Winthrop’s Grocery Treasure

Winthrop Marketplace is this town’s last and only major league grocery and market. From week to week, we visit Winthrop Marketplace and we take a close look around. Always moving about inspecting his business is friendly owner, Marc Wallerce.
Mr. Wallerce is one of the reasons Winthrop Marketplace looks the way it does and is stocked to the extent that it is. In simpler more expressive language – Winthrop Marketplace is a dream come true for the changing town growing up all around us.
It is well stocked like a mini Whole Foods, with fine meats and produce, and enough product to feed the entire town. It is brightly lit and there is wood all around to give the place a warm and enduring feel. And it is immaculate – absolutely immaculate.
Many retailing institutions in town that have disappeared over the years have oftentimes not been replaced.
Since the Liberty Market closed and CVS took over, the days of the big market disappeared.
Then Winthrop Marketplace took up the slack and gradually evolved into a first-rate, high class, center of town market.
This editorial isn’t about thanking the Marketplace about the advertising it does with us – although thank them, we have.
This editorial is simply a reminder that Winthrop Marketplace is one of this town’s great treasures if you live here, if you shop here, if you try to stay close to home.
For those of you who especially dislike Stop & Shop or super markets like it, Winthrop Marketplace is a breath of fresh air. It’s more than that – it is a store filled with wonderful things to eat.
If you haven’t been there lately, go inside and see for yourself the revolution in grocery marketing that Marc Wallerce, Karen Higginbotham and the entire staff have accomplished at Winthrop Marketplace.

Drama dreams

On Saturday, March 17, Erin McGhee, a Winthrop High graduate and one-time student of deceased drama teacher and coach Neil Shapiro, will lead a group of 13 actors and 10 technical crew members into the second round of the Massachusetts Drama Festival at Duxbury High School.
Like her beloved teacher before her, McGhee is doing her best to make this a learning experience for the students with whom she is working. The have written their own play, they have worked long hours in rehearsals and they are bringing to life a story they can share with their audiences – and the judges.
It is no simple feat to get on stage and perform for others. But just as Winthrop student-athletes take to their fields or courts or rinks and consistently overcome long odds against larger opponents with more resources, members of the Winthrop Drama Society have consistently, since the time of Neil Shapiro, taken to the stage and done their best to entertain audiences while educating themselves.
We wish Ms. McGhee and her troupe all the best and we know that their performance in the State Drama Festival will be something for the town to be proud of, no matter where they finish.

Stoneham’s plight

It would be easy to look at the recent school department budget request of some $17.3 million for 2008 and ask, “Where are we supposed to get that kind of money?”
And, it would be easy to sound the alarm about rising costs, falling scores and the inadequacies of our current educational system and its funding mechanism.
Just a little north and west of here, in the fairly well-to-do town of Stoneham, the town fathers suggested cutting funding for school athletics. Not too long ago, it was Winthrop that was faced with that choice. In fact, Winthrop did cut funding to its school athletics programs.
But rather than bemoan the loss of school athletics in newspaper articles in the Boston Herald and Boston Globe, the people of this town came together and found a way to fund sports so that the school system could continue to survive and children could continue to receive a balanced education that includes all that sports has to teach them.
It would be easy to look negatively at the current financial situation facing Winthrop schools and the town as a whole.
But recent history shows that Winthropites don’t like to take the easy way out. They’d rather find a solution to their problems and carry on.