By Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
It’s hard to believe that breaking and entering could lead to anything but jail time but to Norma Judson it’s led to her quest to revive the fast fading history of Westport, MA. Since September 2003, Judson has been leading a loosely organized group of Westport citizens on a purposeful tour down memory lane. “Too much is being thrown out, people don’t realize how valuable their old letters, photos, and documents are,” she laments.
To Judson, these relics, as well as the memories of Westporters who assemble in her living room once a month, are all pieces of a New England history, bits of a jigsaw puzzle that she’s trying to fill in before time runs out. Just the sea reclaims sand on Horseneck Beach, Judson knows that history is also lost when older members of the community pass away.
Two events, occurring nearly fifty years apart, motivate her sleuthing. The first spark was struck when she snuck into A. H. Cory’s Store (now the site of the Paquachuck Inn) in the dark of night with several other teenagers after a dance. The store, a casualty of the abrupt decline of the whaling industry at Westport Point, had sat forlornly and uninhabited ever since she could remember, a “ghost store” to the neighborhood kids. Rumors about the interior of the store abounded. “All the kids in the neighborhood were dying to know what was in that building,” she recalls, and one night after a local dance, they couldn’t deny their curiosity. They found a window they could open, cranked up their courage, and climbed in.
“What I saw is burned in my memory. It was like I was flown back in history to see those little leather shoes and little gloves in boxes,” with hats and the other merchandise still spread on counters. “We went up into the sail loft, it was like they went home one night, closed the door and never came back. That was a thrilling thing to see and for me it was like a peek into old Westport.”
That thrill smoldered in Judson’s memory during her 44-year career, coincidentally in a retail business that began just across the river from the former A.H. Cory store. “I started my Moby Dick shop in 1953, mostly gifts and women’s clothing, and operated it as a summer store. In 1968, I bought land from Al Lees, cut up my three buildings, and brought them over the bridge, and set up Silas Brown’s, which was located where Sovereign Bank is now.” Silas Brown’s became a well-known store that included departments for men and women, fine gifts, and a decorating department “where we wired lamps, sold paint and wallpaper,” she recalls. She closed the business in 1997 and sold the property to Compass Bank.
Sparks of history intermittently flared during her business career. ”I always had a love of old houses and restored a number of them. I restored the Wing Carriage House and the Feio house, a big old farm that I bought on Main Road, and some in New Bedford where I was born.” Her affiliation with the Westport Historical Society provided more fuel for her curiosity. In the 1970s she was on the committee that restored the Bell Schoolhouse for the Westport Historical Society. One of the society’s programs became the second event that kindled her interest in Westport’s past.
“Lincoln Tripp, the historic society’s president, gave us a quiz on one of the first meetings there and I did poorly. I remember the question, ‘What happened to the Kate Cory?’ I had no idea and wanted to get the answers. I went to the library and began reading (local historian) Eleanor Tripp’s volumes.”
Between then and closing her businesses in 1997, “my antenna was up and I just collected general knowledge. After retirement, it came very naturally to me. I saw the need to do something about the records, which were scattered all over the place and that concerned me. They needed to be in one good fireproof place.”
Just as she once took inventory in her stores, Judson now takes inventory of Westport history. Each month’s meeting features a Westporter with stories to tell. Topics have included Russ Hart's recollections about an old wooden aqueduct built at Westport Harbor, Ab Palmer's tales of the sword fishing industry, Cukie Macomber's stories about the history of Westport’s store businesses and the arrival of telephone technology (with amusing anecdotes about “party lines” in which no news was ever private), and Howie Gifford's memories former ice house businesses here.
“I call this a work group, it’s certainly more than a social group. The old timers really shine here... age is an asset. If they’ve had roots here all their lives and a good memory, they know more than they think they know,”
The current group is comprised of about a dozen regulars and others who attend intermittently. There’s a lively give and take as listeners ask questions and add anecdotes. Judson takes notes, makes copies of documents that have been brought in, and files them in a corner of the Westport Public Library.
“I have a dream that some day there will be a room in that library filled with Westport information, wonderful pictures on the walls, copies of books people from Westport have written, and drawers of files of everything from the landings to the bridges to the farms, you name it. Anyone could walk in there and know what this town is all about.”
That dream is stepping into reality. A corner of Library Director Sue Branco’s office contains a file cabinet and several bookcases of material that Judson has organized.
“Her contribution gives us ready access” to material that isn’t yet cataloged, says Ms. Branco. ““For the past five years there’s been a boom of interest in Westport history and my staff and I are doing a better job of helping people find what they want because of how Norma has organized this material.”
Some day in the not too distant future, residents will come to value this corner of the library as a public heirloom, a link to a town’s rich history that is slowly fading away.
SIDEBAR
If you have any documents that would shed light on Westport's history, contact Norma Judson at 508-636-2603. She will copy the documents for inclusion into the Westport History section of the library and return them to you. The group's meetings are taped and broadcast on local cable TV. Also, consider starting your own history group. As Norma Judson says, “There’s enough Westport history to go around for everyone."
Gay Talese: Dressed for Success
Gay Talese
Impressions of the man, the myth, the legend as he’s interviewed at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA
May 15, 2006
A wet blanket described by some as a “hundred year rain” had covered New England for ten days. The promise of a famous author making a local appearance was a ray of sunshine.
