Yesterday, we bid farewell to a woman as much a part of the city’s heart and soul as anyone could possibly be.
Others who have acted, painted, sculpted, written, sang, played music, or told stories in the various venues and platforms of this city gathered with her extended family at Unity on the River–an entity most welcome in the Ahavas Achim Synagogue–to pay tribute and share remembrances of Astrid Dorothy Lorentzson.
Celebrations of Life always leave us smiling. Tears are unavoidable, but re-living the vignettes of loved ones’ lives, their foibles as much as their strengths, has a way of turning tears to smiles. Vignettes of Astrid took the concept to another level. As one relative quipped before the 90-minute event ended, “We could have sold tickets for this!”
So it naturally was for an actress/playwright/director whose whole idea of being alive, according to all who spoke, was to make anyone within her reach happy. Stories of her penchant for turning the mundane into the memorable–a gourmet feast around a campsite fire, anyone?–at times turned the gathering into a comedy show.
Replete with a tagline: ” Always time for wine!”
Back in January, following a talk at the Custom House Maritime Museum, her husband Jack Santos introduced us. Brief as it was, it was telling. With my thumbnail photo appearing on the local paper’s opinion page about every three weeks for over 40 years, I’m accustomed to a friendly but guarded response when introduced. A look, maybe a phrase, to the effect of, ya, I’ve got you pegged.
Not Astrid. As we shook hands, an eyebrow raised and a wry smile slowly spread. Just what she said I cannot accurately recall, but her voice was indelibly cheerful, verging on conspiratorial. Her expression made the message clear, a woman letting me know:
It takes one to know one.
That was the only time we met. A month later, husband Jack, posted on social media that he needed to drive to the Hudson Valley and was looking for a conversational companion. I jumped at the chance. In retrospect, I realize that I was actually filing in for Astrid who, just in recent years was his cross-country road companion countless times in every direction. So many photos from Wyoming made me wonder if it was their summer home. Or was Georgia a winter home?
Back in Newburyport by 9:00 the night of my day-trip with Jack, there was no mention of a nightcap at The Grog or Port Tavern. Frankly, I’m now too old for that, but, again in retrospect, I see that he had a pressing reason to get home.
Compare that to a story told by her son-in-law, Martin, at yesterday’s celebration: Not too long ago, Martin and Jack’s daughter stayed a weekend with Astrid and Jack. Conversation, flowing with wine, went late enough that Jack tired out and went to bed. Before long, so did his daughter. That left Astrid and Martin talking into the wee hours, with wine. According to Martin, Astrid at some point wanted to “go out,” but he stopped short of saying that they did. If so, I think they live close enough to downtown to have walked, but maybe, like Martin, I should shut up now.
Except to marvel at Lisah Plumley’s rendition of “Angel of Montgomery,” the John Prine song that Bonnie Raitt soared into popularity, and Meg Raine’s rendition of the Celtic classic “Fields of Gold.” No matter how many times you’ve heard either song, yesterday they sounded not just new, but specifically about the woman we were hearing described. Pianist John Hyde’s accompaniment floated as if played on harpsichord, befitting both the occasion and the setting.
At the celebration’s opening, Jack sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” accompanied by two ukuleles, one of which he played himself. The song, of course, is out of his vocal range, but it’s out of most everyone’s vocal range which is what makes it so beautiful and so cherished. What moved all of us yesterday was just the fact of his attempting it. Though out of tune at times, it set the tone for the touching stories, the comic relief, and the angelic music to follow.
Meg finished the celebration asking us to join in a call-and-response. She then sang lyrics, one at a time, that we repeated. Whether she made it up on the spot or it’s a template for such occasions that I was hearing for the first time, I don’t know. Began like this:
Thank you for your heart!
Thank you for your energy!
Thank you for your laughter!
Eventually, we heard and then sang this:
Thank you for your mischief!
Yes, Astrid, it takes one to know one.
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Photos from Jack Santos’ Facebook page, compensation for serving as his co-pilot, February 26.
Carole Anne Ouellette, 74, passed away on December 16, 2024, at the Care One home here in Beverly. She was born in Beverly Hospital, Nov. 23, 1950, the cherished daughter of the late Leo and Carolyn (Fielder) Ouellette.
Ms. Ouellette graduated from Salem State College in 1972 with a Bachelor’s degree in business administration. While there, she played on the women’s tennis team, participated in theater, and took up pottery which she continued for many years.
In 1980, she graduated from the Suffolk University Sawyer School of Business with a Master’s in accounting and finance while starting her career with U.S. Bank & Trust in Boston. She would later work for various firms on the North Shore
Ms. Ouellette’s professional success may be measured by the trips it allowed an avid traveler. With her husband, the late John Yammerino of South Dakota, Ms. Ouellette traveled extensively through Europe, the US and Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean, once driving from Scotland to the southern tip of mainland Greece on a 6-week tour.
She loved to entertain in homes she kept bright and colorful. Through the 80s it was a condo she and John remodeled in Salem. After that, it was an apartment that John built atop the Ouellette family home on Foster Drive. She continued to live there after John passed away in 2011 until a few years ago when her illness made it impossible for her to care for herself.
She had several musician friends and asked them to play along with John. Live music was the pulse of her many gatherings, whether indoor, around the pool, or at a summer home John built on Kezar Lake in Maine.
Ms. Ouellette studied recipes and took pleasure in watching friends and family enjoy her creations, which were always anticipated and enjoyed at potlucks she attended. In her own home, food and drink were often served on and in pottery she made. And a few walls were graced with her paintings from her Salem State days.
“Carole had an exceptionally beautiful voice. She loved to sing and was much taken by the music of Laura Nyro, Ann Murray, and especially Joni Mitchell,” says Charlie Beaulieu who became her frequent companion in the first week of freshman year at Salem State. “She was a true and faithful friend.”
