Kragsyde

This isn’t Architecture Wednesday but this house is, without a doubt, one of my favorite houses, ever. One that existed for a time, then it didn’t, and then it was resurrected. I first posted about it in May 2013, but have since found more photos of the original and of Kragsyde II, and more information about the original owner.

The original Kragsyde, built on Smith's Point at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts in 1883, was commissioned by George Nixon Black, Jr. and built by Peabody and Stearns, and is generally regarded as the zenith of "Shingle Style," a subtype of American Queen Anne architecture. Rambling, haunting and evocative, the beautiful house was set high on a dramatic headland; Nixon and his family occupied the house every summer from May until October to the end of their lives.

Kragsyde's footprint followed that of broad "V", with the massiveness of Kragsyde hidden, its broadest facades facing the ocean but that wasn’t done specifically for the views but for the house to be able to capture the cool sea breezes since the three-and-a-half-story main house faced the Atlantic Ocean; a secondary wing was set at a 45-degree angle. The house's most dramatic feature was a massive arch that formed a Porte cochere and supported the loggia, or open porch, and glass-enclosed billiard room above. Guests arriving by carriage would be dropped off under the arch, enter through the front door, and climb an interior stair to the main floor, which featured formal rooms for entertaining.

Service rooms and the kitchen were located on the ground floor, and a service stair kept the servants out of sight. A dumbwaiter carried food from the kitchen to the butler's pantry on the main floor. A piazza, the length of the house faced the ocean, and a covered section cantilevered out over the rocks. The parlor was surrounded on three sides by the piazza and an L-shaped covered porch. Stairs led down from the loggia to a series of terraces.

The second floor contained bedrooms for the Blacks and their guests while the third floor contained bedrooms for servants. The terraced landscape surrounding the house was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York City and the Biltmore Estate gardens in North Carolina.

Separating the service court from the front of the structure was a wing dominated by a massive arch. Within the arch was an entrance into the house on one side, and access to a billiard room on the other. A single room, with windows on three sides, was situated above the arch along with a private loggia. Stairs from the loggia led down to the property below helped to add length to the structure.

Kragsyde was, gulp, destroyed in 1929 following the death of George Nixon Black Jr, in 1927, when the new owners who considered the iconic late-19th-century shingle-style masterpiece outdated chose to tear it down.

But then came Jane Goodrich and resurrection.

Goodrich first saw Kragsyde in a book when she was a child. She found it again, in the same book, as an adult, and showed her husband, Jim Beyor, a builder. They became ‘fascinated with that era of seaside life’ and set out to find the house, only to discover it was long gone; that was when they decided to build a replica.

Luck was with them and they found the original blueprints for Kragsyde in the Boston Public Library, where they had been deposited by a professor at Northeastern University, Wheaton Holden, but they needed his permission to see the plans. Goodrich called him from the library basement and said, ‘I’m going to build Kragsyde’ and he said, ‘Fine.’

Even with plans in hand, finding affordable seafront property proved difficult. A two-year search finally took them about 200 miles north of the site of the original, to Swans Island. The setting is correct for the style: a rocky shore with views of Mount Desert Island and the ocean.

Kragsyde’s twin is identical in almost every way and is a large house by even today’s standards. It has 13 principal rooms and, like the original, the new Kragsyde has a library with a reading porch; a large parlor opening onto a covered porch, or piazza; another piazza, this one open; a dining area; 4 large bedrooms; a kitchen; and 10 servants’ rooms on the third floor. Kragsyde is a 6,000-square-foot house with 4 chimneys and 13 fireplaces, and it is sheathed with 130,000 square feet of shingles that named the style.

It is hard to say what such a house would cost when Goodrich and Beyor began the build; some say it would have been upwards of $800,000 in 1988 dollars. But since Beyor is a builder, he and Goodrich took on construction of Kragsyde II by themselves, working on it nights and weekends for six years, and built the home for less than $200,000, which included the cost of the two acres of seafront property.

Beyor’s skill and experience have made the construction of the house possible. He bought all the lumber from a mill, not from lumberyards, thus saving nearly half the cost, and personally milled it all himself; he also built all of the windows. He used no shortcuts; he used no structural plywood. Instead of using plywood in the floors, as is common, he used seven-eighths-inch boards.

