Dorchester Historical Society

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1751

News correspondent John King grew up on King Street in Dorchester, and some of his relatives still live in the area.

Wikipedia 2012

John King (born August 30, 1963) is an American journalist and is the anchor of John King, USA which appears weeknights at 7pm/ET on CNN. He is also the former anchor of State of the Union with John King. With Lou Dobbs’ sudden resignation from the network on November 12, 2009, CNN announced that King would take over Dobbs’ timeslot on March 22, 2010 with a new show.

King was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He attended Boston Latin School, and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Rhode Island.

In 1985, King joined the Associated Press where he began as a writer. In 1991, King was named chief political correspondent and headed the AP’s political coverage of the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. Also in 1991, King won the top reporting prize from the Associated Press Managing Editors’ Association for his coverage of the Gulf War in Kuwait.

In 1997, King joined CNN where he served as the senior White House correspondent from 1999 to 2005. In 2005, King was named CNN’s chief national correspondent, a position he still holds. He frequently appears on the nightly news programs The Situation Room and Anderson Cooper 360 and sometimes fills in as anchor.

King also uses the Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall, nicknamed the “Magic Wall” or “Magic Map.” First used during the primaries of the 2008 presidential campaign, it allows him to display and manipulate various graphics and maps relating to poll and election results. He and the Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall have both been featured in a Daily Show segment.

Just prior to the 2009 US presidential inauguration, King began hosting his new talk show State of the Union, which replaced CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. It was announced on November 12, 2009 that King will host a show in the timeslot formerly occupied by Lou Dobbs in early 2010.  On January 31, 2010, King announced that CNN’s senior political reporter, Candy Crowley, would replace him as anchor of State of the Union. King began hosting a new show on CNN starting March 22 called John King, USA.

In a debate on January 20, 2012, John King made headlines after opening the debate with a question related to allegations from Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife in an ABC interview that Gingrich wanted an open marriage. Newt Gingrich answered stating his anger that CNN would open a debate with such a question.  Fox News hosts Chris Wallace and Neil Cavuto spoke out in support of King for asking the question.

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If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1750

Mark Wahlberg is another son of Dorchester.

Wahlberg was born in Dorchester, on June 5, 1971, to Edward Wahlberg and Alma Elaine Donnelly. His paternal grandfather, Axel Simon Wahlberg, was of Swedish descent, while the remainder of his ancestry is Irish.  He graduated from Copley Square High School on Newbury Street in Boston.

Wahlberg first came to fame as the younger brother of Donnie Wahlberg of the successful bubblegum pop group New Kids on the Block. Mark had been hired as an original member of the group but quit before it became a success.  When the New Kids’ success finally ended, Mark began recording as Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch, earning a hit with Good Vibrations from the album Music for the People. The record was produced by his brother Donnie.

Wahlberg was also known for his impressive physique. He first displayed it in the Good Vibrations music video and most prominently in a series of underwear ads for Calvin Klein shot by Herb Ritts. He also made a workout video entitled The Marky Mark Workout: Fitness, Form, Focus

He then began an acting career, making his debut in the 1993 TV movie The Substitute. He earned positive reviews and appeared in a number of successful movies like Boogie Nights, Three Kings, The Perfect Storm, Four Brothers, and The Italian Job.  Wahlberg starred in the football drama, Invincible, based on the true story of Vince Papale. He is also the executive producer of the HBO series Entourage which is loosely based on his experiences in Hollywood. He appeared as a Massachusetts State Police detective in Martin Scorsese’s thriller, The Departed in 2006.  These are only a few examples of his work.  One of his more recent movies was The Fighter in 2010 where he portrayed “Irish” Micky Ward from Lowell, MA.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1749

Sheldon Adelson grew up on Erie Street in Dorchester, and is now one of the wealthiest men in the world.  He made money from American International Travel Service, which became the largest travel agency in New England.  He invested in trade shows for computers and made a huge success out of Comdex.  He then moved to Las Vegas and transformed the Sands Hotel into The Venetian Casino.  More recently he has opened the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

