Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 3, No. 46 - November 18, 2021
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................7
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals............................. 4,6,7
Finance..................................3
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Cloudy
62˚/54˚
Saturday
Cloudy
64˚/55˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
73˚/56˚
Lawndale Tribune
AND lAwNDAle News
Hawthorne Press Tribune
Featuring the Weekly Newspapers of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale
Three Hawthorne Officers Honored
Officers Mathew Jones and Diego Campos were sworn in as full Hawthorne Police officers just starting their careers. An hour later, we said farewell to Detective Keith Chaffin who served the city with
distinction for 26 years. Congratulations to all three officers as they begin new chapters in their lives and careers. Photo courtesy Hawthorne Police Department.
The Thing About Boston
Article and photos
by Ben & Glinda Shipley
The thing about Boston is its unique sense
of history.
Many places boast a history, of course—
history exists everywhere humans have trod
the earth—but in too many communities, the
past has been hastily buried in the lunge to
the present and future. In Boston, the past
lies right there at your feet and finger-tips.
It radiates from the squares and markets, the
clapboard houses and the brick and granite
buildings—but more importantly, from the
oddly accented New Englanders themselves.
More than anywhere else, the history here
exists in thick, vibrant layers, waiting to be
peeled back to reveal to us where our American
collective came from and who we really are.
Bostonians are great story-tellers. Maybe
it’s the Irish influence, but everyone you
meet, from bartender to shopkeeper, from
taxi driver to lay-about, has a gripping tale
to tell. Is everything you hear 100% factual?
Probably not—how could it be?—but it doesn’t
matter. Anyone who claims that history can
be deconstructed into precise, verifiable bits
of experience has spent too much time with
television and not much time with the past.
Some stories are just better than others, and
that’s why we keep re-telling them.
A handful of the more remarkable layers
you’ll uncover in Beantown, Titletown,
the Athens of America, and the Hub of the
Universe:
The American Revolution:
The rebellion that started in Boston wasn’t
the same Revolution that outlasted King
George’s patience and defeated Lord Cornwallis
at Yorktown. Long before Washington
and von Steuben converted their militias into
a modern, well-trained army at Valley Forge,
a rabble of New England farmers, dockhands,
merchants, roustabouts, and ne’er-do-wells
took on the greatest Empire in history, armed
with nothing more than bloody-minded obstinacy,
spectacular marksmanship, and an
occasional swig of rum. And booted them
out of town before the Revolution even
got rolling.
That’s the reason you won’t find an individual
hero dominating the narrative of the
rebellion in these parts. A plaque here, an
oddly named cobblestone street, a grave marker
there, a crooked eave—if you search beyond
the surface of events, you’ll find thousands
of personalities who arose, did their part,
and then eased back into the mists of history.
The North End:
American neighborhoods have taken a bad
rap in the last couple of decades, as many
confuse freedom and access to resources
with churning all of us into one bland, massive
blob. Boston has always been a city of
neighborhoods—the North End and East
Boston for the Italians, Southie for the Irish,
Roxbury for the Blacks, and Beacon Hill for
the Brahmins. Not to mention Chinatown and
several smaller congregations. But from the
beginning, the intent was never to exclude,
but to protect one’s own language, religion,
and politics from the nastier rampages of an
occasionally ugly democracy.
Paul Revere and William Dawes eluded the Redcoats. Revere
won all the poetry.
So the North End, which is where the
Puritans are buried and the Revolution started,
became home in quick succession to the
Jewish, Irish, and then the Italian immigrants.
Today, the Italians are struggling to
preserve their heritage against an invasion of
partying millennials who have no idea how
Cotton Mather, Paul Revere, Rose Kennedy,
and Sacco & Vanzetti came to be memorialized
within a few blocks of each other. To
the casual outsider, the North End might look
See Travel, page 7