It's history, Hingham

By Brian McGrory, Globe Columnist  |  June 27, 2006

Good Lord, Hingham, get over it.

A columnist for the Hingham Journal keeps writing about yours truly, twice in the last couple of months. Another Hingham resident sent a recent letter to the Globe suggesting I focus on Dover or Marblehead. And the cartoonist for the Hingham Journal keeps drawing me as if I have a $6 haircut and a bulging potbelly.

This town, I tell you, is obsessed. It's getting as unhealthy as it is hostile.

I have this vague recollection of mentioning the place on a couple of occasions, but I thought that was ancient history. True enough, the Globe library informs me I haven't addressed the town in a column since last July, and then I was only attempting to be helpful with its campaign for a new civic slogan. They didn't bite on ``Hingham: Where the Old World Meets the Nouveau Riche," but give me points for trying.

Let me repeat: That was nearly a year ago, folks. Do you have any idea how long a year is in the newspaper business?

It's about 12 months, but that's beside the point.

So what's with this obsession? What's with all this overt negativity? Have I even once in the past year cracked some sort of half-hearted joke like, ``What do you call a fashionable woman in Hingham?"

Lost.

Have I gloated at all about how the Greenbush Line, 30-some years in the making, is coming soon to a South Shore town near you? Have I talked about the $40 million tunnel through Hingham Square that the minority of petulant prima donnas demanded, then complained about every day while it was being built?

No, I most certainly have not. Nor have I mentioned the ill-fitting tennis skirts worn by the scowling Escalade drivers or the crimson colored ``H" flags hanging from so many look-alike houses.

Why? Because time marches on, and I march with it. Someone mentions Hingham these days, I think, pretty town, good people, salt of the Earth. Maybe I'll tie a sweater over my shoulders and drink a Campari with them sometime.

If I really had a thing against Hingham, wouldn't I have written about the biggest local issue since town fathers ruled that Dunkin' Donuts breakfast sandwiches counted as ``illegal" fast food?

I speak, of course, of the proposed traffic light on historic Main Street, which the Hingham Journal said follows ``decades of debate." That's right -- 20 or 30 years worth of neighbor-on-neighbor bickering, arguing, shouting, over a light that turns red to get cars to stop and green to let them go. That's some novel technology.

But I haven't mentioned it, just as I haven't mentioned how anyone connected to the traffic light goes to great pains to point out that it's identical in design to the ones used in Wellesley.

Thank God!

But their obsession got me thinking about what long-ago things I might have said to cause it, because I really and truly don't remember a thing.

That's when I unearthed a December 2004 column pointing out how town officials, in the midst of the Iraq war, sawed down a National Guard recruiting sign that had one leg on town-owned land, because, they said, it violated zoning laws.

Well, yes, there was that.

And then there was a 2003 column written when Governor Romney appeared to be on the verge of killing the Greenbush proposal, and I asked, ``Have we really allowed a self-obsessed band of tiny-minded townspeople to kill a project that would benefit the entire South Shore?" The eventual answer: no.

And there's the day in 2002, when the New York Times referred to Hingham as a ``largely blue-collar town," that I mused about how all the local women were canceling their tennis lessons because of ``undue emotional stress."

But I tell you, Hingham, you've got to get over it. Get yourselves to a civic shrink. You're getting driven to distraction, which is the last thing you want with your new Wellesley-style stoplight coming to town.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.