Adelson and his wife Miriam have a long history of philanthropy and are donors to many pro-Israel causes, helping to fund travel to Israel by young Americans.  In 2006 Mr. Adelson contributed $25,000,000 to the organization Birthright Israel, which finances Jewish youth trips to Israel, and  in 2007, he pledged another $25,000,000 to the program, allowing for approximately 20,000 people to take part.  He and his wife also donated $25 million to Yad Vashem—the largest donation received by the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem by a single donor.   

About a year ago Adelson visited Boston to scout out the possibilities for casinos in Massachusetts, but all the news this year is about his support of Newt Gingrich’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for President.

Sheldon Adelson was born in 1933 into a neighborhood of Jewish immigrants on the west side of Dorchester, not far from Franklin Park and Grove Hall.  An earlier son of Jewish immigrants, the author Theodore White, also born on the same street, offered this description:  “it was then a bustling market street ancillary to the main shopping artery of Dorchester/Blue Hill Avenue.  Storekeepers had transformed Erie Street from the quiet residential neighborhood my grandparents had sought as Jewish pioneers in the district into a supermarket bazaar.”

Check out Sheldon Adelson in Wikipedia and take a look at the article by Farah Stockman in the Boston Sunday Globe, March 18, 2012, “Sheldon Adelson, Dorchester is Calling.”

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1748

I hope than I am using the proper terms in the following paragraph, but I think you can make sense of it in any case.

Today’s photo shows the foundation sill and a post in the ell of the Clapp Family barn.  In the days of hewing each post and beam by hand, builders would shape posts and beams before putting the building together.  In today’s photo each mortise on the foundation sill would accept the tenon from a post.  And the mortise and tenon would be shaped to fit each other one at a time.  Due to the nature of hand work, it was important to be sure the post’s tenon would enter the same hole it was designed for.  So the builder marked Roman numerals on the post and on the corresponding side of the beam.  These are called marriage marks.  The straight lines of Roman numerals are easier to cut than the rounded forms Arabic numerals.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1747

Yesterday we saw that in 1910, Dr. Archibald T. Davison (a Dorchester native) left his position as Organist & Choirmaster at All Saints to take the post of University Organist and Choirmaster at Harvard.

Wikipedia says: Archibald Thompson Davison (11 October 1883 – 6 February 1961) was an American musicologist, conductor, composer and music educator.

Davison was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He completed his studies in music at Harvard University, finally graduating in 1908 with a PhD. He is best remembered for his work as editor of the two volumes of ‘The Historical Anthology of Music’, done together with Willi Apel. He died in Brant Rock.

His compositions were completed early in life, and none of them are part of the standard repertoire.

His musicology writings include:

• The Harmonic Contributions of Claude Debussy, 1908
• Choral Conducting, 1940
• The Technique of Choral Composition, 1945
• The Historical Anthology of Music Volume I: Oriental, Medieval and Renaissance Music, 1949
• The Historical Anthology of Music Volume II: Baroque, Rococo and Pre-Classical Music, 1950

For a much longer description of Davison’s life, check out his obituary in the Harvard Crimson.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1961/2/17/archibald-t-davison-faith-in-good/

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1746

All Saints’ Choir of Men and Boys along with Harvard Glee Club at Ashmont

On Tuesday, 27 March 2012, at 7:00 p.m., the Harvard Glee Club, and the All Saints’ Choir of Men and Boys, will present a free, one hour-long concert at All Saints’.

The musical directors of the groups–Andrew Sheranian (Ashmont) and Andrew Clark (Harvard)–have planned an evening of socializing and music-making culminating in a joint concert of the ensembles.

All are invited to this free concert, but you are asked to make a special effort to bring along a boy (grade 3 through 6) who might be interested in the choir. This joint event with the Harvard Glee Club re-establishes an historical connection and is the beginning of an exciting new collaboration.

