Kirby on the Loose

Part Ten of "The Fall Guys": The Northwood Affair

2012-02-07T18:59:00.005-05:00

"Board members must have no connections

with business enterprises that would affect

their judgment as directors"

Article in Consumers Reports

looking for new members for

their board of directors

I ran into a guy on the street one day that talked to Mike Smith at the YMCA one day and three days later got a check in the mail for a plane he wanted to buy. A couple weeks later he got a somewhat embarrassed phone call from a woman at the bank saying that she couldn’t find any paperwork on this plane purchase. Could he please come in and sign a note?.

"Oh," he said, being a kidder, "That money?. I thought that was some kind of promotional offer from the bank. You know, buy me a plane and I’ll tell all my friends I got my money from Heritage. "

A long silence ensued, and somewhat chastened, he came in and signed the note.

If Mike Smith was looking to his boss Dick Covell to be the role model, there’s no doubt how he got into trouble. Read the full article here

Part Nine of the "Fall Guys" Mike Smith gets to wear a wire

2012-01-31T16:58:00.007-05:00

In March of l991 a young FBI agent named T. J. Roberts came out from Boston and started probing into the bank failure. The bank was on its last legs and he threw himself in subpoenaing everything relevant from the bank. During the 1991 and 1992 period, there was a lot of apprehension that some of Northampton’s leading lights would go to jail from being involved in this mess. The FBI came to Northampton in force, spending many hours following the paper trails out from the County Registry of Deeds into the offices of the leading players in the Northampton area. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, developers, leading members of the friends of Mike Smith club. The FBI and FDIC investigators were armed with information from the 1989 FDIC audit and an internal investigation done by the bank in 1988, the so-called Hoar report, that found hundreds of violations of State and federal laws and banking regulations. In l989, the FDIC threatened to fine Covell for his violation of insider trading practices. A lot of people were scared, and it was thought that up to twenty people might be indicted. Read about Mike Smith's dinner date at the Putney Inn and the missing FBI tape recorder.

The Fall Guys

2012-01-30T19:47:00.015-05:00

Northampton in the eighties

click on titles to read

1. The Beginning

Heritage Bank was our regional bank, and while the boom-time of the nineteen eighties lasted, it was the financial center of our town. If you couldn’t get a loan elsewhere, you came to Heritage Bank. They came from Providence and Maine, from Ohio and Miami Beach.

2. The Plotters

One night developer Mike Sissman saw the three men who ended up being key players in the secret partnerships that did so much to ruin the bank having dinner one night at the Inn at Northampton. He realized right away that something was terribly wrong at Heritage Bank.

3. The Great Wazoo

While I hid in the corner waiting for the receptionist to notice me, I read one of their brochures. I wondered how many people who attended these seminars in Boston and elsewhere knew that their resource person who was advising people on how to deal with banks calling in their loans was a convicted felon. I find that Donald Todrin is not in.

4. The Great Cummington Farms Disaster

In the ski business we call projects like Cummington Farms 'monuments.’ To make money, you can't spend too much on the building. All the floors and windows at Cummington Farms had to be replaced. If the Rockefellers or Donald Trump were funding the place, the work would have been perfect.

5. Mike Smith, check my warning lights!

According to the Gazette, Mike Smith was now managing an auto shop, earning about $250 a week and living up over the garage. An innocent juror at the Labovitz trial might think that this reflected credit on Smith. Bank executive starts life anew. A trip to New Hampshire revealed that the business was just another favor from his Heritage borrowers.

6. The Dutchman

When the banks lawyers came up here in l989 trying to check out these persistent rumors at the bank that Mike owned a condo in the Lake Sunapee area, they found nothing. There was no Mike Smith in the index at the courthouse but he had a condo. The title was held by The Dutchman, Inc. a New York Corporation having a usual place of business at 8910 Third Avenue, Brooklyn New York.

7. Looking for Danny Constance

I called Danny Constance in 1999, but he didn’t want to talk to me. “Do you want to talk about the 80s, Danny?” I asked, and there was a long pause. He was thinking seriously about it. “No,” he finally said in this gravelly voice, “I don’t think I do.” He was polite, but firm. I never met the man. There were all kinds of tantalizing references in federal records to the man that ran Beardsleys, the French restaurant on Main Street that become the symbol of Northampton in the eighties. A FBI tape recording that disappeared. It was intriguing that the area’s leading bank was financing someone who was a kingpin in the Valley’s numbers racket, someone who had links to organized crime, someone who was eventually arrested for money laundering and sentenced to federal prison.

