Radio Script #1182

Little Talks on Common Things
December 17, 1978

Besides our native Maine writers, the number of prominent authors who have retired to homes in Maine and those who have long spent summers on our seacoast, or beside our lakes, is impressive. They include such names as Margaret Deland, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Samuel Eliot Morison, Booth Tarkington, and Kenneth Roberts.

One of the prominent writers still living, after many summers in the Blue Hill region of our coast has made his permanent, year round retirement home in the little coastal town of Brooklin, where he still resides, now a man of advanced age. He is E. B. White, famous author of the children’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web,” and for many years the columnist of “One Man’s Meat” in the New Yorker magazine.

In his memoirs, published in 1974 and his letters, put into book form in 1976, White makes many references to Maine. As one would assume, a large number are to his Brooklin home and the local environment. But more than a dozen refer to our own part of Central Maine.

About a year ago, Mr. White lost his charming wife of nearly fifty years, Katherine Sargent White. A few years before my own wife died in 1959, she and I had the pleasure of being hosts to Mr. and Mrs. White on the occasion of his receiving an honorary degree at Colby College. He was kind enough to praise my book, Kennebec Yesterdays, which I considered a significant compliment, coming from such a prominent and critical writer. The Whites became close friends of President and Mrs. Strider at Colby, so that his connection with our local college has been close.

Now for some of White’s published references to Maine. Let us start with one that concerns his boyhood contacts with our state. “For me as a boy the golden time of year was summer, when we all went to a rented camp on the shore of Great Pond, one of Maine’s Belgrade Lakes. The era began when I was about five years old in 1904. It was sheer enchantment. We Whites were city people and everything about the Belgrades was a new experience: the big freshwater lakes, the pines and spruces and birches, the pasture with its sweetfern and juniper, the farmhouse where we took our meals, the rough camp with its sparsely furnished bedrooms, the backhouse with its can of chloride of lime, the boating and swimming, and the company of other campers along the shore.

“The month of August was four solid weeks of heaven. Father took exactly one month’s vacation, always that month. July was a time of waiting with sultry nights in a hammock on the screened porch,games in the street just before dark, dust laid by the spindly cart. At that time American nomadic life had not begun. In those days there were no campers and trailers with outboard motors lashed to their tops.

“The journey to Belgrade was a miracle of planning and execution. The packing of trunks began weeks in advance. Father, who spent thousands of hours commuting between Mount Vernon and New York in a day coach, embraced Pullman cars with passion – a once-a-year affair, when he shot his wad and bought over-night accommodations on the Bar Harbor Express for his entire family. It must have run into a lot of money, but Father was no pinchpenny. The Bar Harbor Express left New York in the evening and we got to Belgrade Depot at about nine in the morning. After dinner in Grand Central Station, we boarded the fashionable train with its green lights of compartments and drawing rooms, and upper and lower berths. The drawing room fan had three speeds with little Elwyn – that’s myself – at the controls.

“The delicious smells and sounds of Belgrade are still with me after many years of separation. I spent much of my time in a canoe, exploring bogs and streams, netting turtles. At night I fell asleep to the distant thump of a single-cylinder engine far out in the lake – the little launch built in Mount Vernon, New York and shipped to Belgrade, and we would all crowd into her, nestled together in the tiny cockpit like barnswallows in their nests, and we crossed the pond in all kinds of weather. The launch was named the Jessie, after Mother, who couldn’t swim and who hated and feared the water.

“Leaving the Gleason shore, we would steer straight for Horse Point a mile away, then head westerly for the long, two-mile stretch to Allen Point, then on to the well-concealed mouth of Belgrade Stream, which led to the Hills, now Belgrade Lakes Village. At Bean’s store, Father would treat us to a round of Moxie, and we would feed the big bass that hung around the wharf. Then we would head back across the lake, sometimes adding to the boat’s intolerable burden, a case of Moxie. A new drink had just come out called Coca-Cola, but Father said it was just a cheap imitation of Moxie and without virtue.”

