Get lost!

Farmers have cornfields sprouting mazes at every turn

By Taryn Plumb | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

OCTOBER 19, 2014

Getting lost is typically not a state any of us wants to be in — unless, of course, we’re looking for it.

That’s the quintessential fall tradition of corn mazes: exploring among the rows and rows of labyrinthine stalks, getting turned around, hitting dead ends, following clues, and finally breaking free into the autumn air.

“We love to see old and young, just having fun,” said Lynn Reading of Billingsgate Farm in Plympton, which offers up a corn maze of a different theme every fall. “It’s good exercise; it’s educational.”

For adventurous types, the region is teeming with maize cut with crisscrossing passageways and corridors, false exits, and obstacles, ready to be navigated. The state boasts roughly 30 corn mazes, and there are about 800 scattered across the country, according to the tracking group Corn Mazes America.

“It’s just so much fun,” said Jan Nargi of Hanson’s Farm in Framingham. “It’s a throwback to childhood.

Hanson’s annual 3-acre maze — open through Nov. 1 — doesn’t have a particular theme, although visitors are met with the playfully ominous signs “Enter if you Dare,” and “Exit if you Can.”

“We’ve had high school kids who have been able to buzz through it in about 15 minutes,” Nargi said, “and then couples will take their time and be in there for an hour.”

The farm is also offering haunted hayrides on Friday and Saturday nights through Nov. 1; the trek traverses the fields while various creepy characters “come out and torment folks,” Nargi said. “I’m told it’s pretty scary.”

Billingsgate, meanwhile, has an elaborate pirate theme with a design featuring a ship, turbulent seas, skull and crossbones, and a desert island.To work their way through its passages, explorers take clues from pictures, word games, and questions (such as: How many yards can a pirate cannon fire? Answer: Between 100 and 200 yards). Reading says the real pathfinders who make it to the center of the maze will find a treasure chest from which they can pull out a lucky coin.

The farm works with the national design company Maize Quest, and in the past it has had a rain-forest theme, and an emphasis on buying fresh and local.

This year, the farm is also incorporating a kiddie maze, titled “Jack and the Cornstalk,’’ and pet lovers can bring their dogs to an animal-friendly maze day on Nov. 1, its last day open.

For a spookier experience, Billingsgate will host a night event on Saturday where people will have to find their way just by the illumination of their flashlights.

“It is a little bit more challenging,” said Reading. “It is a sight to see all the lights going inside the maze.”

Of course, “corn cops” are always on hand to help people on the paths, she said.

Marini Farm in Ipswich also has “maze masters,” and travelers are given flags, a phone number to call for help, and a link to the website www.mazetracker.com that can help them exit via GPS.

“They can feel comfortable where it’s not something they’re going to get lost in for hours and hours,” said corn maze employee Sarah Churchill.

To have the best experience, she also urged people to dress appropriately for the weather and bring water.

This year’s theme for the farm’s sizable 10-acre maze is “Spookley,” based on a children’s book about a square pumpkin who gets bullied — until he wins the favor of his round friends. Several stations through the maze are set up with clues and game pieces, Churchill said.

And don’t forget about the world-famous befuddler at Connors Farm in Danvers (nicknamed the “911 maze” because of a notorious emergency call made in 2011, when a family literally got lost inside). Its 7-acre maze, open daily through Nov. 2, has an “America the Beautiful” theme this fall, looking from an aerial perspective a verdant map of the United States. Past themes have included “Family Guy,” Clint Eastwood, and the witches of Salem. Accompanying the attraction is a zombie paintball ride, a paranormal cemetery walk, and an assembly of creepy, murderous characters.

“It can be done with the whole family; it’s exciting for everybody from adults down to small children,” Churchill said of Marini’s maze, which is open until Nov. 1. And it’s an “actual cornfield — you’re out there in mud and rocks — on an actual working farm.”

But while for the visitor it’s cavorting and fun, creating a maze takes a great deal of planning and manual labor.

At Hanson’s Farm, a group spends hours cutting the stalks back with machetes.

“It’s labor-intensive,” said Nargi, adding that “we don’t want to make it too easy.”