7. The Roof Falls In on Heritage Bank

Heritage moved to their ultra-modern, boat-shaped tower in Holyoke in June of l989, at long last consolidating their offices in one place. Dick Covell wrote a preface to the 1989 annual report comparing the creation of his new bank to the founding of the United States. He compared the amalgamation of the seven banks to the more "perfect union" of the 13 original states.

8. The Fall of Manuel Duarte

In April Fridlington hired Alfred Dean, a former banker, to review the portfolio of the senior Heritage bank officer in Worcester. Going through his desk, Dean discovered this whole bundle of checkbooks with a rubber band around them. The names on the checkbooks were relatives and friends of many of Manny’s biggest clients; the signature cards at the banks all had Manuel Duarte’s name as signing for these people.

9. Mike Smith wears a wire

During the FDIC audit in August, there had been a slight falloff in the number of delinquencies, but then Fridlington told Gonzales about Duarte’s checkbooks and the massive losses that had just cropped up in the Worcester branch. Concerned that that they might have another Smith on their hands, Louis Gonzales thought that enough was enough. He told a discouraged Dick Covell that the bank was in apparent violation of minimum capital requirements and that, by definition, the bank was deemed to be engaged in an unsafe or unsound practice.

10. The Northwood Affair

"Oh," he said, being a kidder, "That money?. I thought that was some kind of promotional offer from the bank. You know, buy me a plane and I’ll tell all my friends I got my money from Heritage. "

A long silence ensued, and somewhat chastened, he came in and signed the note.

11. The FBI Enters the Case

During the FDIC audit in August, there had been a slight falloff in the number of delinquencies, but then Fridlington told Gonzales about Duarte’s checkbooks and the massive losses that had just cropped up in the Worcester branch. Louis Gonzales thought that enough was enough. He told a discouraged Dick Covell that the bank was in apparent violation of minimum capital requirements and that, by definition, the bank was deemed to be engaged in an unsafe or unsound practice. Covell was particularly apprehensive about the possibility of the FDIC filing a cease and desist order and the required public disclosure that would ensue. Gonzales also filed a report of an apparent crime against Michael Smith, and that brought in the FBI. Read the full story here

Goodbye

2012-01-25T14:12:00.005-05:00

The sun is blazing outside, high tide is about one pm, and I am sitting here in our winter quarters near San Diego wondering what to do about kirbyontheloose. My higher power tells me that I have had a good run over the last three years, reporting on Northampton issues that no one else wants to cover, spotlighting failures in city government, and whatnot. I am not getting any younger, and stories like the last one, about Opal Development, take their toll. And my other writing seems to sit around and go nowhere because I am out chasing some local story. I guess it is time to retire. Just before we left town, I happened to go into the Gazette office on an unrelated matter. I looked around at the great expanse of desks, mostly empty. The daily deadline had come and gone, and another paper was out on the stands.
I didn't like where the Opal story had lead me, and I wondered, why me? Why are all these people who are paid to report the news not doing it, and why is this old guy taking it upon himself to step into this particular meat-grinder? It's not doing my blood pressure any good. And yes, I am getting a mite bad-tempered in my old age. So, I am calling it a day. And yes, I have done this work up til now because I enjoy it and I think it is useful. Kirbyontheloose will stay up on the web, and will get reorganized a bit, so that older stories are easier to access, and I may post new chapters of my book about the fall of Heritage Bank.
Local journalism has changed profoundly over the last century, and it is only once in a blue moon that we get stories in the Gazette that go beyond what is in the press releases. I guess I am old fashioned. I believe that community newspapers should be a watchdog, they should bark once in a while, and their reporters should not be rewriting press releases and anointing development groups like Opal Development with their good housekeeping seal of approval. How far we have fallen can be seen by the Picknelly family choosing who they did to head up a major real estate venture in Northampton. They must have assumed that no one at the Republican or the Gazette would ask questions and look into his background. I hope Clarke School will change its mind, rebid its acreage, and pick a group with a proven track record.

