Linda Mason’s daughters had dressed as insects, characters from a favorite book, while her son marched with his trumpet in the middle school band. They were among hundreds of participants in last Sunday’s parade marking Manchester’s 175th anniversary.
Mason was surprised as were other Manchester residents when she picked up her Monday Town News section. Dominating the top of the cover was a huge color photo of a brick tenement with men peering out two windows as the tops of two blurry people in Scout uniforms passed by waving flags. A smaller photo showed a portion of a drum major’s face and shoulders, also blurred, while his shiny silver mace reflected his image.
To those who called, the photographs did not depict the parade that volunteers had worked on for months and that had residents basking in an afternoon of community spirit.
“When something good is happening, it deserves some heralding,” said Mason, a special education teacher whose daughters joined the Manchester public library contingent as characters from “James and the Giant Peach.” “One of the glorious moments was masked.”
“Every day you read about shootings, drugs, killings. Here something nice happens in a town, and they print this,” said Martha LaFranchise, one of the dozen readers who called. The array of “our youth” in the parade impressed her. But the image of a bare-chested man looking out a tenement window in the newspaper photo was disturbing. “Why did they pick those? Do they hate Manchester or something?”
Toni Kellar, last Sunday’s photo editor, thought the photographs captured the “old-timey” spirit and exuberance of the 3-mile parade down Main Street. “The building is evocative of Main Street in Manchester,” she said. The man in a Scout uniform the “flag-waving person in the center of the image” conveyed the parade’s spirit. The photos offered “a refreshing view of a typical event,” Kellar said, noting that the job of a newspaper photographer is to be “accurate but creative.”
The artistically composed photos could have graced a museum wall. Jay Clendenin, the free-lance photographer, in fact, was inspired by Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank’s iconic images of 1950s small-town America.
But the photos were not what residents expected to see of their neighbors, and community, on the cover of a local news section. A more traditional photo of spectators in lawn chairs, watching a float go by, was published Thursday on the cover of the weekly Manchester Extra section. At least one photo last Monday reflecting the way residents perceived their parade would have helped.
I confess to a fondness for Manchester. For a decade, I lived in neighboring East Hartford and think of Manchester as a vibrant, diverse community of homeowners and working people, a hub of voluntarism and cultural activity.
Manchester has had its battles over subsidized housing and school integration, but it’s also home to Buckland Hills, the new shopping mecca of eastern Connecticut. Manchester residents are also among the most active and involved Courant readers, people who frequently voice their opinions on Courant Source lines and call my office.
Coincidentally, the Sunday of the parade, I drove to the Berkshires on back roads through Granville, Mass., which was in the midst of a harvest festival. Everyone from town seemed to be bustling back and forth across the road in a cheerful mood. That’s fall in New England a time of fairs, festivals and parades, an opportunity for celebration and togetherness before winter sets in.
Those attending the Manchester parade spoke of the pride and warmth permeating their afternoon much like what I experienced vicariously driving through small-town Granville.
Newspapers, by their nature, often focus on conflict, controversy and disagreement. Fortunately, the Town News sections also depict situations in which people and communities come together for plays, school and church events, nature walks, fund-raisers, athletic competitions, graduations and parades.
A journalist by definition, a professional outsider may not always see a town the way residents do. Ideally, the journalist’s vision will convey a reality residents recognize, and readers will see themselves and their neighbors in the newspaper, literally and figuratively, both in times of conflict and togetherness.
Last Monday, though, the visions did not coincide, and some Manchester residents saw only that The Courant had rained on their parade.
