredients and where they were going to get them. They saw the limits of our food system. How we gain control is by raising our own food. Mary Ann Esposito is featured on season six of Weekends with Yankee, which debuts this April on public television stations nationwide. To find out how to watch, go to weekendswithyankee.com.

JOHN W. HESSION

Mary Ann Esposito

That’s what inspired the book. Once the hot weather hits, you’ve got tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant coming in all at once. So I have to decide what I’m going to cook and what I’m going to put up. I’m thinking about things I can freeze, like minestrone and eggplant Parmesan. And then I put up giardiniere, which are pickled mixed vegetables, and caponata.

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The

LIGHT

he Gurgling Cod is hard to explain. Not how it functions— the namesake noise that this ceramic pitcher makes as its contents are poured can be chalked up to simple science. The real mystery is how this delightful bit of kitsch came to be the signature offering of Boston’s most venerable jeweler, Shreve, Crump & Low. The company’s roots stretch back to 1796, when watchmaker and silversmith John McFarlane set up shop just across the street from fellow craftsman Paul Revere. At the time, George Washington was president, Tennessee had just become the 16th state, and the Old Farmer’s Almanac was in its infancy, just four editions old. Named Shreve, Crump & Low after an 1869 reorganization, the company outlasted all its early competitors. Today it’s known as the purveyor of luxury jewelry and gifts, the creator of high-profile sports trophies the Davis Cup and the Cy Young Award, and the only source for the original Gurgling Cod. Believed to have been the brainchild of Benjamin Dale Shreve in the early 1960s, the Gurgling Cod is a variation of the British “glug glug jug.” It’s designed to trap air in the fish’s tail, which escapes when the jug is tipped to pour its liquid, causing the fish to, well, burp. At f irst the Gurgling Cods were all brown, but they have since diversif ied into a rainbow of colors and multitude of sizes. Despite several attempts at local “spawning,” these f ish have almost always hailed from across the pond (made first by England’s Dartmouth Pottery and more recently by Wade Ceramics). But their quirkiness is pure New England, yielding a massive school of piscine heirlooms whose appeal only grows with each oddly satisfying, giggle-inducing pour. —Joe Bills

COURTESY OF SHREVE, CRUMP & LOW

First

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P R I VAT E TO U R

| Home

OLD HOUSE, NEW LIFE

When Dana Paradis and Guido Domke fell in love with an antique house in Massachusetts, they were still New Yorkers—but that would change. BY K AT E W H OU L E Y P H O T O S BY J O S E P H K E L L E R S T Y L I N G BY K A R I N L I D B EC K- B R E N T

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ana Paradis wears her dark brown hair in two long braids. As we tour her expansive gardens on this glorious June day, I find myself trying to recall the last time I wore my hair that way—fourth grade? Maybe sixth? She leads me along pebbled paths, points out the patch of puffy alliums that she says remind her of marshmallows on sticks, a nighttime pleasure enjoyed around the fire pit just ahead. She’s immortalized the toasted treats in her whimsical take on a family crest—a crossing of campfire swords that separate the words MARSH MELLOW— on a sign on the front of the barn. It’s a whimsical misspelling that references the marsh across the street and suggests

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a calming of mood. Dana opens the gate to the vegetable garden, defended against wildlife by a f lat slat fence of black locust wood, and I admire the logic of her layout. But I’m still preoccupied with decoding the braids. A way to stay cool working under the blazing summer sun? A quirk of personality? I’d place Dana somewhere in her 50s. Has she always worn her hair this way? After traversing the gardens, we move to the herringbone-patterned brick patio, settling in at a metal bistro table with a view of possibly the cutest potting shed ever. Over fruity ice tea, I learn that Dana and her husband, Guido Domke, vacationed for the first time on Cape Cod in 2009, fell in love

THIS PAGE , CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT :

Dana Paradis and her husband, Guido Domke, at home in Eastham, Massachusetts; a sampling of the couple’s plantsin-progress; an antique cast-iron urn and patio seating welcome visitors to the potting shed.

OPPOSITE :

Original 18th-century beams grace the kitchen in the couple’s refurbished Cape, known as the SmithWalker House.

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with the antique houses along Route 6A, and soon commenced hunting for a place of their own. “We looked at 35 old houses over three years, made offers on five, but none came through,” she says. “We’d never looked in Eastham, but then this house came up for sale. We drove up Friday early for a Saturday appointment, and as we crossed the bridge, we could see a rainbow over the Outer Cape.” The house at the end of the rainbow did not disappoint. Like so many old New England houses, the c. 1775 original had been extended, and extended again. “It looks like a farmhouse from one side, a colonial from another side, and a Cape from the third side,” Dana says. Looking toward it now, we have the long side-view, a perspective that highlights the changing roof lines, including a recently completed addition housing a guest bed and bath. On the first walk-through with the 30 |

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realtor, Dana felt that the house had a functional layout—many of the places she and Guido had looked at didn’t f low so well—but it was the huge c. 1852 barn that sealed the deal. “I climbed that ‘suicide ladder,’ and there’s 18 feet of cavernous space above me in the loft.” A clothing designer by trade, Dana pictured the studio she could create there. “The whole thing went through in about two weeks, and suddenly—wait—we have this house on the Cape, but we live in New York.” Believing they were working on their retirement home, Dana and Guido planned a modest renovation, starting in the kitchen, where a 1970s update hadn’t done a lot for the original character of the place. Dana, whose work was portable, came and stayed in the house to oversee progress. “We didn’t have TV, there was no Internet, so I listened to NPR. Guido got me a bicycle because I didn’t have a car here. I

The light-filled front bedroom, where one of the historic home’s “magical little doors” hides just behind the chair in the corner.

would get on my bicycle and ride to the beach. That’s when I started wearing braids. I felt like a kid again. I felt free.” The longer she stayed, the less Dana wanted to take out her braids and return to her New York life. When the original beams were revealed in the kitchen, the remodel expanded to the whole ground floor. “That’s when I got my dog, and I became a Cape Codder,” she says. On cue, Guido pulls into the driveway, and Ginger, their 58-pound, 7-year-old pooch, exits the vehicle to greet me with a refreshing lack of regard for social distancing. Satisfied with appreciative noises, an ear rub, and a couple of pats, she goes for the leather backpack at my feet. “She likes to take your stuff and then give it back NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 12:41 PM

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to you,” Dana explains. Before Guido hustles the thieving pup inside, he deposits a f lat paper bag on the table. Inside: a hardcover copy of A Book of Cape Cod Houses by Doris Doane. “I study like the most frantic, interested student,” Dana tells me, smoothing the dust jacket. An A student, it turns out. In 2018, Dana and Guido won the Eastham Historic Commission’s Abbott Award for their loving restoration of the Smith-Walker House, as this place is known. “Dean Smith was a seaman who died at sea when he was 27,” says Dana, but adds that despite the fate of the original owner, the home has no ghosts. “There’s something about 32 |

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In the master bathroom, vintage furniture and prints come together with reproduction fixtures and a clean, modern palette.

this property—there’s a weird, happy energy to it.” Dana talks about the house’s former inhabitants as if they are dear friends. “We bought the place with contents, and it still had some of Dottie’s things in it,” she says, referring to Dottie Long, the home’s owner until 2010. “She was meticulously grooming this property for almost 40 years, and then she got Alzheimer’s and things started to fall into disrepair.” Builders and designers often talk about good bones. The Smith-Walker

House has them. Entering through the original front door takes you back in time. Climb the steep stairway off the parlor to enjoy a marsh view from the front bedroom. The crisp blueand-white wallpaper is interrupted by a tiny door tucked into an eave. “There are these little magical doors in a few places,” Dana says. And she’s added two more in a new guest bedroom. Moving through the rooms with me, Dana explains the slight adjustments she’s made, talks about the 550 reclaimed bricks she rescued from an overgrown former patio, and shares her mixed feelings about demolishing a small section of the home’s north end (a later addition with a crumbling brick foundation). “The house was shaking,” she says. “I watched from the second f loor, and I felt guilty about removing some history.” As the Cat excavator chomped on the roof—like a T. rex, she thought—Dana worried that her neighbors might be upset. But if there were any concerned neighbors, I’m guessing they approve of the rightsize new addition that echoes the steep roof lines of the barn. From the patio, only the golden cedar shingles give the addition away, and they will silver soon enough. “I love old houses. I like knowing that other people have lived here,” Dana says. She also loves the way that old objects trigger memories and reveal stories. When excavation around the barn turned up a treasure trove—including a sewing machine that seemed an especially fortuitous omen for a clothing designer—Dana launched a blog featuring the objects she’d discovered. Not long after, she moved to Instagram, starting #happy hoarder, where she solicited photos and stories. Eventually, she focused her Instagram presence on the Smith-Walker House itself; as of this writing, @ThisOldCapeHouse has close to 30,000 followers. Her fans are able to follow the evolution of the property—Dana affectionately calls the house “the Old Girl”—both inside and out. It’s the NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 12:40 PM

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P R I VAT E TO U R

outdoor space, in fact, that has seen some of the most dramatic changes. “We had 15 invasive locust trees removed in March 2018, and I decided to take some time off work to do some landscaping that summer,” Dana says. With no previous gardening experience, she moved and placed rocks, creating stone pathways that could be rearranged. “As I worked, ideas would come to me, like the shed, the fire pit.” But even before she became an active, avid gardener, Dana was determined to reveal the original front entrance. “The whole front of the house was obscured by a f ive-foot-deep hedge—holly and yews—with a fence directly in front of that. The sellers had hacked out a space in the middle.” After she cleared the area, she painted the door red. “I put lipstick on the Old Girl,” she says with a smile. She used the bricks she’d dug up to create the walkway, and more recently, added an arbor. Evolving—and studying—her way to becoming a dedicated plant lover, Dana recognized remnants of a neglected bed and set to reviving Dottie’s garden, uncovering two matching lipstick-red azaleas. The spectacular gardens—including an assortment of hydrangeas that any Cape Codder would envy— are a point of pride with this nowexperienced gardener. But they aren’t the point of it all. “The gardening is to honor the house,” Dana says to me. A house that has been home to generations of Cape Codders before Dana and Ginger, and now Guido, freed to work remotely, came to live here. A house that makes passersby stop to ooh and aah. But with all the home projects and the garden projects, does this hardworking woman have time to enjoy the fruits of her labors? “Summer evenings, Guido will come outside after his last conference call—that’s usually sometime after seven—with two steins of beer, and we walk around together, and kind of gaze at what we’ve created here, and it makes us very happy.” NEWENGLAND.COM

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GARDENING

Outdoor Gear L.L. Bean | Freeport, ME

It was inevitable that we would ground ourselves (so to speak) in that most quintessential item of Yankee footwear: the L.L. Bean Boot. This garden-friendly iteration—the slip-on, slip-off rubber moc—is a shorty treatment of the classic Bean duck boot, a silhouette as comforting and familiar as flannel. Like its iconic sibling, the boot that started the Bean empire in 1912, this one is still handmade in Maine, one pair at a time; still kicking it. For the full Bean lookbook effect, pair with a broad-brimmed No Fly Zone boonie hat and a Sea to Summit mosquito head net, treated with Insect Shield. After all, what is summer without a mosquito net? Rubber mocs, $99; boonie hat, $34.95; head net, $14.95. llbean.com

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Lunaform cofounder Phid Lawless at the pottery studio’s headquarters in Sullivan, Maine. ✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿

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Planters & Urns

Lunaform of Maine | Sullivan, ME

Nearly three decades ago, this coastal studio founded by Phid Lawless and Dan Farrenkopf produced its first piece, the Luna urn, and at 24 inches tall and weighing 210 pounds, they thought it was immense. Since then, the dazzling array of handmade planters and urns, seemingly sprung from the studios of ancient Greece, have continued to embody graceful design, gravitas, and presence. The tallest urn, XL Milano, reaches 66 inches and weighs 1,020 pounds, but be not daunted, as there is a range of sizes, shapes, and finishes. “The Carini is a sweet piece that people can carry away,” notes Farrenkopf, and the Tulip is another planter that falls in the 40-pound range. Most important, these pots are made to survive weather. The process is proprietary, almost alchemical, and unapologetic in its use of concrete, which Farrenkopf considers “a superb, noble, and ancient building material.” Each pot is hand-built on an interior mold, wrapped in a steel matrix, and hand-turned on a wheel. If that can’t whup a Maine winter… From $275; lunaform.com NEWENGLAND.COM

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Outdoor Seating

Jeff Soderbergh | Portsmouth, RI

If you’ve ever encountered Jeff Soderbergh’s kingdom of reclaimed beauty, you’ll never forget it: the heaps of beautiful barn remnants, curated wood, curled metal, aged bits of curious salvage, all waiting to be repurposed. Over time, Soderbergh’s eye has only become more refined, more attuned to every morsel of handselected material. “Early homes, mill buildings, ships, churches, schools, and barns are carefully surveyed,” he writes, detailing his sources. Revived and renewed, these pieces come back as custom furnishings, sculptural and clean. “Beauty in the raw,” he calls it. That finds humorous expression in his Ring Chair—the ultimate variation on a hammock—incorporating a rugged steel ring topped off with original Coney Island boardwalk decking and produced in small batches. It’s the perfect spot to literally hang out and admire your garden handiwork. From $3,200; jeffsoderbergh.com ✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿✿

Gardening Tools Ashfield Tools | Ashfield, MA

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The right tool really does make a difference, and the prospect of using a hand-forged garden implement like the ones from Ned James’s Ashfield Tools is catnip for serious green thumbs. After studying metalwork at the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, James pursued the ultimate smithy pedigree, working at the Old Sturbridge Village Blacksmith Shop before venturing out on his own to do custom work for architects and historic houses. He has spent most of his life “trying to master metalworking skills as old as New England itself,” he says. Hand-forged trowels, hand plows, hand hoes, and deadly-looking viper weeders attest to his mastery, rendered in high-carbon tool steel. From $42; minimum two-week turnaround. ashfieldtools.com

MARCH | APRIL 2022

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GARDENING

Woven Baskets

Peterboro Basket Company | Peterborough, NH

There’s hardly a basket style imaginable that hasn’t been woven at the oldest continuous manufacturer of baskets in the country, established in 1854. Franklin Pierce was president then (born a few towns away, in Hillsborough); the town of Peterborough itself wasn’t even 100 years old. But these baskets are timeless. And with more than 200 handcrafted versions—shaved and woven on-site—offered at the Dodds family business, you’ve got decisions to make. Go for the handsome New England Half-Bushel Basket, with its rustic Oxford weave? Or a roomy Greenhouse Market Basket, perfect for daily picking? There are gardening caddies, tomato baskets, and multitask totes—all crafted from Appalachian white ash harvested in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and all waiting to be filled. Garden baskets from $39; peterborobasket.com

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Seeds & Bulbs

There would be no garden without seed, those miraculous specks that contain worlds. And that is their magic. Fortunately, New England’s seed gurus know and understand the challenges of our region’s magical climate, too. High Mowing Organic Seeds, started in 1996, offers more than 700 varieties (its Mesclun Mix reportedly survived every kind of weather last year). Johnny’s Selected Seeds has been

growing for 48 years and is one of the original signers of the Safe Seed Pledge (non-GMO). Fedco Seeds staunchly advocates cold-hardiness and sustainability (while also offering potato and onion sets). If you’re on the fence about herbs, Artistic Gardens/Le Jardin du Gourmet offers a preselected bundle of 50 small packets for a mere $22; you’ll end up discovering esoterica like pimpernel and cardoon. And pushing the seed envelope a bit, we ask:

What are bulbs, really, but just very big seeds? That’s our excuse to peruse the White Flower Farm catalog, and glory in its visions of daffodils. High Mowing Organic Seeds, Wolcott, VT, highmowingseeds.com; Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Winslow, ME, johnnyseeds.com; Fedco Seeds, Clinton, ME, fedcoseeds.com; Artistic Gardens/Le Jardin du Gourmet, St. Johnsbury, VT, artisticgardens.com; White Flower Farm, Litchfield, CT, whiteflowerfarm.com

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Birdbaths

Roger DiTarando | Vernon, CT

If you were a smart bird looking for a bath, you’d make a beeline for Roger DiTarando’s creations, wrought of copper and bronze and embodying a mix of realism, artistry, and insouciance. Your bird’s eye might be drawn by, for example, a metal dragonfly perched on the rim, or a hummingbird lightly touching down, lured to the sparkling water. But then, all of DiTarando’s nature sculptures are arresting, from herons mid-poke, to an otter on alert, to a line of ambling tortoises. While his metalwork combines various techniques—casting, blacksmithing, mold-making—these are simply means to an end: creating sculptures that are, as his website puts it, “an exercise in reverence.” From $200; ditarando.com MARCH | APRIL 2022

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1/11/22 12:52 PM

GARDENING

Clay Garden Markers Mavis Butterfield | Cushing, ME

You broadcast a handful of seeds, you plan to label the plot, a few days pass by, and suddenly it’s all a mystery. At some point you’ll be able to ID the burgeoning plants, but here’s the smarter, preemptive move: stocking up on permanent plant markers that you can reuse, year after year, sprinkling them around the garden like a word poem. Enter Mavis Butterfield, a gardening dynamo whose professed intention is to “grow two tons of food in the backyard.” Between blogging about gardens, crafts, canning, and recipes, she makes time in the winter to craft simple, stamped terracotta garden markers—“I’ve always been a bit of a minimalist!” Peppers, Beets, Spinach, Chives … the straightforward descriptions, pressed into clay, foretell a garden in which you’ll know exactly what’s where. From $7.95; mavisbutterfield.com 40 |

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Home

Bucket Totes

Sea Bags | Portland, ME

When a swath of recycled sailcloth takes its final creative bow at Sea Bags, located in the heart of Portland’s working waterfront, it’s repurposed by skilled hands into something bold and beautiful. It may become a sporty tote, like the ones they’ve been crafting since 1999, but it could also morph into a more recent creation: the virtually indestructible Gardener’s Bucket. Hemp rope handles do the heavy lifting, six exterior mesh pockets hold tools where you can see them, and a mesh bottom sifts out sand and dirt. Work it, hose it, or use it as a picnic centerpiece and fill the pockets with napkins, utensils, and condiments. All in all, it promises smooth sailing for gardeners. $75; seabags.com

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/11/22 3:47 PM

Vermont Glove owner Sam Hooper at the company’s factory in Randolph, Vermont.