No to occupation

2012-01-19T22:10:00.003-05:00

Over the last months I have been pushed gently by a number of my friends to become involved in the Occupy Northampton movement, but my response was tepid. I was out there in front of Thornes Market the first day, dutifully shouted out various slogans when prompted, and attended an organizational meeting of Occupy sympathizers at a private home. Most of us there were old and creaky and comfortably housed, and there was no one there from the movement itself. The first plan that was floated at that meeting was moving the protest from the park and the street to the senior center, which various people deemed "half-empty, overbuilt and underused." While I am all in favor of an option that would get the protesters off the cold streets, and also generally in favor of anything that would upset the existing order, when it came time for me to talk, I landed on the idea. Occupy Northampton marching down to the elderly center and throwing down sleeping bags would be a public relations disaster. Better to occupy Memorial Hall, which is downtown and half-empty. As time goes by the movement nationwide has dwindled. Carefully calculated non-violent repression has scattered the young people, and we have gone back to business as usual as our noble cruise ship SS. United States drifts onto the rocks.

For awhile the Occupy movement barked at us, we beeped our horns in support, but it had no bite, no long term strategy for change, and not much leadership here in Northampton except this one guy who is a poet and a monk. I have heard his poetry and it is bad; I have met the young woman who follows him about faithfully and does his laundry, and found this much submission detestable. When he asked me for help with his fight with Jon Hite who he says disrespects and discriminates against him, he told me that the only time he could talk to me was six in the morning. An acolyte I am not, and I sent him a note that I never left the house before 9:00. I am retired.

I rarely agree with the head of the Housing Authority, but when I heard that Jon Hite had lost his temper with him one day and intimated that he should go to work and free up a unit at MacDonald House I said "Here, here" like the Brits in the lower chamber do. It is a sin for a person with his talents and energy taking up an apartment in MacDonald House that a truly needy couple needs. The Occupy movement contrasts vividly with the vigorous talk and the action of a small group of Green Party people who I met at this party several months ago. They were doing conventionally reformist things, they had been out of the streets of Holyoke and Northampton talking to people, running for office and looking for delegates. A third party with a vigorous platform addressing the needs of the 99% is what we need to buck the existing order.

A managing director with a past: a 1999 arrest, a foreclosure and involvement in a Bermuda land scheme raises questions about Opal Development.

2012-01-01T15:51:00.009-05:00

Due diligence, according to Wikipedia, is a term used for a number of concepts involving either an investigation of a business or person prior to signing a contract, or to depict an act done with a certain standard of care. It can be legally mandated, but more commonly applies to voluntary investigations where someone buying or selling a property evaluates the credentials and history of the other party. A relatively new development company owned by Peter Picknelly has made an offer to purchase the remaining acreage and buildings of the Clarke School. About two weeks ago I went to the meeting up on Round Hill that Robert Jonas hosted for the principals of Opal Development. An opportunity to meet the neighborhood. The Gazette came and took pictures, I sat there and took notes and observed the vibes. Some of us went with some apprehension, since the tone of the email that neighbor Lewis Popper had received from Opal’s managing director was pretty frosty.
” Read the full article by clicking here.

Why King Street languishes, why the Fire Station is where it is, when Roy Martin got almost 30% of the vote for mayor, and other mysteries solved

2011-12-07T14:44:00.006-05:00

At a forum before last month’s election, a woman asked the candidates for councilor at large, "Why all the empty lots on King Street?"
None of the candidates seemed to have a take on what was wrong. Just some of the usual bromides. It’s clear, however, that the people that are building and expanding businesses are locating elsewhere. Look to our north, where new businesses are springing up all along along Routes 5 and 10 in Hatfield, just north of the town line.. Look at where the Valley Medical program money is going: Easthampton and Greenfield. Look at all the earth-moving equipment working in Easthampton. Easthampton Savings Bank is building a three-story building barely 100 yards from our town line. Look at all the construction along Rte. 9 in Hadley. Modern office space, modern industrial buildings. There are no new commercial or industrial buildings going up on Hospital Hill. Why?
And then look at King Street, bracketed on the south by that huge empty parking lot that once held Lia Honda, and then the empty Kollmorgen buildings that Pat Goggins called "useless" this year. And behind the railroad, you will find increasing numbers of vacancies at the Industrial Park. It had zero vacancies in 1999, now there are four or five buildings vacant. The other day I saw signs outside Tiger Press telling us they are moving to East Longmeadow. Read the full story here.

WHMP promises " a more robust response" from the station in future emergencies.

