River Tales: Unveiling the Past and Future of the Connecticut River Valley

David Williams: 0:14

Hey, welcome everybody to this inaugural edition of the Weeks in Review on ICRVRadiocom. It's a podcast that will tour the various content areas on ICRV Radio to share some of the stories and nuggets of wisdom and perspective that you might find helpful in your life, or you may get inspired and want further exploration for you or your friends or your family. Our focus is on the Connecticut River Valley, past and present, but the journeys we take are for everyone to enjoy and contemplate. Icrv Radio covers content areas ranging from culture and community to area history, the outdoors, music, regional passions and so much more, and the emphasis always is on making local matter, because we showcase the amazing resource we all have in the knowledge that abounds right here in our neighborhoods and our museum docents and directors, our teachers, our historical societies, state parks and the incredible cultural venues that surround us. To learn more, check out ICRVRadiocom.

David Williams: 1:22

But let's get started, hey, one of the reasons people come to the Connecticut River Valley is the amazing beauty we have in our state parks, our state forests and our preserves that are all over the place.

David Williams: 1:36

Regardless of where you are in the state, you're only 10 minutes away, or even less to away, from a state park or a state forest or a great place to take a hike, etc. In our outdoors programming we cover a lot of different things. We have Steve Gephart, who did 40-plus years as a supervising biologist for DEEP, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and he comes in on a regular basis on his program and shares perspective on how everything is connected. The program is called Nature's Connections because if you tug on one string, you're tug on all of them. Normally we had in our area some heavy, heavy, heavy rains, and Steve reminds us that this is something for us to think about. This is something for our towns to really have to be prepared for, and it has its residual effects for all of us that we should not take lightly. Here's Steve Gephart to explain.

Steve Gephard: 2:41

Often when you and I get together and we talk about climate change in this region, we tend to focus a lot on sea level rise and coastal communities. That's what everybody focuses on. However, we must remember that inland communities, which are out of reach of the tide and the sea, have their own challenges and a lot of towns have been going through these resiliency workshops and forming up resiliency and sustainability committees, and in fact I was recruited by the town of East Hadam recently to help them do some brainstorming on such a committee. And the town of East Hadam, the Connecticut River is titled, along its border, but really there isn't a lot that is at risk there because good speed and gelsen house, they're pretty high up that East Hadam River, except for Chapman's Pond, which is all preserved, it's undeveloped. But that town, as well as many other towns I should say most other towns in the Connecticut River Valley, have an additional challenge and that is we have steep terrain, we have lots of development and we have infrastructure that is right up against these streams. I'll continue to use East Hadam as a convenient example, but there's certainly not alone in that.

Steve Gephard: 4:26

There's a small brook that runs right down the center and flows into the Connecticut River through the center of the village, which is called Sucker Brook Sucker as in the old English term for assistance help and its headwaters are up by Shagbark hardware for those of you who know that area by the intersections of 82 and 151. And it's a small stream with only about a three square mile watershed, but between that its headwaters in the Connecticut River drops 350 feet, which means it's steep and it doesn't have a lot of floodplain. But early settlers, including the Britannia Spoon Company, built the little mills which of course included dams right on this small brook, right in the center. And once they built those dams, they then had to build roads to get to them in the mills. And one thing led to another, and so now we have a state highway, state highway 82, that runs right along the small brook, up through the Goodspeed complex, and every time it rains it jumps the river banks and floods out.

Steve Gephard: 5:44

And so East Hadam is grappling with. Well, what are we going to do, just like Middletown is grappling with? What are we going to do about the Canoe Club? And so it seems to me and this is some of the things we've been discussing in this committee is you have two basic approaches. There's a lot of subcategories, but two basic approaches. And one is that you try to floodproof your existing infrastructure build dykes, diversions, so to floodproof. The other is to move, get the hell out of the way.

David Williams: 6:28

That is a little perspective from Steve Gephard and the fact that we might be inconvenienced and think heavy rains we've got to deal with. But the town officials need to plan for these things and it's something to be mindful of. If you're seeing more severe weather and wet weather patterns in your area, you might also want to contemplate what to do with your own yard. Judy Preston comes in and does gardening for good on our air and picked up on the theme of these heavy rains and shared with our listeners some intel on what is water logging and why should we care what?

Judy Preston: 7:12

actually is saturated soil. What is water logging If your soil is filled with water? Why is that a big deal, since plants need water, Right? Well, as it turns out, plants also need oxygen. So I would have said fine, that's what they get above ground. There's plenty of oxygen above ground, but the detail there is that plants also roots also require oxygen. So plants are pulling oxygen out of the soil and if you were to look at the soil through a microscope, you would see how much space there is in between organic material and sand, silt, clay. All those different mineral sources are broken apart by oxygen, and that's really important because a well-ariated soil is what's helping those roots grow. So if you get rain after rain after rain and the soil can't keep up with the draining part of that, then eventually you're robbing oxygen from the plant. So it seems counterintuitive, because I would look at a plant and say, above ground which is how we see plants it's got plenty of oxygen. Exactly.

