Again, in an August editorial that year, he wrote in anticipation of what was to become The Marshal Plan for U.S. aid to stricken nations. "The U.S. people, " he wrote, "have to change their way of thinking. The idea that we are so wealthy and that it is impossible ever to give away a substantial part of our wealth must be discarded. We must work to free India and China and every nation that wants to be freed. If we are honest and sincere about this it can truly be said we are entering an age when the welfare of man will reach heights which seemed impossible when Wilson first dreamed the idea." Thus spoke the "crotchety" smallltown editor from Marblehead.

But Eben was his irascible editorial self again a few weeks later when he assailed the medical profession of Marblehead for refusing to make house calls. "With the exception of Dr. Stanley Hopkins," he wrote, "the town is infested with medical specialists who refuse to take house calls. We know they are competent in their fields but to pry them out for an average call is a task something like the raising of the Normandy."

By 1947 Eben was ready for another dip into politics, this time his goal a seat on the Board of Selectmen. Running on a platform that called for a new hospital to replace the old and obsolete Mary Alley Hospital on Franklin Street, and for a slow down on town zoning, he won the fifth place on the five-man board.

The new hospital issue had for long been a priority issue with Eben. But he had his own ideas on the subject. When, years earlier, the Goldthwaite family had offered free to the town the old Devereux Mansion and three acres of land for a new hospital, Eben fought the idea, claiming quite properly that he handsome wooden building would be a firetrap for patients. The project was rejected. His own proposal later that the Lydia Pinkham stone castle out on the Neck, Carcssone, be obtained as a hospital site, was soudly defeated. But he continued to campaign for a new hospital and finally the town voted the $675,000 necessary for the present Mary Alley Hospital that was completed in 1954. (One can imagine the editorial explosions that would erupt were Eben Weed running The Messenger today and heard of present plans to phase out the Mary Alley!).

Eben ran for re-election as Selectman in 1948 and, typically, at Town Meeting the very week before the balloting, arose to propose lowering the slaries of all town employees. "I realize," he told the meeting, "that what I'm saying might lose me the election next week." It didn't. Again he placed fifth in the race, edging out Richard Rockett who had been chairman of the board during Eben's term the previous year.

It was probably such challenges as that of the State Board of Education about the site for Marblehead's proposed new Junior High School that kept Eben's combative spirits up. The state board demanded that the site include at least seven acres of land. On The Messenger's front page he roared: "Only a jackass or someone connnected with the State Board of Educarion, evidently synonomous phrases, would, looking upon Marblehead's geographic characteristics, suggest such a thing."

And when in March, 1952, Dr. Henry Stebbins, chairman of the town Board of Health, annnounced that a Salem man had been appointed Marblehead's health agent his wrath was unbounded. This was just three days before Dr. Stebbins was up for re-election. Stalking to the home of Thomas A. Jordon, Eben insited that friend Tommy oppose the board chairman as a write-in candidate the following Monday. Somewhat dazedly, Jordon agreed and ran his sticker campaign over the weekend. In the biggest upset in the town's political history, he defeated the doctor-chairman, 2,535 votes to 1,543. Thus began Tommy Jordan's long and varied politcal career.

Always interested in waterfront affairts and writing with some authority becasue of his three years' naval service, Eben was an early proponent of the idea of a breakwater for Marblehead Harbor and in addition, a town pier off Crocker Park. When club yachtsmen failed to rally in support, this ignited Eben's ready ire. A front page editorial in 1952 assailed them: "When our yachtsmen get into their whites and loll around their clubs they do look like the cat's whiskers. But I don't know of any group hereabouts which has acted with so little intelligence and foresight." Nevertheless, it was the voters as a whole who voted the breakwater idea down at Town Meeting a few years later.

In 1953 Eben's role as watch dog for the taxpayer was recognized by the Board of Selectmen with his appointment to the powerful town Finance Committee, a post he held until his death fourteen years later.

The remaining years were not easy ones. Eben appeared daily at The Messenger office but at luchtime, on doctor's orders, retired to his nearby Washingotn Street home for a rest in bed. Refreshed, he would return to the office for some afternoon work and then, almost inevitably, and evening meeting. These years a constant companion was his friendly spaniel, "pepsi". The dog, too, was getting on and it is told that Eben cancelled a winter trip to Florida to remain by the side of "Pepsi" during the old pet's final days.

So much for sentiment. The obverse side of Eben's nature erupted again full force shortly afterward when a local landlord rented the house behind the Weed place to a group of young sports who proceeded to keep the nights alive for the neighborhood with noisy revelry. Complaints to the owner, Ambrose Brown, who can be named because Eben named him in his front page editorial, were disregarded "I planned to call Mr. Brown a rent-hog," he wrote, "but changed it to rent-hungry. There is no similarity between Mr. Brown and a hog, although I have never seen him down on all fours."

More balanced writing Eben reserved for literary work that he was doing at home. The first of these was a biography he was writing of General John Glover. He abandoned this project but did complete his long historical novel called "Red on Black". This told of the Abolitionist days in which appeared Marblehead characters such as the daughters of maligned Skipper Flud Ireson (a distant ancester of Eben) and Wiliam Lloyd Garrison, Wentworth Higginson, John Brown and others.

That long labor completed, Eben turned more and more to his new love, painting. Using oils and "canvasses" made from the cardboard crates in which newsprint deliveries arrived, Eben painted scores of scenes, much in the primitive style of his late friend J. O. J. Frost. Most of the scenes were of Marblehead but there were many, too, of the camp in Maine, on Mousam Lake, near Sanford, to which Eben and Dorothy made weekend retreats.

But the end was near. A few weeks befoe Christmas, 1966, Eben went to the hospital for a cancer operation. He survived the operation and was back home for the holidays. In January, 1967, he suffered a stroke and died on the 23rd of that month.

He had been no churchgoer. Private services were held at Nichols Funeral Home, followed by cremation. The ashes lie beside a simple stone at Waterside Cemetery, not far from the pillar marking the graves of his early Weed ancestors.