Rockport's Millbrook Meadow

Millbrook Meadow

Rockport’s  “Magic Place”

          Lura Hall Phillips just contributed over $100,000 to Rockport’s Millbrook Meadow.

Lura, died in 1994, at the age of 94. 

For over 40 years she fought to preserve Rockport’s Millbrook Meadow.  She left no stone unturned to collect donations—all to make improvements in what she called “Rockport’s ‘Magic Place’”.

            Lura was always working to make the Meadow better.  Although she lived a very frugal life, she managed to save up money to leave a sizeable donation for the preservation of the Meadow. 

When the new dam was completed in 2013, it became glaringly obvious that major improvements were needed in the Mill Pond and the little park that runs from the Mill Dam to Front Beach.

The Pond has been filling with sediment for years, and each year loses areas of clear water to the masses of invasive aquatic plants.  The Meadow drains poorly, resulting in times each spring when part of it is underwater.  The Mill Brook is cluttered with stones that have come loose and block the flow of water to the sea.  Finally, several of the large trees in the Meadow have reached the end of their lives, and need to be replaced.

Lura left a Trust fund of over $160,000.  Gunilla Caulfield, the trustee of that fund, arranged to give Rockport’s Millbrook Meadow and Mill Pond $60,000 in 2013, and that began the restoration project that is now under way.

With that first $60,000 in hand, Millbrook Meadow Committee initiated a request for another $60,000 from Town Meeting last year, and Rockporters voted to approve that last spring.  Last fall, Town Meeting approved another $100,000 from Community Preservation funds.

Now, Gunilla has closed Lura’s Trust Fund and sent the check for over $102,500 to the Town.  The Board of Selectmen are expected to approve this gift for Restoration of the Meadow and Pond.

Lura Phillips and Gunilla Caulfield, ca. 1988

          Rockport’s Department of Public Works and the Millbrook Meadow Committee have hired Milone & MacBroom of Springfield, MA to begin the task of studying the length and breadth of the Pond and Meadow, to draw up plans for just what needs to be done to revive the area.

            Rockport has formed the Rockport Millbrook Meadow Conservancy to conduct a public fund drive.  At present, the money required to complete this project is $690,000.

 May Day in Millbrook Meadow, 1989

            But—let us return to Lura, who died 20 years ago this year.  Who was she?

Lura Hall Phillips

(1900-1994)

           

Lura Hall Phillips, ca. 1991

              Lura Phillips was the lady who, back in 1951, went head-to-head with businessmen who wanted to convert the Meadow into a parking lot.  She was a one-woman bulldozer, raising funds for Millbrook Meadow.

           

“Whenever I go into the meadow,” she said, “I realize what a magic place it is. It doesn’t matter how I feel when I arrive. But once I get inside, I feel the magic and everything changes.”

           With Lura’s leadership, this “Magic Place” flourished.  She organized fairs and festivals, pet shows, art auctions, Maypole dances and much more, to raise funds for the beautification and preservation of Millbrook Meadow.

            She ran a drive to raise funds to build a bridge across the Mill Brook in the Meadow, and more funds to build a beautiful winding stone stairway from King Street down to the Meadow.

 Lura raised the money to build this stairway

 into the Meadow in 1992.

            Lura loved that Meadow, and protected it, and raised funds to keep it up. 

            Lura left money in a trust, and now we are using that as seed money to start our restoration of the Meadow.

            All during Lura’s later years, she saved her money. When she died in 1994 she left money to the Lura Hall Phillips Trust, for the improvement of her beloved Millbrook Meadow.             

            Lura loved Rockport, and she loved the Meadow.  Now, her money can be used to help restore the Meadow and the Pond, to make it the Magic Place for future generations.

            For more information see the Conservancy website at www.millbrookmeadow.org

For more information contact Sam Coulbourn, Chair, Millbrook Meadow Committee (978-546-7138) or Shannon Mason, Vice-Chair (214-686-9272).

A Modern-day Soviet Union

Eurasiastan

 SELÇUK DEMIREL FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Americans are worried about a modern-day Soviet Union?

In his discussion about Vladimir Putin’s recent actions and words, Leon Neyfakh of the Boston Globe brings up an idea that is getting a lot of airing lately.

The collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1991 was an event that we in the West welcomed with great joy.

But, for an old KGB hand like Vladimir Putin, it is not surprising that he views it as

“the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Neyfakh reports that the prospect of a new union of old Soviet states causes great uneasiness in Washington. 

