Another City upon a Hill: A New England Memoir

Acknowledgments

[xi] [ Acknowledgments ] This memoir is a personal story, but also, as the title suggests, it’s a story about a New England place. My Fall River, Massachusetts, was distinctive in ways that I try to convey to the reader. I am grateful to Frank Gaspar, who read a draft of this memoir and pointed out that the personal narrative was too often in the background to the story about Fall River. My friend, the distinguished poet Wesley McNair, suggested something similar two years earlier. He gave it to me straight, as a good friend should. Had I listened to him, it would have saved me a lot of grief. But it proved a challenge to wean my writing away from what I was taught growing up: you don’t speak about family and especially yourself in public. I also want to thank Tom Grady for reading two drafts of this memoir and offering critical evaluations that gave me a basis to revise and greatly improve my narrative. Phil Silvia Jr. read the first chapter to make sure I had my historical facts straight. I thank Darrell Reinke, my former colleague at Rhode Island College who pulled up stakes and returned to his tiny Idaho hometown. More than thirty years ago, we explored surprising similarities in our widely divergent backgrounds. Across the continent and years we have tried to keep the conversation going. Several years ago I needed a respite from academic writing. Howard Rosenfield, a psychiatrist (though not mine) and a fiction writer, encouraged me to explore writing a memoir. I am grateful for his persistence. My local academic friends, now all retired from the University of Southern Maine and other institutions, have offered encouragement over lunch during the time I worked on this memoir. Joe Grange, Jim Leamon, Dick Maiman (who helped with photographs), John Woolverton, and Oliver Woshinsky have served as an inspiration by their continuing pursuit of research and writing. Also Victoria Bonebakker, now retired from the Maine Humanities Council, has been a good friend, a wonderful collaborator, and a stimulating lunchtime conversationalist. With family roots in New Bedford, she has been very interested in the progress of this memoir. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Frank Sousa has been Acknowledgments [xii] a constant source of encouragement during the process of review and revision. Mario Pereira has quickly responded to my numerous questions about producing and publicizing the book. The university has a strong connection to my family. Many of my nieces and nephews are alumni. One of my brothers graduated from a predecessor institution, Durfee Tech, and so did a cousin who went on to become academic vice president of the university. It never occurred to me when I started writing that this family connection made the university the appropriate publisher of this memoir. At the Fall River Historical Society, Michael Martins expressed a strong interest in my work. I am grateful for his help with photographs. I especially want to thank my brothers John, Bill, and “Doc” and my sister “Betts” for answering my constant queries, reading a draft of early chapters about our growing up, correcting errors that crept into my memory, and suggesting areas where I needed a more balanced perspective. I trust my daughter Antonia, an only child, will gain a broader understanding of the background to her life from this memoir. I also hope she acquires some insight into what she has meant to her parents. Once again my wife Dorothy patiently supported me while I scraped this book off the brain, to paraphrase the great Herman Melville. Her love and her values have shaped my life in countless ways. I have dedicated previous books to her, a small token of my love. This book I dedicate to three Fall River men who took me under their wings, and to a highly accomplished diplomatic historian who also happens to be my most loyal friend since our undergraduate days at Springfield College. Note: Perhaps it is my historian’s training, but I am skeptical of memoirs that reconstruct detailed dialogue thirty, forty, or fifty years after it has occurred. My memoir is not a dialogue-driven work. I have included exchanges that I overheard or I was party to and that I remember vividly and, I believe, accurately . I have slightly changed only two names to protect persons’ privacy. [ Another City upon a Hill ] ...