Get On Board

Shelburne Farms, up near Burlington, Vermont, near the top of the state, is a fairyland of rolling green fields with now and then a beautiful farm building. The property and grounds were developed with Vanderbilt money and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1823-1903), one of American's best-known landscape architects. Last Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the Preservation Trust of Vermont. As the Windsor Library had been given a grant to complete the masonry renovation this year, the trustees were invited to put up a display and talk about it. Not paying attention to various small signs, one could easily get lost.

The exhibition barn, largest of its type in the world, was filled with dozens of representations from towns all over Vermont. It was gratifying to see so many projects of older buildings being restored to new life in their communities. In the midwest where I was born, as buildings age, they are often destroyed. My grandfather's three-story hotel, a beautiful brick 1903 building with sculptured metal façade, was bulldozed down by his sons who lacked the will to save it. Most significant buildings in Breckenridge, Minnesota, have been destroyed and replaced with modern, stark architecture or a parking lot. The important heritage of my ancestors is lost forever.

Within the last few years, two entrepreneurs have reversed the trend to destroy heritage structures in Windsor, Vermont. A dozen buildings are being renovated, restored to their former place in the community. Folks are bringing new life to some Main Street buildings that, a year ago, were on the way to the scrap pile. Four new storefronts will soon bring a new look we have all missed. But for the foresight of a handful of people who believe in renovation, Windsor's Main Street might still be back in the dark ages. One thing, however, must follow: Constant support from all of us, who believe in a revitalized town, to insure the new merchants' gamble. The more we shop and buy from our local merchants, the more we keep our town vibrant and healthy.

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Escape To Sanity

While we were young boys, I never paid much attention to my brother Bob. We had no father in our home well before we were teenagers. Our Grandfather became his role model as did our Uncle Tony for me. We both started first grade in the Catholic school, but, after first day in the third grade, Bob refused to stay and installed himself in the public school. At only nine years of age, I now suspect it was grandfather that gave him the courage. We began drifting philosophic worlds apart in two different schools. I still have some interest in the concept of God, he, completely anti-church, is probably an atheist

After Pearl Harbor, I joined the Air Force and Bob went in the Marines. When I heard he was being sought by the FBI for driving a stolen car across state lines while being AWOL from the Marines, I was worried and bewildered. From a Marine "Brig" where he saw men being beaten by Marine guards, he was shipped overseas to the South Pacific. Going AWOL again, he was jailed for years, until finally released after the war.

Bob was never able to forget the brutality he saw in the Marines and not able to talk about it until now. After the inhumane treatment of prisoners in Iraq, and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a shocked world is seeing this inhumane treatment go on and on. October 16th of 1969, "Life" magazine did a complete story of the mistreatment of Marine prisoners on Marine training bases on both coasts. Doctors and ministers, who tried to object to this brutalization of servicemen, were ignored and silenced.

Now we witness a single woman, who has lost her son in Iraq, waging her single-handed effort to be able to speak to the President about this war. That he is able to ignore her plea is testimony to the fact that a similar inhumanity of man goes on, year after year, while we do nothing about it. The question that persists is, it seems to me, are we all in a prison of the mind, from which there is no escape to sanity?

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Mystery Man

Read all about it, on the obituary page, a man named Lynwood by his parents died recently. This was no ordinary man, and he proves: "there is no such thing as an ordinary man." When I came to Windsor nearly thirty years ago to start Vermont Public Radio -- third floor of The Windsor House, Lynwood was walking toward the library on a Friday, clutching a brown paper bag under his arm.

He was tall, slim, and walked with a rolling, or ambling gait, sort of leaning into the wind. Never going slowly, it seemed he had a mission to accomplish; destiny somewhere was calling. Even in coldest winter, Lynwood never wore a hat, too much in a hurry to bother with that, had to get to the library, then get right back home, it seemed to me.

At least once a week I saw him or met him on Main Street, as he tread that weekly path, and although I spoke or said good morning to him, he never ever answered me. It is that way with some Vermonters. Last Friday he fell to the floor in the library and was dead on arrival at Mt. Ascutney Hospital. They say he had been selecting his "usual six" books. Privacy prevents knowing what he read in those 9000, or so, volumes. Lynwood is as much a mystery as Salinger and, it seems,there is something Godlike in both of them.

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Duty Calls: Public Radio

The summer of 1977 I was in my little garden in Chelsea, Vermont, thinking of Voltaire's Candide, in his ideal garden, when the phone rang. I was summoned to Windsor, to be interviewed for the job of founding producer of "The Spoken Word," for the new Vermont Public Radio. Enjoying the country after three years of fighting the establishment, I had been reading a personal letter from Senator Robert Kennedy, congratulating me as the deciding factor for bringing about a new federal law guaranteeing a trial by jury, within 30 days, for mental institution patients. Hundreds were freed, all across the country, as a result of the new law. But now my vacation was over!

Divorced from a life of working industry and raising a family of four, I had visions of being in an old house in Vermont, tending my garden, doing the writing that busy days had taken away. Now a new challenge called. From 70 applicants, I was chosen to help start a new public radio station for Vermont. When I had applied, I had not really expected it!

On that Saturday morning on the third floor of Windsor House, six of us were gathered around Ray Dilley and Betty Smith, becoming more excited by the minute, as we discussed the details of a state-wide radio station. Jerry Erickson, our engineer, said a permanent control board was being built by an electronics firm in Canada, but we would be on the air, before summer ended, with a portable control board. We met every day and planned, while the third floor was being converted into offices and a sound-proof studio with airlock-doors.

As producer of "The Spoken Word," I began calling nationally well-known people, some, like John Kenneth Galbraith, here in Vermont on summer vacation, and others, like Margaret Mead, visiting at Dartmouth. My weekly program, Legendary, always featured a new person. Politicians such as George Aiken and Richard Snelling were very eager to see Vermont Public Radio get off to a good start. Windsor House was the ideal place to get it going!

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(Copyright 2005 - All Rights Reserved by Frank Anthony - Reprints Permitted
Please notify when reprinted and where.)

Letter to the Author: Frank Anthony at newvtpoet@aol.com

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