Radio Script #170
Little Talks On Common Things
January 11, 1953
Although no one expects early depression, there are already indications of somewhat lower prices in 1953. That is good news for the consumer, and who of us isn’t a consumer? It is not only increased oroduction that wi II brinq this about, but also that much revi led characteristic of private enterprise, competition. The increased supply of raw materials and the accompanving increase in plant capacity lead to vigorous competition for markets in which to sell the products. Improved efficiency also plays a part. 1\5 factories tend to turn out an ever larger volume of goods per man-hour of labor, unit costs are lowered, even though wages increase. U. S. Nelf/s and IlJor f d Report po i nts to the automobile industry as a striking example of this trend, and predicts lower prices for cars this summer.
Nov>” let’s not· forge-r that it is the American free enterprise system that has bui It new factories, provided new machines, turned out more goods. !ndustry itself is making possible the price breaks which government interference nas done so much to prevent.
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As -rhe years go by it is increasingly di fficult to bring to I ight a ionq forgotten name. I want to know who were Watervi lie’s old time florists. tJlore than that, I am try i ng to ascerta in who first made a bus i ness of ra is i ng and 5e I ling f lowe rs i n th is commun i ty .
Several of our older people remember a florist establishment seventy years ago near where the C i tv Ha I I now stands 1 but none of those peop Ie cou I d reca I I the florist’s name. After some half dozen of our elderly citizens had been approached, it was Miss ,A,nnie Dorr I’/ho remembered. She says the florist was J irnmie Wendell. Mr. ahd Mrs. A. J. Drummond, as well as Miss Dorr, have helped me establish the exact location of. that florist’s house,. garden Qnd greenhouse, I had at first been to I d that it was located on Front Street bet\’ieen the 01 d C ityHa I I and Common Street. knew that was un like i y} if not down right impossible, because I have copies of the deeds of land to the town of Waterville both by Dr. Williams and by Abijah Smith, and a provision of each deed Is that none except public buildings shall be erected on the land. The two deeds together account for the land on which the City Hall nOvl stands, the parking lot behind it, and all of the park in front of it. So I knew the old florist place could not be anywhere on what is nO\>1 the park.
The Drummonds andfl1i ss Dorr are both certain that the entrance to the f 10- rist’s was neither from Front Street nor from Main Street, but from the south side. near the rear of the building long occupied by Sal Whitcomb’s grocery. Many of you I isteners remember Harmon’s Cafe in a little building behind the Whitcomb store. That would have been about Where one entered the florist1s place. That place is remembered as consisting of a very small dwell ing , a greenhouse, and an outdoor garden.
The earl jest defi n i te recollect i on wh ich dates that establ i shment goes back to 1884. A \vatervi lie woman remembers that in that year she went to that fJ.orist’s -to buy flowers to wear at a college fraternity guest banquet, and all she could get were cinnamon pinks. She wore those pinks ona dress oftur-, quo i se blue nun! 5 ve i ‘i ng .
Was Jimmie 1!Jendell Waterville’s first florist? Ifnot: whopreceded him, and where was hi s place?
Th rough the courtesy of rks. Po II ard of the Fi rs t Rangeway ~ who has p reviously suppl ied other items. I have seen the catalog of trotting stock of Sunnyside Farm for the year 1886. Sunnyside Farm was the breeding and training farm of C. H. Nelson, owner of the farrous trotter Nelson, holder of the world:s record when in his prime.
Some of you have heard me say before that Kennebec County, and especially the area around Watervi lie was once ·farrous for its breed of race horses. Some of the finest animals of the American turf were raised in this community. So it is interesting to see what Hod Helson had to say in that 1886 catalog, sev'” era I years before the horse t~e Isonga i ned h is nat i ana I fame.
i’Sunnyside Farm!!, says the announcement, ‘lis situated in \l\fatervi r Ie, a mile and a half from the railroad depot. There are nine stallions for service this season, al I containing strains of the fashionable blood of the day. Gentle~ men’s road horses” trotters and fam; Iy steeds always on hand or furnished on short notice. ParTies have good horses of the above description which they wish to dispose of, please address the proprietor. Mares from a distance will be carefully cared for, and taken to and from the railroad cars free of expense., and boarded by the year at from $75 to $100. All accidents and escapes wi II be at owner’s risk. Mares at grass, by the week 75 cents”; hay and grain $2.50.”