Since the USSR imploded in 1991 we Americans have been the world’s lone superpower.

            It’s been lonesome.  Like one hand clapping.  Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Our world has thrived on balance—action and reaction.  USA vs. USSR…. Capitalism vs. Communism.   It’s been lonesome in the superpower suite.

For ten years, we remained distant from conflict in the world, distant even from the meltdown in old Yugoslavia, when the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and all tried to kill each other.

            Then came the Arabs and the terrorists who highjacked four U.S. airliners, drove two into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, and initiated what President George W. Bush called the “War on Terror”.  That brought on our invasion of Afghanistan, and Iran. 

            But fighting embedded Arabs and other assorted Islamic fanatics has not been a contest between two very powerful adversaries. Our opponent has been one nasty, murderous group of throwbacks from an earlier century, thoroughly filled with hatred for America, the West, and for our freedom, our values, and perhaps our success.  Many Americans have died in the conflict since 1991, but this has never been a contest between two world powers.

            During the days of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, the Soviets backed the Arabs in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt, supported them in their opposition to Israel and the West.  We sided with Pakistan, they sided with India.  We each had allies in Africa and the rest of the world.  The Chinese had their favorites, and they weren’t always the same as those of the USSR.  But this tension between east and west enabled small nations to play between the superpowers for special attention.  All this kept down the temperature in the Middle East, so it took the angry Arabs ten years to lash out on September 11, 2001.

            Now Mr. Putin wants to create the 21^st Century Version of the USSR—a Eurasian Union of nations combining their market power for trade, and more.  Of course, Putin is for “more” and we’ll hear more of his disdain for America, for our slackness, our loss of moral values, perhaps our great loss of military strength. 

            And we hear that the “Eurasian Union” causes great uneasiness in Washington. 

            If you believe in Newton’s Third Law, you might just think that the formation of a strong Eurasian Union might be the best thing for the world today.

            It might jerk Americans into realizing that we have gotten a little soft these past few decades.  Certainly our national morality has relaxed. Our competitive spirit is questionable.  And now we are talking about vastly reducing our armed forces.

            Our President seems fixated upon providing more and better government services, more and better health care. More and more, but perhaps reducing our capability to back up our words with actions when dealing with leaders like Mr. Putin. 

            What kind of man or woman do we need for our next President?

            These are interesting times.

--Sam Coulbourn

scoulbourn1@verizon.net

From the Boston Globe, Sunday, March 9, 2014:

Putin’s long game? Meet the Eurasian Union

It starts in 2015 and sounds like a scheme to rebuild the USSR, but its history is quite different — and troubling for the West

By Leon Neyfakh

WHAT IS Vladimir Putin up to? The crisis in Ukraine, brought to a boil when Russia’s president sent troops into the Crimean peninsula, has created almost a cottage industry of guessing at the autocratic leader’s intentions from one day to the next.

When it comes to Putin’s long-term strategy, however, there is at least one concrete plan that offers some insight, and one specific date that Russia observers are looking ahead to. That date, Jan. 1, 2015, is expected to mark the birth of an important new organization linking Russia with an as-yet-undetermined constellation of its neighboring countries—an alliance Putin has dubbed the Eurasian Union.  [For Neyfakh's story see:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/03/09/putin-long-game-meet-eurasian-union/1eKLXEC3TJfzqK54elX5fL/story.html   ]

Leon Neyfakh is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail leon.neyfakh@globe.com.

Was there really a Cold War?

Russia today and yesterday…. 

Pres. Obama in Oval Office, on phone with Vladimir Putin March 1, 2014 (White House photo)

            The Cold War is over, and besides, it was just a 47-year-old tennis match between two old fuddy-duddies. 

            It’s easy for bright young people today to dismiss the Cold War as something that happened after World War II and before the Islamic terrorists decided that it was their time for history. 

            When I was slogging through the snow along Schmidt’s Bank in Leningrad, USSR, doing my job as a naval attaché in the Soviet Union (1983), young Columbia student Barack Obama wrote a long article for the school magazine placing the blame for U.S.-Soviet tensions largely on America's "war mentality" and the "twisted logic" of the Cold War. President Reagan's defense buildup, according to Obama, contributed to the "silent spread of militarism" and reflected our "distorted national priorities" rather than what should be our goal: a "nuclear free world." (Jonah Goldberg: Obama in denial on Russia, USA Today, Mar 3, 2014.)

