Freedom of Speech

Seen on the side of Elizabeth’s Restaurant on outer East Street in Pittsfield, in black lettering on a horizontal white sign measuring about 4 by 6 feet:

Government is not reason, / it is not eloquence — it is a force! / Like fire, it is a dangerous servant / and fearful master; / never for a moment should / it be left to irresponsible action.” / –GEORGE WASHINGTON

The sign has been there for years, the restaurant for about 30. Its outside walls are of white stucco and trimmed with a bright but sun-faded turquoise. In the shade of the front porch hang two small banners, a black-and-white one with an equal (=) sign and one with just the bright colors of the rainbow.

Elizabeth’s is a door or two west of the brick house where Francis Quirico, a state Superior Court judge for 13 years and a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice for another 12, lived all his life.

Tom Ellis is maitre d’ and his wife, Elizabeth, is in charge of the kitchen. He is a former probation officer in the court system.

It’s one of the last places Bruce and I walked past with our light-reflective “9/11 TRUTH” signs — orange-bordered black lettering on white, 1 foot by 1 foot — fore and aft on the afternoon of May 9 before I went left on Newell Street toward my home and Bruce continued on East toward his on the second-to-last day of walking between Provincetown on Cape Cod to the New York State line.

The food is good there.

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Note: George Washington may never have written or said what is on the Elizabeth’s sign, a variation of similar sayings of yore, but there is no evidence that he did not.

— Mark