Remembering Rahars

One of the great things about Packards in Northampton is that it serves as a kind of museum of Northampton business history. I was struck by a wave of nostalgia there recently to spot the old sign for the legendary bar Rahars.



If you look behind the Rahars sign, you can also see part of the sign for Beardsleys, a famous 70's restaurant but one I never ate at because it was too pricey for me on a college student's budget.

Rahars however, I have very fond memories of, which is surprising considering the state of mind I was often in while in attendance there. It was the premiere place in its time for local bands and the coolest place to be in Hamp on a Saturday night. It sort of played the role that The Elevens plays today, but on a larger, hipper scale. Here a band called The Foreign Objects performs at Rahars in 1979.



Carl Mayfield, Martian Highway fame, at one point rented an apartment over the bar. I used to visit him there, and it was absurd to even think of sleeping while the bar was open and a band was playing, as you could hardly talk with the music booming through the floor. God what parties went on there!

I miss that place, as well as some of the other classic Northampton businesses of yore which now survive only as Packards memorabilia. If you haven't been to Packards before, definitely do stop in as the local history lesson alone will make it worth your while.

A neat new place I discovered recently is the Simple Gifts Farm in Amherst.



Great, wholesome, locally grown food that is filled with health is available there at low prices. The farm gets its name from an old Shaker hymn whose lyrics would serve well as the official poem of the Pioneer Valley:

Tis a gift to be simple,
’Tis a gift to be free,
’Tis a gift to come down
Where you ought to be.
And when you find yourself
In a place just right
’Twill be in the valley
Of love and delight.

Finally, people sometimes complain that I'm too critical of Springfield, but at least I've never nuked the place like Bill Dusty:

Valley Winter Reflections

Assorted Places.

I was in Westfield last week and stumbled upon this evidence of the Irish troubles as manifested here in the United States.

Here are some interesting facts about Irish-Americans from the 2000 United States Census.

10.8% of the total US population claim Irish ancestry - the equivalent of 7 times the population of Ireland itself.

Irish-born people in the US numbered 156,000.

Irish-Americans were the largest ancestral group in Washington DC, Delaware, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Here is the site of the former Fire and Water Cafe in Northampton.

I used to have a lot of fun at that place in the 1990's. They had the best amateur poetry readings in the Valley. I never read any poems there, but always enjoyed listening to those who did. It was a terrible cultural loss when that joint closed, but who ever made money off of poetry?

Northampton's Packards now has a political message on its front.

Of course the main reason to visit Packards is not for its politics but for its museum of Northampton business history.

More than a year ago I was complaining about how difficult it was to find and use a payphone at UMass one day when I was a call-in guest on the Bax and O'Brien Show. At the time I wrote about how hard it was becoming to find a payphone, which were once everywhere on campus. I ran this picture showing the few phones there were remaining by the Campus Center poolhall, where when I was a student you sometimes had to wait in line to use the phones! 

The other day I noticed the few remaining phones have been completely removed and the wall painted.

 



Hey, in this day and age when everyone has a cell phone, what good are payphones? Anyway, the payphone has not yet completely vanished from the campus. These few remain, but for how long?

Here's the latest on my brother:

John is going back to the hospital today. When we arrived at the Infusion Center, they were concerned about his mouth sores, his rash, and his temperature. So it is not his choice, but he is going to be readmitted. The hospital staff will be able to watch things better and can take some of the decision-making load off of us, so that will be a relief actually.

A stem cell transplant is not for sissies! He has had some blood samples and cultures taken to see if they can find the problem causing the fever, and they think the rash could possibly be shingles.

John had to get fluids, potassium, and platelets today. He is feeling really rough, of course, but still trying hard to stay awake, and eat and drink adequately. The mouth sores are horrible and he has a red, raw rash on back, chest, neck, and head. The poor guy looks like a train wreck! As bad as it seems, the doctors and nurses continue to tell him he is remarkable and doing better than most.

Just a couple more days and we are expecting to be over the worst. We trust in our faith - that the Lord will bring us through this and we will see victory over this cruel disease soon.

He is still trying to joke, smile, and stay awake, but he is in basically just in misery. Please keep him in your prayers as I know you have been.

Love,
Connie

At Amherst College these odd signs have appeared with no explanation. 

They show people's faces with cryptic writing, but what does it mean?

Wise readers, do you have the answer?

Speaking of Amherst College, the boys of Amherst are completely unfazed by the trials and tribulations of our brutal New England winters. 

Foreign Affair

I liked him from the minute I met him four years ago. I was on the bus, and he came up and introduced himself. Like most strangers who approach me, he was a fan of this blog and he wondered if he could sit next to me and talk. I was only too happy to do so because he was really hot!

