Radio Script #26
Little Talks On Common Things
May 8, 1949
The past week has turned up an old-time expression that may be new to many of our listeners. It contains the use of the word pie as a verb. We are reminded of it by Mrs. Grace Purington, a native of Fairfield, who recently resumed residence in central Maine after many years in another state. She says that in her girlhood the family often visited the home of a rural relative, where according to the custom of the time pie was served three times a day — breakfast, dinner and supper.
After each person at the table had eaten his fill of the main course, the man of the house would lean back in his chair and say, “Now pie ’em, Sarah”. In other words, give ’em pie. That is the only connection in which I have ever heard pie used as a verb.
When we referred to the peddlers who sold soft soap, we had no idea anyone now living remembered such a peddler. At least half a dozen people, including Mrs. Purington, tell us that they remember a regular peddler of soft soap in Waterville and Fairfield. He carried his commodity in a big barrel on a cart, and dipped it out with a ladle, which he claimed held exactly a quart.
Even in America of 1949, when travel by automobile and airplane have become usual, the railroad is still a common thing, and I have not forgotten that I promised to say something tonight about railroads — not the old narrow gauge lines alone, but the general subject of railroads.
The mere statistics of American railroads are staggering. In spite of abandonment of many branch lines, there are still 400,000 miles of railroad track in the United States. Every day 17,000 passenger trains and 24,000 freight trains pass over American rails. The roads are valued at 28 billion dollars, and the wages of their employees total nearly four billion dollars a year. Some of you may be surprised to learn that, of our million railroad workers, 115,000 are women. By the way, only once did I ever encounter a woman railroad conductor. She was a comely, efficient miss, punching tickets on a Pennsylvania train in 1943. Our railroads operate a huge publishing business, for they turn out 80 million copies of time tables every year.
Oddly enough the first chartered railroad in the united States was not a steam road. The Baltimore and Ohio was the first to get a charter in 1827, but at the beginning it operated with horse-drawn cars. So Charleston, South Carolina, rather than Baltimore, has the honor of seeing the first steam road. Horatio Allen, relative of the foster-father of the famous Edgar Allen Poe, had a locomotive built in New York, transported it by water to Charleston where, in December, 1830 it drew the first steam train in the United States the six miles from Charleston to Hamburg.
Then the B & 0 staged a contest for the best steam locomotive. It was won by Phineas Davis, a native of New Hampshire, then living in Pennsylvania. He called his engine “The York”, and it became the first of a long and celebrated line of B & 0 engines.
In the 1830’s there waged excited legal controversy as to what a railroad is. Is it a public way like a highway, or is it a private way? Many lawyers claimed that the analogy of the turnpikes, and more especially of the canals, held for those new routes, the railroads. Just as anyone has the right to run a boat through a canal if he pays the toll charges, so anyone had a right to run a train on a railroad track. It was Jonathan Knight, chief engineer of the B & 0, who finally convinced the courts that the fixity and rigidity of the railroad tracks, making impossible the casual turning aside when one met another train, disputed completely the analogy of highways and canals; and, since 1840, there has never been any question that While a railroad is a public carrier, just as were the old stage coaches and the wagon freighters, it operated on a private way.
Do you know why the cow-catcher was invented? The first locomotives did not have them, but from the beginning the crews were troubled by stray cattle on the tracks. It doesn’t take a very brilliant mind to figure out that the cowcatcher wasn’t put on to protect the cows. It was invented to protect .the train.
In the early days every time a train hit a cow, the train went off the tracks. So a device was conceived which would lift the animal and deflect it off the track rather than pitch it under the wheels. It wasn’t always success.ful, as I can witness. I was once a passenger on the little Bridgton and Saco River line one evening when, in the stretch of woods near Perley’s Mills, the train hit a moose. Result: one very dead moose, but locomotive and one car off the rails. Perhaps the cow-catcher didn’t do its job that night because the animal was a bull moose.
