You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Novelist Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was born in this 1774 house owned by her grandparents, which she would inherit from them. The site, sitting in the heart of South Berwick, Maine, just a few miles from us, is now owned by Historic New England and open to the public.
Not all of New England’s water-powered mills sat along major rivers. This woolen mill in North Berwick, Maine, was founded by Quaker William Hill, beginning in 1862, and made blankets for Union soldiers. The Great Works River itself had been named by earlier Quakers.
The mill has been renovated into residences and offices.
My fondness for old mills, by the way, did prompt a novel, Big Inca.
Each lobsterman has a set of distinctive buoys to identify his traps. This is how the floats look out of the water. Shingle siding adds to the effect.
The Isles of Shoals are a cluster of small islands off the mainland of New Hampshire and Maine. White Island is occupied by its lighthouse and supporting structures.
Next time you see one of those “No U Turns” signs on someone’s driveway, think about their side of the story and the audacity of some of the public.
We know an old farm in Maine that has a driveway connecting to both the busy highway in front of the house and a country road to the side. It gets plenty of “summer people” congestion at the traffic light, along with drivers who try to beat it by driving taking the driveway – or worse, just driving through the yard.
Recently, during a sudden storm, one SUV dodged in under the tree in the front yard to deflect hail, in the process mowing down hostas and other flowers before then backing hard into the parked pickup truck on the way out, and gunning it down the road.
Later, when one of the residents of the house was turning up the driveway from the side road, another car, crowded with tourists, came the other direction – and gave her the finger when she refused to back out so they could pull on through. Look, it’s her home, not theirs!
Their New York plates did nothing to soften the reputation.
Many of these Red Barn postings have illustrated the historic seacoast region of New Hampshire where I live. While our downtown is 16 or 17 miles inland from the Atlantic, the tides roll in all the way up to the waterfalls and mill dam at the heart of our city, and then roll out, usually twice a day. In fact, Dover was an active seaport until floods and silting took their toll early in the 20th century.
Situated on the Cocheco River, as well as the Bellamy and a stretch of the Salmon Falls, Dover was once a major textiles manufacturer and railroad center. It’s part of a cluster of small cities and adjacent towns, each with its own character, that drain into the Piscataqua River before it, in turn, pours into the ocean.
In contrast, downstream on the full Piscataqua, Portsmouth boasts of an active port – one with iconic red tugboats, oceanic freighters, and active passenger cruises around the harbor, its islands, and coastal sights – stretches familiar to us from both the shoreline and ventures out on water. On the Maine side of the river, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard builds and repairs nuclear submarines.
Upstream, however, has remained far more mysterious. Since it’s hard to glimpse much of the waterway from public roads, we’ve long wondered how the route would appear. Long ago I discovered how different a shoreline fits together when viewed from a boat rather than the lands around it. This is, after all, a major part of where we live.
At last, hearing of the Inland River Fall Foliage Cruise offered each September and October aboard the 49-passenger MV Heritage, my wife and I got a chance to see for ourselves. Depending on the timing of high tide, its daily two-and-a-half hour trip ventures from downtown Portsmouth to downtown Dover 11 or 12 miles upriver or, as an alternative, into Great Bay, itself a remarkable estuary.
It was an eye-opener. Once we left the familiar, picturesque Colonial-era Portsmouth Harbor, we began passing all of New Hampshire’s industrial waterfront, which includes three electrical power plants, the world’s largest lobster operation, an oceanic underwater cable producer, oil tank farms, and the like – each with major docking facilities for oceanic freighters or other vessels. I hadn’t envisioned the extent of this activity. Nor had we anticipated the width of the passageway, in many places approaching three-quarters of a mile. Not what most folks would call beautiful, but it was impressive, even if we were grateful Aristotle Onassis failed in his attempt to put an oil refinery a bit upstream.
