Radio Script #642

Little Talks on Common Things

February 21, 1965

I have sometimes referred on this program to the rather scurrilous annual publication put out each year by the sophomore class at Colby College, lampooning the Freshmen, and sometimes even making uncomplimentary remarks about the faculty. For many years that publication carried the name “The War Cry”. It was, in accordance with college tradition, distributed at the annual Freshman Prize Speaking Contest, always held in the First Baptist Church on Elm Street. In the midst of the program a shouting group of sophomores would burst into the room and toss copies of the War Cry allover the place.

In 1903 that episode prompted a student strike. In 1902 President Charles Lincoln White had decreed, if such an interruption happened again, the perpetrators would be severely punished. Sure enough, at the 1903 freshman speaking, the first speaker, Karl Kennison, a Waterville boy, who afterwards had a distinguished career as engineer of Boston’s Metropolitan Water District, had just finished his speech when sophomores loudly invaded the room. President White immediately closed the program and the next day suspended from college all men of the sophomore class.

Other classes went on strike, out of sympathy for the sophomores. The women of the sophomore class also refused to attend classes. Because it was already early June when the speaking program was held, commencement was not far away. Through the conciliatory efforts of Professor Arthur Roberts, who a few years later himself became president of the college, the seniors were persuaded to hold commencement exercises and received their diplomas. The next fall the other classes were back in college and all was again serene.

One victory, however, had been achieved by the administration and faculty. Never again was the War Cry or any of its successors distributed at the freshman speaking, and never again was that program disturbed by sophomore invasions.

The War Cry itself continued to be published, and in the spring of 1904 Karl Kennison’s own class, whose speaking program had been brought to a halt just a year earlier, were the publishers. I have a copy of that 1904 War Cry and find it relatively innocent compared with the almost libelous sheet my own class produced seven years later in the spring of 1911.

Who were some of the members of that Class of 1906, in whose name the 1904 War Cry was published? We have no way of identifying the writers of various articles, but we can tell you who were some of those Colby students who were sophomores in the spring of 1904.

Besides Karl Kennison, whom we have already mentioned, there was the pious, sedate, reserved Charles P. Chipman, who was to be Colby’s first full-time librarian, serving from 1911 to 1923; also Fenwicks Holmes, who became the notorious founder of an eccentric religious sect in California; Merle Jones, afterward a prominent high school principal in New Jersey; and Merlin Joy, who was for some time superintendent of schools in Fairfield. Then there was Elliott Lincoln, who became an author of considerable repute; and William H. Stevens, nationally known economist and chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Among other local boys in the class were our well known physician, Dr. Ralph Reynolds, and the eccentric attorney who made himself a sort of godfather of the KDR fraternity, Harold Leon Pepper; and one of Colby’s most noted missionaries, Arthur Robinson, who as a boy lived in the house on the corner of Pleasant and Winter Streets, next door to my present home.

But of all the members of the Class of 1906, the one who became most famous was John Wesley Coombs, called by hundreds of persons, who had otherwise never heard of the college, “Colby Jack”. A baseball pi tcher in co 11 ege, Jack Coombs led his team to repeated victories over the other Maine colleges, and immediately after graduation was signed by Connie Mack for the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League. There he had a remarkable career, once pitching every inning of a 24 inning game, and pitching three winning games in a single World Series.

Really, it was quite a group of young men who made up the class that put out the War Cry in the spring of 1904. Now let us see who were some of the freshmen whom that paper held up to ridicule.

It directed especial attention to a boy who would one day become Mayor of Eastport and one of the leading citizens of all Washington County, Roscoe C. Emery. Here is an extract from the War Cry: “Roscoe Conklin Emery is said to have originated at Eastport, that land of lobsters and sardines, and he is undoubtedly the biggest lobster in the bunch, if we can take his word for it. Like all lobsters he was green when Prexy potted him, and no amount of boiling has changed the color. His gait has been acquired from the rolling waves of his native element. How refreshing it must be for him to receive every day from a dormitory window a pailful of that element dropped on his head.”