There are a couple of differences. The floorplan was flipped to have the piazzas face the sea and the exterior walls are 6 inches thick, instead of the 4 inches in the original. The foundation is poured cement, not stone as in the original, although it will be sheathed in stone.

Other than that, it’s the same glorious house brought back to life.

Jane Goodrich has since written a book about the house and their experiences called The House at Lobster Cove:

“Coup de foudre, the French say, literally “bolt of lightning” but meaning love at first sight. How better to describe the instant when a chance meeting alters a life? For who can ever expect the sudden place, or glimpse, or turn of the page that will change everything? I first met Kragsyde in an old box of books my father brought home. I was barely a teen, and paid little attention to the text or the title of the book, but the photographs and drawings gave me goose bumps. These were the most beautiful houses I had ever seen. Not impossible fantasy castles, nor the monotonous ranch-style structures of my own time. Shingled and playful and shaggy, like a favorite dog, full of mysterious rooms placed at odd angles. Fanciful windows I longed to peer from, deep cool porches, turrets with pennants flying from spires, promising endless summers. And the names: Grasshead, Sunset Hall, Wave Crest, Seabright. I studied them all, but even then my eyes could discern the masterpiece: Kragsyde. With its fantastic arch large enough to drive through, its beautiful stones, its romantic perch above the sea, this was the pinnacle. Completely beguiled, I clipped the photograph from the book and pasted it into a scrapbook. The sepia photo, held in my hands for the first time, was both a daydream and a seed.”

For me, one of the most interesting things about the house is George Nixon Black. As Goodrich and Beyor researched, and then built, Kragsyde II, she thought she might uncover something about him that was nasty or cruel, and she never did.

The George Nixon Black she discovered was a gay man living in an era where coming out wasn’t even a concept and yet she believed Black’s sexual orientation was an open secret. In his will, Goodrich found further evidence of both his goodness—he gave liberally to his former servants and to charitable causes—and his gayness—he left a large portion of his estate to his longtime companion, Charles Brooks Pitman, with whom he lived happily for 34 years.

She tracked down Black’s letters and documents, and with the same determination that allowed her to build that grand house, shingle by shingle, brick by brick, Goodrich reconstructed the story of George Nixon Black.

On the ceiling of Goodrich’s office at Kragsyde, she has painted the constellations—a furry great bear, a scaly dragon, a muscular Hercules.—arranged exactly as they would have appeared on the night of July 11, 1842, when George Nixon Black was born. It was in that office that she wrote, by hand, The House at Lobster Cove:

“If you’ve built your own space, it’s a little like living inside a giant piece of art that you made. Remember when you were little and you would make your own fort? That’s the same feeling.”

So, whatever happened then to the site of the original Kragsyde house that was unceremoniously demolished? Well, three subsequent homes have been built upon its foundations: in the 1930’s a stuccoed house built by Boston lawyer Pierpont Stackpole sat on the site, but it, too, was demolished in later years.

In 1975, a home dubbed The General's House was built, and like the original, it featured a wing with Porte cochere set at a 45-degree angle to the main house. It was built for Georges Doriot, founder of American Research and Development Corporation, and his wife Edna.

In 2014, a fourth Kragsyde was built upon the original's foundations, and still exists to this day, though for me it holds none of the charm or mystery or allure of the original.

This is the current home sitting on the site of the original Kragsyde, Manchester-By-The-Sea. A midcentury modern take on the original.

The Bad and The Good ... Tuesday June 7, 2022

These really are the easiest posts to compile because there are dumb people everywhere and it seems they are all trying to out-dumb one another with fear and loathing, but there are some bright spots, and given this is Pride Month, it’s especially nice there most are LGBTQ+ … so here goes:

MASSACHUSETTS

Rayla Campbell, the GOP nominee for Secretary of State, said this at the state Republican convention:

“You can’t just sit and say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible. Maybe somebody else will take care it. Oh, that’s not so nice.’ Well, I don’t think it’s so nice when [teachers are] telling your five-year-old that he can go suck another five-year-old’s dick, do you? This is what they’re doing!”

And uttered without a shred of proof.

MISSOURI

GOP Representative Billy Long, a candidate for Senate, has a bizarre new plan to get Thing 45 reinstated to office.

