Tag Archives: tour guides

Truth and the Tales We Tell: Mother Goose not in Granary

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This brief rebuttal of standard fare was submitted yesterday by Delilah Webb, continuing her popular column “Truth and the Tales We Tell.”

If you were to stand in front of the Granary Burying Ground for a few hours listening to the snippet of audible narrative from passing tour buses, you’d frequently hear a common untruth espoused: that the beloved children’s author Mother Goose is buried within.  This is not the case!  There are two women named Goose in this cemetery, both wives of an affluent landowner named Isaac Goose – but the stories attributed to MG, as well as the pseudonym, can be traced to a century prior to their lives in France!

In my experience discussing the matter with other tour guides, the canard referred to remains stubbornly embedded in Boston tour guide lore, and I suspect many tour guides will stick by their guns to defend the now-traditional conviction that Mother Goose is in the Granary.  But the research of the current writer leads Bostontourguide.org to side with Delilah.

Dispute our position in the reply box below, or begin a new topic thread in the discussion forum.

Beantown Trolley Tour Guide Stephen Collins also Shakespeare Actor and Teacher

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Stephen Collins performs Shakespeare

 

by Jon Cotton

To the left is Stephen Collins of Beantown Trolley Tours yesterday performing Shakespeare in Concord.  Many of us tour guides either know him personally or have seen him on the road or have read the reviews he receives from Tripadvisor.  In yesterday’s performance he did pieces from the Tempest, Hamlet, Lear, and three sonnets.  His other performances include impersonations of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost.  He also teaches classes on poetry and literature.  Stephen worked briefly for Old Town in 2006 and has been a tour guide at Beantown Trolley Tours for 6 years.  Visit his website.  His phone number is 978 853 0710.  Stephen describes himself in the following terms:

A Renaissance man, actor, teacher, tour guide, and ex-salesman now much more comfortable doing what he truly loves: performing.

A one-minute recording from yesterday’s superb performance attended by Bostontourguide.org

Truth and the Tales We Tell

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By Delilah Webb

Mark Twain once quipped that truth was stranger than fiction, and in the world of tour guides it can be important to remind ourselves that the truth can be just as interesting.  Not only that, but many of us pride ourselves not only on the entertainment value of our tours, complete with humor and character development, but also on the integrity of the content which we share. Many of us have a few consciously selected exceptions to textbook history; I call this the “historical fiction” caveat.  This approach can be the difference between a dry, lecture hall delivery, and an engaging and memorable
experience for our customers.

For instance, when passing the Christopher Columbus Park, after I say that the Rose Garden was dedicated to Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy on her 100th birthday (fact), I
say that on that occasion she was asked what the best part was of being 100, and she responded (with a Boston Kennedy accent for color) “There’s no peer pressure.”

I can’t confirm Mrs. Kennedy’s clever remark, although I suspect it to be based on truth.  Regardless, I use it simply because it works.  Deliberate anecdotal retellings are different from chronically  repeating incorrect information unawares.  It may not bother some
guides, but I, for one, was embarrassed when my longstanding stories were proven to be longstanding falsehoods.  I had always said the Federal Reserve Bank was made of recycled aluminum, and that the Commonwealth Pier was “Boston’s Ellis Island.”  At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility to know fact from fiction.  I am spending the
current “off-season” (aka Winter), independently researching some of the stories we tell, and sharing the knowledge with my tour guide brethren.

-Delilah Webb is a Boston tour guide, a professional voiceover artist, and the bostontourguide.org webmaster.

Tour Guide Fabrication: Commonwealth Pier was not “Boston’s Ellis Island”

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by Jon Cotton, editor

Some tour guides claim the Commonwealth Pier was “Boston’s Ellis Island.” Delilah Webb investigated.  There was a Boston “Ellis Island,” but it was in East Boston, torn down last year.  Its proper name was the East Boston Immigration Station. It processed 230,000 people from 1920 to 1955. Some were Nazis and immediately deported. Italian schemer Charles Ponzi was deported to Italy through here.  Read more.

The Boston World Trade Center building on Commonwealth Pier was built in 1901. The following quotation is from wikipedia:

Constructed in 1901 as a maritime cargo handling facility, Commonwealth Pier was the largest pier building in the world at the time. Able to accommodate the largest vessels that entered the port of Boston, this facility was an integral part of city’s maritime industry, handling both freight and passenger traffic, with rail and truck transportation access right on the pier. Commonwealth Pier subsequently underwent two major renovations and continued to host ships through the 1970s, when changes in cargo transport made the Pier obsolete. In the early 1980s, the Massachusetts Port Authority designated Fidelity Investments and The Drew Company as developers of Commonwealth Pier, which they transformed into the World Trade Center Boston in 1986.

thanks to Delilah Webb and Joe Carroll for contributing to this article and to tour guide truth