You’ve likely heard of Patricia Schultz’s best-selling book, “1,000 Places to See Before You Die.” It’s a “traveler’s life list” of monuments, must-see events, and natural and manmade wonders from the Taj Mahal to Niagara Falls. One of those thousand places just happens to be the Chesapeake Bay, to which she devotes a couple paragraphs on crabs and oy-sters, and mentions a few Eastern Shore towns, including St. Michaels. (We’ll just ignore the fact that she misspells the town’s name with an apostrophe, as in St. Michael’s.)
Here, at Chesapeake Life, we decided to get a little more specific. So we created our own list of “25 (Chesapeake) Things to Do Before You Die.” From visiting Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge to reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance” at Chick and Ruth’s Delly, it’s a fun and varied compilation of must-dos for any area resident. We’ve also included a separate sidebar of must-see events. (Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed pumpkins catapulted the length of five football fields during Delaware’s annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin.)
One of the places we include in our list is the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. This depository for all things Chesapeake boasts a stash of more than 10,000 objects but, as curator Pete Lesher told me on a behind-the-scenes tour, the vast majority aren’t on display at any given time. So we asked Lesher to pick some of the museum’s more interesting pieces hidden from view and to tell us the stories behind them.
See the results of Lesher’s diggings in “Mining the Museum.”
Another place worth exploring is the African American Schoolhouse Museum, originally a one-room school for Kent County students between 1890 and the 1950s. What’s fascinating is that many of its former pupils remain in the area, and a half dozen were generous enough to share their experiences with us in “School Days.”
And now for some housekeeping: As I mentioned in my previous editor’s letter, we’ve decided to cut back on the frequency of Chesapeake Life in 2010. After this issue, you can expect magazines in May, September, and November. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll receive the same number of issues you signed on for, but they’ll be stretched out over a longer period of time. So if your seven-issue subscription started with this issue, you’ll get four issues this year and the first three next year.
While we’ve reduced the quantity of issues to save costs during this difficult time, we will not compromise on the magazine’s quality. You still can count on the same incredible photography and interesting stories from around the Bay.
Until next issue,
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