‘The boozing, the anger’

Founded in 1969 as the Bull & Finch Pub, this bar on Beacon Street in Boston is best remembered as the exterior of the bar seen in the hit NBC sitcom Cheers, which ran between 1982 and 1993.

 "It’s {the Boston area} just a really interesting place to grow up. The sports teams, the colleges, the racial tension, the state workers, the boozing, the anger. All of that stuff. I don’t think I ever appreciated the amount of maniacs that live in Massachusetts until I left. When I lived here, I took it for granted that everyone was kind of funny and a bit of a character."

— Bill Burr (born 1968 in the Boston suburb of Canton, Mass.), standup comedian and actor

The name "Canton" comes from the erroneous early belief that Canton, China, was on the complete opposite side of the earth (antipodal). New England merchants in the 18th and 19th centuries had many lucrative commercial links with the Chinese port city of Canton (now called Guangzhou). Canton, Mass. was originally part of Stoughton.

Part of Great Blue Hill is in Canton, whose summit, at 635 feet, is the highest point in Greater Boston and Norfolk County and also the highest within 10 miles of the Atlantic coast south of central Maine. 

What does it mean?

Historical coat of arms (1876)

“these days
sometimes you sleep
in a purple T-shirt
that says Massachusetts
which means something
in an older language
I can never remember.’’

— From “Poem for Massachusetts, by Matthew Zapruder

“Massachusetts’’ is an Algonquin word that roughly translates to “large hill place” or “at the great hill.”

The word refers to Great Blue Hill, in Milton, an ancient volcano last active over 400 million years ago. It’s now part of a park that includes a famous and historic weather observatory and a ski area.

Great Blue Hill

The weather observatory atop Great Blue Hill

— Photo jameslwoodward

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Warming up on Great Blue Hill

The famous weather observatory atop Great Blue Hill.

— Photo by jameslwoodward

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Observations at the famous Blue Hill Observatory, atop Great Blue Hill in Milton, Mass., show that over the past three decades there have been nearly six times as many daily records broken for heat as for cold. The hill, at 635 feet above sea level, is the highest one on the East Coast south of Maine.

Don McCasland, program director at the observatory, which has kept weather data since 1884, told The Boston Globe that the average annual temperature is, in The Globe’s words, “warming at Blue Hill much faster than in the past. Temperatures rose less than 1 degree from 1820 to 1919, but just over 2 degrees from 1920 to 2019.’’

“That is 3 degrees warmer in two centuries, and that is a large increase in a short amount of time,’’ he told The Globe.

To read The Globe’s story, please hit this link.

Blue Hill is famous for many dramatic weather events there, perhaps most notably for the 186 mph gust recorded there in the Sept. 21, 1938 hurricane.

The hill is also a cute ski area, and I have happy memories of the inexpensive fun it provided. It has snow-making machinery; it couldn’t be in business without it, especially as winters get shorter.