Sep
18
2025

New Lower Blue Licks Treasure

by Gary Sanderson

My archaeologist / anthropologist friend Mike Gramly placed the call a week into his latest dig at Lower Blue Licks in northeastern Kentucky – a 13,000-year-old mastodon boneyard located along an ancient saline spring bed on a Licking River floodplain.

I could feel the man’s enthusiasm. It was infectious, and told him so.

“I’m always happy when learning,” he said. “Hopefully, I’ll continue learning till my dying day.”

A noble wish, indeed. Don’t bet against it. Though rapidly approaching octogenarian status, the man is driven.

Overseeing his second organized excavation of this Ohio Valley treasure-trove site, purchased for $100,000 by a friend and benefactor, Gramly sees no reason to hide his excitement. What he’s bringing to light is groundbreaking in the realm of North American and world archaeology and anthropology, yet largely unknown and uncelebrated.

Gramly believes the key to mastodon research is finding the saline springs they sought for sustenance. It was at these important sites that Clovis hunters killed them and left behind artifacts for posterity. Thus far, he has apparently discovered the world’s earliest shaman sled burials – first at the Hiscock Site in upstate New York, now at Lower Blue Licks.

His theory is that such ritualistic burials – fancy ivory sled runners and all – staked the claims of competing hunting bands at important saline-spring haunts.

Gramly calculates that his latest 11-day mission, which ended on September 5, consumed 120 man-days of volunteer work, all of it performed by a trusted crew from his own brainchild American Society for Amateur Archaeology. Their mission? To establish the site’s southern perimeter and, in so doing, define the extent of a Paleoindian mastodon-hunting midden littered with bone and ivory fragments. In the process, of course, many fascinating artifacts came to light and spun the crew’s creative anthropological wheels to a shrill scream.

Exciting stuff.

Now, with the expansive midden defined, Gramly and his crew can return next year with a game plan for their final dig. In the meantime, he’ll organize, clean, and reassemble the broken artifacts he has collected before publishing his discoveries and hypotheses between the covers of a book.

Thus far, he’s most excited about a couple of remarkable artifacts. One is a drilled bead crafted from a thick seashell that looks to him like that of a periwinkle. The other a five-inch-long mastodon chin tusk, worked into ancient decorative art.

Despite being buried for 13,000 years, Gramly says this cleverly carved tusk is so polished that he can see his reflection on its mirror-like surface. He believes it was created as an atlatl hook, secured to the spear-throwing weapon’s shaft. There it would have engaged the butt end of the javelin, akin to nocking an arrow on a bowstring. Gramly identifies it as a sculpted phallus, symbolizing the power and penetration of the hunt.

At the time of our telephone conversation, Gramly was still 1,000 miles away from his North Andover home workshop. His latest assemblage of artifacts, a work in progress, will receive intense scrutiny when he returns home.

As for the bead, Gramly suspects it was worn to the Kentucky site by a member of a Paleoindian hunting party following megafauna game trails from the West Coast. Just on a hunch, he thinks the shell came from the Pacific Ocean, though it certainly could have come from the East Coast as well. He expects expert analysis, probably at a Harvard University lab, will easily identify its genus and place of origin.

“There’s no question it’s a deliberately-made bead,” he said. “In fact, we also found the piece of another broken example. Both were clearly drilled in the Paleo style.”

The chin tusk is one of three thus far uncovered at Lower Blue Licks – two this year, one a year ago. Only one has been worked into an art object, which Gramly is eager to study further when he returns to the comforts of home. At first glance, he noticed interesting lines carved into the surface. He hopes to understand them better under closer inspection.

Gramly believes the tusk carving has the characteristics of European Upper Paleolithic Gravettian art, which goes back at least 30,000 years and, he believes, came to this continent across the Bering Strait with the earliest human migrations from northeastern Asia. The bead also screams Gravettian to him, he said; shell beads were common in that ancient culture.

So, Gramly now has two more esoteric artifacts to sink his anthropological teeth into. And that doesn’t even address what he may yet find among the other bits and pieces his team collected. Those items he’ll clean, organize, catalog, and ponder – taking time out to bounce his latest observations and hypotheses off his network of friends.

The most enticing specimens – like the bead and carved chin tusk – will go to his trusted artist friend Steve Wallmann, who’ll sketch them for posterity and future publication in print and digital media. Such visuals motivate thought and discussion into the esoteric Paleoindian spiritual realm. Nothing provides more valuable insight into ancient cultural beliefs and lifeways than artistic expression – be it petroglyphs, pictographs, or stone, bone and ivory carvings and adornments with hidden spiritual meaning.

Gramly has been mired deep in that rabbit hole ever since his first mastodon dig 11 years ago at Bowser Road in Middletown, New York. It seems like yesterday he was calling in to report his findings there.

Now, more than a decade later, his sights are set on Vienna, Austria, where he’ll share some of his recent findings during a 30-minute presentation for European scholars.

They’ll be eager listeners.

posted in Columns, Indians | No Comments

Sep
02
2025

Gramly Has Intellectual Energy to Spare

by Gary Sanderson

Late July. Eight-thirty. Bright morning sun. Neighbors’ tall sycamore across the road casting a long, broad, cool, front-yard shadow. Two-mile walk a couple hours in the rearview.

The phone on the table to the left of my chair rings. Caller ID reveals an unnamed “wireless caller,” with a 978 area code number I don’t immediately recognize.

Taking a gamble, I answer it.

It’s archaeologist friend Mike Gramly – a man closing in on 80, yet still a remarkable bundle of boundless energy and intellectual enthusiasm. He checks in at least once a week to chat about his latest focus and discoveries. This time, he’s calling from the New England Auctions parking lot outside of New Haven, Connecticut, some 155 miles from his North Andover home. He was the high bidder on a few strategic “left bids” for lots he was interested in – most notably a couple of miniature, 19th-century, ivory Inuit sled carvings – and he’s waiting for the doors to open at 9.

Nothing unusual. Just another day in the busy existence of scholarly Richard Michael Gramly – an endangered, some might say old-fashioned, breed of archaeologist, who still digs, sifts, analyzes, and documents his findings, hypotheses, and conclusions between two covers.

Having spent the weekend selling books and shooting the breeze with fellow travelers at a Pennsylvania Indian artifact show for collectors and dealers, he’d driven six or more hours home and had no time to relax; doubling halfway back to retrieve the auction house merchandise.

Despite a few health concerns that have cropped up in recent years, Gramly doesn’t seem to have slowed down a bit. In fact, for the past 10 years he’s been revved up exploring North American human-proboscidean interactions that occurred 13,000 and more years before present. While your average Joe can find such deep time disorienting, Gramly spends much of his time there, studying artifacts and pondering their meaning.

