I appreciate amateur historian Gary Leveille’s ongoing feature in the Berkshire Edge, “Then and Now,” where he juxtaposes a historic photo from South Berkshire County next to its modern-day equivalent. One of his recent pairings — of two very different Great Barrington winters — was particularly poignant.
The old black and white captures the northwest corner of Main Street and Railroad Street in the winter of 1943. That was eighty-three years and many wars ago, but it isn’t the distant past. My own mother, still an active fixture around GB today, was a second grader that year, living in Queens, waiting on food lines with a ration card.
Here in Great Barrington that same winter, a banner waved high above town with the number 532 on it, representing the local service members deployed at that moment, and nine percent of the population. (Many names of local veterans listed in Bernard Drew’s book Great Barrington: Great Town, Great History will be famil…
