Jim Walsh
Fifty-two years ago, at the age of thirty, I moved to Nahant. I’d taken a job in Lynn and, coincidentally, a friend of a friend lived in Nahant, a town I had never heard of, much less visited. I thought I might stay for a couple of weeks, just to get my bearings.
I drove across The Causeway at ten o’clock at night, woke up the next morning, looked around, and said to myself, “I’m staying.” And I did.
It happened that I’d come into possession of an eighteen-foot Marshall Catboat. It was my only “luxury.” I didn’t own a car. But owning that boat meant the first Nahanters I came to know centered much of their lives at the Town Wharf. Sean Antrim was among the first. He and his extended family came to define the best of who Nahanters were.
There were also others at the Wharf. In an early conversation, I shared with one of them that I’d moved from New Haven. He replied, “Lotta black people there!” Except, the words “black people” were not used. Thankfully, I didn’t hear the n-word very often. But I also heard worse.
Still, as I settled in and got to know the town, the Wharf remained at the center until, in 1985, I remarried. My new wife was allergic to the sun. Therefore, sailing was never going to be part of our life together…and I didn’t remarry to not spend time with my wife.
In the preceding decade, I had come to spend a lot of time at the Dory Club. In Nahant—a small, modest community—a “Yacht Club” would sound a little too pretentious. The Dory Club sat in a small building at the edge of the Wharf with a perfectly placed pot-bellied stove in the center of the room. It was presided over by Wilson Tibbo, the town’s Harbor Master. He was, shall we say, a somewhat stern but reticent fellow. And there were others—Harriet and Bob Steeves, Bill Gilday, Harry and Gladys Edwards, Rene and Seta Michaud, Bill and Margaret Antrim. Memories of those times were nurtured recently by a talk given at the Nahant Village Church by Rex Antrim on the history of sail racing in Nahant. But there was another, more specific memory, recently stimulated by an astonishing Executive Order issued by Donald Trump. The order forbade the burning of an American flag.
My memory was of a weekly gathering, on Thursdays, around that potbellied stove in the Dory Club. The light that evening was provided by oil lamps, adding even more warmth to the evening’s atmosphere. I’ve told of that special winter evening at the Dory Club for more than forty-five years. On that special night, a very controversial subject came up. The question on the floor that night concerned the burning of the American flag. There were thirteen of us. I was the newcomer, but none of us were strangers to one another. Was there a law against burning the flag? No, there wasn’t. Should there be? Well, that was the question we explored.
There were veterans in the room. To them, on the battlefield, the flag had great meaning. It was the symbol of what they were fighting for. Comrades had died fighting for that flag. Some vets were offended at the very thought. And there were none among us who belittled those feelings.
Some saw those World War Two and Korean War vets as fighting for the freedoms that the American flag represented. I was someone who had come of age in the 1960s. Early on, under the leadership of JFK, we began the final fight for legislation ensuring that every American had a right to vote, to eat in restaurants and sleep in hotels of their choosing…and to bring an unjust and unwinnable war to an end. To us, all Americans had the right to speak our minds without repercussions, to march, and to shout if we chose. And, ultimately, if a person so chose, to symbolically burn a flag. As an American, I had that right. I, for instance, had never done it, but it was a constitutionally protected freedom of expression.
In the gentle light of that warm room that night, feelings were strong and deeply felt. Yet, on that magical evening, we talked to one another. We expressed our thoughts and feelings and listened to the thoughts and feelings of others. Neither fists nor voices were raised…not once.
When the artist Norman Rockwell represented the Four Freedoms in 1943, he might have painted “Freedom of Speech” from the balcony of the Nahant Town Hall. The painting portrays a man standing up at Town Meeting, the Warrant dangling from the pocket of his well-worn short coat. He was ready to make his opinion heard on the item in question. Around him, we see his fellow citizens, turning, looking, ready to listen. In Nahant that night, Mr. Rockwell might have stood off in a corner of the Dory Club, paint brush in one hand, palette in the other, but so entranced with the respectful conversation going on among men and women who disagreed so strongly, that he forgot to put paint to canvas. Too bad. We were an interesting bunch.
Some years later, the Supreme Court of the United States took up the specific question of flag burning and ruled that freedom of speech and expression were fundamental to the Constitution, and the Constitution is who we are as a nation.
Which will prevail…the Constitution of the United States or this President’s Executive Order?
We cannot flag from this fight.
Jim Walsh is a writer who lives in Nahant.
