Welcome to the March 2008 edition of Jud's New England Journal, the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, editor-in-chief of Yankee magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, New Hampshire. About Boston and Bostonians Probably "snobby" is too harsh a description. "Proud" might be better ? Old-time New England humor typically includes the "asking directions" jokes and those deadly "put-downs," too. It also includes Bostonians, relying on their allegedly snobby ways and attitudes. Of course, some of it is even true! "My goodness," said a Boston woman when the Boston Transcript announced it was going out of business. "Whatever shall the country do now for a newspaper?" That same particular woman was known to have said, when her husband was in the Antarctic on a six-year scientific expedition, that he was "out of town." I remember a brief cocktail-party discussion in a house on Commonwealth Avenue on the subject of the desirability of extensive travel. "Why should I travel," one elderly matron interjected, "when I'm already here?" Harvard, of course, often comes into play. When a Harvard alumnus asked a fellow classmate what class a mutual friend had been in, the classmate replied, "He had no class. He went to Yale." There are lots of those. James T. Fields, a great supporter of the "Chosen City of the Universe," as he called Boston, used to delight in telling the story of a Boston man he personally knew who, after viewing a production of Hamlet, was expressing his wonder at the genius of William Shakespeare. Finally, he was moved to the ultimate praise. "There are not a dozen men in Boston," he said, "who could have written that play." Boston and its suburbs (to which a lot of the "old money" has moved) really are the center of New England culture and social life. Not because culture and social life in other parts of New England aren?t as good. In many cases, they are. Maybe it's just that they're not as old. Something like that. I mean, formal dinner dances (rare these days) in, say, Springfield, Massachusetts, are very fine, but as the participants themselves say frankly, they're "not Boston." The Boston Symphony Orchestra travels to the Berkshires every summer, but when it returns to the "Hub" (meaning "Hub of the Universe") in the fall, Berkshire County, as writer Tim Clark says, "hangs up its tuxedo and pulls on the long underwear and overalls." Then there are the "Brahmins." Even though the dictionary broadens "Brahmin" to include all New Englanders of a "cultured, long-established, upper-class family," it seems to me that the two words "Boston" and "Brahmin" are inexorably linked. The best image of a Boston Brahmin, in my opinion, is to be found in a certain anecdote told by Cleveland Amory, in his book The Proper Bostonians, about the late Wendell Barrett of Boston, known during his lifetime as "the Brahmin of Brahmins." It seems that on one of his trips to Ireland, Barrett visited the famous Blarney Stone. However, he did not, as almost every other visitor does, lie on his back and kiss it. Instead, he touched it with his umbrella and kissed that. That sorta says it all. Less