Did you get the flu this year? All the flu-news brought to mind the flu epidemic of 1918, one hundred years later. This global pandemic killed 50 MILLION people, largely healthy young adults from age 20-50. You could feel fine in the morning and be dead by midnight. So I wasn’t surprised to find a family connection to this crisis as a result of my recent Gloucester research. Sadly, this is a particularly tragic story.
William Bentley is a first cousin of mine, William being the grandson of Captain John Bentley.
You will note he married Blanche Wagner. As children, Blanche and her sister Margaret survived a horrific fire that killed two of their siblings. Tragically, you also notice that Margaret also died in the flu epidemic just one day after William died, leaving behind four young children including a 2 month old baby.
Very tragic story all the way around. Flu related news was all over the papers in this time period, in Gloucester and around the world. Sometimes we don’t consider that our families participated in the history of our country or world, but this is one small thread in the tapestry of world history.
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Good Morning Sleepyhead! Actually, afternoon, for you and I. Snowies hunt during the long day light hours of the Arctic summer, but here on Cape Ann, Hedwig awakens every afternoon to begin a night of hunting, returning to her roost at daybreak.
She spends a good deal of time grooming before take off–cleaning her feet, pulling her front feathers through her beak, washing overall, and fluffing out her feathers. Oftentimes she’ll spit up one, two, and even three pellets. Moments before take off she poops, and then off she goes.
A Snowy Owl’s beak and mouth look small, covered in feathers as they are, until you see it wide open. The size of a pellet that is regurgitated from her mouth can be as large as a rat. The beak is covered in small bristles to help detect nearby objects. Snowy Owls have tiny ears and owl’s ears are often asymmetrically set on their head, all the better to hear sound from different angles.
Hedwig was observed everyday this past week in rain, fog, snow, and sun. She’s feasting well on Cape Ann fare!
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Size— The largest four specimens yet seen measured 18¼ and 18½ inches; 19 inches, weighing 3 pounds; and 20 inches, weighing 4½ pounds and 24 inches, weighing 7 pounds
General range— Outer part of the continental shelf from the latitude of Chesapeake Bay to the vicinity of Sable Island, Nova Scotia, and perhaps to the Laurentian Channel that separates the Nova Scotian Banks from the Newfoundland Banks. It reaches the inner parts of the Gulf of Maine now and then as a stray.
From Fishes of the Gulf of Maine by Bigelow and Schroeder, 1953
On March 3rd @ 4pm at Talbot Rink, CAYH is hosting a Try Hockey for Free Event as part of Hockey Weekend Across America.
Pre-registration is required via the link below.
Local children age 4-9 who have beginner skating skills and who have not tried hockey are encouraged come to experience hockey for the first time. We will have some equipment available to borrow.
Free hockey jerseys and hockey sticks to registered participants (while they last).
Today’s post is a result of a request from FOB Paula Ryan O’Brien, who found the weather vanes around Gloucester to be as varied as they are numerous. We either don’t have as many weather vanes at home or I just haven’t noticed them, but Paula made a good point to “look up” and check out Glosta Vanes. And this is some of what we found:
The variety and artistry of these seem to speak to the personalities of the property owners. Though I realize wind direction is vital information for fishermen and boaters, it appears to me most of these vanes are more decorative than informative. I’m pretty sure my own roof would be sporting one if I had a roof available around here.
And, of course, (because it’s me and I can’t help myself) there’s an interesting history to the use of weather vanes throughout history that you might find interesting here. Before you scoff, did YOU know their use dates back to Ancient Greece???? I’m imagining Socrates studying a vane for wind direction. Or maybe he just liked the way it looked atop the Parthenon.
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Avocado Egg Boats Made In The Airfryer By My Love @kfoley41 Shout out to @kileybeth for the inspiration. Prepped the bacon first 350/ten minutes and then the avocado/egg another round 350 degrees /10 minutes. Didn’t have to heat up the huge oven. Cleaned up with a quick wipe down. Simple/easy/great results. The Airfryer Is A Gamechanger
Here’s the link to read reviews and purchase the airfryer on Amazon – http://amzn.to/2ooH80D
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ATTENTION Gloucester High School Students (and Parents):
Applications for 2018 summer jobs are now being accepted!
Apply for a GHS summer internship for July and August. Get a jump on your friends and nail down a summer job. THERE ARE ONLY 20 OPEN SLOTS, SO WE LOOK FORWARD TO REVIEWING YOUR APPLICATION ASAP!
As part of this internship you will:
Be matched with a local company where you will gain important workplace skills
Be paid minimum wage or a stipend
Start to build a solid resume for college and future endeavors
Internship highlights:
Open to students in 9th through 12th grades
Interviews will be conducted starting in March and we will let you know if you are accepted into the program
Employee orientation will be held in June
A 2.5 hour workplace skills workshop each Wednesday at GHS during the weeks of July 9th- August 17th, and an…
GloucesterCast 267 With Kerry McKenna, Paula Curley, Pat and Jimmy Dalpiaz, Melissa Cox, Bill Cox, Paul Morrison, Hannah and Craig Kimberley, Charlene Delaney, Kim Smith and Joey Ciaramitaro Taped 2/25/18
When you subscribe you need to verify your email address so they know we’re not sending you spam and that you want to receive the podcast. So once you subscribe check your email for that verification. If you don’t see it, check your spam folder in your email acct so you can verify that you’d like to get the GloucesterCast Podcast sent to you for listening at your convenience..
