Boston Rambles

Boston Rambles

A Rambler Walks and Talks About the Hub of the Universe

About Me

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I am interested in old roads. I walked the pilgrimage road to Santiago and I walked from Boston to New York on the Lower Boston Post Road about which I wrote a whole series of articles on another website of mine called Walking the Post Road.1 This website does not work as well as it used to for technical reasons. Many of these entries are now available on this website-they all have the tag ‘walking the post road’. Any that are not here at present will eventually be transferred over if you can’t take the aggravation of the old web site!This series of articles will be about walking closer to home. Rambles about Boston in both senses of the word: rambling as in walking, and rambling as in going on at length about something. Two things I am pretty good at, only I hope that all my “rambles” have a purpose and are not so random as to be meaningless. I also plan to walk the Upper Boston Post Road at some point and those entries will appear here under the tag “Upper Boston Post Road.” Feel free to get in touch with comments, criticisms, or queries.

6 Responses to About Me

  1. Hi! I’ve been reading your “Walking the Post Road” blog over the past few weeks and it’s fascinating. I’m growing interested in walking from Boston to NYC (likely next year) myself. I’m a 30-year old graduate student recently moved to Boston.

    Best,
    Patrick

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    • Hi Patrick,
      Thanks for your interest in my humble project! Let me know if your interest in walking advances to the planning stage; maybe I can provide some assistance and/or advice. I hope you can wade through to the end of my Post Road entries; I admit they are a bit long but I too found the walk fascinating and tried to stuff as much as I could into the entries without just writing a history of the United States. Perhaps you will find some of the entries in this Boston Rambles project interesting as well, particularly if you are new to Boston. They have two or three different flavors so you can pick and choose which flavor interests you from the tags and categories on the left side of the page. Good luck! Gary

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  2. Hi, I just read a biography of Samuel Adams and it led me to look up info on colonial Boston to your site. Interesting stuff. The about me page here doesn’t have your name, occupation, years lived in Boston, etc. Things a reader would be interested in. Nor do the entries for the Post Road. What’s up?

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    • Hi Charles,

      Thanks for reading. Sam Adams, interesting as he is, doesn’t figure much in my entries, although he did spend his last years near the “six mile” stone on Centre Street, the Lower Boston Post Road to Dedham, Providence, and New York, on the other side of the Arnold Arboretum from my house, which I believe I mentioned in my walk through Jamaica Plain and Roslindale entitled Steeple Chase.

      As to your question, I have tried to let the work speak for itself. I don’t have anything to hide, but I am also not particularly interested in gaining attention or in selling anything, nor do I want my readers to jump to any conclusions based on some profile they might form. So up until now I have limited my biographical details. As you are not the first person to ask me that question, I will provide some information to assuage the curious readers. I apologize in advance if you are disappointed that I am not a celebrity historian (is there such a thing anymore?) masquerading as a casual rambler.

      My name is Gary Denton, I have lived in Boston since 1990 and in and around the city for 43 of the last 47 years, with brief forays to London and to Los Angeles. Before that I lived in Bermuda for most of my early childhood as my mother is Bermudian and my father was in the US Navy. I have an assortment of degrees in History and in Biology from various institutions, including Worcester Polytechnic Institute, UCLA, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Harvard. I have in the past had many “occupations.” I worked in warehouses, kitchens, coin rooms, clothing stores, and restaurants; I managed a book store; I was a park ranger for several years at Boston National Historical Park (Freedom Trail, Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown Navy Yard, etc.); I was once a graduate student and subsequently a research scientist in Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry at Harvard Medical School; I taught High School Biology and Chemistry for some years; I was a private tutor for many years, mostly doing SAT prep. Perhaps I occupied myself with other remunerative endeavors but I have forgotten them at this point. I have been married for 35 years to a wonderful person. I now cook a lot and walk a lot and do a lot of birding when I am not working on my old house in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. My ultimate goal is to walk around the world; at my current rate of travel I will accomplish that goal sometime in the next millennium.

      I hope this précis gives you a glimpse of the author. Again, thanks for reading and for taking the time to send a note. All the best, Gary

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  3. Do you give lectures as well as write about your findings?

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    • Good Morning,
      Thanks for the interest! I have not given any lectures yet but there have been previous inquiries. I would be certainly willing to speak about my experience and the results thus far in this project to any interested parties. Nothing concrete has materialized yet but I would most likely say yes if someone asked. I was a park ranger and a school teacher in previous lives so I have experience in public speaking.

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