2011-11-03T16:29:00.006-04:00

"You want a story that no one else is going to do?" said the executive secretary for a local mayor. "WHMP, that's your story. Here, we've always been taught to keep extra batteries in our radio. Why bother, if there's nothing on except garden shows? If someone had given me the key to the station I would have gone there and opened up the phone lines and listened to people and tell them what I knew."

It was Thursday morning and many people in her town were still without power. A woman had just left her office after complaining about everything she had been through since Saturday's storm. And there was nothing that city hall could do except lend a sympathetic ear and tell people to call the electric company and to keep calling them. A whole group of people had evidently come to her office earlier, really angry.

"At least," she sighed, "This woman was polite."

The first twenty-four hours after the lights went out was hard on almost everyone. In our house, we were totally out of the communications loop with no TV, no cable, no land phone, no cell phone, no internet, no nothing. My wife had a small battery-powered radio and tuned in WHMP and all there was a garden show about wisteria and dahlias and news that Christmas day wasn't too late to plant your bulbs. People have told me that other area stations were also "on automatic" with canned coverage. She finally found some real storm news on WTIC in Hartford, and bulletins on such subjects as to keep food in refrigerators and freezers from spoiling and the extreme hazards of using charcoal or propane heaters to stay warm.

We talked to the new general manager at WHMP and "The River," David Musante. He's the son of the former mayor, and has only been on the job for a couple of weeks. He said I wasn't the first call he had gotten complaining about the station's' storm coverage. He said that much of the staff at the station were newly hired, and the storm caught the station off guard. They had just hired new local people like Bob Flaherty and Denise Vozella just so they could beef up their local programming. He said that when the power came back on, they went on with their regular programming, but cut fresh news breaks and updated them hourly and on Sunday afternoon they played a message from acting mayor Narkewicz.

"Rest assured," he said, "in the event of another public emergency our response and coverage will be more robust and in line with the gravity of the situation." In the near future he plans to meet with elected officials and fire and police officials to hash out an emergency protocol that would give local governments the ability to get emergency information on the air right away.

TOP SECRET

2011-10-25T09:04:00.008-04:00

Part Two

The Head Correspondent for KOTL caught Northampton Fire Chief Brian Duggan in his office Monday morning, October 24. The chief sat on the opposite side of the reception room at the main fire station; I sat in the chair next to his secretary. This was my opportunity to ask him some questions about his work as an outside consultant for Municipal Resources Inc. (MRI) of Meredith, New Hampshire. Considering everything that had transpired in the blogosphere, the chief was relaxed and amiable. He did, however, shoot me a few barbs and there was some counter-fire from the other side of the room. He broadly hinted that his work for MRI was over, saying, “This was past tense.” He said that he did the work on his personal time, and further stated that he would not reveal his earnings from MRI for the last few years nor make public any information on his billable hours to MRI unless he was ordered to do so by the mayor.

Chief Duggan had just returned from a two-week federal training program run by the Naval Postgraduate Center for Homeland Defense and Security in West Virginia. He told me that being in the program was important for Northampton and for his country, and this would take him out of the city and perhaps, out of the country. Evidently with Mayor Higgins’s approval, he applied for, and was accepted to, a master’s degree program at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The program is described here: Its objectives include "strategies, plans and programs to prevent terrorist attacks"

I got the sense from talking to Acting Mayor Narkewicz last week that he knew very little about the postgraduate program which had sent Chief Duggan out of the city, and he was essentially playing "catch-up," just like me, talking to the assistant chief, Duane Nichols, and waiting for Duggan to return. The website states that the graduate program "involves a significant commitment on the part of the participants and the agencies to which they are assigned." The 18-month program requires participants to spend two weeks every quarter in its "Eastern Management Development Center" in Shepherdstown, West Virginia and other sites, and calls for 15 hours a week in web-based course work. An academic quarter is three months, and that means the chief will be out of the area a total of 12 weeks over the next year and a half. To me, that time commitment represents a significant burden on his subordinates, as well as on the city of Northampton, which will continue to pay the second highest salary in the city to a part-time fire chief.

As for me, I kind of doubt that we are going to have any terrorist activity in Northampton in the near future that will require a chief who is so highly trained in homeland security strategy. We're just a little Podunk town, and what we really need is a chief who isn't traveling all over the place and working up a resume so he can eventually jump to a much better paying job in Boston or Baghdad. With my final two questions, I verified what I already knew to be true: The department had not initiated any fire drills at Meadowbrook following the big fire in 2009. Yes, they had done some kind of post-fire meeting, the chief said, but it hadn't worked out. When I mentioned the highly carbonized truss-work under the roofs of Meadowbrook, I got a blank look. Ditto for their plans to hold other meetings in neighborhoods outside the water protection district. He had sent everyone outside that district a letter by registered mail, and warned them to get a sprinkler system. It seemed to him that this letter was enough. My concerns seemed trivial.