The early-morning auction journey is insignificant compared to his agenda in the coming weeks and months. This weekend, it’s off to New York’s Letchworth State Park for the Genesee Valley Flint Knappers Association’s 35th-anniversary Stone Tool Craftsman and Artisan Show.

Then he’ll motor west to Kentucky for two or three weeks of archaeological investigation at the so-called Lower Blue Licks Battlefield, where he’s been making groundbreaking discoveries at an ancient mastodon boneyard purchased by an old friend – a proud member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, no less.

The Lower Blue Licks site has become Gramly’s latest treasure trove of cutting-edge discoveries relating to human predation and ritualistic treatment of mastodons they killed. He was drawn to the site by his buddy’s museum discovery of a previously unidentified ivory-tusk sled runner. His friend recognized a familiar form among a collection of skeletal mastodon remains unearthed long ago and squirreled away for posterity in a Kentucky museum,

The ivory artifact resembled 13,000-year-old sled runners Gramly had identified in recent years among mastodon remains stored for years at the Buffalo Museum of Science. The Buffalo collection Gramly studied was gathered at the Hiscock Site, a well-known proboscidean boneyard in upstate New York’s Lake Ontario region.

There Gramly also brought to light a 13,000-plus-year-old sled burial of a female shaman. That sled is the oldest yet discovered on the planet – though others may come to light as Siberian and other Arctic permafrost continues to melt and reveal archaeological treasures.

Assisted by a loyal group of volunteers from his own American Society for Amateur Archaeology, Gramly expects to be finished for the year at Lower Blue Licks in September. From there, he’ll drive home to enjoy a brief October respite before going international. In Vienna, Austria, he’ll deliver a 30-minute lecture in November at the Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology (ISGMA). His title is the Description and Absolute Age of a Late Upper Paleolithic Zoomorphic Drum Beater from the Hiscock Site, Genesee County, New York State.

Which brings us back to the presumed shaman burial at the Hiscock Site, which no one except Gramly seems willing to address. According to the report he will hand out for his November 20 presentation in Vienna, discovered along with the fragmentary skeletal remains of a female, aged 27 to 39, were the remains of a sled with tusk-ivory runners, “a dog associated with the sled, and many artifacts of ritual and practical nature.”

Among those artifacts, collected near the human remains and presumed by Gramly to be personal property of the buried shaman, was an “heirloom drum-beater” made of what he believes to be either caribou or extinct moose-elk antler. This drum-beater, which wears the zoomorphic carving of a moose or elk head in profile, and traces of ancient red-ochre paint, is the focus of Gramly’s ISGMA presentation.

Symposium officials are so eager to hear what Gramly has to say they have already taken it upon themselves to mail him a check to help cover his expenses. A generous outlay, indeed.

The salient questions in my mind are: Why must this venerable archaeologist, a Harvard PhD with mountains of Paleo-Indian knowledge under his hat, fly 4,000 miles to another continent to share his fascinating findings with experts in his field?

And, for that matter, why is it that his two comprehensive magazine articles chronicling recent mastodon findings have thus far been published abroad as well – in the prestigious French journal L’Anthropologie?

Is America not interested, or just giving the academic cold shoulder to an old-school archaeologist who’s bucked modern trends at every turn and chosen instead to do it his way?

In rigid academic circles and hierarchies, independence doesn’t always fly.

posted in Columns, Indians | No Comments

Aug
05
2025

Nove Salute; Correction; Bears

by Gary Sanderson

On the walls surrounding a small bookcase in the southeast corner of my study hang a trio of framed images – one a small oil painting of a spaniel retrieving a cock pheasant; another a sepia-toned, circa 1882, Lewis Kingsley photo of my great-grandfather Willis Chapman Sanderson’s East Whately family, restored by Chris Clawson; the third a numbered print (3/999) of an Indian squatting down to read tracks in the snow.

It’s the third that I wish to focus on today: a thoughtful, spur-of-the-moment gift from friend John Nove, a bookbinder I got to know and like in many arenas after he moved to my hometown of South Deerfield around 2010 and ran the Grey Seal Bindery from his Mountain Road home.

John died at 77 on July 1, the day after my 72nd birthday. I’m going to miss him.

I knew John’s home as that of Ray Bergiel, a town cop with a daughter Elaine in my graduating class. I used to stand talking to John on the deck leading into his kitchen, pointing out the old shade-tobacco plots to the immediate north and south, and, east, to the high, lonesome North Sugarloaf Indian cave I frequented as a kid. I promised to take him there some day if he wanted to see it. It never occurred. I would have liked to lead him up there, assuredly telling him childhood tales from the South Deerfield I knew, a fun place that ain’t what it used to be.

John, a career scientist, took up bookbinding after retirement, training for two years at Boston’s prestigious North Bennet Street School, which teaches old trades. He was a good man, soft-spoken and fair, active in the community as chairman of the Deerfield historical commission and as Deerfield’s representative on the Battlefield Grant Advisory Committee researching the historic “Falls Fight” (May 19, 1676) of King Philip’s War.

John read my column and knew of my interest in deep local history, thus the cherished gift of this print he gave me on a thoughtful whim. Though I don’t know this for a fact, it must have come to him from someone in Old Deerfield as a memento of the 300th-anniversary remembrance of the 1704 attack on Deerfield.

I promptly had it framed and hung it in my study for posterity – now a daily reminder of my late friend. Soft-spoken and kind, John always treated me fair and engaged in interesting conversation.

I know I’m not the only person who’ll miss him dearly. He was a good, honest man. A straight shooter. Ethical to the core.

—

I would be remiss, if not dishonest, to let an error from my last column pass without notice.

The inaccuracy had nothing to do with the mid-19th-century painting I recently bought and featured in the column, but rather with what turned out to be a bogus example of artistic license I attributed to 19th-century artist Charles Louis Heyde on his circa-1852 oil painting Deerfield Toll Bridge, acquired recently by Historic Deerfield.

It was an unfortunate case of misreading the Heyde painting’s perspective. Because of my bad fix on the site, I inaccurately claimed Heyde had conveniently moved Mount Toby a few miles north as a convenient framing device. I was wrong – Heyde’s painting is actually a realistic depiction of the landscape he saw backdropping the bridge at the site of today’s Montague City Bridge from a spot on Greenfield’s Rocky Mountain near where Poet’s Seat Tower stands today.

My incorrect fix on Heyde’s easel placement placed it west and slightly south of the bridge, which crossed the Connecticut River just above the Deerfield River confluence. I figured it for somewhere between Woolman Hill and the Cheapside Railroad Trestle, and I stuck to it, despite failing to find a likely spot on maps or drive-through searches.

