Towns carry on cane tradition

Damaris is an imaginary town, and Yankee Swat is entirely fictional, but the Boston Post Cane is real. A Boston newspaper gave the gold-headed canes to hundreds of New England towns in 1909. The Boston Post is long gone, but the canes still pop up in local headlines more than a century later.

Westwood, Massachusetts, presented its Boston Post cane last week to a 102-year-old woman who told Westwood Patch she remembers attending a parade that celebrated Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic in 1927.