An Easton Congregation and Its Award Winning Church

St. Marks Episcopal Church on the corner of Columbus Avenue and Center Street won the Easton Historical Commission‘s Clement Briggs Award last week. The award goes to the property owner who has done something out-of-the ordinary to preserve a historic property. Clement Briggs , our first English settler, built the first European style home in town along the banks of the Queset in Eastondale.

The historic church’s congregation has worked hard over many years to maintain this little gem, and in 2012 a particularly nice job of repainting their building in a two-toned Victorian style caught the eye of Historical Commissioners. What the Historical Commission discovered at its awards ceremony was an inspiring story of perseverance well worth sharing.

The story begins next door to the church lot on Center Street where sometime between 1889 and 1891 Samuel Judson Howe built “Sunnyside” the large house that is today 89 Center Street. Howe was born in Chatham in 1845. Like many Cape people, Samuel’s father mixed farming with the sea. The Howe family moved to Middleborough in the 1850s, and it was there that young Samuel met and married Susan Abby Sanford  in 1866. By 1870 both Samuel and his father were listed as sea captains in the census, and at some point Samuel became a captain in the United States Revenue Service, a precursor of the Coast Guard. Howe, a devout Baptist lived at Sunnyside until his death in July, 1917 and his wife continued there into the 1920s.

Next to Sunnyside were two small lots that were part of a subdivision set out by Lemuel K. Wilbur and Josiah Goward in 1890. Howe bought these lots in May,1892, and in June, 1893 donated them to the First Baptist Church of Easton.  The new church was completed by 1895 in the simple, but elegant late 19^th century  version of the Queen Anne style. A recent historical survey calls the church an “intact and distinctive example of late 19^th century church building in North Easton” and “an important architectural and cultural landmark in the town.”

The Howes were leading members of the new church, but unfortunately, as the original members of the church faded away, the younger generation couldn’t keep up its financial obligations. In 1909 the members deeded the church to the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society which continued to own the property until 1928.

Meanwhile, on February 13, 1916 a group of Episcopalians met in a private home in  North Easton to participate in a service led by Reverend W. W. Love. The service was so well received that the little group decided to establish themselves as St. Mark’s Mission and to rent Lake’s Hall, a small room above Lake’s Store on Main Street at the northwest corner of Mechanic Street. The group met there until October 1926 when it began to rent the Baptist Church on Center Street. The Baptist Society sold the church to three trustees who were to “hold and manage” the property for St. Marks. The church was consecrated in May, 1928 and the trustees soon transferred title to the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts with the condition that the building be used for “a church, chapel, or rectory” for Episcopalians.

Always a small congregation, the people of St. Marks have had to work hard to carry out the mission of their church and to preserve their beautiful building. All went well for fifteen years until Halloween night 1943 when around 9:30 P. M. a fire destroyed most of the interior of the building. Giving the date suspicion arose that the fire might have been caused by a prank gone awry, but close inspection pointed to defective electric switches as the cause of the disaster.

With damages of $9,000 in 1943 dollars a lesser congregation might have given up on the building, but the frame was sound and the people got to work. Five local churches offered help, and the congregation met at the Swedish Lutheran Church on Williams Street for eighteen months. Professionals restored the damaged structure while the men of the church cleaned and repainted the sanctuary. Services resumed in the spring of 1945. The beams in the roof still bear the scorch marks of the great fire.

With the building structurally sound and usable the next decade saw a complete renovation of the interior often through gifts and memorials. The sacristy was restored and a new organ added. A new altar, public lectern, chancel rail, prayer desks, vases, and altar hangings all were added during this time. The exterior required continued maintenance, of course, but the only major change was the replacement of old windows.  In 1952 Sunnyside was acquired as a rectory and parish hall. A decade later the barn on the property was converted into a parish center with Sunday school rooms in the basement.

Throughout the 1960s membership grew, and the congregation made many small improvements to the property. The decades of the ‘70s and ‘80s saw a decline in membership, but the congregation remained committed to maintaining its building. During this time Sunnyside was sold to create an endowment to maintain the church building.

