Highlights from our virtual mailbag. Please email your letters to us, making them as short as possible. We reserve the right to edit them for length and clarity. For safety's sake, they may be published anonymously, but you must send us your name in your email. We're sorry, but we cannot answer all questions we receive.

1) Generally, West of Route #2 from South of Emerson Hospital down to the Reformatory Circle to #2A to the Acton line, West and South to Nine Acre Corner to the Maynard and Acton townlines. There's conjecture as to the Nine Acre Corner line .. . whether it's further North .. . Walden Pond being in West Concord or Sudbury Road or just Emerson Hospital. I vote for Rte #2 to the Sudbury line. Thoreau loved the New England country .. . West Concord is part of that country. In actuality, you'd have to ask the residents if they view themselves as West or just Concord. "Concord Country Club" is on the Old Road to Nine Acre Corner .. . and they view themselves as Concord, from my experience. I say "Fore!" Give it your best shot.

2) West of Monument Street. This includes part of Concord.

3) Not Monument Street. This includes 99% of Concord. The joke here is that Monument St. could always get their roads repaired. It took them 50 years to re-do Main St. to West Concord. Before this, it was all patch work.

4) Whomever pays the bulk of town taxes, lives in West Concord.

5) Whomever works, lives in West Concord.

6) The Reformatory. Works or lives in .. . Before my time, the "White Row" (of which one example remains, and is referred to as "White Ladies Row") was Reformatory housing built for prison guards and officers .. . because they were paid too low to afford W. Concord housing. This caused such an uproar among the local citizenry that the practice was ended and civil service instituted. During my grandfather's time this was a 24/7 occupation... no civil service.

7) East Maynard! (I heard this one from an Acton resident and thought it quite clever and funny.)

8) 01781 Zip Code. The defunct area zip code. Easy to remember, it was the year British General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War.

9) Where the farms are/were .. . As a boy all around White Pond were corn and hay fields (usually rotated crops). This extended all the way to Angelo Roger's farm off Harrington Ave. The woods were also woods then.

10) Wherever you get mosquitoes...

11) Where the country mice live...

12) Where there are no sewers.

143) W. C. is where you have more mosquitos ...but more ladybugs.

These are all funny and contain some truth, hence making them funny. In actuality, rich or poor, professional or not, Concordians are very very decent, likeable people. Enjoy!
Sincerely yours, Bill Freeman

Grammatical Ups and Downs
There is an unfortunate grammatical error/typo in the reply to Lisa (age 10) in "Letters": "it's" for "its." I teach English but despair [sic] ever being able to succeed amid all the inadvertent and careless mistakes which appear in an age of desktop publishing. Even my local newspaper seems incapable of producing error-free copy.

I've been surfing your site and this is the only error I've found, so kudos and appreciation. However, it is sad that the first slip was made in a reply directed to an impressionable young person! Those who write for public consumption have a responsibility to 'smarten up' not "dumb down" readers. Please repair this hole in the dike post haste!
Ainslie Baldwin

Browser Troubles and West Concord Memories
The page on West Concord -- Where is it? -- is unreadable. The pictures with the text obscure the text. Why must web designers try to get too fancy, at the expense of clarity?

Charlie Comeau, when he was alive, told me that the downfall of the Bluine business was trying to market it nationally. Conant would send out a free kit, worth $5, and ask that the children send the money after they sold the kit. The kids would sell the kit and keep all the money. Charlie worked at the post office at the time. He said that the kids would send a penny postcard back sometimes saying that they weren't going to pay -- just to irritate Conant I suppose. Conant built my house on Riverside Avenue as a single family home in 1895. After the Bluine business declined, two bosses from the Damondale Mill occupied the house and converted it to a two-family. This was around 1905, I believe.
Thomas Knatt

The editor replies:
Thomas, above is a screen shot of how this page was actually designed to appear and how it does to most readers. Older browsers (3.0 and earlier) do not support layered backgrounds sufficiently so you are not seeing the muted color we place behind the text to make it readable. You may wish to upgrade your browser. Should you be using a "modern" browser, you may wish to reinstall it as you must be having this trouble with many other sites as well.

Photos: ©2002 Rich Stevenson
Backgrounds: ArtToday.