Students walk past the Elm Arch, once so thick with Elms you couldn't see the sky at Phillips Andover.


The Boston Globe
June 2, 2002, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: GLOBE NORTHWEST; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 996 words

HEADLINE: GLOBE NORTHWEST 2;
EFFORT GROWS TO RESTORE SIGNATURE ELM DISEASE-RESISTANT STRAINS INTRODUCED

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
ANDOVER - Stephen Tolley cares for living history as manager of grounds at Phillips Academy, where some 140 elms form one the largest elm populations east of the Mississippi.

"A large part of my job is maintaining the elm population," said Tolley, a 35-year-old Dedham resident. "It's a burden, but it's also a very special thing to be maintaining a tree population like this."

The Andover elms represent a vestige of New England from times past. Elms once shaded Main streets and town commons across New England, but Dutch elm disease claimed the trees by the tens of millions after World War II. Now, thanks to the efforts of nonprofit groups, plant geneticists, and people like Tolley, the Massachusetts state tree is being preserved and, in some cases, restored to the landscape it once graced in abundance.

At Phillips Andover, the line of trees known as the Elm Arch that parallels Main Street from Chapel Avenue to Salem Street is a beloved feature of the campus, with elms spaced 30 to 40 feet apart and reaching 80 to 100 feet in height forming an arched canopy over the length of the walk.

A particularly hallowed tree is the Great Elm, off Salem Street, a massive elm more than 200 years old that is the starting point for the annual commencement procession. The tree stands about 80 feet tall, with a leafy canopy extending some 100 feet.

"The trees are close to the heart of the school," said Tolley, who said Andover makes a "significant investment" toward preserving the trees and replacing the one or two lost to Dutch elm disease or other natural causes each year.

In most New England towns, however, elms are mostly a memory.

In Acton, for example, a canopy of American elms shaded the center of town more than a century ago, their branches arching over Main Street. "It was like driving through a very attractive tunnel of green," said Boxborough arborist Bruce Carley.

By the 1960s, Acton's elm grove had largely disappeared. But today, there are signs of a comeback.

Since 1994, Carley has donated to his hometown of Acton more than 40 elms of the disease-resistant Valley Forge strain developed by US National Arboretum plant geneticist Alden Townsend in Washington, D.C., and the American Liberty strain developed by the Elm Research Institute of Westmoreland, N.H. Trees that were 3 1/2-foot-tall saplings when planted in the arboretum in 1998 now stand more than 15 feet high.

Carley has devoted a Web site (www.elmpost.org) to the American elm, and his fledgling business has begun to market a limited supply of disease-resistant Valley Forge saplings. He said he sold 20 to the Town of Wellesley last fall, and that demand remains so high he has a waiting list of buyers.

"What I'm trying to do is to preserve examples of this species," said Carley, who is 35 and a landscaper. But he isn't seeking a return to the all-elm groves whose "monoculture," while pretty as a postcard, helped bring about their demise.

"I'm not trying to restore elm-lined Main streets," said Carley, who suggests spacing elms with lindens, beeches, horse chestnuts, sycamores, tulip trees, and oaks to form a shade-tree canopy. "When you have a high density of one species, you invite the pest. There's safety in diversity."

When Massachusetts Institute of Technology urban-studies scholar Thomas Campanella of Brookline set out to write a book on the place of the elm in the American historical imagination, he placed an author's query in the New York Times Book Review.

"I got over a hundred letters from people all over the United States," Campanella recalled, "letters from professors at Ivy League Schools, letters with return addresses from nursing homes. . . . I really felt I had touched a chord."

Walking the Tufts University campus in Medford one recent afternoon, Campanella described the singular appeal of the vase-shaped elms that still dot the grounds along Professors Row. "They lifted the canopy so high," he said, with a sweep of his hand, "and dropped down so gracefully."

The "village-improvement" campaigns that arose in New England in the 1840s represented America's first grassroots environmental movement, he said, and were influenced by the romantic view of nature that informed the transcendentalists, the painters of the Hudson River school, and poets like William Cullen Bryant.

"I can't emphasize enough how important it was for the citizens of a young upstart nation to have landscapes that conveyed a sense of timelessness and age," said Campanella, whose book, "Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm," is due out this year. "Americans lacked the cathedral ruins . . . that endowed the European landscape with depth. Few trees got monumental and relic-like faster than the elm. . . . The idea of this natural cathedral of limbs and trees had great purchase in the New England imagination."

New Englanders moved across the country, planting elms as they went. "By the 1920s, Elm Street had become a national institution," said Campanella.

Then, in fatal succession, came Dutch elm disease, the Hurricane of 1938, and World War II. The Dutch elm fungus arrived in 1930 in a shipment of imported logs. Dead wood stacked after the hurricane became infested with bark beetles that carried the deadly fungus, he said, but few resources could be spared during the war to check the blight that spread rapidly across the country.

"We loved the American elm to death," he said. "The power and glory of Elm Street came from its regularity, the scores of the same tree. . . . A lot of the same qualities are not possible with the species that we're planting now. We'll never have the old Elm streets back."

At Phillips Andover, Tolley said he still feels the magnificance. He was hired three years ago to manage the grounds of the 500-acre campus after having worked as a landscaper at the Washington National Cathedral.

Now, he said, "standing under a huge tree is kind of like my cathedral."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. The Elm Arch at Phillips Academy in Andover is a vestige of the New England landscape once shaded by graceful elms. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTOS / JOANNE RATHE 2. The Great Elm on the campus of Phillips Academy. Efforts are under way to bring back the Massachusetts state tree. Top

The Boston Globe
March 31, 2002, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 2064 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
DICKENS IN LOWELL: A PARADISE DISCOVERED FESTIVAL MARKS AUTHOR'S 1842 VISIT TO CITY'S MILLS

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
"Although only just of age - for if my recollection serve me, it has been a manufacturing town barely one-and-twenty years - Lowell is a large, populous, thriving place . . . The very river that moves the machinery in the mills (for they are all worked by water power), seems to acquire a new character from the fresh buildings of bright red brick and painted wood among which it takes its course; and to be as light-headed, thoughtless, and brisk a young river, in its murmurings and tumblings, as one would desire to see . . ."

Charles Dickens,

American Notes, 1842

LOWELL - When Charles Dickens was 12, his father's bankruptcy forced the family into debtors' prison, and the future creator of Tiny Tim and Oliver Twist was himself put to work in a dismal boot-blacking factory.

Harrowing memories and a lingering shame connected with the experience colored Dickens's later writings on the bleak existence of the poor in Victorian England.

This familiarity with the gritty underside of the Industrial Revolution back home led Dickens to look favorably on Lowell when, during a visit to the United States in 1842, the celebrated novelist spent a day touring the mills of America's first planned industrial city.

In Lowell, where he described Yankee mill girls penning literary essays after a day's work at the spindles, Dickens perceived a model of what industrial society could be. "Compared to England, it was a paradise," said Diana Archibald, who teaches on the Victorian novel at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

One hundred-sixty years later, Dickens's day-trip to Lowell on Feb. 3, 1842, will be recalled here this week with an academic conference, dramatic performances, a concert, lectures, and a gallery show.

More than 100 Dickens scholars from around the world are expected to attend the Dickens and America Conference being hosted in Lowell April 4-6 by the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the Tsongas Industrial History Center, and the Lowell National Historical Park.

An accompanying Dickens festival in the city will feature performances by British actor Gerald Charles Dickens, great-great grandson of the novelist, an exhibit of Dickens prints at the Whistler House Museum of Art, a concert of 19th-century millhands' music at St. Anne's Episcopal Church, and tours of museums and historic sites in Lowell.

And a fund-raising drive has been launched by the UMass-Lowell English Department to endow a Dickens Memorial Scholarship for English majors from the Merrimack Valley who show financial need and have a strong interest in literature or creative writing.

Dickens was in the early days of a six-month United States swing in 1842 when he paid a visit to Lowell, the so-called Manchester of America, incorporated 16 years previously at the locale where textile mills harnessed the power of the Merrimack's Pawtucket Falls.

According to Archibald, Dickens arrived in downtown Lowell at a railroad depot on Dutton Street where trolleys now run, and lunched at the old Washington Tavern at Gorham and Central. He visited the Merrimack Mills, where the Tsongas Arena now stands, and toured some lodgings in what is now Boardinghouse Park before leaving on the 4:30 train for Boston. His time spent in the city totaled four-and-a-half hours.

In his book "American Notes," released shortly after his tour, Dickens wrote approvingly of conditions in the Lowell mills and the wholesome dress and manner of the girls who worked the looms.

"It is said that on the occasion of a visit from General Jackson or General Harrison to this town . . . , he walked through three miles and a half of these young ladies all dressed out with parasols and silk stockings," Dickens wrote.

The mill girls he described as hard-working and thrifty young women who read books and cultivated musical talents, and who returned to the farm after having raised enough money for a dowry.

"Out of so large a number of females, many of whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance; no doubt there were," Dickens wrote.

"But I solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power."

A contrast effectively was drawn with the life of English factory workers bound by class to a sullen and brutish existence.

"In this brief account of Lowell, and inadequate expression of the gratification it yielded me, and cannot fail to afford to any foreigner to whom the condition of such people at home is a subject of interest and anxious speculation, I have carefully abstained from drawing a comparison between these factories and those of our own land," Dickens wrote.

"Many of the circumstances whose strong influence has been at work for years in our manufacturing towns have not arisen here; and there is no manufacturing population in Lowell, so to speak: for these girls (often the daughters of small farmers) come from other States, remain a few years in the mills, and then go home for good.

"The contrast would be a strong one, for it would be between Good and Evil, the living light and the deepest shadow. I abstain from it, because I deem it just to do so. But I only the more earnestly adjure all those whose eyes may rest on these pages, to pause and reflect upon the difference between this town and those great haunts of desperate misery: to call to mind, if they can in the midst of party strife and squabble, the efforts that must be made to purge them of their suffering and danger: and last, and foremost, to remember how the precious Time is rushing by."

Dickens's 1842 visit to Lowell is recalled in "The Republic of My Imagination," a stage show performed by the novelist's great-great-grandson, Gerald Charles Dickens, that has its world premiere April 4 at 7:30 p.m. in Durgin Hall on the UMass-Lowell campus.

In the show's first act, Gerald Dickens portrays his great-great-grandfather touring the Lowell mills and recalling the factory experience of his own boyhood. "As he sees the factories and mills at their most clean and ordered, his mind flashes back to the time he worked in a factory in London and the horrendous conditions there," the 38-year-old actor said in a recent interview by telephone.

He said the show's second act features "a whistlestop tour of America in 45 minutes" with Charles Dickens, who traveled as far as Richmond in the South and St. Louis in the West in his six-month US tour.

Charles Dickens's visit to Lowell early in his US trip impressed him with a vision of "what factories should be," said Gerald Dickens, but the novelist ultimately came away disappointed in America, with its slavery and its often rustic folkways, including a preponderance of tobacco-chewing.

"Certainly Lowell was a highlight for him," said Dickens conference organizer Archibald, an assistant professor of English at UMass-Lowell, noting that chapter four, describing a railway journey and his visit to the city, was "the one chapter in 'American Notes' that was unequivocally positive."

