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They're Baaaack...

Okay, now we can exude the Christmas spirit; the Amherst Pelham Boy Scouts have set up shop on Kendrick Park as they have done for 50+ years (waiting, mercifully, until the day after Thanksgiving ) to sell trees over the next month where profits pretty much cover their overhead for another year.

As some of you may remember, the Town Mangler wanted them banished from the premises and taxed them $1/tree two years ago. Like trying to "take over" the July 4 Parade so anti-war folks could march, not one of his smarter PR moves.

One of the first edicts issued (unanimously) by the Kendrick Park Study Committee stated the Boy Scouts should have free access to the site for as long as they wish.

Even the Bulletin, eventually, covered it

And another one gone...

So it was announced at a Wednesday staff meeting that Department Head Epi Bodhi, Director of the Amherst Health Department is retiring. Ms Bodhi will probably best be remembered for the caustic Smoking Ban in Bars battle, dubbed the "issue of the year" by the venerable Amherst Bulletin for 1999. The ban, barely, held making Amherst for a brief while the only town with such an ordinance that now is now a statewide law commonly accepted.

And as a sizably-paid town employee (unlike the actual Board of Health that's made up of volunteers) she had to traverse a minefield as her boss Town Manager Barry Del Castilho and the Select Board lead by Bryan Harvey and ever so vocal pro-smoking Czar Hill Boss (affectionately refereed to a "Boss Hill") sided with the ultra vocal bar owners.

Yeah, you would think Public Health would be above politics--but not in Amherst. In fact, town officials will probably now use her retirement as fodder for the upcoming Override by adding her position to the body count of employees cut due to budget constraints (although a few of those cut have simply shifted to grant funding.)

A Thanksgiving Story

(From the archives 11/21/07)

Only in Arlington would posing for the greatest illustrator in American history on assignment for media juggernaut The Saturday Evening Post pass for routine.

Richard (Dick) Hagelberg returned to the family dairy farm after surviving five years in the 9’th Army Air Corps, flying 65 treacherous daylight bombings missions over Europe, including D-Day.

One summer morning he sat beside his 51-year-old mother Saara (Finnish spelling) for an hour of modeling; and two generations later, the scene still resonates.

Rockwell desperately recruited the Hagelberg’s at deadline. Initially they refused, but acquiesced when he offered them each $15. After publication, as he often did with models, Rockwell offered to gift Dick the original painting. He respectfully refused.

Last year Rockwell’s ‘Homecoming Marine’ sold at auction for $9.2 million and ‘Breaking Home Ties’ (a farmer sitting on the running board of a pick up truck with his son dressed in Sunday best clothes heading off to college) brought an astonishing $15.4 million.

Rockwell’s 1943 ‘Freedom from Want’, an extended family gathering around a sumptuous turkey dinner, would prove more popular than the minimalist “Thanksgiving, 1945: A mother and son peeling potatoes.”

But the earlier Post cover had a distinct advantage.



Part of Rockwell’s public relations war effort, the epic series of illustrations based on FDR’s 1941 State of the Union speech, ‘The Four Freedoms’ heartened a battered America still reeling from Pearl Harbor’s infamy.

The US Government originally rebuffed Rockwell’s sponsorship proposal so he settled on his regular employer, The Saturday Evening Post. The blockbuster results appeared over four consecutive weekly covers from February 20 to March 13, 1943.

‘Freedom From Want” hit the stands on March 6, 1943, so unlike ‘A mother and son peeling potatoes’ that appeared on November 24’th, 1945, it was not simply a seasonal Thanksgiving tribute.

The Office of War Information printed and distributed millions of full-color reproductions of the ‘The Four Freedoms’ and sponsored the originals on a War Bond Tour of major cities that raised $130 million.

Americans adored ‘Freedom from want’; but with Europe in ruins our struggling and beaten allies didn’t want a reminder that America’s heartland escaped war’s devastation.

For his Thanksgiving, 1945 cover Rockwell journeyed to Maine for a change in scenery, starting work in mid-August--the day Japan surrendered.