Work Gloves

BEN DEFLORIO (HOOPER)

Vermont Glove | Randolph, VT

Full disclosure: I got my first pair of “The Vermonter” gloves last year, as a birthday gift. My hands are small, so I sent a tracing, and the rugged goatskin gloves were made to fit by this heritage Green Mountain State company. “These are the only gloves I’d ever own,” a well-known gardening acquaintance told me, and current owner Sam Hooper also started out as an avid fan of these indestructible gloves, originally made by three generations of the Haupt family, who got started outfitting the line workers who were “electrifying the country” in the 1920s. When my pair arrived, they boasted outseam stitching (for comfort), seamless index finger (for dexterity), and reinforced seams at heavy wear points—and they were even prettier than the pictures. It killed me to get them dirty. So I waited until those little leather fingers practically wagged with accusation every time I stepped into the garden without them. The gloves went on. They got dirty. I hauled out the neatsfoot oil, rubbed it into every nook and cranny, and suddenly they were mine. Soft, buttery, and quite honestly, they fit like a glove. $100; vermontglove.com MARCH | APRIL 2022

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1/11/22 3:50 PM

Home

HOUSE FOR SALE

Situated on 3.3 acres in Suffield, Connecticut, Fuller’s Corner includes an 11-room home and a large barn. INSET : The pastoral view from the porch.

All in the Family Passed down from generation to generation, an 18th-century beauty with views of protected farmland is ready for new owners.

im Fu l ler’s fami ly d idn’t build the house that would come to be known as Fuller’s Corner, but 195 years of residency have given them plenty of time to make it their own. Jim and his wife, Melinda, are the eighth generation of Fullers to call the house home. His daughter, Nancy, and granddaughter, Clementine, mark the ninth and 10th generations. “I grew up over there,” Jim says, gesturing toward a nearby house, then at several others, where rela42 |

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tives either did or still do live. With a smile, he adds, “My father moved away—about five houses away.” Indeed, this neighborhood of Suff ield, Connecticut, has been teeming with Fullers since long before any current resident’s memory. At one point there were 18 houses within a mile and a half of here that were home to Fuller relatives. The f irst of the family to own propert y here was Joseph Fuller, who in 1696 bought a house lot on what is now High Street; his son,

Joseph Jr., inherited the land in 1714 and became the f irst Fuller to actually reside in the town. But the house that is now Fuller’s Corner was actually built by Eliphalet King c. 1765, replicating the f loor plan of a house he’d already built on Main Street for his brother Alexander. (The Alexander King House, a classic centralchimney-style home of the era, has been open to the public as a historic house museum since 1960 and offers a picture of how Fuller’s Corner would have originally looked.)

JERRY W EINER /PHOTO - F LIGHT AERI AL MEDI A ( TOP); LEONARD L AMPEL/L AMPEL PHOTOGR APHY (INSE T)

BY JOE BILLS

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Home | H O U S E F O R S A L E

Eliphalet King sold his house in 1814, and it passed through a few owners before being purchased in 1827 by Apollos Fuller. When Apollos died later that same year, his brother William purchased the property from his estate for $2,470, five dollars less than Apollos had paid. William’s descendants have owned the house ever since. The central chimney at Fuller’s Corner was lost to renovation in roughly 1860, replaced by the dual chimneys that remain part of the property’s distinctive look. William Spencer Fuller, cofounder of the GriffinFuller Tobacco Company and Jim’s grandfather, made some big changes about 50 years later, adding bedrooms and porches, redesigning kitchens and bathrooms, and combining two smaller rooms into the current living room. One of the outstanding features on the first floor is an intricately detailed built-in corner cupboard. “This is one of my favorite features in the house. And we know it is original,” Jim says, “because there’s one just like it in the Alexander King House.” In 1995, Jim’s father, Samuel S. Fuller, born at Fuller’s Corner in 1923, wrote an autobiography called Breaking Away. In it, he describes his childhood on the land: “The house sat on 20 acres, the bulk of which was devoted to 44 |

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growing broadleaf tobacco. We had a large barn. The ground level served as a three-car garage and hay mow, and the lower level of that barn contained the cow barn and pig pen.… In the fall, we played touch football in the area between the driveway and the f lower garden.… [For softball] we used the garage/barn wall as our backstop with home plate being midway between the gas pump and the big doors to the hay barn.... Any ball that was hit across the street was a ground-rule home run. There was (and probably still is) a big maple tree out in right field. This

meant we had to play the high fly balls out of the branches.” As Jim leads me through the house, he points out various reminders of generations gone by, like the door to the former laundry chute (now a handy conduit for utilities) that once allowed dirty clothes to plummet directly from the upstairs bedroom area to the washing station in the cellar. “There is so much here, so much family history, that of course it is hard to let it go,” Jim says. “But it is time.” Beside the door leading to the side porch, Jim points out another historical

LEONARD L AMPEL/L AMPEL PHOTOGR APHY

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE : From elegant wood paneling to cozy country wallpaper, each of the rooms has its own personality; looking through the dining room to the kitchen, whose checkerboard tiles and bold yellow walls reflect the artist’s eye of co-owner Melinda Fuller; among the original grace notes of the c. 1765 home is an ornate built-in corner cupboard, seen at left.

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HOUSE FOR SALE

callback: a little square door. “The icebox would have been inside, just on the other side of this door,” he points out. “This little innovation allowed ice to be loaded directly into the icebox from outside.” During my tour, I’m struck by the differing moods of each room. Unlike many historic homes, these are cheerful spaces, exploding with bold primary colors. The painted yellow walls of one bedroom are set off by a verdant ceiling encircled with vines; the next is adorned in stately blue wallpaper. Jim explains that in 1995, not long before he and his family moved in, Fuller’s Corner had been used as a design showhouse as part of a fundraiser for Johnson Memorial Hospital in nearby Stafford. More recently, the kitchen has been opened up. Melinda, an artist, has infused this space with color too. Bold blue cabinets are painted to appear weathered, with yellow walls and checkerboard floor tiles connecting the space to a wall of windows and the panorama of gardens and former tobacco f ields beyond, accented by blueberry bushes and the glimmer of Bromes Pond. Giving up that view will be one of the hardest parts of leaving, Jim admits, but in true Fuller fashion, giving it up isn’t exactly in the plans. He has a vacation home in western Connecticut where the family hopes to spend more time, but for now, he and Melinda—along with Nancy and Clementine—have taken up residence just steps away, in a smaller house that was originally built for the farm’s caretaker and rebuilt as a residence for Jim’s aunt in the 1960s. “The view isn’t quite the same from here,” he deadpans. “The angle is slightly different.” Fuller’s Corner is listed at $599,900. For more information, contact Brian Banak of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage at 860-668-3100 or email brian@brianbanak.com.

1/6/20 11:06 AM

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 3:07 PM

THE BEST 5

| Home

A room vignette by My Sister’s Garage in Windham, Maine, offers ideas to borrow and treasures to buy.

Home Decor Wonderlands Blending old and new, these style-packed shops furnish endless inspiration.

COURTESY OF MY SISTER’S GAR AGE

BY KIM KNOX BECKIUS

here’s a quiet rebellion under way against fast furniture, one being waged with images that show how pretty antiques can be when they’re spiffed up and surrounded by contemporary accessories. Among those leading the charge are these New England home decor stores, whose vintage-meets-new aesthetic is so inviting, you’ll want to MARCH | APRIL 2022

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plan a redecorating road trip and give upcycled finds the chance at a new life in your home. Crompton Collective Worcester, MA Multidealer antiques malls can feel chaotically cluttered, but here, it’s as if elves have rearranged heavy furniture and nostalgic bric-a-brac, added hand-

crafted touches, and then hidden in the shadows to observe shoppers’ glee. No elves, though: just the 70 select vendors inside this 9,000-square-foot store that moves roughly 10,000 vintage and artisan-made items each month, before they can gather any hint of dust. Located on the lower level of a revitalized 1860 mill in Worcester’s thriving Canal District, Crompton Collective | 47

1/13/22 3:12 PM

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My Sister’s Garage Windham, ME Sisters and business partners Sarah and Jenn Tringali unleash a frenzy on Facebook every Thursday. It isn’t just a few cutthroat regulars madly refreshing the page at 8:30 p.m. so they can put items on hold before in-person shoppers get a look on Friday and Saturday. Some followers click through photos for the therapeutic joy of imagining life in the cozy-chic, Maine-flavored room vignettes—each a soothing blend of hand-painted, restored vintage pieces and brand-new accents—that the sisters create. From $5 tiny treasures to beds, dressers, and sofas that rarely cost more than $500, all stock is typically cleaned out by the time the Tringalis lock up their uncle’s antique farmhouse at 5 p.m. Saturday. Then, the cycle begins anew: rescuing furnishings from Maine homes, reimaging their look and their use, and resetting the entire store

in a way that’s so enticing, customers sometimes purchase complete rooms. mysistersgarage.com Revived Furniture & Home Decor Londonderry, NH Come spring, Carolyn Leiter fills her heartwarming store with silk tulips and daffodils and cute-as-a-bunny accessories, but they’re not the reason you’ll wish you’d pulled up in a truck (if you didn’t). In an on-site workshop, Leiter’s husband, Richard, turns salvaged furniture and industrial castoffs into statement pieces that are colorful, fresh, and perfectly suited for your cottage or farmhouse, or even a contemporary space that’s crying out for a conversation piece. Weathered doors become coffee tables; china and curio cabinets are made over as eye-catching shelving units; dining tables are one-of-a-kind inventions destined to appear in generations of family photos. You’ll want to shop for pottery, New Hampshire–made soaps, and wall hangings, too. Pick up anything that captivates you immediately, because if you hesitate, you may find the item has found another home. revivedfurnitureandhomedecor.com

C O U R T E S Y O F T H E V I N TAG E R E T R I E V E R

reflects owner Amy Lynn Chase’s passion for supporting local creatives and elevating antiques dealing to an art form. Every old object styled to look newly on-trend is a reminder to think twice before landfilling relics from our well-made past. cromptoncollective.com

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/7/22 2:58 PM

C O U R T E S Y O F T H E V I N TAG E R E T R I E V E R

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The Vintage Retriever Holden, MA Savor the moment when you pull open the door of this strip-mall store and discover a sophisticated “found goods” emporium brimming with vintage furniture and unique homewares, all thoughtfully curated in earthy tones. A sleek online presence and appearances at Brimfield shows have won owners Julie and Dave McNamara a following far beyond Massachusetts’s borders, and while they now have pickers feeding them the antique cabinets, tables, armoires, chests, and other hefty pieces for which they’re known, they still have to work to keep up with demand. Take inspiration from how they marry the old and the new, then gather up taper candles, turned wood bowls, New England artist prints, pillows, clever gifts, and quirky whatnots. You may need to spring for a well-traveled antique suitcase to cart it all home. vintageretriever.com

11/19/07

10:05 AM

Page 1

The Promise A Most Unusual Gift of Love

THE POEM READS:

A Most Unusual Gift of Love “Across the years I will walk with you— in deep, green forests; on shores of sand: and when our time on earth is through, POEM READS : in heaven, too,THE you will have my hand,”

The White Elephant North Kingstown, RI It’s your “dream house by the sea” Pinterest board in 3-D. Since 2016, “Across the years I will walk with you— Dear Reader, cousins and longtime antiques colThe drawing you see above is called The Promise. It is completely composed of green forests; on ashores ofplaced sand: lectors Maribeth Zoglio and Caitlin dots ofin ink.deep, After writing the poem, I worked with quill pen and thousands Greene have built a reputation for of these dots, one at a time, to create this gift in honor of my youngest brother and and when our time on earth is through, styling roomscapes that mix handhis wife. made and new elements with sturdy Now, I have decided to offer The Promise to those who share and value its in heaven, too, you will have my hand.” pieces from the past, freshly painted sentiment. Each litho is numbered and signed by hand and precisely captures the in coastal hues. Last fall they comdetail of the drawing. As a wedding, anniversary or Valentine’s gift or simply as a pleted their most ambitious trans- Dear Reader, standard for your own home, I believe you will find it most appropriate. you see above called Promise.” It isfully-framed completely composed dots oftone ink. After formation yet, moving their shop The drawing Measuring 14" byis16", it is“The available either in a subtleofcopper the poem, I worked with a quill pen and placed thousands of these dots, one at a time, to from Main Street in East Green- writingwith hand-cut double mats of pewter and rust at $145*, or in the mats alone at gift in honor of my youngest brother and his wife. wich to a long-abandoned and over- create this $105*. Please add $18.95 for insured shipping. Returns/exchanges within 30 days. Now, I have decided to offer “The Promise” to those who share and value its sentiment. Each grown mid-1700s home on Route My bestand wishes are by with you. litho is numbered signed hand and precisely captures the detail of the drawing. As a wed1 in North Kingstown. Their labor ding, anniversary or Valentine’s gift or simply as a standard for your own home, I believe you will Sextonart Inc. • P.O. Box 581 • Rutherford, CA 94573 of love has given their furnishings a find it most appropriate. 989-1630 refreshed historic backdrop, indoors Measuring 14" by 16", it is available(415) either fully framed in a subtle copper tone with hand-cut All major credit cards are welcomed. Please call between 10 A.M.-5 P.M. and out. Whether you buy hand- mats of pewter and rust at $110, or in the mats alone at $95. Please add $14.50 for insured shipping Standardguaranteed. Time, 7 days a week. is completely poured candles, locally grown spring and packaging. Your satisfactionPacific Checks are also accepted. Please include a phone number. My best wishes are with you. blooms, vintage art, woven goods, *California residents please 8.0% tax 491 Greenwich St. include (at Grant), San Francisco, CA 94133 hand-painted words of wisdom, or The Art of Robert Sexton, an entire room, you’ll lend your liv- MASTERCARD and VISA orders welcome. Please visit our at card number, address and expiraPlease sendwebsite card name, between noon-8 P.M. EST. Checks are also accepted. Please allow 3 ing space a seaside-vacation vibe. tion date, or phone (415) 989-1630 www.robertsexton.com weeks for delivery. thewhiteelephantri.com MARCH | APRIL 2022

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“The Promise” is featured with many other recent works in my book, “Journeys of the Human Heart.” It, too, is available from the address above at $12.95 per copy postpaid. Please visit my Web site | at

www.robertsexton.com

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th e m o r f s n Lesso food revival Jewish amaleh’s. at M

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AV E R S O R T Y M BY A Piazza Michael elt y y b s o t o Ph eK y Catrin St yling b

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Food

TR ADITIONS

LEFT : In Cambridge, Massachusetts, patrons grab a seat at the counter at Mamaleh’s Delicatessen, its name inspired by the Yiddish term for “little mama.” ABOVE :

A bowl of wooden dreidels signals the approach of Hanukkah at Mamaleh’s last autumn.

BELOW, FROM LEFT :

Rachel Miller Munzer, Rachel Sundet, John Kessen, and Alon Munzer, all members of the deli’s ownership team.

he order counter at Mamaleh’s Delicatessen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is dotted with all the Jewish deli essentials: a box of Lactaid pills, chocolate halva, and Joyva Raspberry Jelly Rings. Just behind, refrigerator cases are stocked with matzo ball soup, chopped liver, and cans of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray. Many of the customers placing orders for Reubens and rugelach have no ties to Judaism, but for the ones who do, these displays function as both marketplace and memento, plucking the heartstrings while priming the palate. The display evokes memories of the great delis of yore, like Boston’s G&G and Jack and Marion’s and New York’s Carnegie and Stage delis. When Mamaleh’s first opened in Cambridge’s Kendall Square in 2016, it was hailed as a modern reimagining of the classic nosh house. But in the hearts of the seven partners who own this mini chain (there’s a second location in Brookline and a soon-to-open spot in Boston’s Hub food hall near North Station), Mamaleh’s isn’t meant to reinvent the deli but to save it. And as the team has wrestled their way through red ink and Covid, they’ve had to sacrifice some traditions to save others. 54 |

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TR ADITIONS

| Food

From-Scratch Matzo Ball Soup Recipe, p. 100

MARCH | APRIL 2022

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Food

TR ADITIONS

Chef’s Salad with Manischewitz Vinaigrette Recipe, p. 100

Noodle Kugel Recipe, p. 100

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The classic Jewish deli is an American creation with deep roots in Eastern Europe. There, a combination of poverty, climate, and religious laws gave rise to a cuisine based on preserved meats and fish, poultry (and its rendered fat, or schmaltz), bread, and root vegetables. Between 1890 and 1920, more than two million Jews fled poverty and persecution by coming to America. On New York’s Lower East Side, the culinary traditions of Poles, Russians, Romanians, and Germans met and melded and were, in turn, shaped by the emergence of the American lunch counter. Del i food was a lways laborintensive and humble. Bagels and pastrami take days to produce, but no one expects to pay much for them. That may have worked in a turn-ofthe-century economy, but as Jews assimilated and deli owners found themselves without a next generation to take over, New York’s count of kosher delis dropped. This history is chronicled in David Sax’s book, Save the Deli. “Today, there are but a few Jewish delis scattered around,” he wrote in 2009. “In 50 years’ time, it is possible that no delis will exist in all of New York City.” Downstairs from Mamaleh ’s main dining room, co-owners Rachel Sundet, a pastry chef, and Rachel Miller Munzer, the team’s chief restaurant officer, are mulling this possibility. Before opening Mamaleh’s, Miller Munzer and her husband, Alon, had long nurtured the idea. Then Alon read Save the Deli, which lit a fire under their plans. Both Rachels are Jewish, with school-age children and a sense of urgency about passing traditions on to the next generation. “I worry about it,” Miller Munzer says. “I feel a strong NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 3:04 PM

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1/7/22 2:54 PM

Food

TR ADITIONS

responsibility. There’s a generation between ours and our kids’ that is having to relearn all this.” And yet since Save the Deli came out, the genre has seen a real, if modest revival. In the Boston area, there’s Mamaleh’s, Michael’s, Zaftigs, S& S, and Our Fathers. Bagel bakeries like Bagelsaurus, Exodus, and Levend are thriving. In Portland, there’s Rose Foods and BenReuben’s Knishery. When Mamaleh’s opened, everything was made in-house: the corned beef, the bagels, the lox. Knishes were fresh and ser ved hot. Trigenerational families gathered for blintzes. The restaurant was winning awards, but losing money. And in 2020, Covid forced Mamaleh’s to shut down for a time, then pivot to takeout service with a smaller menu. In that sobering moment, the team found an unexpected solution to the deli dilemma. Switching to takeout and streamlining the menu created economies of scale. To save the deli, they learned, they had to serve casual, humble food in a casual, humble way. Now, the bagels are still made in-house, but the smoked meats are produced off-site using Mamaleh’s recipes. Table service may be gone, but Sundet says she still sees families gathered together on weekends. “It’s been challenging,” she says. “In our perfect world, we would have everything on the menu. But we had to make decisions that would work for the business.” In Save the Deli, Sax spoke with the late sociologist William Helmreich about why the deli still matters. “Younger Jews who go into delis are practicing something us sociologists call ‘symbolic ethnicity,’” Helmreich said. “When the real trappings of ethnicity are gone—language, religion, practices—by the third or fourth generation people look for symbolic ways to identify, and food is the easiest.” Miller Munzer agrees. “I think really what keeps us going, as hokey 58 |

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In the kitchen at Mamaleh’s, co-owner and pastry chef Rachel Sundet turns out a batch of blackand-white cookies, a longtime Jewish bakery staple. Recipe, p. 101

as it sounds, is that we’re making those memories. We see people who get up on Saturday morning and come with their kids. And those kids are going to remember that as part of their childhood.”