Once we’d passed the mouth to Great Bay, we were surprised by how much of Dover itself sits on the Piscataqua – and how much very expensive waterfront housing with expensive docks to match have been built there, mostly, as we were told, in the past two decades, now that the river’s been cleaned up from its earlier industrial pollution. In fact, looking at this and at the Maine side of the river gave the impression of passing high-profile lake shores with their ever more imposing year-round mansions. To be frank, we were a bit stunned by the wealth we were witnessing – where are these people in our otherwise modest city and what’s their source of income? Theirs is a different world, we’d say.
That’s not to say there weren’t stretches of colorful foliage or fascinating wildlife. In addition to a host of herons, gulls, and cormorants (we most loved the ones who stood atop mooring buoys marked “private,” as if the birds defiantly owned them), we viewed a soaring osprey and then a bald eagle in flight, an impressive hawk high in a pine overlooking the river, and a seal or two – all close to home.
The Pisacataqua originates at the fork of the Salmon Falls and Cocheco River, which we then followed as it narrowed on its way to downtown Dover.
What a contrast!
At one broad pool, we were told that tall-mast ships turned around here before reaching the mills by being poled by hand on high tide or pulled by oxen the final few miles. And, at the upper narrows, we appreciated a friend’s work with the Army Corps of Engineers in dredging power-plant tar from the river to reopen the passage. (That could be another posting in its own right.)
We passed the marina at the edge of downtown and circled, to retrace our journey.
Why is it, the return always seems to go faster than the first part, outward?
On our drive home after debarking, we stayed close to the rivers. Surprising how discrete the lanes to the big houses! You’d never, ever, suspect they were there if you hadn’t taken the cruise. Makes us wonder how much more is hidden just out of view.
As I blogged during the summer of 2014, the No. 1 topic of discussion across much of New England concerned the dramatic battle for control of the Market Basket supermarket chain. In an unprecedented reaction to moves by one-half of the family owning the company to sell the popular stores to more expensive rivals, its management, devoted workers, trusted suppliers, and loyal shoppers united to bring the enterprise itself to a halt. A grinding halt. And it worked.
After months of earlier rebuffs and daily headlines, the part of the family actually running the stores announced an agreement to buy the entire operation from its hostile relations.
It was a complicated story, with some long-festering feuds in the not-so-recent background. The kind of story that’s bound to show up as movie adaptations. Maybe even as a television mini-series. Maybe not Dallas in Boston, but as rich in its material.
We’ve been waiting for the book-length analyses, and the first one is finally making the rounds: We Are Market Basket (the title comes from a slogan at the time) has been published by an American Management Association affiliate.
Authors are frequently advised to “know their audience,” with the implication of tailoring their work to assumed demands. In this case, the book can be seen aiming at two audiences: New Englanders who remember the revolt and likely participated in some part of it, and then business majors and managers around the world. It’s both a strength and weakness for the volume.
Reading the text, it’s easy to see which part was written by which coauthor: Lowell Sun newspaper reporter Grant Walker drafted the day-by-day narrative, while associate business professor Daniel Korschun provided the chapters on business management. It’s all good stuff, though a bit repetitive, as one might expect from daily news reports that have to recap earlier developments. And I started wishing Walker had more sources to draw on. Still, they underscore the point of their book.
As the subtitle says, The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved a Beloved Business, this was a remarkable event. Korschum uses it as a platform to argue for an awareness of stakeholders in a company – not just stockholders. It’s a theme Bernie Sanders has been pressing in his presidential campaign, and he’s not alone it saluting its importance. Workers, suppliers, and entire communities have investments of one sort or another in the companies that operate in our presence. For Market Basket, with prices typically 16 percent lower than its major competition, customers have a definite reason for supporting the stores, which, as it turns out, are remarkably profitable, despite or (as Korschum argues and others of us believe) because of their culture of contrarian instincts.
You can read the book for the reasons why. The list of down-to-earth practices throughout the operation, where the lowest level workers are encouraged to find ways to improve the business, is worth the read alone. You won’t walk through any store quite the same afterward.