“Whatever Carole did, she did it exceptionally well,” adds her closest friend, Emily Cousens, who also knew her since college. “Whether it be studying, working, cooking, hosting a party, singing, traveling, playing tennis, being a sister and friend, caring for her aging parents… she was the embodiment of carpe diem, and lived each day to its fullest.”
Ms. Ouellette leaves behind her brother Philip Ouellette of Beverly, and several cousins. Services are 11:00 AM Friday, January 10 at the Campbell Funeral Home, 525 Cabot St., Beverly.
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Circa 1992.Plum Island, 2013. Photo by Michael Boer.
When most Americans outside of Georgia first heard of Gov. Carter in 1976, I was hitchhiking up and down the West Coast, a vagabond taking odd jobs for a few days here and there, staying in YMCAs and in dorms of colleges out of session. In Seattle, jamming with a couple guitarists on the docks of Puget Sound, I gained a lead for a job as a music therapist at a state hospital in Northern California.
Next day I started south, by thumb. Or by all ten fingers, as I often played my tenor recorder–the easiest for an on-coming driver to see–while awaiting rides. Many drivers would say that they did not “usually stop,” but since “you’re a musician,” they felt “it’s okay.”
All of this is in a chapter in my book, Pay the Piper! Here’s an excerpt that describes meeting the Carters, including what led to it and an odd sequel two days later:
Some rides came from other musicians, one of whom steered me into Salem, Oregon. Hearing my story made him think that I would fit Salem’s music scene with so many hoot nights and jam sessions in downtown bars. And he knew that his wife wouldn’t mind putting me up for a night, having listened for weeks to her urgings that he should take a part-time job in her day-care center. They needed males to work with the older boys, especially outdoors with the improving weather.
So there it was: A job, a place to stay at least one night, and musical connections all before I arrived. Why go to Eureka when Eureka comes to you?
Next day I moved into a third-floor room in the YMCA on Court. St. with a view of the state capitol one way and the very center of downtown the other, just a few doors down from the Court Jester and a couple blocks away from Boone’s Treasury, the most frequent scenes for hoots and jams.
When I think back on my busking life, this two-month stay may have been its biggest missed opportunity. Like most small cities in the Pacific Northwest, Salem boasted a clean and carefully landscaped downtown with flowers and shades of green so rich in the Willamette (pronounced to sound like: Don’t damn it!) Valley. That notorious Northwest rainfall comes mostly in mere mists easily avoided under the trees that line most streets. But I simply never thought to busk…
Unless we leave out that part of the definition that includes tips, because it is certainly a spontaneous outdoor musical performance in public that I propose to two guitarists in the Court Jester one May afternoon.
This is 1976, one of those rare years—along with 2008—when presidential nominations in both parties will not be locked up way ahead of time, and when states other than New Hampshire, Iowa, and a few populous early birds have any real say in the matter. With three Democrats still contending, Oregon’s primary looms large. Each day The Oregonian runs a side-bar with the times and locations of appearances by Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, Idaho Senator Frank Church, and California Dreamer Jerry Brown. Though they have one of our largest states geographically, about 90% of Oregonians live in the 150-mile corridor from Portland on the north past Eugene on the south, all connected by I-5 as well as the Willamette.
That day, following a session, we are just finishing sandwiches and a pitcher of beer when the radio newscaster announces an appearance by Carter at a local school.
“Is that far from here?” I ask.
They guessed 20 or 30 blocks north.
“Let’s go, “ I say
“Whaddaya wanna hear him for?”
Apparently, the idea that Carter might be the next president of the country doesn’t much matter to my new friends. Secession is, after all, a recurring topic of consideration in the Beaver State, but none of that is what I have in mind.
“Not to hear him. For him to hear us.”
They look at me as if I’ve started speaking Norwegian. I try again:
“We set up in front of the steps to the school before he gets there, and—“
They turn to order another pitcher. I put money on the table as I leave for a long walk north.
When I arrive, no more than three-dozen folks are milling about. When I take the tenor out of my shoulder bag and fit the three pieces together, a fellow in a suit and shades with a wire leading to one ear walks by, pausing to look me over. After I empty the bag by taking out the soprano and tucking it into my belt, he walks away, his eye on everyone as they arrive.
The crowd grows quickly, and I’m playing almost unnoticed until I hear a shout: “He’s playing ‘Dixie’!”
Well, it is the former governor of a southern state I’m hoping to entertain, and the radio and television crews, just arriving, take the shout as a cue. Within seconds microphones are thrust toward me. On a boom dropping as if from the sky, one is bouncing back and forth as the person holding it is jostled in the gathering crowd. Eyes wide, I rather enjoy dodging its erratic movement toward my face and begin bobbing to avoid it, eyes flaring as if to taunt it.
When I pause, I tell a reporter scribbling in a notebook that it’s my “Muhammad Ali version of Dixie.” Without any hint of noticing the irony, she dutifully writes it down, and I launch into “Camptown Races” as a car with the candidate pulls up and all microphones and cameras leave me.
Before I make the second pass of “somebody bet on the bay,” a tall, elegant, handsome woman is standing directly before me, offering her hand, and saying something I find completely incomprehensible. I stop, “Sorry, I didn’t hear—”
“Ahhm Missuhs Jimmahhy Cahhtahh.”
So transfixed by her voice I shake hands without noticing the man now standing next to her until he pipes up, pointing to the tenor:
“Ah gotta get me one of those!”
All the editorial cartoons to come during his four years in the White House will hardly exaggerate his smile, but I am still able to see that the couple has brought back all those mics and cameras. Reflexively I take the soprano from my belt and offer it to him.
He throws his head back: “No, no! Thank you, but no,” he laughs, waving his hands and moves toward the podium placed at the top of the school’s front steps. I breathe a sigh of relief that needs no microphone, and smile into the cameras.
