Iconic Regional Businesses: South Coast

Be sure to check our SOUTH SHORE and CAPE COD versions of this article. Same into, different businesses.

Life has bounced me from Boston to Quincy to Duxbury to Worcester (back) to Duxbury to Monponsett to Cape Motherlovin' Cod. I've seen them come and go, friend.

One thing that I noticed as I hopped around was that some business chains I got used to in one spot would either not exist in another spot, or some other product in the same field would be dominant in this new region.

I'd also see businesses that started in one spot springing up everywhere. That's always nice to see, especially with something you grew up loving... it sort of affirms your sense of good taste for you.

One other phenomena I'd see is that, while my friends and I might favor one particular local place or another, we'd have a regional default option. To use an example with a powerful business not born of these parts... we both might want a burger. I like Schmuckburgers over on Main Street. You like Ye Olde Slaughtered Cow on the State Road. However, there's always McDonald's.

Massachusetts is a funny place. We like things a certain way. There is an impressive list of otherwise nationally prosperous franchises who flop in Massachusetts. Pizza Hut, Papa John, Little Caesar and Domino's all struggle in Massachusetts, as locals often prefer their town's House Of Pizza. Locals laugh, especially near the coast, if you ask where the Red Lobster is. You might get punched, especially in Italian neighborhoods, if you ask where The Olive Garden is. IHOP and Krispy Kreme may be the biggest names crossed off of the Dunkin' Donut's hit list.

Today, we shall examine a few businesses which have that sort of regional recognition. Some people explore the world. Some people explore regions of it. If you are a regional tourist, look at this as a part of Bucket List. You should be familiar with all of these businesses we are about to discuss, You can get your Local card pulled, otherwise.

Someone who never went to the Cape as a kid might not know the Thompson's Clam Bar jingle, while someone from Harwich might think that Peaceful Meadows is a pet cemetery. View these places as a sort of Mendoza Line. Thompson's never expanded regionally, and Peaceful Meadows might be an ounce of Swagger away from being listed down below.

I broke this list up by Barnstable/Plymouth/Bristol County, although it could very easily be Cape Cod/South Shore/South Coast. I had to stretch up to Mansfield to fatten the South Coast category, but it's still Bristol, babe.

Here we go...


Bristol County

Honey Dew Donuts

Honey Dew and Marylou's make a tough dollar fighting for coffee sales (Honey Dew doubles down by going after the donut market, too) on the home turf of Double D. Honey Dew has fought hard enough to scatter 165 locations around Massachusetts.

They started in Mansfield, are now based in Plainville, and they own interior Bristol County. They have done a very good job of establishing themselves in Boston. Dunkin' kicks the spit out of them, but the people who like Honey Dew better are a loyal and dedicated bunch.

You can survive quite nicely like that, especially if you make a decidedly different donut than Double D does.

No one said it was easy, but Honey Dew is faring well enough for themselves. I want to see them cross paths with Marylou's somewhere, just to see who wins.


Gaspar's

Gaspar's is the largest manufacturer of Portuguese smoked sausage in the USA. Most of this is via their sales of Linguica and Chourico.

They have been whipping out the sausage for 4 generations from their Meat Mecca on Faunce Corner Road in North Dartmouth. They started in 1923.

Linguica is smoked sausage, made from smoke-cured pork, garlic and paprika. It is the go-to meal for any Portuguese person, but white people can shovel it down, too.

In Brazil, it is served with rice and beans. In Massachusetts, it is generally sliced open and grilled.

IMHO, it's the best pizza topping.


Minerva

You could very easily scratch out "Minerva" from the heading, fill in "Rose & Vickie's" or "Venus Cafe" and pretty much tell the exact same story. Someone of Southern European heritage starts a pizza joint, has some luck, wins over the locals and expands somewhere in the region.

Minerva started out in 1969, in Wareham. They carved out a nice niche serving Wareham, Onset and Marion. They expanded west, into Fall River, and east, into the Cedarville section of Plymouth.

Rose & Vickie's has Manomet, Cedarville and Marion. The Venus chain, which numbers all of their franchises other than the original Venus Cafe in Whitman, also has the Venus II in Brant Rock and Venus III in Hanson.

I have friends who eat 7 meals a week easy out of the Cedarville Minerva. They eat enough that their dog, Joe Biden, has grown accustomed to it. He eats enough of it that we re-named him "Joey Takeout."

"Joey Takeout" sort of morphed into a joke among my friends and I, and we work Joey Takeout references into our phone conversations... always with ominous overtones that are funny if you know that Joey Takeout is a ragamuffin Shih-Tzu dog and not the dangerous Sicilian mobster who we make him out to be.

