Summer’s Big Chill
Summer is typically known as a slow period for news. The theory is that people are on vacation and therefore less likely to make news or to be paying attention when other people make news, so what’s the point of making news?
Politicians know this. That’s why, despite a Sept. 9 primary and a Nov. 4 general election where we’ll be voting for a congressman, a new Governor and a host of other major statewide offices, the average citizen hasn’t heard a peep from any of the candidates. They’re holding their fire (and their advertising war chests) until after Labor Day when, trust me, you’ll be wishing you’d never heard of any of these people.
But there’s some news even the politicians can’t control, despite their best efforts to hide from it.
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Tags: ALS, Facebook, Galvin Middle School, Ice Bucket Challenge, Mark Sardella, Market Basket, News, Politics, summer, supermarket, Wakefield Daily Item
Amy Herzog’s funny, moving take on the human condition
Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, currently at the Gloucester Stage Company, deals with some deep matters, including life, death, aging, coming home and moving on. But far from weighing it down, these universal themes emerge as organically as the fruit of a community garden in Herzog’s Obie winning and Pulitzer nominated play.
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Tags: 4000 Miles, Amy Herzog, bicycle, drama, Eric Engel, Gloucester Stage Company, Karl Marx, Manhattan, Mark Sardella, Nancy E. Carroll, play, Samantha Ma, Sarah Oakes Muirhead, theater, theatre, Tom Rash
School’s Out Forever
Galvin demolition conjures ghosts of schools past
Watching the big yellow CAT’s giant claw rip through the old Galvin Middle School last week, one couldn’t help but wonder – if those walls could talk, what would they say? (Besides “Get that damn machine away from me!”)
They don’t build them like they used to. The building that opened in 1955 as Wakefield Memorial High School will be gone less than 60 years later. Meanwhile, the Lincoln School (built in 1892) survives as senior housing. The Warren School (1897) houses the McCarthy Senior Center. The 1902 Franklin School is now condominiums. The Greenwood School, built in 1897 and the Hurd School (1899) are still being used to educate kids.
And now, the Main Street site where once stood the majestic mansion of none other than Cyrus Wakefield himself is being dismantled and rebuilt faster than the 2014 Boston Red Sox.
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Tags: Baby Boom, Boston Red Sox, Cyrus Wakefield, demolition, Galvin Middle School, General John R. Galvin, Greenwood School, Junior High School, Mark Sardella, schools, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield High School, Wakefield MA
A Fistful of Dollar Stores
Economic revitalization of downtown areas is usually aimed at sprucing up what’s already here through things like improved, uniform signage and dressing up storefronts as well as attracting the kinds of new businesses that reflect the quaint, warm and homey small town feel that we either remember from our childhoods or have seen on postcards from the Good Old Days before malls and the Internet stole all our retail commerce.
Which makes all the recent hand-wringing over a possible “Dollar Store” in downtown Wakefield, MA so very interesting.
That possibility has once again surfaced with respect to the possible re-uses of the still vacant former CVS building on Main Street in Wakefield. Rumors that a Dollar Store was going into the space first came up earlier this year. But at the time, people were too busy dictating to the owners of the Fraen Corporation what they could do with their property to give much more than passing attention to the specter of a Dollar Store.
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Tags: 5 and 10, Dollar Store, Dollar Tree Store, downtown, F.W. Woolworth, Family Dollar, Five and Dime, Five and Ten, J.J. Newberry, Main Street, Mark Sardella, Massachusetts, retail business, stores, W.T. Grant, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield MA
Play bends comedy, drama and mystery in one entertaining package
Widowed Mary Antonelli, a retired school teacher, and Joe LaCedra, a 64 year-old leg-breaker for the mob, are spending a stormy New Year’s Eve together in Mary’s South Boston home. But this is no social encounter. It’s strictly business. We learn that much in the opening seconds of Jack Neary’s Auld Lang Syne, currently on stage at the Gloucester Stage Company.
Joe (played by Richard Snee) has to drag the details out of Mary (Snee’s real life spouse, Paula Plum), who phoned him earlier and asked him to come over. It turns out that Mary made her late husband Arthur a promise on his deathbed and she needs to hire the gangster to carry out the job. She can’t do it herself, she explains, because, well, that would be a mortal sin. But a gangster like Joe can do it, she reasons, because, “People who don’t believe in heaven or hell are the kind that murder people.”
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Tags: Auld Lang Syne, Douglas Lockwood, Gloucester Stage Company, J Michael Griggs, Jack Neary, Lynn MA, Mark Sardella, Molly Trainer, Paula Plum, play, playwright, Richard Snee, South Boston, Southie, Tareena Wimbish, theater, theatre, Tom Rash
Pleasure Island: 1959-1969
New book on legendary Wakefield, Massachusetts Amusement Park
“It’s been highly rewarding,” says local author Bob McLaughlin of writing his second book on famed local amusement park, Pleasure Island, published this month by Arcadia. The best part, according to the affable Water Street resident, was getting “to meet a lot of people I never would have met.”