Two days later I hitch to Portland, ostensibly looking for a job but with the recorders slung over my shoulder should I hear of a jam in a bar or catch one in a downtown corner. In the short distance from the exit ramp to the center of the city, I spot what looks like a concert in a city park and walk in while a country singer on guitar finishes a song. As soon as I join the back of the crowd, he introduces Missuhs Jimmahhy Cahhtahh.
She gives a ringing—and entirely comprehensible—speech ending with an introduction for her husband. As he takes the stage, I notice the two expressionless men—recognizing one—stage left and right, both staring at me. I have never stood so still, and Carter is no brief speaker.
They are at my sides as soon as he thanks us for coming. They open my pack and look over and through all five pieces of wood. That might end it, but they go through my wallet and find the unlikely combination of an expired Massachusetts driver’s license and a South Dakota student ID for someone “looking for work,” as I tell them, on the West Coast.
“You look for work by attending political rallies?”
“I was on my way downtown. When I heard Waylon Jennings was here, I came over.” I ad-lib the advance notice to make them think my motive is something other than “following him around.”
They exchange a glance. “That was Jerry Jeff Walker.”
That mistake keeps me in their custody for what seems like hours more, although the whole scene is perhaps 15 minutes. With the warning that if they see me one more time I’ll be in custody well into November, they let me go.
Never one to say that politicians are “all the same,” I now make sure that I can tell the entertainers apart. As for the Carters, they defied the myth of “all the same” on every level.
What other couple left the White House–or State House, or Congress–and served four decades thereafter as global humanitarians? And does anyone doubt that they are hoping to hear from us in November?
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Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter hold hands as they work with other volunteers on site during the first day of the weeklong Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, their 35th work project with Habitat for Humanity, in Mishawaka, Indiana, in 2018. PHOTO: Robert Franklin via https://www.wxii12.com/article/photos-jimmy-and-rosalynn-carter/45878337#
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign Getty Images
For the first time in over three decades, Newburyport’s harper will not ring in spring on Market Square.
Nor will that harp play Inn Street or the Waterfront or anywhere anytime thereafter.
At this writing, I do not know the cause of death at age 70, but I may be as versed as any in the harper’s cause of life.
Of all the musicians who’ve played Newburyport’s streets over the years, I alone had seniority over David Bishop, as he introduced himself to me in the late ‘80s, or Aster Shephard as she re-introduced herself perhaps 15 years later.
I had already played Inn Street for a few years since I washed ashore in 1982 after picking up that same “cause of life” in Denver.
Historic preservation made it possible. Whether or not the preservationists knew it, they set the stage for the re-birth of busking in America.
Hundreds of stages from coast to coast. In Denver, I was one of several able to take advantage of the wide walkways, benches, bricked-in acoustics, and historic setting of Larimer Square.
Who signed the bill? Give credit where due: Yes, Nixon’s the one!
Planning a return home, I knew it happened in Newburyport. Before our harper arrived, I was one of just two buskers here. The other was a hammered dulcimer player from Portsmouth.
Since the dulcimer player—it was the instrument, not him that was “hammered”—played here barely twice a month, I was Newburyport’s only regular.
Moreover, with an odd schedule that freed me most weekdays, I divided my time with historically re-done Salem. For about five years, I had both cities to myself.
Enter the harper. You’d have thought he was applying for a job, as polite and deferential as could be, asking if I would share the stage.
I laid out the “Denver Accord”—my own name for the unwritten rules we High Milers all gladly upheld—to yield a space within one hour of seeing another busker awaiting it.
And to pour all pennies in your hat—or basket or case—into that of the busker replacing you. He looked incredulous. “For good luck,” I explained. He laughed, “I’ll bring some with me!”
Then I thought of Salem, and asked if he preferred any days. Turned out he was a full-time machinist with only weekends free.
“But not Saturdays,” he answered, “Sundays.” And so, we divvied up weekends as if we were Spain and Portugal in 1494 with a line of demarcation.
Still, I didn’t want him to know of what was, frankly, the more lucrative venue. My daughter was a pre-teen at the time, on the loose with her two buddies, Anna and Anya, one of whom lived very close to downtown.
“Rachel,” I always reminded her before going on my Sunday raids, “say hello to the harper for me, but if you talk to him, don’t mention Salem. Salem does not exist.”
Something of a risk in this. Getting into a conversation with David, and later with Aster, was quite easy. Getting out of it, not so much. He and she more than made up for his and her ancestor, Harpo Marx.
The liner notes on his second CD, Angel Music, offer several tastes of a gift of gab so in character that you can hear the harper’s meticulous, yet affable speech: For “Golden Saturday”:
A musical depiction of a Saturday in the early autumn with a deep azure sky, bright sun, and a wind that causes the colored leaves to rustle continuously in the trees.
For “The Garden Tour”:
I finished composing this piece just in time to play it at an annual garden tour. It seems like suitable music to hear while walking along looking at flowers.
“Profound Contemplation”:
I played this piece for a woman in town who told me it sounded like profound contemplation. So that’s what I call it.
The only quick descriptions go to the title track (A caprice of sorts) and to the now painfully prophetic closing track, “A Flash of Light”:
One way to go from this realm into the next.
On the few occasions when we did cross paths, we played several of the legendary Irish bard Turlough O’Carolan’s tunes. That harp was so rich with foundation, so heavenly precise with melody, I could have improvised forever on it.
In recent years the harper showed up at King Richard’s Faire with sons, Aaron and Ian, to heckle me while reveling in Celtic tunes and early music.
But most of the harper’s own repertoire was original, much of it collected on two CDs, Original Music for Harp and Angel Music, a name taken from one tourist’s description.
When I relayed the news, fellow flautist Roger Ebacher, who produced both CDs, responded: “Completely original, naturally talented, brilliant, and uncompromising in pursuit of artistic excellence.”
“Uncompromising” is something the street allows, enhances, promotes.
