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Jen

@ourownstrings.bsky.social

256 followers 347 following 113 posts

They/them. Geriatric Millennial. X-Files Bisexual. Cranky Yankee farmer.

Jen @ourownstrings.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

The team was never called the Ruby Legs. Inexplicably, they were the Worcester Worcesters. Here's more info from our Happiness Pony baseball issue. Still a cool piece of Worcester history.

For the five plus decades I've done research on Worcester's National League baseball team, I've seen many books on the sport's history claim the team's nickname was the Ruby Legs. Going through every local newspaper from the period the team was in Worcester, I never saw them called that, or the Brown Stockings either; there was only one mention of the color of their socks, at the start of a season in a story explaining what their uniforms looked like. While visiting the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in 1989, I came upon this July 26, 1881 Boston Herald headline in a scrapbook compiled by a Boston baseball fan: Boston’s Ruby-Legged Veterans Polish Off Worcester’s Jewels.

My guess is that a researcher in a later generation saw the headline, scribbled a note, and misread it while writing an article about the team, starting the mislabeling that has lasted to this day. --- Brian Goslow

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Jen @ourownstrings.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

Sadly, I think this guy’s story might be lost to history.

An elderly man stands on the steps of a building leading to a front door. His long beard extends to the middle of his torso. He is holding a walking stick or cane. An inmate, Worcester, Massachusetts, "Home Farm," 1904. (Courtesy Arthur S. Tirella).

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Jen @ourownstrings.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

While you’re in the local history section, you can also just read old meeting notes and reports like this one.

REPORT OF THE OVERSEERS OF THE POOR.
To the City Council.
GENTLEMEN: With the closing year of the nineteenth century, the scriptural injunction that ye have the poor always with You," continues to be true. With the rapid growth of the city there come to us people of different nationalities, who live from hand to mouth, and when in want, by some natural instinet, or through friendly advice, find their way to the office of this
board.
Once they receive assistance they have an idea that they are on the list to be forever aided when their own efforts fail to furnish the necessities of living.

Intemperance is the principal cause of inabilty of the hea

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Jen @ourownstrings.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

When researching the Home Farm for Happiness Pony, I found David Wagner’s, The Poorhouse: America’s Forgotten Institution, to be a great resource. It’s available in the local history section of the WPL.

Photo of a page from the mentioned book says:
WORCESTER'S HOME FARM IN THE 1940s AND 1950s
While some poorhouses/poor farms were transitioning into health care facilities by the end of World War II, Worcester proudly held out its home farm as a model facility, upholding its many functions of service. In a mimeographed history by its last superintendent, Ellery Royal, he described how the home farm had actually expanded in the 1930s and 1940s:
It is very true that there have been many changes, but the type of people who require Institutional care, exists today in perhaps a greater degree than it ever did. Those are people who are unable to care for themselves because of many reasons, They are the crippled, the chronic sick, the bed-ridden, those who are addicted to liquor, and those who just do not have the ability to get along with their families and whom no one else will put up with them. It is interesting to note that the population of the Home Farm has been greater in the last ten years than at any time in its history, regardless of all the other forms of aid that have been supplied at the City's expense. Each year we house many emergency cases, many times taking in whole families or children who have no place to go.
Often we take children to keep while a widow has a chance to find a job or otherwise get back on her feet, or while a mother is sick in the hospital.38

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Jen @ourownstrings.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

One of my favorite moments of Lynch’s work feels unfortunately relevant to Worcester politics.

Text says “And when you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.” Image is David Lynch an older white man with great hair in character on Twin Peaks as Gordon Cole.

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