Saw that and meant to congrat on the great escape! lol. Both shows are available via iHeart radio whenever you get the urge to check in on your old stomping grounds though they cover all things national and beyond too.
Thanks, Moonlighter.
I had a very good childhood in Mass. Born and raised on Cape Cod. Learned to sail in summer, play hockey on the pond in winter. Oldest of 8, Irish/English, Catholic, altar boy, and loved neighborhood sports with our friends. Dad was a real estate agent. A Reagan Democrat, Navy gunners mate on an LST at Normandy and Okinawa.
Like many families I suppose, we had a beautifully bound set of Great Books on the living room book shelf — that nobody read! But one time I was scanning them and my Dad remarked that if I read Emerson and understood it, “you could get into Harvard.”
Three decades later, I did study Emerson’s essays and made a little HTML program that categorized his essays into sections. And if anyone reading this wants to get a copy of this I will send it to you. I’ve since used the quotations in his Essays many times in my writing.
Dad was the one who instilled a love of the English poets. Usually in a darkened dining room at a time when everybody else was sleep — and after sipping a Seagram’s Seven glass for a few hours — I would sit a social distance way as he’d recite some of the epic poets. He only knew a few stanzas from Coleridge, Shakespeare, Invictus, Gunga Din, and Tennyson but that was enough for him to teach me the rhythm of the English tongue. Which many years later got me hooked.
After my peacetime Navy stint (9 years in San Diego, Hawaii, Japan) the Boston tech economy got me onto my career, and I’m still making my living (at 68) as a tech journalist/ industry analyst.
Now I live in Athens, GA, home of the 40,000 student strong University of Georgia. They have a big journalist school, but almost nobody there has a feel for the tech market style of journalism that is big in Mass and New England.
In sum, I owe my career to Massachusetts and now I can afford to live in a far more affordable place with a warm climate, and quite a beautiful small city — largely because of the influence of the University.
Yet the culture and arts of the Boston area has much you cannot find here. You can knock MIT and Harvard, but they did much to bring brainpower, innovation, and jobs to the Greater Boston area.
The guy who mentored me in tech journalism had a computer graphics newsletter in the 1980s and he was an MIT grad. And every day I wander over to actor James Woods’s Twitter page, another brilliant guy born in Rhode Island and who is an MIT undergrad.
Fortunately my wife is a good cook and fun person to live with, so I’m sufficiently fed, entertained and work keeps me busy - which I guess is the point :- )
So while I don’t like the politics of Massachusetts at all, I wanted to give credit where it’s due. While pursing many dead ends and making some big mistakes, I was in many ways “made in Massachusetts”.