HARWICH — The town will once again seek Community Preservation Act funding to restore the health of Hinckley's Pond. Town Administrator Christopher Clark was before the community preservation committee last week and made it clear the project is important, citing another fish kill at the pond this year. The CPC public hearing last Thursday was a requirement under state statute that the group conduct a public in...

HARWICH — The weather, for the most part, cooperated for the annual Harwich Cranberry and Arts Festival last weekend. The new location behind the community center provided plenty of space and the surrounding fields added room for parking, making access to the festival easier. The parking, an expanded number of crafts fair vendors, food trucks, the CranJam Music Festival, business expo and the return of firewor...

HARWICH — Driving across the Great Plains, 18-year-old Alexis Comeau of Harwich can look all around her and see wheat fields all the way to the horizon. On Sept. 9, she loaded up a customized van and embarked on a cross-country odyssey that's already broadened her perspective in other ways, too. Comeau has been planning the trip since she was 14 and dreaming of this kind of travel adventure for much longer. Ha...

Who will miss you when you’re gone? How will they react when you die? Family, friends, co-workers, and even the people on the street you see every day? Ever wonder that? Gordon Michael Schwinn, songwriter for a children’s show starring a frog named Mr. Bungee, has a severe case of writer’s block and a brain disorder. Will he survive either? “A New Brain,” an imaginative and madcap musical/operetta by William F...

Earth and fire would come later in the day, via a great bonfire, but Saturday morning of Orleans’ Celebrate Our Waters weekend was all about wind and water. A photographer and a reporter (coincidentally husband and wife), completely inexperienced with sailing, had volunteered to board a sailboat, courtesy of Pleasant Bay Community Boating (PBCB), to skim the bay’s gentle waves. We’re so inexperienced, in fact,...

How many times has a raindrop been recycled? By the time of publication, we should be feeling some effects of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Jose. Changeable as these tracks always are, it would be a fool’s errand to predict what could be happening. If a hundred years of tracking these isn’t enough, the simple past few weeks of the Disaster Movie of the Week (whose programming seems to be stuck entirely on storms) i...

Faced with the possibility of retail marijuana sales, selectmen in both Chatham and Harwich have opted to take similar approaches. Last week both voted to direct staff to develop zoning and general bylaws to ban marijuana shops, an expected and not altogether unreasonable approach, since voters in both communities rejected the November referendum question legalizing pot sales. In July the state legislature voted ...

              Harlingen, Texas - Margaret Foster Jorn (Meg) went to the Lord Wednesday morning, September 13, 2017. Meg was born in the Marine Corp Hospital, Quantico, Virginia on November 20, 1959; the first daughter of Roger and Linda Foster (nee Fessenden). Meg grew up on the coast of Cape Cod, reared by Roger Foster and stepmom Beverly Foster alongside her blended family of sisters Natalie Foster (Tally) a...

David Willard has accomplished what few do in these job-hopping times: he is retiring after 50 years with Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank. “I never wanted to work anywhere else since I started,” Willard said last week during a breakfast interview in the Optimist Café in Yarmouth Port, not far from his office in West Yarmouth. “It was my home.” Willard joined the bank back in June 1967, at the beginning of ...

ORLEANS — The board of selectmen and the finance committee are on the same page heading into the Oct. 16 special town meeting, with favorable recommendations on water quality projects, HVAC upgrades to the elementary school, and other articles. But not all of last week's votes were unanimous. Majorities of both boards agreed that the town should spend $3.68 million to put in the core of the downtown sewer syst...

ORLEANS — The town of Chatham is willing to patrol its section of Nauset Beach, but it wants to share costs and revenues in a new arrangement with the town of Orleans. “We can't just ask our taxpayers to pay that cost,” Chatham Selectman Shareen Davis said at a meeting of the two boards Sept. 13. “We're trying to find the best-case scenario to offset costs.” Following the 2007 break in the barrier beach, ...

ORLEANS — For a while Saturday night, Mother Nature just didn't want summer to end. A heavy blanket of moist air descended on Nauset Beach, where thousands had lined up to face a towering stack of pallets destined to become a glorious bonfire. As Orleans DJ Tom Tuttle spun (appropriately) the long version of “Light My Fire” (“The time to hesitate is through”), the throngs waited patiently for the pyrotechnic...

Having weakened to tropical storm status overnight, José is set to pass south of Nantucket today, bringing gusty winds, coastal erosion and heavy rain. Meteorologists say the experience will be more like a strong fall nor'easter than a hurricane. Because the center of the storm is expected to loop south of Nantucket, stormy weather is forecast to remain in the area throug...

  Thomas F. Murphy Jr. Thomas F. Murphy Jr. of Wellesley Hills and Chatham, MA passed away peacefully at home on September 5 th surrounded by his family after a brave fight against ALS. Born in Worcester, MA, Tom was the son of Thomas F. Murphy and Elizabeth Price Murphy. He was a graduate of Saint John’s rep in Shrewsbury, MA; The College of the Holy Cross in Worceste...