Dickens complained about the lack of copyright protection afforded his works in America, where thousands of copies of his books were published without his seeing a dime. The American press teased the celebrity author. Some Americans of breeding, noted Gerald Dickens, "weren't entirely keen" on a "brash young man in colored waistcoat who combed his hair at the dinner table."

In "Martin Chuzzlewit," released the year after Dickens's American tour, the character Martin is swindled in an American land deal, arriving to find his promised land a swamp.

Yet it was a mark of the then-30-year-old Dickens's idealistic regard for America that he should be so disappointed to not find it the "republic of his imagination," said Archibald.

Gerald Dickens also will present the New England premiere of another of his one-man shows - "Mr. Dickens is Coming!" - in which he portrays the rags-to-riches life of Charles Dickens, with excerpts and characters from the novels "David Copperfield," "Great Expectations," and "Nicholas Nickleby." The performance will be given April 6 at 7:30 p.m. in UMass-Lowell's Durgin Hall.

"I want to bring Charles Dickens to life, to make him real, not just a figure of history," said Gerald Dickens.

The Dickens conference and festival add to the literary luster of the blue-collar city already known as the birthplace of Beat writer Jack Kerouac.

Visiting Dickens scholars will be given the opportunity to tour sites associated with Kerouac, said conference organizer Archibald, as well as a chance to work on a sped-up assembly line at the Tsongas Industrial History Center.

For more information on the Dickens and America conference, festival events, and the Dickens Memorial Scholarship, visit the Web site www.uml.edu/dickens. For more on Gerald Charles Dickens, see his Web site, www.jackprises.com. Read Charles Dickens's "American Notes" on the Web at www.online-literature.com, www.bibliomania.com, or at books.mirror.org Top

The Boston Globe
December 30, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 6

LENGTH: 1597 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
NOW 60 YEARS OLD, ARCHIE HAS ROOTS REACHING TO HAVERHILL CARTOONIST USED HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS FOR HIS INSPIRATION

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
HAVERHILL - He spent his early boyhood touring the country with a vaudeville act, visiting all 48 states by the time he was 9, and went on to international fame as the artistic talent behind the Archie comic.

Yet cartoonist Bob Montana, who died in 1975 and whose Archie drawings debuted 60 years ago this month, said some of the best days of his life were those he spent as a teenager in Haverhill.

The city on the Merrimack inspired the fictional town of Riverdale, home to Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and others in the comic gang who were patterned, in some cases, on Montana's friends from his student days at Haverhill High from 1936 to 1939.

The soda fountains on Merrimack Street, models for Pop's Chok'lit Shop, are gone. But the old Haverhill High School, which lent its look to Riverdale High, still stands, as does the landmark Thinker Statue that also made its way into the strip. "He was faithful to Haverhill," said the artist's daughter, Lynn Montana, of Meredith, N.H., who with her sister, Paige Kuether, maintains a Web site, www.archieprints.com, that markets copies of their father's classic strips.

"He had the best memories of Haverhill High," she said. "Haverhill is where the characters are from."

Three soda fountains popular with Haverhill teens in the 1930s - Crown Confectionery and the Chocolate Shop on Merrimack Street and the Tuscarora on Winter Street - are said to have influenced the Chok'lit Shop, and their hard-working Greek immigrant owners the long-suffering Pop Tate.

"There was this gang, and they would hang out at the soda shop," said Gregory Laing, curator of special collections at Haverhill Public Library, across the street from the old high school, now Haverhill City Hall. He said the young Montana "would sit at the counter and ask, 'Well, gang, what happened today?' and make little sketches on napkins.

"They were just fun-loving kids. High-school antics were all that strip was about," Laing said.

Mr. Weatherbee, it is locally agreed, was based on 1930s Haverhill High principal Earl MacLeod and Miss Grundy on school librarian Elizabeth Tuck. ("Even Tuckie knew that," said Laing.) Arnold Daggett, who kept his flattop throughout his life, was pegged as the model for brawny Moose.

The inspiration for other characters has been open to conjecture. Some saw "Skinny" Linehan in Jughead. Blonde girl-next-door Betty has been seen as a composite of girlfriends, while sultry blue-blood Veronica Lodge was named for Hollywood star Veronica Lake and for Massachusetts' Brahmin political family, the Lodges, for whom the young Montana had once painted a mural.

In Archie, Montana put "a lot of himself," according to the artist's widow, Peg Bertholet, since remarried, of Meredith, N.H.

The cartoonist, famed for capturing the school days of American teenagers, had relatively little organized schooling of his own, family members said. He reveled in the high-school experiences he had in Haverhill and Manchester, N.H., another proto-Riverdale on the Merrimack, where his family moved in his senior year. He graduated from Central High in Manchester in 1940.

Born in Stockton, Calif., in 1920 to Roberta Pandolfini Montana, an ex-Ziegfeld girl, and Ray Montana, leading banjo player on the Keith vaudeville circuit, Montana received his early schooling from lesson books in theater dressing rooms. As a young teenager, he lived in Boston's Theater District. After his father's death and his mother's remarriage, his family moved to Haverhill, his stepfather managing a theatrical costume shop in Bradford.

"He traveled all over," recalled Bertholet. "He didn't have many years of associating with actual schoolchildren. In Haverhill, it was the first time he went to a school that he really liked. He met the kids and had a good time.

"I know he was very happy at this point in his life."

An illustrated diary Bob Montana kept as a student at Haverhill High gives glimpses of his early talent as a cartoonist, whimsically chronicling his teenage comings and goings as well as the fortunes of the powerhouse Haverhill High football team.

A copy of the diary is kept in the archives at the Haverhill Public Library, and selections can be viewed on line at www.archie prints.com.

Another memento has been lost of his student days at the old Haverhill High School. A chalk mural Montana did of a horse was kept on a blackboard at the school until 1963, when it was inadvertently erased by visitors, according to Laing.

Montana was a 21-year-old illustrator for the MLJ comic house in 1941 when he was assigned by publisher John Goldwater to develop an All-American teenaged character along the lines of Andy Hardy. Archie made his debut in the December 1941 edition of Pep Comics and was such a hit he was given his own comic book. Archie No. 1, drawn by Montana, was released in November 1942.

After Montana returned in 1946 from wartime service in the Army Signal Corps, he took over the daily and Sunday Archie strip for MLJ, which changed its name to Archie Comics and launched a line of Archie comic books, penned by other artists, that sold 2 million a month.

At its peak, the Montana-drawn newspaper strip appeared in some 700 papers around the world. Montana drew six daily strips and one Sunday color strip - equal to three dailies - each week until he died at 55 of a heart attack near his home in Meredith, N.H., in 1975.

Archie, with his crosshatched red hair, remains, next to Dick Clark, America's oldest teenager. Arriving on the scene in an age of jalopies and malt shops, he and his Riverdale pals have mirrored the changing fashions of American youth, from Big Bands to bellbottoms, while spawning Saturday morning television shows and a 1960s hit single, "Sugar, Sugar." And the eternal question - Betty or Veronica - ranks among the great conundrums of American popular culture.

To mark the 60th anniversary, Archie Comic Publications (www.archiecomics.com), based in Mamaroneck, N.Y., plans a yearlong celebration in 2002 and has launched a new entertainment division, with an Archie movie said to be in the works, as well as a new touring musical group.

"Riverdale is a place you'd like to live if you could," Michael Silberkleit, chairman of Archie Comic Publications, said, "and Archie is the teenager you'd like to have if you had a kid."

Under a settlement reached in a copyright dispute between the Montana family and Archie Comics, Montana's heirs have been granted a license to his original work in their possession, some 1,000 daily and Sunday strips. A dozen of the originals recently sold at auction for $78,000, according to Lynn Montana.

The classic Archie of letter-sweaters and one-liners lives on at www.archieprints.com. The old strips are marked by the vaudeville sensibility of their creator, who loved Buster Keaton and slapstick and as a boy did rope tricks to warm up crowds for his banjo-playing father.

"It was good, clean fun," said daughter Lynn. She added: "I don't think he ever wrote Archie for the teenagers. He wrote for the adult looking back on his teenage years and reminiscing."

Indeed, both the Veronica and Betty of old had a distinctly voluptuous quality, the stuff of Lana Turner sweater girls or GI pinups. "You've got to remember Bob grew up backstage in vaudeville in the '20s," said Bertholet.

The second of four Montana children, Lynn, now 50, recalled being raised with Archie and Jughead.

"All of us kids would write down something that happened in school and put it in a box in the kitchen," she said. "If Dad used it, we got 25 cents. In those days that was a lot of money.

"I broke my leg skiing at the age of 13, and that got put in a Sunday strip - though I got turned into a 16-year-old blonde Archie was chasing.

"One of the highlights of living with someone who was a humorist was that he would bring all his ideas to the dinner table and try out all his jokes on us," she said.

The family lived on a large farm in Meredith where Montana, described by his daughter as "a gentleman farmer," had a studio in the barn. The former vaudevillian never lost his wanderlust: He moved the family for extended residences in Italy, Mexico, and England, the latter at the height of Beatlemania in the mid-1960s, which resulted in Archie sporting the latest in Carnaby Street fashion. The New Hampshire farm regularly hosted artists and writers, his daughter recalled.

Yet Montana maintained fond memories of Haverhill in the days when Hillies pigskin fervor reigned and the Dorseys and Duke Ellington regularly played nearby Canobie Lake Park.

"It was a much simpler time," said Charles Hayden, 81, of Seabrook, N.H., who was a year ahead of Montana at Haverhill High, and was once banished temporarily from Crown Confectionery after his friends rotated the phonebooth - with him inside.

"We were getting over that Great Depression," Hayden said. "Everyone was in the same boat. Nobody had a dime. If you wanted to go to a dance, you were out looking for nickel bottles to cash in. It was a gentler time."

Hayden said he was serving in Italy with the 5th Army when he first saw the Archie strip.

"I said, 'Bob Montana? I know him!' They said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' " he recalled. "I said, 'That's my high school!' They said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' "

He instantly recognized his hometown in the comic, Hayden said. "Absolutely. Right from the outset. I said, 'This kid used Haverhill High School as a setting. This is my school.' I saw so many things in that strip that were familiar.

"It was a touch of home."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, A Bob Montana illustration (above) with, from left, Betty, Archie, Veronica, and Jughead. At left, the cartoonist in a 1937 photo with his stepfather and half-sister. / ILLUSTRATION FROM ARCHIE COMIC PUBLICATIONS Top

At St Joseph the Worker Shrine, in Lowell, many candles have been lit by parishoners


The Boston Globe
November 4, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 871 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
MORE LED TO SEEK RELIGIOUS SOLACE

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
St. Christopher may have been removed years ago from the official Roman calendar of saints, but the legendary patron of travelers, eternally popular among Catholics, has drawn newfound devotion since Sept. 11.

Sales of St. Christopher medals have doubled since the attacks on New York and Washington, and similar demand has been seen for devotional items such as prayer candles and rosaries, according to Catholic religious-goods merchants in the area.

Reported selling briskly are medals of Our Lady of Loreto, who is revered as a protector of those flying by plane, and scapulars, small badges of brown cloth worn front and back that bear an image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and are held to protect the wearer against the fires of hell.

"We're not as safe as we used to be," said Denise Barbin of Pelham, N.H., manager of the gift shop at the Shrine of St. Joseph the Worker in downtown Lowell. "I think people feel that. You're not guaranteed tomorrow anymore."