Reigning in the Northampton Fire Department

2011-10-18T11:50:00.005-04:00

Part One

Full-time pay for a part-time chief?

Our public safety administrators are the two top paid people in the city. Former Mayor Mary Clare Higgins commented in Northampton Media, “Police and fire are the only departments in the city that have to cover 24 hours a day seven days a week... “Everybody’s working hard [and] working extremely long hours.”

Not Chief Brian Duggan. Police Chief Sienkowicz may be at his desk at 8:30 AM, but not Duggan. Our second-highest paid official is a double-dipper: drawing a full time salary of $139,095 while drawing a salary as a project manager and consultant for Municipal Resources Inc. of Meredith, New Hampshire.

At most other city offices I know of, the administrators are always there at 8:30 am, facing whatever needs to be done, answering the phone calls and dealing with the latest. They are civic servants. The Chief of Police will be there. I know every weekday about 8:20 am George Zimmerman, our treasurer, will be coming across the Round House parking lot and heading for his office with a big briefcase of papers he probably spent reading the night before. I know that at 8:30 am our building inspector will be sitting at his secretary’s desk making a note to someone and giving me the evil eye as I stand there at the counter with a question.

But the Fire Chief is never at his desk at 8:30 am. Read the story here

2011-10-15T20:32:00.001-04:00

The Truck-Eating Bridge, Take Two

2011-10-12T14:49:00.000-04:00

The Bridge in 2009

I remember back at the dawn of time, maybe 1993, driving into Boston for a conference being sponsored by the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Don’t ask me what it was all about. I was on the city council, and Mary Ford had just been elected Mayor. She was really excited at the changes she was going to make. Going under the truck-eating railroad bridge, she pointed up at the battered and twisted ironwork and said, as I remember, “If I become Mayor, there’ll never be another truck stuck under than damn bridge.”

“We’ll put up warning cables like they have on Storrow Drive.”

read the full story here

Airport Stories

2011-10-08T20:55:00.004-04:00

Down at the LaFleur airport some time after midnight on the cold night of
February 16, 1983, a young kid was trying to make a phone call on the pay phone. The airport is in the meadows area of Northampton next to Route 91. It’s your standard country airport, a tar strip, a scattering of planes and hangars. In winter, it’s a desolate place. After hours, no one is around. A neighbor who usually walks around nights and keeps an eye on things was out of
town on vacation.

It all started with a wrong number and a payphone that wouldn’t return money. Bob was trying to call a friend, lost his money, got angry, and tore the phone off the wall of the hangar. He was a troubled kid, a shabby quiet loner from a rural background who hid behind a big bushy black beard. Someone who might have been a schizophrenic. Someone who brooded a lot about the state of the world, who had been hospitalized out at the Northampton State Hospital, and now was living at Northampton Lodgings, a brick building on Pleasant Street close to downtown, going to meetings, and taking his medication. Norma Rubeck, who managed the place in the days when the place was managed, told me he was a weird one. The graduates and drop-outs of Northampton’s mental institutions have always given our town a certain odd flavor. Just as many of the five college graduates stick around the area after graduation, so did many people from the Northampton State Hospital and the Veterans Medical Center in Leeds, which had a big in-patient and out-patient mental population.

A counselor who knew him told me that he hated the airport. Guys in his recovery program had talked about it and how the heroin and cocaine that was a big part of street life came through Lafleur on light planes flying in from the Martha's Vineyard or further south. Staring down at the wreckage of the phone, he saw something glinting on the ground. A key, with a tag attached. On the tag was a woman’s name, and a plane registration number. Click here to read the story.

Nights of Thunder

2011-09-29T13:02:00.004-04:00

The real Demolition Derby

In Ward Three, fall means the Morgan House show and the Three County Fair. I heard the action at the demolition derby on Friday night coming in the windows and wafting across the old graveyard. When Sunday night rolled around, I walked down to the Fairgrounds.

"It's like being in a barroom, only you are outside," says my friend Bobby to me, talking about the midway.

