WATER CLOSET for March 7, 2014: Yellowstone Wolves
Preface – Arthur McKee, a forest ecologist, friend of the Water Closet and an occasional contributor, has sent an account of dynamic changes in the ecology along the streams and rivers of Yellowstone Park’s Northern Range. Changes along our Ipswich River have...Water Closet for 2-28-14 Iron and Water
Remarkable Carl Close of Middleton takes us back to an ancient art once common. Even more remarkably his son, Carl, Jr., followed suit and became a professional blacksmith. For his father it has been a lifelong hobby.
Water Closet for 2-21-14 Civilization and Dirty Water
A descendant of Australian leavers, the people there before the takers came. Internet photo CIVILIZATION AND DIRTY WATER Sometimes Stream Teamers and Closeteers feel they shouldn’t read. This is tough in our culture where we’ve been encouraged by parents and...PETE SEEGER’S SPIRIT SAILS ON
Last month the body of Pete Seeger, environmentalist and so many other good things, died. In the Water Closet and elsewhere our hero’s spirit sails on. In 1966, he, good wife Toshi, and others founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Inc. in an effort to clean up their river, the mighty but then filthy Hudson. The founders were certainly bucking the political and economic tides of the time. It was in the decade before President Nixon signed the Clean Water Act. Others had given up on the Hudson, long an industrial dump. The environmental group ordered a wooden sloop built in the old way from Harvey Gamage of Maine. In 1969 his beauty, christened Clearwater, was launched and sailed to her new homeport in Poughkeepsie on the Hudson.
Pete’s story of leading many great causes is almost as well known as his songs.1 The older Closeteers remember first hearing him as part of the Weavers in the 1950s singing Leadbelly’s ballad “Irene Good Night”. A Howard Johnson restaurant and ice cream parlor then in Salisbury’s center was an evening hangout for high schoolers. One Closeteer and friends dropped nickels in the jukebox over and over in hopes of seeing Irene “in their dreams”. How quaint the words nickel and jukebox sound 60 years later. Weavers’ songs and thousands of others are now available in many teens’ pockets.