ABSTRACT
When people ask Alan Rilla, caretaker of Spectacle Island, how to get a job like his, he laughs and tells them, “You can’t.” Alan, a former lawyer and corrections specialist, has been responsible for overseeing this Boston Harbor island since 2006. It’s a job he applied for, along with sixty other people, after reading an article about the open position in the Boston Globe. He describes it as “the best job in America.” For six months of the year he has the island more or less to himself. During the other six months, he entertains as many as eighty-five thousand visitors from all over the world.
