Legacy Matters

The Curse of Generations Reversed and Ice Cream

In Red Sox nation, generations have come and gone whose love for the Boston Red Sox never dimmed, who never lost hope that someday the Sox would be world champions. There's a second beloved tradition in Boston and that's Brigham's ice cream. It's not only been Boston's favorite ice cream for 90 years, its reach extends throughout Red Sox Nation. (Last year, its vanilla ice cream was New England's #1 ice cream and the #1 frozen food item sold in New England according to the Griffin Report of Food Marketing.)

I learned from my grandfather and my father that the way to watch the Red Sox was with a bowl of Brigham's ice cream, or two. A really good game deserved a quart. There was no questioning of their devotion to the Red Sox. When my grandfather married my grandmother, their honeymoon was a trip to Boston to watch the Sox at Fenway. When my father died, some of his ashes were scattered in his favorite places which included, natch Fenway Park and the Brigham's ice cream factory which just happens to be in my home town of Arlington.

Arlington is the world headquarters for Brigham's ice cream and here began the reverse the curse. This year, on Babe Ruth Day, April 27, Brigham's introduced a new ice cream flavor "Reverse the Curse" (vanilla ice cream, caramel and chocolate swirls and chocolate covered peanuts). They also brought in two psychics to re-enact the same reverse-the-curse ritual in the ice cream factory that was performed last year in Fenway Park. It worked!

Today I raise the ice cream bowl to salute my grandfather and my father as well as the Red Sox and all those fans who died hoping and waiting for this day.

Debby Green's father died of cancer in 1999 and his last words described a stirring Red Sox victory as "incredible" reports Thomas Farragher in today's Boston Globe who quotes Debby as saying, "''For this moment, there is just this amazing completeness."

Sol Gittleman, a former provost at Tufts University, where he now teaches a course on baseball history, said the World Series triumph is a thrilling punctuation point in the history of a franchise that was sometimes marked by incompetence, racism, selfishness, and stupidity. But for now, he said, that legacy is a dull memory...
'' A lot of ghosts have been put to rest. It's over."... Workers at Mount Auburn Cemetery said yesterday they began to see tiny Red Sox flags blossom near some headstones at the historic graveyard in Cambridge.

''This is a place where the living and the dead meet," said Janet Heywood, a Mount Auburn vice president. ''It seems appropriate that people would want to invoke the spirit of their ancestors and let them know what's happening with the Red Sox."

As for Brigham's, they now have to rename their ice cream and they are asking for your vote.

update: In this week's cover story in Time magazine, the following

For Boston fans, this is more than just an overdue triumph. The graveyards of New England are filled with men and women who gifted the curse to their children like a family heirloom. Maybe there were fights over money and you argued over music and politics, but everyone shared in the exquisite agony of rooting for the Sawx. By beating the Cards, the Sox provided their fans a redemption story to beat all other redemption stories. As Washington attorney Bob Kirk, a Boston native, stood watching the celebration on the field in St. Louis, Mo., he talked about his father, who died of cancer last December. "His last words to me were, 'Have they signed [pitcher Curt] Schilling?'" Kirk remembers. "I promised him that if he pulled through, I'd take him to see this. I wanted to be here for him. I feel a little angel over me."

update: I just heard a story about a man who laminated the pages in the New York Times that told about the Red Sox victories over the Yankees, then over the Cardinals in the World Series. He took the laminated pages to his mother's grave where he planted them instead of flowers. Posted by Jill Fallon at October 28, 2004 8:38 PM | Permalink