Radio Script #51
Little Talks On Common Things
January 15, 1950
One of our commonest sayings is, “Time flies”. How fast the weeks go by! I cannot make it seem possible that tonight’s is the fifty-first of these unimportant broadcasts on common things. Frankly the program was started with the idea that it might last for a dozen weeks, but certainly not longer. How the radio audience and our public spirited sponsor, the Keyes Fibre Company, have endured our simple, inconsequential talks for more than fifty weeks passes comprehension.
But, anyhow, we have passed the half-hundred mark in these broadcasts, as we stand past the half-century mark in the calendar, and with our listeners’ generous indulgence we’re going right on toward the hundred mark.
Just as we suspected there are a lot of men in this vicinity who once pumped the old pipe organs. One man who has had a lot of experience, not only with organ pumping, but also with other matters pertaining to church life in Waterville, is Frank Littlefield, present sexton of the Methodist Church. Mr. Littlefield says that, for a great period of time many years ago, he, Ted Branch and Harry Vose were the regular organ pumpers at three Waterville churches.
Ernest Davis, sexton at the First Baptist Church, pumped the organ at the Freeport Baptist Church some fifty years ago. The pastor of that church was the greatly revered Dr. George Merriam, who was afterwards pastor of Bethany Church in Skowhegan for more than a quarter of a century — a remarkable man, who had the distinction of occupying only three pastorates in his active ministry of more than sixty years.
Another organ pumper was Edgar Brown, former postmaster and former secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. In the early years of this century he pumped the organ at the Unitarian Church. Both Warren Philbrook, afterwards a justice of the Maine Supreme Court, and his wife were members of the choir. Edgar used to take time out, actually leaving the building sometimes during the evening sermon, which usually lasted twenty minutes. That worked all right until one evening when the minister cut his sermon shorter than usual. As Edgar went back into the church he heard the organ. Llewellyn Cain, the bass singer in the choir, had noted Edgar’s absence and manned the pump.
Eddie Osborne, the well known Maine Central Railroad employee, and son of Samuel Osborne, the Colby College janitor whom hundreds of students knew and loved, tells me that when he was a boy in Waterville High School, he pumped Colby’s first pipe organ. Colby men and women of my own student days remember well the organ that stood in the northwest corner of the old chapel in Memorial Hall. In my time Cecil Daggett usually played it, or some student acting as understudy for Cecil. But twenty years earlier, when the organ was first installed, the organist was Charles Spencer of the class of 1891, a man who has returned regularly for his class reunions at Colby, and Spencer’s organ pumper was Eddie Osborne, son of the college janitor. Charles Spencer, by the way, was son of the man who had the longest service of any minister of the local First Baptist Church, a pastorate of 21 years.
The best reminiscences of organ pumping reach us from Eugene Crawford, who has more than once helped us with other items on this program. He offers himself as one of the oldest local members of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Organ PUmpers, having been initiated into that company 69 years ago. Gene was one of the many pumpers of that day who did the job “free for nothing”.
Some of the fellows were luckier. Ernest Davis was paid ten cents per hour. Edgar Brown got 35 cents a Sunday for two services. But most of the boy pumpers, like Crawford, whose folks made them go to church, were glad to pump the organ to get out of sitting still in a pew and listening to a sermon. Many a dime novel has been read in the pumping alcove behind the organ, but there is no record of anyone reading a dime novel in a pew.
Is organ pumping hereditary? Mr. Crawford’s son Earle, many years after his father’s experience, pumped the organ at the Waterville Universalist Church. Mr. Crawford recalls two choice incidents of his own organ-pumping days. In his boyhood church the choir sat back of the minister, between him and the organist. At that time the minister was a solid expounder of hellfire and brimstone, whose sermons could rival Cotton Mather’s famous eruption on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. One Sunday just as the minister reached the most singeing and frying point of his fiery sermon, a prankish lady member of the choir lighted a bunch of those old brimstone matches we were talking about on this program a few weeks ago. Anyone who ever smelled one of those old matches, much less a whole bunch of them, can imagine what happened. There was no choir the next Sunday.
Mr. Crawford’s second story concerns the new minister over whom dissention arose in the church. One of the trustees who opposed the new man went to the village bank and forbade them to pay the pastor’s salary. When the cashier informed him that the pastor had already been in and received his salary, the trustee exploded, “Don’t that man beat the devil”. To which the cashier answered, “I thought that was what you hired him for”. Well, so much for the old hand-pumped organs. If not already a lost art, organ-pumping will soon be that. The electric blower and the electric organ have put the old organ””pumper out of a job.