Granted, this is a lot funnier if you have reason to believe that the police are tapping your phone. Somewhere in Plymouth, there is a police file on a non-existent gangster with transcripts like "Joey Takeout gets a bite out of everything coming into the White Cliffs."

Titleist

Golfers know all about Titleist golf balls, which enjoy a fine reputation among golfers and have been spoken for by many of the great ones.

Titleist got started just like every other business did, even yours... a MIT grad missed a putt, blamed the ball, had his dentist friend X-Ray the ball, and then transitioned a rubber-making company into golf ball production factory. They did $1 billion in sales in 2003.

Titleist, originally the Acushnet Process Company or something like that, is now based in Fairhaven. Staying true to their Original Recipe, every single ball made by Titleist is X-Rayed to ensure that the center is balanced.

The cursive "Titleist" logo scrawl on the golf balls belongs to Helen Robinson. She was a secretary for the Acushnet Company who was known for her exquisite penmanship. They gave her a pen and a scrap of paper, she hit it in one take, and her writing has appeared on every single product that the company has produced ever since. Her writing has appeared on more balls than Jasmine St. Claire.

I think that this is Helen Robinson. She looks like she was about to get taken off to see the Wizard.

Trucchi's

William Trucchi opened a supermarket off Tremont Street in Taunton with $500 that he borrowed from his parents. The Great Depression went down shortly after, but Italian grocers don't get Depressed! Especially in Taunton!

They have six stores scattered from Taunton to West Bridgewater to Abington to Middleboro to New Beffuh.

This is no mean feat in this age where a Super Wally opens down the road and every business nearby dies.

Angelo's, A&P, Shaw's, Star, Purity Supreme... supermarkets come and go, change names, and all sorts of stuff. Trucchi's keeps trucking along.


Fishing

The port of New Bedford is America's leading fishing port, with landings valued at $369 million. They have 30 wholesale processing plants, and employ 4400 people.

New Bedford lands 117 million pounds of product, including 50 million pounds of scallops. During the height of the season, 500,000 pounds of scallops move through New Beddy in a day.

Gloucester has the Gorton's Fisherman and the George Clooney movie, but New Bedford has the money. The port, and the economic activity associated with it, haul in $1 billion a year.

New Bedford has whatever you need to get fishing done. New Beige has chandlers, ice houses, welders, net designers, boatyards, gear builders, engineers, maritime attorneys, insurance brokers, settlement houses and every other conceivable shoreside marine support business.

They also have pretty girls hanging around the docks while we were shooting.

Buttermilk Bay Beach Replenishment

Buttermilk Bay is a body of water in the village of Buzzards Bay, in the town of Bourne. There is also Little Buttermilk Bay connected to it. I know, it gets confusing, but bear with us here. I am presently unaware of any name existing for the beach in front of Hideaway Village... "Hideaway Beach" is already taken, by Marco Island, Florida. (Editor's Note: We found a reference to "Hideaway Village Cove" on this site)

People ask "Why don't they just call this part of town Buttermik Bay?" Sorry, but that's taken by Plymouth. "Buttermilk Bay" is the southernmost village in Plymouth. If the Plymouth version of Buttermilk Bay touches the body of water that is Buttermilk Bay, it doesn't touch much of it. (Editor's Note: The Plymouth village doesn't touch her namesake bay it stops at Head Of The Bay Road. Bourne is the only town which touches both Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay)

I'd complain, but I live in the village of Buzzards Bay, which only touches the body of water that is Buzzards Bay in the slightest way. If you need to be more confused, you enter Buttermilk Bay by going through Cohasset Narrows. The actual Cohasset town is about 40 miles north, in Norfolk County. Welcome to Cape Cod.

All of this sand is going to help restore the beach in the Hideaway Village area of Buzzards Bay. HV fronts Buttermilk Bay, if I phrased that proper-like. They get low (3 foot, as opposed to 8-9 foot tides I used to see on Duxbury Beach) tides, and minimal wave action.

However, it doesn't take much tidal compulsion to move beach sand down the line into Wareham. This sand meets with soil run-off from the Red Brook in the Wareham/Plymouth/Bourne tri-corner, and helps form an ever-growing estuary. There is some danger of sanding over a rather nice clam-digging area, but you can always buy some hip-waders and march out into the shallows with a fat rake. There is also a history in this direct area of rapid/total eelgrass depletion following development.

Erosion wins by attrition, rather than in a singular, overwhelming charge. Even if you just lose a few grains of sand with each wave, it all adds up over time. It's perfectly natural, and all good... unless, of course, you want to sit by the shore instead of having the shore move inland past your house. In that case, you need to replenish the lost sand.

Have no fear, Hideaway Village is here! They're dumping all of this sand down, hopefully the X part of a "Beach Remaining After Erosion + X Amount Of Sand = Cozy Beach" equation. By my own conservative estimates, they have enough sand stacked on this beach to fill 873,290 kitty litter boxes.