Judy Preston: 8:21

I mean it's raining out, but it's still oxygen.

Judy Preston: 8:22

Yeah, yeah, so that's the issue. What's really interesting too on that is that wetlands plants have a means of living in water, and the way they do that is they have these really big air pockets in their roots. It's called aranchauma tissue and it's sole purpose is to suck air down from the above ground part of the plant into the roots so that the plant can continue to grow. So it's very cool. It looks almost like styrofoam. You can find them in plants that are growing completely under water or submerged in water. So nature's amazing that way.

Judy Preston: 8:57

Too much water takes nutrients out of the soil, it just leaches it. It takes all the good stuff that plants need and just keeps moving it through the soil and into the water table and away. So if you have a lot of rain, by the time that happens, even when the sun comes out, the plants don't have nearly as much of the nutrients potentially that they need. So that's a problem. They can rot over time. Erosion is a huge issue and of course, erosion not only can destroy, take soil with it, but it obviously can take your garden and vegetation along with it. So that can be a problem. There are also a fair amount of diseases that are associated with just persistent moisture. That can be humidity, that can be rain, it can be just wetness on leaves and branches and those sorts of things.

Judy Preston: 9:48

And then there's also pests, there's snails and slugs, and I think there are a lot of people who can appreciate how damaging slugs can be, particularly if you have a vegetable garden and you're wondering where all the leaves went.

David Williams: 10:03

So, go figure, you think that, oh, we need the water, but maybe too much water can be harmful and for sure it can have its repercussions, as Judy kind of continued. It's not funny, but this was something that I have always seen on when I take morning walks or what have you. But I've never figured out what is going on, and it has to do with worms after a lengthy period of rain. First Judy to explain.

Judy Preston: 10:36

You know how, after a rainstorm, you walk on a sidewalk and you see a lot of dead worms, yes, or sometimes they're still alive. Yeah, yeah, mostly those worms, and it has to be a lot of them, not one or two. But they're escaping that poor space in the soil because worms can also drown if they can't get to oxygen. So if the soil is starting to fill in with water and those poor spaces of oxygen are going away, the worms are saying I'm out of here, wow, they're going to be on the surface and they'll try to escape to someplace. That, of course, is a boon for robins and for birds that love an easy way to get at worms, but it's not so great for the worms.

David Williams: 11:18

Well, some mysteries are solved here on icrvradiocom. Hey, keeping it in the theme of the weather of the summer -- a lot of people refer to those extended days and weeks of high temperatures and humidity as the dog days of summer. Have you ever hit the pause button and said where did that phrase come from? Well, Jenn Matos, former executive director at the Noah Webster House, does that all the time and clues us in on what she finds as we better understand the dog days of summer.

Jenn Matos: 11:59

Well, you know we're in the dog days of summer. Have you ever thought about where that might have come from? Well, dog days, dog days. If you look up dog days in the dictionary, it actually refers to a period between early July and early September, when the hot, sultry weather of summer usually occurs in the northern hemisphere. Dog days can also refer to a period of stagnation or inactivity, and you might be wondering, like, does this actually relate to dogs? I mean, dogs are hot, but we are also hot during this period and it really relates to constellation. So it actually relates to what is known as the dog star, which is a star called Sirius, and this is the hound that is, with the hunter, orion. So this is.

Jenn Matos: 12:54

We've talked about constellations, maybe just a few weeks ago and I don't think this is one that we covered, but so the dog star, sirius, has long been associated with the sultry weather of the northern hemisphere because it rises simultaneously with the sun during the hottest days of summer. So it was called Sirius by the ancient Greeks, considering it to be the hound with Orion, and the Greek writer Plutarch actually referred to the hot days of summer. In Greek it meant literally dog days, and then there was a Latin translation of it that became the source of our English phrase today dog days. So it goes back to ancient Greece. Dog days comes into our language in 1538. And it actually relates to another word canicular Canicular. So canicular is spelled C-A-N-I-C-U-L-A-R, it's an adjective and it means of or relating to the dog days.

David Williams: 14:05

So that has to be canine, has to C-A-N-I, then has to relate to dogs, right?

Jenn Matos: 14:12

Right, exactly so. The Latin word canicula means small dog. It's the diminutive form of canis right, canis, so C-A-N-I-S, which is the source of the English word canine right. So canicula was also the name for Sirius, the star that represents the hound of the hunter Orion in the constellation which is named for that Roman mythical figure. And because the first visible rising of Sirius occurs during the summer, these days, again from early July to early September, are called diaconicularis, that's the Latin, which is translated into English as dog days.

