Category: Q&A

Watters honored with lifetime achievement award

New Hampshire Humanities has named David Watters as the recipient of its 2020 Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities award, which celebrates individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the humanities in New Hampshire. Watters talked about the humanities work he has done during his years as a UNH professor, NH Humanities board member and New Hampshire State Senator.

What is your background in the humanities?

I taught English and American studies at the University of New Hampshire for 39 years, and I retired about three years ago. My work was on New Hampshire and New England culture and literature. I did a lot of work studying early burying grounds and the symbols on gravestones, and I did a lot on New Hampshire Black history and New Hampshire political history and New Hampshire writers. … One of the big projects I did was I co-edited the Encyclopedia of New England — 1.2 million words and 900 contributors and everything you thought you knew or didn’t know about New England.

What have you done with New Hampshire Humanities?

When I started doing projects with New Hampshire Humanities, what I loved about it was that it was an opportunity to get off campus … and really connect to the people in the libraries, historical societies and places of work, and to kind of really put down roots and bring the ideas and conversations out to New Hampshire communities. I spent 35 years working with New Hampshire Humanities, doing programs around the state, doing institutes for teachers in the summer on New Hampshire history and literature and culture, doing a lot on bringing Black history and awareness of Black authors in New Hampshire to the general public, and working on projects about immigrant communities.

What areas of the humanities are you especially passionate about?

As a professor, of course, I’ve intrinsically found literature and history going back several centuries interesting and always wanted to teach my students about it. But what makes my work with New Hampshire Humanities different [from teaching] is that we’re trying to connect people to ideas today. What can we learn from our past, both good things and the bad things? How does [history] make a difference for us today and how we live, how we treat each other, what our values are and how we live up to our ideals as a community and as a state? … I think learning how people have struggled in the past and connecting to that history helps us talk about contemporary things as well … and by having those conversations, we can live up to our values.

What other kinds of humanities work have you done in New Hampshire?

I’ve been able to serve on a lot of boards of trustees. I’ve been on the board of the New Hampshire Historical Society. I’ve been on the board of … the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. I’m also the New Hampshire legislative commissioner for the Atlantic States Marines Fisheries Commission, which regulates fisheries from Maine to Florida. … I was on the Robert Frost Homestead board … and on the board of the Dover Adult Learning Center.

What have you been up to lately?

The most recent project I’ve done connected to the New Hampshire Humanities is helping to create a Black Heritage Trail tour of Concord … to honor the history of slavery and of African-Americans, abolitionists and more contemporary African-Americans who made Concord their home, with a focus on political history, since it’s in Concord.

Has your work in the humanities tied into your work as a State Senator?

Humanities are about people’s values, and it’s good to have a law that’s founded on values, so in that way, I think a legislature can be really strengthened by an understanding of the humanities. … It’s been a good blend for me, and I’ve been able to translate a lot of my work with history and the humanities into legislation. … One [example] is that I got a bill passed to create a [substance abuse] recovery monument in New Hampshire — the first in the country — which would recognize the history of recovery and those who have been lost to it, and celebrate those people who are in recovery. … There have been organizations in New Hampshire working for recovery for a couple of centuries now … so it’s a way of bringing our past into a very public place, which I think is important for our communities.

What’s something people might be surprised to learn about you?

I worked as a carpenter way back when I was in high school and college and for a year after college, so I have a shop in the basement. … I’m on the board of corporators for Canterbury Shaker Village, so I make Shaker boxes and Shaker oval boxes, plus a lot of other things. When I get time to go down to the basement, I’m happy.

Local grad working on EagleCam project

Bedford High School grad William Edwards, now an undergrad at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, is one of 20 students working on “EagleCam,” the first-ever student project to be sent to the moon. Edwards talked about the mission of the project, his role on the project’s software team and what he is learning from this unique opportunity.

Why did you decide to go to Embry-Riddle and pursue a career in aeronautics?

I just like planes, honestly — aviation, aerospace, pretty much any fields having to do with flying or space. It’s something I was always interested in, even as a kid, and I just never lost interest. … A close family friend who knew I was really into aviation recommended the school to me because he knew it was a very good aviation-based school.

What is the EagleCam project?

It’s a module that’s going to be a payload on a Nova-C launcher from the company Intuitive Machines. The goal of the project is to take a third-person photo of the lunar lander actually landing on the surface of the moon. As the lander is coming down on the surface, it’s going to jettison our payload, and our EagleCam is going to take pictures of the lunar lander and send the pictures back to the lander via WiFi, and then the lander is going to send the data back to Earth. That’s the minimum requirements of this project. We’d also like EagleCam to continue to take pictures after it has landed to collect some information on dust plumes as the lunar lander actually makes its descent, and hopefully take some pictures of Earth as well.

How did you end up working on the EagleCam?

I actually had a friend of mine recommend me for it. She was already working on it, and I found out about it and said, ‘That sounds really cool,’ and she said, ‘Well, we need some extra help. Do you want to hop on?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ … One of the reasons I came to Embry-Riddle is that I’ve always wanted to work on something important like this, like anything to do with research, and especially anything to do with space, so once I heard that this was a project based on the moon, I was like, ‘Absolutely, I need to do this.’

What is your role?

We have a couple teams. There’s the electrical engineering team, and they’re the ones who actually choose the computer that goes on board and the cameras that go on board, and they’re going to figure out the connections between our EagleCam and the Nova-C launcher. I’m on the software team, so I’m going to be the one who’s controlling the function of the cameras, when the payload is going to be jettisoned and the way the pictures are going to be taken. Also, the pictures are going to be taken with 186-degree cameras, so afterward we have to do some software post-processing to make the pictures look like normal-field-of-view pictures instead of wide-field-of-view pictures.