The 4-acre puzzle at Mansfield’s Flint Farm starts as a a mere grid on graph paper; then, when the stalks are only 3 or 4 inches high, it’s manicured and cut to specs with a lawnmower.

Even though his family has been creating mazes for more than a decade, Dave Flint never really knows for sure whether the design came out just right until he gets a glimpse of it from the air, in a small plane from the nearby Mansfield Municipal Airport.

In the past, the family has designed mazes with themes of the beach, ice cream cones, and to celebrate a Red Sox World Series win.

“The hardest part is coming up with something you can incorporate into a maze,” said Flint.

This year, the theme is an old-school pickup truck, accompanied by questions related to America’s favorite vehicle.

“It’s a ‘what you make of it’ kind of thing,” Flint said, “just to get outside and do something.”

Original story link. 

These aren't your father's model planes

Model plane enthusiasts zoom into the wild blue yonder

By Taryn Plumb | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

OCTOBER 02, 2014

The three jets line up side by side on the runway, then take to the air with a collective, thunderous roar.

Commanding the sky, mocking gravity, they spiral, dip, and weave in every direction. Soar straight up until appearing as mere blips in the clouds before rocketing back down. Fly parallel to the ground at full speed, trailed by the piercing whoosh of their engines.

Necks are craned and eyes shielded from the sun to watch the spectacle, and, when several minutes later they come in for a landing, they are met with applause and acclamation.

But this isn’t your typical air show — and you’ll not recall Tom Cruise piloting these high-powered machines in “Top Gun.”

They’re radio-controlled model planes, but generations evolved from the kind you might remember tooling around with — and crashing — as a kid.

“It’s expensive to fly a full-sized aircraft,” said Bob Gettler, president of 107th Radio Controlled Flyers, one of several local model clubs. With model planes, you don’t spend nearly as much money and yet, as he put it, “You get the thrill of flight.”

While they might be small and portable, toys these are not. Enthusiasts spend anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars to equip, repair, boost, and accessorize their models, whether Cessnas, biplanes, warbirds, helicopters, or even jets. With wingspans ranging from several inches to several feet, some planes run on a special blend or kerosene for fuel, while significant developments in battery technology have enabled others to become increasingly like their full-size counterparts.

“A lot of aerospace technology has made it into models,” Gettler said as he stood by the edge of his club’s runway at Rumney Marsh Reservation in Saugus, a windy, wide-open location just a blip in the guardrail along Route 107.

Nearby, model planes of various sizes took off, landed, and coursed through the air. “The hobby’s definitely grown a lot in the last 10 years,” Gettler said.

In addition to the 107th RC Flyers, formed 30 years ago and now with about 100 members, other local groups chartered by the national Academy of Model Aeronautics include the Cape Ann RC Model Club, which flies at a field in Amesbury; the 495th RC Squadron, which holds events in Tewksbury, Billerica, and on Plum Island; and the Middlesex County RC Flyers, which also uses a field in Billerica. Hobbyists meet and trade tips at local, regional, national, and international rallies held throughout the year.

Peabody resident John Almeida regularly loads his Boomerang jet into an RV for vacations planned around various shows.

“It’s a big-boy sandbox,” said Almeida, 49, crouched by his jet as it cooled down after several minutes of air time at 107th RC Flyers field.

Modelers love to build, maintain, and tinker, he said. “It puts a smile on a grown man’s face.”

Measuring roughly 8 feet long and 8 feet wide at the wings, weighing nearly 40 pounds and painted a patriotic red, white, and blue, his jet is powered by a turbine that requires a kerosene start and has two on-board systems for safety. Considered the elite fliers of the radio control world, model jet pilots must prove their proficiency to the Academy of Model Aeronautics to legally fly.

Almeida has always been into modeling, he said. As a kid he liked boats, then moved on to propeller planes, and now the jet, which can scream through the sky at up to 160 miles an hour.

“Mentally, you’re exhausted after one minute of high-speed flying,” he said. “The challenge never stops. The maneuvers can get smoother, better, tighter.”

Nearby, Gettler was preparing his red and yellow Trex model helicopter for liftoff. Holding a remote with a digital readout, he ticked through the controls of the battery-powered aircraft.

He explained that all models get a preflight check, just like the big ones.