David Williams: 15:01

Maybe more astronomy lesson than you care for, but hey, that's where dog days of summer comes from. Hey, keeping it in the sciences, I guess, why not? A little astronomy will go to archaeology. The state archaeologist, Sarah Sportman, does a program on our air. She comes into the studio on a regular basis.

David Williams: 15:22

This time we went to her and actually toured a dig that was done a few weeks ago in Bolton and she is going to explain to us exactly why they were in Bolton at this site, because they were going back centuries in time. It was a project called Digging into History that was done with the Connecticut State Library and involved students from area high schools plus visiting students from France, and it was a reciprocal experience for the French students, because the American students several years previous went over to Sèche-Pres, France, and had a similar type of an experience digging into history in the French area of Sèche-Pres, where Connecticut soldiers served in World War I, primarily based right there, and the learning experience unparalleled experiential education at its best. But this time they were in Bolton and this time the state archaeologist was on her home turf. And here's Sarah Sportman to describe for us what the intent was and how all the pre-production kind of came to be.

Sarah Sportman: 16:38

So just to provide a little bit of background for everybody, the place we were excavating was at Bolton Heritage Farm, which was one of the campsites where the French troops stopped and camped overnight on their way across Connecticut into New York to meet up with General Washington's troops in 1781 before going down to fight the battle of Yorktown. And of course the assistance of the French was key to our success in the Revolutionary War. So it's a major historical event. But the camps were really interesting because the French troops were moving in waves across Rhode Island and Connecticut into New York, so they would march about 15 miles each day, drop camp for one night and then pick up and move again, and each campsite along the way was used for four nights by a different wave of soldiers. So it's a relatively archaeological speaking. It's a relatively small signature, right, just basically the stuff that people used and dropped over four nights of camping On the upside. It was a huge operation with lots of wagons and people and food and equipment and all kinds of things. So the possibility of finding an archaeological signature is there, but also the challenging aspect of it's not a place where somebody lived for 50 or 100 or years or longer, so it's a relatively light signature and so going into it we didn't really know what we might find or what we might not find.

Sarah Sportman: 17:57

So just to kind of set it up, battlefield archaeology in general is kind of a tricky form of archaeology because you're often dealing with very brief moments in time, very brief periods of time, such as a battle or an encampment or retreat or something of that nature. And in this case what we did was we started out last spring, once we had settled on a site, trying to find a good location for an archaeological excavation for the students, and what we did was we initially went out there and did a metal detector survey, looking for metal objects because those are the types of things that are most common in military sites things that people dropped, like buttons and musket balls and wagon parts and gun parts and things like that and we also did a ground penetrating radar survey. And what we did was we overlaid those two sets of information, trying to look for an area where we had a concentration of artifacts and potentially interesting features to excavate. So that's when we laid out our excavation block and we got started.

David Williams: 18:56

And then Well, Sarah continues. Obviously all the planning was fantastic, but sometimes what you can't plan for is weather, and the rains came in and just offered, I guess offered the students an up close and personal look on how meticulous and sometimes frustrating the work of an archaeologist can be. But they persevered. They found a lot of great artifacts and they learned an immense amount about that era and about the relationship between the colonies and the French. And Christine Pittsley actually was the director that put this thing together, that kind of crafted, this whole digging into history thing the first franchise in Sèche Pré and the second installment there in Bolton. Here's what she learned just in putting this whole thing together about this era. There's history all around us, as she learned.

Christine Pittsley: 20:02

I think one of the most interesting things to me was that some of the French soldiers actually brought their families along. We hear about camp followers in the American Army and they were generally women that were cooking or doing the wash for the soldiers. But the idea that some of these French soldiers brought their families along really was a shocker to me. It would be hard enough to leave your family behind, but to bring them into a foreign land where they did not speak the language, where nothing was sure, was just fascinating to me, and that's something I'd really like to learn more about. However, there's not a lot of documentation of it out there.

Christine Pittsley: 20:54

We know it happened because there's stories. There's a story of one particular town where the Reverend in the town tried to buy one of the French soldiers' children. The pastor and his wife had no children of their own, so they decided this was no life for a child following an army camp around there. So hey, can we buy her? And the French couple obviously said no and it made the French newspapers. But it's stories like that. Let us know that this stuff was happening.

David Williams: 21:28

Amazing how you just don't realize the way things were. And were it not for somebody finding an old article in an old French newspaper, maybe even that story would have just gone unnoticed. But important to preserve these stories and to acknowledge them and think about them a little bit. Hey, one of the programs that allows us to travel on our air is Antiques Trail. David Perrelli is a master in this space, has a shop here in Essex but knows noted authorities in every vertical of the antiques world and brings them onto his program, Kind of sharing with us.

David Williams: 22:14

Just another thing that you just don't think about unless you have somebody kind of guiding you through things. This is an amazing quote from Charles Clark, who is from Woodbury and for decades and decades has kind of dedicated his pursuit to American antiques, with a specific focus and expertise on the classical period. But here's David exploring with Charles some of the notable finds or accomplishments or innovations that came out of this classical period. And here's Charles with something that again, maybe we just don't think about. But how fascinating is this, something that he compares to the computer or the cell phone from hundreds of years ago.

