New Year, new Wikipedia list.
Wrote a quick stub for Valorie Taylor, the Republican chosen by the Governor to replace Jim Harrison who resigned from the Vermont House of Representatives because he's moving to New Hampshire. Taylor had previously resigned from her town's selectboard (where she served as chair) citing "stress" as the reason. No official portrait yet, so here's her running a race.
Last year's list is here. https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/113755586410070454
One more quick stub for one more appointed Senator, this one is mine! A staggering 35 years of volunteer firefighting service for this civil engineer and currently his town's Selectboard chair. I'm a little surprised he's got time to work in the legislature. Good luck John Benson!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Benson_(Vermont_politician)
Randy Riley was the State Librarian of Michigan until his untimely death this week. He seemed like a wonderful man, a librarian's librarian, who really believed in access and outreach. Thanks to an interview he did with IMLS, there was a public domain image of him available. It can be hard, sometimes, for librarians to get a lot of media mentions, so much of what they do is just about the institution, not the person. I am sorry I did not know him better.
Funny thing about Wikipedia, if someone's name is a "redirect" (i.e. goes to the name of their band, not them) and you turn that into an article, you don't get credit for an article creation. I mostly don't care about getting credit, but I do a tiny bit
ANYWAY, I wrote a stub for Steve Wilson, one of many Steve Wilsons, who is the current drummer for the Dead Kennedys and the only one in the band's footer template without a page. Here he is with my partner's dad. RIP DH
When Helen Macdonald says you've got the best author photo she's ever seen and gives your first book a glowing review, people take notice. But maybe not Wikipedia people. Now that Jonathan Slaght's got a second book about Amur tigers (and the first one about fish owls won a lot of awards) it's high time he was in Wikipedia.
Bobby Gosh was a local musician and producer who you may know from such hits as Dr. Hook's song "A Little Bit More" or Bjork's music box pieces on Vespertine. He may or may not have opened for Streisand during her happening in Central Park. He definitely wrote the Honeycomb Hideout jingle. He was an art collector. An unapologetic weed eater, Gosh's life is full of amazing facts and what I suspect are some embellishments. Definitely a local legend who will be well missed.
When I started this article about Rice Estes, it's because I thought he was a Black librarian raised in South Carolina committed to ending segregation in public libraries in the South. As it turns out, that article was wrong and he was all those things, except he was white. He was married to well-known author Eleanor Estes. She had a long Wikipedia page, he had none. He did not do a lot of public activism after the 60s (that I found) but what he did then was important.
Leo Manso designed some exceptional paperback and hardcover book jackets. He was also an accomplished artist and helped get the Provincetown MA arts scene going in the 1940s. No idea why Wikipedia didn't have an article about him but it does now.
Community Auditions was a Boston area tv show which ran for 37 years. It featured live performances of local folks doing talent show stuff. Dave Maynard, local radio legend, hosted. It was very "of its time" and totally imprinted itself on my partner while I had never heard of it. In the early shows people would vote for their favorite performer via postcard and the results would be announced the following week. In the reboot of the show, you voted via social media.
I know Fraser Metzger's great grandson who lives up the road from me. He has talked to me about his ancestor's role in the town. I'd been meaning to look him up and wow, that guy did a lot of stuff. Eschewed the family hardware business to go to divinity school, ran for Governor of Vermont as a Progressive and was the first Dean of Men at Rutgers. I started the article yesterday, ran out of steam and was delighted to see that someone else filled in the blanks overnight.
I used to write a lot about Stadium Organists when I was listening to Josh Kantor's Seventh Inning Stretch livestream regularly. I'd gotten out of the habit but then I saw Josh Langhoff saying somethingorother on Bluesky and was like "Oh hey there's another one!" Not a lot of public detail about him but he's done a lot of cited music reviews (he's into Christian music and regional Mexican music) and has a nice personal website.
Wikipedia work begets Wikipedia work. Reggie Ramos is the executive director of Transportation for Massachusetts a coalition of groups working to improve transportation in MA. She thinks high quality and affordable and accessible transportation is a civil rights issue. She is from the Republic of the Philippines where she was Undersecretary for Transportation. And she's a lawyer and international negotiator. She's quite cool.
Emily Sweeney does news clips on Insta for The Boston Globe where she's been a staff writer since 2003. She's from Dorchester, has a thick Boston accent. I found that she also writes a lot about Massachusetts crime and authored a book about John "Dropkick" Murphy, an amateur wrestler turned rehab host (yes, where the band got their name). Oh and she was the first woman to play hockey at Boston Latin (on the boys' team) and played four years at Northeastern.
The Framingham Eight were women serving time for killing their abusive spouses/partners in Massachusetts. They sought commutation of their sentences in the 1990s saying they were acting in self defense because of battered person syndrome. Seven of the eight received commuted sentences; many had difficult lives afterwards either in or out of the spotlight. A short documentary about them won an Oscar. They had no Wikipedia page. Most news articles about them are by women.
Jessamyn
Ethan Marcotte
Max Fenton
Piers Cawley