EXTRA...

JFK White House at sea; Rain helps some Cape businesses; Horror of Party Beach; Harwich baseball in 1884; Marine Center gets $750K; Mezza Luna rises from the ashes

TODAY's quotes:
     "As they say on my own Cape Cod, a rising tide lifts all the boats."
                                   - John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
      "Fortunately, the rainy days were some of our busier days."
                                   - William Catania.

Harwich baseball exhibit now showing at Brooks Academy Museum

Harwich Baseball Team - 1911, Brooks Academy Museum is open Thursday through Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m.,  June 25 through Oct. 10.

Harwich has a rich history of baseball. Based on the old English game of rounders, "base ball" has been around for centuries. Interest in the game spread across the country after the Civil War, brought home by returning soldiers who had played the game in camp.

On Cape Cod, as elsewhere, train travel made it easier for teams to play each other, organized leagues developed and by 1880 baseball, known as town ball, was being played by amateur clubs across the county.

Organized town baseball games appear in the Harwich newspaper beginning in 1884. "Base ball fever seems to be raging across the Cape this season," commented the paper. Early town ball teams attracted local and college players who have been the mainstays of teams throughout the years, evolving into the Cape Cod Baseball League of today... Harwich Oracle.
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Soggy Summer Puts Damper On Cape Cod Business

"The weather? Not as great as we expected, but yesterday was beautiful. The whale watching was beautiful. We didn't have too bad a time."

While this soggy June has been a wash-out for much of Cape Cod's tourist trade and many of its vacationers, some indoor businesses have flourished. Ron Sanders visited a few and found that, in addition to an actual sighting of the sun Wednesday, there is hope on the horizon.

As rain came once again to Cape Cod, what few people were there at Kalmus beach left their vacation behind with mediocre memories. 

"The weather? Not as great as we expected, but yesterday was beautiful. The whale watching was beautiful. We didn't have too bad a time."

And if the beach did not provide too good a time, the indoor wave pool at the Cape Codder Resort took its place for some vacationers.  "Fortunately, the rainy days were some of our busier days," said owner William Catania... WBZ.
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The Kennedy White House on Sea

Bill Clinton has done it. Gordon Brown has done it. And now it looks as though Barack Obama might do it. If current rumours are true, the Obamas will be following other political heavyweights in taking their family summer holiday on the Atlantic coast of New England.

The (British Prime Minister) Browns tend to head to Cape Cod, while the Obama family is odds-on to take the Clinton trail to nearby Martha's Vineyard. Both are popular A-list bolt-holes - and have an added glamour as long-standing playgrounds of the Kennedy family. (The photo on right is Jack and Jackie sailing his Wianno Senior sloop off Hyannisport.)

But these are not the only stretches of the New England coast to have been sprinkled with Kennedy stardust. Just to the west of Cape Cod, about 50 miles south of Boston on Highway 95, lies America's smallest state, Rhode Island. Here, the big draws are the 400-odd miles of largely undeveloped coastline, the capital, Providence, and the smart little resort of Newport where, on September 12 1953, Jacqueline Bouvier married Senator John F Kennedy. Archive photographs show the couple in the grounds of Jackie's stepfather's property, Hammersmith Farm, her train billowing in the breeze on the grassy shore sloping down to Narragansett Bay... Telegraph UK.
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Rebuilt Mezza Luna serves hearty Italian favorites

E.J. Cubellis II had one heck of a fall season in 2007. In October, the third-generation owner of Mezza Luna in Buzzards Bay watched his venerable 70-year-old restaurant burn to the ground. Ten days later, his son E.J. III was born.

Talk about your yin and yang.

A long process of rebuilding would follow - after all, you can't pass the family business down to that fourth generation if it's a pile of charred wreckage.

So Mezza Luna is back in business, with a new building that retains the soul of the original along with the classic recipes that have been enjoyed for seven decades.

My brother Chris and I arrived for lunch at Mezza Luna on a rare beautiful day, and both of us were hungry. I got to his house at 11, but after catching up with his kids and running errands (and getting stuck in New Bedford traffic), we didn't officially get on the road until almost 1... Standard-Times.
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"His organs are so decomposed it needs the only food which can keep it alive...human blood" - Dr. Gavin, "The Horror of Party Beach"

He's pointing to the fictional "Western Island," right off the coast of Woods Hole, as near as I can tell.

[Mike Bailey is the senior political reporter for the Enterprise Newspapers. He writes a kewl blog called "Snark-Infested Waters" from which we offer this episode:]

This is a bit of random silliness I had to share, and it'll appeal to only so many readers.

Last night, in an effort to decompress after a long day, I went to AMC's new B-Movie Classics website, which features a small but growing catalog of simply awful b-movies...the kind of fare I grew up on, thanks to Channel 56's "Creature Double Feature," which ran every Saturday afternoon for many a wonderful, rubbery monster-filled year.

I chose for no real reason "The Horror of Party Beach," which combines the thrills and chills of a mutant-monster-on-the-rampage horror flick with the toe-tapping tuneage and innocent goofy charm of a Frankie-and-Annette beach movie. Yes, it is as "good" as it sounds. What made this cheesefest all the more entertaining: It is apparently set in my home town of Falmouth... Enterprise. 
See the movie.
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Marine Center nets another $750K

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Advanced Technology Manufacturing Center received another spark last week to power its research in marine energy in the form of a direct appropriation from the federal government.

The center's Marine Renewable Energy Center will receive $750,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy's fiscal year 2010 budget, said John Miller, director of operations for the ATMC and head of the marine center. The appropriation is on top of $1 million in DOE grant funding the marine center will receive to spur academic research efforts and support small marine technology companies... Boston Business Journal.