Radio Script #20
Little Talks On Common Things
March 27, 1949
Waterville is justly proud of its three championship basketball teams. They are fine boys, real sportsmen — the fellows that compose all three of those teams, and they have been coached by three sterling men, the kind of men every father and mother likes to have in contact with their son. These three teams will be jointly honored at a testimonial dinner this week.There is so much popular acclaim and so much glamor attached to championship basketball that some of our citizens may mistakenly believe that it is the only thing that has had any attention at the Waterville Senior High School this winter. I assure you that such is not the case. Last Friday it was my privilege to attend another kind of testimonial dinner — a dinner in honor of the boys and girls at Waterville High School who have just been elected to the Cum Laude Society. Every year a group of seniors and juniors are chosen for this -the highest honor at the school. When the final group is chosen in senior year not more than ten per cent of the class can be selected and the total number is usually less. It is a distinguished honor to be a member of Cum Laude, comparable to membership in Phi Beta Kappa in the colleges. The faculty committee of selection chooses the members on the basis of a carefully devised system which considers the three S· s of the Cum Laude triangle — scholarship, service and sincerity.
At an assembly on Friday afternoon the whole school paid honor to the nine seniors and eleven juniors initiated into the society under the direction of Miss Mary Warren, chairman of the faculty committee. Those twenty boys and girls, together with nine more seniors who had become members in their junior year, sat on the High School stage in chairs arranged to form the Cum Laude triangle. Not only the parents and teachers, but all Waterville, should be proud of those 29 young citizens. They represent families of every status and varied occupation — a true cross section of the City. Sons and daughters of professional men, merchants, mechanics, manufacturers and laborers sat together on that platform -living evidence that scholarship, service and sincerity in this America of ours recognize no distinctions’ . of social class or national origin. Here was young America in its excellence.
A listener wants to know the origin of the slang word “buck” for dollar. It comes from saw-buck, an old-time slang word for ten dollars, because X, the symbol for ten, is the shape of a saw-horse. As time went on, buck without the prefix “saw” came to denote the unit of paper currency, the dollar. The expression “pass the buck”, however, originates from the game of poker, which I believe Drew Pearson recently alluded to as a presidential pastime at Key West. In poker the buck is a counter, possession of which by the dealer requires a jack pot. The buck goes to the winner of each jack pot. To pass the buck was to shift the responsibility to the next player.
Many think of words as long ago made and fixed in the dictionaries. But the makers of dictionaries know better. They are constantly printing new editions to keep up with new words. The newest dictionary is an edition of Webster’s Collegiate, just published this month. It contains many interesting new words or new meanings of old words. For instance, what is a bazooka? First is given the older meaning, which actually is not very old. It is “a sound contraption used by Bob Burns, radio comedian “. Then comes the meaning that didn’ t even exist before 1940: “a portable, electrically fired rocket launcher, whose projectile is effective against tank armor”.
The new dictionary contains atomic bomb and atomic pile, as well as ash can, the slang for depth charge. It has DDT, the abbreviation for dichlorodipheqyltrichloroethane, the new destroyer of insect pests. It tells us what a cyclotron is; it recognizes the well-known G. I.; it informs us that Kamikaze, the Japanese suicide pilot, is a word which in Japanese means divine wind. This new dictionary immortalizes Mae West by the definition “a yellow life-saving jacket, which is worn like a vest by pilots in flights over the sea”. Then it adds another definition: “Slang. u. S. Army. A twin-turreted combat tank”. Here you will also find Shangri-La, defined as “a nonexistent idyllic land depicted as a utopia in James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon’, 1933”. But alas, even this new dictionary does not refer to President Roosevelt’s Shangri-La retreat. Yes,words are being made faster than any dictionary can keep up with them. I want to give you just five examples of recent slang. How many of you know what they mean? Be-bop, browned off, dilbert, iron cow, gunk.
Mention last week of a monument to a wolf in the town of Moscow has brought from six different listeners, in six different towns reached by this broadcast, the information that Maine also has a monument to a tree. The town of Mercer once claimed the biggest (or was it the oldest) elm tree in Maine. After the tree had to be cut down, a monument was set up, in the shape of a section of tree truck and was appropriately inscribed.
By the way, what are the oldest and the biggest trees still standing in Waterville? Was the big tree on Appleton Street Waterville’s biggest tree when it stood there whole and unharmed? Where in the City is there a really big elm elms the size of that giant which had to be felled when the Central Fire Station was erected? Some of our beautiful, though not the largest,elms came down when the service station was put up in front of the Elmwood Hotel. Fire stations and service stations are made by man, but only God can make a tree. The passing of those God-made trees is one of the prices for what we call urban progress. Growing from a country town into a city is not all gain. Growing pains accompany the process.
Judge Burgess of Fairfield reminds me of a picturesque old-time saying, “tooth off the old rake”. We are all familiar with the much commoner “chip off the old block”, but somehow “tooth off the old rake” gives a homelier” more memorable picture of the same idea.
