Jay Libardi

Yikes, somebody stop the clock! It's been 13 years since Jay Libardi died. Hard to believe that he never went online nor owned a cell phone. Jay would be amazed to see this website, which evolved from a publication he helped found before there were websites. That it now has readers from all over the world would have delighted him. Unfortunately today he is missing all of that. Instead he is the only person in Saint Michael's Cemetery with a Pink Floyd lyric on his grave.

 



1994 feels like a long time ago. Yet sometimes it seems like yesterday, as if Jay isn't really gone - he's just off on a trip somewhere, and his pick-up truck is going to be pulling up right outside any minute now.

More likely we will one day be joining him on that trip.

Doyle the Twig Painter tells me that the current generation of Pine Point stoners know of Jay's grave. Of course they never knew Jay himself but they recognize the Pink Floyd phrase and think it's cool. They hold little pot parties in the woods near the grave, a location they call "Crazy Diamond" as in "Let's go smoke a joint in the woods by Crazy Diamond."

In other words, Jay's grave has become a Pine Point party place. That's just what he would have wanted.

McCain in Boston 2000

Going through some of my photo archives recently, I came across these pictures showing presidential candidate Sen. John McCain addressing supporters in Copley Square in Boston on Mar. 4, 2000.

Former Councilor Mitch Ogulewicz and I were in the very front row, located so that we were in the direct path of CSPAN, which was filming the rally for national broadcast. As it turned out, the only person whose face was on the program more than Mitch and I was McCain himself! I heard from friends and relatives all over the country that they had seen me on national television. Here's a picture I took standing right beneath the Senator.

The head of the Western Mass John McCain for President campaign was a local lawyer and former mayor named Charles V. Ryan. Here is a picture of (L to R) Mitch, Joan Ryan, and Charlie after the rally.

McCain's 2008 campaign got off to a rocky start, but he seems to be finding his footing, helped by rhetoric such as denouncing the Congress for spending money like drunken sailors. Unfortunately, he said he had to drop that line after a Navy veteran wrote in complaining that being a former drunken sailor himself, he resented being compared to a politician.

The New Springfield Control Board

Well, the new Springfield Financial Control Board was named yesterday, and there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the appointees are credible people, without anyone chosen from the Springfield Central era, as some had feared. To his credit, Governor Patrick avoided taking the easy path and simply putting in hacks who would have pleased the local power players but done nothing for Springfield as a whole except perhaps send it into another downward spiral.

The bad news however, is that nothing in yesterdays announcement, or in the statement by Patrick and new FCB Chairman Chris Gabrielli printed in the Sunday paper, really tells us very much about what direction they are going to go in. There is boilerplate language about improving the schools, but what does that really mean? More funding poured into a system that's not working for reasons having nothing to do with money? A new round of pay raises for everyone in the system with no changes in the status-quo? That is what "improving the schools" has been a buzzword for in the past. If it still means throwing good money after bad, then there is little to get excited about.

More disturbing is the equally vague talk about "economic development." That can mean almost anything, but in Springfield it has traditionally meant boondoggles that fail almost immediately after they are completed, yet are considered a success anyway because all the inside players successfully cashed checks at every step of the process.

Government is by its very nature a poor economic developer. If there are ways to make money, people in the private sector have an unerring ability to step forward and do what needs to be done to pocket the cash. Therefore, if there is a proposed project that no private sector person is interested in, that is almost certainly because the private sector can see that the project will fail. Almost by definition any economic development project that requires government (taxpayer) money is a bad project, since if it was likely to succeed the private sector would have gladly funded it on their own.

For example, no one in the private sector was interested in putting condos right in the center of Springfield's ghetto, since common sense indicates that no one would buy them. Yet that actually happened because government doesn't have to be bound by the laws of economics. Any project, no matter how stupid or destined to fail, can be seen to its conclusion if there's enough government money involved. But once the project is completed and has to stand on its own in the private sector, then they usually fall flat on their face, wiping out millions of dollars of the public's money. 

 
I think it was a mistake to replace the Control Board members. Yesterday the speakers were full of praise for the work the Romney nominated members have done over the past three years. But of course that praise only begs the question of if they were so good, why replace them? The Boston Globe in its coverage of the changes, made clear in their first paragraph that this was an entirely political event;

Governor Deval Patrick seized control yesterday of the five-member panel that oversees Springfield's finances, removing Governor Mitt Romney's three appointees and replacing them with his own nominees 

 

 

I like that phrase, "seized control." Dumping the Romney appointees and putting his own people in charge (above) is the only reason this change is occurring - in other words pure partisan politics. Of course I shouldn't be surprised by that, it's just that one of things that appealed to me about Deval Patrick last year was that he suggested that he was above politics as usual and would do things differently. Oh well, yet another political illusion bites the dust.

What is perhaps the most interesting development in yesterday's changes is the announcement that the Board will consider new forms of governing Springfield, perhaps even abolishing the mayor's office altogether in favor of a city manager hired by the City Council. That was the solution chosen by the Control Board in Chelsea in the 1990's, where there had been (like Springfield) a long history of political corruption. Switching to a manager system was seen as an effective way to help permanently freeze out the old corrupt political machines. It will be interesting to see how the possibility of this and other suggested reforms plays out, but I won't be holding my breath.

