IAN DONNIS

Ticket chase

IAN DONNIS — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:42:43 GMT

Ace Ticket deal offers several benefits for the Red Sox
Last week, the Phoenix broke the news that the Boston Red Sox were opting out of the agreement Major League Baseball struck last year making eBay–owned online sports-ticket giant StubHub the official reseller of MLB seats.

Ticket shock: Fans are paying the price for the Sox success: inside the Fenway fiasco. By Ian Donnis

By partnering with Ace Ticket, the Boston Red Sox are gently edging closer to the new era of secondary-ticket sales while shielding themselves from criticism that fans could have been expected to make about a similar arrangement with StubHub.com.

This past week, the Phoenix broke the news that the Sox were opting out of the agreement struck this past year that made StubHub the official ticket reseller of Major League Baseball. On Saturday, the Boston Globe reported that the team signed a one-year agreement for Ace Ticket to be the organization’s official “offline” ticket re-sale agency for season-ticket holders.

Sam Kennedy, the Sox’ senior VP for sales/marketing, calls the deal with Ace Ticket “a straight advertising relationship.” The team will gain revenue by placing Ace’s name on the scoreboard for three innings during each game and on a billboard near Fenway Park’s right-field fence. Unlike MLB’s deal with StubHub, in which teams will receive a percentage of revenue for tickets re-sold though StubHub, the Sox will not make money on Ace Ticket’s ticket re-sales, sparing the team accusations of double-dipping.

In explaining the Sox’ decision — apparently unique among MLB’s 30 franchises — to opt out of the StubHub partnership, Kennedy points to the squeeze on getting into Fenway, which is the smallest ballpark in baseball, with the most costly tickets.

The Sox have made more efforts than any other professional sports team to maximize the number of unique visitors to Fenway, he says, “[But] in the case of ticket availability, when you have under 39,000 tickets to sell [per home game] and 14 million fans, it’s an unsolvable problem.” Because of this incredible demand, the team opted to take a slow approach, he says, choosing not to get into the lucrative secondary-ticket-sales market this year.

Kennedy pointed to another reason why the team sided with Ace. “Our biggest concern, frankly, is fraud,” and the potential distribution of counterfeit tickets through Internet sales. “We felt it was incumbent on us to direct people to an offline location endorsed by the team,” he says, adding, “We found that Ace had the best reputation in the industry.”

Brookline-based Ace, which was launched in 1979 and now has seven Boston-area locations, is a familiar name for Sox fans, thanks to commercials aired by the company during game broadcasts.

Ticket shock

IAN DONNIS — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:09:42 GMT

Fans are paying the price for the Sox success: inside the Fenway fiasco
When NESN periodically broadcasts a historic Red Sox game during the off-season, the vast swaths of empty seats are enough to cause a sharp sense of wistfulness for many fans.

UPDATE: Ticket chase: Ace Ticket deal offers several benefits for the Red Sox. By Ian Donnis

When NESN periodically broadcasts a historic Red Sox game during the off-season — say, Roger Clemens’s record-setting 20-strikeout performance in 1986 — the vast swaths of empty seats are enough to cause a sharp sense of wistfulness for many fans. Considering the current vogue for the team, it’s hard to believe that fewer than 14,000 paying customers turned out on that April night.

In recent years, Sox buffs have endured mind-numbing waits — typically three, four, or five hours — for just an opportunity to buy a restricted number of tickets during the team’s annual online sale in late January. On January 26, though, scores of Sox enthusiasts found themselves shut out, facing a meager selection, or able to buy just a single pair of decent tickets after a 12-hour purgatory in the dreaded online Virtual Waiting Room at redsox.com.

For some long-time fans, it added insult to injury to see how scores of tickets were quickly re-offered that day — at significantly marked up prices — on StubHub, the Internet-based ticket re-seller.

Considering the continually growing popularity of the Sox, who have won two world championships in the past four seasons, and whose home is the nearly 96-year-old Fenway Park — the smallest ballpark in the Major Leagues, with a maximum capacity right around 39,000 — the situation is a by-product of the intense demand for the most coveted tickets in baseball.

Making the already-feverish competition even worse, the market now spreads to the Far East, thanks to the Red Sox (who will open the 2008 season in Tokyo on March 25) having this past year added Japanese imports Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima to their roster.

All this represents a massive makeover from the 1980s, when homeless people from Kenmore Square, and anyone else who wanted to come in, were freely admitted to Fenway Park once games were well under way.

The price of Sox tickets has soared during the past five years, with right-field boxes climbing from $37 to $50, loge seats from $65 to $90, and field boxes from $70 to $125. The team has done a better job of holding the line at the bottom end — lower bleachers have increased from $18 to $26, upper bleachers from $10 to $12, and standing-room tickets from $18 to $20. Yet the Sox have also added capacity — and revenue — through the innovative creation of new premium seating (Green Monster seats, $160; pavilion-club seats, $165 to $215; and right-field roof-deck seats, $115), as well as a lesser amount of new cheap seats (Conigliaro’s Corner, $25).

The Station’s long shadow

IAN DONNIS — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:02:20 GMT

Five years on, getting by remains a day-to-day challenge for some of those touched by the fire
For most Rhode Islanders, the Station nightclub conflagration — the worst disaster in the state since the hurricane of 1938 — is like a receding object in a rearview mirror.

LEGACY: The site of the February 2003 nightclub disaster is set to become a formal memorial.

For most Rhode Islanders, the Station nightclub conflagration — the worst disaster in the state since the hurricane of 1938 — is like a receding object in a rearview mirror.

Dave Kane, the father of 18-year-old Nicholas O’Neill, the youngest victim of the February 2003 catastrophe, uses this image to describe the typical view of those not directly affected by the fire. “They come to the site to see what happened, and they drive away,” Kane says, referring to the scene in West Warwick destined to become a formal memorial. Public concern about the disaster “gets smaller and smaller, and five years from now it will be even smaller.”

For Kane, as could only be expected, the situation is very different. Like some of the others touched by the Station fire, he remains outraged by what he perceives as the injustice of the aftermath, and his voice is choked by emotion as he discusses this, his sense of frustration palpable.

Bound by their shared experience in the cataclysm in West Warwick, the survivors of the Station disaster — as well as the friends and relatives of those injured and killed — each have different stories, different outlooks, and different ways of carrying the pain and suffering inflicted on February, 20, 2003.

It was on that apparently unremarkable Thursday night, shortly before the start of the war in Iraq, when the seemingly carefree act of going to see Great White, a fading hard-rock act, at the Station, an old roadhouse in the geographic center of Rhode Island, became a nightmare.

Great White’s use of pyrotechnics, combined with a clogged main exit, the lack of a sprinkler system, and the cheap foam soundproofing that accelerated the spread of a small initial fire, produced an inferno that turned the Station into a deathtrap within minutes. One hundred people were killed, and more than twice that many hurt.

ProJo squashes kids' spelling-bee

IAN DONNIS — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:59:51 GMT

As the ProJo Turns
Newspapers need all the help they can get these days, so the Providence Journal ’s withdrawal of sponsorship for the Rhode Island Statewide Spelling Bee -- resulting in the cancellation of this year’s competition -- has angered ProJo staffers.

Newspapers need all the help they can get these days, so the Providence Journal’s withdrawal of sponsorship for the Rhode Island Statewide Spelling Bee -- resulting in the cancellation of this year’s competition -- has angered ProJo staffers.

The Journal’s decision to no longer serve as the event’s main sponsor was communicated in a letter sent just before Christmas time to the Rhode Island Association of School Principals, which helps to coordinate the bee. “Unfortunately, it won’t happen this year as a result,” says John Golden, the association’s executive director.

Golden finds no fault with the paper’s decision. “The Providence Journal has been very generous for a long time,” he says. Being the lead sponsor for the bee, which was scheduled for March, “is expensive and it eats up a lot of staff time,” particularly in the ProJo’s promotions department. Golden, who was unable to identify the precise cost of lead sponsorship, places it at “something in excess of $5000.” Because of the cancellation, schools have been encouraged to conduct their own local spelling bees.

A number of ProJo staffers are angry and flabbergasted by the newspaper’s withdrawal of sponsorship, which has gone unreported in Rhode Island’s newspaper of record.

“This is just incomprehensible,” says reporter John Hill, president of the Providence Newspaper Guild. “I don’t see how you could have an event that is more connected to a newspaper’s mission, which is reading, and learning about the world, and expanding your vocabulary. These are things that you need to learn if you’re going to be a newspaper reader or a Web site reader.”

Past winners of the Rhode Island Statewide Spelling Bee have progressed to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC.

Hill recalls having covered a packed Rhode Island spelling bee last year in which study guides provided by the ProJo were a ubiquitous sight. “To throw that away, I’m completely baffled by it,” he says. “It just betrays a tone deafness to what the Journal’s role in the community ought to be, and we are diminishing that role.”

Last year, the newspaper’s parent, the Dallas-based Belo Corporation, considered the Journal’s support for the spelling bee important enough to trumpet it in a news release on the corporate Web site. Now, though, the decision is thought to be part of another cost-cutting effort at Rhode Island’s largest newspaper. Barbara Nauman, the Journal’s director of promotions, didn’t return a message seeking comment.

Out of the shadows

IAN DONNIS — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:22:08 GMT

The Providence ‘Wunderground’ gets its due at the RISD Museum
Although “Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present,” an exhibition that opened last weekend at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, covers a brief period of time, it also represents a dramatically compressed cycle of change in the life of the city. Images from the Wunderground Print the legend: Providence's "Wunderground" and MassArt's "Crafty." By Greg Cook

WHOLE LOT OF HISTORY: With local artists, Tannenbaum conceived the idea of displaying a decade’s worth of posters documenting the Providence look.

Although “Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present,” an exhibition that opened last weekend at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, covers a brief period of time, it also represents a dramatically compressed cycle of change in the life of the city.

Eleven years ago, the availability of cheap mill space enabled a youthful cast of anti-materialistic artists to create Fort Thunder, their own wildly fertile alternative to mainstream consumer culture. Yet within just a few years, amid growing national hype about the so-called Providence Renaissance, the low-rent accessibility that helped fuel this influential scene was rapidly disappearing.

When an out-of-town developer planned a bland suburban-style strip mall on the site encompassing Fort Thunder, the ensuing battle highlighted sharply divergent visions of Providence’s future. Despite broad opposition, the shopping complex came to fruition, initiating a wave of new development extending from the rear of the Providence Place Mall to Olneyville Square. And though the battle served as a distinct wake-up call, Providence still struggles to find a way to ensure a place for the underground artists who have lent the city creative caché far and wide, particularly through noise music, screen-printing, and comics. This scene continues, though, thanks in part to the devotion of its members to their adopted city.

In this respect, “Wunderground” looks at both past and present. One element of the show presents more than 2000 posters promoting subterranean art and music events. The other part, a towering sculptural village created by eight artists representative of the Providence underground, is titled Shangri-la-la-land. The title, chosen by the participants, suggests the kind of utopian ideals associated with art collectives like Fort Thunder, as well as the uncertain tenor of the current moment. One piece, Brian Chippendale’s wheeled Home On the Run, seems a riff on how he’s repeatedly been displaced by development.

The Phoenix (the media sponsor for “Wunderground”) recently sat down to discuss the show with Judith Tannenbaum, the RISD Museum’s Richard Brown Baker curator of contemporary art.

Young Sulzberger prepares to go West

IAN DONNIS — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 21:12:56 GMT

As the ProJo Turns
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who has built a promising foundation for his journalistic career during almost two years as a reporter at the Providence Journal , plans to leave the paper later this month to take a job at the Oregonian .

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who has built a promising foundation for his journalistic career during almost two years as a reporter at the Providence Journal, plans to leave the paper later this month to take a job at the Oregonian.

A ProJo source says Sulzberger, one of two children of New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., is slated to work his last day April 21 before moving to the substantially larger daily in Portland, Oregon.

“He’ll be missed,” says Tim Schick, administrator of the Providence Newspaper Guild, who confirmed Sulzberger’s impending departure. “He’s a good reporter, and he’s highly respected by his coworkers.” Schick says the young heir’s tenure at the ProJo “proved to be something very rewarding for both [Sulzberger] and the people who work with him.” Because of his place as a member of one of American journalism’s great dynasties, “People initially didn’t know what to expect -- is this a guy who’s coming in with an attitude or a feeling of entitlement? And that was not the case at all. He was just one of the guys looking to do a good job.”

Profiled in the Phoenix earlier this year, Sulzberger, 25, was described as a skilled reporter uneasy with public attention who cultivated a reputation as a well-liked, hard-working and unassuming young man (see “The prince and the paper,” News, February 2). The direct descendant of four previous Times publishers, Sulzberger graduated from Brown University, where he concentrated in political science, and he joined the Journal as a two-year reporter-intern in mid-2004. In January, the scribes in that program were converted into permanent staffers.

Later, in February, at the Providence Newspaper Guild’s annual Follies, Sulzberger was bestowed with an award in honor of copy editor Mimi Burkhardt, a revered mentor to young ProJo reporters, who had died in 2004 at age 52. Medical reporter Felice Freyer, part of the three-person selection committee, says the depth and breadth of Sulzberger’s entries most impressed the judges. There was “an earnestness about them,” she says. “You could tell he was really trying to learn the craft.”

Sulzberger did not immediately return a telephone message and an e-mail left for him at the Journal’s South County bureau in Wakefield. In March, Willamette Week foreshadowed his move to the Oregonian by reporting that he had interviewed at the newspaper.

Wild and Crispy

IAN DONNIS — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:37:08 GMT

Yes, Damon’s departure changes the Sox, but they won’t be wanting for charisma
When Johnny Damon took a $52 million deal in December to join the New York Yankees, it cut through Red Sox Nation like a rusty knife.

When Johnny Damon took a $52 million deal in December to join the New York Yankees, it cut through Red Sox Nation like a rusty knife. With his spirited play, devil-may-care demeanor, and messianic appearance — complete with scruffy locks and a beard worthy of a Russian revolutionary — the Red Sox center fielder was a cult figure who helped bury the team’s infamous 86-year curse. That the offense-igniting leadoff hitter was not just leaving, but going to the hated (and neatly groomed) archrival Yankees, added considerable sting. Some wondered whether the Sox, whose loose, overgrown frat-house mentality propelled their remarkable come-from-behind victory over New York in the 2004 American League Championship Series, had lost their soul.

Coming as it did just after the loss of popular GM and boy wonder Theo Epstein, Damon’s defection was enough to give agita to Messrs. Henry, Lucchino, and Werner. But this winter’s front-office tumult is now in the past. Epstein is back and the 2006 Sox seem to be shaping up as a lively mixture of pitching, hitting, and defense. Questions certainly remain, particularly about the ability of two 2004 stalwarts — Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke — to bounce back from subpar 2005 seasons. However, with a variety of changes, including the recent additions of Wily Mo Pena and Hee Seop Choi, Boston has built a younger, deeper, and more dynamic 2006 team. If the wheels don’t come off, these guys could compete into the post-season.

But what about those intangibles? While some cast Damon as a traitor, it’s clear that the Sox, for strategic reasons, were willing to go only so far to keep the head Idiot, and the team, not coincidentally, has emphasized the addition of experienced “character” players. As ESPN’s Peter Gammons told me during spring training, “They’re consciously trying to get to being a baseball team now, not a show-business team. I think it’s very important.” After all, says Gammons, the Yankees’ self-description as the American League’s “most professional team” isn’t without purpose. “They don’t tolerate any of the clowning around, and not running balls out, and the ‘Idiots’ stuff that the Red Sox loved,” he says. “I mean, it’s nice, but there’s a reason the Yankees have finished first [in the AL East] every single year now since ’98.” (Gammo, who considers slugger David Ortiz far more of an icon than Damon, also significantly downplays Johnny Jesus’s role as the onetime face of the Sox.)

The prince and the paper

IAN DONNIS — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 14:38:27 GMT

Quietly building his journalistic credentials in Rhode Island, 25-year-old Arthur Gregg Sulzberger could one day vie for the top job at the New York Times
When a young Providence Journal reporter was poised to reveal the all-male membership of the Narragansett Lions Club last year, it didn’t sit well with at least one member.

When a young Providence Journal reporter was poised to reveal the all-male membership of the Narragansett Lions Club last year, it didn’t sit well with at least one member. As the subsequent story recounted, Democratic Town Committee chairman Gene Wills visited the ProJo’s Wakefield news bureau and warned the scribe not to mention the absence of women, implying that doing so might cost him his job and diminish advertising for his employer.

Wills probably didn’t know that the target of his message, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the 25-year-old son of New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., is part of a publishing dynasty that has faced requests to suppress information in matters ranging from the Bay of Pigs to the Pentagon Papers. (As it turned out, Sulzberger’s May 2005 piece on the Narragansett Lions, one of the largest such clubs in the country, highlighted the Lions’ considerable civic and charitable efforts, and didn’t mention the absence of women until the 16th paragraph.)

The Brown University graduate is just one of a number of talented young Providence Journal reporters in their 20s, many of whom, like their predecessors, will eventually move on to bigger papers and brighter destinations. The difference in Sulzberger’s case, of course, is that he might ultimately ascend to the top job at the New York Times. The chance to plow Rhode Island’s fertile journalistic terrain with such anonymity seems ideally suited for Sulzberger, a skilled reporter uncomfortable with public attention who has built a reputation as a well-liked, curious, hard-working, and unassuming young man. “The kid is not at all a prima donna,” says veteran political reporter Scott MacKay. “We’ve gotten kids here over the years with the same educational background, genius-types who think they know everything. He is really about making it on his own and being his own guy. You have to respect that.”

Family Times
As the direct descendant of four previous Times publishers (his great-great-grandfather was the iconic Adolph S. Ochs, who rescued the Times from failure and established its stellar reputation), Sulzberger was born to be in the public eye. His August 1980 birth to Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and reporter-turned-artist Gail Gregg was announced in the Times — in a story headlined SULZBERGERS HAVE SON — even though the paper had long since stopped publishing birth announcements (sister Annie was born two years later). As Alex S. Jones and Susan E. Tifft recount in The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times (Little, Brown and Company, 1999), “When the New York Post scored the Times for singling out a family member for special treatment, the Times countered that it considered the birth ‘news.’”

Cops vs. clubs

IAN DONNIS — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:36:39 GMT

Dispute poses threat to live music in downtown Providence
A dispute between a nightclub impresario and the police puts l ive music in downtown Providence in danger .

The presence of live music in downtown Providence is in some danger because of a dispute between nightclub impresario Michael Kent and the Providence Police Department.

Because of safety concerns raised by the police, the Providence Board of Licenses has scheduled a February 10 hearing at City Hall (1 pm in room 112), in which Kent’s company has been asked to show why its entertainment and liquor license for Club Diesel on Washington Street should not be suspended or revoked. Rich Lupo operates Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel from the same space used by Diesel, in what is often referred to as the Strand Building.

Police contend that incidents involving patrons from Diesel, including a dispute on January 6, when an 18-year-old Johnston man was stabbed in the neck with a broken beer bottle, pose an ongoing problem. Kent points out that the stabbing took place outside his club, in a parking lot owned by the Providence Journal, and that he had hired an eight-officer police detail on the night in question. He also says the brand of the bottle of beer used in the stabbing is not sold at Diesel.

Raising the stakes is how sanctions against Diesel — which could range from a fine to a suspension of the club’s ability to operate — could affect Lupo’s. Lupo’s has shared space with the dance club since relocating from a previous Westminster Street location, in part to accommodate one of Arnold “Buff” Chace’s residential downtown developments. If Lupo’s had to cancel previously scheduled concerts, “It would be devastating, totally devastating,” Rich Lupo says. “How can we make contracts [for live shows] not knowing if we’ll be there?” (Disclosure: Kent and Lupo are longtime Phoenix advertisers.)

On a more basic level, Lupo’s would not be able to operate if the city closes Diesel, in part since the two venues share the same liquor license, Kent says.

While several calls to the police department went unreturned as the Phoenix was going to press, Cliff Wood, director of Providence’s Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism, says the city considers Lupo’s an asset, and that it is not being targeted. As far as the police view of Diesel, Wood says, “My impression is that this [January 6 stabbing] was sort of the last straw in a series of incidents, I believe, over time.”

Rhode Island’s great communicator

IAN DONNIS — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:23:49 GMT

Is Carcieri RI's Barry Goldwater?
The Governor's message mastery is a prime asset — and a leading challenge for democrats — in the 2006 campaign

A Rhode Island Republican couldn’t have asked for better timing. Four weeks ago, when Governor Donald L. Carcieri took the state out of a regional effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, the Providence Journal’s front-page account was, for practical purposes, basically invisible. The top-billed story in the ProJo — which remained an ongoing staple of talk-radio and local television news — was Carcieri’s effort to aid Madeline Walker, the 81-year-old woman who had been evicted from her South Providence home because of an unpaid sewer bill.

In the instant analysis of some observers, Walker’s plight was a particularly brazen instance of a routine and exploitative practice. In fact, as the Journal’s Mark Arsenault reported, the elderly woman’s eviction was a more complicated matter that involved liens for unpaid taxes and equity used for bail in criminal cases. Still, in the prelude to a legislative session in which a $60 million-plus deficit could spur sparks between Carcieri and the Democrat-controlled General Assembly over cuts in social programs, it hardly hurt the governor to be on the side of the angels — a needy black woman in a poor part of the capital city. And although environmentalists and Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch criticized Carcieri for pulling out of the agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — something that affects every Rhode Islander through global warming — the issue got a shred of attention by comparison.

Certainly, the timing in which the two stories hit the paper could have been coincidental. Asked whether there was a deliberate linkage by the governor’s staff, Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal says, “No, absolutely no.” Then again, the image of the grandfatherly governor reaching out to lend a hand during the holiday season was quite in keeping with the administration’s self-scripted narrative. And although it seemed clear at the outset that Carcieri was going to project a more robust presence than the quietly effective Lincoln Almond, he has emerged, to the begrudging admiration of his partisan detractors, as Rhode Island’s version of the great communicator. Carcieri’s message mastery and comfort in speaking is so natural, says one Democratic observer, “[That] you can’t teach it. There’s no speaking coach that’s going to create Don Carcieri, or the image of him. He comes across as very genuine, and if anyone is responsible for that, it’s Don Carcieri.”

Politics of pain

IAN DONNIS — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 22:37:31 GMT

Rhode Island follows through on medical marijuana
When it comes to the legalization of medical marijuana in Rhode Island, the question has generally been when — not if — it would happen.

When it comes to the legalization of medical marijuana in Rhode Island, the question has generally been when — not if — it would happen.

Sure, Republican governor Donald L. Carcieri, whose vetoes have withstood the Democratic-controlled General Assembly in the past, could cite a litany of concerns, from distribution to the fear that legalizing medical marijuana will make it far more available to children. But by resoundingly overriding Carcieri’s veto in a 59-13 vote, the Rhode Island House of Representatives on Tuesday embraced the compassionate theme long sounded by proponents.

The vote, capped by enthusiastic applause from supporters, makes Rhode Island the 11th state to legalize medical marijuana — and the first to do so since the US Supreme Court ruled last June in Gonzales v. Raich that the federal government can prosecute sick people who use the drug to ease their discomfort.

Showing a distinct lack of anxiety about crossing the feds, the Rhode Island Senate voted in support of medical marijuana less than 24 hours after the high court’s decision last summer. And while such legislative support might seem unusual in a place with a strong strain of social conservatism, it reflects the intimacy of a state where everyone, it seems, knows someone who would like to use medical marijuana to better cope with such debilitating illnesses as cancer, AIDS, and multiple sclerosis.

“Two years ago, it probably wouldn’t have been an issue with me,” said Representative Thomas C. Slater (D-Providence), the lead sponsor of the legislation in the House. But after watching a brother, an uncle, and his father die from cancer, the representative — who has himself has been treated for the disease — sees things very differently. Speaking with reporters before Tuesday’s vote, he noted, “There are a lot of other people out there who have friends and family who have been sick.”

A three-fifths majority was needed in the 75-member House to override Carcieri’s veto, and the outcome never seemed in doubt as the chamber took up the matter before officially starting the new legislative session. Opposition came mostly from Democratic rivals of House Speaker William J. Murphy and from Republicans, like House Minority Leader Robert Watson, a medical-marijuana proponent, who voted with the governor in partisan solidarity.