Hippo Manchester
August 18, 2005

Go Glendi!
by Jody Reese

This year’s Glendi will be held Sept. 16-18. Manchester’s largest and most tasty festival features homemade traditional Greek meals, desserts, handcrafts, dancing and plenty of people from every community in the city. It’s a must-attend event. Also, don’t forget about the Fall Charity Festival on Sept. 24, featuring the Hippo 5K road race. Sign-up forms are included in this week’s paper, page 59.

Manchester Parks need help

One way to make Manchester less like Las Vegas and a little more like Manhattan (the mayor is pushing to replace the nickname ManchVegas with Manchhatten) is to make sure we have well-tended parks.

To do that, our mayor and aldermen need to increase the money city government spends on park upkeep. Case in point is Stark Park on North River Road. Seclusion, heavy underbrush and weeds made that park a haven for sex hook-ups, scaring away city residents. As is it now, the parks department takes care of 1,200 acres with just 18 employees, perhaps some of the hardest working employees in the city. There is just no way the department can do more than mow the park, so the Friends of Stark Park organized with help from Ward 1 Alderman Mark Roy. The group held several clean-ups and removed large amounts of underbrush.

But private groups can only do so much. In the end, city government needs to return the money cut from the parks department. Only then, will you hear me call Manchester, Manchhatten.

UL bias

This week Hippo explores the Union Leader’s use of the word “Hispanic” to describe trouble-making youth in a series of stories published over the weekend (Aug.13-14). Hippo asks the UL why it identifies people as Hispanic but does not give similar treatment to other ethnic groups. We also look at the term Hispanic and ask what it really means. Does it describe a racial group, an ethnic group or a linguistic group?  In fact, “Hispanic” is generally used to describe people from former Spanish colonies. Most newspapers have stopped using the term.