Since our amicable parting three decades ago, my suburban Boston hometown has undergone a steady transformation from a mainly Irish, Italian, and African-American enclave to a reshaped community of new immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean.
No surprise there. Like most suburban areas in the US, Medford, Massachusetts, is changing, as it has over successive generations since its founding in 1630 and incorporation as a city in 1892.
If I were a betting man, though, I would never have wagered that my hometown would become a desirable spot to live for millennials and young professionals, which is what the property market – and my own eyes – have been telling me for some time now.
Why am I perplexed by this development? During my adolescent and young adult years in the 1970s and early 1980s, Medford and its inhabitants enjoyed a rather unflattering reputation based partly on other people’s misconceptions and partly on our own misbehaviour.
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Medford’s dubious image was amplified in 1980 by the extraordinary Depositors Trust bank robbery, which has been recounted in a feature film as well as in a bestselling book entitled The Cops are Robbers.
The heist involved a small cohort of local police officers and petty criminals who spent an entire Memorial Day bank holiday weekend plundering an estimated $25 million in untraceable cash and jewellery from a single vault containing the bank’s safe deposit boxes. Unfortunately, the stolen loot belonged to some serious Boston underworld figures, who, quite rightly, wanted their valuables back.
Not to be outdone, during a regional crackdown on organised crime, the FBI successfully recorded a Mafia initiation ceremony in Medford in October 1989 – a ritual observed by countless moviegoers but never before monitored by law enforcement agents.
You’d think those two incidents alone would provide sufficient notoriety for a simple community of 60,000 souls. But there’s more.
A revisionist spotlight is being shone on Medford’s Colonial Era links to the slave trade, specifically as it involved Isaac Royall snr, patriarch of the largest slave-holding family in Massachusetts – and his lucrative trade in sugar, rum, and enslaved people from the West Indies.
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In the early 1700s, the Loyalist-leaning Royalls took up residence on their 500-acre Ten Hills Farm estate in Medford, and over the years at least 60 enslaved people worked and lived there, housed in the slave quarters beside the family’s mansion. Both buildings are now registered national landmarks.
On a more positive note: travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux is an acclaimed Medfordite, as is former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Plus, renowned aviator Amelia Earhart lived briefly in Medford with her mother and sister before becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932.
As it happens, there’s an even more uplifting tale associated with Medford, which, condensed to its essence, is this: Medford provides the setting – and might be the birthplace – of the jaunty Yuletide standard Jingle Bells.
In support of the nativity claim, a plaque erected in Medford Square maintains that James Lord Pierpont composed his bouncy tune about winter sleigh rides in 1850 in the Simpson Tavern, a long-forgotten local watering hole. On the same civic hardware Mrs Otis Waterman is cited as a witness to the song’s creation. (Whether the Waterman testimonial was elicited contemporaneously or years later in the poor woman’s befogged dotage, isn’t made clear.)
As with much local history, discrepancies have emerged. For instance, the song – originally titled The One Horse Open Sleigh – wasn’t published until 1857. Pierpont would hardly have waited seven years to assert ownership. Also, Boston University (BU) senior lecturer Kyna Hamill has determined that the roguish Pierpont was in fact caught up in the California Gold Rush in 1850, leaving his wife and children with his father, who was a Unitarian minister in Medford, to pursue his fortune out West.
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And despite the proprietary claims made by Savannah, Georgia, in relation to the song – Pierpont accepted a post as musical director of a Unitarian church there in the late 1850s – BU’s Hamill surmises that Pierpont wrote Open Sleigh/Jingle Bells in the early summer of 1857 while he was residing in a Boston boarding house.
In the end, the link between my hometown and Pierpont’s beloved signature tune is both inconclusive and unmistakable.
What isn’t in dispute is that Pierpont used his memories of snowy sleigh rides and races in Medford as inspiration for the tune – which includes some suggestive lines in the later verses and was never intended as a Christmas song.
Given Medford’s up-and-down image over the years – which makes the place far more interesting and endearing than the ritzier, well-mannered communities around us – that’s good enough for me.
