Word: bedfords
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...great-grandfather Johann Christoph Jardin was a whaler. Born in Germany, he was a cooper by training, making barrels aboard ship to hold the whale oil gathered by men who spent months, even years, roaming the seas. He sailed out of New Bedford, Mass., in the late 1840s. When his ship was wrecked in the Arctic a decade later, those who made it to shore survived the cold by stomping back and forth across the frozen tundra. My father remembers Christoph (as he called himself) telling him how his hair turned white overnight. Eventually they were rescued and taken...
Whaling formed the backbone of the New Bedford (Bonanza bus lines, $20 round trip) economy in the 19th century, and today the fishing fleet continues to anchor in the harbor...
...Bedford, along with Nantucket, which is accessible by ferry from Woods Hole ($25 round trip on Bonanza), were the two largest whaling ports in the United States before the decline of the industry in the second half of the 19th century...
This was not, however, a case where local lawmen winked and looked the other way. Forrest County, named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and patron saint of the K.K.K., charged 14 Klansmen with murder and arson. Five were convicted or pleaded guilty and received life sentences. But not Sam Bowers, the Klan's Imperial Wizard for Mississippi, whom prosecutors accused of ordering and planning the murder--and whom Klan experts describe as the most dangerous man ever to don a white hood...
Such questions begged to be asked throughout the play. Though there were moments of unqualified genius (having the audience fill out a fake survey, for instance, or putting the curtain call in the middle, for instance, or allowing "The Dry Salvages" to speak through the windbag New Bedford fisherman--again, the versatile Monteleoni), the intellectual demands # made on its audience took their toll on our sense of the pleasure of drama. Perhaps the discombobulation of meaning in # is only perceived, or at least fully deliberate--in either case one must report one's own failure of understanding. This...