David Perrelli: 23:06

As you mentioned, with the advent of steam power, this was a period characterized by technological advancement in general, and I think two notable examples of that are advances in lighting and also upholstery. Can you address that aspect?

Charles Clark: 23:25

The lighting particularly, was revolutionary. At about 1794, I think, a Swiss inventor named Amy Argand got a patent on the Argand burner, and the Argand burner allowed lamps to be made that could for the first time burn somewhere like maybe two to four hours at one time, and they were fueled by oil and they enabled people to start doing things at night that you otherwise had to be done by candlelight, and I like to kind of equate it to almost a cell phone or a computer. It was that revolutionary, but they were really. Only the wealthy people could afford these kind of lamps, and Jefferson has a. There's an Argand chandelier at Monticello and Mount Vernon. George Washington had his agent in London. It's like, get me some of those Argand lamps, and so those are really significant because that changed literally what people could do at night, and that's that's a kind of a big part of my business these Argand Sonumbras, solar lamps that have that kind of mechanisms.

David Williams: 25:08

Fascinating stuff to think about is how just light changed, changed the whole kind of landscape in the home, in the community, and wild to hear Charles comment on how revolutionary it actually was. Hey, we'll keep it in the period. We do a lot of history programs on our air. We have a great relationship with the Historical Society in Old Saybrook and a program that we call Saybrook!. Lamar LeMonte comes in and shares with us some of the people, some of the places, some of the events of notable interest to us that had kind of shaped the landscape hundreds of years ago and have residual impact on our area for years and years to come.

David Williams: 25:55

The shipping business was a major part of the arc of our entire area, there's no question about it, and Lamar wanted to make sure that we paid note to an era called the Packet Ship Era and what it was all about, what its focus was and the fact that immigration yes, it was one of social kind of traveling and movement from one part of the world to the next and opportunity and all that comes with it, but it also was a business. Here's Lamar to explain.

Lamar LeMonte: 26:33

Saybrook has quite a seafaring heritage, over 200 years worth really. In the 1600s all the local river towns had white pine and oak trees growing very near the shore, easily cut down and fashioned into ships. These things were sloop, sometimes schooners, 50, 60, maybe 90 feet long. They could all get over the Saybrook Bar and they were used for coastal shipping before there were decent roads and long before there were railroads, as well as a connection to the West Indies where they could get a lot of European supplies, manufactured goods, and they traded the produce here with the islands and it was a nice round trip.

Lamar LeMonte: 27:12

During the 1700s Saybrook was still a seafaring town with numerous shipyards and they built. The same ships that were going to the West Indies also became privateers during the Revolutionary War, and especially Connecticut, being so close to Long Island, which was British. The enemy, the whaleboat privateers, the whaleboat Navy it was called, and your, our dear, great late friend Wick Griswold wrote a great book about the whaleboat privateers for Connecticut. But by the 1800s the seafaring industry in Saybrook was pretty much over and the ship captains who were living there, all fairly wealthy at that time, basically went down to New York to start to join an enterprise that was dedicated to the new wave of immigration coming from Europe to the East Coast and there was a whole new breed of sailing vessels and a new breed of sea captains, really, and it was all due to this first major immigration. And these ships were called packet ships and they came about because of this enormous wave of immigration from about 1820 to 1880. Historians now call it the old immigration because there was another period taken over by steamships that lasted through the World War into 1920. It was called the new immigration. But the old immigration consisted of about two million immigrants come into this country during that period on sailing ships. The demographers estimate that was about 10% of the US population here on the East Coast. It came from Europe, english, irish, german, all sailing to the East Coast.

Lamar LeMonte: 29:00

The second wave of immigration, the big one that they call the new immigration, was from about 1880 to 1920. That was 25 million people come into this country. They claimed it could have been almost as much as 25% of the US population East Coast and West Coast, and that was primarily Italians. That was the big Italian immigration here to the East Coast. Greeks, slavs, poles, hungarians, that was just the East Coast.

Lamar LeMonte: 29:24

Anyway, immigration was a big business and in the 1820s they started to build new types of ships to take part of this. The packet ships were unique because they were the first ships to have printed sailing schedules. Prior to that, before your transatlantic ship, you would trip. You would go down to New York mostly the East River I don't know why the pier is mostly for Europe or on the East River before the Hudson and you'd meet a captain, you'd find his boat, you'd contract for a bunk and then you'd wait and wait and wait while the captain filled that ship with the various cargoes to make the ship profitable, and you could be there for weeks before the ship would sail. Packet ships were different Loaded or not, they would sail on Thursday at 12 noon or whatever day, and these lines would have a reciprocal ship in England leaving the exact same time as. So they would cross mid-ocean and that was a big business.

