The 17 feature-length articles in veteran journalist and Montpelier resident Nat Winthrop’s new book, “On the Record” (Onion River Press, 2026), first ran in Vermont newspapers between 1978 and 2005; however, this compelling volume is an engaging read for anyone who wants to better understand Vermont today.
After selecting magazine-style cover stories he wrote for the Vanguard Press, the Vermont Times, the Vermont Sunday Magazine of the Rutland Herald and Times Argus, and Seven Days on issues still relevant today, Winthrop dove back into each story and wrote supplemental, two-to-four-page follow-ups (called postscripts) on what happened next, and in some cases, what is happening now.
During an interview on VTDigger’s podcast, The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman, Goodman asked Winthrop what it was like following up on stories he had written decades ago.
“It was fascinating, and it reinforced my feeling that these were evergreen stories, as we say in the journalism business,” Winthrop said.
Winthrop writes about a later-aborted plan to offer in vitro fertilization at a Vermont hospital only two months after the birth of the world’s first “test tube baby”; a major health care merger and the health care industry in Vermont; experiments with restorative justice and other “community-based alternatives to incarceration”; and pedophilia (now generally called child sexual abuse) and how victims often grow up to abuse children.
In “The Shadow of Iran,” a March 1979 feature — written after the “Shah’s departure from Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini’s subsequent peaceful takeover,” but months before Iranian students took over the American embassy and held captives — Winthrop interviewed Iranians living in Vermont, including several of the 124 Iranian cadets studying at Norwich University in Northfield.
The students had been sent to Norwich by the Shah, but now that he was gone, they widely criticized him as a corrupt puppet of the United States and told Winthrop that “virtually 100% of the cadets now oppose the Shah.”
“Although the Iranians may now be united in their opposition to the Shah and what he stood for,” Winthrop writes in a particularly prescient passage, “many of them remain unsure about Khomeini or what direction Iran should take in the future. Since most Iranian students in the United States come from the better-educated and more urbanized segments of society, most of them favor modernization. They tend to support Khomeini to the extent that they believe an Islamic republic under his guidance would lead Iran forward, not backward. Many see the appointment of Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister as a positive sign.”
Here we are 47 years later, Iran did go backward, and once again the United States is at war with the country.
In “Devoted Minority: Vermont’s Muslims, in a difficult time, feel welcome, sometimes isolated,” a 2003 piece written 18 months after 9/11, Winthrop shares stories from the state’s Muslim community. The four-page, empathetic postscript — the longest in the book — reveals the continuing hardships of Muslims and why many say they still feel welcomed in Vermont.
Other stories are about shadowing Vermont’s congressional delegation in Washington in 1994 (Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sen. Jim Jeffords, and Rep. Bernie Sanders), Ben & Jerry’s in the early days, Bread and Puppet Theater, the Vermont Supreme Court, the first Hydro-Québec deal, drug dealers, and a fraudulent real estate developer (with connections to Montpelier’s City Center).
Winthrop writes about activists David Dellinger and his wife Elizabeth Peterson, Jules and Helen Rabin, Peter and Elka Schumann of Bread and Puppet, and author Grace Paley and her husband Bob Nichols. He writes about Jefferey Amestoy, who was first attorney general and then Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court when the state became the first to approve civil unions.
Narrative is the heart of the book, and scores of local and well-known Vermonters from today and the recent past populate the articles.
In addition to writing, Winthrop was publisher of the Vanguard Press and Vermont Times — precursors to today’s Seven Days. After his 30-plus years in print journalism, he became an independent filmmaker best-known for being executive producer of “Freedom & Unity: The Vermont Movie,” a six-part, feature-length collaborative documentary.
Designed by Mason Singer of Laughing Bear Design, this 200-page, 7.5-by-9-inch softcover includes original news magazine covers and reader-friendly white space.
The book’s final article, “The Making of ‘Disappearances,’” about the Jay Craven film, based on Howard Frank Mosher’s novel and starring Kris Kristofferson, opens in the Northeast Kingdom.
“The waves of Lake Willoughby whip against two small boats as menacing clouds start spitting hail down on actors clutching umbrellas. Crew members struggle to steady the boats. Actor Luis Guzman … looks weary and apprehensive as he bails his listing wooden dory. And Jay Craven, the director, decides to move the next scene to a more sheltered corner of the magnificent scenic lake.
“We are on the scene during the filming of ‘Disappearances’ ….”