The mid 1980s marked a positive turn for the little congregation. The undercroft of the church was renovated with a kitchen, bathroom, and meeting space added. The members then met in the undercroft while the sanctuary was restored and an office and sacristy added. Once again these changes did not affect the buildings lovely exterior.

An exterior change did occur in the new millennium.  A revived congregation used the undercroft for many charitable and community projects, but it only had a single exit making it dangerous in case of fire. Granted parish status for the first time by the annual Diocesan Convention in 2001, the congregation was able to receive a small loan from the diocese. With the loan and a lot of “sweat equity” from the members a second exit was added, and the building was brought up to code.

Still, the congregation is a small one with a strong commitment to charitable work including support for HUGS II and a program for providing backpacks filled with school supplies for kids in need so financing even general maintenance requires creative thinking. At one point prisoners on work release painted the church, but by 2012 the building needed a new scrapping and paint job. Money was again in short supply. In fact, the job was likely to be postponed until a call was placed to Painter’s Pride in Framingham, a painting company that specializes in churches and other large projects. The owner, Bud Killam, visited the church even though he was told it was unlikely the church could afford his services. Mr. Killam, a fellow Episcopalian, fell in love with the little building and decided to donate a painting crew for a week. Church women banded together to feed the crew who worked through Holy Week 2012. Mr. Killam had the idea to add the golden sunburst in the gable for a touch of Victorian splendor. That sunburst attracted the eyes of the Historical Commission, but it was the congregation’s dedication to preserving this little gem through decades of good times and bad that proved the choice for this year’s Briggs Award winner was one of the best ever.

Painter’s Pride provides free consultations for churches, senior centers, and other large painting jobs. Mr. Killam can be reached at 1-800-600-6472 or bkillam@painterspride.net.

Carne no Espeto

Carne no Espeto is known around these parts as meat on a stick, a direct translation. It is the Portuguese version of Shish Kebab, but the stick is about all the two dishes share in common. Portuguese cuisine is one of the great neglected cuisines of Europe. It first appeared in Massachusetts on the South Coast with Portuguese fisherman before the Revolution, and we are very lucky this is one of the few places in America where it is available.

A Manuel DaSilvia or DaSilva enlisted for Easton in the Revolution and was among our longest serving men. It's doubtful that he actually lived in town, however, since he never shows up on tax records after the war. For some reason Easton wasn't an attractive destination for Portuguese immigrants for a long time. The 1885 state census listed only a handful of Portuguese in Easton while Raynham and Stoughton had large numbers. Farms in Raynham and shoe shops in Stoughton may have been more attractive to these immigrants, but by and just after the turn-of-the 20th century the Portuguese joined the Irish and the Swedes as one of Easton's largest immigrant groups.

The families that came to Easton or perhaps just the males in those families brought with them an excellent marinade for barbecued Carne no Espeto. It became a specialty, a famous delicacy served at ethnic and family events throughout town. It was delicious and served with great pride and a degree of secrecy.

Now at Oliver Ames, the American History classes always did a "Your Immigrant Ancestor" project where students brought in traditional foods. Even warmed up meat on a stick was delicious, but the recipe was still a secret. Heck, in my classes I even added a rule that a recipe had to accompany each dish, you know in case someone had a nut allergy, wink, wink, but still meat on a stick was "oh it's just salt and pepper." Wrong there was more to that recipe, I could taste it.

I made it a crusade to get a real authentic Easton recipe without cheating and using the Internet. It was actually easier to find out who joined the KKK back in the 1920s than to get a recipe for meat on a stick. My attorney knows the damn recipe, but even under the strictures of attorney-client privilege I couldn't weasel the recipe out of him. Things looked grim for years, but I still wouldn't cheat and turn to the 'Net.

Then two weeks ago I was in the Stoughton Bakery, a bastion of wonderful Portuguese baked goods. While waiting for an order of shrimp cakes, I noticed a bag of salt on a shelf. Closer inspection revealed a Gonsalves product labelled "Carne no Espeto." The fine print noted it was for shish kebab Madiera style. Meat on a stick! It had an ingredient list. I bought the bag and marinated some steak tips. It was the real deal.