Add to that the chatty exchanges with all kinds of people between songs, and you know the cause of life.
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*Original Music for Harp and Angel Music are both available at Dyno Records, downtown Newburyport.
At the Bluebird Performance Venue in Georgetown, Mass., about a year ago.
We say that our cousins are our first friends, something that might be more the result of geography than of blood lines.
For my cousin John and I, the close relationship of two sisters–our mothers, daughters of Italian immigrants in Haverhill, Massachusetts–put us together for hours at a time before either of us could remember. Likely began a day or two after I was born when he was just ten weeks old. All I recall from the toddler years is a few whacks followed by the admonitions of our two moms: ”No hitting!” And, “Play nice!”
Didn’t matter that we lived about a dozen miles apart in the Merrimack Valley: me in Lawrence, a densely populated, industrial city in decline; he in Groveland, Haverhill’s idyllic suburb spread out along the river’s east bank. Women had won the right to drive cars, or so it seemed, and the invention of the automatic transmission made it possible for anyone to get behind the wheel just in time for Ellie and Kitty to visit each other. I had no siblings, but John had Johanna, a sister eight years our senior. Not only was a cousin my first friend, but another cousin was my first baby-sitter. And so it was that less and less of our time together was in Lawrence, more and more in Groveland.
In time we grew into sports, playing them outside, and making them up inside: Basketball with a rolled up pair of socks we shot at the tops of door frames; baseball on the floor with Lincoln Logs as bats whacking marbles off the new, glossy, installment-each-week encyclopedia set up as an erratic Fenway outfield wall with an empty cigarette carton for bullpens; and most elaborate of all, Tire Football.
At the top of a steep ramp on one end of a long corridor, we released rubber tires of model cars into an obstacle course of plastic car parts to the other. A running back and three blockers had four downs to knock down the defense and get the runner to the endzone. Or, we might elect to kick a field goal after three. This was done with parts of an erector set as the goal post and a book of matches as the ball. John kicked with his index finger, while I preferred the middle (joke unintended, though extended), something we actually argued over.
We named teams for the newly formed American Football League. We had standings and kept stats. While we rooted for the Boston Patriots–yes, Boston!–we played no favorites in the corridor and did nothing to prevent the Buffalo Bills from winning the championship and Cookie Gilchrist from scoring the most touchdowns. As consolation, Gino Cappelletti kicked the most field goals, likely because he used an index finger.
John’s parents were quite relieved by this game because it replaced the previous use of the ramp and corridor to race those model cars. Paint marks from the cars–red, black, blue, but never green which is bad luck on a race track–were all along the bottom of both walls. That, however, was a minor annoyance compared to our penchant for going to the kitchen stove for repairs. The ramp was steep enough for speeds capable of creating serious cracks in the axles. John figured out early on that, if you softened plastic in a flame, it’ll stick to any plastic you want, and it works especially well if you soften both sides. Of course we did this when we were home alone, but it left a smell, and the thought of two pre-teen boys hovering over a gas burner, perhaps not too careful with the dials, must have been unnerving.
But our moms had bingo to play, our dads had beers to drink, Johanna had friends to entertain, and grandpa had his Polish newspapers to read. Could say we grew up as something between cousins and brothers. Brothins? Cousers? Neither rolls off the tongue too well, and I’ve been spitting them out ever since I thought of them. But I am intrigued by a term commonly used in the 19th Century: cousin german.
The g is lower case because this has nothing to with the European nation, and all to do with the English word, germane, from a Latin root meaning “closely attached.” Likely, it was the formation of Germany as a unified nation in 1848 that caused the English-speaking world to drop the term in favor of “first-cousin.” Cousins at any other distance were called just that, “cousins,” and so the added degrees (2nd, 3rd, etc.) fell into place just in time for FDR to safely marry sixth-cousin Eleanor.
The Eleanor I knew, my mom, had two sisters and five brothers, so John and I had many first-cousins, none of whom we spent a fraction of the time with as with each other. Not with all of them combined. If he could be Polish-Italian and I could be Irish-Italian, then cousin german sounds about right.
Six of our first-cousins were German-Italian with the third sister as their mom living in Ohio. My parents and I were visiting them one summer when a letter from Kitty arrived to let Allie and Babe know that John was recovering quite well and not to worry. Worry about what? All of us were puzzled until my dad guessed that this was a second message that beat the first message to its destination due to the unpredictability of postal service in the Eisenhower years. Zip codes came later. Best we could do, in this case for example, was: Akron 10, Ohio. Why not telephone? Believe me, the cost of long-distance calls was something to avoid back then, even if a member of the family was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance after being struck by a car.
My dad was right. Kitty’s first message arrived the next day and would have scared us back to New England had it arrived on time. Instead, we returned when planned, and when I saw John, say, two weeks later, he showed no sign of any accident. His bicycle, however, looked like a fifth grade science project gone very, very bad.
During these early years, something went very bad with one of his legs. A rare childhood bone disease called Perthie’s. Can’t recall which leg, or exactly when, or for how long he had to wear this god-awful brace that slowed him down no matter how hard he kept running. I’ll guess that it was two years, but even then as a child, he knew to disdain complaint and respond with determination, a quality that made him as competitive as anyone on the court or field.
After the brace came off, it was never mentioned. In Pentucket Regional High School’s Class of 1968, he was the starting point-guard on the Sachems basketball team. He also played third-base and pitched for Groveland’s Babe Ruth team, hurling a no-hitter in Rowley, followed by a two-hitter in Salisbury. And he made a Haverhill all-star team that faced the legendary pitcher, Eddie Feigner. He struck out, but just to have been on the field with Feigner was a matter of pride for him–and envy for me.