It was increasing freight business that caused the introduction of night trains, even on the short lines. Some of the roads scheduled all passenger trains by day, all freight trains by night. This introduced the problem of light. Remember that any kind of lighting was a real problem in the 1830’s. It was before the ·discovery of petroleum and its use for oil lamps. Candles lighted the homes of the well-to-do; tallow wicks gave feeble light in the hovels of the poor. When the B & 0 first ran its trains, the invention of the headlight was many years in the future. The most common early device to provide light ahead of the train was the fire-car. Ahead of the engine was attached a flat car, covered with sand, on Which blazed a fire of pine knots. No wonder those early trains caused many fires through the countryside.
A familiar expression of Civil War days shows how the times have changed. That expression was “to lie like a time-table”. The old trains were seldom on time; a wait of several hours was not unusual. The fact that probably no one now living ever heard the expression “lie like: a time-table” actually spoken is ample testimony to the efficiency and regularity of the modern railroad.
Most of you know that for many years there was no standard gauge for our railroads. Often, when goods had to be transported by more than one line, they would have to be taken out of the cars of one road and packed into the cars of another road. I am familiar with that procedure, for it is exactly what had to be done with every pound of freight that came into Bridgton in my boyhood. Out of the Maine Central cars at Bridgton Junction and into the tiny B & SR cars went every box and barrel. every bag of wool for the mills, every shovelful of coal. It was a tedious and costly procedure.
In the early days the B & O’s gauge was 4 feet 8 inches; the Mohawk & Hudson’s was 4 feet 9 inches; the Camden and Amboy had 4 feet 10 inches; and the Charleston and Hamburg 5 feet; while the New York and Erie had the extraordinary width of 6 feet. standard gauge was adopted in 1886, and all regular American roads are now 4 feet 8t inches between the tracks.
Why was the distance of 4 feet 8! inches adopted as standard? The answer gives us a clue to another common thing — the strong hold which tradition has upon us. The old Roman measure that gave the standard axle distance between the two wheels of a Roman chariot, when converted into English measure, came out as four feet, eight and one-half inches.
Until the coming of the Romans into Britain with Caesar’s legions, the British Isles had no roads. As everyone knows the roads which the Romans built were so strong and so permanent that many of their remains can be traced to this day. The wheels that first traveled those roads were the wheels of Roman chariots, and the ruts made by those wheels, generation after generation, for four hundred years, were either chariot wheel ruts, or ruts of wheels of the same axle width as the chariot wheels. Therefore, when railroads first came to Britain, it was natural to make them the width of tracks with which every Englishman was familiar, the tracks on the old Roman roads and their later counterparts.
In the days of early American railroads, before the building of the great Baldwin works, the best locomotives were imported from England, and those locomotives were all of 4 foot 8, inch gauge. Many American roads were therefore built with the original idea of using British locomotives. Finally in 1886 the American people got fed up with the nuisance of different gauges, and 4 feet 8 inches became, standard gauge for all broad-gauge roads.
I hope none of you have been foolish enough to count shave strokes, just because of what I said last week. But, believe it or not, the average man takes approximately two hundred razor strokes each time he shaves. The range is from about 150 to 250. If a man takes as few as one hundred regularly, day after day, he is unusual.
Many of our listeners know that I have long taken a special interest in the life of Abraham Lincoln, especially in all that can be learned about him during those obscure years of his youth before he achieved fame. So on this Mothers’ Day I think it is significant to point out that Abraham Lincoln was one of very few men who had two mothers, both of whom loved him dearly, and both of whom deeply influenced his life. Nancy Hanks, his own mother, and Sarah Bush, his step-mother, may both have been in his mind when he said, “All that I am and all that I hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”
Now for one last reminiscence tonight. Do you remember the old fire-horses? Can any modern kid possibly get the thrill out of the big gasoline pumpers of today that we used to get out of the old, big-stacked steamers drawn by horses madly dashing to answer an alarm? In the cities the fire engines were often drawn by three horses abreast. I remember three coal-black beauties that used to haul one of Portland’s old engines. They were a magnificent sight on parade, and a thrilling sight when they galloped wildly to a fire.
Last fall some Colby students got out one of Waterville’s old engines, got up steam in it, and paraded it before the stands at the Colby-Bowdoin football game. For some time,I believe'” that old engine reposed in the open shed opposite the city home, on the site where the new Thayer Hospital will stand. Gone with a lot of other memories are the fireman’s big horses. But we can all be grateful that the fire-fighter is more efficient and our property better protected in our mechanized day.
Year: 1949