Today’s Zippy takes us to Groton CT:
(#1)
Our Pinhead is holed up in Norm’s Diner in Groton:
(#2)
A classic diner, with (apparently) a loyal clintele. It closed for a while in 2008, then re-opened under new owners, Brenda and Mark Trask (Brenda is a long-time waitress).
On Groton, from Wikipedia:
Groton … is a town located on the Thames River in New London County, Connecticut, United States…
Groton is the home of the Electric Boat Corporation, which is the major contractor for submarine work for the United States Navy. The Naval Submarine Base New London is located in Groton, and the pharmaceutical company Pfizer is also a major employer. The Avery Point section of Groton is home to a regional campus of the University of Connecticut.
… Groton was established in 1705, when it separated from New London, Connecticut. [New London was first settled in 1646, later become a significant whaling port]
The map, with New London, Groton, and nearby Mystic, all famously hiftoric, all famously tied to the water:
(#3)
Also in Groton is Groton School, one-fifth of the fictional St. Grottlesex. From Wikipedia:
The term Saint Grottlesex refers to several American prep boarding schools in New England. These schools have historically sent their graduates to the nation’s most prestigious universities…
The schools are: St. Mark’s School. St. Paul’s School, St. George’s School, Groton School, Middlesex School. The term is a portmanteau of the St. part of St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and St. George’s, then part of Groton, an extra t, and then ended with Middlesex. The St. Grottlesex schools were founded in the nineteenth century for well-to-do Episcopal Church boys (excepting nondenominational Middlesex, founded in 1901), and were consciously styled as the American equivalent of famous English public schools. In contrast, the Academies, notably Andover, Exeter, Milton, and Deerfield, were generally founded in the late eighteenth century as places to “combine scholarship with more than a little Puritan hellfire” and, originally, were often the first educational step in preparing men for the Puritan ministry. The St. Grottlesex schools retain an aura of preppy establishment.
April 14, 2016 at 3:12 am |
[AMZ: correcting a serious factual error in my original posting, a slip of the brain on my part]
The main campus of the University of Connecticut is in Storrs, quite a ways away from Groton. The institution in New London is Connecticut College (formerly “for Women”), a quite unrelated private institution.
[plus:]
Your map must be as old as Norm’s Diner: there hasn’t been a toll on the bridge over the Thames (pronounced as spelled, not as “temms”) for a long time.
[I was puzzled by the toll, which I didn’t recall. I should have checked. In any case, I selected this map because it was reasonably sharp and showed the watery nature of the area, including Mystic.]