I knocked around far and wide when I left Wareham for parts unknown in 1973, vowing never to return. The cost of living was high here and opporunity for kids coming up, next to zilch. If you had two brain cells to rub together and any ambition at all, you fled. Wareham was a backwater, a wide spot in the road. The closest friends I left behind were already beyond retirement age and I didn't expect to see them again.

Some of them are still with us, pushing one hundred with all their sharp wits intact. Ernie and Eleanor Precourt both hailed from immigrant families, and knew a much harsher, less forgiving Wareham. Both lost their fathers when they were infants.

They are why when I visit OneWareham and see the quaint horseshoe factory they display on their home page, my first thought is, are they out of their f-ing minds? People remember. How clueless can you get?

The horseshoe factory wasn't Wareham's employer of last resort but it was no one's first choice. Ernie Precourt's uncles worked there. The house you see in these Conant Hill pictures, adjacent to the horseshoe factory ruins, was once a boarding house run by Ernie's grandmother; coal stove, no electric, no phone, no water and a two holer out back. One bath a week, whether you needed it or not. The nearest well was a hundred yards away. Nothing about it was quaint.

If OneWareham is our only hope of escaping a grim Sauvageau future, and no hope at all for our children, they damn well better wake up soon and start engaging Wareham's voters.

More of the same old shit won't cut it.

Last edited by billw (2009-03-29 15:45:02)