Radio Script #1010

Little Talks on Common Things
April 21, 1974

A family magazine that came to hundreds of Maine homes in my boyhood was the Youths Companion, and I am sure there are many persons still living who remember it well. In fact, though begun in 1829, long before any persons now living were born, the Companion lasted exactly 100 years, finally discontinuing publication in 1929.

Some of us remember soliciting subscriptions for the Youths Companion. The magazine offered all sorts of prizes for new subscriptions, from as few as two to as many as twenty. I recall vividly getting a magic lantern for securing four new subscribers.

On the masthead of the magazine was the statement that it was published by the Perry Mason Company. There was actually no such person on the staff as Perry Mason. That was a fictitious name for the real owner who did not want his name used. That man was Daniel Sharp Ford, who both owned and edited the Youths Companion from 1857 to 1899. I have often wondered whether the inventor of the fictional lawyer Perry Mason was a reader of the Companion when a boy and named his hero for that fictitious publisher.

I am indebted to my friend and Colby graduate, John Pullen, author of The Twentieth Maine and other books, for new information about a long standing and universal favorite among Companion contributors. That writer was Dr. C. A. Stephens of Norway, Maine, who married the renowned opera singer, Madame Scala, and built a unique and spectacular home near Pennesseewassee Lake close to the hamlet known as Frosts Corner. My boyhood home in Bridgton was only 18 miles away and I often looked at that Stephens mansion much as people then gawked at New York skyscrapers.

John Pullen says that in the late 1860’s a young man walked into Daniel Ford’s office trying to sell a few short stories. Ford paid that young man, C. A. Stephens, $7 a piece for four stories. Since they were the first Stephens had ever sold, he was elated, but little did he realize that it would result in long association with the magazine. I have forgotten most of the stories and articles that I read more than 65 years ago in the Youths Companion, but I share with hundreds of other persons the still vivid recollection of C. A. Stephens’ Old Squire stories.

John Pullen has discovered how that series came into being. Publisher Ford decided that his readers preferred true stories rather than fiction. Ford was a staunch, orthodox Congregationalist and he meant by true stories, actual events with characters who were persons that had really lived, not the composite make-believes that fiction writers so glibly invent. Ford arranged for Stephens and several other enterprising young writers to travel about the countryside, interviewing people who could tell their interesting episodes from their own experience. The crew had scarcely begun their research when Ford’s health began to fail. Fearing he might not live long, and wishing to get his plan of publication into print, he asked Stephens to write recollections of his own boyhood, which Ford knew Stephens had spent on his grandfather’s farm in Norway.

So Stephens began to search his memory for events that occurred in his boyhood and of earlier happenings that his grandfather recounted. C. A. Stephens had good reason to feel close to his grandfather, whom in the stories he called the Old Squire. The grandfather had had five sons, everyone of whom enlisted in the Civil War and not one of whom survived it.
So the grandchildren, brothers, and cousins, to the number of six, were brought up by the grandfather, while the mothers and other relatives took all the others. The group on the Old Squire’s farm were six boys and girls from nine to sixteen years old, when they came to the Norway farm from six different states.

So, bit by bit, the early Stephens stories told about those boys and girls, their neighbors and friends, their fun and their trials, their tasks and duties, their schooling and their final leaving the old place. There were interspersed stories of the days before those children were born, the struggles of the young couple who came to the farm in the early 1800’s.

John Pullen remembers a story called “The Wild Rose Sweeting.” I remember better “The Night the Stars Fell”. That story tells how the young squire and his wife of a few months were returning on horseback and pillion from a visit to relatives near Portland, when night overtook them. Before they reached Norway, they witnessed an awesome spectacle, the greatest shower of meteors ever recorded in Maine. That pious, orthodox couple must indeed have thought the end of the world had come. In the brilliant style he had developed, Stephens pictured the terror and suspense, the determination of the man to hide his own fear and calm the distraught wife, and the tremendous relief that came with their safe arrival just as streaks of dawn appeared in the east.