My interest in the topic goes back decades before this, as I saw the operations of a smaller but similar grocery operation run by my then-girlfriend’s father. His own father had started out with a produce cart that went door to door. Besides, my own inclination has been for smaller, typically family, operations rather than monolithic corporations – as I demonstrate in my novel Hometown News and pursued for most of my employment as a journalist.
As I was perusing We Are Market Basket, I kept thinking of business books like Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence series. They’re fun to read and make their point, though there just might be more to the story. In this case, I definitely feel there is.
Yes, when we come to the stakeholders argument, we can look to John Henry Patterson’s benevolent leadership at the National Cash Register Co. in Dayton, Ohio, or the glory years of the cereal makers in Battle Creek, Michigan, or Aaron Feuerstein’s moves in the aftermath of the Polar Fleece fabrics’ devastating factory fire in Malden, Massachusetts. Essentially, these provide similar models of enlightened leadership along the stakeholders’ ideal. But this book also leaves me wondering about the next generation after Arthur T. Demoulas’ leadership – he is, after all, pictured riding a white horse. So there’s a need for a management text on maintaining leadership a generation or two down the pike, which this book glides over as one of simply maintaining the historic company culture. There’s a lot of repetition on Market Basket’s culture in these pages, perhaps to drive the point home or, as I suspect, perhaps because of slack editing. But will that culture be enough?
On another front, there’s a volume yet to appear that puts the Market Basket experience in perspective with other leader-defined companies. Yes, we love our heroes, but they’re hardly the stuff of corporate America these days. More often, they’re anonymous and invisible. What kind of executive would be needed to fill Arther T.’s shoes?
And there’s another round of writings that might relate Market Basket to other family-owned companies and their survival or failure in moving from one generation to another. Family ownership issues have become a distinct subset of a business school curriculum. You don’t get fired from being a brother or a sister or cousin or grandkid — it’s a lifetime position.
We Are Market Basket skims over the earlier family conflicts that erupted into ugly, protracted, and costly court battles only years before the events at the heart of this book. To understand the bitterness of the most recent round, I’d love to see a volume – or at least one more open to both sides – more detailed than what this one presents. Not that the other side made itself in any way sympathetic in the 2014 accounts. Even so, the events were not quite as black-or-white as they seem to appear. An astute reader senses the authors’ desire not to antagonize their sources, meaning the book’s told basically from one side.
Another fascinating dimension also appears in corporate ownership that’s not quite split evenly 50/50. Television viewers may remember an episode of Ed Asner’s Lou Grant series where the newspaper was threatened by such a division – not that much different from the Seattle Times, actually, where one percent held the sway vote.
When it comes to Market Basket, we have one crucial family voter who switched. Why? Everyone wants to know.
So I’m still hoping for a more definitive volume than this entry. Maybe by the crack team from the Boston Globe, which could throw far more reporters at the story than the suburban Lowell Sun could – reporter/author Welker at least had the advantage of having the Demoulas family grocery stores originating in Lowell and putting their headquarters one town over, in Tewksbury, but he was a Lone Ranger in the face of a large reporting and editing staff in Boston.
Another of the case studies waiting to happen would look at Market Basket since the uprising. Can it sustain the large debt load and still maintain its generous employee bonuses and profit-sharing, along with its low prices? A year-after report by the Globe found that the company is indeed prospering in its rebirth. But long-term questions remain.
Will the fuller story ever come out?
For me, more and more, I’m looking for another current example, somewhat the way scientists want an experiment that can be replicated — another stakeholder over stockholder victory.
In the meantime, we’re still shopping – almost religiously – at Market Basket.
Spending a week this time of year in this cabin gave me a taste of Thoreau at Walden. Some of the nights were quite icy, even with a wood fire beside me.
Wreckage on the shore serves as a warning and reminder. The sea can turn violent in a moment. Another harsh winter’s ahead for all of us in these parts. And commercial fishing’s an especially dangerous occupation.
Just look at what it does to metal.
There’s a romantic allure to the idea of living on an island, and Maine has more than its share. Still, a day visit can be memorable.
Jnana's Red Barn 