I will say this for the editors (Amanda Kay Gustin and Steve Perkins), they had already assembled a great cast of Vermont historical writers before they thought of me. I assumed (correctly) that I wasn’t their first choice to write about a prize powder horn in their collection, but I gave it a shot, on a rather tight deadline, and they approved, and illustrated it beautifully as a chapter (“Witness to Victory: Captain Deuel’s Powder Horn”) in a superb coffee-table book with a great cover (also available in paperback) and lots of great writing. Note the powder horn (ca. 1760).
This image below is a screen capture of the opening frame. Below it is a Vimeo link to the 60 second Opening Day (at home) video, courtesy of the Red Sox and NESN, their TV affiliate, . Allow 15 seconds for the lead-in.
The Bigs, in baseball lingo, is the “big leagues,” the two major American baseball leagues. If you follow the Sox on Instagram, or were watching the broadcast on April 4, you may have heard my voice narrating an inspirational “baseball is back” script. The spot came right after the national anthem and the command to “Play Ball.” I watched it at a bar in Bennington at 2 in the afternoon.
Voice of the Red Sox? Pinch me! And thank my daughter-in-law Marissa, who works for the Sox and got me the audition. It’s the high point of my audio career so far, and who knows what it might lead to?
I have given my “Black Presence at the Battle of Bennington” talk off an on here and there for the past six years. This year is, or rather was, the 100th anniversary of a time (first a week, later a month) to consider the nation’s Black history. I was glad to be able to mark the occasion with a talk at the beautiful Bixby Memorial Free Library in Vergennes, and I followed up with a piece in the Bennington Banner:
No thick volume has come from me, but the Bennington Museum has issued A Continued Clap of Thunder (422 pages), a collection of essays on the Battle of Bennington and various Vermont subjects. I have one of the former (just a concise account of the Battle) and one of the latter in the book.
I was glad to see that they reprinted my piece on Robert Frost and Bennington College, which first appeared in the Walloomsack Reviewfive years ago.
I’ve published a couple of history pieces in the Bennington Banner in recent weeks:
Next up: I’m working with Museum curator Jamie Franklin on an audio component for a new exhibit on the Battle of Bennington. The first-person voice-acted audio clips in the Ken Burns Revolutionary War documentary were inspiring. I did this kind of work for the Friends of the Bennington Battlefield in 2022.
It’s official: the Bennington 250th Committee has awarded a grant to three of us (Katie Brownell, Ingrid Madelayne, and me) to write and produce a play based on Sarah Rudd’s 90-page pension file, to go up in 2027. I am very excited about this project. It will take me not only into Revolutionary War Bennington but to Bennington and Washington, D.C, in 1837-8, the latter location for scenes at the U.S. Commissioner of Pensions’ office.