Vaguely European in look, he turned out to be European in fact, from the Czech Republic. It was his freshman year at UMass and he was in his first semester. He told me in his good but accented English that he was enjoying himself in the United States, but that he was having a hard time making friends. He said he was lonely. He also said he was gay.

Danger alarms went off all over my mind, but I knew that any attempt to restrain myself was futile. There was coffee at the Haymarket, followed by dinner and drinks at Packards and then finally I brought him to a gay bar. He had never seen such a liberated environment! He told me that where he came from to be openly gay was to be rejected by your family and risk getting beaten to death by the local toughs. I told him he would be safe in Northampton.

The night got later, as nights will do, and then before I knew it we were enroute back to Amherst and my downtown apartment. I'll leave you to imagine what happened, provided you have a very erotic imagination.

Then I rarely saw him again for the next four years. It was as if having introduced him to the Hamp gay scene he had taken to it like a fish to water. With his slightly exotic, Continental looks he never lacked for offers to buy him a drink, and whenever I ran into him he was always in the company of some handsome young man, always a different one. I didn't mind. I felt a little guilty for robbing the cradle that night we were together, and I didn't want to hurt him. He just needed a little push to pursue the lifestyle he was seeking, and after one night's tour of the gay scene with me he never had any problem again overcoming loneliness. Besides, I was old enough to be his father, although you'd be surprised how many young guys find that a turn on.

I ran into him last December around Christmas in downtown Amherst, and he informed me that he would be graduating this spring. Wow, I thought, how quickly four years had gone by! He was amazed to hear that I was sober and living in Hamp, he told me he always imagined me as the "Wizard of Amherst." I don't know exactly what he meant by that, and I didn't ask him because I wanted to take it as a compliment. When we parted after only a short chat, I assumed that it was unlikely that we would ever speak again.

I was wrong.

Last Friday I was sitting at a computer in the UMass Library reading my favorite blogs. As I did so, I felt a strange sense coming upon me that I was being watched. I know it's irrational to believe in such a sense, but I usually find it to be accurate and this was no exception. Sitting at a computer just a row over was my European friend staring at me as his eyes locked immediately upon mine. I got up and went over to greet him. We shook hands and soon we were sitting in the library lobby in the coffee shop aptly titled "Procrastination Station" because that is its primary use as a place for students to escape the assignments they are supposed to be working on elsewhere in the library. But of course I am not a student and as a new graduate neither was my friend, so it was not schoolwork that occupied our conversation.

He was leaving on Monday, back to Prague for a summer's rest before pursuing a graduate degree in Vienna. He was leaving to live a life in a world so absurdly different from mine that he may as well be moving to another planet. That was okay, I never expected anything different.

Then he suggested we get a hotel room. At first I thought he was joking, didn't he know that I was in drug recovery? "When you give up drugs and alcohol," he asked, "does that require you to give up sex as well?" I told him no, of course not, but that it was recommended not to have romantic relationships for about the first year, lest the emotional complications drive you to drink. He laughed and said he knew of such relationships. However he then asked how we could have an emotionally complicating relationship when he was leaving to go half way around the world in just a few days?

Of course I had to say yes, but I was even more convinced by what he added. He reminded me of that night on the town in Hamp. We had never mentioned it to one another on any of the brief meetings we'd had since that night. Now he wanted me to know how much it meant to him to have had a kind and fatherly friend to introduce him to gay life in America, and how much he appreciated how I didn't pursue him afterwards, but let him go his own way for four fun filled years of sexual adventures. "But I would have been your boyfriend if you'd asked me." he said. I suspect that was a lie, yet the fact that he would say that almost brought a tear to my eye.

We went out to that place on Route Nine, where prices are low and questions are not asked, and we spent the afternoon having fun. Neither of us drank alcohol. I did not take drugs but he did, although I made him take them in the bathroom. Still, a whiff of marijuana followed him back to the bed once and my willpower swayed sickeningly, but I did not yield. Another time I heard sniffing sounds from the bathroom, but I feared nothing good could come from inquiring about it.

As I write this, by now he must be on a plane back to his homeland. In this new world of interconnectivity, it will be easy for us to stay in contact. However I will let him make the decision first of whether to email me. Our relationship, consisting of only two sexual encounters in four years and a half dozen conversations, was never a romance. But whatever it was, it was perfect, unfolding and concluding just as it should have, and I've learned as I've gotten older that on the rare occasions in this life when things go absolutely perfect, to just let it be.


