Though the period represented by Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Sturbridge, Mass., is slightly earlier than when Samuel Clemens worked as a printer, the Village’s printer, 62-year-old William Contino, demonstrates what it was like to be a mid-nineteenth-century printer. Not only did Contino give us a printing demonstration, but we also got a bit of an etymology lesson, as well as vehement displays of nostalgia for a century he did not personally live in.

Video by Dan

Dan Tham’s videos capture two of the Mario Picciones I know from my 26 years, 1969 to 1995, of putting out the Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News. As the owner for decades of Mario’s, a local restaurant, Mario produces excellent Italian cooking and trains numerous people to become chefs. As caring, concerned citizen he offers his honest assessment of the state of his home town.

Loren Ghiglione

Video by Dan

Videos on YouTube portray Southbridge, Mass., as a dying mill town of loonies and losers. A snippet from producer Rod Murphy’s “Greater Southbridge” documentary makes Jerry Sciesnewski, a stuttering collector of empty soda and beer cans, into a symbol of the “Eye of the Commonwealth” (in a town of 17,000, American Optical, which left for Mexico a generation ago, once employed 6,000 people).

Jordan Forget’s video, “Top 10 Reasons Why Southbridge Sucks,” starts with reason 10: “Its [Forget forgot how to spell] full of bums and hobos.” The video ends with reason 1—the town is boring—before showing the Friendly’s restaurant on Main Street: “This is the best thing we have and even it suckz.” Ironically, Southbridge’s Friendly’s, which I recall fondly as a place to take my wife and two daughters for an afternoon ice cream cone, just closed forever.

Forty-two years after first arriving in Southbridge, I choose to remember the town of industrious immigrants for simple acts of kindness.

In 1969, shortly before I bought the 5,700-circulation Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News, Frank McNitt, the owner, allowed me to learn about the paper and town by working as his assistant. Before retiring each night to the Beechwood rooming house, I often ate dinner at Mario’s, a tiny Main Street restaurant.

Feeling sorry for a 28-year-old News employee who knew virtually nothing about Southbridge, restaurant owner Mario Piccione insisted during my first week in town on buying me dinner. When he later read I had become the paper’s owner, he sent me a small, celebratory orange tree.

Southbridge restaurant owner Mario Piccione

So among the people I wanted to see during a return to Southbridge, after leaving the town and its newspaper in 1995, was Piccione. Ron Tremblay, Jean Ashton and Mark Ashton, so important to the success of the News during my time at the paper, joined me for lunch at Mario’s, now on Central Street.

Over delicious haddock and other favorite foods, we shared embarrassing stories—about the time I challenged Steve Jones, the sports editor, to a mile run around the high school track and, leaping for the finish line, wound up with my knees full of cinders that required a visit to Harrington Hospital. About one of my many self-indulgent editorials, a photo-filled piece about the Lamaze-style birth of our first daughter, in which I used the royal “we,” as if Jessica were coming out of my womb.

Piccione shows us a 1991 plaque that celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the arrival in Southbridge of the first of 2,000-3,000 Italian immigrants—“thrifty, hardworking people who quickly learned the English language and contributed to this community as masons, contractors, craftsmen and industrialists.”

He tells how Italian 50-cents-a-day, pick-and-shovel workers rid themselves of an Irish crew boss who urinated on them. And he recalls his father’s burial in St. Mary’s Cemetery: “The Southern Italians didn’t even want to be buried next to the Northern Italians.”

Nearly empty Mario's Ristorante

Only one other customer enters Mario’s during our lunch there, a reminder of how difficult it is for a restaurant to stay in business in today’s Southbridge. Across the street, the Ink-Toxicating Tattoos parlor and on Main Street Clockwork Tattoo have replaced higher-end retailers. Other prime Main Street retail spaces are empty or filled by tax services, driving schools or Iglesia Evangelica Sanando al Herido.

Even Southbridge’s churches are hurting. With only a combined two priests, the four Roman Catholic churches—Notre Dame, St. Mary’s, Sacred Heart and St. Hedwig’s—have begun to merge. Mark Ashton recalls that First United Methodist Church on Main Street often attracts only a dozen parishioners.

At lunch’s end Piccione shows me a copy of war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s Brave Men, a book about U.S. soldiers in World War II’s European theater, including Southbridge’s Pfc. George Slaven. Noting my interest in the book Piccione asks me to take it. It’s a gift, another simple act of kindness.

Loren Ghiglione

The Charlton Public Library lifted the ban on "Eve's Diary" by Mark Twain, 105 years later, because of its illustrations

As his 40th birthday approached, Mark Twain joined walking buddy Rev. Joe Twichell on a hundred-mile hike from Hartford to Boston. They walked 35 miles to North Ashford, Conn., before Twain’s aching knee joints and the subzero weather caused them to jump the nearest train for Boston.

I wish, for poetic justice’s sake, that they had managed to walk 15 more miles before being forced to stop walking in Charlton, Mass. It was the Charlton Public Library that made history by stopping access to a Twain book with nude illustrations in 1906 and then, last month, lifting the 105-year-old ban.

So of course we had to visit Charlton’s library to see what caused all the fuss.

Circulation Clerk Nancy Mills Chalk

Our first attempt, on a Friday, failed because Friday is one of two days a week that the library closes. Our second attempt failed because, as Circulation Clerk Nancy Mills Chalk explained, the library’s two copies of Twain’s Eve’s Diary, with 55 illustrations by Lester Ralph of Eve in her “summer costume,” were checked out. They were being checked out at a rapid rate by Charlton readers, Chalk said.

If Twain were still alive he surely would have something to say about those Charlton readers. He said of Mrs. H. L. Carpenter, the librarian who first “had her doubts” about the illustrations in Eve’s Diary: “When she made the dreadful find, being very careful, she jumped at no hasty conclusions—not she—she examined the horrid things in detail. It took her some time to examine them all, but she did her hateful duty!”

In a letter to a friend, Harriet E. Whitmore, Twain offered a final word on the book banning by the library’s trustees, a Congregational clergyman, the town clerk and an undertaker: “When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth any age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.”

Loren Ghiglione