Radio Script #34
Little Talks On Common Things
September 18, 1949
Friends of the radio audience, it is good to be back with you again, and I am grateful to the Keyes Fibre Company for giving us another season’s opportunity to continue our discussion of common things.
Vacations are now among the common things, and I hope you have all enjoyed one since our last broadcast in June. But I know perfectly well some of you have had no vacation at all. I recall how indignant my mother used to get in my boyhood days when female relatives from the city used to talk about coming to Maine for their vacations. It was my mother’s firmly held notion that no housewife ever had the right to a vacation. The man of the house might get time off from work, but the wife’s work went right on. Remembering those days, I want to ask some of you men who had a vacation this summer if you saw to it that your wife got one too until he was 55 years old my father never had a vacation. All through the years of his operation of the grocery store in Bridgton he worked 52 weeks a year. Once in those twenty-four years he was called to jury duty in Portland, and he afterwards avowed that it broke his record for never taking a vacation. To him anything that took him away from the store, even jury duty, was vacation. Of course working steadily without vacation ruined him. He lived only to the age of eighty-three. But perhaps that was because, after he moved to Massachusetts, the Boston vacation bug bit him, and he did come to Maine for two weeks vacation every summer. Don’t misunderstand me. We are not trying to do away with vacations.
What in the world would this land we used to call the Pine Tree State, but now goes by the name of Vacationland — what in the world would we do, if there were no vacations? We certainly aren’t going to bite the hand that feeds us. But seriously we do assert that it is quite possible to make too much of vacation, and talking about our own to other people can be quite as obnoxious as talking about our surgical operation.
I am told that ladies who have made either a hobby or a business of painting scenes on such objects as dishes and trays have been hard pressed to find suitable material to take oil paints. Mrs. Josie Claflin of Western Avenue, Fairfield has solved the problem. She has recently sent me a little six by four tray on which she has painted in oils the well known scene of Portland Head Light. Mrs. Claflin, now 78 years old, has long done painting as a hobby.
Unable to get the trays she used before the war, Mrs. Claflin finally saw the new plastic trays of Kys-ite, made by the Keyes Fibre Company. She writes: “I think hand-painted Kys-ite would make nice Maine souvenirs for Christmas gifts.”
Yes, Mrs. Claflin, I think so too.
The many railroad fans who listen to WTVL will be interested to know that a few weeks ago I had my first ride on the Edaville Railroad, about which I talked last winter. What is more, I rode in the old narrow guage car called the Mt. Pleasant, in which I had ridden many miles on the old Bridgton and Saco River road as a boy. You will recall that the Edaville is a six-mile, narrow guage road on the cranberry plantation of Mr. Ellis Atwood at Carver, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.
Mr. Atwood bought rolling stock and rails from the Bridgton and Saco River, picked up other cars from the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes, the Wiscasset and Quebec, and the old Billerica roads. Mr. Atwood’s road winds around the cranberry bogs where at this season of the year we saw hundreds of pickers at work. That ride behind the tiny rebuilt locomotive brought back fond memories. As we slowed by the little station stops, it was easy to imagine them as Sandy Creek, South Bridgton and Perley’s Mills, and the illusion was heightened when over the terminal station we saw the sign Bridgton. The truth is that two separate buildings compose the terminal of Mr. Atwood’s road. Over one is the sign Bridgtoni over the other is carabasset.
Everyone said the old narrow gauge roads were doomed forever. Not only has Mr. Atwood put a new one in operation out of the remains of half a dozen defunct ones, but he has made it a financial success. The Edaville Road makes money every season. During the summer it carries thousands of sight-seers at 25 cents a head; it transports thousands of yards of sand for the cranberry beds; it hauls the pickers; and it carries hundreds of boxes of the harvested fruit. I hope others of you will have a chance to ride on the Edaville Road. It will bring to life again whatever one of the old roads was most familiar to you the Bridgton and Saco River, the Rangeley, the Wiscasset, or the Monson.
One of the commonest things in life is to look out for ourselves. We all favor economy in government as long as it doesn’t step on our toes. We are all for letting the other fellow do the economizing. It is folks whose toes are stepped on that prevent any real economy in government. The reorganizations recommended by the Hoover Commission, designed to save from four to six billion dollars a year, are either modified or blocked completely by people who consider their own gain bigger than the public welfare. Let us not too quickly blame the members of Congress; it is their selfish constituents who bring pressure upon them, and those constituents are people just like you and me.
Doubtless it would be safer and just as easy to illustrate this difficulty in government by examples from far away. We might talk about the pro-butter, anti-oleo block from Wisconsin, the timber holdings of the Northwest, the cotton growers of the South, or the cattlemen of the Great Plains. But no part of the country is immune. So let us bring it right home to ourselves in Maine.