Perhaps, I pondered, Heyde stood on a hill that no longer exists – possibly on a promontory now long gone and hollowed into a massive crater at Trew Corporation’s gravel pit off the south end of River Road in Deerfield. My problem was that the site is a wee bit out of my domain, which begins a couple miles south of it and extends south and west.

With my site interpretation far in the rearview, JoAnn M. Costa posted a late 19th-century engraving that caught my attention on her popular Facebook page, “Historical Franklin County Massachusetts Realm of Wonders.” There she displayed a sketch of the Heyde painting described as a view of the Deerfield Toll Bridge from Rocky Mountain.

Lesson learned. In the future, I’ll try to stick to intimately familiar landscapes. For me, Rocky Mountain and the last mile of the Deerfield River are not among them.

—

Speaking of Facebook posts, there seem to be a lot of backyard and downtown black-bear sightings around the state these days.

Viewing the recent photo of a big bear lounging and munching on someone’s downed birdfeeder in a heavily settled, flatland, Franklin County neighborhood, a thought immediately came to mind: How many people born after 1980 viewing the post understand that, prior to that, bear sightings here and throughout the Bay State were rare indeed?

In fact, I would venture a guess that most people in towns like Greenfield, Deerfield, Whately, Montague, Gill, Bernardston, and elsewhere had never seen a bear. Even in the upland towns, sightings were rare.

Now the big beasts are not uncommon on city streets, or treed in thickly-settled suburban neighborhoods of Boston, Lawrence, Lowell, Worcester, West Springfield, Pittsfield, and you name it.

For this development we can salute Jim Cardoza, a retired MassWildlife biologist I often spoke with during my days as a fulltime newspaper man and outdoor columnist. Cardoza’s highly-successful bear and wild turkey restoration programs made the struggling, contemporaneous Atlantic salmon restoration program look like an exercise in futility.

Some tough-guy, NRA, sportsmen’s club types criticized Cardoza as an eccentric egghead who ruled from a strong academic bent. Not me. I respected him, viewed him as a friend, and salute him as an exemplary wildlife biologist whose restoration efforts were more successful than anyone could have ever dreamed.

Today, with altruistic hopes of annual Connecticut River salmon runs unplugged forever, state officials aren’t quite sure what to do with all the turkeys and bears brought back to the Bay State by “quirky” Cardoza and the restoration teams he led with aplomb.

 

posted in Columns, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments

Jul
11
2025

Unsigned Hudson River School Treasure?

by Gary Sanderson

Another auction purchase. Another wild ride aimed at discovery. Isn’t that the joy of collecting?

How better to keep a retired old man active, alert and engaged.

One of my latest acquisitions is a large, likely unsigned oil-on-canvas riverscape painting I believe to have great potential. I snagged it at auction a couple months ago. It was described in the catalog as “American School,” and my first impression narrowed it down further. I saw it as an early Hudson River or White Mountain School work, though at the time site was not my primary interest.

What immediately captivated me was the activity it pictured. Two men on opposite sides of a raging mountain stream were retrieving fishing nets from the water. The time of year is early autumn, the place our Northeast.

Because there is no evidence of fish or a fish-processing station, in my mind, they were likely picking up for winter storage and mending. Just a guess. But one would think such nets were most likely used during the spring for shad and salmon, or, I suppose, fall Eastern brook trout spawning runs, though I have never heard of those.

My main focus was on the seines or gillnets shown. I had only read about such nets in sources like The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H. from 1754 to 1788, which I featured here in recent months, along with town histories from the Connecticut and Merrimack valleys. All you get is words in those accounts. No illustrations. One has no choice but to rely on imagination. Now, finally, an artist’s depiction. Akin to a photograph. A step in the right direction.

The only previous illustrations I had seen of weirs, traps, nets, hooks, sinkers, and spears came from clear across the land, displayed in Hillary Stewart’s 1977 book Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast. Then, more recently, similar online images. I was forced to assume, and still believe, that the fishing practices of indigenous fishers from faraway North American places differed little from those employed here, first by indigenous people, then by European copycats.

Illustrations of such fishing activity here in the Northeast are still rare, especially early representations, which are virtually nonexistent. So, when I spotted this circa 1840 canvas depicting a fishing scene at a roaring whitewater bottleneck on an unnamed upland stream, my curiosity blossomed.

Ah! At long last, an image to work with. Let the auction bidding begin.

I knew it might represent the only chance of my lifetime to obtain such a treasure to pick at and probe. I was thus compelled to take an honest run at it, welcoming the exhilarating research I knew it would trigger. That said, there was a limit to what I could spend, and I expected the hammer price would race out of range.

Not so. I lucked out.

Shockingly, as I put in a phone bid, only one bidder seated at the auction went against me, and he didn’t hang in there long. A stroke of luck, I guess.

The date of my purchase was April 30, which coincidentally would have been my late father’s 97th birthday. Who knows? Though he was never a fisherman or historian, he may have been watching over my shoulder for that adventure. Just a fleeting thought.

Two days later – delayed a day by a late, greasy, spring snowfall I decided not to challenge – I drove to the auction house, wedged the large painting into my double-cab Tacoma’s back seats, and left it with a conservator for minor inpainting and repair. Less than a week later, the 47- by 43-inch framed painting was hanging proudly in my west parlor. Not only had I finally found the illustration for which I had furiously searched for decades. I owned it. Could study it.

The chase was on, and is ongoing.

The journey thus far has meandered up and down the Merrimack and Hudson valleys, the White, Green, Adirondack, and Catskill mountains, the upper Lake George and lower Lake Champlain country, and even rivers in western Connecticut. Who knows? The artist’s impetus way have been born elsewhere, like, say, a lower Merrimack tributary where fish runs persisted long into the mid-19th century.

The biggest problem confronting such research is the weakness of documentary evidence detailing fishing activity before and after the Revolution.

I started my research by studying topo maps and online images of suspected rivers. I found many possibilities, but nothing conclusive. I then queried river guides, book dealers, town clerks, historical societies, and even museum curators who I thought might recognize the site. I sent them images that I hoped would stimulate interest or, better still, ring a bell. Uh-uh. No one could place it.

Though I was familiar with 19th-century artists like Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole and White Mountain School master Benjamin Champney, I knew little in depth about their “schools,” which overlap. I bought books, read them, and found nothing to discourage me from digging deeper.

I then took the YouTube route, watching several scholarly presentations. Similar to the reading, I found it validating. My painting does indeed display several Hudson School characteristics, including repetitive themes and symbolism, atmospheric effects, and contemplative allure.

Attribution to a specific artist is seldom easy, however – and this is no exception. Complicating matters, I soon learned that pinpointing sites of Hudson River School paintings is not easy due to the liberal employment of “artistic license” to romanticize compositions. These artists routinely enlarged and reshaped background mountain ranges, or even moved picturesque distant peaks to backdrop a river scene where it didn’t exist.