One thing we always said on Duxbury Beach.... never do work on shoreline property until mid-to-late April. This is 25% because of "the chance of storms," 25% because of "high spring tides," and 50% of "both." The Hideaway people are nowhere near the high tide line, and should lose no new sand to a high tide.

We'll be back with more pics once they've spread it around a bit.

Death Row? Dividing The Scenic Highway...

The Scenic Highway in Bourne may be undergoing some major changes, according to Wicked Local Sandwich.

The Scenic Highway, as you know, is the 4.5 mile section of Route 6 that runs along the Cape Cod Canal between the Bourne Bridge and the Sagamore Bridge in mainland Bourne. It eventually becomes the Cranberry Highway, but that's Wareham's problem.

The Scenic Highway's problem is that it is undivided. The only things stopping you from using all four lanes to weave through summer traffic are Law and Imagination. The potential for head-on collisions is staggering. The downhill/northbound part just before the Herring Run rest area traffic lights might be the worst section of road on Cape Cod in a snowstorm.

Why, just yesterday, I saw a northbound fuel truck with 55000 gallons of gasoline pass within one nanometre of a southbound 18 wheeler truck entirely devoted to delivering Bic lighters to various liquor and convenience stores in the area. The potential explosion would have flattened Buzzards Bay and took down the Bourne Bridge. A nanometre is a unit of measurement equivalent to one billionth of a metre.

It's only a matter of time before we have some terrible accident like that, or one like the rejected-by-staff example where an unfortunate collision causes a truck full of liquid nitrogen to disgorge into a bus full of of church-picnic nuns and orphans. When the accident does happen, people are going to look back and ask "What could have been done to prevent this?"

One thing that we could do involves Jersey Barriers. Now, you should already know that a Jersey Barrier is not when a corpulent Governor puts a bunch of DPW trucks on the one bridge leading in to your town. No, these are modular concrete or plastic barriers used to divide traffic lanes.

Laying a line of these things down the Scenic Highway would vastly lower the chance of head-on crashes, the big killer of the Oops industry. The police, who have to clean these messes up, agree. When asked about the environmental impact of the Jersey Barriers, one Bourne cop told WLS to "paint it green."

Speaking of green, those barriers don't just sprout up on their own. Funding would be needed, not an easy thing to get these days. They're already talking about a permatax (in the form of a toll) on any third bridge project.

Patrick Ellis, a Sandwich selectman who has run a business in the area for years, also sits as the Upper Cape representative on the Metropolitan Planning Organization. He thinks that getting the project on the Transportation Improvement Program will open up the possibility of federal funding.

Granted, we still have to pay for federal funding stuff via taxes, but it's a much larger pool of "we" when we go national instead of local.

I'm not sure if we could get the fancy, HOV lane style of movable Jersey barriers. I'm not sure if they'd help at all, to be honest. Our worst traffic jams seem to be when the traffic is coming fro all directions, anyhow.

There would be a learning curve. People may also get a bit gun-shy when driving near barriers. Many people think that the prominent sidewalk is what slows down traffic on the bridges.

 Either way, you'll be hearing about the Jersey barrier idea again, and it may become a fact of life in the upcoming years.

Ocean State Job Lot Opens In Wareham

East Wareham was down, but they were never out. 

Things looked bad for the east side of the 'Ham when Wal-Mart left the Cranberry Plaza. Coming on the heels of Staples hauling up stakes a few years ago, it looked like a deathblow for a whole section of town. Wally was the engine that drove the local economy.

More than one local who I chatted with mentioned how leisurely it was to drive on the Cranberry Highway since Wally moved along. It used to be awful, and you were taking your life in your hands any time you tried to cross it... especially on foot.

It's tough to replace Wally. You don't do it with just one store it seems, as two stores have rushed in to fill the void created by the Drang nach Westen of Walter Mart. Cardi's (of Wareham) is coming soon, and the Ocean State Job Lot just opened.

Coming soon... Cardi's!

So, with Wally just down the road a bit, and two new stores setting up shop in Wally former nest, what's not to like?

I do worry some about the Buzzards Bay version of the Ocean State Job Lot, as I can't imagine that the demand for OSJL's particular inventory can support two stores within a mile or two of each other... but I also do this for a living, so what the Hell do I know?

 Locals recall that Buzzards Bay once had a Burger King, but that it moved down into Wareham. Dunkin' filled the void, and would be the leading candidate to shift into the OSJL's Buzzards Bay location if they decided to just host one store in the area. I can see Dunkin' wanting very badly to be posted up on the Belmont Circle rotary.