Like original delis in turn-ofthe-century New York, the kitchen of Mamaleh’s is staffed with a team of recent immigrants, now mostly women from Central America. The close-knit crew is made up of several sets of cousins, sisters, and aunts. “It’s a ladder system,” Sundet says. “As soon as they can start moving up, they bring in new people and start teaching them.” The Jews on staff, in turn, share the stories behind the food. “So much of Judaism is about storytelling,” Sundet says. “And those stories are connected to the meal. So we’re telling the story of Hanukkah and why we eat food cooked in oil. And our incredible staff is like, ‘Oh, OK. That helps to explain why we’re cooking one million potato latkes!’” And so the tradition continues on. (Continued on p. 100) NEWENGLAND.COM

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Food

IN SEASON

Amy Traverso is Yankee’s senior food editor and cohost of our TV show, Weekends with Yankee (weekendswithyankee.com).

Maple Gooey Butter Cake Tapping a Midwestern classic for New England’s sweetest season. BY A MY TR AVER SO ST YLED AND PHOTOGR APHED BY

L I Z N E I LY

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he original gooey butter cake was invented in the 1930s in St. Louis, Missouri. As the story goes, a German baker mistakenly added too much butter to a coffee cake, baked it anyway, and found that the texture was delightful: crisp on top and velvet-soft in the middle. While the original recipe calls for a yeast-risen dough, later versions simplified the process to the point that many cooks now use cake mix for the base. That’s all well and good, but with five minutes and a few on-hand ingredients, you’ll get something even better: a caramelized base layer with

a creamy, ooey-gooey top. Baked in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish, the result more closely resembles bars than cake, but the name sticks. Now in case you’re wondering why the Yankee food editor would go beyond New England for this recipe, there are three reasons: First, we know that many of you live in other parts of the country, so this may be a familiar dish. Second, it’s simply too delicious to pass up. Finally, and most important, gooey butter cake is even better when made with maple syrup. St. Louis may have invented it, but we perfected it. NEWENGLAND.COM

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FOR THE BASE 1 cup salted butter, melted, plus more for greasing pan 2¾ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting pan 11/3 cup granulated sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon table salt 1/3 cup maple syrup, at room temperature 1 large egg, at room temperature 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

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FOR THE TOPPING 1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, softened ¾ cup confectioners’ sugar, plus more for sprinkling 2 large eggs, at room temperature ½ cup maple syrup, at room temperature ¼ teaspoon maple extract (optional)

Preheat your oven to 325° and set a rack to the middle position. Grease a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with a thin layer of butter, then sprinkle with some f lour, tilting the dish to coat evenly. Discard excess. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a medium bowl, whisk together 1 cup melted butter, maple syrup, egg, and vanilla. Add butter mixture to dry ingredients and stir with a spatula until evenly combined. Use your hands to press this mixture into an even layer in the bottom of the prepared pan. Now, prepare the topping: Using a stand or handheld mixture, beat the cream cheese with the confectioners’ sugar and eggs in a large bowl until smooth. Add maple syrup and maple extract (if using). Beat until smooth. Pour the topping over the cake base. Bake until the edges are golden brown and the center is puffed but still jiggles slightly when you shake it, 45 to 55 minutes. Cool to room temperature. Sprinkle with additional confectioners’ sugar just before serving. Yields 12 servings. MARCH | APRIL 2022

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Travel

W EEK EN D AWAY

PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS

SPRING COMES EARLY TO THIS FAMOUS CAPE COD TOWN. BY IAN ALDRICH • PHOTOS BY ELIZABETH CECIL

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OPPOSITE : Springtime snapshots from Provincetown, Massachusetts, including wheels for rent at Gale Force Bikes (TOP LEFT); wood-carver Geoff Semonian at his studio on MacMillan Wharf (TOP RIGHT); and freshmade waffles at Liz’s Café, Anybody’s Bar (BOTTOM CENTER). THIS PAGE : A view down the town’s main drag, Commercial Street.

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Travel Home | XWXEXEXKXEXNXDX XA W A Y Though Provincetown, Massachusetts, is known as a summer place, spring may be its finest time. In the absence of the July rush that defines this seaside town, you will find an accessible and—dare we say—quiet Cape community. Not everything is open, but enough is. That means a last-minute Saturday-night table at a place like the Lobster Pot is an option, as is strolling long, isolated stretches of sand at some of the best beaches in the country. Downtown galleries have emerged from their winter slumber. Even the parking is free. Long before the more northern towns have seen a single crocus, Provincetown is awash in blossoms and greening lawns. It’s ride-your-bike, sit-out-on-the-deck, smell-fresh-cutgrass, order-an-iced-coffee weather. In the first weeks of April, that all sounds pretty good.

FRI DAY

Come early and get grounded in your surroundings by, well, getting off the ground. Situated on the curled “hand” of the arm-shaped Cape Cod, Provincetown is best viewed from

atop the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum. The property’s signature building is the tallest allowable structure in the area and features a network of 60 ramps and 116 stairs that gets visitors more than 200 feet closer to the sky. Make time for the museum, too, where items such as a giant f inback whale jawbone, a century-old f ire pumper, and Wampanoag artifacts f lesh out the region’s history. It’s a story that continues to evolve: In 2020 the museum overhauled an entire wing of exhibition space to create a more

complete accounting of the devastation that colonialism inf licted on indigenous peoples. The story panels and video reenactments don’t pull any punches, inviting visitors to linger longer than they may have intended. Even in early spring, Provincetown has lodging options, nearly all offering deep discounts at this time of year. For instance, at nearly half off summer prices, you can drop anchor at the Lands End Inn: From its hilltop on the edge of town, this shinglest yle 18-room mansion has long welcomed guests who want to be near both downtown and the Cape Cod National Seashore. The inn’s many decks and lookouts offer views of the sea, two lighthouses, and, on a clear day, whales feeding offshore. With your bags unpacked, it’s time to explore a town made for both walking and bicycling. Opened in 2000, Gale Force Bikes sits on the edge of Provincetown’s lone remaining piece of farmland, where current owners Jeff Epstein and Dany Soucy offer a little bit of everything: rentals, tune-ups, gear, even made-to-order sandwiches. For dinner, head to The Mews, an on-the-water eatery whose menu showcases seafood and vegan dishes, as well as a robust lineup of house LEFT : The dune-filled landscape at Race Point, bathed in a dreamy Cape light. OPPOSITE : The jaunty facade of the Lobster Pot, a Provincetown landmark since 1979.

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W E E K EXNX D X XAXW X XA YX

MARCH | APRIL 2022

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cocktails. End the day w ith the short journey to Race Point Beach to watch an over-the-ocean sunset that might just top anything you’ll see in the Northeast.

SAT U RDAY

The Lands End Inn serves a generous continental breakfast, but for something that packs more of a morning punch, head over to Liz’s Café, Anybody’s Bar, for big omelets, bigger Benedicts, and slabs of French toast served with pure maple syrup. You’ll never find consensus on the most beautiful section of the Cape Cod National Seashore, which spans nearly 40 miles of untouched coastline from Chatham to Provincetown, but a strong case can be made for the 3,000acre northern tip known as Province Lands, a dune-filled reserve that has long been the muse for artists. You can explore the terrain on your own—by pedaling the nearly six-mile 66 |

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Province Lands Bike Trail or walking the 2.4-mile Dune Shack Trail, for example—but the most entertaining and complete portrait of the landscape comes via Art’s Dune Tours. What began in 1946, when Provincetown native Art Costa f ired up his Ford Woody to offer tours of the Outer Beach, has become a bucketlist adventure. Art’s son, Rob, now runs the business, and over the years he’s expanded the operation. There are sunset and lighthouse tours, a sunrise trip geared to photographers, and another outing by sailboat. Back in town, grab lunch at Far Land Provisions, an upscale grocery whose homemade sandwiches sport locally inspired names (Hatches Harbor, Pilgrim Lake, Head of the Meadow) and are a challenge to finish. Now it’s time to stroll Commercial Street. Provincetown’s creative bona fides were birthed in 1899, when painter Charles Hawthorne opened

FROM LEFT : One of P-town’s historic dune shacks perches on the edge of an ocean vista; designer and ceramicist Yuko Nishikawa, an artist in residence last year at the downtown gallery Room 68.

his Cape Cod School of Art. Generations of artists followed in search of the spirit Hawthorne inspired, as well as the region’s famous light. Today, local work hangs in each of Provincetown’s municipal buildings, and the population of galleries that line the eastern side of Commercial Street are a testament to the quality of artists who’ve made P-town their home. You’ ll f ind no better deep dive into this continuing story than at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Established in 1914, PAAM is one of the country’s great small art museums. High-ceilinged galleries feature a rotating lineup of more than 3,000 works, including the secondlargest collection of Edward and Josephine Hopper artwork in the world. NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 3:44 PM

A Choice of Heritage and Scenic Train Rides! • Take a step back in time and experience classic train travel on our Valley Trains or enjoy a scenic journey aboard the Mountaineer. • Seasonal excursions begin in April and run through November. • Holiday and Snow Trains operate during the Winter

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38 Norcross Circle | North Conway, NH 1/7/22 3:03 PM

Travel

W EEK EN D AWAY

Even as Provincetown’s f ishing scene has quieted over the decades, its relationship to the sea remains vibrant. Fishing charters and whalewatch boats make their berths at MacMillan Wharf, and later this year the pier will be home to the new Shark Center Provincetown, with interactive exhibits, videos, and displays that detail local research on great white sharks. Shark tours will also be offered. The discoveries are a little less defined at Marine Specialties, which has to be in the running for the most unusual gift shop in New England. Opened in 1961, when Bob Patrick and Elizabeth “Ghee” Livingstone Patrick turned their successful marine catalog into a store, the shop’s evolution over the past six decades has tracked the changing f lavor of its hometown. You can still pick up rope, anchors, knives, and other gear, but the inventory also includes leather 68 |

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jackets, feather boas, and vintage prom dresses. In one section there’s a healthy collection of beads and shells; on an opposite wall, an array of old license plates. Come dinnertime, the seafood options at Tin Pan Alley include the Taste of Cape Cod (f ish and chips, clam chowder, and lobster roll), but if you want to go full tourist, look for the Lobster Pot’s famous neon sign. The seafood menu here is gargantuan, as is the legacy of this on-the-harbor eatery, which launched the restaurant career of Anthony Bourdain in 1972. Even in the early shoulder season, Provincetown still boasts a fun nightlife scene. Check out some of the haunts that have established the town’s after-hours popularity, such as the Crown & Anchor, an oceanfront hotel famed for its different LGBTQ bars and clubs, and the Pilgrim House, which offers a full schedule of cabaret and comedy.

A summer house built more than a century ago is now the Lands End Inn, offering one of Provincetown’s most dramatically situated overnight stays.

SU N DAY

After a hot mug and a pastry at Joe Coffee, you’re ready to tackle one more local favorite: walking the Causeway. Nestled just below the Lands End Inn, this mile-long boulder walk is subject to the tide and weather. Time it right, though, and it’s one of the Cape’s most spectacular strolls, evoking a sense that you’re almost walking on the water. Expect to spy hermit crabs and starfish, and, in the not-too-far distance, seals splashing in the waves. Then there’s the payoff: an isolated beach, unrivaled views of the harbor and Cape Cod Bay, and a pleasant trek to Long Point Light Station. Don’t head home just yet. Take off your shoes and feel the sand beneath your feet. Spring has finally sprung. NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 3:44 PM

(Destination: Wachusett Mountain)

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1/7/22 3:05 PM

S’ CH

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NEW ENGLAND EE A M AG

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BEST CASTLE CASTLE IN THE CLOUDS MOULTONBOROUGH, NH

BEST OCEAN VIEW BAR HARBOR INN BAR HARBOR, ME

BEST LIVING HISTORY EXPERIENCE PLIMOTH PATUXET MUSEUMS PLYMOUTH, MA

BEST FAMILY RETREAT BY A POND LOCH LYME LODGE LYME, NH

Experience this stunning historic estate with unmatched views of Lake Winnipesaukee and the surrounding mountains. Tour the 1914 mansion, enjoy outdoor dining with a view, attend a special program, explore the estate’s 28 miles of trails and waterfalls, and more.

Steps from downtown Bar Harbor, along majestic Frenchman Bay, this iconic property has been welcoming guests since 1887 with genuine hospitality, signature service, and timeless charm. Enjoy the area’s finest waterfront dining, accommodations, and spa services on this stunning eightacre property.

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BEST FAIRYTALE LUNCH PICKITY PLACE MASON, NH

BEST BEACH TOWN HAMPTON BEACH VILLAGE DISTRICT HAMPTON, NH

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Experience the enchanting cottage that inspired Elizabeth Orton Jones’s Little Golden Books version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Untouched by time, this is a mecca for gardeners, epicureans, and anyone looking for inspiration and relaxation. Have a Pickity day! 603-878-1151 PickityPlace.com

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Rediscover Hampton Beach, rated #1 in United States for water quality. FREE activities: Fireworks, concerts, sand competition, country music, soccer on the beach, volleyball tournaments, children’s activities, talent show, circus show, fire show. Subject to change due to COVID.

A must-see New England destination that tells the shared history of Plymouth Colony and the Indigenous Peoples of the region in the early 1600s. Visit the 17thCentury English Village, Patuxet Homesite, Plimoth Grist Mill, and Mayflower II. Celebrating 75 years of living history!

Enjoy a quarter mile of sandy beach and docks on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. Lakeside cottages, apartments, and rooms available. Great location for fishing, hiking, kayaking, boating, and more. Family owned and operated since 1890.

A scenic lakeside family resort on Post Pond, near Dartmouth College, offering one- to threebedroom B&B or efficiency cabins. Easy access to lots of outdoor activities, area attractions, sightseeing and antiquing—or just relax at our sandy beach. Our Lodge Restaurant serves delicious, fresh local fare. Pet-friendly!

Climb this historic 7.6-mile road to the summit of the Northeast’s highest peak— drive yourself, or take a guided tour. This must-do drive is America’s oldest manmade attraction. During the winter, take a tour on the Mt. Washington SnowCoach. 603-466-3988 MtWashingtonAutoRoad.com

1/12/22 6:23 PM

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Travel Travel | R|E S O U RT CDEOSO R S

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A family-owned hotel featuring two restaurants, fireplaces, indoor pool, and select pet-friendly rooms. Complimentary breakfast and afternoon tea with overnight rooms. Complimentary transportation from Amtrak Downeaster station. Two blocks to L.L. Bean. Best shopping in New England.

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At Home with History

BEST GIFT STORE GALLERY GIFTS AT 136 DAMARISCOTTA, ME

At these New England house museums, tours take you behind the scenes and into the past.

Gifts at 136 offers a large selection of fine crafts and art from Maine, including furniture, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, pottery, glassware, lighting, and more. Gifts at 136 has won multiple awards for its well-curated collection of accessible art. Open all year. 207-563-1011 GiftsAt136.com

Reconnect with past Editors’ Choice winners and see for yourself why they received Yankee Magazine’s highest accolade.

com

n contrast to museums whose treasures are carefully arrayed in plaque-filled exhibits and glass cases, historical houses invite us to stroll right into another era. We can tread the same halls and look out the same windows as the original owners, and imagine life as it was lived in past centuries. The lure of time-traveling is irresistible, especially when exploring properties that have been kept so intact it feels as though the owners have just stepped out. Even better? When we get a chance to take a peek into a house’s nooks and crannies and hear little-known tales from the past. The following are some of Yankee’s favorite places to take those kinds of historical deep dives.

TRAVEL NOTE: At press time, some

museums had not yet finalized operating plans and tour offerings for 2022. Covid protocols and staffing may also affect schedules. Please visit the museums’ websites or check with them directly before planning your visit.

CONNECTICUT HILL-STEAD MUSEUM, Farmington.

Theodate Pope Riddle, one of America’s first women architects, designed this distinguished Colonial Revival home as a country estate for her globe-trotting parents. At the turn of the 20th century, the Popes toured Europe annually, often purchasing Impressionist artworks from the likes of Degas, Monet, Manet, and Cassatt before they became famous.

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BLOOM TIME S

Fifty feet of asphalt is only the most obvious divider between Boston’s famous downtown green spaces, the Common and the Public Garden. Born more than 200 years apart, they also diverge in their expression: one a freewheeling invitation to public life, the other a horticultural oasis rooted in Victorian-era decorum. But in his 22-year career with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, Anthony Hennessy has come to see them more like companion plantings. “The Common is an area where people can go and just be whoever they want to be. They can shout as loud as they want, wear outrageous clothes, protest, sing. A person can go there and ref lect on who they are,” he says. “Then when you enter the Public Garden, there’s this feeling of tranquility, and everything else sort of disappears. And it really makes you think about what people can do, the amazing things that individuals can accomplish.” 74 |

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The city’s horticultural superintendent since 2013, Hennessy leads the team that makes the Public Garden, along with about 40 other sites across Boston, a showcase of gardening accomplishment. The springtime display gets under way in March, as they begin planting pansies and other early perennials from the parks department’s 13 greenhouses, and it becomes downright lavish by May, when 30,000 bulbs burst into life—the vast majority of them being tulips in the Public Garden, where they have been planted each year since the 1840s. The tulip show is close to Hennessy’s heart not just because he’s a big backer of Boston traditions—which he admits he is—but also because of its message of hope. “You take this bulb, this plain little thing, like an onion, and bury it deep in the ground through the dead of winter,” he says. “And then when the signs of spring show up, and you see that first green and then a couple of weeks later, a beautiful f lower… it’s like you know that everything’s going to be fine.”

ADAM DETOUR

It’s a delight for the senses as Boston pushes its petals.

NEWENGLAND.COM

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ADAM DETOUR

CLOCKWISE FROM OPPOSITE : A pathway on the Charles River Esplanade invites strolling beneath a canopy of blooms; tulips in one of the Public Garden’s 60 formal planting beds; magnolias in the Back Bay; lilacs bursting forth in the Arnold Arboretum, home to one of the oldest and largest lilac collections in North America.

