shad trees, shad restrictions

When I was telling my father about the fish elevator and all those shad, he told me that he'd learned from a friend that mountain laurel, which blooms around now, is known as "the shad tree"--because when it blooms, that's when the shad run.

(Here's a photo from Flickr of mountain laurel, by Flickr user Robert Ferraro--you can click through to see it larger.)


He also told me that there was a law in Boston in the 18th century that you couldn't feed apprentices shad more than twice a week... whic...