He also worked on his brother-in-law’s pit-crew at the Pines Speedway and had a life-long love of auto racing and antique cars. For years, he had a 1947 Chevy Fleetmaster that he drove from the island into the Port on sunny weekends. By the late-70s he moved to Plum Island where he resided most of his adult life. When he heard that his cousin german was giving up his Prodigal Son years in the Dakotas, he rolled out the fatted calf and found me a nearby place to grill it. It appealed to him to have a beat up, old Ford Falcon with a North Dakota plate parked outside his window.
He had a keen taste for the eccentric. That Falcon had its gears stripped in the time it took me to learn a standard. A Dakota friend disconnected the column shift and cut a hole in the floor to replace it with a three-speed stick. One rod wouldn’t fit, so he changed the pattern, transposing 2nd and 3rd. Result was a one-of-a-kind pattern, sopmething of a W instead of the expected H. John occasionally asked to drive it when we went to the mainland, laughing everytime he put the clutch in. One evening this came up in conversation with other friends as we watched a Celtics game, an event for which John often hosted small gatherings. One of his friends asked why I didn’t fix the transmission. Before I could answer, John turned into Mount St. Helens: ”Because it works!!!!”
Never one for politics, he was alternately amused and annoyed by my penchant for it, although he gladly bailed me out of a Boston jail after one of my arrests at an anti-war demonstration. Rather than city streets and public rallies, he spent as much time as he could in White Mountain campgrounds or on Plum Island Beach.
On Plum Island he was known as a skilled and reliable plumber who always showed when needed and never left a job unfinished. Many customers regarded him as a friend, with a few he played golf, and many more islanders enjoyed his generous wit, wry smile, quick laugh, and engaging conversations he often kept going by asking what if…
In recent years, time was always a blur to us as we reminisced of football in our grandmother’s harvested garden in Haverhill or hitting fly balls to each other in the oversized schoolyard across the street from 414 Main. Our assessments of our younger aunts and their friends doing the limbo, a dance-craze of the early Sixties, had to do with their age and our coming of age.
I’ll guess that he and his companion, Lisa, had been together a dozen years before moving off the island into Newburyport. When she passed away some five years later, John landed in Salisbury. Almost next door to a liquor store, no designated driver required.
Despite health issues, he kept working for a few select clients, but otherwise contented himself home alone watching sports and anything to satisfy a nostalgia for the Fifties, including Three Stooges movies, a favorite of both of us back in the day when our re-enactments drew more calls from the next room: No hitting! Play nice! Must admit that John’s final years might echo one of the zaniest sketches: Calling Dr. Beam, Dr. Daniels, Dr. Beam…
Could be wrong, but I figured I was the last person he kept in contact. Couldn’t get him to the Winners Circle or any other pub, no matter how much I bragged of that weekend’s tips at the renfaire to cover the bill. When I told him that, through the magic of social media, I was in touch with his high school friends he hadn’t seen in 40 years, he took interest and relayed his greetings, but declined any reunion. Closest he came was to instruct me: “Ask Bill if he remembers the skating rink play.”
He would come over every few months, outside of winter, to join me on my deck for burgers and Pabst Blue Ribbons. Red Sox opening day was an annual tradition–until this year. Up on this hill overlooking the marsh, he’d remind me of the what-ifs he kept asking long ago. Many about family:
What if our grandparents didn’t board the boat in Naples? What if John (an Ohio cousin four years our senior) made the Baltimore Orioles? What if we took Uncle Mussy and Aunt Ginny up on their invitation to stay in Fort Lauderdale?Were their daughters adopted?
Many more about sports: What if Ted Williams played in Detroit with that porch hanging over right-field? What if Tony C. didn’t get hit by that fastball? What if Ernie Davis had lived?
Some with a taste for science-fiction that are now science-fact: What if cars could drive themselves? What if telephones didn’t need wires?
He glowed when I let him know that one of his barbs back in the Eighties when millionaires started buying all they could of Plum Island was, in fact, the premise of a national movement a century earlier: What if you had to live on property in order to own it?
He made us laugh, but he also made us think.
Early this year he stopped answering his phone, wired or not. After wondering if I had become too much of a nag about reunions here or pizza there, I now wonder if I wasn’t persistent enough. Or, was I just offering a low-dose version of contentment: Calling Dr. Pabst, Dr. Gansett, Dr. Pabst?
Born January 8, 1951, the son of Bennie Hyzuk and Katherine (Butruccio) Hyzuk, John is survived by his sister, Johanna Hyzuk-Deveau of Haverhill, by a niece and two nephews, and by numerous first-cousins. He left no last wishes, but considering that he was an ardent Boston Celtic fan for most of seven decades, a contribution to a charity sponsored by the Celtics would be a safe bet to honor the memory of John Peter Hyzuk.
As First Lady from 1977 to 1981, Rosalynn Carter organized “The Friendship Force.”
Based on her own idea that she was able to launch in Georgia when her husband was governor, it was an exchange program for American cities with cities around the world.
Chartered planes took residents from one city where they would stay, not in hotels, but with host families. Hosts and their guests were matched according to what they had in common, usually their occupation, and guests would go to their hosts’ places of employment, schools, recreation centers. That other city would send the same number of people to the first, with all of the same arrangements.
In 1979, I was a resident of Bismarck, North Dakota, where about 200 of us signed up for ten days in Hamburg, Germany, home of namesake Otto Von Bismarck. I stayed with an editor of Der Spiegel, which may be the largest circulating magazine auf Deutsch.
Highlight of our stay was a day-trip that required about a half-hour train ride out to the Bismarck estate. All of us North Dakotans and all of our German hosts were there to pick from the platters of endless trays of shot-glasses filled with schnapps. Ever since, I’ve shaken my head at the stereotype of Germans as uptight, joyless people—which I would come to realize was the point of Rosalynn Carter’s Friendship Force.
Back in North Dakota, all of us had high praise for the experience, urged friends and family in other cities to see about starting one, and, as you can see here, still reminisce about it while wishing it might be re-created. Today, I’m sure that all of us will recall with gratitude the woman who made it all possible.
