THE VERY BEST OF THE VIEW FROM THE PUMPKIN PATCH

It was a small-town newspaper editor’s dream – tem-pered with visions of nightmare. The police chief of more than 30 years in tiny Bolton, Massachusetts, stood on the brink of retirement, and he had offered to write a weekly column for The Bolton Common.

I knew Warren Wilson well by then; weekly meetings with him to gather the police news for the Common had revealed an utterly intriguing character. A true New Eng-land Yankee, not only a police chief, but a farmer of pump-kins who loved life and laughter. A pilot of an antique air-plane, a driver of a classic art-deco Mercury convertible, a camper who kept a tipi in the wilds of western Massachu-setts. A “renegade” police chief, as described by a nearby city newspaper, who favored the abolishment of the death penalty and a major overhaul of the nation’s controlled sub-stance laws.

Sure – he could write a column expressing his views “from the pumpkin patch.” His views would range from town politics to town history and from farming to flying. I knew he would anger some and delight others in any given week, but what else should be expected from the author of an opinion column? I just didn’t think it would happen so fast.

After the announcement of the upcoming debut of the column, a Town Father wrote a letter welcoming the pump-kin farmer’s views. The letter ran in the same issue as the first column. And, as fate would have it, the same Town Father took personal offense to that first column and wrote a letter to the editor for the next issue harshly criticizing the farmer’s first published take on local politics.

I knew we had a winner.

The weeks and months and years went by with The View from the Pumpkin Patch becoming one of the most popular – and most talked about features in the newspaper. And the paper’s keyboarders struggled with Chief’s hand-writing: scratches in green ink on sheets torn from a spiral-bound notebook and often fastened together with a safety pin.

Warren Wilson is still writing (by hand) the column for the new owner of the paper, and still eliciting strong opin-ions from his readers.

But as we were always fond of saying in our office, “Love him, hate him, but read him!”

Bill Latimer

October 2003