Beyond Obsession Read Online Free PDF Page B

afflictions that beset much of the nation: pervasive drugs, violent crime, racial unrest and so much more. Though Glastonbury was less than a half hour’s drive from the center of Hartford, the state capital that, in recent years, had become one of the most poverty-stricken and crime-ridden cities in the Northeast, it was as though the town somehow existed on another planet or in another time.
    Its roots were far in the past, its old streets laid out in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Its oldest homes dated from before the Revolution. Glastonbury had been settled in 1638, only two years after the Reverend Thomas Hooker and 110 members of his congregation had left the Massachusetts Bay Colony, traveled south and established the first permanent settlements on the Connecticut River in what became Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield. Some of the Wethersfield pioneers, resenting the strict rules of the Hooker congregation and seeing fertile land on the eastern side of the river, broke away and formed their own community on thirty-four parcels they bought from the local Indians. The colonists called their new town Glastonbury, after the place in England where many had been born.
    The town prospered, as both an agricultural center and the site of some small industries—a cotton mill, a paper mill, a soap mill, a tannery, a silver firm and, most important in those early days, the Stocking Gunpowder Factory, a major supplier of gunpowder to George Washington’s revolutionary army. But industry gradually vanished as the Industrial Revolution took root and factories moved closer to urban centers and the railroads. Glastonbury lapsed into a sleepy agricultural backwater, a place where residents of Hartford, East Hartford and surrounding communities went during the summer to buy local corn, tomatoes, berries and other fresh produce, and cider made from locally grown apples, often crossing the river on the Glastonbury Ferry, which made its first passage in 1655 and continues to run to this day, at least in good weather, and is now the oldest ferry service in continuous operation in the United States.
    By the end of the 1950s there were only about eight thousand people in the town, and it had changed little from early days; in 1959, for instance, it was still governed, as it had been since 1692, by the town meeting. But radical change was at hand. Suddenly new highways were laid down, and bridges built across the Connecticut River, bringing Hartford with its insurance companies and other growing communities with their factories within an easy commute. As Glastonbury turned from an agricultural enclave into a bedroom community, home to the growing middle and upper middle classes, the town meeting vanished, replaced by a nonpartisan town manager, appointed by an elected nine-member town council (more often than not with a six to three Republican majority, though registered voters have over the years been about evenly balanced among Republicans, Democrats and independents). Over the next quarter century the population tripled, soaring to more than twenty-four thousand by the mid-1980s, and townspeople predicted that by the turn of the decade they would be joined by another thirty-five hundred people.
    But that growth has hardly reflected the demographic image of America at large. Glastonbury is lily white—in the mid-1980s, 97 percent white, in fact, with a mere 107 blacks, most of them servants, and 365 “others,” the others representing an influx of increasingly prosperous Asians. Of the fourteen religious congregations, one is Jewish, two are Catholic, though the Catholic population has grown steadily, and the other eleven are various Protestant denominations.
    The median family income in the early 1980s was more than thirty-one thousand dollars; by 1990, according to estimates, it was close to forty thousand dollars. And there is a car not just for every family but for almost every citizen—more