I know the North Shore has produced famous people. I didn’t know their stories filled a three-inch-thicker folder tucked into the Item’s morgue (that’s newspaper-talk for “library”).
My mind tends to veer to the infamous when I recount people who gained, technically speaking, notoriety rather than fame. Alfred Hunter strafed Lynn and adjoining communities on a night in 1989 from the seat of a small airplane after police said he killed his wife. He had five minutes of flying time left in his fuel tank when he landed.
Albert DeSalvo wasn’t from Lynn but he made national headlines in 1967 when police captured him in the city after he escaped from Bridgewater State Hospital. Helen Blake, a former Newhall Street resident murdered in 1962, is considered to be the Boston Strangler’s fourth victim.
But I digress into the macabre. Let us focus instead on more people with more positive claims to fame.
Who knew that money management genius Peter Lynch, before he attained fame, worked weeknights, according to a 1999 Daily Evening Item profile, at an Italian restaurant and studied so hard classmates called him “The Mole?”
Who knew that Jan Matzeliger, South American-born immigrant who revolutionized the shoe industry 140 years ago, made his “shoe lasting” machine’s first prototype using a cigar box, elastic and old pieces of wire? He died in 1886 and is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery.
Anyone over 50 years old on the North Shore has heard of Eddie Andelman and his “Hot Dog Safari.” The event got so big in the 1990s, it filled the former Palace nightclub in Saugus before moving to now-defunct Wonderland Greyhound Park in Revere and then to Suffolk Downs where National Guard members cooked nearly 100,000 hot dogs consumed by more than 30,000 people. Safari proceeds raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for cystic fibrosis research.
West Lynner Richard Fecteau is a Cold War legend. People’s Republic of China officials first claimed Fecteau died when his plane was shot down in 1952 over Manchuria. The Communists changed their tune two years later, declaring Fecteau and Jack Downey alive and sentencing them to 20 years in a Chinese prison on espionage charges. Fecteau spent nine of his 19 years imprisoned in solitary confinement. “Your future is very dark,” a Chinese soldier told Fecteau when he was captured.
He was honored in 1998 with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Director’s Medal and a Lynn school and park are named for Fecteau.
Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons’ acting career is rooted in the North Shore with the “Bonnie and Clyde” actress getting her start with the Tavern Players in Lynn and apprenticing three years with the Marblehead Summer Theatre. According to an Item story, Parsons boasted in a 1956 interview, “I’m going to be one of the world’s greatest actresses in about 10 years.” She was honored for her best supporting role in 1968.
North Shore sports legends abound and the pantheon their names are enshrined in includes Sandra Whyte, the Saugus native who played, according to an Item account, “a pivotal role” making the three goals in the U.S. women’s hockey team’s gold medal win in the 1998 Winter Olympics. Whyte hit the ice at the age of five when she joined Saugus Youth Hockey.
It’s not difficult to equate Mary Baker Eddy’s fame with Lynn and Swampscott. Historic homes in both communities are named for her and legendary Nahant sculptor Reno Pisano immortalized the Christian Science founder with his tribute in stone to Eddy at the corner of Oxford and Market streets.
Eddy’s near-fatal fall at the corner on an icy February day in 1866 inspired her treatise on “healing truth” that became Christian Science’s foundation. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1995.
While we’re in the 19th century, let’s pay tribute to Joseph Cressy, the high seas record-setter born on High Street in Marblehead. A sailing vessel captain when he was 23 years old, Cressy set a sailing speed record in 1851, piloting the “Flying Cloud” from New York to San Francisco in 89 days.
For anyone wondering why 89 days was any kind of speed record, consider the fact that Cressy’s East Boston-built clipper actually outpaced steamship speeds during its record-setting run. Cressy commanded the U.S. Navy ship “Ino” in 1861 with 80 fellow Marblehead residents fighting alongside him.
