SBOL_Jeanne

by Rick Winterson      The 2018 Polar Plunge, perhaps the longest continuous annual custom and event in South Boston, will happen on Monday morning, January 1 (of course), at 9 a.m.  The location – the Curley Community Center (a.k.a. “The L”) on Day Boulevard at the foot of L Street, on the K Street Beach side.    South Boston’s historic Polar Plunge has been a faithfully followed local custom for over 115 years – at least since 1901.  Our hometown’s Plunge is the oldest in the country.  Very possibly, South Boston residents took part in unrecorded Plunges going all the way back to the Civil War.  Soldiers in that years-long conflict learned the value of sanitary habits, including bathing; they brought these health-giving customs [...]

by Rick Winterson   You have surely seen and heard of the “Toys for Tots” program, first founded by Major Bill Hendricks, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, and his wife Diane.  Actually, the idea occurred to Diane, after she had unsuccessfully tried to find a way to get Christmas toys to needy children. Just as a reminder, here are a few remarkable facts and figures describing “Toys for Tots”.  In this Year of Our Lord 2017, “Toys for Tots” has turned 70 – Diane and Bill Hendricks began it in 1947.  If you would like to see a heart-warming sight, take the elevator to the Eighth Floor of South Boston’s Design & Innovation Building at 21 Drydock Avenue by the Flynn Terminal.  You’ll see an entire [...]

by Rick Winterson      “For Now”, located at 68 Seaport Boulevard on the edge of One Seaport’s Courthouse Square, is a retail incubator.  Inside “For Now”, there are thirteen - Lucky 13 - small pop-up shops, which take many forms - racks, steps, shelves, pegboards, tabletops, and mannequins.  Each one of these is really a small business of its own, featuring elegant, enticing crafted goods. It is the concept of the “For Now” proprietors, Katharine ReQua and Kaity Cimo, that small but creative businesses belonging to craftspeople can pilot their wares in a real-life, bricks-and-mortar marketplace at “For Now”.  They can then move on, after one, or two, or three months, to achieve their own independent e-commerce success.  But they are here for, well, [...]

by Rick Winterson   There is a certain insanity to “Cyber Monday”, the Monday of November’s final week.  Yes, we live in a cyber-influenced age, but blending this into the Winter Holiday Season is a bit extreme in our opinion.  Even more insane is so-called “Black Friday”, which was originally confined to the Friday after Thanksgiving.  Over the last few years, Black Friday has been stretched from well before midnight on Thanksgiving Thursday into the following weekend.  In this year of 2017, Black Friday was stretched far enough backwards to include November 20 – the Monday before Thanksgiving.  So we should now call it “Black Week”, maybe? Insanity, indeed! Fortunately, between the two volcanoes of insanity known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there was [...]