“Everything’s good to go; all controls are working correctly,” he announced, and the helicopter’s carbon-fiber propellers whirred to life.

With just slight directions on the controls, the miniature chopper zipped through the air, flew upside down and backward, flipped, rolled, looped, pirouetted, and hovered.

A program manager for General Electric, Gettler, 32, who lives in Salem, has been flying models since college and now has three helicopters, a jet, and an aerobatic plane. He also has his pilot’s license, as well as “some time” in a full-sized helicopter, he said. He volunteers teaching an aerodynamics course at Kipp Academy in Lynn.

“I just have a love of aviation,” he said, calling remote-control flying therapeutic and “like meditation.”

All around him, various models were set up on platforms, while others were being tinkered with, or lining up on the carpet runway, engines buzzing. Onlookers sat beneath tents, and the occasional flock of swallows or a roving turkey vulture careened out of the path of the swooping and diving planes. Gettler said the rules limit the height for flying to 400 feet, and only four aircraft can be up in the air at once.

On the sidelines with their remotes, pilots yelled out status reports.

“Landing!”

“Taking off!”

“I got no power — I’m dead!”

Earlier, Geoff Caldarone suffered what he called a “class A mishap,” when one of his planes crashed and a wing fell off.

“Crashing is part of the hobby,” the 51-year-old engineer from Danvers said with a shrug.

Sitting on a pedestal next to him was a 2-pound foam warbird with a 44-inch wingspan, “Dallas Darling” painted on one side. Warbirds are his personal favorite, Caldarone said; he can perform rolls, loops, and Immelmann turns, “flying evasive maneuvers to get behind an enemy to shoot it down,” he said.

“It’s a great hobby. I’m in it deep now.”

Original story link. 

Peering into the past

Hingham’s glory days as ‘Bucket Town’

By Taryn Plumb | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

For more than a century it sat relatively untouched, shuttered up and vine-covered, on an 18-acre Hingham farmstead passed down through generations.

Finally, one day, a rusted lock was removed, the vines cut back, and the door of the wooden shed groaned open to reveal a preserved world. Cluttered inside, through the dusky light of its windows and beyond the dust and spider webs, were all manner of tools, raw materials, patterns, account books, and toys and boxes in various states of completion.

It was a rare and extraordinary find: one of Hingham’s last woodcrafting shops, and one of the oldest toy-making workshops in America, sitting unassumingly on a pasture on the Hersey estate.

“It was very much a time capsule,” said historian Derin Bray, author of “Bucket Town: Woodenware and Wooden Toys of Hingham, Massachusetts, 1636-1945.”

Now, many of the long-hidden artifacts found within – along with numerous other antique woodcrafts spanning various eras – are on view for the first time in “Bucket Town: Four Centuries of Toymaking and Coopering in Hingham,” an exhibit at Old Sturbridge Village meant to honor the town’s illustrious and prolific woodworking past and its wide-ranging impact. Curated by Bray and Christie Jackson, the show will be on display through Jan. 18.

“Hingham was the woodenware capital of Colonial America,” said Bray, who is based out of Portsmouth, N.H. “These craftsmen were so prolific, their items ended up all over the country.”

Located in the living history museum’s visitors center, the exhibit includes more than 180 items from the Hersey family as well as private collectors and historical societies and museums.

“The idea was to focus on individual makers and folks who became so prominent in the field,” said collections manager Rebecca Beall.

That includes the town’s first cooper, Thomas Lincoln, who settled in 1635, as well as other respected craftsmen such as William Luce, Loring Cushing, and Augustus Hudson.

The Hersey family, who first settled in town in the 1730s, was among the most influential of Hingham coopers, a term dating to the 14th century and referring to the craft of making, repairing, furnishing, or fixing. Patriarch Reuben Hersey and his sons and grandsons were joined by hundreds of other artisans, establishing Hingham as the woodenware hub of early America, and earning it the distinction of “Bucket Town” – after one of its most prolific exports.

“Their specialty was wooden buckets,” said Bray. “They produced tremendous quantities of them, tens of thousands.”