It actually is mostly "just salt and pepper." Two kinds of pepper: the everyday black stuff and red pepper flakes. I've learned since that most people use American red pepper flakes which is made from cayenne peppers, but that there is a Portuguese pepper (pimenta muida) that is traditional. Along with the salt and pepper, there was garlic powder. Homemade versions may use crushed fresh garlic, lots of garlic. The final and very surprising ingredient was crushed bay leaf. I never would have gotten that.

I happened to mention my find to a Portuguese immigrant who moved to Easton from Stoughton and who is apparently not bound by the secret death curse for talking about the marinade. She confirmed the ingredients on the bag and added that there is a wet and dry version of the marinade. You don't use it like an American style dry rub because the meat would be too salty. In the old days the meat was rubbed and then was brushed off before cooking. Today you can shake it with the meat in a plastic bag and brush off the excess before barbecuing. The homemade wet marinade contains red wine vinegar with all the dry ingredients mixed in.

How much marinade do you need? A wet version from the Internet (I finally looked) uses a quarter cup of red wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons of red pepper, and "liberal amounts" of the other ingredients for two pounds of beef tips. A dry version starts the base with 6 tablespoons of cayenne for five pounds of beef. All recommend an overnight marinade. This probably comes from the old days when the vinegar and salt would be needed to soften up tough cuts of beef. A few hours in the fridge seems to work as well flavorwise. No Internet recipe mentions the bay leaves-the secret ingredient or the one that makes the mix "Madiera Style?" Who knows, but if you don't want to mix it yourself, it's there on the shelf in a really wonderful ethnic bakery. Try the pastel de nata, the famous little custard tart that Portuguese mariners have spread to every corner of the world, while you're there.

Amazing New Idea at the Library!

Halftime of the Patriots game, and I had to go to a dinner at the Library. Not just any dinner, but a jacket and tie dinner. This was a very special special occasion because the library was announcing its plans for the Creative Commons at Queset House. Rumors of a new idea had been circulating for months but what was a Creative Commons?

As more folks are learning every day, the Library is the busiest place in Easton.  Various groups meet there weekly and hundreds of programs take place annually. Also, I’ve visited libraries in Stoughton, Raynham, Mansfield, and Norton recently and I can tell you that, while those are all excellent libraries, the friendliest and most helpful staff is located right here in Easton.

The new library makes use of the old space gloriously and the Italian Garden is becoming a must see destination with plans for more work this summer. Queset House, the other part of the library campus, has lagged a little behind the other developments, but now it is set to take off and lift our library even further beyond other small libraries in Massachusetts.

What is a Creative Commons? You’ll soon be seeing a trifold that explains it in detail soon, but the idea is to build a space where people of all ages can use new technology and old fashioned networking to spark a creative renaissance in Easton.  The slogan is “Classic Exterior, Savvy Interior.” One of the great thrills of the main library building is having modern library services in an extraordinary building that is a pleasure to visit. At the Creative Commons state-of-the-art media will be housed in a beautifully restored,  elegant 19^th century mansion.

Each room will be a module in a site designed to encourage creativity and collaboration. There will be a recording studio, a lab devoted to digital imaging, and a studio for video editing. Creativity needs more than media and the Creative Commons has set aside a room for craft activities, two meeting rooms with TV capability, and a quiet reading area. While I love the technological whiz bang, my favorite room concept is using the house’s original library as the quiet area with the books from the library’s original collection lining the shelves. The modular idea carries through into the old dining room that can easily be converted into a sophisticated new dining room or a high tech meeting area.

The point of this grand idea is to get you, dear reader, to be a media creator not just a consumer. You’ll be able to record family stories, convert old photos to digital ones and retouch the wear and tear of the ages, design a color poster or piece of original digital art, build a website, write an ebook, or simply host a meeting of your favorite group. Young people will be able to work on multimedia school projects. And, something dear to my historian’s heart, you’ll be able to add your reminiscences and photos to the library catalog making them available to future residents.  And, using excitedly bad sentence structure once more, this will be a collaboration, a sharing of ideas, concepts and skills between people of all ages. The Creative Commons at Queset is an opportunity to build a true “artist’s” colony right here in Easton, and you can be the artist!

