Your Letters from the August 2015 Issue

Send letters to Editor Rick Broussard, New Hampshire Magazine, 150 Dow St. Manchester, NH 03101 or e-mail him at editor@nhmagazine.com.

Returned Ring
After reading your yard sale stories  [“Yahd Sales,” April 2015] about people who bought items for a few dollars and then sold them for thousands unbeknownst to the original owner, I felt the need to share my story about a wonderfully honest couple that came to my yard sale.

My mother had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for several years, and was in the habit of hiding things she valued, including blueberry jam and her diamond engagement ring. My father had proposed to her with that ring wired into the throat of an orchid in 1945, and I had admired it my whole life. When it went missing, I searched her house and every purse, pocket and crevice, always hoping I’d find it over the two years I cleaned out her home and refurbished it for sale.  

When I had a yard sale to get rid of some of the clutter from her home, a nice couple bought my mom’s tin of old buttons. They came back late the same day, and the woman said, “Are you missing anything?” I knew immediately what she meant! She had found my mother’s ring hidden at the bottom of all the buttons in the tin. She said the funny thing was that normally she would have just put the tin on a shelf, and when she eventually found the ring, she wouldn’t have know which yard sale she had gotten it from.  But a friend of hers had a jacket that needed a button, so when she got the tin home, she spilled out all the buttons to find one that would match the others on the jacket. That was when she discovered the ring, cleaned it and drove back to my house to return it to  me. Later, I had the ring appraised at somewhere between $2,000-4,000. I was thrilled to tears and flabbergasted that someone would be so kind and honest. The missing ring would have bothered me for the rest of my life, but because of this wonderful couple, it is now still in the family and will be passed down to my mother’s grandchildren. 

I am so grateful for the goodness of this wonderful NH couple!

Jackie (Menge) Clary
Grantham

Colorful Comment
Thank you so very much for the five-paragraph review and publicity for my book “Colorful Journey.” [July 2015] I am glad you enjoyed it and wish to share information about it. Your write-up was a perfect summation, and I think it will be very helpful in getting the word out about the book.

Besides Amazon.com it is available at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, Morgan Hill Bookstore in New London, MainStreet BookEnds in Warner, Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough as well as Keene and Milford, the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, Gibson’s in Concord, the Manchester Historic Association and the Wild Goose Country Store in Sunapee Harbor. I want to try to get it into the gift shop at the Currier Museum too.

If required to guess, I would say that you know Laura Jean Whitcomb and perhaps saw the cover to her spring Issue, my drawing from the book.

Many people like to check out my monthly arts blog, colorfulfuljourney.us.  I have posted dozens of drawings there about NH as well as any place I happen to be.

Sue Anne Bottomley
New London

Sponsor Objection
I am disappointed in New Hampshire Magazine’s decision to allow Best of NH [to] be sponsored by Kinder Morgan. Their pipeline will permanently cause damage to the land along its route, take landowner’s property by eminent domain and will not benefit New Hampshire in any way. The pipeline is in no way “The Best for New Hampshire” and [I] respectfully request you drop Kinder Morgan’s sponsorship. To allow Kinder Morgan’s pipeline to be considered The Best of NH by association with New Hampshire Magazine is misleading to your readers.

Kevin Woolley
Fitzwilliam

Go Mobile
I love your articles on the best lobster or ice cream places [June 2015], even knowing that they are only handful of those available. But how about formatting them to go mobile?

 Just list them in geographical order and create a simple, concise document to download onto smartphones. Right now, I stash the print copies but somehow, they are always at home and not in the car. So I labor to download some of your stories into MS Word and clean them up, then transfer them to Dropbox and load them on my iPhone for reference on the road ­— especially the ones that will help us find ice cream or cold beer on the way back from a long, hot hike!

Ruth H. Axelrod
Concord

Editor’s Note: Our site in general is completely responsive, so whether you’re at home, on a tablet or on your phone you should be able to easily read our website and find the info you’re looking for.

Some of our articles (like the beer guide) do have a Google map for reference, but we can certainly consider adding ones for other list-type articles. We’ll make sure ice cream and lobster maps are added.

Best Not the Best
My most sincere thanks for the May, 2015, issue. It is totally readable, interesting and enjoyable from cover to cover. In my opinion The Best issues are not of any interest to most of your readers.

Anne Hunt
Mirror Lake

Huge Gap
I enjoyed reading the article on the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom [“Fandemonium,” July 2015]. It was called The Club Casino for many years; the name as it goes now was made up by me in 1991, when I managed the venue.

 I think the article should have mentioned Jim Goodwin, who ran the Club Casino and made that venue into a major tour stop. U2, Roy Orbison, Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin, all were Jim’s doing. Thousands of people remember The Righteous Brothers and Roy Orbison doing historic multi-day shows and those shows made the Casino what it is today. Not to mention Mr. Goodwin is to leave a huge gap in the history of the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom.

Mike Flanagin
Sandown