This is not a history of Worcester; it does not pretend to be. It is a collection of memories and stories of Worcester from the years immediately after WWII up to the present, years during which accelerating change has swept away much of historic New England's cities and towns. It is a book about things that Worcester people, wherever they may live, today, remember. The serious: those lost in WWII, the Worcester Tornado, the Blizzard of 1978, loved ones at Worcester State Hospital. The traditional: Thanksgiving, a Polish wedding, the downtown stores, delights of kids on "snow days." The special food: corned beef, grinders, apples cider, the amazing potato, blueberry pies and muffins. And experiences many shared: fishing, trips to the Higgins or the Mall, going to church on Sunday mornings. To tell this story, I began with my own memories of growing up, family, school, summer and winter fun, work. These were then enriched, extended, sometimes corrected, by hundreds of members of the Facebook page “You’re Probably from Worcester, If…” Like so many across the country, it is bringing people together, voluntarily, spontaneously, to share their memories of a city, a way of life, in an America rapidly disappearing. This must be humankind's first such mass movement in writing, sharing, correcting, and elaborating its history. My book captures a small piece of this amazing effort because it includes not only my own posts but also hundreds of comments on those posts—comments arising from direct, contemporaneous experiences, observations, feelings. Without this irreplaceable cumulative record of so many lives and experiences, this book would be a mere memoir—not a piece of living history in a new American tradition.

"You're Probably from Worcester, If..."

Biographies & Memoirs

Donway, Walter

Community & Culture

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Please note:  this title is so expensive because all photographs are in full color.  The same book with black and white photos is MUCH cheaper.  And, if you buy that book, you get the eBook for free, which includes all photographs in full color.  This is not a history of Worcester; it does not pretend to be. It is a collection of memories and stories of Worcester from the years immediately after WWII up to the present, years during which accelerating change has swept away much of historic New England's cities and towns. It is a book about things that Worcester people, wherever they may live, today, remember. The serious: those lost in WWII, the Worcester Tornado, the Blizzard of 1978, loved ones at Worcester State Hospital. The traditional: Thanksgiving, a Polish wedding, the downtown stores, delights of kids on "snow days." The special food: corned beef, grinders, apples cider, the amazing potato, blueberry pies and muffins. And experiences many shared: fishing, trips to the Higgins or the Mall, going to church on Sunday mornings. To tell this story, I began with my own memories of growing up, family, school, summer and winter fun, work. These were then enriched, extended, sometimes corrected, by hundreds of members of the Facebook page “You’re Probably from Worcester, If…” Like so many across the country, it is bringing people together, voluntarily, spontaneously, to share their memories of a city, a way of life, in an America rapidly disappearing. This must be humankind's first such mass movement in writing, sharing, correcting, and elaborating its history. My book captures a small piece of this amazing effort because it includes not only my own posts but also hundreds of comments on those posts—comments arising from direct, contemporaneous experiences, observations, feelings. Without this irreplaceable cumulative record of so many lives and experiences, this book would be a mere memoir—not a piece of living history in a new American tradition.

"Your Probably from Worcester, If..."

He was history's luckiest puppy. Abandoned in a German army kennel in the war-torn France of World War I. The town flattened by artillery fire. Only one-week old and still blind, starving with brothers and sisters that a desperate mother had no milk to feed. The German Shepherd puppy's chances of survival should have been zero. Then, an American G.I., on reconnaissance far head of this own unit, happened along. And so the Hollywood--and American--legend began that never faded. Starring in more than two-dozen films, as much a celebrity as any actor, he received the most votes for "best actor" in the first year of the Academy Awards. He kept the name that the G.I., Lee Duncan, had given him--a name taken from a Paris good-luck charm French children used to give to soldiers. It was Rin Tin Tin.

History's Luckiest Puppy: The Story of Rin Tin Tin

Arts & Literature

How, then, has the decline in economic freedom-in recent years a remorseless degradation of individual liberty-played out day to day in corporations and small businesses, in Washington, DC, and city hall, on Wall Street and in the courts? What are the grim mechanics in America today of encroaching government control and the inevitable consequence of a shrinking of the domain of innovating, choosing, acting economic man? What specifically are we losing that we care about-or should care about?Those are the questions answered in these 18 essays, which range from a demonstration that government is "nationalizing the financial industry" to a close-up look at how one Long Island town exercises plenipotentiary power over property rights in the name of zoning.