Neighbors, don’t expect the landscaping at my house to improve, I’ve gone to the Creative Commons at Queset!

You can learn more and find out how to participate by contacting Uma Hiremath at uhiremath@easton.ma.us or Assistant Director Jason Bloom at jbloom@easton.ma.us.

Bread

I love all kinds of bread. I prefer it to potato, rice, or even pasta. I'd have bread at every meal, and so when the Easton area is full of good bread, I have to watch my carbs!

It's been a long time since I tasted the incredibly dull taste of Wonder Bread, but I ate a lot of peanut butter and fluff sandwiches or peanut butter and banana sandwiches when I was a kid. Today, the supermarkets are filled with much more healthy choices like the offerings of the "When Pigs Fly" bakery in Maine that bakes several hearty whole grain breads like Anadama Bread or Pumpernickel. The name Anadama alleged originated in New England when a husband came home to find that his wife was off gallivanting and hadn't made the bread-"Anna Damn her" bread was what the husband threw together.

Even regular bakers like Arnold put out solid healthy non-white choices. Sadly my "favorite" bread from Arnold are those flats that you can slap around a turkey burger and pretend you are eating a roll. At least they come in whole wheat and multigrain varieties.

Real bread lately has come from the Farmer's Market. This summer O'Brien's Bakery from Quincy, the long time Easton Farmer's Market champ had to duke it out with Bridgewater Village Bakery aka The Sourdough Lady. Despite O'Briens offering every bread variety under the sun, the artisanal sourdough was the hands down winner with the customers. At the indoor Winter Market at Simpson Springs there are often three bakers on site. The great breads and confections from Bridgewater come in their infinite variety, but Linda S. from Pond Street has found her niche with scones, cookies, and fudge. A new baker from Norton has also come in with non-sourdough artisan breads; the one loaf of rosemary cheese bread I tried was great!

The problem with artisanal breads is they often come in shapes that are not sandwich optimal. Easton has a solution for that at Andrews Cafe. One of my three New Year's resolutions was to eat at Andrews Cafe at least once a week.  I love their sandwiches-simple, healthy, excellent, with a great price and a cookie for dessert (if you can stay away from their amazing blondies). The bread is a highlight not a sidelight in Andrew's sandwiches. Anyway after my sandwich I bought a loaf of rye bread to take home. Their bread makes great toast whether its multigrain, Jewish rye, pumpernickel, or marble rye (my favorite).

I'm not going to forget two out of town places although I don't go to either one for bread. One is Back Bay Bay Bagel. Now I taught in Randolph when the population was heavily Jewish so I know my bagels as well as knishes, tsimmes and other fabulous food. My Randolph friends and I agree that Back Bay makes the best bagels in the area surpassing the late and somewhat lamented Zeppy's in Randolph.

In exotic Stoughton there is the Stoughton Bakery right next to the train station. I've discovered the back way to this place that avoids the Square, and it is becoming a weekend trip tradition. Recently reviewed in the Globe, it features all sorts of baked goods with a Portuguese flair. They make a linguica roll that is really great and a little fried "cake" that has shrimp in a white sauce inside. My favorite is a guilty pleasure for a diabetic-a sweet custard in a small pastry cup. While waiting for my shimp cake the other day I was looking around the shop when I discovered a bag of seasoning. Tune in tomorrow to discover how a decades long quest to get the secret recipe for Portuguese meat on a stick finally was realized. Take that you Freitas, Pires, and Gomes families!

