Radio Script #938

Little Talks on Common Things
September 10, 1972

Incredible as it seems to me, this broadcast begins the 25th consecutive year of Little Talks on Common Things. It was in the fall of 1948 when Carleton Brown, owner and manager of the then comparatively new radio station, WTVL, asked me to give a few 15 minute broadcasts on Sunday evening. I agreed to do so for three weeks, and now those three weeks have stretched into 24 completed years with the 25th year now under way.

Not counting the repeated broadcasts, selected from past years for presentation each Sunday during the summer, the entirely different broadcasts now number 938. Since each broadcast contains about 1,800 words, there have gone forth on the airwaves from WTVL, for this program of Little Talks, a total of nearly 1,700,000 words.

When the program began I had no idea it would turn into distinctly a program on local and regional history. It has by no means been an important program, but it has proved one point, namely, that many people are interested in the way folks lived and the things they used here in the Kennebec Valley in the days gone by. If that were not true, the program would have been forced off the air many years ago.

In fact more than ten years ago, I felt that television would soon doom this radio program to extinction. But somehow not only have old listeners stayed with it, but many new ones have been added. One of the most gratifying results has been the number of young persons who listen to this program that was once thought to be only for old timers, the more senile the better, I assure you the program was never intended to be thus limited. It has always been meant for people of any age who care about this region’s history and heritage.

I want to begin this new season’s broadcasts with reference to a Waterville religious organizatioon about which I have said too little in the past. That is St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. It was November, 1909, when that church opened its parish house attached to the church building, just behind Dr. Boyer’s red-painted dwelling and stable on the corner of Elm and Center Streets, where now stands the Sears Roebuck Store. The addition, long contemplated, was at last ready in that fall of 1909, when I entered college as a freshman, and the annual parish meeting was the first gathering in the addition. The rector at the time was the Rev. Cannon Nicholson. The senior warden was Geo. K. Boutelle, president of the Ticonic Bank, and grandson of Waterville’s lawyer, stationer and business promoter, Timothy Boutelle. The church treasurer was Foster Percival.

The Sentinel carried an account of the annual meeting, one paragraph of which is of special interest. It said: “After the meeting, the young people of the parish presented tableaux arranged by Miss Ruth Abbott. The scenes depicted the love affairs of persons of various occupations. In the final scene Miss Marguerite Percival, as an aristocratic heiress, was successfully wooed by L. G. Salisbury in the part of a poor but honest farmer.”

The Sentinel said the ladies of the church had furnished the dining room and had supplied all necessary dishes and silverware.

At the same time when they opened the parish house, the people of St. Mark’s had arranged to buy the adjoining property on Center Street for a rectory. The occasion warranted a surprise party for Cannon Nicholson, who had just completed ten years’ service to the local church. Early that evening, Mr. Nicholson received a telephone call summoning him to a downtown office. When he arrived there, he was puzzled to find the office closed. There was nothing to do but return home to the rectory. When he got back, he found that during his absence his home had been taken over by his church people. The ladies had provided delicious refreshments, and in the conventional phrase for such occasions, “a good time was had by all. ”

Although Coburn Classical Institute, whose history goes back to 1820, no longer holds classes in Waterville, but is merged with the Oak Grove School in Vassalboro, we like to think of it as still belonging to Waterville, from which the merged school now enrolls many of its students. So let us today take a look at Coburn in the year 1917, when the U.S. entered the First World War.

The catalogue for that year carried the heading: “Coburn Classical Institute, College Latin School 1820-29; Waterville Academy 1829-65; Waterville Classical Institute 1865-83; Coburn since 1883.”

The President of the Coburn Trustees in 1917 was George Otis Smith, head of the U.S. Geological Survey, who had married his Colby classmate, a member of the renowned Coburn family of Skowhegan, and niece of Maine’s former Governor Abner Coburn. Vice-President was Dr. Frederick C. Thayer, the prominent physician for whom Thayer Hospital is named. The board’s secretary was Edwin Carey Whittemore, pastor of the local Baptist Church, official of the Maine Baptist Convention, and author of the Centennial History of Waterville. Treasurer was the well known Waterville business man, Martin Blaisdell. Other prominent Coburn trustees were U. S. Senator, Charles F. Johnson; former Governor William T. Haines; Supreme Court Chief Justice, Leslie C. Cornish; Associate Justice, Norman Bassett; Colby President, Arthur J. Roberts, and this city’s leading construction contractor, Horace Purington.

