Word: ellsworth
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Some years back, James Russell Wiggins, editor of the Ellsworth American in Maine, wanted to prove to readers how pitifully slow was the U.S. Postal Service. So he proposed a race: he sent letters to a nearby village, one through the Postal Service and others by oxcart, canoe and bicycle. At the pedals was a local celebrity, Writer E.B. White. The Postal Service lost every race, and Wiggins gloated on the front page...
That was big news. Big news elsewhere, though, often doesn't seem quite so pressing in Ellsworth. The October stock-market crash got one sentence last fall; the blueberry industry, a mainstay of the region, got a five-part series. But nothing is read more closely than the court page, a list of everyone caught speeding or driving tipsy or lobstering without a license. "I want to see if any of my buddies are in there," says Carmen Griffin, a waitress at the Pineland Diner on Main Street. It may be a yawn in Portland, Me., but in Ellsworth...
When Editor Wiggins, 84, wanted to tell his readers, many of whom live by and from the sea, what was happening in the America's Cup race, the weekly sent a reporter to Australia. The story was relayed by satellite to Washington, wired to an Ellsworth bank and then walked across Main Street by the bank's vice president...
...That's how things have always been done in Ellsworth, one neighbor counting on another. Ellsworth is the shire town of Hancock County, some two-thirds up the Maine coast, and gateway to the summer resorts of Bar Harbor. For more than 200 years, the town has hugged the Union River, which spills out into Union River Bay and eventually the bold Atlantic. The town was named for Oliver Ellsworth, an early Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Folks here are friendly. They can't help themselves. But Down Easters draw a line between outsiders -- "people from away" -- and locals...
From Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims to Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy: 1800-1950, by Robert H. Ellsworth (Random House; 1,049 pages; $850), is a great leap forward in our perception of this surprisingly complex and adaptable culture. Twelve years in preparation, the three-volume set contains illustrations of more than 800 pieces of art, 369 pages of color reproductions of paintings, scrolls, fans and album leaves, and hundreds of pages of calligraphy, an art form in itself. This is the largest compilation of 19th and 20th century Chinese art in the West...