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Laconia

8 Things You Didn’t Know About New England Olympians

Ever since a Bostonian won the first event in the first modern Olympics, New England has sent more than its share of Olympians to compete for athletic glory.

New England Olympians have done especially well in the winter Olympics, winning a share of gold medals disproportionate to their states’ populations.

James Connolly, the first-ever U.S. Olympian to win a medal.

Tiny Vermont can claim four Winter Olympics gold medals. New Hampshire has six, Connecticut has five and Massachusetts has 16 – third most in the country, despite ranking 14^th in population. Even Rhode Island can boast a Winter Olympics gold. The only New England state without a gold medal in the Winter Olympics is Maine.

Here, then, are eight facts about New England Olympians you may not know.

New England Olympians

The town of Norwich, Vt., with 3,000 residents, produced 11 Olympians and accounted for three Olympic medals. Nine of its Olympians competed in the winter Olympics, including ski jumpers Mike Holland and Jeff Hastings and skiers Hannah Kearney, Betsy Snite and Tim Tetreault.
Penny Pitou is a well-known name in New Hampshire for her eponymous travel agency, but she is also the first American skier to win a medal in the Olympic downhill She won silver medalsin both the downhill and giant slalom events at the 1960 Olympics. Pitou grew up in Center Harbor, N.H., but moved to Laconia with her family at 15. As a freshman at Laconia High in 1953, she hid her hair under her hat and competed on the boys’ ski team.
Nine of the 14 Americans who competed in the first modern Olympics in history came from the Boston Athletic Association or the Suffolk Athletic Club of South Boston. James B. Connolly, born in South Boston to poor Irish immigrants, won the first event– the triple jump — in the 1896 Olympics in Athens. He took home a silver medal (gold medals weren’t issued then) and an olive laurel wreath. He almost didn’t make it because a thief stole his wallet on the way to the games.
Many people know four players from the ‘Miracle on Ice’ hockey team of 1980 all attended Boston University and all came from Massachusetts. They included team captain Mike Eruzione, starters Dave Silk and Jim Craigand Jack O’Callahan. But few people remember the five Massachusetts players from the 1924 U.S. hockey team, which won the silver medal: Irving Small, Willard Rice, Justin McCarthy, John Lyons and John Langley.
New Haven native Dr. Benjamin Spock won a gold medal for rowing in the 1924 Olympics as a member of the Yale University rowing team. Later, as America’s most famous baby doctor, he warned against putting young children into ‘excessive competition.’
The Boston Skating Club has produced more national championsthan any skating club in the country, including Olympics medal winners Dick Button, Nancy Kerrigan and Tenley Albright.
Dorothy Hamill was Paraguay’s sweetheart, too.
Two-time Olympic skier Tom Corcoran was born in Japan and spent his childhood in Quebec, but he spent most of the rest of his time in New Hampshire. He attended the Emerson School, Philips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College. In 1965 he founded the Waterville Company and began developing the Waterville Valley Ski Resort, which he ran until 1990.
Figure skater Dorothy Hamill grew up in Greenwich, Conn., She made her mark in the 1976 Winter Olympics when she took a gold medal in the ladies’ singles competition – and started a fashion trend with her sassy bobbed hair and large glasses. The media dubbed her ‘America’s sweetheart.’ She also invented a skating move known as the ‘Hamill Camel. She later married, and divorced, Dean Paul Martin, the son of entertainer Dean Martin.

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The Oldest Bank in Each New England State

The oldest bank in a state isn’t necessarily the first one chartered. Banks have had their difficulties over the years and many failed or were swallowed up by other banks.

Bank of America, for example, started out as the Providence Bank in Rhode Island in 1791. It became the Industrial National Bank in the 1950s, morphed into Fleet Financial Group in the 1990s, bought Shawmut and BankBoston, and then was acquired by the Bank of America in 2004.

Here, then, are brief histories of the oldest bank in each New England state. If you know of other old banks with interesting histories, please include them in the comments section.

Liberty Bank

Historic Main Street district in Middletown, Conn.

In 1844, a young merchant from Old Saybrook named Frederick Sheffield rode his horse to Middletown, Conn., and deposited $8 in the Liberty Bank. Six months later he deposited another $18.

That $26 grew to more than $32,000 in 1994, when Sheffield’s descendants closed the account. It was the oldest individually owned savings account in America.

Liberty Bank was founded in 1825 as a mutual savings bank to help the poor and working class become thrifty. The bank’s headquarters complex includes its original location at Samuel Southmayd’s pharmacy on the corner of Main and Williams Streets in Middletown. They are part of the Main Street Historic District, and they include the former post office built in 1916, the Middletown Savings Bank built in 1928 and the Old Banking House Block built in 1796 and 1815.