Generally speaking, the focus was on lightweight containers – pails for milk and water, tubs for curing meat or laundering – as Bray explained, “any kind of wooden container that you could conceive of,” that were then shipped to Boston, down the Eastern seaboard, and as far away as Canada, Hawaii, California, and even the West Indies.

Hingham’s coopers also played a pivotal part in the Revolutionary War, producing in 20 days 5,000 canteens, drinking vessels that remained a staple of the US Army for years.

The industry flourished so much, that, in 1687, the town paid its tax bill to the general court in Boston with surplus milk pails, according to the exhibit. Similarly, according to a newspaper account from 1818, 500 men, or 38 percent of the total male population, were engaged in woodworking. (Hingham’s population in 1820 was 2,857, according to the 1893 book “History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts” — compared with 22,157 in 2010.)

The introduction of steamship service between Boston and Hingham in 1819, as well as the arrival of mechanized tools in the 1830s, further fueled the industry.

But out of everyday items soon came toys: With steamship service proliferating by the late 18th century, coopers began making miniature versions of their goods to sell to tourists.

With that market taking off, William Tower opened one of the country’s first toy factories in Hingham.

The practical wares and their more whimsical counterparts are juxtaposed side by side in the exhibit.

Buckets range from the size of nickels to full-sized basins water-stained and nicked by time, and vary from well-known “Hingham blue” to red, green, and yellow, some covered with clasps, buttons, and equipped with twine handles, others decorated ever so delicately with tiny flowers or eagles.

Interspersed with them are tiny yellow rockers and chairs no taller than 6 inches; mini desks complete with drawers and knobs the size of pinheads; high-back chairs about a foot high with intricately woven fiber seats; a tiny grandfather clock stuck at 3 o’clock for eternity; and teeny wash stands, towel racks, wash buckets with washboards, and butter churners.

It’s about “being inspired by the craftsmanship,” said Beall, marveling that “when you’re working in miniature, there’s a lot less room for error.”

In a nod to the Herseys, the exhibit replicates the experience of those who first peered into the recently rediscovered workshop by placing many of the tiniest items behind windowpanes.

According to Bray, the property has been passed down through six generations, and the family began cleaning it up in 2007. The workshop, which has been dated to 1835, had been overgrown for years, and, once they got inside, the process took a great deal of “pulling out and cleaning out 150 years worth of accumulation.”

That included account books with impeccable handwriting, all manner of tools, stamps, clamps, molds, as well as personal items such as tobacco, tea tins, liquor bottles, and a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his family (the Herseys were related to the Lincolns by marriage).

The family eventually hired Bray to research their history, a project he worked on full time for a little more than three years, he said, studying tax, property, and court records, probate inventories, visiting historical societies, public libraries, museums, and speaking with private collectors.

Eventually, they approached Old Sturbridge Village – as opposed to the much closer Plimoth Plantation – because its focus on the late 18th to mid-19th centuries fit with the most prolific period of coopering and toy-making in Hingham.

“The topic is right in their wheelhouse,” said Bray.

But why did Hingham come to such prominence in the woodenware industry?

Bray noted the proximity to Boston, as well as water access and abundant cedar in swampy lands around the town.

But ultimately, it came down to hard work and Yankee perseverance.

“Really entrepreneurial, skilled craftsmen developed this network early on,” he said, “and it just grew.”

Bray says buckets haven’t been made in town for more than 100 years, and the toy-making industry petered out by World War II. Today, Lindsay Malone, great-great-granddaughter of Reuben Hersey, makes bucket jewelry (in the shapes of the coopering buckets) that are sold at Whitney Gordon Jewelers in Hingham. The ornamental mementos of the town’s glorious past may be viewed at the website www.buckettown.com.

Hingham earned its ‘Bucket Town’ nickname

SEPTEMBER 28, 2014

►From the 1650s to the 1890s, Hingham woodenware crafters produced thousands of items, earning their home the nickname “Bucket Town.”

►In 1818, roughly 500 men, or 38 percent of Hingham’s total male population, were involved in coopering.

►The Herseys were among the largest and most influential families, settling in town in the 1730s.

►During its heyday, tens of thousands of wooden buckets were shipped from Hingham to Boston, and then as far away as Canada, Hawaii, and the West Indies.