Beyond the 24 manicured acres of the Public Garden, that kind of f loral reassurance takes on all kinds of additional, equally marvelous forms when spring comes to Boston. The Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain is famed for its 400-plus lilacs, which send their perfume across its 281 scenic acres starting in April; meanwhile, the cherry trees along the Charles River Esplanade are pinking up. Over in Boston’s Back Bay, historic brownstones are framed by growing drifts of magnolia blossoms. And this spring, like the one before it, is bound to have a little extra resonance for the city’s residents and visitors than in years past, Hennessy predicts. “More people are outside, they’re out in these parks, they’re just being outside in general,” says Hennessy, who is often out working in the beds and receives the public’s feedback firsthand. “When a random stranger comes over to you and compliments you and says, ‘I love what you’re doing, you make my commute to work special’—I mean, that’s just the best thing.” —Jenn Johnson ➼ For more on the Public Garden, go to boston.gov/parks/ public-garden; for details on visiting the Arnold Arboretum, go to arboretum.harvard.edu. MARCH | APRIL 2022

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THE

GIDDY

SEASON

At age 12, I made my first turns down Sugarloaf’s trails, then narrow and twisting, during spring break. Although a beginner, I followed my chum Diana and her mountain-brat friends, all of whom had been skiing since they could toddle. Not only did I survive intact, but I also left with a tan that rivaled those of friends who had spent vacations sprawled on Florida beaches. Of course, it was a raccoon-eyed goggle tan, but heck, what a souvenir. Even better, I now counted myself a Sugarloafer. Decades later, I still am. Every spring rekindles a wild, childlike abandon in going everywhere on this pyramid-shaped

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Maine mountain just because I can. I love the sun’s warmth on my face, listening to winter-dormant streams giggle and gurgle, and inhaling that only-in-spring, liferenewing, earthy aroma rising from bare spots where the snow has surrendered. After months dressed in mostly white and gray, the mountain is sprinkled with confetti colors. Mardi Gras beads dangle from tree branches, and the trails are brightened by vintage ski duds adorned with blooming flowers, tiedye patterns, and crazy stripes. Spring is the reward for surviving a frigid and blustery winter, when the sun barely clears the Sugarloaf summit. But the same winds that drive temperatures down to—well, let’s just not talk about that—also

blow snow across the summit, blanketing Sugarloaf’s crown jewel, the above-treeline Snowfields. When I slide off the summit chair, I take a few minutes to take in the view, from Mount Washington to Katahdin. Then I join the steady stream of skiers and riders hiking to their fields of dreams. My reward: the joy of backcountry skiing. Joy is infectious at this time of year. Spontaneous parties erupt trailside and on the deck of Bullwinkle’s, Sugarloaf’s mid-mountain lodge. As the day progresses, the party moves to the Beach, that area in front of the base lodge where you can sit back, relax, sip a cool one, and watch the antics of those still on the mountain. The party reaches a crescendo during

COURTESY OF SUGARLOAF

Warm sun, soft snow, and pure joy at Sugarloaf.

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COURTESY OF SUGARLOAF

RITE of RETURN

In Connecticut, a migratory parade to make bird lovers of us all .

Reggae Fest, when live bands perform outside during the day and inside at night. Truth is, spring can be fickle and often elusive, especially since March and April tend to be Sugarloaf’s snowiest months. Yet even then, though I crave spring’s promise, I still get that tingle of anticipation when I see the first snowflakes of a promised storm. When dawn reveals fresh snow paired with vivid blue skies and brilliant sunshine, my inner child awakens, and I race out the door eager to score first tracks. —Hilary Nangle ➼ Sugarloaf’s annual spring party, Reggae Fest, is set for April 7–10. For event details, skiing conditions, and more, go to sugarloaf.com. MARCH | APRIL 2022

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As Connecticut’s largest shoreline park, Hammonasset Beach State Park is a place visitors naturally f lock to. And what’s attractive to nearly a million sun-worshipping humans annually is just as alluring for birds, especially during peak avian travel season. “Coastal hammocks like Hammonasset are terrific stopover habitat for migrating land birds,” says Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. “It’s a big open area on a very highly developed coastline, so for any bird flying over, it stands out like a sore thumb.” But that’s just part of the reason the nation’s third-smallest state is a major jumping-off point for birds trekking between their wintering and breeding grounds. Its 5,543 square miles encompass a rich mix of habitats, includ- ➼ The Connecticut ing river valleys that start leafing out sooner Audubon Society hosts than inland waterways, drawing migrants its annual Migration with early-spring shelter and food. Madness birdathon May Connecticut Audubon’s 21 wildlife sanc- 13-15. For details, or tuaries reflect that variety, from the Coastal to learn about its many Center at Milford Point to the forests, mead- other birding programs, ows, and wetlands of the 850-acre Deer go to ctaudubon.org. Pond Farm Sanctuary. But for eager springtime bird-watchers, it’s hard to beat the tiny Birdcraft Sanctuary in Fairfield: “It’s six acres surrounded by development, so in a sense it’s the only game in town for these migrating birds,” Comins says. “It concentrates them all into this one area, and sometimes you get amazing views of birds that you wouldn’t normally see.” No matter where you are, you probably won’t have trouble finding these annual visitors, many of which are in their brighter breeding plumage and singing enthusiastically to mark territory and find mates. Spring migrants generally begin arriving in Connecticut in late April; their numbers peak in mid-May, when nearly 200 species are likely to be passing through the state. Comins’s own favorite sign of spring, though, is a bona fide early bird: a type of plover called the killdeer, after its distinctive call. “They’re one of those species that are pressing the snowmelt line and trying to get as far north as possible. You can hear them as early as March, on those first warm evenings,” he says. “It always reminds me that spring is here, when I hear the killdeer flying around at night.” —J.J.

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RITE of RETURN

A sampling of spring flyers, curated with help from the pros at Connecticut Audubon.

Killdeer: Occasionally overwinters in southern New England but in general is considered an early harbinger of spring migration, with males closely following the melting snow line to find the best territory first.

American Robin: A year-round resident in parts of New England, but largely inconspicuous in winter. Come spring, robins’ numbers swell across the region and the air once again fills with their song.

Tree Swallow: The spring return of this trim little songbird, which nests across New England, is a prelude to a bigger show later on: The autumn roosting of migrating tree swallows on the lower Connecticut River—where they gather in numbers up to half a million strong—is one of the true wonders of the bird-watching world.

White-Crowned Sparrow: Though sparrows aren’t often associated with spring migration, white-crowns fly though New England each year—reaching peak numbers in Connecticut, for one, around Mother’s Day—as they head for breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic.

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I L LU ST R AT I O N S BY J O H N B U R G OY N E

Common Nighthawk: A species with one of the longest migration routes among North American birds; considered endangered in parts of New England. In mid-May, watch the skies for these migrants in late afternoon and listen for their buzzy meep calls. Blackburnian Warbler: Typically a May arrival, this spectacularly colored bird often perches high in the treetops; to locate, listen for the Blackburnian’s distinctive high-pitched series of tsee notes ending with a very high trill.

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Yellow-Rumped Warbler: One of the biggest joys of spring are the warblers. Yellow-rumps winter much farther north than most warblers and are among the first to show up in New England; can be super-abundant in peak migration. Common Loon: Though known for nesting in northern New England, loons can be seen migrating over southern areas from late March to roughly mid-May. After spring rainstorms, it’s worth checking decent-size ponds for loon sightings, along with grebes and sea ducks.

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Because I grew up spending hot summer days on a crowded Rhode Island state beach—transistor radios blasting, strangers’ blankets touching ours, salt air mixed with smells of Coppertone and fried clam cakes—as an adult I love out-ofthe-way beaches, off-season. An empty beach, when the breeze is cool and the only sounds are waves and gulls, makes me happiest these days. I am lucky that my husband, Michael, feels the same and is my boon companion, lugging our beach chairs and picnics across endless stretches of sand. That is how we came one Saturday last April to Westerly’s Napatree Point, a long, gracefully curving elbow that looks out across the ocean to Block Island and Fishers Island. The weather had finally turned warmish; we

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needed our f leeces still, but not our mittens and hats, and we spent the afternoon doing what we like best: reading and eating and gazing, our feet buried in sand. One of the perks of the beach in spring (or winter or fall) is free parking, and in Watch Hill, the part of Westerly where Napatree Point hides, this is especially wonderful. In summer, the narrow streets are jammed with cars and tourists, and parking is nearly impossible to find. But on this day, parking spaces were as plentiful as the spring sunshine. We carried our chairs and picnic across the street and then across a condominium’s parking lot to the entrance at the mouth of the beach. On one side, a long, calm stretch of sand facing away from the ocean. On the other, up a steep path and then down, the ocean side. Here waited, really, the perfect

M AT T A N D R E W / C AVA N I M AG E S

A BEACH OF

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M AT T A N D R E W / C AVA N I M AG E S

ONE’S OWN Happiness is an empty stretch of Rhode Island sand.

Sunset at Napatree Point in Westerly, Rhode Island.

beach. A lone kite surfer skittered above the waves. Only a few people walked or lounged, the sounds of tired kids and mothers, partying teens, and barking dogs replaced by the waves crashing gently. To our right: driftwood and dunes. To our left: the water glistening. Something happens to me when I step onto a beach in spring. All of the tensions of obligations big and small leave me. I mean, I feel them ooze out of me and blow away in the breeze. In their place is a calm and joy and rightness that comes, no doubt, from years and years of being by the ocean. From memories of diving headf irst into the waves and eating melting root beer Popsicles on a sandy blanket; of chasing my own kids across the sand and building sandcastles with plastic pails and Dixie cups; of quiet beach days f illed with MARCH | APRIL 2022

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walks holding my husband’s hand, then dropping into our brightly striped chairs and tilting our faces upward to meet a cool spring breeze or gray clouds or, like today, a warm sun. That’s what we did this day, grateful for this beautiful place. We walked its length and back, f leeces zipped. We sat, books open in our laps. We lifted our faces, smelled the salty air, listened to the crash of waves, closed our eyes. “This is nice,” Michael said. “Sand in our toes.” His hand found mine and held on tight. Summer, thankfully, still seemed a long way off. —Ann Hood ➼ For information on visiting Napatree Point, go to thewatchhillconservancy.org. | 81

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GOLD RUSH Sweet gifts from the New Hampshire woods.

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buckets; many others have set up miles of tubing that spiral like arteries through the forest, delivering sap straight to their sugarhouses, letting gravity do the work. A number of sugarhouses open their doors to visitors during March Maple Month. Inside, you breathe an aroma found nowhere else, the elemental alchemy of boiling sap and steam. Some will offer pancakes and waffles with the freshest maple syrup possible sitting beside the table. Go ahead, pour, and ask for seconds. There will also be syrup for sale. Take home a pint (or more) and know the sweetest gift a forest can offer. Once you do, any substitute will pale by comparison. —Mel Allen

➼ To find a New Hampshire sugarhouse or to learn more about March Maple Month, go to nhmapleproducers.com. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: In the Chichester woods, sap boiling gets

under way at Matras Maple Farm, started 20 years ago by brothers Willie and Asa Matras; a bottle of the good stuff at Heritage Farm Pancake House in Sanbornton; loading wood into the boiler at Matras Maple; flapjacks topped with ultrarich maple butter from Mack’s Maple in Plainfield; drawing off the syrup at Mack’s Maple.

JENN BAKOS

From the last days of February into the early weeks of March, when we see smoke curling above Morning Star Maple, a modest red-roofed building just east of Yankee’s offices in Dublin, New Hampshire, we know that John and Karen Keurulainen have started boiling off their maple sap—a signal that even with snow lingering in the woods, one season is losing steam and another is soon to arrive. What began more than 30 years ago as the couple’s self-described “hobby” has grown to 4,000 taps on maple trees in nearby small towns. During sugaring season they will work seemingly never-ending days collecting sap in a massive stainless steel tank, then letting heat and time evaporate the water until what remains is an amber liquid whose singular flavor has been treasured by generations stretching back to indigenous peoples. No matter where you travel throughout the state in March, you’re likely to come across a sugarhouse with smoke rising from its chimneys—some 350 maple sugar farmers belong to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association, and this is their defining time. Some still collect by hand in woods where metal taps drip sap into

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JENN BAKOS

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SHIFTING

GEARS Cycling into springtime on Vermont’s Champlain Islands.

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It’s not the Vermont that many imagine: Positioned between the Adirondacks to the west and the Green Mountains to the east, this land is f lat, with farms and barns and silos nestled close to cottages edging the water. Sometimes you feel as though you’re riding through the Midwest; other times, a breeze rushes up from the big lake and you swear you’re near the ocean. Is that salt air I smell? “My wife and I have biked all over the country, in some pretty spectacular spots,” a man from Lake George, New York, told me. “But this is as beautiful as any place we’ve seen.” Having made base camp at the North Hero House, an inn and restaurant that sits lakeside in its namesake town, we pedaled along the quiet shoreline of Isle La Motte. Then we headed south to Grand Isle’s West Shore Road, where farmland, orchards, and mountain views intersect. Our mission was simple: to meander. We picnicked at an old military fort, explored the grounds of a retired granite quarry famous for its fossils, and moseyed around the aisles at Hero’s Welcome for tchotchkes, toys, and the best made-to-order sandwiches on the

A springtime ride down West Shore Road on Isle La Motte comes with outstanding views of Lake Champlain and plenty of shoulder-season quiet.

islands. We took a load off for kidfriendly cold beverages at Kraemer & Kin, a North Hero brewery that makes its home in an old church, and made a similar stop the following afternoon in South Hero at Snow Farm Vineyard, whose property tumbles to the water’s edge. During one afternoon break, Calvin perused the titles of a book swap shop while I stretched out on the grass. Then it was time to push on to our next unplanned destination. The cycling on these islands isn’t merely a tolerated activity; it’s

COREY HENDRICKSON

We were coasting toward an intersection on Route 2 on Grand Isle when I spotted a small handpainted sign promising just the rejuvenation we needed: “Bake Shop.” Soon enough, my 10 -yea r-old son, Calvin, and I had dropped our bikes in the driveway and stepped into the prim little building that housed owner DonnaSue Shaw’s madefrom-scratch creations. Cookies, granola, cakes, mini loaves, and “go to” energy bars stocked the upright wooden boxes and shelves; meanwhile, a humming refrigerator held berry pies, along with iced coffee infused with maple syrup. After rounding up our goods, we took a seat on a bench that looked onto a fenced-in yard of chickens and ducks. Late morning, a bright sun hung in the sky, songbirds fluttered about, and the apple trees and lilacs were in full bloom. Calling an end to winter can be a dicey game in New England, but on this midMay day it finally, officially felt over. Calvin shook his head. “I think I could live here,” he said. I knew what he meant. For two days we had explored the Lake Champlain Islands on our bikes.

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COREY HENDRICKSON

part of the culture. Signs for the Lake Champlain Bikeways—a 1,60 0-mile net work that r uns through Quebec and New York— are everywhere, as is the patience of drivers, even on the busy stretches of Route 2. The islands’ roads, both paved and dirt, are well maintained. At a big farm on Grand Isle, cyclists are invited to take advantage of the “free water and air.” Come summer, Local Motion, a Burlington-based cycling advocacy group, runs a bike-specific ferry that links South Hero to the mainland. MARCH | APRIL 2022

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Put it all together, and on a prime April or May day even a few hours of cycling on these islands can pack just the right kind of spring lift after months of winter conf inement. To f inally allow some serendipity back into your life after a season of restricted movement is liberating. On the f irst day we covered 31 miles; on the second, 22. My son, who’d maybe hit only the dozen-mile mark in a single day before this trip, didn’t spend a second complaining about the distances.

But never was he happier than while sitting on that bench at DonnaSue’s bake shop, tearing of f big chun k s of homemade oatmeal bread and taking swigs of cold water. “This is pretty perfect,” he said. Indeed it was. —Ian Aldrich ➼ For Lake Champlain biking maps and ferry information, go to localmotion.org/bike_ferry. North Hero House is open year-round; for rates or to make a reservation, go to northherohouse.com. | 85

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CONVERSATIONS

KATHRINE SWITZER

ON STRIDING INTO BOSTON MARATHON HISTORY.

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I N T E RV I E W BY J O N M A R C US

It’s one of the most famous running photos in history,

and it doesn’t show a champion crossing a finish line or a brokenhearted runner-up. It’s the indelible image of a 63-year-old man trying to push a 20-year-old woman out of the Boston Marathon, contending (though gender wasn’t mentioned in the rules) that women weren’t allowed. The runner, Kathrine Switzer, eluded cantankerous race official Jock Semple that day in 1967 and finished the race; she’d signed up under the name “K.V. Switzer” and—in the cold and snowy weather—worn a baggy sweatsuit that kept her from drawing attention at the starting line. That made her the first woman to officially run Boston, the number 261 safety-pinned to her sweats. The incident helped pave the way for formal acceptance of women in the race in 1972, the first time women were invited to participate in what had been a male-only sports event. Switzer was back, among eight women (she came in third) in that epochal year for women athletes, when Title IX would also pass. Then, as organizer of the Avon Running Global Women’s Circuit, she spread the women’s running gospel worldwide. By 1984, the Olympics had added a women’s marathon, which Switzer also helped to push for, and for which she provided color commentary. Switzer won the New York City Marathon in 1974, in 3:07:29. But she was just as intent on breaking three hours in a marathon as she was on shattering barriers for women, and she did that the next year in Boston, with a personal-best time of 2:51:37. By then, it was only good for second. Today, slightly more women than men participate in running

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Jon Marcus: People forget how high the barriers were for women in sports when you were in high school and college. Kathrine Switzer: I was very, very lucky. Our high school [in Virginia] actually had girls’ sports. It wasn’t just cheerleading, although cheerleading was the ideal. We had field hockey, girls’ basketball, and girls’ softball, and that was really quite amazing. Other girls in my generation had almost nothing. Even at my high school, what was difficult was that, in general, the girls’ sports were laughed at by both boys and girls. If you participated in sports, you were considered a tomboy. So everybody wanted to be a cheerleader. J.M.: Including you. K.S.: [Laughs.] I told my father that

I wanted to be a cheerleader. And my father said, “No, you don’t. Cheerleaders cheer for other people. You want people to cheer for you.” He said, “Your school has something called field hockey, and I don’t know 88 |

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what that is but I know the girls run. And I know you can run. I know you can run a mile a day.” He measured off the yard, and that’s how I started running. When I started at the high school that autumn, I tried out for the field hockey team. And there were all these older kids, but I had run a mile a day and I felt empowered by it. It was that mile a day that changed my life. When I talk to my other friends who were in that generation, they had nothing but cheerleading. They didn’t have a mom or dad who encouraged them to run. J.M.: People thought women couldn’t physically handle long distances, or it would affect their ability to have children. K.S.: Oh, definitely. First of all, it is hard. It is long. And women who hadn’t been running, they would go out and run around the block and they would be exhausted. Everyone who’s just starting out runs the first 100 yards and they go as fast as they

can and then they feel terrible. My father told me, “Just run at a pace that’s comfortable.” A lot of my girlfriends in the neighborhood would see me out running. They would whisper to me that I was going to get big legs, I was going to turn into a man, I might start growing hair on my chest, but for sure I wasn’t going to be able to have children. I didn’t believe it for two reasons: I didn’t believe it because my dad encouraged me to do it, and if he wasn’t afraid of it, why should I be afraid of it? And the other reason was that I felt so empowered, I didn’t care what people said. J.M.: Who were your role models? Were there any at that time, for women athletes? K.S.: Not really. [Olympic sprinter] Wilma Rudolph wasn’t really a role model for me because I wasn’t a sprinter. I couldn’t go fast. My role model was actually Margot Fonteyn, who was a ballerina. As a girl I read an article about her, and she trained like a Trojan. I thought I could do that with the marathon, if you want to know the truth. It’s because of her that I always wore girly-girl outfits. I wanted to refute that image that women athletes were masculine. I wore a nice-looking outfit for ’67, but it turned out to be freezing cold. So I had to wear my crummy old sweatsuit over it. That’s probably why they didn’t stop me from starting; if it had been a warm day in Boston, I might never have been able to run. But I was disappointed, because I had really wanted to look nice. Afterward I would paint the house in that sweatsuit. J.M.: You’ve said that in high school you’d never heard of anyone running farther than three miles. Why choose distance running? K.S.: I couldn’t go very fast, but I could go forever. And the longer I ran, the better I felt. I felt quite triumphant NEWENGLAND.COM

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HARRY TR ASK, BOSTON TR AVELER/BOSTON HER ALD

events, according to the International Association of Athletics Federations, and the defending women’s marathon record has fallen to 2:14:04, set by Brigid Kosgei at the Chicago Marathon in 2019. Switzer has started a nonprofit, 261 Fearless, that seeks to empower women through running. “It results in self-esteem, in confidence, in fearlessness,” she says. “And once you feel empowered, you can leave a bad relationship, you can ask for a raise, because you have the strength to do it.” In 2017, the 50th anniversary of the Jock Semple incident, Switzer ran the Boston Marathon at 70, finishing in 4:44:31—only about 20 minutes slower than she had in 1967. Running with her were 125 women from 261 Fearless. After the race, the Boston Athletic Association retired her number in her honor.

