June 2011 Archives

As published on page one of the June 29, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.

Personal stories told with passion are the mark of fathers who decry the role the legal system has played in their families' lives.

Fathers' rights activists make headlines from time to time. Their actions can be silly, as in the case of British activists who periodically dress as comic book superheroes and scale public buildings. Or, they can be tragic, as in Thomas J. Ball's recent public suicide outside the Cheshire County Court House in Keene.

But the questions these activists raise touch on fundamental social issues of family, justice and the roles that men and women play in the world.

As published on page one of the June 17, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.

For a time Wednesday evening, Thomas Ball's death outside the Cheshire County Court House transformed a familiar spot in the heart of Keene into a landscape of grim-faced first responders, sobbing witnesses, emergency vehicles parked at odd angles and passers-by who held cell phones tight to their ears.

Twenty-four hours later, little evidence remained that Ball, at 5:30 p.m., took his life by setting himself on fire.

As published on page one of the June 16, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.

A man who was found dead after he was seen ablaze outside the Cheshire County Court House in Keene has not yet been identified, police said.

Police and fire officials responded to a report of a person on fire at about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.

As published on page one of the June 4, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.

WESTMORELAND -- Ernest Hebert's ninth novel will be published in September. Titled "Never Back Down" and set in Keene, it chronicles 40 years in the life of a French-Canadian member of southern New Hampshire's working class.

"It's my life if I hadn't gone to college," Hebert says.

Hebert, who turned 70 in May, is a tenured professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, where he heads the creative writing program. But his road to the Ivy League was long -- and it ran almost entirely through the Monadnock Region.