May she rest in peace. No one worked harder or longer or in more imaginative ways for it.
King Richard’s 2023 season ended with the most unusual weekend in my 23 years of piping and strolling the shire.
Nothing unusual about a rainy Saturday followed by a sunny Sunday, whether we play through the rain or call a day off. Covered by a canopy of tall trees, we often play in precipitation less than a torrential downpour. Cancellations tend to be made only when hurricanes threaten direct hits or when their winds reach us from off-shore. Those trees are old, their branches creaky.
This year, in the seven weekends before the finale, we cancelled two days and played through four that were wet to varying degrees. This is about double the impact of weather on an average season, which may be why the show went on last Saturday: After so many lost opportunities, it offered a second-to-last chance for ticket-holding patrons to spend a day in the Renaissance.
At the final cast-call before we opened Sunday, co-producer Aimee Shapiro thanked us profusely for performing so well through what she more than once called “challenging” conditions. Challenging, of course, is a euphemism which administrators in all professions–politics, education, health, business, sports, entertainment, and the arts–are wired to use rather than admit that anything is in any way bad, unpleasant, or just outright f-ing sucks.
Whereas I’m not administrator, or even a denizen of the royal court, but a lowly minstrel, I’m free to tell you that bad and unpleasant are gross understatements for what happened Saturday.
To be fair to the faire, after the cancellation of two of our 18 scheduled days, ten of the remaining 16 were unhampered by wind or rain. Surprisingly, the final Sunday proved as fully enjoyable as any of them, most every patron leaving the faire smiling and laughing. This I know because I’m at the gate in the last hours of every day.
Now that we have gotten over the surprise–as well as the emotion of a last day at the faire and all that that implies–let’s credit the people who made that last day possible.
No secret that King Richard’s Faire has a reliable, competent grounds crew. We’ve seen the proof twice or thrice every season on days that follow rain. We’ve walked in an hour before opening and seen the pumps and hoses taking out the puddles; wood chips and dirt mixed into mud; mops wiping stages; motorized carts zigzagging equipment and material over rough terrain laced with interminable roots of trees.
But last Saturday did not end with just puddles. More like ponds, around which we tip-toed up to twenty yards to go a distance of five feet. We say that mud shows are a staple of renfaires everywhere, but by the end of Saturday, the entire faire was a mud show. Some of it bordered on quick sand, and I trust no one dared slog through without boots buckled or shoes tightly laced.
And rain continued to fall.
On Sunday morning, little evidence remained of anything more than a slight shower. Small puddles and a patch of mud here and there, but easily avoidable. Walking in before cast-call, we may have been more focussed on the fact and feel of a finale to notice. The amazement we hoped to create eclipsed the amazement already in front of our noses and beneath our feet. Nor were there any pumps still chugging, mops still slopping, carts still darting about to remind us.
What King Richard’s grounds crew did last weekend was way beyond expectation, if not possibility. Whether they worked round the clock under klieg lights, or went at it at the first hint of dawn full-force, they were done before the rest of us began.
Here’s hoping they receive a rousing tribute at cast-call on opening day next year for making this year’s last day possible.
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The show, despite the shower, must go on. Photo by Paul Shaughnessy.
Back in the 90s I always busked Portsmouth, N.H., on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.
As far as I can recall, these were the only busking days I ever piped up before noon, taking advantage of a gathering morning crowd in Market Square, many people seated at the dozen-or-more tables on the wide-as-I’d-ever-dare-ask-for sidewalk outside the late and still-lamented Cafe Brioche.
Everyone was awaiting the annual parade, and I offered myself as a warm up act, doing quite well, thank you, as buskers generally do among crowds in good spirits. That had been an early lesson in Denver, Colorado, where my busking career began during the fall of 1977, the very first year that the Denver Broncos went to the Superbowl. In the historic district of Larimer Square just across Cherry Creek from Mile High Stadium, I learned quickly to save myself for late Sunday afternoons when I could see spirited waves of orange jerseys and jackets approaching the trendy pubs and night spots all around me.
Denver was less challenging than Portsmouth, not just because it was later in the day, or because the event had already happened, but because alcohol was involved. Yes, I use the words spirits and spirited in both senses of the word, and as luscious as Cafe Brioche’s dark roasts always were, they could never induce the, um, uh, generosity that results from a pint or three of a favorite ale or lager.
So I worked for it in Portsmouth and was done at a time when I was usually just getting started. Ah, but I had more than one ulterior motive: Barely a block from where I played was the Portsmouth Brewery, New Hampshire’s original brewpub.
Today, this is no big deal, but in the 90s, brewpubs were new in America. Or at least in New England. In the late 70s, one Billy Carter prevailed upon his brother, who happened to be president of the USA at the time, to undo the stranglehold that a few mega-brewing companies had on the industry. Before long, craft beers and ales were appearing from coast to coast. Most all were successful, a few eventually bought out by Miller, Anheuser-Busch, and Coors. Only failure I recall, ironically, was an eyeball-crossing insult to the taste buds called “Billy Beer,” named for the very guy who started it all.
Brewpubs took longer, but not in Colorado. Could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure my friends in the college town of Fort Collins took me to three before Boston had one, possibly before New England had one. So Portsmouth was a BFD for a hops connosieur in the 90s, and I was often there after teaching evening classes at New Hampshire College–now the U of Southern NH, a name that defies geographic clarity considering that the much longer-established and more renowned UNH is itself on the same latitude in the southern half of the state.