A bit of history:  In 1910, Dr. Archibald T. Davison (a Dorchester native) left his position as Organist & Choirmaster at All Saints to take the post of University Organist and Choirmaster at Harvard. In 1912, he began coaching Harvard Glee Club (HGC) members on vocal training and other aspects of choral music making. He became a beloved figure, and in 1919 he accepted the HGC’s invitation to become the group’s first conductor. Known as “Doc” Davison, he is credited with leading the HGC to the artistic heights and renown it continues to enjoy.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1745

In Codman Square Bernie’s Bike Shop at 26 Norfolk Street and the houses around the corner on Epping Street were taken down to allow an expansion of the Codman Academy, a charter school connected to the Codman Square Health Center.  When the Academy learned that a portion of the Bernie’s Bike Shop building was built probably in the 18^th century, they saved the beams that could be salvaged for a future exhibit inside the new building.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1744

A recipient of the Illustration of the Day has asked what is going on with the building at Edward Everett Square, known as three different addresses.  As of March, 2012, the City of Boston Assessing Department has the parcel at the point of Columbia Road and East Cottage Street listed as 166 East Cottage Street.  The Inspectional Services Department seems to have it at 1299 Massachusetts Avenue, although in early years, an owner promised to file all applications under the address 708 Columbia Road.  The property owner is shown as Yellow Brick, LLC.

The building has been under construction for a number of years—the structure for a full three stories was added a few years ago, but progress has stopped.  The building once housed the New England Brake Center, and the building seems to have been owned by the Brake Center into the1990s.  The original building, built between 1910 and 1918 as a garage, had two stories at the curve but only one story back along both sides. 

For a short period in 2009, the curved portion of the building housed a produce market.  An article that appeared in the Dorchester Reporter in early 2009 said: Purchased by developer Steven Turner in the fall, the V-shaped building has been vacant since the early 1990s, exposing its skeletal structure to thousands of motorists who flood this six-pronged intersection each day. The city began to renovate the square in 1995 and marked milestones in the initiative in 2007. The fresh paint and new windows on the lone remaining eyesore are another significant breakthrough.

Permit application #4679 dated June 9, 2003, requested a change of occupancy from a garage to a furniture showroom and office space, to erect a vertical addition, to combine 5 lots into one parcel of 17,220 square feet (Ward 07, parcel 3957 at the point, and parcels 3598, 3599, 3600, 3601 along East Cottage Street).  The Assessing Department continues to maintain all the parcels as separate tax entities on their website.

In 2010 an attorney’s letter filed at Inspectional Services detailed proposed use of the building once improvements had been made: first floor local retail 4507 square feet; second floor place of worship for Church in Boston Inc.; third floor five residential units to be used as a parsonage, housing ministers, deacons and deaconesses; plus 29 parking spaces.  The letter seems to claim that the building owner can make use of the building in this way as of right under the zoning rules.  A change of occupancy seems to have been approved on September 22, 2010.

The permit applications for ongoing repairs and improvements as well as the change of occupancy on Sept. 22, 2010, seem to reference application #4679 filed in 2003.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1743

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Theodore White spent his childhood in Dorchester.  Perhaps his most famous books are those with the title The Making of the President (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972).

Theodore White: A Childhood in Dorchester

By Anthony Sammarco in Dorchester Community News, August 30, 1991.

In the first chapter of Theodore White’s book In Search of History, he describes in vivid detail his youth in Dorchester at the turn of the century.

The chapter, “Exercise in Recollection,” creates a vivid impression of an immigrant’s viewpoint of a town settled by Puritans escaping the Old World, and creating a new society based on the Augustinian view of a “City upon a Hill.”