When my friend Hwei-Ling Greeney was defeated for re-election last April many wondered how active she would remain in the public affairs of Amherst. As it turns out the answer is very active! Her latest project is trying to protect the jobs of school lunch workers who are threatened by a privatization plan.



I don't know enough of the details to say whether the privatization makes sense, but it sounds like another one of those classic Amherst debates where both sides have good points. Amherst is in perpetual fiscal crisis, so anything to save money needs to be considered. On the other hand, does the human cost in suffering for the workers justify the savings? Whatever the outcome, in or out of office we can count on Hwei-Ling to still be a force in public affairs.

Joe is a student who volunteers at the Amherst Survival Center. Or I should say he used to be a student and he used to volunteer at the Center. Joe graduated last month and as of tomorrow he's leaving for Nova Scotia where he has both an apartment and a job awaiting him. 

He'll probably never be seen in these parts again. That's the mixed blessing of working at the Survival Center, you meet so many cool people but then they disappear into the slipstream of the world.

In Amherst they drive funny cars, such as this flower powered mobile. 

Even the kiddie cars get an eccentric paint job. 

It must be tough to be a kid with a talentless Mom who thinks she's an artist.

When I was growing up the only Tom Devine I was aware of was Monsignor Thomas Devine of Elms College in Chicopee. Today with the internet those people with the dubious honor of sharing my moniker are continuously coming to my attention. Among them is Tom Devine of Great Britain. Both Tom Devine and his friend Josh Smith are sixteen, an age when young lads are inclined to experiment....

Hobbled Hampshire

My wanderings over the past week have brought me to the campus of Hampshire College. Here's Johnson Library, a really cool place.

In fact "a really cool place" is a phrase you often heard about Hampshire College in general over the past half-century. But lately, not so much, at least when it comes to finances. Hampshire appears to be hobbled by a life or death fiscal crisis as the college president and several board members have abruptly resigned.

However, as I traversed the gorgeous Hampshire campus, hands-down the prettiest of the Five College system, I could detect no sense of impending doom. This sign announcing a pro-abortion conference, however, may be one small symptom of what has gone wrong.

Like a lot of Liberal Arts schools, Hampshire's once famously free style has been choked by political correctness. Good grief, even their gym has a pro-abortion sign overhead!

For some reason, people appear to be reluctant to spend over $50,000 per year to be turned into an unemployable social justice warrior so buried in debt you have decades of monthly bills as big as a mortgage payment - except you don't have a house. Hampshire's problems are just the symptoms of a wider crisis in higher education, which is that colleges today have become absurdly expensive, indoctrinate more than educate and do a poor job of preparing students for productive lives.

Only when this changes will students once again be willing to go to college in sufficient numbers to sustain small colleges like Hampshire. Right now, the smartest kids are avoiding college altogether and just plunging into whatever interests them, learning their field from the bottom up. Such people do not remain on the bottom for very long, and they by-pass all the leftist hooey and ruinous expense of what passes for a college education today.

Hampshire may be fading, but already gone is the Northampton Faces, a Valley commercial fixture since its origins decades ago in Amherst. The day after they closed, a mysterious wreath appeared in their doorway.

Lo and behold, it was a sympathy wreath from Packards, the bar around the corner.

Northampton's downtown business environment is the most cut-throat in the Valley, as merchants compete for dominance in our area's most successful downtown market. But bonds of friendship still form across the business district, and whenever a member goes down, the whole commercial community is saddened.

On a happier note, UMass had their literary bake sale, where students make funny and punny spoofs of famous books. This is so corny I had to laugh.

Never has a chocolate cake looked less appetizing.

Meanwhile, I was in arty mode this weekend as I attended an opening at the Oxbow Gallery on Pleasant Street in Hamp.

There was a good crowd.

I was never previously aware of the joint, but I'll be back.

The gallery undoubtedly gets its name from the nearby Oxbow section of the Connecticut River, which was painted by Thomas Cole in 1836 and entitled, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. Learn all about this Pioneer Valley masterpiece in the video below.

An Irish Love Song

 

you are my sunshine

 

my only sunshine

 

you make me happy

 

when skies are grey

 

you'll never know dear

how much I love you

please don't take

my sunshine away

 

 

For sale in a Northampton storefront.

 

Sunflowers in Cornicopia in Thornes. 

 

 What you'll find on the Northampton trails. 

photo by dann vazquez

Packards in the year 2000.

Hadley Garden Center on Route 9. 

photo my m. vennell

Remember when Big Chief Warren appeared on television in 2020 broadcasting from a Springfield classroom where the letter blocks on the shelf behind her spelled out the acronym for the racist hate-group Black Lives Matter? I'm sure that was merely a coincidence.