After Mass last Sunday at St. Joseph the Worker Shrine, Henry Rocha paused before one of the banks of votive candles that line the inside of the church and, for a dollar, lit four of the electric candles to St. Joseph, the church's patron.

The Lowell resident said he has found himself lighting candles more often since Sept. 11.

"I light them for family, for friends, for relatives, for what's going on, and what's needed to change in the world," Rocha said. "You have to turn to your faith to understand what's going on, what's happening."

The shrine's director, Rev. John Cox of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, said he has noted an increase in confessions during the crisis, and a return to prayer, reflected in the glimmer of candles before the statues of the saints.

"I know our prayers are heard," Father Cox said. "Lighting a candle is not a requirement of the church, but reflects people's need to express in ritual what they're feeling inside.

"Lighting a candle is an expression of getting your prayer outside of you. The flame in the Christian tradition is the light of God, light in a dark moment.

"The events of Sept. 11 gave people pause to stop and assess: My life can be over suddenly, quickly. Will I be pleased at what's said at my funeral? Am I putting my life energy in the right things?"

Local shops specializing in religious supplies have reported an increased interest in sacramentals, material items, like candles or devotional medals, that in the Catholic tradition represent signs of God's presence.

"We've been really busy," said Carol Gill of Wilmington, president of Patrick J. Gill & Sons in Woburn, who has exhausted her stock of $1.75 medals of Our Lady of Loreto, patron of air travelers. Two shipments of 100 have been sold, she said, and 300 more have been back-ordered.

Meanwhile, Gill said, the scapulars, ranging in price from 35 cents to $3.75, are selling at twice the usual 50 a month.

St. Christopher medals and rosary beads have seen a similar upturn, said Gill.

Medals of St. Christopher, the legendary Christ-bearer who is the patron saint of travelers, have always been popular, she said. Christopher's cult remains widespread, despite the removal of his July 25 feast from the universal church calendar in 1969 because little historical fact could be ascertained about him.

Gill said she sells perhaps 75 medals with chains and hundreds of prayer cards with the saint's image each month, at prices ranging from 35 cents to $300.

Rosary beads, ranging in price from 75 cents for plastic to $225 for crystal and sterling, usually sell at a rate of about 100 a month, Gill said.

"Since Sept. 11, everything has probably doubled," she said. "I think people are afraid, and getting back to the basics of family, God and country. People who have fallen away from the church are coming back."

At the Carmelites Gift Shop at Northshore Mall in Peabody, a staff member, Laura Warner, reported strong sales in medals of St. Christopher and of St. Michael the Archangel, battler of Satan and protector of church and country.

Blessed prayer candles are selling well at the St. Joseph the Worker Shrine Gift Shop in Lowell, said Barbin, the shop manager, but "what's really flying out of the store" are the little red, white, and blue guardian angel pins selling by the register for $3.95 apiece.

"I ordered a gross of 144 in the last three weeks and have probably six or seven left of the things," she said.

She also reported a run on Our Lady of Loreto medals, once purchased only by the occasional flight attendant, but now much in demand. "People are coming in and saying, 'So and so is taking a trip and I need so many,' " Barbin said. "We can't get a hold of them. They're on back order."

She said she has seen a number of new faces in the store in recent weeks. "I think they're coming back to their religion, to their roots," Barbin said. "They are people saying, 'I've been away from the church a long time.' We get those quite often."

Barbin said she herself wears the Miraculous Medal of the Blessed Virgin Mary. "It's not the medal, but the faith in the saint," she said. "People need to feel and see. People like to hold on to something."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. A woman lighting candles following a service at St. Joseph the Worker Shrine in Lowell, where more people have been coming to prayer and confession since Sept. 11. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO/JIM DAVIS 2. Lighted candles filling a wall at St. Joseph the Worker Shrine in Lowell. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO/JIM DAVIS Top

The Boston Globe
October 28, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1099 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
ARLINGTON HONORS OFFICER WHO DIED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
ARLINGTON - To the bagpipes' haunting wail, Arlington today will pay tribute to a police officer who gave his life in the line of duty 100 years ago.

Patrolman Garrett Cody fell July 1, 1901, shot with his own gun by a deranged assailant in an incident that began with an argument over a piece of fruit - and nearly ended in a lynching.

He remains the only Arlington police officer to have been killed in action.

Traffic will be stopped on Mystic Street from noon to 1 p.m. today as a procession makes its way to Arlington police station for the dedication of a monument to Cody's memory. Plans have been in the works for some time to erect a memorial to the Arlington officer slain a century ago.

But the ceremony has taken on new meaning in light of the sacrifice of hundreds of New York police and firefighters on Sept. 11. The memorial to be unveiled today is a tribute to them as well, Arlington police say.

"Even though it's a hundred years later, we're making a statement: 'We didn't forget what you did,' " said Lieutenant Paul Dooley, who led the drive to establish a memorial to Officer Cody.

"You look at those police and firefighters who died in New York, and it's a way of saying: 'We won't forget about you.' "

Said Arlington Police Chief Fred Ryan: "It is an opportunity to highlight municipal police officers across America who are on the front lines of law enforcement. And it is a way to memorialize Officer Cody for having given the ultimate sacrifice."

Today's ceremony will also turn the page on a tragic and ugly episode in Arlington history, one stained by murder and further shadowed by race and by mob anger.

A 30-year-old African-American laborer from Cambridge named John George Smith, charged in the fatal shooting, was moved from the Arlington lockup after a crowd outside became, in the words of a newspaper account at the time, "demonstrative in its deep resentment of what had occurred."

"We had thought we had seen the good people of Arlington in every conceivable mood, but it remained for the cold-blooded, though not premeditated, murder of police Officer Garrett J. Cody to reveal a temper that shows human nature is pretty much alike everywhere when the conditions working upon it are analogous," the Arlington Advocate of July 6, 1901, reported in its account of the crime.

" 'Lynch the brute,' was on the lips of men who had never dreamed they should utter them with personal feeling, and the police were wise in removing in a quiet way, to the safer quarters of Cambridge, the self-admitted perpetrator of the dastardly deed," the paper's account continued. "A spark would have kindled a flame that would have forever disgraced the fair fame of Arlington."

Smith, described by the Advocate as a "man of quarrelsome disposition and an abuser of his unusual physical strength" who had been implicated in previous assaults, was subsequently ruled insane and committed to a state asylum in Worcester.

According to the newspaper, Smith, a worker on a hay-gathering gang, had stabbed an Italian fruit peddler with the peddler's own knife after an argument on Massachusetts Avenue in East Arlington. Cody set out after the assailant, and in a struggle, lost his revolver to Smith. Unarmed, the officer continued the chase, hitching a ride on a horse team to catch up, but in a final confrontation by Alewife Brook, was shot four times and mortally wounded.

The Irish-American policeman, born and raised in Arlington and a nine-year veteran of the force, was 36 when he died. His wife, Ellen, was expecting their sixth child at the time.

The Advocate described the late officer thus: "Stern and unyielding in the discharge of his duty, he was never unkind, and he had a genial way that made him personal friends to an unusual degree. When we say the children liked Officer Cody, we give the best illustration of just what a disposition he possessed."

At the Arlington police station one recent afternoon, Lieutenant Paul Dooley examined vintage photographs of Officer Cody, dapper in walrus mustache and constable's helmet, marching in the 1896 Patriots Day parade, and posing for a family portrait with his wife and five young children.

"You sit here and think, at his age, having five children, all the things he never saw," said Dooley. "He never saw his five children grow up, never saw them get married, never saw his grandchildren."

Three of Cody's grandsons are expected to attend today's ceremony, as is a great-grandson who is a Plymouth police officer.

"It means a great deal to have him memorialized," said grandson Lawrence Robertie of Groveland. "I think it's good they'd go to the trouble."

Dooley's daughter Heather got him interested in the story about five years ago. Assigned a middle-school research paper on some facet of Arlington's past, she had asked him about the history of the Police Department.

"I couldn't tell her," said Dooley, an amateur genealogist who has done extensive research on his Irish and Canadian forebears. "I got off and running on that project."

Dooley did research in Robbins Library, assisted by historical reference librarian Jennifer Deremer. "I came across the stories of Cody," he said.

"Here's a guy who was killed, gunned down. . . . You ask yourself what makes a guy go after someone who just took your gun and stabbed a guy?"

Dooley, who marks a quarter-century on the Arlington force next year, grew up three blocks from the home at 118 Warren St. where Cody lived.

"I'd always wanted to do something," said Dooley, 48. "I felt kind of bad. I said it's terrible there's nothing here for him, even if it was 100 years ago."

The Cody house at Warren and Webster will be on the route of today's procession. Following Mass at St. Agnes Church, marchers will proceed to St. Paul's Cemetery on Broadway to lay a wreath on the policeman's grave, then to the police station at 112 Mystic St. for the unveiling of the memorial.

The Boston Police Gaelic Column of Pipes and Drums is expected to take part, as are police delegations from Belmont and other communities.

Arlington officers paid for the monument. Some of the dollars came from a police relief fund begun around the time of Cody's death, said Dooley.

The memorial will carry an inscription: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

"It took us 100 years to do this," said Dooley. "When people make sacrifices like that, it's important to have a memorial to them.

"It's kind of like we're finally saying to him, 'Thank you. Thank you for what you did.' "

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. Arlington Police Lieutenant Paul Dooley holding a picture of Patrolman Garrett Cody and his family. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / DAVID KAMERMAN 2. Patrolman Garrett Cody, third from left, marches in an Arlington Patriots Day parade in an 1896 photograph. Cody is the only Arlington policeman to be killed in the line of duty. Top

The Boston Globe
October 7, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 13

LENGTH: 1086 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY / PEOPLE AND PLACES;
SOFT WORDS, A BIG STICK BIOGRAPHER SAYS ROOSEVELT'S IDEAS ARE USEFUL TODAY

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
ANDOVER - One hundred years ago, an anarchist's bullet took the life of President William McKinley and thrust Theodore Roosevelt, at 42, into the White House as the youngest president ever to serve.

A century later, Roosevelt's legacy remains relevant to an America rising from the ashes of Sept. 11, says an Andover historian completing a biography of the 26th president.

"He called for Americans to be reenergized - to try new things and face real challenges at home," said Kathleen Dalton, an instructor of history at Phillips Academy, Andover, whose one-volume biography, "Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life," is to be released by Alfred A. Knopf in 2002.

"America could be a force for good in the world, but it had to renovate itself, not stand pat," she said. "He defined 'the strenuous life' as living your life for the good of the whole. He was asking Americans not to live for selfish gain." His foreign policy guided by the motto "Speak softly and carry a big stick," Roosevelt championed military preparedness while at the same time prizing diplomacy, Dalton said.

She noted that Roosevelt navigated his own Arab crisis in 1904 when an American, Ion Perdicaris, was kidnapped in Morocco by a brigand, Mulay Hamid El Raisuli. Roosevelt dispatched the Navy to the coast of Tangier, and rallied that summer's Republican convention with the cry "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!" But he managed to negotiate the hostage release without a shot fired or a drop of bloodshed.

And while he had little use for pacifists and believed conscientious objectors "should be put in chains," she said, Roosevelt defended dissent during World War I and spoke forthrightly against intolerance.

