In the late 19th century, Boston’s largest open space was renamed Franklin Park, after a “founding father” who advanced science by flying a kite in Philadelphia. If Benjamin Franklin can be credited with inspiring the park’s spring festival, the name change was, above all, a ploy to help fund the public treasure by tapping his estate. Over the next two centuries, the mission
It was 1983, and the nation was just starting to climb back from double-digit unemployment. More than 2,000 people would die from a newly discovered disease called AIDS. Time Magazine’s Man of the Year was “The Computer,” and Michael Jackson would update the shuffle into the fractured poise of the “moonwalk.” On the streets of Roxbury and Dorchester, a section of the Caribbean
Celebrating the 40th birthday of the Dorchester Reporter has transported me back to 1983, when Ed and Mary Forry began publishing their newspaper. I was still early in my tenure as executive director of the Codman Square Health Center, which took several years to start up operations after being organized in 1974. In those days, we had appointment books that we kept for telling
You can never know Dorchester well enough, especially on deadline. Ed Forry learned that lesson again, on his tenth time as publisher and editor of the Dorchester Day supplement to the weekly Dorchester Argus-Citizen. The year was 1983, and the insert’s red-white-and-black cover saluted a high point of the preceding twelve months with a lead photo of President Ronald Reagan