But that's putting the cart in front of the horse. For now, we picked up some new jobs, we filled an ugly gap in a crucial local marketplace, and we'll see how things shake out from there.

This sort of kills my plans to write about the abandoned Wal-Mart being used to house and supply UN troops (Chinese and North Korean), who are being based here for when the one-world government comes to confiscate our guns.

I was going to get my friend Tristan to pose outside the abandoned Wal-Mart in a homemade UN jacket as a sneaky-looking North Korean occupier. He's of Japanese descent, but he'd pass in a pinch.

Now, I'll never get on Infowars.com. Maybe I can get a Jew or a Freemason poisoning a well.

I want the ship clock up there for a blank spot on my office wall....

... as well as this thing to pick cookie sheets up with that looks like Cookie Monster somehow got a baby up in Kermit T. Frog.

Local Town Nicknames

Most of the town names around here are easy enough to figure out. Duxbury was the name of the Standish family estate back in the E. Plymouth was named after an English port city. Hull was named after an English river, Marshfield was named for her meadows, Kingston was named for Rodney King, and so forth.

But locals have their own language, and these towns around here often get a second name, and sometimes several of them.

I'll lead off here by stating that I know where none or almost none of these nicknames come from... especially the fun ones like Marsh Vegas or Deluxebury. I'll be guessing, mostly to entertain you good people. If you disagree, don't get all mad at me... you'll find me amenable to opposing views, because I realize even before I start writing that your guess is as good as- and possibly better than- mine. I just happen to be the one at the keyboard.

Let's check some nicknames... and folks, if you get offended, remember that I'm not the Chamber of Commerce. Your town earned these nicknames.

Marshfield 

We may as well start at the top. Marsh Vegas is the Grandaddy Caddy of local town nicknames.

A lot of people hate this nickname, but I think that they're being a bit sensitive. Marsh Vegas- big, bold, bawdy- rules!

It almost doesn't matter, because Marshfield people tend to identify their homes by villages. They are more likely to say "Brant Rock" or "Green Harbor" than to answer "Marshfield." No one from Duxbury does that, other than perhaps the people on really rich streets saying something along the lines of "Washington Street."

Las Vegas was founded in 1905, and gambling was legalized there in 1931. After Dubya Dubya Deuce, casinos began to spring up. It was famous after that,

But where does Marsh Vegas come from?

There are several prominent theories.

1) Mark Parentau made it up.

MP, the kid-diddling former WBCN DJ, was a Green Harbor resident once. If you waste a morning looking for Marsh Vegas origin stories, you see ol' Mark Parentage coming up a lot.

However, it seems as though he may have just popularized the term by dropping it on WBCN broadcasts when he could. Mark started at BCN in the late 1970s, and the term was already in wide use for decades by then.

2) Marshfield Fair horse racing

You can bet on horses, and that goes a long way in a place founded by Puritans so stuffy that they even banned Christmas.

The Marshfield Fair, and several other agricultural fairs, were allowed to solicit betting on horse racing. Race Fixing was widespread.

However, this is more likely a part of the whole than the whole itself. If it were the whole, Marshfield would have a horse-racing styled nickname, aka Marshfield Downs or something.

3) Gambling, Ballrooms, Eating Establishments

We live in  a modernized South Shore, with malls every 1000 yards and a Dunkin' on every block. It used to be a lot quieter in these parts.

But not Marshfield. As soon as ocean recreation became popular in 'Murica, Marshfield was a favorite spot. Marshfield began to cater to out-of-towners, and was soon the Fun Mecca of the region. Compared to, say, a sleepy Kingston side street, Marshfield would look like the friggin' City Of Light.

The Gestalt of it would be a mix of all of those attractions, viewed from an unsophisticated Swamp Yankee eye, resulting in a cool nickname.

4) "The Meadows"

"Las Vegas" or "Los Vegas" (I took French in high school, which got me laid a couple of times but is of no use in this particular discussion) is Spanish for "the meadows." Marshfield is literally covered in meadows, to the extent that there really was no second choice for a town name.

5) Route 139

Marshfield was never shy about their commercial district. Route 139 is almost a complete run of business signage from the highway to the beaches. It may not look like much if you drive by it every day, but you need to remember that neighboring Duxbury wouldn't even let Dunkin' put a sign up.

Most people in these parts live in quiet little cul de sacs, so Route 139 is as much advertising they'll see unless they drive up to Boston or turn on the infomercial channel.

Anyhow, your guess is as good as mine.

If Marshfield dropped the "field" and added "Vegas" to the town name, they'd probably be everyone's second favorite town.

Long shot/you heard it here first bet? If "Vegas" can be hung off of whatever Massachusetts town gets a casino, look for some variation of the Vegas name to be formed from their name. "Taunt Vegas" or "Midd Vegas" or whoever...