For at least a decade, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend was my one afternoon in the Portsmouth Brewery, and I could always count on the Red Sox to be on the screens over the bar, third or fourth inning, when I settled in. It was in 1995 that I ordered a plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut and started sipping a pale ale before looking up at the screen and seeing something I couldn’t quite believe, let alone understand:
A pitcher who looked like he was throwing darts. The ball moved so slowly that batters seemed impatient waiting for it, and each pitch went into its own herky-jerky motion just before reaching the plate–like an airplane persisting through turbulence. Batters hit nothing but infield dribblers. Many struck out and walked back to the dugout staring back at him with wide eyes and dropped jaws.
The pitcher himself made less motion than the ball, almost as if standing still and simply flicking his wrist. No doubt my memory is exaggerating his stillness, but compared to most any other pitcher we ever see, he seemed like something that might have been carried out of a wax museum.
Strangest of all, he was wearing a Red Sox uniform.
I didn’t follow the team closely in those years, and so maybe I missed news of a trade wherein the Sox acquired a young pitcher from the Pittsburgh Pirates who caused a sensation two years earlier when he nearly led his team to the World Series by beating the heavily favored Atlanta Braves twice in the National League championship series. Took me awhile to figure out he was throwing a knuckleball, a pitch that was celebrated back in the 50s and 60s but was fading from memory long before he showed up–likely because it is extremely difficult for a pitcher to control as well as a nightmare for the catcher trying to corral it.
As happens in bars, the sound was off, so I wouldn’t learn his name until I heard it on the radio driving home from Portsmouth. But the dart thrower and what he might do were not at all on my busking mind when I pulled into Newburyport and set up for an evening busk dowtown. The second ulterior motive for those of you keeping count. Yes! Still in my forties, I played doubleheaders.
All I was thinking was what it would be like to play as if each note was a knuckleball.
Wouldn’t be the first time I took a musical influence from a pro athlete. When I first picked up recorders–old style, wooden flutes–I was one of many baseball fans fascinated by Cincinnati Reds’ perennial all-star secondbaseman Joe Morgan’s twitching left elbow when he was at bat. In jam sessions in October of ’75 when the Reds met the Red Sox in the World Series, I imitated it with my right elbow while playing my long tenor recorder off to the side–a joke to amuse my guitarist friends who, like me, were watching every game. By the time Carlton Fisk did his Body English Pogo Dance down Fenway’s firstbase line, I realized that Morgan’s twitch was what pro athletes call a “timing mechanism” and that it also worked for musicians, at least this one.*
Goes without saying that what the public wants from a street-performer is high energy, so the idea of piping a wind instrument as if throwing darts was going against the grain. But I wasn’t about to try it on every song, or even most of them, and if it fell flat, I could leave it behind.
It did not fall flat. At times the staccato effect provided such such a welcome contrast to the racing jigs and reels that I had to remind myself not to be mesmerized by it. And before long, I started eyeing people sitting on the benches as if they were dart boards, aiming particular notes when making eye-contact. By the time I joined a Renaissance faire in 1999, you could say that this became my stock-in-trade. But you might not recognize it, as I’ve figured out how to throw darts during the jigs and reels as well.
By the end of 1995, all Sox fans would hear the name Tim Wakefield often, as we would while he pitched for the team all the way to 2011, a stint that includes two World Series championships. And we are all hearing it this week as the tributes mount following his passing at the age of 57.
To those tributes, I add my long overdue thanks for what he taught me to do just by standing pretty much still and throwing darts.
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* A more recent example of a timing mechanism that younger Red Sox fans likely noticed was Dustin Pedroia’s hop at his position just as every pitch was thrown. Kevin Youkilis also did it, but he was off screen at third base while Pedroia was at the top of the screen at second.
The pitch is named not because knuckles are on the ball, but because they are flexed and more visible. Written in January, 2021, this says nothing about the cause of death, which Wakefield kept secret. Instead, it is a fair and concise assessment of his career in baseball and his considerable community service after he retired from baseball: https://www.thecoldwire.com/what-happened-to-tim-wakefield/
So Jimmy Buffet lived for a couple years in Brookings, South Dakota. In a trailer court. Can you guess who else once lived a Brookings trailer court?
To this day I can barely explain how I–a Massachusetts boy always called a “Boston boy” because my state’s name ties western tongues–ever landed in that small college town hard by the Minnesota border.
How a native of Mississippi who grew up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico landed there is beyond me. How I never heard mention of him after my arrival just six years after he left–two years after the release of “Come Monday” and just months before the release of “Margaritaville”–compounds the puzzle.
At a dead end of my own youthful indirection, if not indiscretion, I was tempted by a classified ad in Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine. Attending South Dakota State University’s graduate school of journalism was the pretext, but the real draw was moving someplace where no one knew me and vice versa.
Compare that Buffett’s description of his move in his 1998 memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty (a title that plays on his own song, “A Pirate Looks at Forty”):
The Great Plains looked like as good a place as any to get lost in for a while… The next thing I knew, I was headlining Steak ‘n’ Ale joints all over the Midwest, making five hundred bucks a week, with a free salad bar. At first I loved the wide-open spaces, but one afternoon in a trailer park in Brookings, South Dakota, where I was living, the siren in town sounded a tornado warning. Across the flat, open field to the west came not one but two twisters. I, of course, had been in storms at sea, but this was different.
In the 1970s, $500 bought much more in South Dakota than back here in Massachusetts. Add that adjustment to fifty years of inflation, not to mention all those salad bars, and it’s no surprise that Buffett could sing that he “made enough money to buy Miami.”
On the prairie where towns are tiny and spread out, “Steak ‘n’ Ale joints” tend to be quite large with vast parking lots that fill up on weekend nights with cars carrying in people from miles around. Brookings is a full hour north of Sioux Falls, the biggest city in the Dakotas–as well as in neighboring Wyoming and Montana with Idaho to boot. Barely the size of Providence now, Sioux Falls was more the size of Pawtucket then. Many other towns are under 5,000 population, some of them but crossroads.