Dalton said the Roosevelt refrains of action, sacrifice, and shared national fate resound in the wake of Sept. 11. "With this, the 'Me Generation' is over," she said. "We look up to the people who dropped everything and went to New York to help."

The image of Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, has been on the rise in recent decades, his image burnished by biographers such as David McCullough and Edmund Morris, whose second installment in a planned Roosevelt trilogy, "Theodore Rex," is due out in November.

His Bull Moose banner has been seized by political boosters of John McCain and proponents of "national greatness" conservatism, given voice in the Weekly Standard and on the Web page of the Hudson Institute's Project for Conservative Reform (www.conservativereform.org).

The idea for the Bull Moose Republicans, a grass-roots group dedicated to reforming the GOP along more inclusive lines, was sketched out on the back of a napkin in Boston's Bull and Finch Pub by a pair of law students in 2000, and today the group claims 500 members in 33 states.

"He represents something the population has been longing for," said great-grandson Tweed Roosevelt of Boston. "They see him as the quintessential leader. This was a man who at San Juan Hill told his soldiers what any soldier wants to hear. He didn't say, 'Charge!' He said, 'Follow me!' "

A commemoration had been planned Sept. 14 in Buffalo, where Roosevelt had taken the presidential oath 100 years before, but the convention of the Theodore Roosevelt Association was postponed due to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The centennial of the Theodore Roosevelt presidency now sees the aircraft carrier named for him, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, leading a battle group toward the Persian Gulf.

Dalton was to have been among the presenters at the Buffalo commemoration. Interviewed in her Andover study, where a miniature bust of Roosevelt served as a paperweight for manuscript pages piled neatly by chapter, Dalton reflected on Roosevelt's legacy and its relevance to post-Sept. 11 America.

"I think his claim to greatness is in asking hard questions about justice," she said. "He thought big business should be controlled. He was worried about the average working people. He was a very angry person when he saw injustice. He wouldn't put up with it."
his Democratic cousin and presidential successor Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal picked up where the Bull Moose Party left off, Republican progressive Theodore Roosevelt shared "a sense of powerful national unity, that we're all in this together," Dalton said.

"Why are we together? What makes us special as a nation? T.R. wanted every child to have a school lunch, every school to have a playground. He believed in the minimum wage, in the right to collective bargaining.

". . . I think T.R.'s shared-fate message is worth revisiting, if it's an inclusive and tolerant one."

Echoing her remarks was Tweed Roosevelt, who in 1992 retraced his great-grandfather's 1913-1914 exploratory expedition along the River of Doubt in the Brazilian wilderness, and whose Roosevelt Investment Group offices on Wall Street were dusted with fallout from the Sept. 11 devastation.

"He's calling people to brotherhood, to shared nationality," Tweed Roosevelt said of his great-grandfather. "Are we going to be a nation? What does that oblige us to do? Does being a democracy mean just voting together, or something more? What deep things do we have together as a people?"

Dalton said researching this many-sided president has been a scholarly smorgasbord. Roosevelt was versed in art and sculpture, redesigned America's coins, and remodeled the White House, she said. He campaigned to simplify the spelling of American English, wrote extensively on history and birds and mammals, and had American Indian grace sung over dinner.

"I don't agree with everything he said or did," said Dalton. "He got better with age. He's such a character. He's so funny. He did impersonations. He was a ham actor.

"He comes out as quite an effusive, charming man, quite the opposite of the person I learned about in graduate school - the man who charged up San Juan Hill, the cowboy president, the poster-boy for imperialism.

"He turns out to be a more complicated, contradictory, interesting person. He was never boring."

A pen-pal campaign has been organized to send letters and e-mail messages to servicemen aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. "These young people are going into harm's way, and the least we can do is ensure they get mail from home," said Linda Milano, assistant director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, which is promoting the letter drive. Mail to: Any Sailor, USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) FPO AE 09599-2871. E-mail to: PAO@roosevelt.navy.mil

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Kathleen Dalton, an instructor in history at Phillips Academy, Andover, whose biography of Theodore Roosevelt will be published next year. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO/EVAN RICHMAN Top

Pierce Sears looks over soda in original bottles at the Twin Lights Bottling plant in Rockport.


The Boston Globe
August 5, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTH WEEKLY; Pg. 8

LENGTH: 1297 words

HEADLINE: NORTH WEEKLY;
IN ROCKPORT, SODA MAKER BOTTLES TRADITION

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
ROCKPORT - The vintage Dixie bottling machine in the barn at 69 Broadway runs only irregularly now, and returnable soda bottles are hard to come by.

Yet Twin Lights soda, a vestige of the mom-and-pop bottling industry that once flourished in Massachusetts, still bubbles in this corner of Cape Ann.

Twin Lights soda maker Pierce Sears, 69, of Rockport, has carried on the business founded by his grandparents in 1907.

"I didn't expect to be here this long," said Sears. "I didn't expect the bottles to hold out." Sears keeps in stock 20 or 30 cases of each of Twin Lights' dozen flavors, replenishing the supply as need be. He personally delivers cases of the 7-ounce and quart bottles to customers who ask.

The Dixie bottling machine in Sears' converted barn-bottling plant predates World War II and is capable of turning out a case a minute.

Bottles from the washer move along a conveyor, receive an ounce of syrup for a 7-ounce bottle, 3 or 4 ounces for a quart - as well as a swish of carbonated water. Then they are capped. Sears samples the first bottle in a batch to make sure it tastes right.

Flavors include cola, orangeade, root beer, lemon-lime, grape, fruit punch, strawberry, cream soda, birch beer, sarsaparilla and two kinds of ginger ale, golden and pale dry. Sears also holds the local Moxie franchise, concocting the gentian root elixir from concentrate stored in a 5-gallon pail.

"Customers come by the house and pick it up," he said. "I deliver it, too. We have people coming from as far as New Hampshire who take four or five cases at a time.

"Overall, orange is the favorite," he said. "I think orange has always been a little more active than any kind. People also like the strange flavors - birch beer, sarsaparilla."

Although it is packaged today in secondhand bottles and carried in only a few variety stores on Cape Ann, Twin Lights soda commands noteworthy loyalty from aficionados, who say its old-fashioned bite is not found in today's mass-market soft drinks.

"You almost feel as if you're chewing it," said Joe Virgilio Jr., of Virgilio's Italian Bakery on Main Street in Gloucester, which has carried Twin Lights since the '50s. The soda sells at the bakery for 75 cents a 7-ounce bottle, $1.50 a quart.

"I've got a guy from New York who comes in two or three times a year and buys all I have - and brings the bottles back!" Virgilio said. "He knows that when they run out of bottles, they go out of business."

It is no longer easy to find 7-ounce and quart returnable bottles that fit the Ladewig Bottle Washer and the circa-1939 Dixie bottling machine that compose the Twin Lights bottling operation.

A Henniker, N.H., vintage-bottle collector keeps Sears supplied, and the bottling barn attached to Sears' home at 71 Broadway is a shrine to regional soft-drink companies past.

Stacked cases are filled with old empties from Lakeview Beverages of Webster and Highland Club of Ludlow, from Crystal Club of Scranton, Pa., and Regent Bottling Co. of Pittsburgh.

Twin Lights labels with a logo of Rockport's landmark Thacher Island lighthouses are pasted over the old brand names. Sears redeems each returned 7-ounce bottle for 10 cents and each quart bottle for 20 cents.

"We aren't in supermarkets because the bottles would get lost. We don't have enough to stock them," he said. "We've got enough bottles now for another year."

On eBay this past week, vintage 1960s Twin Lights bottles painted with the double-lighthouse logo were being offered for prices ranging from $9.98 to $22.50, while 1930s Twin Lights ginger ale labels were going for $4.50.

At the Little Art Cinema on School Street in Rockport, filmgoers viewing the Swedish film "Under the Sun" last week could wash down their popcorn with 7-ounce bottles of Twin Lights selling at the movie theater price of $1.50.

"I think it's the shape of those lovely little bottles - it's so 'mom-and-popsy,' " said cinema owner Arnold Morton, who claimed an addiction to Twin Lights root beer. "It's nostalgic. It beckons to another time."

Twin Lights recalls an era when every corner "spa" in the Bay State carried local "tonic," and brands like Chelmsford Ginger Ale and Millis's Clicquot Club were household names.

As many as 96 bottlers operated in the Worcester County region alone in the 1930s, according to Christopher Crowley, executive vice president of Worcester-based Polar Beverages, one of the few regional independents remaining.

Changing market demographics, the rise of national supermarkets, and the introduction of nonreturnable packaging were among the factors that undercut small local bottlers, said Crowley, a member of the fourth generation of his family to run Polar Beverages, which reported about $200 million in sales last year.

Most independents couldn't compete with giants like Coca-Cola or Pepsi in obtaining national grocery contracts or purchasing bulk quantities of raw materials such as sugar, syrup, and bottling glass, Crowley said, and either were swallowed up by national brands or went out of business.

"It was - and is - a pennies business," said Crowley. "Every penny you made you had to re-invest. The industry changed."

There was a time when Twin Lights rivaled Coke and Pepsi in popularity on Cape Ann. Tens of thousands of cases a year of orangeade, ginger ale, and sarsaparilla with the distinctive Twin Lights label used to roll out of the bottling plant in the converted barn on Broadway.

Curative powers were attributed to Twin Lights. The ginger ale was known as the "hospital drink," said the baker, Virgilio, a Gloucester native, because "if ever you were in the hospital, they'd give you Twin Lights ginger ale." The old orangeade, meantime, had a local reputation as a potent cure for hangover.

"We had every small store on Cape Ann," said Sears, recalling the brand's heyday in the 1950s and '60s. "We had every bar in Gloucester, and Gloucester had a lot of bars."

In Gloucester, Twin Lights machines were found in fish-processing plants, in the post office, and at the Bass Rocks Golf Club.

In Rockport, at Jimmy Rantala's hot dog and ice cream stand on Back Beach, Twin Lights' numerous varieties outsold Coca-Cola. "For a small stand, he sold a fabulous amount of tonic," said Sears. "He sold hundreds of cases a week."

Sears went to work full time in the family bottling business after serving in the Army and earning a degree from Suffolk University in the late 1950s. Since his father, George, died eight years ago, he has carried on the Twin Lights legacy by himself.

"I'm not holding out or anything," he said. "I'm just glad to be able to keep this building busy."

This past Sunday afternoon, Richard Bryant of Rockport arrived at the Twin Lights loading dock on Broadway to pick up his weekly 12-quart ration of golden ginger ale and drop off the previous week's empties.

"Good golden ginger ale is hard to find," said Bryant, who said he has lived all but two of his 74 years in Rockport. " I've got to get golden ginger ale. Otherwise, the children will be on my neck."

Sears carried the case to the customer's car.

The soda maker acknowledged that Twin Lights' mismatched bottles carry memories as much as soda. "There is a call for it. There are people who fondly remember it."

So Sears will carry on. "As long as I can acquire the bottles," he said.

