Now that I live abroad, I long to find the authenticity of my home state: the people and places that make me smile when foreign friends ask about my home. I want to find the real thing, but does that place still exist?
Wetherbee is the perfect guide. Before his current nine-year run as a “storyteller and historian’’ for WMUR, he worked for 14 years on New Hampshire Public Television’s “New Hampshire Crossroads,’’ and on both, he’s known for his bow tie, granite voice, and, most of all, an appreciation for our home state. Plus, he has a bird’s-eye view of what makes New Hampshirites tick.
“This place was like this when it opened. Nothing has changed,’’ he says admiringly from a booth at Claremont’s Daddypops Tumble Inn Diner. “This isn’t something where they’re wearing hula skirts or trying to make it look older than it is.’’
Sure enough, the staff look like they’ve worked here forever and on this late summer day, they’re serving a near-perfect strawberry shortcake and still talking about last winter’s snow.
“There are very, very few things that haven’t been Barbie-dolled up in this state but once in a while, you find yourself in a place that’s unlike anything else,’’ Wetherbee says, citing a dreamlike room in Effingham’s Masonic Hall, Milford’s Swing Bridge, and the curious “great ruin’’ of hundreds of hulking, rusting trucks on Ralph Balla’s land in Acworth.
Wetherbee suggests heading up Route 12A along the Connecticut River toward Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish. It’s the former home, studio, and gardens of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptor who created the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston’s Beacon Street and the “Seated Lincoln’’ statue of Abraham Lincoln in Chicago’s Grant Park.