The early Hudson River School painters were not plein air artists who set up their easels onsite and painted precisely what they saw. The best of them were academic studio painters, who routinely embarked on weeks- and months-long sketching trips to scenic places and returned to their studios to add color, atmosphere and an imaginative touch.

I had recently seen this with my own eyes, in a Charles Louis Heyde landscape a friend of mine chased at a Labor Day auction. The 1850s painting – which I believe Historic Deerfield purchased – showed a sun-splashed view from the west of the old Deerfield Toll Bridge that once stood at the present site of the General Pierce Bridge connecting Greenfield to Montague City.

Framing an upper background of light blue sky and cumulus clouds on the right side of the canvas was the distinctive profile of Mount Toby. I immediately realized that Heyde had moved it a few miles north to improve the background of his composition.

So where does this leave me in my attempt to attribute this new painting to a known early Hudson River artist? Well, I know the work came to auction from a Washington County, New York estate in the shadows of Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga. The consigner inherited it many years ago from her father, described by the auctioneer as “a well-known collector from the Albany area,” who was an active buyer between 1940 and 1980. It was he who likely paid for a professional cleaning and fitted it with an expensive, 20th-century gilt frame that cost him more than twice my auction price.

That’s the beauty of auctions. It can happen.

The consigner came up empty in a search through her father’s stored files for information. Nonetheless, given where he was from, he, too, likely believed it was of the Hudson School. Getting an attribution to one of the masters – say Cole or Durand or Kensett – is a more difficult matter, one that could invite disagreement among experts unless there’s a signature or initials hidden on the canvas.

So, consider my search a work in progress – one I intend to continue pursuing. I believe I may have found an important artwork that got lost in the shuffle. Thus far, one “off-the-record” expert agrees with me.

All I can do is keep searching, turning over every stone of inquiry.

To me, it’s not drudgery. I love the hunt.

posted in Antiques, Columns, Salmon, Shad | No Comments

Jun
11
2025

Elusive Deerfield River Browns Worth Chasing

by Gary Sanderson

Sunday morning, Memorial Day Weekend, approaching 5:30. Day has broken – half-sun peeking over the eastern horizon, squeezing warm yellow rays through the tulip magnolia shielding my upstairs bedroom windows on each side of my headboard.

From the tree comes the joyous song of an amorous cardinal, likely celebrating the high blue sky, small white clouds, and inspiring sun after days of wet, gray, unseasonably cold May weather. I could relate to the bird’s cheerful disposition. Thank you, my blissful, scarlet friend, for sharing your sunrise joy.

As I walked toward the fan staircase descending to the new day – looking south over the lush green yard below – my thoughts traipsed back to Deerfield River fishing days past. “This,” I thought, “would have been too late for me back then,” when my rule of thumb was to execute my first cast before the birds sang.

To get rare opportunities at large, gluttonous, Deerfield River brown trout lingering a bit too long in their nocturnal feeding stations, that’s when you must arrive: before the birds sing; and even if you know the game, your chances of landing such a fish are slim indeed. Deerfield River browns do not grow large on stupidity.

Over the years, while catching many big, acrobatic, stocked rainbows, I was fortunate enough to land a few of those spectacular browns in the three- to five-pound range. All of them were caught on nightcrawlers dead-drifted just right. Never did I land one fly-fishing, although I suspect a few took a sparkling cream caddis emerger or Montana nymph and got away.

Being a South Deerfield lad, I know the section of the Deerfield I most often fished as Hoosac. It’s located on a small slice of paradise along the west bank between Johnson’s Hole, in Deerfield about a mile upstream from Stillwater Bridge, and the South River. Occasionally I’d wander a tad north to fish the stretch between the mouth of the South River and Bardwells Ferry, concentrating primarily on three productive sites offering the types of pools and runs I preferred.

Less often, I ventured farther upstream to the mouths of Dragon Brook and Bear River, on opposite sides of the river above Bardwells. Those were the days when you could drive the railroad service road following the tracks from West Deerfield to Buckland without fear of a fine.

Sometimes, I’d fish from my 14-foot, fiberglass, Old Town canoe, paddling upstream – black Lab gundog Sara seated astern – to Johnson’s Hole from the now-gated riverside launching spot and parking place below Stillwater Bridge. Other times I’d drive to my destination on the old trolley trestle following the west bank from Hoosac to Conway Station, parking on the power line and hiking steep game trails to my two favorite spots. That access, too, is now closed to vehicles and open only to hiking and biking, with a relatively new footbridge crossing the South River gorge to Conway Station. It’s irrelevant to me in my senior years. Those steep, slippery game trails to the river below are for young legs, not battered old warhorses.

To be honest, I’ve seen the footbridge from afar but never closely examined or crossed it. It doesn’t interest me. Frankly, I preferred it when 1.) the old trolley bed was open to the few locals who used it, 2.) the gorge had to be crossed to hard way, on foot, and 3) the Deerfield River was virtually unknown to whitewater enthusiasts, who’ve ruined it for anglers seeking solitude, tranquility and the soothing rattle of free-flowing waters.

Sadly, that peaceful place disappeared years ago on the lower Deerfield, beginning the day noisy whitewater yahoos arrived from all points of the compass with their canoes, kayaks, inner tubes, rafts, and, yes, coolers and litter – scraping, banging and yee-hawing their merry way downriver.

Yeah, yeah, I know adventurers of all stripes should have the freedom to enjoy the public resource. Which doesn’t mean I want to join them, or profess interactive compatibility between whitewater enthusiasts and trout fishermen. While it’s true that solitary trout anglers create no inconvenience for whitewater enthusiasts, the same cannot be said for the reverse.

Just one humble old man’s opinion – one that hasn’t changed a hoot dating back to the heated dam-relicensing battle between Trout Unlimited (TU) and the Charlemont whitewater companies some 35 years ago.

For a quick refresher, Zoar Outdoor, Crab Apple Whitewater, Appalachian Mountain Club and others fought for increased water discharges from Fife Brook Dam above the Hoosac Tunnel to accommodate whitewater adventurers on the upper Deerfield. TU favored lesser flows more favorable to trout, anglers and the freshwater ecosystem.

Go figure. The whitewater companies won.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

May
25
2025

Rain Impacting Turkey Season, Shad Run

by Gary Sanderson

Mid-May. Rhubarb knee-high. Rotting tulip-magnolia petals carpeting the lawn below their large ornamental tree. Kwanzan cherry blossoms pink. Japanese maples ascending to their spring burgundy splendor.

Such are the springtime inspirations in my yard. Yet, still, to me, nothing triggers spring reminiscence like those faint whiffs of sweet lilac tickling my nostrils and tweaking my consciousness. It’s invigorating. Optimistic. A signal of renewal and rebirth.