Indeed, over the years McLaughlin has crisscrossed the country at his own expense conducting interviews and doing research for his two books on Pleasure Island plus another on New York’s Freedomland amusement park.
“Pleasure Island: 1959–1969,” is an all new, full-color photographic history of legendary theme park located off Audubon Road in Wakefield MA, where the Edgewater Office Park now sits.
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Tags: amusement parks, Arcadia Publishing, Bob McLaughlin, C.V. Wood, Disneyland, Edgewater Office Park, Mar Sardella, Massachusetts, Moby Dick, Pleasure Island, Rex Trailer, Robert McLaughlin, theme parks, Three Stooges, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield MA, William Hawkes
Like other secular national holidays, Independence Day brings its share of reminders of the “true meaning” of the holiday. Enjoy your three-day weekend, we’re told, but take a moment to think about why we observe the day. This seems especially appropriate on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, when we pay tribute to those who fought and died for our country.
But unlike Veterans Day and Memorial Day, which are more observances than festive occasions, the Fourth of July is a true celebration. Still, it’s worth remembering what happened 238 years ago. Have your hot dogs and beer and watermelon, they’ll be telling us tomorrow, but make sure you take a moment to remember why we celebrate Independence Day.
Continue reading ‘A Founding Father’s Advice on Celebrating Independence Day’
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Tags: celebration, Fourth of July, Independence Day, John Adams, July 4th, Mark Sardella, Parade, Samuel Adams, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield MA
As expected, at their June 23 meeting the Board of Selectmen addressed at length the latest controversy over local peddlers, including Fred’s Franks, the hotdog vendor that had until recently occupied a spot at the head of the Lake.
Several Board members indicated that they had been receiving phone calls and emails from local residents on the peddler issue. One resident, Janet Filoramo, spoke during the public participation portion of last night’s meeting and asked the board to explain why the regulations were changed last year to require the peddlers to move 100 feet every two hours.
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Tags: Betsy Sheeran, Board of Selectmen, Carl Galasso, Fred's Franks, hawkers, Mark Sardella, Patrick Glynn, peddlers, Stephen P. Maio, Thonas A. Mullen, vendors, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield MA
Immovable Objects
For the first time in living memory peddlers in Wakefield, MA are being asked to abide by the town’s regulations. But from the reaction, you’d think that instead of being asked to move 100 feet every two hours they were being forced to run the gauntlet.
Contrary to popular belief, local regulations have always indicated that hawkers and peddlers were supposed to move “from place to place” when doing business in town. And the regs have always said, quite explicitly, that “No vendor has a right to a specific location.”
So there was never any doubt as to the intent. The problem was that the old regulations were silent when it came to exactly how often and how far the peddlers were supposed to move. Nature abhors a vacuum and the peddlers took full advantage of it. Several of them have occupied the same locations all day, every day, from spring through fall for years. And with the vagueness of the old regulations, the town couldn’t tell them how often they were supposed to move, so it let them be.
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Tags: Board of Appeals, Board of Selectmen, business, hawkers, hot dog, ice cream, Lake Quannapowitt, Mark Sardella, Massachusetts, peddlers, slush, transient vendors, vendor, Wakefield Daily Item, Wakefield MA, zoning
Filmmakers Michaela O’Brien & Melissa Langer examine EB in Bogota, Colombia
While working as a documentary photographer in 2011, Michaela O’Brien visited an orphanage in Bogota, Colombia. While there, the 2004 Wakefield High School graduate met two girls, Nixa and her older sister Nury. Both girls were afflicted with a rare, genetic skin disease called Epidermolysis Bullosa, or “EB.”
O’Brien watched as the sisters wrapped their limbs in plastic to minimize damage to their raw and fragile skin. She saw the girls draw stares when out in public.
Inspired by these feisty and resilient sisters determined to be independent, O’Brien began an impromptu film shoot and upon her return to Boston shared the footage with film editor Melissa Langer. Convinced of the power of the story, the film makers made three more return trips to Colombia where they documented their discovery of a wider EB community.
Their documentary film, In Crystal Skin, focuses of four individuals with EB and their separate but interwoven stories of struggle in the face of great odds.
Continue reading ‘Rare Disease Focus of Documentary’
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Tags: Bogota, Colombia, documentary, EB, Epidermolysis Bullosa, film, In Crystal Skin, Mark Sardella, Melissa Langer, Michaela O'Brien, rare diseases, Wakefield MA
Mark Sardella 