  

            I hear that sort of thing a lot.  It’s as if all those years of Korea, and Viet Nam, and the Berlin Blockade, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Truman Doctrine, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Francis Gary Powers, the Hungarian Uprising, Prague Spring, the downing of KAL007, Congo, Angola, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Suez Crisis and all the rest were just a time of innocent jostling.

School Bomb Drill, 1950s

            Most people born since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 cannot possibly understand the real fear that Americans faced when Khrushchev was caught sneaking missiles into Cuba, and President Kennedy declared a Quarantine.  The prospect of nuclear weapons devastating our cities, and America dissolving into a cloud of radioactive dust were very real in 1962.  After all, that was just 17 years after World War II.

            Those of us old enough to remember, and who were a part of all that confrontation between Communists and Americans and our allies realize that this was nearly a half-century of often deadly confrontation. 

            Mr. Obama faulted President Reagan for his defense buildup, but Obama could not have imagined the USSR that we saw in 1981. The Soviet defense establishment was all they had going for them.  Their economy was hollowed out.  Competing with the U.S. was a killer for them.

            It’s quite true that if one had the luxury of doing all that over again, we might have done it all better.  We now operate from the smug knowledge that indeed the world did NOT blow up, even with all those nuclear weapons.  Communism, which swallowed up country after country as World War II ended, did not go on to swallow up the world.  We stood our ground, and our way of life and our economy turned out to be solid after all.  And communism folded like a cheap umbrella, its hollowness, hypocrisy and evil exposed for all to see.

            Now, along comes Vladimir Putin, and, 22 years after the USSR collapsed, and fresh from his triumph at the Sochi Olympics, he finds himself wishing for the good old days of the Hammer and Sickle. 

Stalin hosted Roosevelt and Churchill in Yalta,  Crimea, in 1945.

            The competition and conflict between Ukrainians and Russians is centuries old.  The story of Crimea and Russia is also very old, and when Khrushchev gave the Black Sea peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, how was he to know that one day the Ukraine would be a separate country?

            As the current leader of what was the central part of Union of Socialist Republics, Putin is not about to accept secondary status for his nation.  He is not going to sit still while Ukrainians fight amongst themselves just to the south. He also has the Chechens and other angry people in the old Soviet sphere to deal with. And he is definitely not going to listen to lectures from those busybody Americans.

            And then there is President Obama.  He may have learned some history since 1983, but he thinks he is “the leader of the free world” and the “leader of the last superpower standing” and entitled to advise and warn Putin. 

            If I were Obama, I think I would be very circumspect about handing out advice or warnings.  If he warns, he must back up his warnings with action that the U.S. and our allies will take. If he offers advice, he must convey that this is the advice not of a nice guy from Chicago, but the advice of the leader of a country which is ready to back up that advice with concrete action.

            We are the same Americans who saved Stalin and the USSR in World War II;

             The same ones who forced Khrushchev to back down in Cuba in 1962.

            And if Obama is conversing with Putin, or even just talking to the press about this business, he must get across the fact that he knows much more about Russian-American relations than he thought he knew in 1983. 

            What can the U.S. and its allies do or threaten to do, in order to get the Russians to moderate their warlike stance in Ukraine?

Of course, we can enact sanctions.

We and our allies can seek to isolate Russia, such as by excluding them from international economic conferences, as several Republican senators have suggested.

We can freeze bank accounts and restrict trade deals and privileges granted to Russians. 

Putin cares very much about Russia’s image in the world, or he wouldn’t have invested so much in money and effort in Sochi.  Obama understands public relations.  He can study the best way to suggest that Putin is screwing himself and his country with his actions.  Obama can look for ways to help Putin stay in charge, and act statesmanlike in dealing with Ukraine, while still recognizing that there are benefits from “playing nice” in the world today.

Sam Coulbourn

scoulbourn1@verizon.net

Americans Bad, Indians Good

Americans bad,

Indians good? 

Rockport History Book Club

Rockport Public Library

Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2014

Topic: American Indians from 1620 to 1776

Richter, Daniel K., Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America; 2001; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

            Here is a book that puts the moccasin on the other foot.  When we normally think and write about the Indians that white men encountered when they first arrived on these shores several hundred years, it’s from the point of view of “looking west” at these red men, staring at European faces as our forefathers made their first contact with this continent.

            Daniel Richter begins “Facing East” by telling of a visit he made to St. Louis, Missouri, which, before the arrival of Europeans, was the site of the largest city in North America north of Mexico.  It was Cahokia, near present-day East St. Louis, and here, Indians had created a large city for the living and the deceased.  There were burial mounds and ceremonial platforms, a “woodhenge” of logs arranged in a circle to track the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and room for many to live.

