Rapaport to speak on
“The Naked Quaker”

Sweetser Lecture, May 22

WAKEFIELD — Lawyer, historian, author, and columnist Diane Rapaport will deliver the second Lecture of the 2008 Wakefield's Sweetser Lecture Series. She will speak on "THe Naked Quaker: True Crimes and Controversies from the Courts of Colonial New England."
The Lecture will be held this Thursday, May 22, 2008, at 7:30 p.m.,at the Wakefield-Lynnfield United Methodist Church,273 Vernon St., Wakefield. The Lecture is handicapped-accessible. Tickets are $8 at the door.
Rapaport, a former trial lawyer, has made a new career as an award-winning author, speaker, and publisher.
She brings history to life with true stories from colonial New England, and she uses her legal training to help people find ancestors and trace regional history in underutilized court records. In her book “The Naked Quaker,” she describes a common ancestor of Barack Obama and George Bush, Obama's eight-times-great grandfather, Jonathan Singletary, also known as Jonathan Dunham, who "was something of a wildcat" and "showed up in court records for 'drawing away another man's wife ... against her husband's consent."
Her special interests include colonial New England, American legal history, and Scottish heritage. Rapaport is currently working on a historical novel about 17th-century New England and Scotland. She has written two other books and numerous journal articles about history and genealogy. She has spoken before many university, historical, and genealogical groups and is a member of the American Bar Association, the American society for Legal History, the Genealogical Speakers Guild, and a number of other organizations.
The Sweetser Lecture Series was initiated more than one hundred years ago by a bequest in the will of Cornelius Sweetser, a native of Saco, Maine, who came to Wakefield as a youth and started a successful shoe-manufacturing business. In gratitude to his adopted town, he left money to establish a series of lecture for the education and uplifting of the citizens of Wakefield.
Also in accordance with the will, the net proceeds of the Lecture Series each year are donated to various Wakefield charitable groups. Recent recipients have been the Wakefield Chapter of the Salvtion Army, the Wakefield Interfaith food Pantry, and the Mystic Valley Elder Services (Wakefield residents only).

Burbank “Y” employee builds bridges in Belarus

Thanks to Wakefield’s Adam Rodgers

READING - It was mix of basketball and borscht, Lenin and language classes.
Adam Rodgers, a long-time staff member at the Burbank YMCA in Reading, spent two weeks in April at the YMCA in Brest, Belarus, with a mission to build bridges between the oldest YMCA in the United States and one of the youngest YMCA’s in the world. The initiative was sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Steve Harris and Raina Wissing Harris of Burlington, in conjunction with the Burbank Branch of the Greater Boston YMCA.
Belarus, or White Russia, is a country the size of Kansas, lying between Russia and Poland, which gained its independence in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nominally a democracy, it has been ruled by the same president throughout most of its history and has retained Soviet-era institutions like the KGB.
Rodgers, who lives in Wakefield, has traveled extensively in Eastern Europe over the past five years, from Estonia to Bulgaria, and found Belarus to be the least modernized of the former Soviet Bloc countries he’s visited. “There’s some really beautiful places in Belarus, like the Bialowieza Forest, which was a hunting retreat of the Russian Tsars,” he said, “But in the cities it looks just like the images of the Soviet Union that you see in movies from the Cold War era. There’s a big statue of Lenin in every town and murals everywhere with Communist Party slogans.”
The Brest YMCA was founded in 2002 and has made remarkable progress as a private service organization in a country where the state still controls most aspects of the economy and daily life. Its AIDS prevention seminars are considered the best in the country. Operating out of a three-bedroom apartment in what Rodgers described as “a crumbling old Soviet-style building,” and with very limited resources, the center offers English classes, enrichment programs and recreational sports, to members of all ages.
During his time at the Brest Y, Rodgers assisted with language classes and provided input on leadership, team-building and program development for the local staff. One of the highlights was presenting new basketball uniforms to the sports program, on behalf of the Greater Boston Y and its partnership with the Boston Celtics and Reebok.
“They were pretty emotional about that, they couldn’t thank me enough,” he said. “They’ve never had real uniforms before and they have one ball for all of the kids.” Rodgers said the Brest Y’s programs are really valued by the kids who take part, because the schools in Belarus limit sports participation to a select group of students.
Rodgers was especially impressed by the resourcefulness and the commitment of the people who run the YMCA in Belarus, who are mostly volunteers. “We take it for granted here that the YMCA is well established in the community and has a lot of support. But they have almost nothing to work with and they’re in a state where the government and the public haven’t developed a lot of trust for this kind of organization. A lot of them know people who have been jailed or deported for their political activities,” he said.
They weren’t such bad hosts, either. “They were incredible to me,” said Rodgers, “I had to learn how to leave a little bit of each thing on my plate or in my glass or they’d fill it right back up again.” They treated him to local favorites like borscht (beet stew), dranik (potato pancakes) and vodka, with a heavy dose of sour cream on everything. In turn, Rodgers tried to give his hosts a taste of American hot dogs, using local sausages and rolls, and a makeshift relish he concocted himself using local pickles.
The Burbank and Brest branches are considering how these emerging friendships can develop into a lasting partnership that benefits both branches. One of the first initiatives is a pen pal program linking children from both programs.
Elizabeth Chaput, a Wakefield fourth-grader who attends Burbank’s after-school program, was thrilled to get her first letter from 12-year-old Katya, who has a pet cat, likes to read ghost stories and has sent several small gifts, including a bracelet. “I want to wear it every day, because Katya sent it to me,” said Elizabeth, who picked out a paperback ghost story to send to her new friend in Belarus.
“It’s fascinating to her to find out there’s this girl on the opposite side of the world who is really just like her,” said Elizabeth’s mother Cynthia Peach. “I think it’s just so great that the Y is promoting international friendship like this,” she said.
“This is the foundation of a long term relationship that we hope will have lasting benefits for both the YMCA in Reading as well as in Belarus.” said Kathleen Walsh, executive director of the Burbank YMCA in Reading. “It’s a chance to partner with a country that doesn’t have nearly half the resources that we have. There are huge learning opportunities on both ends,” she said.
And Rodgers looks forward to the next step in developing this East-West partnership, when he participates with staff from the Belarus YMCA in the regional conference in Poland in November. “Maybe I’ll bring them some Fenway Franks this time,” he said.