Radio Sidekicks 2

 Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid both began life as rough characters in turn-of-the twentieth century short stories. Cassidy was a tough, but law abiding cowboy who got his name through an injury in his first story. The Cisco Kid was actually a villain in an O. Henry story. In the 1930's actor William Boyd began to star in a series of 66 B-westerns loosely based on the Cassidy character. "Loosely based" means the original author of the stories fainted at a showing of the first film! The hero Cassidy had two sidekicks in the films: a young headstrong and romantic cowboy and a bumbling older cowboy who provided comic relief. The job of the young sidekick was to initiate the plot by getting involved with a girl or some problem which the wiser, older (so old he had white hair!) Hopalong would solve. The older sidekick was a not-to-bright bumbler who sometimes got into trouble and had to be rescued or made some funny mistake that got Hoppy into trouble. For most of the films Andy Clyde, a Scottish character actor who specialized in rural American accents, played California Carlson,  the older sidekick.

When the market for B-movies faded, Boyd got the brilliant idea of buying up the rights to the films and cutting them down for use in the new medium of TV. Appearing in 1949 Hopalong Cassidy became the first TV western and a megahit. Interestingly, unlike the Lone Ranger which aired on radio for years before making the jump to TV, the Hopalong Cassidy radio show was a spin off of the TV series. Wonder if anyone saw the handwriting on the wall with that although radio westerns lasted another decade after the 1950 debut of Hopalong.

Going from a B-movie to an hour TV show to a half hour radio show meant something had to give and what gave was the young sidekick. California Carlson became the only sidekick. That left room for some character development for Clyde's character. We learn that the nickname came when he bought a gold mine in California that turned out to be in the middle of San Francisco Bay. We learn that a series of spinsters have tried to land the commitment phobic Carlson and that occasionally these become the basis for an episode. We also discover that Carlson is a bottomless pit that needs to be filled with steak, bacon, beans, and flapjacks. As the not-to-bright sidekick Carlson gets to hear Cassidy advance the plot with explanations, an ancient radio story device. Like Tonto Carlson is occasionally sent off with messages to deliver, but unlike the noble Indian Carlson is often made to look foolish or backwoodsy. Despite his bumbling, he always has Hoppy's back in a gunfight.

If you're looking for a storyline for a new TV show, you could do worse than a variation on Hoppy and California. Imagine two retired grandfathers roaming the country in an RV. One a retired middle management type with a famous reputation and the other his company's former janitor or better yet former company trucker with a girlfriend in every truck stop. Each week they roll into another crime scene or swindle or broken family relationship that they fix in the 46 minutes of a typical network show.

As the last of the radio westerns rolled out, they became grittier and more realistic just like the great hour long westerns that ended the era on TV. Gunsmoke is probably the best example. The radio show usually began with the Marshall Dillon character telling us about the lonely life of the frontier marshall, but, while Dillon often acted alone, he had Doc, Miss Kitty, and Chester as continuing characters. Chester, of course, was the bumbling California Carlson type, but in Gunsmoke his miscues had real consequences and were seldom used for comic relief in this grim series. In one instance, a mistake by Chester lets two killers escape, permanantly, with Marshall Dillon left totally exasperated.

 Sidekicks who never made it out of the third grade don't offend if they are All-American dimwits, but when they are ethnic characters things change at least for us today. The radio versions of the Cisco Kid and his sidekick Pancho were played by American not Latino actors. While Cisco is presented as very bright, charismatic, and capable, his sidekick is the dumbest on radio. Pancho is so dumb that he nearly gets Cisco killed on many occasions. One comes to mind where Pancho and Cisco were in disguise but Pancho can't learn to call Cisco anything but Cisco. The banditos, slightly less dumb than Pancho pick up, on this and capture the pair. Add in Pancho's stories about his fat and lazy Mexican relatives, and you have a very offensive mix. Interestingly, the radio show is still widely available while television versions of the equally offensive (this time to African Americans) Amos and Andy are hard to come by. The Amos and Andy radio show was not recorded so all but one or two episodes are thankfully lost to history. Even one of the last radio westerns recorded at the height of the early Civil Rights Movement, Have Gun, Will Travel, has stereotypical Asian sidekicks in Hey Boy and Miss Wong, two employees of the hotel where the mysterious hero Paladin makes his home.

For better and worse, radio westerns with their heroes and sidekicks reflect the time they were made. Despite their flaws, the best of them-the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and Gunsmoke among the ones we've discussed and Fort Laramie among the many we haven't still provide better entertainment than the repetitious  bickering of sports radio or the drug addled babbling of Feel the Rush Limbaugh.
Podcasts of many genres of old time radio are readily available at ITunes.