Not Half Free: The Myth that America Is Capitalist

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

From the perspective of the mid-Twentieth Century, when the schools of “Naturalism,” then “Realism,” had swept “serious” literature, Ayn Rand could look back on Romanticism and discern—as even Hugo did not in full—what truly constituted its spirit and power. What was essential and what accidental, what consistent with its vital spirit and what contradictory to it.This enabled her, as she progressed from novel to novel—and the growth that occurred from We the Living to The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged seems astounding—to attain a Romanticism of ruthless purity that with the writing of Atlas Shrugged endowed her art with unprecedented power. See the chapter, “Ayn Rand Resuscitates Dying Romanticism.”She had identified what gives Romanticism its incomparable ability to excite the imagination, lift the spirit, and inspire intense hero-worship. She mastered a literary method that rendered Atlas Shrugged and its events and heroes immortal in the minds of readers—part of an experience readers say no other fiction gave them—and made it literally life-changing. I give personal testimony to that experience in the chapter, “Incurable Atlas Fever.”If in her novels she resuscitated the Romantic Revolution, she gave that movement at least a slender chance to grow against almost insurmountable cultural odds. She was able to do so by virtue of her parallel careers as a novelist and philosopher. Even as her novels became more consciously, consistently Romantic, her own philosophy emerged and became more explicit, articulate, and complete. Her hope that the future might see a rebirth of Romanticism was heard by many of us.In writing Atlas Shrugged, she determined not only to create a grand epic of the clash of values on a world stage—at levels simultaneously intimately personal, social, political, and philosophical—but at the same time to define what should be a hero’s values. If, in Romantic fiction, men and women embodied the grandeur of dedication to their values, what should those values be? As she put the assignment to herself: Define a philosophy for successfully living on earth.Atlas Shrugged became perhaps the first Romantic novel in history with heroes who lived and acted not for conventionally accepted “highest values”—an era’s prevailing conception of the noble—but by a philosophy and code of values originated by the author and introduced to the world in the pages of a novel. The rest is history, as a generation of mostly young readers turned the last page of Atlas Shrugged not only on fire to emulate its heroes, but possessed of an explicit exposition of the ideas that made those heroes possible.

Ayn Rand's Road to Romanticism: Essays and Reviews

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Independently published

The heroic young African woman whom Tarzan meets, N'Kimba, has traveled across the midsection of Africa from the east-the hunting grounds of the legendary Maasai lion hunters in what is now Kenya and Tanzania. She comes in search of her parents, seized by slave hunters and taken back to work in the rubber plantations of the Congo Free State. Her own home, to which she and Tarzan later journey, is on the east side of Africa, bordering the Indian Ocean. It is the homeland of the Maasai, but also the vast territory of Arab-Islamic slave traders, who for centuries took slaves from all populations not of their religion, but especially the Bantus. On the Indian Ocean coast, the island of Zanzibar was a slave market through which millions of African men, woman, and children were sold into slavery worldwide.

Tarzan in the Heart of Darkness: (Inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs)

Genre Fiction

The Fountainhead is the story of Howard Roark, a brilliant architect who stands alone against the hostility of conventional architects and a society that prizes conformity over innovation. The theme, in Ayn Rand’s words, is “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul.” The theme is embodied in Roark’s conflicts with a socialist who schemes to destroy him; a media magnate whose trashy newspaper plays to the masses but, despite himself, becomes Roark’s closest friend; and a beautiful woman who loves Roark but works to undermine him. In the course of the novel, Roark’s interactions with these and other characters bring out the true nature of independence and of man’s creative potential.\nThe Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead, by The Atlas Society, is a thorough, quick, and easy-to-use readers’ tool for fans and first-time readers alike. It includes a complete plot synopsis of the novel and an alphabetical guide to the novel’s cast of characters. Whether you are reading the novel for the first time or the fifteenth, this Pocket Guide will help you stay abreast of all the twists and turns in Rand’s epic portrayal of creators on strike.

Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead

Kelley,David

Atlas Society Press

Romanticism Reborn: Ayn Rand, 20th Century Romanticism, and Romantic Realism.

A NIPMUC INDIAN MAN SAVED MY SUMMER WHEN I WAS 12 YEARS OLD. HIS NAME WAS "TALL LUKE"When we were kids at Webster Lake in Massachusetts, near the border with Connecticut, we heard about Nipmuc Indians. For a long time, some kids thought people were saying "chipmunk." It makes a sort of sense. You associate Indians with knowing everything about animals and plants and living with nature in ways most people today don't know how to do.The Nipmucs, sometimes spelled "Nipmucks," were the native American people who first lived around Worcester, Massachusetts, near where I grew up in Webster. In fact, they lived throughout parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York, And they were there long before the English colonists or any other white people arrived. Before anyone kept records of the region.My father, mother, two older sisters, younger brother, and I lived in a house, which we called a "cottage," right on the edge of South Pond, one of the three ponds that made up Webster Lake. We had a wharf sticking out into the lake. We tied up a row boat, there, and fished from the end almost every evening, sometimes by casting a fishing lure, or plug, toward the middle of the lake. On a hot day, when visitors arrived and got into their bathing suits, they would run full speed down the gravel path next to the cottage, onto the wharf, right out to the end, and do a long jump or dive into the lake. You could get a splinter in your bare foot from that old wharf, though.I said the summer when I was 12 years old was my best. I think it ended up that way not because of a "chipmunk," but because of a Nipmuc Indian, Tall Luke. That doesn't sound like a Native American name, but there is an explanation.

The Nipmuc Indian Who Saved My Summer: A Native American Man Meets a Bullied Boy

Children's Books

Growing Up & Facts of Life

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