The War Cry hit at juniors as well as freshmen in a series of fictional ads: “For sale — two valuable treatises: ‘How I Got My Pull with Dutchy’ and ‘How I Became Rob’s Brightest English Student’. These volumes will be of great value to aspiring freshmen. Ever Kicking Maxfield.” “Ever Kicking” was a use of the initials of Ezra K. Maxfield of the Class of 1905, a man who became a noted professor of English.

The War Cry had a lot of fun with Elbridge Davis, who became a prominent Boston attorney and a member of the convention that revised the Massachusetts constitution in 1919. Under the heading “Rollo’s Visit to a Freshman Side Show”, the War Cry said: “Papa, what is that strange beast in the cage? That, Rollo, is not a beast, although it strongly resembles a hyena. Its name is Davis and it was captured alive in the wilds of Aroostook, where it had terrorized the natives for many years. It is now a Colby freshman. “But, papa, are all freshmen like this? Oh, yes. Some people divide the species into juniors and freshmen, but there is really no difference.”

Now, with just one further word of explanation we will leave the subject of the old Colby War Cry. We would explain that, for more than half a century at Colby, juniors and freshmen were supposed to be allied, while seniors and sophomores were arrayed against them.

Now to another subject. Several persons have asked me if any legal recognition was ever paid to the purchase of Maine lands from the Indians. I am reminded by these listeners that I have often talked about grants from the crown, about the Plymouth Company, the Bingham Purchase and the Waldo Grant. But what about purchases from the Indians?

Complicated as the Maine land titles became in the two centuries between 1600 and 1800, it is quite true that the courts eventually honored several of the Indian sales of lands in what was once the royal Province of Maine. In 1820 the first Supreme Court of Maine confirmed the purchase made a century earlier from the Pejepscot Indians, whose central village was at Brunswick. That big tract of land extended up the Androscoggin to Minot and Leeds, and included various tracts along the Kennebec, as well as one large piece east of Damariscotta.

In the little coastal village of New Harbor down on the Pemaquid Peninsula is a granite boulder to which is attached a bronze tablet testifying that there was signed the first deed negotiated in what is now the State of Maine. The tablet tells us that in 1625 two Indian sagamores, John Samoset and Unongoit, sold to John Brown of New Harbor a tract of land beginning at Pemaquid Falls and running to the head of New Harbor, thence south to the end of Muscongus Island, then 25 miles into the country, then 8 miles northwest, then south to the starting point. That tract took in all of the present towns of Bristol, Bremen and Damariscotta, and parts of Newcastle, Nobleboro and other towns. The deed was witnessed by the military commander of the old log fort at Pemaquid, Abraham Shurte. He wrote on the paper, “John Samoset and Unongoit, Indi an sagamores, personally appeared and acknowledged this instrument to be their act and deed, at Pemaquid before me, June 24, 1626.” The deed itself was dated July 15, 1625, showing that it took nearly a year to get the two chiefs and Capt. Shurte together. That may not have been the fault of the Indians, for Shurte was a man who had wide-ranging interests and was seldom at home in Pemaquid.

Nearly a century later, in 1720, recognition was made of that deed at the registry in Boston. “Charlestown, Dec. 26, 1720. Read, and at the request of James Stilson and his sister, Margaret Hilton, formerly Stilson, they being claimers and heirs of said lands, and it was accordingly so entered. Samuel Phipps, Clerk of the Committee on the Eastern Lands.”

The same recognition of Indian sales held true along the Penobscot. In 1815 the Massachusetts Committee on the Eastern Lands granted a township on the west side of the Penobscot above Old Town to the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, the new school that in the course of time would become Colby College. The document making that grant began as follows: “Whereas the Agent for the Sale of the Eastern Lands was authorized to give a deed of Township No. 3 on the west side of the Penobscot River, purchased from the Indians,to the Trustees of the M L & T Institution, now therefore I do, in behalf of the Commonwealth, assign to said Trustees title in that township of land purchased from the Penobscot tribe of Indians, containing 29,164 acres, as surveyed by the direction of Salem Town in the year 1797.”

Those are only a few instances of subsequent recognition of Indian land titles. There were many more throughout Maine’s turbulent colonial history.

Year: 1965