The oldest of Nelson’s catalogued stock in 1886 was a gelding named Black Billy, foaled in 1874 and therefore already twelve years old. He had a track mark of 2:37~. Next came a nine year old mare, Susie Owen. with a mark of 2:26. Then came three year old Ne/son who then had a good, but not sensational, mark of 2:26 3/4.
The catalog lists the farm’s nine stallions in order of what the owner considered their relative worth. Number One was Nelson, Number Two Dictator Chief, Number Three Colonel West; then came Wi lkes, i’4embrinsEghert~ Pluto, Rolf Knox, Rolf and Onward.
He re is the ped i gree of the s ta’ I ion Ne f son. Reg is try n umbe r 4209. Sire> Young Rolf (3518) 2:21t; Dam, Gretchen by Gideon. Grandsire, Tom Rolf (306) 2: 33t. Great Grandmother, Pocahontas 2: 17£, by I ron Cadmus. Gneat-great grands i re, I ron Cadmus (393) by Amer i can Ec Ii pse. Nelson’s mother, Gretchen, wasadaughter of Gideon, who was a son of one of the nat i on’s most famous horses, Hamb leton 1 an.
This is the way the catalog describes Nelson: !lNelsonis a bright bay with black points, and has the rl ght ki nd of feet and legs, with nice mane and tail, fine head and neck, and his general make-up is all one could wish. His record is 2:26 3/4 over a half mi Ie track, carrying 40 pounds. His gait is like a piece of well balanced machinery, and he needs no weights or boots. Nelson won the sliver cup for stallions of all ages at the Maine State F’air in Lew i ston in 1885. If
I am sure some of the horse lovers of this vicinity must have cherished recollections of the horse who once held the world trotting record. Send them a long for this program, please.
Here are a few more of those boners we have been digging up lately~ William Tell shot.’an apple through an arrow whl Ie standing on his sonts head. Philip was expected to marry Catherine of Aragon. He went .. to see her, and history says he never smiled again. Mary, Queen of Scots, was playing gol f with her husband when news was brought to her of theb i rth of her son and heir.
Strange indeed is the course of history, as told on these student papers. Another grim fact that we thus learn is that Sir Wa Iter Rale i gh died in James I’s reign and started smoking. It Is not surprising also to learn in regard ‘.” ” to a battle in 1760 that many Indians were ki /led, which proved very fatal to them. It is a little surprising, however, to find out that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address wh i Ie trave I ing from Wash ln9ton to Gettysburg on the, back of an envelope.
There were some mighty powerful gentlemen in the old days, according to these schoolboy statements. Copernic’usinvented the sun as the center of the un iverse and thereby aided science. Shakespeare was born in 1564, supposedly on his bi rthday. Shakespeare wrote tragedies, comedies and errors. t,1i Iton wrote Paradise Lost; then his wife left him and he wrote Paradise PS£lained.
Another literary gem is thus recorded: At th is time humor was introduced into the English drama, for example a wife wringing her husband’s neck. vie can understand what the pupi I meant who wrote: !iTwo straight lines cannot enc lose .a space un I ess they are crooked. But one needs to know something about a certain English poet to get the point of this one: “Shellev was a blithe spirit who got washed up in Italy.’1 And any of you who ever read Wordsworth IS I nt i mat ions of I mmorta Ii ty will be interested to knolll that Words·· worth wrote Imitations of Immortal ity in youth. ment i oned cana I s on +h is program a few weeks ago . Probab I y it is we II for me to learn, therefore~ that the invention of the steamboat caused a network of ri vers to spring up. You may like to know that two ch i Idren born to’geTher are twins; three are culprits. Cheer UP — when a man has only one wife it is called monotony. By the way, one pupil wanted his teacher to know that Horace Greeley was the r:1ost defeated candidate ever elected. Believe me, we mean no disrespect to an honorable profession when we quote a kid’s paper which said “Rome was overthrown by the invasion of the Huns, the Visigoths and the Osteopaths.