In 1948 Uncle Sam poured $67,000,000 into Aroostook County alone, to hold up the price of potatoes . More than 30 farmers of Aroostook received more than $100,000 apiece from the government, according to investigations made by the Washington Post. The Post points out that Congress has held to the potato program although it has been warned time and again against it.Even the larger potato growers themselves have urged that price supports be cut. But Congress has held fast. Less than a month ago the House of Representatives, under the leadership of Albert Gore of Tennessee, voted to keep supports.
Potatoes are grown in many states besides Maine; so pressure is brought on a lot of Congressmen. Nevertheless, it is time the American people woke up to what this way of doing things means to all of us. The $67,000,000 handed out to Aroostook was only part of a cool 225 million dollars which was disbursed in the whole country to support the price of potatoes alone. And remember that the potato was only one supported commodity.
That 225 million is twice the cost of operating all the activities of the District of Columbia; it is more than the cost of all the business of either the Department of Commerce or the Department of Labor, and nearly the same as the Department of Justice. It is more than one-fourth the entire cost of the huge Department of Agriculture. We are not unaware that there is something to be said on both sides of disputed questions, and this program of price support is certainly subject to a lot of dispute. Most of us want to see the farmers, especially the small farmers, protected from disasters over which they have no control. But some of us believe the present government program is not the way to do it.
How this price support program works out in practice is made clear by the Maine potato experience. First, the taxpayer is assessed for 67 million dollars to purchase surplus potatoes from Maine growers so that the price of potatoes sold on the market can be held up. Then the same taxpayer, in his capacity of consumer, is forced to pay the highest price he ever knew in peacetime for potatoes on his dinner table. Then, to cap the climax the high prices cut the per capita consumption of potatoes to the lowest figure in American history 108 pounds as compared with 123 pounds in 1947 and 144 pounds in 1935 — thus increasing the quantity of surplus potatoes the government had to buy. The whole thing just doesn’t make sense.
Grover Weymouth of East Vassalboro, who more than once has supplied information for this program, now comes up with some interesting yarns about Ben Butler. General Benjamin F. Butler was probably at once the most efficient and the most hated of Union generals in the Civil War. Many southerners hated him worse than they hated Sherman.
Because Butler graduated from Colby in 1838 most Colby men and women have known the stories connected with the general’s college days, stories published a quarter of a century ago by Herbert C. Libby in his book of Colby stories. How Ben destroyed the stolen sign and how he petitioned to be excused from chapel because he knew he was already counted among the damned, not the saved, are familiar Colby yarns.
Now Mr. Weymouth brings up some stories of Butler’s later days as lawyer and politician, in both of which fields his career was quite as stormy as it had been in the Army. While the following story may be fictional, those who knew Butler are sure it could have happened. The story goes that one day two prominent attorneys of Boston were crossing the Common and arguing about who was the best lawyer in Massachusetts. Suddenly one of them said, “Here comes Ben Butler. We’ll ask him.” They told Butler of their argument and asked him who, in his opinion, was the best lawyer in Massachusetts. Ben promptly replied, “I am!” “That may be so”, said one of them, “but how are we going to prove it?” “You don’t have to prove it”, said Butler, “I admit it.”
Another story concerns Ben in the Massachusetts Legislature. Ben never smoked but he had the peculiar habit of chewing cigars constantly. His cigars were made especially for him with both ends solid. In the legislature a minister from an up-state district sat next to Ben. For a couple of days the clergyman watched Butler chew on one end of a cigar for an hour, then turn it around and chew on the other end. Finally, standing it as long as he could, the minister. said: “Butler, you disgust me. A hog wouldn’t do what you are doing.” Ben responded with a question, “Do you chew tobacco?” “Certainly not”, was the disgusted reply. “Neither does a ‘hog”, said Butler. “So who’s most like a hog, you or me?”
When Butler was the military governor of Louisiana i~ the early days of the post-war reconstruction, the people of New Orleans vented their utmost wrath upon· him. He was accused of all manner of illegal and outrageous acts, of which history has long since cleared him. Among the accusations was one that he personally appropriated the magnificent solid silver from New Orleans mansions. Hence, the story of Ben Butler and the silver spoons became a part of American folklore.
Mr. Weymouth has a delightful story connected with those silver spoons. It seems that during one of his many political campaigns Butler was speaking in a theater. His opponents, in order to embarrass him, hired a boy to climb up into the fly over the stage and lower a huge spoon on a string down in front of the speaker. Without batting an eye, Butler pulled out his pocket knife, grabbed the spoon, cut the string, and rammed the spoon into his pocket with the words, “That’s one I must have missed.” Needless to say, he, rather than the opposition, captured the audience along with the spoon.
You will remember that, just as our program season closed last June, I asked for information on old stage coach lines that once came into Waterville. It is true that one listener told me where I might get that information, but no one has yet submitted the information itself. Come now, who will be the first to tell us about the old stage coach routes in this vicinity?
Year: 1949