According to a 2008 report from my SDSU friend Tom Lawrence, now co-editor of The South Dakota Standard, Buffett was immensely popular throughout the region. Lawrence interviewed the owner of Jim’s Tap, a Brookings bar, and a chef at a local supper club who agreed, as the latter put it, that Buffett “did a good job of packing the house.”
Considering that Jim’s was a favorite watering hole of mine in the Carter years, it’s all the more puzzling that I never heard of Buffett in Brookings.
Buffett enjoyed his time in Dakota. Enough so that when Lawrence was sent to cover a concert in Texas, Buffet took him past security and backstage as soon as my friend blurted out his one allotted (by an “unctuous” security guard) question at a distance: “Did you live in South Dakota?”
Lawrence describes Buffett’s dawning smile of recognition as if it was that of a man who just found that lost shaker of salt. Thankfully, the interview is more of a gold mine than a salt mine, and I’ll add the link below.* But not before I chip away at a nugget as galling as it is satisfying to consider:
In Brookings, Buffett lived in a trailer court. If I was wide-eyed when I saw Brookings in the tributes, I was dropped-jawed by this. Trailer court I lived in was on the western edge of town overlooking alfalfa fields that went on forever. Just eight trailers where we all knew each other and often sat together drinking and smoking weed outside.
My then-neighbor and still-friend Bruce dubbed it the “Easy Livin’ Trailer Court,” a name that stuck. Would have been perfect for a singer-songwriter with a laid-back vibe. Had he stayed anywhere in South Dakota, his fans would be known as “Pheasantheads.”
While there’s no question that his music was escapist, Margaritaville a place to be “wasted away again,” Buffett was as aware as any artist of art’s environment. Come any day of the week in the mid-70s, and you’d hear people sing “in a brown LA haze” when residents of many American cities were living in grayish brown and orange clouds, when papers such as the Denver Post put air quality warnings on their front pages every day. The EPA, brand new at the time, had a mandate of public support that “Come Monday” likely helped galvanize. Those clouds were gone by the mid-80s.
No wonder Buffett was alarmed by the view from his trailer of tornadoes touching down on a “flat, open field to the west.” Wish I could ask if it was an alfalfa field he looked over.
Lawrence reminds me that Brookings, a college town after all, has several trailer courts, all of them much larger. By the time I arrived, Buffett was already in California growing into his beach bum persona. By the time I left, perhaps I was chasing him in some unknowing way.
Where did I wash ashore? Plum Island, and I’ve been here ever since, spending as much or more time on a beach all these years as anyone, provided you do not count the winter months.
Buffett, meanwhile, strolled the beaches of Key West, Florida, where there are no winter months. And where the risk of skin cancer must be high. I was probably spared his fate in 1998 when a dermatologist insisted on removing a spot as soon as he saw it, my plans for boiled shrimp and sponge cake be damned.
Some people claim that there’s carelessness to blame. Yes, as Buffett ended his most beloved song, “I know it was my own damn fault.”
Hoping for something both local and personal to mark the 40th anniversary of the Daily News’ “As I See It” column, my wish was granted in the shadow of William Lloyd Garrison’s statue across from City Hall last month.
And I regret it.
News of the passing of Sarah Bodge was as hard to register as her age, 87, was hard to believe, even by those who knew her. And they are many.
For years, and right into early June just three weeks before passing, Sarah served at various local assisted living facilities. Years ago, she helped establish the Salisbury Senior Center’s food pantry.
On this side of the Merrimack, Sarah established BodySense, a most popular beauty shop downtown, in 1973, and ran it until the mid-80s. According to current owner Lisa Gianakakis, Sara remained helpful through the years, “a lovely, most considerate woman.”
Meanwhile, Sara volunteered her service on many of the Port’s civic boards.
In her prime, she was an acrobatic dancer who graced the stages of venues such as NYC’s Apollo, and ever since contributed her artistic vision to arts organizations that perform here in the Port.
I knew her as a long-time, frequent patron of the Screening Room, and without her ever knowing it, I turned her into something else.
Though “As I See It” is now 40—with the venerable Stuart Deane and I the only remaining members of the original cast—I never posted on social media until about ten years ago.
That coincides with the rise of the Tea Party that quickly combined the ugly undercurrents of white nationalism in the Republican Party which soon propelled a crude but charismatic huckster to power in 2016.
And which to this day presents a clear and present danger to this country—most immediately to Black and Jewish people each and every day.
Out of self-assigned necessity, I, a white guy, began writing about race.
At the time, I knew few Black folk. After living seven years in the Dakotas, I’m more familiar with Native Americans than with African-Americans.
And so it was that Sarah Bodge became my muse.
Writers do this all the time. Writing teachers coach students to think of someone whose opinion they value and who knows more than you about the subject. Not someone close who thinks alike, but at some distance they sometimes talk to.
A simple thumbs up would let me know I put enough emphasis in the right places. Her comments filled in what I missed but could file away for next time.
Hoped I’d see her at the reading of Frederick Douglass’ “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech, but she passed four days before.
Unlike my commentaries on events in far-flung places, I’d be writing about an event we both attended. The test was welcome, but like all tests, it makes one nervous.
Would she agree with me that the single line capturing what Douglass faced in 1852 is what we face today:
Where everything is plain, there is nothing to be argued.
Maybe that’s why I never heard Sarah argue, or express any impatience, much less anger. Even now I can’t picture her without a smile on her face.
Her quiet responses were enough to let me know where she stood—that if I wasn’t on the right track, I was at least headed in the right general direction.
Perhaps I should let it go at that. Better that she be remembered as her many friends knew her, and as her daughter describes her: “my adorable, kooky, formidable mama.”
Still,I can’t help but be rueful thinking that the person for whom I write is no more.
Then again, a muse is inspiration. Sarah’s reached me long before she hit “like” or added a comment. It came long before I hit “send”—in this case before I left the shadow of Garrison’s statue.
Mouth of the River 