The Berkshire Eagle
HINSDALE, Mass. — The Hinsdale Volunteer Fire Department has a new vehicle in its arsenal: A pumper truck on a Ford F-550 chassis designed to fight brush fires and get a fast attack on fires in remote locations.
Chief Larry Turner tells County Fare that this truck replaces a 27-year-old surplus pickup truck, which was becoming a serious maintenance problem.
“The key thing about the new truck,” Turner said, “is that this vehicle was designed by members to be used for brush fires but also is geared for use as a quick-attack pumper that can negotiate narrow roads and long driveways.”
The versatility of the four-wheel drive vehicle will allow the Hinsdale Volunteers to get water on structure fires in hard-to-reach areas much faster than a larger, conventional-sized fire engine. The truck will also serve as a support piece for operations at vehicle accident and extrication incidents.
A Homeland Security Assistance to Firefighters grant paid 95 percent of the total cost of $125,000. The remaining 5 percent was a federal matching grant requirement supplied by the town.
In Rockwell’s footsteps: This Friday, Norman Rockwell Museum Director and CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt will walk in the footsteps of her museum’s namesake and see the world as he saw it and painted it, literally.
Norton Moffatt will travel to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, as a U.S. Speaker and Specialist of the Department of State Bureau of International Information Programs. There, she will talk about Norman Rockwell’s paintings “The Four Freedoms” and “Peace Corps.”
Norton Moffatt’s visit coincides with the 70th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech to Congress and the 50th anniversary of founding of the Peace Corps, events which inspired Rockwell’s iconic paintings.
Rockwell traveled to Ethiopia in 1964 to paint the Peace Corps’ work in the country for Look Magazine. Now, 47 years later, Norton Moffatt is excited to see the place that inspired his painting and feel what he must have felt as a “cultural diplomat.”
During her visit she will be working with Ethiopian artists, museum personnel, and students. She is “extremely honored” to be bringing the story of Rockwell art and his ideals as a representative of his work.
A Monumental “lip dub": Monument Mountain Regional High School just performed one of the biggest school spirit events in its history: A “lip dub” to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started.”
What’s a lip dub, you ask? Well, it’s when you get a large group of people together, choreograph them, and then use a video camera to film a continuous segment, sweeping in and out of locations where the all the various people lip sync to the same song.
The entire school — along with staff and administrators — participated in exercise, which wends its way through the school’s halls and classrooms for a full five-minute, one-take video. It culminates with well, a pretty cool ending that you’ll have to see for yourself: Search “MMRHS Lip Dub” on YouTube.com .
To our knowledge, it is the only lip dub that has been done in Berkshire County. If there are others, then let us know on Facebook — search “The Berkshire Eagle” or Twitter — @BerkshireEagle.
TV host/comedian takes on the Berkshires: Jimmy Fallon, the Saturday Night Live alumnus and host of NBC’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” and his wife frolicked in the Berkshires last week, according to his tweets on Twitter. And judging by his missives, they had a good time.
On New Year’s Eve day, he tweeted, “I’m spending a week in Great Barrington,” and apparently had a great breakfast at Joe’s Diner in Lee, which he said had “great hash and eggs.”
It was also an education vacation, apparently. Later in the day, Fallon and his wife spent the day trying to get a hang of downhill skiing at Ski Butternut.
The 36-year-old comedian grew up in the Saugerties, N.Y., area.
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