Well, 2016 is just about in the books and we have to say, its been another incredible year in the ol’ Insider pod.
The end of the year is always a good time to kick your feet up on the desk, grab copies of all 51 issues and take a trip down memory lane. (And yes, we are fully aware that there’s 52 weeks in a year and the Insider is a weekly, but you’re currently reading No. 52 so we couldn’t exactly thumb through it last week, now could we?)
Anywho, so we combed through every page, looking for the best stories of the year, no matter how big or small. And let’s just agree, whittling it down to a shortish list was not exactly an easy task. But as they say ‘it’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”
And in traditional Insider fashion, there won’t be a ranking or anything like that – just a random collection of stuff from the year that was.
While most of you might think that we’d start with the completion of South Main Street or the Sewalls Falls Bridge project, we can’t gloss over the fact that the Insider had a pretty important birthday this year.
In October, we officially turned double digits and celebrated by catching up with some of our predecessors. Come to think of it, we didn’t even have a cake. Maybe at 20 years?
But that’s enough self-promotion – at least for right now. As we mentioned before, the second half of the Main Street reconstruction project was slated for this year, and like last year’s North Main section, South Main stayed on schedule and finished up in early November. And there wasn’t even a water main fatality this time around.
Not being able to turn right out of the Monitor driveway for almost two years was challenging to say the least. So when the shiny new Sewalls Falls bridge opened in late fall, it’s like it created this whole new world for us. While it seemed like it took forever to complete, (apparently building a bridge over a large river can be complicated) it was well worth the wait. Unfortunately, now we actually have to look both ways when we leave on assignment.
We did lots of fun stuff, and we’re not even talking about all the food we ate and beer we tasted. Tim handed out bouquets of flowers to complete strangers for Petal It Forward, Jon (sort of) helped people find their seats at the Cap Center and also attempted to take down Arnie’s Place T-shirt Sundae challenge. It’s eight scoops of ice cream, six toppings, two bananas, whipped cream and nuts – which he couldn’t quite finish.
In July, we received what might have been the first selfie ever from reader Bill Luti. It was of Luti and his wife, Marjorie Barnes Luti, taken at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Corona, Calif., in the spring of 1946. Without anyone around to capture the moment, Luti used a long stick to hit the button on his Kodak box camera. Talk about quick thinking.
Now that Main Street is done, the downtown area has gotten a nice boost in the public art department. Over the summer, a mural was placed on the side of CVS thanks to Kimball-Jenkins students taking part in the Haley Rae Martin Mural Project. This fall, two pieces of public art were added to North and South Main with more to come in the future.
Did you know that you can actually build a boat – that will float – out of cardboard? Well, we didn’t believe it either until we saw a group of third- and fifth-grade students from Christa McAuliffe School do it. Yes, the students actual built and captained the life-sized boats, paddling around a real lake. It was impressive.
In August, we were fortunate enough to attend the 100th birthday get-together for Concord resident Nellie Mitchell. It’s the same thing she had done in the previous six years – gone to Constantly Pizza on South Main for a lobster roll with some family. Only this time, the birthday milestone was a little more memorable. Although when you get to be near triple digits, all of them are probably pretty important.
The Friends of the Audi are at it again, this time raising money to redo every seat in the city-owned theater. The price tag is about $100,000, but if anyone can raise the money, it’s the Friends.
If you can remember all the way back to April, two lifelong friends, Marshall Crane and Jeremy Woodward, both ran the Boston Marathon. For Woodward, it was his second year in a row running Boston, but it was Crane’s first official run of any kind of distance. We’re happy to remind you that both finished.
We tagged along with students from Rundlett Middle School who visited the Galapagos Islands, ancient Egypt and Greece – and we never even left Concord. Thanks to a visit from Google Expeditions Pioneer Program, these students got to check out some of the places they had been studying using cell phones and cardboard viewers.
And as always, we thank you, our faithful readers for taking us along on some exotic vacations. We traveled to places like Antarctica, Cuba, Austria and Jordan. It was a wild year.
Well, we could probably go on and on about how great the past year was, but that’s enough for now. We’ve got to start getting ready for 2017.