Let's hop a town line or two, shall we?

Pembroke

Pembroke has 2 nicknames, neither one in wide usage. "Pimp Broke" is mostly used by hip-hop fan kids, and may never have been uttered by anyone over 17 years old who isn't writing this article.

"Pemby" is useful only to people who have to write "Pembroke" a lot. It's kind of cute and peppy, but is also not in wide use.

Pembroke's nearest flirtation with an alternate name was in colonial times. They were very nearly called "Brookfield," as the town is covered with both brooks and fields. "Mattakeesett," which means "place of many fish," was also pretty catchy.

They ended up naming it after a Welsh castle, river, battle and village. Massachusetts got the far more peaceful Pembroke.

There is a small section of Pembroke named Bryantville, but it was never really a contender for the whole town's name. .


Hanover 

Some nicknames take care of themselves. Hanover is named after a German city, sort of as a tribute to King George, a Hanoverian head of state in England who was perishing at the time of Hanover's 1727 incorporation.

Hanover (formerly a part of Scituate, another hard-drinking town) people are the veterans of many a hard-fought bottle, and they don't need a second nickname.

Hangover!

Scituate

Scituate is a pretty cool name, made cooler by the fact that only locals can pronounce it.

You will hear this pronounced with a misleading "Skit" prefix now and then, perhaps springing from the Cape Cod habit of teasing the tourists (for instance, there is no Cape Cod Tunnel) now and then.

We may as well knock off another Heavyweight next...


Duxbury

Duxbury is a rather posh locale, and shoulders a lot of hate from the more blue collar towns. Naturally, there will be some good-natured ribbing involved.

Unknown to history, some South Shore genius hung "Deluxebury" on to someone who most likely deserved it. "Bucksbury" was passed over.

Duxbury embraced the term, and using it on them is ineffective, much like when black people call white people "honky."

There is a Deluxebury Wheels in Los Angeles, which could just be one of my people moving out west. I wish they made rims, but I don't think that they have a website.


Halifax

Halifax is the opposite of Deluxebury and Marsh Vegas. They chose their own nickname, knocking a syllable off the total cost.

They call the town Hally, pronounced like the first name of Miss Berry from Monsters Inc.

Monponsett

Shortened to Mopo, which is probably a syllable too many for the area. Wampanoag for "island between the seas."


Bridgewater

Any of the Bridgewaters- East, West or Regular- is known as Bilgewater here and there. I'm not sure if there is a sewage treatment plant in town.


Plymouth

Plymouth's America's Hometown nickname is so prominent that it almost needs a nickname for itself. It also isn't casual, like most nicknames. I doubt that Madonna's friends call her "Madonna," and no one says "I'm headed down to America's Hometown today" to other locals.

However, this was the big one I forgot to add. See? I do take (useful) advice from commenters.



Brockton

It's never a wise policy to make fun of Brockton where she can hear you, but it is known as Brocky, B-Rock, 30 Brock and a dozen other minor epithets.

The high school used to be known as Club Homeboy, but that may have played itself out.

New Bedford

New Bedford is sort of lame anyhow... "We couldn't think of an original name, so we stole an old one." Would you pay money to see "New Led Zeppelin" and such?

No worries... New Bedford is also known as New Betty, New Beddy, New Beffuh and both Beige and New Beige. I'm pretty sure that New Beffuh is white trash articulation, while various forms of Beige are pure Portuguese patois. After a while, it just sort of became one of the names.

Each of these names are used extensively, especially by me.


Middleboro

Facebook people are telling me ex post publisho that Middleboro, which we sometimes refer to as Middle Bro, is actually called Diddleboro.


Mattapoisett

How you pronounce this word is not important, because if you get it wrong, by the time they go through the word's spelling, you'll have had enough time pass where you can say "Yeah, that's how I pronounced it."

Alternately Nattypoisett, Nastypoisett, Nasty P, Matty and Master P, most people just pretend they live in Marion.

The South Coast in itself is a nickname, coined by a weatherman. It used to be the Greater New Bedford area.

I don't know who invented The South Shore.

Bourne

Not many one-syllable towns out there, other than Bourne and all the ones I can't think of right now.

One-syllable-named people rarely get nicknames, unless they earn them. "Def Jeff" is a good example. I used to know a Cool Roy, he was also a good example.

Bourne is very parochial, as everyone there self-identifies by villages. The only ones I know who get nicknames are the mainland ones, Bee Bay and Snagawhore. They are generally used derisively, usually by the residents of said villages.

Buzzards Bay House Of Pizza is in my phone as BBHOP, pronounced Bee Bop. The second syllable almost looks Egyptian.

Bournedale is also known as "Shortcut."


Provincetown

Everyone knows this one, even heterosexuals and people from the Berkshires.

