On the rare occasions Marshfield receives national news attention, storms are usually battering the town’s shores and flooding coastal streets. For a brief time in the early 1980s, however, the national spotlight was on Marshfield – this time for a storm entirely of its own making.
Like something out of the movie “Footloose,” (which told the tale of a town that banned dancing) voters at a June 1982 town meeting approved measures that both banned coin-operated arcade games in Marshfield and criminalized their possession, seeing them as a sinister way to corrupt the children and charm of the town – the first town in the country to do so.
Rick Pelland, who in 1982 was an owner of Marshfield Family Skateland, said the move seemed “ridiculous” at the time.
“The people that were pro-the bylaw were trying to relate it to drug use among kids and gambling issues among kids,” he…