HARRY TR ASK, BOSTON TR AVELER/BOSTON HER ALD

and fearless, really. I was at Lynchburg College for two years after high school and it was at Lynchburg that I got recruited onto the men’s track team. The coach needed somebody to run the mile. It wasn’t against the rules in that conference [for a woman to run], but it created quite a sensation. I would have preferred to have run two miles, because in the mile I was always last. I liked going far. J.M.: The idea of running Boston almost seemed to stalk you. K.S.: I transferred to Syracuse University, and they didn’t have any girls’ sports at all. So I ran as an unofficial member of the men’s track team. One of the guys on the team ran the Boston Marathon, and I was also writing for the college newspaper and I wrote an article about him. And I asked, “Did any women run?” And he said yes. [The woman was Bobbi Gibb Bingay, who ran unregistered in 1966.] And I asked, “What time did she run?” And he said about a 3:20. And I said, “What did you run?” And MARCH | APRIL 2022

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he said about a 3:40. And I said, “You let a girl beat you?” We had this volunteer coach [Arnie Briggs], and he had run 15 Boston Marathons. And he felt sorry for me because I kept getting lost, so he would run with me and always tell me another Boston Marathon story. It was marvelous to have a really experienced marathoner be my running buddy. So my interest in Boston was really getting fired up. When I said I wanted to run it, he said a woman couldn’t do it. He said, “If any woman could, you could, but I don’t think you can do it.” So that was always the goal. I was going to show him. J.M.: You entered Boston in 1967 with Briggs and some of your Syracuse teammates, leading to the famous incident in which Jock Semple tried to push you off the course. That moment took on a life of its own. How would you like it remembered? K.S.: You couldn’t have staged that if you were Cecil B. DeMille. The combination of the weather suddenly

How the infamous 1967 encounter played out, from left: Boston Marathon codirector Jock Semple charges at Kathrine Switzer … then tries to rip off her bib … before being knocked aside by runner Tom Miller.

being so ridiculously bad, officials trying to get the race started on time, everybody running around in circles trying to stay warm. I just wanted to lay low and start the marathon. And then the press truck came up beside us. And it all kind of came together at that moment. Who would have imagined that Jock Semple would have been enough of a bozo to jump off the bus in front of the press truck and come running up behind me, in front of all those cameras? I prefer to think of it as a positive moment, of the moment things began to change. As bad as it was for me, in a way it was the best thing that happened in my life. It changed women’s running forever. It was the spark that started the women’s running revolution. (Continued on p. 110) | 89

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the ephemerals IN THESE WILD WOODS, THE SPRINGTIME THINGS THAT PASS MOST QUICKLY ARE THE GREATEST TEACHERS ABOUT TIME. BY ROWAN JACOBSEN PHOTOS BY ALLISON TRENTELMAN

T O N I G H T I S T H E N I G H T . After months of thin winter air, a warm breath has blown in from somewhere south, thick with moisture, and the land starts to unfold. The maples f lush the faintest scarlet, and in the woods behind our farmhouse the spring ephemeral wildf lowers are up: trout lily, trillium, bloodroot, spring beauty, Dutchman’s breeches. At dusk, it begins. From the fen, a single, short eep, like a creaky old door. Then another, a few seconds later. It sounds both enthusiastic and unoptimistic, like the SETI folks beaming their message to extraterrestrials. Is there anybody out there? The peeper continues for half an hour as the sky darkens and a fine mist falls, and then, miracle of miracles, somebody answers. There’s another peep, and another, and soon the night is filled with them, a squeaky jam session. Spring peepers! We pad across the backyard, no lights, and follow the trail to the fen. We’ve been waiting for this, toeing the party line about how wonderful winter is, keeping a stiff upper lip through the March mud, when really all we wanted was stuff happening. And now it is. We keep quiet and still, but the closest frogs sense our presence and clam up. Farther out in the fen, though, from every reed and willow, they are peeping like mad. The sound rattles around your brain until you think you might go mad yourself, but it’s a happy spring madness, a bacchanal of mud 90 |

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and sex and blissed-out organisms. It sings to all who will listen that right now, this is the place to be. That’s how we felt when we moved into the old farmhouse 18 falls ago. We arrived just in time to watch the hillsides oxidize bronze and gold, then hung on tight through the dark and cold until spring came. Suddenly there were peeps in the fen and mysterious f lowers in the woods. We felt like newbies at an old New England summer colony. The Maples and the Robins and the Birches had been here for generations. This is how we do it, they seemed to be saying. The house itself had seen 175 summers. We just tried to fit in. The peeps pipe down at dawn. We follow the trail past the fen, listening to the churr of red-winged blackbirds— always one of the first arrivals—camped out on last year’s cattails. In the woods, we search for spring ephemerals, the tiny ground-huggers that make the briefest of appearances. With no leaves in the canopy, the mossy ground glistens with light. We stoop to examine trout lilies, their leaves speckled like brookies. Here’s a patch of pink-veined spring beauties, intensely perfumed if you get your nose right down next to them. We even spot some Dutchman’s breeches, whose puffy white petals everyone compares to pants hanging on a clothesline, but remind us of pantalooned acrobats in mid-split. Let’s face it: A month from now, when lilacs and crab apples are drenching the landscape in scent and color, these pipsqueaks wouldn’t merit a second glance. But right now they are the only game in town—which, of course, is their whole plan. These little forest flowers live their entire life cycle—sprout, f lower, get pollinated, go to seed, disappear—before the trees have even leafed out. The sun is all theirs, as are the few bugs. In a few weeks, we’ll never know they were here. The ephemerals have always seemed like the weirdest residents of the summer colony: Arrive when it’s still nasty out, and then vanish just as things are getting nice. Why not stay all summer like the Robins and the Roses? But the more springs I get to know them, the more I learn the lesson they have to teach. As we climb the muddy trail through the woods, signs of time are everywhere. Old cellar holes. Centurion apple trees. Slate-lined springs dug by some determined soul. From the top of the hill, we look down on our house and fields. Anywhere I dig in those fields, I come up with cans, wires, and old tools. We live atop the ruins of an earlier culture. Heck, when we bought the place, the f lagstone basement was filled with the knickknacks of that earlier culture. For decades the house was occupied by a couple who ran the 92 |

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local hardware store, and they were serious pack rats. They hoarded the tools and trinkets that f lowed through their store, and they also bought up the houses and land around them. Quirky and colorful, they were a local institution, the character of the place ... and then they were gone and forgotten, a mossy headstone in the country cemetery, their reign as evanescent as this year’s spring beauties. Beneath a stand of ash we discover a carpet of white bloodroot blossoms, their leaves wrapped around their stems like capes. When I see these pioneer plants pushing their noses up through the last bits of frost, I picture the New England of 12,000 years ago, when a warming world thawed the glaciers and released the land. For 90,000 years before that, there wasn’t much going on around here. This place was dead. When the first humans arrived, chasing the caribou that were chasing the tundra, there were still no trees, just rocks and sedge. We predate the forest. Hike the White Mountains above treeline and you’ll get a sense of that landscape. The first trees—cold-loving spruces and firs— didn’t arrive for millennia. Hike the White Mountains a thousand feet lower and you’ll get a sense of that landscape. Keep dropping toward the valley f loor and you’ll be fastforwarding history as the birches and aspens arrive, then beech and maple, and finally oaks. Sometimes I play that history in my mind, the milehigh rivers of ice bulldozing the earth, then retreating in a gush of silty meltwater, the first shrubs popping up and the caribou herds flowing across the land, human hunters behind them. Then, as the sun and moon whir overhead and the snows come and go, but mostly go, the first trees pioneer the tundra, and soon the new forests march up the river valleys and over the hills, all the species of the mixed woods swirling together and jockeying for territory, water welling up through bedrock to form the fens, frogs f lickering in and out of existence like specks on an old movie reel, and then, late in the film, the settlements come up the same river valleys, men with axes clacking like windup toys, grasses and sheep chasing the forests back to the most inaccessible slopes, towns edging out from the rivers, until, in the last few seconds of the film, the men with axes disappear, the sheep disappear, the old houses melt into the earth, and the forests come f lowing back down the hillsides and over the cellar holes. And here we are, the latest arrivals to this wild interglacial happening. Like all recent arrivals, we assume that everyone else has been here forever. But we’re all newbies. Us, the old hardware couple, and the honeybees and dandelions before them. Even the birches. These forests NEWENGLAND.COM

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are still jockeying for the best plots, and they will continue scrapping as the climate warms. They’re still making up the rules as they go. The methuselah maple near the farmhouse died last year; the oak tree had its first acorns. With its craggy granite peaks and weathered farmhouses, New England can feel ancient, but it is eternally new. We are less an old summer colony than a sudden summer party. The next night is even warmer—strangely warm, in fact—and the chorus intensifies. The peepers start raging at twilight, joined by clucking wood frogs and a piping thrush. We hover on the muddy edge of it all, wishing we had a tent. It feels like the beginning of something important, but it MARCH | APRIL 2022

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might just as easily be the end of something sweet and brief, the kind of thing I’ll report to my perplexed grandkids years from now. “Hey, man,” I’ll say, “I heard the blackbirds and the peepers. I was there.” The point, as the spring ephemerals teach, is to keep your perspective. We may be stardust, but we aren’t frozen right now. In weeks, the peepers will have gone silent and the spring beauties will again retreat into the earth. Not so long after that, we’ll follow. Things will keep changing, and the next generation to arrive will look around the place and assume what is, is. And they’ll be wrong. It’s never been like this, and it never will be again. | 93

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Hard-Pressed

trim 85, in his trademark blue blazer, tasseled loafers, and wire-rim glasses, Phil Camp strolls across Elm Street to the general store in downtown Woodstock, Vermont, to replenish the supply of coffee for his off ice, returning the smiles and waves of everyone he passes. “He’s like the mayor of Woodstock,” a colleague says with a laugh. The store was founded in 1886, making it an upstart compared to the weekly newspaper Camp owns, the Vermont Standard, which since 1853 has chronicled local triumphs and tragedies, births and deaths, Little League scores and garden club meetings, high school graduations, business openings, and petty crimes. The Standard occupies the building it once shared w ith Camp’s grandfather’s funeral home. Back then, the presses had to be shut down when there was a funeral because the floor would shake so much. “It really was that homespun,” he remembers. 94 |

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Still is. There’s the smell of ink and newsprint from the bundles of back issues on the floor, and a handwritten list of next week’s advertisers thumbtacked to a bulletin board. The newspaper moved back here after surviving a f lood in 2011 in one rented off ice when the Ottauquechee River overf lowed, then a fire in another in 2018. Now it’s trying to surmount another threat: the destructive changes to an industry threatened by shifting reader habits, shrinking advertising, and acquisitions by distant corporations that starve newspapers of their resources and strip them of their assets. Those challenges are as urgent in New England as anywhere else. But something else is happening here. New Englanders still disproportionally support their local newspapers, far fewer of which have closed than in the rest of the country. Circulation rose during the Covid-19 pandemic, when readers were reminded of the value of local news; many even sent in unsolicited donations. There are fewer “news deserts”—places with no local media outlets at all. Nonprofits and student journalists are stepping in to fill what gaps exist. And wealthy residents in places from Nantucket to the Berkshires to Harpswell, Maine, are taking over or buying back their community newspapers, or starting new ones. Camp was among the first. After leaving to make his fortune in the ski industry, he came home and bought the local paper he had once delivered

from a wagon as a kid. He still subsidizes it to the tune of about $3,000 every time it prints its weekly edition, according to his publisher, Dan Cotter. “It’s a hell of a way to make any money. I learned that the hard way,” Camp says. But there’s a broader debt he says he’s trying to repay. The local newspaper is the glue that pulls together towns like his, keeps their residents connected, supports their businesses, and holds their powerful accountable. “I was born and raised here,” he says. “This town made me what I am. I got a lot of breaks. They passed the hat at Rotary to raise my university tuition. This is a very small way of saying thanks.” Camp lets out a rare burst of anger when asked what would happen if he and people like him didn’t keep alive the tradition of the local newspaper. “Some vultures would come in and find a way to put out a rag,” he says contemptuously. The vultures Camp is talking about, along with other economic, social, and technological realities, have already cost the nation onequarter of its newspapers, including more than 2,000 weeklies, since 2004. About 90 shut down during the pandemic. Of those that remain, many have been scooped up and pared down by national chains and hedge funds with few ties to the communities they cover, such as Gannett, which owns 613 papers; Digital First/Tribune (207); and Lee/BH Media (170).

A N N A W A T T S ( C A M P, D A W S O N ) ; G R E T A R Y B U S ( B R O W E R )

With New England’s long tradition of small-town newspapers under threat, communities and journalists are fighting to stick together and stay informed. BY JON MARCUS

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A N N A W A T T S ( C A M P, D A W S O N ) ; G R E T A R Y B U S ( B R O W E R )

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP : Phil Camp looks over issues of the Vermont Standard, the c. 1853 newspaper he bought in his hometown of Woodstock, Vermont; MaineToday Media owner Reade Brower outside the Free Press offices in Rockland, Maine; Cory Dawson, editor of the University of Vermont’s Community News Service, which pairs budding reporters with local newspapers.

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New England hasn’t been entirely spared from this dramatic downturn. Massachusetts and Connecticut have been favorite hunting grounds for the big chains, which have bought up (and in some cases shut down) large numbers of newspapers there and left many others ghosts of what they once were. Fifty-five weeklies in Connecticut and 67 in Massachusetts closed between 2004 and 2019, and another seven—six of them owned by Gannett—during the pandemic. Others

have reduced the number of days they publish, laid off staff, outsourced content, or gone partly or fully digital. Elsewhere in the region, though, the losses have been much, much smaller. Of the thousands of newspapers closed nationwide since 2004, 12 were in Maine, three in Vermont, two in New Hampshire, and one in Rhode Island. Only four daily newspapers out of 81 in New England shut down in that period. And while the South has 91 counties with no media outlet at all,

New England has but one. That’s by far the smallest number of any region in the country. Those familiar plastic tubes still stand next to a vast number of mailboxes along New England country roads awaiting delivery of the local paper. Journalists still labor on, in offices that look like Norman Rockwell prints in towns that could be settings for Frank Capra films. Half of their readers say the local news they get is still relevant and useful—two

Cory Dawson ( FAR RIGHT) on the UVM campus in Burlington with some of his student journalists: ( BACK ROW, FROM LEFT) Noah Lafaso, Jenny Koppang, Sofi Mendez, Douglas Phinney, and ( FRONT ROW, FROM LEFT) Abbie Kopelowitz and Ayden Carpenter.

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A N N A WAT T S (U V M , C A M P) ; TO N Y LU O N G ( R O E S SN E R , N E W B E D F O R D)

“This town made me what I am,” says Camp, adding that his paper, the Vermont Standard, “is a very small way of saying thanks.” and a half times the proportion of their fellow Americans who think so. “You may be a son of a gun, in their opinion, but you’re their son of a gun,” says Earl Brechlin, retired editor of the Bar Harbor Times in Maine. “People here see newspapers as part of the fabric of their communities,” he adds. “A lot of the newspapers in New England are older than many towns in other parts of the United States.” It was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638, that the first printer in Britain’s American colonies set up shop. The first newspaper was in Boston. With the advancement of the steam-powered printing press in the 1820s, newspapers got so cheap that even the lowest-paid workers in New England’s fast-growing industrial cities could afford to buy one. Scores of them did; Massachusetts and Connecticut as early as the mid-17th century required that everyone be taught to read, and literacy was widespread. There were huge numbers of newspapers, with massive circulations. At one point, Boston had nine dailies; just one of them, the Boston Post, had 628,000 subscribers. MARCH | APRIL 2022

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Barbara Roessner, a Pulitzer Prize– winning former managing editor of the Hartford Courant, today leads the New Bedford Light, a nonprofit news site that launched last year in an old textile mill ( BELOW ) in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

ntiment. In places where local newspaper circulation falls, one study found, so does voter turnout. In cities and towns where newspapers close or have been hollowed out, government efficiency declines, taxes rise, and municipal borrowing costs increase, anoth

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Harvard research fellow Heidi Legg works on the school’s Future of Media Project, which looks for ways to “rebalance truth, privacy, and power in the media industry.”

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In places where local newspaper circulation falls, one study found, so does voter turnout. 50 volunteers stepped up in March to move the 400 bound green volumes of back issues in a human chain to the town’s history museum. Brechlin remembers one group of coastal Maine towns losing their newspaper after it was bought by new owners, before someone else stepped in to revive it. “Those towns didn’t have a paper for a couple of weeks,” he says. “And I think people realized, Oh, crap, this is important to us.” So what happens when the newspapers disappear for good?