The beer smell does carry from the open-air tents, and you can stroll around with your 16 ounce Bud draft without any problem. You can look at the stars, you can look at the pretty girls. There is that fabulous kielbasa stand down near the animal barns, country music, a lot of food stands with pizza and fried bread treats, and the whole thing is a great old-fashioned mélange of smells and noise. The cows, the manure, the kielbasa, the Old Spice, the Chanel number five, the sweet smell of hydrocarbons. And over the sound of the calliope music and the screams of riders on the whirl-a-gig rides is the roar of unmuffled engines and the crash and another crash as a Cadillac De Ville gets rear-ended by a Crown-Vic, spins around and takes out a Honda passing by. The smoke rises, the horn blows, and the firemen rush out and put out an engine fire. The crowd roars. To read the full story, click here

Demolition Derby: Part Two

2011-09-21T17:09:00.017-04:00

The Case of the Cement Sandwich

The only photograph we have of 29 Cherry is one taken by a neighbor on its last day before the demolition guys started work. The Bobcat is parked, ready to go, and the first dumpster is on hand.

On June 22, 2010, about two weeks before the Timothy and Wendy Van Epps closed on the cottage at 40 Union Street, a Sandri controlled realty trust, Roxbo Development, bought 29 Cherry Street, a house built in 1880. Their lot directly abutted the cottage. They paid $297,000 to a lawyer who represented the late Irene and Lester Kozontkoski.. Like 38 Union Street, its pre-1900 construction date would ordinarily give it a one-year reprieve from demolition if it was deemed of historical value, but it never came before the Historic Commission.

To read the complete article, click here

To see the demolition progress at 29 Cherry, click here

How did this fully restored 1850-era house on Union Street

2011-09-12T22:25:00.015-04:00

vanish and became this?

How to get around the Demolition Delay Ordinance,

Part One

Mike Kirby with Lu Stone

Sometimes curiosity can get this old cat into real trouble. Lu and I walk down Union Street often on our way downtown. She has been researching the development of our Market/North Street neighborhood and compiling an inventory of its 19th-century houses. We knew that there had been a demolition at 26 Union because the frame house, dating to the 1820s, had been badly damaged by fire during the wave of arson attacks that hit the city in January, 2010.

But the massive new building going up at 38 Union next to the jail? This was a puzzlement, and Lu wondered how a house that had won a Historic Preservation award from the Northampton Historical Commission only eight years before could suddenly disappear. Read the full article here.

Wake Up and Smell the PCBs

2011-08-31T10:53:00.006-04:00

I don't know, maybe these falling trees have a story to tell about what is under the ground at the old Northampton Honda and Mass Electric land. When people talk about our need to spur development along King Street, they often mention the vacant Northampton Honda site (171-187 King). So why is nothing happening there? Signs have been put up, and they have been up there so long that they fell down. The building is drowning in weeds that have turned into trees. What happened to the 2005 mixed-use development that Berkshire Development LLC wanted to put in there.

Some people think that it was the demands of our new King Street development zoning that killed the project. It was Wayne Feiden and the city council who drove a deep-pockets developer away. The city wanted two story buildings with residences and offices upstairs; the developer thought that this space would be difficult to rent, and the lawsuit from Florence Bank who didn't like a bank across the street didn't help. It turns out the major problem was the site itself. read the full story here

Unappreciated, but still working

2011-08-29T13:15:00.014-04:00

The Upper Roberts Dam yesterday

The Pond behind it

About 5:30 pm, it was clear that the hurricane had jilted us and left us in the lurch. Then we heard the astounding news that the Mill River was at, or close to flood stage. About five-thirty or a little later, the field staff for Kirbyontheloose went out the door, camera in hand. At Baker dam it was a real mini-Niagara, thunderous and impresssive, and the show had drawn a crowd of us rubber-neckers. Upstream at the bridge below Musante beach, the water had carved out more of the bank, at the swimming area there was no swimming, and further up in the meadows the brook lapped the road, but didn't close it. The object of my trip was the Upper Roberts dam, to see how this much-maligned dam was doing. Yes, the DPW has done its best over the years to demolish it. Today I saw Ed Shanahan on the street, and he remembers that in the seventies or eighties they had brought out a wrecking ball and tried to knock it down. That didn't work. Then last year, they went after federal money to demolish it with heavier equipment. But here it was,holding fast, doing its job. The pond behind it was a foot or two higher than I remembered it being last fall. That foot or two of water times the expanded area of the pond was all water that wasn't pounding at the footings of the bridge downstream, creeping up on Water Street, going over the Baker Dam, and pouring into the boat house down at Paradise Pond. For more background, see this older post from December of last year

