There is no dearth of media and commentary and reflection out there right now focused on the sensation of the arrival of spring, with its warmth, longer days, the perfume of nature awakening.  Yeah, sure, I know, we have had a historically mild winter – but I don’t care, it was winter all the same. I’m ready for this.  Now watch – even though the temps have been extra mild last week, we will have ourselves an epically cold spring and summer.   Nah, not going there; not going to happen. What I am focusing on in this column are my recollections of spring and sports in Easton.  This is a very …

  I hadn’t planned to write another column on this year’s Oliver Ames High School Spring Musical, which was presented and produced by the OA Music Department and which it performed over this past weekend. I wrote a column that ran last Thursday in which I promoted the musical. I attended the Sunday matinee of the performance, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and, you know, from start to finish the show was just superb and a demonstration of love, commitment, dedication, hard work, admirable audacity and pizzazz - and the highest level of teamwork. It was exceptional – absolutely exceptional.  Then …

  I needed to do a follow up of my column which posted on Monday – you know, the one in which I leveled and dumped a hefty dose of negative criticism on certain Oliver Ames High School students for their rude chants during the OA-Stoughton boys’ high school state tournament game at Brockton High School on Tuesday night, March 6. If you missed the column, you can find it here. In the comments section following the column, “cjh” posted – Ross, Unfortunately, there were many students from OA at the game who were respectful, who were there to cheer on their team in a respectful and appropriate …

  I’m not preaching here, but reflecting and offering commentary and a little teaching. I hope the commentary, reflection and teaching are valuable.  As I said, I’m not preaching – for I am in no position to preach.   Believe me, I have messed up with the best of them, and said things I shouldn’t have said. I've followed up with apologies, sometimes. This is curious because my vocation is public relations and writing, and while I have been fortunate to build a fulfilling career in advising companies and people on what to do, write and speak, I sometimes veer from the script in my own life. So…

  I have long been a fan of Henry David Thoreau and his writing.  It seems I never have finished one of his books – that is read one completely.  But the happiness and fulfillment I receive from reading bits and pieces of Walden or Faith In A Seed or Civil Disobedience is significant and helpful.  Reading Henry David Thoreau – HDT to many – is one of life’s pleasures.  Living in Easton, growing up here, one is fortunate and blessed in having around and available an abundance of conservation land – untouched nature, or nature lightly and moderately groomed and styled.  If you think of the …

  I am fond, of course, of touting and evangelizing the benefits of living in a close community in which people share and look out for each other and work together to make life better.   All of this makes life happier.  Several studies have borne out the health benefits of being part of close and caring community.  No surprise to me; it all makes sense.   In a column I wrote which was published at Easton Patch early last summer, I discussed the drawbacks, but mostly I discussed the benefits, of living in a small town – a town such as Easton, which has a lot of a small town feel, even if it …

  A light-hearted moment. Back on a summer evening in 2001, I was at a fundraiser for State Sen. Stephen Lynch (D-Boston) that my brother and his wife were hosting outdoors on the patio behind their home on Partridge Way down in North Easton Village.  It was an event to raise money forLynch’s campaign in a special election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.  (It has to be noted that the seat for which Sen. Lynch was running had been held for close to 30 years by Joe Moakley, a saint of a man, who had served with extraordinary passion and hard work for the people of Massachusetts…

  Like tens of millions of Baby Boomers, I remember Sunday nights as a kid watching the The F.B.I. television show.  The series, sponsored by Ford Motor Company, ran from 1964 through 1974.  Except for the final season, when the show started at 7:30, the hour-long episodes started at 8.  The Muscato clan, then living on Andrews Street, made a weekly event of watching the show, and attended it with a practice that I suspect we shared with many families in Easton:  pizzas from the Crossroads Cafe and Simpson Spring soda (can still taste that wonderful root beer, which back then, as was the case…

  Here is a sequel to my December 8, 2010 column titled, “I Can Still Smell … : Smells From Easton’s Past.”   In the column, I quoted this line from a BBC story:  “Smell is the only one of our senses directly hard wired to our brain.” So true.  Smell and taste are also tied tight together.   Smell pushes and pulls and tugs and jumps our emotions.  Soon spring will spring – and will have sprung.  As the earth and plants shake off their dormancy and are invigorated and bloom and flower and bud, the air will become permeated and laced with delicate and the mostly delightful scents and perfumes …

  There are truths, important and vital lessons that can never be emphasized enough.    One of those truths is encapsulated beautifully, succinctly – almost perfectly – in a speech that former U.S. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910.   Citizenship In A Republic is the name of the speech, and here the words within it that speak to an eternal truth and ever vitally important lesson:  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man…