He says that he will get Vice President Kamala Harris to resign, and then he have President Biden appoint Thing 45 as vice president, and then have Biden himself resign, putting Thing 45 first in line to ascend to the presidency.

Seriously, he thinks this might work.

LOUISIANA

The Louisiana House approved two anti-abortion bills that restricts access to abortions.

One makes it a crime to sell abortion pills through the mail, while the second closes every abortion clinic in the state, criminalizes most pregnancy termination actions, and sends physicians who perform the procedures to prison.

I really want the mistress of just one GOP politician to come forward and talk about the abortion she had at the behest of her anti-abortion lover.

OHIO

House Republicans passed a bill to ban all transgender students from playing high school and college sports and requires a genital exam in any disputes.

These pigs voted on this bill on the first day of Pride Month.

Hate.

TENNESSEE

Stewart Parks is a GOP candidate for Congress and wants y’all to know that if he’s elected Pride celebrations are done.

“If you elect me, this month will be the last National Gay Pride month ever celebrated. We need to elect people into US congress that will stand up and say Homosexuality and Transgenderism are evil. I will push to have the 2015 Obergefell vs Hodges ruling overturned which legalized same sex marriage … We have to ban it asap and safeguard our children against it. We have to get Transgenderism out of our schools. When I win this election everyone will know their gender again.”

Stew seems a little too enthralled with being gay or trans. I think he has a secret …

GOOD

AMERICA

The Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from Boozy and Clod, AKA Mark and Patricia McCloskey, that St. Louis couple who waved guns at a Black Lives Matter protest outside their home in 2020. They are both facing an indefinite suspension of their law licenses.

Sorry, not sorry.

NEW JERSEY

Students and faculty at Passaic Preparatory Academy rallied to show their LGBTQ+ pride after a school board policy prevented them from hoisting a rainbow Pride flag on the flagpole in front of the school.

After students at Passaic Preparatory Academy raised the flag last June for Pride Month, the Board of Education, realizing there was no policy covering which flags could be flown, worked to change that policy into one that allows only an American flag, a New Jersey state flag, or a school flag to be flown.

So, what did the students do? Well, since the law says you cannot fly a Pride flag on the flagpole, the students opted instead to hang Pride flags in every single window, and on every wall in the school.

This is how you do it.

UTAH

The state’s GOP Governor Spencer Cox issued a proclamation marking June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month and calling on Utahns to be more welcoming and accepting of the community:

“This should not be controversial. There should be nothing controversial about supporting a group of people in our state who have historically felt marginalized.”

Cox may be the only Republican governor in the entire country to issue such a proclamation; last year, he issued a similar proclamation, becoming the first Utah governor to officially acknowledge Pride Month.

Good on this Governor.

CALIFORNIA

Years back the Los Angeles Dodgers mistreated Glenn Burke, the first out gay player in Major League Baseball history; this week the team will be honoring Burke’s legacy and his family at its 9th annual Pride Night.

In 1978, the Dodgers traded Burke to the Oakland Athletics because the Dodgers’ general manager, Al Campanis, disapproved of his homosexuality. Campanis ALLEGEDLY tried to hide Burke’s sexuality from the public by offering him $75,000 to get married, to which Burke incredulously replied, “To a woman?!??”

It was particularly insulting to Burke as he had a solid rookie season and helped the team advance to the 1977 World Series. During his time with the Dodgers, Burke was also credited with inventing the high-five as a congratulatory gesture with teammates.

Burke’s stint with the Oakland A’s didn’t go much better after the team’s manager Claudell Washington introduced him to the team with:

“Oh, by the way, this is Glenn Burke. And he’s a faggot.”

Some teammates avoided showering with Burke, and he was released from his contract and sent to a minor league team in Ogden, Utah. After Burke left the sport entirely he moved to San Francisco and played on gay teams, but later fought addiction and died of complications related to HIV in 1995.

Over 40 of Burke’s family and friends are expected to attend the event. During the event, the Dodgers will take a moment to officially honor Burke and the players will wear custom rainbow ballcaps.

Think of how different this all might have been if professional sports wasn’t such a hotbed of homophobia.

Congratulations, Glenn, I’m giving you a high-five right now.

Remember, We The People have to make the Good News happen by speaking up and standing up and shouting out and voting to remove those people from office who are out to harm women, People of Color, and the LGBTQ+ community in their quest to take this country backwards.