There, in his tailored light gray suit, burgundy handkerchief jutting like a crocus from the pocket, vest, pale yellow cravat, black shoes tied with red laces, pale taupe knee length stockings exposing no flesh as he sat on the Brattle Theater stage with interviewer Robert H. Giles, curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, was Gay Talese.
As far as Talese seemed to be concerned, Giles was another accessory to his outfit, an accessory who lobbed questions that the author measured and swung into with the grace of a DiMaggio. Talese was the show.
Some of the packed assembly had read all the man’s work; others, like me, had not but wanted some insight into an author who writes books destined to bask on bestseller lists for months at a time.
You can find background information about Gay Talese on any search engine. The man inhabiting the hand-stitched suit is far more elusive. As complete as his answers were, Talese seemed to be embodying his professional habit of remaining detached - an objectivity he said he learned while working for the New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal, whose mantra was, “Get the facts, tell the truth, let the story go where it goes.”
As the interview progressed, it was clear that this was a tamped-down Talese. No chance he’d loosen the knot on that silk cravat and become confessional. I was going to have to follow Rosenthal’s advice myself - listen for the facts and find out where the author’s story was going.
Talese’s attire seemed like a suit of armor. Sitting regally erect, legs crossed, elegant long fingered hands draped over his knee, he could have been posing for a portrait. He often recast questions asked him to suit the way he wanted to respond. Was he composed or coiled?
Talese takes years to write his stories. He may have been the only writer in the world who asked the question, “What ever happened to the one woman out of five on the Chinese soccer team who missed a goal in the 1999 Women’s World Cup championship shoot-out, allowing the USA to win? I must meet this woman.” Then spent five months in China finding the story, undaunted that he didn’t speak the language, had no clue how to find the woman (remember how large China is?) or even have a solid prospect for selling the story. Typical of Talese, this isn’t a profile of one person. By the time he finished, he wanted to meet the woman’s mother, and her grandmother, “to get a view of China from pre Mao, to China after 1949, to post Mao - from bound feet to cleats!” Assuming you watched live or reruns of that 1999 soccer contest, is that what was on your mind when you watched the dramatic shootout?
His non-fiction, journalistic style, steeped in research and verifiable facts, paints a huge canvas with a very small brush. Tom Wolfe dubbed it “the New Journalism”. Talese bristles at the term. There’s nothing new about having your feet on the ground and sniffing out the story, he says. It’s old-fashioned hard work.
Book lovers and writers came to hear nuggets from the author. They heard stories, yes, but nothing revealing what makes him tick. He spoke a few sentences about his wife, a few about his Sicilian immigrant parents. He answered stories about how he goes about his business with surgical precision, sphinx-like detachment. Intensity was present in force. Passion was absent. Talese managed the interview like one would imagine Frank Sinatra, another enigmatic Italian he wrote about, might have done. On his terms.
His methods? By talking to secondary characters, people who’ve been on the margins of the story, Talese consumes details, fills note cards, types his notes every night, and lets the story come to him. His guiding principle: what’s the story inside these stories?
Sensing he needed to throw some crumbs to admirers interested in “how”, Talese said in specific words what he’d been saying through stories for the previous 45 minutes: “Don’t be smothered by your knowledge, Your artistic ambition is to write in story form, like fiction, but write verifiably accurate reality. You want a large cast of characters tell you about time and place then you want to capture time and place in words, embed it in fact.”
“It takes months of patience, persistence, perseverance, and then very careful writing. It’s hard work and I don’t use a tape recorder.”
In response to a question in the Q and A, he threw a whole loaf to the faithful. “After all my legwork and research, I begin to organize. I review all the daily notes from the journals I’ve been making for the story and summarize them. I pin the summaries to a large Styrofoam board and make a storyboard. To me, it becomes a visual medium. I see the story like a filmmaker. I write scenically. I write like a choreographer.”
Nothing explains this better than his 1966 Esquire magazine story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Sinatra’s handlers never let the writer interview him because Sinatra had a cold. Undeterred, Talese hung out in Sinatra’s hot spots. He watched, asked questions, and listened. He talked up valets, third trombone players, minor actors in movies Sinatra starred in, and others on the margins of singer’s life. Then he gorgeously nailed the sense of time and place of Sinatra’s “almost operatic” life. The piece launched a trend that became known as “the New Journalism.”
By the time you’re finished reading it, you can smell the cigarette smoke on Sinatra’s tailored suits, hear the ice tinkling in his high ball glass, feel the astonishing power he wielded over men and women, and through Talese’s nuanced observations, sense a fragility in the man who had it all. I know this because when I returned home, I found an online copy of “Frank Sinatra has a cold” and stayed up till midnight reading it. Summary: Incandescent. Intense. Influential. New journalism, old journalism, who knows. This non-fiction was riveting.
If I had to guess, I’d say his ability to create intensely vivid stories from the information he digs up creates a doppelganger effect, casting some of the power of the subject of the writing upon the writer himself.
I really don’t need to know more about what makes Gay Talese tick. I do want to read more of his “operas”, ones about publishing industry (The Kingdom and The Power), the rise and fall of a crime family (Honor thy Father), the changing sex lives of Americans (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (The Bridge). And I’m going to reread “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” about once a month.
The man is the center of a giant vortex of style and substance. Judging by this interview, I would not want to get in his way when he’s on the hunt.
To read Frank Sinatra Has a Cold:
Click this link, disregard the signin, click OK
http://www.dalekeiger.com/wp-content/FrankSinatraHasaCold.pdf
May 16, 2006 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (4)