Granite staters

Granite Staters

John O. Harvey

The New Hampshire Century: Concord Monitor Profiles of One Hundred People Who Shaped It, Felice Belman and Mike Pride, Eds., University Press of New England, 2001, $19.95

New Hampshire has been bucking regional and national trends throughout the past century, growing when the rest of the region shrank, embracing local rule as state and federal powers grew, going its own way. Who made it so?

Editors of the capital city's daily newspaper, the Concord Monitor, look at 20thcentury New Hampshire by profiling 100 famous and not-so-famous people who have called the state home: from teacher/astronaut Christa McAuliffe to poet Donald Hall to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. There are less famous shapers too, including a stonewall builder, a computer expert and a survivor of the Spanish Flu of 1918.

The book is edited by Monitor editor Mike Pride and former Monitor city editor Felice Belman, now with the Washington Post

The collection is written in the easy journalistic style of newspaper profiles, making some of the pieces frustratingly brief. Exactly five paragraphs are devoted to John Sununu, the hightech era governor who dogged Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis throughout the 1988 presidential election and was rewarded with the chief of staff job under the elder George Bush.

A profile of the first two women elected to the New Hampshire Legislature, Jessie Doe and Mary Louise Rolfe Farnum, weighs in at just three paragraphs, but is interesting nonetheless given New Hampshire's national leadership in electing women lawmakers. About this phenomenon, the editors quote 1990s House Speaker Donna Sytek: "You can always find women in the world's lowestpaying jobs." New Hampshire legislators today earn $ 100 a year for their service in Concord just as Doe and Farnum did.

A longer essay on Carlton Fisk is a home run, explaining how the Red Sox catcher grew up in snowy Charlestown, N.H., where "the growing season is just too short" for ballplayers, how Fisk made his home in New Hampshire even after making the majors, and how the church bells rang in Charlestown at 12:33 am. after the favorite son famously coaxed a 12th inning home run over Fenway Park's Green Monster to win game six of the 1975 World Series.

The editors offer a fascinating account of the life of labor leader Elizabeth Flynn, from her activist grandfather's role in a plot to set up an independent republic in Canada, through her shuttling the children of striking workers' out of harm's way in Lawrence, Mass., to her leadership of the American Communist Party and her state funeral in Moscow.

Of course, places and times are not really shaped only by people's good sides, and The New Hampshire Century's panicky exits when lives go awry gets tiresome. For example, the chapter on Sherman Adams is good enough, but the scandal involving Boston textile manufacturer Bernard Goldfine that ultimately cost Adams the perceived role as Ike's righthand Yankee is relegated to a single mention in the final paragraph. The lack of preparation offered the reader for New Dealer Gov. John Winant's 1947 suicide is even more perplexing. Ultimately, the profiles are endearing, if a bit economical-just like New Hampshire.

John O. Harney is executive editor of CONNECTION.

Copyright New England Board of Higher Education Summer 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved