Word: bedford
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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TIME did a serious injury to New Bedford and insulted many of its residents by the story published in the June 8 issue, reporting the conviction of Mayor Edward C. Peirce on gambling conspiracy charges...
...Bedford since the Whales...
...century ago New Bedford, Mass, sent whaling ships around the world, and its picturesque wharves fairly groaned with the raw material of period novels. But today New Bedford (pop. 110,000) is a textile mill town. Its Yankees have long since been joined by thousands of Irish, Portuguese, Greeks and Italians. It is old, shabby, resigned, and tolerant of both vulgarity and venality in politics as long as they are kept within reasonable bounds. When a glib, promise-'em-everything, ex-cotton salesman named Edward Peirce (pronounced purse) was elected mayor 20 months ago, New Bedford was undisturbed-even...
...drank too much and talked too boisterously at the ultra-respectable Wamsutta Club-to which he could never have been elected, but in which he automatically achieved membership as mayor. Worse, he fought with the district attorney, who finally embarrassed him by engineering a raid of New Bedford gambling joints by a small army of 121 state cops. Even then, Mayor Peirce might have got by if he had not turned, in rough and highhanded fashion, upon a police lieutenant named Alfred Figueira, who was the head of his vice squad and his chief partner in crime...
Stackpole stops his story before the petroleum boom came along to supply most of the world's need for oil. But even before that, the clouds were gathering over Nantucket. Stubborn sand bars drove captains to New Bedford and other ports; the appeal of the Gold Rush drew crewmen to California. But if the oldtime whaling man disappeared, he left a record behind him, as Author Stackpole notes, as citizen of the world, man of industry, oceanographer and as "a sea-hunter whose exploits make ... a bright page in American history...