When a hurricane in

August took aim at the densely populated coastal city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, whose fishing f leet is the largest in America, Mayor Jon

Mitchell called a news conference to detail the precautions that were planned. When he looked out from the podium on that anxious Saturday morning, Mitchell saw a handful of mostly out-of-town reporters. But he was struck by who was absent. The local newspaper, the StandardTimes, had no one in attendance. “Our newspaper was not there,” says Mitchell. “They just didn’t show up. Impending natural disaster, the mayor calls a press conference, and they weren’t there.” He sounds incredulous, but the mayor wasn’t really that surprised. The newspaper, which dates back in one form or another to 1850, had been hemorrhaging reporters as it bounced from one national owner to another; the newsroom directory lists five reporters and editors and a photographer, down from 50. Now the property of Virginia-based Gannett, the Standard-Times produces rewritten news releases and covers high school sports, its critics say, but offers almost none of the kind of watchdog journalism that communities need from their newspapers. Even politicians, often targets of that scrutiny, are alarmed about this trend. “Local newspapers play an indispensable role in not only holding public officials accountable—and maybe that’s why so few have spoken up about the problem—but more fundamentally they establish a bulwark of trust in a community,” says Mitchell, a former federal prosecutor. So important does he consider this that Mitchell made it part of his annual state-of-the-city address, asking people to support the StandardTimes: “Your city needs it to function effectively.” When things still didn’t improve, he encouraged a group of local investors to buy the paper, but Gannett wouldn’t sell. “We’re in a situation now where much of the narrative of Greater New Bedford isn’t being told by anybody,” Mitchell says. “That leaves the door open for less

SUS A N L A P I D E S ( L E G G) ; G R E TA R Y B US ( B R O W E R )

“For 250 years this culture on the East Coast has been super-steeped in reading,” says Heidi Legg, a research fellow at the Future of Media Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It’s a culture that craves and elevates this sense of being literate and being informed.” Civic life is also more hands-on here. The tradition of town meeting in particular brings together everyone in a community. “There’s a level of civic engagement you don’t have in a lot of other places. You’re going to get up and argue about $10 a year for extra chalk,” says Brechlin. Local newspapers are essential to this system, says Penelope Muse Abernathy, a scholar of news deserts and ghost newspapers and a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, who rode out much of the pandemic in Vermont. “You rely on that newspaper to let you know what’s going on.” Such essential chroniclers of local history are they that when the Clinton Item in Massachusetts closed its office,

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SUS A N L A P I D E S ( L E G G) ; G R E TA R Y B US ( B R O W E R )

A colorful character whose early days in newspapers included selling ads in a T-shirt, flip-flops, and an orange bathing suit in the summers, Reade Brower now owns several papers in Maine and Vermont, including the flagship Portland Press Herald.

government accountability. It may not be in my enlightened political self-interest, but it’s something that my city needs.” The importance of community journalism is about more than nostalgia and sentiment. In places where local newspaper circulation falls, one study found, so does voter turnout. In cities and towns where newspapers close or have been hollowed out, government efficiency declines, taxes rise, and municipal borrowing costs increase, another study showed. Yet other research suggests that, by focusing on local issues that cross party lines, local newspapers blunt the spread of political polarization. What happens in a small city or town, after all, often has more immediate impact on people’s lives than what happens in Washington. John Barrett remembers parrying with reporters from three different papers during the 26 years that he was mayor of North Adams, Massachusetts. “They were there every day,” says Barrett, now a state representative. “They were watching government very closely, and you know MARCH | APRIL 2022

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what? It made me a better public official and it kept me on my toes.” Then a series of owners bought the daily North Adams Transcript, which ended up disappearing as an independent newspaper and being merged into the Berkshire Eagle. “Now it’s not unusual that school committee meetings aren’t covered, planning boards aren’t covered, and so much is being lost. And the people paying the price are the ones that are living in the communities, who relied upon the newspaper,” Barrett says. “I had my battles with editors. I can get in arguments with reporters as well as anybody. But I miss that. All I hear today in politics is, ‘We need transparency.’ Well, we have transparency when we have newspapers.”

With the weekly

edition of the Addison County Independent written and laid out—“put to bed,” in journalism parlance—and on its way to front stoops all over town, Angelo Lynn takes a breath in the corner office of the onetime toothbrush bristle factory on the far edge of downtown Middlebury, Vermont,

that houses the newspaper and several others Lynn and his family run. He writes the editorials and some of the stories, edits The Reporter, and sells ads. His wife, Lisa Gosselin, a former state commerce commissioner and magazine industry veteran who previously worked at Audubon, Islands, Bicycling, EatingWell, and Skiing, is the editor and publisher of Vermont Sports and VT Ski+Ride, two regional magazines that help keep the company afloat. One of their three daughters, Polly Lynn Mikula, is co-publisher and editor of the Mountain Times in Killington; her sisters, Christy Lynn and Elsie Lynn, are advertising manager for the Independent and the Reporter and graphics designer, arts and leisure reporter, human resources manager, bookkeeper, and IT guru, respectively. Mikula’s husband, Jason, is the advertising manager at the Mountain Times. In a conference room on whose shelves are strewn antique cameras and bound back issues, they laugh (Continued on p. 118) | 99

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Long Live the Deli (Continued from p. 58)

FROM-SCRATCH MATZO BALL SOUP

The Mamaleh’s team tried many variations on matzo balls before deciding on one that closely resembles a recipe from a close family friend of Rachel Sundet’s named Miriam Freidin, who has since passed away. “There’s a nice feeling that comes from keeping somebody’s recipe going,” Sundet says. The beauty of this recipe is that every part of the chicken thighs gets used: bones for the stock, meat for the stock and the soup, and rendered fat for the matzo balls. You can even enjoy the crisp cracklings, also known as gribenes. FOR THE STOCK

5 pounds bone-in chicken thighs 5 large carrots, peeled and roughly chopped, plus 4 large carrots, peeled and diced 4 medium onions (about 1 pound), peeled and roughly chopped 4 celery stalks (about ½ pound), roughly chopped, plus 3 celery stalks, diced 3 cloves garlic 8 sprigs fresh parsley 2 bay leaves 3 sprigs fresh thyme 1 tablespoon black peppercorns Salt, to taste Minced chives or parsley, for garnish

inches. Cover pot, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a very low simmer (do not boil, or the stock will be cloudy). For maximum flavor, cook for at least 3 hours and up to 12. When finished, cool at room temperature for 30 minutes, then refrigerate until ready to use. Meanwhile, lay the chicken skin and fat in a large skillet over medium heat. When the skin starts to sizzle, reduce heat to medium-low and slowly render the fat from the skin. Keep cooking, turning occasionally, until the skin is brown and very crisp, 20 to 30 minutes. Strain the fat into a measuring cup to cool. If you’d like, you can dry the chicken cracklings on paper towels, salt them, and use them as you would bacon. Now, make the matzo balls: Take the chicken fat and add enough olive oil or vegetable oil to reach ½ cup. In a large bowl, whisk the fat together with the eggs. Add the matzo meal, salt, and ¼ cup chicken stock. Mix well. The mixture should feel a bit like Play-Doh. Wet your hands and form the dough into balls roughly the size of ping-pong balls. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes and up to overnight. When you’re ready to put the soup together, cook the matzo balls in a large pot of salted water for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, remove the chicken from the stock and set aside, strain out the vegetables and herbs, and return the clear stock to the pot. Bring to a simmer. Add the 4 diced carrots and 3 diced celery stalks and cook until just tender, for 10 to 15 minutes. Just before serving, pull the chicken meat off the bones and add it to the pot along with the cooked matzo balls. Add salt to taste, and serve hot with a sprinkling of chives or parsley. Yields 8 to 10 servings.

FOR THE MATZO BALLS

½ cup melted chicken fat or a combination of vegetable oil and chicken fat 5 large eggs, lightly beaten 2 cups matzo meal 1½ teaspoons kosher salt ¼ cup chicken stock

First, make the stock: Remove the skin and extra fat from the chicken thighs and set aside. Layer the 5 chopped carrots, onions, 4 chopped celery stalks, and garlic cloves in the bottom of a 7-to-9-quart stock pot and lay the chicken thighs on top. Add parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and peppercorns. Cover with water by 2 100 |

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NOODLE KUGEL

“Between all of our families, there are a lot of recipes of what kugel should be,” Sundet says. This version comes from Ellie Feldman, who lives on Long Island and is Alon Munzer’s sister’s mother-in-law. “At first, I thought cornflakes on top sounded ridiculous,” Miller Munzer says, “ but it’s really good—it gives that little extra crunch, a little extra texture.”

4 tablespoons salted butter, melted, plus more for greasing pan 1¾ cups sour cream ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar 8 ounces farmer cheese 3 large eggs ½ cup heavy cream 1 teaspoon table salt 12 ounces (1 bag) cooked wide egg noodles ½ teaspoon cinnamon 2 cups cornflakes cereal, lightly crushed

Preheat oven to 350° and set a rack to the middle position. Butter a 9-by-13-inch baking dish and set aside. In a la rge mi x ing bowl, whisk together the sour cream, ½ cup sugar, 4 tablespoons butter, farmer cheese, eggs, cream, and salt until smooth. Fold in the cooked noodles. Pour into prepared pan. In a small bowl, stir together 2 tablespoons sugar with the cinnamon. Top the noodles with cornf lakes and then sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar. Bake until the top is puffed slightly and the edges have turned a golden brown, about 35 to 45 minutes. Yields 8 to 10 servings.

CHEF’S SALAD WITH MANISCHEWITZ VINAIGRETTE

This streamlined version of Mamaleh’s signature Big Salad is fresh, delicious, and filling. Using the famous (or is it infamous?) Manischewitz kosher wine in the vinaigrette is a fun way to use up an old bottle from Passover. If you don’t have any on hand, you can always omit it and add an extra teaspoon of sugar to the vinaigrette. Halloumi cheese, which can be seared without melting, is available in most supermarkets and adds a terrific creamy/salty note. FOR THE VINAIGRETTE

¼ ¹⁄ 3 2 1 1 ½ ½ ½

cup Manischewitz Concord grape wine cup red wine vinegar teaspoons mustard teaspoon sugar small clove garlic, minced teaspoon dried oregano teaspoon kosher salt cup olive oil

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FOR THE SALAD

½ small red onion, thinly sliced 10 ounces mixed salad greens, washed and dried ½ medium English cucumber (about 4 ounces), very thinly sliced 5 large radishes, very thinly sliced ¼ cup chopped parsley ¼ cup chopped mint 3 tablespoons chopped scallion 1 tablespoon olive oil 8 ounces halloumi cheese, cut into ¹⁄ 3-inch-thick slices 8 ounces smoked turkey breast, cubed 3 large medium- or hard-boiled eggs, peeled and sliced lengthwise

First, make the vinaigrette: In a small saucepan, simmer the Manischewitz until reduced by half, about 4 minutes. Put that into a jar along with the vinegar, mustard, sugar, garlic, oregano, salt, and oil. Shake well until combined. Set aside. Next, prepare the salad: Soak the sliced onion in cold water for 10 minutes. Drain and set aside. Meanwhile, arrange the greens in one large bowl or divide among 6 individual serving bowls. Top with the cucumber, radish slices, herbs, chopped scallion, and onion slices. Set a nonstick skillet over mediumhigh heat and add the olive oil. Swirl to coat. Lay the halloumi slices in the pan and let them cook undisturbed until browned on one side, about 2 minutes. Repeat on the other side. Transfer these slices to the salad along with the turkey and the eggs. Serve with dressing on the side. Yields 6 servings.

BLACK-AND-WHITE COOKIES

This Jewish bakery staple is to many Jews what madeleines were to Proust. They invoke a lifetime of memories. FOR THE COOKIES

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature ¾ cup granulated sugar 2 large eggs, at room temperature 1½ teaspoons freshly grated lemon zest ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

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1½ 1¼ ¼ ½ ¾

cups cake flour cups all-purpose flour teaspoon baking powder teaspoon table salt cup milk

FOR THE VANILLA GLAZE

1 tablespoon boiling water 1 cup confectioners’ sugar Pinch salt FOR THE CHOCOLATE GLAZE

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped 1 teaspoon light corn syrup 1 cup confectioners’ sugar 3 tablespoons boiling water 1 tablespoon cocoa powder Pinch salt

Preheat oven to 350° (325° if using convection) and set racks to the upper and lower positions. Line two baking sheets with parchment and set aside. In a large bowl, using a standing or hand mixer, cream the butter and sugar until truly pale and f luffy, 5 to 7 minutes, stopping to scrape down the sides several times during the mixing. Add the eggs, one at a time, scraping the sides after each addition. Add the vanilla and lemon zest and stir. In a medium bowl, whisk together the cake f lour, all-purpose f lour, baking powder, and salt. Add a third of this mixture to the butter mixture and mix on low speed just until smooth. Add half the milk and mix until smooth. Repeat these steps with the dry ingredients, then the rest of the milk, then the remaining dry ingredients. Use a standard ice cream scoop, ¹⁄3 -cup measure, or a large spoon to scoop out 2½-to-3-ounce portions of cookie dough onto the prepared cookie sheets, with about 2 inches between them. Bake, rotating the sheets halfway through, until the cookies are firm and the edges are just golden brown, 13 to 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool completely. Meanwhile, make the glazes: For the white glaze, whisk the water into the sugar and salt. The glaze should be thin enough to spread but not drippy. For the chocolate glaze, melt the chocolate and corn syrup together in a double boiler, stirring often. Whisk in the sugar, water, cocoa powder, and salt. The chocolate glaze should have a similar texture to the white. If not, add some more boiling water, a teaspoon at a time. To glaze the cookies, begin with the white icing. Drop a dollop of icing on the top right side of a cookie with

an offset spatula or butter knife, then spread it down the right side, keeping the center line as straight as possible. Clean up any drips on the edges. Repeat with remaining cookies. When the f irst layer of white icing has set, use the chocolate icing to coat the left sides in the same way, with a straight line down the center. Let that set, then apply a final coat of the white if needed to even out the two sides. Let the icing set, then serve. Yields about 18 cookies.

MAMALEH’S HOME-CURED LOX

Store-bought lox can be quite pricey, and you can get a terrific, more economical result by making it at home. Just be sure to buy highquality salmon from a vendor you trust. 2 pounds high-quality skin-on, boneless salmon filet ¾ cup kosher salt ½ cup granulated sugar ¼ cup chopped fresh dill Zest of 1 lemon 1 teaspoon ground coriander 1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper

Clean salmon f ilet and pat dry. In a medium bowl, stir together the salt, sugar, dill, zest, coriander, and pepper. Line a small sheet pan with plastic wrap and sprinkle with a thin layer of the salt mixture in the same shape as the salmon filet. Lay the salmon, skin side down, on top of the salt mixture. Cover salmon with the remaining salt mixture and wrap tightly in plastic. Cover with a plate and weigh the plate down with something that weighs about two pounds (cans of tomato puree are good here). Transfer the pan to the refrigerator and let it cure for 3 to 4 days, opening up the package each day to baste the filet in the accumulated juices. W hen the f lesh beg ins to look opaque, rinse off the salt mixture and pat dry. Lay the filet on a wire rack and set in the sheet pan. Refrigerate the salmon, uncovered, overnight to let the f lesh dry. Slice thinly on the bias to serve. Lox will keep for up to a week. Yields 6 to 8 servings. | 101

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(Continued from p. 71) Still mounted over the fireplaces and on walls, these masterpieces feel as accessible to visitors as they were to the home’s original residents. For a true insider experience, check into Hill-Stead’s two-hour private tour: Offered on select Saturdays, it provides full access to the mansion’s nearly 20 historically intact rooms and is typically led by Hill-Stead’s curator or director of education. hillstead.org THE MARK TWAIN HOUSE & MUSEUM, MAP ILLUSTR ATION BY M I C H A E L B Y E R S

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Hartford. Though we generally ascribe qualities of modesty and frugality to New England’s old houses, this magnificent 25-room Victorian High Gothic home speaks of Hartford’s heyday as a commercial powerhouse, while its exuberance expresses its famous owner’s larger-than-life personality. Filled with art and artifacts including Tiffany glass and many original furnishings, the house—which Time has dubbed “Downton Abbey’s American cousin”—displayed the latest in modern innovations when it was built in 1874. Docent-led tours take visitors through all three f loors and offer a peek at everything from the library where Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) recited poetry, told stories, and read excerpts from his new works to his family and friends, to the modest room where the family’s butler often stayed when his duties kept him late. Note: Tours sell out well in advance, so book early online. marktwainhouse.org ROSELAND COTTAGE, Woodstock. While there’s no missing this vibrant pink Gothic Revival beauty that welcomed four American presidents to its Fourth of July picnics (Ulysses S. Grant once bowled on the long lane out back), not all of the rich historical details of the c. 1846 dwelling are so easily seen. There are regular guided tours of the main living space—largely unchanged from the Victorian era and featuring beautiful wall coverings, carpets, and stained glass—but the home’s owner, Historic New England, is also known to arrange “behind the scenes” specialty tours that include rare looks at the attic, cellar, kitchen, and servants’ quarters, as well as outbuildings such as the icehouse and woodshed. Open seasonally; historicnewengland.org/ property/roseland-cottage

MAINE CASTLE TUCKER, Wiscasset. Built in the

Regency style in 1807, this gracious brick mansion was bought some 50

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years later by shipping agent Captain Richard Tucker Jr. and redecorated and furnished to suit the tastes of the Victorian era. Preserved by three generations of Tucker women, Castle Tucker is little changed from how it looked in 1900; filled with actual family furnishings and décor, it is one of the most complete and original Victorian homes in the nation. In addition to regular tours during the regular operating season (Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from June to mid-October), the property reveals its secrets on occasional “Behind Closed Doors” tours, which provides access to rooms and connecting spaces otherwise not seen by the public. Open seasonally; historicnewengland.org/property/ castle-tucker VICTORIA MANSION, Portland. Facing demolition in 1940, this grand Italian Villa–style residence was saved from the fate of being remembered only in photographs by a retired educator, Dr. William Holmes, who fell under its spell, bought it, and led its transformation into a house museum. Now considered the country’s most magnificently ornamented dwelling of its period, it retains about 90 percent of its original Gustave Herter furnishings, which heightens the sense of stepping back into the Gilded Age in which the original owners lived. And these days, you can look even deeper into the lavish rooms than in years past, as the visitors’ areas have been enlarged to allow for greater social distancing. Guided tours are offered most days, but for the price of a museum membership (starting at $35 for individuals), you can also join in exclusive events throughout the year, including tours that venture into such areas as the third-f loor rooms, the servants’ quarters, and even the tower. Open seasonally; victoriamansion.org