Last time we met in this space, my topic was the native Eastern brook trout I once pursued with youthful passion. That discussion was ignited by news of a record eight-pound brookie pulled through the ice on Maine’s Moosehead Lake in January.

This week we’ll switch gears to a couple of other spring pursuits that kept me busy for many years as a sportsman – not to mention as an outdoor writer pumping out a weekly column for a small daily newspaper. I’ll touch upon wild turkeys and shad, both of which significantly grew in population and popularity among regional sportsmen in the 1980s. By then I was married with two kids and keeping a home, yet still stubbornly clinging to my youth, tattered and torn, on the local men’s softball circuit.

First, turkeys. The wild variety did not exist in my world as a kid growing up in South Deerfield, chasing trout up and down rattling mountain streams in hip boots. Times have changed. Aggressive trapping and relocation efforts brought quick success to aggressive restoration efforts by New England state wildlife agencies. Now, not only have they gained lofty status as our state game bird. It’s not unusual to catch the big birds strutting down city streets.

I remember hearing my first gobbles in the early ’80s. Approaching 50, I was guided by a friend trying to spark my interest. This daybreak introduction occurred, quite coincidentally, less than two miles up the hill west of my current home. That East Colrain neighborhood surrounding a vast, working Yankee dairy farm was then viewed by many Bay State hunters as their state’s turkey-hunting capital.

The 2025 spring turkey season opened on April 28 and consumes four weeks. I finally saw my first turkeys of the season two weeks in, on my way to Pine Hill Orchards in Colrain for a Mother’s Day pie. Two skittish hens crossed the road in front of my truck, not a half-mile as crows fly from the spot where I heard those first gobbles many moos ago.

I stopped turkey-hunting many years ago, satisfied that I was a competent caller. After that I called in a few for a friend who loves to hunt, then drifted away when he preferred gentlemen’s 9 or 10 a.m. starts. Far too late for me. Similar to trout fishing, I wanna be there before the birds sing to experience first-light magic. There’s nothing quite like blending into the habitat and waking with the woods.

If ever I get the urge to return to the field, I have plenty of calls, camo clothing, and equipment squirreled away in safe places. Some of the box and slate calls are collectible. In fact, some of the box calls are works of art. A comeback becomes less likely as I age. I have lost my stomach for killing.

As for the ongoing season, it’s hard to imagine anything but a lackluster first two weeks of hunting. The rainy weather has not helped, keeping fair-weather hunters home and reducing daybreak gobbles from the roost to a bare minimum. Gobblers prefer announcing their presence in clear, high skies in which sound travels far, and hunters prefer aggressive gobbling on the way to the gun.

There is, however, plenty of time to harvest a nice gobbler searching for last-chance hens who’ve lost their first nests to predators or pneumonia brought by the extended raw, rainy weather. Still, the highest percentage of spring kills occur during the first two weeks, so I would expect this year’s numbers to be down a bit.

A hunter told me he was puzzled by what he had seen during week one. Perplexed by a lack of sightings and gobbles, he said he’d heard coffeehouse chatter about bird flu infecting our statewide flock. Though I suppose that’s not impossible, I find it hard to believe I wouldn’t have been alerted to such a development by MassWildlife, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the New England Outdoor Writers Association, or other wildlife-management organizations I’m cyber-connected to.

Which brings us to the annual Connecticut River anadromous fish runs, and particularly American shad – the best and most plentiful sportfish of the lot. Shad spawning runs always peak in May after river temps rise into the-60s Fahrenheit. Having tracked, compared and contrasted these runs for nearly half a century, I was surprised to receive my first notice that the runs were underway on April 18. The Holyoke fish lift had opened four days earlier.

I sensed an early start but had no time to investigate. Too busy. So, I printed the report and left it handy on my desk before hitting the road for an Easter Weekend getaway at Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont. Shad could wait.

Since then I have received three additional weekly reports, released each Friday until the fish runs come to a halt and spawning begins. I was right about the early start. Connecticut River coordinator Ken Sprankle attributed it to drought and abnormally low mid-April water levels. That all changed overnight, when five inches or rain fell during the week of May 4. Valley runoff flooded the river, necessitating closure of the fish lift, which, at press time, was expected to open no sooner than late this week.

What that means for this year’s fish runs is at this point anyone’s guess. What we know for certain, however, is that flooding lowers the water temperature and raises turbulence, both of which temporarily slow spawning runs. That said, migrating fish are prepared for such setbacks. By the time all is said and done, we know it’ll all come out in the wash and they’ll make their way to spawning grounds.

As of May 9, with the fish lift down, a total of 26,508 shad had passed Holyoke and 287 of them had passed Turners Falls. Once the river settles down and water temps ascend into the 60s, the sportfishing peak will arrive and last a couple of weeks. So, it won’t be long before the Rock Dam boys are reeling ’em in hand over fist.

A simple matter of when, not if.

posted in Cougars, Salmon, Shad | No Comments

May
15
2025

Squaretail Chronicles

by Gary Sanderson

A record Maine Eastern brook trout weighing nearly eight pounds darted through my Facebook feed last week.

The photo and story posted by a fellow New England Outdoor Writers Association member told the story. Both were pulled from a recent issue of the Bangor Daily News, which had lifted them from the smaller biweekly Moosehead Lakeshore Journal, which seems to have broken the story.

So why not drag it through the five fingers of Montague and bordering communities?

Caught on January 22 by well-known Greenville, Maine ice fisherman Eric Ward, the record fish was a brook trout for the ages, measuring 25 1/16 inches in length and weighing seven pounds, 10 ounces. The weight topped John Dixon’s July 4, 1959 Moosehead record by two ounces. At 25 ¼ inches, Dixon’s seven-pound, eight-ounce fish was a hair longer, with a girth of 17 ½ inches. The girth of Ward’s fish was not reported.

The largest brook trout recorded in Maine was caught in 2010 at Mousam Lake. That one tipped the scale at nine pounds, two ounces. Maine squaretails grow so large due to high populations of rainbow smelt in the food chain. These forage fish are preferred bait for ice fishermen, and keep big trout and salmon fat during their winter dormancy period.

Known to northern New England anglers as squaretails or brookies, Eastern brook trout (Latin name Salvelinus fontinalis) belong to the char family. They are historically the only native trout in our familiar slice of the Connecticut Valley. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brookies populate eastern North American waters from the Great Lakes east to the Atlantic Ocean and south to Georgia along the Appalachian Range.

Squaretails are the first trout I learned to catch as a boy, bait-fishing a small, unnamed, mile-long spring brook that feeds the Connecticut River three or four hundred yards north of the intersection of Hillside and River roads in South Deerfield. The spunky, colorful, voracious fingerlings ranged in length from five to seven inches, and kept me and childhood buddy Mike Manson busy whenever our parents dropped us off there.

