A New England Food Fight!

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the June 30, 2016 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Fights within a family are nothing new. The world’s oldest literature records them (Cain and Abel), history chronicles them (Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth 1), and folklore embellishes them (the Hatfields and McCoys).

            Massachusetts is not new to family troubles, either. In-laws in the Porter and Putnam families tussled in Salem during the 1600s and some of that acrimony fed the Witch Trials. The Friendly’s brothers fought over ice cream. Even the famous Koch brothers’ in-fighting has a tie to Massachusetts – three of the Koch brothers attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Election Fever

Norma Logan is the Literacy Coordinator at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read Norma Logan's column in the June 23, edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Since last June, for anyone paying attention to the political arena, it has been a whirlwind of emotions and news bites.  More than twenty politicians have come and gone out of the presidential campaign, and we are now edging closer to seeing one non-politician and one career politician left standing.  Emotions are running high, and we still have a long way to go.

In Search of the Perfect Tomato

Read Alli Palmgren's column in the June 16, 2016 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin. Alli is the Technology Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library.

For the first time in over two months, my husband and I are able to eat dinner at the kitchen table. Since March, nearly every flat surface in the house has been completely covered in seedlings. While I devoted a fair amount of counter space to peppers, strawberries, pumpkins, and the like, it is really the dozen varieties of tomatoes that have taken over our house and my life.

Trains and More Trains

Margot Sullivan is a part-time reader's advisory and reference librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column as published in the June 9, 2016 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Many, many, many years ago at Boston University I took a course on Middle Eastern History with a young professor who is now Professor Emeritus – foreign policy in the Middle East.  I am not really sure why I took the course other than it was something totally new and different but I ended up writing the final paper on the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad Railway. I do remember enjoying the research.  From 1899 to 1914 and eventually 1940 this immense project was fraught with politics, finances, and confusion. The reasoning behind such an enormous and long linking between two geographical areas was that Germany would get oil and Turkey would trade for needed goods. Abdul Hamid ll was the last sultan to have absolute control over the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909 when he was deposed. The alliance with Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm ll which included the Baghdad Railway construction was unsuccessful. There is still discussion today as to whether this undertaking helped bring about World War l.

Libraries I've Known and Loved

Jeff Hartman is the Senior Circulation Assistant and Paging Supervisor at the Morrill Memorial Library. Jeff also creates the graphics used in marketing library services and programs. Read Jeff's column in the June 2, 2016 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin. 

I started out in the basement, two afternoons every week, all summer long.  It was hot that year, and I rode my bike downtown, but it was a good chance to get out of the house.  And I got all of my volunteer hours out of the way before my freshman year of high school even started in the fall.  It was dusty down in the basement, but cool and quiet, and all I had to do was rip barcodes off of old magazines, stamp them “WITHDRAWN,” and wheel my booktruck down through the stacks to get a new batch.