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MASSACHUSETTS BEAUPORT, THE SLEEPER-MCCANN HOUSE, Gloucester. In a region rich in

historic homes, this is a crown jewel: a 40-room summer residence designed and built by Henry Davis Sleeper, one of America’s first professional interior designers, in 1907–1908. He conceived of Beauport as a series of showrooms, each done in a different style, from early colonial to Arts and Crafts to chinoiserie. It’s like entering a life-size dollhouse, a portal to a more glamorous era (no wonder Isabella Stewart Gardner was a frequent guest). The McCann family, who bought the house shortly after Sleeper’s death in 1934, made few changes, leaving the

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property largely intact when it was acquired by Historic New England in 1942. Look for the specialty “Nooks and Crannies Tour,” an in-depth, threehour exploration of Beauport right down to the closets and other spaces not usually open to the public, during which guides highlight their favorite objects and share stories about Sleeper, his friends, and staff. Open seasonally; historicnewengland.org/property/ beauport-sleeper-mccann-house GIBSON HOUSE MUSEUM, Boston. Home to three generations of one well-to-do family before becoming a museum in 1957, this gorgeously preserved 1859 row house in Boston’s historic Back Bay neighborhood was a bit of a hidden gem until its star turn in the 2019 film adaptation of Little Women. That brush with Hollywood inspired its popular specialty tour, “The World of Little Women at the Gibson House,” which treats visitors to stories of the movie’s filming and explores areas of the house not usually on view, including the fifth-f loor servants’ quarters that stood in for Jo March’s boardinghouse bedroom. That said, even the standard tours of the Gibson House offer a don’t-miss timecapsule experience of life both upstairs and downstairs in the 19th and early 20th centuries. thegibsonhouse.org OLD HOUSE AT PEACEFIELD, Quincy. Few places connect the present to the past as seamlessly as Adams National Historical Park, whose 11 buildings include the birthplaces of America’s second and sixth presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams; the magnificent c. 1870 Stone Library, containing more than 14,000 antique volumes; and Old House at Peacefield. The last is the showstopper: A Georgian-style mansion whose 21 rooms speak to more than 140 years of Adams family history, it is filled with a stunning array of original furnishings, from John Adams’s favorite chair, to White House china from both Adams administrations, to the canopied bed in which former First Lady Abigail Adams died of typhoid fever in 1818. And while visitors may not be able to get up close with the precious artifacts, the sense of intimacy with history here is profound. Note: Closed in 2021, Old House at Peacefield is planned to reopen to the public this May. Adams houses are open seasonally; nps.gov/adam THE OLD MANSE, Concord. Don’t let the austere clapboard facade fool you: This c. 1770 two-story Georgian swirls with the drama of our nation’s early years. Perched near the Concord River, it overlooks the North Bridge,

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where the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired. The upstairs study is ground zero for another revolution, the Transcendentalist shift in thought, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his landmark essay, “Nature,” here. Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and his new bride, Sophia, etched verses on windowpanes; Henry David Thoreau planted a vegetable garden. But another chapter in the Old Manse story was opened in 2008, when the Trustees of Reservations began leading tours into the building’s attic, giving visitors a rare look at the lives of those who dwelled there: older children of the household, students and ministers, servants, and enslaved people. thetrustees.org/place/ the-old-manse

Make your own adventure.

NEW HAMPSHIRE CASTLE IN THE CLOUDS, Moultonborough.

Built on a mountainside overlooking New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, the stunning Arts and Crafts–style former home of manufacturing tycoon Thomas Plant is an irresistible lure for architecture and history buffs. The Tiffany glass, the book-filled library, the big billiard table, the guest room Teddy Roosevelt slept in—it’s all still there, along with what just might be the finest views from any house in New Hampshire. To learn what lies beneath, though, pony up a little extra for the 45-minute “Basement Tour,” which covers the highlights of the Castle’s unique construction in 1914, the “ultramodern” appliances and amenities of the time, and the lives of the servants who helped run and manage the estate in the 1910s and 1920s. Open seasonally; castleintheclouds.org

KALIL AND ZIMMERMAN HOUSES,

Manchester. Getting inside the only two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in New England that are open to the public can take planning and patience, but it’s worth it. The buildings’ owner, the Currier Museum of Art, offers intimate, immersive small-group tours that let visitors explore these rare properties inside and out, with docents on hand to share historical insights and answer questions. Both the Kalil House and the Zimmerman House, built in the 1950s, boast original Wright-designed furnishings; further heightening the back-in-time feel at the Zimmerman House is the former owners’ personal collection of sculpture, pottery, and Japanese art. Note: Tours are offered April to December; reservations are required (and booking in advance is strongly recommended). currier.org/ frank-lloyd-wright

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T HINGS TO DO IN NE W ENGL A ND

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RHODE ISLAND HEARTHSIDE HOUSE, Lincoln. Stephen

Hopkins Smith poured a $40,000 lottery windfall and four years of painstaking effort into constructing a fieldstone mansion worthy of the city girl who’d captured his heart. Alas, after the c. 1810 residence was completed, she took one look and pronounced its rural setting intolerable. But that wasn’t a problem for the 11 different owners who chose to make their home in Rhode Island’s “house that love built” over the next 180-plus years, and whose stories are told by tour guides in period costumes who lead visitors through all the rooms, which have been decorated to represent the owners’ different eras. Even the attic has treasure to reveal: centuries-old looms where weavers labored to produce hand-made textiles. Open seasonally; hearthsidehouse.org NEWPORT MANSIONS, Newport. Attracting more than a million visitors from around the world each year, Newport Mansions is the undisputed grand dame of New England’s house museums. Run by the Preservation Society of Newport County, this collection of 11 historic properties features legendary turn-of-thecentury “summer cottages” of wealthy industrialists such as the Breakers, a sprawling 1895 mansion where the Vanderbilts entertained their company (think: 10-course dinners for 100 guests, with a footman behind each chair). While the Newport Mansions operating schedule and visiting options have varied during the pandemic, behind-the-scenes tours have traditionally included “Beneath the Breakers,” which leads visitors into the underground tunnel, boiler room, and basement at Newport’s most famous Gilded Age mansion; and “Servant Life at the Elms,” which travels from roof to basement in telling the stories of the men and women who worked at this grand estate. newportmansions.org ROSE ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE, Newport. Situated in the middle of the East Passage of Narragansett Bay and boasting terrific views of the Newport Bridge, Rose Island is home to a wildlife refuge, historic military barracks, and a lighthouse that has kept watch over these waters since 1870. And it’s that lighthouse, restored to its appearance c. 1912, that promises a “house museum” experience like no other. Even for day visitors it’s a rare chance to step inside the lives of lightkeepers of old, as you wander the humble abode’s artifact-filled living

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room and vintage kitchen and climb up the lighthouse itself. The real magic lies in the overnight option, as the nonprofit that oversees Rose Island Light rents accommodations in the keeper’s house as well as in the Fort Hamilton barracks and the former foghorn engine building. Open seasonally; roseisland.org

VERMONT HILDENE, Manchester. The genteel 1905

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summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, invites visitors to time-travel not just with their eyes but also their ears, thanks to the rare Aeolian player pipe organ in the entrance hall: A birthday gift from Robert to his wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln, its music still often fills the air of the family’s Georgian Revival mansion. The rest of the estate would likewise be immediately recognizable to the Lincolns today, as almost all of the furnishings are original; outside, the stunning formal garden designed by Robert and Mary’s daughter Jessie has been equally well preserved. Explore this magnificent home on a self-guided tour, or reserve a slot on an in-depth, lorefilled guided tour for a small extra fee. For an even more immersive experience, behind-the-scenes “Archives Tours” include spaces that aren’t open to the general public and showcase the work done by archive staff to keep this historic gem shining bright. Note: Archives Tour availability may depend on staffing and current Covid protocols. hildene.org

MARSH-BILLINGS-ROCKEFELLER MANSION, Woodstock. Even as its 550

acres of woodland beauty beckon to nature lovers, Marsh-BillingsRockefeller National Historical Park—the only national park in the U.S. devoted to conservation history—has something to delight architecture buffs as well. Over the course of nearly two centuries, this 1805 brick Victorian Queen Anne was home to each of the prominent families for which the park is named and still retains such exquisite details as Tiffany stained-glass windows and parquet wood floors, as well as a notable art collection. The mansion is open seasonally, and its tour lineup is subject to change; highlights have traditionally included “Hidden Spaces” tours, which venture into parts of the estate that are usually closed to the public (third-floor family bedrooms, the service wing, the Rockefellers’ bowling alley and soda fountain, etc.), and “Fallout Fridays,” in which visitors descend into a 1960s-era fallout shelter built by the Rockefellers. Open seasonally; nps.gov/ mabi/planyourvisit/guidedtours.htm

NEWENGLAND.COM

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The Invention of the Year The world’s lightest and most portable mobility device Once in a lifetime, a product comes along that truly moves people. Introducing the future of battery-powered personal transportation . . . The Zinger. Throughout the ages, there have been many important advances in mobility. Canes, walkers, rollators, and scooters were created to help people with mobility issues get around and retain their independence. Lately, however, there haven’t been any new improvements to these existing products or developments in this field. Until now. Recently, an innovative design engineer who’s developed one of the world’s most popular products created a completely new breakthrough . . . a personal electric vehicle. It’s called the Zinger, and there is nothing out there quite like it. “What my wife especially loves is it gives her back feelings of safety and independence which has given a real boost to her confidence and happiness! Thank You!” –Kent C., California The first thing you’ll notice about the Zinger is its unique look. It doesn’t look like a scooter. Its sleek, lightweight yet durable frame is made with aircraft grade aluminum. It weighs only 47.2 lbs but can handle a passenger that’s up to 275 lbs! It features one-touch

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Conversations: Kathrine Switzer (Continued from p. 89) J.M.: Half the world thought you shouldn’t have run, and the other half criticized you for not running faster. K.S.: I received fan mail, and I received hate mail. Half the people who heard about it thought I totally deserved it. What was I thinking? Why was I such an uppity person? Why couldn’t I leave the men alone? I just threw away the hate mail. Why would I want to read hate mail? In the fan mail, there were people who said, “We cut your picture out of the paper and we put it on the mantel.” So I just focused on the positive. I didn’t have a problem being in the spotlight. I always believed so strongly in running. J.M.: Was there a degree to which that incident drove you to keep running— not just that day but afterward? K.S.: I would have run for the rest of my life. There’s no question. It was just too important to me. I couldn’t live without the sense of empowerment and even religion that running gave me. It’s a transformational experience. But after that day, I really needed to take responsibility for it. My mom and dad always said, when you start something, you’d better be sure that you can finish it. I’ve always felt enormous responsibility to that moment. J.M.: A lot of people would have harbored anger. K.S.: Was I angry at Jock Semple? Yes—up until Heartbreak Hill, I was really angry. But once you get past those hills, you’re on fumes. And you can’t stay angry any more. You have to focus on the race. The only thing I could do was keep on running and show women they could do this. It’s like a ball of snow. It’s going to grow fast. And that’s exactly what happened. 110 |

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J.M.: You have written that some of the people who seemed to resent what you were doing were other women. What was that about? K.S.: That was the really hard part. The only drivers who tried to run my coach and me off the road [in Syracuse] were other women. And I said to him, “Why is it always a woman?” And he said, “Because you’re powerful.” Women were very fearful of women who exhibited physical power and worried that we were stepping into a male domain. They had a sense of fear. Sweat was really inappropriate. You needed to be dainty and clean and perfume-y. Look around the world— this stuff still exists.

“I received fan mail, and I received hate mail. What was I thinking? Why was I such an uppity person? Why couldn’t I leave the men alone?”

J.M.: Conversely, male runners were supportive. A lot of them encouraged you when they saw you along the marathon course. K.S.: I found that very interesting. Here’s a good example: At Syracuse University the guys on the crosscountry team were very welcoming. When I would train with Arnie, older masters runners would come and run with us. And they never thought of it as they were men and I was a woman. We were just running together. Running to me is the best example of inclusion and diversity and equality and respect. If the guys in the marathon were full of catcalls and innuendo and spit at me, as they often did in other sports with women, it would have been very hard. On the contrary, they would say, “I wish my

wife would run,” “I wish my girlfriend would run.” They believed that women should run. And why not? I’ve always said they were the original sensitive new-age guys. Runners are different. They have a sense of fairness. J.M.: So then in 1972 women were finally officially allowed to run the marathon, but they had to have a separate starting line and be scored apart from the men and meet a qualifying time of 3:30. K.S.: We had pushed the door open a crack. Let’s be happy with any gains we have. Because once you make that gain, you can make another gain. Jock Semple was the one who said, “If these women are going to run in my race, they’re going to meet the men’s qualifying time,” because he was going to protect his race. After that race he said, “Well, they actually ran pretty well.” None of us ran very well that day. But we still prevailed and the media regarded us for the first time as athletes. That was the big thing. They covered us and it was huge news. J.M.: As much as your running Boston broke barriers for women, you also seemed intent on the personal goal of breaking three hours. You wanted to be known as an athlete and not just the woman in that photo. K.S.: My intention was not originally political. After I got attacked by Jock, it became political, because I didn’t have any choice. Then I had a lot of homework to do. Everybody dismissed me and said I ran it in [the comparatively slow time of] four hours and 20 minutes. Jock Semple said I could have walked it that fast. And I wanted them to shut up. I also became physiologically curious. Could an ordinary runner like me become a faster runner? I trained my brains out. I was lucky I didn’t get injured. And I ran well. J.M.: Also in 1972, Title IX passed, and after that the Olympics added a women’s marathon. You’ve said that having a women’s Olympic marathon NEWENGLAND.COM

1/13/22 11:15 AM

“STUART KNOCKABOUT”

Designed by L. F. Herreshoff Forrest Pirovano’s painting shows a beautiful sailboat which is built on Cape Cod. It is early morning in Quissett Harbor and this Stuart Knockabout, while moored, looks like the extremely fast boat that it is. It was designed by L. Francis Herreshoff in 1932 as a single boat for Willoughby Stuart, who was looking for a large daysailer with a shallow draft, ease of handling and comfort. The boat is a descendant of the long line of Herreshoff creations. L. Francis combined his own talent, artistry and experience with his father’s designs to create this exceptional daysailer. This 28-foot Knockabout is at home in Buzzards Bay. This beautiful limited-edition print of an original oil painting is individually numbered and signed by the artist.

This exquisite print is bordered by a museum-quality white-on-white double mat, measuring 11x14 inches. Framed in either a black or white 1½-inch-deep wood frame, this limited-edition print measures 12¼x15¼ inches and is priced at only $149. Matted but unframed this print is priced at $109. Prices include shipping and packaging. Forrest Pirovano is a Cape Cod artist whose paintings capture the picturesque landscape and seascapes of the Cape, which have a universal appeal. His paintings often include the many antique wooden sailboats and iconic lighthouses for which Cape Cod is known.

FORREST PIROVANO, artist P.O. Box 1011 • Mashpee, MA 02649 Visit our studio in Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod All major credit cards are welcome. Please send card name, card number, expiration date, code number & billing ZIP code. Checks are also accepted.…Or you can call Forrest at 781-858-3691.…Or you can pay through our website www.forrestcapecodpaintings.com

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same kind of pushback doing that, if not worse. Do you remember any in particular? K.S.: I had to go through it again and again. Germany, France, Italy, Southeast Asia. Japan was one of the worse. They just couldn’t accept having a race for women, but we were going to do it anyway. They said, “It’s very dangerous for women to run. You can only have a 5K and no one under 18 can run—it might injure them.” Well, 1,000 women showed up in Japan. Women for the first time in Japan had something that was theirs. It was such a huge success; they imitated it and went off and got another sponsor. I got angry with that, but then I got over it and said who cares. And look at who the successful runners are now from Japan: It’s the women, not the men.

was as important as American women getting the right to vote. Why is that? K.S.: Not just because it took place, but because it acknowledged women’s equality in the longest running event in the Olympic Games. The vote was about women’s intellectual acceptance. The Olympics were about our physical acceptance. It changed the landscape—one part of the landscape, anyway. J.M.: What was it like to watch that first women’s Olympic marathon, where you were a commentator for ABC? K.S.: I was trying very hard to be professional and not emotional. I thought nobody’s going to understand the importance of the moment until the first woman comes through the tunnel and into the Olympic stadium [it would be Maine’s own 112 |

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Joan Benoit]. And that’s exactly what happened. I was working with Al Michaels and he said, “When she comes into the stadium, say nothing. Say nothing. Let the crowd take it.” So we did. But then when [Swiss marathoner Gabriele] Andersen-Schiess came in reeling [from heat exhaustion], the thoughts came screaming back into my mind—they’re going to pull the event because they’ll think women can’t handle the pressure. Fortunately, people regarded it as heroic instead of awful and desperate. That was a major shift in people’s thinking. People were brought to tears by seeing a woman so determined to finish. J.M.: You went on to organize the Avon Running Global Women’s Circuit, putting on events around the world. I’m guessing you got the

J.M.: Do you worry that, after 50 years, younger generations might forget how hard it was to get these things they take for granted? K.S.: Running is too visceral for that. They feel it so acutely. It’s such an important part of their lives. I say to them, “Pass it on.” They’ll show their kids, both boys and girls, how important it is to be active. I think they’re getting all of that, and grateful for it. And I am full of gratitude that they are grateful.

HAGEN HOPKINS

Switzer in 2017, the 50th anniversary of her watershed Boston Marathon run, which also inspired her 2007 memoir, Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Women’s Sports.

J.M.: Not just in Japan, but worldwide, women today outnumber men in running events. K.S.: The happiest day of my life was when I ran again in 2017, my 50th anniversary [of the Jock Semple incident]. That was awesome. I had been the only woman with a bib back then. And when I looked around, I was surrounded by 13,500 women with bib numbers, all officially qualified. And everyone on the street was cheering or holding up their little girls and saying thank you. The other phenomenal thing was that waiting at the finish line was Joann Flaminio. She was the first woman president in 130 years of the Boston Athletic Association.