Twin Lights soda is available at the Thomas Wilson & Co. bottling plant at 69 Broadway in Rockport and at selected outlets on Cape Ann, including, in Rockport, the Rockport Market at 21 Broadway and Little Art Cinema at 18 School St.; in Gloucester, Virgilio's Italian Bakery at 29 Main St. and Annie's Variety at 86 Concord St.; and in Essex, Puna's Convenient Store at 121 Eastern Ave.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Pierce Sears looks over the soda in original Twin Lights bottles at the Rockport plant. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO/JOANNE RATHE Top

The Boston Globe
July 15, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 1538 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY / PEOPLE AND PLACES;
DRAWING ON MEMORIES OF A LEGEND DEDICATION OF RESTORED GYM PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE LATE GENE MACK, HIS BALLPARK WORKS

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
MEDFORD - His illustrations of America's famous old ballparks hang in the Baseball Hall of Fame, but the playing fields closest to Gene Mack's heart were in his hometown of Medford.

Now a restored gymnasium named for the late Boston Globe sports cartoonist is giving hundreds of Medford youngsters a place to beat the streets, while recalling Mack's legacy in the golden era of Boston journalism.

Within two weeks of its ribbon-cutting Feb. 26, the Gene Mack Clubhouse, operated in Medford Square by the Boys and Girls Clubs of Middlesex County, had enrolled more than 750 children.

"I can't tell you how wonderful it is," said Mack's daughter, Ruth Murphy of Stoneham, who said that the night of the rededication she was walking on air.

The old Medford High School gym on Forest Street was originally named for Mack after the popular cartoonist's death in 1953 at age 62. More than 800 people attended the dedication ceremony commemorating the artist who had been dubbed "Medford's Number One Fan." After Medford High moved to new quarters on Winthrop Street in 1970, however, the Gene Mack Gym and the Chevalier Auditorium upstairs fell into disuse. The old gym in the basement was in woeful shape in the mid-1990s when the nonprofit Friends of Chevalier Auditorium and Gene Mack Gymnasium launched a restoration campaign.

The City of Medford contributed about $750,000 toward the gym's renovation project, while the Friends raised $55,000. The Boys and Girls Clubs of Middlesex County were brought in to operate the youth center.

When the renovation was finished this year, the long-neglected Mack Gym shone anew, with a teen center, an arts-and-crafts area, study and game rooms, and a polished basketball floor with Gene Mack's name stenciled at center court.

"It's a dream come true, something the community has talked about and wanted for many years," said May Marquebreuck of Medford, the vice president and newsletter editor of the Friends of Chevalier Auditorium and Gene Mack Gymnasium.

Those who recall the state of the gym prior to its restoration would appreciate its transformation.

"When you have something that had fallen into disarray, and it's reborn, it has to be a wonderful feeling," said Marquebreuck.

The renewal also has introduced a new generation to the artist for whom it is named, who likewise had faded from civic memory.

Eugene McGillicuddy, who would become known to sports fans across the country by the pen name Gene Mack, was a 1908 graduate of Medford High who got his start engraving pots and pans for $3 a week. He began his 35-year Globe career doing illustrations for the newspaper's advertising department.

Mack is most widely remembered today for his 1940s series of Major League ballpark illustrations that were printed in the Globe and The Sporting News, and now reside in the collection of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

He also is recalled for creating a feature that still runs in the Globe sports pages, a cartoon of a bus carrying the undefeated high-school football teams that wends its way, losing cargo by the week, through the fall season toward the Thanksgiving Day finale.

When Mack penned the feature, each town or school had its own little character, such as Lattimore Latin, Medwick Medford, Sammy Salem, or Sylvester Southie.

"Every Monday the teams that got licked got pitched off the bus," said former Globe sportswriter Clif Keane of Winchester. "It was the most fun he had."

In the pretelevision days when Boston had eight daily newspapers and nearly as many full-time sports cartoonists, Mack was among the best known in the field, and would be given nearly a full page in the morning Globe for his drawings.

"It was an era when newspapers dominated the media, and cartoons were where people got the game story," said Brian Codagnone, the associate curator of the Sports Museum of New England. "Gene Mack and the others told a story with pictures."

Mack's whimsically detailed drawings gave Globe readers a daily reason to turn to the sports section for his take on the latest feats of the Red Sox or the Braves or the local college or high-school teams.

Little cartoon characters peopled the edges of his portraits to describe colorful plays or dispense comic asides, and in his famed illustrations of the 14 Major League ballparks of the 1940s, to tell the distinctive history of each park.

His drawing of the old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, for example, shows the spot in the outfield where in 1909 a lightning flash made possible a spectacular barehanded catch by Red Murray of the Giants.

His rendition of Fenway Park shows where a hill called Duffy's Cliff once rose to the wall in left, presenting a unique hazard to outfielders, and the location in the bleachers where Ted Williams's longest home run smashed a fan's straw hat.

Fans of Boston's National League team could easily recognize right-fielder Tommy Holmes in the cartoon ballplayer shouting, "I got it! I got it!" by the "Jury Box" bleachers in a Mack drawing of the old Braves Field.

"You would always know a Gene Mack cartoon," said veteran sports cartoonist Phil Bissell of Sandwich who succeeded Mack at the Globe. "Everyone wanted to grab a paper to see what he had done."

Many at the time considered Mack second only to the great Willard Mullin of the New York World-Telegram in the ranks of sports cartoonists, said Globe colleague Keane, whose own career at the paper spanned from 1929 to 1976.

"He did a perfect picture of a guy making a catch," said Keane. "You didn't have to read about how [a player] caught the ball. Gene Mack would show you."

Mack took a workmanlike approach to the job of filling five columns' worth of space in the daily paper, colleagues and family said.

Bissell described Mack and Bob Coyne, of the old Record, perched in the back row of the press box at the ballpark, filling their sketchbooks, then departing in the late innings of an afternoon game for their newsrooms on Washington Street's Newspaper Row.

"[Mack] would do the completed drawing in a couple of hours and be home for dinner," said Keane, who recalled the cartoonist as a departure from the raffish, ink-stained stereotype of the newsman in the "Front Page" era of journalism.

"He should have been a priest," said Keane. "I never heard him cuss anybody. I never saw the man angry in his life. He'd just sit there and draw and laugh."

His daughter, Ruth, recalled, as a schoolgirl, asking her father if he were famous. "I'm an artist - that's it," was his reply.

Mack took great interest in school sports. "He used to go to the [Boston] Garden on Saturday afternoon for high school hockey games - Arlington, Medford, Stoneham, teams like that - and he'd sit there drawing cartoons all afternoon," said Keane.

And he remained loyal to Medford High with the annual Thanksgiving game vs. Malden, a boisterous tradition in the McGillicuddy household, according to his daughter.

He would have been proud to have a youth gym named for him, Murphy said. She recalled how her father's "eyes got all watery" when the 1942 state championship Medford High football team presented him with a football-shaped charm.

At the newly renovated Gene Mack Clubhouse one recent Friday afternoon, children in the after-school program buzzed around athletic director Marco Abreu of Somerville as he gave a tour of the facility, where a membership for September through June costs $15.

"With these kids, you can't help but have fun," said the 21-year-old Abreu, dressed in a purple staff T-shirt, baggy shorts, and an upside-down visor cocked sideways on his head.

The veteran of the local pickup-basketball circuit credited a similar Boys and Girls Club in his hometown Union Square neighborhood for keeping him off the streets.

"I'm hearing from these kids that some got into trouble because they had no place to go," Abreu said. "Some come up and thank me, as if I opened the place, so grateful are they to have a place to come."

On Father's Day, the only one of Gene Mack's five children still living reflected on her father's legacy as she showed visitors to her Stoneham home some of her most treasured family keepsakes.

There were the annual Christmas cards her father had drawn in the 1940s, each decorated with caricatures of the family as well as ballplayers and the odd bat-toting Indian chief exhorting, "Come on, you Braves!"

There were the illustrations of baseball immortals like Babe Ruth, pictured on his return to Boston in 1935, and Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack, born Cornelius McGillicuddy, a cousin.

There was the weathered news photo of A's manager Mack, her father, and her late brother, Gene Jr., as a boy, posed at the ballpark under the heading "Three Real Mackmen Get Together."

And there were photographs taken at long-ago Red Sox spring training camps, of her sister, Miriam, with Joe Cronin, of her sister, Grace, with Jimmie Foxx.

"I miss them," Ruth Murphy mused.

But a spirit that had been lost has been recaptured at the youth center that bears Gene Mack's name, Marquebreuck said.

"A place that was dark and had fallen into disrepair," she said, "has life in it again."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, A rendition of Fenway Park by the late Boston Globe sports cartoonist Gene Mack, who is widely remembered today for his 1940s series of Major League ballpark illustrations. GENE MACK ILLUSTRATION Gene Mack's daughter, Ruth Murphy of Stoneham, holding a drawing of Babe Ruth by her father, said that the night the old Medford High School gym was rededicated in Mack's name she was walking on air. CAPTGLOBE STAFF PHOTO/JONATHAN WIGGS Cartoonist Gene Mack, left, in a 1940s pose with his cousin, Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack. Top

The Boston Globe
July 8, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 772 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
TINY PORTRAITS TELL VERY PERSONAL TALES MINIATURES LOOK AT A PRIVATE SIDE OF AMERICAN STORY

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
ANDOVER - At his death in 1799, George Washington was commemorated across America as a national icon. But when his widow, Martha, two years later commissioned a locket portrait of herself by English artist Robert Field, she chose to remember her husband in more human terms.

On the locket's reverse, an altar topped by two joined hearts and two entwined doves is depicted beneath the legend, "Join'd by Friendship, Crown'd by Love." Clippings of the widow's gray hair and her late husband's intermingle in a sign of undying affection. "It's not the public George, it's the private George," said Susan Faxon, associate director and curator of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, where the Martha Washington locket is among a collection of American portrait and mourning miniatures on exhibit through July.

"This is the family commemoration, the personal commemoration of him."

In the age before photography and mass production, painstakingly crafted miniature portraits, often small enough to hold in the palm of the hand, were painted on commission to commemorate births, engagements, marriages, or deaths.

Women wore them around the neck or on bracelets, sometimes woven of human hair, while men would carry them in a pocket or pin them under a coat lapel. "They were not meant for adornment or public show, but for memory," said Faxon.

Nearly 140 of these intimate keepsakes from the 18th and 19th centuries were assembled for the Addison Gallery show, "Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures," by the Yale University Art Gallery.

Included in the exhibition are works by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Benjamin West. Magnifying glasses are provided at the door.

"The works are as breathtaking as they are small," Faxon said. Most, she noted, are painted on ivory, which has a translucent, almost glowing, quality that imparts to the object "a particular kind of luminosity." Some, like reliquaries, incorporate the beloved's hair, plaited, or even chopped and used in the paint.

Each comes with a story, and show organizers have made the objects' personal context paramount.

"These are private things that were worn by private people to commemorate or remember a person they cared about," said Faxon. "A history of the person is inherent in each object."

Romantic allegories abound in the miniatures. A few - such as "Young Lady in a Sheer White Dress," done by William M.S. Doyle in 1805 - are remarkably revealing. "To don almost nothing," writes exhibition organizer Robin Jaffee Frank of the Yale University Art Gallery, "a lady had to be as lovely and confident as Doyle's sitter, who may have dressed provocatively for everyone to see or saved her display for the man who carried her portrait miniature."

In "Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait)," Sarah Goodridge, a Boston artist romantically involved with Senator Daniel Webster, presented the statesman in 1828 with a uniquely intimate keepsake - a miniature rendering of her bare breasts. This "provocative gift," writes Frank, "remains a striking sign that boundaries of conduct were never as narrow as we sometimes believe."

Particularly poignant are the mourning miniatures, of spouses and children "not lost, but gone before," in the words of a consoling maxim inscribed on tombstones of the day.

Harriet Mackie, young and lovely, died on the day before her wedding in 1804. Wearing a chaplet adorned with white roses, she was painted, as if sleeping, on her deathbed; enclosed on the locket's reverse is a plaid of her hair.

Willows of hair weep in memory of the Hays brothers, Solomon and Joseph, in a locket from 1801, while willow boughs painted on glass, framing a woman weeping over a tomb, give the 1802 memorial locket for Henry G. Staats a stereoscopic effect.

In one of the more unusual mourning miniatures on display, "Memorial for S.C. Washington," done in 1789 by an unknown artist, the deceased is depicted breaking out of her tomb, like a chick from an egg, to a mourner's amazement.

"I find them fascinating," said Faxon. "The images of the children who died are sad. But even with these, I'm astounded by the skillful artistry of the painters and the elaboration on such a tiny scale. The skillfulness leaves me breathless."

"Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures," appears through July 31 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Route 28 and Chapel Avenue, Andover. The museum is open to the public, free of charge, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For information, call 978-749-4015.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Two samples from a collection of American portrait and mourning miniatures on exhibit through July at Phillips Academy in Andover. ADDISON GALLERY OF AMERICAN ART Top

The Boston Globe
February 25, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1222 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
LAWRENCE'S IRISH PAST CITY CELEBRATES EARLY TIDE OF IMMIGRANTS LAWRENCE MARKS IRISH HERITAGE MONTH

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
LAWRENCE - When Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness visits Lawrence on St. Patrick's Day, he will find a city steeped in Irish republican lore.

In the 1860s, Lawrence Irishmen of the Fenian Brotherhood, a militant secret society pledged to Irish independence, shouldered arms in a failed invasion of British Canada, and figured in the "Manchester Martyrs" episode in England that stoked Irish passions against the Crown.

"By the outside world Lawrence is considered one of the hot-beds of Fenianism," the Lawrence Eagle reported in 1878 in an article noting a flow of contributions from the city toward an anti-England "skirmishing fund," which in subsequent years would support a campaign of dynamite bombings in London.

Addressing a cheering throng in Lawrence in June 1919, future Irish President Eamon de Valera, then a rebel Sinn Fein chief recently escaped from a British jail, hailed the city as the first in America to recognize the new Republic of Ireland. Lawrence's green legacy as a center of Irish nationalism is recalled in a 6,000-piece Irish collection, newly housed in the South Lawrence Branch Library, that will be showcased in a month-long Irish heritage celebration in the city beginning Friday.

It begins with the unveiling of an Irish art exhibition at Lawrence Heritage State Park, Irish storytelling for children at Lawrence Public Library, and an Irish Authors Weekend at the South Lawrence Branch Library that organizers say is the year's largest Irish literary event in Massachusetts.

Upcoming events include the Ancient Order of Hibernians' St. Patrick's Day banquet on March 10 and luncheon on March 16, and offerings at Heritage State Park ranging from an Irish film festival March 15-17 to an Irish soda-bread contest March 16.

The St. Patrick's Day visit scheduled by McGuinness is seen by festival hosts as a major coup. The chief negotiator for Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish republican movement, McGuinness played a central role in the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland.

He serves as education minister in the Ulster government, and in that role he will read from the Irish sagas to Lawrence elementary schoolchildren at the South Lawrence Branch Library on March 17 before joining Representative Martin T. Meehan (D-Lowell) at St. Patrick's Day fund-raisers in Lowell and Marlborough.

Local Irish festival organizers see McGuinness and Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams as heirs to the Fenian spirit that inspired Lawrence Irishmen to join raids on British garrisons in Canada in 1866 and 1870.

"They're in the same mold, willing to sacrifice their lives for Ireland," said David Burke of Lawrence, vice president of the Rev. James T. O'Reilly Division 8 of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a chief sponsor of Irish Heritage Month.

More than 170 Irishmen from Lawrence took part in a quixotic invasion of Canada in June 1866 mounted by Fenians bent on forcing Irish independence from Britain. Volunteers from the city also participated in a subsequent Canada raid four years later that also failed.

"What was going through a young man's mind as he marched from here to Vermont, knowing he might be killed?" said Burke. "What was in his mind? An ideal - that the land of his birth should be free."

Captain Timothy Deasy of Lawrence, a decorated Civil War veteran-turned-leader in the Fenian Underground, was among those who took part in the Canada invasion in 1866.

The following year, in England to stir insurrection, Deasy was taken into custody by authorities but freed in an armed confrontation that left a Manchester policeman dead. Three of his Fenian rescuers were captured and hanged and mourned by Irish patriots as "the Manchester Martyrs."

Deasy would go on to serve on the Lawrence City Council and to be elected a state representative. When he died in 1880 at the age of 41, thousands lined the city's streets for the funeral procession.

Another Fenian who enjoyed political success in the city was John Breen, who became New England's first Irish-Catholic city mayor when he was elected in Lawrence in 1882.

The city's current mayor, Patricia Dowling, who grew up in St. Patrick's Parish in South Lawrence, the descendant of immigrants from County Cork, said she was raised with a sense of the rebel spirit of her Irish forebears in the Mill City on the Merrimack.

"Absolutely," she said. "I heard stories from my grandmother. The Irish who came over were staunch Catholics, and not so predisposed toward accepting English folks."

In the mid-19th century, Lawrence was among the most Irish cities, per capita, in America. Successive waves of newcomers - French-Canadian, Italian, and today, Latino and Asian - have since remade the face of what locals dub "the Immigrant City."

But many who have since come to the city see reflections of their own experience in that of the Irish who toiled in the mills and built the churches of Lawrence a century ago, said Dowling, honorary chairwoman of Irish Heritage Month.

"The Irish story parallels a lot of the recent immigrant stories," the mayor said. "My great-great-grandparents came over in difficult times. They were able to come to this country and make a success of themselves, to enjoy opportunities that were not open to them in Ireland.

"Lawrence has always been an immigrant community," she said. "The Irish, the Italians, the French, all these groups got along well together while maintaining pride in their national ancestry.

The Irish-American experience in Lawrence is chronicled in a library collection that was compiled over more than 20 years by the Ancient Order of Hibernians and will be showcased in the city's Irish cultural celebration in March.

The 6,000-piece collection of books, periodicals, films, and ephemera is touted as the largest nonuniversity Irish archive in Massachusetts outside Boston.

Items on recent display included a plaque commemorating de Valera's triumphant visit to Lawrence in 1919, an 1880s subscription pledge for the Ireland Anti-Coercion Fund bearing a likeness of Irish statesman Charles Stewart Parnell, and a ticket to an 1867 assembly of the Shamrock Baseball Club.

"Some of us are second-, third- and fourth-generation Irish, but we feel just as keen as if we were born there," said Burke. "The kinship is there. We want to pass it down from generation to generation as it was passed down to us."

When the AOH, moving to new offices, sold its spacious Hibernian Hall in downtown Lawrence in December, the archive was donated to the city's public library system, and is now housed in the former Immigrant City Archives room of the South Lawrence Branch Library at 135 Parker St.

The branch is open Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

"I like to see collections that are alive and vibrant and accessible," said David Hildt, acting director of the Lawrence Public Library. "There's a great deal of potential for people who want to do research on Irish issues, and specifically local issues pertaining to the Irish community. For our part, we're delighted to accept the collection."

For more information on Irish Heritage Month events, contact Lawrence Heritage State Park, 1 Jackson St., Lawrence, at 978-794-1655, or the South Lawrence Branch Library at 978-682-1727.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. Library director David Hildt (left) and David Burke of the Ancient Order of Hibernians show the Irish historical collection. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTOS / TOM LANDERS 2. Some of the pieces of the city's Irish history in the Lawrence Public Library. 3. Among documents in the Lawrence library is one portraying past Irish republican leaders. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTOS / TOM LANDERS 4. Irish statesman Charles Stewart Parnell's 1880 visit to the city is noted in the Lawrence Public Library's exhibit. Top

The Rev'd Benjamin J. King after Mass at The Church of the Advent, Boston


The Boston Globe
January 28, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1235 words

HEADLINE: CITY WEEKLY;
CHURCH OF THE ADVENT PLANS MASS FOR A MONARCH CHURCH SOCIETY TO HONOR MARTYRED KING FOR KEEPING THE FAITH

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
BEACON HILL - Boston history recalls him as the British royal for whom the Charles River was named, but many High Church Anglicans revere King Charles I as a sainted martyr, who lost his head for defending the faith of the Church of England.

Sentenced to death by Parliamentary forces after the English Civil Wars that pitted Royalist Cavaliers against Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Roundheads, the doomed Charles uttered these famous last words before the headsman's ax fell on Jan. 30, 1649: "I have a good cause and I have a gracious God. I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown. Remember!"

And so Charles I will be remembered, on the 352d anniversary of his death at a 6 p.m. memorial Mass on Tuesday at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill. Members of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, the Anglican devotional society sponsoring the Mass, see no incongruity in honoring a deposed English ruler in a city famed for tossing the British monarchy more than two centuries ago.

"We commemorate him not because he was an English monarch, but because he was a saint, who died in order to avoid having to acknowledge the church he believed in was false," said Society member Thatcher Gearhart, 24, a money manager from the Back Bay. His student society at Yale, the Tory Party, held Charles I as its patron.

A devout Anglo-Catholic who traces his Old Boston lineage to Cotton Mather and John Adams but describes himself as a monarchist, the bow-tied Gearhart, sipping sherry after the 11 o'clock Solemn Mass at the Advent this past Sunday, said the historic church on Brimmer Street was a fitting place to honor a churchman who died in the name of tradition.

"Beacon Hill is by nature a very traditional place," he said, "and it is not surprising to find here the most traditional expression of the Christian religion anywhere."

If a service for an English monarch in Boston seems an anomaly, so too does the Church of the Advent, for many years a singular presence in this city of Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics.

The parish was founded in 1844 as the American flagship of the Oxford Movement, which emphasized the Catholic instead of the Protestant heritage of the Anglican Communion, and took a "High Church" view of the sacraments and liturgy.

Parishioners have included the Harvard naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, memorialized in sailing gear in a statue on the nearby Commonwealth Mall, and flamboyant socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner, who did annual penance by scrubbing the walk in front of the church on her hands and knees.

Mass at the Advent, a sensory feast with its chant and incense and ornate ceremony, recalls the old Roman Catholic Latin Mass, only said in English.

The steeple bells that peal to accompany the "1812 Overture" during the annual July Fourth Pops concert on the nearby Esplanade also ring each Sunday during the elevation of the Sacrament at Mass and the praying of the Hail Mary afterward.

And it is noteworthy that in today's Catholic Boston, post-Vatican II, one of the few places a priest is to be seen in traditional black cassock and biretta is at the Anglican Church of the Advent.

The Rev. Benjamin King, a newly ordained priest from England who is serving as curate at the Advent while studying at Harvard Divinity School, will offer Tuesday's Mass for Charles I, and said he is pleased to be doing so.