David Williams: 30:23

Of course, you can't talk about this business without addressing the people and the patrons, the people that it served. And, of course, when you're talking about the immigration period and you're talking about Old World, new World and travel across the Atlantic, you definitely are talking about also the figurative ocean between the HAVEs and the HAVENOTs and the packet ship and the accommodations were no different because they were available and crafted for both, for the HAVEs and the HAVENOTs. Here's how much you really had to want to come to this New World and what you had to endure to get to your ultimate destination if you were traveling with little resource.

Lamar LeMonte: 31:14

The unique aspect of these packet ships were the two classes of passengers. There was steerage and there was first class, and if ever there was the haves and the have nots, it was that difference. The poor steerage people, hundreds of them, would board these ships and they'd have to deal with rats, insects, disease. They had to bring their own bedding. They did their own cooking down below. By the 1850s they finally passed some new laws to preserve the lives of these people who, because it was an arduous journey down in steerage they were the owners of these ships were required to issue all these passengers 60 gallons of water, three pounds of biscuits, a pint of vinegar and 10 pounds of pork. They were supplemented with oatmeal, flour, rice, sugar, molasses and tea. These voyages could take over a month, 30 to 40 days.

Lamar LeMonte: 32:18

These guys were in steerage doing their own cooking. Quite a few of these people were dentured to some degree. The Cheney Ivory factory, just down the street from the studio, had a representative who was based on Ellis Island. These people were contracted to come over and work in the factory here. He would meet up at Ellis Island, but they were indentured. They were working for their passage over.

Lamar LeMonte: 32:43

That was very typical of a lot of this immigration as opposed to steerage. There was first class and truly was first class. There was a room for maybe a dozen, maybe 15, I think at the most maybe 20 passengers could live in first class. They lived well. It was the only way to cross. Already when you cross the Atlantic in the mid 1800s, they enjoyed fine wine. There were hens on board for fresh eggs. There was a cow on board for fresh milk, I strongly suspect toward the end of the voyage. It was a month long voyage. There was pretty good stakes.

Cindy Haiken: 33:23

You saw that coming.

Lamar LeMonte: 33:25

Whale, oil lamps, silver dining service stewards it truly was the luxury liners of the day. They had ventilated state rooms that opened onto an open salon where there were couches and chairs and writing tables and a large dining table. The captain truly was royalty. He hosted these elites dine with them almost every day. You can imagine, I mean, it would be like traveling across the Atlantic with I don't know, trapped on board with Elon Musk for a month. You got to know these people very well. That was the nature of these new captains. They were true Stuart's social power brokers by the end of these voyages, with many of these passengers.

David Williams: 34:09

Fascinating stuff. Lamar Lamont, Old Saybrook Historical Society. Thanks so much for being part of ICRV Radio. Hey, we'll keep it on the water. We do a program called Myths and Legends where Professor Stephen Gencarella comes in from UMass Amherst. He's a folklorist. He is a noted authority, published internationally, travels the world lecturing and is on our air on a regular basis sharing with us the Myths and Legends that are popular in and around our area, that travel from our area -- to our area, and it's just an amazing experience just hearing his collection of stories and legends from the Devil's Hopyard, Moodus Noises to Obed and First Nation Legends to the often forgotten Vagabond era in the Northeast. But he wanted to do a couple of episodes on what could be the first legend to be on our shores, but it was no stranger to shores around the world. I'll let the Professor explain about his fascination with the sea serpent.

Professor Stephen Gencarella: 35:22

There's a rich tradition of seeing what's called the Great New England Sea Serpent in the Long Island Sound and even at certain parts of the Connecticut River, and again, it mostly coincides the sightings mostly coincide with the 1800s and the rise of tourism in the area. So that was kind of the mark that we made last week. And again, this is something that is literally endless. There are so many thousands of sightings over hundreds of years of a sea serpent off of the New England Coast that this is truly one, even more than the frogs of Windham. It would be endless. But the problem is there's no real story and basically the story as it's reported in the news is always the same. I mean, it's got a structure to it. What's clear and was evident to all of us is that this tradition of a sea serpent seen off of the New England Coast very much in the late 1700s or early 1800s, must be attached to other legends of sea serpents that are bound across the world, and so I love that we kind of had that global perspective.

David Williams: 36:36

And it should be noted and this could be the nugget of all nuggets, because, as sensational and fantastical as these Myths and Legends may be, what we've learned in every episode of Myths and Legends on our air is that often times there's one of the things that a professor has to do is to sort out fact from fiction, and there are facts involved. Even when you're talking about sea serpents, there are facts, as he actually acknowledges that the sea serpent was an accepted species for a very brief period of time. I'll let the Professor explain. This is absolutely true.