As for certain weird definitions, we read that a tantrum is a bicycle for man and wife; posthumous is a ch i I d born after the death of both of its parents; a seminary is a place where they bury the dead,: a tonsure is a priest shaving his head instead of cutting it off; quinine is the bark of a tree, canine is the bark of a dog; an extrovert is an animal with its spinal column on the outs i de; a bamboo is an I ta I i an baby; an a rti.san is one that never runs dry,; a fossi I is an extinct animal, the older it is the more extinct it is.
i have wondered how long the school reports continued to give outspoken criticism of teachers by name. About a year ago I showed you how caustic were some of those reports from Kennebec Va Iley Towns in the 1870 1s.1 now know That this sort of thing continued up into the 1890’s.
In 1894 G. S. Getchell, supervisor of The Winslow schools, put these statemenTs into his report to the town: llin District 5, under [“1iss !vHflie vie I Is, some progress was made by the pupils, but government was rather lenient. In DistricT 6, iVliss Belle Tibbetts began under favorable circumstances in a new SChoolhouse, but her efforts as a teacher were not very successful. In Dis· trict 8. under f”liss Annie Storey, I anticipated a good term. But near the close I was aware that friend Iy fee I ings between teache rand schol ars di d not prevail, In District 16 Miss Winnie Jones is a good instructor, but a little better discipl ine would have made a better school.!!
The next year, in 1895, J. M. Taylor was supervisor. He was high in his praise of a teacher whom many Winslow people .rernember fondly. He wrote: ‘lIn District 1 the winter term was taught by Miss Jennie Howard~ a teacher so well and favorab Iy known that no words of recommendation are needed,li But Mr. Tay”. lor was not so kind to lvlissJones in District 6. Of her he wrote: “The term opened with the school quiet and orderly and the pupils stUdious. But for causes unknown to us, at the close of the term the scholars manifested little interest and the teacher had fast control.
So far as Winslow was concerned, the last of those critical school reports appeared in 1895. Beg inn i ng with 1896 the reports conta i ned me re I y the names of teachers and the enrollment statistics, Take a look at teachers’ salaries in “linslow as late as 1898. E. E. Kid~ der got nine dollars a week; r~ary Holmes $7.50; Emi Iy Garland $6.50. It is interesting to note the relative expenditures for schools and for roads made by the town of \Inns low between 1893 and 1898. I n1893 the money spent for schools was exactly haff that put out on the roads, $1,500 compared with $3,000. In 1894 the school money was cut down to $1,450, whi Ie the road money went up by 33 per cent to $4 ,000. By 1897 it was ad j f fe rent story.
Road money was back to $3,000, and school money had advanced to $2~300, and there it stood in 1898.
Now let y s have a few more facts about our State of Ma ine. The length of Maine’s highways exceeds the circumference of the earth. In Lafayette National Park onp,1t. Desert are the highest mountains directly on the Atlantic Coast anywhere north of Hio de Janiero. In spite of continuing lumber operations for more than a hundred years, fl.1aine’s sti II standing spruce and fir are est;.,.. mated at 25 bill i on board feet.
Before the deve fopment of the ! umber industry in our Paci fi c Northv/est, Bangor was the largest lumber market in the world. At the turn of the century the annual log dri ve on the Penobscot frequent Iy reached 200 ,000 ,000 feet. By 1930 it had dropped to 25 million. As late as 1925 tl;aine had 518 miles of el .. ectr i c ra i I way. I s any of it left today?
At the ri sk of sti rring up sti II more controversy about Ma ine mounta ins, must venture my opinion that our most picturesque mountain names are Chairback tJlt., Good-Eye M1-., ~10unt Misery, Mosquito Mt., Ragged Jack Mt., Sparrow Hawk ~IJt., Tear Cap f\1t., Tir ’em Mt., and 11aterspout tvlt. And I have just dis~ covered that old Pleasant fvlountaln between Bridgton and D3nmark, where f hunted sheep on New Years Day in 1911, is actually higher than the much more cele-· brated ~~t.Kineo.
Year: 1953