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Milford, where I spent most
of my days growing up, was a little town on the outskirts of all the
development of Boston's rings of suburbs. Conveniently located
35 minutes from Boston, Providence and Worcester, Milford is
inconveniently located 35 minutes from Boston, Providence and
Worcester. The most overlooked
thing that has ever happened in this once little granite quarry town
was that
Sacco and Vanzetti called it home for five years before they
were electrocuted for being communists. Milford High has also
produced two graduates of note -
some guy who won the Nobel Prize for making organ transplants
possible, and
Howie Long, the Oakland Raiders defensive end who won Super Bowl
XVII and became a football announcer and spokesman for Radio Shack
alongside Teri Hatcher.
Besides tripling and doubling in size in the 80's, Milford was a
typical suburb in typical fashion - a quiet little place with nothing for teens to do and just far
enough away from anywhere you had a feeling
you were in the middle of nowhere. That left a lot of room to
let your imagination run wild or amuck. The town hasn't
changed drastically since I left, the quarries that doubled as
dangerous swimming holes are now covered up with gigantic granite
parking lots housing equally gigantic chain stores and hotels.
The town holds a nice New England charm, with a stately Town Hall
on Main Street, but no real heart. It's the suburbs, every
square inch of open land now covered in strip malls and fast food
haunts. My brother drove me through downtown and showed off
some of the new development, along with the destruction of an old
brick building by one of my old middle schools.
But as things turned out, there were a lot worse places to grow
up, and the proximity to Boston, the coast, and even New York made
it a well placed hub to all that New England had to offer.
Continue on to Boston...
Town Hall,
where they hate pigeons.
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Follow this link for some
interesting research into Milford's breakaway neighbor, Hopedale, which was founded by my old
landlord's grandfather
Adin Ballou as a utopian community which went bankrupt and was
bought by a shoe factory. |
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