            At the time that Columbus and his men were “discovered” by Indians in the Caribbean, some two million Native Americans inhabited the country east of the Mississippi. Tribes speaking Moskogean languages occupied the southeast, Sioan the Piedmont areas of the east; Iroquoian from the Great Lakes eastward and down into the Carolinas; and Algonquian from the Chesapeake up the coast.  For centuries the Indians had moved about the county on the great rivers. 

            For some 10,000 years these people had lived in an environment unconnected with other humans, so the first Europeans, who were the Darwinian survivors of all the diseases of their homelands, brought diseases which cut like a knife through Indian tribes. By the start of the Revolution, only some 200,000 Indians lived in that huge area.

            Richter personalized his story by picking out three notable Indians because their stories area well-known to many:

Pocahontas saving John Smith

            Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, who was a young Indian maiden first seen at Jamestown in 1607, had a relationship with John Smith and then married another Englishman, John Rolfe.  She went to England in 1616, where she died. 

            Kateri Tekakwitha was a Mohawk Iroquois born in 1656.  She was discovered by Jesuit missionaries, who converted her to Christianity.  Her short life was one of ascetism and sacrifice; before she died in 1680 she led many others to Christianity.  She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980.

            Metacom, the Wampanoag called King Philip, waged bitter war against colonists.  Yet, centuries after he had lived, in the 19^th century he was revered as an Indian hero of our country.

            In recent years, perhaps even going back to the time of President Andrew Jackson, the story of the Indians of America is a tragic tale.  Once proud men of the woods and plains bundled together and marched westward, made to settle in ever-shrinking reservations.  That is a true picture, of course, but there is much more, and Richter tries to explain that to the reader.  In the early parts of the book his narrative is fascinating, but as he goes forward, up to the time of the American Revolution, his narrative gets enormously detailed and complicated.    

            One of the problems one has in writing about the history of the Indians in America is that there are no written records—only records written by Europeans as they reacted to their encounters with Indians.  Then, explorers would take Indians back to Europe to show them off, perhaps use them as slaves, often to train them so that they could return as interpreters for future European ventures.  Bit by bit, these people were able to explain parts of their oral history and way of life to people who did record the information, and this is what Richter gratefully includes in his history. 

            In short, this is the discovery of these ugly bearded men on floating islands that appeared in various locations on the coast of present-day Canada and America.  These strange creatures sometimes began the encounter by attacking the Indians with these hard sticks that made a loud noise.  Often they brought pretty colored beads, and sometimes they performed strange rituals and offered the Indians hard biscuits and a red drink.  [The early Christian missionaries were offering the Indians communion.]

            The early explorers were looking for a quick scheme to enrich themselves with gold and gems.  The Spaniards had gathered up such riches in South America and they looked for it here, as well.  When they didn’t find it, they pressed further and further inland.  Early reports that went back to Europe were discouraging for the get-rich-quick people.  However soon, often with help from the Indians, they discovered furs, deerskins, tobacco, and all kinds of vegetables, as well as rich catches of fish.  

            Richter does a good job of letting us view these explorers through the eyes of Indians, as he describes their religious and spiritual outlook, and the world view they had as these strangers appeared. 

            As time went on, Indians got to look forward to the material things that the Europeans brought in their ships, like kettles and axes and knives and cloth, and over generations they grew to depend upon these things, which they purchased with furs and skins and whatever else the Europeans valued.

            Americans today are often quick to condemn our forefathers in the way they treated the Indians.  One must be scrupulously careful to try to understand the environment that early settlers saw.  Each encounter, from those by Cartier and Champlain in the north, to those by DeSoto in the south, had its own villains and victims.  Many of our forefathers really wanted to make a new life for themselves, but they brought cattle, and wanted to plant farms, and that was enough to upset the Indians.  You can understand that to Indians, planting fields, raising domesticated livestock, putting in fences --- were all things that they could not tolerate. 

Before you condemn our forefathers, first learn all you can about the world that they were living in.  It makes little sense to evaluate them by 2014 standards.  The men and women who arrived on America’s shores in 1620 and afterward were making a huge jump for a new life.  In many cases their lives back in Europe were miserable.  And when they arrived here, in some cases their very presence was a threat to the Indians. 

Try to study their lives, and try to understand the lives of the Indians, and think how you would have done it better. 

Comments?  Contact scoulbourn1@verizon.net