Professor Stephen Gencarella: 37:20

1817, the Linnaean society. They were the kind of after Linnaeus. They were the society that kind of was in the very beginning of classifications of natural history. They were an educational society that sought to put things in scientific categories to bring. So they were not folklore creators, they were early scientists trying to clarify the natural history of the world. So they would give Latin names to new species and that kind of stuff. They weren't always accurate but that was their attempt.

Professor Stephen Gencarella: 37:59

So in 1817, there's tremendous flurry around sightings in the Gloucester area and arguably hundreds of people say they see something. This is, we have a massive amount of reports of people seeing things and describing what they're seeing in that area around Gloucester and Gloucester Bay, at Gloucester Harbor. So they go up because they also get a report. They go up from Cambridge Mass. They get a report that there's a small one that has washed ashore. And it is true. I actually think that, if I'm not mistaken, the small one was preserved for quite some time.

Professor Stephen Gencarella: 38:40

So they find what appears to their minds is a young, unusual sea serpent that must be the child of this. They even give it a scientific name. They even gave it a Scolophus Atlanticus. That is the name of the sea serpent. We now have proof. We have a child of the sea serpent. This is its spawn, the large one that was seen out there. Hundreds of witnesses. We've got this, and so in 1817, for a very brief moment, the sea serpent was a legitimate creature in the scientific definitions of natural history. You want to guess?

David Williams: 39:21

Sturgeon or an eel.

Professor Stephen Gencarella: 39:22

It's a great guess Black Snake with cancerous tumors. Oh, yeah, that deformed it and made it right. Right, but Sturgeon or eel is exactly where people should be going.

David Williams: 39:35

Wow, that is amazing that for a very short period of time it actually was an accepted part of our ecosystem here. Crazy, crazy stuff. Hey, speaking of ecosystems, we investigate the real landscapes of our area as well. We have a program called Zoonami Adventures from Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo on our air, where some of their educators come in and share with us the great learnings that you can accumulate by just walking through this amazing facility in Bridgeport. And well, we had a great experience with them because in this most recent addition, because one of their ambassadors joined the program, let's see if you can figure out what it is, because you'll hear it in the beginning and then you'll hear why, as Andrew Connolly shares with us, why it's important to understand this ambassador. Here's a little bit of the ambassador and a lot from Andrew.

Andrew Connolly: 40:37

We bring this information out with these animal ambassadors to really show you the amazing diversity around us. And right now there is an animal ambassador.

David Williams: 40:45

That's just a couple inches next to my head. Do you hear that right there? Yeah, he's a radio rock star. Oh, what's wrong? Come on, talk to me. Icrv radio, the stream feeding the river valley and, I think, our friend got a little bit shy.

Andrew Connolly: 41:02

But if we heard that little sound, there we go. Sitting right next to me is a baby American alligator, and Dave, what are your thoughts seeing this in here?

David Williams: 41:12

It is amazing, it really is amazing. How old is this alligator?

Andrew Connolly: 41:17

This alligator is about four months old. So this alligator will spend about the first year to year and a half of its life growing at the zoo and that helps it to head start, to help it get big enough so when it goes back to a sanctuary down south it can really live and thrive on its own. It gives it a little bit of an advantage. So right now it's four months, it's newer to the zoo and it is an ambassador, so this is one of the animals that goes on these trips and that goes to the summer shows and things like that. So people can see the American alligator because it is an amazing conservation story. So before I mentioned the Lake Erie water snake, one of less than 30 animals ever taken off the endangered species list the American alligator is another one of those species. The alligator was endangered due to poaching so people wanted their alligator skin belts and boots and bags and things like that and then the US government put these protections in. Today the American alligator it's doing really well. If you go down to places like the Everglades or even like South Carolina, georgia, you're going to see them in a lot of streams and ponds and things like that. And though the friend next to me right now is about a foot and a foot and a half from head to tail. He will grow one foot a year for the first six years of his life and then it slows down a little bit but he'll keep growing for the rest of his life.

Andrew Connolly: 42:34

They average about nine to 12 feet but the record alligator American alligator 19.8 feet Amazing that is. For those of you who can't picture that. That's about three times the size of the average adult male. So this is a huge animal and their nature is perfect animal. They can swim a lot faster than us, they can run a lot faster than us and they are designed for their environment. That's, strong tail to swim, the webbed feet. They have osteoderms, bony plates under their back to help warm them up. So when it gets cold and they dive into the water it's like their own built-in solar heating system. So they really are designed to be nature's most perfect animal and that's what I call them Nature's most perfect animal that have existed for thousands of years.

David Williams: 43:19

How fun was that having this baby ambassador hang out at our studios here in Iverton, connecticut? Hey, one of the things that we do on ICRV radio is to tip the cap to our area libraries that have made the pivot from just being a resource for the printed word to being a community resource period for doing such amazing work for us in all of our communities. And we have a program on called Library Chat, where Sunny and Cindy take over the microphones and share a little bit about what's happening at area libraries and recommended reads. And in this most recent edition they wanted to make sure that, while during the summer people are trying to escape a little bit and they do so with their beach reads and whatever you might be taking on vacation, but there is a category of literature that is often overlooked, especially during these escape kind of months, and they wanted to make sure that we paid attention to nonfiction.

