Category: Episodes

Three Battles for Boston Light (episode 227)

Boston Light,  America’s first and oldest light station, still welcomes visitors and locals alike if they approach the city by sea, but that wasn’t always the case.  During the first year of the Revolutionary War, there were three attempts to destroy Boston Light during the siege of Boston.  First, the newly formed Continental Army burned the strategically important lighthouse twice in July 1775, 246 years ago this week, using the 18th century equivalent of a stealth fighter: the humble whaleboat.  Then, as the British finally evacuated Boston in the spring of 1776, the last ships to leave the harbor blew up the lighthouse that June.  


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Blazing Skies: Boston’s Nike Missiles (episodes 226)

For almost 20 years, Nike missile batteries formed a suburban ring around Boston that ushered the city into the 1950s and the atomic age.  The Ajax missile and its successor, the Hercules, were intended to defend Boston and its many military assets from Soviet bombers flying over the North Pole to rain nuclear destruction on the Hub.  The ring of bases stretched from the South Shore to the North Shore and far inland, always ready to fire in 15 minutes or less.  The Nike program was an open secret, with base gates sometimes thrown open for the public and reporters alike.  But there were more closely guarded secrets, as well.  Like the fact that the Ajax missile wasn’t really equipped to engage modern jet bombers.  Or the fact that a successful interception by the later Hercules would result in a nuclear detonation in our own backyards, with tens of thousands of Americans killed or injured.  


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The Middlesex Canal: Boston’s First Big Dig (episode 225)

In the last decade of the 18th century, a group of investors called the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal turned a crazy idea into reality.  After some initial stumbles, they were able to successfully build a navigational canal from Boston Harbor to the Merrimack River in Lowell.  In an era before highways and airports, it became the first practical freight link between the markets and wharves of Boston and the vast interior of New England in Central Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  Against all odds, it was a success, and an unparalleled feat of engineering.  However, its perceived success was short lived, with the coming of the railroad spelling doom for the canal business and commercial failure for the Proprietors.


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The Liberty Riot (episode 224)

On June 10, 1768 a riot swept through Boston that forced Royal officials to flee for their lives, saw a boat bodily carried onto the Common and burned, and in the end helped bring on the Boston Massacre less than two years later.  John Hancock, later a prominent patriot and owner of America’s most famous signature, was at the center of the controversy.  Known then as a leading merchant and possibly the richest man in the British colonies, Hancock would find himself on trial as a smuggler before a court that was originally set up to deal with pirates and defended by none other than future President John Adams.


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The Mysterious Murder (Maybe) of Starr Faithful (episode 223)

When Starr Faithfull’s body washed up on a Long Island beach 90 years ago, the case became a national obsession.  At the center of the story was a beautiful young flapper, with a diary full of covert sexual conquests, a sordid history with a prominent politician, and a drug and booze fueled nightlife in the speakeasies of two major cities.  Was her death a suicide, driven by her dark past?  A tragic accident after one too many?  Or was it something darker, a murder for hire on behalf of a former Boston mayor… or his underworld adversaries?


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Julia Child, from the OSS to PBS (episode 222)

At the outbreak of World War II, president Roosevelt decided to create a single centralized agency to organize the nation’s many competing intelligence services. Not the CIA, which would come a few years later, but the Office of Strategic Services. Before the CIA, the OSS was America’s chief spy service. And before Julia Child was a famous chef on PBS, young Julia McWilliams was recruited by the OSS, where she traveled the world and fell in love with Paul Child and exotic food. Listen to this week’s episode to learn about Julia Child at war: how she was recruited and trained, where she served in the Asian theater of war, and why that experience helped lead her to a Cambridge house with its now famous kitchen.


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Boy Wonder Arrested as Ringleader when Reds Riot in Roxbury (episode 221)

On May Day in 1919, Roxbury socialists marched in support of a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence.  The afternoon turned violent, with police firing shots to disperse the crowd.  In the aftermath, two officers were killed and a mob formed that hunted down and viciously beat many of the marchers.  As the smoke cleared, it became evident that one of the leaders of the march was a celebrity: William James Sidis, the boy wonder.


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Puritans in Paradise (episode 220)

In the 1820s, waves of Christian missionaries were dispatched from Boston, believing they might never return.  They didn’t know much about the land they were going to settle in or the people they were trying to convert, but what little they had heard was frightening.  The missionaries came from a church that was directly descended from the harsh Christianity of the Puritans, and they were on their way to a land where the people worshipped a pantheon of many gods.  From a society where both men and women were basically always covered from neck to ankles, they were going to a land where the people wore tattoos and very little else.  They had heard rumors of graven idols and human sacrifice, and believed they were on their way to do battle with the devil himself.  Many of them believed that they were being sent into the gates of hell, but they were on their way to heaven on earth itself… the Kingdom of Hawaii.


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Expo 76: Future Vision or Fever Dream? (episode 219)

During the Kennedy administration, a group of Boston businessmen led by a millionaire dairy farmer hatched an audacious plan.  They proposed building an experimental city of the future on made land, piers, and floating platforms connecting Columbia Point in Dorchester with Thompson Island in Boston Harbor.  This new city would be the site of a World’s Fair timed to celebrate America’s Bicentennial, and the site would then be reused to solve all of Boston’s problems with housing, race relations, environmental damage, and economic decline.  Spoiler alert: We don’t have a futuristic city connecting Columbia Point with the Harbor Islands.  But the story of how a plan ripped straight out of science fiction almost came to be built in Boston reveals a lot about an optimistic city torn apart by the busing crisis.


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Disaster at Bussey Bridge (episode 218)

March 14 is the anniversary of one of the worst railroad accidents that ever happened in Massachusetts.  On March 14, 1887, a train filled with suburban commuters was on its way from Dedham to Park Square station in Boston, stopping in West Roxbury and Roslindale along the way.  Moments before it would have passed through Forest Hills, disaster struck.  By the time the engineer turned around, he saw a cloud of dust and a pile of twisted rubble where nine passenger cars should have been.  In a split second, a normal morning commute was transformed into a nightmare of death and dismemberment for hundreds of passengers.


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