►During the Revolutionary War, Hingham crafters manufactured 5,000 canteens by hand in just 20 days.

►Hingham’s population:

1765: 2,467

1820: 2,857

1830: 3,387

1850: 3,980

2010: 22,157

SOURCES: Derin Bray; Christie Jackson; “History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts.”

For more details on the exhibit, visit www.osv.org/buckettown. For details on purchasing Bray’s book, visit shop.osv.org/a543/bucket-town.html.

Photo slideshow by Michele McDonald.

Original story link.

A new avenue for young writers

Worcester Journal

Posted on Oct 1, 2014 in Faculty

Professor James Dempsey launches Worcester Journal, a showcase for young writers

One is a rumination on forgiveness, prompted by the writer’s encounter with an incarnation of the boy who once bullied him.

Another is a poignant remembrance of a 7-year-old girl burdened by the loss of sight.

A third is a treatise on the evolution of Godzilla—a beloved celluloid monster inspired by one the most tragic events of the 20th century: The 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These are just a few of the touching, introspective, humorous, and informative pieces that appear in The Worcester Journal, a new literary magazine dedicated to showcasing the work of young writers. Edited by prolific columnist-turned-author and WPI humanities and arts instructor James Dempsey, its debut issue premiered online in late September.

It’s long been a goal of Dempsey’s, who, with a background of 20 years in journalism and several books in his portfolio, knows full well that the best way to hone a craft is, simply, to do it.

“I’ve found that having students write for a real publication makes it much easier to teach them how to write,” he said. “They’re focused on producing something for a real audience, rather than focusing on something to keep the instructor happy. They’re not just writing for a grade, or an audience of one.”

The quarterly online magazine was launched with help from a grant from the Judy and Tony King Foundation. The magazine’s office is at Bancroft School, where Dempsey is serving as writer-in-residence. “I’m most grateful to the foundation and to Bancroft,” Dempsey said. “The school has given me and the Journal the warmest of welcomes.”

Getting the word out about it required casting a wide net to numerous area high schools and colleges, he says, as well as intern programs, homeschooling websites, and even the Worcester County House of Correction.

With a focus on creative nonfiction, it features memoirs, historical and cultural essays and criticism, poems, book reviews, and photos from local high school and college students from WPI and beyond. The first issue features the work of students age 16 to 24, although Dempsey stresses that that age range is “not strict by any means. I’m happy to go a little bit above or below that, if I get a good piece of work.”

Hannah Yukon, a Clark University grad student and academic assistant at Worcester State University, is one of the featured writers; her stylized piece “I am like you, I am not like you” recounts the life of her father, who “majored in geology and sacrifice,” and her own upbringing in Singapore and eventual emigration to the U.S.

“Countless boxes checked were ‘other,’ because there wasn’t a space for Mixed American-Chinese Catholic-Jewish girls,” she writes. Then, in America, “where my white roommate asked me why I speak English so well, or what my ‘real name’ was, because Hannah wasn’t Asian enough.”

Other pieces discuss Charles Dickens’ American Notes following his four-month journey through the country; a primer on Bollywood for “the confused and the curious”; an interview with romance writer Susan Elizabeth Phillips; and the life-altering experience of reading Moby-Dick.

A DECENT READ

But in addition to giving young people a platform to self-express and sharpen their craft, Dempsey says he simply wants to give those who check out the magazine a “decent read.”

“We have a nice variety of stuff, so people can pick and choose,” he says.

And the author, whose most recent biography, The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer—about Worcester’s native son who published a literary magazine in the 1920s and was analyzed by Sigmund Freud—says he gets as much out of the experience as the students.

He works with each one to germinate and craft ideas, some of which are buried in other prose they submit to him.

“I and the writer are working together to get a piece up to a good level for publication,” he says. “The pleasure of the whole thing is working with the writers. It’s a real luxury to be able to do that.”

And he says he’s been impressed by the caliber of work so far. “I really love the stuff that the writers are producing, to the point where I wish I’d written it myself. It’s a recharge for me in a lot of ways. Finding new talent is a real pleasure, it really is. There’s so much of it.”

Check out The Worcester Journal at theworcesterjournal.com.

- BY TARYN PLUMB

Original story link.