In 1917, Coburn was headed by Drew T. Hawthorn, who had on his faculty seven full time and two part time teachers. Best remembered of that group, in the affection of Coburn graduates was Miss Adele Gilpatrick, dean of girls; Miss Clara Morrill of the celebrated Morrill Sisters, who long lived at No. 5 Winter Street; Fred Daye, instructor in math and jealous guardian of the telescope in the Coburn tower, an instrument Daye always declared superior to the telescope in Colby’s Shannon Observatory, and Phyllis St. Clair, my own Colby classmate of 1913, who later married the Colby gridiron great and Coburn football coach, Paul “Ginger” Fraser.

Of the part time teachers, many Waterville people still living remember the dignified and stately Miss Exerine Flood, who then taught speech and dramatics at Coburn. Miss Flood’s portrait by a distinguished New York artist now hangs in the Trustee Room of the Waterville Public Library, evidence of her long and devoted services as a library trustee. In charge of the Coburn office, where she served for many years, was Miss Ruth Abbott, who later became Mrs. Frank Goodrich.

War conditions had pushed Coburn enrollment down a bit in 1917, so that there were only 85 students, but the end of the war would see it soon back to normal. The school offered then only two courses of study, called Classical and English Scientific. Both prepared for college, the essential difference being that the latter course required no Latin. Cost of attending Coburn was cheap in 1917. Tuition was $45 a year, board and room $4.50 a week. A thrifty student could attend for a full year for no more than $200, and if he lived at home in Waterville for about $50.

A few of the boys and girls who attended Coburn in that first year of America’s participation in a world war are well remembered today. Mary Warren, long a teacher of Latin at Waterville High School, but now retired, is my neighbor on Winter Street. Frederick Fassett. Jr. was recently retired after a prominent career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Freddie, if as we called him, is fondly mentioned in the memoirs of the notable scientist, Vannevar Bush, who was a close friend of both Fassett and his late wife, the daughter of Judge William Pattengall. Doris Hardy, herself later a teacher and dean of girls at Coburn is now Mrs. Edward Haweeli residing in Worcester, Massachusetts. She has served also as a trustee of Colby College. Mary Whitcomb, daughter of merchant and businessman, Sel Whitcomb, still keeps in touch with many friends in Waterville. Another Coburn boy of the time was Leo Darviau, who won renown in the field of drama. Not to be overlooked are members of the Coburn Class of 1917, who had graduated just before this particular catalogue appeared, but who were seniors in the school when, at Woodrow Wilson’s request, Congress declared war against the Kaiser’s Germany. One of those 1917 graduates was Stanley Black, son of Colby’s long-time professor of history and first secretary of its chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, J. William Black. Another was Grace Foster, granddaughter of Colby’s professor of Greek and sister of my own classmate, Dr. John H. Foster. Another was Elizabeth Whipple, now Mrs. Elizabeth Whipple Butler, residing in the Whipple home on Burleigh Street. Her brother, William, was a student at Coburn the year after Betty graduated. Another girl in the 1917 class was Christine McGann, now the widow of Colby coach Eddie Roundy.

We will close this broadcast with reference to a man of long ago who became well known for his homespun verses well before the time of the now famous Holman Day. That man was Noah Barker, born in Exeter, Maine, in 1816. He became a Piscataquis County lawyer, but spent a lot of time writing verses for newspapers and magazines. He was by no means a distinguished poet, but he could put together verses of the kind later made more famous by such preferred practitioners as Day and Edgar Guest. So we close today with what I think was one of the best of Barker’s poems. I think you will enjoy it.

“‘The fools ain’t all dead’ is a maxim that’s sounded
From grog shop and stable, from tavern and shed;
And more truthful adage was never propounded
Than this modern proverb, ‘The fools ain’t all dead’;
While faki~s the practice of science are aping
Though science goes hungry while faking is fed,
While hundreds of thousands are greedily gaping
To swallow a humbug, the fools ain’t all dead.
While churches will agree that every true preacher.
Should pound out his sermon by stamping and blows,
That learning disqualifies man for a teacher,
And gospel’s not pure til it twangs through the nose;
While fops are esteemed for the starch in the collar,
And bearoil’s preferred to the brains in the head,

“While merits outweighed by the almighty dollar,
It is plain to be seen that the fools ain’t all dead.
The fools ain’t all dead and my readers well know it,
For he who can hope to win glory or bread
By leaving his lawbooks and turning to poet,
Illustrates the fact that the fools ain’t all dead.”

And, with that wholesome truth from old Noah Barker of Exeter, we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1972