Rockwell drafted a 16-year-old boy for the veteran and a friend’s wife acted as his mother. When the illustrator returned to his Arlington studio he couldn’t make it work—the young man didn’t exude the stress of war.

Rockwell recruited two more locals but once again didn’t like the results, considering it too staged. Fortuitously, Dick, recently returned from battle, arrived to deliver milk fresh from the nearby Hagelberg farm. The illustrator had his subjects.

Rockwell originally posed Dick in a wheelchair striking a pensive pose imitating Rodan’s ‘The Thinker’, but decided it was too sad. The selected scene is still slightly incongruous, as Dick is performing one of the military’s more despised chores—KP duty—yet he radiates contentment.

Saara Hagelberg’s loving expression—the look only a mother can give—to a son who survived the ravages of a conflict that had claimed so many sons, personifies Thanksgiving.

Rockwell rejoiced: this time the handsome young man had weathered the misery of war; this time his real mother sits by his side.

So why refuse to accept the original painting? Rockwell, as he often did with models, took liberties with Saara adding twenty pounds and twenty years to her appearance. In fact, Hallmark later used her Thanksgiving image for an “I love you Grandma” card.

The dutiful son knew his mother—although proud of the overall result—was mad.

Saara Hagelberg died of cancer only two years later, a few months before the birth of her first grandchild. By then a priest had purchased the painting and he donated it to an American Legion Post in Winchendon, Massachusetts.

A Rockwell Museum expert rediscovered Thanksgiving, 1945 in the late 1970’s; aghast it hung in a smoke filled building with no fire suppression. The Museum borrowed it, where it remains to this day.

In 1988 the Hagelberg family returned from Stockbridge, Massachusetts disappointed the painting was not on display.

In an apology letter curator Maureen Hart Hennessey explained, “The museum has almost 500 paintings in its collection and can only exhibit 40-50 at one time. We also rotate paintings for conservation reasons to help preserve them for future generations.”

A few weeks later the Hagelberg’s enjoyed a private showing.

In 1993 Dick Hagelberg, after helping build a home for his daughter Nancy high on a hill overlooking the family farm that he also built, succumbed to cancer. His wife Olga, a proud WW2 Marine veteran, still lives in that home in Arlington, Vermont.



And lately, even around Thanksgiving, she briefly struggles…but then vividly recalls—keeping alive those magnificent memories.

Sad Update

The Media Internet revolution: Version 3.0

We believe in the nimble, street-level approach to collecting news. We hope to offer great writing from seasoned journalists as well as fledgling reporting from citizens who agree to cover public meetings. Life is a Journey, and we are unfurling our sails.

Mary Serreze
Publisher, Northampton Media

This is how the seasoned Gadfly/Journalist/Information Technology guru turned Publisher described Northampton Media upon its recent September 15 launch. When asked what motivated the new on line endeavor, she enthusiastic replied: “I felt compelled--I couldn’t help it! I love the city of Northampton and felt the local daily newspapers were not doing their job covering local politics.”

With an "angel investor" providing $5,000 and a plethora of free advice from experts who had made the transition from print to Internet bandwidth, combined with her three-year experience doing IT development for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton Media can easily become the poster child for local Citizens Journalism in the Digital Age.

Serreze almost sounds as though she is taking this on-line journalism course, as she describes her role as a "curator and aggregater" of all things Northampton, freely linking to news articles in the Springfield Republican and radio station WHMP, and others not hidden behind a paywall.

Her goal is to make Northampton Media a “One stop shopping experience for fans of Northampton news.” She starts every morning doing a Google news search for anything concerning her adopted City of Northampton, where she has lived for twenty years.

The website already displays links to 25 local blogs (including mine) on the home page and photos or video accompany all posts (bordering on daily). A volunteer Arts/Entertainment editor starts work soon to diversify the offerings and make the site more mainstream.

Northampton Media is still a work in progress as Serreze says she launched a little early in order to closely cover the recent November 3 Northampton Mayoral election which certainly was one of the more contentious and as a result most interesting over the past dozen years.