Some twenty years later, after he had begun to gain recognition as a writer, White visited the Belgrades again. In 1927 he had vacationed at Mosher’s Camps. He wrote to a friend in New York: “The reason I chose Maine is because there is a lady here who takes the New York Times and let’s me have it after she is through. I have taken off about 15 pounds. There is a spare bedroom in my shack and, I trust, if you ever come this May, you will feel free to join me.”

Nine years later in 1936, White was at Bert Mosher’s again. He wrote to his brother: “I return to Belgrade. Things haven’t changed much. There’s still a train called. the Bar Harbor Express. Portland is foggy in the morning, and the Pullman blankets are thin and cold. When you look out the diner windows, steam is rising from the pastures and the sun is out. Pretty soon the train is skirting a blue lake called Messalonskee. Things don’t change much’ – even names of people we have long ,known here – Caswell, Bartlett, Bickford, Gleason. The lake is clear and still at dawn, and the sound of a cowbell comes softly from a farmer’s woodlot. A fish rises in the lily pads and parts the water with a plop. The water in the room’s basin is icy before breakfast, and cuts sharply into your nose and ears. But the boards of the dock are already hot in the sun, and there are hot doughnuts for breakfast. A crow calls fearfully and far. If a night breeze springs up, you are aware of a restless noise alprig the shore and before you fall asleep you near intimate talk between waves and rocks that lie below the bending birches. Indeed things don’t change much. Meadow Stream still has a beginning in the pickerel weeds. If
you push along, gently, a blue heron will rise with a heavy squawk and a flap.

“Over at the Mills is a frogbox sunk half in the water. Big bass swim lazily in the deep water at the end of the wharf well fed. At twilight cows come hesitantly down the woods road to steal a drink at the cove. Rocks in the stream behind the Salmon Lake House are colored red and green, where boats have scraped them. Sometimes a farm dog barks. Yes sir, I have returned to Belgrade. I thought somebody ought to know.”

In 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor, White took his stepson to Belgrade. Writing his wife from Mosher’s Bear Spring Camps, he said: “Very hot here, and everyone is in the lake. Joe has been in for more than an hour, and shows no tendency to come out. We went fishing last night and caught five big white perch. This place is as American as, Coca-Cola. Raymond Duncan is here in a brown smock. Other guests are Dorothy Lamour and Eddie Cantor. We have news that the temperature is 106 in Bangor. Bangor is a great comfort to Maine people in hot weather.”

In 1964, some ten years after he had received his honorary degree from Colby, White was again at the college. President Lyndon Johnson had awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When illness prevented White from going to Washington to receive it, the President asked Senator Edmund Muskie to take the medal to Maine on his next trip to the state, and confer it upon White in the President’s name. Muskie arranged for the presentation to be made in Waterville, at the home of President and Mrs. Robert Strider on Mayflower Hill.

Back at his home in Brooklin, White wrote a gracious letter to the Striders, in which he said: “Yesterday was a fine day for me, and you had a big part in making it so. Occasions of this sort are not easy for me, and I usually spend a lot of time dreading them, but your warmth and friendliness were so immediately apparent that I felt at home as soon as I arrived. I send you my thanks and my gratitude.

“I had not intended to put anyone to trouble about the medal, but Senator Muskie’s scheme gave me the pleasure of returning to the Colby Campus and to become acquainted with you. The only thing that marred the day was that Mrs. White couldn’t be along. She makes much more sense than I do.

“I was awfully glad to see Dean Marriner again. I was moved by the Senator’s presentation; astonished by the sound of my own voice, touched that it all came on President’s Kennedy’s birthday, and very proud to strut around your living room in my decorated condition and in such distinguished company. I shall always recall with pleasure my presidential day at Colby.”

We have time for just one more Maine reference in these letters of E. B. White. The publisher’s representative who edited the letters was Cor.01a Machemer, daughter of the present chairman of the Chemistry Department a t Colby, who has his home near the old North Belgrade depot. Three years ago, in June 1975, Mr. White wrote to Miss Machemer: “I am going to like being edited by a girl who grew up overlooking Snow Pond. I always wanted to try a canoe trip down Belgrade Stream from Long Pond to Messalonskee, but I never made it””

In these brief 15 minutes I have given you a mere sample of the memorable style of one of the great essayists of our. time, E. B. White of Brooklin, Maine.

Year: 1978