12.19.99

Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar was the verdict on the brash emporium Joseph and Leon Samuels founded in 1894, but that didn't keep Rhode Islanders from rushing to buy cut-rate clothes at the Manufacturers Outlet Co. It survived for nearly a century.

School clothes looked more like Tundra Wear during the era of the Fresh Air Schools in the 1920s. A cough could kill you during the years when tuberculosis -- called the White Plague -- ran rampant.

Crowded immigrant tenements were breeding grounds for the disease. Doctors believed fresh air helped fight it, so Providence opened five fresh air schools, where the windows stayed open all winter long. The fad spread to a number of other cities before, mercifully, dying out.

As the sons and daughters of Roman Catholic immigrants grew up, Bishop Matthew Harkins pushed to expand the church's role in education. Harkins founded Providence College in 1919, with 71 young men who each paid $100 in tuition. PC played its first basketball game on Dec. 4, 1920. The Friars lost to East Greenwich Academy, 64 to 13.

Rhode Island's business community has long looked to a big shipping port on Narragansett Bay as a boon to the state's economy. In 1912 an early dream of a Providence port literally went down with the Titanic: Charles Melville Hays , a railroad tycoon and port developer, died on the ship's maiden voyage.

The Scituate Reservoir was begun in 1915 to supply Providence with pristine water to fuel its building and industrial boom. But there was a cost in Scituate -- 6 villages, 375 houses, 233 barns, 30 dairy farms, 7 schools, 6 churches, and a railroad were flooded to make way for the reservoir. Scituate locals groused that they had lost their villages to the "water sharks of Providence.''

Hockey, the winter passion of French Canada, came to northern Rhode Island via Quebec immigrants. Brother Adelard Beaudet grew up playing hockey along the St. Lawrence River. A member of the Order of the Sacred Heart, Brother Adelard brought his love of the Lord and hockey to Mount St. Charles Academy, in Woonsocket, where he started the school's hockey tradition. Since 1984, five Mount St. Charles Academy alums have skated on U.S. Olympic teams -- Paul Guay (1984), Garth Snow (1992), and Keith Carney, Mathieu Schneider, and Byran Berard, all in 1998. Adelard died in Burrillville in 1990 at age 106.

At a time when college basketball was dominated by slow-moving players lobbing two-hand set shots, Frank Keaney was a revolutionary. Keaney, who coached the University of Rhode Island Rams, changed the game forever by having his teams run the fast break and a full-court pressing defense.

URI often led the country in scoring, and in 1946 the Runnin' Rams came within one point of defeating Adolph Rupp's Kentucky team and winning the National Invitation Tournament, which in those days was tantamount to winning a national championship.

Sevellon Brown built The Providence Journal into a nationally recognized newspaper that covered Rhode Island like the morning dew.

After becoming managing editor in 1923, Brown opened bureaus outside the city so his reporters would be no more than 20 minutes away from "whatever might happen'' in Rhode Island.

He fought to open government records -- battling Pawtucket on city tax records all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court -- and improved the newspaper's investigative, political, sports, and cultural reporting. Brown also served as publisher of the Journal, and by the time he retired in 1954, the newspaper was considered one of the country's best in its circulation class.

The paper's independent tradition continued under publishers John C. A. Watkins, Michael Metcalf, and Stephen Hamblett, winning four Pulitzer Prizes since 1945. In 1997, the newspaper was sold to A. H. Belo Corp. of Dallas, Texas.

Before Kmart, before Wal Mart, before Zayres, Ann & Hope was the first self-service discount department store in the land. It opened in 1953 in an old textile mill in Cumberland.

In 1960, college students and others picketed the W. T. Grant and S. S. Kresge stores in downtown Providence to protest lunch-counter segregation practiced by those retailers in the South. In April 1968 the General Assembly bucked a fierce lobbying campaign by realtors to approve a strong Open Housing Act that barred racial discrimination. The act became law eight days after the murder of Martin Luther King.

Royal Little was the man who transformed Textron from a small textile firm to the country's first conglomerate, a huge operation that, at one point, ranged from Bell helicopters to Gorham silver. Money was to be put to work, he believed; he thought inefficiency and conspicuous consumption sinful. In his final years, he moved to the Bahamas to avoid Rhode Island taxes.

When the credit union crisis of the early 1990s hit one-third of the state, an unprecedented number of religious, business and civic leaders banded together to fight for reform.

Leaders included former Episcopal Bishop George N. Hunt III; Hasbro chief executive Alan Hassenfeld; and H. Philip West, Common Cause of Rhode Island. They pushed through reforms including tougher ethics laws; bans on legislative pensions; four-year governor terms; and merit selection of judges.

The Providence Civic Center , opened in 1973, has become center stage for athletic, cultural, and musical events. From Frank Sinatra to the Providence Bruins to Providence College and University of Rhode Island basketball, the arena has drawn thousands to the city.

Without the Civic Center, PC would not have been allowed to join the Big East basketball conference. The irony is that Mayor Joseph Doorley, the major proponent of the arena, was ridiculed for his support. His detractors labeled it "Doorley's Icebox'' and asserted it would not attract crowds.

A yearlong Providence Journal series about life in Rhode Island.
Produced in cooperation with the Rhode Island Historical Society.