Sole support

Soles of appreciation

 

Donna Picone gets a quick ride on a North Reading firetruck after walking to the main station from her Danvers home last week. (Photos by Lisa Poole for the Boston Globe) 

 

By Taryn Plumb Globe Correspondent / May 17, 2012 

As many people do on crisp, sunny mornings, Donna Picone laced up her Sauconys, grabbed a bottle of water, and set out for a walk with a close friend.

But this was no ordinary get-the-blood-moving, enjoy-the-outdoors stroll: The women were in for a nearly 9½-mile trek from their Danvers neighborhood to the North Reading Fire Station.

They weren’t training for a sporting event; they weren’t raising money for a cause; and they didn’t have too much time on their hands.

Their many footsteps served a different purpose: To raise awareness of the dangerous job firefighters do, and to show their appreciation by donating one of the most precious things a person can: time.

“Everybody can raise money for a charity,” said Picone, 55, who has made it a personal quest to visit as many fire stations north of Boston as possible by foot or, if she has to, by car. “I give the support by walking the miles.”

Over the past six years, Picone has walked from her Danvers home to fire stations in 15 area cities and towns, from her old hometown of Salem all the way to North Andover.

Last Friday, she logged several more miles on her silver-and-turquoise walking shoes when she and her friend, Patti Lynch, meandered down Route 62 to North Reading.

In September, she plans to lace up her shoes and head south to Lynnfield’s two firehouses.

And next year? She’s considering Topsfield and Boxford (one in the spring, one in the fall). Eventually, her goal is to cover the whole region.

“I enjoy giving them my time,” she said.

It was the Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse fire — and the deaths of six firefighters battling the blaze — on Dec. 3, 1999, that inspired her crusade.

“It was a senseless tragedy,” she lamented.

Having several relatives on fire forces — including her late uncle, John Monahan Sr., who was a captain; his son, John Monahan Jr., also a captain in Salem; and another uncle, Charles Jodoin, a Revere firefighter — profoundly affected her, and reinforced how dangerous the job is.

But before walking, she drove. She started in 2000, and has visited hundreds of stations in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, as well as about 30 in California and Florida while on vacation.

She realized she could make more of an impact with her soles than with wheels, and she did her first walk, to Salem’s five stations, in September 2006 with her sister, Gail Corsetti.

Since then, first with Corsetti, then with her friend Karen Shah, and now with Lynch, 59, Picone has visited the fire departments in Beverly, Danvers, Gloucester, Hamilton, Ipswich, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Marblehead, Middleton, North Andover, Peabody, Rowley, Swampscott, and Wenham. She typically tries to walk to two communities a year, one in the spring and one in the fall, prefacing the visits with handwritten letters to their chiefs.

In between, to stay in shape, she walks about 1½ miles every day through her neighborhood, listening to the birds and watching planes descend to Logan Airport. She’s a bit of an aviation enthusiast; she has a 28-inch-long model airplane in her basement, and can point out the types of commercial aircraft passing overhead.

Because she’s been to so many stations — and because she’ll often stop in on a whim when driving through a place, as she plans to do this summer while visiting Cape Cod — it’s hard for her to give an exact number. That’s not what she keeps track of: She keeps track of the thanks, the hugs, and the appreciation she receives when she reaches her destinations.

At each station, she meets and talks with firefighters, is usually given a tour, and hands out tokens emblazoned with a firefighter emblem on one side and a prayer on the other.

“It does mean something to them,” she said. “It helps them realize that people appreciate what they do.”

This is a point she stressed to members of North Reading’s force last Friday.

It was 60 degrees when she and Lynch set out just after 9 a.m.

They were equipped with two bottles of water, peanut butter crackers for a snack, Excedrin for headaches, sunglasses, and a small plastic bag filled with the tokens.

They first passed through their manicured neighborhood on the edge of the Putnamville Reservoir (starting off from Picone’s house with its fire engine mailbox hand-carved by her father), then worked their way west on Route 62.

As the road wound along — in a couple of places sans sidewalks — the pair passed houses, schools, businesses, sloping fields, wetlands, and country clubs; investigated lilac bushes; and dodged poison ivy.

At 12:45 p.m. — 3 hours and 45 minutes later — they turned the bend into North Reading Center.

At the station, firefighter/EMT Matt Carroll met Picone and Lynch, shaking their hands.

“We appreciate what you did,” he said as he invited them in.

The rest of the men in the station — five in total — gathered around as they talked.

“I love what you people do,” Picone said as she handed out the tokens. “I have since I was 5 years old.”

It was then, she recounted, that she learned just how quickly firefighters respond to a call. On a dare from a boy, she pulled the switch on a firebox. Instantly terrified, she threw her bike on the ground, sprinted home, grabbed some cookies, and hid in a closet. All the while, the sirens got closer, and the engines arrived within minutes.

Carroll, in turn, shared the burdens of the profession.

“It’s a stressful job, that’s the truth,” he said. People are having “their worst day in a long time when they call you. You absorb a lot of other people’s stress.”

Then the men led Picone and Lynch on a tour of the 1967 building, which operates with four engines, two ambulances, and one ladder truck. Carroll showed off a mural of firefighters climbing a ladder into a blinding cloud of smoke, then took the pair into the truck bay lined with flaming red lockers, one or two ajar to reveal a jumble of gear and photos of daughters and wives.

Before she left, Picone even got to ride around the block in a firetruck, fulfilling a longtime wish.

“We get thanks a lot on the job,” Carroll acknowledged later as Picone prepared for the trip back (by car; her parents picked them up). “But when people go out of their way, it makes it a little more special. What she’s doing is simple, but effective.”

 

© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.

The end of an era?

• (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff )

Renting the last picture shows

May 13, 2012 | Taryn Plumb, Globe Correspondent

 

For Jesse Kreitzer, the click-access, browse-from-your-couch-or-computer, instant-gratification movie rental trend that dominates our time is a “soulless” experience.

He’d much rather peruse aisles neatly lined with DVDs — you can pick them up, turn them over, marvel at the cover art, maybe even find something you never expected.
“It’s an immersive, first-hand experience,” said the 27-year-old Brighton filmmaker, noting that a visit to the good old-fashioned video store has become part of his weekly routine.

For not much longer, however: His favorite rental shop, MovieWorks on Beacon Street in Brookline, is in liquidation mode, and is set to close by the end of June. The well-known and long-respected establishment, which had more than 30,000 titles before owner Greg Revill began selling off its inventory late last month, was one of the last remaining brick-and-mortar video outlet not only west of Boston but in the state.
“Now I don’t know what I’m going to do,” lamented Kreitzer, acknowledging that he’s a bit of an “old soul.”
“It’s like the end of an era for me.”
But not just for him: MovieWorks was a longtime holdout in what has been a protracted extinction of physical video stores.
Among area communities, Video Signals in Acton and Stow appears to be the lone survivor. Elsewhere, just a smattering of Blockbusters remain, including in Malden, Lawrence, Haverhill, and Worcester. Meanwhile, the 25-year-old Hollywood Express in Cambridge, the Video Underground in Jamaica Plain (around since 2002), and 20-year-old Chet’s Video in Marblehead are the handful of independents still in operation.
This is in startling contrast to the scores of stores — both chains and independents — that were so evident throughout suburbs and cities not a decade ago.
In late 2010, the lights went dark on Video Vault in Westborough; Video Exchange Inc. in Marlborough, in operation for 30 years, appears to be another casualty (its website is down and its phone number disconnected).
Lexington Video — formerly Videosmith — was also shuttered last month, a little more than a year after it was taken over by a new owner, Sue McDonald.
McDonald did not return requests for comment, but her website notes a lack of investors and an inability to keep up with rental costs, despite a concerted community investment effort.
“I am very sad that I have to do this,” she writes on her store’s website, www.lexingtonvideostore.com, “since the business was just starting to see real improvement.”
All told, the number of video stores across the country has declined to a quarter of its peak. In 2003, there were 25,000; by the end of last year, there were just about 5,800, according to Michael Arrington, a senior analyst with an industry research and consulting company, IHS Screen Digest.