Since 2000, Liberty Bank merged with several other smaller banks and is now the third largest as well as the oldest bank in Connecticut, with 56 branches and about 700 employees. It introduced a checking account to offer rebates of other banks’ ATM surcharges and built an affordable housing complex in Norwich, Uncas Condominiums.

Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution

Maine’s oldest bank, Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution was founded in 1827 as a social good, a way to encourage low-income people to save money.

The Saco & Biddeford Savings Institution was chartered during a flurry of charters for savings institutions along the East Coast. The first was founded in Boston in 1816, and within three years savings banks were incorporated in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, Hartford, Providence and Salem, Mass.

Today it has eight branches along the coast of Southern Maine, employs about 200 people and has assets of about $900 million.

State Street Bank and Trust

An early incarnation of the State Street Bank

Massachusetts Gov. John Hancock in 1792 signed the first charter for Union Bank, the forerunner of the State Street Bank and Trust Co. It was the third bank in Boston, located at the corner of State and Exchange streets. Its first president was Hancock’s lieutenant governor, Moses Gill.

The bank was tied to Boston’s shipping industry, and has always celebrated the city’s maritime history. The bank’s offices featured ship models, prints, harpoons and figureheads, and published about two dozen monographs about Boston’s shipping past.

The monographs, wrote one collector, “hold a unique place in Boston publishing history for a number of reasons, including their high level of scholarship, the elegant printing and presentation of the volumes, the very many rare photographs and illustrations first published therein, and the magnanimity of the great financial institution which made them available to the public.”

The bank’s interior was described as looking like a New England merchant’s counting house of the late 18^th century, including the period furniture.

In 1924, Massachusetts Investors Trust chose State Street Bank as custodian of the country’s first mutual fund. The importance of that development wouldn’t become clear until years later.

In the 1970s, State Street decided to move away from retail banking and commercial lending, and into the high-tech world of processing asset management, global custody, 401(k), retirement plan accounting, and trusteeship of debt securities

A series of mergers and moves resulted in the bank’s current structure. Today it is a subsidiary of the State Street Corporation, the third largest asset manager in the world with $2.45 trillion under management. State Street Corporation is responsible for the custody and administration of 11 percent of the world’s assets. It is the oldest bank in Massachusetts and the second oldest bank in the country next to the Bank of New York, founded eight years earlier.

Bank of New Hampshire

Bank of New Hampshire in Laconia, N.H.

In 1832, the Meredith Bridge Savings Bank in Laconia received its first deposit: $10.50. Its charter had been signed by Franklin Pierce the previous year. Thirty-eight years later it would change its name to the Laconia Savings Bank, and so it would remain until 2012, when it became the Bank of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire’s oldest bank was founded as a mutual savings bank, owned by its depositors, and it has remained that way ever since. In 1994, the bank began acquiring other banks, and today has 24 branches throughout the state.

The Bank of New Hampshire boasts of its support for such nonprofit organizations as the Laconia Public Library, Lakes Region Childcare, the Bedford Public Library and the Children’s Museum of Portsmouth. It has $1.5 billion of assets under management.

Washington Trust Company

Historic downtown Westerly, R.I.

The Washington Trust Company was chartered by the Rhode Island legislature in 1800 to furnish loans and savings options for residents of the Westerly area. More importantly, it also had responsibility for issuing bank notes. The federal government at the time did not issue currency as we know it today, and paper notes were from time to time in short supply. This made bank currency essential to a functioning economy.

Named for President Washington, the Washington Trust Company was known as Washington Bank. It became the first bank in the nation to issue currency that bore Washington’s portrait — a full 69 years before federal currency would bear his likeness. It was just the third bank chartered in Rhode Island history.

In the earliest days of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the bank insisted that its reliance on the values of Yankee thrift and frugality made it so sound that it had no need of FDIC insurance. Congress eventually forced all banks to participate in the insurance system, regardless of the health of their balance sheets.

National Bank of Middlebury

The State of Vermont chartered the National Bank of Middlebury in 1831. It operated out of the Middlebury Hotel until 1845 when it opened its first building. The bank became a federally chartered bank in 1865.

In 1885 the bank suffered a setback when an investment in the National Bank of St. Albans failed. The National Bank of Middlebury was among a group of banks that were shareholders who were asked to contribute funds to make good the deposits and debts of the St. Albans institution. The banks sued to escape liability, maintaining that they were not responsible for losses beyond their own investments. In 1888, however, the courts ruled that the National Bank of Middlebury, in addition to the others, must contribute to paying the St. Albans bank’s debts. Middlebury was ordered to pay $19,642 in the case.