John Pullen suggests that the stories appealed to us kids of the early 1900’s because rural life had changed little since the 1870’s. I am not so sure that the explanation is so simple. For myself, I must say that I was brought up in a Maine industrial village. The first cow I ever saw milked was in the Boston zoo. All I knew about a farm was that it was a good place, inhabited by relatives, where we sometimes had a big chicken dinner on Sunday. I did vaguely know that potatoes did not grow on trees and one did not dig apples out of the ground. I learned the difference between turnips and carrots, between spinach and chard, in my father’s store, not on a farm.

Yet I was entranced by those Old Squire stories. Both my brother and I awaited eagerly the arrival of each week’s Youths Companion with its old yellow cover. The same was true of my cousin, Ted Marriner, who lived in Maine’s largest city, Portland. Ted had an opportunity to see the rapid expansion of Cape Elizabeth’s market gardens, because his grandfather ran a general store at Ferry Village, but actually his ignorance of farm life was as abysmal as mine.

I think what appealed to all children of our generation was the way the Old Squire’s grandchildren acted. They behaved much as children did in my day and as my own grandchildren did when they were young. I don’t think either Sesame Street or Captain Kangaroo make the Old Squire’s stories indigestible to boys and girls today. Somehow C. A. Stephens grasped a quality of childhood and teenage psychology that, as Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare, was “not for an age, but for all time.”

It is notorious that the poorest paid, highly educated profession is the Christian ministry. Although pastors’ salaries have been appreciably raised during the past quarter century, they are still far below those paid in other professions. It is gratifying to note that the national protestant denominations have, in many cases, established minimum salaries for their clergy, and have either kept a small church open by granting subsidy or let the church close as wholly inefficient. So the situation today is indeed better than it was at the turn of the century. At that time, in my boyhood Maine town, not one of the four full-time ministers got more than $500 a year, and often the church was behind on the pastor’s salary, small as it was. When I joined the Colby faculty in 1923, more than half of Maine’s numerous Baptist ministers were getting less than $1000 a year, and the Methodists fared no better.

It is interesting, therefore, to note what a Free Baptist paper had to say about ministers’ salaries in 1867, just after the Civil War. Listen to this. “How long must our ministers live on the old adage, ‘God will provide’? That is the way to educate our churches in stinginess. Many pastors do their churches wrong by giving the impression that the Lord expects them to work for nothing. Our clergy have never had respectable salaries, perhaps they never will.”

The same paper chided church members for what it called free rides. It said: “There are otherwise good members in our churches who are free riders. They take no adequate share in church expenses. They claim a carte blanche to Heaven, a free pass, while a few of their fellow members do the work and pay the bills. These feather-bed members are a burden to the church.”

Ministers’ salaries in the old days were supplemented by donation parties, annual occasions when parishioners brought commodities to the parsonage. That was the way one Winslow minister kept his family fed during the winter of 1870. During the year, other donations were sometimes received. That Free Baptist paper in 1867 contained the following thank you notices.

“Rev. E. E. Clark and his wife of Oxford, Me., express thanks for donations of $106.”

“Rev. and Mrs. G. W. Gould acknowledge with gratitude the receipt of $125 from the Free Baptist Society of Wayne, Maine.”

“Rev. and Mrs. S. A. McKeon of Gardiner, Maine acknowledge a generous donation of $100 in addition to salary.”

“Some friends of the Free Baptist pastor at Orland, Maine, have surprised him with $50 besides the presents already given him on the church Christmas tree.”

It has taken the Christian church a long time to get over the impression that its clergy must be, for their temporal living, mere objects of charity. That is why ministers were long given free passes on the railroads, special discounts in the stores, and other perquisites, considered not as pay, but as charitable favors to a poverty-stricken profession.

How much better for the clergy and how much more respectable for the rest of us it would be to have our ministers paid adequate salaries and expected to pay their bills like all citizens, without special handouts.

Year: 1974