Topics Include:
Free Tickets To Cape Ann Community Cinema – Share this post on Facebook for a chance to win two free tickets to Cape Ann Community Cinema, The Cinema Listings are always stickied in the GMG Calendar at the top of the blog or you can click here to go directly to the website
Duckworths Bisto Dinner Was Ridiculous.- Three Favorite Meals That were Next Level memorable- Tonno Pok Chop, Feather and Wedge Scallops, Duckworth’s Friday Night,
College Basketball coaches getting wiretapped and huge takedown of NCAA college hoops while they can’t investigate kids saying they are going to shoot up a school.
Led by beloved children’s author Virginia Lee Burton, this group of mostly untrained women created immortal designs.
Atlas Obscura
By Cara Giaimo
Folly Cove Designers Eino Natti “Polyphemus” 1950 Cape Ann Museum
One by one, the prints unfold before you. One shows sheep leaping in the grass, another, children on a tree-hung swing, the moon shifting above them. All are charming, sophisticated, and unbelievably detailed. They take the essence of everyday objects and activities, and unspool them into mesmerizing patterns. No matter how much you may want them, though, you can’t get these prints on Etsy. In fact, you can’t get them anywhere.
They live mere miles from where they were produced, at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester—the last bastion of the nearly forgotten Folly Cove Designers. Helmed by a children’s book illustrator and comprised of her previously untrained friends and neighbors, the Folly Cove Designers were hardworking, tight-knit, and sincere—so sincere, they eventually voted themselves into obscurity.
To children worldwide, Virginia Lee Burton is the beloved hand behind half a dozen classics, including Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Katy and the Big Snow, and The Little House, intricately illustrated tales of close-knit communities. But to her neighbors at Folly Cove, on the north shore of Massachusetts, she was Jinnee Demetrios. Jinnee and her husband, the sculptor George Demetrios, moved to the area in 1932 with their one-year-old son Aristides, who was soon followed by Mike. The couple quickly became community pillars, making art all day, and spending evenings gathering their friends and neighbors for raucous sheep roasts.
“Folly Cove gets its name because it would be folly to bring a ship in and turn it around,” says Christine Lundberg, producer of the film Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place, as well as the upcoming Beautiful and Useful: The Art of the Folly Cove Designers. This ethos carried over into the rough-and-ready town life. “You couldn’t get pretty little things,” says Lundberg. “If you wanted them, you had to make them.” An artist through and through, Jinnee surrounded herself with homemade treasures, including, as the story goes, a particularly nice set of block-printed curtains. One of her neighbors, Aino Clarke, admired the curtains so much she wanted to make her own. Jinnee and Aino struck a deal: Jinnee would give Aino top-to-bottom design lessons if Aino, a member of the local orchestra, would teach Jinnee’s sons the violin. (A less legendary, but perhaps more truthful, version of this tale holds that Aino suggested Jinnee give design lessons to her neighbors in exchange for money to buy the necessary paper to illustrate her first book.)
Regardless of exactly how the two came together, Jinnee’s flint struck on Aino’s iron sparked an artistic movement. Within its rock-hard exterior, Folly Cove harbored a vein of artistic impulse that dated all the way back to the 1800s, when painters had flocked there to take advantage of the seashore’s distinct sunlight. (“If you spend time lying on the granite around here, you get creative powers,” one resident told Lundberg). As Jinnee and Aino dove into the lessons, other members of the community began joining them.
Folly Cove Designers Virginia Lee Demetrios “George’s Garden” 1964 Printed in her favorite color. Cape Ann Museum
Thus began the Folly Cove Designers (FCD), a ragtag group of locals united by their desire to fill their lives and their minds with a particular form of well-thought-out beauty. Many members were, like Aino Clarke, the children of Finnish immigrants, and sought to combat the economic and emotional hardships of the Great Depression. Others were so-called “Yankees,” who had moved permanently to Folly Cove after vacationing there as children, and who wanted something new to do. Eino Natti, one of the group’s few male members, was an Army veteran and former quarryman—experiences he drew on for prints such as Polyphemus, of a granite-carting train, and PT, which shows near-identical soldiers in mid-squat. Elizabeth Holloran, the local children’s librarian, printed young people skiing and sugaring. “A majority of them were never artists,” says Cara White, director of the Cape Ann Museum’s Folly Cove gallery. “They were editors, architects, housewives, accountants.”
The Folly Cove Designers “diploma,” presented to each member by Jinnee upon their entrance to the guild. Cape Ann Museum.
HARDHEAD; BULLSEYE The hardhead (by which name it is commonly known to fishermen) resembles the common mackerel. A smaller fish, growing to a length of 8 to 14 inches only. Tremendously abundant and so plentiful off Provincetown from 1812 to 1820 that three men and a boy could catch 3,000 on a hook and line. But it practically disappeared from the United States coast some time between 1810 and 1850. It is interesting to note that destructive methods of fishing had nothing to do with the case, for its disappearance antedated the introduction of traps, pounds, or purse seines; it also antedated the reappearance of the bluefish; hence cannot be blamed on these sea pirates. So completely did the hardheads vanish that the Smithsonian Institution tried in vain for 10 years prior to 1879 to obtain a single specimen. In its years of plenty, which fall at long intervals, however, the chub mackerel is likely to appear wherever mackerel do off the Massachusetts coast, especially about Provincetown.
From Fishes of the Gulf of Maine by Bigelow and Schroeder, 1953
Good Morning Gloucester 