It was a lovely and soul enriching mix of fun, laughs, tributes, memories, a tutorial in history, and some sad and solemn reflection this past Saturday night at the Oliver Ames High School Athletic Hall of Fame Classes of 2010 and 2011 induction ceremony held at the Joseph Martin W. Martin Institute for Law and Society at Stonehill College.  The Martin Institute was packed.  People saw each other who had not seen each other in decades.  People met for the first time.  I hope friendships were rekindled.  I hope new friendships were made. Celebrated this past weekend was close to a century of …

“From the moment a child begins to speak, he is taught to respect the word; he is taught how to use the word and how not to use it. The word is all-powerful, because it can build a man up, but it can also tear him down. That’s how powerful it is. So a child is taught to use words tenderly and never against anyone; a child is told never to take anyone’s name or reputation in vain.”     HENRY OLD COYOTE, Crow Tribe Author, excerpt from Respect for Life Earlier this week I saw a story on Easton Patch about how a student group at Stonehill College, on Monday, November 14, launched a week-long …

A few years ago, I was talking to a gentleman who graduated from Oliver Ames High School in the late 1960s.  He was an athlete at OA, and an outstanding student who went on to a prestigious university where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He graduated from an equally prestigious law school.  This gentleman was married with adult children, and a successful and highly regarded lawyer who lived and worked on the South Shore (not in Easton).  Anyway, in our conversation, he was telling me that he had recently gone to watch the local high school boys’ basketball team play one night.  His own kids…

"But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."     MATTHEW 18:6, KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE This past Thursday night, a friend emailed me a link to a blog post of Joe Posnanski, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, who is writing a book on legendary former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. Mr. Posnanski has been working on the book for a couple years, and as he mentioned in his post, he has been getting paid to write it.  The post is titled…

For many of us, when we think about military service and those who serve and our veterans, our vision is all too full of uniforms and armaments.  We think of war and combat.  We think of marching and military salutes.  All of this is appropriate, and all of this is our military.  As well, we most certainly should express and maintain special reflection for those on the front lines, those who have been wounded, and those who have given their lives.  Military service is a far broader concept and institution, though – perhaps the noblest of occupations, the noblest expressions of civic duty and …

It was a little more than a year ago now; it was Monday, November 1.   The next day would be the important 2010 congressional midterm election.   On that Monday a “Muscato’s Musings” column, titled “Easton Voters Should Consider the Struggle of Founders”, posted on Easton Patch.     The column discussed the economic and societal challenges of the present day; it also discussed Easton on the cusp of the Revolutionary War and its patriotic fervor and devotion to opposing the British Crown to win liberty for the colonies.  These words were included in the column:   “Today's Tea Party would have …

"Steep hill to climb." Popular maxim describing adversity My mother grew up in the small town of Maynard, which is a western suburb of Boston.  Maynard borders Concord, the town in which my dad grew up.   Living in Easton, something my mother missed about her childhood days was the slightly hillier and more undulating terrain that Maynard and the surrounding area had than we have here.    Now, for sure, all of Eastern Massachusetts is fairly flat.  It is when you get out to Western Massachusetts and the Berkshires that you find plentiful numbers of hills of appreciable stretch and height. …

Here I continue with the second installment of my columns focused on “Easton Tough Guys.”  The first of these columns ran on March 2 of this year. **** All Peter “Butch” Bosader was trying to do was relax and unwind and reflect on a win.  It was in the mid ‘80s, late in the evening, and Butch, an Easton resident in his early 40s, was at the Pickle Barrel, a bar on Rte. 138/Washington Street in South Easton.  Butch was by himself sitting at a table.    Butch was happy.  Earlier in the evening, the team he played on in the Easton Men's Softball League had won the championship.  Butch was …

“It’s like homeroom every day,” said Phil Nichols (Oliver Ames High School ’84) at a get-together at Buddy’s Union Villa of some of his OA classmates and others (including yours truly) who graduated from OA around that time. Phil was talking about homeroom at OA before the bell sounded to send you to first period class.   Homeroom was a concentrated bustle of talking and gossip swap.  What Phil was also talking about was the 24/7 phenomenon of Facebook and how OA and Easton people are able to share thoughts and opinions, stories and articles, photos and videos, all the time and from wherever…

As a late Baby Boomer (I was born in 1963) growing up in Easton, I was well acquainted with local stories of the paranormal and ghosts and strange occurrences, and all that.   Southeastern Massachusetts has a rich history of the supposed extrasensory. Easton itself and its history contain a trove of the strange and unexplained, and maybe unexplainable. Even the physical disposition of our community supported and abetted weird tales:  a town of about 30 square miles, incorporated in 1725, with long and winding roads through low-lying and swampy, wooded areas which issued fog that floated and …