What's really important now is that this new board succeed. Let's give them a honeymoon - not a long one, we can't afford it - but enough time to get their feet on the ground and show us what they can do. There will be time enough to take them to task if they prove unequal to the challenges ahead.

I was happy to see when I was in Pine Point last week that there is a new sign on the Pine Point Library! 

We Pointers take pleasure in even small improvements.

Odd Antique Object

I am slightly intrigued by this odd antique box in the Haymarket.

Does anybody know what it is and what it was used for? Mail?

Today the Massachusetts Democrat Party was having its yearly convention at the Mullins Center at UMass. Of course I didn't attend, but I did spot these Draft Gore activists in front of the Campus Center.

 



Shouldn't we be grateful to have dodged that bullet back in 2000? Why tempt fate again?

At least I found that some Democrats share my immature sense of humor. 

Ruins of Russells

When I was in Pine Point the other day, I stopped by to see how the old Russell's Restaurant building was doing. From the looks of things, not very well. Here is how it looked a few months before it closed in the spring of 2005.

Now that famous sign is completely gone, cut off at the base as you can see in this photo. Probably it was sold as scrap metal. 

Here is the front entranceway, the once elegant awning now sagging with decay. Notice how Mary Russell's flower pots are still on the site, although now filled with weeds. 

The fence that once protected the parking lot has fallen prey to vandals.

Around the back, logs attempt to keep dragsters from doing donuts in the parking lot (only the ghosts of Russell's patrons from the 1950's are allowed to do that) and in the forefront you can see a homeless person's abandoned shopping cart. 

When the Russell family sold the restaurant, it was to the convenience store next door, who intended to expand their store size and the number of their gas pumps. However, the plan couldn't get approval because some thought the site should go to a better use. As Russell's falls into ruins with no buyer in sight, the city may regret turning down the original offer. 

While on the Hadley rail trail Monday, I noticed that all the farmer's fields in Hadley are plowed and ready to do that whole growing the crops trip. As a city boy, agriculture is pretty much foreign to me.

 


I notice that a lot of farms grow shrubbery on otherwise unusable land. I'm told there is a great demand (and a good price) for already grown bushes to be installed at new houses and businesses whose owners don't want to plant saplings and wait years for them to grow. They want mature shrubs on their property from day one, and are willing to pay premium prices to get it. The shrubs require very little care while growing, help to control erosion, and the farmers find it a good way to make a little easy money on the side.

On Gay Marriage

 

It's been three years since Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, and in that time no other state has legalized it. On the contrary, Massachusetts has inspired a national backlash that has caused many states to pass legislation specifically forbidding their courts from making gay marriage legal.

Not being the marrying kind, it was never a big issue with me. If straight people want the name "marriage" reserved for themselves, then I couldn't see the harm in humoring them as long as there were so-called civil unions guaranteeing equal rights to same sex couples. Frankly I didn't think that gay marriage would catch on very much outside of a small number of romantic lesbians, since I always considered that one of the few advantages to being gay was being free of the responsibilities and complications of married life.

Then some things happened to change my mind. For example my cousin and his lover of 15 years got married, and I was shocked to discover the number of my relatives, good Catholics all of them, who refused to attend the marriage of this person they had known since he was born! Then I started noticing the sort of people who were most vigorously opposing gay marriage. It was obvious that they were not pro-marriage or even pro-heterosexual. They were out and out haters of homosexuality.

No way am I going to have anything to do with those sort of people, whom I think will ultimately be shown to be on the wrong side of history. Like it or not, the age of gay marriage - and a whole lot of other non-traditional family arrangements - is upon us. Now we have to make a choice between either doing what has to be done to make those arrangements work, or instead we can fight each other over and over and make each other miserable while accomplishing nothing.

Meanwhile, this is an advertisement for the student run cable station at UMass. Set at the murky campus pond, it is freaking hilarious. 

Second UMass Card Rally

Sorry about not posting yesterday, the day turned strange (as my days are prone to do) and there was no time for blogging. However, yesterday I did attend the second lunchtime rally in less than a week at UMass to protest the granting of an honorary degree to former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

The crowd was about the same size as the rally last week, a disappointment to organizers who had publicly predicted a larger turnout. Frankly, my impression is that for the vast majority of UMass students the Card appearance is a non-issue. However, what the protesters lacked in numbers they more than made up for in enthusiasm, as it was a much more energetic rally than last week. 

Conspicuous in their absence were the UMass conservatives, who had a lively presence at the last rally but had no organized counter-protest yesterday. I did however see these people with a sign showing African dictator Robert Mugabe, the blood-thirsty socialist whom UMass gave an honorary degree to in the 1980's. Where was the leftist outrage over this far more obviously inappropriate honorary degree?

I asked the sign holders whether they were allied with any organization and they said no, stating, "We only want to see people held accountable."

For some reason there was less of a media presence than last week, although the gentleman on the left below was from National Public Radio, which had not covered the first rally. The person on the right is a UMass journalism student who is quizzing the radio reporter about his job. Most of the students are looking for work this time of year!

Finally, it is hard to be too angered by the defacing of this mailbox in Northampton, when the vandal is so artistic about it!