Sunnie Scarpa: 44:22

There's also a large number of people out there who just sort of discount nonfiction when they're going to look for a book. They might feel like nonfiction is maybe has too much of a correlation with school for them. Maybe they feel like it will just always be a bit dry or dense. It has that educational feel to it which is not always what people are looking for.

Cindy Haiken: 44:45

Some people look to read for an escape, and an escape from the real world and the problems of the real world and a lot of the nonfiction out there right now is very targeted on today's angst and problem issues and so that's not appealing when they want to sit on the couch and go be taken far away.

Sunnie Scarpa: 45:08

However, there is also a lot more nonfiction out there in the world.

Cindy Haiken: 45:16

We both made lists of our favorite nonfiction and I was like, OK, and titles just started coming right away. It's not hard when you think about it.

Sunnie Scarpa: 45:29

Well, to start with, one of my favorites, and actually the first book that popped into my head, is We Fed an Island by Jose Andres, which you recommended to me, cindy, about five years ago, long time ago, yep, and I came in with some specific parameters, cindy. I need a nonfiction book that's going to make me look smart. I think I was going to a dinner party or something like that. You were, that's right. I was going somewhere where I wanted to impress people. I knew it was going to be a literary crowd. They were going to ask me what I was reading and I needed it to be something good, and this book is one that I do think of regularly. It's about a world famous chef who stepped up when Puerto Rico was in the aftermath of the hurricane, and just a very warmly written book, a very human book about human struggles and the story of how they did it, how they came together and really fed an island and then, after that experience, he started doing that as a philanthropic mission I think the key.

Cindy Haiken: 46:37

You just said something that made me think about what the key is to a great nonfiction book, and it's that there's a great story to tell. So that's element number one a great true story to tell, and that was one that's just a fascinating story.

Sunnie Scarpa: 46:53

That was one of my favorites. And then a couple of years ago I read Educated by Tara Westover, and the really fun thing about that. Now that's a memoir of a someone's experience that is very outside of most of us. Most of us do not have a childhood like this woman, and that was something that was so interesting because everyone was reading it.

Cindy Haiken: 47:18

Yeah.

Sunnie Scarpa: 47:19

And that is fun. When a book hits that way and is at that level where people are just talking about it everywhere you go, it adds a fun element to it. It's like being in an accidental book club, where the book club is just life, I mean that is true of big fiction as well as big nonfiction.

Cindy Haiken: 47:40

I don't know how many weeks Educated spent on the New York Times bestseller list, but it was over a year, I think, and in paperback. Then, once it came out of paperback, there was another round with it, and it is grippingly written and you're unable to stop reading this book.

David Williams: 47:58

It's so amazing what these ladies know about the offerings on the shelves at area libraries, also on the activities and happenings. So check out Library Chat on icrvradiocom and support your area and local library. Hey, we do a lot of music programming on ICRV radio. This clip, though, is a different kind of musical tribute. Usually we're celebrating independent artists and folk music and music from the past, with sea shanties and muster fife and drum music etc. But here we wanted actually to take a different kind of musical stroll, as it were, because we love trivia on ICRV radio. Here was a question that absolutely stumped me. I didn't know what our state song was in Connecticut. Do you? Do you know what the state song is in Connecticut? Well, listen in to our buddy, Dave LeVasseur, a former first selectman and town historian in Killingworth and lover of anything hundreds of years old. Here's Dave.

Dave LeVasseur: 49:04

The French and Indian War, that's the war that brought us Yankee Doodle. Oh, okay, and I don't know if you know the story behind the song.

David Williams: 49:14

No, all I know and I'll be honest with you, I haven't really paid that much attention to the lyrics and you're the one who so adroitly sang Yellow Rose of Texas for us and forever won the heart of LRB. And if you listen to the lyrics you know there's a lot going on here. All I know is that we had the head of the Old Guard, which is the president's Fife and Drum Corps. Sergeant Major Reilly was on and I asked him what was the most difficult event for you, and it was when they were playing at the White House and the Queen was there and somebody told them to play Yankee Doodle and they said are you sure about this? So it's not a great song, it's not a flattering song.

Dave LeVasseur: 50:06

It is the Connecticut State Song, is it really? And the reason that it is is the story behind it. A company of soldiers from Norwalk under a Colonel Finch Fitch were headed to the French and Indian War and they stopped in Albany on their way, or marched through Albany, and a Dutch merchant saw them. And the story behind them is they all had feathers in their hats and the reason they had feathers in their hats were, as Colonel Fitch and his men were leaving Norwalk or on the way up to Albany, a farmwife saw them and said oh your soldiers, soldiers must have plumes for their hats. And she came out and gave each one of them a goose feather from a recently deceased goose who was probably dinner in that household. And the men graciously stuck the feathers in their cap and headed off to Albany. When they went through, this just struck this particular Dutchman very funny and so he told them. He called them macaroni's because of their fancy dress with the feather in their hat, and the term Yankee Doodle became known and later on the song came about.

