Radio Script #98
Little Talks On Common Things
February 25, 1951
Among the commonest words on everybody’s lips these days is the word “security”. I suppose if all the men and women in the world could put into a single word their greatest desire, that one word would be security. But it is quite another matter to determine what security really is. When is a man or woman secure? Men once thought it was a material thing, so they built moated castles and turreted walls. But from the Great Wall of China to the Maginot Line, physical defenses have never spelled security. Nor can it be found today in jet planes and guided missiles and atom bombs.
There have been other times and other places in which security was thought to lie in law. “If we can only get a law passed”, people said, “we’ll have no more trouble. ” Well, the Medes and the Persians passed such laws that men called them “the laws of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not”. But where are the Medes and the Persians today? Their inalterable laws did not make them secure. Probably most people think that money is security. “If we only had money”, they say, “we WOULD. have no fear”. But money can be lost, inflation lowers its value. Security is not spelled in dollars and cents.
By this time we know, with sad disillusionment, that security does not come by political promises. We are not so ready today to follow the “vote-for-me-and-I-will- take-care-of-you” politician. There is no security in the privileges that arise out of political power. If security is none of these things, what is it? Security is not outside, but inside. It is not material, but spiritual. It is something that lives in the heart.
Did you see the heart-warming movie “I Remember Mama”? You won’t soon for- get the story of that Norwegian family living in San Francisco — living always on the ragged edge of poverty. But they knew Mama had a bank account in the big bank downtown, kept for an emergency. Emergencies came, but they always found a way to meet them without turning to the bank account. Yet just knowing it was there held the family together and gave them strength. Years passed and the children prospered. At last they said: “Now, Mama, we don’t need to worry about living expenses any more. You go downtown, take all the money out of the bank, and spend it on yourself.” Then Mama confessed that there had never been any bank account. Security is in the heart.
We want to tell you tonight about another small-town newspaper. A north Kennebec town that once had a newspaper was Clinton. The Clinton Advertiser was started in 1877 by a man of several undertakings. Indeed he was Clinton’s undertaker, as well as furniture dealer, Benjamin Foster. After a time he took into partnership Miss Etta Pratt, and until 1903 the Advertiser was published every week by Foster and Pratt. After Miss Pratt’s death, Foster sold the paper to a more recent undertaker and furniture dealer of Clinton, Marcellus Cain, who published the Advertiser for five years, selling it in 1908 to William Tracey. Tracey kept the paper going for about a year. He is quoted as saying there was more glory than dollars in printing a paper in Clinton. Anyhow the paper last appeared in 1909.
We think those publishers did very well to keep a paper going, week after week, in so small a village as Clinton, foi32 years. They deserve a lot of praise for their persistence, and probabl~ all of them were out of pocket in their laudable attempt to give Clinton a newspaper. For my information about Clinton’s paper I am indebted chiefly to Mrs. Lillian Brown of Clinton, who has kindly sent me a copy of the Advertiser dated October 11, 1888.
Three columns of the second page are devoted to short paragraphs under the heading “Home Items”. Some of them are not what a modern paper would call news, but they show that people in 1888 were talking about the same subject that claims our attention today. I quote from the Clinton paper: “When is it going to clear off? is the question asked by nearly everyone you happen to meet”. Another paragraph later on: “The steady rain of the past few days has caused the river to rise to a very high pitch for the time of year.”
Another: “So much stormy weather has greatly hindered the work on the Free Baptist Church, which it was hoped to have finished before cold weather. It will be ready to receive the plastering the first of next week.” As for the news items, Mrs. Elvin Jaquith had made over a hundred dollars worth of cheese; Secretary Gilbert of the Maine Board of Agriculture met with Clinton farmers; Mrs. Lucy Witham of Richmond committed suicide by taking “Rough on Rats”; and Rev. Osgood, presiding Elder of the Methodist District, preached on “The Interest Felt by Angels in Man’s Salvation”. As usual with these old newspapers, the ads are the best revealers of the times. Dodge and Jaquith, dealers in Clothing, Shoes, Crockery and Glassware, evidently sold other articles as well, for in a part of the paper separate from their regular ad they announced the arrival of a lot of very nice, pure tea.
B. T. Foster, publisher of the paper, ran a full column ad of his own, setting forth his fine assortment of lounges, chamber sets, looking glasses, crockery, curtains, caskets and burial shrouds. The last item of his ad reads: “A good cloth covered casket. $12 and upwards.” Two carriage manufacturers advertised their skills: W. I. Brown and S. W. Steward. L. Wright, the blacksmith, wanted folks to know that he now ran the shop formerly occupied by C. Jaquith. Making use of that apocryphal yarn about George Washington and the cherry tree, J. P. Billings showed an amusing wood-cut, and under it the words: “I cannot tell a lie, either; I did it with one of Billing’s axes. All kinds of edge tools manufactured by J. P. Billings, Clinton, Maine.”