  Have you ever wondered how our town was named?  Why “Easton”?   Here’s a little history.  The first settler of the community was Clement Briggs, who in 1694 built his home near what is now the intersection of Rte. 138/Washington-Rte. 123/Depot Street.  In 1725, the area of land which would become Easton, about 30 square miles in size, was separated from the east end of a tract of property called the Taunton North Purchase, and incorporated as the town of Easton.  Easton, the name, is a marriage of the “east” in east end and the “on” in Taunton. Easton is also a proper name that has roots in…

  I have for several years paid particular attention to the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere (where our wonderful town of Easton is located) – an event which is most commonly identified with late December and the shortest day and longest night of the year.  The word solstice comes from the Latin “sol” (sun) and “sistere” (stand still).   Here excerpted from Wikipedia is a description of the winter solstice: The winter solstice is the time at which the Sun is at its southernmost point in the sky (northernmost point in the Southern Hemisphere) appearing at noon at its lowest altitude …

  I suppose it is fair to put upon me the mantle of “Townie” as it describes my relationship with the Town of Easton, past and present.  I was born in 1963, and am a native of Easton, and have lived almost all my life here.  I am involved civically it the town.  I study the history of the community, and I have been all around, up and down, and through its almost 30 square miles.  I have driven over and ran along perhaps hundreds of its miles of roads.  Starting as a kid growing up on Andrews Street in North Easton Village, I began to explore its woods, paths, streams, ponds and swamps.  I …

  AAAAGGGGHHH!! Eli @$%#^*% Manning Mario #@%^&(% Mannigham. Oh, man that was tough.   Wes Welker?  You never not make that catch.   Gronk had a shot at the Hail Mary.  I knew well a very successful high school football coach who told me that in games he coached in which is team was blown out, he often slept well.   Weird, huh?   He said in those instances he could look back and be fairly confident that nothing different he could have done could have resulted in victory. But games he coached in which his team lost a close one – when it came down to one play or two – well, those were the games…

We’re almost there New England.  Early Sunday evening – the kickoff of Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis.   As I have admitted in this space before, I am not the biggest sports fan – despite being a part of a big sports family, and even having competed in sports in college.  Heck, I even worked for two newspapers as a freelancer for their sports departments.  So, now, not a big sports enthusiast?  Go figure.  But, of course, I am rooting big time for our Pats.  Yet, I'm not one of these fans who posts Patriots images all over their Facebook page, and who have Patriots stickers on their cars, …

  Earlier this month, Easton Patch editor, Patrick Maguire, wrote an excellent story on the career of Easton Fire Chief, Tom Stone, who is retiring tomorrow after more than three decades on the job.     As well, in this space, I wanted to write about Chief Stone on the occasion of his retirement.    I have known Tom Stone, it seems, my entire life – and the Stone family and my family go a ways back in town, and have had a good and strong relationship and a shared experience of civic involvement here. Perhaps it was inevitable that Tom Stone became a firefighter in Easton – and one day the …

  In the early 1970s, Boston mayor Kevin White, a group of Boston business and civic leaders, architect Benjamin Thompson, and real estate and urban developer Jim Rouse, took on an epic, some might say, Quixotic, quest. They spearheaded an effort to redevelop, preserve, and bring back to former grandeur, Faneuil Hall, and the surrounding buildings. Critics and naysayers were abundant.  Then again, they always are.   Built in the mid 1700s, Faneuil Hall, also called Quincy Market, became a thriving hub of commerce and industry, and it remained vibrant through the 1800s.   Yet not long into the…

  What is now Louis A. Frothingham Memorial Park was once a low-lying and swampy and marshy area.  It is still low-lying, but not swampy and marshy.  It still might be swampy and marshy without the initiative, passion, and financial support of Mary Shreve Ames Frothingham, wife of Louis A. Frothingham (1871-1928).   Soon after the death of her husband, Ms. Ames Frothingham resolved to create a park in his honor.   That low-lying and swampy and marshy area was chosen, and fill was brought in – and the area was crafted, shaped, contoured, and built into a beautiful space.  Louis A. Frothingham …

  In my column which posted this past Thursday, I said that today’s column, published on the day we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, would “focus on issues of race and civil rights as they relate to Easton and its history.” But I have called something of an audible.  This is still a Martin Luther King Jr. column, and I am still looking at our town.  But the reflection on Easton has been cut back a bit.    That is because subsequent to writing last Thursday’s column, I read a superb piece by ESPN Senior Writer LZ Granderson.   I loved it, and needed to give it a call out.  Here is …

  “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.” D. H. LAWRENCE, English Writer On Monday we celebrate the birthday of one of history’s greatest emissaries and apostles for peace and justice.  Martin Luther King Jr. is all of that, for sure.   My column on Monday will focus on issues of race and civil rights as they relate to Easton and its history Today, though, I write of public speaking – and, of course, when we think of Rev. King, if there is something of an image short-hand that describes the man, that image for so …