Tuning Out

Last night it was the prime part of prime time, and Lu was in the living room reading a book about the Bloomsbury clique and I was in the kitchen assembling the loading dock for the Furlow Freight and Transfer house. I am relearning the patience it takes to let the glue set before you do something else. It was Day Number Six since we pulled the plug on our $59.69 a month Comcast coverage. We're now on "Basic" coverage, which is really pretty basic. But we are saving money. Our cable is less than $6.00 a month, and the house is quiet, for a change. Hobby projects are getting dusted off, New Yorkers read in a timely fashion, and board games dug out of the attic. Old time fun, when people knitted, invited neighbors in for coffee and did things like that, is back.

And all these people have left the house that we do not miss. All the cable people. Chris Matthews and his non-stop harangues, obnoxious bloviators like Buchanan, that chirpy woman on House Hunters and her toxic cheerfulness as yet another young couple complain about smallish bathrooms and get into another house they won't be able to afford. No more irritable chefs, housewives of NYC, and no more Rachel Maddow, who has grown a little wearisome now that she has to smile so much. Good bye to you all, and good riddance.

Still, we're feeling a bit deprived, even though there's more and more to watch on the computer, 90 percent of it for free. The true test will come when we go a whole season without the Red Sox and Sundays nights without "Mad Men." For a long time we all thought more was better. More is less.

Looking for Danny Constance

Beardsleys restaurant today

I called Danny Constance in 1999, but he didn’t want to talk to me. “Do you want to talk about the 80s, Danny?” I asked, and there was a long pause. He was thinking about it. “No,” he finally said in this gravelly voice, “I don’t think I do.” He was polite, but firm. I never met the man..

There were all kinds of tantalizing references in federal records to the man that ran Beardsleys, the French restaurant on Main Street that become the symbol of Northampton in the eighties. A FBI tape recording that disappeared. Subpoenas that never got served. And a great deal of Heritage commercial paper on his restaurant and other joint ventures. It was intriguing that the area’s leading bank was financing someone who was a kingpin in the Valley’s numbers racket, someone who had links to organized crime, someone who was eventually arrested for money laundering and sentenced to federal prison.Click here to read full story