P-Town!

There is no second contender for the title, look.


Sandwich

For some reason that I never identified during my near decade as a Bourne town reporter, a sizable % of the locals refer to this town as "Sammich." This is not at all done in a derogatory manner.

Hyannis and Wareham

Cape Cod is a nice little place, and generally is the sandy tourist trap that you think it is. However, there are some shifty parts, where folks are sketchy like Captain Bob.

I list these two as a pair, because they share the same modus operandi as far as nickname assumption goes.

For one, both are known as "Brockton-by-the-sea," sort of like "Manchester-by-the-sea" but 100% opposite. Wareham, a genuinely dangerous small town, probably deserves it more than a town that has the Kennedy Compound in it, but Hyannis had it first for their Wedge neighborhood.

Wareham sort of dines on the leftovers.... "Baby Fall River," "Coastal Lynn," or "Sea Lowell," which doesn't really fit but sounds sort of like Sea Level.

We love "Shangri-La," but that's just a part of town.

Wareham also most likely would lose out on ?ham, as the town of Ware sort of deserves that.

I do wish to one day write a cop show called "The 'Ham." We'll leave that discussion for a future article.

If we left something out, hit us up in the comments!

Leftovers From Our Foliage, Cranberry And Halloween Travels

I think that the people on the right turn before Edaville Railroad have had just about enough of TomTom's flaws.

The first article Jessica and I did together was us mistakenly thinking that Edaville was closed and abandoned, like the Lakeville Speedway or something.

A phone call from a detective proved that we were incorrect.

It all worked itself out. We were harmless. "Respectable citizens. Multiple felons, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous."

This fellow came up on me while I was shooting a pic of the cool barn he lives in. The barn made the article, but the horse had to wait for us to get to the Leftovers article.

We do a lot of trespassing, although we generally have no reason to trespass on the property of people whom the Ultimate Warrior referred to as "normals."

You kind of have to earn our presence on your property, and 99% of our small trespass violations involve us getting a pic of something that the homeowner was most likely showing off anyhow.

We're generally well-received, and we have a good sense of when Jessica should talk to the person and be sweet/nice, and when I should act crazy and try to crack them up... or, in some cases, scare them away.

We have developed an effective Mojo, and can generally move about now without any bother.

That's Green Harbor, in Marshfield.

I say that because there appears to be a Green Harbor Resort in West Yarmouth, as well.

I'm not sure if the Yarmouth one is named after a Green Harbor out there.

Either way, the Green Harbor in Marshfield is named after William Green, who opened a commercial fishing enterprise there in 1627.

Yarmouth, however is more likely better-known worldwide. A lot of tourists from a lot of different states have trampled through the Resort. Is it enough that more people associate the name "Green Harbor" with Yarmouth than with Marshfield?

I'd love to see a feud, but it probably won't go down that way. My vote is with Marsh Vegas.

Since we're trying to start fights, why not throw a good one up in the mix?

Is Wareham part of Cape Cod?

We'll let both sides speak.

No: Mainland side of the Canal, more thug-life than any Cape town (including Barnstable), and did I mention that they are on the wrong side of the Canal? Bourne's membership in the Cape Cod Club is sometimes questioned, and Wareham is west of Bourne.

Yes: They have that Gateway sign, they have a Cape League team, they have a sizable summer community, they bear the Cape's traffic and they market heavily to sell that Cape vibe.

Many years ago, Wareham was on the team. You got off the highway in Wareham, and crawled through the tourist traps and clam shacks to the Cape. Wareham, with miles of coast and lakefront space, claimed many tourist dollars on their own.

Duxbury and Marion have Summer People population, but they don't weigh as heavily on the affairs of the town as they do in Wareham... and Cape Cod.

I think that, prior to to the highway being extended to the bridge, Wareham was Cape Cod. Now, I'm not so sure.

We've still got some foliage runs left in us

I think that Cape Cod's foliage peaks in November, perhaps even mid-November in some places. We're driving out there either Thursday or Friday to see where the local color is.

We have a larger article coming up about a Foliage Project, but I need to talk to someone who owns a tree farm.

It'll be cool, trust me.

Ironically, the Kingston Water Department is in this building.

Shooting foliage on cloudy days is tough, but if the wind is calm, you can go All In on shooting houses reflecting in water.

Lemons, Lemonde, babe...

I really love the Monponsett Inn's swan benches, but they're bolted down.

Maybe I should make a Turkey Bench...

Good luck this month, Gobbler...

Turkeys that you see around here in December are usually cocky and uppity.

You would be too, if you'd just dodged the cemetery. It catches up to all of us eventually, however.

Leftover spooky graveyard pic... check.

I may have included it in the Halloween article series, I'm not sure.