"I would say it is marvellous - with two Ls," said the 26-year-old cleric, savoring a Britishism.

Mark Wuonola of Waltham, the American representative of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, will give a presentation following the Mass, which he expects to draw perhaps "a couple dozen" worshippers.

He said as many as 100 attendees were expected at the annual Mass and meeting of the Society of King Charles the Martyr yesterday at St. John's Church in Newport, R.I.

Wuonola is a 53-year-old research chemist and church historian who authored the official guide book to the Church of the Advent and who, appropriately enough, lives in a section of Waltham called Piety Corner. "The name goes back to the Puritans," he explained. He has been heralding the cause of Charles I for more than a dozen years.

By refusing to submit to Cromwell's demands to abolish the Anglican episcopacy, Charles I forfeited his life, Wuonola said, but preserved the succession of bishops that stretched unbroken to Christ's apostles and maintained the Anglican Communion as a branch of the "one holy, catholic and apostolic church."

Wuonola said he came to believe that a "gross injustice" had been done to Charles I. "What appealed to me was the wrongness of the situation, that he had been unjustly tried in a kangaroo court," he said. "I subsequently came to appreciate his service to the Anglican Church."

A cult grew up about Charles I almost immediately following his execution, with strips of cloth dipped in the royal blood credited with miraculous cures. Thirteen years after his death, after the monarchy had been restored, the Church of England proclaimed him a saint, establishing Jan. 30 as his feast day.

In 1859, for reasons owing to church and court politics, and to the waning observance of his feast, Charles I was ordered removed from the Anglican calendar of saints by Queen Victoria. A group of High Church Anglicans seeking to restore his feast to the church calendar formed the Society of King Charles the Martyr in 1894.

The cause of the "decollated" monarch has inspired some devotees to flights of impassioned - not to mention gory - hymnody. A favored hymn composed by Society founder Ermengarda Greville-Nugent begins:

"O holy King, whose severed head/ The Martyr's Crown doth ray/ With gems for every blood-drop shed,/ Saint Charles for England pray!"

Another hymn, "The Praise of Charles, Our Martyr King," recalls the monarch thus: "For holy Church his head he bowed,/ Upon the axe his life-blood flowed:/ And where that kingly seed was sown/ New harvest unto Christ has grown."

King said he has the text to a sung-verse "paean of praise to Charles the Martyr" that runs upward of 12 stanzas, but is hesitant to use it in its entirety on Tuesday. "The Mass would go on all night," he said, with a smile. "I'll try and use some of it."

Society member Gearhart planned to attend Mass for the king in Newport yesterday, and return for the rite in Boston on Tuesday.

"It's hard being a monarchist in modern-day America," he said. "The appeal of the monarchy is it gives any particular culture a face, a symbol behind which all the people can unite."

History has not been kind to Charles I the king. An unprepossessing monarch with a slight stammer, he was devoted to religion and family and was a notable patron of the arts. But he lacked the common touch, held an authoritarian belief in the divine right of kings, and has been faulted for provoking the civil war that led to his execution through his intransigence in the power struggle with Parliament.

His glory was in his exit, said Richard Mammana, a 21-year-old classics major at Columbia University who is a frequent contributor to the Society of King Charles the Martyr newsletter and Anglo-Catholic Web sites, and who will preach on Charles the Martyr on Tuesday at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan.

"He wasn't a great king," said Mammana. "But in the end, he knew who his God was. He knew there was a king greater than he."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. The deposed British King Charles I was beheaded in 1649. / PHOTO COURTESY OF CHURCH OF THE ADVENT 2. The Rev. Benjamin J. King after last Sunday's Mass at Church of the Advent. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / DOMENIC CHAVEZ Top

The Boston Globe
October 29, 2000, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 4

LENGTH: 1654 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY;
AUTHOR DESCRIBES LITTLETON'S 'OTHER DIMENSION'

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
LITTLETON - The spirits that walk the woods behind John Hanson Mitchell's home in Littleton are as tangible a part of the historical landscape, he says, as the ancient stone walls that wind through the oak and hickory trees.

There's the "Gallant Ghost," the specter of a Minuteman killed in battle who pledged to return to his betrothed "in body or spirit" - and who kept his promise.

There's the "Bear-Man" spirit - half bear, half man - that may still roam an area where American Indians lived for millennia.

And there's the curse pronounced by a 17th-century Indian medicine man who is said to lie on nearby land where the high-tech giant Cisco Systems plans a new office park.

"The spirits are closer to the veil here," said Mitchell, a naturalist and author, guiding a visitor through a hemlock grove behind his house on Beaver Brook Road. "There is a spiritual dimension to landscape that you don't see," he said, "an overlay of spiritual history that contains within it all the stories and legends and myths that have gone into the creation of a place."

The ghosts of legend figure prominently in the writings of Mitchell, editor of the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Sanctuary magazine and author of five books on the natural and human history of the woods and ponds around his Littleton home.

His latest, "The Wildest Place on Earth," is due out next year.

His most celebrated work, "Ceremonial Time," released in 1984, traces life in the square-mile Scratch Flat area of Littleton more than 15,000 years, from the Ice Age to the present day, and has become an environmentalists' favorite.

The title of that book, he said, was drawn from an American Indian ritual of conjuring simultaneously the past, the future, and the spirit world.

The past, and the attendant spirits, seem close in the woods behind the gingerbread house that the 60-year-old writer shares with his wife, Jill Brown.

Scratch Flat is part of an expanse from Turtle Rock in Carlisle to Mount Wachusett in Princeton that is held by native spiritualists to contain powerful natural forces, Mitchell said.

Nearby Nagog Pond was a sacred place to Native Americans, while Nashoba Hill, known for its mighty rumblings, was said by the Indians to hold the four winds and by English settlers to have army cannons trapped inside it.

The vicinity of Bumblebee Park in town is noted as a center of seismic activity, and stone mounds found in the area are believed by some researchers to date to Indian days.

The tales Mitchell tells of the woods behind his home evoke Washington Irving's stories of the enchanted Catskills, where Rip Van Winkle happened upon the bowling party of Henry Hudson's phantom Dutchmen.

"People who claim to be in touch with the spirit world have come back here and said there are powerful presences here," he said.

Now and again, "the veil parts that separates what we call reality from the spirit world," he said, "and for a brief second we see into the past, into the spirit world."

More than once, the ghost of a lovelorn Minuteman is said to have made his presence felt.

According to local legend, the spirit of a Revolutionary War soldier, Enoch Dole, felled by a cannonball at the Battle of Dorchester Heights, wanders fields and orchards searching for his lost love, Eve Cogswell, who in the 18th century lived on the farm next to Mitchell's home on Beaver Brook Road.

The story goes that Dole pledged to return to his beloved Eve "in body or in spirit," and kept his word, his ghost startling the young woman as she milked the cows.

Reports of a phantom presence in the barnyard continued in the 19th century. The most recent sighting of the so-called "Gallant Ghost" was in 1975, according to Mitchell, when a local handyman walking in the fields at night "felt a chill wind" and turned to behold, at forest's edge, a man in 18th-century garb with a tarred pigtail.

Enoch Dole's headstone, detailing his battlefield demise, may be seen in the old burying ground on Littleton Common.

Littleton had its own "White Witch," Mary Louisa Dudley, who in the aftermath of Salem, in 1720, was accused by three girls of having bewitched them and having appeared in the shape of a bird. Hounded by accusations, Dudley, fair young wife of the town clerk, died shortly thereafter, probably of a miscarriage, according to Mitchell. "It's a sad story," he said.

A bear sachem, part man, part animal, revered in Indian lore, may have figured in an eerie account of the 1812 death of the last black bear on Scratch Flat, Mitchell said.

Mitchell took a visitor through the grove of gnarled hemlock where the bear had been tracked and shot and where, according to a historical account given by Johnny Putnam, an African-American freeman who was there, the seemingly dead beast had roared frighteningly to life before breathing his last.

Years later, before he died, Putnam said to an interviewer: "Wasn't no bear died that day. Was a man."

"Shape-shifters" of this sort appear regularly in Native American legend, Mitchell said, recalling one local Indian who told English settlers his grandfather had been a bear. "This idea of bears being Indians is not uncommon," he said. "Who knows but that the spirit of the bear was here?"

An Indian spirit of another sort may hang over the 90 acres along Routes 495 and 119 where Cisco Systems plans a major new office park, according to Mitchell.

Perhaps 200 yards from the site of the proposed development, on Beaver Brook, was the site of a 17th-century fishing weir built by a member of the local Nashoba settlement of Christian "Praying Indians," Tom Dublet.

After acting as a translator for the English in hostage negotiations with Indians during the King Philip's War of 1675, Dublet sued the Massachusetts General Court when payment was not forthcoming. The Indian prevailed in his suit after 15 years, but his compensation amounted to nothing more than a red vest with shiny brass buttons.

"The legend is he was offended by his treatment by the English, and cursed the land," said Mitchell, citing tales he has heard at local Indian tribal gatherings.

Two previous commercial development projects planned on the site, now owned by Cisco Systems, were scratched in the 1980s, Mitchell observed, as were plans for a shopping center on a nearby site, across Great Road, where houses have now been built.

The idea of a ghost hostile to office plazas drew a guffaw from Nancy Bradbury, curator of the Littleton Historical Society. "I suppose there's a possibility we have ghosts who are anti-commercial development," she said, laughing.

A Cisco spokeswoman, Mojgan Khalili, reacted with bemusement to a question on the reports of a curse. "Our normal policy is we don't comment on rumors or speculation," she said. "We don't have a policy regarding predictions from medicine men."

A sad legacy remains from Littleton's Indian past, when peaceful Praying Indians were rounded up during King Philip's War and marched for internment on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, Bradbury said.

That colorful and tragic history, combined with tales of Nashoba's rumblings and the remaining presence of once-sacred Indian lands that have gone as yet undeveloped, she said, lend to a sense of Littleton as a place where ghosts walk.

"I'm sure there are other places that have more," she said, "but it's a special place."

Bradbury has heard her share of ghost stories in the 50 years she has lived in town.

One involves the "Littleton Giant," Henry Dix Kimball, a gentle and unassuming seven-footer of the mid-1800s whose stature was noted in Thoreau's journals and whose outsized shoe is displayed in the Historical Society quarters.

A family who lived in the late giant's house on King Street told Bradbury of a night, about 30 years ago, when a light in an upstairs room inexplicably turned on of its own accord. This occurred on the exact date that Henry Dix Kimball had died in the house years before. "He might very well have come back for a visit," Bradbury said.

A barn in the Pingryville area on the Litteton-Ayer line was the site of an "exorcism" about a dozen years ago, when a medium was summoned to rid the structure of an unwanted spirit that was bothering the horses, according to Bradbury, who said she was told of the incident by the property owner.

Bradbury, who declined to reveal the exact locations of the alleged hauntings, or of the names of the residents who had reported them, told of another old home in town where repeated sightings have been made of a Colonial-era ghost in tricorn hat and waistcoat. The phantom, described as a small man in period dress, is said to have appeared once in the basement while the homeowner was canning preserves and again in an upstairs hall, where he disappeared into a doorway.

"What John is saying about the land - who's to say with structures there isn't this crossover?" Bradbury said. "I'm not discounting it. Makes a great story!"