No swimming at Musante Beach

Space Age Medicine

2011-08-17T12:59:00.003-04:00

He sat there at the keyboard of his laptop, peering at the screen. He was not a happy camper. Our ten minutes together was over, and it had been a lot of fun while it lasted. A small joke, the ticker was okay, blood pressure normal, normal sounding arteries, medicine that seemed to be working okay. I was putting my shoes on, and he was at the keyboard of the computer the health service had given him, summarizing and documenting, tapping away at the keys, sending to Alabama or somewhere on Mars a form to get me a 90 day supply of medicine.

“Nice the way they make it so you don’t need an assistant any more.” I said. “Doing all the work yourself.”

“You noticed that huh?” he said. “Here I am, just like everyone else in the world, staring at the goddamn screen, filling in blanks. Data, data, data.” Read the full diary entry here

Watch out for the Facebook Shark

2011-08-13T14:34:00.005-04:00

This voracious little animal comes in a blue box. I have scrambled the brand name on this picture since I don't want to give the people that are marketing it any publicity at all.

We all know that Facebook is huge right now, number two only to Google. Approaching 700 million users. Anything that is really popular attracts the wrong element, and now it seems that all of us using Facebook and other social media sites are vulnerable to all kinds of marketing gimmicks the second you "friend" anyone that you don't know really well. I confess to friending people in the past without thinking about it very much. A young and beautiful face wants to be this old guy's friend. Sure. But who is she?

I have four emails from the blue box guy in my in-box today. Let's call him Denny. I've listened to what purports to be his warm and convincing voice as he guides me through a demo tape on how his software works. He wants to help me increase the number of hits on my blog, he wants to help me to get rich off of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and all the other social networks. The picture on his website shows a young handsome guy standing in front of a swimming pool. He has addresses in Miami and Nevis; he might be wanted for something and he might not. He has 79 domain names going. Read the article by clicking here.

Congratulations to Owen Freeman-Daniels

2011-08-04T16:57:00.002-04:00

on his election, and on a running a good solid campaign. The Election is over, the voters have spoken, and all the political signs up and down the streets of Ward Three are coming down. In that spirit, I have taken down my postings that focussed on campaign issues. I am going to take a little breather and be back next Friday, August 12 with some kind of August surprise.

It's July, so its time for Smith College to knock down a landmark building or two

2011-07-23T10:26:00.013-04:00

It's hot, the town is quiet, the students are home, the faculty is on vacation, and its a perfect time for the college to go for their demolition permits, break some eggs and do controversial things.

The Director of Media Relations at Smith, Kristen Cole, bridled a bit when I put down my reporter's notebook and made this observation.

"Is this a question?" she asked.

"No", I admitted, "It's a statement. Read the whole story here.

No, that's not just a ditch

2011-07-07T14:49:00.003-04:00

I've been out biking recently on the new bike trail to Easthampton. I noticed a ditch paralleling the trail, and realized that this was a landmark of sorts, all that remains of the old Northampton-New Haven Canal. The canal was a real boondoggle, Read the full article here

“Done Deals” How Insiders benefit from secret planning board meetings

2011-06-29T20:49:00.002-04:00

One morning in 2005, I heard a noise outside my front door and here is a manila envelope on my doorstep. I looked around to see where it came from, but whoever it was,was making a fast getaway. A green Subaru with a Smith sticker on it was just turning down King Street. I saw a friendly-type wave from some one as he drove out of sight, just like Santa Claus.

I think my Santa Claus worked for Smith College and wanted to get the truth out about Smith College’s long term plans. In the envelope were two copies of an interesting map. Click to read this story

On not meeting Whitey Bulger

2011-06-28T10:16:00.009-04:00

I began telling one of my war stories to my wife this morning, about how I met Whitey Bulger back in the early seventies, and caught myself. I was fairly solid on remembering killing a half an hour or so in a little bar just off Broadway in the Winter Hill section of Somerville, waiting to see the guy, but did I get into the back room and actually talk to him? I don’t think so. I'd have remembered it if I had actually got through that well-guarded door. I think he sent one of his boys out to see me and tell me that Diane was okay, and we shouldn’t worry about her. She was up in New Hampshire with her mother.

read the story by clicking here