Bill Burgess — I think memory of the old Hebron days gives me that first name privilege — relates a yarn told by his father that deserves a place in a national magazine where each week one reads about “the perfect squelch “. In Fairfield Center many years ago, so the story goes, there lived an old gentleman who was quite a character. One day a very dignified, frock-coated personage appeared at the old man’s door. “I am the new Methodist minister”, said the caller. “I thought I would call on you and leave a few tracts.” Doubtless the old fellow in Fairfield Center knew perfectly well that the minister said tracts (t-r-a-c-t-s), for there were pamphlets in the minister’s hands. But the old gentleman preferred to hear the word as tracks, for he answered: “It’s all.right with me if you leave tracks, provided you leave ’em with the heels toward the door”.
More than once on this program we have said a good word for American private enterprise, for those rights and opportunities of the individual that used to mean so much in America. Some of my friends tell me that I am only whistling in the dark, that the socialized state is so surely on the way that the old individual enterprise is as dead as the dodo. In light of that sort of thinking it is interesting to note the experience of Russia since the Revolution of 1917. In the early stages the Bolshevists were determined to equalize society, to make no distinctions in wages and salaries because of individual ability or enterprise. For four years they even tried to abolish money. Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy) of 1921 not only introduced money, but other practices of the hated capitalistic regime. Differential wages recognized the contribution of those who could contribute skills especially needed by the state. A ration card system allowed favored workers an extra share of scarce commodities. The Marxist ideal of distribution according to need was displaced by distribution according to individual contribution. I suppose many of us think there are no such things as savings in Russia, but indeed there are. Because consumer’s goods are so scarce and because some favored individuals are paid high wages, there are not a few Russians who receive more money than they can spend. But unlike us in America, those Russians cannot invest their savings in any way they please. They can only put them in government banks or buy government bonds. Since the government owns all the industries, it finances those industries largely from the savings of the people. That is just the way private industry, in part, finances the means of production and processing in the united States.
Now the point of this discussion, which I hope is not too heavy and unintelligible, is this. Such a vital thing in our human relationships is individual enterprise that, in order to survive at. all, the Russian government not only had to recognize it, but exactly like the capitalistic economy which the Soviets so ardently hate, they had to reward it. Is it too much to say that it will not be an economic utopia, but a kind of social Dark Ages, if the day ever comes when individual worth and personal enterprise do not have their reward?
You heard Drew Pearson’s prediction that John D. McCloy will be a new member of the President’s Cabinet. He gave the Commencement Address at Colby in 1947.
We mustn’t let a Sunday pass without mention of at least one of those old time things. Tonight I am thinking about the old round crackers. We still have them, and we call them common crackers. They now come in neat packages of a single pound. They used to come in barrels, and in my father’s little country store their sale was so large that he always had a hundred or more of those empty crackerba:r:rels for sale every fall when it came apple picking time.
To ~y of our young, house-keeping couples today it seems grotesque enough to think of any families ever having bought a whole barrel of flour. What would they think of buying a whole barrel of common crackers? But people actually did that, especially on the farms. The great boom in the cracker business came at haying time. The·. way to get your haying properly done was to set up a barrel of cider and a barrel of crackers side by side in the shade of a big tree not too far from the mowing fields.
There used to be two kinds of those old, round crackers — soft bake and hard bake. The soft baked variety was a white-livered, doughy looking object that never appealed to my crusty taste, but a lot of folks preferred them. The ones I remember best were made in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and called St. Johnsbury crackers. They came not only in barrels, but in big pasteboard cartons, exactly a hundred crackers to the carton. They arrived at the store in huge wooden boxes — four dozen cartons to the box — boxes nearly as big as a piano box. Wood was cheap in those days. At today’s prices that box would cost almost as much as the crackers. What grand chicken houses and dog kennels and children’s play houses those old St. Johnsbury cracker boxes used to make. The hard-baked crackers were my favorites. They were made by the old Huston factory in Auburn — beautifully browned and had a wonderful, snappy crunch. They went down fast with the old five cent a quart milk, but they went down even faster with the tangy home-made root beer.
For several weeks we wore out the narrow· gauge railroads, ripped up the tracks and called it a day. Now let’s wake up the devotees of another old timer the covered bridges. Let’s see if all who listen to this program cannot contribute something to our search. These are the things we want to know. Where are there old, wooden covered bridges still standing in Maine and still actually in use on traveled roads? Let us see how large a list we can compile. Then let’s find all the reasons that have ever been given to explain why they built those bridges covered rather than left them open. Just jot down on a post card any interesting thing you know about the old covered bridges and mail it to Ernest Marriner or to Station WTVL or to our sponsor, the Keyes Fibre Company. Addressed in any of those three ways, your card will reach me. So for a few weeks now covered bridges will be our quest.
Well, our time is up, and this must bridge you over until next Sunday.
Year: 1949