The website is a step up from her blog as she feels that bloggers have undeservedly gotten a bad rap when it comes to journalism, so this new platform slightly disassociates from the term but still relies on the instant ability to post writing, photos, video and color graphics pioneered by Wordpress and Blogger.
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While online since 1999 the Daily Hampshire Gazette has not embraced the Citizen Journalism movement, although editor Noah Hoffenberg says it is “not harmful or threatening to mainstream media.” In fact, he even went as far as saying it was a “good thing” citing “more people involved leads to a divergent perspective and opinions.”

The Gazette currently uses no outside bloggers or Citizen Journalists and doesn’t plan to in the near future. When they rolled out a major revamp of their website last year they had a half-dozen in house blogs from staff and editors but only the youngish sportswriter (former Daily Collegian writer) Matt Vautour seems to have thrived using the medium.

The Gazette is still very much a bricks-and-mortar newspaper (circulation about 20,000) and the website (about 1,000 subscribers) an afterthought. They layout/build the print edition first and then export to the web. But with their pedigree perhaps it is little wonder: The Daily Hampshire Gazette is one of the oldest papers in the nation first coming off the printing press in 1786.

And a recent $10 to $12 million investment in a new Italian four-color process printing press and the extensive renovation required to house it at their Conz Street, Northampton location underscores their continued faith in the printing press.

Although the building expansion/renovation seems not to have impressed former long-time editor and now publisher of downstreet.net Ed Shanahan, who quoted a local architect on his website last year: “I swear to God, that’s the first building that’s ever scared me.”

The Gazette continues to consider the Springfield Republican newspaper as their main competition, as two years ago they switched from an afternoon distribution to the early morning to match their rival.

And while they abandoned the idea of a Sunday edition they slightly revamped the Saturday edition (with the highest circulation of the week) and call it the "Weekend edition."

The Gazette also saw major changes four years ago when purchased by Newspapers of New England, a private company owned by folks with ink in their veins.

When I asked editor Hoffenberg why they simply do not issue digital cameras to reporters to go along with company issued laptops, he responded that it was a "quality" issue. Citizen Journalist or blog photos often do not look like the kind of photo that would pass muster for the Front Page.

Their staff photographers take photos and are good at it, their reporters write, and editors edit. Fair enough, but with all those layers to orchestrate immediacy is sacrificed--although in the last year or so they have gotten better with getting breaking news up on Gazettenet.

And although ensconced behind a paywall, they have recently started allowing non-subscribers to access articles that come up via a Google search. So they are, at least, starting to get it.

Conventional wisdom claims you "can't teach an old dog new tricks." With Northampton Media now nipping at their flank, the Gazette may want to take a refresher course in Internet news distribution.

Especially since they can conveniently do it on-line.

Sign sign everywhere a sign

Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind / Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign

So this large sign out by state owned Rt 116 coming into North Amherst goes one better on copyright "fair use" borrowing. Not only the white on blue and same font but also the cute little graphics (I like the martini glass).

But the sign is (just barely) on private property owned by the Jones family, Amherst's ninth generation entrepreneurs extraordinaire. And if Cinda Jones can get the Town Manager to publicly belly dance at a Chamber of Commerce gala it doesn't surprise me she could jump through all the hoops required to get this sign up--even in the People's Republic.

I'm just a tad surprised she followed the state's half-assed concept of making them only one sided.

A tale of two signs

So four years ago when the town ripped off the state's design logo for signage (that Mass charges $1,200 annually per location) Hickory Ridge Golf Course was paying for this sign in South Amherst, but Cherry Hill in North Amherst got theirs for free (two of them).

May sound like a minor competitive advantage, but another major one is Hickory Ridge pays the town over $17,000 annually in property taxes while Cherry Hill pays zero. Even the 9-hole Amherst Golf Course, owed by tax-exempt Amherst College pays over $7,000 annually in property taxes.


Just another hidden cost of our municipal white elephant.