Not to mention the NRA lapdogs and asshats.

CAST A GODDAMNED VOTE!

Stories of Pride: Nicholas Bulman is Prom King

Nicholas Bulman has been named Prom King at Barnstable High School in Massachusetts.

It was just last summer, in an Instagram post, that  Nicholas told his classmates that he was in the process of transitioning. He was met with support and encouragement, and, thanks to the teaching staff at Barnstable, he was nominated to be Prom King.

At his high school, teachers pick five boys as candidates for prom king and five girls as candidates for prom queen. One teacher , Lyn Vazquez, said Nicholas was an obvious choice:

“He’s just an all-around great person. Teachers at Barnstable High School felt Nick was a great candidate.”

Nicholas said he didn’t even know he was nominated until a classmate told him;  and then last week, he attended the school’s ­Great Gatsby-themed prom with his classmates where he was chosen as Prom King.

Nicholas has struggled with his gender identity for many years and it wasn’t until he was in the eighth grade and heard the word “transgender” that he found a place where he fit:

“It helped me a lot knowing there were other people who understood what I was going through.”

Last summer he started hormone replacement therapy, and earlier this year he got top surgery.

“When I was getting fitted [for a tux], everything fit better.”

Everything fit.

Congratulations to Nicholas for becoming Prom King, but even more congratulations on choosing to live his life authentically as himself.

We could all learn that lesson.

LGBTQ Nation

Architecture Wednesday: Island Residence

I need a beach house, and this one, sitting on a narrow strip of land on the island of Chappaquiddick near Edgartown, Massachusetts, ir perfect.

It’s relaxing.

Of course, sad to say, it’s also a wee bit large—though maybe I could get the Reader’s Digest version—and comprised of four different structures: a 6,300 square-foot main house, a 630 square foot garage, a storage shed, and a boat house. I could probably do without the shed … because it’s so relaxing, with the ocean on one side and a bay on the other.

The home was built on the site of an older house, that was razed to make room for this home and some changes to the site. The site strategy involved moving the road from the middle of an existing meadow to a new location, winding through an oak and pine forest and ending in a hidden courtyard near the garage. Then you walk along the boardwalk, through the trees, to the house, sited far enough away, that the driveway and garage simply disappear.

The main house has been strategically located to optimize the experience of living in the home, and outside, while minimizing the impact on the environmental. For instance, the boathouse—and I never thought I’d need one, but now I want one—sits on four concrete columns among pine trees, but was constructed without ever touching a branch.

The house offers remarkable views of Nantucket , the sunrise over Cape Pogue Bay , the ocean and Edgartown, and the sunset over the water. The house was built low to the ground and clad in sealed, unpainted wood to naturally weather over time to recede into the landscape.

Naturally, it’s not just pretty, it’s also environmentally friendly; behind that natural wood cladding is a system of rigid insulation to withstand the hardiest of nor’easters. And where the façade lacks wood, it contains fully operable windows, created by a local craftsman who uses a technique that allows corner windows to open completely, and large panels of glass to slide open along the exterior façade of the building, leaving nothing but the view and the breezes. These window openings work with the home’s radiant heating and cooling, vastly reducing the cost of HVAC equipment. The home’s southern exposure fills the interior with natural light, maximizing solar heat gain and minimizing electrical consumption, while green roofs—covered in sea grasses—provide roof insulation, improve air quality and biodiversity, manage rainwater, and reduce noise.

As I said, it’s quiet and peaceful and seems almost a part of the land. If only there was a smaller version ….

Click to emBIGGERate ...

HomeDSGN

Peter Rose + Partners

Grown Men Could Learn Something From Nico

Emily Nash is sixteen and an avid golfer; she recently finished a Massachusetts high school golf tournament competition, where she was the only girl playing, with the best score.

Good for her, but ... rules set by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association prevented her from getting the first-place trophy because ... wait for it ... she’s a girl. The girl with the best score; the best one playing; but not good enough for a trophy because she doesn’t have a penis. Oh, and let’s not forget that Emily’s score, again, the best score, was used to contribute to her school’s overall team score, but she was not recognized as an individual player, again, because of her gender.