White, however, gives us the viewpoint of his childhood in Dorchester from that of an American born to Russian Jews.  Theodore White (1915-1986) was born on Erie Street, a nondescript street adjacent to the Midlands Line Railroad.  Near his home was Grove Hall, a bustling shopping district that once boasted a magnificent estate, Grove Hall, for which the intersection had been named.

The area had changed dramatically after the annexation of Dorchester to Boston in 1870, and White recounted that “it was then a bustling market street ancillary to the main shopping artery of Dorchester/Blue Hill Avenue.  Storekeepers had transformed Erie Street from the quiet residential neighborhood my grandparents had sought as Jewish pioneers in the district into a supermarket bazaar.”

Boston’s Amenities are Next Door

The aspect of immigrants in Dorchester was an important factor in the development of the town, for the town’s proximity to Boston allowed for both the affluent and those less fortunate to enjoy the same amenities.  The cool breezes from Dorchester Bay during the summer, the same panoramic views of both the Harbor and the Blue Hills and the same enjoyment of the exotic animals at Franklin Park Zoo were enjoyed by both the descendants of the Puritans and the newer arrivals from Eastern Europe.  The streets radiating from the former “Upper Road” (now Washington Street) attracted ethnic enclaves that had distinct connotations from Irish, Jewish, or German settlements.  White speaks of inner-city neighborhoods as being a part of a ballet that “is different in each city.  In the larger cosmopolitan cities of the Eastern Seaboard, old stock Protestants gave way to the Irish, who gave way in turn to Italians or Jews, who gave way n turn to blacks.”

Inspired by His House

However, being the grandchild of Easter European Jews separated White from his contemporaries.  He lived with his family in a two-family house that had been purchased for $2,000 in 1912, in a neighborhood that once attracted more affluent residents.  The house, unprepossessing by today’s standards, was an important feature in his youth, as “the house on Erie Street … connected me, unknowingly, directly to the New England past.  It might have been gardened by John Greenleaf Whittier, and its garden was the most beautiful on the block.  All the New England flowers about which I read in school, in the poems of Longfellow, and Whittier, and Emerson, and in the stories of Thornton Burgess, grew in my own backyard.  Under the lilac bushes grew lilies of the valley; we continued to replant the tiger lilies and tulips until we became too poor to buy tulip bulbs … To the original fruit trees—a pear and a cherry—my grandmother added a peach tree and a grapevine.”

Erie Street, carved out of the lands surrounding the former Atherton Estate, was an attractive neighborhood.  Tree-lined streets and a pleasant walk to Franklin Park must have sparked his imagination, but it was Miss Fuller, his sixth-grade teacher at the Gibson School on Mount Bowdoin that “set fire to the imagination of the ordinary children who sat in lumps before her, and to do so was probably the chief reward she sought.”

However, the public school education received by the children of immigrants could prove confusing, for the poems and stories read in school could be in marked contrast to the sounds of street merchants: “[L]eading their horse-and-wagons through Erie Street, they would yodel and chant their wares.  For each peddler another chant: the fish man would sing in a special voice, ‘Lebediker fisch, weiber, Lebediker fisch;’ the secondhand-clothes merchant would chant otherwise; the Italian banana man would chorus only ‘Bananas, bananas, bananas,’ hawking a fruit previously unknown to Eastern Europeans.” 

Though Theodore White said that Jews have no place at all in the grand history of Western thought, the courage his own family showed in their movement from Russian to Dorchester proved to make so interesting a migration that his book remains a familiar and personal adventure of an immigrant group in Dorchester.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1742

The amateur ham radio fad of the early to mid 20^th century found many enthusiasts in Dorchester.  After radio operators communicated with others, they often followed up with a mailed postcard to confirm their contact.  Wikipedia has a long article about amateur radio and seems to imply that radio communication for personal use is still popular.

Postcard. Caption on front: Dorchester, Massachusetts, Boston “More Yankee Grit” 258 E. Cottage St., W1MYG Thomas Edward O’Connor. Postmarked Mar. 5, 1941.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org