Radio Script #40
Little Talks On Common Things
October 30, 1949
You often hear the remark, “What complicated lives we lead; how simply our grandfathers lived”. Our technological age of electricity and petroleum, of aviation and television, has brought us many complications, but the truth is it has brought us a lot of simplicity as well.
In grandmother’s day boiling water for the morning coffee was a complicated process. Months before, grandfather had sawed and split the four-foot sticks of cord wood; and had cut some of it up fine into kindling. On one of those winter mornings when ’twas so cold even grandpa’s cuss words would freeze in the air, he’d crawl out of bed down into the icy kitchen, lift the covers off the old cast iron cook stove, stuff in a little wad of paper and carefully cross-lay the sticks of kindling. Then, making sure the dampers were open, he would take off the shelf something few persons under forty years of age have ever seen a Portland Star match. They came in attached sections called cards — those smelly, old sulfur matches. When you struck one, a burst of nauseating smoke preceded the blaze, and often you had to strike several before you got any blaze at all. Those matches came six cards wrapped in tissue paper, and twelve of those wrappers in a package, and the whole package cost eight cents. At least, that was the price in our old store in Bridgton. A mighty lot of matches for eight cents; but, believe me, grandfather needed a lot of them when about three out of four wouldn’t work.
Please pardon the digression about matches, but I tell you grandfather would appreciate it, because it might have taken him that long to get one of those old Portland Stars to light. Well, when he did get it going, he touched it to the paper, and soon the pleasant sound of a roaring wood fire filled the room. He didn’t immediately go out to the pump, thirty or forty feet from the back door, to get a pail of water. No one in those days was so foolish as to leave no water in the house overnight. Such forgetfulness would be disastrous, because the pump was sure to be frozen solid on such a morning. So grandpa just put the already filled tea-kettle on one of the front covers of the stove. By this time grandmother was in the kitchen. Indeed in some families it had been she rather than grandfather who had built the fire, because had early chores to do in the barn. Even if they lived in the village, rather than on a farm, they usually had a horse and a cow.
Now it took time for those stove covers to heat up; it took even longer for the cold water in that tea-kettle to come to a boil. But, before that moment arrived, grandma had poured some of the heating water into the old, blackened coffee pot. Then she put in generous spoonfuls of ground coffee, perhaps ground in her own hand mill, but more probably in the big, two-wheeled hand mill at the store. If they splurged a bit, that coffee was prime mocha and java at 35 cents a pound. If they were comfortably financed, but thrifty, it was a cheaper blend, like the yellow-canned Excelsior brand at 25 cents; and if they had to economize sharply it was the rank old Rio (grandfather called it Rio) at 18 to 20 cents a pound.
Finally when the coffee had boiled, grandmother poured it out into grandfather’s big mustache cup, using a strainer over the spout, to hold back the grounds. But same of those grounds always collected in the cup, and a few of them found their way into grandfather’s gullet.
How different is granddaughter’ s way of making the morning coffee ?A turn of the faucet gives instantaneous hot water; a turn of the switch gives immediate heat in the chosen unit of the electric range; the hot water put into percolator or dripolator comes to a boil in a few seconds, seeps through coffee ground finer than the old hand mill could ever get it, and before grandson even has time to apply lotion to his electrically razored face, the coffee is ready to drink. Perhaps for granddaughter it has been even more simple than that; she may have merely plugged in an electric percolator in which ground coffee and water has been prepared the night before. Before grandpa and grandma sat down to breakfast, someone of the family always braved the bitter cold to go out to the pump. Taking the tea-kettle or a dish of boiling water from it, that person primed the pump, and brought a big pail of fresh water into the house. If it was Monday, and grandma was going to do the weekly washing, that trip from kitchen to pump had to be repeated many times.
Faucets and switches, thermostats and hundreds of other automatic devices make life pretty simple for us, compared with grandfather’s day, now don’t they? The truth, of course, is that life is always both simple and complex, simple in some ways, complex in others.
What many of us fail to appreciate is the complicated, painstaking, often disappointing hours, days and years of thought, experiment and effort that have made possible some of the simple things we take for granted. If you want to know something about the time, money and brains that went into years of experiment to bring two very common modern things, just read the story of cellophane and the story of nylon in this week’s issue of the Saturday Evening Post. You will find it in the fourth installment of a series on the fabulous DuPont family.
