Boston Athenaeum
This time we’ll visit the largest membership library in the country, the Boston Athenaeum.
The Athenaeum is in the middle of celebrating its 200th year with an impressive exhibition covering their continuous collecting of books and art over the last two centuries. The building holds books, paintings, and sculptures from the libraries of John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and others, along with many important pieces of Boston history.
As a working library, the Athenaeum runs community outreach programs throughout New England in addition to serving its 5000 members — who get to use the library’s amazing fifth-floor reading room.
I visited the library on Beacon Hill for the first time a few months ago, and went back a few weeks ago to get a feel for the place from the institution’s director and a tour of the anniversary exhibition from a curator.
Photo Credit: Boston Athenaeum
Boston Marathon
This show is an exciting look at Boston’s 500,000-spectator sporting event, the Boston Marathon.
2007 marks the 111th running of the oldest annual marathon in the world. Started just one year after the first modern Olympics revived the marathon in 1896, the Boston Marathon brings tens of thousands of runners to Hopkinton, Massachusetts, then quite literally runs them out of town toward Boston’s Copley Square — 26.2 miles away. Along the course, the runners battle the weather, their competitors, their own tired bodies, and the notorious Heartbreak Hill.
To get the inside story of the marathon, I went to the Copley Square offices of the Boston Athletic Association. The BAA has organized every marathon since 1897, and my guest this episode has been following those efforts since he was a kid. He’s covered it as a reporter, run it as a contestant, and now helps make it happen from his office at the BAA.
Boston Accent
Today I talked to someone about talking — specifically, the way people talk in Boston.
The Boston accent is famous for its misplaced Rs and strange vowels, as well as its well-known speakers. John F. Kennedy, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Click and Clack from Car Talk, the character Cliff Clavin on Cheers, and even The Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby have all have brought variations on the Boston Accent to the world stage.
It’s a dialect I hear every day, but almost all most people know about it is encapsulated in the phrase “Let’s pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” but that isn’t really the way people talk here. To do a little better, I went to someone who could give us the real deal:
MJ Connolly grew up just outside of Boston, and is now a professor of linguistics at Boston College. He’s listened to — and spoken with — the Boston Accent his whole life, so I went to him to tell us what it is.
Every city should have a podcast like Boston Behind the Scenes.
This one is a no brainer; add it to your rotation right away.
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