My folks came to the NH seacoast in the 1930s to avoid the city pressures of where the old man had to work during the winter months. Seacoast NH was pretty rural then but by the 1960s, there was nothing rural about North Hampton. What we had in the 30s, 40s and 50s was a bungalow in the pines out of the range of cars and people; if you did not know there was a house down our dirt track then no one came to investigate.

We had no heating, but we did have electricity and running water (summers only ... hose came from another year around plumbing to our cottage), a fireplace, kerosene hotwater system, lpg stove and an ice box. Somehow the old man never learned to light the pressure kerosene hotwater service without burning all the hairs off his arm; Lampreys took care of the bottled gas and ice for the ice box, and our childrens' job was to cut down trees and stack wood in cords to be cut into logs the next year because there was only a fireplace to heat the house. As I am sure at the shoals, some summer mornings are cold when there is not heat.

By the end of the 60s the old man complained there were too many cars driving by the front of the house, too many strangers on his beach, too many houses on his street, too many retail stores in North Hampton and/or Hampton/Exeter and so forth. The country had grown up from summers only to year-around residents with year around necessities for residents. Bill Warren, Yesterday & Today
http://seacoastnh.com/yesterdayandtoday

The key to keeping people on a site is to provide a lot of original, updated, targeted content and as few links off as possible. For that reason, it is always a bad idea to offer a link to another web site in the middle of one of our own pages. People leave and forget to come back. That's why you will usually find "out" links clustered either at the bottom of the page or in a separate section like SeacoastSearch or Link Free or Die. Our guess is that this policy will become even more rigidly enforced as the number of advertisers increase. More page views equal more chances for advertisers to show you their products and services -- unless someone wants to send us a zillion dollars a year (sent to PO Box at bottom of page).

The other problem here is that, while our pages have been in the same spot in the Internet for 5 years, most content sites disappear or change page addresses. We recently redid a page of outside links and found that 75% of them were gone two years later. (Putting stuff online is easy. Keeping it there is costly.) Updating our outside links requires a ton of maintenance, considering we have 2,600 pages currently. That takes away time from adding new content, that brings in new readers. More maintenance also means more webmastering time, more time means more operators, who cost more money, that requires more advertisers, that requires more web pates for banners -- that live in the house that Jack built! You can see why there are so few sites like SeacoastNH.com online. Even Disney and Encyclopedia Britannica have struggled with these problems. We want you to find out more on every topic, but we have to keep the economics in mind. Well, we have to start doing it. Thanks for the feedback.

Petey's fried clam strips are delicious and we're sure the chowdah's as good as you say. Geno's (Mechanic Street, Portsmouth) clam chowder is first class, too.
Al and Carol Hawthorne in Port Smith
http://seacoastnh.com/brewster/

During my childhood, and now my adulthood, I have always been fascinated by motion pictures. I subsequently became a film critic in Boston and Lynn, Mass.I also lived in Old Lyme, Conn., before returning to Massachusetts and Marblehead. I now work for the Orlando Sentinel newspaper in Florida, and for the past 20 years have written a syndicated column on class movies -- of the type of ost Blundaries and The Whistle at Eaton Falls. Thanks again for making my day.
Crosby Day, Orlando Sentinel, FL
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/

EDITOR’S REPLY: We’re not done yet. We’re preparing future material on the March of Time series, Boomerang, Animal Farm, Walk East on Beacon, Windjammer, and the rest of the Louis de Rochemont canon. We were happy to work with a local hotel that plans to name a suite of rooms after the Seacoast’s #1 movie producer soon.
http://seacoastnh.com/louis/filmography.html

Oh, by the way, absolutely love your weather web-site.
Simones

WEATHERMAN KEN MITCHELL REPLIES: Thanks for the kind words. If I were a betting weather-guy, I'd say the winds died down offshore because a sea breeze (on-shore flow) was trying to gin up, but was being counteracted by the off-shore flow, hence they canceled each other out. I don't forecast marine weather for several reasons -- quirky stuff like that can occur, and unless you live literally on the ocean daily, you don't really learn about it, and second: NWS has experts that are supposed to know that stuff better, so I defer to them. Anyway, it was great hearing from you! Wish I could update the page during the days/evenings, but I work 6 days a week full time, so the once a day AM issue is all I can handle right now. Enjoy your summer!
http://www.seacoastnh.com/weather/index.html