We’d return home with a creelful of the speckled beauties, which without exception went from creel to sink to batter bowl to a cast-iron skillet flavored with sizzling, splattering bacon fat. Thus the name “panfish,” brookies sweetest of them all, served with sides of thick-cut slab bacon and crispy home fries.

In later years at forbidden sites, we discovered much larger squaretails in the one- to three-pound range. We called them “bakers,” meaning oven fish. But why go there?

No. Check that. I must tiptoe back. I can’t sidestep my youthful indiscretions for this discussion. Why? The statute of limitations long ago passed.

The big brookies we routinely caught a half-century ago from posted, spring-fed impoundments are directly related to my first impression of the record brookie photographed in Ward’s hands. I wasn’t awestruck because I have seen many large local brook trout and heard of many others over the years.

The big brookies we caught were taken on lures in forbidden waters where they grew large. Golden Thomas buoyant spoons were most productive, but Daredevils and small Mepps spinners worked in a pinch, especially when cast at dusk into an 60-foot outflow neck that collided with a cold, shaded feeder stream once known as Sanderson, then Harvey Brook. The action was fast and furious, and the one- to two-pound brookies ranged from 12 to 18 inches long.

Though I myself never caught a fish that compared to Ward’s there, I did indeed hear of one taken by a neighborhood kid who was probably five or six years younger than me. This notable catch occurred in the late ’60s. I would have been about 15, and heard the tale repeated by several witnesses fortunate enough to see the elementary school-aged boy lugging the fish up the hill home on a stringer.

Word was that the fish had to be nearly two feet long because the kid couldn’t keep its tail from dragging on the road.

I know fish stories tend to be exaggerated, but one of the tellers was a state policeman who had given much testimony in his day, not to mention fished the same, productive spot. In passing, he’d pretend he didn’t see me and my friends fishing there. I guess he liked us because we were ballplayers, and he figured we could be doing much worse than fishing.

We referred to that tidy arrangement as “the hot setup,” and had a blast fishing there. In later years, I took big squaretails from that same bucolic spot on White Wulff and Hendrickson dry flies. That was even more enjoyable than open-faced spin-casting and lures, especially on my friend’s father’s Tonkin cane rod.

In advancing years, when old enough to carry a shotgun, I hunted partridge and woodcock in adjacent woods traversed by a major feeder stream. There I discovered a settling pool at the base of step falls, where large, upstream-swimming brookies congregated on their fall spawning run. It was quite a sight to behold, and one that I shared only with the best of friends.

While I doubt I ever saw a seven- to eight-pound brookie in the mix, the visuals imprinted in memory suggests that some of them may have gone four or five pounds; and that was likely the case for that aforementioned kid’s catch that had the neighborhood buzzing.

My point is that back in the day, before acid-rain endangered native brook trout, there was no need to chase off to the blackfly-infested Northwoods for big ones. They were available right here in our own backyards.

I can’t help but wonder how many of the only trout available to the indigenous people who lived here before us are left?

 

posted in Columns, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments

Apr
26
2025

Riverbank Bobcat

by Gary Sanderson

April 7. Raw and rainy. Eleven-ish.

Out in the woodshed on a morning whim, I’m rearranging what’s left of my winter cordwood supply, heaped against the north and east walls. I can see there’ll be a little left for fall.

I chuck a big, heavy, all-nighter wedge of hard seasoned red oak closer to the entryway when I hear the phone ring in the kitchen. No rush. I’ll check the caller-ID when finished with my chores. The woodburning routine is less demanding come springtime.

Before going inside, I load up an armful of smaller, irregular, knotty pieces – tangled, twisted, and messy with debris. They burn hot and revive a fire when needed. During my daily woodshed chores, I routinely build a little side pile of these oddball pieces to make them easily available from time to time as needed. Kinda like medicine for the daily fire, especially morning’s first on embers from the night before.

Anyway, with my wood-gathering duties completed, I go to the phone expecting to find a familiar name on the caller-ID screen. Nope. Someone new. Last name Richardson, first initial D. Phone number beginning with South Deerfield’s familiar 665 exchange.

Hmmmmm? Facebook friend Peter Richardson, perhaps?

I promptly return the call, and a man answers the third ring.

“Peter?”

“Nope, Doug.”

“Oh, sorry. Didn’t get the first name, and figured it must be Peter.”

“I’m his big brother,” he said – and his River Road neighbor as well, the two residing in adjacent dwellings within sight of Sunderland Bridge.

He went on.

“You’re the guy who wrote an outdoor column in the Recorder, right, and used to report cat sightings?”

“Yep, that’s me. I’ve been retired seven years. What’s on your mind?”

He had a tale to tell. One he believed – correctly – would interest me.

It unfolded on the west bank of the Connecticut River, across the road from his house, where he and three neighbors had been monitoring a bald eagle nest on an island across the way. Following a familiar path to an unobstructed vantagepoint, tripod telescope in tow, they were pleased to discover an eaglet, and were sharing the telescope for close-ups.

As they chatted, Richardson noticed something that drew his attention, nestled into the steep upstream riverbank to his left. There, about 40 feet away, motionless and blending into the backdrop, was the face of what looked to him like a wildcat. Or was it an optical illusion?

When he pointed it out to the man next to him for an opinion, he was assured it wasn’t a log. Sure looked like a cat to his friend as well. When it finally moved, they knew they were viewing a brownish bobcat that didn’t seem unnerved by their presence.

Though I’ve never associated bobcats with the Connecticut River, it makes perfect sense that they’d be attracted to such riverbank environments, which provide tangled shelter and a tasty smorgasbord of prey.

The cat, wearing a blue tag on each ear, just calmly laid there, cleaning itself as the four eagle-watchers quickly switched their focus. All four studied it with their naked eyes, and discussed it as they alternated closer looks through the scope. One even took cell-phone photographs that showed up on Facebook soon after my phone conversation with Richardson ended.

Curious to the four observers was the fact that the animal, though well aware of their presence, seemed relaxed. Why didn’t it flee? Injured, perhaps? Then it calmly rose to its feet and sauntered away at an angle from the intruders. No sign of a limp or unsteady gait. It appeared to be perfectly healthy.

Richardson returned home perplexed. He was certain what he had witnessed was not typical bobcat behavior. Given that the animal was tagged and the number was discernable through the scope, he called MassWildlife’s Connecticut Valley District office in Belchertown to see what he could learn. Possibly state wildlife biologists were conducting a bobcat study, and would be interested in his observations.

To his good fortune, the call came into the district office at a hectic time and was answered by none other than district manager Joseph E. Rogers. What better source than the boss?