Mitchell said he has had only one experience in the woods behind his house that might be deemed a brush with the supernatural.

In the '70s his old dog disappeared one autumn night, never to return, and which by mid-winter was presumed dead. Months later, walking behind his house one night during a light spring snowfall, Mitchell heard a crunching noise behind him, and turning, saw what appeared to be his old dog - only much younger - atop a stone wall. The dog moved in concert for a time, running ahead, stopping atop the wall as if waiting, then running, until he disappeared into the woods.

A Wampanoag medicine woman friend of Mitchell's, upon hearing the story, asked if he'd seen any prints in the snow. "I'd wager you that dog left no tracks," he recalled her saying.

"For me," the place "has got some elements at night that suggest the spirit world is a little closer to the surface," he said. "But that's true of any place - something lurks."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Author John Hanson Mitchell, outside his Littleton home, has written extensively about the spirit world in that area. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / DAVID KAMERMAN Top

The Boston Globe
August 27, 2000, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NORTHWEST WEEKLY; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 1629 words

HEADLINE: NORTHWEST WEEKLY / SPORTS;
WHEN BASEBALL WAS CHIEFS IN MEDFORD EX-PLAYERS, HOSMER FAMILY RECALL THE GLORY DAYS AT PLAYSTEAD PARK

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
MEDFORD - They sometimes wore Indian war bonnets on the field, and were known for their incessant whistles and chatter to rattle opponents.

The Hosmer Chiefs of Medford were for two decades one of the finest amateur baseball teams in New England, in the early '60s occasionally outdrawing the then-woeful Boston Red Sox, and topping the Intercity League seven times in a row between 1968 and 1974.

Named for the Indian-head emblems on the flashy chrome-covered Pontiacs sold by their car-dealer sponsor, the Chiefs brought a barnstorming spirit to the game.

Their star pitcher won more than 100 games with an old-fashioned high-kick delivery that hid the ball till the last possible second from the batter's sight.

One player-manager once ran backward around the bases after hitting a home run, and in the field would often drop his mitt to the grass and taunt rival batsmen to hit the ball to him. Another went on to make millions selling hot dogs and sodas at sporting events and has been mentioned as a possible buyer for the Red Sox.

"We played with such a zest," recalled Lennie Dempsey, the Chiefs' scrappy player-manager from 1960-66. "You couldn't be at a game without people screaming from the opening pitch. We played with a passion. We were the Boys of Summer."

Now, 18 summers after their last game, the Chiefs and their late sponsor, John Hosmer Jr., are being honored in the city to which they brought such sporting pride.

A memorial plaque and flagpole have been dedicated in Hosmer's memory at the Chiefs' old home field, Playstead Park in West Medford. Team alumni who attended the June ceremony are now planning another reunion in Maine this fall at a restaurant owned by former catcher Gordie Lewis.

Hosmer family members and former Chiefs have welcomed the chance to reminisce on the days when baseball was king in Medford, and a ballyhoo-loving car salesman and a gang of ballplayers formed an extended clan that would endure through the decades.

"Every team in New England knew who we were," said Dempsey, who piloted the team to five straight titles in the Suburban Twilight League between 1961 and 1965. "We were invincible. We gave Medford something to be proud of."

Large crowds would fill the bleachers and sidelines for playoff games at Playstead Park, with stampedes of youngsters chasing the foul balls that cascaded off adjacent housetops and parked cars. "It was a time when the Red Sox couldn't draw 5,000 people, and we'd outdraw them for a playoff game," Dempsey claimed. "They had to rope off the diamond in those days."

"We all pulled for each other, and we hated to lose," said Eddie DiGiacomo of Medford, who played alongside his brother, Richie, on the Chiefs in the 1960s and was nicknamed "The Whistler" and "The Barker" for the ear-splitting noises he would make from third base to distract the opposition. Playing for the Chiefs "meant everything," said DiGiacomo, 57, a meter-reader for the electric company. "It was my life."

Medford City Councilor Robert Penta, a relief pitcher for the team from 1966 to 1972, still proudly displays his red-sleeved jersey with "Chiefs" in red script across the chest. "It made an average kid like myself feel as if I were playing professional baseball," he said, recalling hot summer nights on the mound when he might lose five pounds to perspiration over the course of a game.

In a baseball-loving city that produced big-leaguers Bill Monbouquette of the Red Sox and Mike Pagliarulo of the Twins and Yankees, the Chiefs were a "link between playing sandlot and playing for the Red Sox," said John H. "Jay" Hosmer 3d of Winchester, son of the team's late sponsor.

Mention the team and old-time fans recall long-ago games against the Boston Typos and Mass. Envelope and the McKinnon Club of Everett. They recall players like Ralphie Walker and Ellis "Sonny" Lane, who became athletic director at Melrose High, Tommy Mandile, who went as far as Triple A with the Cubs before his arm gave out, and hard-hitting Holy Cross grad Joey Armstrong.

"To this day, when I say my name, 25 percent of the people I meet will say, 'Hosmer Pontiac? Hosmer Chiefs?' " said Jay Hosmer.

What Tom Yawkey was to the Red Sox, John Hosmer Jr., who died at his Winchester home in 1989 at age 68, was to the Chiefs.

Hosmer had a promoter's flair, luring singers like the Ames Brothers and sports stars like Tom Heinsohn of the Celtics and Gerry Cheevers of the Bruins to appear on behalf of his Pontiac dealership. Period publicity stills show youngsters cramming the Mystic Avenue showroom to have 45s autographed by a popular crooner or to shoot baskets with visiting Celtics. He also sponsored a basketball team, the Indians, and a number of youth baseball teams that served as a farm system for his Chiefs.

"He was a showman," said his widow, Betty Ann, of Winchester. The same spirit animated his Chiefs, which Hosmer groomed as the showpiece of the area's talent-laden but gritty amateur baseball loop.

Hosmer took over the four-year-old team in 1962, when he succeeded his father as president of the Medford dealership, and ran it until '82, when he sold the dealership and the Chiefs disbanded.

In those 20 years, competing first in the Suburban Twilight League and then in the Intercity League, the Chiefs won a dozen championships and never finished worse than second. Six times, the BoSox Club, the Red Sox' booster organization, named the Chiefs the best amateur baseball team in New England.

Hosmer attended every game. He found jobs for some of his players, who were mostly in their early 20s, and lent cars to others. Every summer in late August, after the season ended, he and his wife invited the team to their summer home on Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester for a clambake.

"He loved that team," said Betty Ann Hosmer. "My husband was a very energetic person. He required little sleep, and was very enthusiastic. The kids went to the games, and they got a kick out of it."

The four Hosmer children came to see the ballplayers as part of their extended family. "The Chiefs taught me how to play whist," said daughter Darcy Hosmer Margiotta of Andover, who recalled watching the first lunar landing in 1969 with the ballplayers at the Gloucester beach house.

Former Chiefs manager and catcher Joe O'Donnell of Belmont recalled Hosmer as a benevolent owner who would sit on the bench during games but never interfere, and would treat players to dinners at Blinstrub's and other eateries.

"He was the kindest person I ever met," said O'Donnell, a product of Everett and Harvard University who was player-manager for the Chiefs from 1968-80, winning his final championship with the club in his last year at age 37.

Since hanging up his catcher's mask, O'Donnell himself has had a noteworthy off-field career. The 56-year-old Harvard Business School alumnus has built his Boston Concessions Group into a multimillion-dollar business that markets refreshments at sporting arenas and resorts around the country. He has founded the Joey Fund, to aid children with cystic fibrosis, in honor of a son who died from the disease, and has given millions to the baseball program at Harvard, where the field is named in his honor.

Widely seen as a potential suitor for the Red Sox if and when the team is put up for sale, O'Donnell describes his old patron, Hosmer, as a role model for him. "He was the first rich guy most of us ever met," O'Donnell said. "He demonstrated day after day, year after year, the good things you could do with money. He helped more people in an unobtrusive way. He had an impact on that community far beyond the Hosmer Chiefs."

The Harvard B School-bred O'Donnell's approach as player-manager was pure "Wall Street," he said, at least compared with that of his predecessor, Lennie Dempsey, who climbed backstops and ran bases backward to rally the troops. "I was kind of dull," said O'Donnell. "Lennie was electric."

Dempsey personified a Gas house Gang style in an age when baseball rivalries were fierce between communities like Cambridge and Watertown and Medford and Malden, and no quarter was asked or given on the field.

"It was never a gentlemanly contest," said Dempsey, 64, in a phone interview from his home in West Yarmouth, where he is retired after 30 years as a teacher at an American military base in Italy.

"We never saw a locker room," he recalled. The fields were awful. They were rocky. The home team had an edge. They knew where the bumps were.

"It was a tough game, and when we stepped across the lines, it was war. Pitchers were not afraid to throw inside. I ate dirt. I was run over. I was also spiked. I took that as a compliment," he said.

A Medford native who captained the Boston University nine in 1957 and got his start in amateur ball on the powerhouse Malden City Club, Dempsey guided the Chiefs to five straight Suburban Twi League titles, from 1961-65, while encouraging a hustling and colorful style of play.

A standout player who spanned both the Dempsey and O'Donnell eras was Fred Knox, dubbed "the Original Chief." The sidearm-throwing right-hander was the ace of the pitching staff, winning some 115 games in 16 years with the club.

Knox's trademark on the mound was a high leg kick, reminiscent of the style of the Boston Braves' Warren Spahn. "At the last second," recalled Jay Hosmer, "the ball would come out of nowhere."

The 63-year-old Knox retired two years ago after 36 years of teaching social studies and coaching baseball at Medford High School, and now lives in York, Maine, where he and his family operate a bed-and-breakfast inn.

"We used to yell," he said in a recent phone interview. "We had a tremendous competitive spirit. We were pretty much unbeatable - we hated to lose."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. John "Jay" Hosmer 3d and former Chiefs pitcher Robert M. Penta, now a Medford city councilor, visit a memorial to Hosmer's father at the team's old home field. / GLOBE STAFF PHOTO / DOMINIC CHAVEZ 2. The Hosmer Chiefs gathered for a team photo after becoming the Suburban Twilight League champions in 1965 for the fifth straight time. / FILE PHOTO Top

The Boston Globe
July 23, 2000, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: CITY WEEKLY; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 630 words

HEADLINE: CITY WEEKLY Not all goes up in smoke, here smoke appears/To give stability in changing years./Are meerschaum pipes and briars still a fixture/In the front window, flanked by Cake Box Mixture?;
UP IN SMOKE? HARDLY, SAYS TOBACCONIST THERE IS GOOD NEWS FOR PIPE SMOKERS IN CAMBRIDGE

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

BODY:
CAMBRIDGE - Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hillyer, Harvard '17, wrote those words 42 years ago on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Leavitt & Peirce tobacconists in Harvard Square. For generations of Harvard's sons and daughters, the venerable tobacco shop redolent of Latakia and Judge's Blend and hung with aged oars and footballs recalling Crimson sporting triumphs of 1908, has been an aromatic bastion of tradition in the ever-changing square.

Synonymous with Leavitt & Peirce has been Famous Cake Box Mixture, the shop's signature pipe-tobacco blend, touted as "known to Harvard men throughout the world." So when the Cake Box jar ran empty at Leavitt & Peirce last