Dave LeVasseur: 51:30

And no, it's not considered to be a particularly flattering song for the British, but it also poked fun at Americans. I mean, if you know the lyrics they talk about how this young farm boy and his father go to camp and see the soldiers and and thick as hasty pudding and it's kind of a neat song. And of course, my favorite story about Yankee Doodle is the fact that they asked General Grant if he knew much about military music and he said no. I only do two songs. One of them is Yankee Doodle and the other one isn't so, but that's the state song. It is the state song for Connecticut, for Connecticut, yeah there you go, there's a nugget for you.

David Williams: 52:11

Hey, we're going to end this edition of this inaugural the Weeks in Review podcast on icrv radiocom. We're going to end it with a little bit more trivia. We love just throwing in nuggets here and there or asking people things that they toss out when they go to a cocktail party, and it's just a way for us to kind of collect some of these, some of these did you know kind of quotes and stories, and here are a couple. Our buddy Mark ,Griswold, comes in and he has a program about food and beverage, about alcoholic drinks, adult beverages called Fermented. But he loves nautical lore, he loves learning about things on the water .. that come from the water.

David Williams: 53:00

So we had an artist on, Leif Nilsson, who is one of the most prolific impressionist artists on the East Coast, anyway he's a resident right here in Chester, Connecticut, and Leif was on, but Mark wanted to ask him some trivia and then all of a sudden Leif wanted to turn the tables and we'll, we'll go out with this one. Here's some did you knows little nuggets that you might find helpful the next cocktail party you go to, first Mark.

Mark Griswold: 53:28

Well, let me talk about some nautical trivia. So my trivia question for you is what is a barge pole?

Leif Nilsson: 53:35

A barge pole.

Mark Griswold: 53:36

Yeah.

Leif Nilsson: 53:38

I imagine it's something that you used to pull a barge along. Yeah, that's that's what I said P-O-L-E, p-o-l-e. Yeah, so you pull it like, you push it in the ground.

David Williams: 53:49

Yeah, exactly Like like what a gondolier will do, or or somebody taking you out fishing on in the flats. So you that, that pole that you push, yeah, yeah.

Leif Nilsson: 53:59

Not correct.

David Williams: 54:01

We're both wrong, leif, we're both wrong.

Mark Griswold: 54:03

So a barge pole. So back in the sort of the 1700s, 1800s, when sailing was, you know, was the mode of transport, the vessel that you transport people with was a barge and it typically had three to five pairs of oars on it and if the wind was right, you had a barge pole that you put in the middle and put a sail on it. It's a little over three meters long and and that's give you like a free ride if you get the wind with you. But it was used to fend off from things, so you want to hit a bow or a rock or and in certain situations, you could put it in the water. Another interesting thing about a barge is that anything that an HMS captain stepped into was called a barge. So a little bit of history. But in back then they would say I wouldn't touch that with a barge pole, because a barge pole is 10 feet long.

Leif Nilsson: 55:00

Okay, oh I like that. Wow that's great, that's right.

David Williams: 55:07

So there's something for you your next cocktail party that you go to, leif, you can pull that one out.

Leif Nilsson: 55:12

I love stuff like this. It's like. It's like what is what does? Break a leg means when in a theater.

Mark Griswold: 55:21

I'm guessing a chair like that. I don't know.

Leif Nilsson: 55:27

The leg was the thing that the crank or the lever that you would pull and to open and close the curtains. So when you had to open the curtains up again for an encore, that was called breaking.

Mark Griswold: 55:43

Wow, that makes more sense than what I thought.

David Williams: 55:46

That is classic. Leif, that is classic, is that for real?

Leif Nilsson: 55:50

that's for real. Yeah, that's one of those things that nobody really knows about.

David Williams: 55:58

I love that there's a little bit of a nugget. Maybe some of these stories you might take with you as you go through your week, but maybe also you might be encouraged just not to miss any moments and maybe tap on the brakes a little bit and slow down and wonder where did that phrase come from, or why do we say that, or what was the origin of this or that? History is all around us, we learned. We quote our friend from the state archaeologist, Sarah Sportman. She says to us archaeology is everywhere, it's all around us, history is everywhere, it's all around us, and these stories need to be preserved and we need to learn so much and celebrate our collective arc, as it were, because it's only by understanding where we came from that we can better appreciate where we are and where we can go. Hey, that's just a little bit of the mission and mandate of ICRV Radio. If you enjoyed this podcast, we encourage you to check out icrvradiocom icrvradiocom, where we make local matter.