In the initial issue of All Pawtucket All the Time, which hit the Bucket last week, Hadden wrote, “Our mission is to focus on what’s news everywhere in Pawtucket, from neighborhood goings-on and activities by community organizations and local businesses to pocketbook and other important issues from the schools to City Hall.”
He continues, “Of course what will be most vital about the paper will be its ability to reflect Pawtucket itself, a city along a fast-rushing river whose distinguished industrial history traces almost to the founding of the Republic, yet it is as contemporary as the burgeoning arts community that today is refilling its old mills with creative people and new ideas.”
If anyone can capture the pace and patter of Pawtucket, it’s Hadden.
The Bud-I, most of the time
We recently spoke to some Bristol denizens who were shocked — shocked! — that marching in their mighty Independence Day Parade this July will be none other than former Providence mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr., aka the Bud-I. (Well, not actually “marching.” You know he’ll be in some sort of gas guzzling macho-mobile.)
All we can say is that the good people of Bristol (with the possible exception of the DeLeo family) should just get over it. Bigger chowder-heads than the Bud-I have marched in Bristol on the Fourth. (Proof positive: Jorge has twice ridden on a float in the parade.)
Also new on the Bud-I front was the lead story in Monday’s “National” section of the New York Times. It was Dan Barry’s weekly “This Land” column, entitled, “Now Free to Speak His Mind, an Ex-Mayor Is Doing So.”
Barry, an ace former BeloJo scribe, looked at the Bud-I’s radio show, pointing out that “intermixed with sharp analysis and legitimate criticism . . . are taunts and half-truths.” The scribe also refers to “Buddy patter” being replete with “smirking half-truths.”
Well, hell, Dan, why do you think they call it show biz? There was only one sentence in Barry’s perceptive report that rang untrue: “Back in Rhode Island, people wondered whether Mr. Cianci would be sufficiently shamed to avoid the public stage upon his release, and whether the state was sufficiently weary of him.”
Your superior correspondents can tell you that we do not know anyone, not a single soul, who thought for a second that the Bud-I would be “shamed,” even insufficiently. The only question in most people’s minds was for which radio station he’d go to work.
Send radio job prospects and Pulitzer-grade tips to p&j@phx.com.
