Patton's Mini Book Tour Covers Seacoast

The next stops on my mini book tour will be The Water Street Bookstore in Exeter on Thursday, Nov. 14 and the Hampton Lane Memorial Library on Tuesday, Nov. 19

Last week, I had the opportunity to appear at River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth and the North Hampton Public Library. At the River Run, I shared the stage with author Brendan Smith and noted Granite State storyteller Rebecca Rule. Smith and I are relative newbies to New Hampshire, while Becky Rule is a native.

The first thing I do when I discuss my new book Outtastatahs: Newcomers' Adventures in New Hampshire is to ask the members of the audience to raise their hands if they were born in another state. Each time, the large majority of the group wiggle-waggle their hands. According to surveys, fully two-thirds of New Hampshire residents weren't born here.

That lead to an interesting debate at River Run. Will New Hampshire lose its distinctive characteristics as more and more newcomers move here? Becky Rule said no. When she tells her tales in tiny Granite State towns, she still sees in her audiences those odd and quirky behaviors we think of as being The New Hampshire Way - a puckish sense of humor, frank and direct speech, a lack of pretense, personal aloofness, a distrust of government, and thriftiness.

I take a slightly different view. Natives can't help but influence newcomers, but, on the other hand, newcomers can't help but change natives. So, we end up somewhere in the middle. The state is still libertarian, but not so much as in the past. Those areas where immigration has been the greatest, such as the Seacoast, the change has been the greatest. But, in the small towns and villages which have been bypassed by people moving into the state, pure, unadulterated Granite State ways still prevail.

At the North Hampton Library, we got to chortling and laughing about the New Hampshire tradition of town warrant articles. Some people from Hampton were there where we face the daunting prospect of voting on anywhere from 30 to 60 warrant articles each year in town elections. Each warrant article is presented in lengthy, dense and impenetrable legal language. The end result is about six or seven separate ballots. Each is 8.5 inches wide, 14 inches long, and printed on both sides.

Woe unto newly-arrived voters who wander into the voting booth with no previous knowledge of the issues at hand. Those unfortunate out-of-staters will likely emerge totally confused two or three hours later ready for a stiff drink or two to settle their tortured brains.

Veteran voters have sense enough to carry personal "cheat sheets" into the voting booth which list the warrant articles by number and carry the words "yes" or "no" next to each one. The complexity of the Hampton ballot has led to the popularity of the notorious "yellow sheet." Prepared by an anonymous group of town mothers and fathers, the sheet briefly tells citizens how they should vote on each warrant article.

Given an understandable desire of town voters to avoid exhausting themselves  trying to understand each complicated warrant article, the advice of the town elders is taken perhaps more than it should be, leading to a strange form of oligarchy.

These sorts of discussions revolving about Outtastatahs: Newcomers' Adventures in New Hampshire will continue starting at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 14 at the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter and at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 19 at the Lane Memorial Library in Hampton. Both events are free, and refreshments will be served. Now, that's a darn sight better than big-time book tours by famous authors like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Sonia Sotomayor where not only is an entrance fee charged, but, in addition, the author's book must be purchased.

Mini book tours have something to say for themselves.