Who has it?
Note the comment Tom Ryan made to my post about The Newburyport Liberator, here. How many people knew this?
In chatting with a friend recently, she mentioned institutional memory. It seems like we don't have a lot of it going on here (especially at the newspapers), and what there is seems to be shunted into the background.
That's the reason why "newbie" reporters might use such a resource as my fellow blogger Mary Eaton when researching an issue. But wait, she hasn't lived here that long and neither did Tom Ryan (relatively speaking).
A couple of weeks ago, I was speaking with Ralph Ayers, who has lived here for all of his 86 years. I could have talked with him for days, and maybe I will, when I get a chance.
Recently, I interviewed George Lawler, another lifelong resident.
And for every person you talk to, you get another perspective. All valuable, all relevant, since we are facing today the same issues faced by the city for decades, it seems.
I'm not clear on why people objected to Byron Matthews being on the NRA, that quasi-governmental entity that owns those two parking lots on the river, but not to James Shanley's nomination to the same body, by Mayor Moak.
Look at all the hoo-ha there was when Patti Dorfman was appointed to that group, also by the mayor. Would she be the mayor's evil pawn, or not?
Matthews used to be the mayor. He was there when the NRA was an infant. I've talked to him - he's got some sound ideas (not just about the waterfront).
There's nothing wrong with James Shanley's appointment (by the governor - he gets to pick one of the NRA members), but he and the mayor seem to see eye-to-eye even more than the mayor and Matthews, especially about the waterfront.
"Politics makes strange bedfellows," another friend said to me today, when I brought this up.
Is institutional memory "old hat?" Are community "activists who are fairly recent transplants truly acting for the community, or fulfilling their own agenda? Does it even matter?
I don't know the answers to these questions; if I did, I would tell you.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
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6 comments:
i would guess quite a few people knew that fact
Gillian,
Interesting post. If I still had the ‘Toad going I would have been able to fill an issue with your comments. A lot of rich stuff there.
I think much of what aided me was what Mary wrote about in her blog today. When I came to town so much was going on politically and I was hungry to understand it all. It was fascinating to me. (To give some perspective, at the time I think on a one to ten scale the excitement level was close to a “10” when it came to politics. These days it’s more like a “2”.)
I didn’t write nearly as much as I listened and read when I first started out. And before I wrote my first piece in the Daily News as an As I See It columnist living in Newburyport, I spent weeks going through the Daily News archives on tape at the library. There’s some great stuff there. I went through 40 or 50 years of information and gathered so much I never forgot. If I needed a refresher I knew where to find it.
Much of that research was done on Byron Matthews and Lisa Mead during their epic mayoral contest. Byron was a fascinating man and the campaign he ran against Mead was the nastiest I have ever seen. But as nasty as it was it was lively. (Who could forget Peter Matthews [Byron’s nephew] working at the bank and telling the ladies at what was Plum Island Steamers [the current location of PI Grille] that he might cancel out their loan if they didn’t ditch their Lisa Mead sign?)
Perhaps you should spend some time reading those old archives, reaching back into the 1960s, back before Byron was mayor and was the city council president and led the charge for the demolition of the downtown instead of restoration only to be stopped by the good people of the Historical Society of Olde Newbury.
Or maybe you’d find it interesting what Byron was doing when he was mayor and attempted to make a deal with Jackie O’s Greek husband to bring an oil tank farm that would house 28 huge oil tanks on the area now near the corner of Hale and Low Streets. To get the oil there he would have put in a oil tanker dock station off of Plum Island with huge pipes running under water and then over the beach to the mainland. Of course when the public learned about it he avoided them. It’s great stuff. You should read it.
Byron did some incredible things for this town, but he also did some things that weren’t respected. Many of them came out when he ran against Lisa Mead. I was sitting in the third row of the Firehouse Theater when Pat Iris, a Mead supporter, questioned Byron about something he said and he lashed out at her with the unforgettable comment “Newburyport was never like this when I was mayor.” His comment was clear to everyone coming as it did in the middle of the homophobic war against Mead.
Yes, the Byron stories are great. Do some homework on him and don’t just ponder. You’ll find out why people had issues with him being on the NRA.
As for James being on the NRA, people should have hollered bloody murder about that appointment, and Erford’s, too. As Chris Sullivan pointed out when he was council president, a councilor should be a councilor and serve his constituents and have only that one master. James and Erford being on the council and the NRA is too much potential power being monopolized by one person. To think the city or governor can’t come up with one individual who will serve the NRA and only the NRA is a statement that doesn’t say much about Newburyport.
As far as George Lawler goes, next time you talk to him, go read up on his time as the city clerk when a great deal of money went missing, before you do.
All this stuff is out there Gillian, you just have to go and read about it. And back “then” the Daily News really was a good newspaper and something to be really proud of. They did some great reporting.
Here’s an assignment for you: while digging in the archives, find out which mayor (who was in office at the time) shot off a gun a man of color in a public park because he had the audacity to date his daughter. No arrest was made because of who he was.
Even the Boston papers followed along. The controversial politicians didn’t start and end with Bossy Gillis. One former mayor, while working for a governor, made it into Norma Nathan’s “I” column in what is now the Herald. The story was about his womanizing while his good wife was back in little Newburyport. A plane was hired to fly over Beacon Hill towing the banner that read “[Blank] and Myra are making it in Massachusetts.” It was a take off on Governor King’s slogan, “Making it in Massachusetts.”
Those were interesting days indeed. And they probably would have stayed quiet had a group of old men who had done their time and were somewhat well thought of had not gone to war with a mayoral candidate simply for the reason that she was a woman, a newcomer and a lesbian.
If you do decided to do the above homework, at least reading through old copies of the Daily News from the 60s-90s, you’ll love the story of a mayoral candidate who ended up trying to sink his own fishing boat while he was still in it when the Feds were waiting for him as he tried to smuggle drugs into town. As the salty fellow said, “For years I tried keeping my boat afloat and it never worked. The one time I tried to get her to sink she wouldn’t.”
Regards,
Tom
Honest to God, I bet you could stand in Market Square and ask 100 people if they even know who or what "Bossy" Gillis is/was and most of them would not have a clue.
Quick, tell me who the Gillis Bridge is named after?
What's the Gillis Bridge?
I'm slightly confused by your question, Gillian.
Institutional memory is not confined to one person but is by definition of a group of people.
All of the living Newburyport mayors, for instance, can group their individual memories into institutional memory. But an individual mayor's memory cannot represent the body of mayors' memories.
Thanks Tom,
For the trip down memory lane. Really miss your reporting.
And of course Mead had her own shortcomings, mostly involving domestic "unrest". In exchange for not reporting/arresting anyone she didn't look too closely at the Foley Follies (which reached their nadir in the Dreadnaught incident).
And yes, I have an almost unimpeachable source for this.
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