Do you remember the old castoria ads? Here’s one that appeared in an Augusta newspaper in 1889:
“When baby was sick we gave her Castoria.
When she was a child, she cried for Castoria.
When she became Miss, she clung to Castoria.
When she had children, she gave them Castoria.”
It seems as if Castoria ran through families.
Now we must get in a word about railroads again. Even in what seemed their hey day, the old electric street railways were not always lucrative investments. The annual report of the Benton and Fairfield Railway for the year 1900 showed gross earnings of $8,000, expenses of almost $7,000 and fixed charges of $1,000, leaving a new balance of $19.11.
Speaking of railways, Waterville is not the only locality where folks are still interested in the old narrow ·guage railroads. A few weeks ago, down in Augusta, a good story about the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes line reached the· columns of the Kennebec Journal. The story goes that one autumn morning a sweet little old lady got on at Farmington and asked the conductor to let her know when they reached Madrid. The train was more heavily loaded than usual and had difficulty getting up the steep grades. After much puffing and heaving it finally reached Redding Siding. The conductor, who had been much concerned about the train’s progress, suddenly remembered the old lady. Madrid now lay some ten miles back. The conductor hurried up ahead and confided his plight to the engineer. The two agreed that the honor of the road was at stake, and there was nothing to do but back the train back to Madrid. So the engineer inched the creaking cars backward down the line for ten slow miles. When they finally got back to Madrid the conductor entered the passenger car, tapped the old lady on the shoulder, reached for her baggage to help her alight, and said, “Madam, here we are at Madrid”. “Oh, no, don’t take my suitcase”, she said. “I’m going through to Rangeley. Dr. Nichols told me to be sure to take another pill when we got to Madrid.”
That story is good enough to have happened on any railroad, even on my oId Bridgton and Saco River. But the sticklers for fact won’t have it so.An irritated and somewhat belligerent correspondent immediately wrote to the Journal, pointing out that there was no such station as Madrid on the Sandy River line. The correspondent says, “There never was a Madrid station~ The Berlin Mills Company had a mill on the railroad between Phillips and Redington at one time, and I believe passengers sometimes·stopped there and drove by team to Madrid. The train left Phillips in exactly the opposite direction from the carriage road that went to Madrid.” What about it, you old railroad fans? Did or did not the Sandy River have a Madrid Station? The same correspondent says the legend that passengers used to fish out of the train wi.ndows in the passing trout streams is sheer myth. Even yarns about walking behi.nd the train as it puffed up grade is a figment of the imagination.
Well, now, we Cumberland County boys never handed anything to that Sandy River line anyway. For a good, old, honest-to-goodness walking line, give us the Bridgton and Saco River. I can name you half a dozen other fellows besides myself Who have alighted from that train as it failed to make the grade from Bridgton Junction to Rankin’s Mill, and have picked mayflowers while the train backed down to the junction and got a fresh start. As it inched its way by the spot where we got off, we’d climb aboard again. Now j9st let some stern stickler for facts come along and tell me that’s all in my imagination! Well, who has any more good narrow guage stories? We can still use them.
It seems to me that one of the nicest things said to and about us Americans at this mid-point in the twentieth century was said by Allan Nevins, one of our greatest living historians, in the New Year issue of Life magazine. I have no doubt many of you who are listening tonight have already seen that excellent article. If so, you will not mind my calling your attention again to its inspired closing sentences. And for you who have not read the article, the statements should be equally welcome.
As we see developing a more and more bitter struggle between independent business and socialistic enterprise, between earned economy and the welfare state, it is good for us to heed these words from the man who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for American Biography_ He says:
“The American of 1950 does not expect worldly redemption by appeal to the single authority either of Big Business or of Big Government. He is more and more aware that the traditional contradiction between the two is false. World War II dramatically demonstrated what the two, in alliance, could achieve. As the half century ends, the man of business realizes that he must display a sense of responsibility about political affairs, even in remote areas of the earth. The man of government realizes his own need for the talents and practical experience of the business man.
“The American of 1900 turned away from principles, from abstract ideals, from absolutes and origins. He turned toward concreteness, toward fact, toward things of size and shape .and color, toward action and power. “Of action and power the American of 1950 has had quite enough. But in the age of the atom, in the fresh memory of the Second World War, in the harrowing menace of a third, concreteness and facts seem less compelling and not at all satisfying. To bury his dead with pride and dignity, to arm the living with hope as well as a gun, to comfort his brain as well as his stomach, today’s American seeks out fixed moral principles. He is doggedly determined to probe for those absolute values — real, not pretended — by which he may be judged and which distinguish his cause from “the nation that is not holy”.
Year: 1950