After the banking crisis of 1933, during which Franklin D. Roosevelt closed the nation’s banks, the National Bank of Middlebury reopened and was declared one of the nation’s soundest banks. Today it is the oldest bank in Vermont.

Images: Liberty Bank, By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19384631; Westerly, R.I., By English Wikipedia user Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4422975

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Peyton Place – A Town, Its Scandals and the Woman Who Told the World

The dirty novel Peyton Place landed like a bombshell in 1956, a surprise hit by an unknown author. The critics panned it, the public loved it, the town it pictured resented it – and for the next 13 years it was a staple of American entertainment.

Grace Metalious

Peyton Place became shorthand for secret scandals, mostly involving sex. Its author, Grace Metalious, was a New Hampshire schoolteacher’s wife whose own scandals were anything but secret. She was a mother of three and, by all accounts, a lousy housewife who drank, swore, wore baggy jeans and cheated on her husband.

She based some of Peyton Place on the town she lived in with her family, Gilmanton, N.H.

“To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture,” Metalious once said. “But if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot — all kinds of strange things crawl out.”

The people of Gilmanton felt victimized by Peyton Place, but it was Grace Metalious who was the book’s real victim.

Grace Metalious

Metalious was born Grace de Repentigny on Sept. 8, 1924, to poor Franco-American parents in Manchester, N.H. Her father, a merchant seaman, left the family when she was 10.

She graduated from Central High School, married George Metalious at 19, and gave birth to three children. Since her childhood she dreamed of being a writer. She began writing Peyton Place at 30, while George taught school in Gilmanton.

Scene from Peyton Place, the film

The fictional town of Peyton Place has shady streets, white church steeples, traditional New England houses and brick mills along the Connecticut River. But beneath the bucolic surface lurk ugly secrets.

In the book, Rodney Harrington, a rich kid, dies in a car crash while ogling a topless women driving with him, and Constance MacKenzie lives in fear that the illegitimacy of her daughter will be discovered. Metalious based the character of Selena Cross on a woman from Alton, N.H., who killed her father after he raped her. The story was uncovered by crusading reporters including a young Ben Bradlee.

She insisted Peyton Place was based on several places in New Hampshire – including Durham, where her husband attended the University of New Hampshire; Gilmanton, where he taught school; and Laconia, where her favorite bar was located.

Peyton Place, The Book

The book Peyton Place, published in 1956, was a smash hit, selling 100,000 copies in the first month. The average first novel sold 3,000 copies — if the author was lucky enough to get it published.

Promo for the film Peyton Place.

Critics trashed the book. Manchester Union-Leader publisher William Loeb called it ‘filthy sewage.’ Grace Metalious responded, “Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend, and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.”

Peyton Place was one of the most widely read novels in American history. One in 29 Americans read it (mostly in secret), according to one estimate.

“If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste,” Metalious said.

Fame

Peyton Place was followed in 1957 by a hit movie of the same name starring Lana Turner and set in Camden, Maine. As many as 500 locals appeared as extras.

Lana Turner and betty Field in Peyton Place.

At first Peyton Place didn’t attract many moviegoers, but then Lana Turner’s daughter stabbed Turner’s boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, and the film took off. It received nine Academy Award nominations.

The book and the movie made Grace Metalious rich — and reckless. She carried on a stormy affair with a Laconia DJ, divorced her husband and burned through millions of dollars. She took a floor at the Plaza hotel, ordered champagne by the case and flew chartered flights to the Caribbean.

Downward Spiral

Grace Metalious wrote three more books, none of which sold as well as Peyton Place. For the last five years of her life, she drank a fifth of liquor every day.

Grace Metalious in 1957

She dumped her Laconia DJ, reunited with George Metalious and parted again. Then she had an affair with a married British journalist. On a trip to Boston, she collapsed and ended up in Beth Israel Hospital. Grace Metalious died days later on Feb. 25, 1964, of cirrhosis of the liver.

Hours before she died, she changed her will to leave her entire estate to her British lover, who promised to take care of her children. Her family successfully contested the will, but it turned out she had $41,174 in the bank and debts of more than $200,000. Years of high living, gifts to friends and an embezzling agent left her insolvent.

Promotional photo showing the cast of Peyton Place in 1968.

In 1964, seven months after Grace Metalious died, ABC aired a prime-time soap opera based on the novel. (The producer refused to call it a soap opera, instead calling it a ‘high-class anthology drama.’) It launched the careers of Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal, among others. Peyton Place ran until 1969.

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed this story about Grace Metalious, you may also want to read about other Franco-American writers here. If you’re interested in towns with hidden scandals, you may want to read Bar Harbor Babylon by the authors of this post.

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