GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Chance of showers. It might not totally look like it out there, but the weather’s turning around. We’ve been sitting under low pressure for the last few days, with high pressure parked off to the west, and today, things start shifting east. We’ll be getting sunnier as the morning wears on, though with a chance of showers through the afternoon, with highs in the mid 60s and calm winds. Lows tonight around 40, colder in the hollows.
Connecticut River School. If you ignore the cars and the Dartmouth Rowing trailer, there’s a mid-19th century painting in Laura Gillespie’s photo of the river down at Kendal Riverfront Park the other morning.
In Norwich, communications between the selectboard and the town manager remain a sore point. The board and Brennan Duffy have been struggling to find common ground on goals for the manager ahead of a September evaluation, writes Sofia Langlois in the Valley News, and one big sticking point has been whether or not Duffy can be reached on the two days a week he works from home. “You’re not contactable,” vice chair Brendan Classon told him at a board meeting last week—to which Duffy responded, “I have communications that go on throughout my days whether I am working remotely or in Tracy Hall.” Langlois sketches the frustrations.
Woodstock’s longtime listserv moderator steps down. The “mods” who keep the listservs owned by Vital Communities from going off the rails are mostly invisible (unless you run afoul of one). But they put their mark on a town’s online discourse, as David Brown has done for the dozen years he’s overseen the Woodstock-area list. “Being able to manage this [listserv] that people appreciate has been one way of demonstrating [a] commitment to community — whether you’re trying to sell a used bicycle or you lost your cat — it’s all a good thing to do,” he tells the Standard’s Justin Bigos. Still, he says, he wants “to do something else with my mornings.”
CRREL settles with NH on 2021 hazardous waste violations, pays $200K fine. The agreement stems from a state environmental inspection that found problems “associated with CRREL’s management of waste streams generated from a groundwater treatment process to address legacy trichlorethylene (TCE) contamination at the facility,” NH AG John Formella said in a press release last week. As the VN’s Clare Shanahan writes, “TCE was used at CRREL as a refrigerant until 1987 and contamination from the carcinogen has long been an issue at the laboratory where thousands of gallons were accidentally discharged between 1960 and 1980.”
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In WRJ, an “exuberant little thrift shop experience.” Last week, Dave Celone writes on his Upper Valley VT/NH Musings Substack, he wandered into Uplifting Thrifting, the small store that inhabits the front corner of the train station. “Uplifting Thrifting lives up to its name, not just because its profits support children and families in the Upper Valley, but because this is a non-profit with an attitude. And a highly positive one at that,” he writes. Though he celebrates the cotton shirt he found, what he really valued was the vibe: friendly, conversational, and a sense that “a thrift store’s atmosphere should impact every customer positively and directly.”
In Claremont, Stevens High’s theater crew shows how to mount a production on the thinnest possible shoestring. High school theater departments aren’t generally rolling in money—but at Stevens, the school district’s financial crisis cut the spring production’s budget “to nothing,” writes Marion Umpleby in the VN. And yet, Mary Poppins Jr. happened anyway: Theater teacher Cat Gessner scrounged money from the alumni fund and proceeds from an earlier production, and shelled out from her own pocket, parents covered costume costs, senior Miles Sheehan and fellow students organized a benefit concert… Umpleby describes the grit it took to get to opening night.
SPONSORED: Special Director’s Tour at the Hood Museum! Join Museum Director John Stomberg for a special tour of the galleries this Wednesday, June 3 from 12:30–1:30 pm. The tour meets in the Russo Atrium five minutes prior to the start time. No registration is necessary, but space is limited. Sponsored by the Hood Museum.
Yep. Snow. Not right around here, but over the weekend there was hail up north, the summits turned white, and on top of Mt. Washington? Six inches. "We had a park truck with tire chains and a plow and experienced staff who know how to do this stuff,” Mount Washington State Park Supervisor Patrick Hummel tells WMUR about the late-May plowing effort.
Federal judge rules against NH’s proof-of-citizenship voter registration law. Thursday’s ruling by US District Court Judge Samantha Elliott held that the state’s 2024 law “would particularly affect people who might not have easy access to citizenship documents, such as college students, those without passports, those who changed their name after marriage, and those born out of state,” reports NH Bulletin’s Ethan DeWitt. The AG’s office on Friday said it will appeal; Secy of State David Scanlan said his office will tell local officials to allow NH voters to register without producing citizenship documents—though they’ll still need proof of ID, age, and domicile.
VT Legislature adjourns after passing compromise education reform bill. That bill, made possible after Gov. Phil Scott yielded on his demand for mandatory school-district mergers, creates a hastened process for encouraging voluntary district consolidation and will penalize districts with spending greater than a gradually lowered threshold above the state per-student average. It passed both chambers on Friday, which then adjourned for the year. Senate majority leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale “called the protracted negotiations over education ‘one of the hardest ends to a legislative session that any of us can remember,’” writes VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson.
Meteor was visible even from VT. You’ve probably read about the meteor that exploded about 40 miles above Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire Saturday afternoon (“The energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud noise,” NASA wrote on FB). At the burgundy link, NBC5 meteorologist Tyler Jankowski’s post of video from a mountain biker at Smuggler’s Notch that caught the fireball.
The Monday Jigsaw: White River Junction, 1915. This week, Cam Cross starts on a project using the panoramas taken of towns in VT by Brooklyn photographer Henry Barreuther between 1912 and 1917 using what was known as a Cirkut camera. In this particular original photo, he writes on his Curioustorian blog, you can see the twin towers of what was then the Junction House hotel, which “was renamed the Hotel Coolidge in 1924 and burned three months later. The Hotel Coolidge we know now is its 1925 replacement.”
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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Rose Hip Jam at the Ottauquechee Yacht Club. Kerry Rosenthal, Steve Glazer, and Eric Bronstein perform everything from 1930s classics to modern tunes across folk, country, blues, rock, and jazz. 6:30 pm.
And for today...
Some 40 years ago, a French singer and musical archivist named Dominique Cravic met Robert Crumb, the cartoonist (and banjo and mandolin player). They struck up a friendship, and then a band, Les Primitifs du Futur. Recently, they released their fifth album, which one critic writes “sounds like they rooted through an attic full of 78 RPM records, scribbled down some arrangements, and then played them on a collection of instruments they found in another attic, including accordion, sax, xylophone, clarinet, banjo, ukulele, theremin, Hawaiian guitar, bagpipe chanter (I’m guessing here), and musical saw.” Here’s “Ne tirez pas sur le pianiste”—or “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player.”
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