Home Town

by Kidder, Tracy

• ISBN13: 9780671785215
• ISBN10: 0671785214
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Washington Square Press

Summary

In this fascinating book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes us inside the everyday workings of Northampton, Massachusetts -- a place that seems to personify the typical American hometown. Kidder unveils the complex drama behind the seemingly ordinary lives of Northampton's residents. And out of these stories he creates a splendid, startling portrait of a town, in a narrative that gracefully travels among past and present, public and private, joy and sorrow.A host of real people are alive in these pages: a tycoon with a crippling ailment; a criminal whom the place has beguiled, a genial and merciful judge, a single mother struggling to start a new life at Smith College; and, at the center, a policeman who patrols the streets of his beloved hometown with a stern yet endearing brand of morality -- and who is about to discover the peril of spending a whole life in one small place. Their stories take us behind the town's facades and reveal how individuals shape the social conscience of a community.Home Townis an unflinching yet lovingly rendered account of how a traditional American town endures and evolves at the turn of the millenniums.

Author Biography

Tracy Kidder is an American nonfiction author and Pulitzer Prize winner. He studied at Harvard College and served in the United States Army.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xv
Part I
Townie	3	(30)
The Morning Polka	33	(24)
A Restraining Order	57	(28)
Part II
A Moral Place	85	(17)
Hands	102	(22)
Hunting	124	(24)
Sanctuary	148	(19)
Too Cold for Crime	167	(30)
Part III
Tearless, Eager and Longing Eyes	197	(14)
Plain Miss Smith	211	(6)
Total, Mindless Joy	217	(20)
I Could Do This Stuff	237	(9)
The Witness List	246	(13)
Part IV
Public Works	259	(8)
Meaning Well	267	(19)
The Caretaker	286	(13)
The Application	299	(8)
The Trial	307	(25)
Milton	332	(27)
Part V
The Farewell Sermon	359	(5)
Willoughby Gap	364	(12)
Karma	376	(8)
Free at Last	384	(24)
The Judge	408	(11)
Acknowledgments and Bibliography	419

Excerpts

Chapter 1: Townie He grew up here. He was the youngest of Jane and Bill O'Connor's seven children. His oldest sister called him Todder when he was an infant. His high school friends shortened up his surname and rechristened him Oakie. To teachers and other adults he was usually Tommy. His wife would call him Tom. All his nicknames and the diminutive accompanied him to adulthood. If you do all your growing up in the same small place, you don't shed identities. You accumulate them.One day when he was ten years old, Tommy O'Connor's Little League baseball coach made him the starting pitcher. A signal honor, but then Tommy couldn't get anyone out. He walked the first batter, and from their lawn chairs on the sidelines the parents called, "Make him be a hitter, Tommy." So he threw an easy one right over the plate, and the batter nailed it. His teammates in the field behind him did as they'd been taught: they talked it up, they chattered, squeaky voices calling, "Hum chuck, Tommy. No batter, no batter. Hum it in there, Tommy baby." He threw harder and walked the next two batters. He eased up and the next kid hit it over everything. Many games of Little League reach this kind of impasse. Five runs in, the bases loaded once again, and still nobody out, the fielders grumbling, the parents looking on in silence, all except for one, someone else's father, who cares more about a good ball game than his neighbor's son, and shouts, "Get him outa there, for Christ's sake!" Tommy stood on the mound, staring at his shoes.The coach called time and went out to talk to him. If sports build character, they can also test it prematurely. What if the kid can't take it? What if he begins to cry? "You all right?" the coach asked.Tommy lifted his eyes toward the sky. It was a fine summer afternoon at Arcanum Field. Not a cloud in sight. Tommy looked back over his shoulder, as if just making sure. Then he looked at the coach, and he smiled. "Think it might rain?" he asked.The coach told the story to Tommy's father, Bill, the treasurer of Hampshire County and the region's preeminent master of ceremonies and after-dinner speaker. Bill put that story about Tommy in the vast repertoire he employed at the Elks, the Legion, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the John Boyle O'Reilly Club, the family's kitchen table. There it grew as smooth as the bits of glass that Tommy found on the beach during the family's summer camping trips to Cape Cod. Tommy's mother kept scrapbooks about him, even when he was an adult. He was her last child, the youngest of the six who survived. He had brown curly hair, and a little cockeyed grin that made girls and women smile back.Tommy spent his childhood and adolescence on Forbes Avenue, just off Elm Street and a few blocks from Smith College, in a quiet neighborhood of both grand and ordinary homes. He was raised in a wood-framed house that a family of modest means could afford back then. The house was full to bursting with exuberant youth, and the neighborhood was so full of children that Tommy never felt a need to go beyond it, except for the sake of adventure. Early on summer mornings he would stand on the sidewalk in front of his family's house and hear a cry or lift it first himself -- "E-awkee!" -- and then the same call, from voices that hadn't changed yet, would sound up and down the streets, and soon barefoot children would appear from all directions, apparitions out of the gray dawn. Tommy's friend Rick emerged from just three doors up Forbes Avenue, and from their homes came Ethan and Lisa and Bobby and half a dozen more. They'd converge on the sidewalk and make plans, naming destinations -- "Meet ya at the Hill," "Meet ya at White Rock," "Meet ya at the dirt mounds."The fastest, easiest route to Hawley Junior High -- named for a local Revolutionary War patriot -- would have been by sidewalk, but Tommy and his friends rarely went that way. From September u