Meanwhile, Blockbuster, one of the only national chains remaining, topped out at roughly 5,700 stores. But with Blockbuster’s recent acquisition by Dish Network, Arrington said, its number will fall below 1,000 by the end of the year.

On the other hand, video rental kiosks — most notably Redbox — are approaching 50,000 locations nationwide, Arrington said, while the mail-order Netflix operation has 26.1 million US subscribers, and 23 million subscribers to its online streaming video service in North and South America, England, and Ireland, according to financial reports.
MovieWorks, for its part, was doing several thousand rentals a week at its peak. Most recently, it continued to do close to 1,000 a week, and had even taken on some new customers, but the numbers just didn’t work, according to Revill. The Salem resident also ran a MovieWorks store in Danvers, which he closed in late 2010.
“Business has been slip-sliding for a long time,” he said.
A number of factors contributed to a slow decline of what was once a voracious “rental habit,” he explained.
Most notable are Netflix and on-demand services, along with the recent proliferation of Redbox kiosks offering 1.20 a night rentals, as well as multiplying cable television channels.
The impending closure of MovieWorks has spurred quite a few queries of “what happened?”, Revill said, with one woman saying she was feeling abandoned. The Brookline location has been a video store since 1989 and became Movie­Works in 2000.
“Everyone’s disappointed,” said Revill, standing at the store’s central counter on a recent weekday afternoon. “Some are not surprised. Some are utterly shocked.”
On the walls around him, yellow fliers advertised DVDs for 20 percent off, and Blu-rays for $12 and $15. Out front a yellow “Going out of Business” banner was on display.
Customers dribbled in to pick through the substantial amount of stock that remained. On a flat-screen TV at the back, “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked” played on a continuous loop.
At the end, “the regulars were a smaller group than they ever were,” Revill explained. “The occasionals were very occasional. People tend to forget it’s an option.”
Then just how did his store hold on for so long?

Momentum from past success, according to Revill, as well as a “kind and gentle landlord,” and the store’s vast inventory. (Also, its pricing was less than that of Redbox: $4.75 for a DVD for six days, and specials like two-for-one rentals every Monday.)
“This place functioned like a pay film library for a lot of folks,” particularly film students from Boston’s many colleges, said Revill.
The highest percentage of the store’s business was from its catalog of older films, rather than the new releases, which Revill said helped it to outlast the “hall of hits” stores.
And Arrington, for his part, doesn’t think the model is totally obsolete.
He pointed to the Illinois-based Family Video chain, which has 765 stores in 19 states, according to its website, and which, “by all accounts, is doing quite well, and is actually expanding,” Arrington noted.
A successful 21st-century video store will come down to an ability to compete, be conservative with spending, and contain costs. “Just running your business effectively is the key,” Arrington said.
Still, he does expect to see a continued decline in the brick-and-mortar industry: Traditional video stores slid from $8.5 billion in revenues in 2001 to less than $1.4 billion last year, and he expects the total to fall below a billion dollars over the next five years.
But there could ultimately be a “stabilization point,” he noted. “I think there’s a future for video rental stores, but it’s a very small future.”
Revill agreed, saying that the now-nostalgic video store will always be a lure for some.
“What people love about these places is the tactile, visual, finding-stuff-by-accident appeal,” he said.
That’s certainly what kept Kreitzer going back.
“I’m a bit of a purist,” he said. “I like the physicality of renting discs.”
(And that affinity for the good old-fashioned way permeates his life, from his collection of vinyl records to his preference for shooting his numerous projects — including a feature-length film, “The Wake” — on film.)
Renting from MovieWorks three times a week on average, he would always find “obscure and very hard-to-find independent and foreign films,” Kreitzer said. In the process, he’d banter with the staff and came to learn and trust their tastes.
“It is to me much more than a video store. It’s a subculture,” he said. “It’s just all part of something that will go missing.”

© 2012 NY Times Co.

MetroWest495 Biz April 2012

The annual "10 to Watch" list starts on page 12. 
And a story I did on Marlborough development starts on page 20. 
Go here to check out the e-edition.

Artscope Magazine May issue

Read (some of) my article on Portland's Greenhut Galleries here. And buy a copy to read the rest! (Go here to do that.)