By Brendan Hellweg ’14
Friendly competition is a hallmark of Williston society; from Wildcat teams and club sports like Ultimate Frisbee to the occasional academic rivalry, we’re rife with the competitive spirit. A new outlet for this mindset has sprung up, one that has drawn dozens of students to the library to show their skills at the age old game – Scrabble. Student vocabularies are put to the test as the boys’ and girls’ teams face off in increasingly close matches.
by Brendan Hellweg
Since 2002, when the Friendly’s that was located in the Reed Center was replaced with a school-owned facility, the Stu-Bop, alums and current students alike have clamored for Friendly’s to open a new location so that students can get their sundae fix between classes. After 11 years of this pressure, the school has brokered a deal with Friendly’s Ice Cream, LLC to construct a restaurant on campus. Due to the success of the Stu-Bop, a new location has been proposed that would not compete so directly with the store: the Robert Parker Clapp Memorial Library.
After a two-month summer renovation, tables, a kitchen, and the cashier’s ruby-red booth will take up the majority of the library’s second floor. In an interview with a Friendly’s spokesperson, she said that Williston’s “track record as an exceptional private educational institution won’t be damaged by removing roughly one third of the books. During a quick tour of the current library, I saw literally 12 books on JFK’s presidency. If they cut that down to one book, we’d have room for a rainbow sprinkles dispenser!”
Valentine’s Day picked up the unfortunate reputation somewhere along the way that it’s all quantifying love on the bottom of a confectioner’s receipt and testing exactly how much a man is willing to spend on dinner in the desperate hope that he won’t spend a month in the doghouse. Like a particularly tense Christmas, but with more sexual tension and flowers.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The purpose of a gift or a nice dinner is to show deliberate and focused care for a person through a shared experience and generosity of time and effort. Not a one of these goals require paying for marked-up generic gifts or spending through the nose for luxuries. In fact, I intend to show that a beautiful day can be spent within a five minute walking radius from campus with minimal expenditures and maximal thoughtfulness.
A couple of weeks ago I sent an email out to the whole school as a survey, asking where they most liked to go around Easthampton in their free time. I wanted to develop a kind of a resource either for people new to the school or veterans looking for new spots to try out in town.
I asked around, gave a week for answers to come in, and finally checked my somewhat flooded email. I found the results really interesting, and I was pretty impressed by the diversity of preferences students had when it comes to favorite places to go.
This photo, taken by Janine Norton during last year's photo trip to India, is a glimpse of just how beautiful India can be. I had dinner at that table. I don't expect this new restaurant to be able to compare with that, but really, what can?
When Riffs moved off campus to the Eastworks building, a hole opened up in student dining that hasn’t really been filled yet. Delivery still exists, of course, but there’s something really nice about sitting down and eating good food somewhere other than in the cafeteria.
This power vacuum among restaurateurs may soon be filled by Glory of India, a soon-to-open, sit-down restaurant just across the street from Rite-Aid. The restaurant boasts “Authentic Indian Cuisine,” and from what I’ve seen of the nearly completed interior, will have a great, quiet environment. I was allowed into the building to interview the manager, and from what I could hear over the sound of power tools, it’s going to be a really great place to eat.
