Reporter’s Notebook: Snippets from Grafton Town Meeting
A voter attending Town Meeting Monday had a cardiac incident toward the end of the evening. Luckily, he was surrounded by first responders.
Personnel attending the unidentified man asked Town Meeting attendees for aspirin or nitro tablets as 911 was called for an ambulance. The man was removed by EMTs as Town Meeting came to a halt for about 15 minutes, resuming after his exit with Article 27.
PHOTO BY JENNIFER LORD PALUZZI
It’s not a Town Meeting without technical issues.
While residents at home could flip from the New England Patriots game to GCTV’s live broadcast, those watching Town Meeting via streaming video on their computers were not so lucky. The livestream was completely without sound.
This proved to be bad news for the reporter for the Grafton News and Worcester Telegram & Gazette, who was covering the meeting remotely.
Meanwhile, Grafton Common’s editor was in her usual seat at Grafton High School — stage left, just ahead of the GCTV camera and close to an electrical outlet in case her laptop needed a bit of a charge. Unfortunately, her plan to live-blog the meeting on Grafton Common was thwarted by the failure of the school’s “guest” Wi-Fi.
It’s a time-honored Town Meeting tradition.
A little-known requirement of every Town Moderator is the need to periodically update residents with a sports score. In the fall, that can especially be rough if the Red Sox are in the playoffs (nope, not this year, even if they did win the World Series in 2018) or the Patriots are on Monday Night Football.
And so it was. The New England Patriots (7-0) handily won over the New York Jets, 33-0, with Town Moderator Ray Mead occasionally interjecting the updated score for sports fans obliged to vote for the town’s business rather than cheer on the team from home.
Last night’s town meeting was filled with an abundance of rude and negative behavior. The comments and questions raised about the Town’s funding for the restoration of Sarah Ciscoe’s homestead was wrong and discriminatory. This valuable piece of Grafton history was not dropped in by spacecraft; our Town was built around the reservation and this indelible piece of property must be maintained, and not by bake sales and car washes.
For those of you who attended last night, and missed this history lesson, you are forgiven if you arrived in Town within the past twenty minutes.
For those of you who were born and educated in Town, and went to the reservation for the Pow Wow or with a scout troop, SHAME ON YOU.