G. H. piper thought, now the crops were in, it was time he got paid for the spring fertilizer. He advertised: “Notice. All parties indebted to me for phosphate please settle their account on or before November first.” I think the ad of D. G. Webber, Clinton’s dentist, is the only instance I can recall of a dentist announcing as follows: “Gas free for extracting teeth …
Not all the ads originated in Clinton. Tuttle and Frazier, in the Burgess Block, Corner of Main and Bridge streets, Fairfield., had a full column ad in baseball jargon headed “A Base Steal Stopped”. They said: “In our game against competitors, the latest feature is the clever stopping of a base steal, by whiCh our opponents schemed to steal our trade by a sharp, secret cut in prices. But it didn’t work. The pennant will go to the firm that undersells every other and knocks all competition flat. That firm is Tuttle and Frazier. We don’t need base steals. We’re making clean hits. Hit No.1 — A sweeping reduction in swmner shawls and mantles. Hit No. 2 — Chevot shirting for working men and boys, to be sold regardless of cost.”
Another Fairfield firm, D. W. Allen and Co., also advertised for the Clinton trade, offering kitchen ranges from $18 to $45, as well as a splendid assortment of parlor heating and oven parlor stoves. The pride of their collection, however, was a stove called the sub Base, Which burned wood and was guaranteed to keep a steady fire as easily as a coal stove. This stove, proudly said Allen, would keep plants from freezing, maintain even temperature in a sick room, and keep everybody in the house warm and comfortable. We are grateful to Editor Foster for printing on his front page casual items of Clinton in the long, long ago. In this particular issue of 1888 he was concerned with town meetings in the 1840’s and results of the Clinton vote in the September state elections.
The record is sprinkled with names that meant a lot to Clinton a hundred years ago — names that are still well remembered in the town. Among them are Philander Soule, Francis Low, Samuel Burrill, RiChard Wells, John Stinchfield, Mathew Pratt, John Totman and Sargent Jewell. The Hunters were a famous Clinton family. There were James, David and Z:irnti, and doubtless several others, back there in 1846, when James Hunter won his famous law suit against the Town of Clinton. A raft of lumber, being floated down the Sebasticook by its owner, James Hunter, had run against the abutment of the bridge with suCh impact that the raft broke up and the lumber went its wild, unChaseable way down the Sebasticook and the Kennebec. Hunter claimed damages of the town, and, believe it or not, he collected.
Knowing that some of my listeners are interested in unusual items from the world of books, I want to tell you about a book 1,200 years old that has never been printed. Some time in the eighth century the monks of Kells in Ireland produced by hand what has become one of the world’s most famous illuminated manuscripts of the gospe1s. It has long been considered one of the world’s most beautiful books.
Although many attempts have been made to reproduce by hand the rich illumination the drawn pictures, the laviSh capital letters and the ornamental page borders they have never been successfully duplicated. Since 1661 the book has been kept at Trinity College, Dublin. Now at last, thanks to modern methods of color photography and color printing, a Swiss publiSher, after four years of patient experiment, has produced a method that makes possible printed copies of this rare old book. The printing is being done at Berne, Switzerland, but don’t be too eager to own a copy. Only 120 copies will be for sale and the price will be $450 a copy.
The original hand-written manuscript of the Book of Kells contained 344 pages and a binding of riCh gold. Some time in the eleventh century, when William the Conqueror’s Normans were invading England, thieves stole the book and stripped off the binding. That gold binding was all they wanted; the precious book itself they threw away. It was later found under a pile of sod, with five pages missing. It is the remaining 339 pages that are now being printed. Some idea of the color problem facing the printer is shown when we learn that the original book contains more than 650 distinct shades. Yet the 48 pages which will be reproduced in full color will have the exact shades of the original.
If you can’t own one of those $450 copies, perhaps you may some day visit Dublin and see the original book. If you do that, you will see only two pages. In the Trinity College library the book lies open. Every morning an assistant turns over a new page. Any visitor who wants to see the whole book must· come back for 170 successive days.
More than a year ago on this program I talked a bit about folk-etymology, the process by which people fit strange words into familiar moulds — sparrow grass for asparagus, cutlash for cutlass. I told you how folk-etymology accounted for such words as primrose and rosemary (neither of which are roses), and for pantry and buttery .(which have nothing to do with pans or butter), and I referred to a few family names that originated by the same process. One of those names was Simpson, as applied to families of French-Canadian descent.
Simpson is a very old English name. How did French-Canadian families happen to have it? I told you that Dr. Julian Taylor, whose memory of Waterville went back to years before the Civil War, once assured me that the French-Canadian family name of Simpson was the English way of trying to say Sans Souci. The name Sans Souci was very strange to English ears, but it sounded something like Simpson; so Simpson the Sans Soucis in New England became.
Now Joseph Bolduc of Elmhurst Street, who has a rich fund of historical knowledge and is a man very well worth knowing, comes forward with a more complete and very interesting explanation. Whether the explanation is fact or mere legend out of old French Canada doesn’t matter much. It makes a good story anyhow.
It seems that long ago there came to Canada two brothers named Bureau, with land grants from the Crown of France. One brother, thrifty and industrious, located on good, fertile land, took good care of it, and prospered. The other brother, happy-go-lucky and easy-going, took up a piece of swampy, brushland nearer town, failed to clear it properly, and gradually found himself in poorer and poorer circumstances. That happy-go-lucky brother came in time to be called by his neighbors Bureau Sans Souci (Carefree Bureau). By the time the next generation had grown up the Bureau part of the name was dropped, and Sans Souci became the recognized family name. Generations later, when the Sans Souci, no longer impoverished and thriftless, like the first possessor of the name, but hardworking immigrants with ambition and zeal, came to New England, folk-etymology changed the Sans Souci to Simpson.
Year: 1951