Speaking of Halloween...

A friend (Jaime Bedford) posted this on FB, I stole it, and I plan to tell her about the publication of it ex post facto. She's a home slice, she should be OK.

This was a house on Duxbury Beach. This picture was taken the day after the Perfect Storm/Halloween Gale stopped beating up the neighborhood in 1991.

It is famous locally for a cool legend. The owner came down before the storm and had a glass of beer. He or she (not sure which Bedford it was, Jaime is a new Bedford) left that glass- unfinished- on the table you can barely see through the door.

Th storm lifted the house up and washed it back about a first down or so from where the photographer was standing. 10 foot storm waves battered it back and forth, hither and yon.

The glass did not spill.

For an added bonus story.... I was standing about where the men in that photo were standing when the Bedfords came down to see how their cottage fared in the Gale. Power and phone lines were down, so they may have not known exactly how bad it was, or even known that the house had been wrecked. Sh*t like that happened before the Internet, kids.

I was perfectly positioned to see their First Impressions. Their expressions were horror meets awe. Iraqis probably had the same look during the WMD War. My house was wrecked, too... I had the same look.

Let's end on a happier note.

Halloween Displays IV, and A Rich Man/Poor Man Comparative Analysis

(EDITOR'S NOTE: We lifted this article from a site we used to write for, and it dates back to 2012. "2012" explains why we planned to egg Taylor Swift's house, as she had then been smitten with Konnor Kennedy and had bought a house adjoining the Kennedy Compound. She has since divested herself from both entities. 

Also, my kid was Wolverine that year, he's a stormtrooper this year. 

The pictures in the article, aside from being Halloween-themed, have nothing to do with the story.

This article is the fourth installment in our Halloween Displays series, and the pictures come from Whitman, Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver, Wareham and Plymouth.)

One way to make a childish activity fun for Mom and Dad is to use your child as the bait in a half-assed sociological experiment. This Halloween, we did just that.

He didn't care. He got to dress like Wolverine, and he hauled in enough candy to bring a dentist to climax.

The experiment was thus: Take a kid trick or treating in two neighborhoods of varying wealth, and try to take note of any differences that might make themselves apparent.

We had to choose two neighborhoods. Mommy had the Whammy, an absolute veto.... which eliminated Brockton, Roxbury, etc... and some pre-Halloween recon eliminated the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port when we found that no one but the staff was around there after Labor Day. 

Let the record show that I would have had No Problem At All with egging Taylor Swift's house if she didn't show my people some proper confectionary love. Fortunately, it never came down to that.

The Kennedy logic also eliminated many of the marquee Cape Cod neighborhoods. We have nothing but love for Summer People, but they aren't of much use when you need candy in late October. Demographics are everything. We needed more of a bedroom community, and a wealthy one at that.

We narrowed it down to Jersusalem Road in Cohasset, and Washington Street in Duxbury. Even though Cohasset's main drag has more of a Gatsby feel, Duxbury had the advantage of centralized parking (we used what most locals still call "Sweetser's") and more occupied houses per square mile. The average house goes about a milly or so, and you can bang out a bunch of them without walking a costumed 10K.

As for our seedy site, we chose Wareham. We wanted to use Shangri-La, but the sidewalk/streetlight ratios didn't work out in favor of those with a wandering five year old Wolverine. We decided instead on a trailer park between Mazzilli's Farm Stand and Barnacle Bill's Seafood Shack. The double-wides are too tightly packed to get a car moving through at any kill-a-child speed, and we could do 50 units without any great hardship.

Your average home on Washington Street is owned by someone in the finance industry. Your average person in the trailer park works at Benny's or the Lobster Pound. The average salary on Washington Street is probably equal to the salary of 20 people in the trailer park. The average salary in the trailer park is probably half or a third of what the kid's car costs on Washington Street.

Does it matter? Does it translate into generous candy giving?

Due to us having to pick Mommy up in Sagamore at a certain time, Wolverine and I decided to start in the Wareham trailer park. We got out a little before dark, and we set right to our task. Wolverine (the Michigan yellow/blue Wolverine from the comics, not the leather jacket one from the movies) is five, cute, and fully invested in the candy acquisition process.

In case you think that this article is going to make fun of the poor... don't. Wareham came correct. I'm proud to say that every trailer we knocked on answered, and nobody came cheap with the goodies. Wolverine didn't have to disembowel anyone with his kid-sized adamantium claws due to Grinchy candy withholding.

The only standout facet was that some of the candy was of the cheap variety, a la individual Starbursts, Dum Dum lollipops, and the small solo generic Reese's cups with the gold foil. This was offset by the fact that they gave it out in great amounts. Besides, in this economy, and in that neighborhood, we should have been (and were) happy to get anything.