Apprised of what Richardson and friends had seen, Rogers wasn’t surprised. Though MassWildlife is not currently tagging bobcats for a study, state wildlife biologists in Connecticut are, and a similar sighting had recently been reported in Hampshire or Hampden County. In Rogers’ opinion, it was likely the same cat. He thanked Richardson for reaching out.

Richardson’s wife Kathleen emailed Rogers the four-digit number on the cat’s ear tags, in case he wanted to dig deeper and confirm his initial presumption that it was the wayward Connecticut cat on an upstream journey.

A few days after the sighting, late afternoon-early evening, my phone rang and Richardson’s name again appeared on the caller-ID. I answered. He wanted to report new information he thought would interest me. Rogers chased down the cat’s identity. The tags were not from Connecticut.

Let Rogers’ April 9 email to Kathleen Richardson explain: “It took me a couple of days to track down, but I was able to ID the tag numbers for the bobcat you reported. It appears this was a bobcat treated at Tufts Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic and released in Belchertown this past winter. It’s good to know the animal is healthy. Thanks for reporting the sighting.”

So, there you have it. Mystery solved.

Apparently, the bobcat remains semi-comfortable around humans after being fed and nursed back to health by Tufts veterinary personnel. That’ll likely change if the animal stays out of harm’s way and continues reacclimating to the wild.

That said, one can never confidently predict such outcomes. Some rehabilitated wild creatures make it. Some don’t.

posted in Columns, South Deerfield | No Comments

Apr
26
2025

Opening Day Stirs Fenway Memories

by Gary Sanderson

Four o’clock. Opening Day. Settled into my power recliner, my wife lounging eight feet to my right in its twin leather companion, computer tablet propped up on her lap. The Red Sox and their new flame-throwing phenom, lefty Garrett Crochet, are facing the Texas Rangers in Arlington, Texas.

Half taking in the pre-game festivities over the top of her device, my wife entertains a thought and asks, “Have you ever been to Opening Day at Fenway Park?”

“Nope, can’t say I have,” I responded, immediately drifting off into a raging stream of memories from America’s baseball cathedral that endured till the final pitch.

Funny how an innocent question like that can trigger a vivid journey down memory lane. So, I figure, why not share some of the recollections I judge appropriate, if even barely so, for a family newspaper? And while we’re at it, if space constraints don’t obstruct our path, maybe even random memories from other New England sports venues – such as the moldy old Boston Garden, Harvard Stadium, and the low-budget Schaefer Stadium in Foxboro, where I spent many a sun-baked Sunday afternoon on the east side, shifting in discomfort on Section 218’s aluminum bleacher  seats.

Yes, those were the days at Foxboro, and I was there – often struggling outside the south entrance before the game to get face-value $18 apiece for two extra tickets. When barterers tested my patience with offers of half-price or less, I sometimes just gave the tickets to a couple of kids who looked like they’d appreciate the generous offer, and ended up joining us for the game.

The problem with a narrative like this is that the best stories can never be told in print, even if the statute of limitations has passed. Far too scurrilous. After all, one has an adult reputation to protect. Trust me, many unprintable reputation-busters arose from the permissive Seventies – when stadiums were stuffed with cussing, cigar-chompin’ men akin to racetrack “railbirds,” and, if you can imagine, coolers stuffed with food and beverage were allowed through the Foxboro turnstiles.

Those were wild times, indeed. Maybe we can circle back if space permits.

I have vivid memories of my first trip to Fenway – purely kids’ stuff. I was 10, in the company of my father, younger brother Bobby, and South Deerfield pals Frannie Redmond and David Zima. Reserved-grandstand seats were $2.25 a pop back then, souvenir programs a prohibitive 15 cents. My father knew the ticket manager and, with our seats on the first-base side, arranged a pregame meeting with budding star left-fielder Carl Yastrzemski near the Red Sox dugout. The Minnesota Twins and slugger Harmon Killebrew manned the visiting dugout.

I brought Yaz’s Topps baseball card to the game to try and get it autographed. Unsuccessful, when we returned home, I stapled it to the program cover and tucked it away in a scrap book. Decades later, when my brother was the golf pro at the International in Bolton and got to know Yaz as a member, he got it signed for me with a “HOF ’89” tag signifying his Hall of Fame induction year.

By then I had been to Fenway several times with my dad and brother, but can’t say any of those visits were particularly memorable. However, that cannot be said of the times I attended games in my teens and 20s with friends and without adult supervision. Many of those adventures were memorable but not for print.

I can tell about the 1972 twi-night doubleheader I attended with older St. Joe’s of Thorndike Tri-County League baseball teammates, on the way home from an independent Saturday road game against the Amesbury semi-pro baseball club. Back then, with attendance sparse by today’s standards, you could still get good seats at the ticket windows leading into the ballpark.

On this day, with a few beers under our belts before we passed through the gate near the Green Monster, our second baseman, a garrulous, fun-loving, black Vietnam veteran from Amherst, got into an argument with a police officer that quickly escalated. Uniformed officials had a way of sparking spirited reactions from some Vietnam vets, and my teammate was one of them. To make a long story short, he never made it into the ballpark, and was instead cuffed, stuffed, and loaded into a paddy wagon to – if memory serves me – Boston’s Fourth Precinct jail, where he spent the night as a drunk-and-disorderly.

When we called the station in an effort to bail him out, we didn’t take the bait to come and get him. Sounded like entrapment to us. Not something you soon forget.

The very next year, on a free catered bus trip for St. Joe’s players to another Saturday game, I arranged to meet my college buddy and teammate at the game, got carried away, and missed the bus home. Undeterred, we hit the Commonwealth Avenue bars after the game and spent the night in Boston. Early the next morning I hitchhiked home to South Deerfield, threw on my uniform, and drove to Thorndike in time for batting practice before our weekly Sunday doubleheader, the park equipped with a full bar and concession stand behind the backstop.

Prior to my arrival, the hilltop park was buzzing about my whereabouts. The loyal, colorful, alcoholic grounds crew was concerned: Would I or would I not show up for the game? Was I alright? As I pulled into a parking place along the right-field line, the fellas gave a smiling standing ovation.

I don’t recall how I performed on the field that day. Probably not well. Out late and up early, I was not in high-performance mode, but ready to give it a go nonetheless. Story of my young baseball life.

I also had some memorable Fenway visits with my sons. Among them was the famous October 16, 1999, ALCS Game 3 “pitchers’ duel” between Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez, won by Pedro and the Sox, 13-1. Clemens lasted two innings and was serenaded with chants from opposite sides of the field of “Where is Roger?” “In the shower,” long after he had settled in the clubhouse.

