My name is Abraham Tulchin. I feel a little bewildered and sad tonight. Because a

friend just emailed me a link to some grainy video footage of a town council

meeting where I got up and spoke exactly 21 years ago. I live in Silversmith,

New Hampshire. Population 8,000 give or take. There was really only one subject on

the agenda that mattered that night. And it was the reason I attended. The

public having been invited to share their views. In my allotted few minutes I

argued against the proposal to change Silversmith's name 300 years after its

incorporation by the British. And then before my emotions overwhelmed me I

left out of side door. The issue was scheduled to go to a vote one week

from that night. And frankly it didn't look good for my side who I guess could

have been called the traditionalists. The thinking around town was that what

happened on August 3rd 1997 and the ensuing unwelcome media attention it had

brought to Silversmith was simply too great an obstacle to get past without an

active re-identification of purification. There had already been a book about

what happened a documentary for television. Without at least a new name most

people thought the stain would last forever. I thought my special status that night

would give my words more weight. So it did the one thing I hate more than anything

else. Standard a microphone and speak to a room full of strangers. At 9am on

that August day in 1997 a somewhat ramshackle white rental bus pulled up to

the curb beside the Lurie building on the campus of Silversmith Community College

which I myself had attended for a couple of semesters about three years before.

Driving the bus was a man named Stanley Servinsky age 55. Servinsky was a

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