BY HEIDI
ULRICHSEN
Perhaps legendary baseball player Babe Ruth would have felt at
home in our community. After all, he lived in another Sudbury,
this one located in Massachusetts, from 1916-1926.
Ruth is still bringing fame to the town of 17,000, located
about 45 minutes away from Boston.
In 2002, Sudbury made the news when Boston Red Sox fans
unsuccessfully tried to find a piano the slugger had allegedly
sunk in Willis pond to break "The Curse of the Bambino."
 The curse is an urban myth cited as the reason the Red
Sox failed to win the World Series for 86 years after they sold
Ruth, also known as The Bambino, to the New York Yankees.
The Red Sox finally won the World Series in 2004.
Sudbury Historical Society curator Lee Swanson thinks the
curse was actually broken because a child who lives in Ruth's
old house was at a Red Sox game in 2004 and was hit in the face
with a line drive.
Our city isn't the only community bearing the name Sudbury.
If you Google the word "Sudbury," you'll come up with links to
three other communities besides our own. Northern Life is
presenting an occasional series on the places that share our
name.
Town manager Maureen Valente says people love living in the
town partly because of its green, wide open spaces.
"I've heard we're the only town in the country with two
federal wildlife refuges within its borders. There's a great
deal of migrating bird life and animals and things like that.
It's just a physically gorgeous, beautiful community."
Valente, Sudbury's top bureaucrat, was appointed by the
town's equivalent of a municipal council, the board of
selectmen.
She says the town attracts many professional couples who
work in Boston, and high tech workers employed at Raytheon, a
large company which produces defense and aeronautical
technology.
Not many people go hungry in Sudbury. The median income is
$128,041, and just 2.8 percent of the population lives in
poverty. On average, homes cost $612,771.
"This is such a high end community. The per capita income
shows that the people who live here are very well off. For the
most part, people who live in Sudbury aren't going to shop at
Wal Mart," says Valente.
Children are educated at five local elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. Citizens can take books out of the Goodnow library and go swimming at the Atkinson Pool.
Sudbury has a long, rich history. The area was originally
used by native people for hunting and fishing. They called it
"Musketahquid" or "grassy ground."
The first European settlers, who arrived in the late 1630s,
were Puritans.
Like our own community, the town borrowed its name from
Sudbury, England. The first minister in the area, Rev. Edmund
Brown, came from Sudbury, England.
"Back then, the church services would last five hours or
more. Native people and slaves attended the services as well,"
says Swanson.
"At the noon hour, they went to the noon house...Since there
was no heat in the meetinghouse, they would break for hot
drinks, alcohol and food, and they would go back for another
two and a half hours.
A "meetinghouse" or church built in Sudbury in 1723 still
stands in the centre of town.
Sudbury was given the ZIP code 01776 because the town's
militia were involved in key battles in the American
Revolutionary War.
The town is also home to the Wayside Inn, built in 1716.
In 1862, legendary American poet Henry Longfellow stayed at
the inn (then known as Howe's Tavern) and used it as the
inspiration for a book of poems called Tales of a Wayside Inn.
Tales of a Wayside Inn is famous for the line "listen my
children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul
Revere."
The editor of the town's newspaper, The Sudbury Town Crier,
says the biggest news story right now is the Nov. 4 state
elections.
"It's just warming up. We had one of the candidates write in
about the same-sex marriage issue here in the state, and that
generated a lot of letters to the editor from people on both
sides," says Ben Smith.
"The whole state of Massachusetts is democratic. The two senators are Democrats. Sudbury is a little more Republican than some of the towns. Perhaps that's because we have so many prosperous citizens."
People are also looking forward to Sudbury Day Festival, which
takes place Sept. 16, says Smith. This year, citizens will
celebrate the culture of countries surrounding the equator,
including Brazil, Kenya, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The editor says he covers a lot of stories in Sudbury that
might not otherwise make the news because the community is
pretty small.
"We report on things like cell phone towers going up. That might be just a small brief in another town, whereas we expand on them a little bit more. We do a lot of feature stories as well."