Luckily, Nico Ciolino, who got the second-best score, and received the championship trophy instead, because he’s male, is more aware and grown-up than the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association:

“I felt a little bit awkward. It felt like I cheated in a sense because I didn’t win and I got the trophy. It didn’t feel right with me. I felt bad. It’s so hard winning tournaments. … It’s just so tough when you finally win and you get the results that you worked so hard for and then it’s like, ‘Oh wait, you can’t win. You’re a girl.’”

And so he offered the trophy to Emily, who was touched by his gesture ... 

“He came over and said he didn’t win the tournament, that I did. It was really nice of him and respectful”

 ... but politely declined.

Nico says:

“I like to call myself a good golfer, but it’s very hard to win in the tournaments I play in, so it’s very hard for me to kind of say, you know, give up the trophy ... But I knew that she deserved it. She beat me fair and square. It was the right thing to do. She won. It didn’t mind me that she was a girl. We played from the same tees. We played in the same conditions.”

Again, too bad the adults running the tournament were as, well, aware, as Nico.

Soulful

A Gay Couple's Home Was Vandalized, And What The Neighbors Did Next Was Shocking

Shortly after the Orlando massacre, Cari and Lauri Ryding hung a Rainbow flag outside their home as a sign of solidarity. They had  always felt welcome on Strawberry Hill Road in Natwick and so they knew that hanging the LGBTQ Pride flag was the right thing to do.

But, after returning from vacation they found that their flag had been stolen and their house and porch had been pelted with eggs. Cari said they were in shock, after having lived so peacefully in the neighborhood, but it was what happened next that really stunned the couple.

After alerting the local police, they posted questions to Facebook, asking the neighbors if anyone had seen anything; no one did and still there are no suspects. But the Ryding’s neighbors were outraged, and one neighbor, Maura Gaughan, sprang into action. She contacted the Rainbow Peace Flag Project, a local organization that gives away flags to Natick-area residents.

And on the next Sunday morning a group of neighborhood children on bicycles delivered rainbow flags to each and every house on the block; and one by one, every house was decorated with a Rainbow flag emblazoned with the word “Peace.”

“It just happened so quickly — the whole neighborhood said, ‘Get me a flag. Get me a flag. Get me a flag.’ If we can stop whatever hate is out there, I think that’s really important.” — Penni Rochwerger, a neighbor

Lauri Ryding was busy cleaning off the eggs from her porch when she spotted a Pride flag, and as she walked through the neighborhood she saw more and more; on doors and fences; flying high from a flagpole; hanging on a gate.

Lois McGillivray has lived on Strawberry Hill Road for 50 years and she was one of the first to fly the Pride flag:

“I have never met anyone who would do what that person did to that house. This is a place where nobody bothers anybody, no matter how you want to live, as long as you’re not digging up the garden and throwing the dirt in my yard.”

Neil Podolski is Jewish, and he instantly took a flag to fly in front of his home:

“It’s just not right. Who’s to say tomorrow we don’t find a swastika on our house?”

The Ryding’s, after finding their home vandalized, did what most of us might do: they thought of leaving, feeling that maybe the neighborhood wasn’t so safe. But what the neighbors did, in solidarity, “completely overshadowed that fear and we are just overwhelmed with the kindness and generosity.”

All in all, there are now forty houses on Strawberry Hill Road m and the surrounding neighborhood, flying the Pride flag in Peace.

Times do change, y’all. 

Boston Globe

Good News ... Bad News ... Good News On Trans Rights

Last week, in Massachusetts, Governor Charlie Baker signed new legislation that will allow anyone in the state to use bathrooms or locker rooms that match their gender identity, and empowers authorities to make sure that no one does so fraudulently.

Now, how this is going to be done is unclear; oh, not the trans person using the bathroom, that’s been going on forever. But how will authorities make sure that a non-trans person isn’t using the bathroom for their own disgusting purposes is unclear.

Opponents of the legislation say that male sexual predators might pretend to be trans women in order to enter a woman’s bathroom or locker room even though there doesn’t seem to be a single case on the books to suggest this has been an issue ever.