What are you working on right now, specifically?

Right now I’m just having to learn the [software] framework, and I’m making an application that controls the camera lens cleaners, so that if any dust particles get on the camera lens we can clean them off.

What’s the most exciting part of this experience for you?

I think it’s just the excitement of being able to do all of this and work on it for so long, and knowing that we’re going to get an end result that I could even make a screensaver on my phone. It’s also a great experience for me as a software engineer to actually be using NASA-based software frameworks to control our EagleCam and the jettison and any internal functions that we have on.

What has been the biggest challenge?

Learning the NASA software framework. It’s called cFS, and it’s a lot of C code, which I’m not too familiar with, so spending the first two or three weeks learning that has been pretty difficult.

Do you think the EagleCam project is helping to prepare you for what you want to do in the future?

Yes, most definitely. As a software engineer, being able to work on a team with electrical engineers and aerospace engineers is definitely an important skill. Since I want to be working in the aerospace industry, having the skills to communicate with them and understand what they’re doing and understand how my code influences their decisions and vice versa is definitely very important to me.

EagleCam
The Nova-C launcher carrying the EagleCam will launch in October 2021. To follow the progress of the project, see @ERAUEagleCam on Instagram and visit daytonabeach.erau.edu/eaglecam.

Featured photo: William Edwards. Courtesy photo.

Windham author Renee Mallett (reneemallett.com) has penned a number of books and articles on New England’s folklore, legends, ghosts and hauntings. She talks about her newest book, Wicked New Hampshire, where she explores some of the Granite State’s darkest history.

How did you start writing about odd history and paranormal encounters?

It all kind of happened accidentally. I was writing a travel article about the bed and breakfast where the Lizzie Borden murders happened. It’s been turned into this lovely little inn, and it’s supposedly haunted. … When I went to go write the article … there was this sort of psychic who … walked me through the house, and it was just so interesting and fascinating. … So, after I wrote this sort of quirky travel article about it, the publisher actually contacted me and said, ‘Do you think you could write a whole book of ghost stories?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ And they said, ‘What city do you want to focus on?’ and I said ‘Manchester.’ I have no idea why I said that. It just sort of came out. So my first book was Manchester ghosts. It was popular, and it was so much fun to write, so I just sort of kept on writing them.

Have you always been interested in the paranormal?

I’ve always been interested in history and folklore, and that’s sort of the fun thing about these ghost stories. A lot of times they share parts of history that you wouldn’t normally learn about. Usually the things that make it into the history books are about generals and wealthy landowners, but a lot of these ghost stories actually tell about the day-to-day life of everyday people.

What kinds of stories are in Wicked New Hampshire?

I’ve spent so long researching and writing about the paranormal side of New Hampshire, and all the time I would find these really amazing stories and scandalous bits of history … so I wanted to collect all of those things in one kind of quirky and fun book about the darker side of New Hampshire history. We have a lot of characters and quirky people in our past. We have scandalous authors. … We have H. H. Holmes, who is known as American’s first serial killer, and a lot of people have no idea that he was born and bred here in New Hampshire. … We have witches, like Goody Cole. … I tried to pick a variety of stories. I didn’t want to focus on just one kind of wickedness or one point in history.

So, do you believe in ghosts?

I am a skeptic. … I’ve had experiences that people who are hardcore believers look at and say, ‘Yeah, you saw a ghost.’ I’m not ready to say that yet. I think I’m still waiting to see that one thing that makes me go, ‘Yes, that’s definitely a ghost.’ But with each book, I’m a little bit less of a skeptic. I’ve seen some weird stuff that I can’t explain. I’ve talked to so many people at these places who do not know each other but have had similar [paranormal] experiences. … Another big thing is ‘orbs’ in photos. A lot of times, if you take photos at a place where there is supposed to be a ghost, you get these fuzzy little dots in the photos. People who are big believers say that’s the manifestation of the ghost, and people who are skeptics say, ‘Well, that’s just dust on your camera lens.’ I will say that, going to a lot of places that are supposed to be very haunted, I get a ton of orbs in my photos, and I’m a pretty good photographer. I mean, my photos have been shown in art galleries. I don’t get those orbs in any of my other photos.

Why are these stories worth telling?

For me, the stories are really about the people. We think of these people who lived so long ago as being completely different from us, but at the end of the day, people today are not that different from people hundreds of years ago. A lot of the stories are about people who made poor choices in spouses or people who drank too much and it affected their jobs. People are people no matter what the time period or the situation.

Who are your readers?

I do a lot of book signings and talks in a year, and I’m continually amazed at how these stories seem to appeal to different people in all different ways. I’ve had everyone from middle schoolers up to little old ladies ask me to sign their books. … I think it’s the local history that appeals to them, because at first they think, ‘Oh, New Hampshire — we’re just like everywhere else; it’s not that interesting here,’ but then they’re like, ‘Oh, no, wait. Look at these wacky people who have been here and all these things that have happened.’

What are you working on now?

I’m actually writing two books right now. … I’m writing one book that’s about abandoned towns throughout New England, and that’s been another fun kind of road trip book. … I’m also writing my first true crime book; the Peyton Place novel was actually based on a crime that happened here in New Hampshire, so I’m writing about that.

Featured photo: Wicked New Hampshire