Patricia Kelly sits at a picnic table and gazes over an expanse of barns and pastures of grazing horses, a “campus” she has built over the past 36 years for the riding group Ebony Horsewomen Inc.
"My thought process is childlike. It’s good to be childlike. I think that’s a precious quality.”
When Dr. David Greenfield began sounding the alarm about the danger of technology addiction in the mid-’90s, he was so far ahead of his time that few people took him seriously. “People thought I was crazy,” he says while sitting in his West Hartford office at the Center for Internet and Tech…
More than 140 years ago, the murder of a young woman in Madison and the resulting trial of a Methodist minister for the crime gripped much of the nation. And then in 1978, the 100th anniversary of the murder, the case hooked Joel Helander, Guilford’s town historian.
How does Ramblin’ Dan Stevens manage to keep on ramblin’ during a pandemic laced with restrictions on everybody’s movements? And how does a musician make a living when so many shows keep getting canceled?
Walter Woodward wants to remind us about key people and events in our state’s past — the good and the bad.
When the Pleasant Valley Drive-In of Barkhamsted opened for the season on the second Friday in May, owner Donna McGrane was worried because it was pouring rain. “But we were packed!” she says. On the following night, “There was a crazy blinding blizzard. We sold out!”
Jeanine Basinger begins her book The Movie Musical! by recalling being a child in the small town of Brookings, South Dakota, during World War II and beholding Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the big screen of the downtown movie theater. The movie was Swing Time. In those days, she writes, …
They will be back with us soon, by late May or June, those monarch butterflies, a sight more beautiful and welcome this year than ever before.
At his home he has more than 100 trophies on display, and he’s looking forward to the Masters National Championship in Pittsburgh in July.
Gerri Griswold has “a passion for bats.” Known as “the Bat Lady of Connecticut,” Griswold has made it her mission to rehabilitate bats in her home and to educate the public about our misconceptions toward them.
On a fateful day in 1969, a group of Trinity College students who loved movies met screened a double feature of Alice’s Restaurant and Yellow Submarine at an auditorium in the campus chemistry building.
Catherine Violet Hubbard loved to hold and pet animals. Whenever she did, she whispered to them, even if it was a tiny insect in her palm: “Tell all your friends I am kind.”
Collectors routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars for one of Bill Eggers' vintage vehicle reproductions.
Connecticut produced arguably “the greatest female athlete in sports history,” but you might not even know her name.
The Manchester resident and disciplined fitness guru took up Baja racing in his 60s as a way to "to do something interesting."
Our new poet laureate, Margaret Gibson, wants to come to your town or city, go to your public library, park, art gallery or coffee shop, and engage you in a community dialogue.
In a small, nondescript building set back from the road along a strip of industrial warehouses in Waterbury, two brothers and their dad have carved out a successful product line recognized by a growing number of Major League Baseball players: the Tater Bat.
Christine Cummings and Todd Secki have put into action what Cummings calls “a shared passion for birds” by transforming their Killingworth property into a rehabilitation and education center for birds of prey.
On Dec. 30, 1981, Fred Murolo went for a run. He has continued to do so daily, without missing one day, for more than 37 years.
Chief Justice Richard A. Robinson keeps a guitar in his chambers, and it’s not just a memento left unused in the corner. “When I get stressed,” he says, “I pick it up and start playing. I try to play a little bit every day. It just puts you right in a zone; everything goes away.”
Tasha Caswell was walking between the shelves containing the film collection of the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford three years ago when she got a strong whiff of vinegar. She knew immediately what that odor meant.
Over the past year Tyler Green started a product line called Synthetic Simulation Systems. His goal is to help medical trainees, EMTs and others move away from working on dummies and replace them with his “super realistic” models.
First launching in 1938, Connecticut Magazine's predecessor, Connecticut Circle, was dedicated to selling the good life in the Nutmeg state.
Colin Caplan was raised on New Haven pizza, and he has never lost his deep affection and desire for what’s now recognized, he proudly notes, as “the best in the world.”
Martin Podskoch wants to get us out of our habit of visiting the same old places in our state and instead “take the road less traveled.”
Christopher Wigren doesn’t want people to merely read his new book, Connecticut Architecture: Stories of 100 Places. He hopes we will go out and see for ourselves the state’s rich variety of sites and even discover some we never knew existed. Perhaps even some that didn’t make it into the book.
One hundred years ago, after much debate, misgivings and opposition, the Connecticut State Farm for Women, set up in a collection of cottages in the fields of Niantic, opened its doors to 12 inmates.
Connecticut’s new state troubadour is not just another “folkie” like those who preceded her. And she is the first African-American solo artist to be chosen for the position.
Scott Freiman says he loves it when he reveals to people “tidbits” about the Beatles “and I hear that gasp from the audience because I’ve told them something they didn’t know.”
Noticing hearses periodically going past the window of his converted condominium in an 1865 house that overlooks New Haven’s historic and picturesque Wooster Square, Steve Hamm had an epiphany.
Howland Blackiston is always eager to talk about “my passionate hobby” and “my love affair with honey bees.”
Documentary filmmaker Karyl Evans, who says she “wanted to give voice to women,” found a fitting person to focus on for her latest film, The Life and Gardens of Beatrix Farrand.
When I first call Ray Figlewski at his home in Branford, he says, “It’s hard for me to run these days; my balance is gone” because of Parkinson’s disease. Then he adds, “It’s tough. But it can be dealt with.”
Duo Dickinson and Steve Culpepper didn’t want to write a basic history of New England. Instead they decided to co-write a “tapestry” of the people, places and homes they find interesting and that make this region of the country unique.
It’s amazing what a small group of dedicated and skilled volunteers can accomplish to showcase their love of model trains.
Bill Lucey has come full circle, and that’s good news for those of us who care about the health and future of Long Island Sound.
When Tony Renzoni arrived at Toad’s Place, the legendary New Haven music club, he was carrying a shopping bag that included two Gene Pitney albums and a transistor radio from his youth on which he had written “Independence.”
Lennie Grimaldi’s book on Connecticut characters traces back to January 1978. That’s when Grimaldi, a 19-year-old obituary writer for the Telegram newspaper in Bridgeport, landed an exclusive interview at the now-closed Fore ’n’ Aft club in Westport with 18-year-old Linda Blair, who had play…
Neil Scherer, a New Yorker, was visiting Waterbury last summer to work on a project at the Mattatuck Museum when he asked the museum’s curator, Cynthia Roznoy: “Are we in Yankee territory or Red Sox territory?”
When you arrive at the Pleasant Valley Drive-In, set in a grassy field within a hamlet that really is called Pleasant Valley, you will feel you have stepped back into another century.
Paul Spitzer is entranced as he trains his binoculars on a series of nesting platforms along the Great Island salt marsh, where the Connecticut River flows into Long Island Sound in Old Lyme.
When Chris Dobbs was a lad, his dad, Charlie Dobbs, often took him to diners across Connecticut for breakfast, talk and camaraderie.
Jon Berk was on summer break from law school at Boston University in the early 1970s when he spotted a Spider-Man comic on the racks of a local store. The sight startled him, and brought him back to his youth.
Gary Payne greets me at the front door of his condo in Hamden and says, “Come on down to my Circus Room!”
People have been flocking to 354 Main St. in the heart of Winsted since 1926, when the building opened as a vaudeville theater.
Shawn Peterson knows that people often feel overwhelmed when they walk into the PEZ Visitor Center in Orange, but that’s OK.
Nestled between a pasture of grazing horses and a stretch of woods in the town of Bethany sit two barns, each with a sign posted above the front door: “Set yourself free.”
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