“This … legislation extends additional protections to the commonwealth’s transgender community, and includes language to address the public safety concerns expressed by some by requiring the attorney general to issue regulations to protect against people abusing the law.” — Governor Baker

While this is a celebratory moment for the LGBTQ community and our trans brothers and sisters, let’s not forget North Carolina and their law that — in addition to denying LGBT North Carolinians equal protection under the law — mandates people use only the restrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificates.And let us not forget that on the heels of Governor Baker signing this new law, some ten other states filed suit against the federal government over public schools allowing trans students to use restrooms conforming to their gender identity. Those backwoods states are, well, the usual suspects: Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North and South Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Wyoming.

And so now nearly half the states in this country are fighting to make sure transgender students can be discriminated against in schools. Yes, they’re fighting for the right to discriminate.

That new federal lawsuit in Nebraska challenges the federal government’s recent guidelines about the protections transgender students deserve under the law. And this new lawsuit joins a separate lawsuit that Texas — along with about a dozen states — filed in May.

The Nebraska suit argues that the Department of Justice [DOJ] and Department of Education [DOE] are overstepping their roles by “rewriting” the term “sex” to include “gender identity.” And, like the Texas suit, the Nebraska suit focuses mostly on how the new guidelines were issued; it’s semantics, y’all.

While the Administrative Procedures Act says that that when agencies like the DOF and the DOE clarify an existing rule, they can just issue new guidelines. But these Hate States say these agencies have created a new rule by now clarifying that “sex” protections should include transgender individuals, and so they want the DOJ and the DOE to go through a lengthy notice-and-comment period before the new guidelines are finalized.

You know, drag it out so the kids can’t pee. And the most disgusting part of these lawsuits is the wording in the suits seems to deny the very existence of transgender people and their identities:

“Neither the text nor the legislative history of Title IX supports an interpretation of the term “sex” as meaning anything other than one’s sex as determined by anatomy and genetics, which was the meaning assigned “sex” by the leading dictionaries at the time Congress enacted the statute.”

Basically, these Hate States think Title IX’s enforcement should be permanently attached to a 1972 understanding of the word “sex” — the term ‘transgender’ was first coined in 1965 — and the fact that trans people have failed to obtain protection under the law in the past is somehow proof that they should receive no protections now.

And while most of the research of what it means to be transgender is very recent, Nebraska and the Hate States argue that none of that new information should inform enforcement of Title IX. They want to use an understanding of transgender from back in the day when very few people knew what it meant; back when even the word itself was new. They clearly want to live in the past, with the rules and laws of the past informing the rules and laws of today, even though we have, or at least some of us have, increased knowledge and awareness of what it means to be trans.

But these Hate States aren’t concerned with how the transgender person feels, but rather how other people feel around, or about, transgendered persons. The suit maintains that individuals must use bathrooms or locker rooms based on their “biological sex” and even trots out the Hate Speech about how anyone can get access to any facility by just changing their gender identity on a whim.

You know, because that’s what it means to be trans … changing gender because of a mood or a feeling. Of course, the hate is clearly evident in the fact that, in the Nebraska suit specifically, nowhere is the word “transgender” even used unless they are quoting another document.

They’re so afraid to say the word so how can we possibly believe they’ll, ever accept the word, or the transgender person?

On the upside of the Hate … Friday was the deadline for collecting signatures for a Washington state anti-trans ballot initiative, and those anti-LGBT conservatives have fallen far short of the signatures they needed to legislate discrimination.

The Just Want Privacy campaign—an off-shoot of the Hate Group, Family Policy Institute of Washington—had proposed Initiative 1515 — very similar to North Carolina’s HB2 — to ban transgender people from restrooms that match their gender identity, but it also would have allowed students to sue schools if they saw transgender students in the “other” bathroom.

Luckily, though, Just Want Privacy cancelled their appointment to deliver their petitions to the Secretary of State because they have failed to collect even two-thirds of the 300,000 signatures they hoped to collect.

And so, last Friday, the campaign’s leaders released a statement conceding failure:

“Just Want Privacy will not give up the fight to protect the state’s girls and women and is considering all of its options for repealing the ‘Open Locker Room’ rule. The current law is grotesquely dangerous and in need of dramatic revision.”

This sign of failure is in sharp contrast to their website crowing just a week ago that they were “almost there” but, since they tried fear instead of facts, maybe the good people, of Washington saw the Hate for just that: fear and hate.

Now if only we could get those other twenty or so states to understand that ….

Massachusetts

Nebraska & Texas

Washington