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 3:54 PM

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Hard-Pressed (Continued from p. 99) at the inevitable question—why these 30-somethings and their parents choose to continue running local newspapers, of all businesses, and now of all times. “We ask ourselves that a lot,” says Christy Lynn. It hasn’t been easy. Advertising revenue was down during the pandemic, and the Independent cut back on its print edition from twice to once a week. Not only is it tough to attract young readers; young media buyers won’t take space in the print edition unless they can measure exactly how many people read the ads, the same way they can count the clicks online. “It’s really a funny mind-set and a frustrating one,” Angelo Lynn says. He believes the best place to reach a whole town is in the pages of its local paper. “But suddenly people don’t believe that’s true.” It’s not lost on newspaper editors and publishers in New England that one reason they’ve endured is because the aging population—first, second, and third oldest in the country in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont—has long relied on newspapers. (“Read the obits. Every day I lose subscribers,” says Fredric Rutberg, publisher of the Berkshire Eagle.) The Lynn sisters say that younger readers are there for the taking. “You don’t care about school coverage till you have kids. Then you want to read the paper,” Christy Lynn says. She covers the mountain biking club and sees her online traffic go up. “So we know they’re reading.” More people are checking out the website these days, and the papers now post video clips on Instagram and have started a newsletter for readers with young kids. Those don’t pay the bills, though. “I talk to people a lot who tell me they follow us on Facebook,” says Christy Lynn. “And I’m, like, ‘Cool, but can you send us 50 bucks and subscribe, please?’” What readers get from their local papers ref lects the day-to-day things that make New England charming, distinctive, and occasionally 118 |

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confounding. The biggest story in Woodstock has been about a proposal to hand over a park to the town, along with the trust established by the donor for its upkeep—but some neighbors of the park don’t like the idea and want to leave things as they are. “Welcome to Vermont,” jokes Phil Camp. Local journalists in Easton, Connecticut, have chronicled a debate over whether the town should accept a state grant to build a bike trail and walk ing path, which some residents fear would attract commercial development. “It’s a fascinating cultural issue: If we build a sidewalk, a Walmart will be next,” says James Castonguay, director of the School of Communication, Media and the Arts at nearby Sacred Heart University. The Charlotte News in Vermont ran a story about a man who caught

“People are craving shared context, especially at the local level— What is this place where I live and who are these people around me?” a trout. Readers of the Penobscot Bay Pilot were treated to a feature and photos of a firefighter rescuing a cat from a tree; that story won an award from the Maine Press Association. The Addison County Independent covered a new plant converting cow manure into natural gas, new stores downtown, and the youth theater presentation of Newsies. But local papers also cover painful and contentious topics, often at the risk of blowback from their towns. After the Berkshire Eagle covered the manslaughter conviction of a North Adams, Massachusetts, woman whose father died because she was afraid he’d be put into a nursing home if she took him to a doctor, a reader confronted the publisher, Rutberg. “Why did you have to print all this?” she asked him.

The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror exposed how elected commissioners of a land bank funded by a fee on real estate transactions tried to use some of the money to build a clubhouse at the golf course of which they were members. It also ran a five-part series about the threat to the island from sea-level rise. “The real estate community was furious that we had written it and it was on the front page and in the [peak tourist] season,” says editor and publisher Marianne Stanton. In Maine, the Lewiston Sun Journal reported that a former police officer who died of an opioid overdose had been stealing drugs from dealers. The Bangor Daily News chronicled the almost unchecked power of local sheriffs and found that at least five male guards in a Bangor jail had sexually harassed their female colleagues or committed other offenses, but kept their jobs, and that a local school had physically restrained its students with disabilities and put them in “seclusion rooms” at least 1,200 times in three years. “These kinds of stories aren’t being told anywhere else,” says Earl Brechlin. They also matter as much to the journalists—who live, and are often from, these towns—as to their readers. Walking her dogs in the Rockport, Maine, dog park after wrapping up a deadline story, for example, Lynda Clancy, editor of the PenBay Pilot, greets not only the owners by name, but all of the dogs too. Local journalists and editors “are accountable from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep,” she says. “If you go to the grocery store, you’re going to be caught up in conversation, or down to the bait shop at the harbor. There’s no end.” And not only do local journalists know everybody, Brechlin adds, “you know their stories and you know their families’ stories, and you know the stories that don’t get into the newspapers as well as the ones that do. You interact with people on their best days and their worst days.” Stories about cats in trees, meanwhile, lower the collective angst, says Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and cofounder of the MassachusettsNEWENGLAND.COM

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based Trust for Local News. Given the state of national politics, there’s a real fatigue with national news, she says. “People are craving shared context, especially at the local level—What is this place where I live and who are these people around me? Sometimes you want to open the paper and just read about the guy who caught the trout.”

The dust has barely

settled from the build-out of the squat, red brick textile mill where the New Bedford Light went live in June. Set up and run by former editors and reporters from the Standard-Times and others, the free, nonprof it news site launched in response to growing concern that the city wasn’t being adequately covered. It has already produced a months-long investigation of the effect of the pandemic, discovering that the more than 400 people in New Bedford killed by Covid include a disproportionate number of retired textile workers who had underlying respiratory conditions probably related to their work. “There needs to be deeper coverage of government, deeper coverage of business—of any center of power— and broader coverage of communities themselves” than is being provided by the skeleton staffs of local newspapers with absentee owners, says Barbara Roessner, the Light’s founding editor and a Pulitzer Prize–winning former managing editor of the Hartford Courant. The publisher is Stephen Taylor, a former Boston Globe executive whose family once owned the Globe, and advisors include Walter Robinson, former head of the Globe Spotlight Team. The project raised its first $100,000 ahead of schedule from 248 contributors Roessner says are mostly local. “We don’t have to do much explaining” to solicit these donations, she says. “They’ve seen the decline in local news coverage in their city.” Nonprofits like the Light are stepping in to fill those gaps—the New Hampshire Bulletin, the CT Mirror, the New Haven Independent, the Maine Monitor. A dozen or more journalism nonprofits have started up each year since 2008, according to the Institute MARCH | APRIL 2022

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for Nonprofit News; last year alone, 20 of them did. “In this environment, everybody has to be willing to adapt,” says Anne Galloway, editor of the nonprofit VTDigger, an online news daily that she founded after she was laid off from her job as Sunday editor at the Rutland Herald and Times Argus. It has broken stories about a woman who died in a Vermont jail because she wasn’t given the right medication, and about one of the state’s largest-ever cases of fraud, which encouraged foreign nationals to invest, in exchange for green cards, in an economic development project that was never built. In other places in New England where newspapers have closed down or faded away, journalism faculty and students are stepping in. Faculty and students at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut relaunched the Easton Courier last year as a free, nonprofit online news site after the newspaper was bought by Hearst and shut down. Students at the University of Vermont produce journalism for two dozen local papers around the state, under the supervision of professional editors. Among other things, they’ve filled the void left when the Waterbury Record folded at the onset of the Covid crisis, helping create the Waterbury Roundabout to cover news in the community. The idea is not only to make sure that news continues to be covered, but that young journalists consider careers in local media. Several have gone on to full-time jobs at local papers, often in the communities they’re from. There were 50 last year in the program. “That’s a lot of people getting excited about what they’re doing,” says Cory Dawson, the project’s editor. It’s a similar route to the one that Dawson took. After getting a graduate degree in journalism, he returned to his native Burlington, where he worked at the Free Press until he got laid off. Now he runs UVM’s Community News Service from an office on the campus with a view of the university medical center. “I was born in that hospital,” says Dawson, a fifthgeneration Vermonter. At 28 not far removed from his students, he says he regards his work the way he hopes they

will. “It’s really personal for me. I feel very connected to the communities, and responsible to them.” When the Harpswell Anchor closed, the coastal Maine town came together to resurrect it as a nonprofit. Spread out across a peninsula and several islands, people in Harpswell “feel like the Anchor is a connecting point for them,” says J.W. Oliver, who was hired to be the editor. In a survey to see what residents expected from the paper, virtually everyone in town responded that they’ d read the old Anchor. Wealthy retirees and second-home owners largely bankrolled the project, which quickly raised $200,000. “There was expertise that came out of the woodwork—business expertise and fund-raising expertise,” says Greg Bestick, former head of a Los Angeles talent agency who lives in Harpswell and agreed to be president of the board. “There was a combination of having the skills, the time, and the desire to put it all together. Maybe that’s a combination that’s more common to New England.” Not everyone is thrilled about the growth and f inancial success of these nonprof its. Angelo Lynn thinks V TDigger does important journalism but also sucks up money and reporting talent from the local papers; the nonprofits can offer tax deductions in exchange for donations, and they pay reporters more. This at a time when independent, for-prof it newspapers are starting to solicit their own contributions from readers. “Are they maybe taking some of the dollars off the table that we might get?” asks Dan Cotter at the Vermont Standard. (The bipartisan Local Journalism Sustainability Act introduced in Congress last year would allow tax deductions for newspaper subscriptions.) VTDigger’s Galloway concedes that competitive anxiety has led some of her local newspaper partners to stop sharing content. “I understand why people are upset. But the problem is not us. It’s always easier to blame us than to blame Facebook and Google” for the threats to local journalism’s business model. | 119

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Other New England papers are consolidating—under local, rather than faraway, owners. That’s the case for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire and the eight other daily and weekly newspapers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire that are part of Newspapers of New England, formed by a Massachusetts newspaper family. MaineToday Media operates seven of Maine’s eight dailies, several of which it bought back from the Seattle Times, plus several dailies in Vermont and 30 weeklies. “I can def initely buy newsprint more cheaply than any of them separately,” says MaineToday’s owner, Reade Brower, who began in the business by selling ads for a weekly paper that he started. “The only way to do a sustainable model, whether you’re in New England or anywhere, is to have some size.” Had an out-of-state corporation bought his papers instead of him, he says, “they would have come in and cut 30 percent of the jobs.” When he took over the Portland Press Herald and its aff iliated titles and centralized circulation, billing, and other functions, Brower kept all but five of the 400 employees. He hasn’t charmed everyone, “but in the same vein he’s not like [the hedge fund] Alden sweeping in and laying people off,” as one observer puts it. “It still is local ownership by a local person who knows and cares about these places,” says another. That’s what led Fred Rutberg and some friends to buy the Berkshire Eagle from Denver-based Digital First Media, which is also owned by Alden. Before he bought the paper, Rutberg says, its distant bosses cut pages and ran wire stories and crime reports. “If you were thinking about where to put your company, that’s all you’d see,” he says. “I’m not trying to whitewash things, but this area was nowhere near what it looked like if you were reading the Berkshire Eagle.” A retired district court judge, Rutberg has put money into the Eagle, whose roots go back to 1789. “Since the judge took it over, it has been only good,” says Maureen Marrone, a librarian in the Berkshire Athenaeum 120 |

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in Pittsfield, where she says “the newspaper people” line up waiting for the doors to open in the mornings so they can read it. A newsroom renovation is planned, and Rutberg is investing in a new color press to replace the antique downstairs from his office that occasionally rumbles noisily into action; hanging in his office, which is behind a wall of framed front pages and journalism awards, is his own dark blue uniform work shirt with his name on the chest, a present from the press operators. He meets over coffee with readers at a nearby breakfast place called

Covid may have hurt the bottom line, but it reminded people in New England how they valued local news. Otto’s Kitchen & Comfort and elsewhere, in get-togethers he relishes even when people come to complain about something. “It just proves how important the paper is to them.” (His own father-in-law complains he misses “Beetle Bailey.”) “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” Rutberg says. “I mean, come on— who gets to do this?”

Over breakfast at

Otto’s on a day when Rutberg isn’t there to talk to readers, there’s the familiar blue glow of screens but not a newspaper in sight. Rising though it is, daily circulation at the Berkshire Eagle is less than half the 35,000 it was at its peak. Last summer the paper reduced its print frequency from seven days to five. The Bangor Daily News has moved out of its own building into a f loor and a half of rented space downtown, overlooking a resurgent Market Square neighborhood of artist studios, bookstores, and the kinds of young people with whom newspapers struggle to connect. The paper has been pared down to 16 pages most days in response to Covid. “We’re going to have to deliver it with a rock

so it doesn’t blow away,” one longtime reporter grouses. The newspaper people at the Berkshire Athenaeum are getting older. So are the owners and benefactors of New England papers that are still independent. Two of Rutberg’s partners in the purchase of the Eagle have since died. Reade Brower, who is 64, has three sons in their 30s but none is interested in taking over the business. “I have to create a sustainable model so that somebody locally will want to be the next owner,” he says. Still, there’s optimism. Students, nonprofits, and philanthropists are stepping into the breach. Largely unasked, readers keep offering financial donations. Someone sent the PenBay Pilot $500. A reader wrote to the Vermont Standard, “You should charge more for your paper.” Even a subscriber to one of Reade Brower’s papers returned a $70 bill with $100. “Keep the change,” he wrote. “We’re not used to that,” says Brower, who jokes that most of the time, as a newspaper publisher, he feels like he needs a disguise to go out in public. “Usually I’m wearing sunglasses. We did a story on the local police chief and I’m wearing sunglasses tonight.” Covid may have hurt the bottom line, but it reminded people in New England how they valued local news. When the pandemic started, “I was really fearful that we were going to lose that local newsgathering infrastructure. It’s done better than I would have imagined,” says Steve Terry, retired managing editor of the Rutland Herald, who’s writing a book about Vermont journalism. “My experience over the many years is that New Englanders really like their news,” says Terry. “They like to know it from a perspective of what their neighbors are doing. Because in these small towns, people know each other still.” And many of those towns enjoy the will and the resources to keep their papers going, says Harvard’s Heidi Legg. “Maybe it’s our calling in New England,” she says, “to show the rest of the country how we do this.” NEWENGLAND.COM

1/6/22 4:00 PM

Even the best of Maine vaca�ons draw to a close. So what comes aŌer Maine — and a�er this life? Can anyone know? Science deals with the natural world. But if there’s a supernatural to reality, how PrisƟ could ne, science, What’s not dimension to love about Maine? calming, by deni�on, ever explain the istotality of human existence? revitalizing. Maine really The Way Life Should Be. What really counts in life? Why are we so o�en too busy But �me here on earth is eeƟng. Good �mes don’t last. or too uncomfortable to consider such ma�ers? Even the best of Maine vaca�ons draw to a close. So what

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But �me here on earth is eeƟng. Good �mes don’t last. Even the best of Maine vaca�ons draw to a close. So what comes aŌer Maine — and a�er this life? Can anyone know? Science deals with the natural world. But if there’s a supernatural dimension to reality, how could science, by deni�on, ever explain the totality of human existence? What really counts in life? Why are we so o�en too busy or too uncomfortable to consider such ma�ers?

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Life in the Kingdom (Continued from p. 128) and Kyle has that intelligence. I love dirt roads. I think Kyle does too, though of course I’m sure his affection is tempered by the hassle of maintaining them. Certainly it’s tempered by mud season, those three or four weeks straddling April and May when the deep frost comes out of the ground and even the most carefully tended gravel roads turn to rutted sludge. I’ve long maintained that 80 percent of the wear and tear on our vehicles occurs during this month, and if anything, I suspect that’s understating the situation. How many times have I cringed at the torturous sound of gravel scraping against the underside of our poor old wagon? How many times have I extracted bits of broken body moldings, or rigged an exhaust hanger from a length of scrap wire? How many pounds of accumulated dirt have I cleaned from the inner surfaces of the rims in a quest to eliminate high-speed

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path of travel. And if the car behind us honks, we don’t take it personally, because it can mean only one thing: They’re not from around here. It’s not their fault they don’t know the code. I learned to drive on gravel roads, and I’m grateful for it. You learn a lot about how a car handles when you’re driving on gravel, what with the vagaries of road surface, not to mention the complications of weather. When the boys were learning to drive, we made sure we had a stick shift, in part because driving stick is still our preference, but also because we wanted the boys to learn how to use a clutch, on gravel, in a twowheel-drive car. Of course, there are many excellent drivers who learn on pavement, with automatic transmissions and all-wheel drive, but I’m pretty confident asserting that with each of these conveniences something is lost, a certain sense of responsiveness, a connection to the act of driving that transforms it from just the thing you do to get from one place to another into an actual practice. I don’t know, maybe I’m just showing my age. But whatever the case, I’d take the boys out onto our snow-covered roads and I’d turn off the traction control and point them up the mountain, and we’d practice the light touch you need to get through those corners without too much wheel spin and also where to sneak a bit of extra speed to carry you over that final pitch. Will we always live on a gravel road? I’d like to think so. At this stage of my life, it just feels like something that’s in me, like wood stoves and morning chores. But who’s to say? Maybe someday the compensations will no longer seem worth the complications. Maybe one of us will become too frail with age, or feel too isolated. In the meantime, though, I’m going to keep turning out our driveway onto that narrow path of gravel that Kyle keeps carefully plowed and graded, the one my sons learned to drive on, the one I’ve chased our cows down more times than I care to admit, the one that, if I follow it far enough, will take me anywhere I want to go. NEWENGLAND.COM

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Life in the Kingdom

BEN HEWIT T

Rules of the Dirt Road Where the pavement ends, both community and self-reliance begin. ILLUSTR ATION BY

TOM H AUGOM AT

he town we live in has approximately 16 miles of gravel road within its borders, and exactly zero miles of paved. If you exit our driveway and take a right, you’ll soon f ind yourself at the junction of the main road through town, the one that travels up and over the mountain on its way to villages of greater population and more pavement. Along the way you’ll pass the town hall (open four hours each and every week) and the old church I’ve mentioned at least a time or two before. If you exit our driveway and take a left, you’ll soon find yourself passing a “Road Ends Here” sign, and even though the road does not, in lit128 |

YK0322_BOB_Kingdom.indd 128

eral fact, end there, it is wise to behave as if it does, and take full advantage of the pullout on your right to execute a three-point turn. The roads in our town are maintained by our road crew, whose name is Kyle (a different Kyle from the one mentioned in my previous column). They are not easy roads to maintain—steep, winding, bordered by hills that want to drain water across them—but Kyle is good at his job, and committed to the task. He was hired two years ago, when our previous road crew, Lucian, retired. Lucian was good at his job too, and though I’m not sure exactly how long he’d held

the position, I do know it was a very long time. Lucian was—how to put this?—not overly gregarious. It took me about a year to abandon my quest to get a wave out of him, which is about six months longer than I held on to the possibility of getting a smile or at least a grin. When he wasn’t operating the grader or the town truck, Lucian drove a jacked-up Dodge Ram with a deep-blue custom paint job that included exquisitely rendered f lames in a gorgeous shade of red; I think there might have been some stars in the mix too, but that could be wishful thinking. On especially fine summer days, he also drove a little Pontiac Solstice roadster with a removable top. And he had a nice old Chevy truck. Lucian’s vehicle choices made me think that perhaps he was sucking a bit more joy out of the marrow of life than his day-to-day demeanor suggested. I hope that’s true. Kyle’s not much like his predecessor. He’s a smiler, and he loves to chat and catch me up on the condition of a particular intersection, the work that needs to be done along a particular stretch of road, or the status of the grader, which is nearly as old as I am and demands a certain level of tender loving care to remain functional (like me, come to think of it). Kyle’s a local boy—he grew up riding and driving the very roads he now tends—and I think this helps make him wellsuited to his job. There’s a very particular intelligence that comes of being not just from a place but of it, (Continued on p. 126) NEWENGLAND.COM

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