“Dixie” co-oped for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and then the Hartford Courant as a reporter and then a State Desk copy editor. When graduation turned up no immediate employment, he eventually did copy editing and proofreading for a small printing company that did weekly papers and magazines.
Then came his “dream job” by sheer good timing and circumstance, working for the National Park Service in its North Atlantic Regional Public Affairs Office in Boston; and subsequently, by government reshuffling decree, Boston National Historical Park in Charlestown. Those two posts split the next 30 years of a rewarding career. Meanwhile, in 1980 came his “dream hobby” outlet of researching and writing baseball for Tide-mark, Inc., a calendar company in West Hartford, Conn.. After 25 years he retired from that (2005), and in 2012 retired from the Park Service.
Dixie now volunteers for Boston National Historical Park’s World War II destroyer, the USS Cassin Young, as a guide and interpreter. He still writes about baseball history for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and is an occasional guest on the WBZ (Boston) radio airwaves talking about parks and baseball.
Simultaneously with the above vocational choices, he and travel companion Marilyn Miller (Emmanuel College news editor) have toured North America via several car and fly-drive adventures since 1974. Traveling Interstates, two-lane blacktops, and even the unpaved ALCAN, they have racked up 49 states, 10 Canadian provinces, more than 200 national park sites and 55 major league baseball venues. They live a mile from Fenway Park and Boston’s South End Grounds (NU), in the Mission Hill neighborhood in a quaint triple-decker that has been home to a dozen fiesty feline furballs through nearly 45 years.
He does not intend to leave quietly!
Dixie Tourangeau is a 1971 graduate of Northeastern University with a degree in Liberal Arts.