Category Archives: Columns

Published pieces I’ve written, primarily in The Recorder, Greenfield, Mass.

New Lower Blue Licks Treasure

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 […]

Gramly Has Intellectual Energy to Spare

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 […]

Nove Salute; Correction; Bears

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 […]

Unsigned Hudson River School Treasure?

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. […]

Elusive Deerfield River Browns Worth Chasing

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 […]

Squaretail Chronicles

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 […]

Riverbank Bobcat

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 […]

Opening Day Stirs Fenway Memories

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 […]

Montague Reader Offers Plain Truth

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, […]

The Beat Goes On

When you’ve worked a beat for nearly a half-century as I have, and enjoy deep roots therein, upturned stones of investigation can trigger vivid memories. This is such a circumstance. It started with word of a supposed archaeological site in South Deerfield, about to be disturbed by the construction of a new dog shelter. When […]

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