Also, four years earlier, the post-1994-’95 Major League Baseball strike fan-appreciation doubleheader against the Seattle Mariners, offering $1 general-admission tickets to all on a first-come, first-served basis. I took my family and a group of Frontier Youth League players to the games and, at their request, arrived early to secure primo box seats behind the Mariners dugout. The kids wanted to get a good look at Ken Griffey, Jr., and possibly even his autograph.

Unexpected was the nearby presence of a loud Griffey-hater mercilessly haranguing the young Mariners superstar with vicious banter, including the nickname “Whiffey” as he returned to the dugout between innings, knelt in the on-deck circle, or returned to the dugout after strikeouts.

The man was there for one reason: to get under Griffey Jr.’s skin. It worked. Though big leaguers are expected to ignore such catcalls and insults, Griffey violated the etiquette by engaging in continuous exchanges with the obnoxious fan, who was finally ejected by security guards during the early stages of Game 2. I was surprised, having seen much worse fan abuse aimed at visiting players over the years.

Whew! Enough already. No time for the “Foxboro chronicles.” Just as well – such narrative would require a deep dive into full Hunter S. Thompson-style gonzo mode. I’m not certain a small community weekly is the place for that.

 

Questions and comments are welcome at gary@oldtavernfarm.com.

posted in Columns, South Deerfield | No Comments

Mar
26
2025

Montague Reader Offers Plain Truth

by Gary Sanderson

Spring is in the air and I’m a bit on overload. Thinking. Always thinking. Reading. Absorbing a 24/7 news feed that can be frightening these days. Exhausting, too.

I tried to ignore cable news after the election, which is next to impossible without a change of address to some secluded ramshackle shack along a cold, clear, drinkable spring creek. You know the drill. Living off the grid. No modern devices or distractions. Quiet introspection. But what good does that do? And where, exactly, does it lead?

I’ll begin this week with brief mention of two books I’ve read since I last appeared in this space. Then I’ll circle back to a topic introduced a couple of weeks ago, when I trolled for reader insight about a gruesome scene I happened upon many decades ago in Turners Falls.

For those who missed it, I told of a mass dog grave uncovered by a Montague DPW bucket-loader operator cutting into a steep, sandy escarpment along the eastern edge of the old Montague landfill dump near Judd Wire. I was sitting in my dump truck, awaiting a load of sandy fill as I watched the scene unfolded. Although I did ask around for information at the time, no one seemed to have a clue why it was there.

Keep that image in mind as we switch gears to a brief discussion of the two recently-published books I read. Most recently, Adam Plunkett’s biography, Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry. Before that, Brian VanDeMark’s Kent State: An American Tragedy. Both got good reviews in The New Yorker magazine.

I’m not a Frost fanatic or poetry reader; just knew there was an Amherst connection and figured why not take a closer look? I now know a lot more about the celebrated New England poet, who, according to Plunkett and biographers before him, had his warts. To be expected of artists, no?

I struggled with Plunkett’s analyses of poetry style, rhythm, and form, focusing instead on the autodidactic poet’s idiosyncrasies, his family life and path to literary immortality. Worth the read.

Before that, I breezed through Brian VanDeMark’s Kent State, examining the unfortunate May 4, 1970 crowd-control fiasco I remember well. On that dreadful day, I was a rebellious 16-year-old nearing the end of my junior year at South Deerfield’s Frontier Regional School. The previous summer I had wandered about sopping wet in the fabled Woodstock music festival’s rain and red-tinted mud.

I guess I was biased and had long ago passed personal judgment on Kent State. In my mind, I could find no justification for Ohio National Guardsmen who killed four and wounded nine unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War. It viewed it as an unjustifiable overreaction, but was curious what this new biographer had to say about it a half-century later.

I almost didn’t follow through on my purchase when I looked into VanDeMark and found his Texas pedigree and current faculty status at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Did I really need Kent State analysis by a Texas scholar teaching at a military college? I hesitated and swiped.

In retrospect, I’d say VanDeMark tried to play it fair but, in setting the stage, overstated the dangers presented by radical Sixties activists. Plus, I found him a little too supportive of the weary, inadequately trained, weekend-warrior Guardsmen who pulled the trigger, not to mention the commanding officers. Some of the soldiers faced criminal charges and were acquitted.

As I read, I couldn’t help but wonder if we’re not headed toward another similar occurrence in these hair-trigger times of deep political divides and animosity. In my day, there were plenty of right-leaning, love-it-or-leave-it citizens who unequivocally defended the Kent State Guardsmen. Reactionary supporters of Pres. Richard Nixon and Alabama segregationist Gov. George Wallace were congratulatory, willing to proclaim deadly force against hippie malingerers as long overdue.

Do you think today’s neo-Nazis, KKK, Christian nationalists, Proud Boys, and other hard-right-wing activists think any differently? I’d honestly say these gun-toting, 21-century vigilantes are even more hateful and violent, answering calls for action armed, dangerous, and with bad intentions.

But let’s not get carried away with that. Back to that mass doggie grave on the sandy plain south of Turnpike Road. I knew the furry body parts cascading down the steep sandbank and dangling from the bucket loading my truck were primarily dogs. Roadkill? Veterinary burial place? Something else? Mum was the word when I made inquiries.

Now, nearly 50 years later, thanks to my media query, I’m confident we have the answer. It came via email from a professional Montague woman and longtime resident. There is no need to name her. She’s lived in Montague for at least 50 years.

Rather than paraphrase what she had to say, I’ll present it as it arrived last week in my inbox:

“I’m wondering if this is the same place I went to with my two children seeking our beloved missing dog about 1977. Pretty sure it is. Met the dog officer there and gave him a full description of our unusual buff-colored blue-eyed husky. A beautiful, gentle dog. The officer denied seeing him and pointed to outside kennels holding a few dogs before going back inside. Ours was not there.

“As we were leaving, we heard a familiar howl coming from another outbuilding on the property. Entering, we found our dog tied up in this empty barn, hastily freed him and left the property. Looking back, I wish I had confronted the situation more, but the energy was not comfortable. I still get chills wondering what fate was in store for our pet in that strange place!”

So, there you have it. I do believe we have our answer. That pathetic mass grave we accidentally exposed was on the old Montague dog pound site. Some such places marched to a different drummer back then, when stray dogs were captured, held briefly, and likely shot. Someone I asked that day at the town yard had to know, but decided to play dumb. Why open a smelly can of rotting worms?

Had my source not recognized the plaintive howl emanating from that out-of-the-way barn, I may have seen decomposed body parts of her family’s “unusual buff-colored husky” dangling from the bucket or tumbling down the steep, unstable, sandy escarpment supplying me with fill.

Now it’s history – the dog officer likely dead and gone. Who knows? He may have hated dogs – and loved his job.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

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