America is a bit of a paradox in terms of health and fitness.  For sure, we have a body and fitness obsessed culture, one in which gyms and health clubs proliferate – and in which the fitness industry continues to expand rapidly.   Yet we are also fatter than ever. Go figure.  In my estimation, two of the biggest precursors to the fitness fervor and numbers of fitness and health centers of today were the running boom, which was ushered in with America’s Frank Shorter winning the gold medal in the marathon in the 1972 Olympics, and also the iron pumping bodybuilding craze which launched in the…

Robert Wheeler says he was fortunate that he knew when he was a student at Oliver Ames High School in the early 1990s, and a trumpet player in the OA marching band, that he wanted to teach music someday.  And when he graduated from OA in 1995, he went on to Berklee College of Music from where here earned his bachelor’s degree in music education.  He also loved marching bands.  “For so long I enjoyed watching the great Southern university bands,” said Wheeler.  “These bands were directly inspired by the rich history and tradition of the Drum and Bugle Corps.” Six years ago Wheeler came to OA …

Here is a sequel to my October 10 column, “Innovation And Creativity – Brought To You By Easton,” which featured examples of Easton innovating and pioneering.   For Part II, I went back to and extracted information from a column I already wrote, and I also dug out information not featured yet in this space.  Here I focus on the pioneering roles that two Easton residents, and, by extension, the town, played in athletics and health and fitness.  One of the most gifted and accomplished athletes in Oliver Ames High School history (OAHS) is Ken MacAfee (Class of ’48), the only OA grad to play in …

How does Easton rank on the romance quotient?  You know, how does the Shovel Town, as a place, measure up in terms of love and hearts a flutter and all the cosmic energies that elicit and support passion, hormonal racing – and carnal and lustful drives?  So we aren’t an isolated island in Tahiti, or a gondola in Venice (gag me), or a stroll along the edge of Lake Como, or the sharing of a glass of wine in a café in Barcelona, or an embrace a top the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower.   Then again, wait, I’m not talking about the spots nice and conducive to public romance – but those …

This should be fun.   Uplifting.  Here in the heart of Red Sox Country. The World Series begins tonight.    I am not a big follower of Major League Baseball.  Nor of the Boston Red Sox.  Yes, I know, this is a sort of heresy in these parts.  It’s not a total heresy – for total heresy consists of rooting against the Red Sox and for the Yankees.  In fact, it wasn’t until the September Sox meltdown was complete, and they didn’t qualify for the playoffs, that I understood what an absolute mess of a collapse these guys had authored.  I mean, really, the team lost 20 of 27 games in September – the …

I have a friend, Lisa Looney, an Easton native and 1989 graduate of Oliver Ames High School, who is in to gardening.  Lisa and her gardening passion were featured in this “Muscato’s Musings” column which was published in early May. Lisa is also in to feng shui, a Taoist art/system that dates back to the 6th Century – and which is about optimizing and getting people in touch with their “chi,” which is a sort of cosmic energy.   Lisa, who lives with her husband, Jeff, and their four children in Middleboro, has been at feng shui for a little more than 20 years now, and over that time has …

If you travel through North Easton Village, and pass Ames Free Library on your left, and a segment of the Shovel Shop buildings on your right, and go up maybe a 100 more yards, you arrive at the corner of Oliver Street and Main Street, where you will find an unkempt parcel of land. The parcel is bordered with granite pillars and chain links; within, a path of stone, made obscure by time and nature, leads to a granite monument, which has a bench, and at the middle of which is a metal plaque, and above that the metal bust of a man.    The man depicted in the bust is Oliver Ames, the founder of …

I was introduced to boxing early on.  When I was six or seven, I went away to summer camp for a couple weeks, to Cathedral Camp down in Freetown.  It was a camp run by the Archdiocese of Fall River.  After dinner, there was a boxing ring set up and campers would be paired evenly according to size and we would get to throw some leather.  It was all closely monitored.  And I’m confident if a boy didn’t want to box he didn’t have to.  I remember being fortunate in that the kid I was put up against was smaller than me.  I recall knocking him down, but apparently the punch didn't do much damage, …

I heard about this story, for the first and only time, about 15 years ago – which was about the time the event went down.  As it was told to me, a group of workers from the Easton Department of Public Works was at the town landfill off of Prospect Street – and it discovered an interesting device (perhaps an invention) apparently made here in Easton. Now, I am on deadline when I write this – and I will research this more soon – but from what I recall the device was something of a metal contraption, and it had a motor in it, and a round stack at the bottom of which there was a fan.  On the base…

One year ago today, Easton Patch launched, and so did "Muscato's Musings." When I embarked on writing the “Muscato’s Musings” columns (by the way, it was Easton Patch editor, Patrick Maguire, who came up with the name for the column), I was greatly enthused, happy and grateful to have an opportunity to share stories, that have an Easton angle, with people on the web, and thereby, theoretically, the world. I still feel this way. Nothing has changed.  It is fun and rewarding to talk in person with people who read “Muscato’s Musings” – as it is to receive emails from people around the country, …