One item in the nylon story I cannot refrain from repeating. The wife of a DuPont executive wore the same pair of nylons daily for fifteen months, subjecting them to nightly washing, in order to find out how long’ they would wear without run or tear. The DuPonts say today’ s stockings won’t stand any such test, not because the material isn’t good, but because most women demand sheer hosiery rather than service weight.
Last week while in New York attending meetings of the College Entrance Examination Board and the American Council on Education, it was my privilege to take in the evening sessions of the famous Herald-Tribune Forum. For eighteen years, under the dynamic leadership of Mrs. Ogden Reed, widow of the Tribune’s most famous editor since Horace Greeley, that Forum has become a great annual event of national and international importance. It was my good fortune to attend it first in 1946, the year when the United Nations first met in New York, giving Mrs. Reed an opportunity to gather distinguished speakers from allover the world. We then heard Admiral Blandy, Vanever Bush, and Barney Baruch on the problem of control of atomic energy. We listened to the impassioned words of that later tragic leader of Czechoslovakia, Jan Masary.
We heard the venerable General Smith of South Africa, the young foreign minister of Austria, the leader of the Labor Party in France, and were thrilled by Walter Lippman’s memorable address on One World of Diversity.
This year the Forum was devoted to the subject “What Kind of Government Ahead? The Responsibility of Every Citizen.” The scene of the Forum is one of the most fashionable spots in New York — the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. On the opening evening Mrs. Reed announced that people were present from every state in the union, from Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Canada, Mexico and from 19 countries overseas. On one evening Mrs. Marriner and I sat next to people from Illinois and Montana; on the next evening our seat neighbors came from Georgia.
The Forum consists of four sessions, three of which we attended. The first was started by General Eisenhower on “The Individual’s Responsibility for Government”, followed by Professor Lindsay Rogers of Columbia University, author of many books on American government and politics. The rest of the evening was devoted to the Democratic party — its program and its claims for the voters’ support.
Their opening speaker was senator Humphrey of Minnesota, the brilliant young statesman who, more than any other man, had been responsible for the civil rights plank in the platform voted at the Philadelphia convention -the plank which drove Dixiecrats into open revolt. The Dixiecrats got in their word through Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, who made me think I was listening to the Ku Klux Klan itself. He waved the old flag of white supremacy and states rights with vigor. Less bitter and more suave were the words of Franklin Roosevelt Jr., reminding one, both in personal appearance and in speech, of his distinguished father.
Two U. S. Senators have served as presidents of universities. Senator Fullbright, a Rhodes scholar, was once president of the University of Arkansas. Senator Frank Graham has long been the distinguished head of the University of North Carolina. Liberal and progressive,Graham is no Dixiecrat, by whom he is bitterly denounced for his views on freedom of speech and on race relations. His calm, dignified address at the Forum was in pleasing contrast to the prejudiced tirade of Representative Howard Smith.
Former Governor of New York, Herbert Lehman, summed up the case for the party in what he called “A Blueprint for Democracy”, but the outstanding speech of the evening was made by Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the man who has won deserved fame for putting honesty and efficiency into that one of our state governments which had perhaps the worst reputation of all 48. You felt, as you listened to this man, that here was a politician whose commendable deeds backed up his impressive words.
At the second session the Republicans had their turn. If it was a governor who made a hit for the Democrats, it was a senator who gave the best presentation of the Republican case — Senator Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Widely known as the man who resigned his senate seat to become a front-line combat officer in World War II, he was again elected to the senate by a large majority in a Democratic year. If the Republican party follows Lodge, it will follow him into a forward-looking, progressive program, not back into the exploitation and the isolationism of the not so good old days, to which benighted leaders like Col. McCormick would have us return.
I was proud of our own Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the only woman speaker at the Forum’s Republican session. After Senator Kem of Missouri had lambasted the New Deal and the Fair Deal as entirely bad, and had insisted that the federal government should do nothing at all on health, education and housing~ and after Senator Morse advised measures that seemed no different from the Democratic program than tweedledee seems different from tweedledum then Mrs. Smith showed the wisdom of a middle of the road position between those two extremes. She made it clear that social welfare legislation had begun long before the time of FDR, but that what has happened during the past 17 years is more than a mere expansion of welfare benefits. It is, in Mrs. Smith I s opinion, a dangerous change in fundamental philosophy. Her view is that benefits should be based on proven need, not on the mere fact of existence.
She believes that these government aids are not rights belonging to every American just because he lives in the united States, but are rights acquired by misfortunes over which the individual has no control. If Mrs. Smith had her way, she would put some toughness into the notoriously loose regulation of certain government aids and subsidies.
Year: 1949