Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A surprise limousine for Souter
The Surprise Dinner
In 1988, at the end of their clerkship year with Justice David Souter of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Mathew Rosengart and his co-clerk wanted more than the customary lunch, a handshake, and maybe a hug. Souter had a Yankee veneer and disliked largesse, so they used a little subterfuge to get him to agree to dinner in Boston instead of lunch on Main Street in Concord. They kept the limousine a secret and picked him up at his ramshackle house in rural New Hampshire.
On the way down, at Souter's direction, they stopped for drinks at the Ritz-Carlton on the Public Garden. Dinner was at his favorite restaurant, Locke-Ober, which had been there a couple of hundred years, had hosted the Kennedys and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and had hosted Souter himself when he was at Harvard Law School.
The Yearly Ritual
Every year after that, the evening repeated: drinks at the Ritz-Carlton, a walk across the Public Garden and the Boston Common, a pause in front of the State House to admire the Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment, and then dinner.
The dinner was preceded every year for about 30 years by a hike, just the three of them, up a different mountain in the White Mountains' presidential range. Souter hired clerks he expected to become friends, and on those hikes they talked about everything.
Why does a Boston monument honor the 54th Regiment?
Augustus Saint-Gaudens spent about 14 years on the Shaw Memorial, which was dedicated in 1897. It honors Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a young white officer from a Boston abolitionist family who led the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments raised in the North for the Union Army. Shaw was killed leading an assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina in July 1863. The sculpture shows Shaw on horseback with the marching soldiers beside him, and the 1989 film Glory told the regiment's story.
Why are the Common and Public Garden separate parks?
Boston Common was set aside in 1634 and is generally called the oldest public park in the United States. The Public Garden was laid out in 1837 on filled land that had been tidal flats, and it is regarded as the first public botanical garden in America. The two parks serve different purposes, one as open pasture and gathering ground and the other as a planted garden. They are separated only by Charles Street.
Why is the Presidential Range's weather so severe?
Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Presidential Range at 6,288 feet, and several storm tracks converge over it. The Mount Washington Observatory measured a wind gust of 231 miles per hour there on April 12, 1934. That reading stood as the world record for surface wind speed until a 1996 cyclone gust at Barrow Island, Australia. The observatory still staffs a year-round weather station on the summit.
More from Original Jurisdiction