Some of the trailers were decorated, and some weren't. I may have seen 5 pumpkins... not bad, until you remember that the park is next to a farm stand. Hay bales, corn stalks, scarecrows and various gourds were easily available 20 feet away. I suppose that if a poor neighborhood has to skimp somewhere, they should skimp on decor rather than candy.

Finally, and this is important.... Wareham residents are cool enough to hook up the Elders with a beer now and then. One must be properly fortified when taking the kids about. I even was offered a bong hit, but that doesn't really count because I knew the guy. Either way, my bibulous handouts are important to me, I'm the judge/author, and they factor into the analysis.

I wasn't 100% shocked by the results. I had no concrete reason to think that Wareham would fail to be rewarding. Nothing really jumped out about the candy to cancel the theory one of my friends put forth that "Everyone shops at Wal-Mart."

We were working against the clock, so Wolverine and I hopped into the Benz a bit after sunset, picked up Mommy, and hauled our candy asses up Route 3 into Duxbury.

Now, the wealthy don't have all the advantages when being stalked by a trick or treat posse with a purpose. For instance, wealthy people's houses are farther apart than trailer park homes are. We probably covered 10 trailers in the time it took us to walk up the driveway of the first house we hit on Washington Street. For Duxbury to shame Wareham, the candy-per-step ratio would have to be amazing.

Also, Duxbury residents may or may not have been aware that they were a part of an experiment. They also most likely don't share my view of their role as Giver in the Redistribution Of Wealth theory I was aiming for, as they were more likely to assume that whoever was knocking on the door in costume was just another wealthy person from a nearby neighborhood.

I use the ambiguity because Washington Street has a go-to rep among local trick or treaters, and the residents there may feel an urge towards overkill. We were among 200 or so people trick or treating Washington Street during the hours that we were operating... not too shabby for a town with 15000 people at about 45% elderly.

Here's Duxbury, in a few bullet points.

- There were probably 50-100 yards between houses, if you count the walkways and so forth.

- Every door was opened by a grandparent or a trophy wife. There was one Yummy Mommy at the end of Fort Hill Road who actually could have not handed out candy and just used "You got to look at me up close" as an egging deterrent argument.

- I didn't think that people still put bags of candy unguarded outside of their door with a "Take One Per Person, Please" sign on it. People in 4400 sq. ft bayfront houses do, however.

- People hand out the full size candy bars in Duxbury. Those rich folk gave it up smooth.

- Not only do you get the name brand goods, but you also get the more rare stuff... Caramellos, Hilliards, Pop Rocks, Fun Dip, Flake Bars and so forth. You know... the good sh*t.

- No one handed out money, but it happened a few times during my youth in that area.

- Many residents had the same variety bowl of candy that the Wareham folks did, probably most.

-  One house- and I swear I'm not making this up- had a video screen set up in front of the doorway. The homeowner was able to hide in the house and speak to us through the video screen, which showed a Grim Reaper sort of visage. The Reaper spoke whatever the homeowner said. He also had music going through a loudspeaker, which made his house sound like a nightclub from 100 yards away.

But wait...there's more.

He also set something up where horror film images were holographed onto the house itself, so you'd turn around and be facing a 15 foot Wicked Witch. To offset this, he had his daughter and MILF wife outside, distributing the actual candy.

I'd say he spent about $3500 or so on the electronics, and that may be a conservative estimate.

- Beers were not offered in Duxbury. This was not through rudeness. Every cop in Duxbury was on Washington Street, to the point where I would have been able to discharge firearms on other streets with total impunity had I chosen to do so. Public drinking was out of the question.

- People in Duxbury hand out toys, coloring books, Pez dispensers, crayons, toothbrushes, McDonald's coupons, cheap sunglasses and so forth.

Overall, I'd score them about equally candy-wise, with Duxbury enjoying a huge edge in decorations. Duxbury had enough people handing out full-sized candy bars to offset the greater distances between houses. Wareham people are giving enough by nature to offset the median household income differences.

Wolverine did ridiculously well. That bag of candy you see at the top of the article is what was left today, about five days after Halloween, after several sessions where the adults had at it, and after a children's birthday party. The goody bag was full enough that Wolverine was having trouble carrying it at the end of the session.

We'd have had more, but Wolverine likes lollipops. When offered a bowl full of large Snickers bars and lollipops, he'd grab 2 tiny lollipops instead. I actually had to intervene when he chose a Dum Dum pop over a full Milky Way bar... "He wants one of these, too."

I'm just happy that Trick or Treating hasn't faded away to oblivion like Christmas Carols or whatever. That day is probably coming, and the world will be less exciting when it happens.

Halloween Decorations, Part I 

Halloween Decorations Part II 

Halloween Decorations Part III