Sidekick 1

Now that Joe Biden has apparently pulled us back from the fiscal cliff perhaps its time to write an appreciation for the Wild West sidekick. You know the comic relief that occasionally bails out the gun toting hero. Here I have to confess my love of old time radio-those stories that filled the airwaves from the 1930s into the 1960s. My favorite genre is the Western where in the days before Brokeback Mountain every hero rode the range with a male sidekick without the hint of a bromance. Interestingly, many of the radio detectives also had sidekicks, but they were often dames. There's a limit to how dumb you can make a dame in a radio show (Gracie Allen excepted), but there is no limit to the stupidity of many western sidekicks.

Now before you send an ambulance to take me to the rest home, I want to let everyone know I'm a child of the dawn of TV, and I first met these "legends of the Old West" on TV not radio. That makes me old enough!

Long days and nights on the trail aside, the radio sidekick existed as a plot device. When Hoppy or Cisco or Marshall Dillon was planning something California, Pancho, or Chester was there to hear his ideas in our stead. The most iconic sidekick was, of course, the Lone Ranger's Tonto. Wikipedia informs us Tonto started working with the Ranger in the twelfth episode of the radio show back in 1933. Two origin stories emerged over the years. In the first the Ranger saved Tonto's life, in the Revised Standard Version (affirmed by TV) Tonto stumbled upon the wounded Ranger after the deadly ambush by Butch Cavendish that wiped out an entire squad of Texas Rangers. Just to keep the questions down it was duly noted that the Ranger had saved Tonto's life when he was a youth or a Ute, I'm not sure-you know about Tonto's difficulty with English.

Actually Tonto was supposed to be a member of the Potawatami tribe from Michigan. It just happens that the station owner where the Lone Ranger first aired was a Michigan native who claimed to have learned a little Potawatami back in the day. Rumor also has it that the show's first director's father-in-law owned a kids camp named Camp Kee Mo Sah Bee. Tonto supposedly meant "wild one" in Potawatami while Kee Mo Sah Bee meant "faithful scout."

After the end of the Ranger's run on TV, political correctness brought a microscope to these two terms. Tonto in Spanish means "dumb" while Kee Mo Sah Bee can be translated as "One who knows." When the Ranger was dubbed into Spanish Tonto became Toro ("bull"). In the TV series I don't remember the Ranger calling Tonto Kee Mo Sah Bee, but it happens in the radio show all the time. So Tonto is the "one who knows."  Finally, it's hard to believe that people running a radio station in Michigan in the 1930's would be cool enough to make jokes in Spanish when there were French Canadians nearby to make fun of.

Now General Phil Sheridan made that unfortunate statement about good dead Indians, but for most Easterners of the '30s good Indians were stoic, laconic people with great pride and a connection to nature. The radio writers couldn't show a laconic sidekick so they invented Tonto speak: "Him, no good, Kee Mo Sah Bee. Me go, now." Since throughout the radio show the character of Tonto was played by an English actor named John Todd, there is a certain irony in Tonto's speaking problems.

As a character Tonto is not the comic relief in the plot like many sidekicks. His role is to be the avatar for the Ranger in situations where that foolish mask might raise suspicions and the writers don't want to bother putting the hero into his old prospector disguise. Tonto goes to town, Tonto carries messages to the sheriff or the ranchers, or the nesters. Often Tonto's skills save the ranger or at least advance the plot. If only Todd had been allowed to speak in an English accent, Tonto would have an honored place as one of the first minority characters to be presented as a positive rather than a negative stereotype. Remember stereotypes have a long history in theater as "stock characters."

By the way, the furry friend at my feet looking for breakfast would like to point out that her favorite sidekick is Sergeant Preston's wonder dog King ("On King, On You Huskies"), and, as a bona fide wonder dog herself, she is deeply offended with King's often insightful barks and growls being dubbed by actors with terrible accents.

More about King, California, Pancho, and Chester in the next post.