My Road to Boston

-- By Tom Phillips  

After sixty years of puzzlement, I finally got it. The cartwheel logo of the Boston Bruins, with a capital B at the center, refers to Boston’s traditional nickname, the Hub. I talked to five Bostonians and to my surprise, none of them knew this.  This gives me the courage to analyze Boston for them.

I’ve been trying to understand this place since my first visit in 1952, when I was ten. My father brought me up from the New York suburbs to see a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.  I was excited to see Kenmore Square, which I envisioned as something like Times Square. Nothing prepared me or my father for its sepulchral drabness. After two days in Boston he concluded, “This is a small town.”

 

It still is, but not like any other small town. As the Hub, it is the biggest small town of ten thousand small towns that make up New England civilization. The wheel is not geographical but conceptual – showing the place Boston occupies not on the map of New England, but in its mind.  

Boston is a city of the mind.  On the Freedom Trail tour of downtown Boston, a retired schoolteacher in a Puritan costume gave us the New England view of American history, i.e. ideas matter.  And Boston, then and now, has the best ideas. (It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who came up with the idea of Boston as the Hub -- and he meant the center of the universe.)

New York may be the cultural capital of the world, but Boston is its capital of Thought. In New York, one hears animated discussions on the subway, but on the Red Line in Boston most passengers are silent, lost in thought.  Ideas in Boston are not so much the stuff of intellectual discussions as of post-doctoral theses, peculiar to the thinker. Thoreau was the archetype of a Boston intellectual – just leave me alone, eventually I'll write the answers

But watch out for the grammar police. While in New York people may be silently correcting your speech, in Boston they do it aloud. Years ago my teenage daughter worked behind the counter at a store in Cambridge, when a customer scolded her briskly --  Don’t say “these ones!” Just “these.”

This intellectual arrogance begins at Harvard – founded by Puritan settlers in 1636, as the intellectual center of a new civilization, intended to save the world.  In 1636, not many believed it.  In 2019, Harvard's global gravitas was enough to recruit the leader of the Free World to address its commencement exercises. German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood on the same stage where George Marshall announced his Marshall Plan in 1947, and methodically, maternally, matter-of-factly instructed the graduates that the next miracles are up to them.

I was there to see my 67-year-old sister-in-law Linda receive her B.A. from the Harvard Extension School.  Frankly I had thought of the Extension School as not-quite-Harvard, but the Dean set us straight. It is 100 years old and an integral part of Harvard’s mission to save the world – a democratic alternative to Ivy League elitism, right in the heart of Harvard. This year’s valedictorian was a 58-year-old former juvenile delinquent who graduated at the bottom of his high school class. Like every Harvard graduate, he understands that he must use what he has learned for the good of the world.  His plan is to be a better homework helper for his grandchildren.

                                                           __________________

For me, no trip to Boston is complete without a return to Fenway Park.  From the lower grandstand, the nation’s oldest ballpark looks much the same – no longer old-fashioned, now positively retro. The ancient tunnel that ramps up from the street to the grandstand is now decorated with newspaper headlines from the Sox’ first golden era – 1900 to 1918. Before the game, an elementary school band from a small New England town played the Star-Spangled Banner. 200-strong, they sounded like an elementary school band.  The crowd cheered. 

The groundskeepers looked like Keystone Kops compared to the efficiency of Yankee Stadium.  It took them a half hour to get the tarpaulin rolled up and the field ready after a rain delay.  On the other hand – the PA system is mercifully moderate, not like the blasts in the Bronx. 

  

Boston is changing, little by little. It’s not nearly as drab as it was in 1952.  It’s not as segregated as it was even a few years ago – the Fenway crowd is now a comfortable mix of colors, and the Harvard commencement a global affair. But the Hub is still fundamentally dour, provincial, sleepy, introspective. At two a.m. it is dark as a tomb. The town is sports-mad because there really isn’t much else to do.  

Go Sox, go Bruins. We want the Cup!  

And oh, yes: Veritas.  

-- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips