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Little Talks on Common Things
Volume 1
Little Talks on Common Things
INTRODUCTION
Dean Ernest C. Marriner of Colby College in Waterville, Maine researched, wrote
and delivered for 35 years his radio program entitled “Little Talks on Common Things”.
Broadcast on radio station WTVL in Waterville, sponsored through all those years
by Keyes Fibre Company, these essays on the social history of Central Maine attracted a
loyal following of listeners~ Dean Maniner conducted a voluminous correspondence with
sources for his programs, and traveled all over the State interviewing Mainers and
examining old documents. Over time the listeners contributed more and more of the
material used for the program – seventeenth century account books, old newspapers,
letters written by Civil War soldiers, entertainment programs, banquet menus, etc.
There are 1,323 scripts in all. The program ran each Sunday evening for about 36
weeks per year, starting in 1948 and ending with Marriner’s death in 1983. In the early
1970′ s some of the programs were re-broadcast in July and August, but in most years the
program was “off the air” in the summer.
Except for Broadcast #1,000, no recordings exist for the first 23 years of the
program, but Colby College has in its Special Collections in the Miller Library audio
versions (old fashioned reel-to-reel tapes) of the last few hundred programs, or at least
most of them, commencing with the broadcast of June 11, 1972.
Dean Marriner’s daughter, Ruth M. Szopa, prepared a superb index which
comprises Volume 25 of this 2S-volume set of scripts. She also did the proof-reading of
all the scripts, discovering multiple mistakes which have now been corrected.
The Dean’s son, Ernest C. Maniner, Jr., typed or re-typed many of the scripts.
He also did some research to correct obvious errors, determine preferred spellings of
proper names, fill in blanks in the original manuscripts, and verify the identities of
persons named more than once by slightly different names or titles.
No doubt there are other errors in the scripts which neither Ruth nor Ernest, Jr.
noticed; but it is hoped that those remaining factual errors have been minimized.
It was Dean Maniner’s habit to re-broadcast most of his Easter and Christmas
essays. Sometimes the re-broadcast was assigned a new number and sometimes it wasn’t.
As a result the highest number (for the final script) is 1,338, whereas there are only
1,323 different scripts.
LITTr.:e: TALKS’ ON :.COMMON r;rB:mGS
1st Broadcast No”eJi\ber ’14 ~ ‘1948
The unconnnon and unusual excites and thrills us, but all our lives we .are
in touch with ordinary things that .are significant.and sometimes .even spectacu1ar.
Abraham Lincoln once said: “God must love the conunon peopl~, he made
so many of them.” So it is that we conunonpeople,both he who speaks and those
who listen, are asked to think for a few minutes about life’s ‘connnon things.
There is an old saying that begins “as inevitable as ……. ;. you know the
rest of it. Yes indeed, one of life’s conunonest things is taxes. A prelude to
these programs therefore came lastSunday.evening when the Mayor of Waterville,
Hon. Russell Squire, presented the sound, unanswerable case for a local taxation
survey. The mayor explained the .decision.of the city government to employ
professional valuation experts to survey all real estate holdings in Waterville
and establish new valuations for tax assessment •. Every loyal citizen should approve.
Tax valuation ought to be on an impartial ,scientific basis. Perhaps
someday we shall see that this is only a beginning and that all our municipal
services should be operated by business methods under an impartial administrator,
responsible to no political party . The taxpayer is interested not only in
paying a fair tax in comparison with his neighbor; he is interested also in
getting maximum services for his tax dollars. In local democracies we make
haste slowlYibut in the longrun’ .partisan interests cannot prevail .over the
common interests. Let us be grateful that we have a mayor and a city government
willing to make a start in that direction.
*****
How connnon, yet how mysterious, .is the miracle of birth. A future king of
England was born today, amid age-old ceremony, in Buckingham Palace. What sort
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of an England will he rule? Is the old England dying, the old empire fading
away? The little prince in Buckingham Palace, now only a few hours old, may
symbolize for Old England what Tennyson wrote at the end of his 1dylls of
the King. The Round Table of the glorious knights had fallen apart; King
Arthur was dead; the sword Excalibur had sunk into the sea. As old Sir Belvedere
watched the flaming sword drop beneath the waves, “the sun rose,
bringing the new year.” For the little prince, may someday the sun rise
bringing England a new era.
*****
One of life’s commonest things is hunger. How easily most of us satisfy
it in this American land of abundance. But how very hungry we city folks
would get if it were not for the farmer. In our persistent cry for better
urban services, he is often forgotten. So I want to share with .you a bit of
writing that recently came to my attention. I have a neighbor who occasionally
pands me copies of a weekly newspaper published in his native Scotland.
It is the Peebleshire News, put out in southern Scotland just north of the
English border. In its issue of June 11, 1948 appeared an editorial that applies
equally well to the farmers of Maine. Here is part of it:
“Our rural people pay high taxes, sometimes in excess of the cities,
and yet they do not have the same services. People are moving away from the
farms of Scotland. If this depopulation continues, rural Scotland may become
a national park for which the industrial areas will have to pay. We see towns
and cities extended, eating up more and more agricultural land, and we take
it as a sign of progress. Gone is the day of praising healthy life on the
farm. ”
That was published in far-away Scotland. Perhaps it doesn’t apply to
Maine. Never having lived on a farm, I cannot claim to be sure about it. But
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I do know that a shrewd observer of Maine life who was brought up on a
farm, had a v.ery definite opinion. That observer was Arthur J. Roberts,
President of Colby College, who used to say: “In Maine farming isn’t an
occupation; it’s a misfortune.”
Let us who live in the City ever be mind~l of our dependence upon
the farms. Let us support vigorously every effort to extend modern services
to the rural areas.
*****
Is devotion a cammon thing? Isn’t it unusual? Not at all. We see it
all around us. A mother lavishes sacrificial devotion on her child. A
father goes without things himself that his family may have more. Not all
employees are clock-watchers. Many are devoted to their work.
Devotion is a precious common thing, but it rarely hits the front
pages of our newspapers. It is eventful, therefore, when a great metropolitan
newspaper gives space to the devotion of a man who died 150 years
ago. Last Monday, filling two columns of the first page and running over
to fill an entire inside page of the New York Times was the story of the
long-lost Boswell Papers. In the 18th century James Boswell wrote what is
considered the greatest biography in the English language, his Life of
Samuel Johnson, writing it as an act of devotion to the man with whom he
spent day after day, recording the acts and. sayings of the man.
After Boswell’s death his precious notes and journals became scattered
and neglected. For more than a hundred years no one knew whether
they .still existed or had been destroyed. Then began another story of
devotion. Col. Ralph Isham, a young officer in the first World War, determined
to spend his time and fortune collecting every scrap of paper
connected with Boswell. During the past 25 years he has gathered those
papers from dusty rooms in Scottish castles, from an old croquet box,
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from barrels in mouldy cellars, from trunks in cob-webbed attics. The arrival
of the whole collection in the United States, on its way to Yale University,
was the occasion of the New York Times story. Waterville is interested in this
discovery because at Yale the papers will be studied and eventually publiShed
by a Colby graduate, Dr. Frederick Pottle.
Dr. Pottle will prepare for modern readers not only details of the association
of those two men, Boswell and Johnson, but the contents of hundreds
of letters addressed to Boswell by the great men of his time, such as JoShua
Reynolds, the artist, Alexander Pope, the aged poet, and members of the
royal court. The Whole story is a serial of devotion, of Boswell to Johnson,
of Col. Isham to the public cause of finding the missing Boswell papers.
*****
Another common thing is hero-worship. Every boy has a time in his life
when he adores some man and wants to be like him. Many of us have felt the
stirring influence of some person Whom we had come to idolize. Yet, did you
ever stop to think how rarely it happens that we ever know personally and intimately
anyone who can truly be called great? Have you ever had a speaking
acquaintance with a truly great man? Perhaps you have, and do not know it,
because really great men seldom advertise their greatness.
So, perhaps without being aware of it, many of us in Central Maine have
known well a great man. For Rufus Jones was truly great — a great mystic,
a great Quaker, a great teacher, a great humanitarian, a great soul. Shortly
before he died a friend said to Rufus Jones, “You must write one more book,
a book that will help modern folks who have the scientific outlook to find
their way back to vital religion. Many people have stopped going to church
because what they hear there is at Sharp .variance with What they know. II
So now, a few months after·Rufus Jones’ death, appears his last book,
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“A Call to What is Vital”, a book which he says he wrote in sympathy with
folks who say “I I d rather see where 11m going than remember where I I ve
been.”
In this little book of 140 pages that great world citizen, a native
of Maine, interprets the dynamic force that activated his own wonderful
life, a religion that accepts the facts of science, but clarifies those
facts by revelation and by faith, by what the Quakers call the inner
light. In simple, impressive prose this great son of Maine bids us heed
the greatest story ever told and emulate the greatest life that ever
lived.
*****
And now, at the close of this first Little Talks we say as the old
preachers used to say. “Here endeth the first lesson.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
2nd Broadcast November 21, 1948
We have been accused of having them arrange the big event in Buckingham
Palace last week to accommodate the first broadcast in this series, but perhaps
we can more rightly be accused of dragging it in. By what logic could we herald
the birth of a future king on a program devoted to common things? Didn’t Princess
Elizabeth herself say, “Why all the fuss? Lots of women are having
babies. ” As Octavus Roy Cohen’s fictional character, Florian Slappey, would
say, “We ain’t got nothin’ else but.” And to the parents of any other baby,
the royal Prince of Edinburgh, with all his crown prospects, takes second
place. Indeed I know one grandfather right here in waterville, whose grandson
was born less than twenty-four hours after the King’s grandson came into the
world, and that waterville grandfather is quite willing to let his tiny descendant
forgo scepters and palaces for the chance of growing up in a free American
society, where by his own merits and by individual enterprise’ he can
build his own palaces and win his own crowns.
What’s in a name? Roses would smell as sweet, or wouldn’t they? Reference
to the little prince in Buckingham Palace reminds us of ~e plight of that
baby I S father until a very few years ago. He lacked tlJ.e commonest possession
of us all — a family name. He was simply Philip not even Phil Jones or
Phil Smith — just Philip. Before he married Elizabeth Windsor he decided,
quite understandably, that it was time to make up for his family’s 200 years
of indifference to a name, and, taking the name of his distinguished uncle,
he became Philip Mountbatten. And that was when the King made him Duke of
Edinburgh.
*****
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What common things are books. Sometimes it seems as if we are drowning
in a sea of printers’ ink. But there are books and books. The mere art of
collecting them is a joy to many people. Most of you have heard of the Edwin
Arlington Robinson Treasure Room at Colby College, and of the rare
books and manuscripts assembled there — the fruit of more than twenty years
of devoted search and seizure by that inspired collector, gifted writer, and
ingenious literary detective, Professor Carl J. Weber. Some of the recent
acquisitions to this collection of literary rareties Shows a unique connection
of three devoted men. First, Robinson himself, devoted to the calling
of the poet. Born at Head Tide, Maine in 1869, most of his early life was
spent at Gardiner, Whence his poems went out to be greeted with neglect by
editors and reviewers. But the time came when he was recognized as one of
America’s few really great poets. It is especially fitting that Robinson’s
personal library, as well as the rare editions of his books, together with
many letters and other personal mementoes, should now be housed in a room
named for him in a college near the same Kennebec that he knew so well.
Among the first to recognize the merit of Robinson’s poetry was a
young editor of the outlook, Harold Trowbridge Pulsifer, himself a recognized
writer of poetry. He opened his magazine’s pages to Robinson’s verses
and was influential in gaining for the Gardiner man a national hearing. Retiring
from the OUtlook, Harold Pulsifer settled in Maine and gathered at
his home in East Harpswell a marvelous collection of poetry in rare editions.
Mr. Pulsifer died this year and at a meeting of the Colby Library Associates
last Friday evening it was announced that Mrs. Pulsifer has given that unexcelled
collection to Colby College, where it will, as soon as possible, be
housed in the Pulsifer Poetry Room, an appropriate neighbor to the Edwin
Arlington Robinson Treasure Room.
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In Robinson’s days at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire he made. the
acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Sargent Perry. While a student at Harvard,
Robinson had used as a textbook Perry’s History of English Literature in the
18th Century. The two men became close .friends, and Mrs. Perry , a niece of
James Russell Lowell, a poet herself and a painter, did the familiar portrait
which was copied as a frontispiece in the volume of Robinson’s Collected
Poems. Lilla Cabot Perry’s original oil painting .of the poet now .hangs in
the Robinson Room at Colby • Like Harold Pulsifer , Thomas Sargent Perry left
a distinguished library upon his death.twodecades ago. Last Friday it was
also announced by the Colby ~ibrary ~ssociates that the entire library of Mr.
Perry has been given to Colby College-~.the.gift of his daughter, .Miss Mar~
ar-et Perry of Hancock, New HamJ;’shire.
When the Perry Room also is set up in the Colby Library, the names of
Robinson, Pulsifer and Perry will remind many generations that among the worthy
causes of life’s devotions are those common things called books. And books, let
us remember, issue from the senses and emotions and brains of individual men
and women.
*****
What a lot of fun the newspapers and the radio commentators . are having
with the wrong·guesses of the pollsters, the Gallup and the Ropers. One columnist
voiced a common opinion when he .wrote: “We are gatheredtodayin-:these
rather neglected memorial acres, which for twelve years have held·but a single
headstone.” He referred, of course, to the demise of the old Literary Digest,
whose prediction of Landon’s. election in ·1936 was a major cause of its oblivion.
Perhaps Roper and Gallup will get tombstones in the sameplotiperhaps
not. Time — the old fellow with the ,scythe, not the.magazine– Will render
the decision-.
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We reserve judgment about these so-called scientific polls. One
swa~~ow does not make a sunnner, and they may be right more often than they’re
wrong. Let us wait and see. But we do have an opinion about another kind of
pol~, the poll tax. Why we people of Maine do not get rid of that relic of
the dark ages is difficult to understand. A poll tax is a head tax, something
one pays just for carrying a head on his shoulders. Women don’t pay
one in Maine,not because they don’t have heads, even worthy heads, but because
the poll tax was long associated with voting. When women at last won
the right to vote, the principle of the poll tax was already in such disrepute
that Maine never got around to taxing women as polls.
The poll tax fracas in the 80th Congress was not concerned with the tax
itself, but only with making its payment a requirement before one can vote.
That is what it still is in several southern states. But not so in Maine.
Nobody at a voting place ever asked you if you had paid your poll tax. What
about payment of poll tax as a prelude to automobile license? Well, there
are some who think that may be of doubtful constitutionality. But they
haven’t much of a case. Ownership of an automobile is not a universal privilege
of all persons above a certain age, but voting is. It takes money to
buy and operate a car; it doesn’t cost you a penny to cast your vote.
The poll tax is outmoded and inconsistent with modern methods of tax
revenue and tax-supported services.. Many states long ago got rid of it.
Will Maine be the last?
*****
Terror reigned for a few minutes last Sunday at the zoo in Stoneham,
Massachusetts. In the midst of 150 persons, many of them children, a fullgrown,
male tiger broke out of its cage. The people escaped injury because
the tiger attacked a lion housed nearby. As the two animals fought through
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the bars, those 150 persons ran out through the doors at each end of the
animal house. The tiger had to be shot.
It is a rare experience for the average American to be faced with death
at the claws of a tiger. But a more common tiger is always with us, with
his claws and fangs carrying a threat no less deadly. He is the tiger of
prejutttce. He shows his ugly head in politics, in religion, in race. The
bitterness of the Dixiecrat revolt in the recent election is remindful of
prejudices so deep-seated that they sometimes seem as powerful today as they
were nearly a century ago. How powerful they were in 1860 is revealed in an
incident that has come to light only within the past year. In the summer of
1947, twenty-one years after the death of Robert Lincoln, the famous Lincoln
papers long in his possession were opened at the Library of Congress. AIthough
they were found to contain nothing sensational and very little that is
new about Abraham Lincoln, they do contain many interesting bits of incident
and anecdote. One of these, seeped in the prejudice of 1860, concerns a
man from Maine, the man who became Vice-President in Lincoln’s first administration,
Hannibal Hamlin, lawyer of Ellsworth and Bangor, and distinguished
graduate of Hebron Academy. In late November of 1860, while he was still in
Springfield, Illinois, although he was now the President-elect, Abraham LincoIn
received a letter signed by three men of’ S. C. It· read’ as followS;’
Abraham Lincoln, Esq.
springfield, Illinois
Dear Sir:
“Spartanburg, S. C.
November 27, 1860
We understand you have a very likely and intelligent mulatto
boy you would dispose of on reasonable terms. Being engaged in
negro trading, if you will let us know what you will take for the
boy Hannibal, known as Hannibal Hamlin, and your price is reasonable,
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we will purchase him, and are prepared to meet you with cash
at Richmond, Virginia on the 18th December.”
This stinging, sarcastic letter is unfortunately not too different fram
the kind of things many of us speak and write in unreasoning defense of our
prejudices.
*****
This is Thanksgiving Week, a time when we are annually reminded of the
many blessings for which we are thankful. We must not, we cannot forget the
millions of men and women and innocent children allover this planet, suffering
tonight fram cold and hunger and haunting fear. As we think of the
tragic scenes of destitution and despair in Greece and Poland, in China and
Korea, in the far-flung regions of the earth, it is very easy for us to pray
as did the Pharisee, “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are.” Let
us not do that. Let us rather be thankful for life’s little things, life’s
common things that need more common use. Let us be grateful for words of
kindness When we expect censure and rebuke, for understanding When we feel we
are so woefully misunderstood, for mercy and forgiveness when all we deserve
is justice. For the common things of life that make all the difference between
mere existence and true 1ivin<], let us .everyone be thankful.
*****
Are you interested in same of our old time expressions and their origin?
Well, I am. So much interested, indeed, that I urge you listeners to send me
any clue you may have to the origin· of two of those expressions. They are
“not worth a Hannah Cook” and “leaning toward Sawyer’s”. When my grandmother
wanted to express the depths of worthlessness, she would say ” it ain’t
worth a Hannah Cook”, and everybOdy in my boyhood section of Maine spoke of .
a tumble-down house or barn as “leaning toward Sawyer’s”. Who was Hannah Cook,
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and why didn’t the old barn lean toward Robinson’s or Jones’s, instead of
toward Sawyer’s? How did those two expressions ever get started? If you think
you know the answer, please let us know. Just mail a card to Little Talks on
Connnon Things, Station WTV’L, Waterville.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
3rd Broadcast November 28~ 1948
Who was it said “I’d rather be right than be President”? How do we know
when we are right? Perhaps that isn’t the main necessity. At least that is
what one recent visitor to Waterville thinks. Las~ month this city was honored
by a visit from the famous eighty-year old writer of sea stories, James
Brendan Connolly, who has been continuously publishing his tales of the heroic
G10ucester fishermen since 1902. All his life Jim Connolly has believed
and has voiced in his stories the importance of that old-fashioned thing we
call conscience. To him it is the voice of God in human life. In his fine
story liThe Trawler”, which won first prize of $2,500 in a contest conducted
by Co11iers magazine, Connolly has one of his characters say something that
is worthy of our attention in this day When we haven’t too high respect for
conscience. This is what Jiin Connolly wrote: “Even when you are wrong, you
are right, if you believe it with all your soul. Because, for a man to do
what he thinks is right, whether he be right. or wrong at the time, is to
come to be surely right in the end. II
*****
Now let us look at some other common things. How very common are words.
From time to time, in this series, we hope to remind you of many conunon and
some uncommon things about those sounds we utter to convey our thoughts,
those symbols which we call words. Tonight let us think for a moment about
simplicity in words. When I was a student in college and a member of Dr. Herbert
Libby’s first class in public speaking, we were one day visited by Senator
Herbert M. Heath. I shall never forget one thing he said to us. “Young
men”, he said, “some of you think you want to be lawyers. Then watch your
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language. Don I t think you can sway any jury of Maine Yankees by saying to
them ‘Last evening as the effulgent orb of day sank below the western horizon,
John Smith departed from his domicile. I You say to that jury ‘Last
night about sunset John Smith left home. “.
The language used in government publications has long been subject to
jibes from befuddled readers. Someone has said “The writer of a government
bulletin uses words not to conununicate, but to excommunicate, thought.” An
amusing book called “Federal Prose” ridicules that sort of writing as it
deserves. “Haste makes waste”, written in government style, becomes “Precipitation
entails negation of economy.” “Jack fell down and broke his
crown” would read “A youth, designated only as Jack, sustained, incident to
a loss of equilibrium, a fracture of the cranium.” And that old gag “The
old gray mare ain’t what she used to be” reads thus: “The female equine
quadruped, described as senile and consequently grizzled, has suffered metamorphosis
usually attendant upon the consecutive passing of periods of
time.”
*****
While we are on the topic of words, did you ever think about loaded
words, words that in themselves have come to carry the stigma of prejudice?
The poet C01eridge once said “There are three classes into which all women
over 70 can be divided, that elderly lady, that old woman, that old witch.”
A sign in a market window reads: “first quality sirloin roast”. Just change
the words, but not the meaning: “first–class piece of dead cow … ·Dci you see
what I mean? Words in themselves carry biased, emotional meanings that go
far beyond their literal meanings. Coleridge’s three phrases could describe
the same woman, according to the prejudice the speaker wanted to convey.
The two signs in the window described the same piece of meat.
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Now these emotional meanings of words change with the times, and we need
ever to be on our guard about these changes, which have very little to do
with facts and very much to do with opinions. Today one of these loaded words
is the word CAPITAL. So fiercely has capitalism, the industrial system under
which we live, been attacked that there has come to be a prevailing suspicion
that it is bad. This America of ours, suspicion says, this great giant Shylock
of the Western Hemisphere~ has become the most hated of nations, all because
of its capitalistic economy. They seem to overlook the inconsistency
that life in the United States is so terrible that millions of people in
other lands will go to any extreme to get around our ~igration laws and
come to this awful capitalistic America. Ours is such a mean, inhuman, moneygrabbing
land that the D. P. family which came to Portland last week cannot
yet understand the hospitality~ generosity and friendliness they have received.
One essential quarrel we have with the communist position is that it assumes
inevitable class warfare~ worker against management, tenant against
landlord, the have-nots against the haves. Now no sensible person contends
that our present economic system is perfect. Of course there are evils to be
corrected~ improvements to be made~ but it does not follow that the way to
deal with them is other than the American, democratic way.
Here are a few facts about what the capitalistic system is in the United
States. A survey of our 120 biggest manufacturing companies shows only four
in which any single person owns as much as 10% of the voting stock. In all, the
120 companies were found to be owned by more than six million stockholders,
more than the total number of employees in all the 120 companies. Sixty-two of
the companies reported that no one person held more than 1% of the stock. Five
out of every six stockholders owned less than 100 shares.
Capitalists, we are told, live on unearned money, called dividends and
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interest. By reaping where they do not sow, by neither toiling nor spinning
these wealthy cutters of coupons run the country. But here is a fact. Seven
out of every ten dollars paid out in dividends and interest go to people
with annual incomes under $5,000.
Now what do dividends and interest represent? They represent profit.
And, like capital, profit is today another loaded word, not in good repute.
Is profit disgraceful? If it is, then more than two-thirds of the disgrace
belongs to people whose incomes are less than $5,000.
Before we decide that we must have a new American way of life, that
capital and private enterprise cannot be adjusted to the modern day, let us
at least be patient with the facts. Of course the facts are not all favorable
to the present economy; of course there are things to be remedied. But one
does not lightly sacrifice a limb to save a life. Or to change the figure,
as we strive to clean up the wrongs in our economic system, let us not
throw out the baby with the bath.
*****
Now let us turn to something even more common. Mark Twain said everybody
talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. He referred to the
weather. Did you ever see symbols of life’S deep meaning in such a common
thing as weather? Just a week ago people in the Midwest were struggling
through two feet of snow, cars were stalled on drifted highways, cattle
and sheep were freezing to death on the western ranges. In Nebraska drifts
rose sixteen feet high.
On the same day the weather in New York was so clear and mild that
people sat in the parks without overcoats. Skating was called off in the
sunken plaza of Rockefeller center because the ice melted so fast.
So indeed is life filled with contrasts, with joy and sorrow, with
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profit and loss, with pleasure and pain. It is only by contrast that we make
any progress in work, in government, in pursuit of our ideals. How often we
say of some savage tribe or some isolated community living under primitive
conditions: “I don It see how they stand it. How ~ they live that way?”
And the right answer often is: “They don I t know what they I re missing.” In other
words, they have nothing with which to contrast their existence. The Russian
government has apparently taken extraordinary precautions that their people
shall not find out what life is really like in the capitalistic United States.
The contrast with their own existence might be embarrassing to the Polieouro.
It might put ideas into the heads of Russian peasants.
I have an acquaintance who is probably one of the few survivors of the
pre-war government of Estonia, that little Baltic republic which was swallowed
by its big Soviet neighbor. Most of the leaders of the old Estonian government
have disappeared. How my friend managed to escape is his own secret.
But here is my point. He has told me how, in the early days of seemingly
friendly Soviet influence, Russian soldiers stationed in the Estonian capital
saw goods in the shops that could not be bought at all in Russia, and other
goods that were absurdly low-priced, compared to their experience at home.
For instance, these soldiers could not comprehend that there was no restriction
on the number of pairs of shoes they could buy if they had the price,
and the price was one-twentieth the price in Moscow. When these soldiers
went home on leave, they told of the happy Estonians who had plenty to eat
and wear. So the Russians stopped granting home leave, but they couldn I t
stop desertions. One thing they could do ,and they had intended to do it
a11 along. Th~y took over the country, lock, stock and barrel; they abolished
private enterprise, the free economy, and advertised to the world
that they had freed those slaves of capitalism, their beloved Estonian
neighbors.
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Those people of Estonia have not forgotten though their leaders are dead.
They know, by contrast, what is good and what is bad for them. There on the
Baltic is one country where, some day,truth crushed to earth will rise again.
*****
Another common thing is religion. Anthropologists, those scientists who
study all races of mankind in all places and all times, tell us that no
people, however primitive, has ever been found to be without some sort of
religion. Yet how jittery we are getting about mixing religion with education.
A statement made last week by the Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States
is worthy of attention by every serious person, be he Catholic, Protestant or
Jew”,. The statement points out that the founders of our nation considered
religious instruction of future citizens, impartially allowed without favoritism
to any sect or creed,. as a proper and practical function of good government.
The school was the meeting place of these helpful, interacting influences,
church and state. By our Constitution their functions are separate.
We will not tolerate a state church. But it does not follow that we should
divorce our educational system from all religious influence. The recent de~
cision of the Supreme Court, declaring all religious instruction in the public
schools unconstitutional, may boomerang upon us some day as did the Dred
Scott decision many years ago. Surely a way can be found — in fact, ways are
already being found to teach in our schools those religious principles of
life upon which all sects agree.
*****
Is leisure a common thing? Most of us think we have too little of it.
Everyone knows that, if you want something done, ask a busy man to do it.
Don’t ask a fellow who has plenty of leisure. He’ll tell you he doesn’t
have time.
1-18
How universal is leisure? The Social Committee of the united Nations
General Assembly recently declared that rest and leisure are universal human
rights. Why did they say so? Because in much of the world those rights are
not recognized. But the declaration would have no point unless somewhere
they were recognized. Nowhere in the world does the average man enjoy so
much leisure in proporti.on to his working hours as in the united States. We
have no concentration camps, no slave labor, no war prisoners languishing in
hopeless drudgery.
How much do we really prize our American leisure? And what is vastly
more important, what do we do with it? It was a Chinese visitor to New York
who once asked a searchi.ng question. His host, taking him downtown by subway,
said: “We change to an express at .96th .Street, and we save six minutes.”
“So”, said the Chinese, “and what do you do with it?”
1-19
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
4th Broadcast December 5, 1948
What a good, common thing is laughter. Henry Beston, the modern author
who does his writing and his herb collecting down on his Nobleboro farm, not
far from Route l’ s heavy summer traffic between Bath and Rockland, recently
commented on the difference between laughter in the country and in the city.
Only in the rural regions, says Beston, do we still hear the genuine, fullbodied
laughs that roll folks in the aisles. “On the farm we laugh”, he says,
“with gusto of human spirit, while city folks laugh, if they laugh at all,
from a tension of nerves. Heaven knows that the times have little to laugh at,
though would they had, for laughter is a notable part of humanity, a thing
seemingly given to man alone in the whole realm of living things. When it
thins down into the trickle of a wise-crack and a sneer, all sense of proportion
is gone. The deviltry of this world is the work of people who are too
serious.”
*****
How common, yet how little understood, is truth. Pont.ius Pilate, in
judgment over Jesus, was not the only person who ever asked the question,
“What is truth?” Through the ages the learned philosophers have quarreled
about it. Indeed the word can be used in several senses. Most of us think
of it as the opposite of a lie; we think of it as fact in contrast with imagined
fiction. But, in its larger sense, the word truth contains the whole
meaning of life: man’s eternal search for his place in the universe and his
relationship to his fellow men.
Thus, in concrete situations, as we strive to find the truth, are we
conscious of the things that stand in our way? If we llish to decide honestly
1-20
how to vote on a particular political issue, whether or not we ought to
contribute to a certain cause, which side we shall take on some burning
social question, I wonder if we are usually aware of the barriers that
stand between us and the truth. Do we realize how difficult it is to use
our reason instead of our emotions? Do we know how easily our prejudices
and our fears dominate our minds?
Carl Sandburg, poet and foremost biographer of Lincoln, has just reminded
us of these barriers to truth in his new novel REMEMBRANCE ROCK.
A1 though it is a long book — more than 1,000 pages it is well worth
a leisurely, careful reading. For it is the story of America, from the
coming of the Pilgrims to the end of the Second World War. Through all
the years, at Plymouth and Salem and Boston, at Lexington and at Valley
Forge, at Gettysburg and Shiloh, in the prairie schooners bound for the
West, there were always men and women struggling against fear and prejudice
to find the truth. So Sandburg depicts some one character in each
of these periods in his novel as having possession of a metal plaque on
which were carved what old Roger Bacon had called the four stumbling
blocks to truth. Roger Bacon, philosopher and monk, had lived in England
more than 300 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and more
than 600 years before our own time. These, said Friar Bacon, are the four
stumbling blocks to truth:
1. The influence of fragile and unworthy authority.
How often have you believed and repeated something because someone
told you it was true? What about the really important things you believe
to be true? Do you have them on sound or on fragile authority?
2. custom.
“It was good enough for grandfather;it is good enough for me.” Be
careful of reasoning like that. Tradition has its values, but the mere
1-21
fact that we have done something for a long time is not a sound argument
for our continuing to do it.
3. The imperfection of undisciplined senses.
No one denies the tremendous power of the emotions, the response of
our senses to things about us. OUr problem is not to avoid emotion, but
to make our emotions more reasonable. At least we can try not to let fear
and prejudice and hate do our thinking for us. OUr senses can be disciplined,
and not to discipline them is to set up within ourselves a serious
barrier to truth. That is what Roger Bacon meant by the imperfection of
undisciplined senses.
4. Concealment of ignorance by ostentation of wisdom.
When a politician promises, in return for your vote, a quick solution
to a difficult social problem, he is concealing ignorance under a pretense
of wisdom. When a teacher is contemptuous of pupils’ options, the contempt
may be a show of dogmatic assurance to hide ignorance as well as tolerance.
Indeed it is a very human failing to make a show of a little knowledge, and
the less certain the knowledge, the louder we are likely to voice our opinion.
Strange, isn’t it, that man has.learned so little in 600 years? The
monk, Roger Bacon, died in 1294, two hundred years before Columbus opened
the pathway to our new continent. Yet they remain with us today, these
four stumbling blocks to truth: unworthy authority, tradition, emotional
prejudice, and ignorance covered by a show of wisdom.
**~**
Now for a word about common stories. Some of the best stories in the
world are the oldest — Mother Goose, the fables of Aesop, the Bible narratives
— these stories never die. Among . such is a collection that made
news in the daily papers a week ago. I refer to the stories we call the
1-22
Arabian Nights. How wel.l. we remember Sinbad the Sailor, Al.i Baba and the
Forty Thieves, Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp. It was 250 years ago that
the French scholar, Antoine Galland, introduced these fabul.ous tales to
the Western World under the title of THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. A few
months ago the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago discovered,
among a miscellaneous col.1ection of papyrus rolls in Egypt, a portion of
the Arabian Nights at l.east 650 years older than any previously known manuscript
of the work. The oldest copy hitherto known was dated 1536, but
here are portions dated as early as 800 AD. And they reveal. that the original.
title was A THOUSAND NIGHTS. The name was apparentl.y changed to A
THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS, not because any story or any night was added, but
because during the time of the Crusades the Arabs developed a superstitution
against round numbers.
Many persons wrongl.y believe that the title, whether 1,000 or 1,001,
comes from the number of stories. Not so. The title refers to the number
of nights that the heroine, Sheherazade, kept herself from being killed by
the vengeful Sultan, through the clever expedient of stringing out the
stories night after night. Sometimes one would take a whole week, and always
when she ended one story, she began another on the same night. And one
story led into the next with curiosity-whetting detail. She was a grand
story teller, that slave girl, Sheherazade, and she deserved to live, pardoned
by the Sultan when the thousand nights came to an end.
*****
Now let us think. a bit about a common but troublesome thing suspicion.
Snake that it is, none of us want to do wholly without it. If one
thing hurts our pride more than anything else, it is.to be considered a
sucker, an easy mark for either the crooked gambler or the honest, highpressure
sal.esman. No one likes to be .made a gullible fool. Hence we build
1-23
up barriers of wariness and caution, and step by step we increase the barriers
until we become suspicious of everything and everybody. We always want to know
what the other fellow has up his sleeve, what axe he has to grind.
So general is suspicion in disputes between labor and management that, if
not curbed, it may some day wreck our industrial foundations. It is just as
bad on one side as on the other. Too often both sides feel that nothing can be
assured and no one can be trusted unless everything is written down with every
T crossed and every I dotted in a contract. Now anyone who has ever built a
house or even had a simple job done knows that it is impossible to for see in
advance every contingency that will arise. Those unforseeable things must depend
upon what we call good will, the intention to deal honestly and fairly
with each other.
Is it not barely possible that the good relations between labor and management
in Maine, in comparison with the constantly strained relations in other
parts of the country, exist because the leaders of both management and labor
have learned that, important as are contracts, more important still is a trust
in each other’s spoken promises, a faith in each other’s honest intentions?
Of course controversies will continue; certainly the two viewpoints will conflict;
assuredly contracts must frequently be revised. Yet the surest way to
preserve industrial peace and continued production is by having as leaders of
both management and labor the kind of men who can trust each other’s word.
*****
Another common thing is the evidence of nature’s mighty forces. Long before
this atomic age we have often been reminded of the tremendous power of
nature. Twice within the past decade southern New England has been visited by
devastating hurricanes. That awful power of wind and tide leaves man defeated
and helpless. Man can erect his dikes and levees, lash down his buildings in
cement and steel, build his cyclone cellars. He can heroically battle the
elements, as do the Gloucester fisherman in Jim Connolly’s stories. But there
1-24
..
are times when discretion is indeed the better part of valor.
We had recent reminder of such an occasion when the Portland Associates
held their last meeting on the tip of Cape Cod, then disbanded forever. They
had organized 40 years ago, just because ten years earlier a brave sea captain
had shown that he had better courage than judgment in the face of nature’s
angry whim. On the afternoon of November 27, 1898, the steamer Portland had
left her berth at India Wharf in Boston, loaded with Thanksgiving vacationers
returning to Maine. Hit by the worst northeast hurricane the coast had seen
for decades, she went down with all of her 176 passengers and crew. Many a
Maine home was a place of mourning on that Sunday after Thanksgiving.I was a
boy of seven at the time, and I remember the true thanksgiving at my grandmother’s
home in a little Maine village because her youngest son,my uncle,
who, unable to come home for Thanksgiving i had promised to come home by way of
the steamer Portland,but at the last minute had taken the .train instead. And
I recall that, on that day after the .storm, the drifted snow in the dooryard
was well above my seven year old head.
For 47 years no one knew what happened to the Portland, although bits of
what seemed to be her furnishings were from time to time washed ashore on Cape
Cod. Then, three years ago, the Portland Associates with the help of Boston’s
famous harbor historian, Edward Snow, conducted diving operations on a wreck
nearly covered with sand 150 feet below the surface, four miles off the tip of
the Cape. It proved to be without question the old Portland, blown fifty
miles off her course clear across Massachusetts .Bay. The mystery now solved,
the Associates, made up largely of relatives of those lost in the disaster, decided
to hold one last ceremony on the fiftieth anniversary of the storm. So a
week ago they unveiled a memorial tablet at Higland Light, the nearest shore
point to the spot where the Portland went down .–. a permanent reminder that man
1-25
is not master of all he surveys. He can only make truce with nature; he
cannot conquer her.
*****
Now to words again. Common expressions provide this topic. As the fine
old sayings of rural Maine become less and less common, we are in danger of
losing them altogether. The American Dialect Society is doing its best to
preserve a record of those expressions, proverbs and sayings. Some of them
are expressive common comparisons: slower than cold molasses; homelier than
a stump fence; thick as spatter; like a bump on a log; no more peace than a
toad under a harrow. Some are phrases such as “took a hist” for had a fall;
“she looks kind of peaked” or “she’s feeling pretty slim” for sickly; “he’s
lost his gumption”, “he was all beat out, but yesterday he perked up some”.
Then there are hundreds of simple combinations like a good-living day, the
shank of the evening, the whole kit and caboodle, just a step and a straddle,
a lick and a promise, a hind-end start.
1-26
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
5th Broadcast December 12, 1948
A common thing in the Maine autumn is fog, and the year around it is all
too conunon on the Maine coast. But I suppose we seldom see such fogs as enveloped
England a fortnight ago. The soupy mist was so thick that traffic,
not only in London but in the inland cities, came to a standstill. One could
see nothing two yards away. It clung to the earth with that impenetrable
thickness for five long days, and as lighter haze lasted much longer. The
oldest inhabitants remembered nothing like it.
Now Carl Sandburg, whom we all res~ct as poet and biographer, thought he
knew something about fog, and he once write a poem which began: “The fog comes
in on little cat’s feet.” But I agree with our Maine poet, Bob Coffin, that
if Sandburg means that for accurate description, he never· saw a Maine fog. It
may describe the fuzzy little haze that sweeps in from Lake Michigan over
Sandburg’s Chicago, but it doesn’t fit the fogs of Casco and Penobscot Bays.
Mr. Coffin’s own poem, THE FOG, is more like it. Listen!
“He knew how Roman legions looked, for he
Had seen the Maine fogs march in from the sea
For many years now, in the August days.
They came in mighty columns up the bays,
Tawny and gray and silver in the sun;
They trampled out the seaports one by one,
The islands and the woods, with their high hosts,
And pushed the world back inland from the coasts.
“This little house was lost, these hills and dells,
1-27
Cows in pasture faded into bells,
The world around a man closed in and in
Till nowhere was ten paces from his chin.
This was the peril and the comfort too,
A man who lived in such a region knew;
On any summer’s day, within an hour,
He might be blind and naked to a power
So vast, it might have come from stars unmade,
Undreamt of, even, making him afraid,
So mightier than the night that he could guess
How life was but a name for loneliness.”
So much for the literal fog. Like every true poet, Mr. Coffin suggests
figurative applications: the fog of loneliness, the fog of uncomprehending
fear. At best we live most of our lives surrounded by fog; there are so many
things we see as through a glass darkly, or do not see at all. The fogs of
fear and hate, of vested interest and prejudice, of materialistic philosophy
disguised as reality. How much we all need the light that penetrates the
fog, the light of religious faith — not the dogmatism of any creed or sect -but
the staunch belief that we are not alone, fogbound in an all too hazy universe,
but that we are children of a divine creator, and like Job of old we
know our vindicator liveth. And we would also remember that 2,000 years ago
there was one who said to men just as fog-bound as we: “I am the light of the
world.”
*****
Among common things shall we include the Little Red Schoolhouse? Certainly
we hear enough about it. But let me ask you a frank question. When did you
last, if ever, see one? One of the true elderly statesmen of our community, a
1-28
man whose memory goes well back into the nineteenth century, asked me that
question not long ago, and I confess it was not easy to give him an honest
answer. Had I ever seen one? I can remember just two. In my boyhood days
the litt1e one-room school at West Bridgton, Maine, was painted red. I never
attended it, but my father did, and he often spoke of it as “the red schoo1”,
in distinction from other schoolhouses in the town. The other red schoolhouse
which I remember was painted red, I suspect, because of the red schoolhouse
tradition, and not because red was its original color. It is the building
associated with Mary and her little lamb — the schoolhouse which Henry Ford
moved to a site on his historical development near the Wayside Inn at Sudbury,
Massachusetts.
Whi1e we are on the subject of old-time things now hard to find, including
little red schoolhouses, where in central Maine is there an old cattle pound?
I refer to the really old ones an enclosure, usually rectangular, built of
stone wa1ls high enough to keep cattle and horses from jumping out, with only
one opening where once hung a wooden door. Somewhere, within fifty miles of
Watervil1e, there must be the remains of one of those old pounds, where the
poundkeeper put stray horses to await claim by their owners. I know an historical
worker who is anxious to locate one of those pounds. If any listener will
send this information to WTVL, the historian will get it.
*****
What a precious, though conunon, thing is companionship. We think of it as
applying to two schoolboy chums, two men friends, two inseparable girls. We
scarcely give a thought to the conunonest of all companionship, that made by the
bond of marriage. Many a .man has seriously asked the question, “How has my wife
been ab1e to put up with the kind of person I am, living under the same roof,
for all these years?” We men, .. knowing ourselves for what we really are and how
1-29
far we fall short of being acceptable companions, ought to wonder that divorce
isn’t even more prevalent than it is, instead of venting our social wrath about
its deplorable increase.
Perhaps more than one man of us ought to take to heart the point of a
little story I heard recently. A tornado, one of those quick twisters, had
struck a Nebraska farm in the middle of the night. It ripped the roof off the
farmhouse, and lifted the bed, with the farmer and his wife in it, right out
through the opening, across the road, over the fences, and deposited bed and
occupants, entirely unharmed, in the middle of a distant field. When the man
realized what had happened, he found his wife crying softly, but not hysterically,
and he said: “There, there, Mother, everything is all right. We aren’t
hurt at all, and the twister is over . Stop crying.” But the good lady kept
right on with her gentle sobs. So the man said, “Why don’t you stop crying?
What are you crying for anyway? Can’t I make you understand that we are perfectly
safe?” Whereupon the woman replied, “Yes, Dad, I know we’re out of
danger. That’s not why I’m crying. Don’t you realize this is the first time
we’ve been out together in seventeen years?”
*****
Words, we have said, are common things we shall often mention on this
program. Just now let us think a bit about common expressions. All parts of
the country have such phrases, some more picturesque than others. We who
think Maine is peculiarly rich in them are anxious to get these fine old
sayings of Maine into the record now being compiled by the American Dialect
Society. Some of these expre~sions are common comparisons like “slower than
cold molasses”,”homelier than a stump fence”,”thick as spatter”, “like a bump
on a log”, “no more peace than a toad under a harrow”. Some are simple phrases,
such as “took a hist” for had a fall; “she looks kind of peaked” or “she’s
1-30
feeling pretty slim” for sickly; “he’s lost his gumption; he was ali beat out,
but yesterday he perked up some”. There are hundreds of simple combinations
like a “good-living day”, “the shank of the evening”, the whole kit and caboodle”,
“just a step and a straddle”, “a lick and a promise”, “a hind-end
start”. Do you have some favorite expression you would like to see recorded?
Your present speaker is a member of the American Dialect Society, and he will
gladly see that your favorite expression, unless it is already listed, is properly
recorded and accredited, if you will send it to Little Talks on Cammon
Things, Station WTVL, Waterville.
*****
Let us turn now to the influence of a little man. Shakespeare has reminded
us that “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with
their bones.” But that is fortunately only half the truth. The good which men
do also has a way of.living after them. No generation inherits merely good or
merely evil from its fathers. Hence a homely, shrunken, almost misshapen little
man, clothed in a loin cloth and persistently turning an old-fashioned spinning
Wheel, has left such impression of good upon a people that one fruit of his tireless
effort has ripened before he has lain a year in his grave.
All his life Mahatma Gandhi fought for the unrecognized rights of India’s
50 million untouchables. Those tragic human Qeings, totaling a full quarter of
India’s population,were untouchable because, not only their touch, but also the
touch of anything they had touched was contamination to any other Hindu. They
were outcasts, not because they belonged to the lowest caste, but to no caste at
all. Until the British Raj had brought slight betterment of their plight, they
could not use the village wells, because even their shadows would contaminate
the water. Because they could not enter the shops, they could buy no food and no
tools. They could get their food only by gleaning and scavenging. Millions of
1-31
them literally lived on garbage.
Mahatma Gandhi, though himself a Hindu of Caste, ate with these untouchables,
slept in the same room with them, declared again and again that Untouchability
must go. He seemed to be making no more impression than had the
British Raj on a system that was 1,500 years old when Christ was born. But
last week, only a few months after the assassin’s hand had ended Gandhi’s life,
the Indian Constituent Assembly adopted the following provision in India’s new
Constitution: “Untouchability is abolished and its practice is forbidden in
any form. Enforcement of any disability arising out of Untouchability shall be
a punishable offense in accordance with law.”
Elation and theworld’s acclaim of this reform may be a bit premature.
Customs embedded in a people for 3,500 years are not swept aside:,by_merely p.assing
a law. The vested interests of the higher castes will be defended to the
bitter end. Enforcement will be slow and difficult. Lest we expect a sudden
miracle in India, we had better remind ourselves of a bit of American history.
In 1870 the States ratified the 15th Amendment to our Constitution. which reads:
“The right of the citizens of the United States to vote
shall not be denied or abridged-by the United States or
by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition
of servitude. The Congress shall have power to
enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
For more than 75 years, until a recent decision of the Supreme Court, men
(and later women) were persistently denied the right to vote because of their
color. Even now, by vicious poll tax legislation and by more vicious intimidation,
colored people are .kept away from the ballot box. If we cannot completely
enforce our 15th Amendment after 75 years, in spite of the admitted power of
the Federal Government, we can hardly expect the enforcement of the new law
1-32
against Untouchability in India. But, like our Emancipation Proclamation, and
our 13th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, this new law in India is the
first great step in a long overdue social reform. And the credit for it belongs
largely to the little man with the spinning wheel, the man of non-violence and
passive resistance, who not only brought a great empire to submission, but who
brought the leaders of his own country to face with shame their treatment of
the Untouchables. Shakespeare notwithstanding, the good that men do lives after
them.
Mahatma Gandhi was not a Christian. He died as he was born, a Hindu. But
he himself has told us where he got his idea of the power of non-violence. He
got it from the greatest life that was ever lived, as he pondered and absorbed
the greatest story ever told.
1-33
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
6th Broadcast December 19, 1948
Such common things are words that they will often be mentioned on this
program. In our eagerness to enlarge our vocabulary, to get a passing mark on
the monthly word quiz in the Reader’s Digest, we may overlook a very important
fact. While the new words, the unusual words, sometimes the long words, enrich
our speech, it is the short words, the little words, the familiar words that
make it possible for us to talk at all.
Dr. George McKnight of Ohio State University, one of the foremost authorities
on the English language, tells us one-fourth of the task of expression in
English is accomplished by nine words. In short, if you make a record of any
ordinary conversation, not of illiterate, but of educated, persons, you will
find these nine words, repeated over and over again, accounting for one-fourth
of all the words used. Don’t misunderstand. McKnight does not mean that we use a
total of only 36 words. He means that we repeat the nine commonest words so many
times that if the total count of words in a conversation is one thousand, approximately
250 of those thousand words will be these nine repeated again and again.
Here they are: and, be (or a form of be such as is, are, was, were), have (or
some form of have), it, of, the, to, will and you.
McKnight goes even further. He insists that 43 words form a full half of
the total words in any extended conversation of educated persons, and they, too,
are common, little words. With the exception of the word “about”, which is certainly
common enough, these forty-three words are all of one syllable. What is
perhaps even more interesting, although modern English is made up of words from
the uttermost ends of the earth — from the old Germanic tongues, from their
Scandinavian variants, from French and Italian and Spanish, from Latin and Greek,
1-34
from Arabic, Hebrew, persian, Chinese, Japanese, Polynesian and American Indian
— though Engli~h has borrowed from every language spoken by historic man, to
make up our present composite vocabulary~ these forty-three little words are
all of Anglo-Saxon origin. They come to us from the oldest English speech of
which we have record. I shall not bore you with listing the 33 which I have not
named. But let us try to remember the commonest nine — those that account for
one-fourth of our speech. Here they are again in alphabetical order: and, be,
have, it, of, the, to, will, you.
*****
OUr inquiry about old cattle pounds brought immediate and hearty response.
Before we had been an hour off the air no less than fifteen persons had telephoned
information about eight different pounds. One at South Orrington, between
Brewer and Bucksport, seems to be especially well known, because it was
reported by five persons. We have learned that there is an old pound between
Ellsworth and Blue Hill, another in Jefferson, another in Chelsea on the road
from Gardiner to Togus, another at Hampden Lower Corners on much-traveled Route
One, and still another in the town of Turner. What will most surprise some of
our listeners, there are the remains of two ancient pounds less than ten miles
from the Waterville Post Office. One, nearly in complete decay and scarcely
recognizable for the animal enclosure it once was, is in the town of Winslow,
at the junction of the China Road and the Reynolds Hill Road. The other is in
the town of Fairfield, a few miles out of Fairfield Center.
Now that we have located a few cattle pounds, we are encouraged to put out
a search for something harder to find. We want to know the origin of two oldtime
sayings. One is “not worth a Hannah cook”. The other is “leaning toward
Sawyer’s”. Now, who in the world was Hannah Cook, and how did she ever become
associated with the depths of worthlessness? How did the old country folk in
1-35
parts of Maine come so regularly to say of a dilapidated, tumble-down building,
“It’s leaning toward Sawyer’s”? Why not toward Smith’s or Jones’s? Does any
listener have a· clue to the origin of either of these expressions? :t·f so, send
it in to WTVL.
*****
A very conunon thing in our generation is the machine. In fact~ unless we are
a1ready moving into the atomic age, we are still living in what economists have
called the machine age. We sometimes curse the machine for the way it seems to
have regimented and mechanized the lives of men. Probably, like every other instrument
of progress, the machine is a mixed blessing. In conunon with most things
that are the handwork, either of nature or of man, the machine is neither good
nor bad of itself; it all depends on how it is used.
A hundred years ago the worker was economically muscle-bound. The volume of
his output was limited by his muscular strength. The precision of his work was
limited by his individual dexterity and skill. Since he produced little, he
earned little. There was little to buy, and little that he could afford to buy.
Only 40 years ago, in 190.8, it took one man eight hours to shape the top
half of an automobile’s gas tank. Today one man, and one machine, does the job
in one minute. If a whole automobile were produced by the hand methods of 40
years ago, and that automobile had the intricate parts of a modern car, it would
cost $50,000.
A hundred years ago machines did only six per cent of man’s work. Today
they do .85 per cent of it, and do it better, cheaper and faster, while man gets
more pay in an hour for running a.machine than he did in a day for exhausting
his muscles.
Now it is true that every Jl1ajor advance in the development of machines has
necessitated adjustments .of labor. Temporarily anew machine has thrown men out
of jobs. But in the longrun each such development creates more jobs. It turns
1-36
luxuries into necessities, multiplies the demand many fold, makes possible almost
unlimited diversity of products in astounding quantities. In 1890, when
relatively few machines were in use in the United States, only 29 per cent of
the total population was gainfully employed; the figure today is 43 per cent.
The machine has made possible the standard of living which we Americans
enjoy. Things always look greener over in the other fellow’s pasture, but when
we get there our own grass looks pretty good to us. In spite of our imperfect
social adjustments to the machine age, we Americans certainly have received our
share of its benefits.
Consider the American Negro, for instance. His lot is not a happy one,
even in the northern states. Socially ostracized, if not actually subject to
Jim Crow, he has small individual chance to achieve economic equality with a·
white individual. This is a situation that many of us view with abhorence and
shame. Yet American Negroes, with all of their economic and social inequalities,
own more automobiles than all the other Negroes in the world, plus all the inhabitants
of Russia.
Machines have indeed created wealth, as well as jobs, in every nation that
has used them extensively.
*****
What a common, yet what a wonderful, thing is memOry. As we grow older,
alas, the boy’s definition of memory seems no longer funny. He said, “Memory is
the thing I forget with.” Perhaps it is fortunate that we are good forgetters
as well as good rememberers. We may be saved a lot of grief by just forgetting.
And some of the most annoying, if not downright disagreeable, people in the
world are those who are always saying, “I knew him when.”
Yet there are many interesting things about memory, whether one studies it
through the ·scientific channels of psychology or by the hit and miss
1-37
observations of the ordinary man or woman. For instance, how far back does it go
in a person’s life? Recently I witnessed a very ~pressive church service, a
dedication service for infant children, brought to the church altar in their
parents’·armS. In the course of his remarks to those parents, the clergyman said,
“Your children will not remember this day. They will know of it only as you tell
them about it.”
The remark of that minister suggests an· interesting question. What is the
earliest incident in your life that you really remember, that you can identify
surely as having seen yourself, not having heard it told so many times that you
merely thought you had seen it? Can anyone surely and distinctly remember something
that happened before he or she was four years old? Well — what about it?
*****
Ever since that evening when we referred to Rufus Jones, native and lifelong
resident of China, Maine, as a great man, we have frequently been asked a
related question. Whom do we consider the greatest living man in Maine? A
question like that depends much, but not entirely, on individual judgment. A
lot does indeed depend upon how one defines the word great. Yet we do not intend
to dodge the question. No poll, either “Galluped or Ropered” gets in our way.
This is just what we think, unhampered.bystatistics.
The .greatest living man in Maine is not a prominent statesman, not a learned
scholar, not a successful industrialist. He never went to college, although he
has received honorary degrees from several institutions. Owning almost no land
himself, he came to control one of the largest farms in Maine. Apparently destined
to be a preacher, a.professional clergyman, he won renown as a practical
worker of Christian deeds. Now past his ninetieth birthday, he lives, not merely
honored and respected by all Who know him, but also dearly loved by hundreds of
me.n Whose lives he has touched and molded. The man is George W. Hinckley of the
1-38
Good Will Homes and School my choice for the greatest living man in Maine.
This is the week when we are annually reminded of the angel voices over
Bethlehem 2,000 years ago: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to
men of good will”. In a double sense George Hinckley is a man of Good Will;
first, as founder and life-long head of the famous Good Will Homes for boys and
girls who have no normal home; second, and more important, because the guiding
motive of George Hinckley’s life has been Christian good will. To him faith
without works is dead; so he poured his time, his energy, his talents and his
money into living for others. Plenty of folks make sacrifices; lots of people
do kindly deeds of helpfulness. But it is extremely rare to find a person who
makes his whole life unselfish and, in the financial sense, unrewarded devotion
to the welfare of others. In short, George Hinckley is one of a very few persons
among our 140 million in America who has made a life-long occupation of good
will.
Allover the world are men and women in a hundred different occupations who
are thinking of the Christmas story of the Child of Bethlehem in a peculiar sense
this week, because they are men and women who, at some time within the past fifty
years, came to the cottage homes at Hinckley, Maine, from broken homes, from
bereaved homes, from woefully underprivileged homes. And they remember how Mr.
Hinckley used to read the old, old story of Bethlehem at Christmas time, but they
remember more how, unlike the parents in the story, they did find room at the inn.
Only it was not an inn; it was a home such as they had never known before. And out
from it they went into the wide world to become teachers and preachers, physicians
and lawyers, statesmen and ambassadors, leaders of industry. And with one accord
they will tell you that for the chance to be what they are, and for the ideals
they cherish, they owe an unpayable debt t~ George Hinckley, the man of good will.
1-39
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
7th Broadcast December 26, 1948
Among the season’ s common things are Christmas trees. How they brighten
the home and add to the holiday spirit! Did you ever hear of the Nation’ s Christmas
Tree? Thirteen years ago the citizens of the little town of Sanger, California
began what is now the annual custom of holding services at the foot of
that particular tree.
Yesterday morning, in the chill mountain air of the High Sierras, the
people trudged through the soft snow into the midst of the great, majestic redwood
trees. At the foot of the tallest of them all they stopped, sang the pld
familiar Christmas carols, and held the beautiful Christmas service.
Why call it the Nation’s Christmas Tree? Because that giant redwood is
probably the oldest living thing in the world. There, on the California mountainside,
it had been standing more than 2,000 years before the angels sang the first
carol to the shepherds tending their flocks near Bethlehem. Today that tree
towers 300 feet above the forest floor, and its base covers as much space as a
five-room house. It is a living symbol — is that ancient tree — of enduring
strength and beauty that while many things pass away, while man’s own life on
earth is of few years and full of sorrow, there are things that last a long I
long time — and one of those things is the wonderful spirit of Christmas. The
giant redwood in the High Sierras is indeed the Nation’s Christmas Tree.
*****
Some of our listeners have expressed an interest in words, so let us take
just a couple of minutes tonight on some unusual word origins. Did you know that
alimony can be called literally a “meal ticket”? The word comes from the Latin
alimonia, meaning nourishment or sustenance. The husband was expected to continue
1-40
feeding the estranged wife, providing her with maintenance or alimonia. A bonfire
is not a good fire; it has nothing to do with the French word bon. In the
Middle Ages funeral pyres for human bodies were a necessity in emergencies of
war or pestilence. They were called bone fires. fires of bones. Later, when
it became the custom to burn heretics at the stake, the same name was applied.
It was a bonefire that caused the death of Joan of Arc. In time, as the name
was extended to many kinds of open air fires, it lost its old gruesome spelling,
so that few people today realize the horror it once implied.
When we say a person is not worth his salt, we mean not worth his pay.
There was a time when salt was a very scarce necessity. Roman soldiers, for
instance, drew a special allowance for the purchase of salt. This salarium, or
salt money, gives us our word salary.
*****
This is the Yuletide season, for centuries in England the season of the
great Yule log and its impressive ceremonies. Yuletide means a jolly time, for
yule and jolly are the same word. The original word is lost in the mists of
time, but in its middle English formYol, from the older Anglo-Saxon geol, is
akin to the modern Icelandic word jol, the midwinter feast of Iceland, going
back to pre-Christian times on that ancient island. At any rate the word has
always signified jolly or merry.
Time plays strange tricks with some of our words. What possible connection
can there be between hearse and rehearse? In Norman England, the word for harrow
was herse. The triangular frame bearing three candles, used in Holy Week, was
called a hearse, because it was shaped like a haz:row. Similar was the frame
bearing candles under Which the coffin was set during funeral ceremonies. It was
only another step to apply the word to the conveyance carrying the body from
funeral to grave.
1-41
Another version has it that in rural England, the body was often carried
in funeral procession on a real wooden harrow, because it was just the right
shape to take the three sacred candles. At any rate in their origin hearse and
harrow are the same word. Oh , yes, we started, didn’t we, by asking what is the
possible relation between hearse and rehearse. It’s clear enough now, isn’t it?
Rehearse, of course, is simply to harrow again.
*****
In the midst of the Christmas season, with its abundance of gifts and its
merry spirit, we don’t like to be reminded of unpleasant things. But food is a
very common thing, one of life’s few absolute necessities. For several years
careful students both of agriculture and of sociology have warned us that man
is rapidly using up the world’s food supplies. Erosion carries away the thin
layer of soil that grows his seed; wasteful methods pull the richness from the
ground; and he has found only ineffective means to combat drought and flood.
Meanwhile, in spite of war and pestilence, the world’s population keeps on increasing.
Now these warnings may be too alarming, and after a while we get used to
the cry of “Wolf! Wolf! II But let us not forget the ending of the old fable. You
will recall that finally the wolf did come and killed the flocks of the unheeding
shepherds.
So we may give more than a casual ear to what the British Attorney General,
Sir Hartley Shawcross, said last week. “The grim danger of starvation confronts
the world today”, he said. “If the world starves, chaos and anarchy must follow.
The countries of the world are so concerned with their national differences and
conflicts, so afraid of the prospect of war. so burdened with military expenses,
that they are paying almost no attention to the calamitous danger that confronts
all the world — starvation. The most pressing problem in the world today is for
a united, aggressive agricultural policy by all the nations.”
***** 1-42
Books are .common things, and some of them are very important things. Tonight
I want to tell you about a book that I hope many of you will have a chance to
read. It can now be read only in a foreign language, not familiar to most people
in Central Maine, but it is so important that it ought soon to be translated into
English. This book is the work of a man who is now a citizen of Waterville. He
is Dr. Ossip Flechtheim, assistant professor of history and governme~t at Colby
College, and a member of Justice Jackson’s staff at the famous Nuremburg trials.
Dr. Flechtheim I s book is a history of the Communist Party in Germany during the
Weimar Republic. He traces clearly the development of the party during the First
World War, and especially after the Russian Revolution. shows how it continuously
undermined the work of Stresemann and the true believers in democracy, and how
finally it too fell victim to the ruthless dictatorship of Hitler.
As one reads this carefully documented record of communism at work in another
land, he cannot fail to be reminded of those trouble spots today where the hammer
and sickle cast their shadows — of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, of Eastern Germany
and France, especially of war-torn China. The same tactics of friendly infiltration,
then espionage and terror, finally complete control. The last stage was
not reached in Germany fifteen years ago
terror got in the way– the Nazi Gestapo.
but only because another kind of
We are slow to learn from history, we human beings, but it is not the fault
of patient research historians like Dr. Flechtheim. As another Waterville resident
of a quarter century ago, Dr. J. William Black, used to say: “History is
more than a record of the past. It is given to us that the lessons of the past
may be applied to our present and future good.” How much history must we have
before we can learn that the lesson of the Communist party in .every land, despite
its high sounding, Marxian idealism, is a lesson of the terror that flyeth
by night and the destruction that wastethat noon-day?
***** 1-43
How easily, even at Christmas time, we travel the road from Bethlehem to
Bedlam — from Bethlehem, the symbol of peace and quiet and good will, to Bedlam,
the symbol for noise and confusion and insanity. Can it be that you have
never heard the origin of the word Becllam? The word is itself a corruption of
Bethlehem, an example of shortened pronunciation which is characteristically
British. As the British say “Maudlin” College for what we would call Magdalene
College, as they say Beecham for what we call Beauchamp, so in a special instance
they came to call Bethlehem, Bedlam. In the 14th century, when the old
priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem was already two hundred years old, that ancient
London monastery came to be used as a hospital for the insane. Familiarly known
as Bethlehem, the name was corrupted by popular usage to Bethlemi then to Bedlam.
The name came to be applied to all insane asylums in England, and those
asylums were terrible institutions, far worse than those described in that powerful
novel THE SNAKE PIT. Modern psychiatry was unknown. Those unfortunate
folk lived in filth and squalor, in scenes of uproar and confusion — in a
very bedlam.
Well, we have been through a week reverberating with the name of Bethlehem.
“Little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.” And now we Ire at the
threShold of a new year. Who will be master of 1949, the Prince of Bethlehem
or the Prince of Bedlam?
*****
Tha.t great Quaker neighbor of ours, ·Rufus Jones, once wrote a story that
he called “The Shepherd Who Missed the Manger”. Eager to go with the other
shepherds who saw the star and heard the angel voices in the sky, bidding .them go
to the child in the manger, this Shepherd went instead to his sick child at home
a child stricken with infantile paralysis. Years afterward, the shepherd
took this son, now grown to be a man, but still hopelessly crippled, to a house
where a Galilean healer was speaking to the crowd. Unable to get anywhere near
1-44
the preacher, the shepherd and his friends let the paralytic, on his mat,
. down through the skylight of the roof. They saw the stricken one rise at the
Master’s bidding — rise and walk. But they saw more than that. They discovered
that God is Father and Friend, forever seeking to bring men and women to
Himself, and they heard the Master tell them to cease their fears and worries.
He assured them that, though confusion and bedlam were all about them, their
souls could be at peace. The Kingdom of God, he said, will come as soon as
the love and forgiveness, the unselfishness and the sacrifice that are the will
of God become the will of men.
This was better than going with the other shepherds to the manger. That
night, under the stars, the shepherd’s emotions had been stirred, but here was
something more. Now his mind had been enlightened, his will had been changed.
Though allover the earth there might still be anger and hate, vengeance and
war, within the soul of the shepherd who had missed the manger there was peace,
for he had become a man of good will. He lived not in bedlam, but in Bethlehem.
1-45
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
8th Broadcast January 2, 1949
A lot of people think they know the origin of “not worth a Hannah Cook”.
All agree that it began as a seaman’s term, but there is much disagreement
about just what the original words were. Miss Alta Smith of the Good will School,
herself the co-author of a charming book of Maine pictures and Maine legends,
thinks it was originally hand or cook, meaning that the skipper found something
so worthless that he wouldn’t spare a hand or a cook for it. Mrs. Harold Milton
of waterville says the expression comes down from the old whaling ship days,
and referred to a whale not worth going after — one for which the captain felt
it was not worth risking the life of a single hand (that is, a seaman), or even
a cook. The Answer Man of a competing national network calls it a corruption of
hand and cook. These are all variants of the usually accepted origin, which
up to this time the American Dialect Society has been loathe to accept. It
doesn’t quite ring true. The readers of Jim Connolly’s famous stories of the
Gloucester fishermen know that a very important person on a fishing schooner is
the cook, and he must have been equally important on the old whalers. To say
that the expression means not worth a hand or even a cook, is to slander the
cook beyond all reason. To some of us who have made a comparative study of
similar expressions, and in spite of what the books say, isn’t it more likely
that the expression first meant not worth a hand to cook? Of what earthly value
would the average sailor be in place of the indispensable cook?
Mrs. Milton offers what is to this observer a brand-new expression: “Up
to Sim Sozens”. However, it ought to be spelled, she says it always sounded
like S 0 ZEN S with a short 0 as in of. Mrs. Mil ton says that when she was a
girl and would ask where something was or where some .event happened, she would
1-46
often get the answer, “Up to Sim Sozens”. As she grew older she understood
that this stock expression was not always the equivalent of “I don’t know”, but
that it quite as frequently meant “I don’t intend to tell you”.
This expression of Mrs. Milton’s strikes me as equally original and picturesque
as one from my own boyhood. A clerk in one of the village stores had
an ailing wife, one of those women who seem to enjoy poor health. When some
friend would ask him, “How’s Sally this morning?”, he often replied, “Oh, she’s
got another smudgeon”, meaning she’s complaining again.
Dr. Hugh Robinson, a trustee of Colby College, is a man who has heard many
languages and all sorts of expressions in various parts of the world. He spent
many years in China, and for more than two years he was a prisoner of the Japanese
at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. Dr. Robinson says one of the
expressions he remembers best was a kind of minced oath repeatedly uttered by his
college roommate, who came from Clinton, Maine. When anything went wrong the
roommate would exclaim, “Dod-rabbit-it”.
Then Dr. Robinson points out most interestingly that this expression is very
old English. It is found in the first great English novel, Fielding’s TOM JONES,
published more than two hundred years ago.
*****
A common but very ugly thing is rumor. Ever since the story of the Garden
of Eden, when Eve was beguiled by the serpent, Dame Rumor had enjoyed a ready
market for her characteristic inside information about a particular event or
person. Her unverified reports are more welcome than the truth, not merely because
they are startling, but even more because they are gratifying. As choice morsels
on the tongue, rumors serve to bolster man’s opinions and attitudes, and to fortify
his baseless confidence.
Some rumors, founded in old-time ignorance and superstitution doubtless do
1-47
no harm, but their very persistence shows what a gripping hold upon us a rumor
can have. Like the idea that Boston is the hub of the universe, you cannot, as
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, pry that rumor out of the head of a Bostonian with
the tire of all creation flattened out for a crow-bar.
Attendants at the Question House in the Bronx Zoo in New York say that the
question most often asked is whether an ostrich hides its head in the sand when
frightened. For at least 2,000 years people have been passing on that silly
tale. Almost as long, naturalists and zoologists have tried to debunk the rumor.
But it goes on and on. Without any basis whatever in fact, it will not die. As
people believed it allover Europe in 50 B.C., so many people allover the socalled
enlightened united States believe it today.
Patiently the zoo attendants keep explaining that the hippopotamus does
not sweat blood, that swamp rabbits don’t use their ears to swim with, that
elephants are not afraid of mice, that one cannot get warts from a toad, and
that a porcupine does not throw its quills.
Rumors of sea-serpents and other weird monsters of the deep will probably
never die. Do you remember the Loch Ness monster of Scotland in the 1930’s?
The newspapers spent thousands of dollars trying to verify its existence. Yet
none of the correspondents ever saw the monster, and none of the photographers
ever got a picture of it. The rumor was subsiding a bit when suddenly, in
January, 1934, a veterinary student insisted that early one morning, as he was
riding by the lake on his motorcycle, there before him, to his amazement, was
the monster on dry land. He added one element to the traditional description:
the animal’s tail was rounded off at the end, which is more than can be said
for the tale about these sea and lake monsters. They refuse ever to round off,
or even to have an end.
Much more serious are the rumors that spread alarm or fear or hate. Those
1-48
are the rumors that blast and kill. It was a muggy June Sunday in Detroit. The
heat had brought a hundred thousand people out into Belle Isle Park on the
Detroit River. It was 1943 and the nation was at war. The war industries had
brought thousands of negroes into the Detroit area. For some time feeling had
run high. On that particular Sunday an argument on the bridge between river
bank and park had led to a fist fight, in which friends of both parties engaged.
The incident itself was soon over. Then Dame Rumor took command.
First, it was reported that a white woman had been attacked by a negro on
the park bridge; then it was said she had been killed. Then the story was that
she had a baby in her arms, which her assailant had tossed into the river.
With each new telling the rumor took on bigger dimensions. As it grew more
and more lurid, it fanned higher and higher the flames of anger and hate. And
the rumors were by no means confined to the white people. When the report
reached Paradise Valley, one of the city’s most crowded negro sections, it said
that a bunch of white ruffians had killed a negro woman at Belle Isle Park.
Faster and faster the growing rumors circulated — from barber shops to bars,
from beauty parlors to church socials, from lobbies to restaurants, from telephone
to telephone. The subsided fist fight now broke out into a full-blown riot.
By midnight the fighting and looting had spread to a dozen sections of the city.
By Monday morning organized bands of whites roamed the streets, burning
all cars in sight that belonged to negroes. At nightfall four white boys, none
over 16 years of age, shot and killed a middle-aged negro who was just standing
in the doorway of his shop. When the orgy of hate was finally over, the death toll
was 25 negroes and nine whites, and property damage exceeded a million dollars.
Were you one of those who believed the bumping rumor, spread so widely in
1944? It was told to you something like this, always by someone who had got it
straight. A white schoolteacher in Boston.or New York .or Chicago or Cleveland —
1-49
or any northern city that fitted the convenience of the story teller — this
teacher asked one of her colored pupils to bring her mother to see the teacher
on Thursday, to talk over the pupil’s progress in school. “MCi!ma can’ t come on
Thursday”, said the little girl, “Thursday is her bumping day.” “What on earth
is bumping day?” asked the teacher. “Why that’s the day Mama goes to the department
stores and bumps white women.”
These Bump Club rumors became so serious in some cities that the FBI was
finally called to investigate. Everyone knows that Mr. Hoover’s G-Men do not
go through a job skimpily or half-heartedly. In this instance their investigation
was typicallY. thorough. It failed to produce a single shred of evidence
to prove the actual existence of any such club.
Most business is today conducted on a high level — most business, but
not all. In the trade wars for competitive markets Dame Rumor sometimes wields
a most vicious weapon. Do you recall those days back in 1934 when the whole
nation was buzzing with the whisper that a leper had been found working in a
certain cigarette factory? Here was a reputable manufacturer confronted by a
persistent rumor designed to spread the fear that one might contract a terrible
disease if he smoked this brand of cigarettes. The company offered rewards as
high as $50,000 for a clue that would lead to unearthing the rumor’s origin.
No clue was ever found, and eventually it died down, because the cigarette
makers had to face together the angry candy makers, who saw their business hit
by the folks who could be induced to reach for a smoke instead of a sweet.
The power of rumors is enhanced by the fact that people who hear them
believe they come from unbiased sources. This gives opportunity for those who
would harm a certain company to spread rumors about its product which it would
never dare to put in print. Whispering campaigns against another concern’s products
or operations, are branded as illegal and subject to prosecution by the
1-50
Federal Trade Commission. The alertness of that commission keeps the practice
down, but it does not stop it. A well known breakfast food was once driven off
the market by an unfounded rumor that it contained morphine. Aluminum ware was
rumored to produce cancer. The first mechanical refrigerators were said to be
poisoning the food. A certain dental cream would cause pyorrhea.
The telephones of northern headquarters of the Ford Motor Company were kept
buzzing in the spring of 1947· with inquiries whether it was true that a 1943
copper penny would buy its possessor a brand new Ford. Though the source of the
rumor remains to this day a mystery, the headquarters manager received demands
for verification and information from Ford dealers from coast to coast. Patiently
but wearily he kept telling the callers, “There is no such thing as a
1943 copper penny.” The need for copper during the war was so critical that
steel-zinc pennies were the only pennies coined in 1943. Furthermore the Ford
Company was certainly not a party to any such hoax. It had never offered to
sell ‘a car for that or any other mythical coin.
Perhaps as amusing a rumor as ever went the rounds concerns t;he State of
Washington I s famous mountain. It had originally been named Mt. Rainier in 1792
by Captain Vancouver in honor of a famous British admiral. In 1883 a director
of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who also happened to be president of the
Tacoma Land Company, announced that hereafter all guide books and other publications
of the railroad would use the name Mt. Tacoma. When, a few years ago,
the controversy sprang up allover again, a new rumor went the rounds. Someone
claimed to have unearthed what happened in Washington when a federal board
gave official name to the mountain. The brewers of Rainier beer, said this
rumor, had shipped a whole carload of their beverage to Washington to quench
the board members I thirst. Those august men became so jolly and gay and so
naturally grateful for the present, that they promptly named the mountain
Rainier.
1-51
The facts spoil that luscious s-tory. The bender never did take place, if
only for the reason that Rainier beer had not come into existence until years
after the federal decision had been made.
How does class warfare the curse of our economic and social life —
usually begin? How do wars between nations get started? These catastrophes
start because men, beguiled by their own anxieties and befogged by their own
rumors, pennit the gap of misunderstanding to grow wider and wider. Both sides
in a dispute thoroughly accept the lies about each other. When will the human
species learn that it is rumor that enslaves; it is only truth that makes men
free?
1-52
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
9th Broadcast January 9, 1949
My early experience in a country grocery store leads me to ask some odd
questions tonight. How many of you listeners under thirty years of age ever
saw a barrel of flour — flour in a wooden barrel? perhaps no one under thirty
listens to this program. But ask some young neighbor the question. How long
has it been since flour was regularly packed in wood? Perhaps an even odder
question is, “Who can remember a half-barrel of flour, also in wood?” I can
just barely remember those little barrels. The most usual commodity that came
in them was What is now called confectioner’s, but what we used to call powdered,
sugar. But occasionally, When the price of flour was very high, these halfbarrels
contained 98 pounds of flour. Or didn’t you know that 196 pounds of
flour make a barrel?
What was the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal? Do you remember some of
the old-timers? “Force” with its ads about Sunny Jim. Then there was one called
“Elij ah ‘s Manah” and another called “Krinkles”. Good old oatmeal and corn meal
must have made breakfasts for centuries. Samuel Johnson, that crusty old dictionary
maker, defined oats as a grain used in England for horses and in Scotland
to support the people. But we are talking about cereal ready to go on the
table, demanding no cooking. What was the first one? You can’t fool me about
this. I know. Do you?
A listener takes me to task for calling the Nation’s Christmas Tree the
oldest living thing on earth. Not those giant redwoods, he tells me, but certain
trees in Mexico are the oldest living things. So be it. Perhaps it is just
as well for those bragging Californians not to have everything • OUr Mexican
friends deserve something besides their wiShful manana.
*****
1-53
We hear so much about thieving and graft and dishonesty that we sometimes
wonder whether there are any honest people left. We forget that it is the exception,
the sensational, that makes news. Honesty is the rule, not the exception
— honest dealings, honest workmanship, honest service. The front page
spreads the news about one in 10,000 who goes wrong; we never hear about the
9,999 who go right — the clean, hard-working honest folks who carry on year
after year.
People want to trust others. They invariably favor those who can be trusted.
perhaps, on his first day in the little settlement of New Salem, Abraham Lincoln
was placed in charge of the polls because he was one of the few men there who
could read the names, but certainly the honors that came to him rapidly thereafter
came in no small part because of his reputation for honesty. A lot of
people did not like Calvin Coolidge. They considered him cold and aloof. B’Qt
all trusted him because they knew he was completely honest. The leading citizen
of his time, trusted and honored through all his years, was a man who said,
“Honesty is the best policy.” He was Benjamin Franklin.
*****
All too common in our lives is selfishness. No man or woman dares ask, “Am
I selfish?” We all know that we are. The question is, “How selfish are we? Are
there limits to our selfishness?” We are all ashamed of it, but I wonder if we
realize that selfishness does not pay_ Never was that truth expressed more
forcibly than in a short story that I ran across a few months ago. It is a
sequel to Frank R. Stockton I s famous story “The Lady or the Tiger”.
There is something about the so-called dilemma story that intrigues us all
the story that leaves us right in the air, that really has no ending, that insists
that the reader supply his own. Such a story was “The Lady or the Tiger”_
If you read it, you will never forget it: how a young man was made to enter the
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Roman arena, how in the Emperor’s box was a .girl who loved him, and how behind
one of the closed doors was a tiger and behind the other the girl whom the young
man loved. The girl in the box had made it very clear to the young man that she
could learn the secret of the doors, those doors that stood side by side opening
toward each other. And she told the young man that at the moment when he
must decide which door to open she would give him a signal by motioning to right
or left. When the decisive moment came, the young man looked up to the box and
the girl moved her hand to the right. Without an instant of hesitation the man
went straight to the right-hand door and opened it.
Then Stockton closes the story with these words: “What was behind that door,
the lady or the tiger?”There he leaves the reader. Did that girl in the box relinquish
him to the other girl, or did she prefer to feed him to the tiger,
rather than see the other girl get him? What, dear reader, in her place, would
you have done?
People have debated that story for half a centu:rY. Clumsy sequels, seeking
a satisfactory ending have been written, but none so surprising and so completely
fitting as one written only last year, and one which appeared, of all places,
in the annual prize contest conducted by Ellery QUeen’s Mystery Magazine, and
to that magazine belongs full credit for the story.
The writer presents himself as working on old papers in the Vatican Library
when he ran across a long letter written by a girl to her father. His daughter
had been taken into the household of the Jewish tetrarch Herod as a handmaid
to Herod’s wife. There she had fallen in love with a young Greek, Jason, a
handsome, ambitious man, already on his way to wealth by his artful manipulations
of trade and politics. Jason thought he loved the Greek girl, but his
real love was for himself alone. Some day, he avowed, he would out-Herod Herod;
he would rule all Judea; perhaps some day he would even be Emperor of Rome.
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Now Herod’s daughter Salome she who had demanded the head of John the
Baptist brought to her on a tray wanted this Jason for herself, but he was
wary. She might for a time help his selfish schemes, but in the long run she
would be a handicap. So he didn’t respond.
Meanwhile the Greek girl was troubled by Jason’s vaulting ambition, but
she loved him dearly. She could forgive him much. Naturally he was making
enemies in the court circles, and with the help of these enemies Salome contrived
a situation that caused his arrest. As we would say in modern slang,
“She framed him.” Herod passed sentence. Jason must enter the arena and submit
to the trial by ordeal. He shall choose which of two doors to open, behind
one of which will be the Greek girl, behind the other a tiger.
Salome went to the girl and comforted her. “Trust me”, she said, “I shall
know behind which door you will be, and I shall signal Jason to open that door.
Yes, I wanted him, but he loves you and you love him. I will not keep you apart.”
So the girl wrote to her father, the high priest in Jerusalem: “Tomorrow
is the .day of ordeal. Tomorrow Jason will open the door and I shall run to his
arms.” There the letter ends.
“It was long afterward”, says the writer, “that I found another letter,
written by Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea, to his emperor in Rome. ‘You ask’,
said the letter, ‘how we found it so easy to convict Jesus the Nazarene. It
was because Caiphas, the high priest, had no will to oppose us. He was a broken
man. Has no one told you what happened? Jason, the Greek, was to open one of
two doors in the arena. Behind one was the high priest’s daughter, behind the
other a tiger. I know not whether it is true, but rumor has it that Salome,
Herod’s daughter, gave him a signal. At any rate, he marched straight to the
door on the right. But he didn’t boldly open it wide. He opened it just a crack,
and there behind the door was the tiger. Now what did this Jason do? Those two
doors stood side by side, opening toward each other. He grabbed the other door
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swung both doors open with himself shut safely between them and the wall.
And out of the second door came the girl to meet the tiger.’
“Pilate asks if the emperor is curious to know what happened to Jason.
‘Don’t give him a thought’, wrote Pilate. ‘We took care of him. That selfishness
of his had long been getting him into trouble. We felt sure he was
taking bribes, and it didn’t take long to prove it. What did we do with him?
Why, we crucified him along with another thief, up there on the hill beside
the Nazarene.’ ”
*****
We hear a lot today about schools and teachers. They certainly have been
neglected long enough; it is time the public gave them some attention. Both the
Maine Legislature and the National Congress are going to hear a lot more about
them before these bodies, now in session, finally adjourn. This program is no
place to go into the political issues that must be faced before we solve this
problem of public education, before we admit that the man who trains the mind
is entitled to equal pay with the man who minds the train. But it is not out
of place here to state a few glaring facts.
More than 4,000,000 children of school age in America are not enrolled in
any school, public or private. The shortage of teachers is still so great that
100,000 new elementary teachers — that is, teachers of grades one to eight -will
be needed each year for the next ten years before the deficiency can be
made up. Yet in 1948 the output of all the teacher training institutions in
the country was scarcely 20,000. The number of children in the schools is expected
to increase by 9,000,000 in the next ten years.
Now few people want to see our national defense jeopardized. We want our
country kept strong. But education is itself the basic defense of democracy.
Something is dead wrong when we are spending 15 billion dollars a year in
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preparation for war and only 3 billion for the education of 25,000,000 children
in our public schools. We submit that the difference between these figures is
too great.
*****
Is reading in bed a common thing? If so, what kind of books do you read
in bed? If you are like me, you want bedside books that will not entertain you,
but rather will put you to sleep. That is why I recently read with relish a bit
of writing that I want to share with you. As this writer puts it: “The publisher
who produces a sleep-inducing shelf of books will make a fortune. It will not be
a five-foot shelf, like President Eliot’s, but six inches of printed chloroform.
Of course we do not all drowse off to the same drug. A telephone directory or
the Revised Statutes of Maine may not be enough to shunt your mind off that leak
in the car radiator.
“One of my surest bets is William Faulkner. His sentences start out like
Abraham, not knowing whither they go, and as you try to follow him, sleep knits
up the raveled sleeve of grammar. He will frequently run 65 adjectives to 64
nouns. His style is rambling, confused, hysterical. If you don’t go to sleep
before you have read forty pages, you’d better call your doctor.
“Then there is Hen:ty’ James. Counting his commas is better than counting sheep,
for once in a while a sheep will knock down the top rail and jolt you awake
again. But Henry flows smoothly, and his meaning eludes you.
“There is always the Congressional Record. ·But you can It depend on it, for
once in a while it becomes a most exciting .publication. So let the publishers
take a hint. What we need are more dependable sleeping pills, nicely bound in
cloth, beside the bedside lamp.”
*****
We .want to add our word to those who are demanding that the State of Maine
use some of its liquor.profits to treat alcoholism •. Every observant person knows
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that not only is the consumption of alcohol rapidly increasing, but its social
consequences are getting steadily worse. We ought to lend every possible aid
to that splendid organization, Alcoholics Anonymous. Their well-supported
theory is that only an experienced alcoholic can help another alcoholic. They
do not claim one hundred per cent cures; they do no preaching; they do not look
upon the alcoholic as morally degraded, but as curably diseased. They know that
no one can cure him but himself.
Now as our old friend Ima Wanderer, in the Waterville Sentinel, so frequently
puts it, “You and I are in the rum business.” We citizens are the State, and the
State operates liquor stores. The least we can do is to insist that the State
use part of its profits fram this questionable business in rehabilitating the
alcoholics.
Why do people drink anyhow? Did you read the reasons given in Time magazine
a short time ago?
“People think you are dead if you don I t drink.”
“I do it just to be sociable. I don’t like the stuff; I just choke it
down.”
“When I drink I feel important.”
“Drinking takes me right on up.”
Time tells us that 38 per cent of people who drink do so for sociability,
and that women are more likely to be social drinkers than are men. The magazine
quotes the Rutgers sociologists, who have made a thorough study of the problem,
as saying: “Science does not yet know how to tell the difference between
a potential alcoholic and a drinker who can take it or leave it alone.So we
advise all hosts and hostesses: never insist on anyone’s taking a drink.”
*****
Yes, most of you who responded to my question about the first ready-to-eat
cereal gave the right answer. It was indeed Shredded Wheat.
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Well, we have talked enough common things for one evening. Perhaps you
listeners are feeling like the fifth grade kids in an Oklahoma school, who
voted 34 to one they would rather have a spanking than a friendly talk.
1-60
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
10th Broadcast January 16, 1949
Let us turn again tonight to that familiar subject of words. They are
tricky things, aren’t they? How wonderful it would be if the same word meant
the same thing to all people. That is one of the barriers in the way of world
peace. There can be no peace without understanding, and there can be no understanding
without words.
I was talking a few days ago with a man who represented the United States
last swmmer at the meetings of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Social
and CUltural Organization) held at The Hague in the Netherlands. He told some
amusing incidents concerning the translation of the speeches into English. A
Spanish speaker had urged that the address be short. The translator put it:
“The length must be as brief as possible.” When a speaker from Czechoslovakia
spoke of university professors of long service, the translation read, “professors
in a state of advanced use”.
When the Americans read a translation from the Chinese, which the translator
had rendered into English by “a need to vulgarize the material”, they
might have been shocked had they not remembered the oldest meaning of the word
vulgar. It comes from the Latin vulgus, meaning the crowd, the common folks, and
only in recent centuries did it come to have the meaning of cheap, nasty, in
bad taste. What the translator meant to say, of course, was “a need to popularize
the material”.
Now these instances provided a laugh; they did no harm. But they serve to
show how slippery a thing is language, and how easily it can lead to misunderstanding.
We woefully need an international language, free from the national
prejudice of anyone tongue.
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It is a common thing for us to want other people to do things for us
rather than to do these things ourselves. We are not so foolish as to think
we are going back to the old days of the self-reliant pioneers, those days when
there was no WPA to help the hungry settlers at Plymouth. But it does no hann
to recall that solely by their own efforts those early colonies kept alive, grew
and prospered.
The fundamental core of American democracy is the town meeting, and the
farther we remove decision and action from local government, the less real democracy
we have. Yet we know we are a big country, with vast inequalities of
wealth and opportunity in different parts. Because many a local community
simply cannot afford to pay for the services demanded by modern civilization,
it has turned more and more to help from wealthier communities — help from the
pooled resources of towns and cities that make a State, and then to the big pool
of all, Uncle Sam’s treasury in Washington. Now much of this is good, and a lot
of it is inevitable. But it has two great inherent dangers. It leads us to lean
too much on the other fellow’s help, and it undennines democracy by the creation
of a great bureaucracy in Washington.
Remember that the labor which keeps us alive is productive labor. Every
person who works as I do, in services rather than goods, is not a productive
laborer. For all of us who are teachers and doctors, lawyers alid insurance men,
merchants and brokers, there must be many, many men and women, getting crops
from the soil, minerals from the mines, lumber from the forests, and many more
turning out the products of thousands of factories. In spite of improved machinery
and speeded assembly lines no nation can pennanently let its service workers
increase at the expense of its productive workers, and we must wake up to the
fact that the alanning increase in these services or non-productive workers is
in the field of government. So many people are already working for local, state
or national government that it takes an enonnous amount of productive labor
1-62
merely to pay their salaries.
What are the facts? More than two million men and women are employed in
the executive branch of the federal government alone. The Army has 400,000
civilian employees, the Navy 350,000. The post office has half a million, the
Treasury a hundred thousand, Interior 60,000, and Veterans Administration
200,000. Then there are the numerous independent agencies we never heard of a
few years ago. The FSA employs 36,000, FWA 22,000, RFC 5,000, War Assets Administration
17,000, TVA 15,000. There seems to be no end. Like Topsy, these
things just grow — or perhaps a better comparison would be Jack and his beanstalk.
When everybody works for the government, we won It have to worry about
who will wash the dishes — for then there won I t be any food to get the dishes
dirty.
*****
Last Tuesday it was my privilege to attend a meeting of the Security
Council of the United Nations at Lake Success, New York. It was a thrilling experience
to see the representatives of 37 nations, to eat ina huge cafeteria
surrounded by persons talking numerous languages, to see the system of instantaneous
translation at work, and most of all to observe the directness and
frankness with which world problems are faced.
We are inclined to underestimate and belittle the United Nations. The
world is so far from peace, the horrors of a third World War seem so imminent,
that we wonder whether the U. N. can ever be more than a debating society.
When the Charter was drawn at San Francisco, we probably expected too
much. That is human nature. When Congress or the Maine Legislature passes a
law, we too easily suppose the job is done. Living together peacefully is not so
easy as that. Even the city ordinances of Waterville are sometimes flaunted
and neglected. Most of us value doing as we please more than we value harmony
in the community. We will go a long way to protect our own rights, but we
1-63
don’t intend to give up anything to let the other fellow have his rights.
It is the same way with nations. Even for them to agree to sit around
a council table and talk openly about complaints and grievances is some gain.
When world problems can no longer be settled by secret diplomacy, by the old
bi-1atera1 agreements between two nations, with the rest of the world in the
dark, when now the nations that disagree with a majority decision must Show
their hands, even if it is by the pernicious veto, the whole world at last has
information about what is going on. And in the long run an informed public
opinion is an acting public opinion.
We know it works that way in the United States. A few days ago I attended
a dinner at which Harold Stassen, former Governor of Minnesota, candidate for
presidential nomination, and now head of the University of Pennsylvania, made
a thrilling speech. He gave a pointed instance of the power of public opinion
in America. He said that two weeks before Secretary Marshall made his memorable
address at Harvard, every responsible official in the government believed we
had reached the end of foreign aid spending, that with the Greek and Turkish loans
to help those countries stop the sweep of Communism, we had had enough. The American
people would not stand for pouring any more money down the drain. Then
Secretary Marshall spoke, announcing the now-famous Marshall Plan. Allover
the country press and radio took it up. It was talked about, not only in the
swanky clubs and at business luncheons, but also in barber shops and groceries,
on busses and commuter trains, at the grange hall and the country store. Messages
poured in upon reluctant Congressmen. The nation had become convinced that
the Marshall Plan was not merely a humanitarian and charitable way to help wartorn
Europe; it was enlightened self-interest, the surest way in the long run
to save ourselves.
So, at those meetings at Lake Success, one gets his eyes open to rising
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peaks of world opinion. On the day I attended the Security Council was discussing
the Dutch-Indonesian dispute. Now I ask you, a dozen years ago what
would any of us have cared about actions of the Dutch in the far-off islands
of Java and Sumatra? If we took notice at all, it would be either to say,
“This is a white man’s world; the Dutch had better teach these funny little
brown men their place”, or to say “Those Indonesians want their freedom; more
power to them”. But, whichever side our emotions took, a dozen years ago we
would have been very sure that it was none of our business. Today we are
equally sure that this trouble in far-away Southeast Asia is the whole world’s
business.
So, as an American, I was proud of the straight, unambiguous words with
which our delegate, Dr. Jessup, stated the American posibion. He accused the
Dutch government of defying the cease-fire order passed by the Council and said,
“AI though Dutch armies have seized the capitol of the Indonesian Republic and
have imprisoned its president and prime minister, we serve notice on the Netherlands
government that the world cannot accept the result. It is still a
matter of international concern.” Then he gave this powerful warning: “Instead
of establishing order in the islands, the Dutch government has let loose forces
of terror, chaos and sabotage. The united states Government cannot associate
itself with any aspect of the Dutch military action. In the opinion of the
Government of the United States, the Netherlands Government has violated the
charter of the united Nations.”
Nor did Dr. Jessup let the attitude of Russia go unquestioned, for the
Russians had not supported the Council’s cease-fire order, preferring to offer
a resolution of their own. “The Soviet Union does not want an independent Indonesia”,
said Dr. Jessup. “It wants an Indonesia under the control of a communist
minori tytaking orders from Moscow. II Then he uttered these blasting words:
“Anywhere in the world when a communist government climbs in the window, independence
is kicked out of the door.”
1-65
While Dr. Jessup was talking I was watching faces — the expressionless
poker face of the Russian delegate, the occasional sly glances toward him of
his Ukrainian satellite, the enthusiastic smiles of the Indian and Burmese
observers, the scowling countenances and the sometimes hectic conferring in the
DutCh delegation, the nods of approval by the British delegate, and, most of
all, the deep concern of the small nations, Syria and Cuba, Belgium and Chile,
Liberia and Pakistan. For this aggression of the Dutch in the Indies was
everybody’s business. If one nation could do this, any nation could do it.
No one anywhere in the world was safe.
If you get a chance to visit Lake Success, make the most of it. It will
give you new faith in the greatest venture of our time, faith that in spite of
tremendous obstacles, men of good will can yet make this a peaceful world.
1-66
: ..
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
11 th Broadcast January 23, 1949
What a rare thing is a sense of proportion — the ability to place situations
and events in right relationship. Too many adults lack the sense of relationship,
whose lack is understandable and excusable in a little child. I
recently heard about a little girl in Waterville who was deceived by this
very lack of proportion. Her older brother told this little tot, “I ‘II help
Mother with the dishes from Christmas to New Years if you will help her do
them from New Years to Christmas.” Now the offer came just a little while
before Christmas. To be free from dish-wi~ing for a whole week after Christmas
— that would be wonderful. It just didn’t occur to her that from New
Years to Christmas would be 51 weeks, all the rest of a long, long year.
How excited we get about little things that don’t matter, and how complacently
we look at some of the big things which matter very much. The hard
working men and women who make up the national Congress deserve our respect
and support. For the most part and during most of the time they are about
the country’s business, concerned with important issues of our national welfare.
But not always.
Those of us who regularly read the Congressional Record know very well
that there are times when Congressmen, like the rest of us, sadly lack a sense
of proportion. Twenty-six columns in the Record of January 13th, at $200 a
column, are filled with the bitterness of a personal quarrel between the alleged
labor-hater, Clare Hoffman and the alleged management-hater, John Lesinski,
both from the same state of Michigan. Mr. Hoffman accused Mr. Lesinski
of calling him a “pimp of Joe Stalin”. Mr. Lesinski denied he said it.
Mr. Hoffman refused to accept the denial. Other Congressmen, especially Mr.
1-67
Cox of Georgia, tried to pour oil on the troubled waters, but all to no avail.
Mr. MCCormack of Massachusetts, the majority leader, entered the fray, and in
the thinly veiled politeness demanded by the rules of the House of Representatives,
he and Mr. Hoffman hurled sarcasm at each other. Outside the halls of
Congress two adults would usually settle such a controversy very quickly. They
would either get together and resolve their differences, or they would go their
respective ways. If it got so bad that one really slandered the other, the
courts would always be open to the offended party.
Unfortunately a few Congressmen do not act as do ordinary citizens. So, in
this instance, Mr. Hoffman talked on and on, indicating that, at a proper parliamentary
time, he intended to offer a resolution for investigation and Congressional
censuring of Mr. Lesinski. Finally Congressman Michener stood it as
long as he could, and said: “Mr. Speaker, I know nothing about this occurrence.
But the gentleman has now consumed the hour for which, under the rule, he was
permitted to talk. He has talked. Then he buttressed that talk, as I understand,
by a resolution. The rest of us would like to know just where the resolution
is and what is in it.”
The Speaker of the House replied: “There is a paper lying on the desk of
the Speaker. It starts by saying ‘Resolution’. The gentleman from Michigan
never did offer the resolution. He said he was sending up to the Speaker’s desk,
and he intended to offer, a resolution, but he did not.” Quite reasonably Congressman
Michener asked, “Then the status is that the gentleman from Michigan,
Mr. Hoffman, sent a paper up there, and there it lies. What will become of it?”
Now just consider, as an ordinary citizen, the Speaker’s reply, for this is
what he said: “There is nothing before the House at this time.”
On a question of personal privilege Mr. Hoffman had talked for an hour, and
when he finished, no one really knew what.it was all about, for there was nothing
1-68
before the House at that time. And to get it into the Congressional Record,
the taxpayers paid the printing bill of $200 a column for 26 columns.
How splendid it would be if it could be said of us what Justice Wilson
said of that great Chief Justice of Maine, Leslie C. Cornish, on the occasion
of the latter’s funeral. “One sign of Judge Cornish’s greatness”, said Judge
Wilson, “was that he knew a trifle when he saw one.”
*****
Mark Twain once said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does
anything about it.” This is certainly a freak winter — balmy spring days in
Maine where we are supposed to have only two seasons, winter and the fourth of
July; and snow for the first time in recorded history in San Diego, California.
The Christmas holidays saw not enough snow for skiing in the White Mountains,
but paralyzing blizzards as far south as New Mexico.
Some people say the Gulf Stream is changing, others say we are in the midst
of a swing in the great weather cycle. The professional meteorologists tell us
there is nothing in either explanation. Even they do not know enough about the
causes of our weather. Much is still veiled in mystery . But they know much more
than they did twenty. years ago. They tell us confidentially that the answer
lies in the movement of air 20,000 to 40 ,·000 feet above the earth. There the
air currents move at tremendous speed from west to east. The speed and the precise
direction determine what goes on here. Early last fall bulges appeared in
the smooth west to east flow of the upper air. That air took a wandering path,
first moving northeast, then swinging down to southeast, and back again to
northeast in the pattern of a huge letter S.Such movement means extreme departures
from normal, and thus the northeast part of the united States got one
of the warmest and wettest autUmns on record.
But just why .should this S movement cause such conditions? When the air
currents get into that wavy pattern, they draw off the cold Alaska-Yukon polar
1-69
air and leave it scattered allover the western part of the country_ As they
curve through Texas and start northeastward, they drain a lot of moist, warm
air from over the Gulf of Mexico and deposit it over the East. Under the pattern
the area which will be warm and wet is that most influenced by the south
to north swing of the huge air currents. Through the fall and thus far this
winter that area has been the Northeast. The area which will be coldest and
driest is the one most influenced by the north-to-south swing of the currents.
That section has been the West.
Why the currents take this wavy form in the first place, why the bulges
appear, the weathermen do not find it easy to explain. But at least it isn’t
quite fair to say that everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything
about it. The experts of the U. S. Weather Bureau are W01:lking constantly,
not only with the old time method of reports from widely distributed stations,
but also with the newer methods of radar-tracked balloons and complicated recording
devices. Every year that goes by, these patient workers are adding to
man’s store of knowledge about that common but very important thing, weather.
*****
In the important matter of properly staffing our schools and adequately
paying the teachers there is likely to be a lot of emotional argument. We have
already mentioned the matter on this program, calling attention to a few pertinent
facts. Tonight we are presenting no argument; we have no intent of
pulling at your heart-strings in behalf of the teachers. We prefer rather that
you look at a few more cold, hard facts. That our boys and girls have been the
victims of too much incompetent and sub-standard teaching since 1942 is shown by
the fact that in the fall of 1947, 122,000 persons were teaching on temporary
certificates because they could not qualify for regular certification. This
fall the number had been reduced by only 15,000. There are still 107,000 unpre-
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pared, emergency teachers at work in the nation’s schools.
Maine’s place in this picture is far from enviable. A year ago our State
Department reported 500 of these sub-standard, emergency teachers. This year
the Department reports exactly the same number. During the year we have made
no gain at all.
We have made a gain in the average pay of teachers. In 1947-48.it was
$1,979. It is now $2,200. This places us 37th among the 48 states. We used to
say Maine stands with the deep South in support of education. We can no longer
claim even that. In Virginia, West Virginia, Louisiana, Florida and Texas the
average pay of teachers is higher than it is in Maine. It is not only such
wealthy states as New York and California that pay teachers well. Utah, Nevada,
Texas and Arizona all pay a minimum salary more than twice the teachers’ minimum
in Maine. The maximum in Maine for classroom teachers, exclusive of principals
or other administrators, is $3,500. In Minnesota that maximum is $5,300;
in Montana it is $4,500; and in North Dakota it is $6,500.
Even now, before the increased birth rate of the war years has caught up
with the schools, there is still a shortage .of teachers. The situation has recently
grown better in the high schools, to which former teachers have returned
in rising numbers. Yet most of the country, including Maine, reports that even
in the high schools the shortage still exists. Only such high-salaried states
as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland and California report all high school
positions ·filled with fully-trained, competent teachers.
It is in the elementary schools, in the grades below high school, that the
situation is really alarming. The wealthy state of New York reports a shortage
of 2,380 elementary teachers; pennsylvania lacks 3,000; Virginia needs 4,500;
South Carolina can use 6,000. And here in Maine, with less than a million
people in our whole population, we have a shortage of 1,600 trained teachers for
our boys and girls in the grade schools.
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I fear I have muddled your heads with figures, but I hope the main point
is clear. In our failure to give adequate financial support to education, we
are taking it out of our boys and girls. It is not we adults, it is the next
generation that suffers. If we want to turn our nation over to the foes of
democracy, the surest way to do it is to forget our schools.
*****
Each week we try to mention at least one of the old-time things. Do you
city folks remember when they used to bank up the house for the winter? My listeners
in the country still do it. What do they use for banking? Various materials,
but I am told that sawdust is still the most conunon. Now I want to
know how many of you ever saw bark tan used in that way. That is what everyone
used in the Maine vi1lage where I spent my boyhood. One of the town’s principal
industries was a tannery, to which the farmers annually hauled hundreds of cords
of hemlock bark. The bark was ground, its juices were used in the tanning process,
and the waste pulp, which everyone called “the tan”, was thrown out just as sawduct
is from a sawmi11. That tan made excellent banking for those furnace-less
houses against the co1d blasts from the White Mountains. And what cool, soft
stuff it was to walk in barefoot through the tannery yard in mid-summer!
*****
Heroism often consists in simply doing one’s duty. The tragic stories of
aircrash landings, lLke that of the Yale students in Seattle at New Year’s,
makes such mournful reading that it is refreshing and inspiring to hear the
story of Sgt. Robert Lee Hodgkiss of the 82d Airborne Division. That Division
of the Air Corps, with its famous paratroopers, had already won much renown. As
the big “flying box-car”, the C-82, flew over North Carolina, something went
wrong. Sgt. Hodgkiss, who had jumped in combat in Sicily, Italy, and Normandy,
heard the jtnnp bell ring. There was no time to check harness or parachutes. He
could only shout “Stand up, hook up, jump”. Then he calmly waited while 36 men
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left the doors of the plane at an altitude already dangerously low. It was
simply the sergeant’s duty, as jump-master, to be the last man out of the plane.
But at times like these, it is a splendid thing just to do one’s duty. When it
came the sergeant’s turn to jump, it was too late. The plane was too near the
ground. He could only sit down, brace himself for the worst, and say “This is
it. What of my wife and child?” unexpectedly this incident had a happy ending.
Sgt. Hodgkiss did not die. He escaped unhurt, and every one of the 36 men in his
charge landed safely. Was the sergeant a hero; was he a brave man? He did just
what was expected of him.
1-73
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
12th Broadcast January 30, 1949
How many of you remember Maine’s narrow-guage railroads? How many of you
ever rode on them? The one nearest Waterville was still running only a few
years ago. It started ambitiously as the Wiscasset and Quebec Railroad, then
became the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington. On paper it was the first of
the old two-footers because it got its charter in 1854. It was forty years later,
however, that the narrow, little two-foot track was laid down.
In my student days at Colby College the embankment on the Winslow side,
where the surveyors had intended to bridge the Kennebec on the way to Farmington
was still standing, but the road itself then ran, as it did for twenty years
more, from Wiscasset to Albion. Some local listener can tell me when that part
of the line which ran into Winslow was abandoned.
That old narrow guage road started off with lofty ambitions. It was going
right through to the Province of Quebec, have deluxe trains with diners, sleepers
and parlor cars. Its promoters were going to take the million dollar annual
grain traffic away from the Grand Trunk. Wiscasset had a fine harbor and is a
little nearer Liverpool than is Portland.
From its first days the little railroad ran into trouble. Its first stretch
was planned to Burnham, 55 miles up state from Wiscasset. But the big Maine Central
would not let the little fellow cross its Belfast branch. So it was decided
to swing west at Weeks Mills and send the line to Waterville and Farmington,
hoping to make some kind of deal to use the Sandy River rails from there to Rangeley,
then go on to Quebec. But the Maine Central again boxed the little fellow’S
ears. They couldn’t cross Maine Central tracks at Farmington to connect with the
Sandy River. By this time folks had a new name for the Wiscasset, waterville and
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Farmington. Its WWF now stood for Weak, Weary and Feeble.
Nevertheless it was quite a road in its day, and for many years it served
well the towns between Wiscasset and Albion. My last ride on it was in 1921,
When I was trying to interest the school superintendent at Weeks Mills in a
line of text books I was then selling.
It was not the WWF, however, but another narrow guage road that was the
pride of my own boyhood, because I was born and reared in a narrow guage town.
It was the Bri’dgton and Saco River Road, originally only sixteen miles long,
connecting the town of Bridgton, with its three big woolen mills, with the
Mountain Division of the Maine central at Bridgton Junction in the town of Hiram.
Later the road was extended six miles up Long Lake to Harrison.
George Ham, the engineer of the tiny little locomotive and Phil Marcou, the
conductor, were my boyhood heroes. The last ride I had in the little passenger
car, with its single-passenger seats, was in 1916, but my first ride on it is
more memorable. I was only fiv:e years old, and was making my first trip to
Portland with my parents. Even then, though the big, broad-guage Maine Central
was more impressive, the tiny engine and cars of that two-foot road were more
intimate and more assuredly mine.
Somewhere around the house I have some snapshots taken of a wreck on that
old Bridgton and Saco, the only train wreck, I am thankful to say, in which I
was ever involved. No one was hurt, but the passengers had to walk the track two
miles into Bridgton Junction.
The schedules all called for mixed trains; so the baggage and passenger
cars were always preceded by several freight cars. The first mile out of Bridgton
Junction was all up grade, and if the freight cars were many or carried unusually
heavy loads, the train frequently had to make several attempts to reach
the summit. It would start nobly out of the Junction, puff more and more slowly
until it came to a stop with spinning wheels striking sparks from the rails.
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Then it would back down to the Junction and try again. Believe it or not, Mr.
Ripley, I remember one spring day when all of us passengers alighted on the
train’s firs~ unsuccessful try, walked up to the summit, and picked mayflowers
until the train made the grade. Then, with all cars over the crest and ready
for the long, level run to North Sebago, the obliging conductor stopped and let
us on.
There are said to have been ten of these old two-foot roads in Maine. I
cannot identify all of them; it will take some old-time railroad man to do that.
But I have good reason to recall the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Road. In
1922 I spent seven hours stalled in one of its trains between Strong and Kingfield
in a howling blizzard. It was near the old Dead River Station, a few
miles south of Rangeley that, on another occasion, I saw my first beaver cuttings.
One of the experiences I missed was a ride in the Sandy River’s palatial
parlor car, which used to accomodate summer guests bound for the swanky Hotel
Rangeley. My seat was always in the plebian coach with the other traveling
salesmen.
Having taken a crack at the WWF by referring to it as the Weak, Weary and
Feeble, I must tell you what they called my old road, the Bridgton and Saco
River. In its last days it was known as the Busted and Still Running. The
Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes was the Shaky, Rough and Ready Loafer.
Many people remember the old slate road, the two-footer from Monson Junction
to the slate quarries at Monson. Then there was the Kennebec Central
from Gardiner to Togus. That makes five of the old narrow guage roads: the
WWF, the B & SR, the SR & RL, the Monson and the Kennebec Central. Where were
the five others? Come on, you old railroaders, let us know.
It is very gratifying to some of us that not only the rider of these old
roads, but some of their actual rolling stock is still operating today. Did you
ever hear of the Edaville Railroad, operated by Ellis D.Atwood through his
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cranberry bogs on Cape Cod. Mr. Atwood’s Edaville in the town of Carver is the
biggest privately owned cranberry business in the world. It produces over 10,000
barrels of cranberries a year. Mt. Atwood decided he wanted a railroad. So he
bought same of the discarded rolling stock of the Bridgton and Saco River line.
From various sources he got parts for S! miles of track. One of his engines was
the old B & SR No.7, behind which I had ridden many a bouncing mile. His deluxe
coach is the once palatial parlor car of the old Rangeley line. B & SR’ s
best known passenger coach, the pondicherry, now rides Mr. Atwood’s rails.
Thus down on Cape Cod is a sort of reconstruction of several of the old
narrow guage roads of Maine. If you go down on the Cape in the summer months
you can ride the S! mile loop of Mr. Atwood’s road for a dime. Thousands of
tourists take the trip every summer, but the little road is no mere pleasure toy.
It hauls the cranberries and their pickers, and it hauls the many tons of sand
with which the bogs must be sprinkled every winter to combat weeds and bugs and
to radiate the heat that prevents the vines from freezing.
Mr. Atwood’s road is about the size of the old Monson line, which they used
to call the Two by Six two feet wide and six miles long. It isn’ t so long
nor so important a road as myoId B & SR. But naturally any man of my age who
chanced to be born in Wiscasset or Rangeley, in Monson or Bridgton, gets a thrill
from seeing a modern railroad on Cape Cod using the same engines and cars that
stocked the trains we used to ride on many years ago.
*****
Same of the finest citizens of Central Maine claim Scotland as the land of
their birth, or at least the land of their parents. This week allover the world
Scotsmen are singing Auld Lang Syne with exceptional vigor as they honor that
best loved of Scotsmen, Robert Burns. It was more than thirty years ago that one
of waterville’s leading Scots called me to task for saying Bobbie Burns. No true
Scot says that. It is Robbie Burns, or in better Scotch, Rabbie Burns.
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Most of the Scotch people in America have been moderately well-to-do. Some
of them, like Andrew Carnegie, became very wealthy. But today, as in Burns’
time, much of Scotland is a land of poor farmers. It was Burns, above all poets,
who sang the “short and simple annals of the poor” • Readers who misunderstand
him think he praised poverty as a virtue. Not so! He praised rather the poverty-
stricken people who lived such noble, honest lives with no hope of getting
out of their stricken condition.
Burns, in his love of liquor and his amours, was scarcely a model for living.
A fellow Scotsman, who perhaps understood Burns better than did his official biographer
Lockhart, was Thomas Carlyle. In his masterly “Essay on Burns”, Carlyle
says of the poet’s dissipated life and early death: “Had he been richer, never so
little richer, the whole might have issued otherwise.” It was hopeless, enervating
poverty that doomed Burns.
We folk who do not have the advantage of being Scotch can hardly view their
national poet through the loving eyes of those who knew at first hand the banks
and braes of Bonnie Doon. But we can appreciate the simple sincerity of good
poetry when we read it. And above all things else, Burns was utterly sincere.
So on this broadcast, devoted to Common Things, we are glad to pay honor to the
man who wrote the best that has ever been written about the commonest things of
life. Just consider some of his titles: “To a Mouse”, “To a Mountain Daisy”,
“To a Louse on a Lady’s Bonnet in Church”.
The world of letters will always proclaim the virtues of “Tam 0′ Shanter”
and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”, but we take sides with those Scotsmen -among
them the great Carlyle — who say that Burns ought best to be remembered
for his songs. “They do not need to be set to music”, said Carlyle. “In themselves
they are music”.
Of course the best known of his songs is “Auld Lang Syne”. Almost as well
1-78
known are “My Bonnie Mary”, “Green Grow the Rashes 0”, and “John Anderson, My
Jo” • But· what are to me the most purely musical verses that Burns ever wrote
I want to share with you tonight. He calls this song “The Banks of Devon’~.
Listen!
“How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon,
With green spreading bushes and flow’rs blooming fair.
But the bonniest flow’ r on the banks of the Devon
Was once a sweet bud on the braes of the Ayr.
Mild be the sun on this sweet bluShing flower,
In the gay rosy morn, as it bathes in the dew;
And gentle the fall of the soft vernal Shower
That steals on the evening each leaf to renew.
o spare the dear blossom, ye orient breezes,
With chill hoary wing as ye uSher the dawn;
And far be thou distant, thou reptile that seizes
The verdure and pride of the garden or lawn.
Let Bourbon exult in his gay gilded lilies,
And England triumphant display her proud rose;
A fairer than either adorns the green valleys
Where Devon, sweet Devon, meandering flows.”
*****
A few weeks ago we referred to some of that wierdly twisted language known
as Federal Prose — the language of government agencies in their tortuous directives
that conceal rather than reveal the meaning. What do you make of this one?
“Undue multiplicity of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively
to a single function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant
product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of
personnel.”
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It might take you a long time to figure out that what the writer of
Federal prose is trying to say is the old adage “Too many cooks spoil the broth”.
1-80
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
13th Broadcast February 6, 1949
From the earliest days of our government, every session of the Senate and
of the House of Representatives has been opened with prayer. Too often, during
the hundred and sixty years of our nation’s history, those prayers have been
perfunctory and trite. No one paid any attention to them.
Then, a few years ago, the Reverend Peter Marshall became chaplain of the
Senate. Last week he died at the early age of 48, but in the few short years
during Which he had opened .the Senate’s daily sessions with prayer, he had made
his name known allover the land. For his prayers were most unusual. They were
copied in daily newspapers, not only in the united States, but in Canada, in
Britain, in India, South Africa and Australia.
Peter Marshall’s prayers made even the politicians listen. Sen. Vandenberg
once said he could never be sure whether Marshall was praying for him or at him.
There was nothing trite or perfunctory about those prayers. Only a few weeks before
his death, at a session of the present 81st Congress he had said: “Dear
Lord, save us from useless worry lest ulcers of the stomach be the badge of our
lack of faith”. When the momentous question of European Relief first came before
the Senate, Peter Marshall prayed: “Give us the wisdom to know where to stand
and the courage to stand there, lest failing to stand we fall for anything.”
One of his earliest prayers woke up dozing senators with these words: “Help
us to see the middle path between much talk that ends in no action, and hasty
action without free discussion”. Again he said: “When we have nothing to say,
give us the wisdom to say nothing”.
One day, when the previous session had been stormy with insinuations and
bitterness, this chaplain prayed: “Keep our minds attuned to the eternal values
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of faith and hope and human kindness, and let us not be submerged in the littleness
of prejudice and hate”.
In the 80th Congress, when the closing time drew near and there was so much
hectic confusion, when several sessions lasted all day and all night, when bodies
had been fatigued and nerves frayed, Peter Marshall one morning prayed before the
senate in these words: “0 Lord, give us the wisdom to realize that there are only
24 hours in a day, that trying to crowd 30 hours activity into 24 hours makes us
creatures of circumstance, not creatures of God. If
Perhaps the most quoted of Peter Marshall’s senatorial prayers is one uttered
in those days when Congress changed its political control in 1946, and men of both
\
parties challenged each other’s motives. This is what the senate chaplain then
said: “Much as we need to live in harmony with others, much as we yearn for our
neighbor’s approval, help us, 0 Lord, to the greater task of living in harmony
with ourselves, so that at night we can look in the mirror and say ‘I may have
been wrong today. I may have displeased my neighbor; but I can go to bed with my
conscience clear.’ ”
Peter Marshall will be greatly missed in the senate of the united States. In
its century and a half of existence the greatest deliberative body in the world
has had no other chaplain who could reveal to men in high places, so simply, so
directly, so challengingly, the inner secrets of their own souls.
*****
Next week we shall have more to say about the narrow guage railroads. We
are grateful to those of our listeners who have called or written us during the
week, and we shall acknowledge some of those conununications next Sunday. We shall
tell you also, at that time, who the person is that insists there were once ten
of those old two-foot roads in Maine. And he counts the Sandy River and Rangeley
Lakes as only one road, though it was originally three. Last week I named five of
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those old railroads. So far I have heard of only one more — a narrow guage
road that ran from Old Orchard to Ocean Park and Ferry Beach. There must have
been others. I want to know about them before next Sunday.
*****
Among the old-time things we like to remember are the church suppers in
our small Maine villages at the turn of the century. Churches still hold public
suppers today. They are frequent and they are good, right here in waterville in
1949. But they aren’t like the old timers. Circle suppers, they called them in
my boyhood town, for they were put on in each church by the Ladies Aid Society,
locally called the Ladies Circle.
In my town the Universalist suppers were considered best and drew the biggest
crowds, but that reputation may not have been due wholly to the food. For only the
Universalists allowed after-supper dancing in their vestry. The Congregationalists
permitted a few sedate square dances, but the Methodists banned dancing in any
form.
The principal dish at those suppers was baked beans, supported by brown
bread and rolls, pickles in lavish variety, and topped off with big pieces of pie
and cake, all washed down with gallons of steaming coffee. And the price I
never knew it to change from 1900 to 1910 was ten cents. In 1912 I was a student
in college when my mother wrote me what a howl had gone up in town because
her circle .had raised their supper price to 15 cents.
Once a year there was a special supper for which folks paid 20 cents without
protest. It was known as the Men’s Supper, put on, like all the rest, for the
public of both sexes, but with the work done by the men. It always came in February
and it was always oyster stew. ‘ And the dessert was just as uniform — not
a variety of cakes and pies as at the ladies’ suppers — but only what we called
“Cream pie”, now better known as Washington Pie. We boys used to wangle for a
piece of one of those marvelous three-deckers, whipped cream between the layers
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and a mountain of Whipped cream on top.
Doubtless some of those wonderful suppers are still served in country towns
today, but their price is no longer 10 or 20 cents.
*****
A few weeks ago we were talking about rumor, and we gave special attention
to the blasting, killing effect of evil rumor. We mentioned how rumors have
harmed the sale of certain products, have even driven some firms out of business.
Did you know that deliberate propaganda for good rumor also happens in the
business world? The best men of business still believe that the way to long
term success is to make a better mouse trap than your neighbor, to produce a
product which in quality and price will find a favorable market in open competition.
Yet so powerful is modern advertising that everyone knows it can do a lot to
make the public want to buy a particular product. What isn It so well known is
that there are people who make a business of spreading favorable rumors from
mouth to ear. In his recent book “The Affairs of Dame Rumor”, David Jacobson,
a well known public relations consultant in New York, tells us about professional
rumor services, organizations equipped to plant Whatever rumors a client felt
would improve his chances to get the consumer I s dollar. Mr. Jacobson names the
oldest of these rumor services, established in 1915, as W. Howard Downey and
Associates, with offices in New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Toronto. “On a few
hours notice”, says Mr. Jacobson, “this firm told prospective clients it was
prepared to supply operatives for spreading rumors anywhere in the country. The
standard contract provided two-man teams to circulate word-of-mouth propaganda
by conversation in subways, theaters, commuter trains, elevators, and all other
places of public assembly”.
Here is a sample of the professional rumor-making technique. On behalf of
a tire manufacturer one of. these two-men teams worked a commuter’s train. When
they boarded the train, one of them seemed to be a businessman and the other a
unifo:rmed chauffeur carrying a brand-new tire. “These XYZ tires”, exclaimed
the chauffeur, “are the best I·ve ever put on the boss’ car.” “You don’t say.
John”, replied the businessman. “And how many thousand miles do you get out of
them?” This was the signal for the chauffeur to launch into his spiel. The
mileage he claimed for these tires was phenomenal. The commuters were impressed,
the talk lingered in their minds, and probably some of them bought ~Z tires.
One of these professional rumor agencies was once hired to pump new life
into a dying broadcasting chain. The two-man teams went to work. When a team was
sure it had plenty of listeners, one man would say, “Did you hear what this news
broadcasting outfit is doing?” “You mean so-and-so?”, the other man would ask.
“Yes, so-and-so. They’re throwing money away like water. They’re out to get
people for their programs and they’re paying money you wouldn’t believe.” That
campaign was a huge success after three weeks.
There is also the case of the Detroit department store that engaged a rumor
agency to boost its sales of women’s dresses. Two-women teams rode the elevators
in office buildings and rode the street cars during rush hours, while one woman
shouted to the other about the wonderful bargains in that particular store. The
teams worked for just one day. On the following day the store sold three thousand
dresses.
Well, what do you think? Was Barnum right? Is there indeed one born every
minute? Strangely enough, education seems to have little to do with it. Some
very learned persons have been easily fooled by the affairs of Dame Runor.
*****
In our talks about common things it would be shameful to neglect the heroes
among COImllon folk who go unheralded and unsung. Many of the older people of Waterville
knew and loved one of those unsung heroes. He was Clarence Richard Johnson,
instructor in French at Colby College, just after the first World War. He was
even then a charming person, a maker and holder of friends, always helping the
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other fellow. He had just returned from war service with the YMCA, first in
the troubled Balkans, then on the western Front. During most of his stay in
Waterville, Clarence Johnson lived in the home of the late William Knauff. He
soon decided to leave the teaching of languages and enter the field of sociology,
for he had already conducted an important social survey of Constantinople.
So he left Colby, became a sociologist, married, and was on his way to a
brilliant academic career when he was stricken with tuberculosis. All the rest
of his life — more than twenty years — he spent in the rest centers at Saranac
Lake, in Arizona, in Colorado. More than half the time he could not rise from
his bed. Did he spend his days — those coughing, suffering days — in complaining
self-pity? Not Clarence Johnson. He spent every day planning and working for
others. He collected little gems of cheerful thought, published them in tiny booklets,
and with the sale helped deserving boys and girls to attend college. He
kept up a prodigious correspondence. In his letters he was always asking about
some former acquaintance who he had heard was ill. How was that friend getting
along? He never mentioned his own fatal disease. When he died only a few years
ago, few of his friends realized that he hadn’t been out of bed for four years.
A great heroic soul was this Clarence Richard Johnson.
The truth is that there are men and women like this constantly near us,
and we see them not. I heard of one such only a few days ago, a man who would
feel very much embarrassed and discomforted if I should mention his name. He does
not live in Waterville, but his home is not far away. For many years that man
has sutfered ill health, loss of money, loss of loved ones — in fact, the veritable
afflictions of Job. Yet he is the most patient, the most tolerant, the
most sympathetic of men. He spends all of his time helping others. How foolish,
you say, not to think more about himself! Maybe so, but perhaps he is forgetting
himself into immortality.
1-86
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
14th Broadcast February 13, 1949
Comment about the narrow guage railroads has stirred up a lot of interest.
Within ten minutes of the close of the program two weeks ago, Basil Higgins of
the Maine Central Railroad, who long ago worked on the S.andy River line, called
to tell me that he believed the Sandy River was once three different roads, and
this week he called again to confirm the fact and name the roads.
Mrs. Harriett Holmes of High Street, waterville was the first of several
persons to tell me about the old two-foot line from Old Orchard to Ocean Park
and Ferry Beach. Robert Gay of Silver Street thinks that road was broad guage,
but David Howard of Nash Street supports Mrs. Holmes.
Perry Morse of Carter’s Flower Shop says there was once an old two-footer
at Searsport, connecting with the wharves. He thinks it might at one time have
been two or three miles long.
Harry Jones, who now lives in what was once the East Vassalboro Station of
the Wiscasset, waterville and Farmington, tells me that the little road suspended
operation into winslow in 1908 or 1909, about the time when the electric road
was built through from Augusta.
In spite of his present place of residence, Mr. Jones says he is more familiar
with the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes line. He is one of half a dozen
listeners, including Galen Eustis of Mayflower Hill Drive (a native of Strong),
who support Basil Higgins’ statement that the Sandy River was once three separate
roads. The original one, called the Sandy River, ran from Farmington to
Strong. Then there was the Franklin and Megantic from Strong to Kingfield, with
a later branch all the way to the foot of Mt. Bigelow. The third was called the
Phillips and Rangeley, with a link to the original road between Phillips and
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Strong. Later a line was built from Dead River Station to Coflin, and Mr. Jones
says that branch was called the Eustis Railroad.
Mr. Jones adds an important historical touch when he assures me that the
road bed and culverts on the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Line were
originally graded for standard guage, and that the decision to build the narrower
track was a reversal of early plans.
Speaking of road beds, they last a long time after the line has been abandoned
and the rails taken up. Hunters in the Mt. Bigelow region tell me that the
old road bed of the narrow guage spur out of Bigelow Station still makes a convenient
and recognizable trail.
How many of you are aware that the old road bed of the Maine Central, along
the west bank of the Kennebec back of the old Colby campus, is easily recognized
to this day; yet I think no one now living remembers when trains ran on that road
bed instead of crossing College Avenue at the south end of the campus.
F. D. Wood of Clinton sends the information that the railroad from Burnham
Junction to Belfast was originally planned as narrow guage. Miss Littlefield of
the Waterville High School faculty tells me that the little Monson road always
had the local nickname of the peanut bender.
Several Franklin County residents say that the traveler from New Sharon to
Farmington can still see Where some of the work was done in preparation for the
intended, but never completed, line from Waterville to Farmington. The grading
of embankments for bridge-heads and culverts, and other signs of such preliminary
work, are still visible.
Who is my authority for the· statement that there were once ten of these
narrow guage roads in Maine? He is Linwood W. Moody, author of a little book
called “The Edaville Railroad”, the story of Ellis Atwood· s reconstruction of
the narrow guage roads of Maine on his cranberry. bog on Cape Cod. I quote from
page 3 of Mr. Moody’s book: “The ten two-footers in Maine boasted 212 miles of
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line. They were built and run like big railroads, and were iImnensely vital to
the loves and lives of the neighborhood. Their smoky smells were just as alluring
and they could holler just as loud.”
Is Mr. Moody right? Were there once ten of those narrow guage roads in
Mai.ne? Well, we know there were the Bridgton and Saco River, the S.andy River
and Rangeley Lakes (originally three separate roads), the Wiscasset, Waterville
and Farmington, the Kennebec Central, the Monson. That makes seven if we count
the separate roads that made up the Sandy River. Now we know there was an eighth
at Old Orchard. What was its name, by the way? And if Perry Morse is right,
there was a ninth at Searsport. Where was the tenth, or is Mr. Moody wrong in
his arithmetic?
*****
When I attended the funeral last week of Somerset County’s leading woman
citizen, Helen Louise Coburn, I was struck by the thought, what a long period of
time only two generations can cover. The time from the birth of Miss Coburn’s
father to her own death last week encompassed the .entire history of Colby College
to date. For Miss Coburn’s father was born in 1817, the year before classes were
first held at the Waterville College. There had been only eleven graduations
when he entered the college in 1835, and it was 72 years ago when Miss Coburn
herself received a Colby diploma. She was four years old when her:· father served·
in the thirty-first Congress during the first administration of Abraham Lincoln.
Only twice previously in my life have I been reminded of the long expanse
of time a few generations can sometimes cover. In my early teaching days at
Hebron Academy I became a close friend of an aged lady, Miss Carrie Tripp. She
remembered well her grandfather, Elder John Tripp, who had come to Hebron from
Massachusetts in 1799, and who lived to be a very old man. Elder John Tripp had
once shaken hands with George Washington. It may seem a very trivial thing to
you, but it has always made an impression upon me that I knew well a person who
1-89
had frequently talked with one who had shaken the hand of WaShington.
My second incident of this sort occurred here in Central Maine. For many
years I had known that fine old gentleman, Horatio Adams, who remembered as a boy
watching his father make on the kitchen stove America’s first chewing gum. Surely
all the old timers have not forgotten Adams I Gum. After several years of cherished
acquaintance with Mr. Adams, I came to know his charming wife. One day she
told me this incident. When She was a little girl of ten She was visiting in
the home of her g:tTaridmother on Long Island, and the grandmother told her how,
when She herself was a child of six, Aaron Burr, hiding from public wrath after
the duel with Hamil ton, took refuge in her parents’ home, the very house where
grandmother was now telling the story to granddaughter. So here again· I was
talking with one who had talked with 9- person who had seen the men of prominence
in the founding of our nation.
*****
Yesterday was the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, born 140 years ago, in a oneroom
cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm, four miles from what is now the village
of Hodgeville, Kentucky. It was a scorching July day in 1939 when I visited that
spot, now a great national memorial. High on a hill, which one mounts by a hundred
granite steps, stands a beautiful marble edifice within which is enclosed
the one-room cabin of the pioneer.
To this cabin, on the day following Lincoln’s birth, came nine-year old
Dennis Hanks with his aunt Betsy Sparrow. Telling of the incident years later
to Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, Dennis Hanks said: “Nancy let me hold
him, and she said, ‘Be keerful of him, Dennis, fur you air the fust boy he’s ever
seen!’ I swang him back and forth and he begun to yell bloody murder. So I says
to Aunt Betsy, ‘You take him. He’ll never amount to much.’ It
Even to nine-year old Dennis Hanks a baby was a common thing. There were
lots of them in the cabin homes of the Kentucky frontier. But prophecy is
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always dangerous, and Dennis was far from the truth when he predicted that
little Abe wouldn’ t amount to much.
We live at a time When environment counts for a lot, or at least is believed
to count for a lot. With the writer of the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” we
like to .believe that
“perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”
How does the poet explain it? “Their lot forbade”, he says. The environment
kept these geniuses from having a chance.
According to that theory, if a child has a drunken father and a slovenly
mother, don I t expect the child to grow up to amount to anything. And we know,
alas, that there is much truth in the theory. If a child comes from a home of
poverty, in these days of plenty and social security, don’t expect anything to
come of him.
Now the career of Abraham Lincoln is a constant rebuke to that theory. Environment
would have made him anything except a great statesman and our most
loved President. He might easily have spent his life flat-boating on the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers. He might perhaps ,have been just a wrestling, storytelling,
rail-splitting day laborer of the Sangamon Valley. But he didn’t spend
his life that way. He became a reader of books, an eager listener to the talk of
men of affairs, he became fired with ambition to rise above the level of the
Carey Grove gang, whose leader he had twice out-wrestled. Not in the environment
around him, but in the spirit within himself lies the explanation of Abraham
Lincoln’s rise to fame. “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”, scoffed
the scribes and the Pharisees. Men talked the same way in 1860. Could a President
of the united States come out of the uncultured prairies? Impossible! You can’t
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get blood from a turnip.
But Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The boy who never attended
school so much as a whole year in his life-time, the boy whom the church influenced
scarcely at all, the boy who oo.uldn It find out the name of his own maternal
grandfather, the boy who, growing to be a young man, found retail trade a road
to bankruptcy and his post office the brim of his own hat — that was the boy
who led a nation through a great fratricidal war, the boy who was to say in 1865,
“With malice toward none, ‘with charity for all”.
One of the most misunderstood and most wrongfully condemned of persons is
the stepmother. Fiction likes to picture her as the cruel, ruthless persecutor
of her husband’s children. But that kind of fiction is often most untrue to fact.
Such was the case with Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps the crucial turning point in his
life was the day when Thomas Lincoln brought his new wife, Sarah Bush Johnson,
into the boy’s third cabin home on the Indiana prairie.
A year had passed since that mournful day when he and Dennis Hanks had
shaped wooden pegs with which his father fastened together the rough planks that
made the crude coffin in which they carried Nancy Hanks Lincoln to her grave.
For a whole year Sister. Sarah, now only twelve years old, had cooked the meals
and done what housekeeping she could. Then came the stepmother — a woman of
sympathetic understanding, strong mind and good sense. Long afterward she told
Herndon: “Such a mess I never saw before. That cabin was filthy. I washed and
dressed up those children so they looked more human, and I kept after Tom until
he made bedsteads, a proper table, better stools and two’ hickory chairs.” .
It was this stepmother who encouraged Lincoln’s reading, who protected him
from his father’s taunts about his physical laziness, who saw that he came to
the notice of men like James Gentry, the squire of Gentryville. Al though Lincoln
never saw his father again, after he became a Springfield lawyer, he kept in close
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touch with his stepmother. He protected her small inheritance from the schemes
of her own son; he frequently sent her money; he often spoke of her with deep
appreciation. She lived to see h±m President and suffered the agonizing news
of his assassination. And at the last she said, “Abe was a good boy and a good
man. He seemed closer to me than my own children.”
Yes, when we are inclined to speak ill of stepmothers, let us remember Sarah
Bush Lincoln, the woman who did more than any other person to change a motherless,
Shiftless boy, seemingly destined for an eventless life on the frontier, into a
great man, a great statesman, the savior of his nation.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
15th Broadcast February 20, 1949
This is National Security Week, and we want to put in a good word for the
Reserve Officers Association. They are a group who take our national security
seriously, but not be1igerently. Some of them have been in combat in two world
wars, and they will bend every effort to see that we escape a third. Of Maine’s
3,000 reserve officers — those who accepted commissions on separation from service
— only about 700 belong to the Association. Many more ought to join.
Everyone of our country’s wars has been fought by citizen soldiers. OUr
Reserve Officers are citizen soldiers who are enough interested in the nation’s
security to be willing to give time to the military during peace years in order
to be qualified for active duty if emergency comes.
We owe much to the R.O.A. for the speed with which we could prepare after
Pearl Harbor. The Reserve Officers then gave us a substantial part of our military
leadership. Ranging in grade from lieutenant to lieutenant general, these
officers held key positions in all combat units.
The Reserve Officers are in no sense a substitute for the Regular Army or
for the National Guard. They are an important and effective supplement to those
units. The Reserve Officers would in no way disparage the Regular Army. They
have no quarrel with the West Point men. They share completely the sentiment of
General Eisenhower, who recently said: “The wartime army of the United States
was a mass expression of America. No one questioned whether a man was a regular
or reserve or national guardsman or selectee or volunteer; whether an officer
came from west Point or the Reserve or O.C.S. or directly from civilian life. All
of them together, rising above minor differences, built a magnificent unity.”
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Good luck to the Reserve Officers Association in its efforts to build a
more effective organization.
*****.
This is definitely not one of those “view with alarm” programs. We neither
prophecy disaster nor rave about the terrible ways of modern life. But after all,
we are human, and occasionally some condition that we consider bad does raise
our wrath. That is just what these miscalled comic books do to us. Either we
are getting older and more crotChety, or those comics are really getting worse
and worse. Horror, murder, torture and the lowest motives of life are their common
subjects. Their so-called Characters are often utterly devoid of Character.
Their ethics wouldn’t meet the approval even of gangsters. Yet they deluge the
news stands in ever increasing numbers and then go into the hands of our boys
and girls.
I was interested when my friend, the famous sea writer, Jim Connolly, was
appointed a few weeks ago as chairman of a Boston commission to control those
publications and try to get the worst of them off the news stands. Then someone
dug up an old ordinance forbidding any municipal position to go to anyone over
seventy years old. That was all right with eighty year old Jim.
He had never read a comic book in his life. But something vastly better
could be said of him. In all his hundreds of thousands of words in his several
hundred stories, Jim Connolly had never written a line unfit for any man, woman
or child to read. The comic books would arouse his anger and disgust when he
did take a look at them.
Now I do not defend the Boston method. That city’s record of ridiculous
censorship is too well known. To censor a publication in anyone community is
only to give it free advertising, at best only drive it under cover into a kind
of biack market. The better way is to show an aroused public opinion that makes
reputable newsdea1ers unwilling to sell these items and reputable homes unwilling
1-95
to have them in the house. But the best way of all is to encourage the picture
technique of the comics for worthwhile publishing. Picture stories just as interesting
and far more valuable are Ji.e.iilg pxodUced,Let us give those little books
our hearty support.
Such, for instance, is a sixteen page paper book, made exactly like the comics
with colored pictures and all of the text issuing from the mouths of the pictured
characters. This book is one of a series called “Adventures”, produced
for the General Electric Company by General Comics, Inc. This particular one is
called “Adventures Inside the Atom”, and tells in this forceful, simple fashion
the scientific facts about nuclear energy and the making of the atom bomb.
The way to kill the comic books is to fight t;hem with their own weapon. Why
can’t the churches do for religion and the schools themselves do for general education
what the General Electric Company is already doing for science?
*****
As we celebrate this week the birthday of George Washington, we are reminded
how his military career and his presidency had obscured the real Washington until
Douglas Freeman brought to light much of the forgotten past in the first two volumes
of what will, without question, be the great, definitive biography of the
Father of His Country. Those first two volumes deal only with the young Washington,
before he came to fame. They reveal, however, a central fact about the man
that ought to give us pause in these days when so many Jeremiahs predict the
imminence of social revolution.
We hear much today about human rights versus property rights. In some quarters
it seems as if to own property is to be called an economic royalist. Not
long ago I listened to a man who talked as if one who had property rights had
thereby forfeited his human rights. I hope no one is so stupid as to deny the
supremacy of human rights, but it does not follow that there is no such thing as
1-96
property rights.
So I contend it is good for us to realize the central, controlling motif
in the life of George Washington. That motif was land — the ownership and control
of land. Washington inherited land, he surveyed and prospected land, he
cultivated land, he built on land, he bequeathed land — but he seldom sold
land.
Washington was anything but a selfish man; he gave years of his life to
the public welfare. He never tried to amass a fortune by his land; he simply
loved it. For the soil of Virginia was to him the soul of America. He would
fight to protect that soil; he would resist its exploitation by an unsympathetic
king and parliament; he would leave his beloved acres to head a strong
central government in order that the security of those acres might be better
preserved. In these days when it is somewhat fashionable to belittle property
rights, let us not forget George Washington, the man of property.
Remarks about our two greatest presidents, whose birthdays fall in this
month, remind us of the log cabin myth. Because log cabins were common on the
Kentucky frontier, from the days of Daniel Boone until long after Lincoln’s
boyhood, we have always associated the log cabin with American colonial life.
Most people think it is the way the first settlers built their homes at Jamestown
and Plymouth, at New Amsterdam and Salem. But such is not the fact.
The Jamestown settlers lived in tents, caves and what were called “English
Wigwams”, patterned after the huts of Welsh miners and somewhat resembling Indian
wigwams. Those structures were made of woodbine or grapevine, steamed and
bent to form a shape like the frametop of a covered wagon. The frame was then
covered with thatch. The temporary dwellings during the first awful winter at
Plymouth were built much the same way.
But within a year at both Plymouth and Jamestown better and more permanent
houses had been built. And they were built like the only kind of houses these
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English settlers knew. They did not know the log cabin — they had never seen
one — but they did know the English frame houses of timber, boards and clapboards.
Why do so many people think the Pilgrims lived in log cabins? Because, as
so often happens, the error got into a widely read book. In 1840 Rev. Alexander
Young published his “Chronicles of New England”. He quoted an old Plymouth
diary as reporting that a great storm of February 4, 1621 “caused much daubing
of our houses to fall down”. Now in young I s time — the first half of the 19th
century — ~e space between logs of a cabin was chinked with moss and “daubed”
with clay to keep it in place. That was what “daubing” meant to Young. But in
the journal kept by the great pilgrims, Bradford and Winslow, the word daubing
had the English Elizabethan meaning of the more modern word “plaster”. The
daubing that fell down in the storm of 1621 was clay plastering, smeared over
the clapboards or interior sheathing of the Plymouth houses.
The log cabin first appeared in America in 1638, introduced when the Swedish
West India Company sent settlers to Delaware. It was the kind of house the
Swedes knew at home and was just what was needed for rapid spread of settlements
in a land of no saw mills and few tools. Because it was so quickly built and so
strong against the elements, the English settlers copied it as they moved westward
across the Appalachians. Perhaps the Scotch-Irish, even more than the English,
were responsible for the log cabin’s wide use for they quickly adopted it when
they first came to Maine and Vermont. and they carried it with them to the Ohio
Valley. There were log cabins in Gorham, Maine at the time of the French and
Indian Wars, built by Hugh McLellan and his fellow Scotsmen before the building
of the big McLellan House on Fort Hill, where the Gorham State Teachers College
now stands.
In 1840, twenty years before Abraham Lincoln was to become President and
when he was an unknown young lawyer in the Illinois Legislature, the log cabin
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became a sacred symbol. It was the holy embodiment of the campaign that made
Harrison President of the united States. The symbol seems to have originated
as a boomerang launched by the opposition, for a Democratic newspaper said that
Harrison wOuld be out of place in the civilized White House, that he would be
more at home in a log cabin with plenty of hard cider. The Whigs eagerly seized
upon this slur and turned it to their own advantage. Harrison became, the first
log cabin candidate. “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” became a long-remembered campaign
slogan. To be born in a log cabin became such a mark of popularity for
any political candidate that Daniel Webster, speaking at Saratoga in August,
1840 apologized for not being born in one.
Let us not forget what American democracy really means. A nation that, by
popular acclaim, can elevate to its highest office both a Washington and a Lincoln,
proclaims that both the humble log cabin and the wealthy Virginia acres
belong in American life.
*****
Any speaker is embarrassed when he makes a slip, when he “pulls a boner”. So
I wonder if it wouldn’t be smart to plan for one ahead of time. It is practically
certain that some evening on this broadcast we Shall make a mistake, misquote
a passage, ascribe a quotation to the wrong person, or perhaps misstate a
fact. If we do, we Shall try to make amends, but, we trust, without the formality
and pomposity that marks such corrections in the halls of Congress. Frankly, I
don’t like to see the columns of the Congressional Record cluttered with stuff
like this.
On February 7 Senator Tobey of New Hampshire rose to speak on the pending
bill concerning the special connni ttee on small business. He said: “Mr. president,
I have listened to the remarks of my friend, the minority leader, the Senator
from Nebraska, with great interest. To me, after listening for some time, I think
they form a perfect illustration of Shakespeare’s reference to ‘linked sweetness
1-99
long drawn out.l. I think the Senator from Nebraska had his fingers crossed in
some of the points he made, and I propose to uncross his fingers for a few
minutes”.
Now Senator Tobey had slipped up on his quotation, a very natural and pardonable
slip. Why not let it go? But, no, they don’t do things that way in
the Senate of the united States. The next day, February 8, the Senate had
scarcely opened when Senator Tobey again arose and thus addressed the president
of the Senate:
“Mr. President, yesterday in speaking on the floor of the Senate I attributed
a quotation in which I used ‘linked sweetness long drawn out’ to the immortal
bard of Avon. Mr. James Murphy, the Official Reporter of Debates, has
called my attention to the fact that credit Should have been given to John Milton.
Therefore, with apologies to William Shakespeare, I ask that the Record be corrected
and the name of Milton substituted for the name of Shakespeare in my remarks.”
Whereupon the genial Alben Barkley, president of the Senate, said: “The
correction will be made.”
Just why Senator Tobey apologized to Shakespeare rather than to Milton is
not clear. Anyhow he set the record straight by use of the Congressional Record
with the taxpayer’s money.
*****
We all appreciate a sense of fair play. It is good to see it in a game, in
politics, in business. There is an interesting symbol of it in old London. At
one end of the famous Whitehall is a statue of Charles I, the king who lost his
head at the executioner’s block, and at the other end of Whitehall is a statue
of Oliver Cromwell, the man who ordered the king’s execution. Nothing could
better express the sense of fairness of the British people than the proximity
of those two statues.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
16th Broadcast February 27, 1949
Have you read anything today — a newspaper, a magazine, part of a book?
Most of us do read something every day. Did it ever occur to you that, when you
read, you are doing something difficult, something that seems like a kind of
magic to those who cannot read? You had to be taught to do it, and perhaps
many teachers struggled with you before you could read and understand what you
read. For the art of reading is the art of getting meaning from the printed page.
We read not merely words made up of symbols called letters. The words must convey
a meaning’ and not the words alone, but the way they are put together. We
have to learn to read what is called the context — the whole meaning of a whole
passage.
That we have learned to do this at all, poorly as some of us have mastered
the art, we owe to our teachers. All around us, wherever we live, are other
teachers trying to teach this art to the children of today. Some of those teachers
are tired, discouraged people. Some of them will leave teaching this year,
just as others left it last year, to take jobs that are decently paid, that offer
a better standing in the community and a more normal private life.
The teachers from whom we learned to read gave us a priceless key to freedom.
We have been hearing a lot about the four freedoms — freedom of religion, freedom
of speech and press, freedom from want, freedom from fear. But there is a
fifth freedom, more important because it is more fundainental. It is freedom from
ignorance. The ignorant man is the easiest victim to want and fear. Freedom of
religion means little to him and a free press means nothing at all. For the ignorant
man, even if technically he can read, cannot understand what he reads, and
for that very reason he is a danger to himself and to his country. In a very real
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sense our teachers mold the nation’s future. Give them your support.
*****
Next week I promise you a pleasant surprise. It will be a last word on
narrow guage railroads, and it won’t be opinions of mine or my correspondents.
I think you will like it and will, as I do, regard it as a genuine surprise.
I wonlt even give you a hint tonight about what it is. Weill just save it
until next week.
*****
We have let several weeks elapse without mentioning our favorite topic of
words. We are brought back to it by a letter from Gertrude Taylor of North Vassalboro,
who wants to know the origin of the expression “Black Republican”. The
phrase “Black Republican”, most often used in derision and contempt, referred
to the Republican Party I s defense and use of the negro. The term was occasionally
used before the Civil War — as, for instance, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates
of 1858 — and then referred simply to the Republicans I friendliness to-.
ward the abolitionists, those who wanted to free the slaves by the quickest and
harshest means. But what gave the term its most uncomplimentary meaning was the
policy of Republicans after the war, when the Republican-controlled government
went beyond its commendable plan to free the negro slaves, and ‘launched upon a
pernicious use of the freed negroes to control the South. In those days Black
Republican referred at first to the ignorant, suddenly freed negroes who were
put into the state legislatures of the South by carpet-bagger influence. Later
the name was plastered on all Republicans who upheld the Reconstruction policy.
That period after the Civil War is one of the most shameful in our nation’s
history. Abraham Lincoln had died only a few short weeks after he had said, “With
malice toward none, with charity for all, let us bind up the nation’s wounds.”
But the new leaders of the party he had led so well were determined on vengeance,
and by their evil tactics they not only got the name Black Republicans, but they
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made it impossible for their party to make any political impression upon the
South even to this day.
*****
A neighbor, whom I have promised not to name, has just told me about one
of the best of the old expressions that has ever come to my attentiono I wonder
how many of you ever heard it. Here it is: “I don It feel very bitish”. If you
never heard it, you may have to think twice before you see what it means. Well,
try it out the next time you lose your appetite and nothing tastes good to you.
Just say, “I don’t feel very bitish”.
*****
Ww were speaking a few weeks ago about the old-time tanneries. Mrs. Josie
Claflin of Fairfield reminds me that there was once an old tannery near her girlhood
home in China Village. It was located on the west shore near the head of
the lake, not far from where the Baptist parsonage is now located. To show the
spot, Mrs. Claflin sends me an old picture card postmarked 1922. It shows, in a
clump of trees on the lake shore, J. A. Woodsum’s cottage, and in the upper left
corner rises the spire of the Baptist Church. Mrs. Claflin says she learned to
skate on the shallow spots that froze over where water flowed into the tan vats,
when she was too young to be allowed out on the lake.
Mrs. Claflin mentions another old time thing — how hornets made paper from
cedar fence rails. As the outer surface of the rails began to shred away, hornets
would pullout the fibres, mix them with moisture from their own bodies,
and the chemical result was very much like paper. Does anyone else recall that
kind of insect activity?
Mrso Claflin also refers to a cemetery in China called Sugar Loaf. Is that
name still used? By the way, perhaps we shall have to devote a few minutes some
evening to old cemeteries. Would anyone be interested?
*****
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We queer folk who play around with the study of words are intrigued by a
process which the scholars call folk-etymology. What does the term folk-etymology
mean? It is a popular, natural manner of speech by which we fit an unfamiliar
foreign word or expression into the mold of our common .native language.
In my boyhood I had no idea there was such an expression as contre-dance, because
we called it country dance. Long before I ever saw in print the word cutlass
— the buccaneer’s good weapon — I had heard it habitually pronounced
“cutlash”. In the First World War our American soldiers had a lot of fun with
French words. Quite naturally au revoir became olive oil, bon jour was barn door,
tres bien was trays beans, camouflage was camel flags, and the good British
motor lorrie became motor Laura.
But I have always thought the classic example was the American doughboy’s
description of the Hindenburg Line. You veterans of World War I will remember
that those fortified German entrenchments stretched from Touls to Ypres. So the
doughboys said, “The Hindenburg Line hangs from Towels to Wipers.”
This process of folk-etymology causes many natural, but erroneous, associations
between words and things. For instance, the pantry is not the place where
the pans are kept, but where pain (the French bread) is kept. The buttery is not
the place for butter, but rather the boteillerie, the place of the bottles or
liquor. cutlet has nothing to do with cutting, but is the little rib. The woodchuck
has no relation to wood; the titmouse is not a mouse; the primrose and the
rosemary are not roses. Mohair is not hair, and the hollyhock (a combination of
holly and oak) is neither holly nor oak. All of these names come from foreign
words that our English ancestors could not pronounce so that they put them into
English words that they could pronounce. They even did it with proper names. You
have doubtless known families by the name of Darling. It is a well known name in
the Blue Hill region of Maine. Where did it originate? How did any family come
to have a surname that people use as a term of endearment? The answer is that
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when Englishmen encountered people from the French town of Orleans, made so
famous by Joan of Arc that She was called the Maid of Orleans, they had difficulty
getting the word Orleans around their tongues. A fellow might show up
in Dover or Bristol calling himself Raoul d’Orleans. That was too much of a
mouthful for a channel Englishman. The stranger very soon became known as
Ralph Darling, and Darlings his descendents were ever after.
Waterville people have sometimes wondered why many of our fine citizens of
French-Canadian descent have the name Simpson, one of the oldest surnames in
old England and as stoutly British as roast beef. Dr. Julian Taylor, who taught
68 consecutive years at Colby College, once told me he felt sure that this phenomenon
was the result of folk-etymology, that the name in French was Sans Souci.
Because the English name that sounded most like it was Simpson, in an EngliSh
speaking country Simpson it became.
I have also been told that half a century ago there were three French-Canadian
brothers here in Waterville, full-blood brothers, with three different surnames.
Whether true or not, it makes a good story. The French name was apparently
Roi. One brother called himself Roy, which is what the name looked like
in English writing. Another was King, the translation of the name into EngliSh.
The third was Ware, the English name nearest the sound of the French name. Three
brothers all with different last names: Roy, King and Ware.
Probably we’ve talked too long already on this subject, but we cannot forego
one final word. A lot of good Englishmen would like to believe that the word
sirloin originated because some ancient king of Britain once knighted a loin of
beef, recognizing the national diSh by saying, “Rise, Sir Loin”. The student of
language knows better. The sirloin is simply the under or lower loin and all
we can say about it today is that deflation, disinflation, or What have you, it
still costs too much.
1-105
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
17th Broadcast March 6, 1949
Most of us are guilty occasionally of that rhetorical fault known as the
mixed metaphor. We say things like this: “If the government holds the reins, it
will play the tune”. But probably few of us ever confused two sports in the
same metaphor the way that persistent voice from Michigan, Clare Hoffman, did
a few days ago in Congress. He said: “As a candidate for the Presidency, Mr.
Dewey has twice gone to bat. Perhaps the pitcher in the first contest was a
Bob Feller or a Dizzy Dean, and hence the young man’s strike-out was excusable.
But on this last occasion a soft, easy ball was tossed up to h~ and he just
did not take his bat off his shoulder or start to swing until the catcher had
it in his mitt.”
Up to that point Representative Hoffman was going strong with his baseball
figure of speech. But then he continued: “In all fairness Mr. Dewey should get
out of the batter’s box, cease trying to carry the ball, and if his “me-too”
international supporters cannot run interference or do some minor job on the
team, they and he should go back and sit down on the bench.”
It would be a big job for even Mr. Hodfman’s most pestiferous opponent, Mr.
Marcantonio of New York, to take in the full meaning of that picture. Mr. Dewey
in the batter’s box carrying the ball! Where? In his pocket or in his mouth?
*****
More than once on this program we have had kind words for private industry,
for individual enterprise, as true characteristics of the American way of life.
Pertinent to that topic is a single paragraph that appeared in a long editorial
in the Omaha World Herald a few weeks ago. Listen to these words: “Here in America,
not merely in other lands, the state is more and more taking control and
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ownership of the people. The power to tax is the power to destroy; that is why
the taxing power must always be held in restraint by the people themselves. The
people’s independence and self-reliance must not be destroyed. Free men must not
become vassals either of industry or of the state. Free men must not be rendered
incapable of self-support; they must not be forced to constant reliance upon the
biased paternalism of a great white father. Some of us will fight this concentration
of powers in WaShington to the last ditch, for great power does corrupt,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely. II
*****
Now for the surprise which I promised you for tonight. There are lots of
people in this vicinity who know something about the old narrow.guage railroads,
and some who know a great deal about them. I have talked with several men who
once worked on one or more of those old, two-foot lines, and they have given me
valuable information. But I had no idea that, right here in Waterville., I Should
find an expert, a real encyclopedia of knowledge about the narrow ·guage roads.
And that expert is not a railroad man; he is not an old man; he is not .even a
voter. He is believe it or not — a sixteen year old boy •.
His name is Brian Alley and he lives at 20 Sherwin Street, Waterville. He
is now a senior at the Waterville Junior High School. You can’t stump him with
any questions about the old narrowguage lines. He never rodeon.one in his life,
but he knows about every mile of track, every locomotive, every car. He is right
here in the studio with me tonight and he has consented to answer some questions
on this program.
M: Brian, how did you get interested in something that went out of .existence
before you were born — those old narrow guagerailroads?
~MY mother is a native of Franklin County .and I have relatives who still live
in Phillips, strong and Farmington. I wanted some kind of a hobby, ·so a feW-years
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ago I began to collect everything I could find about little railroads like the
Sandy River.
M: How have you gathered your information?
B: By talking and corresponding with persons who worked on the narrow guage roads,
by collecting items from the roads themselves when they were abandoned, and by
reading everything I could find in print on the subject.
M: Has anyone person helped you especially?
B: Yes, Eliot Steward of Norway, Maine. He was born in Phillips, and over the
years he took a lot of pictures of the Sandy River Road. The tracks ran close by
his house, and he had many rides on the engines. Mr. Steward has been a lot of
help to me, especially in my collection of pictures.
M: When Linwood Moody in his book on the Edaville Railroad writes that there were
ten of these old two-footers in Maine, is he right or wrong? Were there exactly
ten, not nine or eleven?
B: Mr. Moody is right. There were just ten of those two-foot railroads in Maine.
M: Do you know what they were?
B: Yes, I do. In the first place,ypu were wrong when you said the Sandy River
and Rangeley Lakes was made up of three original roads.
M: That is what an old-time railroad man told me. I thought he knew.
B: Well, the record at the State House proves him wrong. The roads that later
made up the SR & RL were six roads, not three.
M: What? You mean there were actually twice as many as I thought there were?
B: That’s right. They were the original Sandy River, chartered in 1879; the
Franklin and Megantic, 1884; the Phillips and Rangeley, 1889; the Kingfield and
Dead River, 1893; the Madrid and the Eustis, both chartered in 1903.
M: In speaking of ten roads, did Mr. Moody count those as six of the ten?
B: He had to, if his total was ten, because there were only four others: the
Bridgton and Saco River, the Monson, the Kennebec Central, and the Wiscasset,
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waterville and Farmington (originally the Wiscasset and QUebec).
M: What about the road from Old Orchard to Camp Ellis, that I have mentioned
twice on these programs?
B: That was a broad guage road. When the little engine they used on it would
break down, they would put a big engine on the train. They couldn It have done
that if it hadn It been standard guage.
M: .And what about the narrow guage down at Searsport and the one at Lincoln?
B: They don’t count because they were not common carriers. There was a lot of
narrow guage track laid down by lumber companies and other industries just for
their own work. The short lines at Searsport and Lincoln were only two of a
dozen or more. We I re talking about roads that carried public passengers and
freight, aren’t we?
M: Yes, we are. Anyway, I accept your explanation. You certainly know more about
the old roads than I do. Brian, I was very much interested in that wonderful
album you showed me. It is a real pictorial history of narrow guage railroads.
I think our radio audience would like to know about some of the things in it.
~ I have pictures of nearly all the old two-foot roads of Maine. I have tickets,
report forms, freight bills, train orders and time tables.
M: Are there any items that you prize especially?
B: perhaps the item I prize most is a picture of the old Sandy River Engine No.
1, taken in 1880. Then I have a very interesting picture of a freight train,
showing a Franklin and Megantic engine and a Sandy River caboose.
M: How do you account for that combination?
B: The picture was taken after the merger of the six roads had been made, but
before they had time to change the lettering on cars and engines.
M: I understand, Brian, that you have some items too big to put into an album.
Tell us about some of them.
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B: I have a car seal from the original Sandy River Road.
M: What do you mean by a car seal?
B: A seal used for closing box cars, to make sure they hadn’t been opened when
they reached their destination. I also have hand-brake wheels from freight cars,
and odds and ends of little things from the cars and shops.
M: Brian, I used to hear a lot about stiff engines. What are they?
B: The familiar standard guage engine has a separate tender. The biggest narrow
guage engines, like the Perry type built for the SR & RL in its boom days, had
separate tenders. But most of the narrow guage engines had the tender built as
a part of the engine. The whole thing — engine and tender — was one stiff
unit.
M: Now, Brian, have you ever had any desire to build a piece of narrow guage
track and actually run a train on it?
B: Indeed I have. But first I want to build a miniature Sandy River unit on the
scale of one and 3/4ths inches to a foot. I plan to make a miniature engine,
about four feet long, with separate tender. It will be a coal burner and will run
on a 3; inch guage.
M: You must get together some time with a Maine Central bus driver, who I understand
plans to build a little narrow guage road on his property at Belgrade Lakes.
If he hears this program, he may get in touch with you. I am sure, Brian, that
our~ listeners,as well as I, appreciate very much your part in tonight’s program,
and we all wish you good luck in continuing your collection of information
about the old narrow guage railroads.
*****
Mrs. Roland Stinneford of the Cushman Road, Winslow, contributes some very
picturesque sayings that she heard many years ago from the lips of her boarding
mistress when Mrs. Stinneford was a teacher at Somerset Academy in Athens.
One of the sayings is an unusual comparison. It is this: “I didn’t know
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who she was from a cord of bark.” Such an expression could only originate in
a community where bark was sold by the cord, and few places used bark except
the old tanneries. It is the type of saying we call an industrial proverb
a proverbial expression associated with a particular kind of industry or
livelihood.
Another of Mrs. Stinneford’s contributions is this: “I would wann the wax
in his ears for him.” Evidently this means that the speaker would chastise
with words, just as someone else might threaten to chastise physically by
saying, “I’ll tan his hide for him”. Another expression of the same general
meaning, which Mrs. Stinneford recalls, is: “I’ll put a split stick on her”.
I want to gather the most complete list possible of these old expressions
of rural Maine. Who will be the next listener to contribute?
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
18th Broadcast March 13, 1949
A little, but sometimes astounding, thing is silence. Those who read a few
days ago in the newspapers of the gracious compliment paid to our Maine Senator,
Margaret Chase Smith, by the Republican floor leader, Senator Wherry, when he
appointed her acting floor leader in his absence for a few hours, may have imagined
a picture quite different from the facts. They may have pictured Mrs. Smith
as making an impassioned speech, marshalling forces of Republican votes against
the enemy ramparts, upholding the banner of her side in momentous debate.
Now Mrs. Smith’s appointment as acting floor leader of the minority was a
fine compliment to her popularity and her worth. She was the first woman ever to
occupy that position in the whole history of the Senate. That perhaps was honor
enough, but it was not without toil. For what was Mrs. Smith’s job as floor
leader last Tuesday? It was the job of an alert watch-dog, to sit in silence,
and give the alarm only if the enemy launched a surprise attack. For last Tuesday
in the Senate the southern filibuster was in full sway, although this time
it was not a southerner, but Senator Cain of Washington who held the floor for
seven straight hours. Ostensibly he was arguing against the confirmation of
President Truman’s nomination of Mon Wallgren to be chairman of the National
Security Resources Board. Part of the time Mrs. Smith and Senator Cain were the
only senators in the senate chamber. Even genial Alben Barkley, president of the
senate by virtue of his office as Vice-President of the United States, had fled
the ordeal, turning the chair over to Huey Long’s son Russell, the new senator
from Louisiana.
Those who know Margaret Smith can be very sure she didn’t go to sleep. Even
if so many senators, both Republican and Democrat, had not taken pity on her
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lonesome vigil, to drop into a neighboring seat for a friendly chat, while Senator
Cain droned on and on, Mrs. Smith would have stuck to her post. No slick
parliamentary trick would be put over on her. The lady from Skowhegan can always
be depended upon to do any job she agrees to undertake.
*****
We persons over fifty years of age often remark how young people today take
for granted many things that did not exist in our own childhood. What remarkable
changes these young folks missed — these kids who never knew a day with no automobiles,
no airplanes, no radios, no electric refrigerators, no oil burners. Only
by a most lively imagination can they understand what we mean by the horse and
buggy days.
But it doesn’t so easily occur to us that we too take for granted many things
that our grandfathers never knew. My father, who was born in 1861, and who from
the age of 18 until his death at 84, was in the grocery business, could remember
when the first yellow bananas came to Maine. For some time the big red bananas
had been known, but before the Civil War no resident of inland Maine had seen a
yellow one.
In my grandmother’ s girlhood no one would eat those new fangled fruits -or
were they vegetables .:.- called love apples. For love apple was the old name
for the tomato. And don’t you fastidious folk call me to task for my pronunciation.
Look it up in Webster. The favored pronunciation today is to-may-to; the
secondary pronunciation to-mah-to is an affectation.
Oranges have been common in Maine for many years. My great grandfather used
to drive an ox-team, ~~hauling freight from West Gorham to Portland. That journey
which can easily be made in an hour now for the round trip used to take him two
whole days — one day in and one day back. Great-grandmother, who lived until I
was twelve years old, used to regale us children with wonderful stories of those
early Gorham days. And one of the stories included the oranges that great-grand-
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father used to bring home from Portland once a year at Christmas time.
But grapefruit is another story. I myself was well along in grammar school
before I saw the first of those eye-squirting missiles. In rural Maine at least
grapefruit have not been known very long.
Well, enough of that subject for now. We’ll return to it again some day.
But right here I want to tell of an old-time incident that happened in Waterville
about seventy years ago. It concerns the national pastime, the American
sport of baseball. The Rev. William Abbott Smith, beloved pastor emeritus of
the Congregational Church, was then a small town boy in the then comparatively
small town of Waterville. Like all the other small boys of the coxmnuni ty, he
went up to the college one Saturday afternoon to see Colby and Bowdoin play baseball.
As the game progressed one vigorous batter clouted a mighty wallop down beyond
the north end of Shannon Observatory. The right fielder went to look for the
ball; he was soon joined by the center fielder and the third baseman. Soon the
whole team was hunting for that ball, but they could not find it.
Now at the game with one of his spirited horses hitched to a light buggy
was Hod Nelson, owner of the famous trotter Nelson, a nationally known racer of
that time. Hod jumped into his buggy, raced his horse down to Main Street, purchased
a new ball, and raced back to the field. Meanwhile the game had just
stopped, to be resumed with cheers when Hod appeared with the new ball.
That’s quite a story folks. A championship game between Colby and Bowdoin
being played with only one baseball.
*****
In this Lenten season I want to call your attention to a book that many of
you will be eager to read. It is by FUlton Oursler and bears the same title as
the radio program that follows this one each Sunday evening: “The Greatest Story
Ever Told”. When I first picked up the book I thought it was merely an account
of how that program was organized and conducted. But I found it to be much more
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than that. Mr. OUrsler has written a significant and memorable life of Christ.
It does not pretend to be a scholarly book. It is not a discussion of Biblical
criticism. It is a simple, straightforward story in the simplest language, written
for the average, ordinary reader to appreciate and understand. And in one
respect, to which we shall refer in a few minutes, it is the most extraordinary
life of Jesus that has ever been written.
But first, let me mention the book’s preface, which does recount most interestingly
how the now famous radio program, The Greatest Story Ever Told, came
to its perfection and its popularity. Mr. OUrsler’s plan for the book preceded
any thought of a program on the air. Some years ago Rabbi Solomon Freehof of
Pittsburgh had said to OUrsler: “The unspoken scandal of our times is tlie hidden
fact that Bible-reading has been largely given up in America.” Later, as Oursler
traveled around the country, he talked to many different kinds of men and
women — fellow passengers in Pullman and day coach. To these people he made
casual allusions to Biblical passages, and he soon discovered that references
taken for granted in his boyhood had no meaning for these traveling companions.
When he would utter such expressions as “thirty pieces of silver”, “the angel
that troubled the waters”, and “tribute unto Ceasar”, he would be greeted with
blank stares. Yet when he explained the meaning, interest was aroused. One sample
from the great life invariably aroused the appetite for more.
This experience convinced Oursler to write the story, centering it around
incidents, so that each incident could be a little story in itself. His book
offers no argument, no explanations. It is, rather, an attempt to tell faithfully,
by record of incidents, just what the four gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and
John assert to have happened during’ the thirty-three years of Jesus’ life.
I must not spoil your own reading of OUrsler’s preface by telling you how
the manuscript for the then unprinted book became the basis for the famous radio
program. Suffice it to say that, in spite of a host of skeptics who said that such
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a program could not be produced without offending one or more religious sects,
Paul Litchfield, head of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, decided to take
a chance. So the first and best known of those broadcasts, “The Good Samaritan”,
was made, followed by “The Unmerciful Servant”.
Now comes the unusual feature of OUrsler’s book, the feature which explains
the universal success of the program. Not on a single page of the book and not in
anyone of the broadcasts has there been any incident or any remark that could
give offense to any religious group: Protestant, Catholic or Jew. For the radio
program each script has been read, corrected, and approved by Monsignor Joseph
Nelson of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, rector of
Calvary Protestant Episcopal Church, Dr. Paul Wolfe, minister of Brick presbyterian
Church in downtown Manhattan, and Mr. Otto Frankfurter, brother of Supreme
Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
Yes, here is the astounding thing. Instead of meeting opposition from Jewish
clergy and citizens, Mr. OUrsler’s telling of the story has their praise and
support. Because Jesus was indeed a Jew. It was a Jew who lived the greatest
life that was ever lived.
So I want to show you how in his book Mr. Oursler tells the crucifixion
story, because for 2,000 years fine, patriotic, high-minded Jewish citizens of
every country have been persecuted and taunted because men have said the Jews
killed Jesus. It was that great friend of the American colonies, Edmund Burke,
who told the British Parliament in 1775, “There is no known method of drawing an
indictment against a whole people~ Yet that is what the whole Christian world
did for centuries when they blamed all Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus.
So, without going one inch beyond the record in the four gospels, Mr. Oursler
shows how an inner circle of Jewish priests, fearing the loss of their own power,
and dreading the results of a popular uprising behind this self-avowed Messiah,
plotted Jesus I arrest, conviction and execution. Led by Annas and Caiphas, they
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had Jesus brought before Pilate, placed Pilate in a position where, to save his
own neck, he had to hand Jesus over for crucifixion, and thought they were well
rid of this trouble maker. Then came the glorious happenings of Easter morning.
In the last pages of Oursler’s book Caiphas has come to the older patriarch
priest Annas to say,”We must get rid of all Christians. I have come to you that
we may agree on a strong policy.”
These two had heard the reports of the risen Jesus’ appearance to his disciples
by the sea of Tiberias, and how he had appeared to others on a mountain
in Galilee. Now in the moist warmth of the torrid night these two Jewish priests
sat together in the dark, remembering much of this man whom they had ordered
killed, yet who could still plague their peace of mind.
“I thought you had already started a strong policy”. said Annas. “We condemned
one”, replied Caiphas. “And stoned him to death”, said Annas, “Stephen, the first
Christian martyr”. “He will not be the last”, stormed Caiphas. “But has it occured
to you”, asked Annas, “that this brave death contradicts all that you have
said earlier this evening. Would any man be willing to die — in heroic, glorious
martyrdom like this — for some conjurer’s trick involving the stealing of a
corpse from a sealed tomb? Let me make it plainer”, continued Annas. “On the
night we killed him, you remember that two of his disciples followed him into
Jerusalem, but one of them denied him three times, and both hid away. What happened
to the other nine? They couldn’t get away fast enough. They went back to
Galilee where they came from. Why? Because they were afraid. But now these same
men are not run-away cowards, but fearless martyrs. Why? Because they know what
they stand for, and what you stand for, Caiphas, and they know this world will
always be a place of fear, of want, of war, of suffering, as long as those two
conflicting points of view exist. The world will be a better p,lace, Caiphas, only
when their side wins. And they will win. We can only kill them; but they can
conquer us.”
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“Lord Annas”, said Caiphas, “the views taught by the followers of this man
are traitorous and subversive. I propose to stamp these people out, so that they
will never be heard of again. There won I t be a Christian left in the world.”
“Very well”, said Annas with a sigh that showed it was no use to argue
longer. “Do as you will do anyhow, Caiphas. But remember these roots are deep
and spreading. Before you get through — God only knows. I have a horrible feeling
that we have blundered. History may blame us. Worse still, history may
blame our nation, all Israel, for the guilt that belongs so much to you and me
and our rich and powerful friends. It may be, Caiphas, that we have been afraid
of the truth.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
19th Broadcast March 20, 1949
More than once we have referred to the enormous cost to the taxpayer of
the hundreds of columns of nonsense, as well as the few columns of important
debate, published in the Congressional Record. But the expense of the Record
is mere chicken feed compared to the cost of the numerous documents put out by
the executive departments of our government. Not long ago Senator Styles
Bridges of New Hampshire decided to find out just how numerous those documents
are. He learned that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1948 more than 83,000
different publications were issued. He learned further that in the ten years
from 1939 through 1948 there were sent out 133,600,000,000 copies. As Senator
Bridges puts it, enough printed matter has been put out by the Government
printing Office to cover and bury the 140,000,000 people in the united States.
Senator Bridges calls attention to the titles of some of these government
pamphlets. If they did not cost the taxpayers so much money, they would be merely
amusing. Perhaps they are worth a moment’s laugh anyhow; so here are a few of
them. “How to Make a Cat Trap”, “Bat-proofing Buildings”, “Classification, Identification,
and Geographic Distribution of Fleas”, “Federal Duck Stamps”,
“Management of Farm Fish Ponds”, “Muskrat population by House Counts”, “Fish
for Breakfast — and Why Not?”, “The Cuban Frog Leg Industry”, “Recipes for
Cooking Muskrat Meat”, “Planning the Farm House Bathroom”, “Habits and Economic
Status of the Band-Tailed pigeon”, “How to Tell the Sex of a Watermelon”.
We realize that the government departments do produce many pamphlets of
value to farmers and manufacturers, to professional men and consumers; but in
this flood of printers ink is much flotsam and jetsam that represents only the
wreckage of the taxpayer’s dollar.
*****
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How long is it since wolves were seen in Maine? I believe an occasional
wolf has been encountered in northern Maine since the Civil War, but in any part
of the state south of Moosehead Lake the creature’s last appearance came before
that conflict. The last record of which I am aware appears in the diary of Charles
E. Hamlin, who was professor of Chemistry at Colby College from 1853 to 1873.
In 1860 the college faced dire financial distress. In the long winter vacation,
when the students went out to teach a term of school, the professors
beat the by-ways and hedges for meagre public subscriptions to keep the college
going. In January of 1860 Professor Hamlin was on such an expedition in Penobscot
County. In his diary he records that on January 18 he spent the night in
Amherst, a little village a few miles east of Bangor on what is now called the
airline road. “I got no rest”, writes the professor. “I was kept awake all night
by the howling of the wolves”.
Perhaps what Professor Hamlin heard were not wolves at all. Some professors,
so our friends say, do have lively imaginations. But another instance of
wolves, or rather of one wolf, is better authenticated. Did you know there is
in Maine a monument to a wolf? For this information I am indebted to W. R.
Collins of Belgrade. He tells me that there used to live on Chamberlain Hill,
about six miles north of Bingham, a man named Hiram Smith, who lived to well
over 90 and who had lived most of his life on the same farm. This Hiram smith
once told Mr. Collins that a century ago when the town of Moscow was first settled,
there was an old up and down saw mill on Austin Stream at a place called
Dead Water. On the west bank of the stream was a cleared field in which stood
the log cabins where the families of the mill hands lived. One moonlight night
one of these men was awakened by his dog fighting with some creature. He got
up, looked out the window, and by the bright moonlight saw that the creature
was a wolf. QUickly getting his gun, he shot through the window and killed the
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wolf. Deponent sayeth not how, in the confusion of such a fight,he shot the wolf
instead of the dog. But we’ll admit there were some wonderful marksmen in those
days.
On that spot today is a stone, about five feet long and a foot and a half
high with a square side facing the west. On it is an jnscribed date, July 3,
1846, the name J. Dresser, and the outline of a wolf cut in the rock. old Hiram
Smith assured Mr. Collins that, to his positive knowledge, that was the last
wolf killed in Somerset County.
Mr. Collins is an archeological explorer in his own right. He once ran
across some carvings on the side of a ledge near the shore of Chase Pond. They
seemed to represent a caribou and other details of a hunt. Because the ledge was
near a clearly distinguished animal trail, once used by caribou, and because near
by is a huge mass of charcoal, Mr. Collins thinks he ran across an Indian camping
ground, and that the rock carving may well have been made before the first
white.man came to that region.
*****
Mrs. Milton Ellis of Cornish, whose late husband, professor of English at
the University of Maine, was a far better authority on words than I am, sends me
a clipping from the Bangor Daily News, which contains the first instance I have
ever seen in newsprint of the verb “to colden”, I have heard it in colloquial
speech, but I have never before seen it in print. In an article headlined “University
of Maine Develops Short Season Tomato”, the News said: “A new breed of
tomato which will develop in the short growing season in northern Maine, where
the St. John Valley towns colden down quickly following the brief open period,
is announced by the Uni versi ty ‘s Department of Horticulture.”
*****
Mrs. Hannah Burrill of China writes me that the cemetery in that village to
which I referred a few weeks ago is still called Sugar Loaf. She says it is now
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completely filled, and the new cemetery is on the China Neck Road.
*****
It was cheering to lear~ last week that in East Vassalboro lives a man,
only a little older than I, who spent his boyhood in the same Maine town where
we both engaged the regular’ pastime of going down to the depot to see the evening
train come in on the narrow guage. He- is Leonard Weymouth, better known to my
generation as Grover Weymouth, and he recalls many old-time incidents which may
be interesting to people here in Central Maine, though they may never have seen
that little village of Grover’s and mine up in the foothills of the White Mountains.
He recalls the old-time school lyceums, where were conducted debates, spelling
matches, dramatic skits, and that good old climax, the reading of verses
burlesquing faculty and students. He mentions one heated debate — both he and
I have forgotten the question debated — when my opponent was a spirited orator
whom we used to call “Doc” Lombard. The nick-name was well chosen, for Doc is
now one of Boston’s foremost cancer specialists.
Did you have those old lyceums in Central Maine? In our town the whole
community used to turn out. After the formal debate, the question was opened
to the house, in true “Town Meeting of the Air” fashion. Then it was that debate
really started. Doctors, lawyers, merchants, farmers got in their say. I
wonder if Grover recalls how the last word was usually spoken by the Rev. Luther
MCKenney, the Universalist minister, who in that staunch Republican town had the
dubious distinction of having served in Congress as a Democrat?
Mr. Weymouth had one distinction I would give a lot to have shared with him.
Two summers he worked in the office of the old B & SR railroad. More intimately
than I, he knew the man who served as the road’s president, general agent, train
dispatcher, ticket seller and bill collector for many years — a man of whom we
kids stood’in awe, because his crabbed face was accompanied by an even more
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crabbed manner. Whenever, loafing around the station, we saw his square-topped
derby coming around the corner, it was the signal to run.
How many of you remember the old square-topped derby? It was a hat of
distinction in our country towns, almost as distinguiShed as the tall silk hat
of Fifth Avenue. Grover may be right when he says, except for the railroad superintendent’s,
there was only one other in our town. It was worn by the Congregational
minister, who also sported a flowing beard parted in the middle, and
in winter a huge ulster with attached cape and enormous overShoes. But I think I
recall one other square-topped derby,on the head of the man who came nearest to
being the town squire — a position that had disappeared officially before I
was born. This man, a lawyer known allover western Maine, had for years been
the rural magistrate.
square-topped derby.
I am sure that Judge Walker strolled our streets in a
*****
Speaking of the ministers in our boyhood days, I wonder if yours had the
marvelous vocabularies that some of ours possessed. Even on the church calendar
some of their notices would contain the most unusual assortment of sesquipedalian
words. What does sesquipedalian mean? Well, it means just as much to you
as the vocabulary of those preachers meant to us. We came away from those sermons
feeling like the darky in the story. He applied to the court for a divorce.
The judge asked kindly, “Well, Sam, what seems to be the trouble?” Sam replied,
“It’s this, Judge. That woman of mine talks all the time. She’s the talkinest
woman in the whole world. She jest about drives me crazy.” “What does She
talk about?”, asked the judge. “That’s jest it, judge”, replied Sam, “she don’t
say.”
The contributions of old-time sayings and expressions keep coming in. Emery
Hegarty recalls two that he used to hear from the lips of an old lady long ago.
She used to say, “If there ain’t a big dog waiting for you, there’ll be two
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little ones”; and even more expressive was her saying, “The silent sow eats all
the swill”.
At the recent career conference at Colby College Dr. Stearns, the now retired
dean of the Tufts Medical School, asked me if I had ever heard the parlor
called the “foreroom”. He said it was a common term in the seaside town where he
spent his boyhood.
Bob Barteaux, a student at Colby, says an aged relative of his always referred
to persons and animals for whom she felt either praise or pity as “blessed
critter”.
Deafness has a lot of comparisons, but none more expressive than the one
heard on parts of the Maine coast IIdeafer’n a haddock”.
*****
How many of you remember that pioneer of newspaper columnists, Newton Newkirk
of the Boston Post? His column was a lively medley of this, that and everything.
Newt had a penchant for verse of the Edgar Guest variety. He was no poet,
but he had a sense of rhyme and rhythrn_akinto that of Arthur Griterman or Ogden
Nash. I am indebted to Mrs. Rexford Oliver of the Second Rangeway, Waterville
for an old Boston Post clipping of 1921, in which Newt lists many of these old,
expressive comparisons. Here they are:
“Brighter than silver, brittle as glass,
Brown as a berry, bolder than brass.
Flat as a flounder, heavy as lead,
Hoarse as a raven, deader than dead.
Colder than charity, darker than pitch,
Fair as a lily, worse than the itch.
Bitter as gall, bald as a coot,
Blind as a bat, blacker than soot.
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Round as an orange, rude as a bear,
Sharp as a needle, fine as a hair.
Slow as a tortoise, sly as a fox,
Sharper than vinegar, safe as the stocks.
Plump as a partridge, pale as a ghost,
Harder than iron, deaf as a post.
Light as a feather, limp as a glove,
Louder than thunder, sweeter than love.
Cool as a cucumber, neater than wax,
Plain as a pikestaff, sharper than tacks.
Old as Methuselah, sound as a bell,
Prouder than Lucifer, hotter than ••••• n
That’s all folks for tonight.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
20th Broadcast March 27, 1949
Waterville is justly proud of its three championship basketball teams. They
are fine boys, real sportsmen — the fellows that compose all three of those
teams, and they have been coached by three sterling men, the kind of men every
father and mother likes to have in contact with their son. These three teams
will be jointly honored at a testimonial dinner this week.
There is so much popular acclaim and so much glamor attached to championship
basketball that some of our citizens may mistakenly believe that it is the
only thing that has had any attention at the Waterville Senior High School this
winter. I assure you that such is not the case. Last Friday it was my privilege
to attend another kind of testimonial dinner — a dinner in honor of the
boys and girls at Waterville High School who have just been elected to the CUm
Laude Society. Every year a group of seniors and juniors are chosen for this -the
highest honor at the school. When the final group is chosen in senior year
not more than ten per cent of the class can be selected and the total number is
usually less. It is a distinguished honor to be a member of CUm Laude, comparable
to membership in Phi Beta Kappa in the colleges. The faculty committee of selection
chooses the members on the basis of a carefully devised system which considers
the three S· s of the Cum Laude triangle — scholarship, service and sincerity.
At an assembly on Friday afternoon the whole school paid honor to the nine
seniors and eleven juniors initiated into the society under the direction of
Miss Mary Warren, chairman of the faculty conmdttee. Those twenty boys and girls,
together with nine more seniors who had become members in their junior year, sat
on the High School stage in chairs arranged to form the CUm Laude triangle. Not
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only the parents and teachers, but all Waterville, should be proud of those 29
young citizens. They represent families of every status and varied occupation —
a true cross section of the City. Sons and daughters of professional men, merchants,
mechanics, manufacturers and laborers sat together on that platform -living
evidence that scholarship, service and sincerity in this America of ours recognize
no distinctions’ . of social class or national origin. Here was young America
in its excellence.
*****
A listener wants to know the origin of the slang word “buck” for dollar.
It comes from saw-buck, an old-time slang word for ten dollars, because X, the
symbol for ten, is the shape of a saw-horse. As time went on, buck without the
prefix “saw” came to denote the unit of paper currency, the dollar. The expression
“pass the buck”, however, originates from the game of poker, which I believe
Drew Pearson recently alluded to as a presidential pastime at Key West.
In poker the buck is a counter, possession of which by the dealer requires a
jack pot. The buck goes to the winner of each jack pot. To pass the buck was to
shift the responsibility to the next player.
Many think of words as long ago made and fixed in the dictionaries. But
the makers of dictionaries know better. They are constantly printing new editions
to keep up with new words. The newest dictionary is an edition of Webster’s
Collegiate, just published this month. It contains many interesting new
words or new meanings of old words. For instance, what is a bazooka? First is
given the older meaning, which actually is not very old. It is “a sound contraption
used by Bob Burns, radio comedian “. Then comes the meaning that didn’ t
even exist before 1940: “a portable, electrically fired rocket launcher, whose
projectile is effective against tank armor”.
The new dictionary contains atomic bomb and atomic pile, as well as ash
can, the slang for depth charge. It has DDT, the abbreviation for dichloro-
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dipheQYl-trichloro-ethane, the new destroyer of insect pests. It tells us what
a cyclotron is; it recognizes the well-known G. I.; it informs us that Kamikaze,
the Japanese suicide pilot, is a word which in Japanese means divine wind. This
new dictionary immortalizes Mae West by the definition “a yellow life-saving
jacket, which is worn like a vest by pilots in flights over the sea”. Then it
adds another definition: “Slang. u. S. Army. A twin-turreted combat tank”.
Here you will also find Shangri-La, defined as “a nonexistent idyllic land
depicted as a utopia in James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon’, 1933”. But alas, even
this new dictionary does not refer to President Roosevelt’s Shangri-La retreat.
Yes,words are being made faster than any dictionary can keep up with them. I
want to give you just five examples of recent slang. How many of you know what
they mean? Be-bop, browned off, dilbert, iron cow, gunk.
*****
Mention last week of a monument to a wolf in the town of Moscow has brought
from six different listeners, in six different towns reached by this broadcast,
the information that Maine also has a monument to a tree. The town of Mercer
once claimed the biggest (or was it the oldest) elm tree in Maine. After the
tree had to be cut down, a monument was set up, in the shape of a section of
tree truck and was appropriately inscribed.
By the way, what are the oldest and the biggest trees still standing in
Waterville? Was the big tree on Appleton Street Waterville’s biggest tree when
it stood there whole and unharmed? Where in the City is there a really big elm
elms the size of that giant which had to be felled when the Central Fire Station
was erected? Some of our beautiful, though not the largest,elms came down when
the service station was put up in front of the Elmwood Hotel. Fire stations and
service stations are made by man, but only God can make a tree. The passing of
those God-made trees is one of the prices for what we call urban progress. Growing
from a country town into a city is not all gain. Growing pains accompany
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the process.
*****
Judge Burgess of Fairfield reminds me of a picturesque old-time saying,
“tooth off the old rake”. We are all familiar with the much commoner “chip off
the old block”, but somehow “tooth off the old rake” gives a homelier” more memorable
picture of the same idea.
Bill Burgess — I think memory of the old Hebron days gives me that firstname
privilege — relates a yarn told by his father that deserves a place in a
national magazine where each week one reads about “the perfect squelch “. In
Fairfield Center many years ago, so the story goes, there lived an old gentleman
who was quite a character. One day a very dignified, frock-coated personage appeared
at the old man’s door. “I am the new Methodist minister”, said the caller.
“I thought I would call on you and leave a few tracts.” Doubtless the old feilow
in Fairfield Center knew perfectly well that the minister said tracts
(t-r-a-c-t-s), for there were pamphlets in the minister’s hands. But the old
gentleman preferred to hear the word as tracks, for he answered: “It’s all.right
with me if you leave tracks, provided you leave ’em with the heels toward the
door”.
More than once on this program we have said a good word for American private
enterprise, for those rights and opportunities of the individual that used
to mean so much in America. Some of my friends tell me that I am only whistling
in the dark, that the socialized state is so surely on the way that the old individual
enterprise is as dead as the dodo •.
In light of that sort of thinking it is interesting to note the experience
of Russia since the Revolution of 1917. In the early stages the Bolshevists were
determined to equalize society, to make no distinctions in wages and salaries
because of individual ability or enterprise. For four years they even tried to
abolish money. Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy) of 1921 not only introduced
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money, but other practices of the hated capitalistic regime. Differential wages
recognized the contribution of those who could contribute skills especially
needed by the state. A ration card system allowed favored workers an extra share
of scarce commodities. The Marxist ideal of distribution according to need was
displaced by distribution according to individual contribution.
I suppose many of us think there are no such things as savings in Russia,
but indeed there are. Because consumer’s goods are so scarce and because some
favored individuals are paid high wages, there are not a few Russians who receive
more money than they can spend. But unlike us in America, those Russians
cannot invest their savings in any way they please. They can only put them in
government banks or buy government bonds. Since the government owns all the industries,
it finances those industries largely from the savings of the people.
That is just the way private industry, in part, finances the means of production
and processing in the united States.
Now the point of this discussion, which I hope is not too heavy and unintelligible,
is this. Such a vital thing in our human relationShips is individual
enterprise that, in order to survive at. all, the Russian government not only
had to recognize it, but exactly like the capitalistic economy which the Soviets
so ardently hate, they had to reward it. Is it too much to say that it will not
be an economic utopia, but a kind of social Dark Ages, if the day ever comes
when individual worth and personal enterprise do not have their reward?
*****
You heard Drew Pearson’s prediction that John D. McCloy will be a new member
of the President’s Cabinet. He gave the Commencement Address at Colby in 1947.
*****
We musn’t let a Sunday pass without mention of at least one of those oldtime
things. Tonight I am thinking about the old round crackers. We still have
them, and we call them common crackers. They now come in neat packages of a single
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pound. They used to come in barrels, and in my father’s little country store
their sale was so large that he always had a hundred or more of those empty
crackerba:r:rels for sale every fall when it came apple picking time.
To ~y of our young, house-keeping couples today it seems grotesque
enough to think of any families ever having bought a whole barrel of flour.
What would they think of buying a whole barrel of common crackers? But people
actually did that, especially on the farms. The great boom in the cracker business
came at haying time. The·. way to get your haying properly done was to set
up a barrel of cider and a barrel of crackers side by side in the shade of a
big tree not too far from the mowing fields.
There used to be two kinds of those old, round crackers — soft bake and
hard bake. The soft baked variety was a white-livered, doughy looking object
that never appealed to my crusty taste, but a lot of folks preferred them. The
ones I remember best were made in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and called St. Johnsbury
crackers. They came not only in barrels, but in big pasteboard cartons,
exactly a hundred crackers to the carton. They arrived at the store in huge
wooden boxes — four dozen cartons to the box — boxes nearly as big as a piano
box. Wood was cheap in those days. At today’s prices that box would cost almost
as much as the crackers. What grand chicken houses and dog kennels and
children’s play houses those old St. Johnsbury cracker boxes used to make.
The hard-baked crackers were my favorites. They were made by the old Huston
factory in Auburn — beautifully browned and had a wonderful, snappy crunch.
They went down fast with the old five cent a quart milk, but they went down even
faster with the tangy home-made root beer.
*****
For several weeks we wore out the narrow· guage railroads, ripped up the
tracks and called ita day. Now let’s wake up the devotees of another old timer
the covered bridges. Let’s see if all who listen to this program cannot contri-
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bute something to our search. These are the things we want to know. Where are
there old, wooden covered bridges still standing in Maine and still actually
in use on traveled roads? Let us see how large a list we can compile. Then
let’s find all the reasons that have ever been given to explain why they built
those bridges covered rather than left them open. Just jot down on a post card
any interesting thing you know about the old covered bridges and mail it to
Ernest Marriner or to Station WTVL or to our sponsor, the Keyes Fibre Company_
Addressed in any of those three ways, your card will reach me. So for a few
weeks now covered bridges will be our quest.
Well, our time is up, and this must bridge you over until next Sunday_
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tITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
21st Broadcast April 3, 1949
Doubtless many people sincerely believe that Negroes are a permanently inferior
race. But any anthropologist, any serious student of racial groups and
race histories, will tell you that there is no such thing as a superior race.
So far as blood strains are concerned, they are just like morals — there
is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us that it
little behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us. But when a member of the
Negro race makes outstanding, unprecedented achievement, when he succeeds where
white men have failed, he deserves being talked about with publicity and praise.
After the assassination of Count Bernadotte, who had again and again been
frustrated in his zealous, sacrificing attempts to bring peace between Jews and
Arabs in Palestine, his place as United Nations mediator for the Palestine dispute
was taken by Ralph J. Bunche, an American Negro. His own nation — to say
nothing about the rest of the world — knew little about Dr. Bunche. Newspaper
reporters hurriedly dug up a few biographical facts. Dr. Bunche, it seems, was
an anthropologist, a scientist who deals with mankind as a biological and social
being. He holds the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Harvard, has been a professor
at Howard University in Washington, and served first the Office of War Information,
then the State Department during the war. In 1946 he became director
of the division of trusteeShip of the United Nations.
Bunche did not seek the job made vacant by Count Bernadotte’ s death i he took
it reluctantly as a high duty. Now the whole world knows him as the man who
brought about the most successful feat of peace-making statesmanship in modern
times. Single-handed, and against powerful opposition, he persuaded the Egyptians
to enter on peace negotiations at Rhodes. Though they threatened to walk out
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more than once, Bunche’s patience and persistence kept Egyptians and Israelites
conferring when the whole press predicted the conference would go on the rocks.
Only a few months ago we all expected long, bloody warfare — a terrible
Holy War — in the Middle East. We were told the entire Arab World would rise to
the desert nomad’s blood-thirsty cries. We looked to see the River Jordan and
the Sea of Galilee stained red with blood. But now Jew and Arab are making peace,
ready to turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, to make a
Middle East in which both can live and let live. All because an American Negro
led the way.
It has frequently been noted that the achievements of Negroes in this country,
however spectacular they may be, are usually confined to matters which concern
their own race. Perhaps only George Washington Carver accomplished much on
other than a racial basis. But not so with Ralph Bunche. His achievement is entirely
outside his own Negro people. He has proved himsel!f a statesman of the
first rank. No wonder the Christian Century, the great religious weekly magazine,
suggests that Dr. Bunche be awarded the Nobel peace prize.
Perhaps Drew Pearson’s suggestion is even better: that Dr. Bunche be named
American Ambassador to Moscow. Russian propaganda keeps pounding away at American
intolerance toward black-skinned citizens. It claims that Negroes, allover
the United States, north as well as south, are daily lynched from the nearest
lamp post. To send Bunche to Moscow would be open disavowal of the Soviet’s claim
that the U. S. Government itself mistreats American Negroes.
As for this little weekly broadcast in Central Maine, we have more than once
contended that tolerance and understanding are little things, but mighty important
things. So we have been glad to devote ·several minutes of this program to the
praise of Ralph Bunche, colored Ambassador of good will and maker of peace.
*****
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This broadcast had to be prepared before any except the earliest returns
had arrived in response to our request for information on covered bridges in
Maine. Because your speaker had to make a business trip out of the State, earlier
preparation than usual of this week’s program was in order. Therefore our
promised detailed comment on covered bridges must go over until next week.
There’s plenty of time for any listener to get in his contribution before next
Sunday. Our question, repeated from last week, is this: Where in Maine are
there covered bridges still in use on traveled highways? If you know of such a
bridge, jot its location down on a post card and mail the card to Ernest Marriner
or to Station WTVL or to our sponsor, the Keyes Fibre Company.
*****
Do you recall the story of the hired man who did such a fine job digging
post holes that the next day the farm owner set him to sorting a truck-load of
potatoes into three piles — big, medium and small. When the farmer went into
the barn at noon, he found the hired man gazing vacantly into space, with three
tiny piles of potatoes in front of him, not more than a peck in each pile. “Why!”,
said the farmer I “I thought you were a fast worker. You put in those post holes
mighty fast yesterday. What’s the matter with you today?” “This is different”,
replied the hired man. “When you dig post holes you don’t have to make those
darned decisions.”
That hired man might have liked to live in Russia. There the average citizen
has a lot of decisions made for him. He is told what to like in music, painting,
literature and the other arts. He is not bothered with conflicting schools
of economic thought. Nothing is tolerated which does not follow the party line.
That’s all he has to do if he wants to keep alive and out of the forced labor
camps. Life is pretty simple for people who don’t feel obliged to do their own
guessing.
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But strangely enough, if we can believe the official Soviet press — and
Pravda is that official press the wisdom of the master guessers is not unanimously
accepted even in Russia. With bitter denunciation, calling it a crime
against the State, Pravda recently ranted against the automobile workers in Moscow
who were taking seven hours to perform a certain operation which the master
guessers had set at four and one-half hours.
In the same issue Pravda asserts that production figures in the United
States are capitalist means of sweating workers and lowering their standard of
living. How much better is the lot of the Russian worker where the laborer works
joyfully to meet production figures set by the people’s government.
Well, to say nothing of the mental gymnastics necessary to reconcile those
conflicting statements in the same issue, just how does Pravda answer the question
of a Russian worker who sees photographs of the parking lots around American
automobile factories? For that question is sure to be: “Do you mean to tell
me those American laborers can actually afford to buy the things they make?”
*****
Last week the Trustees of the Waterville Public Library gave a testimonial
tea to artists. Those artists had just donated to the Library a series of their
own paintings, depicting scenes from well-known children’s stories, and the artists
were all pupils of Mrs. Muriel Ragsdale at the Waterville Senior High
School. One painting showed the sisters in Little Women; another showed Robinson
Crusoe with his big palm-leaf umbrella; a third was an exquisitely done transparent
water color of the dog Lassie; a fourth presented the boy and his pet deer
in “The Yearling”. One girl a lover of horses and a constant saddle rider
had done a striking picture of Black Beauty. On a single panel another girl had
painted several characters from Alice in Wonderland; another had put Hansel and
Gretel into a fascinating candy house. There were lots more of those pictures:
King Arthur forging the sword Excalibur, the white snow queen, Tom Sawyer white-
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washing the fence, the Jungle Book, and others we cannot at the moment recall.
Every one of them is worthy of mention and praise. All of the pictures will be
placed on the walls of the children’s room at the Library, an inducement to present
and future generations of little folk to look inside the books that tell
about these wonderful charac.ters.
How many of you have seen the striking mural that decorates the wall at the
head of the stairs leading from main building to gymnasium at Waterville Senior
High School? It is a real mural, not a single scene, but a composite painting
showing various sununer activities at Lakewood. Striking is the word that describes
it. It stops you in your tracks. Its vivid colors, its life-like scenes,
its balanced assembly, make it a work of which a professional artist could be
proud. Yet it was done by Mrs. Ragsdale’s pupils at the school.
Under Mrs. Ragsdale’s guidance the pupils are now working on a very ambitious
project. They are doing murals to decorate the entire main corridor at the
school. These murals will be a series depicting scenes and symbolism from the legends
of King Arthur and his Round Table, especially as that legend is treated by
Tennyson in “Idylls of the King”.
Waterville is exceedingly fortunate to have a teacher of art like Mrs. Ragsdale,
one who has not been bitten by the bugs of cubism and surrealism, who encourages
her pupils to depict scenes and people from life or fiction, rather than
daub on canvas the insane splashings of disordered minds. We may be old-fashioned,
but we prefer a picture like Lassie or Black Beauty, done frankly as illustration,
rather than distorted watches hanging on trees or females with radio towers for
limbs.
*****
Rather common on this program has been reference to workers and employers.
I wonder if members of the u. S. Congress ever consider themselves as employees
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of the people, sent to Washington to produce legislation for the people’s good.
If factory employees turned out production the way the Eighty-First Congress has
thus far been turning it out, they would be discharged with the consent and approval
of the unions.
The filibuster was bad enough; and to the credit of all the New England
senators, save the stubborn and contrary stiles Bridges, be it said the New Englanders
did all they could to break it. But of all the farces seen thus far in
the current Congress, the worst was the House debate on the Rankin pension bill.
Railroaded through committee by the high-handed tactics of the most bigoted and
intolerant Negro-hater in the Congress, this bill designed to cost the nation
untold billions saw heated debate on the floor of the House, as one would expect.
But the final vote is what makes one despair of reason and logic in our Congress.
The amended bill failed of passage by only one vote, and surely very few Congressmen
voted on it the way they really believe.
Certainly we must not forget the veterans, and plenty of existing legislation,
like the G I Bill of Rights, testifies to the fact that we have not forgotten them.
Indeed we have done so much more for the veterans of World War II than we ever did
for those of the First World War that few people object to increased bebefits for
those older service men. But to provide for all veterans, even for those diShonorably
discharged, the pensions suggested by Rankin’s spendthrift bill was unthinkable.
There can be reason in all things. Let us have constantly improved veterans’
legislation, but let it be reasonable.
*****
Has anyone lately cautioned you to relax? Doubtless we all need the caution.
We do live at high tension. But there is another side to this matter. Take the
tension out of the mainspring of a watch and you have relaxed steel; you also have
a useless piece of junk. A person can become so relaxed, so free from all disturbance,
that he too is a useless piece of junk.
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This is the Lenten Season, the time of year when, of all times, we are most
often reminded of the words and deeds of the Man of Nazareth. What a disturbed
and seemingly unsuccessful life Jesus lived. Even when alone in the Garden, he
seemed not to be relaxed, but moved with compassion toward harassed and bewildered
humanity. He carried tension to the end. And he died on a cross.
perhaps relaxation is not life’s greatest prize.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
22nd Broadcast April 10, 1949
What do you know about corn, and I don’t mean radio programs? For one thing,
it is generally agreed that the finest sweet corn in the world is groWn in Maine.
In the world’s markets Maine canned corn is even better known than Maine canned
blueberries. Even before the war cans of Maine corn were sometimes seen in such
unlikely places as Abyssinia and Madagascar, My Colby classmate, Robert Fernald,
is U. S. Consul in Tananarive, Madagascar, and he assures me that Maine corn is
not an unusual item among the American goods Which reach that far-away island.
Now a curious thing about corn is that it has no wild counterpart. Corn is
one of the few plants that grows only when cultivated by man. Yet corn, like every
other cultivated plant, must at some time have had a wild ancestor, but its dis-:covery
has persistently eluded the botanists. Within the past week news has come
of What may be a missing link in this quest.
Two Harvard explorers recently found, in a New Mexico cave, the most primitive
corn yet discovered. In a layer of refuse, which geologists say is 4,000
years old, they found cobs, husks and grains of very primitive corn. The ears are
tiny, about two inches long, and the kernels appear as irregular, single spots,
not in orderly rows.
Did such corn once exist in a wild state? What difference does it make? Who
cares? The answers to those questions reveal your own philosophy of life. If
you can see no value in anything that does not have immediate, practical ends, of
course you don’t care about the origin of corn. But if you believe that any discovery
Which expands human knowledge is in the long run of value to present and
future generations, then you do care. The fact is that the final discovery of wild
corn, if and When it comes, may answer many questions concerning the prehistoric
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men who used it, and the more .we know about the long, slow process by which man
arose from primitive beginnings to modern civilization, the better we can understand
what kind of creature man really is and how his future progress can be best
assured.
*****
Now for the covered bridges. I fear we can’t finish the subject tonight, because
we confront quite a search. Listeners have written and telephoned in even
larger numbers than they did about the narrow guage railroads, and, as you might
well suspect, the more they send in the more checking we have to do.
OUr best clue as to the number of covered bridges still standing in Maine
comes from a listener who has helped us before, Emery Hegarty. He calls our attention
to an article in the Lewiston Journal on October 16, 1948 by Harry A. Packard.
The article is devoted to the famous artist’s bridge in the town of Newry, said to
be the most frequently painted covered bridge in our state. In the article Mr.
Packard says there are 37 covered bridges yet standing in Maine, seven of them in
Oxford County alone. Unfortunately Mr. Packard does not name the 37 bridges; his
article is devoted wholly to one bridge.
You listeners have responded so helpfully that I wish we could name every one
of you who have turned in some information this week. But the list is too long even
to give hastily on this program. If I fail to mention your name it is not because
I did not notice your communication.
More than thirty listeners call attention to the covered bridge at Stillwater
Village, and Fred Dore of l5i College Avenue has taken the t~e to send me four
large hand-written pages by Adelbert M. Lakeman on history and legend connected
with the Stillwater bridge. Mr. Lakeman says it is one of only three so-called
double barreled bridges still standing in New England. Both of the others are in
Vermont.
There used to be many of those double barreled bridges • Less than 15 years
1-141
ago one crossed the Androscoggin at Turner. Most of the covered bridges had
width for only one team, and hence were one-way bridges. Some of them were wide
enough for teams to pass, but few of them had two actually separate tunnels —
a long line of crossed timbers dividing the two sec;:tions. That is the way the
Stillwater bridge was built more than a century ago, in 1835. During a freshet
the very next year it fell into the stream and had to be rebuilt. But since that
year, 1836, the bridge has stood — its whole 230 foot length — with only occasional
repairs. Originally a toll bridge, it was purchased by the town for $2,000
in 1870, and for nearly 80 years has been free to all travel.
Why did they ever go to the trouble and expense of the twin tunneled architecture?
Why not just a wide bridge? Traffic was not dense enough on most of
those bridges for the narrow passages of one-way structures to cause much delay;
so the mere desire for two-way traffic could not have been the reason. Mr. Lakeman
gives a more plausible explanation. Covered bridges were bad places for collisions,
and frisky horses were not so likely to shy at one another with a dividing
barrier between them.
Why did they build covered bridges anyway? That was apparently an easy question,
because more than forty listeners have sent in the right answer. It was not
to add weight to the structures in times of high water. It wasn’t, as a magazine
article once seriously said, to keep the bridge free from difting snow. In winter
they sometimes actually shoveled snow onto the bridge to give sleds traction. The
real reason, of course, was to protect the timbers from rotting, and explains why
those bridges have so long resisted rain, ice and snow.
What other covered bridges still stand in Maine? One crosses the Piscataquis
River between Dover-Foxcroft and Guilford. It can be seen from the main highway
between those towns, though it is on a less traveled road connecting the main
highway with the so-called black road — also a tarred surface — from Dexter to
Sangerville. Another crosses the Little Black River just before it enters the st.
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John in Allagash Plantation. This is not far from the more famous Allagash River,
the canoeist’s paradise.
The Artists’ Bridge, to which we have already referred, crosses the Sunday
River at Ketchum, a tiny village in the town of Newry. Anyone who ever took the
memorable drive from Rumford to Berlin, New Hampshire by way of upton and Eustis
will recall the wonderful scenery both up and down river in the vicinity of that
picturesque bridge.
Another covered bridge connects Maine and New Hampshire across the Ossiskee
River at Porter, but I have been unable to learn whether a second bridge still
spans the Ossiskee, or whether any of the old covered bridges, once so numerous
on the Saco, still stand. I believe the so-called Upper Bridge at Andover still
remains. It is a ninety foot structure across the Ellis River, built in 1870,
and long a landmark in northern OXford County.
I was naturally pleased to see in the Lewiston Journal article a picture of
the one covered bridge with which I was personally most familiar. It spanned the
Saco River at the foot of Walker’s Hill between Bridgton and Fryeburg, but it is
now only a memory. It was replaced nearly a quarter century ago by a concrete
structure. It was one of the longest covered bridges in western Maine, and it nobly
withstood some mighty freshets.
Now this makes only six named bridges that still stand. To be sure Mr. Lakeman
refers to the “ten or a dozen covered bridges left in Maine”, but Mr. Packard
must have had good authority for saying there are 37. At any rate, there are surely
more than six. Where are they?
An interesting question we should like to see answered is, where in all the
world is the longest covered bridge still standing and in use? I am told there
is a covered bridge 1,400 feet long on the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada. Does anybody
know a longer one?
Did you know that in Winslow there were .0nce. th:tree_ covered bridges in sight
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of each other? What a pity that we had no aerial photographs in the old days,
or no. vantage point from which all three could be focused into one picture. Both
at the Waterville Public Library and at the Waterville Historical Society are
blow-ups of an old picture of which a copy has just reached me from my friend
Edgar Brown, former postmaster and for many years secretary of the WatervilleWinslow
Chamber of Commerce. That picture, taken in 1856, carries the caption:
“View of Waterville from Sand Hill, Winslow”. It shows two of the covered bridges
— the highway bridge, a double-barreled structure where the present steel and
concrete bridge cr0sses the Kennebec, and above it the covered railroad bridge.
An interesting feature of the old photo is an elevated sign spanning the highway
at the foot of Sand Hill. The sign reads: “Rail Road Crossing. Look OUt for
the Engine When the Bell Rings”.
The third bridge, not shown in this picture, was the last of the three to
survive. Crossing the Sebasticook in Winslow, it came down in 1902.
Adelbert Wright of the Maine Central yards tells me he knows the covered
bridge at Augusta was standing on July 4, 1896, because on that day he and his
brother crossed it to attend Barnum’s circus in the capital city. Mr. Wright has
an interesting story about the covered bridge at New Sharon, which went out in
the 1897 flood. His sister, who lived about a mile above Rome Corner on the New
Sharon road, recalls that. her whole family rushed to the door to see what was
making such an awful racket one fall evening in 1896. It proved to be one of
the first automobiles ever seen in that part of the country. Memory .says not whether
it was one of the early factory products, or a home-made vehicle such as the
Walker brothers put on the roads of my home town about the same time.
Next day Mr. Wright’s sister and her family learned what happened after the
auto went by their house. It had begun to rain, and the rain froze as it fell.
The car made such slow progress that it was nearly mid-night when the passengers
reached the New Sharon bridge. They .crossedit but found the village hill so icy
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that the car couldn’t make it. So they backed down under the shelter of the covered
bridge and there spent the night out of reach of rain and sleet.
*****
That’s enough about covered bridges for tonight, but we’ll return to the
subject again when we learn where more of them are located. Let us turn now to
another subject. Most Waterville people know that Colby College has a Paul Revere
bell. One of the last of the big bells that came from the foundry of the
man who took the famous ride hangs in the belfry of old South College on the College
Avenue campus. The building is the oldest Colby structure, erected in 1822,
and the bell adorned it only a few years later. Some day, surely, that historic
bell will be heard on Mayflower Hill.
Mrs. Gertrude Taylor of .North Vassalboro says the last church bell made by
Paul Revere is now in the belfry of the Congregational Church at Benton Falls.
I believe Herbert Jones in his book “Maine Memories” gives an interesting account
of the adventures and difficulties encountered in getting that bell to Benton.
*****
Just one more topic tonight. We are told that nowadays one marriage in every
four, after a very few years, ends in divorce. Nevertheless, look about you. You
will find plenty of families where husband and wife have not only stood each
other, but have stood by each other for many years.
It was my pleasure last week to see on the New York stage Howard Lindsey. and
Dorothy Stickney in their new production “Life with Mother”, sequel to the more
celebrated “Life with Father”. It has the same complicated ·actions of the six
red-headed Days that gave the 6,000 audiences which saw its predecessor so many
hearty laughs. Father Day is just as domineering and Mother is just as adept at
having her own way with him. But even more than “Life with Father” , this sequel
“Life with Mother” impresses an essential, central theme. Here .are two married
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people who, in spite of differences and in spite of tempers, have maintained a
mutua1 affection which surmounts all difficulties and persists through life.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
23rd Broadcast April 17, 1949
We have no desire to add to the sentimentality that has characterized newspaper
and radio reports of the tragedy which made the headlines just a week ago.
We would only point out the common truth it reveals: nothing pulls at the heart
strings of us common folk as does injury to a little child. Our generation is
accused of being cold and unfeeling, but in reality we are just as inclined to
sympathy and concern as were our grandparents. In a week when two major disasters
snuffed out multiple lives, it is interesting to note that what hit us hardest
was the death in a deep well-pipe of one little child.
There is something genuinely human about that seeming paradox, our relative
callousness toward wholesale slaughters and our concern about a single life. That
was the way Jesus acted and taught. His concern was for individual men and women
— for the one lost sheep and the one lost coin. It may be that not only human
nature, but divine will, also cares for the single life.
At least two listeners doubt that any bridge on the Gaspe is 1,400 feet long.
Now I cannot vouch for that length, but I can vouch for the fact that several
well known families in waterville originated on the Gaspe-Peninsula. Perhaps some
of them can tell us about the Gaspe bridge.
At any rate Paul Glasgow, a college student now living at Fairfield Center,
and Mrs. Nellie Dunphy of Waterville, both insist that the longest covered bridge
is the huge 1,280 foot span over the St. John River at Hartland, New Brunswick.
An anonymous listener sends me a picture of the Hartland bridge; the accompanying
text says it is 1,282 feet, and at the end of the bridge is a sign: “Longest
covered bridge in the world”.
We picked up information about one more covered bridge in Maine. OUr atten-
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tion is called to the covered bridge over Kenduskeag Stream on Harlow Street in
Bangor. Is that the only covered bridge left in a large community?
Last week we mentioned an old-time warning sign at the Winslow end of the
now extinct covered bridge over the Kennebec. Long after the coming of automobiles
an even more expressive sign was nailed to each end of the famous Columbia
Bridge, a covered structure crossing the Connecticut River at Lemington,
Vermont. The sign read: “Walk or Pay Two Dollars”. Now those are simple words.
A child knows what every one of those five words means. But what do they mean as
they are put together here: walk or pay two dollars? Did they mean that you could
walk across the bridge for nothing, but it would cost you two dollars to ride
across? Hardly that. None of the old toll bridges had so high a fee. Two dollars
was a lot of money among rural people a hundred years ago and few travelers could
spare it. No, the sign meant that you must walk your team across the bridge. If
you trotted or ran the horses across, you would be fined two dollars.
*****
A Waterville man has just published a distinguished book. For more than a
quarter of a century a resident of this city, Carl J. Weber of Burleigh Street,
has been writing books and he now has nearly a dozen to his credit. Known as the
world’s leading authority on the English poet and novelist, Thomas Hardy, he has
gathered into the Robinson Treasure Room at Colby College not only the most completecollection
of Hardy items to be found anywhere in the world, but many other
unique collections.
Professor Weber is somewhat of a literary detective and he is always turning
up something new. His book that has just come from the press is the only book ever
published on its subject. It is called “A Thousand and One Fore-Edge Paintings.”
What is fore-edge painting? Don’t feel too chagrined if you can’t answer. I didn’t
know either until a few months ago. It is painting on the edges of the leaves of a
book. Most schoolboys know the trick of fanning the leaves, holding them firmly in
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that opened, spread position, then writing the owner’s name on the fore-edge.
When the ink dries and the leaves spring back into nonnal position, the writing
on the edges all but vanishes, appearing as little more than a wavy line. But
always thereafter, as long as the book holds together, one who spreads and fans
the leaves, as the boy did when he wrote his name there, can see the clear design
of letters and name. One looks at a particular book and sees nothing on the
fore-edge except hazy, indistinct bits of color. He fans the pages and sees a
distinct painting. When that happens, he has found a book with fore-edge painting.
In his volume of two hundred pages ·Professor Weber tells the enchanting
story of the development of this peculiar art. He tells us about the artists i
bookbinders and publishers who played their parts in it: Daddy Gilpin, Edwards
of Halifax, Lewis of London, and many others.
The book is richly embelliShed with 24 illustrations, exemplifying fore-edge
paintings of great variety and striking design. The frontispiece in full color
is a landscape of a country mansion, painted on the fore-edge of a Book of Common
Prayer, printed in Paris and sold by Edwards and Sons of Halifax in .1791.
Professor Weber’s book is not only interesting reading; it is also a beautiful
example of fine book-making. It is the kind of book one can cherish in the
home for many years. Unlike the national commentator who immediately precedes me
on this station, I am not given to prophecy. Until tonight I have never made a
prediction •. But I will venture one now. Carl Weber’s “A Thousand and One ForeEdge
Paintings” will be selected as one of the fifty finest printed books of 1949.
*****
Who remembers the country peddlers? No one now living remembers the peddlers
of the early nineteenth century, made famous in fiction and historical narrative.
That breed vanished so long ago that I believe they are not depicted in the CUrrier
and Ives prints, which included almost everything in the rural life of the
mid-century. Those early peddlers carried almost every non-perishable commodity
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pins and needles, notions and ribbons, yard goods, tinware, lanterns, brooms and
hundreds of other articles. Fifty years ago the country peddler with his horse
and cart had not entirely dis~ppeared, but he had become more specialized. The
so-ca11ed tin peddler lasted a long time. He was familiar on city streets as
well as on the farms. He became the well-known rag man, with his cry “Any rags,
any bones, any bottles today”. Tinware was the stock which he bartered for rags.
Then there was the extract man. In my town lived one of those men, known all
over Cumberl~d County as Bennett Strout, the extract man. Before the day of modern
synthetic flavoring, he made many of his essences out of natural products.
He was especially proud of the quality of vanilla beans which he imported. After
the snow mel ted from the roads and the mud was not too deep for travel, he would
”
load up his fancily painted cart, drawn often by a span of horses, and start off
on a two weeks’ trip through the countryside. With only a day or two at home in
between, he would keep up these fortnightly trips until November snows made travel
difficult. Then he would spend all winter making up supplies for the next summer’s
sales.
C10sely allied to the extract man was the medicine man. Not to be confused
with the travelling shyster of the medicine show, palming off his worthless concoctions
for a dollar a bottle, the regular medicine man, with his semi-annual
visits, was an honest, respected and well known citizen. The one in my community
had the gayest peddler’s cart of all the itinerant salesmen. Its big box body,
like a fish cart, was painted in yellow and red and had turned posts, like barber’s
poles, rising from each corner. The horses wore harness with highly polished
brass, and with red plumes over the bridles.
The driver himself wore a Prince Albert coat and high winged collar, and he
spoke with great dignity and precision. Because of & home-made remedy which he had
patented, he was called Opodildoc Knight. He had other medicines too. For miles
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around a favorite spring tonic was Knight’s Sassaparilla, a concoction whose vile
taste was supposedly a guarantee of its curative value.
Long before the coming of chain stores, evidence of chain business had crept
into the countryside. The early peddlers were an independent, individual lot
each owning his own business and frequently manufacturing his own wares. But not
so the Grand Union Tea man. He represented an organization; he was one of a chain.
His big, green cart became a familiar object on the rural landscape, and the farm
folk waited eagerly for his regular rounds.
The meat man, the fish man, the fruit man and the vegetable man still remain.
All four can yet be found in many rural regions of Maine. Not quite obsolete are
the foreign peddlers of special wares: the Armenian rug peddlers, the Greek and
Albanian women with their beautiful embroidery, and Italian salesmen of costume
jewelry. The Indian basket weavers seldom go, any longer, from door to door.
Business is better and easier when they set up shop near some well traveled highway.
Even in my boyhood day, when telephones were rare and cOnmm1nication was geared
to the speed of horse and buggy, the peddlers were purveyors of news. They were an
important link between farm and town; to isolated rural families they brought the
latest happenings from distant places and the juiciest~gossip from down the- valley
or over the hill. They played an important part in the development of our great
country, and some of them, like Johnny Appleseed, have made their way into folklore
and legend. May their memory long survive!
*****
On this holiest day of the Christian year what have you been doing? Many of
you have been to church, have heard the joyous Easter music, have listened to the
words of hope. Others of you would have gone, if illness or other uncontrollable
circumstances did not keep you at home. Perhaps others of you did not care to go.
That is your privilege in this land of the free. But whatever your belief, however
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far you may feel removed from formal religion, or however close you may be to it,
you cannot escape the gripping power that Easter has upon the minds and emotions
of men.
The New Testament story tells us, “and the angel of the Lord rolled back the
stone from the door”. Vengeance and hate and spite had had their evil way. Mercy
and goodness and truth lay imprisoned within the tomb. But the executioners had
not reckoned with the angel of the Lord. And the stone was rolled back from the
door. The stone of fear, binding men in craven servitude; the stone of prejudice,
making men always spillers of each other’s blood; the stone of despair, making men
to feel that the end of existence is a sealed tomb. The lesson of Easter, coming
as it does when nature herself bursts forth anew from winter’s bonds, is that the
evil, the frustration, the cynical despair that entombs mankind give way when the
angel of the Lord rolls back the stone from the door.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
24th Broadcast April 24, 1949
perhaps none of our bits of nostalgia has brought more pleasing response
than mention we made a few weeks ago of the common crackers. Mrs. Gertrude Taylor
of North Vassalboro wants to know if I remember the broken crackers, which could
be bought at a reduced price. Indeed I do. They used to be in great demand at
Thanksgiving time when housewives were all making stuffing for chickens. I say
chickens, not turkeys, for almost no one had turkey for Thanksgiving in our part
of Maine.
Henry Bonsall was for many years a Waterville grocer, into whose store in
the block where the post office now stands I used to rush madly on emergency errands
for Ma Jones’s Hanford House, where I waited on table in my student days.
Mr. Bonsall insists that the usual name for the old common crackers was chowder
crackers. But Mr. Bonsall misses my point about the two kinds. He says the second
kind was of smaller size and called butter crackers. I remember those’ also, but
into my experience the butter cracker came much later than the two kinds to which
I referred. My two kinds were the hard baked and the soft baked — both the same
size, but of very different consistency.
Mr. Bonsall used to buy crackers in 25 barrel lots, assorted. The kinds were
common, butter, square oyster, round oyster, and the big square soda crackers. He
reminds me of something that I do well remember and ought to have mentioned before
— namely, that the barrels in which the crackers came packed were used flour
barrels. There were always vestiges of flour sticking to the sides.
When Mr. Bonsall says the old price was three pounds for a quarter, he must
be admitting that the cost of living was higher in Waterville than it was in
Bridgton. Our standard price, year in and year out, was eight cents a pound.
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Mr. Bonsall gives us a clue to the time when flour in barrels began to pass
out. For many years he bought flour by the car load and sold it right out of
the car in three days time. The farmers would come in, and each buy two or three
barrels, paying largely in farm produce. Let’s have the finish in Mr. Bonsall’s
own words. He writes: “The last carload I sold was at the beginning of the First
World War”. That just about makes flour in barrels one of the lesser war casualties.
*****
In many columns that have been written about Mr. Churchill’s recent address
in the Boston Garden, it seems to me that one passage has not been given deserved
attention. He said so much about the Communist menace, about the thirteen scheming
men in the Kremlin, that a much more important statement has been overlooked. Mr.
Churchill is one of those men who believes that man’s basic problems are not solved
by arms and war. To fight against aggression may be a necessary duty, but the
outcome never solves humanity’s problems. Those of us who sincerely believe and
constantly proclaim that the real problems of individual or nation are not economic,
but spiritual, are heartened by Mr. Churchill’s words. This is what he said:
“Human beings and human societies are not structures that are built, or machines
that are forged. However much the conditions change, the supreme question
is how we live and grow and bloom and die, and how far each life conforms to standards
which are not wholly related to space or time. The flame of Christian ethics
is still our highest guide. The fulfillment of spiritual duty in our daily life
is vital to our survival. Only by bringing it into perfect application can we hope
to solve for ourselves the problems of this world, and not of this world alone.”
Mr. Churchill is profoundly right. Let us never forget that the ultimate
basis of life is not material, but spiritual.
*****
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Most of us manage to keep out of court, yet trials are common things. Some
kind of court, in this land of ours, is in session all the time. Foreigners are
critical of what they call the slowness and technicalities of American justice.
They tell us that justice is swifter and surer across the seas.
It is with interest, therefore, that we heard last week about the longest
case in the history of the courts of Ireland. It required 48 days of .continuous
court sessions, filled a book of 300 pages with the pleadings alone, and saw the
President of the High Court take four hours to read a 35,000 word decision dismissing
the action. In other words, when it was allover, matters stood just
where they were before the case began. To get nowhere by that method the contestants
h~d spent 100,000 pounds, the equivalent of nearly half a million dollars.
Cases in the English, Scottish and Irish courts are based largely on the
British Common Law; that is, the accumulated precedents on similar cases since
the time of the Norman Conquest. This particular case was a suit brought by Foyle
and Bann Fisheries against more than eighty fishermen of County Donegal, who
claimed a right to fish in the River Foyle. The company claimed the sole right to
fish in the river through letters patent granted before the year 1189. The Attorney
General, on behalf of the eighty fishermen, argued that the company’s claim
was contrary to Magna Carta. Before the case reached court at all, the lawyers
on both sides spent two years of research into hundreds of documents from Magna
Carta to modern times. More than 300 documents were actually put into evidence,
among them the original texts of rare and priceless documents in Latin, German,
French, English and Irish.
Such is one example of so-called sure and speedy justice across the seas. We
suspect there are others. American courts may not be so bad, after all.
*****
What a common thing is time, so common indeed that we take it for granted.
This is not the occasion to go into a discussion of the difficult but fascinating
1-155
theory of the relativity of time — the Einstein view that time is not fixed and
absolute, but depends on relative degrees of stability and motion. Suffice it to
say that we have plenty of practical evidence that time means nothing to any of
us unless we can relate it to some fixed point. Everyone has had the experience
of waking up from sleep and wondering what time it is. Often, when we check by
watch or clock, we find our guess has been wrong by several hours. In sleep,
therefore, we have no recognition of the passage of time.
How much faster time flies as we get older! How time drags for a little
child! How aged and infirm seemed our parents when we were eight or nine years
old! How fast go the hours of a short vacation! How time drags when one sits on
a jury in a tedious case! Yes, time is a relative thing.
There are some curious facts about round-the-world time. One of these was
brought home to me in striking manner in 1941. Just eight days before Pearl Harbor
I was called to the telephone at eight o’clock in the morning. The operator said,
“Manila is calling. Please hold the line.” In a few seconds the San Francisco
operator was instructing me to stand by, then the operator at Honolulu, and finally
the operator at Manila, saying, “Your party is ready”. With complete distinctness
I then carried on a brief business conversation with my Manila caller.
When it was allover I asked myself the simple question, what time is it in
Manila? As a matter of fact, I hadn’t the slightest idea. When I worked it out
on an international time chart, what do you suppose I learned? Well, I learned
this startling fact: at eight o’clock on Saturday morning, November 30, 1941 I
heard what my Manila caller said to me at nine o’clock the same Saturday night.
I heard what he said thirteen hours before he said it. Or didn’t I?
The time difference from Waterville to Manila is eleven hours. Most of us
are aware of the time zones as we cross the United States. When it is noon in New
York, it is one hour earlier — eleven o’clock — in Chicago; ten o’clock in Denveri
nine o’clock in San Francisco. Thus, as one continues west across the Pacific
1-156
the time changes, so that noon in New York is 6: 30 AM in Honolulu and one A. M.
in Manila. So 8 A.M. in New York or waterville is 9 P.M. in Manila. But if each
time zone west of New York is one hour earlier than the zone east of it, why isn It
the Manila time 9 P.M. the previous evening, and why didnlt I hear what my caller
said eleven hours after he said it, instead of thirteen hours before he said it?
The answer is that between Honolulu and Manila the traveler journeying westward
crosses the International Date Line, and loses one day. If it is November 30
when he crosses the line, his next day is December 2. Journeying eastward he adds
a day. If it is November 30 when he crosses the line eastward, the next day is
November 30 over again. Therefore, eleven time zones west of Waterville makes our
8 A.M. their 9 P.M., but it is 9 P.M. not of the evening before, but of our same
day.
So, as absurd and impossible as it sounds, I like to speak of that telephone
experience of mine in terms of paradox, and I repeat: I heard what my Manila caller
said thirteen hours before he said it.
*****
One of life’ s common .things is the strange way far-off events and distant
places are linked together. So it is with the revolt of the Karens in far-away
Burma and the little city of Waterville, Maine.
Against the despotically inclined government of Burma, the government that
came into power after expulsion of the Japanese conquerors, the Karens of the
northern Burmese hills have risen in revolt. The existing Burmese government got
its power by assassination and force, and both its leaders and its methods are
abhorrent to the democratic, Christian Karens.
How do the Karens happen to be democratic and Christian? Because a hundred
and twenty-five years ago a young man named George Dana Boardman, the .firstgraduateof
what is now Colby College, left Waterville to join Adoniram·Judson in the
wilds of Burma. With Judson he carried Christianity to those wildest of wild
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Burmese natives, the Karens of the hill country. There in the jungle Boardman
met his death. Later his young widow married Judson and led the work that eventually
made a whole people Christian. And Ann Boardman Judson was as democratic
as she was Christian. Democratic ways went together with Christian ways in all
her teaching.
Today, a century afterwards, the Christian Karens fight the cause of democracy
in Burma.
*****
Examples of the old-time experiences keep coming in. Two new ones of the
past week are the word “gunk” and the proverbial saying, “Far off cows have long
horns.” Grover Weymouth of East Vassalboro, to whom I referred a few weeks ago
in connection with the narrow guage railroads, tells me that he has used the word
gunk as long as he can remember. It means something unpleasant or messy, or perhaps
simply worthless. Mr. Weymouth says that a few years ago he was fishing in
China Lake, when his hook got tangled up in marsh grass. Hauling in his line, he
let loose with a verbal explosion about the gunk on his hook. A lady in the fishing
party had never heard the word used before. She tried to find it in the dictionaries,
but of course without success. Such words defy the makers of dictionaries.
At any rate, I agree with Mr. Weymouth that it is a useful, expressive
word.
The new proverb of the week is contributed by Miss Frances Moore of Waterville.
It is “Far-off cows have long horns”. Miss Moore knew several elderly people
who made common use of this proverb. When someone would tell a tall story, a
Paul Bunyan yarn about distant parts, or sometimes when one would tell just a
naturally unbelievable tale, one of these old people would show his skepticism
by saying, “Far-off cows have long horns.”
*****
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Here is a question for men of the radio audience. Each time a man shaves,
how many strokes does he take with the razor? Now of course the exact number
differs among individual men, but what is it approximately? As a matter of fact,
I am assured the range between smallest and largest number of razor strokes among
individuals isn’t very great, and it makes no difference what kind of a razor one
uses.
1-159
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
25th Broadcast May 1, 1949
Consistency,thou art a jewel, but one which few members of Congress ever
wear. How many a congressman can reconcile some of his votes either with his
party platform or with his own conscience is beyond the comprehension of the
ordinary citizen.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have in their platforms strong
planks on the subject of civil rights. Both assert that no citizen should be denied
the rights accorded to other citizens because of race, color or religion.
What is more, many Congressmen of both parties have made emphatic speeches
against racial and religious discrimination. One would suppose that any time when
the filibustering Dixiecrats would let the issue come to a vote, discrimination
would be hit an overwhelming Congressional blow.
Now let us see what actually happened. After debate lasting several days,
the Senate finally came to a vote on various amendments offered to the Housing
Bill. During that long night session of April 21, Senator Bricker of Ohio offered
the following amendment, which I quote in its exact words in order that
there be no misunderstanding or misrepresentation:
“In recognition of the fact that public policy requires equality of treatment
of all people and prohibits discrimination on account of race, color, creed,
national origin or ancestry, in regard to public housing, every contract made
pursuant to this act shall provide that the housing project to which the contract
refers shall be operated without discrimination.”
When that amendment came to a vote, it was defeated 46 to 32, with 18 senators
not voting. One would expect opposition from the hardened Dixiecrats like
Ellender of Louisiana, Russell of Georgia and Eastland of Mississippi. But among
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those who voted against the Bricker amendment were Flanders of Vermont, Tobey of
New Hampshire, Taft of Ohio, Morse of Oregon, Myers of Pennsylvania and Young of
North Dakota. stranger still were the negative votes of such men as Senator Humphrey
qf Minnesota, who led the fight for the civil rights plank at the Democratic
convention last June, and of Senator Taylor of Idaho, who was Henry Wallace’s
running mate in the November election.
Unfortunately both Maine senators were absent when the vote was taken, excusably
absent on necessary business. When the roll was called, Senator Saltonstall
of Massachusetts, in charge on the Republican side of the aisle, announced
that Mr. Brewster and Mrs. Smith were both absent on official business, and that
if present and voting, both would vote yes; that is, in favor of the Bricker amendment.
Just before midnight that same night the Senate finally passed the
Housing Bill, and it contains no provision whatever against discrimination because
of race or religion.
*****
One of our Winslow listeners, Mr. Clukey, adds notably to our list of covered
bridges, by calling our attention to two such bridges which still stood in the
same community until within the past year. One was taken down less than a year ago;
the other still stands. In the northwest corner of Maine, between the Rangeley
Lakes and the New Hampshire border, is Lincoln Plantation with its little village
of Wilson’s Mills. Through this region flows the Magalloway River. It was crossed
by the two covered bridges Mr. Clukey mentions. The one still standing is called
the Storey Bridge.
Mr. Clukey mentions another practice of covered bridge days which we had
never heard of before. He says that, in his native Vermont, people living near the
bridge kept their RFD boxes inside the bridge. A very sensible device to keep mail
from onslaughts of the weather, it must have been a convenience also to the mail
carrier, who could take a breather under shelter of the bridge while he distributed
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the mail.
*****
We are frequently reminded that just around the corner is the middle of the
twentieth century. On this program devoted to common things it may be appropriate
to think a bit about some of the things we have that were unknown when this century
was born. In 1900 there were not only no radios, there weren’t even movies.
The airplane was unheard of; aviator was a word that belonged only in the Arabian
Nights. Doctors of that day not only went without penicillin; they didn’t even
have insulin. The ladies of 1900, in their big-sleeved shirt waists, visited no
beauty parlors and read no cosmetic ads. Then men never went to Rotary or Kiwanis
or Lions or Exchange, because luncheon clubs were unheard of. Only in the larger
cities did people have luncheon anyway. Folks ate a good hearty dinner at noon
and supper at night. When our century dawned, there were no boy scouts and no
state police, no chain stores and no self-service, no income tax and no surtax.
They didn’t have that nuisance one encounters when he registers his car today,
that nuisance which I once heard an indignant taxpayer call his exercise tax.
In 1900 bobbing meant sliding down hill, not cutting a woman’s hair. In the
vocabulary of that day, unknown were the words cafeteria and automat, hitch-hiker
and high-jacker, jazz and juke-box. In Maine fifty years ago the word “drive” had
no connection with soliciting money. It meant either a pleasant experience with a
horse or a tough experience getting logs down a stream.
To how many people living today does the expression safety bicycle have any
meaning? Even in 1900 it was a bit pass:, for I cannot remember ever hearing it
in my youth. And good reason why; for I have only the faintest recollection of
the older, supposedly unsafe bicycles, with the tremendous front wheel and the
tiny rear wheel, and the rider mounted precariously high in the air. I can recall
just once when I saw one of those vehicles being ridden by a human being, and in
the last decade of the nineteenth century, that rider was .even then a somewhat
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archaic curiosity. Memories have to go back farther than mine, into at least the
1880’s, to recall those high-wheeled bicycles in any plentiful numbers.
Anyhow just about the time I was born along came the present type of bicycle,
having both wheels of equal diameter. When one fell from it he had not so far to
fall. It was, indeed, a less precarious thing to ride. In short, it was a safety
bicycle.
*****
Mark Sullivan, popular historian of this century’s first quarter, claims that
it was the bicycle that started the revolution in women’s dress and women’s sports.
Previous to the coming of the modern bicycle women’s only sport had been croquet.
Women had, of course, ridden horseback, but only on sedate side-saddles and in a
costume, the “riding habit”, in which the amount of covering and cloth was even
greater than the long trains of ordinary dress.
SUddenly manufacturers began to make a safety bicycle adapted to women, by
installing nets to protect skirts from entanglement~with the whirling wire spokes.
Gradually and daringly a few women began to wear shorter skirts, w~ighing the hems
down with little strips of lead. When women took up tennis, modification of stays
and corsets was inevitable. Then the more daring females began to appear in
bloomers. It took years for the changes in dress to pass from specialized costumes
for sport to ordinary wear.
In 1900, for women as well as for men, Sunday best meant something in clothes.
But as long ago as 1925 it had no meaning for American women. In that quarter of
a century women in offices were as well dressed as women of leisure, Sunday or any
other day. The average working girl had so many changes of costume that, in June,
1925 the Detroit Free Press remarked: “Give women’s fashions time enough and they
will starve all the moths to death.” The old timers, who didn’t like the changes
a little bit, often let loose such sarcastic remarks as that of the old sailor who
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said: “I s ‘pose the girls wear their dresses at half-mast as a mark of respect
for departed modesty”.
When bobbing of women’s hair became a common fad, some indignant barbers,
with more prejudice than business sense, put out signs reading: “Barber Shop
for Men Only”.
What changes half a century has wrought on the farm as well as in the town.
In 1900, though the mowing machine had come in, plenty of fa:rmers still cut huge
fields with the scythe. Oxen were still sharing the power task with horses. Every·
·fa:rm housewife had her own coffee-grinder, sausage grinder, and apple-parer, her
up-and-down churn, and her vat for making soap. When the fa:rmer and his wife
went to town in winter, they rode in an open one-horse sleigh, Shielded from cold
by a thick buffalo robe. If their sleigh was one of the latest style, it was
called a cutter. Those journeys to town carried a memorable glamor unknown to
a generation brought up with the automobile.
*****
Last week we referred to some curious facts about the common thing we call
time. I suppose it was the railroad that first made time important to Americans.
Time in the pre-railroad days might well be described in the well-known language
of Octavus Roy Cohen’s fictional character Florian Slappey, “it’s what I ain’t
gotnothin’ else but”.
After the railroads had been perfected so that a train could actually go
faster than a horse something which it definitely could not do at first —
to be on time meant to be on time for the train.
If any great man was ever obl’ivious to the passage of time it was the nature
lover and he:rmit author, Henry David Thoreau. In Walden he wrote: “The
trains come and go with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be
heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, .and thus one well regulated
institution, the railroad, regulates the whole country. ”
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The most punctual people on earth are said to be railroad men. As long ago
as 1833 modern time belts were established as a result of the railroads, but the
Federal Government ignored them for 35 years. Not until 1868, after the rail lines
had spanned the continent, did we get official, government recognition of Eastern,
Central, Mountain and Pacific time, with Maine even to this day feeling some
effects of a fifth zone, Atlantic time, in the eastern end of Canada. For 35 years
the government listened to the pleas of local people for their own local times,
to the ranting of ministers against tinkering with God’s time. But finally the
speeding iron horse won out, and people soon got used to our four national time
zones.
*****
As I said when I talked about the narrow guage railroads, I am not a railroad
man. I just happened to be brought up in a narrow guage town. But there are a lot
of interesting facts about such a common thing as railroads, that even greenhorn
passengers like me are pleased to know. So next Sunday I shall speak again of
railroads, not the old two-footers this time, but railroads of any size and any
guage — just plain railroads.
*****
Laura Knight of Fairfield, apropos of my talk on the old-time peddlers,
wants to know if I remember the old pack peddlers. Yes, I do recall a few of
them — all foreigners, Italian or Armenian — carrying assortments. of dress
goods and dressmaking wares. The older generation of native pack peddlers were
long before my day. Mrs. Knight remembers a peddler who kept his goods tied up
in a huge piece of blue and white bed ticking. He would spread it all out on the
grass in front of the house, if it was a fair day, or on the kitchen floor if it
rained. Too often the prospective customer had no money, and in great indignation
the peddler would tie up his bundle and depart.
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Occasionally two peddlers would meet in the same community. Each was sure
the other was encroaching on his territory. They seldom came to blows, but they
used a very complete vocabulary in berating each other.
I am sure we are all grateful to Mrs. Knight for this interesting information
about the old pack peddlers. Most women use every known device to conceal
their age, but Mrs. Knight is proud of hers. She tells me She is 78 years old, and
I can assure her that in spite of failing eyesight she still writes a fine letter,
and her memory of the old days and the old-time things is undimmed.
1-166
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
26th Broadcast May 8, 1949
The past week has turned up an old-time expression that may be new to many
of our listeners. It contains the use of the word pie as a verb. We are reminded
of it by Mrs. Grace PUrington, a native of Fairfield, who recently resumed residence
in central Maine after many years in another state. She says that in her
girlhood the family often visited the home of a rural relative, where according
to the custom of the time pie was served three times a day — breakfast, dinner
and supper.
After each person at the table had eaten his fill of the main course, the
man of the house would lean back in his chair and say, “Now pie ’em, Sarah”. In
other words, give ’em pie. That is the only connection in which I have ever
heard pie used as a verb.
When we referred to the peddlers who sold soft soap, we had no idea anyone
now living remembered such a peddler. At least half a dozen people, including
Mrs. PUrington, tell us that they remember a regular peddler of soft soap in Waterville
and Fairfield. He carried his commodity in a big barrel on a cart, and
dipped it out with a ladle, which he claimed held exactly a quart.
*****
Even in America of 1949, when travel by automobile and airplane have become
usual, the railroad is still a common thing , and I have not forgotten that I promisedto
say something tonight about railroads — not the old narrowguage lines
a1one, but the general subject of railroads.
The mere statistics of American railroads are staggering. In spite of abandonment
of many branch lines, there are still 400,000 miles of railroad track in
the United States. Every day 17,000 passenger trains and 24,000 freight trains
1-167
pass over American rails. The roads are valued at 28 billion dollars, and the
wages of their employees total nearly four billion dollars a year. Some of you
may be surprised to learn that, of our million railroad workers, 115,000 are
women. By the way, only once did I ever encounter a woman railroad conductor.
She was a comely, efficient miss, punching tickets on a Pennsylvania train in
1943. Our railroads operate a huge publishing business, for they turn out 80
million copies of time tables every year.
Oddly enough the first chartered railroad in the united States was not a
steam road. The Baltimore and Ohio was the first to get a charter in 1827, but
at the beginning it operated with horse-drawn cars. So Charleston, South Carolina,
rather than Baltimore, has the honor of seeing the first steam road. Horatio
Allen, relative of the foster-father of the famous Edgar Allen Poe, had a locomotive
built in New York, transported it by water to Charleston where, in December,
1830 it drew the first steam train in the United States the six miles from Charleston
to Hamburg.
Then the B & 0 staged a contest for the best steam locomotive. It was won by
Phineas Davis, a native of New Hampshire, then living in Pennsylvania. He called
his engine “The York”, and it became the first of a long and celebrated line of
B & 0 engines.
In the 1830’s there waged excited legal controversy as to what a railroad is.
Is it a public way like a highway, or is it a private way? Many lawyers claimed
that the analogy of the turnpikes, and more especially of the canals, held for
those new routes, the railroads. Just as anyone has the right to run a boat
through a canal if he pays the toll charges, so anyone had a right to run a train
on a railroad track. It was Jonathan Knight, chief engineer of the B & 0, who
finally convinced the courts that the fixity and rigidity of the railroad tracks,
making impossible the casual turning aside when one met another train, disputed
completely the analogy of highways and canals; and, since 1840, there has never
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been any question that While a railroad is a public carrier, just as were the
old stage coaches and the wagon freighters, it operated on a private way.
Do you know why the cow-catcher was invented? The first locomotives did
not have them, but from the beginning the crews were troubled by stray cattle
on the tracks. It doesn’t take a very brilliant mind to figure out that the cowcatcher
wasn’t put on to protect the cows. It was invented to protect .the train.
In the early days every time a train hit a cow, the train went off the tracks. So
a device was conceived which would lift the animal and deflect it off the track
rather than pitch it under the wheels. It wasn’t always success.ful, as I can
witness. I was once a passenger on the little Bridgton and Saco River line one
evening when, in the stretch of woods near Perley’s Mills, the train hit a moose.
Result: one very dead moose, but locomotive and one car off the rails. Perhaps
the cow-catcher didn’t do its job that night because the animal was a bull moose.
It was increasing freight business that caused the introduction of night
trains, even on the short lines. Some of the roads scheduled all passenger trains
by day, all freight trains by night. This introduced the problem of light. Remember
that any kind of lighting was a real problem in the 1830’s. It was before the
·discovery of petroleum and its use for oil lamps. Candles lighted the homes of
the well-to-do; tallow wicks gave feeble light in the hovels of the poor. When
the B & 0 first ran its trains, the invention of the headlight was many years in
the future. The most common early device to provide light ahead of the train was
the fire-car. Ahead of the engine was attached a flat car, covered with sand, on
Which blazed a fi.re of pine knots. No wonder those early trains caused many fires
through the countryside.
A familiar expression of Civil War days shows how the times have changed.
That expression was “to lie like. a time-t«;lble”. The old trains were seldom on
time; a wait of several hours was not unusual. The fact that probably no one now
living ever heard the expression “lie like: a time-t«;lble” actually .spoken is ample
1-169
testimony to the efficiency and regularity of the modern railroad.
Most of you know that for many years there was no standard guage for our
railroads. Often, when goods had to be transported by more than one line, they
would have to be taken out of the cars of one road and packed into the cars of
another road. I am familiar with that procedure, for it is exactly what had to
be done with every pound of freight that came into Bridgton in my boyhood. Out
of the Maine Central cars at Bridgton Junction and into the tiny B & SR cars
went every box and barrel. every bag of wool for the mills, every shovelful of
coal. It was a tedious and costly procedure.
In the early days the B & O’s guage was 4 feet 8 inChes; the Mohawk & Hudson’s
was 4 feet 9 inches; the Camden and Amboy had 4 feet 10 inches; and the
Charleston and Hamburg 5 feet; while the New York and Erie had the extraordinary
width of 6 feet. standard guage was adopted in 1886, and all regular American
roads are now 4 feet 8t inches between the tracks.
Why was the distance of 4 feet 8! inches adopted as standard? The answer
gives us a clue to another common thing — the strong hold which tr~dition has
upon us. The old Roman measure that gave the standard axle distance between the
two wheels of a Roman chariot, when converted into English measure, came out as
four feet, eight and one-half inches.
until the coming of the Romans into Britain with Caesar’s legions, the British
Isles had no roads. As everyone knows the roads which the Romans built were
so strong and so permanent that many of their remains can be traced to this day.
The wheels that first traveled those roads were the wheels of Roman chariots, and
the ruts made by those wheels, generation after generation, for four hundred
years, were either chariot wheel ruts, or ruts of wheels of the same axle width
as the chariot wheels.
Therefore, when railroads first came to Britain, it was natural to make them
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the width of tracks with which every Englishman was familiar, the tracks on the
old Roman roads and their later counterparts.
In the days of early Ame~ican railroads, before the building of the great
Baldwin works, the best locomotives were imported from England, and those locomotives
were all of 4 foot 8, inch guage. Many American roads were therefore
built with the original idea of using British locomotives. Finally in 1886 the
American people got fed up with the nuisance of different guages, and 4 feet 8l
inches became, standard guage for all broad-guage roads.
*****
I hope none of you have been foolish enough to count shave strokes, just
because of what I said last week. But, believe it or not, the average man takes
approximately two hundred razor strokes each time he shaves. The range is from
about 150 to 250. If a man takes as few as one hundred regularly, day after day,
he is unusual.
*****
Many of our listeners know that I have long taken a special interest in the
life of Abraham Lincoln, especially in all that can be learned about him during
those obscure years of his youth before he achieved fame. So on this Mothers’ Day
I think it is significant to point out that Abraham Lincoln was one of very few men
who had two mothers, both of whom loved him dearly, and both of whom deeply influenced
his life. Nancy Hanks, his own mother, and Sarah Bush, his step-mother,
may both have been in his mind when he said, “All that I am and all that I hope to
be, I owe to my angel mother.”
*****
Now for one last reminiscence tonight. Do you remmeber the old fire-horses?
Can any modern kid possibly get the thrill out of the big gasoline pumpers of
today that we used to get out of the old, big-stacked steamers drawn by horses
madly dashing to answer an alarm? In the cities the fire engines were often drawn
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by three horses abreast. I remember three coal-black beauties that used to haul
one of Portland’s old engines. They were a magnificant sight on parade, and a
thrilling sight when they galloped wildly to a fire.
Last fall some Colby students got out one of Waterville’s old engines, got
up steam in it, and paraded it before the stands at the Colby-Bowdoin football
game. For some time,I believe'” that old engine reposed in the open shed opposite
the city home, on the site where the new Thayer Hospital will stand.
Gone with a lot of other memories are the firemen’s big horses. But we can
all be grateful that the fire-fighter is more efficient and our property better
protected in our mechanized day.
1-172
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
27th Broadcast May 15, 1949
‘By this time every listener to this program knows that I favor federal aid
to education. It is the only way we can secure reasonable equality of opportunity
to all the children of our nation. It does not follow, however, that every
proposed method to secure this desired end is equally good. Few right-minded
citizens can favor any method that sets up a political grab-bag, whereby the
states that have never done their financial best for their own schools keep on
doing less and less, depending upon the Santa Claus in Washington to do more and
more. By the phrase “economical best” I mean expenditures for education in relation
to state income; that is, in relation to ability to pay.
There is also another difficulty about federal aid proposals. The formulas
devised to determine how aid shall be apportioned among the states are often illadvised
and unsound. Probably few persons realize that the federal aid bill now
receiving most attention in the Congress will be of net financial benefit to
very few states. Too seldom, in looking for help from Uncle Sam’s treasury, do we
stop to ask where the good uncle himself gets the money. The present Senate Bill
246 is based on the federal income tax payments in the various states.
Senator Lodge of Massachusetts rendered valuable service when, last week in
the Senate, he showed in plain dollars and cents what each state would receive
under the federal aid plan and what it would cost each state to support the plan.
In its first year of operation the plan would cost $208,083,·000. Where would the
federal government get this money? From tax sources in the states themselves.
Now we certainly do not regard Maine as one of the wealthier states, and
we are not at all proud of our low standing among the 48 states with respect to
our support of education. Yet, under this .particular federal aid plan, Maine
1-173
would receive $945,000, while it would cost the taxpayers of Maine $1,206,000.
In other words we would payout $261,000 more than we would get. Of course that
amount is mere chicken feed compared to what the plan would cost the truly
wealthy states. It would cost Illinois $’13,635,000; California $13,869,000;
and New York $29,574,000. Only seventeen states would receive more than they
paid out; 31 states would lose. The gainers would be Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas,
Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma,
South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, utah, Virginia and west Virginia.
By what possible stretch of the imagination can Texas be classed as a poor
state? How can Virginia be called a poor state and Vermont a rich state? How
can the oil state of Oklahoma be called poor and Maine called rich?
In short, Senator Lodge points out that the formula devised to determine
rich states from poor states, in respect to the need for federal aid to support
their schools, is all wrong. For Texas to receive $41,000 more than it pays
out, while Maine pays out $261,000 more than it receives, simply does not make
sense.
Many well meaning people, especially.professional educators, are so eager
to see a program of federal aid to education get under way that they will support
any bill without the caution of careful· examination. I too want to see a
program of federal aid, to equalize opportunity for all the children of all the
people, but one doesn’t get a structure of equality by trying to build it on
the sands of inequality. That is what Senate Bill 256 tries to do. In my opinion
it is not a good bill.
****.*
To Daniel Webster — not the great orator of long ago, who once beat the
Devil in a court of law, but the present town.manager of Fairfield — we owe
the first suggestion that has come to us concerning the origin of that pictur-
1-174
esque old Maine saying, “leaning toward Sawyer’s”. For those of you who never
heard that expression — and I suspect there may be many such — let me repeat
that it refers to some material object that is tipping or badly askew, and in
its most common use refers to a tumble-down barn or set of buildings.
Mr. Webster suggests that, just as in the case of “not worth a Hannah Cook”,
the saying did not originate in a proper name at all but in a common word. Perhaps
it first referred to a tree which, as it was being cut down, perversely and
obstinately kept leaning the wrong way; namely, toward the sawyer, the man or
one of the men who was sawing it. Because there were plenty of people named Sawyer,
the term became confused with the family name, and when the expression
once got into writing, it came to be spelled with a capital S. Whether or not
it is the correct explanation, Mr. Webster’s is at least both plausible and ingenious.
We’ll see what the Dialect Society has to say about it.
*****
There recently came to my attention a little pamphlet, yellowed with age
during the past 97 years. It is entitled “By-Laws of the Town of Waterville,
1852”. That was more than thirty years before Waterville became a city; indeed
it was back before the Civil War in the real horse and buggy days. In fact I
suspect there was more horse-back riding than buggy riding when this little book
was printed by Maxham and Wing at the office of the old Waterville Mail.
I believe, long before the recent State Legislature got interested in fireworks,
the old ordinance prohibiting their use within fifty rods of any street
or highway was still on the books, as it was in 1852, but it certainly was not
enforced. What is not so well known is the exception provided by the old by-law
of 1852. It reads: “The selectmen may, for military parades and musters, and
for such other occasions as they may deem proper, from time to time, for one
day at anyone time, grant a dispensation from the operation of this section
and may then grant permission to any discreet person to superintend the firing
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and discharge of cannon, guns, or fire crackers in a specified place.”
The penalties for offenses were not excessive in 1852. Listen to this one.
“If any person shall, within said village, wantonly or unnecessarily fire or explode
any squib, cracker, serpent, fulminating powder or preparation of gunpowder
in any store, shop, barn, street, or public place, he shall for each offense
forfeit a penalty of 25 cents.”
Here is a by-law that reveals marked change in our common ways of living:
“Whoever shall presume to carry any fire from any building or place to another
building or place, except in a safe and covered pan or other vessel, so as to
secure the fire from the wind and from being scattered by the way, shall forfeit
50 cents.”
A common means of conveying articles from one place to another is revealed
by this by-law: “No person shall pass with any wheel-barrow upon any sidewalk in
said village, except for the purpose of passing directly across the sidewalk
from the street to some adjoining land, on penalty of 25 cents for each offense.”
There were speed laws in Waterville a hundred years ago. “No person shall
drive or ride any horse in any street of said village on the run, or at an immoderate
pace, except in case of urgent necessity,. under penalty of one dollar.”
I suppose it was urgent necessity which permitted Hod Nelson to run his horse
down College Avenue and Main St:eet that day when he hurried downtown after a
new baseball to replace the one ball available when the Colby-Bowdoin game ~an
the ball lost in the grass and bushes north of Shannon Hall.
Curiously enough it is a by-law concerning smoking which contains the one
reference in this volume to a necessary convenience of the old days which preceded
the modern bathroom. “No person shall smoke or carry a lighted pipe or
cigar”” — note there is no mention of cigarettes; they had not yet been invented
“No person shall smoke or carry a lighted pipe or cigar wi thin or upon any
street, sidewalk, stable yard or outhouse within the village, on a penalty of
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50 cents.”
*****
On three old-time things our listeners have responded splendidly. They have
helped us get a complete and accurate list of Maine’s narrow guage railroads~
they have rounded up the old cattle pounds~ they have given us a respectable
list of covered bridges that still stand in Maine. Now let us try again. OUr
new subject is the old-time canals. Other states had bigger and more numerous
canals. Maine had nothing to match the big Erie, properly called the Barge
Canal. But we certainly had a few that were important channels of commerce before
the days of the railroads.
Now on this subject I am more ignorant than I was of the narrqw guage railroads.
I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit it, but tonight I know of just
one canal ever used in Maine for relatively long-distance commerce. This excludes
the short connection canals inside some of our larger towns or cities, like Lewiston.
and Bangor. The canal I know was abandoned about the time I was born. It
was not my birth, however, that put it out of existence, but rather the building
of the B & SR railroad. It was the old Presumpscot Canal which skirted the unnavigable
parts of the Presumpscot River so that boats could pass between Sebago
Lake and the wharves at Portland.
When my father took over the old Dixie Stone general store in the upper village
at Bridgton in the middle 1880’s, every pound of freight that came into that
store was either brought over the road or, during the months from May to October,
by boat from Portland through the Presumpscot Canal into Sebago Lake, up the
length of that big lake, through the Songo, then called the Crooked River,
through the locks at Songo Locks, out into the widening Bay of Naples, through
the draw-bridge into Long Lake to Bridgton Landing, two miles from the center of
the village.
Next week I shall tell you the most interesting incident I ever learned
1-177
about that old canal. I think you will agree it is a choice bit of Maine history.
Now where else in Maine were there once commercial canals? Let us
see if the radio audience can come through with a gdod list.
*****
It is almost time for the run of alewives at Damariscotta Mills. This is
one of the memorable and unique sights in Maine. If there is any listener who
has never seen it, don’t let another year go by without taking it in. There for
more than countless centuries generation after generation of herring have laboriously
climbed the steep falls from the salt water to the little inland lake,
following nature’s mysterious but unavoidable urge to spawn in the fresh inland
waters. Along those falls more than a hundred years ago man began to assist the
tiring fish, so that more young fish would come down the way to the sea, to return
in greater numbers of big herring the following spring.
So from the middle of May to the end of June one of the grandest sights in
Maine is to see those struggling fish try again and again, with defeat after defeat,
to leap from one man-made pool to the next, up the long ladder of pools to
the little pond at the top. Some of them never make it; some of them take days
to get out of a single pool; but by one super-effort, one gigantic leap, most of
them finally make it.
It is a great lesson for us humans. Most of us are not persistent fighters.
We give up rather easily. But not so these fish. Fatigue, even to complete exhaustion,
cannot make them give up. Only death can make them stop. And the finest
part of the lesson is that most of them do win through to the goal.
1-178
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
28th Broadcast May 22, 1949
Let’s begin tonight with another reference to railroads. A whole volume
could be written
subject of rails
in fact, many pages have been written — on just the one
the steel lines on which the trains travel.
In the 1830’s when railroads first came to ~merica the rails were of rolled
iron and weighed only 33 pounds. But iron rails had been used for a century before
that. Those early rails were of cast iron, very short, three to six feet,
and made very bumpy tracks. The first Bessemer rail was rolled in the united
States in 1865. It was not the heaviest rail of its time, for it weighed only
50 pounds, whereas the Pennsylvania Railroad already had 67 pound rails. Not
until 1900 did we get a hundred pound rail. The newest rails — they call them
the 1950 rails
6 3/4 inches.
weigh 152 pounds, have a height of eight inches and a base of
The T-section rail is distinctly an American invention. Its inventor was
John Stevens of the old Camden and Amboy Railroad. In fact, Stevens was quite
an inventor. He perfected a multitubular boiler for marine engines, for which he
petitioned Congress to give him a patent in 1790. He succeeded and thus laid the
foundation for our present patent system. Stevens was also the first man to apply
screw propellers to ships, trying them out only a few days after Robert Fulton
made his famous run on the Hudson in the first steamboat. In fact, Stevens bettered
Fulton in that he made the engine himself, while Fulton’s boat had a British
engine. Stevens sent his boat from New York to Philadelphia, thus making the
first ocean voyage for any steamship.
It was while crossing the Atlantic to England — this time in an old sailing
vessel — that Stevens designed the T-rail. Securing some blocks of wood from
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the ship’s carpenter, Stevens set to work with his pocket knife and carved out
his conception of what a rail should be. His model bears remarkable resemblance
to a modern rail.
*****
We hear a lot of controvers~al talk about freedom of speech or the lack of
it in Russia. Of one thing we may be sure: it isn’t safe to criticize the government
in the Soviet Union. Even some of the funny stories going the rounds
make that point all too clear.
The story goes that a Russian wolfhound, exiled in London, was lunChing with
an English bulldog. “Can’t offer you much”, said the bulldog. “Since the food
shortage started, Master even keeps the bones. This is a terrible country. How’s
things in Russia?” “Wonderful”, said the wolfhound. “Big chunks of meat; juicy
bones.” “For heaven’s sakes, my friend”, asked the bulldog, “Why are you here?”
“Well”, replied the Russian dog, “a fellow likes to be able to bark once in a
while, doesn’t he?”
*****
Not long ago I warned you that some day I would “pull a boner”, make a mistake
of fact on this program. Well, it happened last week. My excuse is the same
as that of the dictionary maker, Samuel Johnson, who had defined “postern” as
the knee of a horse. When a good lady asked him how he came to make such a·
mistake, Johnson replied: “Ignorance, Madame, sheer ignorance.” That, too, is
my only excuse for saying the old Erie Canal is now called the Barge Canal. My
colleague on the Colby faculty, Miss Marion Hockridge, knows New York State well,
and she informs me that most of the old Erie Canal is now filled in, that the
present Barge Canal is a newer ditch which follows more closely the course of the
Mohawk River. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand corrected.
*****
I promised you a story about the ol.d Presumpscot Canal, and here it is. Ad-
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mittedly it deals with the canal rather indirectly, but except for the canal,
there would be no story.
When my father took over the old Dixie Store at Bridgton in the middle of
the 1880’s many of the old account books were preserved. Some of them went all
the way back to the year when the store was first opened, which incidentally
was the year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, 1809.
All through my school days I spent a great deal of time in that store,
but it was not until the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college
that I became interested in those old account books. One huge, leatherbacked
volume was a stock book, covering the years 1822 to 1847. In it appeared
the lists of merchandise received into the store from the outside. The more
common, and in volume the more important, items received in barter — the butter,
eggs, potatoes, salt pork and cord wood taken in exchange for other goods
were not included, only the items that came from wholesalers in Portland.
Idly perusing the pages of that old book, I encountered an interesting
and, at the time, an unexplainable, item. Regularly, once a month, from May to
October, the book showed receipt of one hogshead of Jamaica rum. Then, sometime
in November would appear the item, six hogsheads of Jamaica rum.
The explanation was the Presumpscot Canal. When the lakes and streams
were open, from May to October, the boats plied regularly from Portland to
Naples, Bridgton and Harrison by way of the old canal. When ice covered the
lakes, the only access to the inland towns was by tote team over snow-drifted
roads.
The old account book made it obvious that the six hogsheads of Jamaica
rum received each November was the winter’s supply_ During the late spring,
summer and early fall, one hogshead every month met the demand. Now for the
curious item that I encountered. In 1834 I found the routine suddenly broken.
The year 1833 had been just like the others before it — six hogsheads in
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November, and one hogshead each month from May to October. And the year 1835
was just the same. But in 1834 there came a break. When the first boats came up
the lake in May, sure enough one of them brought for the D:btie Store one hogshead
of Jamaica rum just as usual. But on June 4, 1834 the old stock book recorded
the receipt of four hogsheads of Jamaica rum. Then in July, August, September
and October appeared the usual one hogshead each month.
Now it took no exceptional detective to figure out that something unusual
must have happened in Bridgton in 1834. Although I was curious I did not pursue
any systematic search at that time. But about ten years afterward, in the
Colby College Library of all places, I quite accidentally ran across the answer.
In June, 1834 one of the most prominent religious denominations held their state
Convention in Bridgton. people from allover the state came for a convention
lasting several days in that little CUmberland County town. The three extra
hogsheads of Jamaica rum were obviously to quench the thirsts of the ministers
and laymen at that convention.
*****
In telling of this incident we are not trying to be humorous. If there is
humor in the story, let it shine by its own light. The incident does point
clearly, however, to changing times and changing customs. Prohibition did not
come to Maine until 1851, and then it was many years ahead of the rest of the
country. In 1834 nobody mentioned prohibition, and only a few people were
aroused to the menace of alcohol. Stimulants, as they were most frequently
called, were expected at every occasion of church or state. House-raisings,
barn-raisings, and even church-raisings were incomplete without plenty of rum.
When the minister called at a home, the mark of one’s proper training in etiquette
was to offer him a glass of rum, or at least of hard cider.
Were there no drunkards, no confirmed alcoholics in the old days? Of
course there were. The chief cause of poverty in the early mill towns of Maine
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and there was plenty of it — was not the low wages, but the demon rum.
Most thoughtful persons agree that one of man’s great unsolved problems
is the problem of alcohol. It still wrecks homes and blasts lives; it makes an
otherwise careful driver a threat of death and destruction behind an automobile’s
steering wheel. It makes nauseating spectacles out of ordinarily decent
men and women.
We have decided that prohibition is not the solution, but we have found
no substitute. We are making only a beginning in our attempts to educate young
people about alcohol. The now famous Yale Institute of Alcohol Studies is one
step in that direction; in Maine the school program of the Christian Civic
League is another good step. At the desperate end of the run, when the disease
of alcoholism has claimed its victim, Alcoholics Anonymous is doing excel1ent
work.
But meanwhile, newspapers, magazines and billboards blaze forth the most
alluring liquor advertisements. In the name of connnercial greed they call
upon us to drink more and more. Taverns and bar rooms multiply; the drunken
drivers increase; the national liquor bill continues to soar. Let us not fool
ourselves for a minute. Alcohol is still a major unsolved problem of American
life.
*****
In the early days of this program we once put in a good word for the farmers.
Recently we heard a pretty good story .about the modern farmer’S problem
with hired help. An investigator from the Department of Agriculture found a
man hoeing corn in a big field. “Do you own this farm?”,he demanded. “Yes.”
“How big is it?” “Two hundred acres”. “What do you raise on it?” “Mostly
corn –. and a few hogs.” “Do you have a hired man?” “Sure. Couldn’t run the
place alone.” II How much do you pay him?” “Six dollars a day and found.” “How
can you pay that much for help, raising nothing but corn and a few hogs, with
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only 200 acres on your whole farm?” “I can’t”, said the farmer. “Most of the
time lim way behind with his pay.” “what happens then?” “Then I just owe him
— I give him a mortgage on the farm. n “But he’ll own the farm someday if that
keeps up.” “Oh, that’s all right”, said the farmer. “He’ s already owned it
three times. During the years he owns it I work for him. Then pretty soon I
own it again.”
*****
I suppose it wouldn’t be cricket to ask if that story reminds you of some
of our recent government economy, especially as it is revealed in the report of
the Hoover Commission. Don’t read that report unless you are ready for a tragic
story of waste and inefficiency.
*****
A very common thing is the oft-expressed wish that we had been living in
some former exciting time. How wonderful it would have been to be a man of the
Renaissance, to have known Michaelangelo and Rafael, Savonarolla and the Borgias.
Oh, to have lived in Stratford with Shakespeare, to have fre~ented the
*ermaid Tavern with Ben Johnson and Marlowe, or a century and a half later to
have known Sam Johnson and his Boswell.
That idle dreaming does no harm unless it keeps us from properly performing
the present tasks. For the fact is we are living now. This is the only time on
earth we shall ever have. We had better make the best of it. There is something
very wrong with our attitude toward life if we cannot muster the strength and
wisdom to confront it. Certainly we have a right to speculate; assuredly we
should plan for the future. But an important lesson few of us learn is to live
fully and nobly one day at a time. Tomorrow never comes. When it gets here it
is today_
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
29th Broadcast May 29, 1949
Some ten days ago it was my privilege to be the guest speaker at the annual
dinner of the Maine Society of New York. There, I assure you, is a group of people
who really love Maine. Although some of them have lived as long as thirty
years in the vicinity of Greater New York, they have never lost contact with
Maine nor their genuine love for this, their native State.
The first· ·course at that dinner was delicious lobster stew. To make stew
for a hundred persons the Society had flown 150 pounds of fresh lobster down
from Maine. That was real lobster stew, not just the kind that a lobster is permitted
to breathe on, but literally filled with lobster meat. Now the average
New York chef can’t make decent lobster stew any better than he can make genuine
Maine clam chowder. Even though he may know a lobster, he won’t let the crustacean
have anything to do with a cow, for in his stew water and tomatoes take the
place of milk and butter.
Knowing well this tendency of New York hotel chefs, the wife of the club
president got up her courage, confronted the French chef at a mid-town Manhattan
hotel, and actually persuaded that haughty dignitary to use her own recipe for
lobster stew. Result: the kind of stew you expect at Penaquid, Camden or Matinicus,
but seldom see in New York.
Eleven of Maine’s sixteen counties were represented at that dinner. The town
with the biggest representation was Islesboro, from which island village came
three sisters whose husbands are now all business men of the New York area. Besides
Mrs. Marriner and me there was only one person from Kennebec, and anyhow
one is supposed to give the county of his Maine birth rather than that of later
residence, so I really belonged with the Cumberland delegation.
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How those folks love to get back to Maine. Every last one of them is planning
on at least two weeks in the old state this summer, and a few of them will
arrive in mid-June to stay until mid-September.
What do you suppose they wanted most to talk about? It was the unusually
mild winter we had this year in Maine, especially in contrast with the deep snow
that twice tied up Manhattan traffic. Said one loyal Maine man, “If this keeps
up, Maine will soon displace Florida as a winter resort.” Folks who still live
the year around in Maine are pretty good boosters of our state, but if you want
to see real Maine enthusiasts, look up those folks who comprise the Maine Society
of New York.
*****
An incident came to my attention in New York last week which shows that the
cliff dwellers in New York apartment houses miss other things besides woodsheds
and kitchen gardens. On a temporarily vacant lot in mid-town Fifth Avenue, surrounded
by swanky modern commercial buildings, and with the sky-reaching towers
of Radio City only a few blocks away, there now stands an exhibition single house
of the latest pre-fabricated variety. It is called the “Dream House” and is open
to the public at sixty cents a head. Passing that house on a Fifth Avenue bus,
we heard a six-year old boy say, “Oh, Mummy, there’s a house.” And when the bus
had passed well by the spot, the same voice said soberly, “Do you know, Mummy,
that’s the first time I ever saw a house in New York.”
*****
Newspaper comment has been so diverse and controversial about the Pope’s socalled
capitalism address, that we had better take note of what the leader of
the Roman Church really said. Some papers tell us he denounced capitalism, others
that he predicted its collapse; still others that he gave it a kind of left-handed
blessing. Now the confusion was undoubtedly caused by carelesSly attributing to
the Pope words actually written by Count Torre, editor of a newspaper having a
1-186
somewhat loose connection with the Vatican. For Count Torre had written for his
newspaper these words: “Capitalism is a social disease and pestilence. The
church has fought throughout the centuries against this human passion for wealth.”
Within a few days of Count Torre’s article, Pope pius gave an address in which he
said something quite different from the count’s words. For the Pope said, “Why not,
while there is still time, put things in order in a way to secure employer against
unjust suspicion and the worker against illusions which easily become social
perils?”
In short, the Pope believes, as do many carefully thinking leaders in business
and industry, as well as many professional economists, that the worst enemy
of capitalism is not the red radical tinged with the ideology of Moscow, but rather
the short-sighted and unreasonable business man who can think only of a way
back to disproportionate profits at the expense of exploited labor. The man who
will not permit any change to meet a new day is the fellow who by his own iron
inflexibility plays constantly into the hands of those who preach that, since
such fellows will never change their minds, violent revolution is the only way.
So the Pope’s words may well be heeded, for his words were addressed to business
men, to leaders of management, because our quotation comes from his speech to
the delegation of Roman Catholic employers assemoled from all Western Europe and
from Canada. It was these capitalists, these representatives of management, whom
the Pope urged to put the economic house in order if capitalism is to survive.
That the Pope believes the capitalist system ought to survive is shown by
further words in the same address. He said: “The proprietor of the means of production
must always remain the master of his economic decisions. The economy is
not by nature an institution of the statej it is, to the contrary, the living
product of the free initiative of individuals and of freely constituted groups.”
*****
Who among our listeners tonight ever heard of the Josias River? Did you
1-187
know there is a stream by that name in Maine? Well, few people ever did know
it until that little creek flooded the floor of theU. S. senate with a deluge
of angry words a few days ago.
One of the few economy-minded men in the Blst Congress is Illinois’ new
senator, Paul Douglas. Last week he proposed to cut about $300 million from
the $750 million civil functions bill, which calls for dams, harbors and flood
control in nearly every one of the 48 states. Senator Douglas used no weasel
words. He talked right out in meeting. This bill, he said, was just oozing with
fat. A dozen indignant senators defied him to name one single project in the
bill that wasn’t urgent. So Douglas opened a big atlas and turned to the map of
Maine. “This bill”, he said, “earmarks $33,000 to improve the Josias River in
Maine, and with a four-inch magnifying glass I can’t even find that river. I
called the Library of Congress for their big scale maps. Same result. I finally
called the National Geographic Society, but they couldn’t find the Josias River
either. So I gave up.”
On to his feet sprang Maine’s Senator Brewster, who declared that the Josias
River flows through the village of Ogunquit. He added that Senator Douglas
probably couldn’t find it because it was so over-shadowed by the $12 million of
appropriations for rivers and harbors in Illinois.
Senator Douglas said there was probably fat in those Illinois appropriations
too, and he would ~e glad to see 40 per cent of that fat pried out at
once. Senator Douglas was pretty much alone in his attempts to stop the spendthrift
flow of the taxpayer’s money. Only Senator Tobey of New Hampshire had a
kind word for the Illinois freshman. Tobey said, “There is one senator who puts
the welfare of the nation ahead of his own pet dams. We ought to sing the Doxology
to him.”
*****
How many of you remember the old one-ring travelling circus? Waterville was
1-188
so long on the route of the big shows — Ringling’s and Barnum and Bailey’s -that
one had to get into the smaller places to see the little circuses. Usually
they had only one elephant, occasionally a mangy camel, and even mangier performers.
But to us kids, in the country villages up-state, they were great shows.
What vast quantities of water we carried to those elephants and camels over our
boyhood yearsl How proudly we donned one of those faded coats of blue and red
and gold, usually several sizes too large, and carried a banner or a corner of
the beautiful lady’s train in the grand street parade that swept down Main
Street just before noon on circus day.
The pink lemonade would now taste insipid; the peanuts would seem unbearably
stale; the clowns would appear unbelievably crude and not at all funny; today’s
young generation would call those trapeze artists and bareback riders downright
lousy and judging by some of the vermin we recall seeing around those old
one-ring animal tents, perhaps they literally were.
But childhood knows not such disillusioning realities. It is fortunately
prone to see the. silver lining, not the cloud; it keeps its eye not on the hole
in the doughnut, but on the rich, spicy doughnut around the hole. So, as I said
before, to us kids the old one-ring circus was quite some show.
*****
We just can’t keep still about railroads. We’ve had our say about head
lights preceded by fire cars, about the origin of the cow-catcher, of modern
rails, and how we came to get the standard guage.
Now let us have a word about that very useful railroad device, the sandbox.
It was first used on the Pennsylvania road in 1836, as one of many frantic attempts
to overcome a plague of grasshoppers. Those millions of insects so greased the
tracks that something drastic had to be done. The sandbox was the answer. A few
days ago a local civil engineer said to me: “There are probably few engineers
living today who could layout an original railroad line. Many of them could
1-189
re-route an existing line, but to lay a new one through woods and swamps,
hills and valleys, and across streams would stump them.” What a comment on
our changing ways of transportation. Those old engineers that surveyed the
lines for the transcontinental railroads would be equally lost trying to lay
out a modern airport. Next year, by the way, will be the fiftieth anniversary
of the last ride of the famous Casey Jones. It was on April 30, 1900 that he
rode that old Illinois Central locomotive 382 to his death. How many of you
remember Casey’s real name? It was John Luther Jones.
On this radio station, situated near the very heart of the Maine Central
system, it may not be good taste to sing too loudly the praises of the Bangor
and Aroostook, but after all that fine, profitable road is in Maine too.
In his “Story of American Railroads” Stewart Holbrook points out that in
1946 all but two of the B & A’s officials were New England Yankees, most of
them State of Maine men by birth. On the board of directors were four Bangor
men who had lived all their lives in that city; others still lived in their
native towns of Presque Isle, Fort Fairfield, Limestone and Caribou. “Thus”,
said Mr. Holbrook, “the Bangor and Aroostook, unlike many other New England
roads, does not have to contend with the sinister forces so often charged to
absentee ownership and control. The B & A probably has less bickering and
trouble with its public than any road of comparative size in the country.”
1-190
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
30th Broadcast June 5, 1949
This program has been going for six months without previous mention of one
of the most common and most picturesque of the old time things. It is certainly
right and proper that we devote a few minutes to the blacksmith shop. So far as
I am concerned, the word smithy belongs solely in poetry. No Maine Yankee
would ever refer to the place as a smithy, though most Maine blacksmiths had
just as large and sinewy arms as did Longfellow’s character who pounded his anvil
under the spreading chestnut tree.
In my boyhood village I think the location of the blacksmith shops was unusual.
Of the five shops in that village, three stood almost side by side, on
one short street called Depot Street, which ran from the post office to the narrow
guage railroad station.
When those forges were all going at once, when the sparks were flying from
all three anvils, it was a sight to be remembered. There were not only the sight
of flying sparks and the sound of hammer on ringing iron; there were also the
unforgettable smells: the choking stench of soft coal smoke, as the bellows fanned
the mass into flames about the big tongs holding the horse shoe; the acrid
odor of iron-tinged steam when the hot shoe was cooled in the big tub of water;
the nauseating whiff of singeing hoof when shoe was applied to uplifted foot
of old Dobbin. One spectacular bit of rigging the blacksmith shops of my village
lacked. They had no ox-sling. But I have seen those clever contrivances.
The last one I saw was at West Kennebunk more than a quarter of a century ago.
Does anyone know where today an ox-sling still stands, capable of use?
Where were Waterville’s old blacksmith shops located? I don’t seem to recall
them in my college days at the end of the first decade of this century.
1-191
probably the reason is that the college boys of my time didn’t sport their
own horses the way today’s college boys sport their own automobiles. We had
no occasion to visit a blacksmith shop in the college town.
But when I returned to Waterville in 1923 at least one of the old blacksmith
shops was still in use. It stood back of Sel Whitcomb’s house on Western
Avenue, opposite the Western Avenue School. That was my son’s first
school, and he still thinks his kindergarten teacher, now Mrs. Francis Bartlett,
and the principal, Mrs. Laura Hall, were the finest teachers he ever
had. More than once he was late getting home from school because of the fascination
of that old blacksmith shop. Where were other Waterville blacksmith
shops located? Who can tell us?
*****
Among the old-time things now seldom seen is the hard yarn ball. I don’t
mean the gaudy colored hunks of soft yarn for babies, but what boys in the
country half a century ago used for baseballs. Few of us ever owned a genuine
league baseball in those days. In fact, we never called those insecurable
treasures “big league balls”. We always named them by their price, and spoke of
them with awe as “dollar and a quarter balls”.
Of course a fifty cent baseball would last through an average kids’ game,
but it was almost as easy to get a dollar and a quarter as it was to get fifty
cents. And if any lad was lucky enough to receive a fifty cent ball as a present,
he didn’t relish seeing it banged to pieces in nine innings. As for the
5, 10 and 25 cent balls, they were looked upon with contempt by any accomplished
player ten years old. They would do to play pass with in the back yard, especially
if Dad would catch a few of your newly acquired curves after supper, but
the first time a bat connected with one of those cheap balls, it changed from a
sphere into a wobbly ovoid.
So we had recourse to the yarn ball. It had its faults. If carelessly made,
1-192
its yarn would begin to unwind, and a fast throw from shortstop to home plate
would leave a comet’s tail of long unwinding yarn behind the ball. But an expert
maker of yarn balls could perfect one that would hold together for a long
time.
My grandmother was such an expert. In order to give bounce and action to
her product, she would begin with a small India rubber ball, about the size of
a bottle top. Those India rubber balls were common five cent articles in the
variety stores at the turn of the century. Around that hard rubber grandmother
would slowly and tightly wind good wo~len yarn. But her best trick was the
sewing. Most home-made yarn balls were sewn only when the winding was finished.
Threads were drawn back and forth to keep the yarn from unravelling. But grandmother
would sew her ball at various stages in the winding process. When she
had finished, there was a ball to be prized. Unless some batter walloped it an
unexpected clout, so that it was lost among the willows down by the brook, that
ball would last all summer. Perhaps in some of the rural parts of Maine yarn
balls are still used, but I, at least, haven’t seen one for a long time.
*****
I spent Memorial Day at my favorite spot on the Maine coast, the beautiful
little village of New Harbor. For me there is no coast spot in Maine quite so
homey and picturesque as New Harbor’s back cove, with its tiny lobsterman’s
houses, its drying nets, its piled lobster traps, and its scores of little
boats anchored in the sheltered cove.
We had dinner, of course, at Gilbert’s Lobster Pound, a mile away at Pemaquid
Point. There we had the satisfaction of serving a Colby student his
first lobster boiled fresh from the water and his very first steamed clams.
He ate them as if he had been used to them all his life — a brave feat, for
it takes a real man to swallow his first clam.
Clam eating in America, so we are told, originated at Duxbury, Massachu-
1-193
setts. Legend says that a daughter of John Alden, Ruth Alden Bass, a Duxbury
housewife, noticed one day that pigs were busy along the shore rooting up clams
and eating them. Observing that, instead of hurting the pigs, the clams seemed
to make them happy, she got up her courage and tried them herself. Finding them
quite tasty, she served them to the family. Thus ultimately came steamed clams,
clam chowder, and fritters, though clams on the half shell probably led the way.
By the way, about the best clam chowder one can find in restaurant service
these days is regularly served on the Boston and Maine dining cars between Portland
and Boston. If you would like the recipe for that clam chowder, you will
find it in the June issue of Yankee magazine.
Speaking of that magazine, we want to take this occasion to thank Miss Mary
Woodman for her article in the June Yankee quoting us at length on the subject
of Maine dialect speech. She has written a better article about our stuff than
we could have done ourselves. We are especially grateful to Miss Woodman for
giving further currency to our unique discovery, “the fog has stems”, and to
our pet dialect word “smudgeon”.
*****
We can’t leave Yankee magazine without reference to the unique feature of
every issue, the Yankee Swappers’ column. Swappers’ advertisements are printed
free of charge, provided they are genuine swaps. No offers for cash are accepted.
Here are a few samples:
“Do you have any pottery-making equipment I could use for a practically
new ladies’ tennis racquet, press and water-proof cover?”
“Has an ex-GI any ornaments such as earrings or nose plugs from the South
Pacific? Will swap auto radio, table radio or other things.”
“Have brand new, light tan, western saddle and would like to swap for
portable green house.”
“Will swap a Stewart guitar in good condition for an accordian.”
1-194
“Will swap wood range with attached oil burner for lawn mower, garden hose
and reel.”
Did you ever attend a swappers’ party? They are not very common in Maine,
but are held frequently in rural New Hampshire and western Massachusetts. Such
parties were held last month in Alton and Andover, New Hampshire; in Franklin,
Massachusetts; and in Oak Lawn, Rhode Island. If you will send a stamped, selfaddressed
envelope to Yankee magazine, Dublin, New Hampshire, they will send you
a “Swapper Party Leaflet”.
*****
It is hard to let one of these programs go by without mention of railroads.
Mindful that two of my neighbors are retired railway mail clerks, let’s have a
few words tonight about the railroad mail.
The Railway Mail Service was founded by George Armstrong, assistant postmaster
at Chicago in 1864. He was not, however, the originator of the plan to
sort mail on a moving train. W. A. Davis of the St. Joseph, Missouri post office,
thought of that idea, and was given permission to try it out in 1862. It was Armstrong,
however, who worked out the plan for general adoption. Abraham Lincoln’s
friend, Montgomery Blair, was Postmaster General. He was a man of vision, eager
to try new devices to speed up mail service in the fast growing country. The nation
was at war; the mail load was increasing rapidly, and demands for speedier
delivery were urgent.
Using drawings supplied by Armstrong, the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad
converted half a dozen old cars into the first railway mail cars. The trial on
the C & NW was so successful that Armstrong was made special agent of the Post
Office Department for Railway Mail Service, and told to put his plan into general
operation on all railroads that would accept it •. His second mail-sorting run was
between New York and Washington. The mid-western roads were quick to follow, but
in the East, Armstrong met rugged opposition. The postmasters at Boston and Phil-
1-195
adelphia thought that sorting mail on the trains would somehow reduce the importance
of their terminal offices. But by 1868 New England and other parts of
the cautious East were glad to have the new service •
.:.
until 1869 when Armstrong became the first general superintendent of the
Railway Mail Service, there had been no uniform system. Each division, and
often each mail clerk, had its own method of sorting and distributing mail.
Armstrong divided the country into six divisions, put a man in charge of each,
and worked out an orderly system.
Long before President Cleveland organized the Civil Service, with its employment
and promotion on merit, Armstrong and his successor, George Bangs,
launched the merit system on the railway mail. Believing that no change in the
national administration should affect these trained and specialized employees,
they made promotions from the ranks, and could not be bullied into employing political
job seekers.
When we receive our daily mail, we may well remember that one reason why
we get it so promptly and so regularly is not merely because of the loyalty and
efficiency of our own letter carrier and the men back in the local post office,
but also because of the expert handling by the men who ride the trains. Even
airmail has not displaced these men. The magic of the moving train still lures
plenty of young men to fill the places of those Who, like Charles Crosby and
Hersey Keene, have gone into well deserved retirement.
*****
Every good. Irishman knows why there are no snakes in Ireland. Of course
St. Patrick drove them out some 1,500 years ago. The Irish danders are sure to
rise at the recent scientific explanation advanced by a Yale biologist, Professor
Edward S. Deevey. Not only is Deevey himself of Irish descent, but Time
magazine says he is even red-headed. Here is Deevey’s explanation of why there
are no snakes in Ireland.
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Once both Great Britain and Ireland were parts of the European mainland.
When what geologists call the fourth glacial period buried northern Europe as
well as North America under billions of tons of ice, animal life either perished
or escaped southward before the advancing ice sheet.
When that glacial period drew to an end and the ice gradually melted, the
sea rose, leaving Great Britain and Ireland as islands now cut off from the
mainland of Europe. Before the rising sea had entirely severed the land bridge,
fast moving little animals — mice, rats, squirrels and the like — came galloping
across from Europe to Ireland. But the snakes were slow movers. Before the
rising water had cut the land connections, these crawling reptiles had come only
as far as England; they never got the rest of the way to Ireland. And all good
Irishmen will doubtless argue that is as far as the snakes deserved to get.
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.. :
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
31st Broadcast June 12, 1949
W. R. Collins of Belgrade, the man who gave us information about the monument
to a wolf in the town of Moscow, now sends in a miniature reproduction
of the first issue of the Kennebec Journal. Originally a weekly, that paper
was first published on Saturday, January 8, 1825 with the promise that it would
appear each Saturday morning thereafter. The publishers were Russell Eaton and
Luther Severance, who in their first leading editorial issued a plea for that
freedom of the press for which their Albion neighbor, Elijah Lovejoy, then a
junior at Waterville College, was to suffer a martyr’s death twelve years later.
The editorial said: “A well conducted publication, which has obtained the reputation
for a zealous regard for truth, must undoubtedly possess a considerable
influence on society; while a publication of opposite character, of which
it is confessed there are a great number, gives some excuse for those who would
curtail the liberty of the press. There is no necessity, however, for government
interference. The evil will cure itself. Error ceases to be dangerous when
reason is free to combat it. An honest and discerning community are better arbiters,
better guardians of public morals, than are the satellites of a throne
or even those elected officials whom the people delight to honor.”
In 1825 Maine was not an industrial state, even to the degree it was fifty
years ago. The original K J knew on which side its bread was buttered. It said
editorially: “If one part of the community deserves more attention than another,
it is the interest of the farmers. Theirs was the primeval employment of civilized
man. All the rest of society depends upon the farmers for the necessities
of life. In war they are the bone and muscle of the country. In peace
they fill the horn of plenty with the abundance of their stores.”
Well, as we said several weeks ago, it is not out of place sfill to give
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an occasional word of praise to the farmers, though we would hardly do it in
the flowery rhetoric of 1825.
That first K J was shy on local news. There is not a single item, except
the ads, that stems directly from Kennebec County. There is a column on Congress,
including the item that the bill had been passed authorizing the President
to construct a military post road from Little Rock to Camp Gibson in the
Terri tory of Arkansas.
Another item in that Congressional column is of present-day interest. It
says: “A bill for the abolition of imprisonment for debt is again before the
Senate. ” This reminds us of the recent furor caused by the imprisonment of two
men in Rutland, Vermont, and the spectacular release of one of them when an unexpected
benefactor supplied the $2,500 which he owed. If one would judge by
the newspaper accounts, it would appear that these two men were victims of outmoded
and cruel laws, put in jail because they owed somebody some money. We are
glad to take time on this program to call attention to the facts. One of those
prisoners had killed a man in an automobile accident, according to the account
in Life magazine, and the other had injured a person in another accident. The
. court held them responsible for claims of about $2,500 each. They said they
could not pay it, and were therefore remanded to jail. We heartily subscribe
to Life’s closing comment on the cases. Here it is: “The nation’s press raised
such a howl that one well-wisher put up the money for Fugatt’s release. No one,
however, raised a howl about the families of the men they had struck. Neither
did anyone appear to wonder why two young men could not have arranged to pay
the debts that juries had decided they rightfully owed.”
Now let us turn to a few of the interesting ads in that first issue of K J
in 1825. “Smith L. Gale would respectfully inform his customers that he has removed
from his former place of business and has taken a stand in the lower
street in Augusta, opposite to Mr. Craig’s hatter’s shop, where he carries on
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the business of blacksmith and keeps constantly on hand a variety of the best
ploughs and cast and blistered steel axes. He flatters himself that few smiths
can surpass him in shoeing horses.”
Craig, the hatter, had no ad in this issue, but his competitors, Thwing
and parker, announced that they had “recommenced their business near the Kennebec
Bridge where they intend to keep for sale an excellent assortment of first
quality waterproof hats”.
W. Dewey announced a fine stock of school books, including Morse’s Geography,
Pike’s Arithmetic and Webster’s Spelling Books. He also sold “French
and American paper hangings and borders”. B. Davis and Company had for sale
“European, India and Domestic Dry Goods”, along with crockery and hardware.
They offered it for cash, country produce, or upon liberal credit. They were
ready also to pay cash for 500 red and gray fox skins.
Chandler and Nason, who specialized in West India goods, wanted to buy
six hundred thousand first quality shingles and 4,000 bushels of oats. E. Caldwell
wanted 200 cords of hemlock bark and fifty white ash barrel staves. Of
course Augusta had at least one hotel in those days. T. Hamlin informed his
friends and the public that “the Kennebec Tavern is now well repaired and handsomely
furnished”. Grateful for past favors, he respectfully solicited their
continuance.
Augusta then had not only a tavern but also a library. A public notice
read: “A meeting of the proprietors of the Common Library in the town of Augusta
for the purpose of organizing themselves into a society, or body politic,
by the name of the proprietors of the Social Library, will be held in the Reading
Room on Friday, the fourteenth of January, 1825 at six 0 I clock P.M. A
punctual attendance is requested. II
We are indeed grateful to Mr. Collins for this very interesting old newspaper
of Central Maine.
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*****
George Seeley of Prospect Street, waterville, has gone to some trouble
and expense to supply us with detailed information about that longest covered
bridge in the world at Hartland, New Brunswick. Mr. Seeley was born and raised
within a few miles of that bridge. On Memorial Day this year he visited his old
home and secured special photographs. These show what no commercial print reveals
— the original sign nailed above the more widely known sign shown on the
picture post cards. The latter reads: “Welcome to Hartland. You are now entering
·.:th:e longest covered bridge in the world, 1,282 feet”. The older sign above it
reads: “Twenty dollars fine for driving faster than a walk over this bridge.”
The nearest rival to the Hartland bridge is a covered bridge in Scandanavian
Norway, about 1,100 feet long, and the third is said to be the bridge at Cap
Chat, Quebec, exactly a thousand feet.
Although most communities spend money for snow removal, Hartland pays a
man about $150 every winter to throw snow onto the bridge, so that sleds and
sleighs can easily cross it.
The story of the building of the Hartland Bridge is worthy of Yankee thrift.
In fact, those Canadians of the lower St. John valley have the same reputation
for careful use of money that the old-time Yankees have.
Most covered bridges are hoary with age. The Hartland Bridge is unusual for
its youth, since it was built only 29 years ago, directly after the first World
War. In 1920 the old open wooden bridge collapsed from rotten timbers. Although
steel was the logical material for a replacement, the war had made its price
prohibitive. So those thrifty New Brunswickers, who, even to this day, through
boom times and depressions, have never defaulted on their obligations, decided
to cut the garment to the cloth. The cloth was wood of which New Brunswick had
plenty. So the garment — the bridge — had to be of wood, but this time it had
a cover to protect it from the elements.
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*****
Many people have responded to the appeal for information about Waterville
blacksmith shops. Mr. Burleigh, the well known cattle raiser on the Augusta road,
whose personal recollection of Waterville goes back three quarters of a century,
recalls distinctly the location of several shops~ as does also Chester Hussey.
But the best and most complete information comes from one of my nearest neighbors.
When I mentioned blacksmith shops last week I little realized that right
around the corner from me lived one of waterville’s old-time blacksmiths. He is
John Davidson, whose Shop was on Front Street, near what is now the Rollins and
Dunham store. I believe he and Andrew Cote are the only survivors of Waterville’s
many blacksmiths.
Mr. Davidson tells me that Mr. Byrnes, another of Waterville’s blacksmiths
of years ago, died in another community and was brought here for burial only
last week. The Byrnes shop was near the corner of Toward Street. Another shop,
one of the oldest in Waterville, was on Silver Street near the famous livery
stable. There was another on Charles Street, which Chester Hussey thinks was
once operated by one of the Byrnes family. (And, by the way, that name is spelled
B Y R N E S.) Another shop, long in existence, was on Common street, where
the Masonic block now stands. Mr. Hussey recalls a shop on Chaplin Street, or
at least near it, operated by a man named Savage, but Mr. Davidson thinks the
shop referred to is really the one on Toward Street.
What surprises me most is Mr. Davidson’s assurance that, in his earliest
recollection, there was no blacksmith shop operating in Winslow. Because that
community is older than Waterville, I should have assumed that almost from the
earliest days the town had at least one blacksmith and continued to have one
until most such shops disappeared. Mr. Davidson does recall that at various times
someone started a shop in Winslow, and doubtless the town had blacksmith Shops
before Mr. Davidson’s day, but he is sure that, when he first opened his Water-
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ville shop, there was no blacksmith shop in Winslow.
Do you notice how inevitable it is that mention of blacksmith shops should
lead to mention of livery stables? What fond memories linger about those noble,
though odorous, establishments. One of the most prominent citizens of Waterville
likes to tell how his first job away from home was working in a livery
stable for the munificent wage of two dollars a week, making his bed in a little
alcove off the harness room and rustling his grub as best he could.
My native town had three livery stables, of which one was regarded as especially
swanky, because it sported what we called the boat-landing stage. That
was one of those old, swaying stage coaches, slung on huge leather springs,
with seats on top as well as within. It carried passnegers from the boat landing
on Long Lake — passengers who had made the famous steamer trip from Sebago Lake
Station up through the Songo Locks — and deposited those passengers at various
points in Bridgton Village, having its terminus at the old Bridgton House, directly
across the street from my father’s store at the top of the steep Main
Street hill.
*****
Now we want to know two old-time items about Waterville. First, where were
its livery stables and who operated them? We know that one was on Silver Street
and another on Front Street. Was one also on Charles Street? Where were there
others?
Second, what stages came to or passed through Waterville? Was there a station
here for change of horses? Were the stages the big closed kind such as I
have just described, or were any of them — especially in the summer — the
four-seated buckboards such as transported my high school baseball team forty
years ago? Who will be the first to give us information on Waterville’s livery
stables and stages?
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*****
Rev. Milton McGorrill, whose family we have known since conunon days in
Portland a quarter of a century ago, delivered a sermon in his Orono churCh
a few weeks ago, whiCh deservedly hit the headlines. Mr. McGorril1 urged the
formation of a state-wide non-political organization to determine the educational
needs of Maine and to elect legislators to carry out a feasible, constructive
program to meet those needs.
people are becoming aroused because of the failure of the recent legislature
to provide funds to get Maine out of the unenviable position of being
called “the Mississippi of the North”. Especially is there concern about failure
to implement with funds already existing legislation for community schools
and school construction. A Kennebunk woman is vehemently urging leading citizens
of Maine to petition the Governor to call a special session of the legislature
to levy taxes to meet these urgent sChool construction needs. We think
such strategy is mistaken. The legislature, rightly or wrongly, has acted.
There are no new facts for them to consider.
Mr. McGorrill’ s plan is better. Let a voluntary, state-wide organization
devoted to getting all the facts about Maine education be organized. Then let
that organization try to get men and women elected to the legislature ready
to support a definite, fair, workable program for adequate financing of education.
Mr. McGorril1 admits that the. usual way to accomplish such a result is
to work through the existing organization of one of the present political parties.
He pu~ls no punChes in saying that that cannot be done in the present
emergency. The Democrats, he says, stand no chance of election, and they know
it. On the other hand, the Republicans, he asserts, although they hold a monopoly
on Maine legislation are (and I quote Mr. McGorrill’s words) “divided at
the top, stubborn at the bottom, and vacillating in their leadership”.
What I have been saying for several years is unpopular with many of my
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fellow Republicans, but I am saying it again right now. The principal reason
why Maine stands among the lowest of the states in support of education, why
it is so often compared to Mississippi, is because, like Mississippi, Maine
is a one-party state. The party in power never has enough effective opposition
to keep it on its toes.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
32nd Broadcast June 19, 1949
A columnist in one of our Maine papers has been getting in some punches at
the Congressional franking privilege. While we agree with him that the privilege
is often abused, we consider the particular incident which he selected
less objectionable than most of this free mail. It may not be smart politics
for Congressman Nelson to send copies of the American Creed to all of this
year’s crop of high school graduates in the second district, but that creed
is a good thing for every graduate to possess and to heed. To critics of Mr.
Nelson’s act, it probably doesn’t occur that he has sent out those cards with
the best of motives. Charlie Nelson is the sort of man who believes that these
young people, after twelve years ~ the public schools, are now ready for higher
education or for the working world, ,~it:h a right to recognition by the man who
represents their district in the national legislature, recognition that not
only congratulates them upon successful completion of the public schools, but
also places before them the stirring, memorable words of the American Creed. If
the franking privilege must be used at all, we can think of no better use for
it. More power to Charlie Nelson’s efforts to instill the American way of life
into the hearts and minds of young Americans.
*****
An anonymous listener sends in a post card asking how the old ox slings
worked. While we have seen those old slings, we never saw one in action, and
our general idea of its operation would probably sound so ludicrous to one who
really knows that we won’t attempt a·description at this time. We promise,
however, to try to get accurate information on this subject and broadcast it
at a later date. By the way, how many shoes did an ox wear? Who can answer
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that one?
*****
people who recall in great detail the location and personnel of the old
livery stables greatly outnumber the folks who have accurate recollections of
the blacksmith shops. Charles Leroy Jones of 70 Elm Street has good reason
to remember those stables, for he used their teams to court a girl in Oakland,
a girl who became Mrs. Jones 46 years ago. As a matter of fact, I suppose
that buggy-riding hireage is the relationship most men now over 50 once had
with livery stables. My own such experience was with the somewhat rickety buggies
and the sleek roan horses from Glover’s Livery Stable in Hebron. The
usual ride was to South Paris, but occasionally we drove to Mechanic Falls,
left the team there, and took the electric car line to Lewiston.
Mr. Jones mentions of course the Jim Pray stable on Silver Street, where
the State Theater now stands. That seems to be Waterville’s best known stable,
but it apparently was not the earliest. Mr. Jones says the first livery he
recalls was the well known Elmwood Stables, back of the Elmwood Hotel, where
the Jackson Dairy now stands. When Mr. Jones first knew the place, it was conducted
by a Captain Jewell, whose successor was the famous hotel man, Charles
Hill, brother of Dr. J. F. Hill and long the esteemed propietor of the Belgrade
Hotel.
Ira Mitchell, who lived at 113 Silver street, had a livery also on Silver
Street, near the present location of the Hathaway Company. So Mr. Jones remembers
two stables very near each other on Silver Street. Charles Pillsbury,
who lived at 220 Main Street, for a long time ran a stable just off Temple
Street, in the rear of the former location of the Salvation Army. Chester Alley
of Boutelle Avenue says there was once a livery stable in the alley back of
where Dakin’s Store now stands on West Temple Street. We recall hearing of that
stable in another connection. It was not far from Buzzell’s Restaurant, and
1-207
legend has it that Roscoe Buzzell used to set his pies on a shelf outside the
back door to cool. The fellows working at the livery stable took advantage of
this opportunity to snitch an occasional pie.
*****
We have no accurate information yet on Waterville stage coaches, but a
listener has put us on track of a source where such information may be obtained.
So that subject, too, must be deferred to a later broadcast.
*****
Is it too hot in these summer months to think seriously about a billion
dollars? Hot or cold, working time or vacation, a billion dollars is a lot of
money and, believe it or not, this particular billion dollars is yours and mine.
For I want to discuss with you for a few minutes tonight the report of the now
famous Hoover Commission on organization of the executive branch of the federal
government.
Everyone knows, or at least suspects, that the various government departments
and agencies have so grown in numbers and size that they ~re almost hopelessly
entangled in expensive duplication, exhaustless red tape, and dubious
efficiency. In July, 1947, without a single dissenting vote in either house,
the Congress created this commission. The choice of Mr. Hoover as its chairman
was especially happy. Our only living ex-president, acknowledged as one of the
ablest American administrators, he is the only man in the nation who knows from
intimate, responsible knowledge the problems which confront President Truman.
The Commission has done a notable piece of work. Employed staff known as
task forces gathered detailed, accurate information about what the commission
defined as the 24 major problems of government and management. Based on these
facts the commission has made its recommendations to eliminate some of the
bureaus and offices, to combine others, to redistribute many into more logical
departments. And here is the point: the new plan, if authorized and adopted,
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will save the taxpayers a billion dollars a year.
When Mr. Hoover was himself President, all departments and bureaus in the
Executive Branch cost four billion dollars a year and employed 600,000 persons.
Today they cost 42 billion a year and employ 2,100,000 persons. What is worse,
they are set up in 1,816 assorted departments, bureaus, sections and divisions.
The result is not only duplication and waste; it is sometimes hopeless chaos.
The report shows that exactly the same services can be better rendered
with two hundred thousand fewer workers. One out of every ten employees is not
necessary. When Mr. Hoover was asked if the present red tape prevents the discharge
of inefficient government workers, he said: “The whole Civil Service
has been surrounded with a mass of red tape that makes it extremely difficult
to discharge anybody for sheer inefficiency. A supervising officer who wishes
to remove a government employee for inefficiency must present documentary proof.
The employee then has four different appeals. The supervising officer must appear
four times to prove his case, and the result is that few officers will
take the time and trouble to do it. Why should he, as long as his own pay depends’
on the fact that one of the bases of salary classification is the number
of employees under him’?”
The report shows how utterly impossible it is for the President to know
what goes on in the agencies directly responsible to him. There are 85 agencies
reporting directly to the President, not to any department or cabinet member.
If the President gave them each a half hour a week, he would put in a 42i hour
week on administrative problems in the agencies alone, with no time for the
major problems of government policy.
So far most of the public’s attention, in respect to reorganization of
government agencies, has been focused on the new Department of Defense. In
light of Secretary Forrestal!s physical collapse and subsequent suicide, Mr.
Hoover’s words, spoken several months ago I are interesting. He said: “Large
1-209
areas of government work simply cannot be made to operate as now set up. I
defy any man, as Secretary of Defense, to make that department operate economically
or efficiently under the present law and the present set-up. It has
already exhausted one man trying to do it.” Mr. Hoover could now appropriately
strengthen that last sentence and say, “It has already killed one man
trying to do it.”
At the start of this broadcast tonight we mentioned the franking privilege.
Of course that privilege contributes heavily to the annual deficit in
oper~ting the postal service, but it is a minor contributing factor compared
with the inefficiency of the whole postal set-up. The commission report pulls
no punches in telling us what is wrong with the post office. Its structure is
obsolete and over-centralized. A maze of outmoded laws, regulations and traditions
freezes progress and stifles proper administration. Political appointment
of postmasters and other officials produces inefficiency and reduces the incentive
of promotion. How rapidly the post office is losing money is shown by a
few impressive figures. In 1947 the deficit was 263 million dollars or 20% of
the revenues. In 1948 it was 310 million dollars or 22% of revenue. In the
fiscal year ending June 30, 1949 the deficit is expected to exceed 500 million
or 30% of revenue.
The Hoover Commission shows clearly that the one most necessary reform is
to take the post office out of politics. In the department, in spite of the
Civil Service system, there are still 22,000 political appointments. Naturally
the commission would do away with the obsolete procedure of the confirmation of
postmasters by the Senate.
But the trouble lies not wholly in the appointment system; the whole policy
of budget, accounting and audit must be overhauled. The post office is by
nature a business that is revenue-producing and ought to be, like any other business,
self-sustaining. It carries on numerous business-type transactions with
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the public. It must, therefore, be conducted from top to bottom by recognized,
modern business methods.
The experience of the federal government in many of its business enterprises
has already pointed the way to the solution of these problems in the Post Office.
The Government Corporation Control Act of 1945 provides for a business form of
budget, accounting and aUdit, and gives modern business flexibility to the management
of those concerns. All that is necessary is to extend the provisions of
that law to the Post Office.
So much for the Post Office. Let us return for a moment to the general,
overall findings of the commission. Here they are:
“I. The executive branch is not organized into a workable number of
major departments and agencies which the President can effectively direct, but
is cut up into many agencies, which divide responsibility and can have no effective
direction from the top.
“2. The line of command from the President down has been weakened, or
actually broken, in many places and in many ways.
“3. The President and the heads of departments lack the tools to frame
programs and policies and to supervise their execution.
“4. The Government has not taken aggressive steps to build a corps of
administrators of the highest level of ability with an interest in the program
of the Government as a whole.
“5. Administrative services, such as purchasing of supplies, maintenance
of records, and the operation of public buildings, are poorly organized,
resulting in extravagant waste.”
Well, what can you and I do about it? Remember it is our billion dollars
that Mr. Hoover has shown us how to save. Let us see that our Maine Congressmen
and Senators know how the people at home feel about it. Let us tell them that
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no selfish interests, no vested holdings of Washington brass, must get in the
way of this needed reform.
1-212
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
33rd Broadcast June 26, 1949
Our very first broadcast, 32 weeks ago, mentioned that commonest of disliked
things, taxes. What is the outlook concerning taxes in the near future?
Of one thing we may be sure: high taxes are here to stay. The Government will
need at least $35 billion a year for many years to come, just to pay running
expenses and the huge interest on the national debt, without reducing that
debt a dollar. If any reduction of the debt is attempted, the annual need will
be nearer to $40 billion. It takes a lot of tax money to produce tha~ stupendous
figure.
Nevertheless it is predicted by competent observers that some tax reductions
can be made, probably not in the income tax but almost certainly in some
of the excise taxes. Those taxes are becoming a noticeable hindrance to business
activity out of proportion to their yield. perhaps the first to go will
be the 3% tax on freight bills, because it unfortunately and unfairly pyramids
in its power to add to the cost of goods. Every time any raw material,
partly finished product, or finished article moves by freight, the tax is collected.
The 15% tax on passenger fares, by bus, rail, boat or plane becomes increasingly
burdensome as business declines. That tax may be the second to go.
Along with it the 25% tax on telegrams and long distance telephone calls may
be cast aside, and perhaps the 15% tax on local telephone calls. Few people
could ever see any sense in the tax on electric light bulbs, and most men resent
paying a tax on talcum powder and shaving lotion in the name of cosmetics. The
U. S. News predicts that 1950 may see the abolition of the excise taxes on cosmetics,
jewelry and furs.
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*****
Now tonight let’s get to work on those old ox slings. Mr. Lewis Whipple
has supplied me with a picture of an ox sling in the old Sands blacksmith shop
at west Buxton. It is said to be over 200 years old. Mr. Carroll Otis of Oakland
has gone to a lot of trouble making us a drawing of an ox sling showing
side and end views, and has written a fine description of its operation. It is
difficult to show you how the apparatus worked without visual aid. You too
ought to see the diagram or the picture. If we had television we might give
you a clear idea. We must do the best we can with mere words.
First you have two rows of three heavy upright posts, and across the top
of each row a big beam. Suspended from the beams in the gap between the two
rows of posts are two leather belts, eight inches wide. The other end of these
belts attaches by hooks to an 8-inch wooden roll.
Now an ox is an unpredictable and cantankerous creature. “Move” and “gee”
and “haw” and goad were necessary to get one inside such a contraption. So at
the front end close to the floor was a 4 x 6 roll, to which was attached a
windlass. A 3/4-inch rope was tied to a chain round the ox’s neck and given
several turns around the roll. Then, by turning the windlass, the ox was literally
pulled into the sling and its head was drawn firmly down to the roll.
Next the two belts were drawn under the ox’s belly and were attached to
the hooks on the other roll which we first mentioned, up on one side, parallel
with the ox. By levers, just wooden sticks stuck in holes in the roll, the roll
was turned and. the animal hoisted up so that its feet just touched the floor.
Near the front a hardwood block about a foot high and 6 inches square was
mortised into the sill on either side, the top of the block sloping slightly
toward the rear. On these blocks the blacksmith placed the ox’s forefeet for
shoeing. A chain held the foot firmly in place. Similar blocks in the rear took
care of the hind feet.
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Yes sir, shoeing an ox was quite a chore. Not only did the blacksmith
have to go through all these preliminaries, but he had to put on twice as many
shoes as on a horse, for old Alderman ox wore eight shoes.
Mr. Otis adds the interesting information that only the outer shoe on
each foot was sharpened in winter, thus preventing the ox from caulking himself.
Mr. Whipple has dug up startling information about the ox population in
Maine. In 1860 there were about 100,000 working oxen in the state, one for
every five persons. Oxen outnumbered horses in every county except Aroostook.
The score was pretty close in Waterville, which then included Oakland under the
name of West waterville. This town had 370 horses and 340 oxen. Winslow had 266
horses and 376 oxen. Buxton, where the pictured ox sling still stands, had 382
oxen. The record was held by the town of Waldoboro which had 986. That part of
the state probably still has the most oxen. Ox teams may even today be seen at
work in the town of Jefferson.
Mr. Whipple tells of a memorable haul by oxen. In 1866 a heavy timbered
barn 50 by 40 feet (and that’s quite a building) was hauled through the streets
of Solon on skids by 60 yoke of oxen. One hundred and twenty oxen on one haul.
That is some team!
*****
We must correct an error we made last week. The Charles Hill who ran the
Elmwood Livery Stable was not the Charles Hill who operated the Belgrade Hotel.
Both were named Charles, but they were no relation. We are reminded of a debate
in Congress a few years ago between Senator Brewster and Senator Happy Chandler,
now the baseball czar. They brought up the Biblical story of Lazarus, or rather
two stories — one about Lazarus raised from the dead, the other about Lazarus
in Abraham’s bosom while the rich man languished in Hell. The debate ended by
the President of the senate solemnly declaring, “The chair rules that there were
two different Lazaruses. II Well, those were two different Hills, both good citizens.
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*****
How much is a billion? We need a couple of striking illustrations to visualize
such a huge figure. Eighteen of those newest and speediest processing
machines for plastics at the Keyes Fibre plant, if they operated twenty-four
hours a day seven days a week without stopping would turn out just about a
billion pieces in one year.
Here’s another illustration. Suppose it were your job to hand out one
dollar bills, a bill every second of a forty-hour working week, and except for
your Saturday and Sunday rest you never took a vacation. You wouldn’t live long
enough to hand out a billion one ~llar bills for that would take you 133 years.
So when the Hoover Commission says its plan will save us at least four
billion dollars a year, that is a great deal of money. In almost every state
there has been formed a citizen’s committee to support the recommendations of
the Commission. In Maine that committee is led by Dr. Charles Phillips, President
of Bates College, and its membership is composed of leading citizens in
business, industry and the professions. Let all of us support their efforts.
Write your Congressman that you want this saving made.
Let us look tonight at a few more items in the commission report. Last
week we referred to the post office and the commission’s plan to save at least
half a billion dollars a year in that single department. Let’s see now what the
commission says about the federal budget. It calls that instrument an “inadequate
document, poorly organized, and presenting no understandable or workable
plan for government expenditures.”
For instance, the Veterans Administration has an appropriation item of
over a billion dollars for salaries and expenses, which indicates nothing of
the work done by that organization. The Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland
receives allotments under twelve different appropriation titles. In no one
place in the budget can he locate the cost of operating a naval hospital. The
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Bureau of Ships is financed by 27 different appropriations, many of which have
no connection with that bureau. Whereas the budget shows $26 million for the
Forest Service, the total operating cost of that service is actually $43 million.
The United States Government is the largest purchaser of supplies in the
world; yet it has no central purchasing authority. Each agency buys as it pleases,
and many are not manned by competent, trained and experienced purchasers. Efficient
purchasing requires training and skill, as every business man well knows.
Half of the several million orders that go out of government offices each
year are for less than ten dollars, yet those orders require all the recording
and all the red tape of large purchases. The commission points out the astounding
fact that the cost of processing those orders amounts to more than the
cost of the goods. For every ten dollar purchase the average office processing
cost is twelve dollars.
The not unexpected result of this unorganized buying is that every agency
has excessive stocks of supplies, stocks which the commission estimates could
easily be reduced by nearly two billion dollars. In fact, improvement in purchasing
and supply management alone would save the nation about three billion
dollars a year.
perhaps the strongest attack of the commission falls upon the military.
Listen to the commission’s words: “Military strength is important, but it is
only one element in national security. National strength depends upon economic,
political and human values. The military arm of the government, in its new
strength, must not grow into a thing apart. It must unequivocally be under the
direction of the executive branch and be fully accountable to the President,
the Congress and the people. II
Everybody knows that the worst feature of our national defense has been the
continued quarreling and lack of unity among the various branches of the service.
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The new act creating a Secretary of Defense has done something to remedy this
deplorable condition, but things are by no means right yet. The Hoover Commission
finds still much disharmony and lack of unified planning in the armed services.
It finds inexcusable extravagance and waste. It finds that the new
National Security organization lacks control authority and direction, is still
plagued by divided responsibility, and provides no clear civilian control. The
authority of the Secretary of Defense is weakened by the rigid structure of a
kind of federation of Army and Navy rather than their unification. The commission
says: “In direct proportion to the limitation and confusion of authority
among their civilian superiors, the military are left free of civilian control.”
In short, teamwork is still sadly lacking, and too many brass hats are determined
that the military shall on all matters be independent and not subject to the will
of the people.
*****
It happens that this speaker knows more about one government organization
than about all the others. Because we have been Veterans Coordinator, serving
as liaison agent between Colby Coll~ge and the Veterans Administration in respect
to veterans attending college under the so-called G I Bill of Rights, we
have had occasion to watch the progress of veterans legislation in Congress,
and the operation of the laws by the V. A. offices. We have only the highest
respect for the efficient, friendly management of the V. A. office at TOgus,
Maine, under the leadership of Col. Stoddard; and we cannot praise too highly
the Togus Division of Rehabilitation and Education under Col. Earle Reed. But of
the overall management on the national scale, of the orders and directives concerning
which Col. Stoddard and Col. Reed have no discretion, we cannot speak
so highly. Our own experience bears out some of the findings of the Hoover Commission
with regard to the Veterans Administration. Let us take a look at those
findings.
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The V. A. spends more money than any other federal agency except the military
establiShment. It spends $5,350,000,000 a year, or 11 cents out of every
dollar going for all government expenses. That is an average of one thousand
dollars.for every veteran assisted. Of the whole 5 1/3 billions, it spends
$859,000,000 for salaries, or 16% of its whole budget. The Commission points
to serious defects in V. A. Management. There are conflicting lines of authority
between Washington and the field. May we digress here for a personal comment.
Early in 1946 this speaker made a public statement that was given wide
publicity. One clipping reached us, for instance, from a paper in st. Augustine,
Florida. We then said, “We do not have a Veterans Administration in the United
States i we have forty-eight veterans administrations.” How true the last three
years have proved that statement to be. We have repeatedly tried to get Washington
to see sense in a plan which Togus would willingly allow, if the big
chiefs on the Potomac would agree. We have simply asked that a veteran attending
college, with clear intent to complete his course and get his degree at that
college, may accelerate his program by attending summer school in another
state without transfer of his V. A. records to the second state. In other words
let the college and the V. A. office in that state be permitted to farm the boy
out, as it were, for the summer in another state. But Washington says “no”.
A time-consuming and costly transfer of all papers must take place. When a
Colby veteran attends Boston University for the summer, all his V. A. records
must be transferred to Boston. When he returns to Colby in the fall, back the
whole bunch of papers goes to Togus.
Now to what the Hoover Commission says. They find in V. A. too many organizational
units. They find the whole system too complicated, with an excessive
volume of written instructions that defy intelligent execution. There
are 665 varieties of technical bulletins, over 400 circulars, and 88 different
instruction manuals. On veterans’ insurance the confusion and delay long ago
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became a public scandal. The employee turnover has been out of all proportion
to the number of personnel. In short, the commission suggests that V. A. is
in for a complete shake-up and reorganization.
If the few facts presented tonight do not convince you, we recommend that
you read the summary of the report of the Hoover Commission, a large print,
easily read book which you will find at the Waterville Public Library.
*****
This is our last broadcast for the season. We vacate the mike during the
summer months quite as much to provide relief for you patient listeners as to
get relief ourselves. We are happy to announce that we shall be back with you
in September, again under the sponsorship of that progressive and friendly
firm, the Keyes Fibre Company. In no small part we attribute the cordial reception
which you listeners have given to this program to the fact that it has
been completely free from advertising. You have heard no plugs or jingles in
behalf of pie plates or plastic trays. Just the simple announcement, at the
beginning and the end of the program, that it is made possible by the Keyes
Fibre Company. If you think that company has rendered a public service by
these thirty-two broadcasts, why don’t you tell them so. They know perfectly
well that the program has little effect on their sales, and the only way in
which they can know that you have enjoyed it is for you to tell them so.
Perhaps after thirty-two weeks a kind of recapitulation is in order. What
have we talked about? We have tried, first of all, to uphold and proclaim the
American.way of life, the system of private enterprise upon which our strength
as a nation and our opportunities as citizens has been securely built. Then,
because we are surrounded on every hand by modern gadgets and ultra modern
ways, we have cast many a nostalgic eye upon the old-time things. Please note
that we have never suggested bringing them back, but our reason for mentioning
them is more than mere reminiscence.
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The present is always the child of the past. Out of nothing, nothing
comes, and the past, for most of us, is filled not. with great_events and ‘.
eollossal possessions, but with little things , many of them things which the
younger generation never knew, but out of which sprang the conveniences of
our modern day. Life is not a system of isolated lakes, it is a river flowing
ever onward to some eternal sea. We make no apologies for following that
river back upstream, and on its banks we’ve found some interesting things:
the narrow guage railroads, the old canals, the blacksmith shops and the
livery stables, the barrels of flour and the old round crackers, and the
grand old words and sayings of long ago.
For us it has been a rich experience, and we have tried to share it with
you. So, with many, many thanks to all of you, we say Goodbye until September.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
34th Broadcast September 18, 1949
Friends of the radio audience, it is good to be back with you again, and I
am grateful to the Keyes Fibre Company for giving us another season’s opportunity
to continue our discussion of common things.
Vacations are now among the common things, and I hope you have all enjoyed
one since our last broadcast in June. But I know perfectly well some of you have
had no vacation at all. I recall how indignant my mother used to get in my boyhood
days when female relatives from the city used to talk about coming to Maine
for their vacations. It was my mother’s firmly held notion that no housewife
ever had the right to a vacation. The man of the house might get time off from
work, but the wife’s work went right on. Remembering those days, I want to ask
some of you men who had a vacation this summer if you saw to it that your wife
got one too.
until he was 55 years old my father never had a vacation. All through the
years of his operation of the grocery store in Bridgton he worked 52 weeks a
year. Once in those twenty-four years he was called to jury duty in Portland,
and he afterwards avowed that it broke his record for never taking a vacation.
To him anything that took him away from the store, even jury duty, was vacation.
Of course working steadily without vacation ruined him. He lived only to
the age of eighty-three. But perhaps that was because, after he moved to Massachusetts,
the Boston vacation bug bit him, and he did come to Maine for two
weeks vacation every summer.
Don’t misunderstand me. We are not trying to do away with vacations.
What in the world would this land we used to call the Pine Tree State, but
now goes by the name of Vacationland — what in the world would we do, if
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there were no vacations? We certainly aren’t going to bite the hand that feeds
us. But seriously we do assert that it is quite possible to make too much of
vacation, and talking about our own to other people can be quite as obnoxious
as talking about our surgical operation.
*****
I am told that ladies who have made either a hobby or a business of painting
scenes on such objects as dishes and trays have been hard pressed to find
suitable material to take oil paints. Mrs. Josie Claflin of Western Avenue,
Fairfield has solved the problem. She has recently sent me a little six by
four tray on which she has painted in oils the well known scene of Portland
Head Light. Mrs. Claflin, now 78 years old, has long done painting as a hobby.
Unable to get the trays she used before the war, Mrs. Claflin finally saw the
new plastic trays of Kys-ite, made by the Keyes Fibre Company. She writes: “I
think hand-painted Kys-ite would make nice Maine souvenirs for Christmas gifts.”
Yes, Mrs. Claflin, I think so too.
*****
The many railroad fans who listen to WTVL will be interested to know that
a few weeks ago I had my first ride on the Edaville Railroad, about which I
talked last winter. What is more, I rode in the old narrow guage car called the
Mt. Pleasant, in which I had ridden many miles on the old Bridgton and Saco
River road as a boy.
You will recall that the Edaville is a six-mile, narrow guage road on the
cranberry plantation of Mr. Ellis Atwood at Carver, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.
Mr. Atwood bought rolling stock and rails from the Bridgton and Saco River,
picked up other cars from the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes, the Wiscasset
and Quebec, and the old Billerica roads.
Mr. Atwood’s road winds around the cranberry bogs where at this season of
the year we saw hundreds of pickers at work. That ride behind the tiny rebuilt
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locomotive brought back fond memories. As we slowed by the little station stops,
it was easy to imagine them as Sandy Creek, South Bridgton and Perley’s Mills,
and the illusion was heightened when over the terminal station we saw the sign
Bridgton. The truth is that two separate buildings compose the terminal of Mr.
Atwood’s road. Over one is the sign Bridgtoni over the other is carabasset.
Everyone said the old narrow guage roads were doomed forever. Not only has
Mr. Atwood put a new one in operation out of the remains of half a dozen defunct
ones, but he has made it a financial success. The Edaville Road makes money
every season. During the summer it carries thousands of sight-seers at 25 cents
a headi it transports thousands of yards of sand for the cranberry bedsi it
hauls the pickers; and it carries hundreds of boxes of the harvested fruit. I
hope others of you will have a chance to ride on the Edaville Road. It will
bring to life again whatever one of the old roads was most familiar to you
the Bridgton and Saco River, the Rangeley, the Wiscasset, or the Monson.
*****
One of the commonest things in life is to look out for ourselves. We all
favor economy in government as long as it doesn’t step on our toes. We are all
for letting the other fellow do the economizing. It is folks whose toes are stepped
on that prevent any real economy in government. The reorganizations recommended
by the Hoover Commission, designed to save from four to six billion dollars
a year, are either modified or blocked completely by people who consider
their own gain bigger than the public welfare. Let us not too quickly blame the
members of Congressi it is their selfish constituents who bring pressure upon
them, and those constituents are people just like you and me.
Doubtless it would be safer and just as easy to illustrate this difficulty
in government by examples from far away. We might talk about the pro-butter,
anti-oleo block from Wisconsin, the timber holdings of the Northwest, the
cotton growers of the South, or the cattlemen of the Great Plains. But no part
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of the country is inunune. So let us bring it right home to ourselves in Maine.
In 1948 Uncle Sam poured $67,000,000 into Aroostook County alone, to hold
up the price of potatoes •. More than 30 farmers of Aroostook received more than
$100,000 apiece from the government, according to investigations made by the
Washington Post. The Post points out that Congress has held to the potato
program although it has been warned time and again against it.Even the larger
potato growers themselves have urged that price supports be cut. But Congress
has held fast. Less than a month ago the House of Representatives, under the
leadership of Albert Gore of Tennessee, voted to keep supports.
Potatoes are grown in many states besides Maine; so pressure is brought
on a lot of Congressmen. Nevertheless, it is time the American people woke up
to what this way of doing things means to all of us.
The $67,000,000 handed out to Aroostook was only part of a cool 225 million
dollars whiCh was disbursed in the whole country to support the price of
potatoes alone. And remember that the potato was only one supported commodity.
That 225 million is twice the cost of operating all the activities of the District
of Columbia; it is more than the cost of all the business of either the
Department of Commerce or the Department of Labor, and nearly the same as the
Department of Justice. It is more than one-fourth the entire cost of the huge
Department of Agriculture.
We are not unaware that there is something to be said on both sides of
disputed questions, and this program of price support is certainly subject to
a lot of dispute. Most of us want to see the farmers, especially the small
farmers, protected from disasters over which they have no control. But some of
us believe the present government program is not the way to do it.
How this price support program works out in practice is made clear by the
Maine potato experience. First, the taxpayer is assessed for 67 million dollars
to purChase surplus potatoes from Maine growers so that the price of potatoes
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sold on the market can be held up. Then the same taxpayer, in his capacity of
consumer, is forced to pay the highest price he ever knew in peacetime for potatoes
on his dinner table. Then, to cap the climax the high prices cut the
per capita consumption of potatoes to the lowest figure in American history
108 pounds as compared with 123 pounds in 1947 and 144 pounds in 1935 — thus
increasing the quantity of surplus potatoes the government had to buy. The whole
thing just doesn’t make sense.
*****
Grover Weymouth of East Vassalboro, who more than once has supplied information
for this program, now comes up with some interesting yarns about Ben
Butler. General Benjamin F. Butler was probably at once the most efficient
and the most hated of Union generals in the Civil War. Many southerners hated
him worse than they hated Sherman.
Because Butler graduated from Colby in 1838 most Colby men and women
have known the stories connected with the general’s college days, stories published
a quarter of a century ago by Herbert C. Libby in his book of Colby
stories. How Ben destroyed the stolen sign and how he petitioned to be excused
from chapel because he knew he was already counted among the damned, not the
saved, are familiar Colby yarns.
Now Mr. Weymouth brings up some stories of Butler’s later days as lawyer
and politician, in both of which fields his career was quite as stormy as it
had been in the Army. While the following story may be fictional, those who
knew Butler are sure it could have happened. The story goes that one day two
prominent attorneys of Boston were crossing the Common and arguing about who
was the best lawyer in Massachusetts. Suddenly one of them said, “Here comes
Ben Butler. We’ll ask him.” They told Butler of their argument and asked him
who, in his opinion, was the best lawyer in Massachusetts. Ben promptly replied,
“I am!” “That may be so”, said one of them, “but how are we going to prove it?”
1-226
“You don’t have to prove it”, said Butler, “I admit it.”
Another story concerns Ben in the Massachusetts Legislature. Ben never
smoked but he had the peculiar habit of chewing cigars constantly. His cigars
were made especially for him with both ends solid. In the legislature a minister
from an up-state district sat next to Ben. For a couple of days the clergyman
watched Butler chew on one end of a cigar for an hour, then turn it around
and chew on the other end. Finally, standing it as long as he could, the
minister. said: “Butler, you disgust me. A hog wouldn’t do what you are doing.”
Ben responded with a question, “Do you chew tobacco?” “Certainly not”, was
the disgusted reply. “Neither does a ‘hog”, said Butler. “So who’s most like
a hog, you or me?”
When Butler was the military governor of Louisiana i~ the early days of
the post-war reconstruction, the people of New Orleans vented their utmost wrath
upon· him. He was accused of all manner of illegal and outrageous acts, of which
history has long since cleared him. Among the accusations was one that he personally
appropriated the magnificent solid silver from New Orleans mansions.
Hence, the story of Ben Butler and the silver spoons became a part of American
folklore.
Mr. Weymouth has a delightful story connected with those silver spoons. It
seems that during one of his many political campaigns Butler was speaking in a
theater. His opponents, in order to embarass him, hired a boy to climb up into
the fly over the stage and lower a huge spoon on a string down in front of the
speaker. Without batting an eye, Butler pulled out his pocket knife, grabbed
the spoon, cut the string, and ranuned the spoon into his pocket with the words,
“That’s one I must have missed.” Needless to say, he, rather than the opposition,
captured the audience along with the spoon.
*****
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You will remember that, just as our program season closed last June, I
asked for information on old stage coach lines that once came into Waterville.
It is true that one listener told me where I might get that information, but no
one has yet submitted the information itself. Come now, who will be the first
to tell us about the old stage coach routes in this vicinity?
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
35th Broadcast September 25,· .1949
In spite of the recent welcome rain, we do not need to be reminded that
we have just had an exceptionally dry sunnner. Those of us who lost most of our
amateur gardens have probably complained bitterly, but the justifiable complaints
ought to come from the drought-embattled farmers. Yet these sturdy
folk take adversity pretty well in stride. The dry, rainless weeks cost many
of them a lot of money. Hundreds of them had to haul water many miles for
herds of thirsty cattle.
Now there is nothing new about these seasons of drought, even in Maine.
I recently chanced to see a copy of the Waterville Sentinel for December 28,
1871. In it I noted the following ingenious advertisement by a man whose family
name still marks the Waterville business district. The ad reads:
“The Great Drought of 1871 has proved a severe blow to many, but instead
of despairing and moving to Aroostook or out west, let us give old Kennebec
County one more trial. Meanwhile, keep it before the people that they can buy
of C. H. Redington furniture of every description from the best parlor suites
to the smallest chair. Carpeting, crockery, shades and curtain fixtures, caskets
and coffins, robes and shrouds.”
*****
When we recall the long hours that laborers worked fifty years ago, we
are likely to think of the eight hour day as a very modern innovation. Well,
here’s an interesting historical item nearly a century and half old. waterville
was set apart from Winslow and incorporated as a separate town in 1802. At the
town meeting of 1803 the new town of Waterville voted (and I quote from the record)
“that the sum of $1. 25 be allowed for a man, $1. 00 for a pair of oxen, 50
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cents for a plow, and 25 cents for a cart, for each day employed upon the
highways, and that eight hours shall constitute a day’s work.”
*****
The proponents of Federal Aid to Education do their cause no good by distorting
the figures. The case for federal aid should be judged on its own merits,
and in working out a practical plan, it is of the utmost importance that we
maintain and safeguard the American constitutional principle of separation of
church and state. Freedom for all religions, but state support of no sect or
creed is a sacred American principle.
Now some educators are so anxious to get any plan of federal aid underway
that they are careless with facts and figures. A report issued by the Senate
Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, quoting the federal Office of Education,
says: “According to census estimates for 1947 about four million children between
the ages of five and seventeen attend no school whatever.”
The head of one of the nation’s best known, private, small colleges decided
to test these figures. This man, President Lawrence Gould of Carleton College,
Minnesota, found that in many states compulsory education does not start
until the child is six years old, in a few states not until seven, and nearly
all the states end compulsion at 16 years or less.
Thus President Gould found that, of the four million not in school,
2,063,000 were only five years old, and 1,406,000 had passed their sixteenth
birthday; 156,000 more who were six years old were not required to attend school
because they lived in states where the beginning compulsory age is seven. This
left only 379,000 instead of the alleged four million, and that former number
is further reduced by subtracting the mentally defective.
Instead of four million children who ought to be in school, but are not,
the number is probably not more than 300,000. But we hasten to assert that
300,000 school children not in school are 300,000 too many. There is no need
1-230
for proponents of federal aid to exaggerate the figures. We must find a way to .
give every American child opportunity for free education. There is a good case
for limited federal aid, provided its administration is left unrestrictedly in
the hands of state and local authorities, but there is no case for another
great federal bureaucracy dictating to all our school systems.
*****
Through the courtesy of Mrs. Ernest Whitman of Benton we have seen an interesting
local document written just a hundred years ago. It is a receipt for
a year’s pass over the old covered bridge at Fairf leld. It reads: “Mr. Asa
Goodridge, with his girl, is permitted to pass the Fairfield Bridge from the
first day of April, 1849 to the first day of April, 1850 at the sum of one dollar,
one half in advance and the residue on the first day of August, 1849, with
single horse and carriage, owned and driven by the above named, in his own business,
but is not permitted to transport any kind of goods and wares for any
other persons, nor carry any other person free of toll. Received payment in
full, 8th of August. William Bryant, Director.”
*****
We are constantly on the alert for picturesque, old-time sayings. One of
the best we have heard recently is the frequent reply of an old gentleman of
Cumberland County whenever he was asked if he knew a person whom he happened
to know well. “Know him?”, the old gentleman would say. “Why, I could tell
his hide in any tannery.”
*****
We were somewhat surprised to read in the September 12th issue of Time
magazine the use of the word boughten as an adjective. We thought that expression,
heard commonly in rural Maine a half century ago, had gone out of use, at
least in newswriting. Yet here was a magazine of international repute, saying
of little Prince Charles of Edinburgh, “Without the moral support of his mother,
1-?31
Princess Elizabeth, he stood up well under the ordeal of his first boughten
haircut.”
Both of the newest dictionaries, the American College Dictionary of 1947
and Webster’s New Collegiate of 1949 record the word “boughten” as an adjective,
and both give it the same meaning: “purchased, as opposed to homemade”.
It is, of course, this use of the word that most Maine folks of my generation
have often heard. “Aunt Mary’s got a boughten dress”. Once I even heard the
usual expression “store teeth”· for false teeth changed to boughten, when an
aged citizen said, “I can’t eat meat; my boughten teeth don’t fit too good.”
Did .Time magazine err in its use of boughten? According to both dictionaries
it did, for both label the word as dialect. And what is dialect? It is a
local or sectional form of a language, or the speech of a particular occupational
or social group. “Boughten” is therefore a word used still in some localities
or among some classes of people. It is no longer a generally recognized,
national word.
*****
In some respects this is indeed a topsy-turvy world. Take our present relations
with England, for instance. We and the British speak the same language,
we are both among the last strongholds of democracy. Britain was indeed once
our mother country. We have no intention of letting our British friends down
in their hour of economic crisis.
Nevertheless, the strange web of events that has been woven since the close
of the recent world war puts our good old USA in a position of considerable inconsistency.
Under the ECA we are in the peculiar situation of backing a socialist
welfare state with free enterprise money. Yet Russian expansion forces
. us to go on with that inconsistent policy. We must help England readjust her
economy. We must continue financial aid to do it. What England needs is huge
private investment. But not only are American investors in British industry
1-232
scared off by the methods of the present British Government, but British capital
itself seeks every chance to escape the restrictions against sending money
out of the country, and finds every possible loophole to invest in American industry.
Now that many parts of the world have become their own workshops, England
can never again be the greatest exporting workshop of the world. Her whole colonial
system is being readjusted. But the socialist regime in England, which
regards investment as immoral and insists ·on backing the welfare state to the
point of national bankruptcy, is a weak instrument for carrying on the necessary
adjustments.
Some time between now and next June there will be a general election in
England. If we believe what we say when we praise democracy, we must uphold at
any cost the right of the British people to choose their own government. But
that doesn’t prevent us from hoping that the British voters will look the hard
facts square in the face and act on the logic of those facts.
The London Economist recently reminded the present British goyernment that
it would have been out of power long ago if American capitalism had not been
willing to subsidize it. The issue in our relations with Britain is bigger
than the stability of the pound or the narrowing of the dollar gap. It is the
tremendously important issue whether a controlled economy can compete with a
free economy_ “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
*****
Waterville folks have been getting their tax bills and on the whole the
comments are favorable. The expert evaluators of local real estate have done
a thorough, competent and scientific job. Of course some property owners find
their taxes increased, but the commendable frankness with which Mayor Squire,
the assessors and the experts agree to meet all complaints with complete information
should win every citizen’s approval.
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*****
On the very first of these broadcasts nearly a year ago we said that among
the commonest and most disliked things on earth are taxes. Our generation is by
no means the first that has been plagued by them. In the Kennebec Journal of
January 1, 1880 appeared the following advertisement: “All persons whose taxes
remain unpaid need not be surprised to receive a call from the collector or a
respectful notice from the post office.”
*****
There were other interesting ads in that issue of the old K. J. published
seventy years ago. C. C. Hunt, dealer in musical instruments, recommended an
organ in everY home. That was the heyday of the old parlor organ, and Mr. Hunt
made the acquisition of one as painless as possible by offering it on the installment
plan at 25 cents a day.
Under a picture of a set of false teeth, William McDavid advertised as
II surgeon and mechanical dentist II • He recommended the use of either American
red and black, or English imported red and white rubber for artificial teeth.
He agreed also to fill teeth with gold, amalgam, os, or artificial gutta percha.
*****
Did you ever hear what started the movement to separate the western part
of Winslow on this side of the river into the new town of waterville? Believe
it or not, it was because the people on this side got tired of crossing the
river to attend church. Remember there was no bridge, and they had to cross
the hard way — the way workers at the H & W have done for so many years on
the river back of the old Colby campus.
To be sure, town meetings had something to do with the controversy, but
save for exceptional emergencies they came only once a year. As early as 1791
only twenty years after Winslow’s incorporation as a town, an attempt was made
to set up a separate town on the west side of the river. But the article in-
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troduced for that purpose at the town meeting was dismissed (or, as we would
say today, tabled without action) • In 1793 the town voted that thereafter
one-half of the preaching should be on the east side and one half on the west
side; also that town meetings should be held alternately on east and west sides.
Evidently this did not solve the problem, for eight years later, at the
town meeting of 1801 it was voted to petition the General Court of the Commonwealth
(Maine was then a part of Massachusetts) to divide the town. The General
Court agreed, and after waterville’s incorporation in 1802 Asa Redington, Justive
of the Peace, issued to Moses Appleton, constable, the warrant for waterville’s
first town meeting. Elnathan Sherwin, Asa Soule and Ebenezer Bacon were
the first selectmen. OUt of reluctance to cross the river to go to church,
Waterville had been born.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
36th Broadcast October 2, 1949
In this day of fast transportation by land and air it is difficult to realize
that, less than a century ago, inland waterways served an important and
sometimes sole means of transportation between two Maine localities. Last
spring I referred on this program to the importance of the Presumpscot Canal in
making possible a through water route from Portland to Raymond, Casco, Naples,
Bridgton and Harrison.
Most Waterville citizens know the story of the founding of Colby College -how
Jeremiah Chaplin, his family, and a handful of students, came in the sloop
Hero from Boston to the head of navigation on the Kennebec, then by lon~ boat
up the river to Waterville.
What is not so well known to Maine people generally is that some method of
river transportation was once common in every county in the state, even in
Aroostook. When the Eaton grant, now a part of the town of Caribou, was laid
out in 1808, the deed conveyed by the General Court of Massachusetts contained
these words: “Excepting and reserving for the use of the Commonwealth, and as
a common highway forever, the main channel of the Aroostook River in its
course through this tract of land.” Indeed the Aroostook River was the only
line of transportation in that day. There wasn’t even a road into the tract,
and the river served as common highway for many years. Until 1830 there was no
road north of Mattawamkeag. To get to what is now Caribou the prospective settler
went by boat through New Brunswick up the St. John and Aroostook Rivers.
By the way, that Eaton Grant in Aroostook got its name from Captain William
Eaton, whose exploits Kenneth Roberts has made famous in his novel “Lydia
Bailey” • It was Eaton who, in 1805, won a momentous victory over the Barbary
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Coast pirates who had long preyed on American ships in the Mediterranean.
Snubbed by superior naval officers and neglected by Congress, Eaton was finally
rewarded by the General Court of Massachusetts with this gift of land
in the wilds of the District of Maine. Almost immediately Eaton sold a half
interest to John Callender of Boston for $2,500. Callender’s half amounted to
somewhat more than 5,000 acres. Think of it — fifty cents an acre for what
was to be Caribou potato land.
Well, we started all this by talking about water transportation. Of course,
among Maine’s more than 2,000 rivers, some were never very important highways.
We doubt whether the Messalonskee from Western Avenue to Rice’s Rips was ever
a very important highway, but a lot of Waterville people can remember when, on
a sunday afternoon, it was covered with canoes. Was it the automobile that
ended canoeing on the Messalonskee, or was there some other reason? Who knows?
*****
California is making much this year of its centennial of the Forty-Niners,
the adventurers who went to the coast in search of gold. But Maine too, as Hon.
Edward Chase of Portland recently pointed out, has reason for remembering 1849.
In that year the efforts of determined Portlanders had succeeded, and the Atlantic
and St. Lawrence Railroad (later called the Grand Truck) was under construction
between Portland and Montreal. Maine railroads already had reached
Waterville via Lewiston, and another line was being built up the Kennebec.
Mills were rising at Lewiston, where the water-power canal system was now complete.
Gas light had just come to Portland and Lewiston. The lumber business
took on a new lease of life, with railroad transportation to supplement the
water routes. Now, as Mr. Chase emphasizes, these things did not just happen.
Risks were great and losses were common. It all required a high degree of confidence,
not in everybody,but in the character of selected individuals. Confidence
was established and maintained. The money was risked; the job did get
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done. But what did it was not government insurance, subsidies, and guarantees.
It was not done by the pump-priming of deficit financing. It was accomplished
by the confidence engendered by direct and understandable relationships between
men, in faith in the lessons of human experience. And not the least important
factor is this. In 1849 security was sought through energy, men were
proud of how much work they could turn out in a day, and he who did the very
best that he could might confidently hope for reward.
*****
We hear much about the alleged pessimism among leaders of business and industry
concerning the economic future of our country. It is heartening, therefore,
to see an acknowledged business leader like Lewis Rosenstiel, head of Shenley Industries,
sound a note of optimism. He insists the united States can have
annual national income of $300 billion by 1954. An increase of five per cent a
year in total production will achieve that goal. Mr. Rosenstiel suggests a program
to bring about this result, including one item that may be subject to controversy.
“Give the American workingman”, he says, “the incentive of a five
per cent wage increase every year between now and 1954, and let him know that
each yearl s boost will follow if he increases his productivity by five per cent,
and you will find the volume of production rising at an astonishing rate. The
national payroll during the peak year of 1948 was $140 billion. The suggested
five per cent increase in wages, cumulated for five years, would increase the
payroll one-third by 1954, giving the nation’s workers $47 billion more to
spend. Other income would go up in the same proportion.”
Having no right to pose as an economist, I don’t know whether Mr. Rosenstiel’s
economic logic is sound or faulty. But I do know that bold measures of
some kind must be taken to eliminate the depression psychology that is now
scaring so many of us. Certainly the way to win the peace in this present cold
war is to make the whole world outside Russia so strong that the Russian people
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themselves will come to question their
own system as inadequate and insecure. The peace of the world will never be
made secure by military force alone. Only an expanding world economy that offers
a better standard of living can fight off the insidious infiltration of
communism.
Whatever plan we follow — Mr. Rosenstiel’s or some other — it -must be
a cooperative plan in which industrial owner and manager, laborer, farmer, and
professional men work together to produce more goods for the people of the
world. It is the most trite of economic truths that the world’s trouble is not
and has never been over-production; it is poor distribution and under-consumption.
The purchasing power of the world’s people must be significantly increased.
*****
Two weeks ago I promised you another Ben Butler story — one about Butler
and the silver spoons. His military governorship of Louisiana was so obnoxious
to the New Orleans’ aristocracy that they accused Ben of appropriating and
turning to his own profit the beautiful solid silver of some of those famous
New Orleans homes. So all through the South Ben Butler became known as the hated
northern general who stole the New Orleans silver spoons. That he was completely
innocent made no difference. The story was believed as gospel in all the South.
After the war Butler not only took up the practice of law in Massachusetts;
he also became immediately and violently active in politics, and a dozen years
after Appomatox, the time came when Butler ran for governor of the old Bay State.
The campaign was bitter and personal; no holds were barred. The Marquis of
Queensberry rules that now govern a Truman-Dewey contest were sadly lacking in
the late 1870’s. For reasons which we have no time to relate here, the region
of the Berkshires was strongly anti-Butler. When his speaking tour brought him
into that region, Butler was sure to encounter heckling and perhaps outright
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interference. What happened at Pittsfield neither he nor the audience could
have anticipated.
A group of Butler’s opponents, more clever than the general run, engaged
a boy to climb into the scenic props and flies over the stage of the theater
where Butler was speaking. Ben was scarcely warmed up with his opening remarks
when down from above the stage dangled on a string a huge wooden spoon painted
a glistening silver.
The audience, catching on at once, let out a roar of laughter. But old
Ben didn’t bat an eyelash. Calmly taking a pocket-knife out of those capacious
trouser pockets of his, he grabbed the spoon, cut the string, and brandished
the spoon before the audience with, “Well, well, here’s one I must have missed.”
In a moment Ben’s quick wit and good nature had turned the audience from
hostility to approval. Contrary to the predictions of his most ardent supporters,
in the subsequent election, Ben carried the city of Pittsfield.
*****
My friend Groves Weymouth says I missed the real point in my remarks about
vacations. His comment to end all comments on the subject is this: “Almost anybody
can work, :put it takes a mighty good man to stand a vacation.”
*****
Did you go to church today? There was once a time here in Maine when it
was the conunon thing for everyone to go to church on Sunday. Many years ago it
was the custom in most New England communities to hold two preaching services
in each church, one in the morning and the other in mid-afternoon. Members of
the congregation coming in by wagon or horseback from the whole countryside
brought their luncheon and remained on the premises between services. In the
winter they often spent the interval in homes near the church. Now most people
who have heard about those old hours of church attendance and those long-winded
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sennons, sometimes lasting more than two hours, suppose that the change was
made directly to morning and evening services with which Protestants are familiar
today. That such is not ~e case is revealed by a glance at the Waterville
Sentinel for December 7, 1883. Church notices listing the services for
the following Sunday reveal that only two churches — the Congregational and
the unitarian — had then caught up with modern practice, having their services
at 10:30 A. M., but even they differed on the hour of evening service,
the Congos m~eting at 7:00 O’clock and the Unitarians at 7:30.
The other Protestant churches — Methodist, Baptist and Universalist
had no morning service; their first service was at 2:00 P. M. Methodists and
Baptists had evening services at 7. Only the Universalists had no evening
service at all. This was long before the present important and prosperous local
Episcopal church had become even a mission station in Waterville.
Waterville’s Catholic communicants today will be interested in the announcement
of Catholic services in the Sentinel of 1883. The beloved Father Charland
was then, as he was many years afterward, the priest and pastor. The announcement
reads:
“Mass at 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M. on every first and third Sunday in the
month, at ten-thirty only on every second and fourth Sunday. Sunday School at
3:00 P.M. Vespers at 4:00 P.M. Instruction in English every second and fourth
Sunday, in French every first and third Sunday. II
Many distractions invitingly call us away from church attendance today.
Perhaps our grandfathers and grandmothers missed a lot of the comfort of modern
inventions and the fun of modern amusements, but perhaps we too are missing
something in not emulating their devotion and their zeal to the particular
church of our faith in this land where religious worship is unrestricted and
free.
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· ,
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
37th Broadcast October 9, 1949
Probably no more bitter quarrels were ever fought out without bloodshed
than were the controversies over the early railroads. There were battles over
routes, terminals, width of guage, financial control, and many other matters.
The Wiscasset and Quebec, the little narrow guage that finally ran only as· far
as Albion, was no exception. Before the route and terminus of that road were
settled, the air was blue with name-calling and invective.
Many years ago an Albion woman, using a government document, the Yearbook
of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, as a scrapbook, pasted into it along
poem, parodied on Longfellow’s Hiawatha. That poem, printed serially in some
Maine newspaper not identified on the clippings, told the story of the controversy
over the establishment of the little railroad from Wiscasset to Albion.
The poem is much too long to quote in detail. Suffice it to say that it
recounts chiefly a long-fought struggle about extending the little road to
Burnham Junction. The verses were apparently written by a Wiscasset man who
ardently f~vored the Burnham terminus and who sings the praises of one Gitchie
Atwood and soundly damns the villainy of one he calls Sachem Wilson. He also
refers to prophet Crosby. Was that one of the Albion Crosbys? Perhaps some
listener knows. Let’s have the few lines in the poem which refer to him:
“prophet Crosby came among you
With a plan for your salvation,
To complete your road to Burnham,
Have two ends and two connections.
Honor be to prophet Crosby!
He’s your friend and always has been.
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If he only had the money,
‘Nary red of yours he’d call for,
But would straightway build your railroad
OUt of love for you, my people.”
Of Sachem Wilson the versifier says:
“Sachem Wilson came among you
With a scheme for your damnation,
And I think it runs in this wise:
If you’ll cough up all the interests,
That you now have in your railroad,
He will build a broad ~age for you;
Build it up the spout or elsewhere.
Give him ninety days, he tells you,
To collect his game and wampum;
Don’t make any further effort
To get your road built into Burnham.
Then in ninety days he’ll own you, .
Stocks and bonds and all equipment.
Verily — he is a DaileY.
Listen not to Sachem Wilson. II
The poem’s third and final installment (or canto, as the author calls it)
is headed “Burnham or Bust”. It ends with this impassioned appeal:
“We are tired of all this talking,
Tired of the broad guage stories,
Tired of the Sachem’s wisdom.
So build your railroad up to Burnham.
Give us of your wealth, 0 China!
The amount that you apportioned,
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Give to us, 0 old Palermo,
All that you’ve been asked to spare.
Whitefield, we expect to see you
Walk up and lay right down your share.
Jefferson, Who’s interested?
Surely you will help us out;
For Albion ha~ done her duty,
Done it nobly and with zeal,
She’s a ready, willing worker,
With your Prophet at her wheel.
Bathe now in his plan to aid you,
Wash the war paint from your faces,
Smoke the calumet together,
Vote to build your road to Burnham.”
Alas, the heated imprecations of Sagittarius — that is the way the author
signed the poem — fell on deaf ears. The road was never built through to
Burnham.
*****
One of the new books this fall is an amusing and informative account of
the woman who was the first to have her face appear in newspaper advertisements
allover the united States and eventually on a bottle label allover the world.
Yes, you have guessed it; the woman was Lydia E. Pinkham.
An Army chaplain, Captain William B. Adams, says when he went ashore on
one of the first South Sea Islands to be liberated from the Japanese, he immed:'”
iately took a lot of photographs. When he developed those films, he came upon
one negative showing a woman standing outside a thatched jungle hut, surrounded
by her children and all her worldly possessions. Those possessions were meager
indeed, but amOng them proudly stood a familiar object — a bottle of .
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Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.
Although everybody in this region has heard .of Lydia Pinkham, I suspect
few realize how closely the operations of her company were related to the
State of Maine. When Daniel, the most adventurous and energetic of Mrs. Pinkham’S
three sons, was trying to get sales of the compound well started in the
drug stores of New York, in 1878, he wrote to his brother Will back in Lynn:
“We’ve got to make up $10,000 worth of pills and shove them into advertising
down in Maine. If I were home I’d show you how to do it. Those Maine folks
will buy if you spread the advertising on them thick. II
Evidently will took Dan’s advice, for later Dan wrote: “I’m glad 1;:0 see
that you are going in so heavy down in Maine. Keep running that state to full
capacity so that everybody that sees a paper in the whole state will surely
see our ad.”
In 1882 the two surviving Pinkham brothers and their sister Aroline, who
a year before had been organized as a partnership, decided to form a corporation,
the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company. That company was incorporated
not in Massachusetts, but in Maine, because, it is said, Maine at that time
had more favorable tax laws for an enterprise which still consisted largely
of equipment and supplies, but very little cash. As a consequence of this incorporation
of the company in Maine, it was Maine courts that saw the bitter
legal battles between quarreling Pinkham interests for more than thirty years.
Like most fond mothers, Mrs. Pinkham never suspected trouble among her
offspring, and when Aroline married gentle, Quaker-born Will Gove, Lydia was
delighted with his cooperation in the business. But the old lady reckoned
without the influence of the third generation. For into that generation was
born a spirited fighter, Lydia pinkham Gove. A graduate of Smith College in
1907, she was one of those determined bachelor girls of the early suffragette
days. Until her death a few years ago she fought with every possible legal
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device to dominate the company against her cousins, the Pinkhams. And of course
she had to fight those battles in the Maine courts. After many attempts in
court to gain control of the company, Miss Gove finally agreed to a plan worked
out by the lawyers of both sides, a plan which someone has described as “a consummate
example of studiously designed corporate deadlock”, The company’s 112
shares of stock were divided into 56 shares of Pinkham stock and 56 ,shares of
Gove stock. Each group had authority to elect three directors. The president,
first vice-president and secretary must always be Pinkham stockholders elected
by Pinkham directors, while the treasurer, assistant treasurer and second vicepresident
must always be chosen by the Gove directors. Certain powers were
given jointly to the president and the treasurer, but only the treasurer or
assistant treasurer could sign checks.
That compromise was only asking for more trouble. Miss GOve, in her capacity
as treasurer, refused to sig~ checks for obligations incurred by Charles
Pinkham in his capacity as president. When the case finally reached the Supreme
Judicial Court of Maine, Judge Sidney Thaxter, in a carefully worded decision,
said: “This arrangement, though it may have had virtue from a sentimental
point of view, assumed a spirit of cooperation between the two groups
which has not in fact existed. It was designed to function in an atmosphere
of harmony which is sadly lacking. II
The litigation finally ended in 1937 because Miss Gove overplayed her
hand. In 1934 a master appointed by the Maine court to determine the facts
concerning Miss Gove’s petition for receivership of the company wrote in his
report: “Lydia Gove stated to Arthur Pinkham that she was going to run the
business, and that the Pinkhams must stop interfering with her”. But on the
witness stand in 1937 Miss Gove testified that absolute equality between the
two families had always been intended. To her consternation the defense produced
a letter written by her to a representative of the pinkham employees
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only a few months before. That letter said: “My mother’s mother, Lydia E.
pinkham, arranged that the Gove interests should control the management of
the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company.”
Obviously what she said in that letter and what she had. just said: on the
witness stand could not both be true. The Gove suit was dismissed and somehow
the Pinkham and Gove directors have managed to function peacefully ever
since.
Do any of you remember this old popular song?
“Oh, we’ll sing of Lydia Pinkham
And her love for the human race.
How she sells her Vegetable Compound
And the papers they publish her face.”
*****
When my family took residence in waterville 26 years ago one of the first
things we noticed was the city’s casual and nonchalant attention to the safety
of its school children. We had just come from Portland where during the minutes
when children were crossing busy streets to and from school nearly the
whole day-time police force was devoted to that job. I remember especially the
genial six foot four officer who escorted children across Congress Street in
front of the Lafayette Hotel. At every trip he had some youngster by the hand
and often some tiny tot in his arms.
That system of police protection of school children accomplished a lot
more than the children’s safety. On minds in the most impressionable years it
established the policeman not as someone to fear and dodge, but as a friend to
whom a child can turn for help and guidance.
For 26 years we have waited, sometimes a bit impatiently, for waterville
to wake up. We haven’t enough police officers. Special officers for school
hours would be too costly. Officers cannot be spared from the business section.
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All of these excuses leave us cold. If the school children of Augusta
can have police protection — and they do have it — the citizens of Waterville
can give that protection to their children too. We are pleased to learn
that the Board of Education is making another attempt — at least its fourth
within our memory — to get action. Perhaps the new police commissioner will
see the light. Waterville has decided by majority vote to do something about
its sewage before a disastrous epidemic strikes from the open sewers that its
two streams have become. Those sewers are scarcely more dangerous than the
poorly protected crossings that threaten the tiny tots in all sections of the
city. The voluntary patrols set up in the schools are fine, but they are not
enough.
What’s that you say? You don’t see ariything to get excited about. Everything
seems to go along pretty well as it is. Maybe so. But you’ll feel very
differently about it if someday tragedy comes to your child.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
38th Broadcast October 16, 1949
We make no apology ~or talking on and on about railroads. Many listeners
tell us they can stand a lot more railroad stories. So here goes with the
grand old story of the old Grand Trunk.
John A1fred Poor was born in Andover, in the northern end of OXford County,
up above Rumford in 1808. He taught school at Bethel, then became a lawyer in
Bangor. He was a big man, six feet two, and weighed 250 pounds — not puffy
fat, but al1 bone and muscle.
Poor went to Boston to see his first train on the old Boston and Worcester
line on April 16, 1834. Though only 26 years old he there had a vision that
never left him — the vision of a railroad system that would embrace all New
England. Early, half-hearted schemes of others had contemplated a railroad from
Belfast to Quebec, or from Portland to Lake Champlain.
Poor made a thorough personal study of the region between Portland and
Montreal, actually drew plans for a proposed railroad, and called it the Atlantic
and St. Lawrence. In 1843 Poor petitioned the Maine Legislature for a
charter. By this time he had even expanded his already ambitious plan, for he
was no longer content with a road from Portland to Montreal, but envisioned a
later extension from Montreal to Chicago, and another line from Portland to
Halifax across the Province of New Brunswick.
Hitherto railroads had been considered conveniences to old, settled communities.
Poor was the first man to plan a railroad for the development of
new country. He engaged James Hall, a civil engineer, to survey a right of
way from Portland to Montreal. Hall recommended by-passing the White Mountains
by way of the Androscoggin River valley and the Dixville Notch. He estimated
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the cost from Portland to the Canadian border at $2,250,000.
Meanwhile a group of Montreal men, led by A. T. Galt, prepared to build
the line from Montreal to the U. S. border.
Then the Boston financiers got busy. They wanted a road from Boston to
Montreal and this Portland scheme was getting in their way. Abbott Lawrence
and Harrison Gray otis secured a charter for a road they called the Boston,
Concord and Montreal.
Poor heard of the Boston plan on February 4, 1845, just as one of the
worst storms on record had started. Yet, shortly after midnight Poor started
out by horses and sleigh for Montreal. He sent a man ahead to arrange for relays
of horses. Finding one brave soul willing to accompany him, and against
the protests pf friends and relatives, he set out.
For a while the travelers held to the road, but soon found themselves
encountering unseen. stone walls, fences and woodpiles. The snow changed to
sleet, cutting men and horses alike. They took six hours to reach Teak’s tavern
in Falmouth, only seven miles from Portland. In the morning the snow
stopped but the cold increased. Nearly two feet of snow covered the road.
Yet, before dark, they reached the Waterhouse Inn . at Paris. By that time
Poor had a frozen nose and frost-bitten ears.
The next day, with Waterhouse breaking a road ahead, they reached Rumford
in the afternoon, where they got half a dozen men to ride ahead on horse
back and break a horse track to Andover. Beyond that town there was no road
or track of any kind. Here was real wilderness — the big woods.
For the 40 miles from Andover to Colebrook Poor had to make his tedious
way without road breakers or even a road. He covered only two miles an hour.
At Errol, New Hampshire came the great test. How would he get through the
Dixville Notch? But luck was with him. At Errol four men agreed to help Poor
get over the height of land. At the entrance to the Notch, with temperature
1-250
18 degrees below zero, Poor encountered terrific gusts of wind. He later related
that all he could see was “perpendicular mountains of snow”. With snaillike
pace, a few feet at a time, Poor and his helpers finally got through the
Notch.
On the fourth day out of Portland Poor reached Colebrook and went on at
once over a road now broken out to Sherbrooke, Quebec. Then he drove all day
and all night to reach Montreal on Monday mo~ning, for Poor had learned that,
at ten o’clock on that morning of February 10, the Montreal Board of Trade
would meet for a final decision on the Boston proposal.
Arriving on time, but with nothing to spare, Poor presented strong arguments:
the superiority of Portland Harbor; that Portland was 100 miles nearer
to Montreal than was Boston; that the route was easier.
While the Montreal Board still deliberated, unexpected assistance came
to Poor. William pitt Preble, determined as was Poor to get the road for
Portland, had started out only a day behind Poor, waiting only for the storm
to subside. In fact he had taken good advantage of Poor’s trail. Now here he
was, before the Montreal Board, to support Poor’s case. Preble had brought
with him a handsome charter, with its great red seal and its beautiful script,
for the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, granted by the Maine Legislature
only a few days before.
The vote went for Portland. Ground was broken on July 4, 1846, but at the
end of two years only 50 miles of track had been laid in Maine, and only 30
miles in Canada. Early in July, 1851, five years after breaking ground, the
road entered New Hampshire, not through the Dixville Notch, but by way of Gilead
and Shelburne. Late in 1852 it crossed the Connecticut River at North
Stratford and reached the border early in 1853.
In July of that year the entire 292 miles were complete and the line was
leased to a new company, the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, on a 999 year
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contract, on which the new company agreed to pay all outstanding bills and
a six per cent dividend on the common stock. Nearly a hundred years afterward,
in .1946, Alvin Harlow wrote in his “Steelways of New England”: “The
Atlantic and St. La~ence Railway still has a corporate existence. Though
most of the stock is held in England, some of it is still owned by Maine
residents who receive that comfortable six per cent every year.”
Now Poor had on foot a much vaster scheme~The European and North American
Railroad. This was to extend from Portland across Maine through New
Brunswick to the farthest point in Nova Scotia. From there steamers would
run to Galway, Ireland in five days. From Galway special trains would speed
across Ireland to Dublin, then fast steamers would run to Holyhead, England,
and a final, fast rail jump would land the traveler in London in record time.
Even while working on his big. scheme, Poor was active in promoting other
/
railroads: the York and Cumberland, the Portland and Rochester, the Belfast
and Moosehead Lake, the Bangor and piscataquis. In 1870 he got a charter for
a road with a prodigious name: the Portland, Rutland, Oswego and Chicago, and
was working hard at it the day before he died.
John Poor was a railroad fanatic, but unlike many fanatics, he made some
of his dreams come true. Maine, very early in its history as a state, secured
valuable ties of communication with the rest of the nation. And that accomplishment
was made possible because neither blizzards nor Boston financiers
could lick a man from Andover, Maine, a man named John Alfred Poor.
*****
Did you ever hear the story of the Loud’s Island duck? Well, Loud’s Island
is a mighty interesting place where, according to legend at least, anything
could happen. That little island, scarcely a l.ong–stone’s throw off
shore from the little village of Round Pond on Route 32 between Waldoboro and
New Harbor, was for many years not even in the United States. Through an un-
1-252
explained error, it was left off the map when the U. S. Geological Survey
charted the region. Hence from soon after the Civil War until 1905 the four
or five score inhabitants of the island refused to pay taxes to any government.
They weren’t on the map, therefore they didn’t exist.
But more about the history of Loud’s Island at another time. Just now we
are concerned wi ththe Loud’s Island duck. The oldest residents of the island
say they had to doubt the Bible story about the whale swallowing Jonah, seeing
as how a whale’s throat ain’t built for any such job, and anyway how could
a man get air to breathe inside a whale’S innards? But their experience with
the duck .made them wonder whether Jonah might not have encountered a peculiar
kind of whale. Leastwise, Egbert was a peculiar kind of duck.
He was a tame duck somebody first saw one fall when the hunting season
was on. He came down near a house and the women folks, seeing· he had a busted
wing, tended him till he was all right. They fussed over him and babied him so
much that, when he got well, Egbert wouldn’t leave. But instead of getting
soft and easy-going, the longer he stayed, the meaner and uglier he was. He’d
chase every cat that came in sight, and there wasn’t a dog in the neighborhood
that didn’t give him a wide berth. But his big, pet hate was the gulls. They
weren’t picking up any food in his harbor, not if Egbert knew it.
Well, Egbert was monarch of all he surveyed until the day he met up with
the goose fish. Didn’t ever see one, you say? Well, sir, they’re a good
sized fish, thirty or forty pound, with little green eyes and looking something
like an overgrown sculpin. Their mouth runs two-thirds the way to their tail,
with little sharp teeth along the jaws, and they got about the littlest gullet
that don’t fit that kind of mouth at all. Well, one day the tide was real low
and Egbert was paddling around sort of bossing things in general, when all of
a sudden he give a flutter and a squawk, and then he just wasn’t there at all.
Something had dragged him clear underwater.
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Somebody grabbed a fish spear and ran down the wharf. Sure enough,
lying quiet on the bottom just at the end of the wharf was one of them big,
lazy goose fish. The water was clear and the fellow with the spear could
get good, straight aim. He eased the spear down slow then let mister fish
have it, close to the tail. He figured Egbert was aboard, and he didn’t want
to drive the spear through him.
Well, they dragged that fish ashore and they could see a big lump in him
squirming and heaving, so they cut him open mighty careful. Yes sir, there
was Egbert, beat up some and looking llke a gnat in a rain barrel. But he
was alive and gave the fellow that released him a good healthy nip to prove it.
They wiped Egbert off and laid him out in the sun to get back his strength.
He lay there for a while, muttering and cussing under his breath, now and again
stretching and shaking himself. pretty soon he stood up and took a quick
swipe at a kitten that had come too close. But he wasn’t yet fully recovered.
It was a good six weeks before he risked swimming again, and then he stuck
mighty close to shore.
The story sayeth not whether they changed Egbert’s name to Jonah.
*****
It is not often that our quiet little city of Waterville gets attention
from the foreign press, but that is just what happened last week. Furor broke
out in London — or at least a tempest in a teapot — over the speech delivered
here in waterville on October 7 by Mr. G. C. Cheliotti, managing director
of General Electric Limited. Mr. Cheliotti was the principal guest
speaker at the Business Management Institute conducted at Colby College.
To us who heard him, Mr. Cheliotti seemed unusually fair, going out of
his way to speak kindly of the parties sure to contend against each other for
power in the coming general elections in England. In fact, before I had heard
of the furor in London, I had intended to mention Mr. Cheliotti on this pro-
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gram, as a fine example of the well known British sense of fair play. And I
still insist that he was such an example.
But evidently the British do not think so. Same dozen irate letters have
reached the college and Waterville citizens. I have personally received one
such letter denouncing Mr. Cheliotti as a traitor to England and especially
to the BritiSh workers.
What happened? It seems that the London papers seized on certain statements
in Mr. Cheliotti’s speech and played them up with bitter exaggeration.
I understand that the Old Thunderer itself, the staid old London Times, played
up the speech with emphasis and with a stinging editorial. I have personally
seen a clipping from Lord Beaverbrook’s paper, the London Express, with a
four-column headline. The burden of the British complaint is that Mr. Cheliotti
said the highly praised output of the British worker in war-time was much
overrated, that one trouble with the British people is their feeling of selfpity,
and that the seeds of the present economic distress lay deep in British
psychological failure to change stubbornly conservative ways after the first
World War, and was not to be blamed on the Labour Party.
Evidently Mr. Cheliotti is in for a hot time when he gets home. Meanwhile
a lot of Englishmen who never before heard of Waterville, Maine now
know there is such a place.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS·
39th Broadcast October 23, 1949
Little troubles — troubles about common things, not world problems -are
worrying most of the people of the world. Devaluation of the currency,
balancing of exports and imports, management of foreign loans and gifts, are
questions over the heads of the vast majority of the world’s population.
A survey made by one of our American economic organizations shows that
people in foreign lands are talking and worrying about just the same sort of
things that we ourselves talk and worry about: homes and jobs, family budgets,
the high prices. In London, if people talk at all about devaluation of the
pound, it is only in terms of its effect on prices — prices of the necessities
they must have to keep alive. If the British worker ever mentions American
aid, his ideas about it are very fuzzy, for he usually thinks of it as
a loan that must some day be repaid with interest, whereas three-fourths of
it is outright gift. But anyway the whole business is too complicated for the
average Englishman. He is sufficiently occupied with his personal anxieties. .
How can he make both ends meet on an average industrial wage equivalent to $28
a week? Even before the devaluation of the pound, food prices had risen since
last April so as to increase a week’s food cost as much as a dollar for a
family of four. As winter approaches, there is increasing worry about housing
and fuel.
Frenchmen this autumn are moody and short-tempered. As they see the
throng of tourists depart, what the French people worry about is not the latest
world crisis, but the sudden renewed rise of food prices and the wretched
weather. The most serious drought since 1921 has crippled electric power, reduced
the crops, and brought back the hated black market.
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In Western Germany, in spite of the news reports about political interest
and party strife, the average citizen has just one concern: how to get cash
for the immediate wants of life. Strangely enough, this is a new problem for
Germans in the American and British zones. Only a year ago they had plenty
of cash, but nothing to buy. Now the shops are full of food and clothing, but
the prices are out of the average earner’s reach. The people seem not all
that grateful for American aid. We aren’t doing it to help them, they say, but
just to ward off Communism. And anyway, they insist, what difference does it
make, if they can’t get the work to earn the money to buy shoes and bread?
In Italy the people are so disinterested in politics that the political
parties are driven to sponsoring local fairs and sporting events to get a
crowd. Politics is nothing compared with the problem of finding a way to make
a living in a country where two million are without work and where no one sees
any possibility of new jobs even keeping up with the birth rate.
In Japan the idea before the war was that an employed Japanese was sure
of a job for life. The Japanese worker now has a new problem — job security
and he is much more concerned about it than about American occupation,democratic
government, or the status of the Emperor. In South America also people
are much too absorbed in making a living to worry about the state of the world.
In Buenos Aires one hears little talk about anything except the high prices
and the shortage of apartments.
In short, go the world around and you will probably find that everywhere
self-preservation is the first law of nature. The basic, animal needs come first
for people everywhere.
Great changes in history do not come about by great mass movements of
humanity. They occur because a few people — few, but tremendously important
take the long, not the short, view, are concerned not merely with bread and
butter, but with what Whitehead called “the adventure of ideas”. It is not
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merely a spiritual leader, but a very wise man, who said: “Man does not live
by bread alone.”
*****
That long serial poem signed Sagittarius, printed in a Maine newspaper
in the 1890’s was not the only attempt to put the Wiscasset and Albion narrow
guage railroad into verse. From another old scrapbook in the possession of
Mr. Charles Crosby comes a poem, not about controversy over the road’s western
terminus, but a kind of idyllic ode, singing the praises of the little,
two-foot line. Let me read you just a part of it:
“On steamer wharf, by the calm, smooth bay,
We jump on board our new railway;
Up Sheepscot Valley away we go,
By rocky ways where the waters flow,
Such varied scenes oft turned the lyre
Of Walter Scott with a poet’s fire.
By ancient church on the distant hill,
Through Alna cut, o’er the smiling rill,
And fair Whitefield, ‘mong daisies wild,
Charming the eye of woman or child.
At Coopers Mills may we tarry long,
For maidens fair inspire our song.
On Windsor soil, by the shady groves,
And cooling founts where the squirrel roves,
Our fiery horse with a smoky tail
Holds back his way on the iron rail;
Where swelling notes of the Crosby band
Roll o’er the track on pigeon Plains,
For next we stop where Homer reigns,
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A lonesome spot in the wilds of Maine,
But booming now with flour and grain.
Now China Lake lies glassed below,
As down the grade we coasting go;
Sorrow and care will not hover o’er
That pure, white church on the pebbly shore.
By Lovejoy Pond with its cooling breeze,
Where balm is found mid evergreen trees,
OUr puffing steed runs o’er the rail
By Crosby’s house in the pleasant vale.
The waving corn on Albion hills,
The lowing herd by cooling rills,
The leafy trees and the thorny thistle
All hear the sound of the Crosby whistle.”
*****
The economic prophets tell us that one of the sure signs of business depression
is a decrease in the marriage rate. They point out that, at the
bottom of the big depression in 1932, the number of marriages in the United
States failed to reach a million for the first time in twenty years.
Whichever is the cause and whichever is the effect, the relationship between
the two phenomena is evident. Fewer marriages mean reduced demand for
wedding presents, household furnishings, and other goods and services accompanying
the formation of new families.
Recent statistics seem to belie the impression one gets by glancing at
the society pages of the newspapers. Those pages give us the idea that marriages
are now more prevalent than ever. But such is really not the case.
The war boom made 1946 a record high year for American marriage, the
number then reaching 2,291,000. In 1948 it had dropped to 1,992,000 and the
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statistical prediction for 1949 is 1,600,000.
Reduced number of marriages means a reduced birth rate, and that is something
which lowers the demand for industry’s products for many years to come.
What about the effect on our schools? Educators have rightly pointed out that
the rising war-time and immediate post-war birth rate has even now placed a
heavy burden on already overcrowded schools. The peak will be reachea in 1952
or 1953, when those 1946 babies enter the schools. But after that, in the
elementary schools (the grades below high school) the enrollment will steadily
decrease until about 1970, when the 1946 babies are likely to increase the
marriage rate and produce a new crop of potential school enrollment.
*****
In all the heated talk about socialized medicine it seems to me one important
point is being overlooked. That is the time-honored, intimate relation
between physician and patient. Even the clustering of doctors in the
cities at the expense of the rural districts and even the intense medical
specialization of our day, have not erased the cherished relation between
the doctor and the person who comes under his care. The family doctor is still
the family’s friend, advising on all sorts of non-medical problems. The relationship
is one based on confidence and trust in a person, not a system. It
is something the proposed assembly-line, impersonal process of socialized
medicine can never replace.
*****
When the noted Hindu scholar, Dr. Sarkar, was in Waterville recently, he
made a significant statement: “While it is true that European peoples from
England to Greece are grateful for American aid, that aid has made them hate
Americans. In every European nation today Americans are really hated.”
Dr. Sarkar went on to explain that we Americans exercise noticeable lack
of tact and diplomacy in our dealings with foreign peoples. We talk about the
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Marshall plan as charity and a dole for other nations instead of a means to
assure an outlet for American goods. However grateful an object of charity
may be, he deeply resents being such an object, and not infrequently he comes
actually to hate the giver.
Even in England the common man in the street resents American aid, and
the resentment is making him blind to his real troubles. His nation is far
from self-sufficient. She must import a third of her food, and all of her oil
and cotton. To pay for the imports she must export heavily_ But she cannot
do that unless she can produce goods at a cost that will meet the competition
of world markets. She is finding that she cannot meet that competition if,
to the normal costs of production, she must add an ever-rising cost of “cradle
to the grave security”. Foreign buyers will not pay higher prices for English
goods than they have to pay for the same goods in other countries, even to
make a socialist dream come true in England.
The English common man is seeing the cost of government become outright
prohibitive. Taxes in 1949 take over 40 per cent of total income. That the
cost of government must be carried by production and must be covered in the
selling price of goods is a simple economic reality. How then can British
goods possibly meet foreign competition?
Life in the socialist manner simply costs more than England can afford to
pay. If the British people want a socialist type of government, that is their
business, but they have no right to ask people of a non-socialist country to
pay for it.
Do you recall the statement once attributed to Lenin: “The united States
will spend itself out of existence~? Well, it is interesting to note that
European nations dependent upon us for aid are afraid of just that happening.
An American professor, who spent last summer in Europe, writes:
“In every country that I visited informed and thoughtful persons repeat-
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edly said that the worst catastrophe that could happen to the world would be
a serious depression in the United States. Those people know that a contributing
factor to such a depression would be the renewal of deficit spending by
our government. Rather than have that happen, those Europeans would prefer
to see aid to their own countries scaled down.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
40th Broadcast October 30, 1949
You often hear the remark, “What complicated lives we lead; how simply
our grandfathers lived”. Our technological age of electricity and petroleum,
of aviation and television, has brought us many complications, but the truth
is it has brought us a lot of simplicity as well.
In grandmother’s day boiling water for the morning coffee was a complicated
process. Months before, grandfather had sawed and split the four-foot
sticks of cord wood; and had cut some of it up fine into kindling. On one of
those winter mornings when ’twas so cold even grandpa’s cuss words would
freeze in the air, he’d crawl out of bed down into the icy kitchen, lift the
covers off the old cast iron cook stove, stuff in a little wad of paper and
carefully cross-lay the sticks of kindling. Then, making sure the dampers
were open, he would take off the shelf something few persons under forty years
of age have ever seen a Portland Star match. They came in attached sections
called cards — those smelly, old sulphur matches. When you struck one, a
burst of nauseating smoke preceded the blaze, and often you had to strike
several before you got any blaze at all. Those matches came six cards wrapped
in tissue paper, and twelve of those wrappers in a package, and the whole
package cost eight cents. At least, that was the price in our old store in
Bridgton. A mighty lot of matches for eight cents; but, believe me, grandfather
needed a lot of them when about three out of four wouldn’t wo;-k.
Please pardon the digression about matches, but I tell you grandfather
would appreciate it, because it might have taken him that long to get one of
those old Portland Stars to light. Well, when he did get it going, he touched
it to the paper, and soon the pleasant sound of a roaring wood fire filled the
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room. He didn’t immediately go out to the pump, thirty or forty feet from
the back door, to get a pail of water. No one in those days was so foolish as
to leave no water in the house overnight. Such forgetfulness would be disastrous,
because the pump was sure to be frozen solid on such a morning. So
grandpa just put the already filled tea-kettle on one of the front covers of
the stove. By this time grandmother was in the kitchen. Indeed in some families
it had been she rather than grandfather who had built the fire, because
he had early chores to do in the barn. Even if they lived in the village,
rather than on a farm, they usually had a horse and a cow.
Now it took time for those stove covers to heat up; it took even longer
for the cold water in that tea-kettle to come to a boil. But, before that moment
arrived, grandma had poured some of the heating water into the old,
blackened coffee pot. Then she put in generous spoonfuls of ground coffee,
perhaps ground in her own hand mill, but more probably in the big, two-wheeled
hand mill at the store. If they splurged a bit, that coffee was prime mocha
and java at 35 cents a pound. If they were comfortably financed, but thrifty,
it was a cheaper blend, like the yellow-canned Excelsior brand at 25 cents;
and if they had to economize sharply it was the rank old Rio (grandfather
called it Rio) at 18 to 20 cents a pound.
Finally when the coffee had boiled, grandmother poured it out into grandfather’s
big mustache cup, using a strainer over the spout, to hold back the
grounds. But same of those grounds always collected in the cup, and a few of
them found their way into grandfather’s gullet.
How different is grandaughter’ s way of making the morning coffee. A
turn of the faucet gives instantaneous hot water; a turn of the switch gives
immediate heat in the chosen unit of the electric range; the hot water put
into percolator or dripolator comes to a boil in a few seconds, seeps through
coffee ground finer than the old hand mill could ever get it, and before
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grandson even has time to apply lotion to his electrically razored face, the
coffee is ready to drink. Perhaps for grandaughter it has been even more simple
than that; she may have merely plugged in an electric percolator in which
ground coffee and water has been prepared the night before. Before grandpa
and grandma sat down to breakfast, someone of the family always braved the
bitter cold to go out to the pump. Taking the tea-kettle or a dish of boiling
water from it, that person primed the pump, and brought a big pail of fresh
water into the house. If it was Monday, and grandma was going to do the weekly
washing, that trip from kitchen to pump had to be repeated many times.
Faucets and switches, thermostats and hundreds of other automatic devices
make life pretty simple for us, compared with grandfather’s day, now don’t they?
The truth, of course, is that life is always both simple and complex, simple
in some ways, complex in others.
What many of us fail to appreciate is the complicated, painstaking, often
disappointing hours, days and years of thought, experiment and effort that have
made possible some of the simple things we take for granted. If you want to
know something about the time, money and brains that went into years of experiment
to bring two very common modern things, just read the story of celophane
and the story of nylon in this week’s issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
You will find it in the fourth installment of a series on the fabulous DuPont
family.
One item in the nylon story I cannot refrain from repeating. The wife of
a DuPont executive wore the same pair of nylons daily for fifteen months, subjecting
them to nightly washing, in order to find out how long’ they would wear
wi thout run or tear. The DuPonts say today’ s stockings won’t stand any such
test, not because the material isn’t good, but because most women demand sheer
hosiery rather than service weight.
*****
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Last week while in New York attending meetings of the College Entrance
Examination Board and the American Council on Education, it was my privilege
to take in the evening sessions of the famous Herald-Tribune Forum. For eighteen
years, under the dynamic leadership of Mrs. Ogden Reed, widow of the
Tribune’s most famous editor since Horace Greeley, that Forum has become a
great annual event of national and international importance. It was my good
fortune to attend it first in 1946, the year when the United Nations first
met in New York, giving Mrs. Reed an opportunity to gather distinguished
speakers from allover the world. We then heard Admiral Blandy, Vanever Bush,
and Barney Baruch on the problem of control of atomic energy. We listened to
the impassioned words of that later tragic leader of Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk.
We heard the venerable General Smith of South Africa, the young foreign
minister of Austria, the leader of the Labor Party in France, and were thrilled
by Walter Lippman’s memorable address on One World of Diversity.
This year the Forum was devoted to the subject “What Kind of Government
Ahead? The Responsibility of Every Citizen.” The scene of the Forum is one
of the most fashionable spots in New York — the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel. On the opening evening Mrs. Reed announced that people were
present from every state in the union, from Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Canada,
Mexico and from 19 countries overseas. On one evening Mrs. Marriner and
I sat next to people from Illinois and Montana; on the next evening our seat
neighbors came from Georgia.
The Forum consists of four sessions, three of which we attended. The
first was started by General Eisenhower on “The Individual’s Responsibility
for Government”, followed by Professor Lindsay Rogers of Columbia University,
author of many books on American government and politics. The rest of the
evening was devoted to the Democratic party — its program and its claims
for the voters’ support.
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Their opening speaker was senator Humphrey of Minnesota, the brilliant
young statesman who, more than any other man, had been responsible for the
civil rights plank in the platform voted at the Philadelphia convention -the
plank which drove Dixiecrats into open revolt. The Dixiecrats got in
their word through Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, who made me think
I was listening to the Ku Klux Klan itself. He waved the old flag of white
supremacy and states rights with vigor. Less bitter and more suave were the
words of Franklin Roosevelt Jr., reminding one, both in personal appearance
and in speech, of his distinguished father.
Two U. S. Senators have served as presidents of universities. Senator
Fullbright, a Rhodes scholar, was once president of the University of Arkansas.
Senator Frank Graham has long been the distinguished head of the University of
North Carolina. Liberal and progressive,Graham is no Dixiecrat, by whom he is
bitterly denounced for his views on freedom of speech and on race relations.
His calm, dignified address at the Forum was in pleasing contrast to the prejudiced
tirade of Representative Howard Smith.
Former Governor of New York, Herbert Lehman, summed up the case for the
party in what he called “A Blueprint for Democracy”, but the outstanding speech
of the evening was made by Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the man who
has won deserved fame for putting honesty and efficiency into that one of our
state governments which had perhaps the worst reputation of all 48. You felt,
as you listened to this man, that here was a politician whose commendable
deeds backed up his impressive words.
At the second session the Republicans had their turn. If it was a governor
who made a hit for the Democrats, it was a senator who gave the best presentation
of the Republican case — Senator Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Widely
known as the man who resigned his senate seat to become a front-line combat
officer in World War II, he was again elected to the senate by a large majority
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in a Democratic year. If the Republican party follows Lodge, it will follow
him into a forward-looking, progressive program, not back into the exploitation
and the isolationism of the not so good old days, to which benighted
leaders like Col. McCormick would have us return.
I was proud of our own Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the only woman
speaker at the Forum I s Republican session. After Senator Kem of Missouri had
lambasted the New Deal and the Fair Deal as entirely bad, and had insisted
that the federal government should do nothing at all on health, education and
housing~ and after Senator Morse advised measures that seemed no different
from the Democratic program than tweedledee seems different from tweedledumi
then .Mrs. ~~mi:th showed i:he wisdom of a middle of the road position between
those two extremes. She made it clear that social welfare legislation had begun
long before the time of FDR, but that what has happened during the past
17 years is more than a mere expansion of welfare benefits. It is, in Mrs.
Smith I s opinion, a dangerous change in fundamental philosophy. Her view is
that benefits should be based on proven need, not on the mere fact of existence.
She believes that these government aids are not rights belonging to
every American just because he lives in the united States, but are rights acquired
by misfortunes over which the individual has no control. If Mrs. Smith
had her way, she would put’some toughness into the notoriously loose regulation
of certain government aids and subsidies.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
41st Broadcast November 6, 1949
Among the common things that have now all but disappeared is the big
snow roller, so commonly seen on Maine winter roads half a century ago. A
Waterville man who travels constantly over the state in all seasons of the
year assures me that nowhere in Maine is the snow roller still in use. All
roads are now plowed to give traction to motor vehicles.
Was it mere whimsical memory that brought snow rollers to mind this week?
Not at all. I chanced to look at some Grandma Moses Christmas cards, and on
one of them appeared a picture of an old-time snow roller. It brought back
fond memories. My earliest recollection of the machine dates back to primary
school days, for the first school that I attended was next door to the
town hall, behind Which were sheds which housed the town’s road equipment.
OUtside those sheds, winter and summer, stood a big snow roller, and all of
us kids at that primary school made use of it at every recess. We climbed
to its top; we pretended to drive the four big horses that pulled it When
it went out on its mission; we played all sorts of games around its huge
side; and occasionally one of us fell off with more howls than bruises. “Keep
away from the snow roller or you’ll get killed”, was many a mother’s warning.
But none of us ever did keep away, and none of us were seriously hurt.
Perhaps some of our younger listeners don’t know what a snow roller
looked like. It consisted of two huge drums or barrels, six to eight feet
in diameter, to which a framework was fastened, so that When horses , attached
to the framework, pulled it along, the two big barrels, placed end to end,
rolled along over the top of the snow. The whole structure was weighted to
make the rollers press the snow down as solid as possible. The object was
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not to get the snow out of the road, as we must do today, so that wheeled
motor vehicles can travel. The obje~t was rather to keep the snow in the
road, but pressed down so hard that it would make easy traction for the runners
of sleighs and sleds.
In a winter when the snowfall was unusually heavy, the packed snow in
the middle of the road would be two or three feet deep, while the loose snow
beside the road might be four or five feet. It was not an uncommon experience
when one passed another team, to have the right runner of his own sleigh go
off the rolled part of the road, sink deep into the loose snow, while the
left runner stayed supported by the hard packed road. It took some smart balancing
to prevent a spill.
I recall one occasion when I was driving a spirited horse from Bridgton
to Harrison. A mile west of Harrison Village, on what is known as Brickyard
Hill, I had to turn out to pass another team. The sudden tilting of the sleigh
scared the horse, and she bolted. I landed in a drift head first, the sleigh
hit a stump, the horse broke away from the sleigh and kept running until she
pulled up in front of a livery stable door in the village. No one was hurt,
but the sleigh had to undergo major repairs.
Sometimes a single snowstorm was so heavy that four horses could not
pull the roller. Then six and even eight horses were used. After a big storm
it was a grand sight to see those eight big work horses pull the roller down
Main Street over the Tannery Bridge and down Depot Street to the narrow guage
railroad station. Today is the day of the big motor side plows, the giant
rotary plows, and the mechanical snow loaders. Useful articles of modern progress
they are, but none of them has quite the romantic touch of the old-time
snow rollers which Grandma Moses has thoughtfully remembered on a Christmas
card.
*****
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Maine is getting free advertising just now in the New York subways. Last
week on the Seventh Avenue line I saw the following sign: “Election Day. Tuesday
after the first Monday in November, fixed since 1845 when Congress designated
it for choice of Presidential Electors. Date observed in every state
except Maine.”
There is no logical, sensible reason Why we should be out of step with the
rest of the country in respect to our state elections. To hear certain politicians
talk, you would think there was something, not only historic, but eternally
sacred about our September election. It has always been~ therefore it
must always be. Every argument in favor of its continuance has long ago been
exploded in every other state. The cold figures show that it has never been a
barometer to predict the November election in a presidential year. In 1936,
for instance, the old slogan was corrected to read, “As Maine goes, so goes
Vermont.”
But logic and reason have very little to do with decisions on political
procedure. I doubt very much whether any early change will be made in the
date of state elections in Maine. We shall keep right on believing our way
is the best way and that it is the other 47 states which are out of step.
*****
Listeners to these programs are well aware that I do not favor socialized
medicine. I was naturally pleased, therefore, to hear opposition also
expressed at the Herald-Tribune Forum by a veteran of World War II who has
the respect and admiration of millions of Americans, for literally millions
have seen his memorable performance on the movie screen. I refer to Harold
Russell, the armless veteran, who won the Academy.Award for his depiction of
the disabled veteran in “The Best Years of our Lives”.
Mr. Russell was emphatic in his opposition to the kind of medical service
with which our British cousins seem to be getting quite fed up. Deeply
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appreciative of what the government has done for him as one who suffered severe
loss in the war, Mr. Russell nevertheless has shown the world, with unusual
courage and persistence, that even a person with most serious handicaps
can still do much for himself.
Mr. Russell said: “Private enterprise in the medical profession has not
failed the American people. On the contrary, the strides it has made are the
envy of the world. If there are not enough doctors or hospitals or nurses,
the way to cure those conditions is not to force our people into a compulsory
plan of health insurance. There are better, more truly American ways for the
federal government to help. Scholarships for medical education, subsidies to
hospitals, even support of voluntary health insurance are preferable to the
regimentation of government medicine.”
Tonight at eight o’clock in the Women’s Union of Colby College Waterville
citizens, as well as the medical profession itself, have an opportunity to hear
first-hand information about the workings of socialized medicine in England. A
physician of that country, Dr. Ralph Campbell, will state the case against
government-controlled medicine from his personal experience with it.
*****
Last week I told you a little about the first two sessions of the HeraldTribune
Forum, those devoted respectively to the claims of the Democratic and
Republican parties for voters’ support. One thing was made abundantly clear by
those discussions. The young men and women in both parties have something to
say and they must be heard. If either party fails to listen to the voice of
its younger element, it will pay a bitter price. It was obvious that the 3,000
people in the Waldorf ballroom were much more responsive to the words of Cabot
Lodge and Franklin Roosevelt Jr. than to those of Senator Kem and Representative
Howard Smith.
The voice of Col. McCormick, summoning us back to an isolated America, is
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a voice crying in a very deaf wilderness today. The great army of voters in
both major parties want a forward, not a backward, look. As indicated by the
Forum’s title, they want to know “What Kind of Government Ahead?”, not “What
Kind of Government Behind?”
Frankly it was somewhat refreshing when the final session of the Forum
turned away from party politics into the great non-partisan issues involved
in the Interdependence of World Problems. The outstanding speaker was a
woman, Barbara Ward, assistant editor of the Economist of London, who spoke
on Partnership for Survival. Her depth of understanding, her clarity of expression,
and her charming manner will make us long remember that this young
woman had something to say and said it very well.
Another woman speaker ran Miss Ward a close second — Dorothy Fosdick,
daughter of the great preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, who gave the commence.ment
address at Colby College last June. Miss Fosdick, who spent many delightful
summers on Mouse Island at the entrance to Boothbay Harbor, was a teacher
of political science at Smith College until, as she told the Forum, she decided
to get first-hand experience with government. She is now the only woman
member of the policy Planning staff of our Department of State.
We were eager to hear Mme. Pandit, the distinguished sister of Prime
Minister Nehru of India, because she is to visit Waterville this winter, when
she speaks at Colby College on the Averill Lecture series. The high nobility
of expression and the profound sincerity of this woman, who is Indian Ambassador
to the united States, is revealed in words like the following from her
Forum speech:
“Our Indian culture is based on the largest degree of tolerance for the
ways and views of others; in our long history we have never been tempted to
impose uniform ideologies or imperative precepts on either our own people or
other peoples of the world. More than a thousand years ago a great Indian
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king abjured violence as an instrument of government, and during the last
three decades we have had occasion to learn again the enormous efficacy of
non-vio1ent methods on a mass scale. A devotion to truth presupposes a respect
for what the other man sincerely regards as his truth, and a capacity to suffer
for what you consider to be your own. truth.”
As one listened to those.w0rds,he cou1d understand why this woman would
three times go to prison in defense of her ideas.
Other speakers at that final session made their impressions: ~ohn Sherman
Cooper, our new delegate to the united Nations; David OWen, the young
British assistant secretary general of the united Nations; Lucius Clay, hero
of the Berlin Air-lift; the brilliant young son of Count Sforza of Italy, who
told us about the Council of Europe, that new organization that is patiently
working toward a federation of the European states; and Louis Johnson, the
stormy petrel who is our Secretary of Defense.
Good as these speakers were, it was the women who made the most lasting
impressions: Barbara Ward of England, Dorothy Fosdick of the United States,
and Mme. Pandit of India. perhaps, if the past quarter century has been the
age of the forgotten man, the next quarter century will be the age of the
recognized woman.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
42nd Broadcast November 13, 1949
I am not the only person interested in old-time things. There are others
who can speak and write about them far better than I. One such person is Miss
Florence Nelson of Livermore, Maine, whose new book I am pleased to commend to
your attention. Under the imprint of the Falmouth Press in Portland, Miss
Nelson has written a volume which she entitles “Lest We Forget”. That trite,
nostalgic title does not do the book justice, for its contents, though indeed
nostalgic, are anything but trite.
Miss Nelson is an accomplished writer, with a style that gives both
clarity and pungency to the scenes and incidents, the customs and objects,
the anecdotes and sayings, which she brings to us from grandmother’s day_ Her
present horne at Livermore is a Mecca for visiting artists, authors and teachers.
A former teacher of Latin, Miss Nelson has a background of sound classical
education and wide travel from which to view in perspective the admittedly
narrow scene of the old New England homestead of two generations ago.
She is not writing from hearsay. From the broad perspective of a busy, erudite
and travelled life, Miss Nelson can now write about things of long ago,
II all of which she saw and part of which she was”.
Within the first two pages of Miss Nelson’s book one encounters the Balm
of Gilead tree. What memories that revives! There was such a tree in my grandmother’s
yard at Bridgton. Among a lot of old snapshots is one of my brother,
then five years old, standing with his little cart beside the huge trunk of
that spreading tree. Under its shade the whole family, including all the inlaws,
used to gather on warm Sunday afternoons, after one of grandmother’s
enormous dinners.
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What is the best proof that people lived on now abandoned spots where
not even an old cellar-hole remains? Lilac bushes! It is the lilacs, says
Miss Nelson, that provide the best evidence of homes gone by.
On this program I have previously referred to the amazement of mid-westerners
at what we Maine folk call a set of buildings. To be sure, the term
is now loosely used to denote all the near-by buildings on a place, including
a barn across the road. But the phrase “set of buildings” originally referred
to house, sheds, and barn, connected in one long·line. The arrangement, admittedly
dangerous in case of fire, had the big advantage of permitting passage
from house to barn without going out-of-doors. An example of Miss Nelson’s
delightful style is her witty and original simile taken from the old grammar
books. “A Maine set of buildings”, she writes, “is like a compound sentance,
with the two principal clauses, barn and house, connected by the conjunction
‘and’ — the shed.”
I certainly recall that the parlor in old-time Maine homes was said to
be reserved for weddings and funerals. I had forgotten what O. Henry would
have called a third ingredient until Miss Nelson’s book reminded me. The parlor,
she says, was reserved for weddings, funerals and the minister.
Probably that was true in most country homes, but not in the case of my
boyhood, because the one incident I best remember about a minister’s call
concerned the combined living room – dining room, between the kitchen and the
parlor in our house, and it also concerned that brother who stood with his
cart under the Balm of Gilead tree. My paternal grandmother was a devout
Methodist who would never countenance a game of whist or even High Low Jack,
but she was an inveterate player of solitaire. She knew she wasn’t supposed
to have playing cards in the house, but she probably rationalized that she
must be allowed some liberties as a Methodist in a Universalist household.
One day she was busy at her solitaire in the living room, with my bro-
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.——‘-
ther~ then four or five years old,playing on the floor. Suddenly my mother
rushed into the room saying, “Your minister’s coming up the street •. I think
he’s coming here. ‘.’ Hastily grandmother gathered up her cards,got out her
Bible, and ordered brother to pick up his scattered blocks.
In came the clergyman. Sober, religious conversation had scarcely begun
when my brother rushed up to grandmother, holding out a card in his hand.
“Here, grammy”, he said, “you forgot your ace of spades.”
Miss Nelson gives a description that would fit many an old-time Maine
parlor, certainly the one in my own boyhood home. Red ingrain carpet with a
rose pattern, partly covered with hooked rugs. Slippery, haircloth furniture
ornamented with knit tidies. How I recall especially the uncomfortable old
sofa with springs that all but penetrated a youngster’s hide! The marbletopped
table with the big family Bible. The shell that was said to hold yet
within itself the roar of the sea. The cardboard motto “God Bless OUr Home”.
The what-not loaded with bric-a-brac. My own home had neither melodeon nor
parlor organ, which Miss Nelson mentions, but it did have the closed blinds
to keep the sun from fading the carpet and wall paper.
Miss Nelson says so much about the cellar that I thought I must call her
to task for not mentioning the old word cellar-way, which meant the commodious
entrance at the top of the cellar stairs. But, finally I caught her
using the good old word. What a host of good things were stored in those
cellar-ways; pies by the dozen, pickles, jam, butter, milk, cheese, and hosts
of other goodies. In the cellar were the bins of apples and vegetables, the
barrel of salt pork, and a lot of other necessities. But it was the cellarway
that kept many things handy for both housewife and raiding youngsters.
As for the attic, Miss Nelson says, “An attic in a New England homestead
was often a history of New England told in things.” Speaking of the old
leather-covered trunks, she writes: “In one such trunk were a changeable
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green and black silk dress and a shirred bonnet given a wife by her husband
if she would give up smoking. She had always smoked her little clay pipe
after meals to aid digestion.”
As for the woodshed, some of us remember it not as Miss Nelson does
for its pleasant odor of curing wood and its big, frightening spiders, but
for a use which she mentions all too casually. Perhaps some of us owe more
than we realize to that occasional, but stern, command: “All right, son,
come out into the woodshed.”
How delightfully Miss Nelson writes of the hobbies of grandmother’s day~
the making of patchwork quilts and crazy quilts, of hair wreaths and samplers,
of hooked rugs and braided rugs. How feelingly she pays respect to the old
watering troughs, the ferries, and the wandering bands of gypsies.
With one item Miss Nelson brings back a memory long forgotten: Larkin
soap. Is there a man or woman who lived in a Maine country town fifty years
ago who did not .at sometime ring door bells to sell Larkin Soap for the varied
and lurid premiums offered? Neither the Fuller Brush Man nor the Saturday
Evening Post boy ever quite replaced the Larkin Soap clubs.
The old-time things I have mentioned tonight are only a few of those in
Miss Nelson’s splendid book. It is replete with fond and lingering memories.
I recommend it as the perfect Christmas gift for friend or relative who remembers
the good old days.
*****
Now let us turn from old-time things to the foremost issue of our own
day — the threat of communism as it spreads through Asia. When we confront
these problems, we over and over again see how easily the almighty dollar
gets in the way of the noblest ideals. While we would stop communism by diplomatic
means, we proceed to encourage it by economic means. Listen to what
that competent and experienced correspondent, A. T. Steele, said at the
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Herald-Tribune Forum:
“OUr trade with China is more important to the Communists than it is
to us. And the Communists are not doing badly, even without our government’s
recognition. Published figures show that the Communists imported more than
$4,000,000 worth of goods into North China ports during the month of September
and exported more than $3,000,000 worth. Interestingly, the United States
was well up in front in this commerce. In August more than 40 per cent of
Tientsin’s trading going and coming was with our country.” It’s an old, old
story. Patriotism exercises a slim hold where profits are concerned. We
should not soon forget the scrap iron sold to Japan in the 1930’s, scrap
iron that came· back to us in the bodies of American boys kil’led far from
home.
What a common thing is school. How unquestioningly we Americans take
it for granted. How hard it is for us to realize what lack of education means
to millions of people in the world. At the Herald-Tribune Forum Mrs. Brandon,
famous correspondent just returned from Java, was asked the question, “What
future do you see for an independent Indonesia?” Because, as some of you
will recall, I had been present at the meeting of the Security Council of the
U. N. last January, when our Mr. Jessup made his bitter denunciation of Dutch
obstruction to Indonesian independence, I was especially interested in Mrs.
Brandon’s reply. What future did she see for an independent Indonesia?
She said: “The new independence must retain some sort of partnership
with the Dutch. Need for Dutch assistance arises from the fact that Indonesians
lack training, knowledge and experience with government, business and
trade. Less than eight per cent of the 78,000,000 people are literate. In a
nation where now only one person in twelve can read or write, education will
be slow, expensive and difficult.”
Even in this land of knowledge and plenty — these bountiful United
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States — there is much to show that education is still slow, expensive and
difficult. Progress means eternal vigilance and constant struggle against
ignorance. One innate right of every child is the right to know. If peace
and harmony ever come to a war-torn world, they will come not through atomic
bombs and annihilation of enemies, but through education — through the
spread of knowledge that teaches us, as Mme. Pandit put it, to have respect
for what the other fellow sincerely regards as his truth, and a capacity to
suffer for what we consider to be our own truth.
*****
How long has it been since cows were driven to pasture through the
streets of Waterville or Bangor? No doubt there are men now living in both
cities who thus drove cows. If so, let’s hear from them. Harry Vose, the dry
goods salesman, tells me that his brother Thomas used to drive cows from the
corner of Western Avenue and pleasant Street in Waterville down Silver Street
and Lower Main Street, across the Ticonic Bridge, to pasture in Winslow.
Harry tells me of a man still living who used to drive a cow from the Western
Avenue end of Burleigh Street to pasture beyond Cool Street. Were cows ever
pastured on the old circus field in the vicinity of what is now West, Bartlett
and Burleigh Streets? Who knows? Come forward, you old cow drivers, let’s
hear from you.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
43rd Broadcast November 20, 1949
One of the commonest things in life is food. Probably most of us pay too
much attention to it, digging our graves with our teeth or worrying about a
restricted diet. In any event right now it costs a lot to feed a family. What
is the prospect for 19501
The following predictions are not mine. I have neither inside information
nor peculiar wisdom on this subject of food prices. But I am inclined to give
you predictions made by the journal, u. S. News and World Report, because I
have found that magazine very reliable on practical economic analyses.
The prediction is that the family’s food bill is going to be somewhat
lower next year. Housewives will have some of the grocery money to spend for
other things. Most meats, vegetables, and fruits will be cheaper. Supplies
will be large, meaning lower prices in the stores. The chances are that $18
in 1950 will buy as much as $20 bought in 1949.
In 1948 the average family spent 27.7 per cent of its net income on food.
This year the percentage has dropped to 26.3. In 1950 it is expected to drop
to 25 per cent. If that happens, spending for food will be 2.6 billions less
than it would be if present prices prevailed. It means that more will be left
over for other things the family needs, because 1950 wages are not expected
to drop below those of 1949 • In industry the big drop in take-home pay,
caused by the reduction or elimination of overtime, had already occurred before
1949.
Let’s take a look at a few commodities. While in general meat will be
somewhat cheaper, we shall see a shift in different kinds of meat. Pork will
offer the biggest bargains, with bacon and ham substantially lower. Beef will
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be no more plentiful than now, but its price will come down a little as it
competes with cheaper pork. Steak may come back to many tables.
Lamb, on the other hand, will be scarce and will rise in price. Production
of sheep is at the lowest per capita rate in u. S. history. In dairy
products, butter, cheese and eggs will be cheaper, but the controlled price
of milk will probably keep its cost up to present level even though supplies
will definitely be larger.
The fruit situation is not uniform. Killing frosts cut the grapefruit
crop to about a quarter of the normal amount, and prices may be higher. Oranges,
however, will be a lot cheaper when volume shipments get under .way in
December. The big crops of apples assures lower prices, and even bananas are
expected to be a bit cheaper. Most vegetables, too, will be lower priced.
Frozen vegetables will be in record abundance and prices are certain to be cut.
On one commodity the warning sign is already out. That is coffee. Drought
in Brazil and disasters in other regions have made a deep cut in world supplies.
Prices will climb steadily, forcing many families out of the market for
high grade coffee. Some alarmists predict that before next December coffee
may be selling for a dollar a pound. Coffee, however, will be a glaring exception
to next year’s trend. It is really going to cost us less to eat next
year.
*****
One of the common words on people’ s lips today is the word “pension”. Of
course everyone wants it. The days when the unfortunate aged could only go to
the poor house are happily over. Society rightfully recognizes the responsibility
for those whom an increasingly competent and diligent medical profession
are causing to become an ever larger proportion of the population. But how to
meet that responsibility is the problem. Certain big unions say industrial managementmust
bear the whole burden; plenty of thinking people demand contri-
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butions from both employer and worker.
Whichever method finally prevails, one thing is sure. This is a world
in which we do not get something for nothing. For every gain there is likely
to be a compensating .loss. Most of us are pleased to know and are proud of
the fact that, even in this day of the titanic corporations like General
Motors and DuPont, General Electric and U. S. Steel, American Telephone and
Telegraph and the pennsylvania Railroad, there are still thousands of small
businesses in America. And it is an essential point in what we call the American
way of life that these small businesses shall survive and prosper.
Regardless of which side you take in the current government action against
one of the great food chains, if you are a real American you are glad that
independent merchants are still doing business in your town.
Has it occurred to you that universal adoption of business-financed
pension plans, such as those for which many workers are now on strike,
would work to the decided disadvantage of small business. Take a look at a
period only a little more than ten years ago. 1937 was a relatively good business
year; the nation was recovering from the great depression. Yet in that
year 57 per cent of all corporations reported deficits. In 1938 a recession
had set in, and there were fears of real depression again. In that year 61
per cent of all corporate businesses were in the red. Under such conditions
any fixed charge, say 6 per cent of payrolls to carry pension plans, would
hit hardest the companies having most difficulty to stay solvent, and those
are always the small companies. Some of the proposed pension plans, therefore,
would tend to squeeze the smaller and weaker companies; they would make the
start of a new business more difficult than it already is.
Some kind of pension plan, giving reasonable security to the aged or the
incapacitated, is certain to come. In modern, highly industrialized society
it is a compelling must. But among the leaders of labor and of management
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there ought to be both the will and the wisdom to find a pension method that
will not give the death blow to small business, which in spite of the great
achievements of the Fords, the McCormicks, the Firestones, the Carnegies,
and the Rockefellers, has always been the backbone of American commercial
life.
*****
To Emery Heggarty of Silver Street I am indebted for a chance to inspect
an old account book of 1889, the original contents of which represented a
small business in dry goods at Readfield, Maine. The sales accounts reveal
some interesting prices of 60 years ago. Five dozen spools of Clark’s thread
went for $3.00. Standard checked prints were 5! cents a yard. Brown cotton
was 8 cents a yard, bleached cotton 9 cents. Good ticking brought twenty
cents a yard, and the same was true of heavy duck. The books give some idea
of the profits made on those sales. The dealer bought Merrimac prints for 7
Cents_~ a yard:- & sold them for 8 cents, but he must have got a bargain on his
supply of Hamburton prints, because he bought them for 6! cents and sold them
for ten cents.
At some time the book was apparently used as an album for postage stamps,
and on a single page one lone pasted stamp remains, a six cent revenue stamp
of long ago. But many listeners to this program who I know are interested in
railroads would find the most interesting part of this old account book to be
the two pages on which are listed the names of all the locomotives of the
Maine Central Railroad up to No. 66. The first five of those engines were
named respectively the Androscoggin, the Ticonic, the Timothy Boutelle, the
Morrill and the Penobscot. Many of them were named for towns: the Bangor, the
Lewiston, the Farmingdale, the portland, the Bath, the Brunswick, the Richmond,
the Augusta, the Gardiner, and the Hallowell. Among the persons remembered
in the engine names were R. B.Dunn, General Sherman, A. D. Lockwood, I. S.
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Cushing, Abner Coburn, Oliver Moses, David Putnam and Josiah Drummond.
Engine No. 39 was the Waterville, No. 40 was the Skowhegan and 52 was
the Fairfield. The old book records that No. 64 was the Arthur Sewall, leaves
No. 65 blank and gives No. 66 simply as MCRR.
Mr. Heggarty has also shown me a copy of Goldthwait’s Rail Road Map of
New England and Eastern New York, published in 1849 and advertised by the .
printer as “compiled from the most authentic sources”. Only a small portion
of Maine is shown on this map, whose very northeast corner is Waterville.
The Kennebec and Portland Railroad, now the Portland-Bangor main line of the
Maine Central, had not quite reached Augusta, but the Androscoggin and Kennebec
— what we now call the back road — ran all the way to Waterville. The
Atlantic and St. Lawrence — what we now call the Grand Trunk — was nearing
completion all the way from Portland to Montreal. The western division of the
Boston and Maine was then the York and Cumberland Railroad, while the eastern
division was the Portland, Saco and Portsmouth. There were 19 different railroads
in Massachusetts alone; the Vermont Central had already laid its track,
and the Rutland Railroad ran all the way to Burlington.
Think of it! All this in less than twenty years after the operation of
the first successful short lines in South Carolina and in Maryland.
*****
What magazine or periodical was most commonly seen in the homes of half
a century ago? It was indeed the Youth I s Companion. When, after more than a
hundred years, that publication. ended its days, many of us felt as if a beloved
friend had gone. It had started long before my day, in fact away back
in 1827, and it was a Maine man, Nathaniel Willis of portland,who launched
the paper on its memorable career. Miss Nelson, about whose book I spoke last
week, assures us that the Youth’s Companion was always printed on Maine paper,
made at one mill.
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When I first knew the magazine, it had the glossy yellow cover, without
picture, but with table of contents on it. Before I had entered high school,
however, the olive green cover, more familiar to the boys and girls of my
generation, had appeared. Not only did the Youth’s Companion have stories
that appealed to young people. To read it was a kind of general education.
Its short articles, some of them only a paragraph or two in length, told us
about all sorts of interesting things in a world we knew very little about.
For the geographical span of a child’s life in the 1890’s was very narrow indeed.
The kid who got forty miles away from home before he entered high
school was regarded as a world traveler by his associates.
What the Companion’s many imitators failed to realize was that its editors
demanded stories and articles of real literary merit. They refused to agree
with the old conception of writing for children, that the author must write
down to the child’ s intelligence. The Companion, while keeping much of its
material within the vocabulary and understanding of children in the grades,
always wrote up, not down. In every issue there was much to make a boy’s intellectual
reach exceed his grasp, and there is no better educational procedure
than that of stretching of one’s brains.
If I seem to imply that the Youth’s Companion was enjoyed solely by children,
there are many listeners who will call me to task. Let”me forestall
such a protest right now. The Companion was read by everybody in the family.
Somet~es the kids had a hard time getting a look at each issue on the day it
arrived in the mail. Father or mother would be buried in it about the time
Junipr wanted it himself.
I think the favorite stories, if one could take a vote of all ages who
read the Companion at the turn of the present century, would be C. A. Stephens’
stories of the Old Farm. How well we came to know every field and building,
almost every tree and stone, on that farm; and what grand characters were the
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old squire, his motherly wife, and the host of brothers, sisters, uncles,
aunts and cousins that made up the dramatic personnel of those grand stories.
Brought up within a few miles of ‘Stephens” ‘palatial home at the foot
of Pennesseewassee Lake, near Norway Village, I heard a lot about him as a
writer, traveler and editor. Home folks were somewhat awed by his opera singer
wife, and they seldom caught a glimpse of him. For a man who wrote stories
about democratic sociability and the New England hospitality, Stephens had the
local reputation of being an aristocrat, if not. actually a snob. But that man
certainly could write.’- After Stephens’ death, John Clair Menot, the only
Companion editor whom I ever knew personally, told me that in the vaults of
the old Companion Building on Columbus Avenue in Boston were unpublished manuscripts
of -Stephens t ,_ ,; , – stories in such profusion that they could continue
to publish one every week for ten years.
The Companion has gone, and nothing ever quite took its place, though
its imitators, from St. Nicholas to Jack and Jill, have been numerous. Most
of them have been short-lived. Much of the confusion and perplexity of our
day stems from the fact that people, even young people, have so little in
common. No unity holds us together. Half a century ago all boys and girls
who could read and write had a common unifying force – the Youth’s Companion.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
44th Broadcast November 27, 1949
I promised you that tonight we should hear more about cows in the streets
of waterville. No subject mentioned on this program has brought a more generous
response. If I mention only a few names, it is not because other contributions
have not been valuable, but simply because we haven’t the time for
more.
The first person to call me — even before I had left the studio two
weeks ago — was Chester Hussey of Walnut Street, who has more than once supplied
me with information for these programs. Mr. Hussey says that sixty years
ago cows were pastured on what was then a vacant lot on the east side of Elm
Street, directly opposite the entrance to Winter Street.
Ted Branch thinks there is something wrong about Mr. Hussey’s memory,
ei ther of time or location. Ted says his memory goes back well beyond sixty
years and he can recall no cows pastured on that section of Elm Street. But
Mr. Hussey is sure that, between the Abbott house on the corner of Elm and
Spring Streets and the Smith house at Elm and Temple Streets, was a vacant lot
that stretched back of the Congregational Church all the way down to the rear
of buildings on Charles Street. Temple Court was then only a lane through the
pasture. Were cows pastured there in 1895? Can anyone support Mr. Hussey’s
contention?
Mr. Branch was himself a cow driver of experience. He is the man who used
to drive cows from the corner of pleasant Street and Western Avenue out to
pasture beyond the Messalonskee.
A lot of people remember when the land between the Hayden Brook gully
and the Messa10nskee was known as Burleigh Field, and there seem to be scores
of citizens who attended circuses there. But I was especially pleased to re-
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ceive a call from the man whose father purchased that field and gave it its
best remembered name. Mr. Hall Burleigh of the Augusta Road tells me that
the land between Gilman Street and western Avenue on one axis and between
gully and stream on the other axis was once two distinct lots with a board
fence, running from gully to stream, dividing them. Mr. Burleigh recalls
that he and his brother John, as young fellows, had the job of tearing down
that old fence after their father bought the two lots.
The old name of Western Avenue was Mill Street and at one time there
were at least four different factories operating on the stream near what is
now the Western Avenue bridge. One of those was the first factory in this
part of the state to make the old brimstone matches that I talked about a
few weeks ago.
But let’s get back to the cows. Lucien Audet of the Exchange Hotel calls
my attention to Mr. Boudreau, a resident of the hotel, a man over 80, who recalls
that back in days when the old covered bridge connected Waterville with
Winslow, fully 70 years ago, cows used to be driven from Pleasant street to
Winslow for pasture. Mr. Boudreau once sold pond lilies, two for a nickel,
on waterville’s Main Street. Where did he get his stock in trade? From the
swamp between Charles and Elm Streets.
In spite of all these responses, I do not yet have the answer to my original
question. That question was, how long has it been since cows were driven
to pasture through the str~ets of Waterville? A local citizen whom I consider
to be still a young lady recalls distinctly that her father kept a cow in the
family barn on Silver Street, not far from the corner of Spring Street, and
she naturally assumes that Bossy must have been driven somewhere to pasture.
By my figuring that urbanized cow of downtown Silver Street must have been
cropping grass in some pasture as late as 1915. Can anybody beat that?
Of all the communications that have reached me about cows, I now come to
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the best. I think you will agree that it is a grand story, because it not
only deals with old-time things and ways, but it is a wonderful example of
what American democracy really means. It is the story of one of Waterville’s
best known business men, Mr. Napoleon Marshall. Fifty-five years ago Mr. Marshall,
then eleven years old, drove three cows from a barn on Ash Street
down across Ticonic Street, up Kelsey to Upper Main Street, and into a pasture
across the street from the Bartlett homestead. The pay was 25 cents per
week, but Mr. Marshall says what appealed to him even more were the good
things to eat, provided to a growing boy by the wife and daughters of the
man who owned the cows. Sometimes young Marshall would show up at the house
right after dinner. The good lady would make him lie down on the lounge -notice
the word, not couch or divan, but that good old piece of furniture
called the lounge. She would make him lie down for res.t, then stuff him with
cake or cookies and milk before he went after the cows. In 1895 the owner
presented the boy with a heifer calf, and Marshall was then the proudest
youngster in the neighborhood. For seven years that good Jersey supplied
milk to the Marshall family.
Now I told you this story had special significance as an instance of
true American democracy. You will note that up to this point I haven’t named
Marshall’s employer, the owner of the cows. It was Samuel Osborn, the negro
janitor of Colby College. An ex-slave, finding freedom and respected standing
in this Maine town, far from his land of servitude, was an employer now.
He could pay a white boy 25 cents a week to take his cows to and from pasture,
and the white boy was proud to call that gracious colored gentleman
not only his employer, but his benefactor and friend. That is real democracy.
*****
When I was a boy in high school favorite selections for speaking contests
were taken from both the prose and the verse of Holman Day. It was then
that I first encountered that rollicking ballad in which Day recounts how
the steamboat Ezra Johnson tooted up the Kennebec, floated inland on an early
autumn dew, and came to rest on a Sidney farm. A lot of people have heard of
that fictitious river boat, the Ezra Johnson, thanks to the popularity of
Holman Day.
The time is approaching, however, when no one will remember a real Kennebec
steamboat which had an experience something like the Ezra Johnson. for
that real boat sailed the Kennebec just sixty years ago. Certainly there must
be Waterville citizens who remember the boat, but I believe Dr. J. Fred Hill
and Fred J. Arnold were the last survivors of the joyous crowd that went on
that vessel’s maiden voyage. She bore the proud, local name of The City of
Waterville, and the occurrences of her first trip would have provided Mark
Twain with a story equal to his best Mississippi River yarns.
In the late 1880’s William T. Haines, later to be Governor of Maine, but
then a waterville attorney, proposed that navigation between Hallowell and
waterville be reopened in order to secure cheaper freight service. His plan
to build a steamer to make daily round trips between the two cities met with
approval. Waterville business men formed the Waterville Merchant Steamboat
Company with L. H. Soper as president, and many merchants and professional
men subscribed to the stock.
A contract was let to a boat builder at Brewer who in July 1890 had ready
for delivery to the Waterville company a flat bottomed, keelless boat, 90
feet long, with a 20 foot beam, powered by the most up-to-date steam engine
of the time.
Just who first suggested a big party cruise to bring the boat to Waterville
history does not record. Anyhow the stock holders agreed that it would
be good publicity to have the sponsors themselves sail the boat down the Penobscot,
round the coast to the mouth of the Kennebec, and up the Kennebec to
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Waterville. So it came about that forty of the more prominent stock holders
gathered at Brewer, having selected as skipper for the trip Erastus Warren of
Winslow, who had a reputation for being one of the best log drivers that
ever worked the Kennebec. Events were to prove that his knowledge of navigation
was limited to keeping on a pine log as it shot down river rapids -no
mean accompliShment indeed, but hardly the training for piloting a 90
foot keelless boat.
The story goes that there was plenty of refreshment aboard, including
much in liquid form, though several of the touring stock holders were staunch
prohibitionists. At any rate, when the boat reached Rockland, the whole party
agreed that they were having a wonderful time. To be sure, the big sternwheeler
was drawing more water than she should, and when she neared the Rockland
landing and tried to give an appropriate salute, water spouted through
her whistle and the expected blast fizzled into a dud. The next evening they’
had another celebration at Bath, where the City of Waterville, after a calm,
eventless voyage along the coast, had tied up for the night. One day more
would see the new boat at her home port of Waterville.
On that last day fortune took another turn. Fog set in, as it often does
in dog days down river. Cruising aimlessly and sightlessly in Merrymeeting Bay
the steamer came to a sudden stop. She had run onto a ledge. When the sun
broke through the clearing mist, close by was the riverbank and a farmer
working in a field. Captain Warren hailed him. The farmer ran to the river
bank and with frantic gestures yelled, “Get to tarnation out of there. It’s
full of rocks.” That was no news to the joy riders, because the sunlight now
showed them almost high and dry. Like Holman Day’s “Ezra Johnson”, the City
of Waterville had very nearly landed in a field.
As a result of strenuous labor they finally got the steamer back into the
main channel. probably, to accomplish that task, the party had changed from
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the tall silk hats and Prince Albert coats which they had worn the previous
ev~ning at Bath.
By noon they had reached Augusta, where a boisterous welcome was given
by officials and townspeople. Sure that they could reach Waterville before
dark, they started out again but got only a few hundred yards. For just under
the Augusta railroad bridge they ran on to a gravel reef, where they had to
stay overnight. The next morning, with the aid of river drivers and horses,
they managed to get free and headed for the locks on the east side of the
river. By this time the party had enough of captain Warren’s navigation, so
they demoted him to deck hand and selected a new skipper, Warren C. Philbrook,
a young man who later was to be a distinguished justice of the Maine Supreme
Court.
When the boat emerged from .the locks the new skipper met a real test.
Without a keel the craft was poorly fitted to fight the stiff current just
above the Augusta dam. The steamer started to move sideways, heading toward
the dam, with the passengers getting more and more sure that they were in
for a river bath. But Skipper.Philbrook and his crew won the day when the
ship finally began to gain on the current, and the last leg of the journey
home was under way.
For the new steamer the company had built a brand new dock. The old
city dock was located near Ticonic Falls, on the west bank, not far from
where the Lockwood storehouse now stands. The new landing place for the City
of Waterville had been erected farther down the river, on Pooler’s Point,
almost exactly opposite the junction of the Sebasticook with the Kennebec.
As word came that the new steamer, expected the day before but disappointingly
delayed, was at last nearing Waterville, the whole town turned
out. When the big barge for that was what the square-boxed freighter
looked like — came into view, a brass band burst into tune and cheers arose.
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The passenger stock holders smoothed out their Prince Alberts and polished
the sheen of their silk hats. All was now ready for triumphant landing.
But, alas, the bad luck that began two days before in Merrymeeting Bay
had not yet departed. Just as the steamer started to turn from the Winslow
bank to head into her smart new landing, she again struck a ledge. And
there, just off shore from the Winslow Congregational Church, she refused to
budge. Her chagrined and disgusted stock holders could only take to row
boats and make an ignominious landing on the waterville side.
As for the sequel, the Waterville Merchant Steamboat Company did operate
for a brief period between this city and Hallowell, but that ill-fated steamer,
the City of Waterville, last-of the river’s old stern-wheelers, never achieved
its goal of daily return trips between the two cities. After brief, in-.
termittent use here on the upper river, under Captain Bradford Mitchell, it
was sold to a Virginia firm, and stern-wheeled her way to a southern port,
never to return.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
45th Broadcast December 4, 1949
A very common thing is paper, and the mills of the united States and
Canada rollout 28 million tons of it every year. The average American uses
357 pounds of paper products, nearly a pound for every day of the year. Each
of J.some twenty big metropolitan newspapers uses enough newsprint every twelve
months to stretch a paper path, fifteen newstrips wide from the earth to the
moon.
Now most of this paper is made from wood pulp, a product for which Maine
has become justly famous. Maine’s paper mills are among the best in the nation.
But modern scientific achievement has found other uses besides paper
for Maine’s gigantic annual crop of pulpwood. Molded wood products, tire
cord, rayon and cellophane are only a few of the new synthetics. And right
here on College Avenue in Waterville some of these new products are being made.
More than 2,000 tons of wood pulp every month — 25,000 tons a year — finds
its way into the molded pulp food containers, the tableware and the fibrous
plastic products which the Keyes Fibre Company ships to every corner of the
united States.
Maine industry, whose finish has been prophesied by doleful Cassandras
for many a day, is still a very lively corpse and is destined to linger on as
long as pulpwood floats down Maine rivers and as long as keen scientists in
Maine factories ponder over their test tubes.
*****
What did the school children of Maine learn about the world 116 years
ago? The answer has been made accessible to me by Mr. Horatio Jolicoeur of
Pleasantda1e Avenue, Waterville. In Mr. Jolicoeur’s possession is a copy of
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Malte-Brun School Geography, publiShed in Hartford, Connecticut in 1833.
The author points out that previously the child had first studied the
solar system, then got down to earth. He says, “The common method of teaching
geography requires the feeble intellect of childhood, with a small stock of
ideas, and a very limited vocabulary, immediately to comprehend the solar
system; a task which demands the energy of a mature mind. In this new book
the pupil is made to begin with the spot where he lives. He is then led to
adjacent towns, his whole native state, his own nation, and then to foreign
lands.”
Makers of school geographies in this middle of the twentieth century
pride themselves on their objective honesty, their depiction of all places
on the earth just as those places actually exist. Without doubt, Mr. S. G.
Goodrich, who arranged that 1833 edition of the Malte-Brun Geography, thought
he was just as factual and objective. But he was a Connecticut Yankee, his
nation was only 46 years old; there is no evidence that he had ever travelled
west of the Alleghenies; and he did a pretty good job at a~-chair geographic
writing. But what he wrote — and therefore what boys and girls of
the 1830′ s learned — about many parts of the world reflected more of the
popular imagination of the time than of objective fact.
Of Greenland this book says, “The people are of the same race as the
Eskimos, dull in intellect and feeling. Children bury their parents to get rid
of the trouble of maintaining them.” The book devotes three pages to Brazil
and nothing to Argentina, because in 1833 there was no Argentina. It was then
part of what was called the united Provinces, including not only modern Argentina,
but also Uruguay and Paraguay. Brazil was quite a country with an
assured future, the geographer tells us. But of the great fertile plain of
La Plata, the foundation of the modern Argentine’s great wealth, he has only
this to say: “Immense herds of horses and cattle may be seen in a wild state
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on the plains. The people take these animals with a rope called a lasso.
This has a noose at one end, and is thrown by men on horseback with such
uunerring skill that the noose invariably catches the animal by the neck or
leg.”
The writer acknowledges that Buenos Aires is quite a city, but he has
no kind words for it as a port for ships: “Few ships can reach it”, he
writes, “because the river is full of rocks and shallows. Large vessels must
unload about ten miles from the city.”
After paying his respects to the dreary wastes of Lapland, the author
says: “The people are exceedingly attached to their country and prefer it to
every other. This doubtless arises from ignorance and the force of habit.”
It is interesting to learn that “The Turks are believers in Mahomet, an
Arabian who lived about 1,200 . years ago. He called himself the prophet of
God, and under the pretended influence of divine inspiration wrote a book
called the Koran. Such are the indolent habits of the Turks that even a carpenter
sits at his work, and holds the board upright with his toes while he
saws it.”
We must recall that slavery was well established in America in 1833.
Only a few ~rusading souls like William Lloyd Garrison and Elijah Lovejoy had
dared speak out against it. Four years after this book was published Lovejoy
was to die at the hands of a mob for insisting on repeated publication of
his anti-slavery views. Let us charitably remember the state of the negro
slave in America before we judge too harshly what this geography tells us
about the negro in Africa. Here is the passage in the Mal te-Brun book:
“The most numerous people of Africa are the negroes. The physical properties
of the country perpetuate the indolent levity and childish carelessness
for which the race is well known. Twenty days’ work in a year are enough
to supply the rice, millet and other products that make up their frugal fare.
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Their gross taste is not disgusted with the flesh of the elephant, even when
full of vermin. They feed on the eggs of the crocodile and on his musky flesh;
monkeys are generally used for food.
“Such is the negro. Having few wants, and those easily satisfied, he
lives a life of indolence and gaiety. A stranger to our feelings of ambition,
he looks on life as a brief interval to be enjoyed while it lasts. He waits
for sunset to begin his giddy dance, then keeps it up all night. Whatever
strikes his irregular imagination becomes his fetish or the idol of his worship.
He is unable to learn the simplest arts, as witness the fact that after
hundreds of years of opportunity he has not tamed the elephant. II
We wonder if this old geographer was a free-trader. In writing about Japan
he says, “The country has no taxes to interrupt the progress of trade.” The
truth is that neither this geographer nor any other westerner knew much about
Japan. In fact what this book says about foreigners in Japan is especially
interesting because it mentions a place made famous by the atomic bomb, Nagasaki.
“In Kuisiu is the harbor and town of Nagasaki. Here on a rock, 288 paces long,
live a few Dutch people, in a state of seclusion and solitude, ignorant of all
the rest of the world. They are the only foreigners permitted in the Japanese
dominions …
Listen to this on the Philippines: “The Philippine Isles are said to be
1,200 in number. They abound in marshy, mossy ground and lakes. Although they
produce quantities of rice, cotton, tobacco and tropical fruits, the native
tribes are so wild and the Spanish settlements so few, that they are unlikely
ever to be of commercial importance.”
Of the South Sea islanders, whose remote ancestors drove their light
canoes across thousands of miles of ocean and perhaps erected the strange
statues on Easter Island, this geographer has small respect. “These little,
five-foot islanders”, says he, “are an inferior race, both in intellectual
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and moral character, below all others on the earth. When encountered by the
fairer races, they have always retreated, incapable of maintaining their
ground.”
On a later program I propose to tell you some of the things this old
geography tells about our own country, with due reference to the State of
Maine. Tonight’s references from the book have been to foreign lands. Now
this is our question. Are today’s children taught any more objectively and
factually about lands far away than were the youngsters of 1833? Sometimes
we wonder.
*****
On one of these broadcasts last winter I referred to the remarkable
prayers with which the Reverend Peter Marshall, Chaplain of the U. S. Senate,
opened the daily sessions of that most deliberative body in the world •. Dr.
Marshall’s sudden death was a loss to the whole nation. Now, less than a year
after his passing, the government printing office has brought out an attractive
neatly bound volume, containing in chronological order the prayers with which
Dr.. Marshall opened the Senate from January 6, 1947 to January 24, 1949 -the
day before he died. On January 27 the vice-president presented Dr. Crawford
of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington to make·the opening prayer. Dr.
Crawford said “The prayer I shall offer this morning was written for this
session by Dr. Peter Marshall, as one of the last things he did before he
died. II Then Dr. Crawford read this typically Marshall prayer: “Deliver us,
our Father, from futile hopes and from clinging to lost causes, that we may
move into ever-growing calm and ever-widening horizons. Where we cannot convince,
let us be willing to persuade, for small deeds done are better than
great deeds planned. We know that we cannot do everything. But help us to do
something. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.”
In that 80th Congress and in the opening days of the 81st, Peter Marshall
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was the conscience of the Senate. His voice was soft and gentle, but his words
cut cleanly through the pompousness and demagoguery on Capitol Hill. Senator
Kilgore of West Virginia once said of him, “Peter Marshall expresses more feeling
and says more in his short prayers than all the Senators put together the
rest of the day.”
On the day when Alben Barkley first took the chair as regular presiding
officer of the Senate, following his inauguration as Vice President of the
United States, Peter Marshall prayed: “May he never feel lonely in this chair,
but always be aware of Thy hand upon him and Thy spirit with him. When differences
arise, as they will, may Thy servants in this chamber be not disturbed
at being misunderstood, but rather be disturbed at not understanding.”
Don’t think that Dr. Marshall’s prayers applied only to senators. They
had a convincing universality, applicable to people in many walks of life.
Just see how the following sentences, taken from several different prayers,
apply to you.
“Grant that we may like what we must do, since we know we cannot always
do what we like.”
“If we need to make up our minds, Thou who didst make our minds can show
us how to make them up. n
“Today is the tomorrow we were worrying about yesterday, and we see how
foolish our anxiety was.”
“May we be able to disagree without being disagreeable and to differ
without being difficult.”
“Save us from hot heads that would lead us to act foolishly, and from
cold feet that would keep us from acting at. all.”
“When we have the truth, let us not hit each other over the head with it,
but rather use it as a lamp to lighten dark places, in order that we may all
see where we are going.”
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*****
A thrilling story about a Maine girl came to my attention recently.
Miss Martha Morrill of Sanford, a recent graduate of Colby College, now
teaching at the American College for Girls in Istanbul, Turkey, gave her
blood that a Turkish baby might live. Not yet accustomed to blood transfusions,
and fearing the results of blood-letting, the Turkish doctors have
a hard time getting native blood; so they turn to British and American residents
in their country. After a Caesarean birth, almost half of the baby’ s
blood was removed and replaced by a transfusion of Miss Morrill’s blood.
Thanks to a Colby girl 4,000 miles from her Sanford home, a little Turkish
baby has a decent chance to grow to health and happiness.
*****
I can think of no. more fitting close to this broadcast on a Sunday evening
than to quote Peter Marshall’s words about liberty, spoken in his Senate
prayer on March 19, 1947:
“Teach us that 1iberty is not only to be loved, but also to be lived.
Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. It cost too much to be
hoarded. Make us see that our liberty is not the right to do as we please, but
the opportunity to please as we do what is right.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
46th Broadcast December 11, 1949
Last week I said I would some day tell you what Mr. Jolicoeur’s old MalteBrun
Geography says about Maine. The very first section of that old book is devoted
to our state, which was only thirteen years old when the book was published.
“Maine”, says the book, “has very long wint~rs. The cold is extremely
severe, and great quantities of snow fall. It has extensive sea coast with
many harbors. The people, therefore, have generally neglected agriculture and
manufactures, and devoted themselves to commerce. Many of the inhabitants of
Maine are engaged in cutting down the forest trees, and converting them into
lumber, which is shipped to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar and molasses.
” This old geography pays due respect to what was once another prominent
industry of Maine — never so important as lumber, but one which gained our
state considerable fame. It was an industry which people of the Kennebec valley
knew very well — the harvesting and shipping of ice.
“The people of Maine”, says the old geography, “occasionally ship cargoes
of ice to New Orleans and the West Indies. During the winter the extreme cold
in this state creates large masses of ice in the rivers; a ship is easily
supplied with a cargo of it, and in the sultry climate of the West Indies nothing
can be more grateful. The ice is exchanged for sugar, molasses, spirits
and other products of those islands.”
“Portland”, says this 1833 geography, “has 12, 600 inhabitants. Bath is
a considerable town near the mouth of the Kennebec River with 3,800 people.
Augusta with 4,000 has a fine state house of granite. Machias is a place of
considerable trade with 1,000 inhabitants. Brunswick is the seat of Brunswick
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College, a flourishing literary institution; at Waterville is a college supported
by the Baptists.”
in 1833.
Thus was Maine presented to American school children
*****
Mr. Robert Gay of Silver Street tells me that the old steamboat City of
Waterville seemed to have a habit of going aground. A clipping from the Biddeford
Journal, dated July 9, but unfortunately not naming the year, states
that the City of Waterville, under Captain James Brown, lodged on a ledge off
Stag Island in the Saco River. The passengers, numbering 125 and badly frightened,
were taken off in row boats and brought back to Biddeford in wagons.
The next day the steamer was pulled off the ledge by the tug “Joe Baker”. Mr.
Gay thinks the City of Waterville was purchased by Biddeford interests before
it was finally sold for use in the South, but he is not sure. Perhaps someone
has information-on that point~ and perhaps someone also can tell us the year
was· it 1891 or 1892 — when the City of Waterville went aground in the Saco
River.
*****
A little more than a year ago we were talking about cattle pounds. Frank
McCallum of Park Street tells me that the cattle pound in Jefferson is 120
years old; that it was built in 1829 by Silas Noyes for the munificent sum of
28 dollars.
Since we last talked about cattle pounds I have learned, to my amazement,
that there used to be one within the city limits of Waterville. I am told
that a pound long stood on Western Avenue (then Mill Street) just east of the
Messalonskee, near where Corson’s market was not long ago located. Just east
of that spot and running along the avenue for some distance toward Elm Street,
was located Waterville’s first cemetery, according to Gene Crawford, who has
a lot of accurate information about old scenes and landmarks in this vicinity.
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Mrs. Eugene Crawford, by the way, has one of the most unusual collections
it has ever been my privilege to see. It is a collection o,:f newspaper cartoons
of the Spanish-American War of 1898. A lot of people keep newspaper
clippings, but altogether too many such people fail to date their clippings.
For instance that old clipping from the Biddeford Journal about the steamer
City of Waterville is not dated. That’s why we’re having a little trouble
to find out in what year the incident happened.
But Mrs. Crawford’s collection of cartoons are meticulously dated and are
carefUlly arranged in chronological order. Here in pictured form is the story
of aroused public opinion for a war that ought never to have been fought. In
these pictures are recalled the cry “Remember the Maine”; the charge at San
Juan Hill; Dewey at Manila Bay; the naval exploit of Hobson’s Choice; and the
sordid profiteering contracts that provided the rotting meat and the moldy
flour to the camp at Chicamauga. I doubt if there is another suCh collection
in existence. Certainly I have never heard of, much less seen, another complete
collection of Spanish War cartoons from the sinking of the Maine to the
treaty of peace.
*****
Did you ever hear of the Waterville bank robbery? About the time when
Jesse James and his gang were terrorizing the Middle West, robbing banks and
trains and payrolls, robbers not so glamorous nor so spectacular descended
upon Watervil.le. But unlike the James gang, they didn’t get away with any loot.
On the evening of November 22, 1876 a lecture was scheduled in the Town
Hall, now the notorious old armory about to be torn down. Early in the evening
four men left their team at Luke Brown’s on the corner of Pleasant and Mill
Streets, saying they had come to town to attend the lecture. About half past
ten Augustus Wood, the town night watCh, was approached by these men, who blindfolded
and gagged him, then led him to a shed in the rear of St. Francis church.
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Leaving him gagged and bound, the men took his keys and returned to the bank.
Two of the gang were climbing up to a rear window when George Vigue, a
private watchman, came toward the bank looking for Watchman Wood. L. D. Carver,
afterward Maine’s famous state librarian, had a room in the rear of the
building. He was awakened and heard one of the robbers say, “There’s that
cussed night watchman. Let’s get him out of the way first.” Taking his pistol
— how he happened to have one handy the historian does not say Carver
rushed down stairs. Vigue, accosted by the robbers, broke away, as Carver
said afterwards “hollering like a loon”. The two robbers rushed back to their
team, were joined by their two companions, and dashed off out of town.
A general alarm was rung. It was a student at Coburn Institute who found
Watchman Wood tied up in the shed — none other than J. Frederick Hill. I wonder
if anything happened in Waterville that J. F. Hill didn’t have a part in,
always on the right side. The next morning Constable Levi Dow and young Fred
Hill followed the trail as far as Augusta. For many years afterward Dr. Hill
quoted the remarkmade by that grand old schoolmaster, Dr. Hanson, then head
of the Institute, when Constable Dow came to the school to get Hill to go on
the chase the morning after the robbery. “Well, Mr. Hill”, said Dr. Hanson,
“if you think you had rather be a detective than a scholar, you may go, and
your present education is entirely sufficient for that business.”
Now, 73 years after the event, we may modestly ask, what would Alan Pinke;
rton and J. Edgar Hoover say about that?
be a good detective?
*****
Does it take no education to
Among the common things about folks in Maine is the general belief in
other parts of the country that we are old fashioned and ultra-conservative.
If to be old fashioned is to uphold the cherished American freedoms we ought
to be proud of it. In recent weeks, as I have traveled a bit about New England
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and New York, I have noted th.t a lot of people are beginning to express the
same apprehensions that disturb us old fashioned folks in Maine.
People are disturbed about the continuance of deficit spending in good
times. The economists whose logic is most persuasive and whose evidence is
most conclusive are those who have long told us that government treasuries
at every level — city, state and nation — should accumulate surplus in
times of prosperity and spend it to provide employment and prevent social
misery in times of adversity.
Now the Maine Yankee has been brought up to believe that you cannot get
something for nothing; that somehow, at some time, by somebody, everything we
get must be paid for. It is grounded deep in our Maine philosophy that Uncle
Sam is not a mystical Santa Claus, that the billions of dollars poured out of
the government till is really your money and mine. For in this democracy we,
the people, are the government. It is our money that is being so lavishly
spent.
Everyone knows that a primary need in our American economy indeed in
the whole world economy is to increase the purchasing power of the people.
But purchasing power is not increased by taking more and more money out of
the pockets of the people for government purposes. Every step in the great
federal program of so-called welfare costs money. That money does not grow on
trees; it must come from taxes. There are no federal aid funds except those
taken from our pockets. In the last analysis government can’t do things for
people. What we get doled out to us in one form has to be paid for in some
other form.
It was my privilege last week to hear a powerful address by Harold Stassen,
former governor of Minnesota and now president of the University of Pennsylvania.
with straightforward courage, pulling no punches, Mr. Stassen pointed
out the dangers in the expanding program of federal aid, even federal aid
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to education. He made it clear that, as philosophers long ago pointed out,
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The surest way to lose
our liberties in this land of the free is to let it stop being the home of
the brave — of men and women brave enough to fight even what today sometimes
looks like a losing battle against the power-mad bureaucrats.
The Government of the united States is not the president and his cabinet,
not the fellows who tell the farmers how much they can plant, not the inspec.:…
tors who dictate the business man’s procedures, not the FBI protecting on the
one hand and prying on the other, not the tax collector nor the welfare worker.
The Government of the United states is the people, and if we ever forget that
fact American democracy is doomed.
Now we folks who burst into print or talk over the air waves about the
American way of life are naturally derided and hated ‘by the give-away boys.
They say we favor the robber barons, the exploiters of labor, the slave-makers,
and those who grind humanity into poverty and starvation. So let’s set the
record straight. Everybody wants a state of welfare. We want it just as much
as the other fellow. No people in this whole world have ever done so much by
voluntary contributions, not only of money, but of time and effort, to alleviate
human misery as have the p~ople of the United States. Of course we
want to see other people besides ourselves decently fed and clothed and
housed.
The difference between our thinking and that of the give-away boys is that
we refuse to admit that the only way to achieve a state of welfare is through
the welfare state. In fact we are trying to point out that the end of the welfare
state is just the opposite from a state of welfare. It is indeed a state
of bankruptcy. A state of welfare means a state of security with fears of
want and suffering reduced — and no state of security comes from a bankrupt
state. In fact the biggest single factor in the rise of Hitler and Nazism in
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Germany was the collapse of German currency in the 1920’s when it took a
Wheelbarrow load of paper money to buy a loaf of bread.
A nation of free, unregimented people that has built up by private enterprise
and under the capitalist system the highest living standard of any
people on the earth can and will provide for all of its deserving population
a state of welfare without taking the road to both bureaucracy and bankruptcy
that is the welfare state.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
47th Broadcast December 18, 1949
What was going on in Maine 75 years ago? Thanks to Chester Hussey of
Walnut Street, I have had an opportunity to peruse in detail the p~ges of
the Maine State Year Book for 1873-74. Already the volume had become known
by its modern name of the Maine Register, for that is the title given on the
spine of the book.
Sidney Perham of Paris was then Governor of Maine; our U. S. Senators
were Lot M. Morrill and Hannibal Hamlin. They served in a Senate of 74 members,·
instead of the present 96, because no longer than 75 years ago, at a time that
a few people still living can remember, there were only 37 states. Arizona,
Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, utah, New Mexico, Oklahoma,
Washington and Wyoming had not yet been accepted into the Union. In
fact one of them, Oklahoma, didn’t exist even on the map, because it was only
a part of the great Indian Territory.
Maine then had five representatives to Congress; two more than we are
now allowed. They were John H. Burleigh of South Berwick, William P. Frye of
Lewiston, James G. Blaine of Augusta, Samuel F. Hersey of Bangor and Eugene
Hale of Ellsworth.
Although in 1873 no Waterville man was on the Governor’s Council and
none held any of the thirty appointive offices in the state government at Augusta,
a Waterville citizen, Edmund F. Webb, was speaker of the Maine House
of Representatives, and only two years earlier, in the itmnediate1y preceding
legislature, Reuben Foster, another Waterville man, had been President of the
Maine Senate.
Back there, 75 years ago, the closer political issues came home to the
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voter, the more he was interested. In the state election in September a
total of more than 127,000 votes were cast, but two months later, in the
November presidential election, only 90,000 went to the polls. For Governor,
Perham, .the Republican, got 72,000 to 55,000 for Kimball, .the Democrat, a
plurality of 17,000. For President, Grant got 61,000 to Greeley’s 29,000, a
plurality of 32,000.
Although it is diverting from our central topic of what was going on in
Maine 75 years ago, this mention of the 1872 elections leads us to set straight
a wrong impression that many people have about political control in Maine before
the Civil War. Today Maine is looked upon by the rest of the country as
an extremely conservative state, economically and politically. So it is carelessly
assumed that in the years before 1860 the conservative Whig party,
supporters of Henry Clay and antagonists of Andrew Jackson and his successors,
must have controlled a majority of Maine votes.
The facts are exactly the opposite. In 1830 the state election had been
close. By a plurality of less than 2,000 votes, Samuel E. Smith of Wiscasset,
the Democratic candidate, had beaten the Whig incumbent, Governor Jonathan
Hunton of Readfield. Judge Smith was a man of exceptional ability and wide
popularity. Under his leadership — he served three terms as Governor — the
Democratic party gained an ascendency which was only twice interrupted in 25
years. Those two interruptions are interesting because they reveal the bitter
political struggle that went on for a dozen years between two of the most
vigorous fighters of the old days of hard hitting politics. Those two men
were John Fairfield of Saco and Edward Kent of Bangor. Fairfield, the Democrat,
was elected Governor four times, and every time Kent was his opponent.
Twice only, in 1$37 and 1840, did Kent beat the Saco man; the first time by
only 579 votes, the second time by only 567 votes in a total of 91,000. After
Fairfield went to the U. S. Senate in 1843 and Kent died, the Democrats
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elected their Governors by large majorities for ten successive elections. Not
until the sensational rise of the Know Nothing party in 1854 was their supremacy
upset. In that year Anson P. Morrill of Readfield, supported by Maine
boss of the Know Nothings, Solon Chase, famous owner of “them steers”, got more
votes than did the Democratic and Whig candidates combined.
By the next year, 1855, most of the Know Nothings and many of the Whigs
had already joined the newly formed Republican party. It may be a fact, as certain
historians allege, that present Republican strength in Maine is because
the party got an early start in this state. A year before General Fremont became
the first Republican candidate for President, and five years before the
party elected its first president, Abraham Lincoln, Maine had a Republican
Governor. The insecurity of the party labels in those hectic times is apparent
when we note that Maine’S first Republican Governor was the same Anson P. Morrill
who had been elected as the Know Nothing candidate the year before.
Now let us get back to our original topic of Maine in 1873. More specifically
let us consider Waterville in 1873. In that year the Maine Register
recorded among Waterville merchants and manufacturers just three names now
familiar: Arnold, Redington and Hathaway. The book lists Arnold and Meader,
hardware; C. H. Redington, furniture and crockery; and C. F. Hathaway, manufacturer
of shirts.
By the way, as I sat in the big audience that so thoroughly enjoyed and
so enthusiastically applauded the Colby Varsity Show, I noted in the program
the attractive advertisement of the present Hathaway Company, and I wondered
what the founder of the business would have thought. For C. F. Hathaway is
said to have been a very austere, ultra-puritanical man. He and his wife
dressed in the simplest black. It is even alleged that he would never permit
ornamental buttons on either her clothes or his. He was devoutly, Calvinistically
religious, regarded even in his conservative day as a stern fundamen-
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talist.
What would Mr. Hathaway have thought of the gay music, the witty dialog,
and the feminine dress that marked the excellent musical comedy for which two
Waterville boys, Kenneth Jacobson and Bob Rosenthal, were responsible; all of
the play’s catchy music being the composition of Jacobs9n, and the book the
work of Rosenthal. Well, you know perfectly well what Mr. Hathaway, or any
church officer of his time would have thought. He wouldn’t, for anything,
attend even the theater, to say nothing of a musical show. That sort.of thing
was the sure road to hell.
But what of Mr. Hathaway, if he were living today? We easily make the
mistake of thinking that people stand still even if the world does not. That
very seldom happens. The truth is that times change because people change. No
more stupid saying was ever voiced than the statement, “You can’t change human
nature.” Of course you can. It is .. changing: all the 1:iM. So as I looked
at the Varsity Show program, I am sure that my second thoughts about Mr. Hathaway
were better than my first. If he lived in Waterville today, he would
probably have enjoyed that Varsity Show just as much as any of the rest of us.
So change the times • . Although only three names well recognized today appeared among the merchants
of 1873, there were names in other vocations that have long been honored
in this community. L. T. Boothby and E. R. Drummond were insurance agents,
and the latter was town clerk. Solyman Heath was president of the Ticonic National
Bank.
The selectmen were Reuben Foster, then president of the Waterville Savings
Bank, Winthrop Morrill and Noah Boothby. The town had six doctors of whom
one was Frederick C. Thayer. There were four lawyers, the other two besides Mr.
Heath and Mr. Foster being E. F. Webb and F. A. Waldron. A citizen whom everyone
knew in those days was C. R. McFadden. In 1873 he was postmaster, auctioneer,
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\
and dry goods merchant. One of the justices of the peace was ReubenW. ·Dunn.
That 75 year old Maine Register lists only six manufacturing plants in
Waterville. Besides C. F. Hathaway and Company, what was later to be the
Waterville Iron Works was listed as Webber and Haviland, machinery and castings.
The other four were J. Furbish, doors, sash and blinds; I. S. Bangs, flour;
W. H. Dow and Company, furniture; and Roberts and Marston, boot-shanks. No
weaving of cotton and woolen textiles, no making of paper, no pie plates and
plastics, no spools and. dowels. In fact the factories were then commensurate
with the size of the town, for the population totaled 4,852 and the valuation
of all property was less than two million dollars.
The 1873 clergymen were H. S. Burrage at the Baptist, James Cameron at
the Congregationalist, A. W. Pottle at the Methodist, J. o. Skinner at the
Universalist and D. H. Sheldon at the Unitarian. The beloved Father Charland
had not then come to st. Francis; the pastor there was Father Halde.
Mentioning Colby College, then called Colby University, the 1873 Register
lists the entire faculty, consisting of just seven persons: James T.
Champl.in, president; Samuel K. Smith, rhetoric; John B. Foster, ancient languages;
Moses Lyford, mathematics; Charles E. Hamlin, chemistry; Edward W.
Hall, modern languages; Julian D. Taylor, tutor. It is interesting evidence
of the long linkages of time that I personally knew two of those seven faculty
members, though it was long after 1873 before I knew them. They were Edward W.
Hall and Julian D. Taylor. As many of our listeners know, Dr. Taylor was an
active member of the Colby faculty for 68 years.
*****
Now, tonight, let us have a little bit more about that ill-fated steamer,
the City of Waterville. The late J. F. Hill and the late Fred Arnold were not
the last survivors of the maiden voyage of that unlucky steamer. One man still
living also took that embarassing trip from Bangor to Waterville 60 years ago.
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He is Albert F. Drummond, retired head of the Waterville Savings Bank. He
missed the Bangor celebration — said to have been a wild one — the night
before the sailing, but he arrived in Bangor on the morning train in time to
join the party that started on the steamer for Waterville.
Mr. Drummond says the City of Waterville was part of a great vision and
an ambitious plan of William T. Haines to make Waterville the head of navigation
on the Kennebec. It couldn’t be done. Not only was the railroad, with
two approaches to Waterville from the west, getting the traffic, but above
Augusta the old Kennebec just wasn’t suitable for steamers large enough to
warrant the expense of operation.
*****
Mr. David Howard, manager of the Colby College bookstore, has very kindly
given me a memorable photograph of one of the old-time snow rollers. It shows
a roller in front of the J. H. Crosby farm on the Sunday River in Newry, Maine,
and the original negative from which Mr. Howard has made a fine, clear print
was taken in 1922. The snow was deep everywhere in Maine that yea~. I was
then living in Portland, which had a record 126 inches of snow that winter. To
make things worse, there was a serious coal strike, and fuel was hard to get.
The unusually deep snow doubtless accounts for eight horses being hitched
to the roller. Besides the driver, two other men are perched atop the vehicle.
Standing beside it is a teen-age boy with a snow shovel, and three smaller
youngsters are looking on. The nigh horse of the leaders is a handsome white
fellow. While all the other horses in the picture are hanging tired heads, he
holds his nobly erect, with alert ears turned forward and nostrils opened wide.
I should like to have driven that horse.
*****
About a dozen years ago it was my privilege to introduce to a waterville
audience the lecturer and author, Maurice Hindus, who spoke on Czechoslovakia,
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saying that the nation which Hitler’s legions had just overrun would surely
rise aga~n. Then in 1946 I heard that son of a Czech patriot father and an –
American mother — Jan Mazaryk — tell the audience at the Herald-Tribune
Forum how his country was already rising from the ashes of the war. Two years
later Mazaryk was dead, disillusioned and frustrated by what had happened to
his country. Now at the turn of the year into the middle of the twentieth
century, Czechoslovakia presents to all the world the sorry spectacle of what
happens when Communists take over a country.
Government workers are immediately purged. Newspapermen must follow the
party line or go to jail. Leaders of all political parties must accept merger
with the Communist front or be liquidated. All the courts are staffed by Communists.
All businesses with more than 50 employees are taken over by the
government. All farms of more than 125 acres are operated directly by the government~
smaller farmers are for.ced to join Communist cooperatives. Every
teacher must follow the party line or lose his job. Priests and ministers
must become state employees or be accused of treason. Church property is
seized and church funds confiscated.
That is what happened to the proud little country of which Maurice Hindus
spoke so feelingly here in Waterville a dozen years ago. That is what has
happened to Poland and Hungary. That is what the Communists are determined
shall happen in Italy and France. perhaps it will. But on one point every good
American is determined: it shall not happen here.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
48th Broadcast December 25, 1949
Last week we told you a bit about Maine and especially Waterville in 1873.
What was going on in Maine at that Christmas season 76 years ago? All was not
jollity and merry-making. Just ended with a verdict of guilty was one of
Maine’s most famous murder trials. John T. Gordon of Thorndike, accused of
the brutal murder of his brother and sister-in-law, had attempted to cover his
crime by setting fire to the house.
QUite unlike the manner in which the modern press covers a murder trial,
Belfast’s weekly newspaper, the Republican Journal, dealt with the trial in
much the same manner as the British press now covers a homicide trial in England;
namely, by factual, detailed report of the actual testimony. For instance,
this is the way the report of the prisoner’s own testimony begins:
“I am the accused in this trial. Was 29 ,years old November first. Was
born in Thorndike. Have had six brothers, four older and two younger. Lived
at home most of the time until 21. Almon (the murdered brother) was three
years older than I am. Don’t know when he was married. Was on good terms
with Almon. They charged me nothing for my board.”
Brief, cryptic sentences and stilted language of this sort is not connected
narrative. It represents, in newspaper fashion of the time, the summary
of what were really answers to lawyers’ questions. But by the time you
have read fifteen columns of this sort of writing in two issues of the Journal,
you get a very clear picture of the crime and what the many witnesses
thought about it.
When the account reaches the point where the editor has inserted a one
word sub-head “verdict”, you look for a quick statement of the finish. But
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you look in vain. A modern reporter would be much annoyed by the leisurely
manner in which the old Belfast editor approaches the point. He says:
“The jury retired at 10 o’clock. At ten minutes past eleven an officer
came in and whispered to the sheriff, and it became known that a verdict had
been agreed upon and that the judge had been sent for. Soon the Chief Justice
came in and took his seat. Associate Justice Dickerson sat upon the platform
apart from the Chief. The Attorney General sat with folded arms at his table.
The venerable father of the murdered woman and her brothers were present. Soon
the jury filed in. Stillness ensued while waiting for the prisoner’s counsel.
“The silence within the chamber became painful. The gathered throng were
oppressed with the feeling that a human life hung on the issue. The bright sun
shone in at the window, lighting up the hall with a warm glow. From the street
came the merry sound of sleigh bells and the shouts of boys at play.
“The clerk commenced to call the list of the jury, each meIllber responding
to his name, and the crier keeping the count. Then, addressing the foreman,
the clerk inquired, ‘Have you agreed upon a verdict?’ ‘We have.’ ‘Prisoner,
stand up and look at the foreman. Mr. Foreman, do you find the prisoner guilty
or not guilty?’ In a subdued voice the response came, ‘Guilty of murder in the
first degree.’ ”
Murder was not the only news in Maine that week before Christmas 76 years
ago. A heavy gale struck the port of Rockland, sending three ships on the
rocks and bringing two schooners together at the entrance to the harbor.
In 1873 Calais and Eastport were great ports of entry for foreign goods.
The Passamaquoddy Revenue District, which included both of those towns, collected
$93,000 in customs fees that year, while Bangor had only $17,000, Bath
$11,000, and all Aroostook only $13,000. What was once the very important
port of Castine accounted for a tiny $375, and the once-thriving shipping
center of Kennebunkport took in only $6.29. Even the loyal Republican Journal
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had to lament: “It will be seen that the government paid out in the Belfast
District $567 more than it collected.”
Just before Christmas of 1873 the editor of a little paper called the
Clipper was brought before the Lewiston municipal court for contempt, because
his paper had referred slurringly to the judge. The editor was found guilty
and fined ten dollars.
Only two days before that Christmas of 1873 a big storm hit Maine, wind
and sleet doing a lot of damage in the Kennebec Valley. A week later one
newspaper dolefully remarked: “We have received report from Washington that
the big storm of last week was predicted, but the storm got here before the
prediction did.”
Meanwhile down in Ellsworth the sheriff had been engaged in a lively
scuffle with a hundred women. Long in the habit of staying around for chat and
gossip after court adjourned, the women were indignant when the sheriff ordered
them to disperse. When the officer called two deputies to his aid, the fun
really began. The Ellsworth paper described the ensuing action as Ita good deal
like driving flies from the room”. The women would pour down the gallery on
one side and up the other, flee into the ante rooms and closets. As fast as
a few of them went out the door, twice as many more came in. Finally, fearful
Qf missing their dinners, the officers tried persuasion instead of force.
Those milder tactics worked. The hall was soon cleared and everyone was happy_
*****
We hear many glowing stories about what Christmas was like in the old
days. Wherever and whenever Christmas has been celebrated, it has always been
a happy and merry festival. But it hasn’t always been celebrated at all,
even in our part of the world. That old 1833 geography, of which we have previously
spoken, has this to say:
“The inhabitants of New England spend very little time in amusements.
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with the exception of Thanksgiving, they have no national holiday in the
diversions of which both men and women find gaiety and joy. The Fourth of
July is a political anniversary; in its ceremonies men alone are engaged.
The grave habits of the people, derived from their ancestors, their strict
religious notions, the necessity for constant industry, are all opposed to
scenes of thoughtlessness and gaiety.”
That quotation makes it clear that as late as 1833 Christmas was not
commonly celebrated in New England. But, perhaps even more significantly, it
reveals that in the author’s mind Christmas was associated with jollity and
merry-making, and was not merely a religious event. Where did he get that
idea? From England, of course, where flourished the kind of Christmas Dickens
would make famous a few years later in “The Christmas Carol”; the kind of
Christmas Washington Irving had already described in the “Sketch Book”.
The New England Puritans did indeed abhor, jollity, and thus repudiated
even the festivals of the church which in any way allowed merry-making. They
were just as bitter against May Day, with its dances around the May Pole, as
they were against Christmas games and feasting.
This attitude of solemnity and severity in respect to religion was by no
means new when the pilgrims and Puritans came to America. As long ago as 245
AD one of the church fathers, Origen, denounced the idea of keeping the birthday
of Christ “as if he were a king or a Pharaoh”.
No one knows just h?w or why December 25 was selected to celebrate the
Savior’s birth. In fact, before the fifth century, there was no general agreement
as to when it should come in the calendar, whether on January 6, March 25,
or December 25. There was no record nor any reliable tradition to prove the
exact day of Jesus’ birth. Even the exact year is still in dispute, though the
weight of authority sets the year as 4 BC. By a curious twist of reckoning,
the mistake made in the early use of the Gregorian calendar amounted to four
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years, so that historically we must now make the paradoxical statement that
Christ was born four years before Christ.
In one of the works of Hippolytus, written about 202 AD, appears this
statement: “Jesus was born at Bethlehem on Wednesday I December 25, in the 42nd
year of Augustus. II But many of the early churches would not accept that
date. In fact the Syrian and Armenian churches accused the Roman Christians
of idolatry, because December Q5 had Tong been celebrated by the Romans as
“natalisinvicti solis”, the birthday of the conquered sun. So those who
celebrated January 6 as Christmas naturally held to it because they hated the
idolatrous sun-worshipers of December 25.
Always from remotest antiquity the celebration of the Savior’s birth
seems to have been a feast, a time of rejoicing, never a fast or time of solemnity.
There is nothing irreligious or unseemly about making Christmas a
merry time. In spite of Origen’s denunciation the Christians kept right on
celebrating it as a gay festival, and finally they united on the common date
of December 25.
Just as the Romans had a pagan festival on December 25, so had the ancient
Britons. Before Christianity came to the British Isles, December 25
marked the beginning of the Anglian year, was called “mother’s night”, and
was marked with ceremonies appropriate to a new year’s birth.
After the Puritans had come to America, their fellow believers back home
in England had beheaded King Charles, set up the protectorate under Cromwell,
and had put the strict Puritan beliefs into political practice. When Charles
II came to the throne, he restored the Christmas festival, but for many years
afterwards the Scots upheld the Puritan view and continued to ban Christmas.
Outside the Teutonic countries — that is, the countries whose languages
derive from the ancient Germanic tongues, and these include England and the
united States as well as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandina-
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vian nations — outside the Teutonic countries Christmas presents are unknown.
The Christmas tree was common in medieval Germany, but not in England. There
it was the Yule log.
One aspect of Christmas in my boyhood days I now greatly miss. I wish
the practice could be revived. I refer to the Christmas bells. All Christmas
morning every church bell in my boyhood town was rung at intervals all the
forenoon — not tolled, but loudly and gaily rung. The sounds carried far
over the crisp winter air. People who lived as far away as Hio Ridge, nearly
four miles from Bridgton Village, used to say that they could often hear those
bells on Christmas morning.
In my boyhood town there probably weren’t half a dozen people who had
ever heard the chimes of a carillon. The giant carillons of the big cities are
still expensive and rare. The great carilloneers, who control the range of
bells from tiny to huge, are few. But modern electronics and modern magnification
of sound have made possible beautiful and relatively inexpensive carillons
like that in the Lorimer Chapel at Colby College. Thus many people
were able to hear the Colby chimes last evening and today, and to hear also
the magnified notes of the beautiful Mellon organ, playing the familiar Christmas
music.
So, as we near the end of this beautiful Christmas Day, Ernest Marriner
and the Keyes Fibre Company join in wishing you a very merry Christmas.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
49th Broadcast January 1, 1950
Here we are at the time of beginning again, the time of new resolutions
and new hopes, the time when merchants take account of stock and when it is
well for individuals to take account of their lives. This New Year’s Day is
especially significant, because it marks the middle of the century. Those of
us who have lived through all of it know what a wonderful yet terrible half
century it has been. How peacably and comfortably it began back there in 1900,
when there were no automobiles, no airplanes, no radios, and no world wars. Our
little one-round skirmish with Spain was over, William McKinley was in the
White House, our troops were putting down insurrection in the Philippines,
business was good, the savings banks paid four per cent interest, and there
were very few divorces.
What changes the half century has brought, not only in material inventions,
in rapidity of communication, in the horrors of global war, but also
in the relationship of the American to his government. The Central Maine farmer
or merchant or manufacturer of 1900 believed in free enterprise and independent
responsibility; for his American democracy was government of and by
the people; he could not think of it as government simply for the people.
Frankly, the less he had to do with governments, the better he liked it.
No one in his right mind thinks we are going back to those independent
days. The changes that have come are to a degree inevitable results of the new
technology, creating new relationships between the individual and his government.
Yet it is quite possible that the pendulum is swinging much too far in
the direction of government for the people. The next half century may very well
see renewed emphasis upon the duties and responsibilities of democracy, rather
than upon its benefits. Social security provisions, minimum wage laws, and
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other benefits will certainly continue, but they can permanently continue
only if the voters in our democracy clearly understand that when a government
which claims to be for the people is no longer made up of the people and
controlled by the people, the real freedoms of those people are forever lost.
*****
OUr listeners are still calling me up about Waterville cows. ~ere are
many who think that Napoleon Marshall was an unusually’·lucky; bs>y, if Samuel
Osborne paid him 25 cents a week for driving a cow to and from pasture. According
to the experience of other young cow drivers, 25 cents would seem to have
been millionaire wages. ‘ Bert Drwmnond who, seventy or more years ago, drove
Homer Percival’s cow to pasture in what is now Averill Field on the County
Road, received ten cents a week. Warren Moses, former proprietor of the Appleton
Inn, received two dollars for the whole season, from the time the cow was
first turned out to pasture to the time when she was put in the barn for the
winter. He was customarily paid one-half of his wages the munificent sum
of one dollar — a few days before the fourth of July, so that he might do a
bit of celebrating on the national holiday.
*****
Did you know that once the Waterville-Winslow community had a benefactor
much like the Bible character Joseph? You will recall that by shrewd planning
Joseph, as Pharaoh’s prime minister in Egypt, had stored up grain in years of
plenty as protection against years of famine. Then, when the famine came, Jo-,
seph’s hungry brothers came down from Palestine to be fed.
Well, over on the Benton Road in Winslow still stands a corn barn, where
in 1815 the great-grandfather of Herbert Simpson, the present owner, had stored
a quantity of corn. Then came the memorable and terrible year of 1816, the year
that was afterwards called the year without a summer. There was frost in
every month of that. year. The corn crop was a complete failure, and very little
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else was grown. Real hardship hit the settlements of the Kennebec Valley.
In the spring of 1817 word got around that there was corn on one Winslow farm.
People came on horse back, even on foot, from as far away as forty miles to
get just enough corn for seed. A few brought money, others brought things to
barter, most brought nothing at all. But no one was turned away empty-handed.
Through the whole region from Ticonic Falls to Wesserunsett those hard-hit,
scattered farms of the early settlers could have another crop of corn, thanks
to the foresight and the generosity of that Winslow Joseph in Egypt.
*****
Very early in the half century that has just closed, one of our nation’s
most aggressive and dynamic presidents entered the White House. In 1901 the
assassination of President McKinley brought Theodore Roosevelt into the presidential
chair. How well we now remember the independence and initiative with
which the first Roosevelt wielded his Big stick and flashed his toothy smile.
It is hard, so long after the event, to realize that there were many who
thought that Theodore would only be another tool of Mark Hanna and the Ohio
gang. In that September of 1901, Senator Frye of Maine had said: “Business
men of the country have confidence in President Roosevelt, and are going on
just the same as if President McKinley were alive.”
But the editor of the Waterville Mail was a better prophet than Senator
Frye. In his issue of September 25, 1901 he wrote: “Roosevelt has a way of
telling newspaper men just as much of his business as he thinks fit, and then
with a pleasant smile shutting his mouth and the door on them simultaneously.
Things may not go so smoothly for business with this man as president. He is
likely to show both Mark Hanna and Wall Street that he is his own master.”
Those well remembered attacks of the first Roosevelt on Big Business have
not died down during the fifty years, but in spite of all the attacks big business
is bigger than ever. As we review the past half century, we have a
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right to ask whether the bigness of business has really been harmful to
American life. Big Business, we have persistently been told, is crushing out
small business. We are informed that four companies provide 92% of all our
electric lamps, four others make 90% of all our cigarettes, and four others
produce 80% of our soap. Pretty soon there will be.DO such thing as small
business, the critics shout. That is just what they said fifty years ago.
The truth is otherwise, as U. S. News and World Report so clearly pointed
out in a recent issue. Big business could not exist without little business;
it is in fact little business’s best customer. One big electrical manufacturing
firm depends on 31,000 dffferent suppliers of materials and parts.
To sell its products it uses more than 290,000 dealers — small business men.
One of the big tobacco companies does direct buying and selling with 80,000
other firms, most of them small businesses.
Big business units, unless they become real monopolies, shutting off
competition, are by no means evil. Without them we could not have modern American
industry and the world’s highest standard of living. Mass production
could never have reached its present efficiency without huge reserves of capital
concentrated in large units. One company spent $27 million in eleven years,
developing a synthetic material before the product became commercially successful.
Another company spent more than a million developing a garbagedisposal
unit which took fifteen years to find a market.
We should remember these facts when loud voices in Washington say they
are going to put an end to Big Business, even if they have to socialize the
industries to do it. And while you’re remembering those facts, just remember
something else as well. Right now, when we still think we are a long way from
the socialized state, the biggest business in America is the government of the
United States.
*****
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In spite of the quantities of oil and natural gas now used in industry,
the nation’s factories still depend chiefly upon coal. Coal is absolutely
essential to our biggest manufacturing process, the making of steel.
What is the coal situation now with the miners on Mr. Lewis’ three-day
week? Obviously it is not what Mr. Lewis intended. Production stays relatively
high because the miners are working harder. Though they are fed up with
strikes, they believe totally . in Mr. Lewis. So they will strike again if he
calls them out. But meanwhile· by working harder under the plan by which
most mines’ pay, by the tonnage produced, not by the hours worked, the miners
are fattening their earnings against the day when Mr. Lewis may call them out
again.
Coal stocks are ample. The steel companies say they have plenty and are
not worried. Production keeps level with use. As long as the three-day week
continues, there will be no shortage.
The coal operators are in no hurry to settle on Mr. Lewis’ exacting terms.
Even if they did, the miners would soon be worse off, because there would then
be too much coal. One operator is on record as saying that a permanent 3; day
week would supply all the coal the nation would need except in a rare emergency
like war.
But Mr. Lewis is a stubborn man. The miners know that they already owe
him a lot. We’ll let Drew Pearson do the predicting on what Mr. Lewis will do,
but it doesn’t take much of a prophet to hazard a guess. If only to save face,
Mr. Lewis may well call another strike. John L. has a real decision to make.
He must decide whether his true interest is the welfare of the mine workers
or to save . t.I’le face of John L. Lewis.
*****
Recently Sir Stafford Cripps, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, made
a statement that every American as well as every Englishman ought to take
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seriously to heart. Bear in mind that Sir Stafford is an officer of Britain’s
present labor-socialist government and a staunch member of the British Labor
Party. A press interviewer asked Sir Stafford this question:
“As a general proposition, though it is politically popular, do you believe
that social security can be made economically sound in a democracy where
people can vote themselves bigger and bigger benefits?”
Note carefully Sir Stafford’s reply. He said: “That depends upon the
responsibility of the democracy. If it takes an irresponsible view of its obligations
so that it only regards the treasury as a deep till into which it can
perpetually dip its hand, we had better give up democracy. But I believe, by
giving the people information and knowledge of the ecomomic facts, responsible
leaders can instill into the voters the realization that they themselves are
in fact paying for their own social benefits through taxation, and they must
therefore exercise restraint in the way they utilize those benefits and in the
amount of their demands.”
The give-away boys in Washington will do well to heed those words of Sir
Stafford Cripps.
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•
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
50th Broadcast January 8, 1950
An unusual and highly appreciated gift came to me on Christmas eve. It
was presented by one of the most helpful of the listeners to this program,
Mr. Chester Hussey of Walnut Street. It is a very old book, printed at Worcester,
Massachusetts in 1798. But it is more than just an old book; it is
a precious historical record. Its title is “Constitutions of the Ancient
and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons”. If the book contained
only the constitutions and regulations of early masonic lodges in this country,
it would be valuable enough, but its inclusion of a carefully compiled
and fully documented history of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts enhances
its value.
The book was compiled by Rev. Thaddeus Harris, who was then chaplain of
the Massachusetts Grand Lodge and an influential member of the Massachusetts
Historical Society. Mr. Harris had worked under instructions from’ a committee
of the Grand Lodge, all of whom were doubtless estimable gentlemen, but
only one of whom gained a place in history. That one was Paul Revere.
Now all members of the Masonic order and many non-II\embe.rs are aware that
there are two so-called roads to the higher ranks of Masonry, roads known as
the York Rite and the Scottish Rite, deriving their privileges respectively
from the Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Lodge of Scotland. What few
Masons know, and what this old book clearly reveals, is that while Masonry in
America began under the York Rite by virtue of a charter from the Grand Master
/
of Masons in England, it was a rival grand lodge of the Scottish Rite, chartered
later by the Grand Master of Scotland, which numbered among its members
most of the famous New Englanders of the Revolution. What is even more interesting
and suggestive of some historical perplexity is the fact that this
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grand lodge which contained the most distinguished New England patriots was
actually founded by the British Army stationed in Boston. In that army were
three so-called travelling lodges of the Scottish Rite. They petitioned the
Most Worshipful George, Earl of Dalhousie, Grand Master of Masons in Scotland,
to charter a grand lodge in New England. The Grand Master sent them
a charter, dated May 30, 1769, appointing as New England Grand Master a young
man of 29 years, Joseph Warren. So it came about that the hero of Bunker
Hill, the man who said, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes II ,
who still a young man of 35 died under the charge of British bayonets, was ,.
the first Grand Master of the first Scottish Rite lodge in America.
If, as legend long contended, any Masonic lodge of Boston was mixed up
in the famous Boston Tea Party, it must have been Paul Revere’s own lodge of
the Scottish Rite. To that branch of Masonry belonged also Samuel Adams and
John Hancock, James Otis and Josiah Quincy. Masonry itself in America was
much older than the Grand Lodge of the Scottish Rite, with its dynamic patriot,
Paul Revere, and its martyred hero, Joseph Warren. The earliest American
masonry is of the York Rite. As this old book puts it, “in consequence
of an application from several brethren residing in New England to the Most
Worshipful Anthony, Lord Viscount Montague, Grand Master of Masons in England,
he was pleased in the year 1733 to constitute the Right Worshipful Henry
price, Provincial Grand Master of New England. II Thus began St. John’ s Grand
Lodge, from which derived most of the masonic lodges in the other American
colonies.
For instance, in the following year 1734, they granted a charter for a
lodge in Philadelphia, appointing as the first master of that lodge none
other than Benjamin Franklin. On March 20,1762 they issued a charter for a
lodge at Falmouth on Casco Bay, which was of course the present City of Portland.
The old book also records: “In December, 1735 sundry brethren, going
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from Boston to South Carolina, and meeting with Masons there, formed a lodge
at Charleston; from whence sprung masonry in those parts.”
The Revolution seems to have hit the older York Rite Grand Lodge harder
than it did the young Grand Lodge of the Scottish Rite. To discover reason
for this would make an interesting bit of historical research, for it might
reveal much about relations between those lodges travelling in the,British
Army stationed in Boston and the lodges that included men like John Hancock
and Paul Revere. At any rate this old book shows the records of the older
English Grand Lodge closing at the minutes of the meeting and election of
officers on January 27, 1775, and not resuming until February 17, 1787. Between
the two minutes the historian has inserted these words: “On April 19th
hostilities commenced between Great Britain and America. From which period a
chasm is made in this history. War, with its attendant distractions, interfered
with the peaceful plans of this philanthropic institution. Boston became
a garrison and was abandoned by many of its former inhabitants. The regular
meetings of the Grand Lodge were terminated, and the brethren held no
assembly until after the conclusion of the contest and the establishment of
peace. ”
On the other hand the Scottish Grand Lodge kept going, after a fashion,
right through the turbulent days of the Revolution. The record states: “The
political events of the year 1775 produced affecting changes in the state of
masonry. How to convene the Grand Lodge with regularity became a serious question,
especially since with the death of Grand Master Warren at Bunker Hill
the commission of Grand Master had died with him. Communications among the
brethren were held at various times and places until on March 8, 1777, for
the purpose of setting up a proper establishment and of softening the rigors
of a distressing war, they formed an independent grand lodge.” That lodge
succeeded in holding regular meetings straight through the war.
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In 1792 the two grand lodges, York Rite and Scottish Rite, agreed to
unite into one independent grand lodge, which has ever since been k~own as
the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. The new constitution of the united lodge
was dedicated to “our illustrious brother, George Washington, the friend of
masonry, of his country and of man”. In 1794 the United Grand Lodge elected
as its master one who had served the old Scottish Grand Lodge successively
as junipr grand warden, senior grand warden and deputy grand master. He was
none other than the silversmith and bell founder who had made the famous midnight
ride 19 years before — Master Paul Revere.
*****
How much do individual Americans spend in a year? About $180 billion,
an average of $1,200 for every man, woman and child in the United states.
This is exclusive of taxes. In 1950 individual spending is expected to reach
the highest level in our history. The prediction of both government and private
analysts is that this year the total spendable funds will be boosted to an extent
of 2, billions by refund on veterans’ insurance and other factors. But,
lest we get too complacent,. what will corne after 1950? While the answer is
anyone’s guess, common sense tells us that there will corne a day when our people
will have all the automobiles and appliances they can pay for, or even
mortgage the future for, as many of them do now. Steadily rising production
may somewhere reach a saturation point. Then will come the real test to determine
whether the united States had found the answer to stable prosperity. That
is why some of us keep shouting against continued government deficits in good
times. There can be no stable prosperity in a bankrupt state. If government
spending increases year after year in time of rising production, what is going
to happen when production begins to decline, when unemployment sets in? The
wise householder tries to have something laid aside for a rainy day_ Uncle
Sam, on the contrary, seems to be ripping off the shingles in fair weather, to
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give the rain a better chance to soak the house.
*****
In spite of the signs, that we are moving into the welfare state, there
are other signs that indicate the American people’s steadfast belief that the
care of dependents rests first upon the head of the family, not on the welfare
worker in Augusta or Washington. This program is devoted to common things, and
one of the commonest in our day is life insurance. It is one of America’s biggest
busi~esses. A lot of us pay premiums regularly into the treasuries of the
insurance compan’ies. While those companies wait for the day when they must
make payment to our beneficiaries, what do they do with our money? Right now
49 companies have $52 billions of that money. They have invested $36 billions
of it in bonds, of which $14 billions is in government bonds. They have $10
billions in mortgages, a billion in stocks, another billion in real estate,
and three billions in other assets.
Policies now in force amount to more than $200 billions. The average amount
of insurance per family is $4,800. There are two policy holders for every family
in the country. Obviously the American people believe in life insurance.
***** .
One of the most common, exciting incidents of half a century ago was the
runaway horse. Several times a year such an occurrence would stimulate the rather
dull life of a country village. Even larger towns, like Waterville, had
their exciting runaways. One of my neighbors recently called my attention to
an item in the Waterville Mail of September 25, 1901. It reads:
“Saturday a horse belonging to C. A. Hill’s stable and attached to a buggy
standing on Common Street near Main gave a sudden start, freed himself from the
carriage, and ran up Main Street to his stable. When he started, a young lady
was thrown violently out. She struck with some force, but except for the mud
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which clung to her clothes, she apparently sustained no injury. She took
the thing very calmly, got up and brushed herself as if it were a common
occurrence, said she was not hurt, and indulged in no hysteria.”
Now let us get back to some of those old-time happenings in Waterville
and vicinity. How many of our listeners remember the mail robbery at the
waterville station about 60 years ago? Herbert Simpson of Winslow recalls it
well, for he was one of the young boys who found letters scattered in the
pine grove on the east bank of the river, where part of the H & W mill now
stands. A mail bag had been snatched from the station platform, carried across
the river on the ice, and ripped open by the robbers in the old pine
grove.
*****
Mr. Simpson also remembers the spring and fall when the local people
were frightened and mystified by weird sounds that issued from the river banks
above the college. Frightened horses ran away, and posses spent many nights
investigating with lanterns, but the mystery, says Mr. Simpson, was never
solved. However, Bert Drummond, who was himself in college a few years after
the incident, says it was no mystery at all. The fact that the noises which
issued so weirdly on the spring air stopped during the summer. but resumed
in the fall, should have been enough evidence that college pranksters were at
work. If one wants further evidence, let it be recalled that a young fellow
who never let himself be left out of any lively event was then in college.
He was J. Frederick Hill.
*****
The copy of the waterville Mail to which I have already referred -issued
half a century ago — contained some interesting advertisements. Daily
summer service was advertised for steamers from Augusta to Boston. In the
Thayer block was a garment cutting school, which advertised: “Ladies can
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receive personal instruction drafting all styles of garments by accurate and
scientific measurements. Cording, tucking and featherboning taught without
extra charge.” Humphrey 1 s Medicine was advertised to “cure fever. infants’
diseases, rheumatism, whooping cough, kidney disease, colds and grip”. The
grand opening of Clukey-Libby Company’s new department store was announced.
When I first came to Waterville in 1909 that store was in full swing at the
corner of Main and Silver Streets.
*****
The railroads were having their troubles fifty years ago. That old issue
of the Waterville Mail contains the following item:
“The Maine Central has been having hard luck with its freight trains of
late, and is not likely to have smooth sailing until all the cars are equipped
with air brakes. Stopping the front end of a train while the rear end proceeds
merrily along on its way is pretty sure to cause trouble.”
*****
Who can come up with the tallest story about fantastic animals of the
Maine woods? There are some great yarns about the rat-tailed bambaloosa and
the purple fillyoo. Then there was the famous red-backed, horse-tailed buck,
commonly known by Maine guides and shown by them to distinguished visitors from
out of state.
But one of the most versatile of those animals was the ring-tailed plunkus
which my great grandmother used to tell about down on the old farm at West Gorham.
She claimed that her uncle over in Buxton once tamed one of the critters
and used it for three seasons to thresh out his grain with its tail. Then the
poor critter died of the measles.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
51st Broadcast January 15, 1950
One of our commonest sayings is, “Time flies”. How fast the weeks go
by! I cannot make it seem possible that tonight’s is the fifty-first of
these unimportant broadcasts on common things. Frankly the program was started
with the idea that it might last for a dozen weeks, but certainly not
longer. How the radio audience and our public spirited sponsor, the Keyes
Fibre Company, have endured our simple, inconsequential talks for more than
fifty weeks passes comprehension.
But, anyhow, we have passed the half-hundred mark in these broadcasts,
as we stand past the half-century mark in the calendar, and with our listeners’generous
indulgence we’re going right on toward the hundred mark.
*****
Just as we suspected there are a lot of men in this vicinity who once
pumped the old pipe organs. One man who has had a lot of experience, not
only with organ pumping, but also with other matters pertaining to church
life in Waterville, is Frank Littlefield, present sexton of the Methodist
Church. Mr. Littlefield says that, for a great period of time many years ago,
he, Ted Branch and Harry Vose were the regular organ pumpers at three Waterville
churches.
Ernest Davis, sexton at the First Baptist Church, pumped the organ at
the Freeport Baptist Church some fifty years ago. The pastor of that church
was the greatly revered Dr. George Merriam, who was afterwards pastor of
Bethany Church in Skowhegan for more than a quarter of a century — a remarkable
man, who had the distinction of occupying only three pastorates in his
active ministry of more than sixty years.
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Another organ pumper was Edgar.Brown, former postmaster and former secretary
of the Chamber of Commerce. In the early years of this century he
pumped the organ at the unitarian Church. Both Warren Philbrook, afterwards
a justice of the Maine Supreme Court, and his wife were members of the choir.
Edgar used to take time out, actually leaving the building sometimes during
the evening sermon, which usually lasted twenty minutes. That worked all
right until one evening when the minister cut his sermon shorter than usual.
As Edgar went back into the church he heard the organ. Llewel.lyn Cain, the
bass singer in the choir, had noted Edgar’s absence and manned the pump.
Eddie Osborne, the well known Maine Central Railroad employee, and son of
Samuel Osborne, the Colby College j ani tor whom hundreds of students knew and
loved, tells me that when he was a boy in Waterville High School, he pumped
Colby’s first pipe organ. Colby men and women of my own student days remember
well the organ that stood in the northwest corner of the old chapel in Memorial
Hall. In my time Cecil Daggett usually played it, or some student acting
as understudy for Cecil. But twenty years earlier, when the organ was first
installed, the organist was Charles Spencer of the class of 1891, a man who
has returned regularly for his class reunions at Colby, and Spencer’s organ
pumper was Eddie Osborne, son of the college janitor. Charles Spencer, by the
way, was son of the man who had the longest service of any minister of the
local First Baptist Church, a pastorate of 21 years.
The best reminiscences of organ pumping reach us from Eugene Crawford,
who has more than once helped us with other items on this program. He offers
himself as one of the oldest local members of the Ancient and Honorable Order
of Organ PUmpers, having been initiated into that company 69 years ago. Gene
was one of the many pumpers of that day who did the job “free for nothing”.
Some of the fellows were luckier. Ernest Davis was paid tep. cents per hour.
Edgar Brown got 35 cents a Sunday for two services. But most of the boy
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pumpers, like Crawford, whose folks made them go to church, were glad to
pump the organ to get out of sitting still in a pew and listening to a sermon.
Many a dime novel has been read in the pumping alcove behind the organ, but
there is no record of anyone reading a dime novel in a pew.
Is organ pumping hereditary? Mr. Crawford’s son Earle, many years after
his father’s experience, pumped the organ at the Waterville Universalist
Church. Mr. Crawford recalls two choice incidents of his own organ-pumping
days. In his boyhood church the choir sat back of the minister, between him
and the organist. At that time the minister was a solid expounder of hellfire
and brimstone, whose sermons could rival Cotton Mather’s famous eruption
on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. One Sunday just as the minister
reached the most singeing and frying point of his firey sermon, a
prankish lady member of the choir lighted a bunch of those old brimstone
matches we were talking about on this program a few weeks ago. Anyone who
ever smelled one of those old matches, much less a whole bunch of them, can
imagine what happened. There was no choir the next Sunday.
Mr. Crawford’s second story concerns the new minister over whom dissention
arose in the church. One of the trustees who opposed the new man
went to the village bank and forbade them to pay the pastor I s salary. When
the cashier informed him that the pastor had already been in and received his
salary, the trustee exploded, “Don’t that man beat the devil”. To which the
cashier answered, “I thought that was what you hired him for”. Well, so
much for the old hand-pumped organs. If not already a lost art, organ-pumping
will soon be that. The electric blower and the electric organ have put
the old organ””pumper out of a job.
*****
Do you remember the old castoria ads? Here’s one that appeared in an
Augusta newspaper in 1889:
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“When baby was sick we gave her Castoria.
When she was a child, she cried for Castoria.
When she became Miss, she clung to Castoria.
When she had children, she gave them Castoria.”
It seems as if Castoria ran through families.
*****
Now we must get in a word about railroads again. Even in what seemed their
heyday, the old electric street railways were not always lucrative investments.
The annual report of the Benton and Fairfield Railway for the year 1900
showed gross earnings of $8,000, expenses of almost $7,000 and fixed charges
of $1,000, leaving a new balance of $19.11.
Speaking of railways, Waterville is not the only locality where folks are
still interested in the old narrow ·guage railroads. A few weeks ago, down in
Augusta, a good story about the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes line reached
the· columns of the Kennebec Journal. The story goes that one autumn morning a
sweet little old lady got on at Farmington and asked the conductor to let her
know when they reached Madrid. The train was more heavily loaded than usual
and had difficulty getting up the steep grades. After much puffing and heaving
it finally reached Redding Siding. The conductor, who had been much concerned
about the train’s progress, suddenly remembered the old lady. Madrid
now lay some ten miles back. The conductor hurried up ahead and confided his
plight to the engineer. The two agreed that the honor of the road was at stake,
and there was nothing to do but back the train back to Madrid. So the engineer
inched the creaking cars backward down the line for ten slow miles. When they
finally got back to Madrid the conductor entered the passenger car, tapped the
old lady on the shoulder, reached for her baggage to help her alight, and
said, “Madam, here we are at Madrid”. “Oh, no, don’t take my suitcase”, she
said. “I’m going through to Rangeley. Dr. Nichols told me to be sure to take
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another pill when we got to Madrid.”
That story is good enough to have happened on any railroad, even on myoId
Bridgton and Saco River. But the sticklers for fact won’t have it so.An irritated
and somewhat belligerent correspondent immediately wrote to the Journal,
pointing out that there was no such station as Madrid on the Sandy River
line. The correspondent says, “There never was a Madrid station~ The Berlin
Mills Company had a mill on the railroad between Phillips and Redington at
one time, and I believe passengers sometimes·stopped there and drove by team
to Madrid. The train left Phillips in exactly the opposite direction from
the carriage road that went to Madrid.” What about it, you old railroad fans?
Did or did not the Sandy River have a Madrid Station?
The same correspondent says the legend that passengers used to fish out of
the train wi.ndows in the passing trout streams is sheer myth. Even yarns about
walking behi.nd the train as it puffed up grade is a figment of the imagination.
Well, now, we Cumberland County boys never handed anything to that Sandy
River line anyway. For a good, old, honest-to-goodness walking line, give us
the Bridgton and Saco River. I can name you half a dozen other fellows besides
myself Who have alighted from that train as it failed to make the grade
from Bridgton Junction to Rankin’s Mill, and have picked mayflowers while the
train backed down to the junction and got a fresh start. As it inched its way
by the spot where we got off, we’d climb aboard again. Now j9st let some
stern stickler for facts come along and tell me that’s all in my imagination!
Well, who has any more good narrow guage stories? We can still use them.
*****
It seems to me that one of the nicest things said to and about us Americans
at this mid-point in the twentieth century was said by Allan Nevins, one
of our greatest living historians, in the New Year issue of Life magazine. I
have no doubt many of you who are listening tonight have already seen that
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excellent article. If so, you will not mind my calling your attention again
to its inspired closing sentences. And for you who have not read the article,
the statements should be equally welcome.
As we see developing a more and more bitter struggle between independent
business and socialistic enterprise, between earned economy and the welfare
state, it is good for us to heed these words from the man who has twice won
the Pulitzer Prize for American Biography_ He says:
“The American of 1950 does not expect worldly redemption by appeal to the
single authority either of Big Business or of Big Government. He is more and
more aware that the traditional contradiction between the two is false. World
War II dramatically demonstrated what the two, in alliance, could achieve. As
the half century ends, the man of business realizes that he must display a
sense of responsibility about political affairs, even in remote areas of the
earth. The man of government realizes his own need for the talents and practical
experience of the business man.
“The American of 1900 turned away from principles, from abstract ideals,
from absolutes and origins. He turned toward concreteness, toward fact, toward
things of size and shape .and color, toward action and power.
“Of action and power the American of 1950 has had quite enough. But in
the age of the atom, in the fresh memory of the Second World War, in the harrowing
menace of a third, concreteness and facts seem less compelling and not
at all satisfying. To bury his dead with pride and dignity, to arm the living
with hope as well as a gun, to comfort his brain as well as his stomach, today’s
American seeks out fixed moral principles. He is doggedly determined
to probe for those absolute values — real, not pretended — by which he may
be judged and which distinguish his cause from “the nation that is not holy”.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
52nd Broadcast January 22, 1950
Allover the world legends and myths have long been taken for fact. Tell
a story often enough and convincingly enough,’ and plenty of people will believe
it. It is even possible to tell an imagined yarn so often that the teller
comes to believe it himself.
Not even conservative, hard-headed Yankee Maine is immune from these
ill-founded beliefs. For instance, ever since I can remember anything at all
about Maine history, I have been told that Freeport is the birthplace of
Maine, and like many of our listeners I have seen the marker in that town
that so declares. But it just isn’t true.
That the story is a mere legend, a kind of myth, was first brought to my
attention only a few months ago, in a conversation with our State Librarian,
Mrs. Marion Stubbs. We had been chatting about Maine lore for ten minutes
when she asked, “Can you tell me where the story started that Freeport is the
birthplace of Maine? You know”, she continued, “the documents of the Constitutional
Convention and of the meetings leading up to it do not mention
Freeport.”
That was enough to set me off, and I was sure I had a good chance of
success, for the wives of three members of the Colby College faculty all
spent their girlhood days in Freeport. Sure enough, one of those women brought
to my attention a book written in 1940 by Florence Thurston and Harmon Cross,
a book entitled “Three Centuries of Freeport, Maine”.
Now local histories are not noted for their honest presentation of debunking
facts, especially when such facts smash the old idols of local pride.
This history of Freeport therefore deserves critical approval, for it bluntly
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declares that there is no truth in the story that the State of Maine was born
in Freeport.
The story, persistently circulated for more than a hundred years, has
been that the papers necessary to separate Maine from Massachusetts were signed
in the old Codman Tavern in Freeport on March 15, 1820 by commissioners empowered
to perform the act.
What are the facts? From 1784 to 1820 the separation issue was hotly debated.
In 1791 a popular vote showed 2,084 in favor of separation and 2,438
opposed. Again in 1797 the people favored continuing the tie with Massachusetts.
But, in a popular poll taken in 1816, ten thousand favored separation,
against seven thousand opposed. Nothing came of it, however, until 1819 when
elections for representatives from the District of Maine in the Massachusetts
Legislature were campaigned almost solely on the separation issue. As a result
every Maine man in the Massachusetts Senate and 114 out of 127 Maine men in
the Massachusetts House of Representatives came out flatly and emphatically
for separation.
The Massachusetts Legislature then voted to refer the subject to a joint
committee of Senate and House, on which Maine itself was well represented. Upon
recommendation of that committee, the Legislature voted to let the District of
Maine cast a final, decisive vote on the question of separation. The vote provided
that if a majority of 1,500 or more should favor separation, the Governor
of Massachusetts should proclaim the result and Maine would then choose
members of a convention to meet in Portland to draw up a state constitution.
Pending the ratification of the new constitution by the people, the Constitution
of Massachusetts would apply to the new state. But, whatever the result
of the vote on the constitution, the District of Maine was to become a state
on March 15, 1820, provided the consent of Congress was first obtained.
By 17,000 voting in favor to only 7,000 against the District voted offi-
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cially for separation. Governor Brooks of Massachusetts proclaimed the result,
and on March 3, 1820 President Monroe signed the bill making Maine a
separate sovereign state. So, the provisions of the Massachusetts legislative
act having now been fulfilled, Maine became a state on March 15 of that
year.
Meanwhile on October 17, 1819 the constitutional convention had held
its first meeting in Portland, and after much debate had selected the name
of Maine for the new state. They held other meetings before the constitution
was finally drafted, but no meeting in Freeport.
How then did the story ever bring Freeport into the picture? Irony of
ironies, what actually happened was that a meeting of a group of men opposed
to separation was held in Freeport. Eighteen men from Cumberland, Kennebec
and Lincoln Counties, m~n whose names are all recorded and include such well
known persons as Jacob Abbott of Farmington, Stephen Longfellow of Portland
(father of the poet), William Barrows of Hebron (founder of Hebron Academy) •
and Benjamin· Dunning of Bath. Those eighteen men met in a tavern at Freeport,
drew up and signed a broadside against separation a few days before the matter
went to popular vote in the fall of 1819. Far from signing any papers that
made Maine a state, those men , who were not constitutional delegates or commissioners
of any sort, signed, in their private capacities, a paper intended
to prevent Maine from becoming a state. So, instead of declaring itself the
birthplace of Maine, Freeport ought to proclaim itself as the town where Maine
couldn’t be stopped from being born.
*****
This is a census year. Again the census taker comes to our homes and asks
a lot of questions. So efficient and so highly developed are the statistical
services of the government that estimates are already being made of what the
1950 census will show. It will reveal that our nation now numbers 151 million
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people, an increase of 19 million in the past ten years. In 1940 we were told
that population growth was slowing up, that the United States could not continue
to increase its people nearly so rapidly in the future. Instead of
seriously slowing up, the increase continued at such a rate that since 1940
we have added more people than there are in all Mexico and nearly half as
many as in all France. It is an increase equal to the total population of
five cities as big as Chicago. Never before have so many people been added
to our population in any ten year period.
For the first t~e in our history the 1950 census will show more women
than men. In 1940 the nation had 66 million males and 65i million females.
In 1950 we have 75,200,000 males, but 75,800,000 females. The relative increase
is in the number of women in the older age groups; there is actually
a decrease in the proportion of unmarried women. There is no oversupply of
marriageable girls. Today, on the average, women live longer than men, whereas
in pioneer days men usually outlived their wives.
Elderly people past 65 made up 6.7% of the population in 1940; today
they account for 7.5%. Young people under 20 likewise, though increasing in
absolute numbers, have just held their own percentagewise. Now 52 million of
them account for 34% of the total population, exactly as only 45 million of
them did ten years ago.
The trend which must receive increasing, hard-headed attention is the
ever-lessening proportion of the working age group. Considering the usual
working age from 20 to 64, those persons, who formed 60% of the population
in 1940, have now fallen to 58%. It is members of that working group who must
support most of the people over 65 and under 20. As the working group forms
a smaller and smaller fraction of the total population, ‘their financial burden
becomes individually greater. Here is the heart of a major economic problem
in the United states. In the face of these shifting age groups, how shall
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we finance old age pensions and increased costs of educating the young without
placing a crushing burden on the individual wage earner? Somehow in America
we must find the answer to that question.
Quite a change has taken place in family incomes during the past ten
years. In 1940 only two families in five had an income over $2,000 a year;
today three families in four have that income. The family income group from.
$2,000 to $3,000 has remained about the same proportion, 21% in 1940 and 20%
in 1950. But, where only one family in ten had income from $4,000 to $5,000
in 1940, the proportion is now two families in ten. In 1940 only one family
in twenty had income over $5,000; now one family in five has that income.
Figures, however, can be misleading. A lot of people insist that many
families are little better off than they were before, when they had lower income.
When a skeptic and debunker of historical legends once said he doubted
whether George Washington ever threw a dollar across the Rappahannock River,
he was reminded that it might have been possible, because a dollar went farther
in those days. We won’t take any more time on that point tonight, but
in a week or two we shall show you that the facts clearly indicate that in
relative income — that is, income related to prices — we are actually better
off today than we were twenty years ago.
Another thing the 1950 census will make alarmingly clear. We are very
rapidly becoming a nation of city dwellers. Probably we need have no fear of
becoming wholly such, for wherever we live we must somehow eat, and somebody
must raise food to feed us. Of the hundred and thirty million people in the
United States in 1940, thirty million or nearly a quarter of them lived on the
farms. Today only 28 million out of 151 million are farm dwellers, or less
than a fifth.
What about homes? Have we made any dent in the housing problem in these
ten years? In 1940 we had 34,800,000 dwelling units; today we have 48,800,000,
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an increase which is more than double the increase in the number of families.
As for home equipment, the 21 million homes having bathtub or shower in 1940
have now increased to 31 million, and the 28 million homes with radios are
now 40 million.
Yes, indeed, the 1950 census is going to show a lot of interesting and
challenging things about this America in which we live.
*****
A few weeks ago I mentioned an old record of Massachusetts masonry which
had recently come into my possession. The donor, Mr. Chester Hussey, has now
favored me again, this time with a book which answers a question that had long
puzzled. me — why are masons called “Free and Accepted Masons”? The marshall
of my own masonic lodge at the time of my initiation was a Civil War veteran
who had held the office of marshall in that same lodge for forty years. I once
asked him why the term ‘~Free and Accepted Masons”? He had no idea.
One of America’s most interesting and controversial clergymen of a generation
ago was Joseph Fort Newton, a man who rather late in life left the ministry
of the Universalist Church and became an Episcopalian. Newton was always
deeply interested in Masonry. In 1914, when he was pastor of a church in Iowa,
Newton wrote a book called, “The Builders — a Story and Study of Masonry”.
Then years later, when he was pastor of the Church of the Divine paternity in
New York City, Newton revised and extended the book. It is that revised edition
Which I recently received from Mr. Hussey. In it Newton makes completely
clear the reason for the two. adjectives qualifying the name of masons.
Free masons were originally operative masons, members of masonic lodges
who practiced the trade of construction with stone and brick. For many years
perhaps for centuries — masonic lodges contained only operative members. Then
in the seventeenth century, in England at least, what were called speculative
members were admitted — men Who were not masons or in any other building
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trade, but men who were interested in the principles and ideals for which
masonry stood.
The operative members — the free masons — were called free because as
master workmen they were free to journey from town to town, to sell their
services to any who would employ them. In medieval and early modern times
that was a rare privilege. Most men had to stay put, in the towns where they
were born or were placed in apprenticeship. Only the master workman in a
building trade had the free right of travel.
Such men became members of masonic lodges as free masons. Then when the
speculative masons were admitted, they were called accepted masons, not masons
by right of trade and the master mason’s mark, but by virtue of being acceptable
to those operative masons, for association with them in the common principles
and common social tasks of the masonic fraternity.
Hence to this day the masonic order, now spread allover the world, is
called “Free and Accepted Masons”.
*****
A hundred years ago a thriving and significant part of this community was
the section still called Ten Lots. Now there must be many of our listeners who
know interesting items about the Ten Lots neighborhood. Please write me or call
me, if you know any such items.
Mr. H. F e. Sturtevant, who is one of the present residents of that section,
tells me that the neighborhood originally consisted of 2,000 acres of land,
divided into ten lots of 200 acres each. He says the grant was made about 200
years ago. Does anyone know the exact date, and who were the original owners
of the lots?
Mr. Sturtevant lives in one of the oldest houses, the lumber for which
was sawed at an old up-and-down saw mill on the pond back of· the house, a pond
fed by what is now called Red Brook. Much of the stone work of the old dam
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still stands. Mr. sturtevant’s house truly goes back to colonial times. It
has hand-made hinges and latches, and the huge hand-made locks with which
our Revolutionary fathers were familiar. In its construction both hand made
nails and wooden pegs were used.
Now let us see, in the next few weeks, how much information we can
gather about Ten Lots.
1-348
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
53rd Broadcast January 29, 1950
A lot of people now living remember Waterville’s great centennial celebrat
ion of 1902, but to the younger folks it is only a legend. But, believe
me, it was a big occasion, lasting for three days from June 22 through June
24, with a variety of events to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of
Waterville’s incorporation as a town. For it was in 1802 that waterville finally
won its independence from the parent town of Winslow and started off
on its own career.
We hear a lot about big parades in Waterville, such as that of last Armistice
Day, but modern parades are tiny, insignificant affairs, compared
with the gigantic and luxurious procession that marched through Waterville
streets on the morning of June 24, 1902.
The city was crowded with visitors. The Maine Central ran special trains,
and the little narrow guage unloaded hundreds of festive-bound passengers at
its Winslow station. Recording the events, the Waterville Mail tells us that
out of town people began to pour in almost at sunrise. A well-loaded wagon
….. –.-/
brought in a Vassalboro party at 4: 30 in the morning. Says the Mail , “The
streets were filled with marching men, hurrying horsemen, floats slowly getting
into line, and crowds of people everywhere. The noise makers were out
in force. The country youth invested heavily in striped canes. City youths
and even men of mature years wore gaudy decorations pinned on their manly bosoms.”
Then the Mail adds a provoking sentence: itA collection of the badges
of 1902 would make an interesting display at the next centennial.”
Now the date for the 150th anniversary of Waterville’s incorporation is
only two years hence. I wonder how many of those 1902 badges can be dug up for
that occasion.
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Let’s get on with the parade. The grand marshall was Dr. F. C. Thayer,
and promptly at ten o’clock he set the long line in motion. Chief of the first
devision was Dr. Luther Bunker and providing music was the Waterville Military
Band under its famous leader, R. B. Hall.
There were scores of decorated teams, one of which was driven by Miss
Marguerite Percival. Other young ladies rode horseback on spirited steeds.
The Waterville Bicycle Club was out in force with 2l decorated vehicles. The
business firms vied with one another to produce the most lavish displays of
floats and other items. Otten’s Bakery — do you remember his place on Lower
Temple Street? — provided a huge float representing a baking shop, a Fleischmann’s
yeast cart, six decorated delivery teams, and a National Biscuit Company
display. S. A. Dickinson had three floats; Redington and Company had two;
so also did Proctor and Bowie, one of them a representation of Fort Halifax.
H. L. Emery had a float with singing girls; Atherton Furniture Company dis:played
carpets on a specially made float of eight wheels; Miss E. L. Lovering’
s contribution, carrying the children of John and Frank. Webber, was a rosedecked
pony cart. A float showing flat boat days on the Kennebec attracted
much. attention. Other floats were provided by L. H. Soper, W. B. Arnold,. the
Bay View Hotel, G. S. Flood and Company, Wardwell Brothers, and Green and
Green, fuel dealers, and H. R. Dunham.
Hollingsworth and Whitney showed, on its float, samples of paper made at
its mill, from a small sheet to a huge roll 140 inches wide and 40 inches in
diameter. The Mail proudly announced that the roll of paper weighed 5,250
pounds, and if unrolled would stretch for 7i miles. Whitcomb and Cannon showed
an attractive display of meats, with “Jimmie” behind the counter. Young and
Chalmers had four teams, one of them showing how ice was delivered in 1850.
The Mail fairly went into ecstasies about the presentation of Clukey and Libby.
Said the newspaper: “Then came the float of the Clukey-Libby Company, one of
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the most elaborate in the procession. It was drawn by cream colored horses
with white harnesses. It was beautifully draped, and in addition was ador:'”
ned by the young ladies it carried. perhaps no one in the line was more
admired. Behind the float marched 24 boys, w,earing long, linen dusters and
carrying red umbrellas, advertising the same firm.”
The parade concluded just as every parade I have ever seen in’ waterville,
and my parade recollections here go back only to 1910. Of course you
know what I mean. Last but not least in that long procession which took forty
minutes to pass a given point came the Waterville Fire Department. And the
last vehicle of all was “Old Boomer”, an imitation of the town’s first hand
tub.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was a great parade. Of course there were
sports on the Centennial Program. One afternoon was devoted to a baseball
game between Colby and the Waterville town team. Waterville won by a sizable
score, and why shouldn’t they? For the Waterville pitcher was a rangy fellow
named Jack Coombs, who had just graduated from Coburn.
By the way, there will soon appear in the Colby Field House the Colby
graduation picture of Jack Coombs, made by Sam Preble in 1906. This picture
is a recent gift to the college from Chester Hussey of Walnut Street.
For muqh of tonight’s information about the centennial celebration I am
indebted to a local man who has been my friend and fraternity brother since
college days, Attorney Lewis Lester Levine. It was his loan to me of a copy
of the old Waterville Mail which set me off on this subject of the centennial.
Among out of town guests at that celebration is mentioned a family that
rings a clear bell of childhood memory. The Mail says I “Dr. and t1rs. F. E.
Stevens of Bridgton are visiting friends here. They made the trip by the doctor’s
automobile.”
Now by this time every listener to this program knows that Bridgton was
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my home town. I knew Dr. and Mrs. stevens very well indeed. In fact the doctor
owned the building in which my father’s store waelocated. From my earliest
recollection he operated what we called the drug store on the hill, and
he installed the town’s first soda fountain. He was not the first, but very
nearly the first Bridgton citizen to own an automobile. I wonder how long it
took Dr. and Mrs. Stevens to drive from Bridgton to Waterville back there in
1902. Will anyone hazard a guess? That Bridgton couple were frequent visitors
in Waterville, for Mrs. Stevens was one of the Redington sisters.
*****
That June week in 1902 saw the first general reunion of what later was
to be called Colby’s famous class of 1892. I believe that, of the enthusiastic
young business and professional men, just ten years out of college, who assem-.
bled for that reunion, only two are now living, Frank B. Nichols of Bath and
William N. Donovan of Newton Centre, both of whom attended Colby’s 1949 Commencement,
57 years after their graduation.
That same week saw, on the Colby campus, the celebrating of the 50th anniversary
of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. The anniversary poem was written
and read by none other than Maine’s poet-novelist, Holman F. Day, and the fraternity
history was given by Charles E. Gurney, who was later to be chairman
of the Maine Public Utilities Commission for many years, and for even longer
years secretary of the Colby Board of Trustees.
*****
An international event of some importa.nce, about to be held in 1902, filled
several columns of the Mail, in spite of its absorption with the Waterville
Centennial. That event was the coming coronation of England’s new king, Edward
VII. It was indeed a gala event for England, because thousands of her
people had never seen a coronation. England had had none for 65 years. Edward’s
mother, the great Victoria, had been crowned in 1837.
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But an ironical twist of fate postponed Edward’s coronation for many
weeks, and the Waterville Mail got the news just in time to give it a couple
of inches of space and a headline in that issue of June 24, 1902. The item
said, “The coronation ceremonies have been indefinitely postponed. King Edward
was operated on this morning for appendicitis, and at two o’clock was
resting satisfactorily.”
*****
With the centennial behind them, Waterville people had other entertainment
ahead. On July 5, 1902 Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show hit town. It was
advertised as “headed by the famed guide, scout, U. S. interpreter and Oklahoma
hero, Major G. William Lillie (Pawnee Bill). The hero’s 19 year old daughter,
Miss May Lillie, (Why didn’t they name her Calla?), was heralded as
the champion girl horseback rifle shot of the world. A grand street parade
would set the town kids gawk-eyed at ten o’clock.
*****
Just think of some of the food prices of 1902. Flour was $4.75 a barrel,
tea 35 cents a pound, sugar twenty pounds for a dollar. Lard was ten cents a
pound, canned corn three for a quarter, rice four pounds for a quarter, red
salmon two cans for a quarter, and pink salmon ten cents a can. Compared with
the inflationary prices of 1950, W. P. Stewart then advertised best mocha and
java for 39 ,cents a pound, Boston blend for 23 cents, Excelsior blend for 16
cents, and two pounds of Rio for 25 cents.
Among the classified ads was one for a girl to do general housework at
two dollars a week. P. P. Hill wanted two honest young men of good habits to
learn the jeweler’s trade. An establishment on Temple Street offered window
shades for 22 cents, including fixtures and pull. And Atherton’s agreed to
store stoves during the summer months for a modest fee.
*****
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We have often talked about words on this program, but I do not recall
that we have ever mentioned the emotional power of words. Words in themselves,
entirely apart from their context, carry tremendous emotional power. A mere
word is capable of arousing us to anger and hate, zeal and ambition, thrill
and ecstaSy.
Plenty of words have low emotional power; they arouse very little, if
any, emotion. Such words as table, coat, walk, addition, percentage do not
stir us up very much. But notice what happens inside of you when you hear
any of the following words: honor, glory, death, dawn, sunset, stars.
The poet knows what he is doing when he uses words of high emotional
import. Shelley, writing of his fellow poet Keats, dead at the youthful age
of 26, might have said, “Adonais is dead and I long to join him.” But, instead
of that, he wrote, “The soul of Adonais like a star beacons from the .abode
where the eternal are”.
The politician and others who seek to sway public opinion know very well
the power of emotional words. It was not by accident that Roosevelt and his
advisers hit upon the phrase “New Deal”, and, knowing perfectly well the favorable
connection of the word “fair”, the Truman administration adopts the
phrase “Fair Deal”.
Another of those powerful emotional phrases is “Welfare State”. Because
everyone, high or low, rich or poor, native-born or immigrant, wants to enjoy
in America a state of welfare, have enough to eat and to wear, a roof over
his head, and be sure of the freedoms of speech, religion and movement, it is
easy to confuse state of welfare with welfare state.
That phrase “welfare state” is now glibly used by thousands of people,
but it is difficult to get any two persons to agree on just what they mean
by it. A few weeks ago Dr. Gallup tried to find out what the term meant to
people. His pollsters learned that 64 per cent of the men and women ques-
1-354
tioned had no idea at all of its meaning. Three per cent thought it meant
some kind of government control; five per cent said it meant socialism; about
one person in every five said the welfare state means that the government
takes care of the people. In spite of the fact that the term meant nothing to
two out of every three persons, it may be significant that to one out of every
five it is equivalent to the hand-out state, the government that is all give
and no take, that provides for the citizen a rosy bed of privileges with no
thorns of responsibility.
Now I have just used another of those emotional phrases. You heard me say
“hand-out state”. That is an expression just as loaded with prejudice in one
direction as “welfare state” is loaded in the other direction.
Stop and think a minute. Every one of you has had some experience with
the power of labels, the word tags that people pin on one another in praise or
blame. In 1920 all one needed to do to damn a person was to call him a Bolshevik.
In 1950 the corresponding label is Communist.
Think of others of those damning labels: plutocrats, malefactors of great
wealth, robber barons, tycoons, crucifying mankind on a cross of gold. Then
think of how much we used to hear about the forgotten man, the more abundant
lif.e, the century of the connnon man, two chickens in every pot, two cars in
every garage, the honest dollar, the full dinner pail.
Just consider some of the phrases that greet you in every daily paper.
What do they mean, those glibly used words like inflation and deflation, high
velocity money, deficit financing? We have even encountered the words reflation
and disinflation. Such is the confusing gibberish that plagues us. No
wonder Dr. Nourse, former chairman of the President’ s Committee of Economic
Advisers, expressed complete discouragement “over the possibility of using
ordinary words in the English language to carry meaning from one mind to another”.
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So let us beware of slogans and labels, of tag words and emotional phrases.
On the subject of you and your government, whatever the slogans you most readily
accept about it, one plain truth is worth remembering. That truth is this:
what the government gives away·,”itmust~irst … take away.
1-356
Little Talks on Common Things
Volume 2
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
54th Broadcast February 5, 1950
Do we Maine people boa~t enough about our vacationland state? The bragging
of Californians and Texans is proverbial. A few weeks ago, when the
oleomargarine taxes were being hotly debated in the U. S. Senate, Senator Humphrey
of Minnesota said he supposed there ought to be separate oleo factories
in every state, because it would be unthinkable for Californians to eat Florida
oleo.
As for Texas, during the war a Texas family found itself in one of the
war boomed factory towns of the Pacific coast and placed their ten year old
son in a sChool populated by children born in many different states. One day
the teacher said, “Now, Children, in what you have just read there is a reference
to Waco County, Texas. You boys and girls come from many different
parts of the country. Some of you must know Texas. Who can tell me what part
of Texas Waco County is in?” The ten year old spoke up at once. “Waco County”,
he said loudly and p~<k..al.y, II is in the northeast corner of my grandfather IS
ranch” •
With our reputation for Yankee taciturnity and close-mouthedness, we just
can I t do the job at bragging whiCh the Californians and Texans do. But we
ought, without exaggeration or boasting, to tell a lot of folks some of the
real facts about Maine.
No wonder we are a well known vacation state, for within our relatively
small area of 33, 000 square miles are 2,465 lakes and ponds, more than 5, 000
rivers and streams, a hundred mountains more than 3,000 feet high, and 2,500
miles of ocean front.
Maine has in Aroostook the largest county in the United States, with an
2-1
area larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.
It is not true that Maine doesn’t grow in population. It is true that
Maine’s best export is its pe0ple, who have found places of prominence all
over the world. But it is also.true that between 1940 and 1950 Maine increased
its population by nearly eight per cent. In the same ten years the number of
~ufacturing plants in Maine increased 46 per cent, and the number of production
workers increased 22 per cent.
Many visitors who come to Maine in the summer and ride past our rock~
strewn pastures and glacier-bouldered fields — especially if those visitors
come from the black soil region of the mid-western prairies — ask the question,
“How in the world do Maine people get a living? . This kind of land
wouldn’t support a gopher in Iowa or Kansas. II
Well, let’s tell these visitors how Maine people do live. As a state,
Maine has five major sources of income: manufacturing, agriculture, commercial
fisheries, recreation and public service industries. In Maine are made
more than a thousand different articles, from toothpicks to ships.
Recreation is by no means Maine’s largest business. It is indeed sizable
and significant, bringing $125,000,000 into the state every year. But
farm income exceeds it with $200,000,000, and the value of Maine’s manufactured
products reaches a total of $850,000,000 a year.
Maine is strategically located on the Great Circle Air Route between the
united states and Northern Europe, and by nautical mileage Portland is actually
closer to the eastern ports of South America than is New York or even New Orleans.
As for Maine folks making a living, the next time one of those mid-western
visitors asks you in amazement how we keep alive up here in rock-bound,
rock-strewn Maine, you tell him that no less an authority than the U. S. Bureau
of Labor states that there are more than 10,000 ways of making a living
2-2
in Maine.
*****
Frank Littlefield was not only·an organ pumper; he was also an experienced
bell ringer. Most interestingly he tells me something which I venture
to say very few of our listeners ever knew. It is how the church bells of
waterville used to be rung.
Half a century ago the four Protestant churches whose bells were in
sound of each other were the Methodist, First Baptist, unitarian and Congregationalist.
The Universalist, the Getchell Street Baptist and the Advent
churches were too far from the center of town to be in the interesting,
concerted plan for ringing the bells — for Mr. Littlefield assures us there
was a plan for the ringing of those four mid-town bells from 9:15 to 10:15
every Sunday morning. The order of ringing the various parts was first the
Methodist, then the Baptist, then the Unitarian and finally the Congregationalist.
There were three parts to the plan. First, each bell in turn was rung
briefly and then set. It was quite a trick to set a bell, and I wonder how
many of our listeners know what that means. It means to turn the bell squarely
upside down and hold it there.
Secondly, in turn, each bell ringer released his set and gave two strokes
three times. Thirdly, all the bells rang out joyously together.
Mr. Littlefield says that the wife of Dr. Knox, who used to sing in the
Methodist choir, had a very keen ear for musical tones. She insisted that the
four bells did not differ from each other by so much as half a tone.
*****
What about Madrid Station on the Sandy River railroad? That was the
question we asked a few weeks ago. Within 24 hours after our broadcast about
the lady who asked the conductor to tell her when they got to Madrid, I had
2-3
four different persons assure me that they had once lived in Franklin County
and therefore knew :what they were’,ta1king about. Well, believe it or not,
two of them said there was a Madrid Station, and two said there was not.
Now, within a few days, through Mildred W. Russell, I received a statement
by Victor Odlin of South Gardiner. Mr. Od1in says that for more than
three years, from ,June 1896 to December, 1899, he was employed as’mi11 and
yard foreman of the Redington Lumber Company. Naturally he travelled the
little railroad line’ many times with loads of lumber and logs. He therefore
has very vivid recollection of the stations.
Mr. Odlin says that, from Phillips to Rangeley, the first stop was at
Reed’s Mill in the town of Madrid. This was six miles out of Phillips. Four
miles farther on was a stop at East Madrid, where a saw mill was located.
Eight miles beyond that was the stop at Redington. After eight more miles
came the stop at Dead River. Five miles from there was the end of the line
at Rangeley.
If passengers on the Sandy River wanted to get to Madrid Village, they
had to get off at Reed’s Mill or at East Madrid and go into the village ‘by team
or by a long hike.
As for Redington, Mr. Odlin says, “At that time, fifty years ago, it had
about fifteen families and a large boarding house, a regular school, and religious
services twice a month.”
So it is that Mr. Odlin, who worked in the vicinity, contends there never
was a Madrid station. But he is wrong. The best evidence we know to settle the
question is an official time-table of the road. George Beach of the Rollins
and Dunham Company has shown me a copy of a weekly newspaper called “Rangeley
Lakes”, published at Rangeley in January, 1896. At the top of the right hand
column of the first page appear these words: “Phillips and Rangeley Railroad
time-table. The only direct and all rail route to the Rangeley Lakes and
2-4
Dead River region. Friday, November 1, 1895.” Then follows the table,
showing Train No. 1 from Phillips to Rangeley, and Train No. 2 from Rangeley
to Phillips. And, clear for all to read, the stop between Phillips and Reed’s
Mill is Madrid– not East Madrid or any other name, but simply Madrid. The
listed stops from Phillips to Rangeley are given as Madrid, Reed’s Mill, Sander’s
Mill, Redington Mills and Dead River. The up train left Phillips at
2:15 P.M., reached Madrid at 2:40, made a ten-minute stop at Redington Mills
from 3:45 to 3:55, reached Dead River at 4:30, and finally arrived at Rangeley
at 4:55 — two hours and forty minutes after leaving Phillips.
Of the many topics mentioned on this program, none has more clearly shown
the trickiness of memory and confusion about names and places than this question
whether there was or was not a Madrid Station. The confusion seems to
have been caused by the fact that Madrid Station was considerable distance
from Madrid Village and probably at some time or other went by a different
name.
About a mile out of Redington was the top of Sluice Hill, the highest
point between Phillips and Rangeley, about 2,000 feet above sea level. Here
the grade is steep for such a small line, running for some distance at 600
feet to the mile. In the summer of 1896 the Sandy River ran an excursion
train to Farmington for Foxpaugh’s Circus. On the way back the train had
trouble on the steep grade at Sluice Hill. Getting near the top, the wheels
began to spin and the train stopped. The engineer backed down and tried it
again. This went on for three times. Then, on the fourth try, the huskiest
of the many excursioners got off as the train slowed near the hilltop,
grabbed on to the train wherever they could, and literally pushed it over
the summit. Then it was an easy run into Redington. “It was a good thing we
had a lot of husky men aboard on that trip”, says Mr. Odlin, ~for by the time
the train made its fourth try at the hill we were almost out of both coal
2-5
and water. n
*****
We hear a great deal of talk about how much better off people were in
the old days when a dollar bought so much more than it does today. The truth
is that in terms of relative income people are better off today than they
have ever been before in our nation’s history. By relative income is meant
total dollar income in relation to the cost of living.
Let’s take a look at the evidence furnished by the U. S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics. The average retail price of food, clothing, fuel and light, rent
and house furnishings have increased 69% in the past ten years, and 140%
since 1913, which was 37 years ago. But accompanying that increase in living
costs, the weekly take-home pay of all persons engaged in manufacturing -the
great army of American factory workers — has increased even more. In
1913 the factory worker’s average pay was $11.00 for a 50 hour week. In 1929
it was $25.03 for a 44 hour week. In 1939, just as we were emerging out of the
depression years, it was down to $23.86 for a 38 hour week. Ten years later,
in 1949, it had jumped to $55.26 for a 39 hour week.
In short, compared with the price increase of 69% since 1939, the factory
wage increase in the same period has been 131%. And over the long haul,
since 1913, while the price increase has been 140%, the factory wage increase
has been 500%.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a term familiar to all economists,
but needing explanation for the general public. That is the term “real earnings”.
By real earnings the Bureau means actual dollar earnings adjusted to
the cost of living, what many of us usually speak of as the purchasing power
of the dollar. To give a simple example, suppose a worker receives fifty dollars
a week and pays ten dollars a week rent. Then, while his wages remain
the same, suppose his rent goes up to twelve dollars a week. His dollar,
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which previously bought one-tenth of a week’s rent, now buys only one-twelfth.
His rent dollar, in terms of real earnings, is now worth only 83 cents, because
83 cents was what would buy one-twelfth of a week’s rent before his rent went
up.
But, on the other hand, suppose, while his rent went up from ten dollars
to twelve dollars a week, his pay went up from fifty to sixty dollars a week.
In terms of rent alone each of his dollars buys only 83 cents worth of the
previous rental, but he now has $1.20 in pay for every dollar that he had
before. A little simple arithmetic shows that he is now better off, in spite
of the increased rent.
Thus, by this method of figuring adjustment of take-home pay to the cost
of living — not alone in rent, but in all other living costs — the Bureau of
Labor statistics shows us that in 1913 these adjusted real earnings were $16.10
a week; in 1939 they were $24.00 a week; and in 1949 they had reached $32.80 a
week. In short, real earnings have increased 25% since 1939 and have doubled
since 1913.
*****
Kennebec County, Maine has long been praised as a fine place to live. Almost
sixty years ago, when the huge two-volume history of Kennebec County was
published under the general editorship of Henry D. Kingsbury, this central
part of Maine was subjected to high praise by Hiram K. Morrell, who wrote the
introduction to the whole work. Even modern advertising would forego the kind
of ecstatic rhetoric that flowed from Mr. Morrell’s pen. Just listen to his
final paragraph in praise of the grand old County of Kennebec:
“Thus nature has in every way made generous provision in the valley of
the Kennebec for the welfare and happiness of man. Of course man here does not
live forever, but it is a proportionately cheerful and pleasant place to die
in. Skillful physicians and careful nurses smooth his pillow and ease his
2-7
pains, till the grXffi messenger is almost tired of waiting, and when the inevitable
has passed, genial and liberal clergymen will do the best that can-be
done for him, and elegant undertakers will make his last ride the most expensive
he has ever had; and when all is done, a monument of Kennebec granite
will rear its lordly head above his peaceful grave, where after life’s fitfull
fever he sleeps well.”
2-8
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
55th Broadcast February 12, 1950
It is not too early to initiate plans for two waterville anniversaries.
In 1952 our city government should recognize, with appropriate ceremonies, the
l50th anniversary of Waterville’s incorporation as a town. For it was in 1802
that the inhabitants of the growing community on the west side of the river
secured their political independence from the parent town of Winslow.
Waterville is a much bigger city now than it was in 1902 when our centennial
was held. Then they had a glorious three-day celebration with the
mammoth parade I told you about two weeks ago. perhaps we do things with more
restraint in the middle of the century and we are unlikely to devote three
days to honoring our 150 years of corporate existence. But we certainly must
have a fitting celebration. Right now the city government ought to start
thinking about it.
Four years hence in 1954 comes an event of much greater significance -one
in which Waterville, Winslow, Fairfield and Oakland may all appropriately
unite. Nineteen fifty four is the 200th anniversary of the building of Fort
Halifax, and that is the most important slngle event in the history of this
section of the Kennebec Valley_
In 1661 the Colony of New Plymouth sold all the lands for 15 miles each
side of the Kennebec River, from what is now Merrymeeting Bay to the present
Skowhegan, to Antipas Bo!- es, Edward Tyng, Thomas Brattle and John Winslow.
This tract was called the Kennebec Patent. Settlement was slow and insecure.
The few hardy souls who ventured to make homes in the vicinity of Cushnoc
Falls (now Augusta) were constantly harassed by Indians until the building of
Fort Western. The fate of settlers who came farther up the river to Ticonic
2-9
Falls was even worse. Their lives and fortunes were never safe from Indian
raids.
When, therefore, in 1749 a company was formed called the New Plymouth
Company to encourage settlement on the Kennebec Patent, they petitioned the
new governor of the Province of Massachusetts, William Shirley, to build a
fort at the junction of the Kennebec and Sebasticook Rivers. The bitter struggle
between the English and the French for control of North America was at
its height. Brunswick had been burned flat in 1722; Father Rasle had been
killed at Norridgewock in 1724. Other settlements had been wiped out. Our
Maine historians tell us that in 1749 there were only two families of white
people living above Merrymeeting Bay.
Governor Shirley responded to the plea and appointed tQ build the fort
General John Winslow, descendant of the John Winslow who had become one of
the four proprietors in 1661. With 800 soldiers of the king he built a fort
consisting of five buildings and a stockade 800 feet long. It is one of the
corner blockhouses that still stands and that we call Fort Halifax today.
Of course Winslow got its name from the general who built the fort, but
the actual master builder in charge of the workmen was a man who already lived
in Maine, Isaac Ilsley of Falmouth (which was, of course, the old name
for portland) •
As soon as the fort was built General Winslow and his 800 men departed,
and in their place was put a permanent garrison of 80 men under the command
of Captain William Lithgow, for whom Winslow’s present Lithgow Street is
named. Here at last was protection for the settlers. Threatened by Indian
raids, they could take refuge within the stockade and have protection of the
soldiers’ guns.
By the accident of war and diplomatic negotiation, Captain Lithgow proved
to be the only commander that Fort Halifax ever had. Nine years after the
2-10
fort was built England and France signed the Treaty of Paris ending the French
and Indian wars. The fort was then dismantled, but its work had already been
accomplished. settlers were now numerous and their homes were permanent. Eight
years later in 1771 there were enough of them to secure incorporation of the
town of Winslow.
So I vigorously contend that 1754 was the most important date in the history
of this region. The building of Fort Halifax made settlements possible.
To Fort Halifax the communities of Winslow, Waterville, Oakland and Fairfield
owe their very existence.
*****
Now for a new topic of local historical interest. I am told that in certain
parts of the business section of Waterville are reservoirs or water storage
places long ago covered up or filled in. One of these is said to have been in
Post Office Square, another in castonguay Square. Who can give me information
about them? Were they really large, stoned or bricked wells, fed by springs or
underground veins; or were they receptacles into which water was poured and kept
for use in fighting fires?
*****
A number of persons have asked me when certain modern conveniences first
appeared in Waterville. One such question is, “When did we first have city
water?” Long before the splendid and epoch-making accomplishment of Harvey
Eaton in forming the Kennebec Water District, assuring that what is happening
to New York City in 1950 can never happen to Waterville long before that —
the waterville Water Company had been formed. As early as the 1870’s the need
for a supply of water beyond the private wells was keenly felt. So in March,
1881 the Legislature granted a charter to the Waterville Water Company to lay
pipes and furnish water to the town. Several years went by, and the company
could not come to agreement with the town on terms, especially regarding the
2-11
source of supply and the service of hydrants for fire fighting.
In 1886 the town voted to accept the company’s proposal to introduce an
adequate supply of water into Waterville “for the extinguishment of fires and
for domestic, manufacturing and other purposes”. It was agreed that the water
should be taken from Snow Pond ~n Oakland and delivered through 14 inch pipes
to Pleasant Street, then graded in size so as to meet the requirements of the
different streets. Finally it was agreed that the system should be finished by
December 31, 1887.
But both the company and the peqple of waterville had reckoned without
the folks of Oakland. The citizens of that town arose in wrath and passed the
following vote: “The town of Oakland does hereby earnestly and emphatically
protest against the taking of any water from Snow Pond by the Waterville Water
Company, and that the selectmen b~ instructed to use every legitimate means in
their power to prevent the consummation of the subtle, underhand and wicked
scheme of said Water Company to rob the people of this town of their vested
rights and property. II
The aroused citizenry of Oakland won their fight. In 1887 a new charter
was granted to the water Company, providing that they should take the water
from Messalonskee Stream instead of Snow Pond. On May 5, 1887 the town of
Waterville and the waterville Water Company came to an agreement, and Charles
H. Redington was appointed chairman of a committee to locate fifty hydrants.
So Waterville’s first municipal water supply came from Messalonskee
stream. I have found a number of citizens who, when told that fact for the
first time, say they just cannot believe it. But back in 1887 people didn’t
know nearly so much about contaminated water as a carrier of dread disease as
they know today. Yet some of them knew enough about it to make a determined
fight to substitute the pure water of China Lake for the polluted water of
Messalonskee Stream, and the victorious leader of that crusade was Waterville’s
honored and greatly respected elder statesman, Harvey D. Eaton.
2-12
*****
In his recent economic report to the Congress President Truman ~oke
an emphatic word for the free enterprise system that has been the bed-rock
of our American economy for two centuries. The President said: “Of all the
dynamic forces of expansion in America, one of the most important is business
investment. If we are going to attain the goal of a $300 billion nat~
ional income in the next five years, we must equip ourselves with more and
better industrial tools.”
Unfortunately what the President did not say is that there is a definite
shortage of business funds to pay for more and better industrial tools.
A careful survey of business plans for new plants an4 equipment in 1950, made
by the famous McGraw-Hill Department of Economics, shows that all industry
manufacturing, mining, transportation and utilities — plans to invest
$12,400,000,000 in new plant and equipment this year. And that is 13% less
than was actually spent in 1949. The $6,300,000,000 which the manufacturing
industries alone plan to spend for new plant and equipment in 1950 is 15%
less than their 1949 expenditures. With the need for more and better industrial
tools clearly evident, as President Truman points out, why are the industries
actually planning to ~end less?
The answer is that they cannot get the money. Most companies cannot sell
new common stock except at ruinously low prices. Investment capital is not
attracted.
What can be done about it? One way is to lower the taxes on business income
so as to release money for new plant and equipment. Perhaps an even better
way is to repeal the present double taxation of dividends, which are now
taxed once as corporate income, then taxed again as personal income. Whatever
method is adopted, the main point must not be overlooked. If business cannot .
get enough new tools, five years from now we shall have not a higher, but a
2-13
definitely lower total income in the United States.
On this program we do not pretend to economic wisdom. The confusing opinions
of the professional economists only confuse us the more. But old-fashioned
Yankee common sense tells us that if President Truman or anyone else
wants expansion of industrial plant and equipment to assure that much talked
about $300 billion national income in 1955, the money must be found to make
the expansion. And that: money can be found only by ploughing in the profits
of industry or getting new investors to take risks which increasing government
regulations make them more and more unwilling to take. It is a problem not
easy of solution, but one which American ingenuity must somehow solve.
*****
SeVeral months ago I paid tribute to the Railway Mail Service, pointing
out that two of my neighbors are retired members of that honored brotherhood.
It must have :peen with a feeling of sadness that the older men: of the RMS
learned that this respected name would be heard no more. For on November 1,
1949 the Railway Mail Service went out of existence, and the Postal Transportation
Service took .its place. Thus did Uncle Sam bow to the changing times.
The Air Postal Transport had grown to such proportiqns that efficiency dictated
a united postal service, including both rail and air. Hence the RMS is out
and PTS is in.
But our reason for mentioning tonight these men who form the arteries of
the postal service, whether by rail or air or any other method, is not to bemoan
the passing of a name. It is rather to call attention to the stiff examinations
these men must pass.
Many students in high school and college have just come through the ordeal
of mid-year examinations, and the glad news or the sad news is beginning
to reach the folks at home. The passing mark in most high schools is 70; in
most colleges it is 60. What about the clerks of the Postal Transportation
2-14
Service or the old Railway Mail Service? In the original examination for
appointment they must get at least 85 in postal laws, space regulations and
junction connections, and in the examination on mail routes no mark is acceptable
if it is less than 97. Each clerk must learn the names and routes of
from 4,000 to 8,000 different post offices.
Unlike men admitted to many other occupations, the postal transportation
clerk is examined not just to get the job, but repeatedly at intervals while
he is on the job. He must not get rusty or careless. Records of the Post
Office Department show that, on every such examination wbile in service, almost
all regular clerks made a:: grade better than 99, and some of them hit a
full 100 over and over again.
OUr young people are irritated by examinations. They want to know what is
the sense of such terrible ordeals. Perhaps many a teacher is hard pressed to
give boys ·and girls an acceptable answer. But not so the Post Office Department.
Just because Uncle Sam requires that 97% of perfection in frequent examinations,
your letter, however crudely addressed and wherever mailed, seldom
goes astray. In the shortest possible time it is delivered to the person
for whom you intended it.
Of course the transportation men do not deserve all of the credit for this
achievement. The men and women in the post offices, from the tiny hamlets to
the big cities, the postmen who trudge weary miles over icy and slushy streets,
the rural carriers who encounter every hazard of tricky weather all these
efficient, 10yal people play their part so that “neither snow, nor rain, nor
heat, nor cold, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion
of their appointed rounds.”
2-15
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
56th Broadcast February 19, 1950
Two of our listeners have recently put into my hands historical material
of interest and importance — material which will serve as grist for this program
for rna ny weeks to come. Mr. Robert Bradley of Elm Street has loaned me
his set of the history of Kennebec County, published in two huge volumes in
1892. Doubtless many sets are still owned in Kennebec homes, but it is almost
impossible to pick up a set in the book stores. In fact Mr. Bradley got his
set one volume at a time several years apart.
It was from that history that I quoted a paragraph two weeks ago, the
flowery close of the introduction, telling all readers what a good place Kennebec
County is to die in, and how at the end elegant undertakers carry the
Kennebecker on his last and most expensive ride.
The editor of that history written 60 years ago was Henry D. Kingsbury,
who himself wrote many of the sections, including those on Waterville, Winslow,
Oakland, Sidney and Vassalboro. But he was ably assisted by other writers,
some of whom gained far wider fame than the editor himself was ever to enjoy.
An important and exceedingly interesting chapter was written by a young
man, then just beginning his career as teacher, philosopher and international
leader. The chapter is entitled, “The Society of Friends”, and it was written
by Rufus Jones.
The chapter on the History of the Courts was written by William Penn
Whitehouse, who was to be one of the most distinguished of Maine’s able chief
justices of the supreme judicial court. A young Bowdoin graduate, John Clair
Minot, contributed the section on Belgrade. He was later to become the renowned
editor of the Youth’s Companion.
We propose to dip often and deep into the pages of this county’s history,
2-16
and we shall share with you some of the catch that our dip-net brings up.
So much for our debt to Mr. Bradley. An equally valuable loan has come
to us from Mr. Charles Libby of Upper College Avenue. It is a priceless and
utterly irreplaceable bound volume of the entire publication of the Rural
Intelligencer, a weekly newspaper published in Augusta in 1855 and 1856 by
Mr. Libby’s ancestor, William A. Drew.
As most of you know the newspapers of a hundred years ago used better
paper than is used today. This huge bound volume of Mr. Libby’s has between
its board covers 126 weekly issues of the Rural Intelligencer in perfect condition,
not a page torn, not a line smudged or faded. It is just as easily
read today as when it was first printed, a decade before the civil War. Because
these papers are now bound together in a volume, it is a bit difficult
to visualize how the individual issues came from the press, but apparently in
two uncut sheets, because the first issue carries the following instructions
to the reader: “Stitch or pin the back of this paper and cut its leaves before
you sit down to read it.”
Among the good, old, homey recipes listed in that issue of January 6,
1855 is this one: “Recipe to whiten the teeth: Mix honey with finely powdered
charcoal and use the paste as a dentifrice. Those who have worn-down
teeth will be glad to learn that common carbonate of soda will make tough
beef tender.”
probably there are plenty of folks still living who can remember when
central heating was bitterly denounced as both extravagant and unhealthy, and
there may be a few who can recall people who denounced bathrooms as the sure
cause of an early death. But I venture to say not a person now with us can
remember when anybody attacked the coming of stoves. But that is just what editor
Drew of the Rural Intelligencer did in his issue of January 20, 1855. The
new air-tight stoves had evidently become his pet hate, and he let loose with
2-17
all the power of his pen. This is what he wrote:
“We are tempted to declare war against the whole stove system, now so
common in our towns, and even in the country. We believe that stoves cause many
of the diseases — particularly consumption — which have been making such
fatal progress of late. Our fathers before the Revolution used no stoves; they
warmed themselves by the free air heated from an open fireplace; and who ever
heard of consumption among the Pilgrim Fathers?
“In rooms heated by open fire the air is always sweeter and purer, and
consequently more healthy. But,·”j.:r:!-sitting rooms and parlors heated by stoves,
the air is dull and heavy; and besides you must always have cold feet. What is
more cheerless to approach when you are cold than a dark, black stove? We’re
going to be a lot poorer than we are now before we dispense with our open fire
to sit by in winter.
“Stoves are not economical. They cost a lot in the first place. Then quite
soon they are broken, burned out or out of fashion. Then the wood must all be
cut short, split fine, and carefully seasoned; and when it is put in the stove,
the draft eats it up faster than a man can prepare it, whereas an open fire
lets its big logs linger with glowing heat all day.
“And don’t forget the light you get from an open fire in a winter’s evening.
It is easily equal to two oil lamps in the room. Health, pleasure and
economy would be secured by casting our stoves to the moles and the bats and
returning to the simpler habits of our hardier and happier ancestors. II
Editor Drew wouldn’t leave this subject of stoves alone. He returned to
it on January 27 with this comment:
“OUr article on the cheerless and unhealthy effects of air-tight stoves
begins to take effect. An intelligent gentlemen in Richmond wrote us on Monday
that, after reading what we said on the subject, he got up very early Monday
morning and, before the rest of the family were up, he had removed the
2-18
air-tight stove from the sitting room. When, one after another, the members
of the family came into the room, each face gleamed with a radiant smile as it
was lightened by the cheerful rays of a blazing fire from an open fire
frame. To all others who, like our Richmond subscriber, would not have smoky
houses and scolding wives, we say, go thou and do likewise.”
Editor Drew was equally sure about the utter folly of anyone’s claiming
that houses would some day be lighted by electricity. In his column headed
“Mechanic Arts” on January 27, 1855 he printed an engraving of an electric
lamp, said to have been developed in London. It was a crude device, worked
by approaching and withdrawing two opposed electrodes. It was exhibited one
dark night on the Duke of York’s monument, one of the highest places in London.
The lamp astonished everyone by its brilliance, being seen distinctly at a distance
of nine miles.
But Editor Drew was not unduly impressed. He wrote: “We have no faith
in electricity as a motive power, either for propelling machinery or for furnishing
light. It cannot be done. No force is eliminated without a corresponding
destruction of matter.”
*****
More than once this program has gone on record as favoring reduction in
government spending. A few months ago we referred to the report of the Hoover
Commission, which called striking attention to the extravagance and waste of
many government agencies. Perhaps you recall that one item which we then mentioned
was that Uncle Sam spends $10 to fill out forms for a single purchasing
order. Yet more than half of all government purchasing orders are to buy
things that cost less than ten dollars. These orders run into several million
a year. It just doesn’t make sense to pay ten dollars to cover red tape and
form-filling to make a one dollar purchase. But that is Lhe way the government
now does it.
2-19
We live in days of high real estate values. If you own a house, What do
you consider it worth? Now that you have in mind the figure for your own house,
just take in this fact. In its latest budget requests the Army, now in peacetime,
asked for funds for houses — not barracks and camps — but officers’
houses in Alaska at $58,000 per house.
How much do you men pay for a winter suit of clothes? Well, the Army
asked for 829,000 tropical uniforms — uniforms for hot climate — at $129 a
piece.
It is time indeed for you to think about what this Whole matter of Uncle
Sam’s money means to you. Uncle Sam gets his money from taxes and those
taxes come from you. The average citizen that’s you and I, folks — pays
one dollar out of every five dollars that he earns for federal government
taxes. That is in addition to all the local and state taxes Which he pays.
The average American worker, in the factory, on the farm, in the mines, on
the construction jobs, works 47 days every year just to pay his federal taxes.
Over the whole nation federal taxes amount to $300 per person, over
$1,000 a year per family. Income taxes we can all see and appreciate, but it
is the hidden taxes that fool us — the 20% on light bulbs, the 25% on cameras,
the 20% on talcum powder, the 60% on cigarettes.
The point we want to make tonight is that the purchasing power of your
dollar and therefore your standard of living are profoundly affected by taxes.
And those taxes are outrageously increased by extravagant, wasteful, useless
government expenses.
Whose government expenses are we talking about? Yours. The government
doesn’t belong to Harry Truman and Dean Acheson and Charlie Brannan; nor does
it belong to Robert Taft and Owen Brewster and Margaret Smith. The government
belongs to you; you are the government. You can express yourself in fa~or of
better government at a better price.
2-20
*****
In the old days people didn It have so many things, and they didn’t have
so many or such burdensome taxes. They lacked some of the fine comforts and
luxuries which the modern standard of living allows us, but when it came to
the dining table a lot of them fared pretty well. They certainly didn’t spare
materials in some of that delicious old-time cooking. Let’s take a look at a
couple of the old cooking recipes out of the Rural Intelligencer of 1855.
“Philadelphia sponge cake. Take ten eggs, one pound of sugar, one-half
pound of flour and lemon juice to flavor.”
“Cocoanut cake. One pound of loaf sugar, one-half pound of butter, 3/4
pound of flour, six eggs and one large cocoanut grated.”
*****
Do you remember some of the muddy, ground-filled coffee that used to be
poured from the old coffee pots? Happy was the housewife who had found a way
to serve her guests clear, ground-free coffee. In a February, 1855 issue of
the Intelligencer, Editor Drew told her how to do it. “When nothing else can
be obtained”, he wrote, “mix a little Indian meal with the coffee before putting
it to boil.”
*****
Where today can we get Nodhead apples? A few years ago I travelled many
miles to buy a bushel. When I got them home, I found to my dismay that every
last one of them was railroaded by worms. Evidently the tree had not been
sprayed. In skimming through the old Rural ,Intelligencer I was delighted to
learn that what has always been to me the most tasty of all apples, the Nodhead,
originated in York County, Maine. A man by the name of Jewett in Hollis,
New Hampshire develpped it and made it famous in the Boston market, but Edith
Dow insists that Jewett got his original seedlings in Eliot, Maine. Who knows
where there are first grade Nodheads today?
*****
2-21
Did you know that a paper was once published at New Sharon, Maine? It
was published only once a month and it didn’t last very long, but while it
lasted for a few years about a century ago, it was quite a paper. It was devoted
to “agriculture, art, science, general intelligence, and news of the
month, both foreign and domestic”. It had descriptive sketches of travel and
adventure, poetry, horticulture, physiology and phrenology. Said the publisher,
“We intend to make our paper an interesting monthly visitor to one and
all. We shall converse on all subjects and be neutral on nothing, bound to
neither party nor sect. Terms, 25 cents per year, in advance; 35 cents payable
in six months; fifty cents if payment is delayed beyond a year.”
At the bottom of his prospectus the New Sharon publisher presented a
canny scheme for getting” attention. He wrote, “Newspaper publishers giving
this prospectus room in their columns, and sending a copy to us, will receive
a copy of the Advocate one year, gratis.”
*****
One of these old newspapers contains a column of advice to husbands. “Do
not speak of some virtue in another man’s wife, to remind your own wife of
her faults. Don’t try to entertain your wife by praising other women’s beauty;
she will not be amused. Do not, too often, invite your friends to ride and
leave your wife at home. She might suspect you esteemed someone else more companionable
than herself. Do not be stern and silent in your own house and remarkable
for sociability elsewhere. You have no right to all the recreation
in the family; your wife needs some too. See that she gets it.”
That was all considered to be good advice a hundred years ago. Isn’t it
pretty good advice today? There are some things that not even the century of
time can change.
2-22
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
57th Broadcast February 26, 1950
Always the old gives way before the new. Modern progress erases one l¥
one the ancient landmarks. How saddened, perhaps even angered, some of the
people who lived in Waterville a century ago would now be if they could hear
the humorous and satirical remarks about what has been called the old barnory
on Front street.
Yes, the old Armory is coming down. It has served its day long and well.
In fact it was forced to labor long past its usefulness, and now it doesn’t
even get a period of pensioned rest. Down it must come to make way for the
speedy vehicles of a faster century.
It is well for us to recall the eventful history of that old building,
for what has been disparagingly called the old barnory was originally a church,
and, to the everlasting credit of Waterville, be it recorded that it was an
interdenominational church.
When the town of Winslow, including what is now Waterville, was incorporated
in 1771 it became subject to the laws of Massachusetts governing all incorporated
towns. Those laws required that every town support preaching and
schooling. This new town was so poor, however, that several times it failed
to raise the necessary money in town meeting to pay even an itinerant preacher,
and twice legal action against the town had been taken.
Early preaching by travelling ministers was held in the homes or, in
warm weather, out in a field. In 1794 the town voted to build a meeting house
on the east side of the river. Then controversy began. The people on the west
side couldn’t see the justice of paying for a meeting house that they would
have to cross an unbridged river to attend. But the east siders would have
2-23
just as good grounds for complaint if the church were built on the west side.
Meanwhile, with no church yet erected on either side, Rev. Joshua Cushman
was called to the town as its first settled minister. His ordination took
place under a large evergreen booth on the Plains. Where was Mr. Cushman to
have his meeting house?
Harmony finally reigned when in March, 1796 the town voted to build a
meeting house on the hill near or in Ticonic Village, and to carry out the
previous vote to build one also on the east side.
Then one of Waterville’s most prominent pioneers, Dr. Obadiah Williams,
entered the picture. He offered to give the town the land which is now City
Hall Park, or Castonguay Square. On that land Dr. Williams envisioned a
school house, a meeting house and a court house.
Controversy raged afresh between those who wanted the church up on the
heights toward Oakland and those who favored the river-bank site offered by
Dr. Williams. While the west siders fought it out, the east siders got their
church, so that the first church building in town was that which later bec~e
the Winslow Congregational Church on Lithgow Street.
Finally a church was built on the land given by Dr. Williams and was
ready for use in June, 1798. It stood very nearly Where the present City Hall
now stands. At first it had no basement, but for many years stood on wooden
blocks. It faced south toward What is now Common Street. That building, erected
152 years ago, is the building that” now must come down.
In its earliest days the meeting house was available not only to Mr.
CUshman, but also to the various religious societies, whenever one of them
could bring a preacher to the community. Congregationalists, Unitarians, Calvinist
Baptists, Free Will Baptists and Episcopalians had equal privileges in
its use.
The old building was described by Mrs. Chaplin, wife of Colby’s first
2-24
President, in her 1818 diary: “The people of this village” — it had already
been separately incorporated as Waterville sixteen years before
“the people of this village do not seem to be such ignorant, uncultivated
beings as some have imagined, nor are they destitute of places of worship.
We were happy to find here two meeting houses, though neither of them elegantly
or completely furnished. The one in the village” — this is the old
barnory she is talking about – “is about as large as ours in Danvers. The
frame is good and the floor pews are finished, but the gallery is still without
pews. On our first Sabbath here Mr. Chaplin was asked to speak in the
meeting house, and he did so; preaching on John 3:16.”
In the early days town meetings were held in the meeting houses, and
here Waterville’s first separate town meeting was held on July 26, 1802.
After the present churches were built and the edifice held fewer religious
services, it continued to be the town hall, and then the city hall, until
the present city building was erected in 1902, when the old building was
moved to its present site on Front Street.
What stories the silent walls of the old Armory could tell if those walls
could speak. Echoes of stern Puritan, hell-fire sermons, three hours long, the
milder preaching of the unitarians with their belief in the perfectability of
man, the harangues of Federalists, Whigs, Know Nothings, Democrats, Republicans,
Abolitionists, and Sons of Temperance; the call to arms for 1812, for
the Mexican War, for answer to Father Abraham’s plea for troops to put down
the rebellion, the laugh of the minstrel, the pathos of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
the music of the dance, the tread of marching feet. On both its sites the old
Armory has seen the whole history of Waterville for a hundred and fifty years.
Now like the old brick and stone block where the post office stands,.like the
giant elms that once covered the heater-piece in front of the Elmwood Hotel,
like the ancient 18th century house where the Central Fire Station now stands,
2-25
like the lofty tower of the Unitarian Church, the old armory too must go the ~
way of all things temporal and transient. In its passing let us give it a last
fond salute.
*****
How many homes in this vicinity cherish relics from old Fort Halifax?
Allen Hackett of :Fairfield writes me: “In the spring of 1938 Anson Brackett,
hoeing in his garden, turned up a pear-shaped stone with a knob on the small
end, such as was used for a plumb bob in the old days when metal was more
precious. The location of Mr. Brackett’s garden must be very close to the
northeast blockhouse of the old fort, so there is a very good chance that it
was a tool used in trueing up the palisades and block houses.”
Mr. Hackett also tells me that there are remains of the old wells of the
fort under the piazza of Woodbury’s store. Now who else has information about
remains or relics of Fort Halifax?
*****
Two weeks ago we referred to President Truman’s plea for plant and equipment
expansion by industry, and we called attention to the fact that the money
simply isn’t available for such expansion unless something is done about the
tax structure. Last week we emphasized the waste and extravagance with which
government agencies spend your money_
Few people appreciate fully the seriousness of this problem. Unless industry
can so operate as to provide the means to reproduce itself, our great
industrial machine will gradually shrivel up and die. What do we mean by reproducing
itself? This is what we mean. Machinery, vehicles, buildings wear
out or become obsolete. They have to be replaced just the way you eventually
must replace that pre-war automobile of yours. Probably you’re luckier than I
and have already bought your new car.
Industry must constantly make similar replacements, and when it does that
2-26
now it faces just the same problem that you face with the new car — greatly
increased prices. You remember the answer which Alice got in Wonderland when
she asked about running to get somewhere. “Here”, she was told, “we have to
run as hard as we can to stay where we are. II
Modern American industry must do better than that. It must, as President
Truman said, not merely replace worn-out plant and equipment; it must also expand
with additional plant and equipment. Now where can the money be found
for such expansion? It must come out of What the left-wing critics of American
free enterprise think is so terrible, in other words from profits. If an
industry can earn a profit, it not only can, but invariably does, plough a
good part of that profit back into the industry for expansion and new equipment.
That creates more jobs, distributes more payrolls to buy more consumer
goods. One of the simplest facts of economics is that national prosperity
depends upon the people’s ability to buy. It is assured payrolls that stabilize
that ability.
Now all this cannot be done if industry has to submit to what is perilously
close to confiscatory taxation. Every important industry gets its capital
from the sale of stocks and bonds, and investors are getting increasingly
vexed at the injustice of seeing dividends taxed twice, first against the corporation,
then against the investor himself.
What can the average citizen do about it? How can he make it plain that
he realizes the stake he has in the welfare of American industry even if he
doesn’t have a dollar invested in its capital? He can register his belief
whenever he has a chance to vote. But he says, I am just one person, and a
little fellow at that. My vote doesn’t count.
That is not true. Your vote does count. And you never know when it will
count decisively. Thomas Jefferson was elected President by a single vote in
the electoral college; so was John Quincy Adams. Rutherford B. Hayes was like-
2-27
wise elected President by one vote; then his election was contested and referred
to an electoral commission. In the commission he again won by a single
vote.
One solitary vote in the U. S. Congress gave statehood to California,
Idaho, Oregon, Texas and Washington. The single vote of William Pitt Fessenden
of Maine saved a President from impeachment. The Selective Service bill
of World War II passed the House of Representatives by just one vote. In
1944 one additional Democratic vote in each of Ohio’s 8,800 voting precincts
would have defeated Senator Taft, and in 1948 one additional Repub-
1ican vote in each of the same precincts would have carried the
Dewey.
state for
Sometimes this significance of a single vote comes home to a little fe1-
low, as it once came home to this little fellow who is speaking to you tonight.
In the spring of 1912 I was one of a few seniors at Colby College who
ardently supported President Taft for renomination by his party. The Taft organization
in my home town knew that and called me home to vote in the caucus
which was to elect a delegation to the state convention. I arrived at the
voting place just as the vote was being counted. Chagrined that I had arrived
too late to vote, I was greatly relieved when the vote was announced as a tie
and the chairman declared that another vote would be taken. Then the Roosevelt
forces ganged up on me, but it was no use. I knew what I had come for. And,
believe it or not, the second ballot elected the Taft delegation by a majority
of just one vote. And to make it an even better story, that delega~ion was
just enough to swing the vote in the state convention, instructing the Maine
delegation for Taft. Your one, small vote does count.
2-28
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
58th Broadcast March 5, 1950
On this program we have covered quite an expanse of time in our reference
to old time things. We have gone all the way from the building of Fort Halifax
in 1754 to the tearing down of the Waterville Armory in 1950, with many stopoffs
in between.
Tonight let us give attention to an item whose existence began just 150
years ago in 1802. It is the day book or journal kept by an Augusta merchant
of that time. It is now owned by Mr. Burleigh Nichols of Fairfield Center, who
has kindly loaned it to me. So fascinating have I found it that I have been
through every one of its more than 300 pages.
The original owner and writer of the journal’s items has not yet been definitely
identified by name, but I hope Mr. Nichols and I will soon be able to
tell you who he is. Unfortunately a later generation has used about fifty
pages of the journal as a scrap hook, mostly for poems clipped from the newspapers
of the 1870’s and 1880’s. What is worse, the first pages are entirely
missing, probably torn out by some careless hand many years ago. The fir~t
page bearing a readable date is that for Wednesday, March 10, 1802; but it
and subsequent pages are so covered with pasted scrap-book clippings that no
page is clear with all its original items until that for Tuesday, August 31,
1802.
Whether the proprietor began his business in that year or whether there
were preceding journals for the same business we do not know. In any event
the entries from August, 1802 until May, 1810, when the journal ends, are alive
with interest. Here is no dead record of business transactions; here, rather,
is real source history of the Kennebec Valley a century and a half ago.
Take for instance the matter of money and currency. From 1802 to 1805
2-29
every item is recorded at a rate in shillings and pence, then carried out as
dollars and cents. For instance:
2 Ibs. coffee @ 1/10 $ .60
i Ibs. tea @ 6/3 .28
2 gal. molasses @ 3/6 1.16
3! yd. india cotton @ 1/3 .82
2 Ibs. tobacco @ 1/2! .40
2 Ibs. sugar @ /10 .28
On the larger items we have no trouble figuring out this merchant’s rate of
exchange. When he lists 3 yd. linen @ 3/ and carries out the total as $1.50,
and when he lists 2 BOY’s Hats @ 6/ and enters the total as $2.00, it takes
no mathematical wizard to see that he figures the rate at six shillings to a
dollar. But, on the smaller items, he either didn’t stick to his rate or
he got bogged down in arithmetic, because he variously totals 1/6 as 24, 25
and 26 cents. As a general rule, however, he seems to have computed a single
shilling as 17 cents which, of course, is the nearest whole cent to one sixth
of a dollar. Ten pence was usually entered as 14 cents, and roughly one penny
was thought of as 1 1/3 cents, or 4 cents for 3 pence.
We have already placed this old general store in space. It was somewhere
on the west bank of the Kennebec River along what is now Water street in Augusta.
Now let us place it in time, for the mere date 1802 doesn’t mean much
to many of us.
Everyone knows something about Abraham Lincoln, and many of you know
that he once ran a general store in partnership with another man in New Salem,
Illinois. That was in 1831, when Lincoln was 22 years old. And Abraham Lincoln,
after a career that made him the best loved of all American presidents,
has now been dead for 85 years.
Just let this sink in. The old store in Augusta which we are talking
2-30
about tonight was being operated and the journal entries in the old account
book to which I refer were being made, not only 29 years before Lincoln ran
that frontier store in New Salem, but actually seven years before Abraham
Lincoln was born.
When these charges were recorded against householders in the Kennebec
Valley, George Washington had been dead less than three years. John Adams
was President of the united States. For 18 more years Maine would still be a
part of Massachusetts. In the very year when these accounts began, Waterville
had achieved its incorporation as an independent town. Maine’s oldest college,
Bowdoin, was eight years old; the charter for the second college, Colby,
was eleven years in the future. Deacon Barrows and Elder John Tripp at Hebron
were just beginning the plans which resulted in the founding of Hebron Academy
two years later. There were no railroads, no steamboats, and very few turnpiked
highways. Travel was by sail, clumsy cart or springless coach, by horseback or
on foot. It took a long time and favorable wind to bring goods from the outside
world to the wharves at Augusta.
Such is the time when those old accounts were made. What did this oldtime
merchant sell? In spite of the fact that it was a general store, as
were all stores of the time in places so small as Augusta then was, and though
there is wide variety in the items, their total number is not numerous. The
range of things that Kennebec people could buy in 1802 was very narrow indeed.
The accounts carry many mentions of molasses, sugar,. salt, coffee, tea
and raisins; but through the first ten years of entries there are exactly
three mentions of flour. There are several charges of wheat and Indian corn,
an occasional bushel of rye, but flour was apparently a scarce and little
purchased commodity. In 1805 N. Malborn was charged with two hundredweight,
three quarters, and 26, pounds of flour for a total of $11.94. We figure
this out to be 301, pounds, or a little more than 1, barrels, as we measured
2-31
flour a century later in 1902. The price was therefore approximately eight
dollars a barrel. In fact, when sold in small quantities, the price was
nearly at the same rate, for we find a charge of 16 pounds of flour for 64
cents.
In 1802 most of the clothes were made at home, on cloth from the spinning
wheels and hand looms, often from wool grown on the home farm. But this
account book reveals that as early as the dawn of the 19th century people of
the Kennebec Valley were beginning to buy cloth and sometimes whole garments
from the store. On November IS, 1802, for instance, Nathaniel Page of Belgrade
went on quite a splurge. Perhaps he took his wife on this trip to Augusta. At
least we like to think she went along and had the decisive voice in the selection
of the following items charged on that day to Nathaniel’s account:
3 yards ribbed velvet $ 4.50
1 yard satin 1.85
2 skeins silk and 2 of thread .25
2 yards india cloth .29
i yard sheeting .25
7 buttons .24
1 pair morocco shoes 1.17
In fact on that trip from Belgrade to the Augusta store on that November
day 150 years ago, Nathaniel Page bought and had charged just one item for
himself. It was an axe for 11 shillings’ 3 pence, or $1.87.
While some of the prices were very high by modern comparison, others
strike ~s as inconceivably low. Just consider a few of them while your mouth
waters:
9 lb. 10 oz. cheese @ /8
1 quarter lamb
1 dozen eggs
$ 1.07
.27
.09
2-32
4; lb. butter
1 turkey, 6; lb.
1 goose, 6 lb. 6 oz.
1 cord wood
10 lb. sheeps wool
1 M shingles
3 “segars”
18 lb. dry fish
13; lb. veal
By contrast consider these prices of 1802:
1 nutmeg
; lb. chocolate
1 lemon
i lb. pepper
6 yds. forest cloth @ 12/
.59
.46
.35
1.50
.63
.95
.03
.36
.65
.12
.41
.10
.29
12.00
The commonest ready-made article charged in these accounts was the shawl,
for which the usual price was $1.17, but occasionally the camel’s hair variety
sold for as high as $3.00. Next in number to shawls were hats, but with
one possible exception they were men’s hats, selling from 75 cents to $1.75.
That one exception is the charge for 1 straw bonnet, $1.00. Of course the
word bonnet may have been used for men’s straw hats, but if so I have never
before encountered it.
The three commonest items in the old journal, repeated again and again,
are cheese, rum and gingerbread. Yes, I said gingerbread. The storekeeper apparently
bought it in huge sheets from Thomas Dexter, who is repeatedly credited
with the amount of $1.00 for 8 sheets of gingerbread. The storekeeper
then sold it for 18 to 20 cents a sheet. Time and again a customer is charged
for just three items: cheese, gingerbread and rum. He had ridden horseback or
2-33
walked a long way to the store. When he got there he was hungry. He bought
gingerbread and cheese, and washed it down with the commonest beverage of
the day — rum. The sales of rum are revealing of the old measures. While a
quart was one-fourth of a gallon as it is today, and a pint was one-half of
a quart, a gill was not one-fourth, but was rather one-half, of a pint. The
prices for rum reveal this measure. One quart was 28 cents, one pint 14 cents,
one gill 7 cents, and one glass 4 cents.
On September 6, 1802 one citizen is thus charqed: one glass rum .04, two
glasses rum .07, your wife entertained at Soule’s .50. What a story is suggested
by those simple items. Sometimes the story doesn’t have to be suggested;
it is directly told, like this instance: ! pt. rum delivered to your wife .08.
Query: why was the woman charged one cent more than the customary seven cents
for that quantity?
Although most of the charges for rum are for small quantities, occasionally
there is a big item, and one at least seems to have given the storekeeper
a lot of trouble. On December 27, 1802 he entered against Benjamin DOW, Esq.
(the Esquire signifying a man of prominence, as indeed he must have been by
the size of the purchase) — he entered against Dow a charge for 32 gals. rum,
$40.00, then wrote after the item ruefully, “the rum was delivered last January
and a note was taken, which note is now stolen”.
In a later broadcast we shall have more to say about this old account
book, for we have scarcely touched its surface tonight. What we want to emphasize
is that relics like this are historical source materials, revealing
the folkways and customs, as well as the material objects of a by-gone day.
Notice how revealing is this simple account charged on January 24, 1806:
“widdow” Palmer 1 yard crape gauze
1 gal. rum
.58
1.00
This clearly was the widow’s necessary outfit for the funeral.
*****
2-34
This program has had much to say about economic problems of our day_
Openly and without apology we have praised private enterprise and have condemned
the socialistic state. As we read this old account book of 150 years
ago we cannot but be impressed by two facts. First, human nature was much
the same as it is now. Not everyone paid the storekeeper in 1802. Like the
modern merchant, he had sometimes to bring suit. But the second fac~ is just
as important, and that fact is the undenied, unquestioned assumption on the
part of the debtor and creditor alike that the bill must be paid. In 1802
no one would have made fun of the remark credited to Calvin Coolidge about
the British debt to us after World War I. When someone asked him if he expected
Britain to pay, he is said to have replied, “They borrowed the money,
didn’t they?”
The folks of the Kennebec Valley who traded at that old Augusta store
never expected something for nothing. They intended to pay for what they
got, though the wages of a skilled stonemason were recorded right in this
very account book as only $1.00 a day. They didn’t expect Uncle Sam or the
General Court up at Boston to take care of them. Was it a hard and rugged
life? Of course it was. But it was a life not devoid of kindness and
sympathy. In this old account book occurs more than one item like this one
recorded in the winter of 1804:
William Bell, credit, to cancel his account
(his house burned)
*****
$ 7.24
What do the American people do with their money; that is, with the money
not used for the necessities of life? U. S. News gives us some interesting
answers to that question: 26 million families buy. automobiles, 39 million pay
life insurance premiums, 36 million add to savings accounts or buy U. S. bonds,
23 million make payments on homes and farms, 5 million invest in small
2-35
businesses. U. S. News points out that this is a marked change from 1929.
Then everybody was playing the stock market. Today only 4 million people of
all our 150 million are buying corporation stocks. The average family is to~
day more interested in keeping its money safe than in making a quick profit.
One expense the present-day American regards as a necessity rather than
a luxury. Even in the· group of families whose income is less than $1,000 a
year, 23 per cent, almost one in every four, own cars. Or, at least, they
have cars even if the loan company really holds title to most of them.
2-36
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
59th Broadcast March 12, 1950
Several persons have commented favorably on the time we devoted a few
weeks ago to pertinent facts about the State of Maine. One lady wrote that
these things should be emphasized in our public schools. I think so too.
Maine is much more than a state of watermen, woodsmen and hunters, as Arnold
Toynbee called us.
I have no intention of repeating tonight those facts about Maine which I
gave on a previous broadcast. I want rather, on this program, to point out a
few interesting items in Maine history. For instance it occurred to me that
it might be well to find out which were Maine’s first ten incorporated towns.
And do you know that hasn’t been so easy a task as I thought. The names changed
so many times, the records are so much in dispute, and the authorities
so disagree that it has taken some digging to arrive at an accurate list.
I wonder if our present high school generation knows which is Maine’s
oldest town. A little thought should prompt the guess that our oldest towns
are those nearest Boston, and that is the fact. The town just this side of the
Piscataqua River, across from the ancient Portsmouth, is indeed Maine’s oldest
town. Kittery was, in fact, incorporated in 1652, only 22 years after
the establishment of Boston. Our second town, York, was incorporated later
in the same year. In 1653 came Wells. Then we strike some confusion because
of changes in name. The fourth town was incorporated as Saco, but it was actually
on what is now the Biddeford side of the river. Fifth was Kennebunkport,
which in its history has gone by four different names.
The first five towns, therefore, were all in what is now York County.
The first town to be incorporated in what is now Cumberland County was
2-37
Scarboro in 1658, and soon after came Falmouth (not the present town of Fal~
mouth, but the old name for Portland) • Only one other town was incorporated
before 1700 – North Yarmouth in 1680.
Brunswick is one of Maine’s very old towns, but strange as it may seem
to present-day people, not so old as the now much smaller Georgetown. The
latter in fact was the first town incorporated in the Androscoggin-Kennebec
area, getting its charter in 1716. Brunswick’s incorporation was in 1737,
making it the eleventh town, for meanwhile another York County town, Berwick,
had been created in 1713.
Maine’s first ten towns, therefore, incorporated between 1652 and 1716
>.
h~!\\.
were Kittery, York, Wells, Saco, Kennebunkport, Scarborcr,~Falmouth, North
Yarmouth, Berwick and Georgetown.
What about the towns in Kennebec County? In what is now the County of
Kennebec no town can-claim the sole honor of being the first. Four of them
were incorporat~ on the same day, April 26, 1771. They were Hallowell, ,X
Vassalboro, Winslow and Winthrop. The next town was Pittston in 1779. After
those first five Kennebec towns twelve years elapsed before the incorporation
of the sixth, Readfield in 1791. After that new towns were created rapidly,
with Monmouth, Mount Vernon and Sidney in 1792; Clinton, Fayette and Litchfield
in 1795; Belgrade and China in 1796; and Augusta in 1797.
Before 1800, therefore, Kennebec had fifteen incorporated towns; but
note that, of what are now the four largest in the County, only two had then
been separately incorporated: Hallowell and Augusta. Waterville and Gardiner,
although settled much earlier, did not get separate incorporation from
their parent towns until after the turn of the century.
*****
Now for another subject. When I occasionally present some of the statistics
from government or industrial reports, I try not to bore you with them.
I hope you agree that some of them are important, if we are to keep our
2-38
thinking straight about protecting and perpetuating the American way of life.
The cash receipts from farming, according to figures supplied by the Department
of Agriculture, are impressive. In 1910 they were $5,793,000; in 1929
they had risen to$ll, 296,000. In 1939 after the depression years they were
down to $8,684,000. Last year, 1949, they had reached the previously unheard
of total of $30,803,000. Since 1929 labor income has increased 192%, business
and professional income 360%, and farm income 408%.
Now take a look at some of the figures regarding strikes. We have. seen
much in the papers lately about the severe loss to the miners by the prolonged
coal strike. All the nation was affected, but it is the miners themselves who,
individually, were hurt most.
The whole industrial picture, according to the u. S. Department of Labor,
is this: in 1929 strikes affected 289,000 workers who lost 5 million man days;
in 1939 they hit 1,171,000 workers with 18 million man days lost; in 1949, even
before the coal strike got going at its worst, strikes had made idle
3,059,000 workers, who lost 53 million man days. In spite of those strikes,
the industrial production index, using the year 1939 as the guage of 100, stood
at 170 in 1949. The great boom year of 1944, when production shot the index up
to 235, was in the past, but in 1949 we had the highest peace-time production
in our history.
Just one more item; then I will keep still about figures for the rest of
tonight’s program. But I do want you to let these particular figures sink in.
During the past ten years, while the population has increased 25% and prices
have increased 69%, retail sales have increased 310%. Those sales shot up from
$42 billion in 1939 to $130 billion in 1948, and will exceed $120 billion for
1949 when that year’s figures are all in. Sometimes I wonder if we realize,
under the private enterprise system of America, just what a wonderfully prosperous
nation we are.
2-39
*****
How many of you know about a building you have probably passed and glanced
at many times a building with historical significance? It is located
at Riverside, four miles this side of Augusta, and before the construction
of the latest stretch of new highway, the main road from Augusta to
Waterville used to pass directly by it.
At the place locally known as Brown’s Corner stands a big colonial house
flanked by two big barns and a shed. This house, still occupied, was once
one of the best known taverns and stage stops between Portland and Bangor.
There it stands, stately and impressive, on a hill on the ·east bank of the
Kennebec. Straight down to the river is the site of the old ferry which operated
across the river until only a few years ago.
The land on which the old tavern stands was deeded by the New Plymouth
Company to Bunker Farwell of Vassalboro, who built the house and sold it to
Benjamin Brown of Bath. He operated it as a tavern for many years, and
made it a famous stopping place for the traveler and change· of horses for the
stage.
Wooden pegs instead of nails fastened many of the beams and rafters.
Beautiful scroll carving may still be seen on the stair case. Waist-high
wainscotting decorates all the first floor rooms. There is a thick, handhewn
attic door. The huge beams and wide floor boards mark it as a very old
house.
Benjamin Brown grew very prosperous. Besides the tavern he had a general
store, kept in the building which is now the hall of Cushnoc Grange. For
25 years he was postmaster at Riverside. He owned a big lumber mill and
built ships for the Kennebec traffic.
In the historical records of the state Brown is best remembered as the
principal founder of the insane hospital at Augusta. He donated the first
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$10,000 toward its construction. In fact his portrait, like that of other
early directors, hangs in the hospital chapel today.
That portrait has a curious history. Although a man of wealth and prominence,
and living in a day when all such men had their portraits painted,
Brown was too busy and too constantly on the go to find time to sit for an
artist. After his death the hospital directors wanted his picture. His
daughter, then living in Philadelphia, remembered that Judge James Dascombe
of Skowhegan greatly resembled her father. So up she carne, all the way from
Philadelphia, bringing a ruffled shirt, a velvet coat, high collar and other
clothes that her father used to wear. She persuaded Judge Dascombe to don the
garments. She combed his hair as her father’s used to be combed. Then the
artist went to work and did his job so well that few people who saw the portrait
of Innkeeper Brown, even in days when Brown himself was well remembered,
had the slightest idea that they were really looking upon the features of another
man.
*****
Although Maine had for many decades very little foreign population, it
now owes a great deal to those who have come here from foreign lands. Not
only the French Canadians, but the Syrians and Lebanese have contributed to
the advancement of Waterville.
Sometimes a colony of immigrants takes over a whole community and
spreads its influence for years afterwards. Such was the Thomas colony of
Swedes who came to Aroostook in 1870. Eight miles northwest of Caribou they
settled and called the settlement New Sweden. By 1873 their leader, W. w.
Thomas, could report that the original 50 colonists had now expanded to 1,300,
and the Maine Register of 1873 proudly said of them: “These colonists have brought
with them $60,000 in cash, have taken up 20,000 acres of land, and have thoroughly
cleared 600 acres.
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Thus began the towns of New Sweden and Stockholm in Aroostook County.
The descendents of those Swedish settlers are now some of the County’s leading
citizens, and many young men from those Swedish towns have achieved distinction
far beyond the borders of Maine.
Someone has said that the map of the world is pretty well peppered on
the map of Maine. The number of our communities bearing foreign names is
truly conspic.uous. Here in Waterville we have Italy on one side of us and
Sicily on the other side, for to the west of us is Rome and to the east is
Palermo. But we have to cross Asia to get to Sicily, because between us and
Palermo lies China.
I was born in the midst of Scandanavia, Maine. Within 15 miles of my
birthplace, in three different directions, were Norway, Sweden and Denmark,
but in the fourth direction I too knew Italy, for the adjoining town to the
south was Naples. Once I got there it was only a step into Eastern Europe,
for the town of Poland was near.
During the eight years that I lived:in that good old Biblical town of
Hebron, over in Oxford County, I had Europe, Asia and South America within
easy distance. The nearest town was paris, off to the north was Canton, and
a little farther away was Peru.
Over in Franklin County most of the towns bear old English names, but
one at least, Madrid, is of no English origin. With or without its much disputed
narrow guage railroad station, it is remindful of old Spain, even though
it is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable.
Down in Lincoln County the towns of Bremen and Dresden remind us of the
German settlements in that region; up in Aroostook Mars Hill testifies to the
religious zeal rather than Greek relationship of the early inhabitants. The
same is true of Canaan in Somerset County and Lebanon in York County. Bangor,
2-42
as I am sure many of you know, is named not for Bangor in England, but for
the name of a hymn tune.
2-43
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
60th Broadcast March 19, 1950
OUr request for more information about relics of old Fort Halifax brings
a response from the man whom I regard as the best informed person on the life
of the Abenaki Indians. He is John F. Hill, former Waterville business man,
now living on a RFD route in Oakland.
John -Hill says that several years ago, while on one of his many expeditions
hunting Indian relics, he made an interesting find. In the bed of the
stream directly opposite the center of old Fort Halifax, he picked up an iron
axe, which his expert knowledge of Indian artifacts easily identified with
the period of the French and Indian War. He knew that his find was one of
the so-called trade hatchets supplied to the Indians by both English and
French at that time.
Mr. Hill does not contend that the use of this particular trade hatchet
is known, but he points out that its location invites the plausible conclusion
that it played an important part in the history of the old fort.
In the course of his many years of relic hunting, Mr. Hill has found
three of those old trade hatchets in widely separated areas of Maine. Besides
the one picked up near Fort Halifax, he found another on the shore of Cobbossecontee
Lake, and a third near the chain of ponds far up on the Arnold
Trail close to the Canadian border. John Hill has placed many of his Indian
relics for permanent display in the Bates Museum at Good Will. There the
visitor can see the trade hatchet which Mr. Hill found near Fort Halifax.
*****
Another item concerning Fort Halifax comes to me as a deeply appreciated
gift from Mrs. Walter Scribner of Silver Court, Waterville. Mrs. Scribner is
well known as Central Maine’s most expert mender of garments. Mr. Scribner f
2-44
equally well known as a garage operator, has recollections of Waterville
that go back 75 years. For my collection of material about the old times
Mrs. Scribner has presented an ancient map or plan of the Fort Halifax region.
It is a surveyor’s map, beautifully done in three colors — black,
yellow and blue — on white, hand-made paper. Years ago — how many no one
can guess — when the paper began to disintegrate, someone pasted the map
on heavy wall paper. The upper right hand corner is gone, but it apparently
contained nothing but unmarked paper, and the rest of the map is intact.
The map is inscribed thus: “William Freeman’s property, sold Thomas
Eaton, abutting his property. This plan represents Fort Halifax Farms and
the Divisions as was set off by the Commission. The Freeman lots and house
lot laid down by a scale of 20 rods to an inch. A true copy by John Jones,
Surveyor. Augusta, February 22, 1 798 …
The plan shows the house lots on the point of land at the tip of which
now stands what is left of Fort Halifax. Facing the Kennebec are nine lots,
and facing the Sebasticook are six. Between them runs a road which must have
been very near the location of the present highway. Extending along this
road and back up over the hill the map shows huge, undivided lots of 80 acres
each, belonging respectively to William Brown, the Merrick Heirs, the Hallowell
Heirs, William Whipple and the heirs of John Gardiner. The wide sweep
of the Kennebec just above the point, including the island near the Waterville
shore, is marked on the map as Great Bay, which explains why the street
was named Bay Street.
This map shows only the house lots on the north side of the Sebasticook.
The earlier settlements were on the south side of that river and along the
Kennebec, from what is now Lithgow Street all the way to the Vassalboro line.
*****
Not long ago the Mayor, Aldermen and Councilmen of Waterville completed
2-45
the burdensome task of establishing the 1950 budget. The Committee on Appropriations
spent long, tedious hours listening to the pleas of the several municipal
departments.
We owe a great deal to these men of the City Council. It is no fun to
be forced to decide appropriations When, no matter how you decide, you are
sure to displease somebody. These city fathers of ours are conscientious men,
doing their best to cut the garment of financial appropr.iations to the cloth
of financial resources.
In 1950 our elected officers have dealt with a million dollar budget. It
may be small comfort to them, but it is good for the rest of us to know what
kind of a budget the city had 56 years ago, in 1894. Waterville then had been
only six years a city. Let’s see what money the city fathers then appropriated
and where they got it.
In 1894 the total tax commitment was $98,580, divided roughly $73,000
real estate, $20,000 personal property, and $5,000 polls. The tax rate was
20 mills. The year 1894 was a time of depression, and $16,000, or one sixth,
of the whole tax commitment remained uncollected at the end of the year.
The poor we have with us always, and $10,000 was spent for their support
in 1894. The overseers said in their report: “The past year has been one of
the hardest for the poor in the history of this city. Very little work has
been done by the city to furnish labor, except street work. The hard times
continued, large corporations doing only what was necessary, curtailing in
every way. 190 persons have been helped besides those in the alms house. That
means many more, as some have large families. The year’s cost of the alms
house has been $1,472.57.We have cut and hauled 157 cords of wood.”
The cost of the street department was almost exactly the same as that of
the poor department, $10,000. The commissioner, Martin Blaisdell, received a
salary of $750 per year. The big job of the year was replanking the Kennebec
2-46
bridge, part of the expense being borne by the town of Winslow. Edward Ware
was paid $468 for the lumber to do that job. What would it cost today? The
department spent $50 for a dump cart, $12.15 for granite, $15 for moving a
barn at the gravel pit, and $1.25 for cutting limbs of trees.
How the work on the streets was done 55 years ago is revealed by a few
items taken from the department.’s 1894 inventory: 1 road machine, 2 dump
carts, 2 sets forward wheels, 3 steel road scrapers, 2 plows, 3 four-horse
snow plows, 4 sidewalk plows, 1 sod cutter, 3 wheelbarrows, 4 lanterns, 1
bush scythe.
1894 was a fortunate year for fires. The largest fire of the year caused
a loss of only $250 in the basement of W. D. Spaulding’s store. Total expense
of the department was $7,500. The chief’s salary was $1,000. The largest single
item of expense was to the Waterville Water Company — $1,105.
The city report for 1894 reveals some interesting facts about the street
lights of that period. Compared with our street lights today, some of those of
1894 were pretty dim. On Winter Street were two lamps of only 20 candle power.
On College Avenue, near the Perkins place, and on Temple Street were lamps of
32 candle power. But of course the principal lighting was furnished by the
old-fashioned arc lights of 1,000 candle power. There were 58 of those arc
lights scattered through the city, and in 1894 it cost $390 to supply them
with carbons.
Maintenance of the street lights was in charge of Thomas Landry, who was
engaged for this job from April 1, 1894 to April 1, 1895 at a salary of $1,140,
but two additional jobs supplemented his earnings a bit. He took care of the
fire alarm for $75, and he cared for the city’s parks for $100. Altogether it
would seem to be quite a job for one man, and his total salary of $1,315 was
not lavish. A few oil lamps were still in use in 1894. There was paid to
C. A. plummer $6.00 for the care of oil lamps on Pleasant Place.
2-47
The police department under A. L. McFadden made 172 arrests in 1894,
111 of them for drunkenness. Arrests for serious crimes were one each for
forgery, embezzlement, threatening to burn buildings, and keeping a house
of ill fame, and four for breaking and entering.
Economically 1894 must indeed have been a year of hard times, for 907
persons applied to the police department for lodging in the jail. In fact
the chief said in his report: “The expense of the department has been increased
the past year by the add1tion of a regular night watchman on the Plains,
also by having 75 Italians to board three days in Augusta, Who came to our
city without any means whatsoever, being unable· to collect their wages from
the contractor of the Wiscasset and Quebec Railroad Where they had been employed.”
Among the well known names listed as policemen — perhaps they were parttime
— are S. E. Whitcomb, George L. Cannon and Frank Dusty.
Those were the days When, under local option, towns ran liquor agencies,
and Waterville had one. Its year’s sales were $4,870, just about one day’s
good sale at the State Liquor Store today. The agency made a net profit of
$833. Salaries paid the three agents were respectively $268, $163 and $162.
Expenses included installation of a coal bin and repairing the roof. One item
makes us raise our eyebrows a bit: “liquor furnished to paupers, $6.89.”
In 1894 as now the schools called for the largest appropriation. But what
a difference! The school appropriation by the city was then $17,500. Approximately
$6,800 came from the state, making the total school budget $24,300.
The separate appropriation of $3,000 had been made for a new school
house. Does anyone remember where it was? The building committee spent
$659.43 more than the appropriation and, believe it or not, the difference
was supplied from the regular school appropriation. In the new school house
Redington and Company furnished the seats and F. J. Goodridge supplied a clock.
2-48
Choosing from the list a few well remembered names, let us take a look
at the salaries our teachers then received. Dennis Bowman, principal of the
high school, got $1,200 a year, Minnie Smith had $560, Cora Lincoln $450;
Lulu Morrill, Eva Towne, Alice Osborn and Sarah Lang each got:$360. The total
salary account was $15,452.
For conveying scholars the city paid $197.50. Just contrast that with
conveyance costs today. Fuel cost $1,700, and as late as 1894 it was still
mostly wood. Repairs cost $650, books $2,000, and all the janitors in all the
schools of the city received together only $1,630.
Among the miscellaneous receipts was $135 for non-resident tuitions in
the high school, $5.92 for the sale of pens, and $17.00 for blanks. Among the
items of miscellaneous expense were $3.25 for thawing pipes, 75 cents for typewriting,
$1.70 for pitch pipes and $5.00 for removing ashes.
Probably the city fathers in 1894 had just as many headaches as the present
government has in 1950, but how the present aldermen and councilmen would
like to deal with those 1894 figures!
2-49
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
61st Broadcast March 26, 1950
Let us return for a few minutes tonight to the old account book of the
Augusta trader, whose interesting sales we talked about a few weeks ago. In
his book I found frequent mention of a term I had previously seen only in one
·other place. The term is “Bohea tea”, which our Augusta merchant sold for 47
cents a pound. The only other place I ever saw that kind of tea mentioned
is in the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin took on the job
of supplying provisions for General Braddock’s ill-fated expedition, he listed
among the needed items 20 pounds of good Bohea tea.
When I mentioned rum as one of the three commonest items of sale in that
old store, I did not mean to imply that it was the only beverage sold. There
are several mentions of brandy, a few of gin, and in November and December the
item “1 mug cider” is almost as frequent as “1 glass rum”.
OUr Augusta storekeeper sold a lot of horn combs. The charge was uniformly
11 cents a piece. As all readers of Colonial history know, glass beads were
very much in demand for trading with the Indians. I had no idea how cheap
those beads were as late as 1802 until I read this item in the storekeeper’s
journal: “4 strings beads, 12 cents”.
As I turned the pages of that old book it suddenly occurred to me that,
al though I encountered many mentions of thread, I never saw the word “spool”.
The unit is either skein or knot. Skein is still used, I believe, as a unit
for yarn, but does anyone remember ever hearing the word “knot” as the old
storekeeper used it in this charge: “Henry Bolster, 28 knots brown thread,
50 cents” ?
Nowhere in the account book is there any record of a small quantity of
2-50
salt. It is usually “1 bushel salt, 92 cents”. The smallest amount is one
peck. What kind of salt was that? Certainly not modern, refined table salt
as we know it. Nor was it neces·sarily rock salt or mineral salt. It may well
have been what in my boyhood we used to call Liverpool salt, a somewhat powdery,
often soggy, unrefined salt.
Sometimes a customer would get away with short payment. Then the storekeeper
would make a careful notation of the lapse or error. For instance, on
November 2, l804.he made this entry: “Jeremiah Richards of Fayette, to short
pay for knives and forks, 7 cents.”
“Due on one gal. molasses, 4 cents.”
In April, 1805 Jeremiah Towle was charged:
Now let us take a fond, nostalgic glance at some of the sales seldom,
if ever, made in a store today. Our old-time merchant’S journal is filled with
such items as these:
1 pair boot legs $ 1.50
1 bed cord .50
1 cow bell 1.17
! lb. ink powder .17
1 pair specks .34
1 clay pipe .02
! lb. brimstone .04
1 string sleigh bells 1. 75
1 pair ox bows .42
7 flints .07
1 snuff box .10
1 slate and 2 pencils .27
4 gallons soap 1.00
Our Augusta merchant seems to have been a pretty good fellow, lending a
helping hand as need arose. Often in his records we find mention of money
2-51
loaned, always in small amounts, seldom more than a dollar at a time. Sometimes
it was as small as this item entered on October 10, 1806: “Henry DOW, cash
loaned, 20 cents”. It would be interesting to know what Henry was going to
do with that twenty cents. Perhaps he was going to buy a meal at Soule’s
Tavern, where you’will recall the merchant paid for the entertainment of one
man’s wife while the husband was being charged for three successive purchases
of rum at the store.
Everyone my age is familiar with the expression “a dollar a day and
found”. It is not often, however, that one sees any form of this expression in
writing. But here, in this old book, is the entry on March 10, 1803: “John
Soule, credit, by finding Henry Babcock, 2 meals and lodging, 64 cents”. Incidentally
rates like that ought to make modern innkeepers ashamed of their
prices.
Apparently our storekeeper was not averse to doing errands. In June,
1805 he entered these charges: “Jeremiah Glidden, to going to Vassalborough
on your business, 50 cents; to wine .07”. Correct interpretation is impossible,
but we’ll hazard a guess that the storekeeper, not Glidden, drank the wine, and
that the 7 cents is part of what we would today call an expense account.
It is evident that some of the old customers were slow pay, and occasionally
the merchant had to swear out a writ, or bring suit. Whenever he did
that, he added the’ cost of the writ to the customer’s account. Whether he was
ever able to collect through these suits is not clear. The records show
scrupulous honesty, as when he credits Nathaniel Shaw with 6 cents overpaid.
In May, 1806 he wrote this item: “Nathaniel Folsom, 45 lb. rush iron, $2.70;
1 piece rush iron about 30 lb. The reason of this being charged in this manner
was he took the wrong piece.”
An interesting feature of this old account book is the merchant’s amazing
spelling. The point is not his misspelling of common words; that was ordinary
2-52
enough in 1802, and isn’t particularly unusual today. But this storekeeper’s
spelling reminds us of what many Shakespearean scholars assert about the Bard
of Avon. Shakespeare, it seems, could not make up his mind how to spell his
name. One authority says it appears in eleven different spellings. Likewise,
our Augusta merchant of 150 years ago could not decide how to spell the days
of the week. Saturday appears not only in its correct spelling, but also as
Saterday, Satterday, Saterdy and Satdy. Monday is sometimes Munday, sometimes
Mundy, and at least once appears as Moonday. Of course Wednesday was the old
fellow’s worst stumbling block. Interestingly enough he sometimes spells it
correctly, but more commonly it appears as Wensday, Wensdy, and once as Wendsday.
Thursday is often written Thirdsday, which by any reckoning it could not
possiLly be. Probably the writer never thought of it as actually the third
day of the week, because a few pages later he spelled it Thirstday. perhaps
that was a day when he got in a new barrel of rum.
When I first mentioned this old account book, I told you it is a valuable
historical record. Many of you are aware of my interest in old-time words and
sayings of our Maine dialect. Our good storekeeper’s fantastic spelling gives
us interesting clues to the old-time pronunciation. When he records the sale
of 1 arthen ware jug, it is clear that folks of that time pronounced earth as
arth. When he writes boot legs as “Boot laigs” I we know he pronounced the words
eggs and legs just the way a lot of Maine folks still pronounce them, to the
amusement of people from other states. When he makes a charge for 1 yard narrer
tape and another 1 axle for wheelbarrer, we know how he and his neighbors pro~
nounced the words ending in “ow”. “Mending chimley, 50 cents” shows that the
pronounciation of chimney still occasionally heard was common a century and a
half ago. But when he charges a customer 80 cents for “I cagg and brass lock
with same”, we cannot be sure whether he pronounced keg as kaig or kag. In my
boyhood I heard both pronounciations.
2-53
OUr final word tonight about the old-time Augusta merchant calls attention
to his practice of selling goods on trial and taking other goods on consignment.
On July 10, 1805 appears this item: “Samuel Babcock, 1 gunlock to
have to try and to take mounting if it fits, $3.00” On August 3 of the same
year is entered: “Joseph Ham, credit by 1 pair boyls boots, $3.33; to be returned
to him if no sale.”
*****
Some people tell us that we live in a world where the fellow who shouts
the loudest gets the most. All around us we hear individuals and groups making
dire threats of what they will do to us if they don I t have their way.
It might be well if we occasionally looked to see how much substance lies be~
hind a threat.
A man driving a buggy.down a steep hill met a farmer with a load of hay.
Both stopped their teams and the man in the buggy shouted, “Turn out — turn
out — or I III treat you the way I did a man I met a mile back.” The farmer,
deeply concerned, pulled his team out into the ditch, endangering his whole
load. Then as the buggy drew past, he timidly asked, “What did you do to the
fellow you met back there?” nOh”, came the reply, “I turned out for him”.
*****
Ed Chase, the well known legislator and business man of’Portland, calls
pertinent attention to some good sized holes in the social security bag. He
points out that a great illusion of. our times is the notion that future security
can be assured by paperwork and bookkeeping. We have created a system
by which the government extracts a percentage of our wages in return for a
promise that when we reach a certain age we shall be paid so much per month.
No one has any idea whether, when the time comes, the amount will buy what
it buys today. The plain fact is that what we have really done is to hire a
horde of bookkeepers whom the rest of us must support. Under such a system
2-54
social security has no reliable security in it.
What Mr. Chase is trying to make us see is that, just as it used to be
alleged that a country can have a sound economy if all the people took in
each other’s washing, so our country now seems to be moving toward a state
of paper prosperity based on taking in each other’s bookkeeping.
*****
A lot of us are too indifferent to the destructive forces at work on the
American system of economy. It reminds us of the story about the ant hill on
the golf course. A round, white object came rolling along one day and stopped
on top of the ant hill. A hundred ants quickly assembled to inspect this object
at close hand. Suddenly a terrific blow fell. When the dust settled, the
object was still there, but half the ants were dead. The remainder reassembled
to continue the inspection. A second blow fell, leaving the white object still
in place, but killing all but two of the ants. Then one of the survivors said
to the other, “If we want to stay alive, maybe we’d better get on the ball.”
*****
Tea is a very common thing, though with us it is less common than with
our British friends. Although, a hundred and fifty years ago, the merchant in
that cld store in Augusta sold very few articles for human consumption, compared
with the numerous articles today, one of his few commodities was tea.
Nevertheless tea as a drink known to the western world is not very old.
probably Shakespeare never tasted it. In the very year when Charles II restored
the monarchy after the interruption of Cromwell’s commonwealth — the year
1660 — Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary: “I did send for a cup of tea
(a China drink) of which I had never drank before.”
Those of my generation who worked in the grocery stores of half a century
ago were familiar with not only the China teas, but with the thin, wiry
leaves of Ceylon tea, and the coppery green leaves of Japanese tea. In those
2-55
days we hadn I t heard much about the now common India tea.
It is a fact, however, that until the time of our own Civil War, tea
was produced exclusively in China and the island of Formosa. Since 1860 the
plant has been introduced into India and Pakistan, Java and Sumatra, Japan
and East Africa.
Tea experts insist that the finest tea is grown at the highest.altitudes
and that if the leaves are picked 24 hours too early or 24 hours too late,
its flavor will be inferior. Many of them also maintain that the finest
flavored tea is produced in Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas. To
this· day many British people, when they provide for an important social occasion,
insist on serving Darjeeling tea.
2-56
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON’THINGS
62nd Broadcast April 2, 1950
I suspect that, hidden away in the attics of many Central Maine homes,
are numerous old-time school books. For instance, I have an arithmetic
printed by the well known firm of Smith and Sale at Portland in 1811. It is
old enough to have a usage that appears very strange to every person now living.
That is the use of the connna instead of the dot as a decimal point,
to show the division especially between dollars and cents.
Mr. C. E. Glover, retired superintendent of the Waterville schools, has
shown me a school book that is even older than myoId arithmetic. It is a
reader owned by Samuel Bancroft of Pepperill, Massachusetts, and the owner
has written on the fly-leaf the following words: “Samuel Bancroft’s book and
property. Price 2/6. Pepperill, January 8, 1811.”
The book was eight years old when it came into Samuel’s possession, for
it was published in Worcester in 1803 by one of the most noted distributors
of books in the early days of our Republic — Isaiah Thomas, Jr.. The. title
page anno~nced “PUbLished aceerc1ing ·to act of,C proprietor of the copyright. Sold’wnolesaleand retail by him in Worcester,
and by all the princi.pal booksellers in the united States.”
More easily recognized by the modern generation is the name of the printer,
E. Merriam and Company, Brookfield. That is the original plant of the
famous Merriam family whose business continues to this day as G. & C. Merriam
and Company, Springfi.eld, Mass. Every modern schoolboy knows them as the publishers
of all authentic editions of the Webster dictionaries.
The author of this old reader, now owned by Mr. Glover, was Daniel Adams,
who it seems wrote such other texts as “The Scholar’s Arithmetic” and “The
Thorough Scholar”. To this 1803 book he gave the title, “The understanding
2-57
Reader, or Knowledge Before Oratory; .. being a new selection of lessons suited
to the understanding and capacities of youth, and designed for their improvement
in reading, in the def~nition of words, and in spelling.”
This book is no primer, no first introduction to reading. Yet the modern
educational psychologist would hardly call it “suited to the understanding and
capacities of youth”. Just note this passage on “Storms” which young Sam Bancroft
evidently had to tackle:
“Seeing in the carpet of variegated vegetables which cover the earth a
proximate cause in the warmth of the sun and the moisture from the clouds, man
went from these to an acquaintance with that perpetual circulation subsisting
between the ocean and the mountains through the instrumentality of the atmosphere,
and by the medicine of the rivers to the ocean again. But the philosophy
of this vivifying phenomenon is spoken of as inscrutable.”
That is tough reading for anybody, to say nothing of a boy in the oldtime
common schools.
The selected readings in this old book are indeed of wide variety. Animals
are given due recognition; there are selections on the beaver, the camel, the
lion, the tiger, the fox and the elephant. There are five essays on “The
Hostilities of Animals”, which come’ to the conclusion that man is the most rapacious
of all animals — a conclusion that the second World War has tragically
borne out.
From the Bible is taken the entire book of Esther, Paul’s defense before
Agrippa, and the story of the Resurrection. Some of the sketches are very practical,
like “On the Boiling of Potatoes” and “A Surprising CUre for the Gout”.
But by far the largest number of selections are the moral essays for which all
the old readers, even through the time of the mid-century McGuffie’s, were
famous. Some of the titles are “Life is a Flower”, “Rules for Moderating our
Anger”, “Frailty of Life” and “Neighbor Winrow’s Advice to Haymakers on Drinking”.
2-58
Users of school books a century ago commonly inscribed some appropriate
rhyme within the covers. Sam Bancroft was no exception. On the back fly-leaf
he has written: “Steel not this book for fear of shame, for in it is the
owner’s name”. And here in the book, one of whose three major claims was to
teach spelling, Sam Bancroft has spelled steal “s tee 1”.
How many of you have ever seen a three dollar bill? Mr. Glover has one.
It is a bank note issued by the Phoenix Bank of Hartford, Connecticut in 1818.
It is one of those old plain paper bank notes, printed on one side only, with
the number of the note and the signatures of officials written in ink. The denomination
-~ three dollars — is a part of the original printing, showing
clearly that such three dollar notes were regular currency.
Quite by coincidence, soon after we had seen Mr. Glover:’ s specimen, we
encountered evidence that three dollar bills were still in regular circulation
as late as 1855.
Editor Drew of the Rural Intelligencer — the Augusta newspaper Where, you
will recall, we found the editorial against stoves — well, Editor Drew cautioned
his subscribers about how to send him the money for their subscriptions.
His rates were $1.50 a year if paid in advance, $1.75 on six month’s credit,
and $2.00 on a year’s credit. The editor said: “Let us understand the terms;
then there will be no partiality and no cause for complaint. The great discount
is made for the sake of encouraging payments in advance, which are best
for all concerned.”
So on February 27, 1855 the Rural Intelligencer carried the following notice:
“Some of our subscribers r in forwarding us their nine shillings for a
year’s subscription, have enclosed in their letter a single dollar bill and
fifty cents in silver, paying the postage in advance of 3 cents. But in every
such case our faithful P. M. has noticed that the weight of the coin subjects
the letter to double postage, and therefore has obliged us to pay five
2-59
cents more. When one subscriber cannot unite with another so as to send us
three dollars in one bill, they should send fifty cents in P. o. stamps.”
There indeed is evidence of the customary circulation of three dollar bills
as late as 1855. Does anyone know when they finally went out of existence?
*****
Now let’s spend a minute or two with that topic of federal government
spending, to which we have referred before. When. the present fiscal year ends
on June 30, 1950 our government will have spent $46 billion in these twelve
months. The biggest business in the world today is the govermnent of the
united states.
Where does this money go? $17 billion goes for pensions, subsidies, and
other benefits paid directly to individual citizens. $10 billion goes for govermnent
,salaries, $4 billion for interest, and $2 billion for loans.
A factor too often overlooked is that the govermnent today is the nation’s
biggest business customer. This year it will spend $10 billion for goods.
That is business pump priming on a gigantic scale.
Now to people who get from the government more than they put back in
taxes, this is all to the good. But to millions, like many of you who are
listening to this program, govermnent spending is only a drain. There are
only two ways to meet these huge government expenses; higher taxes or bigger
deficits. Somewhere there is a limit even to a government’s ability to keep
borrowing and to keep piling up deficits. Hence the threat of higher taxes
will linger on for many years unless expenditures are cut.
But that is not all of the story. The more things govermnent does, the
more goods it buys, the more surely is every increase a step toward the socialistic
state. The piper always calls the tune, and it is getting to be
alarmingly true, in widening areas of life, that the govermnent in Washington
plays the pipe for all of us.
2-60
*****
By this time our listeners know that I am quite a railroad fan. My
friend Gene Winslow of the Maine Central will also tell you that I have a high
regard for railroad labor — for the engineers and firemen, the conductors
and trainmen, the· section hands and shop crews, and by no means least for
the employees in the ticket offices, including my friend of long standing,
Mr. McCrillis, and the courteous young lady who assists him in the Waterville
office.
Tonight I want to tell you why I have a high regard for the labor organizations
of the railroad men. Coercion, whether by labor or by management
and both have sometimes used it — is not the American way. Volition, free
bargaining, and the spirit of compromise must be our guiding principle if we
are to escape eventual government seizure of properties and the socialization~
of industry.
As David Lawrence has shrewdly pointed out, the Railroad Labor Act, whatever
may be its faults, and it doubtless has some, is still the best piece of
labor legislation ever written in America. In substance it calls for impartial
investigation and fact-finding. It provides that work cannot be stopped while
these procedures are being carried on.
Why not extend these provisions to all major industries whose shut-down
imperils national health and safety? If any labor union or any employer rejects
what public opinion considers a fair settlement proposed by a truly impartial
fact-finding board, then and only then is seizure or compulsory arbitration
justified as a measure of last resort. Railroad labor and management
have set a pattern Which the whole nation may well. follow.
*****
In recent weeks we have said a lot about old-time doings in Kennebec
County and in mentioning the old stores, the old city reports, and other items
we have given attention to a lot of things that are now no more. Some of
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those things deserve special mention all by themselves. For instance, there is
the fringed-top surrey so lovingly revived in the musical comedy “Oklaho~”.
As late in our history as my own boyhood days, the use of a fringed-top surrey
was a mark of distinction. Of course anyone who owned a horse and buggy was
one notch in the social scale above the mere pedestrian, but the limit of most
families was the two-seated democrat wagon, from which both seats were removable,
converting it into a cart.
The surrey, however, was limousine deluxe, a two-seated pleasure carriage,
whose body was not a plain box, but had stylish cutouts before each seat. In
place of the plain wooden sides to the seats, there was open grillwork. The
dashboard was low and curved with a gay, jaunty air. The fringed top, supported
by four steel rods, afforded protection from the sun, but not from the
rain. A man didn’t use his surrey if it looked like rain. Even if he had rain
curtains to put on the sides, he knew they were scanty protection from Maine
showers. Yes, fifty years ago, the surrey was an important symbol of the amenities
of life.
Then there were the old fashioned woven hammocks ~ Advertisements of them
used to fill several pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog. Here is the actual
wording of one of those ads: “Woven as close as the finest tapestry, with all
the beauty and color in design of an oriental rug. Spreader at head and foot.
Fine heavy fringe. 40 x 80 inches. Upholstered and enameled button tufted
throwback tassel bar. Price $ 2 • 50. II
*****
A lot of people are glad that rocking chairs have not entirely disappeared,
though they are getting more and more scarce in the furniture stores.
We think of rocking chairs as the peculiar perquisite of women, especially
those travelling rockers which work their way clear across a room while the
occupant knits and rocks. Let me remind you that a lot of men also like rock-
2-62
ing chairs. One of them recently wrote to a country newspaper in Maine:
“There are so many uncontrolled alarms and diversions in the world today
that a man needs the gentle, soporific movement of a favorite rocking chair
to keep his balance.”
*****
Did you ever hear of the Staper Society S tap e r? Well,’ Staper
is one of those telescope words, made up of the first letters of a long
name. In this case it is the society to Advance Pie Eating Right. The
Stapers want to bring back the old custom of the way the real, old-time
New Englanders used to eat pie. Say the Stapers, “Most people have the
point of the wedge toward them when they eat a piece of pie. That is not
right. You should have the point directly away from you. Start with the outside
crust first. Then you finish off with a good big mouthful of the best
part of the pie.”
2-63
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
63rd Broadcast April 9, 1950
This is the great, sacred day of the Christian year. I hope most of
you have been to church today; but, if you have not, you have perhaps listened
to the glorious Easter music and heard a stirring Easter message on
the radio. Yet there are some interesting things about Easter that are
not familiar to many people.
First of all, though Christianity gives Easter its best and most profound
meaning, certain fundamental ideas and ideals told in the Easter message
are found in many of the world’s religions. Easter, more than any other
festival of the church, contains ideas and truths that go back to the dimmest
records of man’s history
far-away prehistoric man.
conceptions that have come down to us from
Before it can come to life as a plant, the seed must be buried in the
earth. Before it can soar aloft on its brilliant butterfly wings,’ the caterpillar
must enter the long sleep in its chrysalis tomb. Before the awakening
of spring, the earth is shrouded in the cold death of winter. Jesus once
said: “Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone.
But if it d:les, it brings forth much fruit. II Thus Christ summed up the strange
truth so hard for us to understand, the truth that life is ever dependent
upon death.
A multitude of grains are gathered together and die under the grinding
stone, and out of this death comes bread, the staff of life. Then that bread
is buried in the human body that it may live and grow. Then that body itself
returns to the earth, where its chemicals give life once more to ‘the buried
seed. That is the great cycle of life. Without death it cannot continue.
2-64
Very few people, even educated people, think with abstract ideas. Only
when the great abstractions are turned into concrete images do we comprehend
them at all. And the more primitive, the less cultured, a people, tlle more
colorful those symbols are sure to be. That is the way myths and legends are
built up into dramatic rituals and the beautiful symbols of cultured art.
Many people think a myth is just a made-up yarn of fiction. Not so. A
myth is much more than that. It is an attempt of primitive man to explain
some strange phenomenon of nature, like thunder, or growing plants, or recurrent
floods, or the last great mystery of death.
The oldest myths behind the great central truth of the Easter story concern
our favorite symbol of Easter, the egg. Just as it is the first memory
of Easter that most of us carry from our own childhood, so it takes humanity
back to the oldest known civilizations on earth, Egypt, Mesapotamia, and
India.
In Egypt the God Geb produced a mighty egg, from which the whole universe
was born. Out of this egg came the phoenix, the fabulous bird which was the
symbol of the sun. In the myth the phoenix died by setting fire to its own
nest and burning itself to ashes. In those ashes was an egg from which the
phoenix hatched again. The Hindu and Mesapotamian stories are similar.
Now the point is that the human mind is of the same essential nature
in all times and places. Hidden in its unconscious depths are the profound
truths of God, and those truths find expression in symbols that are remarkably
alike in all parts of the earth.
Why should our modern Easter be associated with these ancient myths?
Because there is an obvious parallel between the rising of Christ from death
and the rising of the universe from the original darkness of chaos. Between
the phoenix myth and our Easter there is an even more striking parallel. Both
emphasize the profound truth that out of sacrifice and seeming defeat come
2-65
victory and life. The phoenix rises from the ashes, Jesus from the tomb.
It is no accident that Easter annually comes near the vernal equinox.
It is not a fixed date, like Christmas, because in ancient times it was
associated with the lunar as well .as the solar calendar, with the moon as
well as the sun. Hence the date of Easter is the first Sunday after the first
full moon following the 21st of March, the date of the spring equinox.
Long before the time of historical records, the ancient legends assure
us that the quarter of the sun’s journey which lies between the spring equinox
and the summer solstice has always been a season of religious rites
connected with the sowing and the fruition of crops. Not only is there striking
similarity between seed and living plant on the one hand, and the entombed
Jesus and the risen Christ on the other hand, but we are also reminded
that Jesus likened himself to the vine and ordained that the blood of
the cruShed grape Should be the sacramental symbol of his own blood in celebration
of the Lord’s Supper. The fact that bread is made from ground
corn and wine from crushed grapes has long been connected in religious symbolism
with the idea that eternal life is the result of sacrifice — of
life-giving death.
Do not misunderstand our meaning. We are not suggesting that the Christ
story is a mere survival of old myths tacked on to the true history of a
Galilean prophet. We are rather emphasizing the fact that Christ brought in
definite, human historical manner the same divine truth that the old myths
sought more feebly to explain. Christianity sees Christ as God in human form
— the complete embodiment of the ideal pattern or divine law by which the
universe and man are created and have meaning — in Short, the incarnation
of what Christians for twenty centuries have called the Word of God.
If then the Word of God is the design in the mind of the Architect of
the Universe, there is every reason to expect resemblances between the life
2-66
of Christ and all the processes of nature that are found in the heavens, on
the earth, in man himself. That is why Christ rose from the dead with the
ascending sun and at the season when crops rise from the ground. For the
works of the Creator are all of one piece. Behind Christ and the crops and
the seasons and the inner workings of the human mind is one spirit, one
rythro, one moving purpose, one God.
As the centuries roll by, numerous customs and folk-ways come to sur~
round all the religious rites and festivals. Easter is no exception.
Eggs have been a part of the Easter folk-ways for many centuries. Sometimes
they are left white or brown, sometimes they are gaily dyed. In parts
of Eastern Europe they are elaborately painted with crosses. In France children
making their first confession on Holy Saturday take a present of eggs
to the priest. In other countries children hunt for eggs in the garden. In
our own national capital they· roll them on the White House lawn. Today, not
only in America, but in Europe as well, candy eggs are prevalent.
Then there is the Easter bunny. He came to America long ago from Central
and Western Europe. His origin is one of those peculiar twists of language,
where one word that sounds like another confuses the first thing with the
second. In many parts of Europe, even to this day, the last sheaf of grain
taken at the harvest is called the hare, and its cutting is called “cutting
the tail of the hare”. An Easter hare hunt — hunting rabbits, not grain
sheaths — was observed in England from remote Anglo-Saxon times, and in Hungary
and South Germany it has long been the custom for children to put an
image of a rabbit in the basket prepared for the Easter eggs. There is little
doubt that the rabbit became associated with eggs and growing grain because
of the two meanings of the word hare.
Then there are Easter hot cross buns. In the time of Samuel Pepys, three
hundred years ago, peddlers went through the London streets on Good Friday
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morning, crying:
“Hot cross buns, hot cross buns,
One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns;
Smoking hot, piping hot,
Just come out of the baker’s shop;
One a penny poker, two a penny tongs,
Three a penny fire-shovel, hot cross buns.”
These buns, or spiced rolls, with a cross originally indented on the top,
now made of sugar frosting, were eaten by almost every inhabitant of England
on Good Friday morning. The custom probably originated nearly 600 years ago
when in 1361 at st. Albans Abbey one of the monks baked buns of this form as
gifts for the poor.
At the time of Chaucer, about 1400, there were many beliefs about good
luck and good health associated with hot cross buns. Unlike common bread, they
were supposed to keep a long time without mold. They were grated into medicines,
used as charms against shipwreck, for keeping rats out of the grain, and as
good luck talismans,the way American negroes cherish a rabbit’s foot.
Easter has always been a time of rejoicing, and strange as it seems to us
today, some of the playfulness and jollity that usually goes with rejoicing
was once carried on in the church itself. At one time a kind of Easter game
was played in the choir by the clergy. It may even have been played with eggs.
In the records of Chester Cathedral in England is found this interesting account:
“The bishop and dean took eggs into the cathedral and, at certain stages
of the service, engaged in an egg-tossing match with the choristers.” In the
course of time these games were withdrawn from the sanctuary and became popular
egg-throwing and egg-rolling games on the village greens.
Several authorities maintain that it is an old Easter custom that accounts
for the origin of pariSh houses, the sOCial halls that now adjoin so many
2-68
churches of all faiths. An important festive event of Easter 500 years ago
was the Easter Church Ale, a distribution and drinking of ale after the prin-:cipal
Easter service, the money thus derived being used for repairs to the
church fabric. It is not hard to understand how these church ales degenerated
into disorderly affairs, so that they had to be put out of the church
itself. As-a result church houses were built or rented adjoining the church,
and were equipped with kitchens and dishes. Some of those houses became taverns
but the majority became the pariSh house or social hall for the church community.
Allover the united States, and in many parts of Europe, the Easter service
is the occasion of popular services, held on some convenient hill. This
is the outstanding Protestant contribution to Easter. It has no part in the
historical liturgy of the church, but is a popular expression of the people.
Some deep seated instinct of devotion drives modern man out of his comfortable
bed into the dim light of early morning to herald the risen Christ.
Whether or not you have been to church today, you cannot escape the
mighty significance of Easter. The new life which the risen Christ brings to
man is not just ordinary, biological life. The gift of Easter is not mortal
life, but spiritual life. And this gift comes as the fruit of death. The passage
from Good Friday to Easter Sunday is the passage from the gloom of
death to the dawn of real life.
To admit that desperate clinging to one’s mortal life is a futility and
an illusion seems complete violation of common sense. It looks like the end
of faith and hope alike. But what did the Master say? “Except a grain of
corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone; but if it die, it brings
forth much fruit.” “Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and he that
loses his life shall find it.” The King of Kings is born in a manger. He dies
upon a thief’s cross. Then he rises from the tomb. Why? Because, by that
2-69
strange contradiction, he fulfills the seed time and the harvest, the setting
and the rising of the sun, the never-ending cycle of the seasons
in a word, he brings real, eternal life to man.
2-70
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
64th Broadcast April 16, 1950
On two previous programs we have mentioned the account book of an Augusta
merchant, whose records began in 1802. We turn again to that old book
tonight, for it reveals that in November, 1806 the merchant gave up his
business of operating a general store and turned to the business of a sort
of combination blacksmith and hardware dealer. After the autumn of 1806
the account book contains no more mention of·molasses and tea and rum, no
more such items as thread and brimstone and forest cloth.
As a blacksmith our merchant seems to have had no uniform price for
shoeing a horse. It may have depended on a number of things — the size of
the shoes, whether all were new or some only reset, and how long the job took.
At any rate in one instance he recorded, “shoeing horse all round, $1.67”;
another record says, “Josiah Mitchell, to shoeing your horse, 67 cents”. Occasionally
he records the rate in English money, as when he says, “Jonathan
Ballard, to shoeing horse, 6 shillings, $1.00”; but to Simeon Paine on the
same day the charge was, “to shoeing horse, 6/6, or $1.50”. On December 15,
1806 both James Bridge and Moses Pollard got their horses shod for 75 cents,
but on the same day it cost Robert Waite $1.25.
Naturally the blacksmiths of 1806 shod a lot of oxen. What a priceless
relic this fellow’s ox sling would be if it were still standing. On November
25th he charged James Bridge 21 shillings, or $3.50 for shoeing oxen. Two
weeks later he charged Robert Hannaday $2.00 for shoeing his yoke, and for
some unrecorded reason Samuel Page paid only $1. 00 for his. There are very
few charges for shoeing oxen in any of the four years from 1806 to 1810 except
during the month of November, just before the oxen went to work in the
woods. It was then that the farmers got out the big pines that were floated
2-71
down the Kennebec for many purposes of lumber, most notably masts for the
ships that left the yards all the way from Hallowell to Bath.
Perhaps some of the older blacksmiths now living remember certain expressionswhich
occur in this account book, but I confess many of them are
entirely new to me. In one instance the blacksmith enters a charge for
“upsetting” an axe, in another for “laying” an axe. We cannot get quite what
he means by “forging 3 pallets for clock” or “upsetting a broad chisel”.
OVer and over again occurs the item “one shave, $1.17”. This puzzled me
for a long time. OUr blacksmith had not turned barber. His price was too high
for that, and in 1806 very few men were shaved by barbers, nor did it seem to
mean a draw shave or shingle shave. Suddenly it occurred to me what he meant.
His one shave was one shaft for a wagon.
Some of this old merchant-blacksmith’s charges are very interesting:
“bracer for a sleigh, 50 cents; making 122 pounds of chain, $7.32; drawing a
hook, 3 cents; bailing one large kittle, 67 cents; mending a plow share, $1.50;
thimba11s for a whee1barrer, 15 cents; mending a bayonet, 50 cents; tongue for
a bell, 25 cents; making a barking iron, $1.00.” How many of you know what a
barking iron was? That’s one of the few old-time things I happen to know.
Now I’d like to see how many listeners can send in a letter or post card telling
me what it was. Let me repeat the question. What was a barking iron?
OUr blacksmith charged fifty cents for forging two steel hammers, 20
cents for a holdback iron for a shay, 10 cents for a hoop for a tub, and 25
cents for “putting an eye to an auger”.
I have often heard an axle called an ex, but I had never before seen it
in writing. But this old book contains the charge, “Joseph Barton, to altering
ex to your carriage, 50 cents”.
Just as this man, when a storekeeper, went on errands to Vassalboro -you
will recall that on one of those errands he charged 7 cents worth of wine
2-72
to the expense account — so as a blacksmith he found time for other duties.
In October, 1808 he recorded, “to my fees as juryman at inquest on the body
of James Springer, $1.50”. Perhaps he employed someone to take over his shop
on such occasions, for on another date he writes, “Abia1 Pitts, credit by one
day I s work in my shop, $1.25.” On the same day he recorded one of the book I S
most unusual items: “Ephraim Ballard, to new steeling his compasses, 25
cents”. On November 5, 1807 he records: “Adam pitts begun to work for me at
ten dollars per month, one half cash, the other in goods.” For some reason
he paid Adam on the same day, but it was a meager amount, for the record reads:
“Adam Pitts, to cash, 4 cents”. On November 15 he made a payment to Adam in
goods, for the account then says: “Adam Pitts, to paid you in leather at
James Childs, at cash price, $1.00”. On the 19th he charged Adam with a
quarter pound of tobacco and one gallon of molasses, Whether from stock left
over from the old store or purchased elsewhere he does not say. Perhaps his
strangest combination of payment to Adam was on November 22, when he charged
this helper 50 cents for towels and shoes. These surely were horse shoes.
Evidently Adam was trying to set up for himself, because in 1808 we find
him charged with 4 sets of shoes and 3 sets of nails, with 10 horse shoes,
with 30 pounds of iron, and with one heavy sledge. Then all mention of Adam
pitts disappears from the record. He was evidently now out on his own.
By the end of 1807 our blacksmith was owning real estate and renting it.
Against Andrew Plummer he had a charge of nine month’s house rent at 15 shil~
lings a month, a total of $22.50 for renting the house for three quarters of
a year.
Somebody in the blacksmith I s family had the unusual name of Parthenia,
for this same Andrew plummer is credited with 67 cents for making a pair of
shoes for Parthenia.
was probably a child.
Since that was a low price, even for those days, Parthenia
2-73
In the summer of 1808 our enterprising blacksmith was taking in boarders.
The record reads: “Jacob Buffington, begun to board him on Saturday,
the 6 of August at 12 shillings per week. John Dawson, began to board him on
Monday, the 8 of August at 12 shillings per week.”
Apparently this blacksmith sometimes served as a deputy sheriff. In
November, 1808 he entered a charge of $1.00 for “my fees on a writ of replevin
of Elizabeth Finney on Thomas W. Smith”. On May 2, 1810 he charged Ephraim
Dutton $2.38 “for fees on your writ on Savage Bolton by agreement”.
The last item in that fat old account book reads as follows: “Capt.
Samuel Smith of Belgrade, to 2 broad hoes, $2.00; credit by one bushel of
corn, $1.00”.
Thus we come to the end of this amazing, first-hand historical record
of Kennebec County 150 Years ago. In April, 1802 the writer of the old
accounts started with Jonathan Ballard owing him 10 cents for one mug of
cider. Eight years later he closed the book with Captain Smith of Belgrade
turning in enough corn to pay for one broad hoe, but still owing for the
second.
Indeed this book is an intimate, homey picture of old times in the
Kennebec Valley a century and a half ago. We only wish we were able to do
it better justice. Again our thanks to Burleigh NiChols of Fairfield Center
for loaning us this remarkable and historically valuable book.
*****
Now let us turn to a subj ect muCh more pertinent to our own times -the
cost of our military defense. However much we detest war and yearn for
lasting peace, most of us are not willing to see our country sold out to obnoxious
un-American ways of life just because we fail to provide adequate
defense. All but a few unrelenting pacifists believe that we ought to maintain
a strong army, navy and air force.
2-74
In all common sense we know that the maintenance of such a force costs
a tremendous amount of money. What common sense doesn’t dictate, however, is
that the brass hats of the military should have everything they ask for, unquestioned
and unexamined.
It is high time the American people realized just what kind of national
defense we get for every dollar the military brass hats expend. Now 14 billion
dollars — the size of the present total appropriation to be spent in
one year for the nation’s defense — is a tidy sum. Are you ready for a shock?
Here it is. More dollars of those 14 billion are earmarked for non-military
spending than for anything or any measure that gives us actual defense. For
every two men in uniform the services employ one civilian. Of the men in uniform,
only one in three is in a fighting unit. While 6 billion dollars are
being s:r;:e.nt for planes, guns, tanks, ships, equipment, supplies and the pay
and support of men in combat units, 8 billion will go for overhead and for
things only remotely connected with keeping our country safe.
Of course combat troops require supply and service troops and Civilian
workers behind them. Everybody knows that. But to contend that 518,000 fighting
men now in service require 968,000 additional servicemen and 841,000civilian
employees is open to serious question.
In 1941 before P.earl Harbor only one civilian for every four men in uniform
was needed in the Army and Navy combined. At that time the total of men
in the armed services was almost exactly the same as now, but the dollar outlay
was less than half the present spending, although billions were going for
stock-piling in preparation for expected war. Instead of 14 billion, the ser~
vices then spent 6 2/3 billion.
Those are the straight facts. From one civilian to four service men the
year before the war we have come to one civilian to every two service men four
years after the war. The great increase in military costs, presenting such a
2-75
staggering burden to every taxpayer, is accounted for in no small measure
by increased ~enditures that have no direct relation to our nation’s defense
and security.
Whenever one raises his voice against this wasteful and needless spending,
the gold braid in Washington ang-rilydenounces him as a pacifist. The
generals and the admirals can do no wrong, or can they? We look to them to
defend us from the dire threat of foreign attack, and we are willing to pay
any reasonable bill to get it. But when we see those generals and admirals
spending our money to pad the payrolls with superfluous personnel that add
nothing to our defense, we have the ordinary citizen’s American right to protest.
2-76
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
65th Broadcast April 23, 1950
When I recently mentioned three dollar bills, little did I think that I
should ever own one. William Kenworthy, who probably knows more about old
coins and currency than any other person in Central Maine, has most generously
given me an unusually fine specimen of a three dollar bill. Unlike most
examples of old currency, this bill has not been worn to tatters. It appears
as new as the day it was printed.
I prize it not only because it is such a perfect specimen of a form of
currency long since abandoned, but also because it is a note issued by a
Maine bank, the washington County Bank of Calais, whose president, directors
and company promise to pay three dollars to the payee or bearer on demand.
As was the case with all of these old bills, this one has its number, 1252,
entered in ink, and the names of the president and cashier are original signatures,
not facsimiles. The date? Well, it was almost 116 years ago. It
too is written on the printed bill in ink — August 1, 1834.
The printed designs on this old bill are also interesting. In the center
are mingled scenes representing education, industry, transportation, and agriculture.
On the left margin is the bee hive, the universal symbol of industry;
on the ,right margin is a man with a sickle and a woman binding a
sheaf of grain — agriculture again.
All the printing is on one side; the reverse is plain white paper. In
fact the stock is very ordinary paper and the printing would be a simple job
for a modern counterfeiter. Yet these simply printed bills were once circulated
freely. Were people more honest a hundred years ago, or were they
just more gullible? Perhaps a lot of counterfeit money circulated undiscovered
in those days.
2-77
*****
The subject of narrow guage railroads has not been exhausted, in spite
of our many references to it on this program. Tonight we have new information
on the narrow guage nearest Waterville, the old Wiscasset and Quebec, the
road that never got nearer to Quebec than the village of Albion.
Mr. Burleigh Nichols of Fairfield Center, who has already been so helpful
with items from the old days, has shown us a map, inscribed as follows:
“Map of the proposed Kennebec and Wiscasset Railroad. Col. A. W. Wildes,
C. E. Lithographed by J. E .. Tilton & Co., Boston.” Unfortunately the map
is not dated, but it must have preceded the building of the road from
Wiscasset to Albion by several years, because the map surprisingly shows that
what later became the Kennebec Central, from Gardiner to Togus, was anticipated
by the original plans for the K & W. The map shows the main line of
the road charted not from Wiscasset to Albion, but from Wiscasset to Augusta.
Like the actual line that was finally built, the mapped route· follows the
Sheepscot River through Alna, Puddle Dock, Head Tide and King’s Mills to Turner’s
Corner, when it swings sharply to the west to Togus and then on to Augusta.
The map shows a connecting spur directly from King’s Mills to Togus,
by-passing Turner’s Corner. Another short branch is shown from Turner’s Corner
to Cooper’s Mills. But the map gives no indication that anyone had then suggested
bringing the road to Winslow instead of Augusta, or of going beyond
Cooper’s Mills to Albion, and even on to Burnham.
The spur line from King’s Mills to Togus was mapped to pass along the
northeast shore of Joy’s Pond on the border of Whitefield and Pittston. The
broad guage with which the road was to connect at Wiscasset was, of course,
the Knox and Lincoln.
*****
We hear a lot about the American food surplus and its huge cost of four
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billion dollars in this fiscal year alone. Do you know that it costs $200
million a year just for storage? That arrbunts to about $23,000 an hour.
Take note of some of the gigantic quantities which the government had
in storage on January 31, 1950: a hundred million pounds of butter, 75
million pounds of dried eggs, 275 million pounds of dried milk, a billion
pounds of potatoes, 625 million pounds of peanuts, 60 million pounds of
dried fruits.
An article in Life magazine a few weeks ago told this story of surplus
food far better than I can tell it. I hope a lot of you read that article.
If you did, I don I t think you found it funny. When we think of the way unemployment
has already begun to hit our large cities, when we think of American
children already going to school hungry, when we know there are a lot of American
families finding it hard to buy food for three square meals a day,
this surplus food situation is not only wretched, expensive economy; it is
downright tragic. If another depression descends upon us, we shall face that
inexcusable paradox of bread lines wading knee deep in surplus wheat.
The complaint many of us have about this agricultural program is that
so many of us who are just consumers have to pay twice; once when we buy the
goods at artificially high prices, and again as taxpayers to provide the money
for the government to keep prices high. Some of us feel that we are being
ground pretty fine between the upper mill stone of high prices and the lower
mill stone of government subsidies.
*****
Now for one or two facts that everyone ought to know about our State of
Maine. Maine’s tree is not the Norway pine, nor any other kind, except the
white pine. whose straight trunks were so highly prized in colonial days to
make masts for His Majesty’s ships. It is the white pine one sees displayed
on the state seal. So far I am sure you can all say, “We ‘ve always known that.
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It’s no news to tell us why Maine is called the Pine Tree State.”
Very good; but can you tell me what is our state flower? I’m sure some
of you know, but I am equally sure that many of you haven’t the faintest
idea. Well, it is the white pine cone and tassel; that is Maine’s floral
emblem.
Then there are official state birds. What is ours? It is the chickadee,
and a very appropriate selection to accompany the white pine. Do you know
what more than one metropolitan newspaper has called the “Flower Garden of
New England”? It is Aroostook County, Maine in potato blossom time. Who of
our listeners can add to my collection of items about Maine trees? Let me
give you just a few of those items tonight, then let us see how many you can
add. I hope to get many letters on this subject.
Down in Kennebunk they have what are called the Lexington Elms, because
tradition has it that they were planted on the 19th of April in 1775. In the
next town of Wells is an elm which was willed to the State of Maine, with a
fund to care. for it. In Portland is a tree which grew from a scion cut from
the famous Washington elm in Cambridge, Mass. In Kennebunk, as in many other
New England towns, there is a Lafayette Elm, which was on the lawn of the
Storer Estate when General Lafayette was entertained there in 1825, the year
that he dedicated Bunker Hill Monument. The Lafayette tree in Kennebunk, like
the tree in Wells, was long ago deeded to the town. It has a spread of 131
feet, and at its base has a circumference of 171 feet. Now what interesting
tree items can any of you supply?
*****
A danger of our time is the increasing spread of the belief that we must
all get more and give less. We cannot escape the fact that the present economic
strength of America, giving us the highest standard of living in the
world, was created by men and women who gave to the limit of their strength.
2-80
Somehow the freedom that we must win back in America is the freedom to
work and create to the limit of our capacity, and to enjoy the rewards of
creative work, not be rewarded for refusal to work.
It is true that a hundred and fifty years ago right here in Waterville
and Winslow the folks decided to pay the minister not to preach to them and
to move out of town. But paying people for not working ought still to be,
as it was then, so rare as to cause extraordinary comment.
Like any other nation, the united states can suffer a great disaster
from war or pestilence, but if the spirit of freedom to work and create remains
sound, we could soon rebuild stronger and finer than before. But if
that spirit of freedom should perish because of the spread of the something
for nothing belief, rebuilding would be impossible, because it could not be
done without individual effort and personal sacrifice.
*****
Ever since the government impounded the gold, took it out of circulation,
and buried it at Fort Knox, a lot of people ask what is it worth to us. Will
gold buy anything?
Well, it will buy just as much as it ever would. Somebody with a mathematical
mind tells us that, if all the gold in the world were melted down into
a solid cube, it would be about the size of an eight-room house. But with all
that gold a man could not buy a friend, or character, or peace of mind, or a
clear conscience, or a sense of eternity. There are a lot of precious things
that gold never has bought and never can buy.
*****
Every teacher and a lot of other people are frequently amused by the
boners which school pupils and college students make on examination papers.
Sometimes these answers are not boners at all, but very clever wording of
what is in the student’s mind. For instance we are all familiar with the
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boy’s definition of a horse — an animal with four legs, one under each corner;
and we recall the rather impressive definition of a skeleton — a person
with the insides out and the outsides off.
Recently the New York Board of Regents published some of the amusing
answers found in the mid-year examinations, last February, in New York high
schools. Here are a few from papers in English: “He tried in vain and was
successful.” “He WafS a great sailor when men were made of iron and ships were
made of wood. It “One should learn the ropes, which is something you grasp
through experience.” “The Duke takes poison, but Henrietta must go the hard
way, die of old age.” “MacBeth is an interesting play, because I got excited
in many parts at the same time MacBeth did.”
From the history papers these sentences were gleaned: “Rousseau introduced
the gellatine, which was used to cut off the heads of many people. II “Salt
Lake City is a place where the Morons. settled. ” “Two French explorers of the
Mississippi were Romeo and Juliet.”
In mathematics we learn that “a converse in geometry is approaching a
theorem from the rear”, and that “two right angles in the same plane, placed
with their backs together, equal a straight an~1:e, and their bottoms form a
straight line.”
We learn also that “typhoid fever can be prevented by fascination”, that
“maple syrup is made by sterilizing sap”, that “on Washington’s trip across
the Delaware two men were frozen to death, but they reached the other. side
in safety”, and one student,asked to define a sensation in psychology, wrote:
“A sensation is that state of public mind which exists in a given corranunity
when one man’s wife runs off with another man.”
The question, “Name three Greek educators and tell what each taught, elicited
this answer: “Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Socrates taught Plato, and
Plato taught Aristotle.” perhaps the most amusing of the answers were two from
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literature. One of them says: “The House of Seven Gables was a house with
a broad door through which the Gables entered and had rooms under the roof
where the little Gables slept”. The other prize answer is this one: “Priscilla,
Miles Standish’s loveress, was a very sweet girl dressed in the simple
Dutch costume consisting of .a white cap and apron.”
*****
Religion is a common thing. Everybody has some brand of it, for even
atheism, disbelief in any God at all, is a kind of religion of its own — it
is a belief in not believing.
Now your kind of religion is your business alone; under the American
Constitution you have the right not only to believe as you choose, but also to
worship as you choose.
The other day I was reading about that notorious bandit and train robber,
Jesse James. Jesse, I read, was a deeply religious man. He read the Bible
regularly, liked to sing in church choirs, and did not smoke, drink or swear.
He was intensely loyal to his friends and always refused to rob a preacher.
Yet at the same time he not only held up trains and robbed the passengers,
cleaned out banks and express companies, but he killed first and talked afterwards,
sometimes killed for sheer revenge, and at least once out of simple excitement.
Human beings are a queer mixture. Not many of us mix our religion with
banditry and killing, but a lot of us mix it with disharmony and unhappiness.
The test of our religion is not what we do with it, but what it does to us.
2-83
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
66th Broadcast April 30, 1950
We frequently lament Maine’s standing today among the 48 states in respect
to support of education. It was not so in 1855. That old Augusta newspaper,
the Rural Intelligencer — the same one in Which we found the editorial
stand against stoves — proudly pointed out the following facts about
education in Maine a hundred years ago. Said the editor:
“OUr free schools educate more persons at public expense than any other
state in proportion to population. The number in Maine is 60,212; in New Hampshire,
7,705; in Connecticut 10,912. In Maine only one adult in a hundred
cannot read and write; in Massachusetts it is three in a hundred; in Virginia
nine in a hundred; in North Carolina 14 in a hundred. Pay earned by Maine
farm laborers is higher than in any other state except Massachusetts. In
Maine it is $13 a month, in Ohio $11.10, in Virginia $8.43, in Alabama $9.62.”
Editor Drew went on to point out that of all the states Maine and Rhode
Island stood highest in freedom from crime. Said the editor proudly: “It is
clear that Maine is one of the best, if not the very best state in the Union
for a man to live Who would rear his family among those social, educational
and moral influences which secure for life the best of its charms.”
Ninety-five years after Editor Drew penned those lines, we still think
Maine is the best of all states to live in, but we hang our heads in shame
when the educational statistics of the 48 states are laid before us. Only the
deep South stands worse than Maine in public support of education.
*****
In that year 1855 Governor Anson Morrill became chief executive of Maine.
Only six years later the whole nation would be involved in a bitter civil war·–
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not a war against a foreign nation, but the worst of all kinds of war -killing
of citizen by fellow citizen, of brother by brother. In the Kennebec
Valley of 1855 did that awful conflict cast any looming shadows before? Yes,
indeed. In his inaugural address Governor Morrill spoke out emphatically
against Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850, the compromise which gave a green
light to the extension of slavery into certain territories. Maine had been
born as a part of the famous Compromise of 1820. She had secured her admission
into the Union largely on the deal that demanded another free state to offset
the admission of Missouri as a slave state. There was good reason for
Maine to espouse the anti-slavery cause.
But she had been slow to do so. with the Yankee conservatism that characterized
Maine folk then, as it characterizes them now, they had held aloof
from the raging controversy. But in 1855 Governor Morrill spoke out. Maine,
he said, could not support the Compromise of 1850, despite its sanction by
Daniel Webster, nor would Maine recognize the legality of the Fugitive Slave
Law. The governor said: “However desirous our people have been to refrain
from discussing or agitating the question of slavery, lest such agitation
might impair the permanence of the Union, the time has now come when that
question must be met and discussed in our national and state councils with the
same freedom with which we discuss other questions.”
Discussion did become more open and more violent, and in a few years
Maine boys were laying down their lives at Bull Run and Chancellorsville, at
Cedar Mountain and Gettysburg.
*****
A lot of ordinary people like me, who can lay no claim to expert knowledge
of the intricate workings of money, credit and currency, are asking
what this talked-of dollar shortage is all about. Because a dollar is something
that I usually don’t have, I can describe my kind of dollar shortage,
2-85
but that of course isn’t what the newspapers are talking about. So I thought
I would look into this matter and see if I could tell you anything about it.
In the ordinary course of trade, the way a nation gets money to buy
goods from another nation is just the way you and I get money to buy goods
of another person. We sell goods that we have, or we sell our labor or
services for money, and we can then buy goods with that money. If a nation
has to buy more than it can sell, it is just like you or me when we do the
same it is in trouble.
In the 35 years from 1914 to 1949 the amount of goods and services that
the United States sold abroad amounted to $270 billion, while our purchases
from other countries amounted to only $170 billion. Thus we sold $100 billion
worth more than we bought.
It is obvious that the foreign nations had to find some way to get those
hundred billion dollars that we could not take their goods to meet. If we
could not take that amount in trade, what could those nations do?
First, they sold their gold and silver assets held in this country to
the tune of $16 billion. Secondly, they got about a billion from the World
Bank. Third, they received $10 billion by remittances from American individuals
and organizations, and $10 billion more from investments of U. S. business
and individuals in foreign industries. That makes a total of $37 billion,
leaving $63 billion still to account for.
Now listen. That $63 billion came from U. S. Government aid; $18 billion
in loans, and $45 billion in outright grants or gifts. In other words
we gave outright to foreign nations almost half the difference between our
own sales and purchases.
After 35 years the problem is even farther from solution than it was a
third of a century ago. The world is more desperately short of dollars today
than ever before. The prospect is that the United States will continue to
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sell more than she buys for many years to come. We certainly don’t know the
answer, but we have the temerity to ask how long Uncle Sam can keep on playing
Santa Claus to all the world.
*****
Some time ago, you will recall, we were seeking information about oldtime
blacksmith shops in this vicinity. My young friend Brian Alley, the Waterville
boy who is an authority on narrow gauge railroads, recently asked
why I didn’t settle the question, since the needed information is available
in print. Brian proved his point by bringing me a copy of the Maine Register
of 1903, in which are listed the Waterville blacksmiths.· of half a century ago.
There were eight of them: John Davidson, Front Street; J. L. LaBranch, Charles
Street; Joseph Loubier, Gray Street; Morris McNelly, Silver Street; Louis Poulin,
Paris Street; Omer Poulin, Water Street; A. I. Trafton, Front Street.
Unfortunately the information i~ the Maine Register is not always accurate.
Sometimes information from the various towns and cities was supplied to
the editor carelessly and superficially. It is therefore possible that this
list of waterville blacksmiths is not complete. All we say is that, if there
were others besides those eight blacksmiths, they were not recognized or listed
in Maine’s official publication.
What about WinSlow? Were her blacksmith shops all closed by 1903? No.
The Maine Register of that year records one Shop on the east side of the rive~,
operated by A. M. Ballentine.
Fairfield had two blacksmiths at that time, F. T. Brown and A. V. Worthing.
Oakland did a big business in iron work and horse shoeing, for it had five
smithies then at work: W. H. Prentiss, Gilman and Booker, E. A. Watson, J. T.
Flynn and F. H. Abbott~
Not many of our listeners ever heard of the blacksmith shop where, as a
boy, I used to “see the flaming forge and hear the bellows roar”. It was the
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shop of Ernest Burnham on Depot Street in Bridgton. In fact that short
street between the post office and the narrow guage station in Bridgton
boasted three blacksmith shops in 1903, and though the town was less than
a third as large as Waterville in population, it had altogether seven
blacksmiths.
By the way, I think one of the most memorable odors from the boyhood
days of men my age is the smell of heated iron pressed to a horse’s hoof.
The pungent reek of smoke when the smith plunged the hot shoe into a tub of
water was one sort of smell, but the much stronger and longer remembered odor
arose when that only sligl\tly cooled iron was placed against the hoof, as
the smith fitted the shoe.
That same copy of the Maine Register, printed 47 years ago, gives us
information also about the old livery stables. The Elmwood Stable was then
run by Silas Small, while Charles A. Hill, the liveryman we mentioned a
year ago, operated a stable at 12 Mechanic Square. There were, in fact, ten
livery stables in waterville in 1903. Two of them were almost directly oppo~
site each other on Silver Street, where Ira Mitchell had one at No. 22 and
A. E. Sawyer operated one at No. 23. Charles Perry ran a stable on Percival
Court; C. Witham and Son had one in the rear of 57 Temple Street; W. M.
Wilshire had his in Railroad Square; L. W. Rollins’s was at 29 Front Street;
F. M. Hanson’s on Union Street; and there was one on the Plains, operated by
J. E. Pooler at 57 Water Street.
Waterville had fourteen barbers in 1903, of Whom I think only one remains
— that beloved and respected veteran of the shears and clippers,
Victor Robichaud. Felix Audet, at the Elmwood Hotel barber shop, must be
getting pretty close to fifty years as a Waterville barber. If he was practicing
the trade in 1903, however, it was before he had a shop of his own.
Louis Breton of the Giguere shop on Main Street is another man who has been
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barbering for many years.
Speaking of the Elmwood, this year 1950 is its hundredth anniversary.
It was in 1850 that this venerable hostelry first opened for business under
the proprietorship of Seavey and Williams.
It was not the first tavern on the same spot. There in what was simply
a large dwelling house Deacon Abial Follansbee had conducted a “Temperance
Hotel” before the Civil War. Destroyed by fire in 1878, the Elmwood was rebuilt
larger and better than before. In his centennial history of 1902 Dr.
Whittemore said of the Elmwood: ‘.’It has furnished a pleasant home to its
many city boarders, a fine headquarters for convention delegates, a worthy
place of entertainment for commencement dignitaries, and the scene of many
festal occasions when clubs and college societies have celebrated after their
fashion. ”
When I entered college in 1909; for dining purposes the Elmwood was overshadowed
by the new, luxurious, gaudily ceilinged dining room at the Hotel
Gerald in Fairfield, and it was there that I attended my fraternity initiation
banquet. Four years later, when I was graduating, the Gerald was forgotten
and banqueters usually sought the Elmwood again.
Another Waterville centennial of 1850 is the drug store now operated by
Robert Dexter, so long conducted by his immediate predecessor, Jim Allen.
According to available records, and they are not many, the first drug store in
Waterville seems to have been opened by Dr. Moses Appleton, who came here in
1796. Whether he had a separate apothecary shop or dispensed drugs from his
residence is not entirely clear. Dr. Appleton, though a graduate of Dartmouth
and once a school teacher in Boston, was a man who clung long to the old customs.
For many years after others had abandoned the practice, he wore his
hair down his back in an old fashioned queue. The story is that one day the
doctor went to a colored barber named Decatur on Water Street to have his hair
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trimmed and dressed. The doctor fell asleep. Suddenly he awoke,with a start
and shouted to the barber, “Look out for my queue”. Decatur replied, “You
is too, late, suh. It’s gone.” The doctor had been the victim of a quicker
and more painless amputation than any he had ever inflicted on a patient.
Dr. Appleton made some curious notations in his fee books. One such note
that he wrote in 1799 read: “It is agreed with Jabez Mathews that he pay me
at the rate of two cords of wood per annum in consideration of being supplied
with materials for keeping his family cured of the itch.”
NOW, as old Sam Pepys would say, “and so to bed”.
2-90
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
67th Broadcast May 7, 1950
My question about a barking iron has brought over fifty letters, post
cards and telephone calls. One of those calls came from one of waterville’s
best known and best loved citizens, Dr. George Averill. When he was a boy
and ,young man up in Lee and Lincoln in northern Penobscot County, the doctor
worked more than once on a barking crew. He not only knows what a barking
iron is; he’s used one.
Jothan Hobbs of Fairfield has used a barking iron many times. He has
written me a careful description of the barking crew’s work, which in all details
bears out Dr. Averill’s oral description of the process.
A barking iron is a tool used for removing bark from trees. Another name
for it is a spud or spudder. About half of the letters and post cards I have
received on this subject say that the barking iron or spud was used to remove
bark from trees used for pulpwood. It seems that the term spud or barking
iron does name the tool used for that purpose, but what I had in mind was its
use in procuring hemlock or oak bark for tanning. In peeling pulpwood the
bark is of no use; it must simply be gotten rid of. But among the old barking
crews the primary purpose was to get the bark for its very important use
in tanning leather.
A barking crew was made up of four men. First there was the chopper, who
felled the hemlock tree. Then the limber or knotter, with quick, dextrous
strokes of the axe cut off limbs and knots. The third man was the ringer and
splitter. He carried an axe with a handle exactly two feet long. Two lengths
of his axe made a four foot length of tree, which he marked with a quick V cut.
When the whole tree was thus measured, the bark was cut through, circling the
tree at each cut; then a lengthwise cut with axe held slantwise loosened the
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bark enough for the fourth man to get to work with the spud or barking iron
and remove the four foot lengths of bark from the tree. The sections of bark
were then placed on the ground, tipped against the trunk and left to dry.
When it had dried out, the bark was placed on a brush pile to keep it up from
the ground until it could be hauled off to the tannery.
Mr. Hobbs recalls that mosquitoes were the great pests of the barking
crews, and that the man who didn’ t smoke carried big supplies of oil of pennyroyal
to fight the stinging insects.
I must mention one post card that reached me from Bangor. I especially
prize it because it comes from Robert Trefethen, grandson of Professor Henry
Trefethen, the man who worked so hard and patiently trying to teach me mathematics
in Colby College forty years ago.
*****
Another question I recently asked was this: nWhat is meant by upsetting
an axe?” You will recall that the old account book kept by an Augusta blacksmith
in 1806 had numerous charges for upsetting an axe. The fir~t person to
answer the question was the manager of this station, the president of the
Kennebec Broadcasting Company, Carleton Brown. He was closely followed by our
neighborhood postman, Clifton Ellis. Then came a letter from Lloyd Collins
of Oakland, which explains the process so clearly that I want to quote it
word for word. Mr. Collins writes:
“When an axe has been used a long while and the bit or cutting edge gets
thick, if there is sufficient steel left, it is upset or heated and hammered
down thin again. Then it is reground and hardened. If the steel is nearly
gone, then it is cut off and a new bit is laid or welded onto the poll or head,
and a nearly new axe is the result. The first process is upsetting an axe. The
second is laying an axe.”
Thanks a lot, Mr. Collins. I did know what a barking iron was, but in
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respect to upsetting and laying axes my education had been sadly neglected
until your letter set me straight.
*****
I want to say a few words tonight about gambling. I am preaching no sermon;
I am not telling anyone what to do with his money. I just want to give
you some straight facts about one of the biggest menaces to the American way
of life.
Gambling today has replaced illegal liquor as the happy hunting ground
of America’s top criminals. Into this lawless business the people are pouring
more than ten billion dollars a year. Profits by the big gambling operators
amount to at least a billion dollars a year.
Now that excellently informed journal, U. S. News and World Report,
points out the startling and despicable fact about the gambling situation
in this pungent sentence: “The protection of these profits can be assured
only by political organizations that dominate police forces.”
A few weeks ago, when Charles Binaggio was found dead in his Kansas
City political club, attention was vigorously called to the connecting links
between the criminal and the political worlds. state senators, state and
county office holders, ward leaders and gangsters were alike present at Bin~
aggio’s funeral. How came such a mingling to see this gangster buried? This
is the story. A gambler aspires to political leadership. He reaches out and
tries to run a city and a state. Vote frauds and stolen ballot bo~es are
mere incidents. Other gamblers pour money into campaign funds, hoping offficials
will let them operate. The ties of crime and politics are thus firmly
knit.
Off-track horse race betting amounts to over three billion dollars a
year. Sports pools take another three billion; the numbers game accounts for
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at least a billion; slot machines grab a couple of billion; gambling houses
make off with another billion.
The arrDunt of money sometimes handled by a single top flight gambler
is enormous. One New York bookmaker paid back income taxes of 30 million
dollars covering a twelve-year period. A front man for a New Jersey gambling
house made deposits of five million dollars a year. Slot machines in a single
state turned up for one man — as his share among several in a syndicate
an income of a million dollars a year.
No wonder these gamblers are willing to pay high for their political
ties. Says the California Crime Study Commission: “No group of organized
criminals has ever been able to achieve profits and prominence without the
friendship and toleration, if not the actual assistance, of public officials.”
To that statement the Chicago Crime Commission adds this: “Handbook operators
in Chicago boast that they can produce two hundred thousand votes and unlimited
financial support toward election of candidates favorable to them.”
According to the California Commission, the slot machine racket reached
such a bold stage that an association of coin-machine manufacturers actually
conducted courses for selected members on how to influence public officials.
The courses discussed ways of buying protection, such as paying fixed sums,
or a perc~ntage of the profits, or making campaign contributions before or
after elections. The Commission found it common practice to pay ten to twenty
per cent of gross profits for protection. Lawyers for the association are
alleged to have told members that they could pick the courts and judges before
whom cases would be tried, and that association had a pipe line into
every state capitol and even into the national capitol in Washington.
It all makes a sordid story of an outstanding menace to the American
way of life. Money talks. The big gamblers have the money. They are making
it talk in ways that determine the actions of government in many an American
2-94
city. Thank heaven we have not yet seen signs of its satanic influence in
the government of Waterville. If we have any sense, we shall see to it that
the gambling interests do not get a hold in this city.
Somebody will say that I am getting excited about something people will
do anyway. That’s not what I am excited about. My concern is about the modern,
1950 fact, that gambling, as the boys who follow the ponies and the boys
who play the nUIr.bers racket. use the word, is undermining our political struc’-“·
tu~e, sapping at the very roots of our American life. And don’t take my word
for it. Read that carefully documented and unassailable article in U. S. News
and World Report for April 21, an article whose title is this:”Politics Hides
Gambling Rackets That Take Billions from the Public”.
*****
Wal ter Heath of Front Street has turned up in the attic of the family
home, which is one of Waterville’s residential landmarks, an account book
that is six years older than the one kept by the Augusta merchant of 1802,
whom we have talked about on several broadcasts.
We. cannot be sure of the identity of the storekeeper. Written on one
cover in badly faded ink are words which appear to be “George Fabyan of Winslow”.
On the other cover the words are “George Fabyan Day Book 1797”. The
name George Fabyan does not appear in Dr. Whittemore I s centennial history of
waterville nor in Kingsbury I s history of Kennebec County. If he was an early
resident of Winslow and a merchant, his name ought to appear on the early
tax lists, collected and published by Kingsbury.
At any rate, whoever made the early entries in this old book, he was
doing business here in 1796, six years before the town of Waterville was
set aside from the parent town of Winslow. The evidence is rather clear that
his place of business was on this side of the river, while the names of those
early settlers along the river on the Winslow side — the Pattees, the Howards,
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the Lithgows — appear very seldom in the accounts. Frequent customers were
Waterville’s noted physician and benefactor, Obadiah Williams, Squire Isaac
Temple, who built a big house at what is now the corner of Front and Temple
Streets; and Captain John MCKechnie, who made the survey of house lots to
which some of the oldest Waterville deeds go back. Captain John is said to
have built the first two-story house in Waterville, not far from where the
store of the waterville Hardware Company is now located.
One of the earliest entries in the old book refers to the grandfather
of the man who was Waterville’s first U. S. Senator. In 1848 Wyamn B. S.
Moor went to Washington as a senator from Maine. His grandfather, Daniel
Moor, was one of Waterville’s earliest settlers. So in this account book
we read: “Daniel Moor, to my horse to ride six miles, 50 cents.”
Names distinguished in Waterville history appear here as purchasers of
rum and brandy, cloth and crockery, sugar and salt, psalm books and dictionaries,
bandana handkerchiefs and ginger bread. There was Dr. Moses Appleton,
who had his home where the Marionite Catholic Church now stands, and who gave
his daughter the lot on the opposite corner, where her husband, a fellow named
Plaisted, built the house now occupied for many years by the Heath family.
One of the oddest items in the book concerns Dr. Appleton. It is worded: “Dr.
Moses Appleton, to cash you took of Benj. Spear for pack of cards, 50 cents.”
Other customers were Daniel Wyman, and Reuben Kidder, the Chases — Captain
Benjamin and his son John –, Benjamin Furbush and Asa Crosby, Ahijah
smith and Benjamin Runnels, fellow trader James McKim, and Waterville’s first
selectman and first town meeting moderator, Elnathan Sherwin.
Let’s take a look at a few of the accounts:
June 10, 1796
David Berry
By 1 day’s work getting logs out of Sebasticook River $1.00
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To 1 pair Worsted stockings
1 Psalm book
I Large Butter Pot
Isaac Temple, Dr.
To paid Parker for odds between hogs
To 1 bottle Sephalin Snuff
James McKechnie
To 4 gal. West Indies Rum
1 gal. N. E. Rum
To be paid in rum or cash
Christopher Jenkins, Dr.
To paid Daniel Goodwin and indorsed on note I
have paid said Goodwin
Credit, by 2 months work, ~ day short @ $10 per
month
Family Expenses
8 lb. Lamb
~ doz. Cucumbers
$ 1.50
.50
.34
1.00
.35
3.21
19.63
.56
.05
Not often do these old books contain items about themselves, but very
early in this book, on February 2, 1796, appears this item:
Jabish Matthews, Cr.
By Account Book, 84 cents.
Apparently George Fabyan, or whoever the trader was, paid Jabish Matthews
84 cents for this very book.
Indeed Walter Heath’s attic find is a mine of information about Waterville
before 1800, and some evening you shall hear more about it.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
68th Broadcast May 14, 1950
Except in libraries and special collections one seldom sees a newspaper
that was printed before the Revolution, but Mr. Johnson Parks of Western
Avenue, Waterville, has at least one copy of such a paper. It is the Boston
Evening Post, dated December 18, 1769, more than 180 years ago. Even earlier
copies doubtless exist somewhere, for this particular issue is Number 1786.
The paper has no mast-head, so it is impossible to tell how often it was published,
who was its editor, or what was the subscription rate. As was the custom
in those days, long term credit was given to subscribers, and apparently
the publisher of the Post was getting somewhat annoyed by the practice, for
in the lower right hand corner of the first page appears the notice: “All
persons indebted for this paper, whose accounts have been above 12 months
standing,are requested to make immediate payment.”
The paper is a four-page sheet, 16 inches by 10, three columns to a page.
The leading article under the heading “Journal of the Times” is devoted to
the pressing question of treatment of the American colonies by the British
crown and parliament. Among other things the article says: “Americans (note
the word American was already being used in 1769) are too enlightened a people
to be imposed upon by the arts and unfair practices of a British minister
who appears lost both to a sense of his own dignity and to true national interest.
The effect of Lord Hillsborough’s letter to the Governor of Rhode Island,
warning that no measures can be taken to question the authority of Britain
over the colonies, has been treated with due contempt. His Lordship’s
promise to take off certain duties is not to be trusted, as past experience
bears witness. The merchants of Massachusetts as well as those of Rhode Island
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will not be thus shaken from their pledged agreement not to import foreign
goods until the revenue acts are repealed.”
Thus in a single newspaper, printed 180 years ago, we see a contemporary
account of the seeds of the American Revolution. Exactly five years and four
months were to elapse before Master Paul Revere would wait on the Charlestown
shore to note whether one or two lanterns shed their gleam from the steeple
of Old North Church and start on his ride to alarm the countryside to
fire the shots heard round the world.
The third page of this paper is almost wholly devoted to advertisements,
most of them public notices or auction sales. Among the former are two adjacent
notices supporting what I said on this program several weeks ago; namely,
that there were two competing grand lodges of Masons in Boston before the Revolution.
One notice reads: “The brethren of the ancient and honorable society of
free and accepted masons are hereby notified that the Right Worshipful John
Rowe, Esq., Grand Master of Masons in North America, designs to celebrate the
festival of St. John the Evangelist on Wednesday the 27th instant, at the
Bunch of Grapes Tavern in King Street, where the brethren are desired to attend
at one o’clock on the said day. By order of the Grand Master, Abraham
Savage, Grand Secretary. N. B. Dinner precisely at two o’clock.”
The other notice says: “Notice is hereby given by the most ancient and
honorable fraternity of free and accepted masons that the feast of st. John
the Evangelist will be celebrated by the Right Worshipful Master and brethren
of the Lodge of St. Andrew in Boston, on Wednesday the 27th instant, at
their hall. Tickets to be had of Brother James Carter and at said hall. N. B.
The brethren are desired to attend precisely at 11 o’clock A.M. Dinner will be
on the table by two.”
Thus at the December festival of Masonry in old Boston in 1769 the bro-
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thers of the Scottish Rite got a two hour start on their brothers of the York
Rite, who did not convene until one o’clock, though both parties sat down to
one of those huge colonial dinners at the same hour of two o’clock.
In another column is the obituary of Samuel Kneeland, Boston’s famous
printer, who had died at the age of 73. It had been exactly fifty years
earlier that an even more famous printer, Benjamin Franklin, then only 13 years
old, had put out his brother’s paper in Ben’s name in order not to violate
the Governor’s edict that James Franklin should no longer publish the New
England Courant.
In another item we learn that Captain Nixon, in a brig belonging to Rhode
Island was to sail from London to Portsmouth in New Hampshire some time in
November, full freighted with gOOds for that place. We also learn that New
Jersey men are not to be outdone by those in New England in so virtuous an
act as the killing of those ‘destructive vermin called squirrels, for a whole
New Jersey town had assembled and killed 1,600 of the creatures.
In those days duels, instead of being outlawed, were faithfully reported
in the press. We read: “On the 31st of October last, Lieut. Goodacre of the
9th Regiment was shot through the body at st. Augustine in a duel with a gentleman
from Pensacola, and died a short time after.”
Now let’s take a look at one of the auction sales of 1769. The notice
says: “On Thursday, December 21, at 11 o’clock forenoo~, will be sold by public
auction at the auction block opposite the west end of Faneuil Hall Market,
several genteel suits of wearing apparel, plain and trimmed with lace,
Holland jackets, nankeen and silk breeches, a silver-hilted sword and shield,
a pair of silver mounted pistols, a silver watch and other articles.”
William Jones, at his shop opposite the Town House, advertised finest
Florence oil in honest flasks, choice new currants, cinnamon, nutmegs, turkey
figs, all recently imported in the ship Betsy from London. Jones also
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sold the conventional drugs of the day: balsam of honey, Jesuit’s drops, female
elixir, and the inevitable castor oil.
Four merchants advertised spermacetti candles, and Barnabas Clarke had
just put in a big supply of choice Jamaica ·sugars to be sold by barrel or
hogshead, both Jamaica and Grandes rum, pepper by the bag, rare ginger, Durham
mustard by the box, and the very best of Bohea tea, concerning which
Clarke’s ad carefully stated that it was imported before the merchants’
agreement not to import dutiable goods.
Learning was never neglected in Boston. In 1769 Harvard was al~eady 133
years old, about the same age that Colby is now. So it is not unexpected to
find in this old newspaper the announcement of a new and accurate spelling
dictionary, lately published in London, neatly bound in red, at a price of
one shilling six pence, boasting to teach the parts of speech and pronunciation
of every word and syllable in the English tongue. It was for sale by
all booksellers in Boston who had made proper arrangements with the man who
held the London sales rights, Isaac Fell of Pater Norter Row, the very man
who was the origin of the famous ditty that begins, “I do not like thee, Dr.
Fell”.
An expression still familiar in rural areas and among older people is
“Not worth a continental”. When folks of my grandfather’s generation wanted
to denounce anything as flagrantly worthless they declared it “not worth a
continental”. As I am sure most of you know, the expression originated out
of the comparative worthlessness of the American continental currency at the
time of the Revolution and during the early years of the Republic.
The story goes that a steamboat going down the Mississippi loaded with
cordwood in the early days of steamboating on the big river tied up at a town
wharf. A merchant hailed the captain, shouting: “Want to sell your wood?”
“Sure”, replied the captain. “Will you pay specie or paper?” “Paper”, yelled
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the merchant, “good Ohio paper. How’ 11 you trade?” “Well, seeing’s you want
to pay in paper, I’ll trade cord for cord.”
In the collections, even the small collections, of the numismatists,
there is usually at least one example of old-time paper money, but many of
these are not strictly continentals~that is, they were not issued before the
signing of the American Constitution. Mr. Johnson Parks has shown me a fine
example of true Continental currency — one item that preceded not only the
Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence as well. It is a half dollar
bill issued by the Provincial Convention of Maryland at Annapolis on December
7, 1775. On the face of the bill is the usual statement of promise to
pay in gold or silver, at the rate of four shillings six pence to the dollar.
On the back is the seal of Maryland, the name of the printer, and the words,
“equal to two shillings three pence sterling”.
If the present policies of government spending are not soon checked, some
of our currency may come to be “not worth a continental”.
*****
It now looks as if the present Congress intends to do nothing about the
cuts in excise taxes already agreed to by the Ways and Means Committee of the
House of Representatives. Those cuts would mean lower prices and real savings
to the consumer. The Committee proposed to wipe out altogether the 20% tax on
admissions to concerts, charity shows, county fairs, and high school sports,
as well as the 20% tax on baby powder and baby lotions, on handbags and purses,
and on light bulbs and tubes. They agreed to cut from 20% to 10% the taxes on
general admissions, on trunks and suitcases, and cosmetics; from 25% to 10% the
tax on telegraph ±6lls; and from 15% to 10% the taxes on household phone bills
and on travel tickets. Something seems now to have snagged this program, but
there is still a chance to revive it, if interested citizens will urge their
Congressmen to action.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
69th Broadcast May 21, 1950
In response to my request for more information about Maine trees, Mrs.
Basil Larkin of waterville has loaned me her cherished personal copy of
Miss Louise Helen Coburn’s book “The Trees of Coburn Park”. Mrs. Larkin
was once Miss Coburn’s secretary, and her copy of the book was a personal
gift from the author.
Louise Helen Coburn of Skowhegan was not only poet, essayist and historian;
she was also an informed botanist, with special attention to trees.
From the time when the Coburn family first established the park beside the
bend in the Kennebec at Skowhegan, Miss Coburn took an active interest in
every tree planted on those beautiful acres. In 1928 she wrote the book to
which we now refer.
At that time,Miss Coburn shows, there were 108 different kinds of trees
in Coburn Park. Perhaps others have since been added. Of the 108 trees,
30 are conifers and 78 broadleaved trees. Thirty-five of the 108 are original
growers in the locality; 51 are either indigenous to Skowhegan or completely
naturalized in the town. Of the imported trees, 17 are from the
eastern part of the united States, four from the Rocky Mountains, 20 from
Europe and Western Asia, and six from Japan.
Miss Coburn’s book not only describes each species of tree with botanical
detail, but also contains much interesting historical information. For
instance, she says the Norway pine has nothing to do with Scandanavian Norway,
but got its name because the first trees of this species which were
shipped to Kew Gardens in England came from Norway, Maine. The Norway pine
is strictly an American tree.
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Miss Coburn pays tribute to the historical importance of the Red Spruce,
the tree that Holman Day crowned with the title King Spruce. She says this
tree is found in a comparatively narrow area, covering New Brunswick, a small
part of southern Quebec, the interior hilly parts of New England, New York ‘
and Pennsylvania, and southward along the slopes of the Alleghany Mountains.
It is the most valuable timber tree of our Northeastern forests. In 1672
John Josselyn, a 17th century traveler, published in London a book of his
travels in New England, in which he said, “The Maine spruce furnishes the
best yards and topmasts in the world.” The French traveler Michaud, visiting
this country in 1806 said that in the dock yards of the United States,
the spars were usually of spruce from the District ‘of Maine, and that it was
exported for the same purpose in great quantities to the west Indies and to
Liverpool. The pioneers along the Kennebec built their cabins of spruce logs,
as woodsmen do today.
Because I so well remember the Balm of Gilead tree in my grandmother’s
yard at Bridgton, I note with interest what Miss Coburn says about that tree.
It is, of course, a species of poplar that has its buds saturated with a
sticky substance that is so highly aromatic that the odor of the tree is perceptible
to the passer-by. Although the tree is not planted in dooryards as
often as it used to be, Miss Coburn says that in 1928 several fine specimens
could still be seen in Skowhegan dooryards. She invites her readers to
see the beautiful Balm of Gilead in Coburn Park near the pavilion close to
the highway.
So, if you want to see more than 100 different varieties of trees, all
within a few hundred feet of each other, pay a visit to Coburn Park at the
east end of Skowhegan Village, where the Kennebec takes a wide bend before
its turn southward to Fairfield and Waterville.
*****
2-104
Jerry Frank, a senior at Colby College, has called my attention to what
the local census, taken in connection with the Federal census, showed about
Waterville in 1840, a hundred and ten years ago. Jerry dug it up in an old
copy of the watervillonian, published June 19, 1841. The statistics were
furnished the paper by Moses Healy, Esq. These figures provide a revealing
picture of what waterville was like tw~nty years before the Civil War.
The population was 2,971. Humans were greatly exceeded by sheep, which
numbered 4,895, with 1,861 lambs still further increasing the wooly population.
There were 1,611 neat cattle and 400 spring calves for stock, and 445
horses.
Now come some astounding figures. Raised within the limits of Waterville,
which then included Oakland, were 6,280 bushels of wheat, 13,091 bushels of
oats, 1,695 of barley, 704 of rye, and 30 of buckwheat, with the biggest crop
of all being 18,345 bushels of Indian corn.
Those Waterville sheep produced 14,944 pounds of wool. The land produced
not only grain, but also 4,680 tons of hay, and 53,938 bushels of potatoes •.
Waterville farmers sold 3,286 cords of wood, in addition to what they used
at home. There were 41 persons employed in lumbering, who brought out of the
woods $76,500 worth of lumber. Twenty-nine men were employed in carriage
making, sell ing their product for $15,550. Six persons worked at making
cutlery, sold for $4,600. In all of Waterville’s factories in 1840 the total
invested capital was $147,000.
The number of retail stores of all kinds was 39, employing 76 people.
The total capital invested in those stores was almost as large as the capital
in Waterville factories — $133,000.
It is clear that, despite the marty saw mills and grist mills using the
water power of Kennebec and Messalonskee, Waterville was an agricultural community
in 1840. A lot of manufacturing still went on in the homes, as it had
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done in the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution. Squire Healy told
the Watervillonian that in 1840 the goods manufactured in Waterville homes
sold for $3,404.
*****
When the old timers of this region used the expression “from China to
the sea”, they meant from China, Maine to Belfast, Maine. Belfast is still
the nearest seaport to Waterville, although in the old days the easiest route
to the sea was down the Kennebec, through Merrymeeting Bay, past Bath and
Woolwich, to the open ocean.
A century ago Belfast was an important port on Penobscot Bay. That is
made clear by a quick glance at a Belfast newspaper of a century ago. It is
the Waldo Signal of May 1, 1845, published by Charles Giles, with office
at the Sign of the Eagle, Main Street, Belfast. The masthead asserts that
the paper is devoted to literature, morality, general intelligence, agriculture,
politics and domestic economy. Subscription rate was “One dollar and
seventy-five cents per annum, payable within the year; two dollars at the
expiration of the year, which will positively be exacted. Advance payment,
one dollar and fifty cents per annum, seventy-five cents for six months.
Country produce taken in payment at market prices.”
Local fervor had been aroused by President Polk’s appointment of M. N.
Lowney as Collector of the Port of Belfast. It seems that Mr. Lowney, on his
way to New York as a delegate to the Presidential Convention had said on a
stop-over in Boston, “If Mr. Van Buren is not nominated I will leave the
Party.”
“This is the man”, wrote Editor Giles, “who now has the fattest political
job in Waldo County. What.kind of bargain did Mr. Lowney make in Washington,
that the President whose nomination he opposed now rewards him with a
job that belongs to a more loyal man?”
2-106
A letter to the editor, signed by a man in Camden, was equally wrathful.
“What think you”, he wrote, “of the restoration of the Van Buren dynasty
in Waldo County? Is the democracy of the county eternally to be saddled
with this death-blight? Mr. Polk has been grossly deceived. A bu’sy and
important port like Belfast should not be under the control of such a renegade.”
Maine Democrats were fighting among themselves in 1845. The Belfast
editor refers to the two factions as “sound” Democrats and “terrified”
Democrats. He predicted that their eventual fate would be that of the Kilkenny
cats. Nothing would be seen but their tails.
In 1845 agitation had started against the use of friction matches because
they were alleged to cause so many disastrous fires. Editor Giles did
not propose doing away with matches altogether, but he did say: “Any person
who neglects to keep matches in a covered tin box should be required to go
back to flint and steel.”
A hundred years ago they were already talking about a railroad down
in Belfast. There was strong agitation for a line from Belfast to Quebec,
passing through the towns of Burnham, Plymouth, Detroit, St. Albans, Newport,
and Skowhegan. A correspondent in St. Albans urged Belfast folk to get
busy. He wrote to Editor Giles: “Your business men are asleep. While they
have been content to barter in fish on a small scale, and deal in a few dead
trees from the back towns, other places are getting ahead of you. We understand
a railroad will soon come to waterville. Do you propose to let that
town get the business which you could easily obtain?”
Well in 1849 the railroad did come to Waterville, and in due time it
came to Belfast also. Now in 1950 that Belfast railroad is one of the most
uniquely operated and one of the few municipally owned railroads in the United
States.
2-107
On this program we talk so much about the old times of the 1840’ sand
1850’s that it is interesting to see in this old Belfast paper of 1845 a
column headed “The Olden Time”. The column refers to a Philadelphia ‘paper’s
reminiscences of George Washington when the General had resided in Philadelphia
as the first President of the united States fifty years ago. People
still remembered Washington’s eating habits, for instance. Thursdays were
guest days at the President’s dining room. Dinners in those days were lavish
and consisted of many courses. At a single dinner as many as a dozen kinds
of meat and game might appear. Washington, however, generally partook only
of a single dish and that of the simplest kind. If offered something that was
excessively rich or unusual he would say, “This is too good for me”. He had
a silver pint cup or mug of beer placed by his plate, which he drank while
dining. He took one glass of wine during dinner and another immediately
after. He then retired from the table and left his secretary to play host
“until the wine-bibbers of Congress had satisfied themselves with drinking.”
Deep sea fishing called for varied supplies in 1845. The fleets that went
out from Gloucester had· nothing on the Belfast boats so far as supplies
were concerned, if we may judge from the advertisement of William Witherbee
and Company in this old newspaper. Witherbee announced for sale at his store,
No. 3 water Street, Castine, “an extensive supply of articles for the fishery,
consisting of Liverpool salt, beef and pork, lard, flour, pilot bread, rice,
corn, Indian meal, white beans, molasses, tar and pitch, Russia and cotton
duck, Manila and tarred cordage, bolt rope, hawsers and cables, hemp and cotton
cod lines, cod hooks and leads, and first quality fishing boots.”
Other ads in the same paper offer a thousand pounds of live geese feathers,
warranted kiln dried, and of the very best quality; isinglass for lanterns;
green window curtain paper I plain and printed. One firm advertised
fire buckets, saddles, harnesses, trunks, valises, carpet bags and satchels.
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Another offered bathing tubs and vapor bath apparatus. Their feature was the
Bates Patent Sliding Top Chamber Shower Bath.
The usual public notices, seen so commonly in the newspapers of a century
ago, were not missing from the Waldo Signal. One of these announced that the
summer term of the public schools in Districts 4 and 5 would commence on Monday,
May 12, 1845. Jonathan Frohock announced the economic freedom of his son
with this public notice: “This certifies that I have this day given to my son,
Jonathan L. Frohock, the remainder of his time to act and trade for himself. I
shall claim none of his earnings and pay no debts of his contracting after
this date.”
In another public notice H. A. Lowell wanted it distinctly understood
that the inhabitants of the town of Freedom had contracted with him to support
Jacob Doten and family, paupers of said town, and that Lowell now forbade all
persons to furnish supplies to the Doten family because he had made ample provision
for their support at his own table in Freedom.
*****
While all the world talks about a coming third World War, among all
people everywhere is a great yearning for peace. Interestingly enough, it is
not a clergyman, but a layman, who suggests that the only sure guide to peace
is the moral law. That layman is Henry Luce, head of the great publishing
organization that produces Time, Life and Fortune magazines. Says Mr. Luce:
“There is certainly no easy road to peace, no well paved Route 1, Route 2 or
Route 3. Peace is a place across a vast jungle of human interests, conflicts,
passions, errors, fears and hopes. But there is a guide through that jungle.
It is the moral law. II
Mr. Luce quite rightly points out that, divided as the different sects
surely are, on one thing they are united: our firm belief that God, the creator
of man, also created a moral law for man’s government and endowed man with
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a conscience to apprehend that law. On that belief the government of the
United States itself was founded. It provided the basis of unity when our
forefathers framed the . Constitution in 1787. That basic belief in moral
law is taught by Protestant, Catholic and Jewish religions alike.
The Difficulty — the great obstacle in the way of peace — is that
while we Americans hold to that faith in moral law, there are others who do
not so hold. In fact it is precisely that belief which the men who now govern
Russia relentlessly attack. Stalin and the men of the Politburo say
they have no objection to religion as a personal matter. They permit churches
to stay open. But what they cannot permit, what they dare not tolerate, is the
idea that their government, all government, is subject to a higher law, the
moral law.
As far apart as we and the Russians are today on this acceptance or rejection
of the validity of moral law, I believe Mr. Luce is profoundly right.
Although Communist tyranny can stand between nations and the moral law, it
cannot stand between men and the moral law. The yearning of men for liberty
and justice cannot be repressed. The hunger and thirst for righteousness is
universal. In the long run man or nation that flouts the moral law is doomed.
We must be determined to do all in our power, taking advantage of every constructive
idea, to lessen the tensions and to restore people’s confidence
allover the world. And we must do it, not because we are afraid, not lest
some enemy overtake us, but because it is right. Greater than armies and
navies, more powerful than atomic bombs, is the power of moral law, giving
all men the conviction that wrong cannot permanently conquer, and that two
wrongs never make a right.
2-110
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
70th Broadcast May 28, 1950
Of all the old newspapers that have recently come to my attention, by
far the most important historically is an old copy of the Boston Gazette,
discovered and shown to me by a friend of long standing, Waterville carpenter
Charles Rhodes. Although itself a facsimile copy of the original, it
was obviously made many years ago, and was carefully preserved under glass.
There is reason for that careful preservation, for it is an original source
document of outstanding historical importance. What important historical
event do you think this paper records? It is none other than the Boston .
Massacre of MarCh 5, 1770.
Every schoolboy knows the story of the incident which caused the marker
to be placed in the pavement of the square back of the old State House, between
WaShington Street and Faneuil Hall — the marker where one may still
read that here BritiSh troops fired on Boston citizens, killing five of them,
one a colored man named Crispus Attucks.
Many a historian has treated the incident in the 180 years since its
occurrence. That faithful old historian whose books many a man and woman now
in middle life read in”their schooldays — David S. Muzzey — says about the
Boston Massacre: “Two British regiments were sent to Boston to awe the inhabitants
into obedience. Roughs baited the redcoats in the streets, pelting
them with brickbats and calling them “lobsters” and “bloody-backs”. In the
riot that followed in MarCh, 1770, five men were killed. The funeral of these
victims was made the occasion for a popular demonstration engineered by Samuel
Adams.”
Not so well known, because the old history books were silent about it,
2-111
· was the fact that the lawyer who defended and won acquittal of Captain Preston,
commander of the British troops involved, was John Adams, the Boston
attorney who was to become the second President of the united States.
In the cooling process of 180 years most historians no longer call it
a massacre, but an unfortunate incident of heated times when tempers were
getting short and passions ran high. That a Boston crowd of not too respectable
persons continuously baited the British troops is certainly true,
but the wisdom of bringing the two regiments to Boston in the first place
can be seriously questioned.
Now , within the past month, has come to my hands, not the erudite research
of modern historians, but contemporary information about that Boston
incident, printed in the Boston Gazette of March 12, 1770, exactly one week
after the massacre occurred.
The Gazette was a small, four-page paper. The inside pages, 2 and 3,
of this issue of March 12, 1770, have deep, black mourning borders around all
six columns, and five of those columns are devoted to the troublesome times
which culminated in the massacre and the burial of four of the victims. The
fifth did not die of his wounds until a week later.
The first column of page 3 contains a drawing of four coffins, decorated
with skull and crossbones, and bearing respectively the initials S.G., S.M.,
J.C., and C.D., standing for Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell and
Crispus Attucks. This is the Gazette’s account of the funeral:
“Last Thursday, agreeable to a general request of parents and friends,
were carried to their graves in succession the bodies of Samuel Gray, Samuel
Maverick, James Caldwell and Crispus Attucks, the unhappy victims who fell in
the bloody massacre of the preceding Monday evening.
“On this occasion most of the shops in town were shut, all the bells
were ordered to toll a solemn peal. The procession began to move between the
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hours of 4 and 5 in the afternoon. Two of the unfortunate sufferers, James
Caldwell and Crispus Attucks, who were strangers, were borne from Faneuil
Hall, attended by a numerous train of persons of all ranks. The other two,
Samuel Gray and Samuel Maverick, were taken respectively from the houses of
Mr. Benjamin Gray and Mrs. Mary Maverick, each followed by relations and
friends. The several hearses, forming a junction at King Street, the theatre
of that inhuman tragedy, proceeded from thence through the Main Street,
lengthened by an immence concourse of people, so numerous as to be obliged
to follow in ranks of six, and brought up by a long train of carriages belonging
to the principal gentry of the town. The bodies were deposited in one
vaul t in the Middle Burying-ground. The aggravated circumstances of their
death, the distress and sorrow visible in every countenance, together with
the peculiar solemnity with Which the Whole funeral was conducted, surpass
description.”
In a riot like that Which came to be called the Boston Massacre it is
very difficult to tell exactly What happened, especially 180 years after the
event. The Gazette was clearly prejudiced against the British troops and re-
I
luctant to believe ill of the townsmen, even the town toughs. Yet as one
reads the Gazette’s account written When the tragedy was only a week old, he
can see that the mere presence of armed soldiers of the king in Boston was
bound to make trouble.
Indeed trouble had been fomenting for many weeks. As the Gazette puts it:
“Many have been the squabbles between our youth and the soldiery, and the latter
being so often worsted in these encounters has served to irritate them
to worse behavior. Citizens have been picked with bayonets, even our magistrates
have been assaulted, and now four of our inhabitants lie dead from the
fire of soldiers’ muskets.”
The Gazette points out that the events which led up to the massacre had
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culminated in the riot at Gray’s Rope-walk, about which historians have since
written much. There on Saturday, February 24, 1770 fist-fights broke out between
half a dozen young men of the town and an equal number of soldiers. In
a few minutes these numbers were swollen to several hundred. In the end the
soldiers got the worst of it and dispersed to their barracks. No shot was
fired. Says the Gazette: “That defeat was humiliating. Divers stories were
circulated among the soldiery that served to inflame them further. One rumor
was that a certain Sergeant Chambers, represented as a sober man, had been
missing since the event and must therefore have been murdered by the townsmen.
An officer of distinction so far credited this report that he insisted on
searching Mr. Gray’s Rope-walk for the body. On Monday this so-called sober
sergeant was found unhurt in a house of pleasure.”
At this point the Gazette editor throws his opinion into the news account.
He writes: “We do not pretend to say that there was any preconcerted
plan to kill our citizens, but we venture to declare, as appears probable
from their conduct, that some of the soldiery aimed to draw and provoke the
townmen into squabbles, and that they intended to make use of other weapons
than canes and clubs.”
Now what actually happened on the evening of March 5, 1770? Here is the
way this Boston newspaper told the story one week after the event.
itA few minutes after 9 o’clock, four youths named Edward Archbald, William
Merchant, Francis Archbald and John Leech, Jr. came down Cornhill together,
and separating at Dr. Loring’s corner, Edward and William were passing
the narrow alley leading to Murray’s barracks, in which a soldier was
brandishing a broadsword of an uncommon size against the walls, out of which
he struck fire plentifully. A person of mean countenance armed with a large
cudgel bore the soldier company. Edward warned~William to look out for the
sword, on which the soldier turned around and struck Archbald on the arm,
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then puShed at Merchant and pierced through his clothes inside the arm close
to the arm-pit, and grazed the skin. Merchant then struck the soldier with
a short stick he had. Meanwhile the other person who was with the soldier
ran to the barracks and brought out two more soldiers, one armed with a pair
of tongs, the other with a shovel. He with the tongs pursued Archbald back
through the alley and laid him over the head with the tongs. The noise
brought people together, and John Hicks, a young lad, coming up, knocked the
soldier down, but let him up again. More lads, gathering, drove the soldiers
back into barracks, where the boys stood for some time, as it were to keep
them in. Then ten or twelve soldiers came out with drawn cutlasses, clubs and
bayonets, and set upon the unarmed boys and young folks, who stood them a
little while, but finding the inequality of their equipment, dispersed.
“On hearing the noise, one Samuel Atwood came up to see what was the
matter, and entering the alley from Dock Square, heard the latter part of the
combat. Meeting the dozen soldiers rushing down the alley toward the square,
he asked them if they intended to murder people. “Yes”, they shouted, “root
and branch”. Whereupon one of them struck Mr. Atwood with a club, which was
repeated by another. Retreating, Mr. Atwood met two officers and said, “Gentlemen,
what is the matter?” They answered “You will see by and by.” The
soldiers proceeded into King Street, where they attacked single and unarmed
persons till they raised much clamor. Thirty or forty persons, mostly lads,
were by this means gathered in King Street. Captain Preston with a party of
soldiers with charged bayonets came from the main guard, the soldiers
puShing their bayonets and crying, “Make way!”. As they continued to push
the people off, the latter began to throw snowballs. On this the Captain
conunanded the soldiers to fire, and more snowballs coming, he said, “Fire,
be the consequence what it will!” One soldier then fired, and a townsman
with a cudgel struck him over the hands with such force that he dropped his
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musket. The townsman rushed on and aimed a blow at the captain’s head, which
grazed his hat and fell pretty heavy upon his arm. The soldiers continued the
fire, successively, until 7 or 8, or some say 11, guns were discharged. By
the maneuver three men were laid dead on the spot, and two more were struggling
for life.
“Mr. Benjamin Leigh, now undertaker in the Delph Manufactory, interposed,
and after some conversation with Captain Preston relative to his conduct, advised
him to draw off his men, with which request the captain complied.”
So much for the Gazette’s story. History records what followed: the orderly
investigation culminating in the withdrawal of the regiments from Boston,
the trial of Captain Preston, John Adams’ staunch legal defense of the British
captain, and his acquittal by a jury of Boston citizens.
Even the prejudiced Gazette reveals that there were two sides to the affair.
Not all of Boston condemned the captain nor blamed his soldiers for starting
the trouble. Far down in the lower left corner of page 3 the Gazette printed a
public notice, one which I have never seen mentioned by any historian, yet it
reveals clearly that not all Boston citizens wanted to see Preston punished for
the death of the massacre victims. Here is the notice, as it appeared word
for word in that paper on March 12, 1770:
“Boston Jail, Monday, 12th March 1770
“Permi t me through the channel of your paper to return my thanks in the
most public manner to the inhabitants in general of this town, who, throwing
aside all party and prejudice, have with the utmost humanity and freedom
stepped forth advocates for truth, in defence of my injured innocen~e, in
the late unhappy affair that happened on Monday night last; and to assure them
that I shall ever have the highest sense of the justice they have done me,
which will be ever gratefully remembered by their much obliged and most obedient
humble servant, Thomas Preston.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
71st Broadcast June 4, 1950
On this program two weeks ago we were talking about the year 1845. As
a consequence someone asked our distinguiShed waterville citizen, Harvey D.
Eaton, whether the original portion of his house on Silver Street was standing
as long ago as 1845. Mr. Eaton replied that it probably was, because
only two years after that in 1847 the man who lived in it was murdered.
That is how we come to refer tonight to Waterville’s famous murder of
1847. Waterville has been remarkably free from capital crime. In fact, Dr.
Whittemore states in Chapter III of the Centennial History of Waterville:
“On September 30, 1847 occurred the first and only murder in the entire history
of waterville.” Dr. Whittemore wrote that in 1902. Ho’tl.” many murders
have occurred here in the succeeding 48 years? I recall three: the Abie Le~
vine murder, the killing of a taxi driver, and the brutal slaying of the little
Proulx girl. Perhaps there have been more. At any rate it says something
for our times when we note that in the first century of its history
Waterville had only one murder, while it has had three murders in the past
twenty years.
In a town as small as waterville was in 1847 any serious crime was noteworthy.
A capital crime was a sensation. When both the murdered man and his
alleged slayer were prominent persons in the community the sensation assumed
grand proportions.
One of Waterville’s most famous early families was that of Mathews. Jabez
Mathews, founder of the Waterville branch of the family, was born in Gray
in 1743. He had seen this little conununity before he settled here, because he
had been in Col. Ward’s division of Benedict Arnold’s army when the bateaux
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loaded with those troops went up the Kennebec in 1775. A quarter of a century
later in 1794 Jabez came to Winslow with his two sons, Simeon and John. For a
time he kept a tavern in a house on the north side of Silver Street near the
corner of Main Street. Later he lived in a small house on the east side of
Silver Street near the Fred Arnold property. Jabez’ son Simeon went into partnership
with Nathaniel Gilman in a store on Main Street near Where the Montgomery
Ward building now stands. It was he Who built the big house on Silver
Street so long owned and occupied by the Terry family. It was Simeon Mathews
also Who is said to have planted the long line of elm .trees on the west
side of Silver Street from the Elm Street corner to the head of Gold Street.
The second son of Simeon Mathews, and grandson of the original Jabez,
was Edward E. Mathews, born in Waterville in 1822. His older brother William
started one of Waterville’s early newspapers, the Yankee Blade, in 1842. Almost
immediately William took his brother Edward into partnership, and the masthead
of the Yankee Blade announced its publishers as W. and E. Mathews,
doing business at the southwest corner of Main and Silver Streets. Here too
Edward started one of Waterville’s earliest bookstores. So Edward Mathews was
an established business man of Waterville by the time he was 25 years old in
184_7.
On the morning of October 1, 1847 the body of Edward Mathews was found in
the cellar of what was then Shorey’s clothing store, on the site now occupied
by the Peavey Building or possibly by the latest addition to the Federal Trust
Company. There were no marks of violence on the body. Expert toxicologists
were not then known in this part of New England, but scientific advice was at
hand in the person of Rev. Justin Ralph Loomis, professor of Chemistry and
Natural History at Waterville College. His examination revealed that Mathews
had died of prussic acid. The authorities soon learned that, on the previous
evening, Mathews had paid a visit to a room in the near-by Williams House
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occupied by Dr. ValorUs Coolidge, a successful young physician, who was
straightway accused of the crime.
The trial was held at Augusta in March, 1848. One of the prosecutors
was Lot M. Morrill, who six years later would be the new governor so loudly
praised by Editor Drew in the Rural Intelligencer. Hon. George Evans and
Edwin Noyes conducted the defense. After being out 24 hours, the jury brought
in a verdict of guilty.
Now this story has been retold in some detail more than once. On its
hundredth anniversary in 1947 both the Waterville Sentinel and the Lewiston
Journal devoted some space to it. In a number of Waterville homes are copies
of a ballad that went the rounds at the time. Verses of that sort were commonly
circulated in connection with all hangings for murder. Readers of Mary
Ellen Chase’s biography of Jonathan Fisher will recall that the stern, Puritanical
Blue Hill preacher had an interesting and somewhat profitable sideline
of writing and selling broadside sheets containing verses about murders
and hangings.
What I want to know now is, can anyone show me a contemporary account of
the murder of Edward Mathews or the trial of Dr. Coolidge? Do there exist
early copies of the Eastern Mail containing those accounts? In April, 1847
Charles F. Hathaway, founder of the Hathaway Shirt industry, had started a
paper called the Waterville Union, but it lasted only 14 weeks. The Union
plant was taken over by Ephraim· :rvaxh3rn, .:v;ho, on July 19, 1847 published the
first issue of the Eastern Mail from the third floor of the Boutelle Block
on Main Street. We believe the paper was issued every week without interruption
until the name was changed in 1863 to the Waterville Mail. So, if
anyone knows where there are copies of the Eastern Mail for the fall of
1847 and the spring of 1848, I should like to see them.
*****
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Let us now take a few minutes for a more timely subject. Let’s jump
complete1y over the years from 1847 to 1950. Those of you Who are waiting
patient1y for delivery of a new car may be interested to know what the
Chrysler strike cost.
In substance the Chrysler workers traded nearly a thousand dollars
each in 10st wages for pensions some of them will never get. The strikers
won a funded pension they could have had three weeks earlier. The overall
losses amounted to a billion four hundred million dollars in wages and
sales. Twenty-nine millions were lost by some 50,000 workers Who were not
on strike at’all, the men in parts plants Who had to be laid off as a result
of the strike.
The loss was not confined to the strikers and the workers in affected
plants, and I want you to get this: assessments levied on auto workers not
on strike amounted to seven million dollars. Other unions dipped into their
reserves to contribute several hundred thousand dollars. Even the taxpayers
were directly hit to the tune of two million dollars in relief p~yments to
Detroit strikers.
We do not question the workingman’s right to collective bargaining nor
to the final weapon of the strike. It is a debatable question, however, when
and Where he ought to use that costly weapon.
*****
Now back to some of the old-time scenes in Waterville. Our town was
founded much too late to partake of the witchcraft furor that blackened New
England in the seventeenth century. But in the early days of the community
belief that certain people possessed supernatural powers had not disappeared.
Such a person was Aunt Hannah Cool, whose name appears as one of the customers
of the old storekeeper whose account book Walter Heath still possesses.
In the early years of the 19th century there stood on the south side of
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Silver street, near where it is joined by Kennebec Street, a building,the
first floor of which was used as a tannery. The tanner had a double occupation,
because in addition to his tanning business he was a Free Baptist
preacher. That preacher-tanner, Elder Jeremiah Powers, was very fond o.f
fishing, but he was also embued with superstit·ious beliefs, including witchcraft.
One night he went fishing with a neighbor and didn’t get a bite. He
laid their bad luck to the magic of Aunt Hannah Cool, saying they should
have promised her the first fish before they set out. “She bewitched the
fish away from our hooks”, said Elder Powers.
Aunt Hannah lived in a low, unpainted house on Silver Street. Her garden
was full of roots and herbs which she carefully prepared into medicines
free for·all sufferers. She is said to have had a piercing eye and a sort
of eerie look, but even that description may be prejudiced. Aunt Hannah was
anything but a witch. Her deeds of kindness are recounted to this day. She
brought up a homeless orphan, and she tended the sick without thought of
recompense. Yet this woman was regarded by some of her own townsmen, even by
a preacher, as in league with the Devil, and quite able to bewitch the fish
if she disliked the fisher.
*****
We recently made it clear that Waterville a hundred years ago was predominantly
an agricultural community. We gave some figures about the wheat,
corn and oats then raised in this town. Now another of those old account
books gives witness to the same general fact — the agricultural character
of the vicinity. This is a book of accounts kept by a Waterville blacksmith
in 1833, and like the account of the Augusta merchant I told you about, this
book too is the property of Burleigh Nichols of Fairfield Center. On November
16, 1833 this blacksmith entered the following charge against Josiah Morrill:
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Sharpening 32 harrow teeth
Sharpening 3 plows
Sharpening and pinting 2 plows
Making 17 harrow teeth
Other charges to various customers run:
Making pitch fork
pulling off horse shoes
Making 23 nails
Bailing tea kittle
Making cant irons
Making mill bar
$ .65
1.00
1.50
1. 70
1.00
.06
.17
.25
1.42
.50
Two words used by this blacksmith have me puzzled: gripe and snickel.
By gripe he may have meant some kind of handle or part for the hand to grasp,
since the dictionary gives as one of the old meanings of gripe, a handle or
hilt. At any rate his entries are
Gripeing a harrow
Gripe on wagon spring
1 gripe
Gripeing 2 plows
.50
.04
.25
.70
On April 24, 1833 he charged Daniel Dexter 33 cents for making a snickel,
and on June 13 he entered against Stephen Denton: 1 snickel, 28 cents.
Now who can set me right on those two words? What was a gripe? What was
a snickel?
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
72nd Broadcast June 11, 1950
We had originally intended that tonight’s broadcast would be our last
until September, but we have agreed to continue for two more weeks. On June
25, two weeks from tonight, we shall suspend the program until fall.
Maine should be very proud of Senator Margaret Smith, and not merely
because she rated the leading article in this week’s issue of Time, and had
her picture on the cover of News Week.
Just because she seldom speaks on the floor of the Senate, when she does
speak, unlike many of her colleagues, she has something to say. What she
said last week rightfully made the front page headlines allover the country.
It was time somebody said it, but it took a lot of courage. The sniping,
petty politics touched off by the McCarthy charges has gone altoge.ther too
far. Ordinary Americans back home in every one of the 48 states are confused,
saddened, and disgusted by the way the politicians of both parties have played
pblitics with American security on the one hand and the American right to
freedom from the slanderous tongue on the other hand.
Did you read what Mrs. Smith said? Let me quote a few sentences. “I speak”,
she said, “as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States
Senator. I speak as an American. I think”, she continued, “it is high time
for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul-searching — for
us to weigh our consciences on the manner in which we are performing our duty
to the poeple of America — on the manner in which we are using or abusing our
individual powers and privileges. I think it is high time that we remembered
that the Constitution speaks not only of freedom of speech, but also of trial
by jury instead of trial by accusation.”
Mrs. Smith’s was an earnest, plain-spoken plea for integrity and sanity in
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our efforts against Communism. She condemned with equal vehemence the whitewaShing
of suspected traitors on the one hand, and the unsupported accusations
of a witch-hunt on the other hand. There was real punch in her words
when She said: “Today our country is being divided by the confusion and suspicions
that are bred in the united States Senate to spread like cancerous
tentacles of “know nothing, suspect everything” attitudes. The Democratic
party has initially created the confusion by its complacency to the threat
of Communism here at hame, by its oversensitiveness to rightful criticism.
But certain Republicans have added to the confusion by political exploitation
of fear, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance. Democrats and Republicans
alike have unwittingly played into the Communist design of “confuse, divide
and conquer”.
Yes, we assert unhesitatingly and emphatically, Margaret Smith’s speech
of June 1, 1950 was one of the few really great speeches delivered in the
united States Senate in modern times, easily the greatest since Senator Vandenberg
made his impassioned plea for the united Nations charter. Mrs.
Smith’s was a speech that rose above party and prejudice, above all the
pettiness of name-calling and white-waShing. It was the utterance of a true
American. We are indeed proud that this cpurageous speech was made, this act
of high Americanism taken, by the lady Senator from Maine, who cames from
. this very Kennebec Valley, to which this weekly program has been so largely
devoted.
*****
Those old reservoirs under the Waterville streets have a long and honorable
history. I have thus far been unable to learn when they were first constructed.
But just before his death Gene crawford, who mapped the locations
of all of them, assured me that there were eleven, same of them very old. For
sentimental or other reasons voiced by the local firemen same years ago when
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permanent surfaces were put on certain streets, at least three of those old
reservoirs were not filled in, but were left just as they were, except that
the covers were reinforced, or double covers were placed.
One of the most neatly constructed is in front of the Sacred Heart
Church on Pleasant Street. It is built of brick, much as were the old cisterns
both inside and outside many farm houses. It was spring fed, but even
if it had been artificially filled it was so well built that it would hold
water for some time. One of the biggest of those old reservoirs was in City
Hall Square, now Castonguay Square. It has never been filled in. When it was
last opened, everyone wondered why it hadn’t caved in long ago, for its top
was made of wood logs. Now it has a secure, solid cover. It is 35 feet in
diameter and 12 feet deep — when last opened it still had six feet of water
in it.
Mr. Crawford believed most of the reservoirs were self-filling, but some
of them may have had water poured into them, hauled up from the Kennebec or
the Messalonskee.
What is even more interesting is the information that there was a public
water supply of a kind long before the Waterville Water Company took water
from the Messalonskee, as I told you several weeks ago. Preceding that event
came the activities of the Ticonic Aqueduct Company. On the Bangs lot on
College Avenue, where the new market has just been· constructed, was a very
old and very bountiful spring. So sure of the fact was Mr. Crawford that he
warned the builders of the modern structures in that vicinity that they would
surely strike water which would hamper their operations. They scoffed at the
idea. But sure enough, they did strike such a flow of water that they had to
pipe it off into the city sewer before they could resume building.
That tremendous spring was the source of supply for the Ticonic Aqueduct
Company. The original aqueduct is said to have been simply bored logs like
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the old wooden pipes that used to carry water from well to barnyard trough
on many a farm. Later the rotting wood was replaced by lead pipe and it
was a piece of the lead pipe of that old aqueduct which Mr. Crawford found
leading into the reservoir in City Hall Square when he opened up that big
receptacle some thirty years ago.
*****
It was last November when Mr. H. F. Sturtevant first wrote me from his
home out at Ten Lots. At that time I put on the air an urgent request about
the origin and develoment of that neighborhood, but I got no response at all.
Now Mr. Sturtevant writes me again, eager to know where there is any record
of the founding and early history of his community. He says that some 150
years ago 2,000 acres of land were taken in that region, divided into ten
200-acre lots, and thus settled. Mr. Sturtevant once had an historical sketch
of the community, loaned it to a newspaper for publication, but it was unfortunately
lost before a published record could be made.
Mr. Sturtevant says tradition has it that the first settlers at Ten
Lots came up the Kennebec River to what is now Waterville and thence blazed
a trail through the woods to their 200-acre allotments.
On his place Mr. Sturtevant has a number of old-time things that I am
going out to see some day this summer: old fashioned two-tine hay forks,
doors with hand-made locks and hinges, and other relics from the days of long
ago.
Mr. Sturtevant remembers much about the old preaching services at Ten
Lots. The pioneers there were staunch, religious people, and the records of
several Waterville churches show that more than one revival had its origin
at Ten Lots. Although the earliest of those revivals was long before Mr.
Sturtevant’s time, he recalls many traditions about them, handed down from
the folks who lived there when George Washington was still alive. One of the
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proudest traditions of Ten Lots is that for several years its preacher
was Samuel Francis Smith, author of “America” — the same Samuel Francis
Smith who was once the pastor of Waterville’s First Baptist Church and a
professor at Colby College.
Now among our listeners tonoigbt there must be someone who knows where
we can find recorded, accurate information about Ten Lots. During the summer
we want to make a thorough investigation, and we need your help, so that
when we come back on the air in the fall, we can give you the straight facts
about the history of that interesting community.
*****
Two subjects we ought to discuss next fall are the ·qpauta~qua and the
even earlier Lyceum Lecture courses. Just by way of a starter, let’s right
now take a look at the Lyceum course of lectures offered in Waterville in
the winter of 1888. It consisted of five lectures for which the patron bought
a course ticket for one dollar. On January 18 Rev. Theodore Gerrish gave a
lecture on the Battle of Gettysburg, to which the weekly waterville Sentinel
devoted a full column. On January 25 Rev. O. P. Gifford spoke on “The Problem
of Life”. That certainly was a convenient lecture title. Under it the lecturer
could talk about almost anything under the sun.
Rev. George A. Crawford gave a lecture on February 7 about “The Land of
the Rising Sun”, Japan, from which country he had recently returned. The next
week Hon. A. G. Hall talked on English cathedrals. For the final lecture the
women of the town, according to the Sentinel, turned out in large numbers, for
on February 20 Mrs. Mary Livermore spoke on the subject “Concerning Husbands”.
Is there anyone now living who attended any of those lectures in 1888?
For several weeks in that winter of the big blizzard the weekly Sentinel
carried an ad which must bring back a lot of memories to our older citizens.
Let me read that ad to you.
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“Take the First Horse Car which leaves Waterville Post Office and in
five minutes you will be in front of the nicest and lowest priced house
lots ever offered in the Waterville market. City water is close at hand, and
the land is well-drained. These lots, remember, are right on the line of
the horse railroad soon to be. Hall and Philbrook, Arnold Block, Waterville.”
*****
In 1888 Waterville boasted a big, open air skating rink. Wall and Branch,
its propr~etors, advertised two acres of solid ice, lighted by electricity,
neat and warm rest rooms, refreshments and hot coffee. The rink was situated
on the Gilman Bog, directly back of the Congregational Church. Entrance was
from Temple Street near Main. The proprietors assured the public that the
rink was in every way fit for ladies and children. Season tickets were $3.00
for gentlemen, $2.00 for ladies and children. Skates could be rented or purchased
on the spot.
Ice hockey was then called polo. A news item tells us that “A game of
polo is advertised for tonight between the Granite Cities of Augusta and the
Elites of Waterville at the Elite rink. There will be skating before the
game, which will begin at nine, and a dance afterwards with music by Scribner’s
orchestra. ”
The following week’s Sentinel proudly proclaimed the victory of the
Elites over the Granite Cities, and reported that the dance was a gala event
lasting into the wee small hours.
*****
It was in 1888, as most of you know, that Waterville became a city. What
perhaps most of you don’t know is the long, bitter fight lasting many years,
before it adopted a city charter. On January 26, 1888 the Sentinel told the
whole story. Three days before, on January 23, occurred the last town meeting,
called especially to vote on the proposed charter. L. D. Carver, S. S. Brown,
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F. A. Waldron and C. H. Redington were chosen ballot clerks, and were charged
with the duty of seeing that all votes were legal and properly checked. The
voters deposited simple Yes or No ballots. When the vote was counted, the charter
had been adopted by 543 to 432. The church bells were rung and the proponents
of a city government held a big celebration.
The opposition had indeed been bitter and both sides had worked strenuously
to get out the vote. The resulting total of 975 ballots was 200 more
than had been cast in the previous charter contests. In fact there had been
three of those previous futile attempts to make Waterville a city, all tried
at the regular town meeting in March. In 1884 the vote was 223 for and 344
against; in 1885 it was 337 for and 394 against~ A year later in 1886 little
interest was aroused, for the total vote was smaller than the year before,
265 Yes and 344 No. The proponents decided not to bring the matter up at
the regular meeting in 1887 but to prepare for a special election in January,
1888. Their strategy was crowned with success.
*****
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
73rd Broadcast June 18, 1950
Among the men upon whom Colby College conferred honorary degrees at the
recent Commencement was my friend Jim Connolly, about whom I was privileged
to write a little book last spring. My “Jim Connolly and the Fishermen of
Gloucester” was no best seller. No one thought it would be, least of all its
author. But even its limited circulation and the kindly reviews it received
did remind folks that a very popular writer of the early 1900’s is still
living. It even brought me a personal, hand-written letter from the President
of Ireland.
On June 12, 1950, a few months before his 82nd birthday, and nearly
half a century after the publication of his first books, “Jeb Hutton” and
“Out of Gloucester”, Colby College made James Brendan Connolly a Doctor of
Humane Letters. The Harvard Athletic Association also belatedly recognized
another of Jim’s achievements. A few weeks ago they awarded him the Harvard
H and the big sweater that goes with it. That award is the culmination of an
ironical story. In 1896 Jim,a freshman at Harvard, asked for leave of absence
to compete in the first revival of the Olympic Games at Athens. The
stern Harvard authorities said “No”. So Jim left the college — left it for
good — and went to Athens anyhow. There, as thousands of Americans are by
this time aware, he won the first track event in the Olympics, the hop, step
and jump. It was Jim Connolly who caused the American flag to be the first
to wave from the peak of the victory pole in the old Greek city where Pheidippides
had ended his heroic run 25 centuries before.
This is the irony of it: that 54 years had to go by before the Harvard
Athletic Association got around to recognizing Jim’s achievement.
Jim Connolly had a fine time in Waterville last week. He looks his age,
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but walks and acts like a man of fifty. And What stories he can tell in the
most animated conversation — stories of deadly storms and terrible fogs on
the Grand Banks, stories of the laden schooners racing home to get first market
for the fish, stories of life with the Norwegian fishermen inside the
Arctic Circle, stories of the great regatta races, and heroic tales of danger
and sacrifice.
A lot of good sea stories have seen the printed page, and a lot of great
characters of the sea have become familiar, from Captain Ahab to Tugboat
Annie. But no stories are better told and no characters are more gloriously
alive than those of James Brendan Connolly, published in nearly thirty books
in the first quarter of this century.
*****
We have ‘ been having a lot of fun talking about such old-time things
with such unremembered names as gripes and snickels, barking irons, and upsetting
axes. We are still on the watch for these old-time expressions and
the things they describe. The latest one we encountered was entirely new to
us, and we believe it will be new to most of you. It is a “thorough stay”.
Who can tell me what it is? It is so rare that I think I ought to give you
at least an indication of the general category in which it belongs. The term
“thorough stay” does not mean an extended visit, nor does it-mean staying in
one place a long time. It is a term connected with one of the oldest trades
in Maine, the great lumber industry. It describes an actual object once used,
but long since abandoned. What was that object? Come on, now, Who will be
the first to tell me? What was a thorough stay?
Speaking of lumbering, some of the stories about prodigious feats in
the Maine woods put the Paul Bunyan yarns to shame. Let me tell you·just one
incident — not a lumberman’s campfire yarn,half fact, half fiction — but an
actual, authenticated occurrence in the Maine woods.
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Many years ago a railroad was laid between Eagle Lake and Umbazookus
Lake in the Allagash region north of Moosehead, for the purpose of transporting
the logs across the land divide, and so get them into the waters
emptying south into the Penobscot rather than north into the St. John. Now
here is the remarkable incident. Two locomotives, weighing 200 tons each,
were somehow brought through the woods from Quebec to Eagle Lake. How was
it done? No one now living seems to know. But the fact is abundantly authenticated.
Those two locomotives did get there and were used for years
on the little railroad, whose roadbed can still be seen. What was the feat
of engineering that got those locomotives through the dense wilderness of
northwestern Maine? History is silent. Perhap~ some day the discovery of
an old letter or diary will solve the mystery.
*****
Many of our Central Maine citizens, perhaps some who are listening tonight,
have had the tremendous thrill of seeing our north woods from the
air. It is an experience that I have not yet enjoyed; I have it still to
look forward to. But one of my neighbors was taken in a private plane a
few days ago and flown allover the mass of lakes that dots our northern
woods from Moosehead to the Canadian border — great bodies of water like
Chesuncook, Caucmagomac, Eagle and Chamberlain, and literally hundreds of
smaller lakes and ponds. And between these great bodies of water lie immense
stretches of woodland.
And here is an amazing fact. In the dense heart of those woodland areas,
far from the reach of the old timber roads, still stands many a king pine
those giants of the forest, 250 to 350 years old, lifting their conical
tops far above the surrounding trees. We understand a project is on foot
to fell some of those giant pines and bring their lumber out to civilization.
Ponderous and mighty bull-dozers will break through the forest to the 10-
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cation of several concentrations of these old trees. They will be cut into
hauling lengths and brought out over the ways cleared by the bull-dozers.
But don’t worry. They won’t all disappear this year or next. Those
great king pines-are widely scattered over many square miles between Moosehead
and the St. John River, between Rockwood and st. Zacharie, Quebec. If
you fly over the forest ten years from now, some of them will still, be there,
just as they were there when Benedict Arnold led his luckless march through
forests farther to the southwest, on his way to the Plains of Abraham and
the Citadel of Quebec.
*****
There is a suspicion that young people now in college are radical reds,
that they have little use for capitalism, private enterprise, and the accustomedways
of American life. The suspicion is simply not sustained by the
facts. Recently a class at Colby College had an opportunity to write a brief
statement on a choice of several propositions. One of those propositions was
this: “I would rather be a hungry American than a well-fed Russian”. About
this proposition, as about all the others, the class was told that they
could take either side; that they could defend the proposition or they
could attack it.
It is significant, in the first place, that of 150 boys and girls in the
class, 62 elected to write on this proposition rather than on one of the others.
And everyone of the 62 supported the proposition. Admitting that they had
never been and hoped never to be hungry Americans, and admitting further that
hunger makes people do a lot of unexpected things, these college students
nevertheless made it clear that they prize American freedom above full stomachs
without that freedom. Many of them said that, having the individual
freedom that still belongs to an American in spite of modern, mechanized society,
they felt sure they could find a way to get food if they really became
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hungry. And all of them said that the lack of freedom in a totalitarian
state like Russia means that even if one is well-fed today, the government
can take it all away tomorrow.
If you hear anyone say that modern college students are willing to
sellout to Communism, or are inclined to dance to the Kremlin’s tune, you
just tell that accuser that he doesn’t know What he is talking about.
*****
In our search for old-time facts about Waterville and other parts of
the Kennebec Valley, we have frequent reason to praise those old folks Who
had the good sense to set down precious recollections in writing before they
passed to the Great Beyond. One such treasury of recollections was published
in the weekly waterville Sentinel of February 16, 1888, when Isaiah Marston,
then 84 years old, told What Waterville was like in 1834. That was when the
town itself was only 32 years old. Waterville College (now Colby) had grad,.. .
uated its first class only 12 years earlier. Maine had been a state only 20
years. Andrew Jackson was President of the nation.
Let us see What Mr. Marston, himself born in Waterville in 1806, had to
say about our town as he remembered it in 1834. It was in that year that, as
one of the selectmen, Mr. Marston helped layout Pleasant Street, from Mill
Street (now Western Avenue) to what is now the railroad freight yard. He says
there was then only one house on the street, which stood on the site now
occupied by the Richards house near the corner of Sheldon Place. In laying
out the street, they had to open a way through an ancient log fence, and
they had to build other fences, because most of the land was pasture.
Mr. Marston could remember When there was no dwelling house whatever
on the Plains, and none south of Col. Sherwin’s on Sherwin Street. He could
recall when the North Kennebec Cattle Show was held Where Center Street now
is, and present day people regard Center as avery old street. Mr. Marston
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tells us that in 1835 a regimental muster was held west of Main Street,
opposite the Elmwood Hotel. In the eastern part of the muster field, the
part nearest Main Street, where the Thayer Hospital and several fine residences
now stand, was a deep ravine.
Building lots went cheap in the old days. Elah Esty paid $25 for a big
lot at the corner of Silver and Mill Streets. Mr. Marston’s father paid
$800 in 1850 for several acres of land between Chaplin Street and what is
now High Street. At that time the now thickly settled area along Ticonic
Street had only one house. Mr. Marston says that at the end of the Civil War
there was not a building on Boutelle or Morrill Avenues, and that he had a
Chance to buy the big field where the high school now stands for $125 an acre.
Remember that Mr. Marston was born in 1806. So he was quite right when
he told the Sentinel that he could remember when Waterville had no railroad,
no college, no newspaper, no factories, and only one church — the one built
by the town on the common, and only one cheap, little schoolhouse on the
same lot. Mr. Marston proudly recalled that he went to Mr. Jewett’s singing
school in that old schoolhouse in 1814.
In 1888 the aged Mr. Marston had fond memories of the old days, but no
longing to return to them. He was proud of Waterville’s growth and glad that
he had lived to see his little town become a lively manufacturing city.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
74th Broadcast June 25, 1950
Not all of the people who knew Waterville intimately a half century
ago now live in this vicinity. It takes Franklin Johnson’s favorite club,
the Colby Old Timers, to bring back to Waterville a lot of those fine people
with memories of by-gone days in the Kennebec Valley. The Old Timers
consist of Colby alumni who have been out of college fifty years or more.
This year they gathered nearly fifty strong for their annual reunion in
connection with the Colby Commencement. The new initiates in the club,
the Class of 1900, provided the largest class group, with such well known
persons as Fred Lawrence of Portland, Frank Severy, oil field engineer of
California, and Charles Towne, long an administrator in the schools of Providence,
Rhode Island.
The graduate out of college the longest number of years was Robie Frye,
who graduated from Colby 68 years ago in 1882. He looks and acts not more
than 60 years of age, but next December Mr. Frye will celebrate his ninetieth
birthday. He was glad to see Jim Connolly, the writer of sea stories,
honored by Colby, because for many years Mr. Frye and Jim’s brother worked
side by side in the Boston Custom House.
Running Mr. Frye a close second for honors was John Cummings of the
class of 1884, who saw his 88th birthday last week. Mr. Cummings led a
long and distinguished career as a Baptist missionary in Burma, spending many
years in Karen country, where that first graduate of Colby, George Dana
Boardman, had preceded him 60 years before. In 1915 the King of England bestowed
upon Mr. Cummings the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for distinguished public
service in Burma.
Two Waterville residents represented the class of 1887 at the Old
Timers’ dinner: Harvey D. Eaton and Joel Larrabee. The latter is looked
upon as a mere youngster among the Old Timers, because he will be only 85
next November. Younger still is Bert Drummond, who represented the class of
1888. Bert won’t be 85 until next May.
Sorely missed were two old Waterville boys of the class of 1889,
Charles Hovey Pepper and Edward F. Stevens. Present at many Colby Cummencements
and always together, these two devoted sons of Waterville and of Colby
could not attend this year. Pepper was born in Waterville in 1864, the
son of Colby’s Civil War president, George Dana Boardman Pepper. After
graduating from the college, Charles studied art in Paris, Berlin and
Vienna, traveled throughout the Orient, became an expert on Japane·se
prints, and was a portrait artist of repute. HeP?inted the portrait of
Arthur J. Roberts, which hangs at the head of the main staircase in the
Roberts Union on Mayflower Hill.
Stevens, though born in Burma, spent many years in waterville. He became
the illustrious head of the Library School at Pratt Institute and a national
authority on printing and binding of fine books.
The Old Timers were delighted to have brought to their attention some
items from the Waterville Weekly Sentinel, published during the months of
January and February, 1888. They remembered well the names of the merchants
whose ads then appeared, the Waterville citizens whose names then made news,
and especially the college happenings which were recorded in a weekly column
headed “The Bricks”.
The big news at the college was Charles Pepper’s departure for a trip
to Europe for his health. It proved to be the beginning of a career in art,
not merely a regaining of such health that Mr. Pepper still lives today. But
when he left Waterville on January 19, 1888 to take a transatlantic boat
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from Boston, none of his college mates knew that a future prominent artist
was given a send-off. A few days before his departure all of his classmates
and a few other friends gathered at his home for a farewell party. They
handed him a package of letters, with the date when to be opened written
on the outside of each, so that he would have a new letter to read each day
of his voyage across the Atlantic. On the day of his departure all members
of his class were at the railroad station, and sent him on his way with class
and college yells. Probably they sang the old song “Phi· Chi”; as they did on
most occasions. Never have I heard Phi Chi more lustily sung than it was by
that group of Old Timers at their 1950 reunion, led by that old-time glee
club chorister, Franklin Johnson.
It is a pity that modern Colby students don’t know the resounding, marching
words of Phi Chi. The song was still very much in vogue during my own
student days from 1909 to 1913, but when I returned to take up residence in
waterville in 1923 it had disappeared. What put Phi Chi out of existence?
Was it one of the casualties of the First World War? Who knows?
Those Colby Old Timers were indeed interested in some of the old news
items about Waterville, not merely about Colby. Here are a few of the items
that appeared in that winter of 1888.
“The Salvation Army have received an addition to their band in the shape
of a powerful, if not very accomplished, cornetist.”
“A Leap Year skate was held at the ice rink last Tuesday. Gentlemen
were appropriately escorted by their lady friends. A band furnished music,
and no accidents have been reported.”
“Agents of the Horsford’ s Bread preparation have been in town giving
exhibitions of the excellence of that article in the manufacture of different
kinds of bread and pastry. At Lane and Walls’ and L. W. Rogers’ stores
they have turned out delicious griddle cakes and hot biscuits for the benefit
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of the public, thereby giving any hungry man an excellent opportunity to
procure a square meal gratis.”
“W. H. Dow’s horse, hitched in front of Perkins’ store last evening,
became frightened at children passing with sleds and started ahead, colliding
with the hitching post. The shafts and harness were broken and the
horse, thus freed, took to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street
and perambulated on his way, pedestrians respectfully moving aside for his
benefit.”
Runaways were frequent occurrences on Waterville streets that winter
of 1888. The next week after the item about Dow’s runaway horse, the Sentinel
printed the following: “A runaway stirred up things for a few minutes
TUesday afternoon. Allie Moore was trying out the paces of one of Charles
Hill’s horses down the tempting smoothness of Main Street, and as he was
scooting along at a 2:30 clip by the Arnold block, his sleigh struck the
sled of John Britt standing there. In a twinkling the sleigh was demoralized,
as were also the trousers of the driver.”
Then for the third successive week the Sentinel came up with another
runaway item: “Runaways are vary numerous but none the less very exciting.
A horse belonging to Prunella Jones, left standing in front of the Plaisted
Block, started and tore down Main Street Saturday afternoon, causing a general
stampede. The pung attached to him collided with a stone post in front
of Redington’s and came to grief. The horse continued his mad career, frightening
William Barton’s horse, which also started down Water Street but was
stopped without damage. The Jones horse then jumped over the fence surrounding
the lot where the old Continental Hotel formerly stood, jumped back again
and fell on the sidewalk in front of Dunn Block, where he was finally subdued
after making things very lively for a few minutes.”
**.***
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By the way, was Waterville’s Main Street ever properly spelled
“M A I N E”? The spelling in those 1888 issues of the Sentinel is not uniform.
On about half of the items it is Main Street, the way it is spelled
for most of such streets allover the united States. But in the other half
of those numerous 1888 items, it is Maine Street, with an lie”. Which
spelling was then correct? Did the editor have good reason sometimes to
write M a i n e?
So far as we know there is only one M a i n e Street in this state. That
is the principal street in Brunswick, which is properly and officially
spelled M a i n e.
*****
Many Maine towns have streets named for towns to which the street leads
or toward which it goes. Augusta thus has Bangor Street; my horne town of
Bridgton has Portland Street; Portland itself has Deering Avenue; Lewiston
has both Sabattus Street and Lisbon Street. Waterville has Oakland Street,
but it led to the Fair Grounds, not to Oakland. The way to that town, formerly
West Waterville, is of course an entirely different thoroughfare, the
Oakland Road.
*****
Last week we asked the question, “What is a thorough stay?” Well, here
is the answer. A thorough stay is a round piece of hard wood about three feet
long, used in the old lumbering days to fasten together the long ,soft wood
logs of a boom. One of these, water logged and embedded in the bottom of the
lake, was recently dug out near the old landing at Chamberlain Lake and
brought back to waterville by my neighbor, who made that thrilling flight
over the north woods by air.
In the old days iron or steel chains were scarce and eXPensive. These
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pieces of hard wood were fastened to the. logs instead, and they are said
to have held the booms just as fast as the big chains now do.
*****
We have talked so much in recent weeks about things of the long ago that
it is time we reminded ourselves that life is filled with common things today.
One of those common things — a common experience of most of us — is
at sometime in life to lose your pocket book. According to the June issue·
of Kys-Items, the plant publication of the Keyes Fibre Company, a most unusual
variation of that experience happened a few weeks ago to Randy Getchell,
a grinder man at the Shawmut Mill of Keyes Fibre. Mr. Getchell and his wire
went fishing at a spot off the Unity Road, and before they set out, Mr. Getchell
committed his wallet to his wife for safekeeping. They had to go through
a cow pasture and crawl through a fence to get to the pond. When they
arrived, Mrs. Getchell found that the wallet was missing. On the way back
they made a thorough search, and near the fence through which they had crawled
they found — No, they ·didn It find the wallet. But there on the ground
was the change, the zipper that closed the wallet, and a tiny scrap of leather.
The rest of the wallet and its paper contents, including currency and
three U. S. savings Bonds, were gone. Watching them nearby was a soulfullooking
cow contentedly chewing her cud. All she had left the Getchells were
the metal scraps from her unorthodox dinner.
*****
Most of you know that Maine was once a banner ship-building state. Even
in our own day we are proud of the enviable record made by the Bath Iron
Works and their ship yards during two World Wars. But a hundred years ago
Maine really built ships. Here is the record for the year 1854 — ninety-six
years ago. _ Bath then led the state with 93 launchings in that one year.
Waldoboro came next with 89. Belfast had 49, Eastport 41, and Portland 40.
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Thirty-six ships first touched the water at Ellsworth, 31 at Machias, 26 at
Castine, 16 at Wiscasset, 12 at Kennebunkport, six at York and Kittery and
two at Saco. That makes a .total of 468 ships launched in Maine in 1854.
That is more ships than were put to sea between 1789 and 1847 bY all the
states of the Union in those 58 years all put together, and more ships than
were built in anyone year in the Whole British Isles.
Do some of the oThissions surprise you? They do me. There is no mention
of Freeport or South Freeport, Whose yards I supposed were booming at that
time. Apparently no ships were launched at South Thomaston, which had a very’
famous yard. And what happened to the big yard at Harpswell, celebrated in
the novels of Elijah Kellogg?
*****
This is our last broadcast of the season. During the summer we shall
give you a rest from these old time things. But on September 17 we shall be
back on the air again. Right now we want to express our gratitude to the many
listeners Who have provided material for this program. You have made it your
program, not mine. Without you to provide the grist, the mill could not
grind. As you go on digging up the old newspapers, old account books, old
records and old letters, I think we can learn together that there is much
to give us pride in the Kennebec Valley heritage.
If the revival of these old-time incidents and legends has any value
at all, it is in their challenge to the present generation to make this valley
in the last half of the 20th century the same kind of bulwark of freedom,
enterprise and neighborly kindness that the settlers around Fort Halifax made
it two centuries ago.
And so we say Good~By until September.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
75th Broadcast September 17, 1950
Here we are again, beginning another season of these talks on common
things, that have somehow, unintentionally but irresistably, become talks
on old-time things. We make no promises about the content of this season’s
talks. Just as we have done in the past, we shall let you listeners pretty
much decide. It is you who have made :the continuance of these programs possible.
It is you who have furnished material, corrected our mistakes, given
us valuable pointers. We are grateful to you, and both your broadcaster and
the Keyes Fibre Company want this to continue to be your program, not ours.
You hear quite enough about war on the newscasts and from the commentators.
Yet on this program we cannot ignore it altogether. Of all common
things, what a tragedy it is that one of the commonest is war. It is now
so common that we can’t even wait for a new generation, but the same boys
must twice endure the horrors of modern combat. Every sensible person knows
there ought to be some way to avoid this savagery. We cannot believe that
the common people of Russia want war any more than do the common people of
America. Yet the governments of nations, blind leaders of the blind, keep
on killing not merely boys in unifonn, but women and children behind the
lines. In our time no war, however necessary and however provoked, is good.
When will we finally get it into our heads that war itself is evil that
not the immediate enemy alone needs to be conquered, but the institution of
war itself.
What a mad world this is! Only a few years ago we were loudly praising
our Russian allies who fought so bravely at Stalingrad. And how we hated the
inhuman brutality of the savage little yellow men of Japan. That was less
than ten years ago. Now look at us. As we approach a third world war, see
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whom we number among our allies: Japan and Spain. Those we called savage
little yellow men have suddenly become good boys, and our great democracy
makes a diplomatic bed-fellow out of the fascist dictatorship of Franco’s
Spain.
If any of you understand all this, I wish you would tell me about it.
Is there no such thing as consistency in government? Does democracy mean
one thing in 1940 and something else in 1950? Frankly, I don’t know. What
I do know is that our boys are dying on the battlefield, and I hope with
all my heart that God will show us a way to stop that slaughter soon.
*****
Having gotten that off our chest, let’s get back to some of the things
we were talking about last spring. You will perhaps recall that one of our
last programs referred to that unique railroad, built far in the wilderness
of Maine’s northern lakes — a railroad that few Maine people have ever seen.
We asked for more information about it, and listeners have kindly responded.
Maurice Coughlin of Oakland has loaned us a copy of the Northern for
November, 1926. That is the magazine published by the Social Service Division
of the Great Northern Paper Company. In the issue of November, 1926 the
leading article is entitled, “Another Advance Step in Woods Transportation.
The Great Northern Paper Company Builds a Railroad from Eagle Lake to Chesuncook
Lake. II
This article describes how the road was built and names many men who
had a leading part in its construction. It gives due credit to that modern
Paul Bunyan of the Maine and Canadian woods, Edward LaCroix. But the article
fails to answer the question I asked last spring; namely, how did they get
those heavy locomotives in from the regular railhead to the lakes? All we
are told is (and I quote): “All of the material for the ChesutAcook end of
the road arrived at Greenville and its conveyance from that point to the
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terminal was a job in itself. On the road special equipment for handling it
was sometimes needed, as for instance the large eight-wheel trailer which
was used to move the locomotive.” That doesn’t tell us very much.
NOW, thanks to one of our Waterville listeners, Raymond Vigue of Water
street, we have not only the answer to how they moved the locomotives, but
many other details not included in the magazine article.
Mr. Vigue shows that an important factor in the story of this unique
railroad is the private highway leading from the Canadian boundary at Lac
Frontiere to Churchill Dam, or to what is more correctly called Churchill
Depot Camp. That road, extending 45 miles through the Maine wilderness, is
familiar to many Maine fishermen and to others who have taken the famous Allagash
trip. I have never been over the road, but I came very near travelling
it in 1941. My son was then, for the fourth time, taking the Allagash trip
with a single companion, who was a good canoeist, but who had no experience
with Maine waters. As usual my son planned to start the trip at Caucmogomac
Lake, make the long carry into Allagash Lake, down the stream into Chamberlain
Lake, through Indian Pond into Eagle Lake, then through Churchill Lake into
the Allagash.
Do you remember how dry it was in 1941? Every Maine lake revealed rocks
and shallows never before seen. Could these two canoeists get beyond the dam
at Churchill Lake? Was there enough water to get them on down the Allagash?
If there was, I would meet them at Fort Kent. If not, I must make the 200
mile drive to Lac Frontiere, obtain the necessary permit to use the private
road, then travel those long, lonesome 45 miles to Churchill Dam.
Believe me, that summer I had reason to be grateful to Patrolman Thibodeau
of the Waterville police. I was worried lest a message sent me by my
son should fail to reach me, and that I should arrive at Fort Kent only to
find that I must now travel nearly 500 miles to get to Churchill Dam.
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Patrolman Thibodeau solved my problem. He asked me to come to his house
when he was off duty, and from there he called his brother, who was fire
warden at Churchill Dam. What a relief when the brother said: “Those two
boys went through day before yesterday. By this time they are half way
down the Allagash.” So I drove to Fort Kent where those two boys met me on
the dot.
I have told this incident at length, in diversion from our main story
about the railroad, in order that you may comprehend the size of the Maine
Wilderness, and the immense distances that must be traveled to reach points
not far apart, as the crow flies.
What started us off on this diversion was the 45 mile road from Lac
Frontiere to Churchill Dam. The first sixteen miles of that road, to the
point where it crosses the st. John River, were built in 1924, and during the
the next two years the remaining 29 miles were completed.
The man whom we have called the Paul Bunyan of the Maine woods, Edward
Lacroix, is of course a Canadian citizen, from St. George, Quebec. In the
early 1920’s Mr. Lacroix owned an extensive tract of timberland in Aroostook
and Piscataquis Counties. So extensive was this tract that it covered many
entire townships. It was in what is commonly called the Allagash Country,
one of the wildest and most remote, uninhabited sections of the whole United
states. It was covered with forests of virgin spruce and pine.
When Mr. Lacroix started lumbering in this region he confronted a major
problem. How would he get the long logs and pulpwood from the Allagash-St.
John watershed to waters which emptied the other way into the Penobscot? Lacroix
and his associates hit upon a private railway system, isolated and completely
disconnected from any regular railroad. The main line was 16 miles
long, connecting Eagle and Chesuncook Lakes. Construction was started in 1926
and finished in the fall of 1928. That was before the day of the gigantic,
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modern bulldozer, and the clearing, grading, and rail laying was all done
by men and teams. Many trestles had to be built, the longest being a wooden
structure of 1,700 feet across the tip of Chamberlain Lake. In addition to
its four rock piers, its supports were huge spruce logs, driven into the mud
of the lake bottom. Mr. Vigue tells us that tree-length logs with butt diameter
of nearly two feet were driven sometimes as deep as 40 feet before
solid bottom was reached. The cross ties and supporting beams were axe-hewn
timbers cut near by.
Rolli~g stock, says Mr. Vigue, consisted of four locomotives, all of
whiCh were converted from coal to fuel oil. Remember this was in 1928, long
before the coming of the Diesels or any general use of oil-burning engines.
Fire from locomotive sparks was a real hazard, and everything possible had
to be done to prevent it. So, ‘far ahead of his time, Mr. Lacroix converted
the locomotive coal tenders to fuel oil tanks. The two main-line locomotives
weighed 75 tons and 100 tons. The larger had formerly been the property of
the New York Central, and the smaller came from the Quebec Central. The other
two engines were much smaller about 20 tons each — and were powered by
gasoline engines. They were used only as switching engines, one located at
each end of the ma1nline.
A total of 45 pulpwood cars of standard size transported the 4-foot
pulpwood. They were equipped with rack bodies, the sides of which swung open
at the bottom to speed up unloading.
Well, it’s about time we answered that question of how this heavy rolling
stock, especially the locomotives, was brought in to the terminal. Remember
the nearest regular line railroad was fifty miles away. Here is Mr.
Vigue’s explanation.
The locomotives and cars were dismantled at Lac Frontiere, and were reassembled
at the new railhead at Eagle Lake. Special sleds, designed for
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heavy loads, were built to carry the truck Wheels, frames, boilers, and tenders,
as well as the many tons of steel rails.
How were these sleds hauled? Without the genius of a Waterville inventor
the job could not have been done. The Lombard log-hauler provided
the indispensible traction. It was those Lombard tractors that hauled the
sled trains carrying the dismantled parts of Mr. Lacroix’s locomotives.
Because the hauling was done in winter, the St. John could be crossed
on the ice. But sometimes the heavy loads broke through, causing damage and
loss. But it was not until 1931, three years after his railroad had been
completed, that Mr. Lacroix bought the steel bridge Which spanned the Chaudiere
at St. George, Quebec, moved it in small sections to the st. John, and
there reassembled it to connect the two sections of his highway from Lac
Frontiere to Churchill Dam. That bridge, 400 feet long and 9 feet wide,
standing fifty feet above the water still does service today.
Getting in the steel rails was no small job of itself. There were 6,500
of them, 30 feet long and weighing 1,800 pounds a piece.
That little road was a part of the gigantic operations carried on by Mr.
Lacroix in the AllagaSh region during the decade before the Second World War.
At one time 4,000 men were on his payroll in the Churchill-Chesuncook area,
and he used 780 horses in his peak season of 1929. Fifty cooks prepared
food in the widely scattered camps. Tote teams hauled supplies day and night,
several of them hauling only fodder for the horses. Butter, eggs, pork,
beans, and other foods were bought in carload lots at Chicago and shipped
direct to Lac Frontiere.
Although pulpwood was the principal product, and most of it went over
the new railroad into Penobscot waters, the long log operations were still
among the largest in the country. The annual average of long logs was 25
million feet, and in one year the cut exceeded 40 million feet. These all
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went down the AllagaSh and St. John Rivers to the Lacroix mills at Keegan,
Maine, over 200 miles away. In twelve years the total drive from the Allagash
forest to Keegan was over 2! billion feet.
Such is the story — or rather only part of the story — of the unique
railroad in the Maine wilderness. And I know of no better way to close the
narrative than to tell of Mr. Lacroix’s tribute to a Waterville man. Mr. Lacroix
has often said that without the Lombard Traction Engine, his railroad
could not have been- built. “It never occurred to me that the project was
feasible”, he said, “until I saw those huge tractors prove their worth under
practically impossible conditions.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
76th Broadcast September 24, 1950
When our broadcasting season closed last spring we had left unanswered
the question about Ten Lots. What is the story of that settlement? How did :it
get its name? How did it happen to play a prominent part in the early history
of Waterville?
Gathering the” exact facts about that interesting settlement has not
been easy. Mr. H. F. Sturtevant, descendant of the most prominent of the early
settlers, has been most helpful, putting me in touch with several persons
who have documentary information to support their own memories.
In a short article in the Portland Sunday Telegram of August 13, 1950
(this year) the reporter states: “The community of Ten Lots was settled in
1784 When a colony of Quakers contracted with the Plymouth Colony of Massachusetts
for an 8,000 acre tract of land to be located by their agent. The agent,
Elihu Bowman, surveyed and charted the tract. Then the Quakers came. There
were only three families settled there at the time. Later ten other families
made application to the colony, and another grant of 2,000 acres was procured.
This has been known ever since as Ten Lots.”
Now none of my sources — and I think they go back pretty accurately to
the old settlers say anything about Quakers. It is, of course, possible
that one or two Quaker families had preceded the official Ten Lot settlers,
and did live somewhere in the vicinity. But if that is true, Rufus Jones
ought to have heard about it. In 1892,· when Kingsbury produced his History of
Kennebec County, he asked the young principal of Oak Grove Seminary to write
a chapter on the Society of Friends. That young principal was the man destined
to become the greatest Quaker of our times, Rufus Jones. In careful detail
he wrote for Kingsbury I s history the story of Quaker settlements and the
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establishment of Friends’ meetings in Kennebec County. He makes no mention
of Ten Lots. When we recognize the care with which Dr. Jones always assembled
his historical data, that silence is significant. Of course, Ten Lots
is now in Somerset County, but that was not true when the settlement was
made.
Mrs. Electa Mitchell of Oakland, though now entirely without her eyesight,
has gone to the trouble of typing me an account of Ten Lots, which
she obtained many years ago from Mrs. Alice Gilman, a descendent of the same
Lot Sturtevant who was H. F. Sturtevant’s ancestor.
As Mrs. Gilman told the story· to Mrs. Mitchell, Lot Sturtevant was a
Revolutionary soldier. “After receiving his discharge from the army, he came
to Maine with two other young men. They came up the Kennebec River by canoe.
When they reached the mouth of the Messalonskee Stream, they decided it
would be interesting to follow it. They were looking for good corn land,
and held the belief, common in those days, that reddish rocks indicated good·
soil for corn. Along the shore, near what is now Ten Lots, they found such
rocks. Moreover the land sloped to the east. Here was the place to settle.”
Interesting as is the account attributed to Mrs. Gilman, it is at variance
with the documentary evidence. The best of that evidence is a paper
read before the Pine Tree Club of Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1896 by Martha
Sturtevant Coolidge, grandaughter of Lot Sturtevan~. For the principal facts
in this paper I am endebted to Mrs. E. P. Chaney of Freeport, grand niece of
Mrs. Coolidge.
Mrs. Coolidge wrote this paper when she was 76 years old, and of course
it is possible that some of the facts originally told her by her grandfather
and other elderly neighbors had been dimmed by the years •. At. any rate she
told a different story from Mrs. Gilman’s. Her grandfather, she says, joined
the Continental Army in 1776, when he was only 16 years old. His father and
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two older brothers also fought in the Revolution. Lot w~s honorably discharged
from the army in 1780. He and nine other men secured a grant from the
proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. Probably this was one of those Revolutionary
grants common at the time. There was very little
the soldiers, but there was plenty of land.
cash to pay
So Lot S~urtevant and his nine companions came to Maine to take up their
claim. They came, of course, by boat along the coast to the mouth of the
Kennebec, then up the river to the head of navigation at Ticonic Falls. They
probably spent several days in the town of Winslow, which had sprung up not
only around Fort Halifax, but across the river as well.
Mrs. Coolidge says, “They penetrated the woods and about five miles west
of the river found a stretch of country with an immense growth of hard wood.
They chose it for their own and pitched their tents, all ten adjoining one
another. From the beginning the ten adjoining tracts of land were called Ten
Lots.”
Now in respect to the way these settlers penetrated the woods, Mrs. Gilman
may be right. Mrs. Coolidge implies, but does not state, that they went
on foot. It is more likely that they went by canoe up the Messalonskee to the
vicinity of Rice’s Rips. But it is not likely that they picked a settlement
because of reddish rocks. They were taking up land already surveyed with lots
already charted.
Having found the place, Lot Sturtevant and his nine companions built log
cabins, planted corn and flax, and one after another returned to Massachusetts
to marry and bring back the girls who had been waiting for them.
The names of Lot’s nine companions were apparently unknown to Mrs. Coolidge,
but there must be some record about them. Mrs. Chaney, my Freeport
correspondent, says she had long been convinced that one of Lot’s brothers
was one of the ten. She says that when she was a small child and stayed with
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her grandmother at Ten Lots, nearly every house was owned by a sturtevant.
Yet a good many years had already gone by since the original settlement, and·
the descendents of Lot’s eight children would fill many houses. Lot’s son,
Reward Sturtevant, had eleven children, among them the Mrs. Coolidge who
wrote the 1896 paper. Another of ReWard’s children was Mrs. Chaney’s grandfather,
Reward Augustus Sturtevant, who brought his bride to Ten Lots in 1866.
I am sure my listeners all know that the great benefactor of Oakland
was Milton LaForest Williams. It was he who built the lovely little chapel
at Ten Lots in memory of his grandfather, Asa Bates. Was a Bates one of the
ten original settlers, or did that family come later?
Mrs. Chaney· tells an interesting story about Mr. Williams’ first trip
to New York. Determined to go there, he was trying to raise the money. He
approached Reward Sturtevant, Mrs. Chaney’s grandfather, who paid him $13 for
a few sheep. As all Oakland knows, Mr. Williams made a fortune in New York.
He not only gave Oakland a high school and Ten Lots a chapel, but he remembered
the old friends and neighbors at Ten Lots. To Reward Sturtevant he gave
a thousand dollars for every dollar Mr. Sturtevant had paid him for the sheep,
a splendid gift of $13,000, coming to Mrs. Chaney’s aged grandfather just
before his death in 1919, When he was 90 years old.
The original chapel is said to have been built at Ten Lots in 1836. It
was from the first a union church, but its association with the Baptists was
very close. As one of the tablets on the front of the chapel testifies, Samuel
Francis Smith, author of America, was its early minister. Smith had become
pastor of the First Baptist Church in Waterville and Professor of Modern
Languages at Colby in 1834. Like most of those early pastors, he ministered
to more than one church, and from 1838 to 1842 he regularly preached at Ten
Lots as well as at his principal church in Waterville.
Vital interest in religion at Ten Lots had long preceded the building of
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the 1836 chapel. The old records of Waterville’s First Baptist Church, to
which I have had frequent access, make that point clear. In that church’s
third pastorate, that of Rev. Harvey Fitts in 1830, ten persons from Ten
Lots united with the Waterville church, seven of them being members of the
Bates family. Of this incident, Mrs. Minnie Philbrick, the church historian,
writing a hundred years later said: “In 1830 a revival sprang up, beginning
as has many another at Ten Lots. These new members formed a strong corps
of helpers, and their relatives and descendents are still in our church and
hold the same high ideals as those who first came to us in 1830.”
In his “Personal Recollections”, written when he was a very old man in
1890, Samuel Francis Smith said: “I found my congregation at Waterville somewhat
peculiar, being made up of three elements — the college, the village
people, and the families from the farms in different directions for five
miles. In 1838 there was a season of deep religious interest which had its
origin in the families at Ten Lots and thence extended to other parts of the
town. The singing of familiar hymns had a large place in the social services,
especially at Ten Lots. There was no visible excitement and no sensational
disclosures. The spirit spoke with still small voice, and human hearts listened
and obeyed.”
I’m sure this isn’t the last we shall hear about Ten Lots. There is much
more than the names of Lot Sturtevant’s nine companions still to be learned.
Who will help us?
*****
We have just a few minutes left to turn to a contemporary subject. In
these very troublous times, when the cold war of diplomacy and economics has
turned to the hot zing of bullets and the crash of bombs, it is well for us
to reflect how the Russian government has maneuvered this situation so that
not a single Russian soldier faces our troops in Korea. That is the Russian
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strategy — to take over, by native communist domination the government of
one nation after another. Then, when a situation like that in Korea forces
u. N. intervention, it is the natives, not the Russians, who fight the u. N.
forces.
So, just for a moment, notice how Stalin and his Kremlin company proceed
to take over a country. Let us look at Rumania. In 1940 Rumania with a population
6f 16 million had less than a thousand Communists. In 1945 Soviet
troops occupied Rumania and forced King Michael to name a Communist stooge,
Peter Groza, as prime minister. By 1946 the Communist government had broken.
up the big estates, given land to the peasants and increased wages; had, in
short, made their usual bid for popularity. Opposition parties were still
tolerated. But in 1946 all voters were ordered to approve a single slate of
candidates picked by the Communists. Russian managers now ran Rumania’s industries.
In 1947 the Communist government adopted another well known Russian
device — they put on a nation-wide purge of non-Communist leaders,
jailing thousands and executing more than a hundred. King Michae~ was forced
to abdicate.
In 1948 the Rumanian parliament, without debate, approved by 414 votes
to none, the new Rumanian constitution. Under it, Stalin’s friend, Mrs. Aria
pauker, got full power. In 1949 Moscow ordered a Rumanian party purge, ousting
all who deviated from the party line. Leaders of the church were especially
persecuted. Rumania’s entire economy was now run from Moscow.
In this autumn of 1950 what is the situation? All opposition to Moscow’s
will has disappeared. Rumania can at any time be incorporated into the Soviet
union by a mere telephone call from Moscow.
That is quite a story of ten short years. In 1940 less than a thousand
Communists in Rumania; in 1950 completely Communist, and, what is more,
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complete Russian domination of the country. That, my friends, is the way
Joe Stalin takes over a nation in these very troublous times.
2-156
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
77th Broadcast October 1, 1950
This year of 1950 marks the one hundredth anniversary of a well known
Waterville store. In the hundred years that store has changed hands several
times, but it has always been a drug store. I refer to Dexter’s Drug Store
on Main Street, known for many years as Allen’s Drug Atore, and earlier still
by the names of other proprietors.
The store was started in 1850 by William Dyer, and Mr. Dexter has kindly
let me examine the first prescription book. Unfortunately Prescription No.
1 is not dated, nor is No.2, but No. 3 was made out for John Richards on
May 22, 1850; so presumably the store was opened in May of that year. Most of
.the prescriptions bear the name of the person to whom delivered, often written
in pencil at the bottom of the document, but none of the first ten are
signed by a physician or even bear a doctor’s name. On Prescription No. 11
appears the name “Dr. Boutelle” in different handwriting from the prescription
itself. This physician was the son of Waterville’s leading citizen of the
time, Squire Timothy:.;Boutelle.
Many prescriptions in 1851 and 1852 bear the name of Dr. J. F. Noyes, who
had opened his medical practice in Waterville in 1849. Almost as frequent is
the name of Dr. Joseph Potter. It was with him that Dr. V. P. Coolidge, the
notorious Waterville murderer, at one time studied medicine. Other doctors
Whose names occasionally appear on the old prescriptions are Dr. Robert Davis,
Dr. Nathan Pulsifer and Dr. Byron Porter, Who purchased and occupied the mansion
on Silver Street Which had been built by Simeon Mathews, and Which in
later years was the home of George Fred Terry.
In the 1850’s prescriptions were apparently issued and filled rather
casually. In those days death-dealing drugs could be bought freely and without
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question. The druggist often issued prescriptions of his own. Dyer ,for
instance, seems to have had his own remedy for whooping cough. The prescriptions
abound in opium, laudanum, and chloroform. Many contain more harmless
olive oil. Was that to assure getting some of the nauseous concoctions down? The
common herbs 1ike wintergreen, peppermint’and sassafras were used again and
again. Of the chemicals potassium is mentioned most often. Camphor was a
common ingredient, as was also spirits of ammonia. That old favorite of my
childhood, ipecac, was prescribed very frequently. Some of the drugs we encounter
rarely nowadays, but seen often in these old prescriptions, were
aqua rosa (water of rose), nux vomica, pulverized aloes, gentian, and gum
arabic. Surprising are the number of prescriptions which call for elixir of
vitriol. One interesting item calls for syrup of squills, wine, and tincture
of opium compound. In our boyhood we were familiar with ipecac and squills,
but this is the first time we have seen squills without ipecac. This prescription
sounds like squills to strike at the disease, opium to deaden
the pain, and wine to get it down.
About the Dexter Drug Store there is a more interesting item than that
it is a hundred years old. It is the oldest existing business building on Main
Street. No less an authority than our IlII1ch revered citizen, Harvey Eaton,
is quoted as saying that , with the exception of the building in which the
Dexter Drug Store is now located, he personally has seen erected every other
building between the Lockwood Mills and the Elmwood Hotel. Since Mr. Eaton
came to waterville in 1881, this means that no other building on the street
is more than 70 years old.
In the original prescription book of the Dexter store the prescriptions
were written on slips of paper about 4 x 2 inches in size and then pasted into
the book. As was common in those days, a previously used book was the medium,
not new white pages. And this old book over whose pages the prescriptions are
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pasted interests me very much, for just enough of those pages remain unpasted
and unmarred to reveal what it originally was. It was obvously the account
book of the town liquor agent, who in the decade before Maine’s prohibition
law of 1851 was authorized to dispense wine and spirits.
Who were the liquor agent’s customers? One of the most frequent was
Professor Loomis of Waterville College (now Colby) who won fame by identifying
the poison in the stomach of the murdered Ed Mathews. In 1844 and 1845
Professor Loomis bought rum by the half gallon, brandy by the quart, and gin
by the pint. On June 21, 1844 Professor Keeley bought40 cents worth of
brandy. Dr. Nathaniel Boutelle was a frequent customer, as were also such
well known worthies as Joshua Bates, Samuel Robinson and Ansel Shorey. On
July 27, 1844 the Congregational Society purchased one quart of wine, surely
for sacramental purposes. Although the names of women purchasers do occur,
they are more frequently covered by the one word “lady”. On a single page
this word occurs three times, once for wine and twice for brandy.
But of all the names in the liquor agent’s book those that interest me
most are V. P. Coolidge, the murderer, and Edward Mathews, the murdered man,
of Waterville’s famous murder of 1847. Mathews’ name occurs just once, when
he bought a quart of wine for 13 cents on February 17, 1844. But Dr. Coolidge
was a frequent customer. Most of his purchases were wine, which he bought
most often by the pint, but occasionally by the quart. In 1844 he bought a
quart of wine every month from May to October, with an occasional pint between
times. In November he paid 31 cents for a pint of brandy.
*****
I don’t pretend to know much about the war in Korea, and I can’t find
that anyone knows with any accuracy what really got us into this situation.
It is easy to cast blame according t~·one·s political leanings, and I for one
deeply deplore the partisan politics on both sides that has been injected into
2-159
the problem. For a serious international pcoblem it indeed is. Only one
thing seems to me clear — namely, the issue that has so strikingly divided
the military from the state department. And that issue is whether, with all
our resources, we can effectively wage war on two sides of the world at the
same time. Now five years after VJ Day of World War II, it is no secret that
our Pacific operations were long slowed up because of our commitments in
Europe.
In a powerful article in his syndicated column on September 5 of this
year, Walter Lippman pointed out that Gener~l Marshall, more than any other
living man, faced the practical question daily of nourishing two wars simultaneously.
In 1947, after the war. ‘was over, he made the crucial decision to
save Europe by proposing what became the Marshall Plan and to give up Chiang
Kai Shek by rejecting the Wedemeyer report. General Marshall, after a long,
,close, personal investigation of China, concluded that Chiang could not be
saved except at the exhorbitant price of an American protectorate over China,
and American intervention in the Chinese Civil War. We could save Europe,
General Marshall decided; only at great cost could we save China, and we
could not possibly save both Europe and China. Mr. Lippman concludes in these
words:
“This kind of choice always confronts us, with MacArthur and the military
on one side and General Marshall’s successors in the state department on the
other side. It is a question that cannot be settled finally and absolutely.
We have vital interests in both directions, and among reasonable and responsible
men the question is not the one or the other, the Pacific or the Atlantic,
but of priority at any given time and of calculated risk. We must continually
face the problem, for whether we like it or not, geography has made the
the united States a continental island, facing Europe across the Atlantic and
Asia across the Pacific.”
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*****
Did you ever have trouble with railroad freight? Well, they had trouble
in the early days of Maine railroads. In 1855 Editor Drew published the follow::
ing in his Rural Intelligencer at Augusta:
“Last Saturday our friends Adams and Morrill of Westbrook sent us by
railroad a’package containing two large grape vines, one twining honeysuckle,
one Chinese wisteria, and a stalk of Egyptian corn. They reached us on the
following Thursday, very well dried up, having evidently been exposed all the
week to wind and sun, with a freight bill for us to pay for the care, or want
of it, which was taken to kill them.”
Editor Drew had other complaints. He objected to the spelling of our
state name. He insisted it should be spelled M E Y N E, for that was the spelling
of the French province in Charles I’s time and is the spelling in the
charter given to Fernando Gorges. Drew accepted the common interpretation
that Charles I named this New England province for his queen, who came from
Meyne in France.
Mainland.
The prevailing opinion today is that it was simply the
*****
Before the advent of standard time railroad passengers had a lot of
trouble. Editor Drew commented: “The New York Central arranges its timetables
according to the Albany meridian, and woe to ‘the-Buffalo or Rochester man Who
regulates his arrival at the depot by the sun in his own sky, as he will then
be 12 or 15 minutes behind time.” The explanation of the editor’s comment is
that each degree of longitude makes four minutes difference in time, and in
those days every city in the country set its own local time by its own longitude.
Another of Editor Drew’s complaints concerned a stray horse. He wrote:
“The person who turned his horse into our wheat field on Monday evening last,
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with a view to his filling himself during the night, is kindly informed that
the next time he performs this neighborly office, he will find his horse in
the city pound.”
May 26, 1888 was an important day in the U. S. Postal Service. On that
day registered letters were first introduced, at a fee of 25 cents.
The year 1888 was not only the year of the big blizzard; it also was
the year of a big flood on the Kennebec. And most unusually, it came in
June, long after the clogging ice had left the river. On June 10th it carried
out 130 feet of the Augusta dam, which had been built in 1835 at the
then huge cost of $300,000. One newspaper said of it: “This dam is the
largest in the state, in the nation,in the world, so wide is the Kennebec at
this place, the whole waters of which are thus forced to create power for
the use of man.” Repairs after the 1888 flood took all summer and cost
$30,000.
Augusta was originally called cushnoc, and after its creation as a separate
town was named Harrington. Why was the name again changed? Because the
wise-cracking gentry of Hallowell, who deeply resented the building of the
1797 bridge at the Fort (now Augusta) rather than at the hook (Hallowell),
began at once to refer to the new town as Herring Town. That was more than
the up-river folks could stand; so the name was changed to Augusta.
*****
Not long ago, in an old-time newspaper, I ran across the meaning of the
word refugee as it was used in Maine in the l850·s. It seems that most of the
Tory families, which fled New England at the time of the Revolution, went for
refuge to the neighboring province of Nova Scotia, which did not unite with the
the other colonies for independence. Said this 1854 newspaper: “Those who
fled and their descendents we still call refugees. 11
***.**.
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Do you want some home-made vinegar? Editor Drew told you how to make
it in 1855. Take three gallons of rain water, one quart of molasses and one
pint of yeast. Mix and let it set. It will ferment and turn to vinegar in four
weeks. He claimed that was a quicker way than waiting for cider vinegar.
*****
Last winter you may recall that I had a good word for Nodhead apples. I
was therefore delighted to run across a letter by John C. Jewett of Machiasport,
written to a Maine newspaper in 1856. This is what he wrote:
“The Nodhead apple had its origin in the orchard of my grandfather, Deacon
Stephen Jewett of Hollis, New Hampshire. The name originated as follows:
As the Rev. Dr. Cummings of Billerica, Masaachusetts, who was my grandfather’s
half-brother, was on a visit to grandfather’s farm, he was one day eating
some of that new tree’s first fruit, accompanying each bite with a satisfied
nod of his head. My grandfather at once decided to call the apple the Nodhead.
I have heard my grandfather relate this circumstance so many times while I
lived with him from 1807 to 1813, that I have no doubt of its accuracy. When
I was last in Hollis in 1832, with feelings almost of reverence I visited that
original Nodhead tree, which then was showing signs of decrepit old age.”
*****
well, I guess that’s enough for tonight. So we’ll say goodnight until
next week and the Coolidge-Mathews murder case, which will then be our principal
subject.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
78th Broadcast October 8, 1950
It was nearly two years ago When, one night on this program, I put in
a good word for Maine farmers. Some of you will recall that I quoted Arthur
Roberts, the late President of Colby College, as once saying, “Farming in
Maine isn’t an occupation; it’s a misfortune.”
In light of statements of that sort, it is interesting to note the figures
recently released by the Maine Department of Agriculture. In 1949 the
cash receipts of Maine farmers totaled $180,944,000. And the cash receipts
by no means tell the whole story. For example, the Maine hay crop annually
brings in only two million dollars in cash, but its value as harvested and
fed to the animals on Maine farms is twenty millions.
By far the larger part of Maine farms are operated by the owners. Of
our 42,184 farms, only 1,337 are operated by tenants, only 211 by managers.
Absentee owners therefore control only 3! per cent of the Maine farms.
Maine farmers cwn 15,000 tractors and 19,000 trucks. More than 30,000
Maine farms have electric distribution lines within a quarter of a mile, and
90 per cent of those farms use electricity.
We often hear that Maine is too far from the markets to be an important
agricultural state. What is the fact? It is this: Two-thirds of the population
and three-fifths of the wealth of the entire North American continent
is within 500 miles of Maine.
*****
So much for Maine farmers. The time has now come to keep our promise
to you patient listeners and turn to Waterville’s famous murder case of 1847.
We are going to devote a portion of three consecutive programs to that murder,
tonight and the following two Sundays. Tonight we shall deal with the murder
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itself, next Sunday we shall tell about the trial, and two weeks hence we
Shall take up the most interesting feature of all, telling you What happened
after the verdict was in.
We referred briefly to the case on one of our broadcasts last spring.
Since that time we have learned a lot more about it. We have not been content
with reports made long afterward, like the feature articles in the press
as recent as 1948. Not even the review of the case in the Waterville Mail in
1888 contented us. We just had to take time to seek out the contemporary accounts
in the newspapers of the time.
The sheer mass of those newspaper stories astounded us. We have read
more than 300 columns of print on that murder — accounts in the old Waterville
Evening Mail, in the Portland Argus, in the Northern Tribune of Bath,
in the Boston Gazette, and in other papers. And best of all, we have talked
with and received invaluable assistance from the man Who probably knows more
than any other living person about that old-time murder. He is Doane Eaton,
retired u. S. Army engineer, now living at Cornville, Maine. Mr. Eaton tells
me that he believes more than a thousand columns were printed in the contemporary
press about that murder. He knows that reporters came not only from
most of the Maine papers and from Boston, but even from New York and Philadelphia.
The railroad had just been completed from Portland to Augusta; it
did not reach Waterville until two years later. When the murder trial was
held in Augusta 102 years ago, the railroad dispatched a special train from
Augusta to Portland at th~ end of each day of the trial, to take the reporter’s
stories to the waiting newspapers.
Now let’s get down to the story. What happened to Shock not only Waterville,
but the whole country on the evening of September 30, 1847? ValorUs
P. Coolidge was a young doctor, 26 years old, who had been practicing in Waterville
for several years. He had learned the art under the tutelage of Dr.
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Potter and had attended medical lectures in Philadelphia. He was born in
Canton, Maine, where his parents and at least one brother still lived in
1847. He was unmarried and boarded at the Williams House, pictures of
which may be seen at the Waterville Historical Society and on the wall of
the Reference Room at the Waterville Public Library. His office was on the
second floor of No. 27 Main Street, in a building which stood where a
part of the present building of the Federal Trust Company now stands.
On the morning of October 1, 1847 Dr. Coolidge, having gone out of town
on a very early call, returned to find the town in an uproar. When he reached
the Williams House, where he not only boarded, but also kept his horses,
he immediately joined other Waterville physicians in an inspection of the
body of a prominent young citizen. Let us see what the Waterville Mail of
October 7, 1847 had to say about what had happened:
“Between 7 and 8 o’clock on Friday evening last, the dead body of Mr.
Edward Mathews was found in the rear of Mr. shorey’s clothing store, Pray’s
Building, Main Street, under circumstances which indicated beyond question
that he had been murdered and robbed. There were several severe wounds on the
head, some marks of violence on the throat, and a cut across the thigh near
the groin, apparently made in cutting open the pantaloons pocket.
“On inquiry it was ascertained that Mr. Mathews had about his person, at
nine o’clock the previous evening, $1,500 to $1,800 and a gold watch, for
which, no doubt, the murder was committed.
“A jury of inquest was summoned as soon as a coroner could be obtained
from a neighboring town, which has continued in session to the present time,
and may still sit for some days.
“We forbear, for the present, giving any of a thousand stories and surmises
which are afloat, or anything that has been developed, so far as have
been made public, before a jury. Strange facts are said to have been dis-
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closed, but under present circumstances we can rely upon nothing so far as
to make it public. No arrest has yet been made, though it need not be concealed
that suspicion is very decided in one direction.”
Such is the factual, cautious account in the Waterville Mail that citizens
:r ead avidly six days after the crime. Of the murdered young man, 25 .,
years old, the Mail had this to say:
“Edward Mathews was a young man of enterprise and highly esteemed, and
was in partnership with Mr. Soule of Clinton in a store at that place. He
came from Clinton to Waterville on Thursday morning for the purpose of completing
certain negotiations relative to the money of which he was robbed,
$1,500 of which he took from the Ticonic Bank during the day. He was seen
by numerous individuals, arid at various places, between 7 and 9 o’clock.”
Not then reported by the Mail, but well known by the citizens, was the
fact that, in addition to his Clinton partnership, Edward Mathews was in the
cattle business, buying beef cattle and driving them to the market at
Brighton, Massachusetts. Though not a man of wealth, he frequently had considerable
sums from the cattle business. More than once he had borrowed
money from the Ticonic Bank to finance these transactions.
On Sunday — the third day after the murder — an autopsy was performed.
The physicians present were Doctors Sidney, Thayer, Plaisted, Noyes, Boutelle
and Coolidge. Dr. Thayer, the grandfather of our famous Dr. Frederick Thayer,
seems to have been in charge. Yet young Dr. Coolidge took an active part.
It was he who removed the contents of the stomach into a wash basin. Later
Dr. Thayer suggested that those contents should undergo chemical analysis.
Someone said, “We’d better send them to Bowdoin”. Dr. Noyes said, “We don’t
need to do that. We have a perfectly good chemist right here in Waterville. II
So they called in Professor Loomis of Waterville College (now Colby). He made
a thorough chemical analysis, and declared that he found fatal amounts of
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prussic acid.
So it came about that, on October 6, the coroner’s jury rendered a
verdict that Mathews had come to his death by poison, or by blows inflicted
on the head, or by both, by a person or persons unknown. The jury further
declared that the poison was prussic acid, administered in brandy, the effect
of which is known to produce almost instantaneous convulsions. terminating
in death, sometimes in so short a time as four or five minutes. The
jury believed, but were not sure, that the blows had been inflicted after
death.
It was clear that the murder had not been committed where the body was
found, just inside the entrance to the basement under Shorey’s clothing shop.
Nor had it been committed on the street or anywhere out of doors, for there
was no mud or dirt on the boots or clothes. There was no indication that the
body had lain or been dragged on the ground, or that any scuffle had occurred.
On October 7 the grand jury at Augusta brought in an indictment against
Dr. Valorus P. coolidge for the murder of Mathews, and the next day he was
arrested by Officers Norris, Nudd and Miller, acting for County Sheriff L. D.
Moor. Let us see what had caused this sudden turn of events, just too late
to reach the Waterville Mail of October 7, though the next week’s issue on
October 14 told the story in great detail.
Young as he was, Dr. Coolidge was not only a doctor, but an instructor
of would-be doctors as well. Two young men studied in his office, one of
whom is unimportant to this story. But the other, Thomas Flint, sealed Dr.
Coolidge’s doom. ~wenty-four year old Flint was the son of State Senator
Flint of Anson. For a week after the fateful night of September 30th he kept
silent, but then sent word to his father that he wanted to see the senator.
The elder Flint came to Waterville and, closeted in a room at the Williams
House, extracted from his son an amazing story.
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The young man said that about nine o’clock on the evening of September
30, Dr. Coolidge came to the door of Flint’s room at the Williams House,
and asked Flint to accompany him to the office, which was but a few steps
distant. They went together to the office, which consisted of two large rooms,
front and rear, on the second floor. After entering the front room, Dr.
Coolidge locked the door, and immediately told Flint that he was going to
reveal a mystery in which his very life was involved. He then proceeded to
say that Mathews came in a short time before, that the doctor gave him a
glass of brandy to drink, whereupon Mathews immediately fell into an apoplectic
fit, and was lying in the other room. The doctor said the affair would
ruin both him and Flint if the body was found in the office; so they must
dispose of it. Coolidge said the night was not dark enough to take the body
into the street or throw it into the river. So Flint was persuaded to help the
doctor carry the. body down two flights of stairs into the basement.
Such was Flint’s story to his father. Was he telling the truth? What
about the $1,500 to $1,800 Mathews was said to have had? For that we must
wait until next week, for it all came out in the trial.
Coolidge was brought before Justice Tenney of the Maine Supreme Court
at Augusta on October 24, 1847, and pleaded not guilty. The judge announced
that trial would take place at the January term of court, and Coolidge was
meanwhile remanded to the county jail at Augusta. When the trial opened on
January 26, 1848, Dr. Hill testified that a very important witness, Cyrus
Williams, proprietor of the Williams House, was too ill to appear. So the
trial was postponed to the second Tuesday in March, and at that point we
shall resume the story next week.
As a final touch tonight, let it be known that the body of Edward Mathews
lies in a well marked grave here in Waterville. Undoubtedly he was at
first buried in the old churchyard where is now Monument Park on Elm Street.
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Our older inhabitants well know that the Elm Street cemetery was abandoned
in the decade before the Civil War. I can now be more definite than that.
I can tell you when the first burial in Pine Grove Cemetery took place. It
was that of Charlotte Sutton Lowe, who died on November 29, 1851.
On October 3, 1847 the funeral of Edward Mathews was held in the
Waterville Universalist Church. Sometime after 1851 his body was taken up
from the old Elm Street burying ground and deposited in a lot belonging to
Miss A. Mathews in the new Pine Grove Cemetery. Here are the exact words of
the burial record, still kept at the office of Pine Grove.
“Name – Mathews, Edward Estey
Residence – Waterville, Maine
Age – 25 years
Date of death – September 30, 1847
Cause – Murdered by Dr. Coolidge
Buried – October 3, 1847
Lot 379. Grave 3.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
79th Broadcast October 15, 1950
Last week we left the Coolidge murder case with the victim buried and
the accused lodged in the County jail at Augusta, awaiting trial. On March
14, 1848 that trial began. The court house at Augusta proving too small for
a case that had aroused so much interest, the trial was held in the Congregational
Church, which had been prepared for the purpose by the erection of
suitable platforms for the Court, counsel and witnesses. When the doors were
opened there was, as one newspaper put it, “a tremendous rush of spectators,
quickly filling all seats, and leaving many unable to enter.” Several papers
commented on the unseemly conduct of the usually staid Augusta matrons, who
had gathered outside the doors before daylight and who did not hesitate to
use hat pins on the men who got in their way.
As was then customary, more than one judge sat at this trial. presiding
was Chief Justice Whitman, and accompanying him were Judges Shepley and Wills.
The case for the State was in charge of Attorney General Samuel Blake of Bangor,
assisted by Lot M. Morrill of Augusta. That Attorney General has long
since been forgotten, but his young assistant went on to fame, for Lot. M.
Morrill became Governor, U. S. Senator, and Secretary of the Treasury.
It took all the morning and part of the afternoon to secure a jury. Expecting
many objections and excuses, the Court had ordered a panel of 100
prospective jurors. Theodore Allen, the second man called, precipitated a
long argument between Mr. Morrill and Edwin Noyes of Waterville who, with
George Evans of Gardiner, was handling the defense. Mr. Noyes contended that
any man who had formed a hypothetical opinion on a case was thereby unfitted
to serve on the jury. The Court disagreed. Mr. Noyes had to use one of his
peremptory challenges to keep Allen off the jury, though another Allen
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Joseph B. — had already been accepted. The twelve good men and true who
must decide the fate of Dr. Coolidge were Francis Haines of East Livermore,
foreman; Joseph Allen of Monmouth, Hiram Averill of Pittston, Brown Baker of
Gardiner, Jonathan Clark of China, Daniel CUnningham of Windsor, Ozem Doust
of Vienna, David Elliott of Readfield, Isaac Farr of Gardiner, Harrison
Gould of Leeds, William Greene of Pittston and Harrison Ham of Wales.
Thanks to Mr. Doane Eaton, I have had a chance to read carefully a photostatic
copy of the grand jury’s indictment of Valorus P. Coolidge, in the
handwriting of the scribe who made those court records a hundred years ago.
That grand jury left nothing to chance. They brought four counts against
the young Waterville doctor: first, that he killed Mathews by.a blow on the
head; second, that he mixed prussic acid with brandy and gave the mixture to
Mathews who drank it; third, that he killed Mathews with a mixture of hydrocyanic
acid and brandy; and fourth, that the doctor mixed prussic acid with
brandy which Mathews was about to drink and did drink.
Now of course prussic acid is only the popular name for hydrocyanic acid;
so counts 2 and 3 are the same. Count 4 was phrased so that Coolidge could be
convicted even if it could not be proved that he had given Mathews the drink,
but only that he had mixed it before Mathews drank it.
Of course all this was couched in the cumbrous, legal language of the
courts. For instance, the actual wording of the first count is thus: “Valorus
P. Coolidge, with force and arms, in and upon the body of Edward Mathews
then and there in the peace of the state being, feloniously, wilfully and of
his malice aforethought, did make an assault, and that he, the said Valorus.
P. Coolidge, with a certain stick of wood, which he, the said Valorus . P.
Coolidge, then and there in his right hand had and held, the afo~esaid Edward
Mathews, in and upon the head of him and near the top thereof, then and there
did strike, penetrate, wound, bruise and fracture, giving the said Edward
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Mathews one mortal wound, bruise and fracture of the length of three inches,
of the width of two inches, and of the depth of one inch — of which said .mortal
wound, bruise and fracture the said Edward Mathews then and there instantly
died. II
A lot of wordage that proved futile, because on that first count the
jury found Dr. Coolidge not guilty. He did not kill Mathews by a blow on the
head. Medical evidence clearly Showed that the blow had been struck after death.
It was reported that the state had more than one hundred witnesses ready
to testify. At any rate sixty of them were actually called to the stand.
Most of them only corroborated the testimony of more important witnesses, but
some of them were vital. Professor Loomis of Waterville College explained in
detail how he was sure that the stomach of the murdered man contained prussic
acid, and cross examination failed to Shake him.
The trial had scarcely gone into its third day when it became apparent
that Dr. Coolidge owed money to almost everyone in Waterville. And it was
equally apparent that more than one of those creditors thought he was the
only man from whom the doctor had borrowed.
The doctor owed William Tobey $115, and had once offered Tobey 10 per
cent interest for a loan of $500, but Tobey didn’t bite. Coolidge owed $200
more to David Smi1ey~ $200 to Isaac Britton~ $125 to Daniel Moor, one hundred
of which had been borrowed at 12% and on pledge of secrecy. He owed $100 to
Warren Doe, $150 to John Philbrick, $180 to James Goodwin, $350 to John Richards,
and $100 to Robert Drunnnond. On September 30, 1847, the day of the murder,
two of Coolidge’s nc~es — one for $100 and a second for $300 — were
overdue at the Ticonic Bank.
The caShier of that bank, Augustine Perkins, testified that on September
30 Edward Mathews had applied for a loan of $1,500 at about 10 o’clock in the
morning, that he had taken a blank note and went ·out to get signers. He had
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returned about 3 P.M., presenting as co-signers John Mathews and Charles K.
Mathews. Discounting the note for 60 days, the bank had handed over to Edward
Mathews $1,484.25.
Now I have more than once heard it said that one thing which convicted
Coolidge was the knowledge by John and Charles Mathews that Edward wanted
the money to loan to Dr. Coolidge. Right here it must be said that there
exists no official record of the testimony in the Coolidge trial. We are
dependent entirely upon the reporters of various newspapers. But on this
point those reporters agree. Not one of them says that, in their testimony,
either John or Charles Mathews gave any reason why they signed Edward’s note
for $1,500. It seems to have been a straight business transaction, in which
a somewhat mysterious mortgage deed played a part.
No, it was not the borrowed money, but motive, opportunity and the clinching
testimony of Thomas Flint that secured the doctor’s conviction.
Young Flint told his story much as we outlined it in last week’s broadcast.
He had gone to the office with Coolidge; he had helped the doctor carry
the body down to the cellar; he had helped hide the money and had later burned
it. Damaging as this testimony was, it had certain omissions. Flint did not
say that at any time Coolidge confessed to him that he killed Mathews. He insisted
that he was not afraid of Coolidge, that, as today’s slang would put
it, Coolidge “had nothing on him”.
In his final summing up, the Attorney General made the most of Flint’s
testimony. He said: “Can the jury possibly decide that Flint’s conduct on
that evening destroys the credibility of his story? Look at the relation of
the two parties. The prisoner was a man of high standing and large practice.
Flint had then no suspicion of murder; he believed the doctor’s story. Place
yourself at his age and in his relation to the prisoner, and what would you
have done? As mature men of principle you might have ruShed to the door and
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proclaimed the fact that a man had died there. But as a young man who looked
upon the doctor as a benefacter you might have done as he did. Flint had no
reason to implicate the prisoner by making up this story. He could make up
a better story than that. He could say that the prisoner confessed the murder
to him. But Flint does not say that. He has simply revealed the truth,
not to implicate the prisoner, but because, on reflection and under the advice
of his father, he deemed it his duty to God, his country, and his conscience
to tell the truth …
The defense consisted chiefly of an attempt to discredit Flint’s story.
The testimony of Oliver Paine implied that Flint could not have been in the
office with Coolidge when he claimed he was on that evening of September 30,
because Paine swore that he had seen Flint elsewhere at the time. Other witnesses
emphasized Flint’s early statements that he not only knew nothing about
the crime, but also was sure that it was not committed in Coolidge’s office.
At 5:30 P.M. on the- eighth day of the trial, the case went to the jury.
At nine o’clock the next morning the jury was still out. At 11:30 the Court
directed that the jury be brought in. The foreman stated that he feared
there was no prospect of the jury agreeing. In answer to the; judge • s questions,
the foreman said there was no point of law requiring to be cleared up.
The disagreement was, rather, as to the weight of testimony sufficient to
render a verdict. The court directed that the jury make further attempt to
agree until 3 o’clock.
At 3 0′ clock the officer attending the jury reported that the jury had not
yet agreed, but might come to agreement in another half hour. At 4 o’clock
the jury came into court. The names were called and all answered. The verdict
rendered was that, upon the first count of the indictment the prisoner is not
guilty, and upon the last three counts he is guilty of murder in the first
degree.
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The judge asked Coolidge if he had anything to say. Coolidge replied
that he was an innocent man, that there is another and higher court before
which he must stand and where false testimony will not avail. He said it
would avail nothing for him to state what he knew, but that when he departed
he might leave it in writing. He bade his friends and enemies an affectionate
farewell, and said he was ready to receive his sentence.
On the next day,’ March 24, 1848, Chief Justice Whitman pronounced sentence:
“ValorUs P. Coolidge: a jury, after an impartial investigation,
have pronounced against you a verdict of guilty of the crime of murder, and
the court deems your guilt legally established. How inadequate your temptation!
How awful your deed! It is a case unparalleled in the history of
crime, and affords a woeful instance of the frailty of human nature. But our
statute is conceived in mercy. You are not to be hurried at once from time to
eternity. You cannot be executed short of a year from this time, and that
space, it may be hoped, will be devoted to your contemplation of your forlorn
condition. And may contrition and repentance then make you a fit subject for
the mercy of an offended God.
“Valorus P. Coolidge, we sentence you to be hanged by the neck until
you be dead, and for this purpose that you be conveyed to the State Prison at
Thomaston, in the County of Lincoln, and until this sentence of death shall
be inflicted upon you, that you there be put to hard labor in solitary confinement.”
Thus ended the Coolidge trial. But the case itself was not finished. For
what happened after the trial listen to our broadcast at this same time next
week.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
80th Broadcast October 22, 1950
Last Sunday the close of our broadcast left Dr. Valorus P. Coolidge convicted
of murder, and sent to the state prison at Thomaston, there to await execution by
hanging a year later. The date of sentence was March 24, 1848; so that on some
date subsequent to March 24, 1849 the execution was expected.
The case against Dr. Coolidge had been almost completely circumstantial, except
for the testimony of Flint. If Flint was telling the truth, ‘there could be
little doubt of the doctor’s guilt. As one reads the testimony a hundred years
afterward, one is struck by the poor case put up by the defense. They called few
witnesses, and some of those few turned out, under cross-examination, to be good
witnesses for the other side. Yet there was something about that trial something
not made clear in the newspaper accounts — which caused the jury to stay out
for 22, hours, and three times report to the judge that they saw no chance of coming
to a verdict. Something caused doubts in the minds of sever~l of those worthy
citizens of Kennebec County. Was it the appealing looks and polite manner of the
handsome prisoner for more than one reporter commented on Coolidge’s handsome
face? Were there attempts to tamper with the jury in the prisoner’s favor?
After the verdict, out before sentence was pronounced, Mr. Blake, the Attorney
General, told the court that he had just had placed in his hands a note found near
the jury room, under such circumstances as to make it probable that it contained
highly improper matter intended to influence the jury. The judge, receiving the
letter, stated that it was addressed to the foreman of the jury, to whom it was
passed with directions to return it to the court if it were not on private business.
After opening the letter the . foreman stated that it was not on private business,
but was addressed inside “To the Gentlemen of the Jury”, and was anonymous.
The foreman did not read the letter, but returned it to the court. The judge
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then delivered it to the Attorney General, with directions not to let it pass out
of his hands, but to take such measures regarding it as law and justice demand.
The judge refused to declare a mistrial because he was convinced that the jury
did not see the contents of the letter.
As for what was in the letter and how it got to the jury room, we have only
the statement of a newspaper reporter, who wrote to his paper: “The letter is in
a lady’s handwriting and contains an appeal to the sympathies of the jury in behalf
of the prisoner.”
Coolidge case.
This was not the last time a lady was to figure in the
I had been told that the case was appealed, but that no record existed of
court action. Imagine my delight, therefore, when I found appended to the indictment
and its accompanying record the following statement, in the handwriting of the
same court scribe who wrote the indictment itself. Here are the words: “And now,
after verdict and before sentence is passed, the said Coolidge, against whom a verdict
of guilty of murder in the first degree has been rendered, comes and moves
the court, here, that the said verdict may be set aside, and a new trial upon the
indictment may be granted to him, for the following reasons, viz: that papers important
for his defense were, immediately upon the finding of the bill of indictment
against him, taken from his possession by order of the prosecuting officer on the
part of the Government, and have been ever since withheld from him and from his
counsel; that among those papers was a letter from one Doctor Potter of Cincinnati
in Ohio, the substance of which is stated in the affadavit of Samuel B. Norris,
thereto annexed; that among them also were other letters from Dr. Potter upon the
subject of land speculations, the exact contents of which are not recollected; that
these letters are withheld from the inspection of the prisoner and his counsel, so
that they are not able to state the contents of them; that upon a new trial the
said Coolidge will be able to produce the said letters and to prove that they were
written to him by said Potter, and that the remedy spoken of in one said letter
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and referred to by said Norris was prussic acid.”
So much for the official language. Exactly what had happened? Those unemotional,
factual newspaper accounts — so unlike the spectacular, detailed emotionalism
in which today’s press dresses up a murder trial — those accounts
make it clear that excitement prevailed and tempers were frayed when this plea
for a new trial was laid before the court.
Mr. Evans, one of Coolidge’s attorneys, told the judge he wished to make
inquiry of the Attorney General concerning the missing letters. The judge
granted the request, and Mr. Evans said that, since the jury went out, he had
learned that among the Doctor’s private papers was a letter, in which the writer
speaks of the use of prussic acid for cataract of the eye — that the strongest
kind must be used and advising Dr. Coolidge to try experiments. The Attorney
General replied that he believed there were one or two letters in his possession
from a person named Potter, but he did not believe there was anything relating to
prussic acid in those letters.
Then Mr. Evans said he was not satisfied with Mr. Blake’s reply, and would
prove to the court that such letters had certainly existed. The Attorney General
then showed his anger by saying that since Mr. Evans questioned his word and even
imputed to him the crime of concealing evidence, he would withdraw his previous,
courteous offer to let Mr. Evans inspect any and all letters taken from Coolidge’s
person and office.
Mr. Evans then produced an affadavit signed by James B. Norris, one of the
arresting officers, that when he took Coolidge into custody, Norris had taken from
Coolidge’s person three letters, one of which was from Dr. Potter and mentioned a
new remedy for some disease of the eye, and advised Coolidge to try the remedy
first on the eye of a dog. Mr. Evans said Dr. Hill had seen this letter, but he
is now absent from town. The court decided to postpone sentence until the next
morning, in order to give Mr. Evans time to get a statement from Dr. Hill.
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The following morning Mr. Evans stated that he had nothing further to offer
in behalf of the motion for a new trial, that the recollection of Dr. Hill did
not support the information which Evans had previously received. The Attorney
General then said that the letters from Dr. Potter contain nothing of importance
to the prisoner, but do contain reflections on some of the most respectable citizens
of Waterville, which can do no one any good. Right there, the attempt for a
new trial collapsed. The judge denied the petition and proceeded to pronounce
sentence upon the unhappy Coolidge.
Coolidge is said to have written many letters from his Thomaston cell, at
least one of which is preserved at the Waterville Historical Society. He had not
been long in prison before it was reported that he had conceived and nearly carried
out a diabolical attempt to murder Flint and fix the Mathews crime on him.
A letter was forged, purporting to be from a man who claimed to have received
a confidential confession from Flint, just before the latter’s proposed suicide.
The plan was to have this letter found in Flint’s pocket. This all came to light
through the alleged discovery of a letter by Coolidge to his accomplice, a released
Thomaston convict, arranging for the latter to murder Flint and make it
appear to be suicide.
“Get him in Bath, if possible”, wrote Coolidge, “if not, in Anson. Ask him to
examine you for a disease, and when he is about it, stun him with a blow on the
back of the neck, then pour contents of the vial into his mouth. Lay him with back
of neck against round of a chair, as if he hit it when he fell, thus explaining the
neck bruise. Lay beside him the vial with a little acid left in it. Take the cars
the next morning and be off where no one can find you. After I am set at liberty,
you will write me a letter as I can pay you the $1,000. Sign your name John Howard
and direct your letter to me at North Livermore, Maine.”
Did Coolidge actually write that letter? Many people thought he did, but
there is no direct evidence. In fact, there is no evidence that the so-called
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“Flint Plot” letters ever existed at all, except in the imagination of someone
Who wanted to keep the case alive. Yet it is possible — even plausible — that
the imprisoned doctor did plot against the life of the man whose testimony had
convicted him.
In October, 1848 the Governor and Council had commuted the sentence from
hanging to life imprisonment. When the plot to kill Flint came to light the next
spring, Coolidge was removed to a solitary cell, where two days later he was found
in convulsions and died after a few minutes. Medical examination revealed no
cause of death. So stated many Maine papers, including the Waterville Mail which,
on May 24, 1849, told the above story and said that the prison warden confirmed
Coolidge’s death as having occurred on May 18.
Now our story begins to assume the proportions of a full-fledged mystery.
Coolidge’s brother came to the prison from the family home in Canton and claimed
the body. In Canton it was buried in the family lot, but after a short time the
father became suspicious and ordered exhumation. He then discovered that the body
had ten whole fingers, whereas his son had lost a finger in boyhood. The father
declared the body to be not that of Valorus Coolidge and refused to have it returned
to the family lot. There is not a word of evidence to support that story.
In all the thousands of words written about the trial, there is not one which indicates
that Coolidge had a missing finger.
I told you a woman would again enter this case. Well, here she is. Though no
proof can be found, the story persists to this day that a very attractive young
woman appeared at Thomaston with a sizeable amount of gold, that she offered Warden
Carr the gold and her own hand in marriage if he would free Coolidge. The Lewiston
Journal said that the woman was Coolidge’s sister. It is a fact that Warden
Carr soon resigned and left the state, but it is only rumor that h~ and the woman
were afterwards married.
For many years stories sprang up that Coolidge had been seen alive at places
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far removed from Waterville or Thomaston. Remember this was the time when there
was great agitation against secret societies, and somebody started the rumor that
Coolidge had escaped through the influence of the Odd Fellows. He was reported
seen on a Mississippi steamboat, in California, in China and in Paris, France.
People living in Winslow today recall the old people telling of a Winslow
man writing from California that he. had seen Coolidge in the gold fiel’ds. Then
they tell how, a few weeks after he wrote that letter, the Winslow man was found
drowned under suspicious circumstances.
This sort of rumor is not unusual. It is the kind that keeps popping- up
about John Wilkes Booth, the murderer of Lincoln, in spite of the evidence that
Booth was certainly shot and killed by the pursuing posse. So far as these Coolidge
rumors appeared in print, their earliest mention seems to have been in Dr.
Mann’s Screamer, a newspaper published in Skowhegan to promote the practice of
Dr. Mann. The most complete printed statement of these various rumors, including
the last report of the death of a man alleged to be Coolidge in Alameda
County, California, is contained in a 40-page pamphlet in the archives of the
Maine Historical Society in Portland.
Now we come to the strangest fact of all. Although there are no records at
Canton showing any burial of Coolidge there, and although no one now living recalls
anything about the case, even any stories handed down from their grandfathers,
one amazing fact has come to light. In Canton in the year 1854 there was
born a child named Valorus Coolidge. Six years after the doctor’s conviction for
murder, a child born in the community of the doctor’s own birth and where he had
lived until of voting age, had been given the doctor I s name of Valorl1s What
Canton Coolidge would name a child for a convicted murderer? There’s a fact to
give you murder mystery fans something to chew on.
What really happened to Dr. Coolidge? Was he hanged? The warden was reported
to have told friends after his departure from the state that he had executed
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Coolidge in spite of the commutation of sentence. Did Coolidge commit suicide
in Thomaston? Did he die a natural death there? Or did he escape?
There is very small chance that anyone will ever know the answer. The
state of Maine tried for fifty years to determine which one of those four possibilities
was true. The prison records, if they ever existed, could not be
found. Not one of the many rumors could be substantiated. What became of ValorUS
P. Coolidge, the convicted murderer of Edward Mathews, remains an unsolved
mystery.
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LITTLE TALKS ON. COMMON. THINGS
8lst Broadcast October 29, 1950
Common things sometimes lead to uncommon results. No better illustration
can be found of that truth than an incident in the life of Martin Keyes, founder
of the Keyes Fibre Company, and maker of the first papyrus pie plates in the
world.
This past week has seen the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Martin
Keyes, for he was born at Lempster, New HampShire on October 25, 1850. When he
was a young man, working for the Indurated Fibre Company in northern New York,
the mills made large quanti ties of maple veneer. Mr. Keyes observed that the
workmen in the mills often ate their lunches off of pieces of this veneer, using
them as plates.
Of course many men had observed the same thing before. It takes more than
observation to get uncommon results out of common things. It takes inventive
imagination, and that was just what Martin Keyes had. Why not make plates out
of maple veneer, thought Mr. Keyes. So he steamed the veneer and formed it into
a plate. Then he hit upon a better idea — forming pulp on a die — and
making a papyrus plate.
Paper plates are pretty common things today, but they were unheard of when
Martin Keyes first noticed that workmen ate their lunches off pieces of veneer.
The great paper products industry — a result important to the economy of thousands
of American families — came from that common observation by a remarkably
uncommon man.
*****
A few weeks ago we mentioned p·ine Grove Cemetery, saying that the first recorded
burial there was in 1851. The father of a man still living cleared the
land for that cemetery. Mr. T. G. Burleigh of Roosevelt Avenue assures me that
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his father, Hall Burleigh, and Augustus Getchell cleared the cemetery land
with oxen in 1850 and 1851.
*****
If Longfellow, is generally considered Maine’s greatest poet, Edwin Arlington
Robinson ran him a close second, and there are many persons who consider
Robinson the greater poet of the two. James Humphry, Librarian of Colby College,
has rendered a service to thousands of Robinson lovers by his recent publication
of a carefully annotated list of the volumes in the poet’s personal
library. A product of the Anthoensen Press of Portland, noted for the excellence
of its printing, Mr. Humphry’s little book is the latest volume issued by
the Colby College Press.
perhaps many of my listeners do not know that the Treasure Room of the Colby
College Library is open to the public, and that Professor Carl Weber, Colby’s
curator of rare books and manuscripts cordially welcomes visitors. Why don’t
you go out to Mayflower Hill some afternoon and see the precious collections of
Maine authors, such as Robinson, Sarah Orne Jewett and Jacob Abbott?
*****
Except for mention of the 1855 freshet which carried away the Augusta dam,
we have hitherto neglected the subject of floods on the Kennebec. So let us
give that subject a little attention tonight.
It was nearly fifteen years ago that the Kennebec suffered its latest and
perhaps its biggest flood. Every Waterville person over twenty years old must
remember it well. All day of Thursday, March 19, 1936 hundreds of anxious citizens
went frequently to the rear of the buildings on lower Front Street, or to
the slope back of the college, to watch the rapidly rising waters. Everyone expected
the railroad bridge to go out. Though weighted with flat cars loaded
with stone, the piers themselves seemed to be giving way, as water gushed not
only around them, but through them.
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But the railroad bridge stood. It was the highway bridge that went out,
and strangely enough it did not carry with it the adjoining span of the electric
railway bridge. That abandoned bridge for the electric car tracks proved
our salvation during the tedious wait for a new highway bridge, for one way
traffic continued across the electric car bridge all through the summer.
That 1936 flood was certainly Maine’s worst. It did more damage than any
previous flood, because there was more damage to do. It destroyed more than
$20,000,000 worth of property, rendered 8,000 people homeless. Winslow’s gas
lines and household water were cut off. Water stood five feet deep in the business
district of Gardiner. The town of Bingham was completely surrounded by
the flood. The fear of epidemic added to the people’s anxiety.
Psychologically the most agonizing part of that 1936 flood was that, When
folks thought it was allover, the worst was yet to come. Wednesday, March 11
saw a heavy blanket of snow over the whole state. That evening it began to
rain, and continued in such downpour all day Thursday that roads began to be
flooded and there were many serious washouts. On Friday the waters of both the
Androscoggin and the Kennebec rose more than a foot an hour. A dangerous ice jam
formed at Vassalboro.
Saturday was fair, but the waters raged so devastatin~ly that the railroad
bridge at Brunswick and the highway bridge at Richmond went out. By night the
Whole Kennebec Valley between Augusta and Richmond was isolated.
Sunday was fair and much warmer. The water began to recede. The flood was
over, and people set about the task of repairing the damage. No one thought much
of it When intermittent showers fell on Monday. But when showers and fog continued
on Tuesday and the weather reports forecast more heavy rain, folks became
alarmed again. Their fears were justified. All day Wednesday the rain fell. On
Thursday morning it was still raining and the high temperature was helping also
to loosen the upriver ice. It was that ice that did the great damage. Few things
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— even the pieces of bridges — that got in its path could withstand it. A
month after that wild night of March 19 huge ice cakes, capable of supporting
a big house, could still be seen on the west side of the highway above Hinckley.
On Friday morning, after the Ticonic Bridge went out, the Kennebec at
Waterville had risen to twice the height it had reached on the previous Friday.
It was not until Sunday that the waters began to go down.
Did the 1936 flood bring the highest water ever known in Waterville? We
are not sure. Won’t some of our Hollingsworth friends Or other persons who
have kept records of the h~gh’water tell us?
the water so high as the flood of 1936?
Did any other flood ever send
How far back do accurate records of the Kennebec floods take us? Fortunately
we have the painstaking research of a competent investigator to help us answer
that question. In 1891 Timothy Otis Paine, at the request of the Hollingsworth
and Whitney Company, made an exhaustive study of whatever could be
learned about floods on the Kennebec.
Mr. Paine had been born in 1824 in a house on the hill above the Sebasticook
in Winslow. He lived there until 1856 when he went to Massachusetts. In
November and December of 1891 he was employed by Engineer H. F. Mills, on behalf
of H & W, to visit his old home in Maine, to go among the aged farmers on
the Kennebec from Winslow to Fairfield and, with his own knowledge of Kennebec
freshets, to fix as many high water marks as possible.
Paine’s notes, still carefully preserved by H & W, clearly show that Winslow
was a good place to study the high waters. Paine wrote: “When Moosehead
Lake sends out a great freshet, Winslow at the Fort catches it; it comes into the
stores and dwellings on the lowland. For this reason there have always been
many high water marks at the village. Waterville, on higher ground, has poorer
flood records than the mother town of Winslow.”
Mr. Paine found that the greatest freshet of which there was record since
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Winslow became a town in 1771 was the freshet of 1832. Mr. Paine wrote: “The
freshet of 1832 has always been the base to which all freshets are referred by
the older people. Ever since my boyhood I have always heard people say, “The
freshet this year comes wi thin so many feet or inches of the freshet of 1832. II
As Mr. Paine patiently accumulated information on all the recorded floods,
he became convinced that 1832 saw the record high water during the 120 years
between 1771 and 1891. Mr. Paine had himself seen that freshet when he was
nearly eight years old. He stood at the sitting-room window of his home and
watched the waters reach their height. He saw them come up over the lowlands
around what is now Lithgow Street, then creep up to the foot of the hill. At the
same time another boy of 14, Winslow Simpson, was watching the flood at the flat
where the H & W mills now stand. Still living in 1891, Winslow Simpson fixed
the high water mark of 1832 by a sawdust line left by the waters in the graveyard
on the flat opposite Colby College. Mr. Paine accepted that mark as authentic,
because he writes: “The sawdust and drift line of a freshet is made
by nature herself. It is a contour line admitted into the courts of the world,
and may be seen and traced for many years.”
When Mr. Paine began his investigations in 1891, he recalled that no one
had ever ascertained any generally accepted reason why the 1832 freshet was so
great. There had been rumors that the cause was known but had been kept secret.
Rumor persisted for some time that the dam at the foot of Moosehead Lake had
burst, and that the builders kept silent for fear of having to pay damages.
Mr. Paine speedily spiked that rumor, because he proved that no dam existed
at the foot of Moosehead in 1832. Mr. Walter Getchell, a very old man in
1891, told Mr. Paine that in the 1″832 flood a northeast wind blew every. day for
fifteen days, and not one of those days was without some rain. It was Mr. Getchell’s
opinion that the continued heavy wind blew the water out of Moosehead
Lake and made the ’32 freshet especially high. That explanation did not satisfy
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Mr. paine, and it was only after he had interviewed many old timers and made
many measurements that he hit upon the real reason for the 1832 height.
Unlike the freshet a century later in 1936, the 1832 high waters were not
accompanied by ice. May 22nd was too late in the season for ice flows. But
Mr. Paine proved conclusively that the high waters were caused by an obstruction.
When flood waters encounter any natural obstruction, Mr. Paine.pointed
out, they pile up the logs, lumber, trees and floating debris into all the essentials
of a dam, which lifts the top water behind it into a rapidly filling
pond. Such an obstruction is Bunker Island at Fairfield. The 1832 logs on the
Kennebec were several feet through, strong enough to jam everything into a hopeless
snarl between the abutment and pier of a bridge. When the water rises high
enough to force this natural dam to give way, a vast mass of driftwood pushes
down the river before a great wall of water which would continue a roaring torrent
until it reached the broader expanse of the bay below Ticonic Falls. Mr.
Paine describes what happened in 1832 in the following picturesque language:
“The high water marks of the 1832 flood at Winslow reveal the vastness of
the clog and clutter let loose at Fairfield on the midnight of May 21, when
everything there gave way and poured down like a great wood and water pudding,
shouldering both shores and riverbed, leaving logs on the hill fields, packing
solid the pond-hole near what is now the H & W mill, and getting ripped to
pieces in the college rip.”
What happened therefore to make 1832 the greatest of Kennebec floods for
more than a century was this. At sundown on May 21 the Kennebec was alive with
moving masses of logs, washed out bridges, buildings, uprooted trees, and all
sorts of floating wreckage. Bunker Island and the piers and abutments of the
Fairfield bridges halted this mass so that some of it formed a huge raft in the
naturally made pond. Soon after midnight this whole raft let loose down the
river.
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“Therefore”, says Mr. Paine, “the ’32 flood, from Fairfield down to
Ticonic Dam, was a series of log and rubbish ponds, the dams of logs now fixed,
now moving, keeping the water not only higher than any freely moving flood had
ever raised it, but higher than any Kennebec freshet had ever raised it before.”
Next week we shall tell you about Winslow’s famous freshet oak, about the
high water marks on the old covered bridge across the Sebasticook, and how high
the water used to come around Bassett’s store. Perhaps we can also find time
next week for mention of a few other big floods, especially those between 1891
and 1936. At any rate we shall have more high water next Sunday .evening.
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· LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
82nd Broadcast November 5, 1950
Last week we promised you more information about old-time floods on the
Kennebec. Here it is. Winslow’s famous freshet oak stood at a distance which
is described by T. o. Paine as 363 steps below Ticonic Bridge. The tree no
longer stands. In August, 1942 H. B. Pratt, Jr. and L. A. Fitch noted that
the tree had recently been cut down. The annular rings in the stump were so
clear, however, that Mr. Pratt could count 183 of them, showing that the tree
was standing from the earliest days of Winslow’s incorporation as a town. Logs
carried by freshets marked that tree at various heights. On one side of the
tree was a deep gash, shaped like a new moon. This was identified as work of
the great ice freshet of 1869. During a whole century no scar was higher, except
an older one, fully a foot above. That was the log-made scar of the champion
of all Kennebec freshets, the flood of 1832, which we described in detail
last week.
When Mr. Paine was making his investigation of Kennebec freshets, Charles
Getchell went with him to the freshet oak, which was then still standing. He
pointed to the highest scar and said: “The’ 32 freshet was up there. The ground
is about as it was then. Mr. William Redington said to my father, William Getchell,
who stood near by, ‘The freshet was there’, and where Father showed him,
Mr. Redington painted a red mark. I was then ten years old, and I could just
reach Mr. Redington’s mark.” Mr. Getchell also told Paine that in 1832 the oak
was round, straight and smooth, and that its great and highest scar was certainly
made by the great freshet of 1832.
How many of my listeners remember the old covered bridge across the Sebasticook
near Fort Halifax? In 1887 that bridge withstood a big freshet. The high
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water mark was above the floor of the bridge, so that no logs could pass under,
and a huge jam piled up in the river between the dam and the bridge. Mr. John
Runnels told Paine that the water stood at its height for three hours, and the
bridge would certainly have gone out under the battering of logs if the drop had
not come very rapidly and the logs went through with a rush.
In 1887 the railroad bridge across the Sebasticook was down stream from the
highway bridge, just as it is now. The railroad bridge formed a sort .of boom,
which obstructed the logs, except in a narrow channel close to the pier. A crew
of men worked frantically to keep the logs in that channel and save the bridge.
A large hemlock log, fourteen inches in diameter, lodged on the bottom chord at
the south end of the bridge. It took mighty high water to lodge a big log in that
place.
Plenty of my listeners remember Bassett’s store in Winslow. It was only nine
years ago, in 1941, that it was moved a few rods south to the position where it
now stands, below the gasoline station near the corner of Lithgow Street and the
Augusta Road. Josiah Bassett told Mr. Paine, “The freshet of 1887 landed big
logs up in the field back of my store. Water came up to within 20 feet of the
northeast corner of the building.” But Mr. Bassett said he had been told that the
1832 flood touched the floor of the store.
On lower ground, east of the Bassett store, once stood a cooper shop, in
which at the time of the 1832 flood was located the Winslow post office. This is
what Josiah Bassett wrote for Mr. Paine in 1891: “A high water mark of the 1832
freshet was cut on the old time post office partition in my father’s cooper shop
about 18 inches above the floor. There were two steps into the shop, one stone
step and the threshold on the sill. The shop was torn down by my brother Benjamin
many years ago, and its precious mark is now lost.”
Another old mark was on the Eaton store, at the head of what was known as
Eaton’s Landing. This was a two-story building with four-sided roof. Mr. Bassett
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when a small boy, had heard Solomon Eaton say that in the 1832 flood a canoe
entered his store and its bow shot over the counter.
Winslow Simpson told Mr. Paine his recollections of the freshet of 1869.
Just as in 1832, said Mr. Paine, a long, heavy, northeast wind blew the water
out of Moosehead Lake. That accounted for the tremendous swell of water which
Mr. Paine saw cover the intervales belonging to his father, Frederic Paine and
their neighbor, Nelson Dingley_ “The wind would pack and pile the river, and
get up a great, surging body full of all kinds of trash. Old pig pens, old
mills on the river, all clustered together, were crowded in among the logs. Once
I saw a load of lumber on a cart with a dog sitting on top of it, all going madly
down the river.”
One amazing feature of the ’32 freshet concerned a flock of sheep. They
grazed on the lower end of the flat just above the Pond Hole, near where the H &
W Mill now stands. They slept under a flat boat turned bottom up. That flock of
sheep, without leaving the flat, lived through the flood.
Fortunately Mr. Paine put into the record an explanation of the phrase “Pond
Hole”. He wrote: “It is important to know that the word ‘hole’ often meant a very
bad place. This meaning comes from the use of the term in Ezekiel, Chapter 8: ‘He
brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, I beheld a hole. Then he
said to me, Son of Man, go in and see the wicked abominations that they do here. •
I found my walk up through the Pond Hole a difficult one. The hole was a gully or
ravine, cluttered, clogged and tangled, full of trees, rocks, bushes, and all sorts
of trash — a very hole of a place. II
It was Winslow Simpson who assured Mr. Paine that the river rose 26 feet in
less than 12 hours in the great freshet of 1832. Mr. Simpson’ s father, who lived
to be 104 years old, used to keep a record of all freshets by marks on a cedar tree
at the foot of Simpson’s Landing. A larg~ limb shot out horizontally from the main
trunk. No freshet recorded by the elder Simpson quite reached that limb, except
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the tremendous flood of 1832. The mark which Simpson placed to show how far up
the tree the water then came was well above the limb. On May 23, 1832, the day
after the flood was at its height, measurements taken from that mark showed a
rise of 26 feet in the flood waters. Long before the elder Simpson’s death, the
cedar was cut down and its valuable record of flood marks was lost.
Mr. Paine felt that stories about the 1832 freshet had been somewhat exaggerated.
He collected evidence to show that, while it was probably the highest, the
1832 flood did not rise much higher than many other freshets between 1761 and
1891. Mr. Paine wrote: “In Nathaniel Dingley’s front yard, and between the Winslow
post office and the railroad bridge, I can stand and, on my own body, mark
off with considerable accuracy, all the freshets since 1761. No freshet can I
call great unless it wets my feet, as I stand inside Mr. Dingley’s gate. Some
freshets in the ’30’s and 140lS would then come to my knees, the great flood of
’32 coming only a little higher, not more than half way to my hips. When I was a
boy, I used to be disgusted with a freshet that was even a few inches lower than
the last.”
Evidence that the freshet of 1936 was higher than even the big flood of 1832
comes to me in the form of a photograph, looking west down Lithgow Street past the
Bassett house. The whole area is completely flooded. No street can be seen at
all. The water covers almost up to the sill of the northeast window of the first
floor. Now Mr. Paine’s little book quotes Josiah Bassett as saying that no flood
had ever cov.ered the floor of that old house — then called the Eaton house — but
that the 1832 flood came to the under side of the floor beams. The 1936 waters
came higher than that.
We shall welcome anything more our listeners can tell us about Kennebec
freshets, especially any facts or measurements that relate the flood of 1832 to
the better remembered flood of 1936.
*****
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When I talked about the Coolidge murder case, little did I think that any
property which once belonged to the murderer was still in existence. But I now
have in my custody what are declared to be the saddle bags used by Dr. Valorus
P. Coolidge when he was practicing in Waterville. These saddle bags came, some
fifty years ago, into the possession of a Mr. Merrill of Fairfield, and were by
him passed on to another person, whose name I am not at liberty to mention.
Mr. Merrill’s nephew, Judge William Burgess of Fairfield, says he knows nothing
about the history of these saddle bags, but he is joining me in the search
for proof that they actually belonged to the murderer, Coolidge. We shall let you
know what we discover.
*****
When the consuming public got jittery after the Korean War started and proceeded
to raid the stores for certain commodities, the story goes that a certain
aged lady, who has long lived alone, ordered from her grocer 25 pounds of coffee
and a hundred pounds of sugar. “Why, Aunt Mary”, said the grocer, “what can you
possibly want with so much coffee and sugar?” “Young man”, said Aunt Mary, “don’t
you know there’s a war on? I’m going to build up my inventories before a lot of
greedy people start hoarding.”
Not long ago Ben Fairless, the distinguished head of U. S. Steel, told a gathering
in Philadelphia that even in the heavy industries and the building trades
there are unfortunately too many Aunt Marys. That, said Mr. Fairless, is the only
way one can explain why today our nation is using 100 million tons of steel to
produce a smaller quantity of goods than it manufactured out of only 88 million
tons seven years ago.
But Mr. Fairless made it equally plain that hidden inventories do not alone
explain our shortage of steel, nor do war demands of the government complete the
explanation. He points to the undeniable fact that strikes have cost the American
people 29 million tons of steel production since VJ-Day in 1945. Now right here
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in Waterville we are getting first-hand knowledge of What a construction strike
can mean.
Mr. Fairless made no accusations. He refused to place the blame on anyone.
He said, “I believe that any man who, in this critical hour,. impugns the motives
or the patriotism of any group of Americans, is playing the Kremlin’s dirty game.”
Mr. Fairless went on to say: “Some men tell us that those strikes occurred
because management was stubborn and unyielding. Others say that labor was willful
and headstrong. As an interested party, I am not qualified to judge which is
right. But of one thing I am sure. If the patriotic men of steel — the men who
make it and the men who manage it — are fully determined to put America’s security
above all else, any problem they ever face can be settled peaceably, with
patience, forbearance arid reason.”
These are hopeful words in a critical time.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
83rd Broadcast November 12, 1950
Faith — the sUbstance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen faith is reputed to be not such a common thing today as once it was.
Whether that is true or not, it is worthy of note that there is taking place
in waterville right now a tribute to a man of unrelenting faith. The citizens’
committee in charge of the local campaign to complete the ~oving of Colby College
to its Mayflower Hill site is making that campaign a personal tribute to
Franklin W. Johnson.
Frank Johnson describes himself as an unrepentent optimist. He is more
than that; he is a man of deep, persistent faith. The optimist may sometimes
be like the postman on the old Jack Benny program, who used to reiterate in
mournful tones, “Keep smiling”. But the man of faith knows there are plenty of
times when he can’t smile, when optimism is not enough, when even grim determination
and downright hard work seem fruitless. It is then that persistent,
abiding faith sees its most effective hour. Without it defeat is sure.
Frank Johnson means a lot to waterville besides giving it the new Colby.
Nearly half a century ago he was principal of Coburn, and he has maintained
active interest in that fine old school through all the years. Only a few days
ago he attended a meeting of the school’s executive committee and helped lay
plans for Coburn’s 1951 summer school and the ensuing school year.
He has had a prominent part in many community enterprises: the Boy Scouts,
the Boys’ Club, the YMCA, the Thayer Hospital. He has probably served actively
and ardently on the boards of more educational, religious and charitable institutions
than has any other citizen of Waterville.
He was the first president of the Maine Teachers Association today the
most powerful educational group in the state. He is a life member of the National
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Educational Association. Most of you know Frank Johnson as a planner of
buildings and a raiser of funds, and he is that indeed. But I don’t want you
to forget that he is also a teacher — one of Maine’s really great teachers.
And it is because he is a great teacher that he would never for a moment relinquish
his determination and zeal for the new Colby. That beautiful site,
those fine buildings, the increased endowment are all for one purpose — that
boys and girls for generations to come may have the right kind of log for future
Mark Hopkinses to sit on.
*****
I want to congratulate the people of Getchell’s Corner on the restoration
of the village church. Perhaps some of my listeners Who do not live in Vassalboro
fail to recognize the name Getchell’s Corner. Well, that is What some of
us have known only as Vassalboro Village, and in fact its post office name has
long been Vassalboro. It is the original Vassalboro settlement on the banks of
the Kennebec, between Winslow and Augusta, as distinguished from the later settlements
of North and East Vassalboro in the same town.
The village church has long been falling into decay, and services in it became
less and less frequent. A group of citizens decided that the community
must not be without religious services. They have repaired th~ building, getting
generous support not only from local people, but from many former residents now
far away. And on the last Sunday in October, two weeks ago, they made fitting
celebration of their success. More than two hundred people crowded into the little
chapel to worship under the leadership of a man Who had been their minister
thirty years ago. Rev. Arthur MacDougal, the noted fisherman pastor at Bingham,
came back to Vassalboro for this occasion. In simple, appealing words he talked
to them about the love of God, which, working through the lives of devoted people,
assured just such results as the restoration of the chapel and the continuance of
worship in the village.
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If you think religious interest is dead, that the church has no message for
our modern day, you should have been, as I was, at Vassalboro on the evening of
October 29.
*****
Our elder statesman, Hon. Harvey Eaton, quite rightly called me to task for
not mentioning the pumpkin freshet on last week’s broadcast. Now the truth is I
had heard of the pumpkin freshet but could not date it. My recorded information
did not say which one of the many fall freshets was given that name.
Mr. Eaton assures me it was the fall freshet of 1869. He remembers it well
because he was 7 years old at the time. The waters, not only of the Kennebec,
but also of the Sandy River and the Carrabassett, rose suddenly to freshet height
that autumn, while the pumpkins still lay unharvested in the fields. The waters
swept through many a corn field, ripped the pumpkins from the vines, and sent
them tossing down the swollen streams. Hence the name pumpkin freshet.
*****
It seems that when I mentioned my possession of the saddle bags belonging to
the murderer Coolidge, I had nothing to brag about. For in the home of Howard
Simpson of Winslow is the very desk used by Coolidge in the office Where the
murder took place. That desk stood in the second floor room over Shorey’s Tailor
Shop at No. 27 Main Street on the evening when Ed Mathews drank the brandy
containing the fatal dose of prussic acid. At that same desk the next mo:r::ning
young Flint, Coolidge’s apprentice, whose testimony later convicted the doctor,
saw Coolidge writing the item that he had loaned Mathews $200 the previous evening.
For nearly a century the desk has now been in the possession of the Simpson
family.
*****
Did you know that Vassalboro once had a newspaper?
tell you about it.
*****
Next week I intend to
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More than a year has passed since I last saw one of those weekly newspapers
from rural Scotland, and I feared I was not going to see any more of them. But
a few days ago my friend John Burgess again handed me three issues of the good,
old Peebleshire News for August 11, 18 and 25 of this year.
It is evident that the Peebleshire folk, good Scots that they are, don’t
like the ways of the Labor government of Britain. They are especially irked by
the delay, red tape, and non-performance that follow the fine promises from
London.
It seems Peebles folk have long been promised a new bridge over the Tweed.
The government hemmed and hawed about the national share in this project. So a
native of Peebles, now resident in South Africa, came forward with an offer of
five thousand pounds toward the cost of the structure. Then the government wanted
to know whether the bridge would be used primarily for business or pleasure, and
decided that it ranked a low priority on steel. Finally London said they would
allow a pre-stressed concrete bridge, but it would cost 20% more than steel and
the town would have to pay the difference. Peebles had been promised the bridge
to be completed in 1949. In August, 1950 the editor of the News was still calling
the government to task for its continuous hedging. The editor commented ruefully,
“We still hope the bridge will be built while the present generation is still
alive.”
We’ve been talking about many old things on this program — things that happened
a hundred, or, as in the building of Fort Halifax, even two hundred years
ago. The events we’ve talked about — the Coolidge murder trial, the founding of
Ten Lots, the incorporation of Winslow — seem a long; long time ago. But they
were recent compared with something that made contemporary news in that Scottish
newspaper last August.
At Broughton, near Peebles — and Peebles, by the way, is just about as far
from Edinborough as Waterville is from Augusta — at nearby Broughton restoration
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has just been completed of a building that dates back not 100 or 200 years, but
1,400 years.
The restored building is called a cell, for it was first used as the home
of a hermit monk of the fifth century — a time when very few Christians had
come to Scotland. It is a small structure, 14 by 8i feet and 8 feet high. It had
of course fallen into ruin with the years. In the fifteenth century, when its
walls were already a thousand years old, it was made part of a Norman church. By
the time of the Reformation in 1560 this church was already badly in need of repair.
In 1805 it was abandoned entirely. So when Scottish antiquarians carefully
examined the ruins and dug down to the original foundations, they found one
end of the building much older than anyone had suspected. Experts identified it
as a monk’s cell of the fifth century, and it has now been carefully restored.
The editor of the Peebleshire News is a good friend of the United States. In
all three of those August issu.es he was carrying on a hot debate with one John
MacKay. MacKay began it by writing to the editor, protesting against the united
Kingdom’s expenditures for armament and defense. When he got on the subject of
the United States, MacKay really let loose. He wrote: “Why is this country hitched
to Wall Street, that great American institution of money-lenders and war-mongers?
Are the youths of Scotland to be sacrificed for American dollars? America seeks
world domination, and our government is prepared to help.”
The editor replied rather mildly by saying: “Mr. MacKay deplores aggression,
but he shuts his eyes totally and completely to the major cause, not the American
dollar but the attack on South Korea by North Korea. Mr. MacKay is perfectly aware
Which is the mightiest armed force in the world today, and until that country will
cooperate, we must keep our powder dry.”
MacKay came back the next week with more than a column of print, revealing
at last What he had had in mind all the time: –“HOW can Russia be looked upon as
the enemy prepared for war against this or any other nation?” That question was
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the burden of his song. “The North Korean Army”, he wrote, “crossed the border
in self defense, because the South Koreans were all ready to cross in the other
direction. ”
When ~tr. MacKay had thus revealed himself as a Scottish spokesman for the
Kremlin, the Peebleshire editor felt called upon to speak more sharply than he
had done the week before. He wrote: “Mr. MacKay indulges liberally in quotations
from the pro-Soviet press. That does not make the quotations true. Take Mr.
MacKay’s own closing statement, ‘The enemy of mankind is not Soviet Russia but
American ±mperialism’. Any person similarly minded could quote that statement;
thousands even might quote it. But the statement would still remain just what it
is, an unsupported opinion, the invention of Mr. MacKay.”
It is heartening to all of us, and especially to the many loyal Americans of
Scotch ancestry in this vicinity, to know that across the seas by the banks of
the River Tweed in bonnie Scotland, are men who can still rise to the defense of
America when she is scurrilously attacked.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
84th Broadcast November 19, 1950
The present campaign is by no means the first time that the citizens of
waterville have rallied to the needs of their college. For 135 years the people
of this community have rightly considered the college theirs, although legally
it is a privately operated institution.
The charter granted to the Maine Literary and Theological Institution by
the Massachusetts Legislature in 1813 did not provide for locating the college
in Waterville. On the contrary, the land allotted for the new institution was
in Township No.3, fifteen miles above Bangor on the Penobscot River. That site,
then far out in the wilderness, was obviously so unsuitable that, in 1816, the
trustees of the as yet unbuilt college obtained the right to locate and establish
their buildings in any town within the limits of Kennebec or Somerset Counties.
Three towns actively competed for the new college — Farmington, Bloomfield
and Waterville. Does Farmington surprise you? It need not, because there was
then no Franklin County. Bloomfield was, of course, the old name of Skowhegan.
Credit for bringing the college to Waterville has long been given chiefly to
Timothy Boutelle, and it was indeed he who collected the subscriptions and issued
receipts for them. But it seems reasonably clear that the man who gave the movement
its start was Dr. Obadiah Williams. If they could have been contemporaries,
Obadiah Williams and Franklin Johnson would have made a great team. Both men of
vision and foresight, both devoted to the welfare of the community, both undaunted
by adversity, both such optimists that they believed the impossible only takes a
little longer than the difficult; one of them planned for a college in Waterville,
the other made the little, struggling institution a college with a new site and a
national reputation.
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You will perhaps recall an earlier broadcast in which I told how Obadiah
Williams gave to the town the site of the City Hall and its park. It was on
that site that the first meeting house on this side of the river was erected
the building that was to serve nearly a century and a half successively as a
church, town house and armory. Dr. Williams was by all odds Waterville’ s lea’:’
ding citizen until his death in 1799, fourteen years before the college trustees
got their charter.
Born in Antrim, New Hampshire in 1752 young Williams had participated in the
battle of Bunker Hill, and afterwards served as surgeon in General Stark’s regiment
throughout the Revolution. The first Maine town to benefit by his practice
was Sidney, where he stayed until 1792. He then came to Waterville, married a
Waterville qirl and became the father of five boys and two girls. He built the
first frame house in Waterville.
Such was the good physician who in 1788 wrote to Dr. Whittaker of Canaan
about his plans for an advanced educational institution in Winslow, for not until
fourteen years later did Waterville become a separate town.
When in 1816 a committee of the trustees reported in favor of Bloomfield,
Waterville citizens remembered how hard Obadiah Williams had worked to interest
people in a college, and they determined not to be unmindful of his memory. They
persuaded the trustees to locate the institution in Waterville provided the people
of the town would raise a suitable sum of money. Over $2,000 was subscribed,
but in 1816, just as today, it is easier to get pledges than to collect them.
Nine men came forward and guaranteed the subscriptions, some of which were in
amounts as small as fifty cents. Two of those nine men were Waterville’s leading
citizens of the time, Nathaniel Gilman and Timothy BOutelle.
Believe me, the men Who·· were determined to have the college in Waterville
were glad to get those fifty cent subscriptions. And it is just the same today.
No one need refuse to give to a worthy community cause for fear that a small gift
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does not help or will not be appreciated. It is the accumulation of many small
gifts that brings success to·’ every such enterprise. What a thrill those small
givers of 1816 must have had when they talked about their college.
*****
I haven’t forgotten that last week I promised to tell you about Vassalboro’s
newspaper. It was a very interesting sheet and one of its editors was a woman
very well known to many of you who are listening tonight.
In March, 1886 there appeared in Vassalboro Volume I, Number 1 of the Clarion,
published by S. A. and N. C. Burle~gh. The first named editor was Samuel
Appleton BurleIDgh, who about eight years later would graduate from Colby College.
In 1886 he was only fifteen years old and his associate editor, N. C., was his
even younger sister, Nettie Burleigh.
That first issue of the Clarion was a tiny, four-page sheet, 6 by 5! inches.
The enterprise of the young editors was shown, however, in their publication of
three display ads; one announcing that Lizzie Taylor, fashionable dressmaker,
made cutting and fitting a specialty at North Fairfield; another that the Lang
Farm at Vassalboro had Plymouth Rocks for sale, also eggs for setting; and the
third ad stated that Miss Mary Morrison of Vassalboro had a good, second-hand
Davis Machine for sale. There was space for a fourth ad, but the young editors
evidently failed to sell it, for they printed therein “This space is reserved
·for our patrons”.
Every proprietor of a new paper in those days took pains to announce his
plans and policy in the first issue, and these youngsters were no exception.
This is what the first column of page one announced:
“To our patrons: With this our first issue we launch our little bark upon
the boundless sea of literature, trusting in the charity of our fellow voyagers
to overlook anything that resembles incompetency and to encourage our labors so
far as they meet with approval. OUr object is the dissemination of truth and
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temperance, and the advancement of scientific and practical knowledge among our
fellow men.”
The Burleigh children announced their advertising rates as 10 cents an inch,
45 cents a column, 85 cents a page. They proposed to publish the paper monthly.
The only local news in that first issue concerned the opening of the spring term
at Oak Grove and an entertainment by the ladies of the Congregational Society.
Now it is not unusual for children to start a paper, especially if someone
gives them a printing press, but it is not so usual for such a paper to continue
publication. I suppose most of the Burleigh neighbors expected Sam and Nettie
soon to tire of the press in the upstairs room of the house. How surprised folks
must have been to see that little paper not only keep on month after month, but
increase in size and actually achieve a circulation of more than a thousand
copies. By June, 1888 its crude, childish printing had disappeared, and a neat
four-pager, ten by eight inches, three columns to a page, heralded Volume 3, No.
1 of the Clarion.
The ads were now numerous. Hall and Meader, with stores both at Vassalboro
and North Vassalboro, carried the biggest ad — two columns of four inches. Their
ad ends with this interesting postscript: “We shall cut prices on fertilizers,
if other firms do”. Mrs. H. C. Minot of Belgrade evidently did a good business
in bees and honey, but she also had a sideline, for in a separate ad she announced
the Novelty Slate Pencil Sharpener at 7 cents, two for 12 cents. The original
subscription rate of the Clarion had been 20 cents a year. Success had now permitted
an increase to 30 cents a year.
There were two full columns of locals in that issue of June, 1888, one of
which announced that Mr. Will Yates had again sailed for Africa, where he would
spend the summer. First strawberries of the season were on the market at 16
cents a quart. In fact a box on page 3 is headed “Vassalboro Market, Retail Prices
CUrrent”, followed by “Potatoes, $1.00 a barrel; flour, $5.75 a barrel; corn,
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80 cents a bushel; eggs, 14 cents a dozen; butter, 20 cents a pound; dry hard
wood, $5.00 a cord; soft wood, $3.75 a cord.”
In 1888 the Burleigh brother and sister were eager to get news from surrounding
towns. They published an ad of their own, which reads:
“Wanted — correspondents in different parts of Vassalboro, China, Winslow
and Sidney, to send US news items. We will furnish writing material and stamps,
and will send the Clarion free.”
So, on through 1889, 1890 and most of 1891 the Clarion continued its monthly
peal. By that time Sam Burleigh was in college, and he launched a more ambitious
publication. On September 1, 1891 appeared’Vol. 1, No.1 of the Kennebec Valley
News, published at Vassalboro. Evidently Sam Burleigh had not thought of the
Clarion as a newspaper, but rather as a monthly periodical of literature, for his
announcement of the Valley News reads: “At last our dreams are realized and Vassalboro
has a newspaper. Here we are! Another literary infant thrust upon the
mercies of a cold world. We don’t propose to pander to the whims of anyone, be
they male or female, saint or sinner, prohibitionist, Democrat or Republican. We
shall try to help warm this cold world by turning into it the gulf stream of
charity and benevolence.”
The Valley News was no tiny monthly; it was a full-sized, four page weekly,
published every Tuesday. Evidently Sam Burleigh had good connections in Waterville,
for his first issue was full of Waterville ads. Sam Preble or rather
Preble and Jordan — offered life size crayon portraits at $6.00; Harriman Brothers
called attention to their fine collection of jewelry; S. A. Estes announced
that his store in the Plaisted Block was the place to buy boots, shoes and rubbers;
but on the same page the Loud Brothers printed a bigger ad, saying “Look here!
Why don’t you buy your boots and shoes at Louds?” Hanson, Webber and Dunham
wanted Vassalboro readers to try the new Royal Atlantic cooking range; F. A.
Robbins on Silver street wanted the Vassalboro folks to bring their furniture to
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him for upholstering. Dolloff and Dunham at 40 Main Street offered men’s,
boy’s and children’s suits, odd pants and overcoats at greatly reduced prices
to close them out and make room for fall goods. H. B. Tucker and Co. asked:
“Did you ever know that there is a drug store in Arnold Block, waterville?
When you are sick do you have Mr. Tucker and Mr. Larrabee, both registered
apothecaries, put up your medicine? If not, you had better begin right away, and
get fair prices on all goods, not be robbed on goods you know little about.”
By 1888 the safety bicycle, as distinguished from its big front-wheeled
predecessor, had come to Central Maine. Sam Burleigh himself was agent for the
Columbia, which his pictured ad announced as the best wheel for business or
pleasure. He also offered two second-hand Columbias for sale cheap_
Such is a part, and only a part, of the fascinating story of Vassalboro’s
newspaper started by two very enterprising children 64 years ago.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
85th Broadcast November 26, 1950
One of the commonest things for all of us is pride in our own state. Let’s
begin tonight’s broadcast with a few facts about Maine. Do you know what is
Maine’s largest crop? It is trees. Forest trees occupy 84 per cent of the
land area of our state. From the days when they produced the best masts for
His Majesty’s ships down to the present day of sawed lumber and pulp wood, they
have been Maine’s abounding source of wealth.
Did you know that nearly seven per cent of Maine’S total area consists of
lakes, ponds and rivers? To say nothing of the waters that comprise our incomparable
ocean front, we are near the top of all the states in respect to inland
waters. That’s why we’re the great Vacationland of the nation.
Is Maine doing anything to preserve its wild life? Indeed, yes. OUr state
has more than 50 game preserves and sanctuaries, varying from small, fenced
areas to the 141,000 acres of Baxter State Park. And in Acadia’s 28,000 acres
we have one of the few national parks in the East.
When one fishes a closed brook or kills an animal in a game preserve, he is
of course breaking the law. But he is doing something else quite as reprehensible.
He is stealing the property of every man, woman and child in Maine. In
this country our common law is based not only on British precedent, but also on
a fundamental document, the Magna Carta, which holds that all fish and game in
their natural habitat are public property, not the possession of whomever happens
to own the land.
Every loyal citizen of Maine should take active interest in the persistent
attempts by state authorities to conserve our natural resources. Reforestation,
fire protection, game preserves, closed streams, fish hatcheries and fish stocking
are all important. It is a remarkable fact that, although Maine saw the earliest
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settlements on the Atlantic seaboard, save only that at st. Augustine, our
state remains one of the few in the whole nation with natural resources that
can not only be maintained, but can actually be increased if all of us citizens
will get behind the plans for conservation.
*****
throUgh the courtesy of Mrs. Christine Hume of Fairfield I have had the
privilege of examining both the account book and the diary kept by her greatgrandfather,
William Bryant, a prominent citizen of Fairfield in the first half
of the nineteenth century.
This man, who meant so much to our sister town, was born in Sandwich, Mass.
in 1781. He died in 1867 at the age of 86 at the home of his daughter, Susan
Totman, on Bunker’S Island. He came to Fairfield in 1817 and lived in the Emery
House at Nye’ sCorner, just south of the old cemetery. Nye’ sCorner, as I am
sure many of you know, is where the road from Fairfield Center to Hinckley joins
the Fairfield-Skowhegan highway, just south of the present site of the Good Will
Homes and School.
William Bryant married Lydia Haley from Rhode Island. They had five children.
Mary, the oldest, born in 1810, married William Connor and was the mother of
Maine’s Governor, Selden Connor. Harriet, the second child, married into the
Drew family. Then came the twins, SUsan and Cyrus, born in 1818. Susan’s marriage
linked the Bryants with the Totmans, as her sister Mary’s had linked them
with the Connors, and the result was that her twin brother Cyrus was operating
the lumber interests of either Connors or Totmans most of his life. The fifth
child was Samuel. Every large family usually has one wanderer, a boy with
itChing feet who is determined to see the world and seek his fortune far from
home.
William Bryant’s diary has in it the makings of a complete novel. What a
story could be written around its varied and picturesque items. And not the least
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sparkling of those items concern young Samuel.
Up in the Moosehead region the Connors, Nyes and Totmans did a lot of
lumbering. One of those regions was called “the sapling”. On February 15,
1842 Mr. Bryant wrote in his diary an item that showed that young Sam, or, as
his father more often called him, Haley, had a mind of his own. Though he was
apparently starting out on the usual occupation of a Fairfield youth of 19, his
way of doing it caused the anxious father to write as follows:
“Samuel Haley started for the saplin with William Connor about 8 o’clock.
It growed cold most all day, and was a terrible tedious day to ride against the
wind. I fear ~at Haley got frost bitten, for he had not any outside coat except
a short jacket, because he could not be plagued with any.”
Evidently Samuel Haley did not like it on the sapling with William Connor’s
half dozen six-ox teams, for he was home again in three weeks, though the Connors
crew stayed in the woods until April.
Six years went by, with Samuel coming of age, working at odd jobs for the
Connors and the Totmans, occasionally helping with a neighbor’s haying, and doing
what he had to do on the home farm. Although the father makes no comment about
it, we can read between the lines and picture hard-working, home-loving Cyrus
getting more and more put out with his younger brother, who was daily itching to
set off for distant parts.
On October 22, 1848 father William wrote in the diary: “Samuel left home
this evening to take the five o’clock boat at Waterville. He is going to the
State of pennsylvania with several young men, logging, running and sawing.”
Something went wrong, for on January 25, 1849 the diary recorded: “Samuel
returned from Pennsylvania.” Just that and nothing more. No hint as to why he
returned, or whether the fatted calf was killed, or how the elder brother greeted
him. But anyhow he was back home, with the itchiness apparently out of his feet,
ready to settle down on the Nye’s Corner farm.
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Remember this was in January of 1849. Something happened in that year to
stir the imagination and tickle the feet of every young man bitten by the bug
of wanderlust. Gold was discovered in California. On August 6, 1849 William
Bryant wrote in his diary: “We suppose that Randall Hall, Daniel Hall, John
Nye, Marquis Cayford, and John Hodgdon sailed this day from Bangor for California
in the ship.”
Why Samuel Bryant was not also in the party we do not know. Perhaps something
in the Pennsylvania experience made him reluctant to break away again so
soon. Perhaps an anxious mother persuaded him to stay •. The father’s diary tells
us nothing about it except by its silence. Sam’s name is not mentioned among
those who even planned to take ship from Bangor.
But on December 28, 1852 the father had something to record about young
Samuel Haley, who was then 29 years old. This is what we read in the diary:
“samuel left home this day to sail in the ship Baltimore from New York to Port
Phillip, Australia, in quest of gold. The following went with him: Bartlett Nye,
B. H. Brown, Rodney Wyman, Briggs Emery, George Holland, Edward Philbrook, and
Thomas Judkins.” On the margin of the same page, opposite the appropriate names,
Mr. Bryant later recorded that Wyman returned home in 1856, Briggs died in California,
and Holland died in Australia. Of his own son, Samuel Haley Bryant, not
another word.
The diary continues until the spring of 1867, a few weeks before Mr. Bryant’s
death. Yet among all the remaining entries the only mention of Samuel is a
touching reference to the dying mother calling for and embracing her son’s tintype
miniature.
Still preserved in the family is an old envelope addressed to Mr. Samuel H.
Bryant, Melbourne, Australia, care of Adams Express, to remain till called for.
It is postmarked Kendalls Mills, January 5. Unfortunately the postmarks of that
time seldom included the year, and it is missing in this case. In the upper right-
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hand corner is written in numerals “45”, which is apparently the postage.
Whether this envelope actually reached Samuel in Australia and somehow
found its later way back to Fairfield, whether it was returned unclaimed, or
whether it never went to Australia, we do not know. The name and address are in
the father’s handwriting, but the words “care of Adams Express” have been
written in by another hand.
Did Samuel Bryant ever return home? Does anyone of the many surviving
Fairfield relatives know the answer?
*****
We have said that William Bryant was a prominent man. In January I 1889,
twenty-two years after his death, the Fairfield Journal said the following
about him: “William Bryant, Esq. was a very prominent citizen at Nye’ sCorner
for many years. He kept a hat store and manufactured hats. He was chairman of the
Selectmen, also a very correct accountant. It was said of him that he could tell
the financial standing of the town any day of the week and any hour of the day.”
In 1865, two years before he died, Mr. Bryant recorded in the diary a statement
of his public offices. He wrote: “I attended the General Court (that is,
the legislature) in Boston two sessions, 1819 and 1820. I was chosen to the
Maine Legislature in 1826 and 1828. I was elected selectman of Fairfield nineteen
times.”
*****
Historians like to cull the old diaries for record of great events. They
are usually disappointed. These Maine farmers and traders were not unmindful of
national affairs. Some of them were indeed deeply immersed in politics. But
they were first of all intent on getting an honest living and getting their children
comfortably started on useful, worthy lives. They were folks who very
strictly minded their own business, and minded it well.
Knowing this trait of the rural diarists, we did not expect to find mention
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of many national events in William Bryant’s book. But one thing did surprise
us, and it has surprised us in the case of at least three other diaries that
cover the years of the Civil War. From 1861 to 1865 you can read these diaries
including William Bryant’s and scarcely know that a war was going on. Yet many
young men of Fairfield served in that war. Somehow it wasn’t so important as
the weather, the crops, the winter lumbering, and the family happenings.
Mr. Bryant makes just two references to the war. The first is when he notes
in 1862 that Selden Connor has left for Fort Monroe. The other is dated May 10,
1865 and reads: “General Lee, the rebel, surrendered his army this day.”
In contrast to this brevity and silence about the great war between North
and South, Mr. Bryant wrote on March 4, 1857: “This day Mr. Buchanan enters upon
the duties of his office as President of the United States. We shall soon know
what to depend upon respecting his stand between freedom and slavery. We cannot
remain muCh longer as we are now. It belongs to the free inhabitants to choose
whom they will serve, Freedom or Slavery. I say no union with slavery as things
go at this time. No more slave states north or south hereafter. What will Buchanan
do about the great question? Let us wait and see.”
Eighteen years earlier, in 1839, Mr. Bryant’s pen was stirred into action
about another incident which hit Maine muCh closer than did the opening weeks of
the Civil War. Let us have that 1839 occurrence in Bryant’s own words:
“February 23, 1839. All is bustle here respecting the northeastern boundary.
Two hundred men started about a fortnight ago to drive off trespassers. The
Governor informs us that other militia to the amount of 1,500 have marched for
the boundary line, and he has called for a draft of 8,000 more. My wife is fixing
Cyrus’ stockings and washing them with tears. But Cyrus has returned home and
got clear of the draft this time.”
This reference is, of course, to the Aroostook War, a bloodless but exciting
matter while it lasted. The Hay-Ashburton Treaty settled the boundary peaceably
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and it has remained unfortified by either Canada or the United States to this
day.
There is much more of interest in William Bryant’s diary, and a lot to be
gleaned from his account book — the only accounts of an old-t~e hatter that I
have ever seen.
of it next week.
But that’s all we have time for today, so you shall have more
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
86th Broadcast December 3, 1950
One of the most penetrating commentators on the life of our times is Ed
Chase of Portland. He ought to have a wider audience than the news letter sent
out weekly to the customers of his securities business.
Even the most elementary student of biology knows about mutation, the
changes which take place to bring varied forms of plant and animal life. Let
me pass on to you what Ed Chase said recently about differentiation of species.
“It has long been an American Article of Faith that athletic games exercise
a beneficient influence in the formation of character. Tangible evidence of this
faith will be found in the proportion of the educational plant facilities which
is devoted to athletics. The weight of this evidence, as indicated by expenditure
on athletic construction and instruction, seems to justify the belief that
of all the competitive sports, football must do the most for character.
But until quite recently the conviction that a superior type emerges from
the gridiron environment seemed likely to remain in the domain of faith. No one
had ever proved beyond question that football players are destined to become
different from other men in particular and desirable traits.
Now we have the two-platoon system. Each school has one first team specializing
on offense and another trained for defense. If there is anything in the
theory that football produces a type, then there should be a perceptible variation
in species, when we vary the environment. Ten years from now, as we observe
these men in after-life, we may expect to find not only differing physical traits,
as in the use of hands, but also differing mental attitudes, as between a disposition
to confidence on the one side and suspicion on the other. Notably, their
conceptions of progress should be quite different. Surely then it will be hardly
necessary for the psych~atrist to ask: ‘Which team were you on?’
‘2-216
“But if it should turn out that there isn’t any difference, we might have
to review our educational policy. We might even shift the competitive emphasis
from the gridiron to the classroom. What a disaster that would be, or wouldn’t
it?”
*****
While that journal of Fairfield’s prominent citizen of the mid-nineteenth
century is still fresh in mind, let’s have a bit more of it.
Now William Bryant was first of all a farmer and he gave much attention to
the crops he raised on the big farm at Nye’ sCorner. As you have heard me say
before on other occasions, the principal crop of Central Maine at that time was
corn. But large quantities of wheat and oats were also raised. As now, .the hay
crop was important, but for a different reason. Now it is to feed the big herds
of milk cattle, for whose product the Hood or Whiting collectors come to the
farmer’s very barn door. In William Bryant’s day comparatively little of the hay
was used to feed milk cows. The great bulk of it went to the horses and oxen. The
oxen far outnumbered the horses. We noted last week that it was not unusual for
Wi11iam Connor to start out for the sapling with six teams of six yokes each. That
means 72 oxen for just one lumbering operation.
So year after year William Bryant notes in his diary his attention to hay,
wheat, oats and corn — especially corn.
It seems that Mrs. Bryant had some kind of formula for predicting the kind
of summer each year would bring. It was something like the modern predictions
based on Ground Hog Day which, I believe, is February 2nd. Mrs. Bryant’s fateful
day was January 25.
On January 25, 1843 Mr. Bryant wrote in his diary: “Clear, fair and cold.
According to my wife’s system we shall have a good corn season, notwithstanding
the Millerites are preaching that the world is to be destroyed in April.” That is
one of the few references I have ever seen in a private diary to the followers of
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the fantastic Miller, who predicted the end of the world for April, 1843. The
believers donned white clothes and assembled on roofs or heights of land to
await the end. Their disillusionment broke up the sect so that a generation
afterward few remembered the furor they so briefly caused.
But to get back to Mr. Bryant’s corn. What about the boom year his wife
had predicted? On May 19 he wrote: “stephen Nye and Joseph Hubbard finished
planting my corn this day. They dropped the seed directly on the hog manure
before they put on any earth, and if the corn comes up well I shall think I have
been too particular in planting corn. If they are right I have been wrong all my
life. But I think it will not come up. I have about determined to plant it over.”
On May 29 he had come to a decision, although he does not say whether it
was because the first planting showed no signs of breaking the soil. He merely
wrote: “We began to plant our corn over this day. I soaked the seed in strong,
wann pickle.”
Two weeks later on June 16 he noted that the corn had come up, but poorly.
“My corn”, he said, “has not looked so slim for a great number of years.”
On July 6 the corn was about 6 to 8 inches high. On the 19th it had begun
to spindle, but Mr. Bryant lamented, “Some of it stands almost still.” On August
4th he was very pessimistic, noting, “Corn almost eat up by wonns.” A week later
on August 10 he wrote dolefully, “Two-thirds of my corn has silked, the rest
spoiled by worms.”
When September was ushered in Mr. Bryant recorded: “I don’t think I have
got one ear of corn filled.” On september 26 he .wrote what seemed to be the sad
climax: “I have cut up for fodder the most of my corn.” But this was not the
end, for on October 20 there was held in William Bryant’s barn what he called
“the biggest huskin party I have ever had, with over a hundred bushels husked”.
Evidently his pessimism somewhat outran the· facts.
Having told you recently .about the freshet of 1832, .1 was interested in Mr.
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Bryant’s reference to that event. He wrote: “The winter of 1831-32 was the
coldest known for many years and continued to the 11th day of April. After a
warm spell it grew cold again on the 23rd. That morning my well was scum over
and manure froze in the barn. Planted some corn on May 11. On May 19 it began
to rain and rained powerfully through the 21st. On the 22nd was the highest
freshet ever known on the Kennebec.”
March of 1846 saw another freshet mentioned by Mr. Bryant. On March 27 he
wrote: “The river raises fast, and I think we shall have the highest freshet
since 1832. Now at 11 o’clock the water is over the Corner bridge. The ice is
dammed up below Noble’s ferry. II
Most of the bridges across principal rivers were then toll bridges. That the
toll keepers sometimes enlisted their relatives for a spell of duty is shown by
Mr. Bryant’s entry of November 16, 1848: “Thanksgiving Day. My wife spent the
day at Nahum Totman’s and attended at the toll house until I went there and took
my dinner. Now in the evening we are home alone.”
That touch “home alone” has a note of sadness. Samuel Haley had just departed
for Pennsylvania. Cyrus and his wife were with her people in Vassalboro. The
three girls were all married and in homes of their own. A lot of people know just
how William and Lydia Bryant felt at the end of that Thanksgiving Day a hundred
years ago.
Mr. Bryant did not fail to notice one of Waterville’s most eventful days.
On November 27, 1849 he recorded: “The cars arrived in waterville this day for
the first time. A great day for Waterville.” That, of course, was the coming of
the first railroad line, the Androscoggin and Kennebec, linking Waterville with
Lewiston — an event whose hundredth anniversary was appropriately mentioned by
the Waterville Sentinel a year ago, but otherwise went unnoticed and unsung. I
fear we waterville folks aren’t strong on anniversaries. What about the Hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of Waterville’s incorporation? Are any plans being made
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for that?
One small item in Mr. Bryant’s diary shows a future governor of Maine in
an embarassing situation. On February 27, 1845, according to Mr. Bryant, Greteon
Wells’ colt met with a fright, run into William Connor’s entry, and knocked down
his wife and son Selden.” It was probably one of the few times anybody or anything
knocked Selden Connor down, until a Civil War shell severed his foot.
The Connors then lived in the house now owned and occupied by Dr. William
Bovie, just off High Street in Fairfield. That house has one of the largest and
most spaciously arranged-brick ovens you will find anywhere in Central Maine.
Wages weren’t high in those days, but when one could work out for cash it
was decidedly welcome. Most work was in exchange for commodities, and long were
the credits extended on both sides. On April 25, 1842 Cyrus Bryant started for
the Dead Water in Vassalboro to work for Nahum and Ezra Totman at $14 a month. On
the same day the father recorded: “OWen Spalding began to work for me for 4
months at $6.50 per month. Cyrus was now his own man and could demand wages. Apparently
it was better to let him work away from home and hire a replacement at
less than half of Cyrus I earning wage.
Not often does one get a chance to determine from these old records how
early children worked for wages, but fortunately William Bryant kept a set of
accounts as well as a diary. In fact the diary begins at one end of the big book.
Then, turn the book upside down, and at the other end you find the beginning of
the accounts.
The first mention of a son’s wages is on June 11, 1832 when, we read, “Herman
Nye, to Cyrus planting one day — 25 cents.” Cyrus was then just 13 years
old. A year later an entry reads: “Charles Pishon. to Cyrus and my oxen to haul
lumber out of the river.” That was a real job for a 14 year old boy. In 1833
the father collected from Isaac Chase 50 cents for Cyrus 2 days haying. In 1834,
when Cyrus was 16, Mr. Bryant collected from Thomas Connor 25 cents for Cyrus
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hoeing corn one day.
When the younger brother Samuel was 14, in 1837, the father received from
William Connor $26.00 for Sam’s four months’ wages.
In our day it seems excessively harsh for a father to take and keep the
wages of his growing boys, but that was the universal custom a hundred years ago.
Every father controlled a son’s wages until the boy reached 21. There was nothing
harsh or unseemly about what every family recognized and practiced. When these
modern 75 cents an hour grammar school kids get their snow shoveler’s pay it takes
a mighty brave father to get any share of it.
As we noted last week, William Bryant lived through the Civil War. After his
wife died in 1858 he missed her greatly, and he himself was not nearly so active.
Yet much of the old pride remained. On January 5, 1861 he wrote: “I am 80 years
old this day. I have not lost a tooth nor had the toothache for over 12 years.
My hair is almost as black as when I was young. But I feel weak and not worth
InUch. II
As the years went by he felt himself growing weaker. “December 25, 1865,
Christmas. A fair day. I am very feeble. I was taken bleeding of the nose for
the third time in one week.” “December 27 I am failing.” “March 10, 1866 —
I fear I am failing and I think I shall not be here long.” “March 31 — I feel
I shall not write much more in this book.” But on his 86th birthday in 1867,
something of the old vigor reasserted itself for he then wrote: “I am 86 years
old this day. I am not smart, but I saw wood, sleep and eat well.”
Early in life Mr. Bryant became a staunch Universalist. The diary’s first
mention of that denomination, which was to become so prominent in Fairfield, was
on May 10, 1838: “Levi Barrett preached at the ferry school house the third
time. The first universal preacher at this place that almost all admire to hear.”
On December 18 of the same year Mr. Bryant and George Drew went to the meetinghouse
to hear the Universalist, Mr. Henry, preach, and the diarist recorded a
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cold time coming home. In 1842 the whole family attended a three day meeting
of Universalists at Canaan. On January 19, 1858 the diary tells us: “Universalist
levee at Bunker’s Hall. Was so crowded we had to. stand on our feet,
which was very tiresome.” One summer Susan was off to Vassalboro for a brief
visit and then on to Augusta for the Universalist convention. There is something,
therefore, peculiarly fitting about the last entry in William Bryant’s
diary. It is dated February 6, 1867 and consists of one short sentence: “I
can’t go to meeting this day.” Soon afterwards this great citizen of Fairfield
was stricken with paralysis and on June 15, at the home of his daughter Susan,
he died.
Memorial windows to William and Lydia Bryant, as well as those in memory
of Nahum and Susan Totman, were removed from the Fairfield Universalist Church
when that society dissolved, and were appropriately reset in the Methodist Church,
the oldest church edifice in Fairfield Village.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
87th Broadcast December 10, 1950
That economic philosopher of Portland, Maine, Ed Chase, whom I have more
than once quoted on this program, had something to say the other day about 2 plus
2. Everybody, says Mr. Chase, recognizes that 2 plus 2 equals four, and 2 plus 2
plus 2 equals six. But, says he, keep on writing 2 plus 2 plus 2 plus 2 on and
on to the point where the answer is no longer clear at a glance, and see how
gullible folks can be. Put down almost any number as the supposed total, and a
big majority of readers will never question it.
But, says Mr. Chase, there is always an intelligent minority which comprehends
and accepts the whole only as the sum of all its parts. In the existence
of that minority Mr. Chase sees hope of our national economic survival. It is
they who understand that the total resources of the United States is only equal
to the sum of the resources of all its subdivisions.
OUr listeners have long ago sensed that we are not in sympathy with a lot of
the claims for huge federal spending of money. We are not so stupid as not to realize
that some communities must have help, just as some individuals must be
aided, in our highly complex inter-dependent society. But we cannot go along with
the argument that the federal govermnent can easily afford to do for all the
states what no one state can afford to do for itself. Just examine that argument.
What else can it mean except, let the money come from the surplus by which the
whole of our national resources exceeds the sum of all the parts of our national
resources? There just isn’t any such excess.
*****
Many thrilling accounts have appeared in print about the great ice harvests
on the Kennebec. Some of them are almost poetic, such as the chapter in Robert
Coffin’s “The Kennebec” in the Rivers of America series.
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There has recently come to my attention a volume called “Picturesque Gardiner”,
an illustrated book about the industries, attractions and surroundings
of our neighbor city down the river. This book, loaned to me by James Wing of
the H & W Company, was published in Gardiner in 1896 and was part of the publicity
of the lively Gardiner Board of Trade.
The volume has some excellent pictures of the harvesting, storage and shipping
of Kennebec ice. There is a full-page scene of ice cutting in front of the
huge plant of the Knickerbocker Ice Company; pictures of the trim, fast, threemasted
and four-masted schooners that carried the ice to distant ports; a view
of the Cochran-oler plant with its capacity of 175,000 tons. Altogether there
are pictures of the ice houses and ships of six companies with total storage capacity
of 600,000 tons.
The first ice is said to have been shipped from the Kennebec in 1826. It was
cut in front of Gardiner and placed on board the brig Orion, which had been hauled
up at that river port for winter quarters. The next spring the owners took the
vessel along the coast, without selling the cargo until they got to Baltimore,
when the whole lot went for $700.
In 1869 the Gardiner publication announced: “Today the largest and most convenient
ice houses in the world line both banks of the river, with a total storage
of 1,500,000 tons. More than a third of this capacity is at Gardiner and Randolph.
The average harvest, compared with that first $700 cut in 1826, is now, 70 yep.rs
later, $2,000,000.
Gardiner pioneers in the ice business were Tudor, Tiffany, Page and Cheesman.
By 1896 outside interests had control, the largest being the Knickerbocker Company
of Philadelphia. The Morse Ice Company had already come in with small holdings,
but it was twenty years later when the Bath tycoon, Charles D. Morse, became
the ice king of America.
What would those men of 1896 think if they could see their river in winter
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today? Electric refrigeration has done to their ice what the internal combustion
engine has done to the horses that used to dot the river by hundreds when
the ice was being cut. Truly, other times, other ways.
*****
So many people have asked for a broadcast of the old ballad that celebrated
the murder of Edward Mathews by Dr. V. P. Coolidge, that I have decided to give
it to you tonight. No one knows Who wrote this ballad. It first appeared in the
form of a handbill of the ‘kind that, Mary Ellen Chase says, her Elu’e ‘!ill I parson
used to write, print and sell at hangings. It has been reprinted from time to
time in the newspapers during the last hundred years, but the original handbills
are rare.
I am fortunate enough to have seen and copied one of those original sheets,
and it is from that earliest text that I read the poem tonight. The handbill is
headed “The Waterville Tragedy! or Death of Edward Mathews by Valorus P. Coolidge.
Tune — Mary’s Dream.”
Indulgent friends and strangers too,
A thrilling tale I’ll tell to you;
‘Twill grieve your hearts the thing to hear,
And many an eye will drop a tear.
A mournful tragedy of late
A young man’s life did terminate;
The murderer I s hand has laid him low,
Which makes our hearts with grief o’erflow.
Poor Edward Mathews, where is he?
Sent headlong to eternity.
The mortal debt by him is paid,
And in his narrow bed is laid.
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No more will anguish seize his soul!
No more will poison fill his bowl!
No more will friendship clutch his throat,
And o’er his mangled body gloat.
Oh, v. P. Coolidge, how could you
So black a deed of murder do?
You, on your honor did pretend
To be his dearest earthly friend.
For weeks and months you laid your plan
To kill your friend and fellow man;
You thought the thing to safely do,
Take both his life and money too.
You knew to Brighton he had gone,
And watched each hour for his return;
The pay for cattle which he drove
You swore within yourself to have.
You failed in that, but did succeed
By promising a mortgage deed,
Of everything you here possessed,
So that he could in safety rest.
The money from the bank he drew,
And brought with faithfulness to you;
Not dreaming of your vile intent,
Alone into your office went.
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You said, “Dear Mathews, worthy friend,
Our friendship here shall never end,
A glass of brandy you must drink.
‘Twill do you good I surely think.”
He drank the liquor you had fixed,
With prussic acid amply mixed,
Then cried, “0 Lord, what can it be?
What poison have you given me?”
You grasped his throat and stopped his breath,
until your friend lay still in death;
Then with a hatchet bruised his head,
After he was entirely dead.
His money then you took away,
And hid his watch out in your sleigh;
Then called for your confederate
And all your doings did relate.
“I have a secret, Flint”, you said,
“And if by you I am betrayed,
The State will me for murder try
And on the gallows I must die.
“Poor unsuspecting murdered friend,
My earthly race must sh0rtly .end,
And I must stand before my God
And feel his mighty. chastening rod.
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“0, Edward Mathews, could you know
The scathing pangs I undergo,
You surely would look down from Heaven
And say, ‘Let Coolidge be forgiven’.
“I see thy murdered form displayed,
When night has cast its sable shade
Around my dark and lonesome cell.
Such horrid feelings none can tell.
“When sleep, that harbinger of rest,
Has spread its mantle o’er my breast,
My thoughts will wander back to thee
And see thee die in agony.
“0, youthful days forever past,
I thought thy joys would ever last;
If I had worlds, them would I give,
If I once more this life could live.
“But all in vain, the die is cast,
The prison walls will hold me fast
Till to the scaffold I am led,
To yield that life I’ve forfeited.
“Take warning now by me I pray.
Let right and justice guide your way;
May Heaven’s choice blessings to you flow
And save you from a murderer’ s woe. II
*****
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Brought up in a small town and in a small business, I have a strong
liking for the small, independent business man. But I cannot go a10ng with some
of the bureaucrats in Washington who condemn all big business simp1y because it
is big. To hear those fellows talk about mergers, you would .think that a merger
of companies was something sinister and evil. They talk continuously about how
the big corporation has swallowed up the little fellow.
I have no doubt there have been cases of the ruthless strang1ing of competition,
but for every such case there are numerous cases where mergers have
brought strength and new resources to all parties to the combination.
What is the United States, anyway? Is it not itself a merger of thirteen
original colonies into a federa1 union? Does anyone regret or now denounce
that merger? Why then are po1itical mergers good, but industrial mergers bad?
By what reasoning does a government whose motto is “E Pluribus Unum” (one out of
many) pass a law making the economic observance of that motto a crime? To abolish
mergers in order to protect competition is no more sensible than to burn
down the house in order to get rid of the rats.
*****
I don’t intend for a minute to 1et you forget that I was brought up in the
horse and buggy age. I am stil1 fond of horses, and I was delighted to see the
fo1lowing item in the September 29th issue of that good old Scotch newspaper,
the Peebleshire News: “Sandy, the horse which draws the milk-f1oat of the Cooperative
Society in Selkirk, has just returned to his normal milk round after
spending three weeks in Edinburgh, performing in the Tattoo whi<;ili was presented
nightly at the castle during the festival period. Sandy was one of four horses
chosen to pull the landau which carried Lord and Lady Montrose in the Installation
of the Governor tableau. Last year this horse was chosen for a pageant representing
“Transport through the Ages”, and this year Sandy came to the rescue
When the organizers could not find a grey horse elegant enough to fill the bill.
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Sandy fitted the part perfectly. Now he has returned to his milk round.”
That item, believe me, brought back fond memories — memories of my favorite
horse, Old Charlie, who like Sandy was a big grey of elegant appearance.
I have a picture of Old Charlie all dressed up and hitched to a decorated
grocery wagon, ready to take his proud place in the Bridgton Fourth of July
parade of 1906.
He was unbelievably smart, that Old Charlie. Not only would he back between
the shafts of a wagon without guidance — a lot of horses could do that
but he could do a regular stunt that I have never seen duplicated. Between my
father’s store and the next building was a space exactly ten feet wide. All
freight brought to the store was unloaded on a platform that jutted out from the
side of the store some thirty feet back from the street. Every time we hauled
freight from the narrow guage freight house to the store the team had to be
cautiously backed into that narrow space to the end of the platform.
At the risk of being accused of telling Baron Munchausen yarns, I seriously
declare that Old Charlie could and regularly did back the wagon up to that plattorm
without a hand on the reins. Many a time I have driven him up the steep
hill from the narrow guage yards, with a heavy load, turned him about to face
the street in front of the areaway, jumped off the team, thrown the reins over
his back, and said, “All right, Charlie, back her up.” And without touching a
wheel to either building, Charlie would back up true to the platform.
That ought to start some of you listeners with some of your own horse
stories. Let’s have them.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
88th Broadcast December 17, 1950
A few weeks ago I asked if anyone knew what became of Samuel J3ryant, the
wandering son of William Bryant, the Fairfield diarist. Apparently Samuel Bryant
died in Australia. At any rate Nahum Totman, who married Samuel’s sister, recorded
in a memoir of his own, written in 1898, that Samuel was heard from in
Australia as late as 1890. Mrs. Gladys Totman Everett of Hallowell assures me
that her mother corresponded with Samuel through many years, and she is certain
that he never returned to the States. When Nahum Totman heard from him in 1890,
Samuel would have been 67 years old, for he had been 29 when he left for Australia
in 1852. With the well known Bryant longevity he might have lived into the twentieth
century, but as yet I have not been informed of the date of his death.
*****
We have recently been dealing with account books’ and diaries. What are called
memoirs by common folk of 19th century Maine are not so common, and it is a real
find to get hold of a good one. Such was a sketch of his life written at the age
of 76 ‘by Asa Burnham, who for thirty years lived on and developed a farm in Winslow,
and to whom many of the Winslow Cushmans are related.Mr. Burnham wrote this
memoir on September 6, 1864.
Born in New Hampshire in 1787 the son of a Revolutionary soldier, Asa became
a resident of the District of Maine before he was two years old. The town was Parsonfield,
which Asa’ s memoir tells us was then “in the forest”.
You will recall how William Bryant, the Fairfield diarist, collected his son’s
wages until the boys reached 21. Likewise Asa Burnham wrote: “I lived with my
father and served my minority and, as I believe, faithfully. Then father gave me
and brother Noah an old farm which he bought of Dennis Newbegin for $1,000. He
also deeded to me one acre of land, on which I built a large, two-story house and
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barn.”
Directly in front of his Parsonfield house Asa set out apple trees. Are
there still farm houses where apple trees can be seen in the front yard in any
quantity? From his front yard trees Asa said he often made as many as twenty
barrels of cider and half a ton of dried apples, which he sold in Portland for
five cents a pound. He even sold applesauce, which he delivered as far away as
35 miles at $5.00 a barrel. Like my own great-grandfather, who used to drive an
ox-team regularly between West Gorham and Portland, Asa Burnham made frequent
trips by ox-team from Parsonfield to Saco, Kennebunk or Portland, anyone of those
destinations taking four days for the round trip.
I don’t recall any reference in the Fairfield diary to the old apprentice
system, familiarly called the “bound out” system. But Asa Burnham makes vivid
mention of it. He wrote: “I needed help on my farm. After taking a little boy
seven years old and keeping him, whose name was John Johnson, five or six years,
I hired Asa Parks for a few years. Then I took B.enjamin Jordan, 14 years old of
Newfield. He was bound to me by his guardian. I engaged to give him 14 months
schooling and when he became 21 years of age, to give him $80. He served out his
time faithfully, was a good boy, and obtained a good English education in our school
district in the town of Parsonfield.”
Asa Burnham, who was to gain quite a reputation as schoolmaster and school
committee member after he came to Winslow, had tried his hand at teaching before
he left Parsonfield. He records proudly that he was the first to introduce the
study of English grammar into that school district. Concerning his preparation for
teaching, Asa says: “When I was 17, I went to Brentwood, N. H., to attend for
three months a school kept by William Graves on sunny days. In 1808 I attended
Fryeburg Academy one term, likewise on sunny days.”
Apparently Asa was much interested in penmanship, for he tells us he took
twelve lessons on the Rockwood system, and claims to have been so materially benefitted
that he gave lessons in the system himself, at one dollar a scholar. Then
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he shifted to the Dunton system, and claimed even more marked improvement.
Like most men of his time, Asa Burnham was deeply religious and staunch in
his churchly duties. He was instrumental in starting the first Sabbath School
in Parsonfield. Of that experience he wrote: “We were poorly qualified for
teachers or superintendents, but done the best we could, giving select portions
of scripture for the children to commit and recite, which they generally did in
a commendable manner. We also taught the ten commendments and the Assembly
catechism. For a while I catechised the scholars in my day school, until opposed
by Elder Buzzel, a Freewill Baptist minister, who said he wanted the children to
have religion but not learn it.”
Although harassed by debt and even defrauded, Asa subscribed four dollars for
the support of the Gospel in Winslow in 1826. What is more, when Winslow was without
a minister, as too often proved to be the case, Asa took his turn with other
neighbors in what he called “assuming ministerial positions”. Minister or no minister,
he was one of those sturdy Winslow men who were determined to have the church
open every Sunday.
It was in 1824 that Asa Burnham settled in Winslow, having found the Parson-
. field farm inconvenient, as he puts it. The most interesting part of his memoir
concerns the hard luck of his business dealings before he finally cleared the
farm of debt and could truly call it his own. Because those dealings concerned
two of the wealthiest men of the upper Kennebec in those days, they are somewhat
revealing. The two men were Nathaniel Gilman of Waterville and Benjamin Brown of
Vassalboro. But let’s have the story in Asa Burnham’s own words:
“In June, 1824 I went to Winslow to purchase a farm of Jacob Hardon, who
said he had bought the farm of Nathaniel Gilman of Waterville and paid for it in
money. This I afterwards found to my sorrow was not true. On the contrary, Gilman
had Hardon’s note for $500, secured by a mortgage on the place. On June 16 I
paid Hardon$600 and gave him my notes amounting to $1,350.
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“When I later learned of Gilman’s claim and charged Hardon with unfair and
unkind treatment, he said: ‘You shall not suffer. I have fine timber on the farm,
and have agreed with Gilman to take it to Augusta to pay my notes and take up the
mortgage. ‘”
Here let us interrupt Asa’s own narrative to say that he seems not to have
been too smart in dealing with men like Hardon, for he actually helped Hardon get
out the timber and market it at Augusta, only to see Hardon make off with the
money without paying Gilman. Though Asa reprimanded Hardon again, doubtless more
sharply this time, the best he could get was the promise of 50 additional acres,
which he did not want, and which he later found was likewise mortgaged. “Hardon”,
Asa wrote, “also turned over to me two old lame horses and an old wagon, and several
notes against poor men from which I finally realized a little in stock and
money.”
The memoir continues dolefully: “In consequence of all this I had to go beyon.
ci my means. I used all my skill and energies to meet these unforeseen difficulties.
I made up quite a raft of lumber, which Mr. Gilman engaged to take delivered
at Augusta, which he did at a low price, so that I paid a considerable part of my
notes. Gilman was a hard ticket. Finally my brother Rice befriended me, took a
transfer of the mortgage and paid Gilman the remainder. Meanwhile the mortgage on
my purchase of Jacob Hardon was assigned to Benjamin Brown of Vassalboro.
“Being disappointed in obtaining money of Huckins and Lougee, I was sued by
Brown and all my property attached. The officer with the writ arrived before the
dun. So I went down to Augusta and gave a confession note with costs amounting to
ten dollars. Had to deal with another hard, oppressive man, even harder than Gilman.
Brown done this purposely to give his son business. Son Theodore was a lawyer,
a chip off the old block, and it hurt to be obliged to pay his fee in the suit.
Brother Rice again assisted me, paid the balance due Brown and loosed me from the
grasp of the tyrant. After paying Brother Rice annual interest for several years,
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by untiring exertion and by selling part of the land, I finally succeeded in
getting out of debt. 11
It seems to me Asa’s opinion of both those prominent men may·have been unfair.
I don’t know much about Brown, but I do know that Nathaniel Gilman had a
reputation as a fair, honest, public-spirited citizen.
I had always supposed that a hay rack, or what some part of New England
called a hay wagon, was a very old and very common vehicle. So I was surprised to
read in Asa Burnham’s memoir that he and John Pease made the first hay rack ever
seen in Winslow. He comments: “Old men denounced them, saying we would never get
the hay out of them once we got it in. We showed how wrong they were and hay racks
soon came into general use.”
Asa claimed that he and Jonathan Garland made the first horse rakes ever used
in Winslow. This was before the days of the revolving rake, and had teeth on one
side only.
More than a third of Asa Burnham’s memoir is devoted to the Coolidge-Mathews
murder case, in which Asa himself was a witness. On the Whole, the facts as he relates
them coincide with the testimony before the court, but in a few instances his
memory was faulty, or he gave way to the rumor of the times. In all fairness we
mgst note that the memoir was written 17 years after the murder, during which time
legend and hearsay had perverted some of the facts. Asa is mixed up about the amount
of money involved and where Mathews got it, about Coolidge’s attitude when the autopsy
was performed, about who saved the contents for Professor Loomis’ examination.
He goes much faz~er than did any of the reporters who commented on the ladies at
the trial, for Asa wrote: “The ladies in the galleries sent down bouquets on the
criminal’s head, for Coolidge was handsome to behold, Which attracted their attention
and admiration. With many of these ladies, if such they can be called, Coolidge
had been particularly, if not criminally, intimate.”
In 1854, thirty years after he had come to Winslow, Asa Burnham moved to Bangor
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where, with his sons, he took over a place on Ohio street a mile northwest of
the County courthouse. During his thirty years in Winslow he had been town clerk,
justice of the peace, and member of the school committee — a worthy citizen of
worthy days.
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
89th Broadcast December 24, 1950
Information keeps springing up about Ten Lots. Mrs. Charles Heald of North
Fairfield has loaned me a copy of the Waterville Mail for September 30, 1881,
Which contains an account of the golden wedding anniversary of Asa and Azuba
Bates. In 1831 Asa Bates had married Azuba Sturtevant, and the newspaper reporter
pointed out that the couple had been known in Waterville longer than the
venerable Waterville Mail itself. A poem, written for the occasion by one of Mr.
Bates’ five sons-in-law, fills nearly a column in the old newspaper. The reporter
entered into the jovial spirit of the occasion, closing his story with these
words: “I will give the names of the couple’ s children. It is customary, I believe,
When doing so, to give also their ages. But your correspondent might get
his scalp into difficulty if he meddled with the ages of seven women in one family.
So he must ask the reader to be content with the names and present residence of
the Bates children, of Whom nine are now living. They are Ellen, wife of G. A.
Mower of Dexter; Erastus of West Waterville; Lizzie, wife of W. A. Farr of Melrose,
Mass.; Martha, wife of S. T. Hersom of New London, N. H.; Mabel, wife of W. H. Fersenden
of Boston; Mary, wife of C. E. Whiting of Norridgewock; Henry of West Waterville;
Julia of Boston; Lillian of West Waterville.”
Mrs. Heald has an old-time photograph taken at that golden wedding anniversary,
showing Mr. and Mrs. Bates and all nine of the children, in the costumes in which
all well-dressed folks appeared in 1881.
My neighbor, Jerry Bridges, an executive of the Lockwood Mills, quite rightly
calls me to task for putting Ten Lots in Somerset County. He quite rightly points
out that the county line runs right through Ten Lots, and that most of the original
homes, as well as the beautiful Williams Chapel, are and always have been in Kennebec
County. Since that is true, I am more puzzled than ever to know Why Rufus Jones
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mentions no Ten Lots Quakers in his chapter on the Friends in Kingsbury’s History
of Kennebec County.
*****
Christmas did not receive much attention here in the Kennebec Valley a hundred
years ago. Let us see how William Bryant of Fairfield, who kept a diary from
1836 to 1865, recorded the annual events of Christmas Day.
On December 25, 1836 Bryant wrote: “Rain and warm. High freshet. Ice
started down between 9 and 10 o’clock.” Other entries were as follows. December
25, 1837: “Went to Waterville with Gideon Wells on business. The first thawey day
for a week past.” December 25, 1838: “Killed two small-boned hogs, very fat,
weighed about 300 pounds each.” Mr. Bryant tells us that on December 25, 1839
William Connor started for the woods, taking Bryant’s oxen among the many teams.
The next year the only comment on Christmas Day is: “Very tough, northeast snow
storm”.
On the next Christmas, 1841, Bryant evidently worked hard all day. He says:
“We have had a hard time breaking a wood road in my swai1 to get alders for wood.”
There is no entry for December 25 in either 1842 or 1843. But when Christmas came
in 1844 Sanmel Haley Bryant, the son who later went away to far-off Australia,
never to return, had then “started with William Connor’s two six-ox teams, to go
10 or 12 miles above The Forks on 10,000 acres”. On December 25, 1845 Bryant
noted a “terrible southeast rain storm”. In 1846 there is no record for Christmas
Day, but five days earlier Cyrus and Olive, the oldest son and his wife, had gone
to Vassalboro, where Olive was to spend the winter. On December 25, 1847 the record
states: “Cyrus started for the woods for D. Chase and L. Webster on wheels.”
In 1848 the day got this item: “Very little snow on the level, but slick sleighing.
”
On December 25,1851 Bryant wrote: “Very high northwester and cold. I returned
from Norridgewock with a bad cold.” On Christmas Day, 1852 William Connor’s
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ox teams were again on the way to the woods, on a day of light rain and sloshy
travelling. Three days after that uncelebrated Christmas, Samuel Haley Bryant
left home for Australia.
There was no wheeling and no slush on Christmas Day of 1853, for Bryant tells
us that “It began to snow last evening between five and six o’clock and snowed all
night and all the forenoon until twelve o’clock; the snow fell in heaps.” Five
days later he wrote: “Roads still drifted and full of snow.”
On December 25, 1855 it commenced snowing at 10 A.M. No mention of any
Christmas observance, but a solemn announcement that “Charles Bradbury was killed
last Saturday by running foul of another wagon.”
On Christmas Day in 1857 there was, according to Bryant, the first good
sleighing of the year, so good that William Connor could start for the woods on
runners. That was apparently noteworthy, for Connors’ start for the Moosehead
woods had for several previous seasons been on wheels.
Not until 1865, after the Civil War was over, does William Bryant’s diary
make any mention of Christmas. On December 25, 1865 he wrote: “Christmas. Fair
and cold. I am very feeble, was taken bleeding at the nose for the third time in
one week.”
Now how could a man keep such a journal for thirty years and tell us nothing
of Christmas trees and Christmas gifts, and most of all of Christmas home-comings?
The answer is hard for young folks of our time to understand. For all the years
between 1835 and the Civil War, neither William Bryant nor anyone else in the Kennebec
Valley put up a Christmas tree or gave a Christmas present. In other words,
Christmas was not celebrated at all.
How do we account for this? The answer is found in the long domination of
PUritan thought and customs over New England life. In 1664, soon after the Puritan
influence obtained control of the British government, an Act of Parliament
made the celebration of Christmas illegal. Even earlier the first settlers of the
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Massachusetts Bay Colony had frowned upon all festivals. The May Pole at Merrymount
had met their stern disapproval. Only two special days did they recognize,
Thanksgiving and Fast Day, and both of these were solemn occasions. Games and
sports were strictly forbidden on those days, just as they were on Sunday. Such
things as Christmas trees and Christmas presents were regarded as devices of
the Devil to lure tempted souls to perdition.
Although the Puritan influence was less strong in parts of the rural province
of Maine than it was on the shores of Boston Bay, it was strong enough for
the opposition to festivals to last well into the nineteenth century. Hence we
are not surprised to find William Bryant’s diary utterly without even the word
Christmas until 1865.
*****
Now let us see· how Americans of olden times knew the Christmas story. That
beautiful story, as Luke tells it with the shepherds and the manger, and as Matthew
gives it with the wise men and their precious gifts, was first brought to
America in Bibles printed in foreign lands. The Pilgrims brought copies of the
so-called Breeches Bible, which got its name because the verse in Genesis that
now uses the word “aprons” was translated: “Adam and Eve made for themselves
breeches. ” The Boston Puritans, at least those who came later than Winthrop ‘s
first little band in 1630, had copies of the King James Bible, which to this day
remains the most famous and the most commonly used of all English Bibles. It
was the great accomplishment of seventy scholarly translators, working under the
sponsorship of King James I, the earliest of the Tudor kings. It was finished in
1611, which makes that date one of the most important in history. So it was not
long before the colonists in America knew the Christmas story in the words that
are familiar to·1 ills’ today.
Strangely enough, when the Bible was first printed in America, it was not
printed in English. The first Bible printed in the colonies was in the languag~
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of the Massachusetts Indians. Product of the little print shop of Samuel Green
and Marmaduke Johnson of Cambridge in 1663, it was the famous translation by Rev.
John Eliot. His was a prodigious undertaking, for he not only had to make the
translation into a new and difficult language, but he had actually to create a
written form for that language which, like most of the Indian tongues, had never
before been reduced to writing. In spite of the fact that Eliot converted 11,000
Indians, organized 24 congregations, trained twenty Indian preachers, and saw
one of them receive a B. A. degree from Harvard in 1665, today no person living
can read the language of Eliot’s Bible.
Not even the second Bible printed in America was in English. The German
Bible, the memorable work of Martin Luther, was reprinted by Christopher Saur of
Pennsylvania in 1743, in the original German because, said the preface, “so many
poor Germans come to this country who do not bring Bibles with them”. It was the
Luther Bible, either brought from Germany or purchased in Philadelphia, that the
German colonists of our own Maine town of Waldoboro so devoutly used.
Another Bible printed in America came from the shop of Robert Aitken of
Philadelphia in 1782. In the midst of the Revolution the Continental Congress
took time to pass a resolution commending “the pious and laudable plan of Mr.
Aitken to publish the Bible.” Aitken’s Bible of 1782 seems to have been the only
one ever sponsored by the Congress of the united states.
*****
There are many interesting facts concerning Christmas carols. A very old
carol, not one of those most familiar today, beginning in its English version
with “Now sing we, now rejoice; now raise to heaven our voice”, was originally
associated verbally with macaroni, for in its early form it was what is called a
macaronic, a mixture of two languages, in this case Latin and German.
In the 18th century there were two distinct meanings of the word macaroni
the common meaning we retain today, a paste of Italian origin prepared from Wheat
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flour in the form of dried hollow tubes ~ and another meaning, an English dandy
Who affected foreign ways, the meaning given it in one line of Yankee Doddle.
Whether the two meanings ever had anything in common, no one knows. From the
latter meaning, however, we (Jet the word macaronic, Which means a mixture of
languages, though it was first used solely to mean a mixture of some other language
with Latin.
“Come hither ye faithful, truumphantly sing”, is one of the most translated
of all the carols. Originally in Latin, it is now sung in 119 languages and dialects.
A much more familiar carol, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come”, as we
sing it today in Waterville, is the combined work of four different nationalities:
David, or some other Hebrew psalmist ~ Isaac Watts, the English hymnologist;
Handel, the German composer ~ and Lowell Mason, the American hymn writer. The
beautiful carol, “It came upon a midnight clear”, is one of the few distinctly American
carols that have won wide fame in other lands. Its words are by Dr. Edmund
Sears and its music is by Richard Storrs Willis.
*****
In thousands of churches today congregations have listened to the words of
Luke’s gospel, “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly
host, praising God, and saying, -, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,
good will toward men’ “. How ironical those words sound in this hour of a great
world crisis. Peace on earth. Anything but assured peace is the lot of all the
earth tonight. The threat of the hammer and the sickle stands in the way of
peoples who would have all men free.
It is not new in world history, this crisis of 1950. I have just been reading
Will Durant’s gigantic book, “Age of Faith”. In it he shows us What happened
again and again to nations: to the once mighty power of Rome, to the sweeping
might of the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan, to the once dominant might of the
Arabic world. Nations died, nations _were born, the tides of conquest ebbed and
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flowed, but through it all the faith was triumphant. The angel voices on the
hills of Bethlehem could not be silenced.
A better transl.ation of the Greek text of Luke’s gospel gives us not “peace
on earth, good will toward men”, but “peace on earth toward men of good will”.
That is our supreme need in this hour of trial — men of good will in Tokyo_ and
Peiping, in Downing Street and-the Elysee, in the White House and the Kremlin.
Give us, we pray, 0 Lord, in this awful hour, in all the world’s nations, men of
good will.
And so, to all our listeners, up and down this old valley of the Kennebec,
we can and do sincerely wish you not so much a merry Christmas as a Christmas of
Christian Good Will.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
90th Broadcast December 31, 1950
Even in the midst of the greatest crisis our nation has known since 1860
our government can continue a lot of foolish expenditures. No sensible American
denies the necessity for appropriating billions for defense. We must have an
incomparab~y strong Army, Navy and Air Force. But that is all the more reason
Why some of the luxuries of peace time ought to be eliminated by the federal
government just as th~y will have to be eliminated in your family and mine as
we increasingly feel the pinch of higher taxes.
The other day in the U. S. Senate Senator Tobey of New Hampshire called
attention to one of those silly inconsistencies that cost the taxpayer unnecessary
millions every year. The Senator pointed out that, on the one hand, the
Department of Agriculture is spending money to teach the people how to raise
more cats, while the Division of Wild Life is spending fully as much telling
the people how to exterminate cats.
Now Senator Tobey’s exposure would be just a humorous anecdote if it did
not illustrate all too plainly how costly it is to have different agencies in
our government at cross purposes, the right hand not knowing what the left hand
is doing.
At this time of crisis, instead of forgetting about the Hoover Commission’s
report, which I discussed on this program last winter, we ought to consider it
more important than ever. Never has there been a time When economy in the ordinary
expenditures of government is so badly needed, for the very reason that
we need that wasted money to keep America free.
*****
On several occasions we have mentioned one or another of the old-time Kennebec
steamboats. We once referred to the whole fleet of boats equipped and
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operated by the Vassalboro tycoon,Benjamin Brown. We also told the story,
with its tragic and humorous overtones, of the maiden voyage of the City of
Waterville from Bangor to the Elm City. Tonight we want to devote a few minutes
to more thorough consideration of Kennebec steamboats.
In 1943 Mrs. Eleanor Sager Adams of Gardiner found in the attic of her home
a handwritten manuscript entitled “Reminiscences of Steamboating”, wr~tten by
Jason Collins. We do not know when this was written, but the latest date mentioned
in the account is 1902. Mr. Elliott Hale of the Kennebec Water District
has kindly furnished us with a copy of Jason collins’ manuscript, and it furnishes
the principal source of tonight’s remarks about the old steamboats.
CUriously enough the man who. is credited with the first steam craft on the
Kennebec River did not live on the Kennebec. He was Jonathan Morgan, a lawyer
of Alna, one of Maine’s most interesting old towns, situated between Gardiner
and Newcastle. Morgan’s scow, propelled by steam, was the first steamboat of
any description on the Kennebec. The year was 1818.
Only a year later, in 1819, a sailing packet boat towed from Boston to the
mouth of the Kennebec a small steamer called the “Tom Thumb”. It was a sidewheeler,
thirty feet long, and all open with engines exposed to the weather. When
the “Tom Thumb” steamed up to Bath against the tide, she created a sensation
among people along the river. Word of her coming preceded her just long enough
to gather the whole citizenry of Bath down to the wharves.
Mr. Collins himself saw the “Tom ‘lhumb” in t834; so he must himself have
been well along in years in 1902, the last date mentioned in his account. He
says when he saw the steamer she was towing the ship “Constitution” from Gardiner
to Bath, and he adds: “Incredible as it now seems, she took six days to make the
trip”.
Waterville enters the picture by name in 1823, when Capt. Samuel Porter
built at King’s Wharf in Bath a steamer which was christened “waterville”. If our
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conjecture is right that she was the first steamboat ever built at a Kennebec
yard, Waterville holds· a·· distinct. honor in the river’s steamboat history. It
is somewhat of an anti-climax to report, however, that the 1823 steamer “Waterville”
never tied up at one of those old slips down below what are now the
Lockwood Mills. Her route was between Bath and Augusta. She never came above
the Cushnoc Rapids.
The same Captain Porter operated a steamer named the “Patent” between Boston
and Portland. In 1824 he extended her route to Bath, where she connected
with the steamer “Waterville” for Augusta. It was 126 years ago, therefore,
that the first steamboat service was established bet”‘e·en the Kennebec ports and
Boston.
The first steamer to go above Augusta was the “Ticonic”, a stern-wheeler
built in 1832 on the lot in the rear of the present Gardiner National Bank. She
was hauled across the street and launched in the river at that spot. Mr. Collins
says he attended the launching and remembered it vividly.
The “Ticonic” was built to run between Gardiner and Waterville. On her
maiden voyage to our City of the Elms she was greeted with cheers, ringing of
bells, and the firing of cannon. At a huge public dinner, the crew and the
owners were feted and congratulated. The “Ticonic” might have continued on her
Gardiner-Waterville route for many years, had not the hand of inevitable progress
interfered. A dam was built at Augusta. To be sure, a canal and lock was
constructed around the dam, so that small boats could pass, but the “Ticonic”
was too big. Waterville had to bid her good~bye. Before she quit the upper
stretch, however, the “Ticonic” had become part of a run connecting Waterville
with Boston. The Boston steamer came to Bath, from where the “Hancock” ran to
Augusta, there connecting with the “Ticonic” for Waterville.
By 1836 the need was clear for a steamer to run from Gardiner straight
through to Boston without any change at Bath. The leading spirit in this plan
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was Captain Nathaniel Kimball, who is perhaps the most famous of all Kennebec”
steamboat men. with the help of R. H. Gardiner, David Bowman, Edward Swan, Col.
John Stone and other prominent citizens, Captain Kimball formed a company and
secured stock subscriptions of $40,000. Such was the beginning of the direct
line to Boston, which was still running when Mr. Collins wrote his reminiscences.
That first through-to-Boston steamer was named the “New Ehgland” and was personally
commanded by Captain Kimball. The fare to Boston, inclduing meals, was
four dollars.
The life of the steamer “New England” was regrettably short. On the night of
June first, 1838, on the way to Boston, she collided with the schooner “Curlew”,
and so quickly filled with water that her passengers were transferred to the
schooner. The latter sailed for Portsmouth, the port nearest to the collision.
Captain Kimball and his crew remained by the wreck until the following noon, when
the steamer rolled over and floated bottom up. She was later towed to Portsmouth,
but lost her engine on the way and proved to be a total loss.
By 1840 the formidable opposition of the Vanderbilts confronted the local
steamboat owners. Commodore Vanderbilt outfitted the steamer “Augusta” and put
her on a regular run between Hallowell and Boston. Meanwhile Captain Kimball and
Parker Sheldon had replaced the ill-fated “New England” with a new boat called
the “Huntress”. Because the “Huntress” proved to be a faster boat than the “Augusta”,
Commodore Vanderbilt decided to put on the river a boat that no one could
beat. That boat was christened the “C. Vanderbilt” and had the reputation of
being the fastest boat on the Atlantic coast.
The rivalry between the “Huntress” and the “Vanderbilt” was much like that
between the Mississippi steamers of Mark Twain’s day. Each boat had its ardent
supporters along the river. When the Captain of the “Vanderbilt” challenged Captain
Kimball for a trial of speed from Boston to Gardiner, the skipper of the
“Huntress” was quick to accept. Every member of both crews put up money on the
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outcome, and Com. Vanderbilt himself is said to have ventured a few dollars in
judicious wagers.
Those old steamers were wood burners and the crew of the “Huntress” went
to a lot of trouble to secure just the wood they needed for pushing the boilers
to their utmost. When the boats left their Boston moorings, the “Vanderbilt”
took a quick lead, but when she reached Boston Light she found the “Huntress”
alongside. Before Eastern Point was passed the “Huntress” was ahead. All night
long the two boats were in sight of each other, so closely were they matched.
Great excitement prevailed on both craft; no one had a thought of sleep. What
rejoicing there was in Gardiner when the “Huntress” arrived three quarters of a
mile ahead of the “Vanderbilt”. She had made the trip from Boston to Gardiner in
ten hours and forty-five minutes, a record that stood for more than sixty years.
Com. Vanderbilt did just what one would expect of him. Convinced that he
could not get a boat fast enough to beat the “Huntress”, he bought the “Huntress”
himself. Then he turned around and told the old company that they must take the
steamer and give him a bonus of $10,000, upon his agreement to withdraw forever
from the line, or he would put the “Huntress” back on the route himself and ruin
their business, because no boat could beat the “Huntress”. The company accepted
the wily commodore’s terms, and the “Huntress” returned to the river with her old
officers.
In 1841 another port got a chance to rival Boston for the Kennebec travel.
In that year the Eastern Railroad reached Portsmouth, and a . steamer called the
“N. Y. Beach” ran between Hallowell and Portsmouth, where train connections to
Boston enabled the traveler to reach the Hub several hours earlier than by the
Hallowell-Boston steamer. P’ortsmouth lost this remunerative traffic a few years
later, when the railroad reached Portland.
From 1843 to 1850 steamboat passengers on the Kennebec had a wonderful time.
The toughest of cut-throat competition lowered the rates to a point where at one
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time one of the lines actually granted a round-trip rebate greater than the oneway
fare. It all began when Capt. Sanford of New York put on the steamer “Splendid”
between Hallowell and Boston, in opposition to the regular line. Mr. Collins
says that on some trips passengers paid Whatever they pleased, and that one man
bragged about going all the way from Gardiner to Boston for twenty-five cents.
Then in 1845 prominent citizens of Gardiner and pittston entered the competition
with their “People’ s Line”. Their steamer had a grand old American name,
the “John Marshall”, but the venture did not prove profitable, and by 1850 the
old company once more controlled the river traffic.
Perhaps the most memorable voyage of the fastest and most famous of all Kennebec
boats, the “Huntress”, was made on July 2, 1847, When she made a special
trip, bringing President Polk and his cabinet with many other prominent men,
from Portland to Hallowell. Reaching Hallowell at midnight, the distinguished
company transferred to carriages for the trip to Augusta, where they spent the
night. After visiting the State House and attending a banquet, the entire company
were guests of R. H. Gardiner at “Oaklands”. They then left for Portland on
the· “Huntress”. At the Hallowell wharf before their departure speeches were made
by President Polk and Hon. George Evans.
Ten years before President Polk’s visit, in 1837, the first steam ferry boat
went into operation on the Kennebec. It ran between Gardiner and Pittston. She
was built entirely in Gardiner, even her machinery being made by the Gardiner
firm of Holmes and Robbins. She was called the “Kennebec” and continued in service
until the building of the Gardiner bridge in 1852.
Jason Collins, writer of the “Reminiscences” began his own steamboat service
on the ill-fated “New England” as an engineer’s helper. He was in continuous service,
on one boat or another, from 1836 to 1849, between his home port of Gardiner
and either portland or Boston. In 1849 he entered the employ of Com. Vanderbilt as
engineer of the “Independence”. While in New York, superintending the installation
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of that steamer·s engines, Mr. Collins watched daily the building of Vanderbilt·s
famous yacht “America”, first winner of the racing cup.
His service on the “Independence” took Jason Collins far from his beloved
Kennebec, for in July, 1850 that vessel was at San Francisco, having made the
voyage around the Horn. She had been held up a month at Rio de Janeiro because of
yellow fever which cost the lives of four of her crew. Then the “Independence”
went on a regular run between San Francisco and Nicaragua, until in 1853 she ran
on a coral reef off st. Margarita Island, took fire, and was a total loss, 245
of her passengers and crew going to their deaths. Engineer Collins was one of
255 survivors. Some evening on this program I hope to find time to tell you ‘Jason
Collins· thrilling story of that shipwreck.
Right here we must leave the account of Kennebec steamboat days. But I assure
you there is more to come. We have brought the account only up to 1850. In spite
of the coming of the railroad, there was plenty of steamboating after that. So be
ready for more of this subject some Sunday soon.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
9Ist Broadcast January 7, 1951
It was twelve years ago that I had the pleasure of introducing Maurice Hindus
to a Waterville audience. He spoke from the platform of the Senior High School on
one of Herbert Libby’s popular lecture series. Those were dark days for Hindus’
native Czechoslovakia. Hitler had just taken over the country, and the storm
troopers held the people under the military heel of Nazi oppression.
Hindus said with great vehemence: “The Czech people will rise again. That
tremendous urge for freedom cannot be kept down.” Hindus was sure the Czechs
would win their independence again, as they had once won it under the elder Masaryk.
Six years ago in New York I heard the younger Masaryk tell the Herald-Tribune
Forum why his government in CzeChoslovakia, freed by allied arms, was now turning
in friendship toward Russia rather than toward the West. Though most of his listeners
felt he was wrong, they knew he was honest and sincere.
I wonder what Hindus thinks today about Czechoslovakia I s new freedom. We know
what Jan Masaryk thought about it, for two years ago, in disillusionment and discouragement,
he committed suicide. His trusted Russians had grossly betrayed the
trust.
What is happening today in Czechoslovakia, which American G.I.’s helped liberate
from the Nazi oppressor in 1945, is a warning to every nation, even our own,
whose people are determined to stay free. Allover Czechoslovakia today, from the
capitol at Prague to the smallest village, appears the ominous sign “Narodni Podnik”,
meaning national enterprise. Gone is the personal pride of the small shopkeeper,
gone the family pride in ownership. For gone is private corporate enterprise,
founded and nurtured over the years from the savings of honest, frugal Czechs.
Well do the Communists know that control over men’s lives begins with control
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of the means of livelihood. Economic freedom dies first; then, after it, all
freedom dies. From economic control it is only one step to complete, oneparty
political control, only one more step to thought control under the dread
threat of the military police and the neighborhood spy. Beyond that is slavery.
Let us take warning from that sign allover Czechoslovakia. We must not
have — not even under the pretense of united defense effort — Narodni Podnik
in America. We must continue determinedly to insist that the best guarantee of
the freedom, the dignity, the welfare and the security of every man, is the preservation
of the American system of private enterprise. We must ever beware of
increased largesse from the Handout state, and the subtle, insidious trend to
believe that the government in Washington owes every citizen, regardless of his
own efforts, complete care from cradle to grave.
Hitler was unable, through force of arms, to carry his kind of National Socialism
to British soil. Yet Britain surrendered to the socialistic theory and
practice of government without firing a single shot. Winston Churchill’s warning
went unheeded, when he said: “The Scoialist program means that the reward of
society must be equal for those who try and for those who shirk, for those·who
succeed and for those· who fail.” If that sounds alluring and just what many Americans
want, let’s remind ourselves of what G. B. Shaw, himself a socialist,
said: “Continuous industrial serVice will one day be made compulsory. The right
to work will become the obligation to work wherever the State puts us to work.”
That is what Britain is beginning to learn, what Czechoslovakia has learned
to her bitter sorrow — that the communist design begins with the socialist incentive
of welfare promises, continues with control of the economic life, and ends
with coercion, with the destruction of every cherished freedom.
No, we must not, we shall not, have Narodni Podnik in America.
*****
When we talked about William Bryant’s diary conunents on the Aroostook War in
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our broadcast a month ago, little did we realize that there was still living in
Maine a man who was born in the very year that Bryant made that diary record, the
year 1839.
Yes, I know it sounds impossible, for 1839 was III years ago. But a month
ago there was still living in Houlton a man named Jeremiah Campbellton who was
born in a wilderness cabin near what is now Van Buren on August 15, 1839. On
December 23, two week.sago, Mr. Campbellton died at a nursing home in Houlton.
He was said to be the oldest man in New England.
When only seven years old Mr. Campbell ton had seen his parents massacred
in a raid of the Micmac Indians from Canada. He was taken captive and lived with
the Micmacs for six years. Although then only 13 years old, with the help of an
Indian maiden he contrived his escape and made his way back to one of the white
settlements in Aroostook.
Jeremiah Campbellton became a hunter and guide for the intrepid pioneers who
\ settled Aroostook, a sort of Kit Carson of the northern border. He was said to
know intimately every nook and cranny of the northeast woods. He long claimed
that he turned the first Shovelful of earth for construction of the Bangor and
Aroostook Railroad. He fought in both the Civil and SpaniSh-American Wars and in
his last years humorously referred to himself as a former G. I.
For 54 years Mr •. Campbellton had the companionship of his wife, the mother
of his sixteen children. Yet so long was his life that he survived her by 28
years, during the last 25 of which he was totally blind.
A true child of the wilderness, Mr. Campbell ton never learned to read and
wri te, but he spoke fluently four languages: English, French, Italian and Micmac.
Such was the man born in that long, long time ago in 1839, when William
Bryant devoted a page of his diary to the start of the Aroostook War.
*****
An amateur social historian like myself, who delves into the doings of Ken-
2-253
nebec Valley people years ago, is grateful for a newspaper custom long since
abandoned. We refer to the lengthy, detailed discussion of social events.
The waterville Mail changed from a weekly to a daily newspaper in January,
1896, just 54 years ago. I am sure many of you will be interested to know how
the Mail of February 26, 1896 reported a reception held in Soper Hall on Main
Street on the evening of February 25. It was conducted by the Delta Kappa Epsilon
fraternity, which was then already half a century old at Colby. The guest
of honor was President William R. Harper of the University of Chicago, who was
later proved to be here, not for the principal purpose of honoring the Dekes, but
to lure President Nathaniel Butler away from Colby to the University of Chicago,
where he became the distinguished dean of the graduate school. President and
Mrs. Butler were of course in the receiving line at Soper Hall, as were also other
distinguished citizens and alumni of the fraternity.
The Mail devoted two first page columns to the event, and one of those
columns is filled entirely with the names of lady guests and descriptions of
their gowns. At the risk of omitting some name that ought to be mentioned, we
cannot resist the temptation to give you a few of the well-remembered names listed
in. that social column of the Waterville Mail 54 years ago:
Sarah Lang- black satin, jet and lace
Annie Knight – light blue silk lace, pink roses
Alice purinton – light blue albatross, pearl trimming
Miss Dunn (was this Miss Florence or Miss Mabel?) – blue silk,
white lace trimming, carnations
Grace Lord – blue crepon
Mrs. F. C. Thayer – figured silk, white lace
Mary Abbott – old rose silk and chiffon
Ophelia Ball – black lace and jet
Mrs. A. F. Drummond – dark red silk and roses
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Grace Illsley – white silk and lace
Mrs. Frank Redington – white moire and lace
Mrs. F. J. Arnold – Dresden silk, pearl garniture
Annie Dorr – pink chiffon
Mrs. A. J. Roberts – pink silk and white lace
Mrs. J. F. Hill – pink silk, lace garniture
Mrs. George K. Boutelle – Dresden silk and Chiffon; diamonds
That’s the way the proud old waterville Mail handled big social gatherings
half a century ago.
*****
Back there in 1896 the bicycle had just come into its glory. The Waterville
Association of Wheelmen had been formed. Their tour.s and their contests aroused
much attention. The April 6 issue of the Mail carried no less than six separate
ads for bicycles. A. F. Drummond at the Savings Bank was agent for the Victor;
F. Blanchard sold several makes, including the Eagle and the Eclipse; S. A. Dickinson
handled the Silver King; R. E. Lincoln sold the Dayton; Learned and Brown
distIibuted the Columbia. C. H. Robinson and Co. of Boston advertised a bicycle
called Robinson’S Crusoe for $65 — $10 down and $2 a week. It had barrel hubs
and large tubing. A bicycle bell was thrown in free.
I find no mention of my own boyhood favorite, the Iver Johnson. Perhaps 1896
was a bit early for that make, because I owned my first Iver Johnson and my first
bicycle in 1901.
In the spring of 1896 the Waterville Mail ran one of those well known populari
ty contests, for which a bicycle was the’ .prize. The contest ran for a month.
Subscriptions and single coupons from daily copies of the Mail counted specified
numbers of points, and could be entered for any lady school teacher in Kennebec
and Somerset Counties. Who was the most popular schoolmarm in the two counties?
To decide that question was the point of the Mail ‘s contest. The prize bike was
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properly decorated and displayed in the store window of J. F. Larrabee on Main
Street.
Although teachers from Fairfield, Oakland and Skowhegan were entered, the ….
contest soon settled down to a hard-fought race among four Waterville teachers: Sarah.
Lang,Clara Dolley, Emma Knauff and Elizabeth Manley. First one of the four
would lead, then another. The result was in doubt until midnight of May 9,
When a distinguished board of judges counted all the votes and declared the winner
to be Miss Elizabeth Manley.
*****
When I read the Mail’s account of the opening of the Olympic Games in Athens -it
was in the Mail of April 6, 1896 — I was disappointed to see no mention of my
friend Jim Connolly, still living at the age of 82 in Boston. In my little book
“Jim Connolly and the Gloucester Fishermen” I told how Jim had been the winner of
the first event in those revived Olympics. The Waterville Mail of April 6 said
only: “The American contestants won in throwing the discus as well as in the hop,
step and jump.”
On the next day, however, the April 7 issue of the Mail did better. It carried
half a column describing the pageantry of the opening of the games in the
presence of the King of Greece. In telling What happened in the early events, it
said: “J. B. Connolly, an American, won the hop, step and jump, covering 13.71
meters.” Not a word of how Connolly had been refused leave of absence from Harvard
to compete in the Olympics, how he had given up his Harvard career, joined
the Olympic team at his own expense, and how finally he had become the first victor
in the first Olympic contest in more than 2,500 years. The world was to
learn that story much later. On April 7, 1896 the Waterville Mail missed it entirely.
But the Waterville Mail was a grand old paper just the same. We are sorry
that it had finally to go the way of all flesh.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
92nd Broadcast January 14, 1951
If you are not one of the ten million Americans who have already read the
article entitled “How a Democracy Died” in Life magazine for January 1, I recommend
that you read it at once — not just skim it, but read it thoroughly and
carefully. I will venture the guess that too many of Life’s readers, as soon as
they discovered that the article dealt with Greek states that went out of existence
more than 2,000 years ago, never read the article at all. But I assure you
it is not only worth reading; it should make every intelligent American sit up
and take notice. For what happened to Athens in the fifth century before Christ
can happen to the united States in the twentieth century.
“We know”, says the author of the Life article, “that history does not consist
of a series of pat and perfect analogies.” Yet by merely telling the story
of the annihilating war between Athens and Sparta, he reveals all too clearly
that the conditions which underlay the destruction of the great Athenian state
are the very conditions which confront America today.
It has now become a very trite saying that the only lesson taught by history
is that it teaches no lesson. Men simply refuse to heed the warnings flashed by
previous events. Yet it is never too late to keep trying, and Life has done a
distinct, patriotic service in bringing to the attention of its huge reading public
this obvious warning from history. What is that warning?
Just as today all the world seems at the mercy of two great powers, seeming
with every passing day more and more likely to fight each other, so in the fifth
century B. C. the Mediterranean World was at the mercy of Athens and Sparta, two
states drawing nearer and nearer to war. Only a short time earlier the two Greek
states had been allies to stop the Persian invasion, just as the two great contending
powers today were once allied to stop the Nazi menace.
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sparta was a dictatorial, military state, afraid of the spread of democratic
institutions, and determined to stop them by force. Athens was the world’s
first democracy, interested more in the expansion of trade than in military might.
She had no imperial ambitions; she wanted only to live and let live.
But the menace of militaristic Sparta grew greater and greater. The alliance
that had defeated the Persians broke up, and Sparta began to draw about her a
group of satellite and dependent states. To meet this threat Athens formed her
friendly states into the Delian League — a sort of fore-runner of the Atlantic
Pact. Now many of these Athenian friends did not want war even to ward off a
Spartan attack. They wanted to conduct their own affairs in peace. But the expansion
of Athenian interests had gone too far to retreat. The frontier was no
longer the Grecian shore-line, but far distant islands in the vast Mediterranean.
Her economic life and her democratic ideals had a stake in lands far away from
home. Doesn’t that sound familiar?
The war which was to destroy Athens did not begin between her and Sparta. It
too had its Korea. In the little distant colony of Spidamnus revolution broke
out, one side supported by Corinth, a satellite of Sparta, the other side aided by
Corcyra, an ally of Athens. The Athenian interests won, and were again victorious
in a similar revolution at Potidaea. Sparta was now determined to take things
out of the hands of its satellites and fight Athens to a finish.
Then Athens faced the problem that always faces a peaceful democracy of great
power. First, not being militaristic, she had no great army like Sparta’s, but
being a trading people, she did control the sea. Second, Athens had to pay the
price of power, and that price is the distrust of lesser, friendly states. Again
and again in history the smaller nations have stood in fear, sometimes turned to
hatred, of the big nation that befriends them. So proud was Athens of its own
justly renowned democratic institutions that it forgot that not all the different
peoples of the world might equally respect and revere those institutions. Third,
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it sbnply could not conceive the possibility of defeat. Athenians had always
won; they always would.
In light of that kind of situation, fear building upon fear, but paradoxically
surmounted by unreasonable over-confidence, it should not surprise us that
Athens, not Sparta, made the first outright attack. She decided to destroy the
Spartan colony of Syracuse in Sicily, 400 miles away from Athens. The attempt
met with ignominious defeat. But there was still the great Athenian navy. It
could still lick the whole maritime world in the opinion of all good Athenians.
Then, one terrible day, in the Hellespont, not far from Istanbul in modern Turkey,
the Spartans by superior stratagem wiped out the whole Athenian fleet.
Blockaded now by land and sea, Athens was slowly reduced to starvation. She
could do nothing but yield. The Athenian democracy was over; it was the beginning
of the death of Greece.
Now, I beg you, read the whole article in Life magazine for yourself. And
after you have read it, think about it.
*****
Let us turn now to some thoughts not quite so sober and alaDming. Let us
take a look at a few more of those items scattered through the 309 issues of the
first volume of the Waterville Evening Mail in 1896. The first issue of the Mail,
as a daily, appeared on January 29 of that year. Its first editorial said: “The
waterville Evening Mail hereby puts out its hand in greeting to the public, in the
hope that it may speedily become the public’s good friend, esteemed and valued for
its sterling quality. The purpose is to give Waterville and the other prosperous
towns of central Maine an evening paper interesting to its readers and servicable
to the c01lDll\lni ties it represents.”
One of waterville’s leading merchants, David Gallert, lined himself up with
the new paper in this movement of progress. His ad on page one said: “Progress
in the front rank. The old Mail tells now the news eve:r:y day. And every day from
-2-25.9
,,”,”-‘ – ,.
now on the oldest Dry Goods House in Waterville, that of David Gallert, noted
for its fair dealings, will tell Kennebec and Somerset customers something reliable.”
If anyone thinks college students are destructive in their pranks today, he
ought to read the Mail of half a century ago. On February 3, 1896 the Mail carried
this i tam:
“Saturday night, when the juniors and freshmen returned from their banquet
at Hager’s, they found the north end of South College — that, by the way, is the
section in which I lived for three years as a student, but some years later than
1896 securely barricaded and a wily soph at every window with a pail of water.
Some of the more daring members of the Class of ’99 procured a pickaxe and a crowbar,
and with their pockets loaded with coal, proceeded to attempt an entrance.
Finally amid showers of coal and broken glass the door was battered down and the
freshmen, followed by nearly every one in college, poured into the hall.”
At that very time a prominent evangelist was holding meetings in Waterville.
The very day after the South College riot, he held a most successful meeting at
the college chapel, warning a large number of student converts. Whether any of
the rioters were among them, the record saith not.
That particular evangelist, like most of his kind, was a bitter foe of dancing.
Along with card playing, it was one of the Devil’ s chief inventions. The
mail devoted a whole column to one of the evangelist’s attacks on dancing in one
issue, took him to task as too extreme in the next issue, and in the third issue
gave a detailed account of a very successful masked ball held at City Hall. It
was attended not only by Waterville’s elite, but also by many guests from Augusta.
Some of the characters represented in fancy dress and masks were a Maine farmer,
a Spanish prince, Richard III, Uncle Sam, a Chinese mandarin, an Indian chief,
a gypsy, an Irish colleen, and the inevitable Topsy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
That the evangelist’s extreme views about card playing were not shared by
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the waterville SChool Board or by the citizenry as a whole, whose overwhelming
views any school board must alertly heed, is evidenced by the fact that a week
after the evangelist left town a Waterville teaCher, Miss Sarah Lang, won first
prize at a big whist party given by Mrs. Lewis Burleigh at Augusta.
Many of our older listeners remember Colby’s popular Negro janitor, Sam Osborne.
It was in 1896 that Sam got his uniform. On January 29 the Mail announced:
“Sam Osborne, the well known janitor of Colby University, will appear in a few
days attired in a regular uniform. This move, while it is a source of pleasure
to all interested in the college, is only in keeping with the example set by other
institutions. Nearly all have their janitors in uniform. Sam’s will be made of
blue cloth, adorned with buttons of the college gray. He has been measured for
the suit and is anxiously awaiting the tailor’s finishing touChes.”
Two weeks later, on February 10, the Mail heralded the grand result. It said:
“Janitor Sam Osborne of Colby University appeared this morning in his new uniform,
and he never looked happier and more contented. The uniform is of dark blue cloth,
trimmed with silver buttons. The coat is a straight front sack, similar in style
to the Pullman car porter’s coat. The head-gear is square topped, low cap with
straight visor, over which are the words ‘Janitor Colby Univ.’ in silver letters.
Altogether it is a neat uniform and is admired by faculty and students as much as
by Sam himself.”
On February 20, 1896 Redington and Company carried in the Mail a huge twopage
ad, one page headed by a cut of the Redington block on Silver street, followed
by these words:
“We have been in business since 1869. The style and title of Redington and
Company was adopted in 1882. The Silver Street block was built in 1893. It is
classed by commercial travelers as the best store of its kind in the state, with
one exception. We do not claim this, but others do for us. What we do claim is
that we do as much for the public in a business way as any firm, and put an honest
2-261
dollar in our own pocket at the same time.”
Some of the commodities mentioned in that big ad are indeed interesting.
There were baby carriages with, so said the ad, “colors to please the eye and
stop the children’s cry”. Bed springs were offered at a price range from 75
cents to $6.00. Chairs were from 25¢ to $50. Oak and cherry clothes poles
(another name for hat racks) went for $1.17. Straw matting and Chinese goat rugs
were in demand. Cradles of beautiful design were ready for the new population.
Willow rockers were favorites in every home. But the Redington pride was its
newly acquired carpet sewing machine, which permitted the firm proudly to proclaim:
“Carpets sewed while you wait”.
There were other memorable ads back there in 1896. More than a year ago
you heard me lament the passing of the good old Mocha and Java coffee for the
modern exotic blends. So I like the ad of C. E. Mathews in the Mails of 1896:
“Boston Java coffee mixed with Arabian Mocha makes the finest cup of coffee obtainab1e.
This coffee is used at nearly every banquet and public supper in Waterville.”
As for the Redington firm, it became justly disturbed at the claim made by
some prospective customers that they could purchase goods so much more cheaply in
Boston. Redingtons ran an especially effective ad on February 27: “Our prices
are always as low as the lowest. We publish in this connection a letter from the
largest carpet house in Boston. This letter was sent us in reply to an inquiry by
one of our customers, who, on being told our price was $1.25 a yard for a certain
grade of carpet, stated he could get the same thing for 87t cents in Boston. This
is the letter:
“‘Messrs. Redington and Company, Waterville, Maine. Gentlemen: In regard to
the Lowell Brussels, would say that, while at different times we have advertised
these goods at 77¢, 87t¢ and other low prices, at retail, in every case they have
been undesirable pat~erns and goods we have been glad-to get rid of at those prices.
2-262·
On the new patterns our price is $1.35. Yours truly, T. O. Callaghan and Company.’
“The above”, said the Redington ad, “speaks for itself. We can and do make
prices as low as any firm in the U. S.”
A fitting close to our program tonight is to quote what the Mail had to say
about a man who is now one of our most respected elder citizens and one whose
personal friendship I have long cherished. This is what the Mail said on January
2, 1897: “Mr. Frank B. Hubbard, the new agent of the Maine Central R.R., has got
his office harness well strapped on and it fits him so nicely that he appears like
an old timer in the job. Mr. Hubbard is a man eminently fitted for the position to
which he was recently promoted, as he began at the bottom round of the ladder in
R.R. business, and has by his own energy and faithfulness made his way up to his
present responsible position.”
It is good to know that Mr. Hubbard was appreciated by the Maine Central and
its waterville citizens half a century ago, just as he was appreciated by Colby
College a quarter of a century later and by all of his many friends in this year of
1951, 54 years after he became head of the Maine Central’s waterville office.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
93:cd Broadcast January 21, 1951
A few weeks ago Ernest R. Breech, executive vice-president of the Ford Motor
Company, told the Economic Club of Detroit about America’s secret weapon. It is
no new gun or plane or bomb. Mr. Breech says America’s secret weapon, long underestimated
by our enemies, is the spirit of American industry. Last spring after
a large group of representatives of British industry had visited American
plants the London Times said: liThe group has learned lessons not confined to
techniques of productive processes, valuable as these are. They have seen managers,
technicians and floor workers enthusiastic in applying knowledge and skill, with
an outlook on productivity and a way of life Which constitute a challenge to the
world. II
That sort of thing, so impressive to the British visitors, is quite beyond
the comprehension of any avowed Communist. America’s industrial strength today is
not in our material advantages nearly so much as it is in our spiritual advantages.
Not machines, not numbers of men, make the difference, but the point of view.
Those British visitors found that production in our steel mills and our cotton
factories is over 50 per cent higher than in the same industries in Britain.
They found American forges producing four times as many forgings per houri and in
the building industries an output per man hour twice the British output.
Mr. Breech contends that this difference is due to the spirit of American industry,
which he says shows itself in three ways: willingness to take risks, as
no state controlled industry can do; willingness to accept change, without which
there is no progress; and the acceptance of competition.
Mr. Breech concluded his address with these words: liThe voluntary will-to-do
of the American people, the potential energy represented by the spirit of American
2-264
management, and the loyalty of American workers — these things are far more powerful
than even atomic bombs.”
*****
Thinking it was time someone had a good word for the commonest family name
in America, H. Allen Smith has written a most amusing book entitled “People Named
Smith”. There are a million and a half Smiths in this country, and the wonder is
that, until H. Allen came along, nobody wrote a book about them. Nor does that million
and a half include such sideline families as the Smi tts, the Schmidts, and the
Smeds, not even the Smythes. With becoming scorn the author casts out what he calls
the Almost Smiths, the sons and daughters of mothers whose maiden name was Smith.
He feels just as bitter about the real Smiths who changed their names to something
else. Those Smiths, for instance, who are now Mary Pickford and Sugar Ray Robinson.
probably H. Allen Smith is right, rather than finicky, about his exclusio~s for, if
he hadn’t drawn a pretty straight line, he would have included nearly all of us.
There are very few people in this country who cannot claim a Smith somewhere in the
family tree.
H. Allen has done a fine job digging up unusual given names which parents have
added to children born simply Smith. His favorite is Light Green Smith, which isn’t
quite fair, for it is the name of a prize pig. Other good ones are Oceanwave Smith,
Wanton Q. Smith, OVer Night Smith, 5/8 Smith, Xenophon P. Smith, and Leonides
D’ Entrecasteaux Smith, a Tennessee lawyer who named his children Keilash Smith” and
Ucal Smith. But the prize should be awarded to Glen E. smith of Georgia, who was
determined to name his first boy by some name never before given to a Smith. By a
stroke of genius he succeeded, for he named “the child Smith Smith.
*****
On New Year’s Eve we brought our story about Kennebec steamboats up to 1850,
just a hundred years ago. In that year a new boat, the T.”P. Secor, was placed on
the line between Hallowell and Bath, where ~e made daily connections with the
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railroad which had then reached the Sagadahoc County seat. Shortly afterward,
when the Portland and Kennebec Railroad reached Richmond, the Secor carried
passengers only the short distance between Richmond and Augusta.
In 1852 the Boston line, plying between Boston and Hallowell, put on the
biggest steamer seen on the river up to that time. It was called the “Ocean”
and did a brisk passenger business until the stormy night of Novembe~ 24, 1854,
when she collided with the CUnard steamship “Canada”, just outside Boston harbor.
The Ocean naturally got the worst of the collision. She took fire and burned to
the water’s edge. Nine lives were lost. This was 44 years, almost to a day, before
the terrible Thanksgiving eve disaster of the steamer Portland.
Captain Nathaniel Kimball of Gardin.er, the man who had done more than any
other individual to keep the Kennebec boats under local management, and who had
himself seen 18 active years of piloting steamers on the river, retired as a boat
captain in 1853, though he still retained a financial interest in the line and
acted as its general manager until 1860.
In 1855 Captain James Collins, relative of Jason Collins, the writer of the
reminiscences of Kennebec Steamboating, piloted on the river a new boat built to
replace the ill-fated Ocean. This boat was called the “Governor” and for two
years, until 1857, she was the only boat on the locally managed line.
But in 1856 a palatial steamer called the “Eastern Queen” was built in New
York. She cost $100,000, a tremendous sum for those days. A new company was
formed to finance her, of which Jason Collins himself was a stockholder, along
with Capt. Nathaniel Kimball, William Bradstreet and William Grant. Two Boston
financiers, Isaac Rich and Nathaniel Stone, had large interests, but no control.
In the spring of 1857 the Eastern Queen, commanded by Capt. James Collins,
former master of the Governor, began her trips from Hallowell to Boston. She did
a huge business for three seasons, then was partially burned in March, 1860,
while laid up in winter quarters at Wiscasset. She was rebuilt in yards at East
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Boston and resumed her trips the day before the presidential election of Abraham
Lincoln in November, 1860.
In the spring of 1861, on the death of James Collins, Jason Collins himself
took command of the Eastern Queen. The Civil War was now on, and the Queen was
promptly chartered by the g0vernment for the General Burnside expedition to Hatteras.
With Jason Collins still in command the Queen sailed from New York on
December 11 with the 24th Massachusetts Regiment, accompani~d by Gilmore’s band.
After disembarking those troops at Annapolis, Captain Collins took on the 4th
Rhode Island Regiment, sailed on to Hatteras Inlet, arrived at the agreed anchorage
a few days later, and waited until February 5th before the signal was given
for the first division to get under way. The Eastern Queen was honored by being
made the flagship of the division and carried on board the division commander,
General Parks. She headed quite a fleet — first the gunboats, then the flagship
Eastern Queen, then the transports carrying 12,000 troops altogether a line of
75 ships. Off Roanoke Island the troops were disembarked in whale boats, under
protection of the Federal gun boats shelling the woods. The next morning the Confederate
forts were captured.
All that winter of 1861-62 the Eastern Queen continued to carry troops, frequently
in the midst of grave danger. But she came through unscathed. In July,
1862 she resumed her old route on the Kennebec. She was indeed welcomed home, for
though the river had been open for more than two months, the ste~oat service to
Boston had been totally interrupted for the first time since its establishment.
But the Eastern Queen was not finished with the war. In November, 1862 she
was again chartered, this time to take part in the expedition of General Banks to
New Orleans. They left New York on December 6, under orders for 24 hours continuous
steaming, and with further sealed orders to be opened after 24 hours in the
presence of the commanding officers of the troops. When those orders were opened,
they found their destination was Ship Island. That was the rendezvous of numerous
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ships for Banks’ great attack. All that winter the Queen was engaged in transporting
troops, supplies and dispatches from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and Pensacola.
When spring came the Queen again returned to the Kennebec, and this time
without interruption she Dema~ned on the Boston to Hallowell route until 1870.
She was then sold to New York interests and her name was changed to the “Tamlapas”.
She ran from Havana, Cuba to various Mexican ports and was finally lost in a Caribbean
hurricane in 1878.
In 1864 the Government offered for sale the blockade runner “Scotia”, which
had been captured by a Federal gunboat. Kennebec interests bought the boat and
. placed her on the route from Hallowell to Portland. The venture proved unprofitable,
the Scotia was sold, set off on the long voyage to China, and was never
heard from again~
The Kennebec Company held a monopoly of the river traffic to Boston until
1865 when an opposition line, started at Bath, put the steamer “Daniel Webster” on
the Boston route. Then the most expensive boat put on the river up to :that time
was built in New York for $180,000. She was called the “Star of the East”. With
such a boat the Kennebec Company hoped to give the Bath Company very stiff competition.
The new boat was connnanded by Capt. Jason Collins, who turned over his old
command, the Eastern Queen, to Captain Samuel Blanchard. The Star was the most
finely equipped boat running out of Boston for any port.
In 1866 there were four boats making daily trips between Hallowell and Boston.
On one day the Eastern Queen would leave Boston while the Star left Hallowell. Then
the following day each would return to its starting point. The same was true of the
two boats of the Bath line, the Daniel Webster and the Eastern City. Passengers and
shippers of freight could choose between two boats of competing lines every· ~ay at
either end of the trip. The competition exceeded that of the early 1850’s. Fares
to Boston were reduced to 25 cents. Excitement was intense. Crowds of people who
2-268.
had never hoped to see Boston took the trip. Some of them were on a steamboat
for the first time. At times the biggest boat, the Star of the East, carried more
than a thousand passengers. When the winter’s ice closed the season of 1866 the
Bath Company had had enough. They never put their two boats back on the river,
and the Kennebec Co~pany returned to its monopoly of the traffic for more than
forty years.
After 1870 the daily trips stopped. For the next 19 years the Star of the
East was the only boat on the route between Hallowell and Boston. She made only
two round trips a week, but those were very profitable and paid the owners handsome
dividends.
In 1889 the modern steamer “Kennebec” was built at Bath for the old Kennebec
Company. She was launched from What was known as the New England Shipyard in the
presence of more than 5,000 people. On board were the Governor and his staff and
I
many other prominent guests. The boat was owned almost completely by persons
living in cities and towns along the Kennbec River.
Our informant, Jason Collins, whose reminiscences of steamboating Mrs. Adams
found in her Gardiner attic only seven years ago, supervised the building of that
boat and became her captain. On July 1, 1889 she made her first trip from Hallowell
to Boston and was still in operation, though under different command, when Mr.
Collins wrote the memoir.
Although ice closed the river above Merrymeeting Bay, and sometimes all the
way above Bath, steamers ran between Bath and Boston year round. In 1897 the Kennebec
Company built the steamer “Lincoln” for the winter route from Bath to Boston
and the summer route between Bath and Boothbay Harbor.
For half a century the Kennebec Steamboat Company, so notably started by
Captain Kimball, and so gloriously continued by the Collinses, James and Jason,
dominated the river, conquering the competition, not only of the Bath Company,
but also of intruding Boston interests, and even the mighty power of Commodore
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Vanderbilt.
Just as the new century got under way, in 1901, the Kennebec Company sold
their steamers, wharves and other property to the Eastern Steamship Company. At
last the trend of big business mergers had caught up with the Kennebec steamboats.
Men of the Kennebec Valley no longer controlled the line. Its future destiny lay
in Boston hands.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
94th Broadcast January 28, 1951
An interesting subject is Indian place names. It is difficult to be certain
of the meanings which the Kennebec Indians attached to various places. As a rule
they never had names for any large area or extent, either of land or water. There
never seems to have been one name for all of the Kennebec River. They had different
names for spots and places along its banks.
Champlain in 1605 was the first to hear the Indian word which he put into
English as QUinaibequi. It was the Indian’s name for the narrow, windy passage
from Bath to Sheepscot Bay on the lower reaches of the river. For the Indians’
frail canoes this was a place of danger, where the water boiled and eddied with
the tides. Hence to the Indians it was the abode of the sea monster, Quinaibick
sea monster in Chippewa.
When the English came they named the whole river Sagadahoc, but for some
reason, above Merrymeeting Bay Champlain’s name stuck. When the Indian wars
wiped out most of the settlements on the lower part of the river, the name Sagadahoc
faded out and the new settlers came to use the name Kennebec to designate the
whole river.
There was long a tradition that the word Sebasticook is a comparatively modern
Indian corruption of the French pronunciation of st. John the Baptist’s
place, or the place where lived an Indian who had been baptized by a French Missionary
and christened St. John the Baptist. Apparently Kingsbury, the author of
the standard history of Kennebec County, believed that story, for he printed it
as fact in his history.
Students of the Indian languages know better. They are familiar with the
word element SEBES, which recurs in numerous place names, and always seems to indicate
“almost through”. Sebasticook thus obviously meant a route to other waters
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by a short carry. This version of the word is supported by the fact that the
stream we know as the Sebasticook was part of the canoe route, with carries,
from the Penobscot to the Kennebec and thence on to Quebec.
Ticonic is probably an old Indian plural of the word for stream (ticus), and
probably in this region originally designated the junction of the Sebasticook and
Messalonskee with the Kennebec.
The most probable meaning of the word Messalonskee is “much clay”. Cobbossecontee
is a compound of the Indian words kabbasch (sturgeon) and Kahnti (plenty).
Just as Cobbossecontee means plenty of sturgeon, so Damariscotta, a corruption of
the older Madamascontis, means plenty of alewives.
*****
Some of us are interested in the different names given to the same thing in
different parts of the English speaking world — as, for instance, pail and bucket,
spider and frying pan, hay rack and hay wagon. Do you know what they call a rummage
sale in Great Britain? I didn’t until I recently saw the expression in that
favorite Scotch newspaper of mine, the Peebelshire News. It seems that September
is the favorite month for these sales, and one issue of the News in that month advertised
no less than five jumble sales. One announcement said: “A jumble sale
is to be held in the Masonic Hall, Peebles, next Saturday. The secretary will be
grateful to those who care to present gifts or jumbles.”
Both words, rummage and jumbles, have appropriate origins. The verb rummage
means to search thoroughly, and the first meaning of the noun was a thorough
search. By extension it then came to mean articles turned up as a result of a
search, then to mean articles turned up as by-products of a search for something
else. It was only a step to the present meaning of miscellaneous articles or odds
and ends.
It is possible, however, that the expression rummage sale comes from a different
source. The French word “arrumage” was the term for goods stowed in the
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hold of a Ship, and the term rummage sale seems to have first been applied to the
sale of unclaimed goods at a Wharf or warehouse.
The origin of the word Jumble is even more interesting for it is one of those
words we call a telescope or a blend — the subtle combination of two older words.
Jumble is a combination of join and tumble, and its first meaning as a verb was
just that to join something together in a tumbled, confused mass. The modern
dictionaries therefore give as the first meaning of Jumble, to mix in a confused
mass; throw together without order. The noun easily came to mean a confused mixture
or medley,· a hodgepodge or a mess.
Well, take your choice. OUr British cousins prefer jumble sales; we like
ruIlJIllage sales. But you’ll probably find the same kind of cast-off garments and
old furniture, whichever word you use.
*****
The PeebelShire News informs me that they have been having quite a controversy
to determine Which is the oldest church bell in Scotland. Yetholm church claimed
a bell in continuous use since 1643. That brought a quick response from the people
of Eddleston, in PeebleShire, who proudly pCinted to the still legible inscription
of the bell in Eddleston church. The inscription was in low German and can be
roughly translated, “I was made in the year of our Lord 1507”. That aroused the
good folk of Manor PariSh, also in Peebleshire, Who said they could prove they had
the oldest bell in continuous use in all Scotland, for the Manor Church bell bears
an inscription Which reads: “In honor of Saint Gordian in the yea~ of our Lord
1478.” The town of Crail thought their neighbor Yetholm exceedingly presumptuous
to brag about a bell cast as late as 1643. Why, right in Crail, they said, were
two bells older than that one cast in 1620, the other in 1614. What is more,
said Crail, their 1614 bell hangs in a church tower that was built in the 12th
century.
Now by what right do I drag into this program remarks about church bells in
Scotland? Because I think it is time we gathered some information about old bells
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of the Kennebec Valley. I know about the Paul Revere bell at Colby College, but
I would like to know the stories about the bell in the Waterville Baptist Church,
in the Universalist Church, and in other churches and schools up and down the
Valley. For instance, what became of the bell in the Unitarian Church when that
building was torn down? If you listeners will help with information, we can have
a program soon on old bells of the Kennebec.
*****
The lot of the prisoner of war has never been happy, but probably not until
World War II did it reach diabolical depths of unspeakable horror. The prison camps
of Germany and Russia, especially those in which they imprisoned their own citizens
were scenes of infamous terror. Never was man’s brutality toward man so grossly
revealed as at Dachau and Schlongarten.
But even 85 years ago it was no picnic to be a prisoner of war. A lot has
been written about the suffering of northern prisoners at Libby and Andersonville,
and much of it was perhaps exaggerated. We ought to be impressed, therefore, as
Waterville folks were impressed in 1864, by what a Waterville man wrote about his
life in Danville Prison.
Abner Small was only a boy when the war broke out, but with other Waterville
boys he enlisted in the Third Maine Volunteers. So distinguished was his service
that he rose to the rank of Major of the 16th Maine and became that famous regimentis-
historian.
Major Small fought in the bloody battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville
and Gettysburg, and well into the long campaign in the Wilderness, until he was
captured in August, 1864. His impressions of life in Danville Prison are neither
exaggerated nor bitter. They are simply revealing. He wrote:
“OUr quarters were so crowded that none of us had any more space to himself
than his body occupied a strip of bare, hard floor, six feet by two. We lay
in long rows, two rows of men with their heads to the side walls, and two with
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their heads together along the center of the room, leaving narrow aisles between
the rows of feet. The wall spaces were greatly preferred, because there a man
could sit up and brace his back against the wall during the long day or longer
night.
“When I was captured I was the proud possessor of ·a new staff uniform ornamented
with gold lace. Five months later my most intimate friends would not have
recognized the ragged tramp Who sat naked on the floor of Danville and robbed the
legs of his trousers in order to reseat them. OUr nerves were worn ragged; the
slightest provocation would cause a quarrel. I saw two cavalry officers come to
bloody blows over a few rusty cans.
“There were attempts to escape and. even we who did not make the attempt
were in danger because of those who did. When the cry ‘Turn out the guard’ resounded
through the prison, I was never more conscious of being in the presence
of death. The fear in battle is nothing compared to the glimpse of eternity when
one looks into the black muzzle of a gun held by a prison guard.
“As our money gave out we sold anything we had to get more. Boots, spurs,
watches, rings, jack knives, buttons were all commodities of trade. Then When we
got the debased Confederate currency in exChange for these possessions, we were
again Cheated by the outrageous prices of those permitted to sell to us at the
prison gates.
“It is hard to keep decent.· Some of our men are almost stark naked, and all
of us are alive with vermin. Most of all we dread the dysentery of whiCh many of
.our men have already died. Life becomes more and more unbearable, and our only
hope is for a general exChange of prisoners between North and South.”
Not since the Civil War has the civilian population of our country seen war
at first hand. We have not had the tragic experience visited upon so many civilians
in Europe in both World Wars, nor have we known the awful helplessness of Koreans
twice driven from their homes within a few months. It is well to remind ourselves
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of what some American families in our own Southland suffered in the 1860 IS.
Dolly Lunt was a Maine girl who went south to Covington, Georgia to teach
school. There she married a planter, Thomas Burge. When Sherman I s Army made
its devastating march from Atlanta to the sea, she was a widow managing her own
Georgia plantation. ·Her diary records what happened when the invading army
reached her home:
“My yards were full of soldiers. To my smoke-house, my dairy, pantry, kitchen,
and cellar, like famished wolves, they came, breaking locks and tearing down partitions.
The thousand pounds of meat in my smoke-house was gone in a twinkling -my
lard, butter, eggs, preserves all gone. My fat turkeys, hens and chickens grabbed
up, my young pigs shot down in the yard. They took everything all the
horses, even myoId mare Mary, now too old and stiff for work, and my dear old
buggy horse, Old Dutch, who has so many times quietly waited at the block for me
to mount or dismount. And they took all my Negro boys, who have faithfully served
me through all this terrible war.
“Even the Negroes I cabins have been rifled of every valuable. I was not personally
molested, but almost everything I owned was taken away — all the last
clothes, the~recious tapestries, the fine paintings ripped out of their frames.
“As night came on the sky all around was lit with the flames of burning
buildings. Dinnerless and supperless as we were, it was nothing to the fear of
being driven out homeless to the dreary woods. I did not go to bed for I knew I
could not sleep. I kept walking to and fro, watching the fires in the distance
and dreading the approaching day, knowing it could only be a continuation of
horrors.”
*****
The Un.ited States Post Office Department has a proud record for the prompt
and regular delivery of mail. We take this splendid service so much for granted
that we forget it took a long time to develop and perfect the system to its pre-
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sent efficiency.
Editor Drew of the Rural Intelligencer, down in Augusta in 1855, was peeved
because he got so many complaints from subscribers about his paper’s late arrival
or sometimes complete failure to arrive at all.
lished the following editorial:
So on April 21, 1855 he pub-
“We assure our friends in Livermore that copies of our paper for the various
post offices in that town are mailed in the Augusta post office every Friday before
noon, in season for the train that leaves here for Portland and Boston at
ten minutes before one o’clock. We can do no more than commit the papers to the
post office in season. If we could jump into the bag with the papers, we would
see where the delay arises, and would appear as an angry spirit to the postmaster
who does not do his duty.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
.95th Broadcast February 4, 1951
In the course of the years I have found many cynical people when you mention
to them the public philanthropies of modern industry. They too often consider
such good works as all bearing the spectacular marks of the elder Rockefeller’s
distribution of dimes, forgetting the enormous benefit to humanity of the Rockefeller
Foundation. These cynics are sure that when any industrial firm today
gives away money, there is either a string attached to it or the company has some
axe to grind.
One of the commonest distribution of grants by big business today i~ to colleges
and universities for scientific research. Of course, say the cynics, these
companies are interested in letting the scientists find ways for the company to
make more money by selling more products to more people who can’t afford them.
That opinion is grossly unjust. One of America’s biggest businesses, still
largely under control of the family in which it originated is the E. I. du Pont de
Nemours and Company, the company which, is sometimes said to be the State of Delaware.
For many years Du Pont has made unrestricted grants to universities for
scientific research. For the coming academic year 1951-52, in spite of the nation’s
absorption in defense production and Du Pont is one of the big defense
producers — they will provide $400,000 to more than twenty universities.
As long ago as 1918 Du Pont began to make these grants to encourage graduate
research in chemistry, and through the years has extended the grants to other
fields of science. The grants are given outright to universities for unrestricted
use in scientific research. The universities themselves select the projects
and maintain complete freedom in the publication of results. Whatever is discovered
belongs to the whole scientific world through the university; it is not the
property of Du Pont.
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The Delaware company is only one of many large industrial firms in America
which by suCh grants are keeping scientific researCh at top quality in our universities.
Such a policy Shows that industria11eaders are well aware of the
nation’S need for independent, unrestricted researCh.
*****
Mr. and Mrs. A. F. Drummond have made to Colby College a gift in whiCh I know
many of my listeners will be interested. It is a map of Waterville in the year
1853, and it is now on exhibition in the main foyer of the Miller Library on Mayflower
Hill.
Strangely enough the map was not printed in Maine, but in New York City by
the engraving firm of Prescott and Edwards at 71 Wall Street. It contains something
I have never before seen on these old maps — the subscribers’ names printed
on the map itself, with eaCh subscriber’s occupation after his name. Many of those
names will ring the bell of memory among the older people who hear them mentioned
tonight. Among those map subscribers of a century ago were Samuel Appleton, postmaster;
Timothy Boutelle, counselor at law; N. R. Boutelle, physician; W. M. Bates,
ornamental printer; J. T. Champlin, professor at Waterville College; Nathaniel
Gilman, opposite whose name is set no occupation, but simply the words “New York”.
Mr. Gilman had left Waterville for the big city some time earlier, but his continued
interest in our town was Shown not only by his large real estate holdings here
but also by his willingness to subscribe for this map.
Other subscribers were D. J. Leighton, West India goods; Daniel Moor, saw
mills and steam boat; E. Noyes, superintendent of the Androscoggin and Kennebec
Railroad; W. A. Stevens, marble manufacturer; S. Wing and Brothers, daguerrean
artists; and C. K. Mathews, book seller, brother of the Edward Mathews whom Dr.
Coolidge had murdered six years before.
As for the map itself, it is very revealing. In the course of the past two
years I thought I had come to learn a lot about old Waterville, but this map held
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many surprises — plenty of information of which I had not been aware. For instance,
I had no idea that Winter Street did not always run all the way through
from Elm to Pleasant streets. Both are very old streets, and I supposed of course
that Winter was from the first a short connecting street between two long streets.
But the 1853 map tells us that such an assumption is wrong. Winter then was a
dead-end street, running from Elm to a point almost opposite where my own house
now stands at Number 17. Between the dead end and Pleasant street was a vacant
lot. Of course I knew, as many of my listeners do, that West Winter Street, from
Pleasant to Burleigh came much later, but how many of you ever suspected that originally
the east end of Winter Street didn’t go all the way through to Pleasant?
Park street was then called Church Street, and Western Avenue, of course,
was Mill Street. The site of the present Monument Park is shown simply as an
unmarked green patch. Just about the time this map was made the old cemetery on
that spot was abandoned, the bodies moved to the new Pine Grove Cemetery, and the
place converted into a park, where some 15 years later .the Civil War monument was
erected.
I have often wondered where the original Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad
joined tracks with the Portland and Kennebec. The A and K, you will recall, I have
mentioned several times on these broadcasts, for it was the first railroad to
reach Waterville, opening here in 1849. Not until six years later did the P and K
reach Waterville. Why the promoters of that road built two expensive covered
bridges, one at Augusta and the other at Waterville, instead of coming straight up
the Sidney side of the river is not entirely clear. Legend has it that one of the
prominent backers was a bridge builder who sold the new railroad a bill of goods,
but the more probable explanation is that Vassalboro was then an important and thriving
village, with at last three prosperous manufacturing plants, and with easy access
to the growing inland villages to the east.
At any rate the railroad bridge at Waterville was finally built in 1854, ex-
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actly one hundred years after the building of Fort Halifax, and early in 1855
the first train from Augusta crossed it into Waterville. The old station of the
P and K was near the Head of the Falls at the foot of Temple street, while the
older station, that of the A and K, was not far from the site of Waterville’s
present railroad station.
Now anyone who goes down on the riverbank back of the old college buildings
can plainly see the road-bed, where once ran the tracks of the extension of the
Portland and Kennebec to Bangor — a road known as the Penobscot and Kennebec. It
had always been clear to me that the tracks of the A and K must have joined those
of the P and K somewhere in Waterville, for before 1860 there are records to show
trains going through from Lewiston to Bangor.
Mr. Drummond’s 1853 map gives us the answer. It shows just one railroad crossing
over College Avenue, exactly where the present upper crossing now is. Just
beyond, in what are now the Maine Central yards, the A and K tracks, having crossed
College Avenue, joined the P and K tracks that came up the river bank from the
bridge. Years afterward the riverbank tracks and the Temple Street station were
abandoned, the lower College Avenue crossing was built, and Waterville got a union
station.
Where Coburn Institute now stands was an older building marked on this map as
“The Academy”. Farther down Elm Street at the corner of School Street, where the
D’Orsay house now stands was another school building marked “The Institute”. All
this calls for an explanation.
What is now Coburn Classical Institute was founded in 1829 as waterville Academy.
It flourished for a time, but declined in the 1830’s so that in 1840 it suspended
operations, without teachers or pupils. A rival school had already sprung
up, called the Waterville Liberal Institute, and is said to have attracted many
students away from the Academy. The rivalry was doubtless enhanced because the
Liberal Institute was sponsored by the Universalists as the Academy had been by the
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Baptists. Friends of the older school were determined, however, that it should
not die. In 1841 they obtained an Act of the Legislature, incorporating Waterville
Academy under a board of trustees, of whom the best remembered were Samuel Plaisted,
Edwin Noyes, Harrison Smith and Stephen Thayer.
It was not the act of incorporation, however, which gave the old Academy the
vigor to make it a great and lasting school. It was rather the coming of a new
principal, James H. Hanson, whose name and fame were to be identified with the
school long after Abner Coburn had built the new building and seen the name changed
in his honor.
There was not room in Waterville for two college preparatory schools. One of
them had to go. That it was the old Institute that died and the Academy (the new
Coburn) that lived is no reflection on the Universalists and no special credit to
the Baptists. Unfortunately the old Institute had no genius like Dr. Hanson to
assure its success and perpetuity. While the old school at the corner of Elm and
School Streets lasted, however, the Universalists had the satisfaction of saying
that while the Baptist society in waterville had the college for its mother, the
Universalist society had the Liberal InstitUte for its child.
The old map gave me another surprise; in 1853 the entrance to the Universalist
Church and the church tower faced across Silver Street to the east, not south toward
the triangle between Silver and Elm Streets.
I got a thrill when I saw plainly marked on the map a building I have mentioned
several times on this program — the old brick schoolhouse on College Avenue, directly
across from the end of Getchell Street, where the north end of the American
Legion building now stands.
Here’s another surprise. In 1853 the part of water Street that extends from
Bridge Street to Main Street did not exist. That was a closed lot. Teams coming up
Water Street went around the lots where Lockwood Park is now, just the way the new
rotary traffic now takes automobiles. In those days it was a more gradUaJ.:1 curve,
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not a sharp turn from.Bridge Street into Lockwood Street as now.
A glance at that old map of 1853 reveals at once how, in Waterville’s very
early days when the town was a part of Winslow, the one road came up the river
bank over the plains and on into. Front Street before lower Main Street was ever
constructed. By 1853 when this map was drawn, Main Street did show all the way
from Lockwood Street to the Main Street railroad crossing, but it is easy to see
how the direct route once ran from Water to Front Streets.
Surely many of you know that until fairly recent years there were buildings
on Lockwood Park. The largest faced the end of Main Street and was visible all
the way down that business thoroughfare. Part of it was once a hotel, and it always
contained stores.
Where the James Hotel now stands were the shops of the A and K Railroad. I
shall have an interesting story to tell about those shops on a later program.
What was known for years as the Noyes house, the present home of the YMCA
and earlier quarters of the BOyS Club, on Temple Street is marked on the 1853 map
“T. Boutelle”. It was indeed the old home of the famous Squire Timothy Boutelle,
and became the inheritance of Squire Boutelle’s daughter, Mrs. Edwin Noyes, whose
husband, starting as a law student in the Boutelle office, had become in 1853, as
the list of map subscribers shows, superintendent of the Androscoggin and Kennebec
Railroad.
On that old map the house where Harvey Eaton now lives is plainly marked “C.
Mathews”. This was, of course, Charles, the brother of the murdered Edward Mathews.
Since Edward had lived with his brother, Mr. Eaton is quite right in saying that he
lives at the same residence once made famous by Waterville’S first victim of
murder.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
96th Broadcast February 11, 1951
Did you ever stop to think what a common and valuable thing is discont.ent?
Yes, I said valuable, for all progress, all advancing change is the result of
discontent. The person who is thoroughly contented with things as they are is out
of place in a changing world. There is a vast difference between the agitating
changer, who wants to sever all contact with the past, who wants not only a New
Deal but a new pack every time he turns around — there is a vast difference between
that sort of social radical and the man who accepts gradual, natural change
as the law of life and therefore shows a hearty discontent with things as they are.
This America of ours was made by dissatisfied people. They wanted freedom
from oppression and they got it. They wanted elbow room, and a vast continent was
open to them. They wanted a higher level of living, and they kept getting it,
higher and higher. If we ever think we have arrived at where we want to be, we
shall stop being Americans. Americans are constantly discontented.
There are benighted employers who like to keep reminding American factory
workers that they are better off than working men in Britain or France or Italy or
China. What they say falls on deaf ears. The American worker doesn’t care about
comparisons with the rest of the world; what he wants is to be better off than he
used to be. He wants to keep climbing up on the American escalator.
But the lUnerican factory worker is not the only American. The American with
money to invest is an American too. If he doesn’t get a fair return on his invested
money, he can protest just as loudly as the workman who feels that he doesn’t
get a fair return for his time and effort.
Now there are certain economic facts that are plain for anyone to see. The
more invested money a country has, the more earned money it gets. Wages go up in
strict proportion to the increased investment of new capital and th.e increased
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installation of new machinery and new power.
Where does the capital come from that makes these increases possible? There
was a time when it came chiefly from the savings of individuals outside the industries
themselves. That is still a significant source of capital, but it is no
longer the largest source. Most of the capital used to expand and develop modern
industry in America comes from a source that is hated and denounced by the social
radicals. It comes from profit. Expansion in our princiapl industries is made by
plowing in the profits of the industries themselves.
Profits mean increased investment. Increased investment means increased wages.
Therefore profits bring increase of wages. If you think that is old fashioned economics,
read what a prominent modern economist one respected by his whole profession
— had to say in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review. There
Dr. Sumner Schlichter explained in careful and unimpeachable detail the connection
between larger profits and larger payrolls. He insists that l.abor and capital had
both better awaken to the fact that the conditions which cause larger profits,
higher wages and increas.ed employment are the same conditions.
By this time some of you are asking why this lecture on economics? Why
doesn’t he get on with some more stories of old days in the Kennebec Valley. I’ll
tell you why. It is because the wealth and strength of our Kennebec Valley was
built by people who understood the values of those sound economic principles which
some of the modern economic theorists would cast idly aside. The Hallowells and the
Gardiners, the Kings and the Sewalls, the Lithgows and the Conys, the Boutelles and
the Gilmans, the Totmans and the Coburns — all the leading men of industry up and
down the Valley knew that progress and business success depended upon teamwork of
capital and labor. Those men never shunned hard work themselves, and their workmen
were encouraged to invest their savings in the Valley’s growing industries.
In fact the industrial team is more than a span; it is a triple rig. Besides
the investor and the worker, there is the manager, whose lot it is to be much
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of the time criticized by both — by investor because profits are not larger, by
worker because wages are not higher. And it is just as true now as it was a hundred
years ago, when the Connors, the Nyes and the Totmans logged the big “Saplin”
up by Moosehead Lake, that it takes all three to make American business, and,
remembering that fact, therefore the American citizen feels a kind of snug contentment
in the midst of natural, persistent discontent.
*****
We have been giving a lot of attention lately to Fairfield. Let’s give Vassalboro
a hearing again tonight. We haven’t mentioned that good town since we talked
about Sam Burleigh’s newspaper.
A hundred and twenty-five years ago a kind of all-around business man kept an
account book a:f:; Getchell’s Corner. The entries in that old book run from May 20,
1824 to October 8, 1825. There is no inkling of the writer’s name, though the book
bears the names of persons who owned it years afterward. One of those names reads
“Hattie Gray, Oak Grove”. Another reads “Mary Ennna Smiley, Vassalboro, Maine”.
Also written on a fly-leaf are the words “Oak Grove Seminary, November 29, 1870”.
On the leather cover of the old book is written “No.5”.
The man who kept this book in 1824 obviously had varied business interests. He
had a potash factory; he owned river boats; he controlled fish seines; he dealt in
groceries and dry goods; he notarized documents.
Frequent entries in the book are headed “Long Boat”. Apparently he operated
one of those old craft that carried freight up and down the river, as well as passengers.
They were poled along close to the bank, sometimes even pulled along by
oxen. It was in such a craft that Jeremiah Chaplin and his family came to Waterville
after they left the Sloop Hero at Augusta.
The Vassalboro business man enters many instances of credit to people who
boarded his boatmen. Other items charge the Long Boat with furnished supplies; as
on May 20, 1824 when the boat is charged for ! bushel of potatoes, 13 cents; and
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4 3/4 pounds of pork, 47 cents. On the same day he charged William Crosby 75
cents for a rafting oar. This may have been for use on Crosby’s own craft, but
it is quite as likely that Crosby was charged with replacement of one of the merchant’s
oars which he had broken.
The most common name in the accounts, as the older vassalboro residents would
naturally suspect, is ~acob Southwick, for in 1824 he was indeed the leading citizen
of Getchell’s Corner. He too operated boats and on July 10, 1824 the book
carries the following charges for one of Jacob’s boats:
“8 lb. Spikes
7i lb. Nails
8i qt. N. E. Rum
1 qt. W. I. Rum
21 ft. Plank
10 lb. SpaniSh Brown
1 3/4 gal. Sperm Oil
1 Paint BruSh
60 lb. Resin
.80
.75
1.00
.31
.45
.50
1.17
.67
2.40”
Especially interesting is the evidence that one of this ledger maker’s enterprises
was hand-hewn lumber. Not once, but several times in the book we encounter
items like this: 5 horse loads chips, 31 cents.
I was surprised to find in this account book a reference to apples sold by
the pound. Not until after the first World War did I ever see apples sold in any
form except measured in the familiar peck and half-peck round measures. So I was
surprised to see in the account book this entry: “February 7, 1824, Edward Starr,
9i lb. apples, 46 cents”. Then it occurred to me that this entry didn’t refer to
whole apples at all. Of course it meant dried apples, the sale of which was connnon
during late winter and spring months in the old days.
In season when the fish were running, that was one of the Vassalboro merchant’s
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biggest enterprises, and this old account book casts interesting light on the once
thriving fish industry of the Kennebec. The book never mentions salmon, although
we know they continued to come up the river until after the dam was buH t at Augusta.
The fish in which this man dealt were herring and shad.
In the spring of 1824 the season opened on May 19 with a good price, $2.75 a
hundred for herring, and ten cents a piece for shad. These people who weighed
dried apples only counted herring and shad. They sold the fish by the piece, regardless
of weight. The next day, May 20, the price had dropped to $2.00 a hundred
for herring and 8 cents a piece for shad. Before the season closed on June 10 the
price had dropped to one cent a piece for herring and four cents for shad. Then
as the run thinned out, it went up again to the original price of $2.75 and 10
cents.
An idea of the size of the fish run on the Kennebec in those days 125 years
ago can be gained from the fact that, between May 24 and June 10 in 1824, this one
dealer sold 26 barrels of herring and about 500 shad. Apparently he did not buy
the fish from fishermen, but operated his own seine, hiring men to do the actual
work; for on June 18 he credited John Dennett with $4.00 for fishing. That was
eight days after the season closed, and may well have been Dennett’s wages for the
Whole season. On July 6 he entered a bigger credit for Nathaniel Hosmer. It reads:
“By his part of all fish taken in the sein $53.27”. In July our merchant had no
more fresh herring, but was then selling smoked herring for one cent each.
This dealer not only operated his own seine. He also outfitted other fishermen.
In May, 1824 he made the following entry in the accounts: “Daniel Marshall,
salt, rum, etc. for his fishermen, $5.83; credit, by boarding Reuben Patridge 39
weeks and 5 days while attending store up to lOth May 1824”.
In April, 1825 he sold to Jacob Southwick 2 qt. Boiled Oil, 58 cents. The
same commodity is often charged to other customers. That fact, and the reference
to sperm oil in the list of items for Southwick’s long boat, to which we referred
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a few minutes ago, leads one to conjecture that 1825 was about the time when
folks of the Kennebec Valley were changing from candles to oil lamps for illumination,
just as three-quarters of a century later they changed from oil to electricity.
Numerous items show his dealings in potash. In June, 1825 he makes several
charges for pearl ash at 17 cents a pound. It was on July 6, 1824, apparently,
that he bought this business from Daniel Marshall, whom he credits on that day with
Potash Arch and Chimney, $24.00; three potash kettles, $112.50; one ladle, 50 cents;
one’ spud, 25 cents; 7 1eaches, $21.00; two receivers, $1.50.
The keeper of this old book also dealt in dry goods. The mere names of the
cloth that he sold make an interesting catalog: muslin, calico, dimity, cambric,
gingham, diaper, sheeting, stripe, duck, devry, shirting, quality and “linnen”.
He sold lots of o1d time remedies; and that families often consumed these in
quantity is revealed by an item of June 10, 1825, when he sold to Elijah Pope a
bottle of castor oil for 84 cents. In 1825 84 cents would buy a lot of castor
oil. It was Jacob Southwick, the village squire himself, who on June 3, 1825
bought a bottle of opodeldoc for 42 cents. An ounce of ipecac cost 50 cents, an
ounce of nitre two cents, a bottle of oil of spruce 20 cents, a pound of logwood
six cents.
In July it took a lot of liquid refreshment to get in the hay, and evidently
the biggest crop was Jacob Southwick’s. Five times in that month are items, each
of which reads, “Rum for haymakers”. It looks as if customers sometimes helped
themselves to refreshment. How else should one interpret this item: “Aug. 8,
1825 — John Littlefie1d, 2 bottles Rum, taken and not charged the last two weeks,
44 cents”.
This dealer managed to dispose of anything that came into his hands. In July,
1825 he made this charge: “Daniel Marshall, to damaged bacon delivered to Getchell,
22 cents”. He must have made many a shrewd bargain. In August, 1825 he
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paid John Gray $4.67 for making 14 pairs of shoes. In June he collected $1.50 from
BE?:njamin Jacobs for “trip in boat to Hallowell”, where he apparently was going
anyhow with a load of goods. But perhaps his neatest bargain had been a year
earlier, in June, 1824 when on one day he sold Jacob Southwick a merino sheep
for $3.50 and on the very next day sold him 3! lb. of Merino wool for $2.10. It
is evident that he sheared the sheep before he delivered the animal to Southw~ck.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
97th Broadcast February 18, 1951
Sometimes we seem to forget that this program bears the title “Little Talks
on Common Things”. We spend so much time talking about the things, common and uncommon,
of long ago days, that we need occasionally to refer to some common
thing of our own time.
I don’t recall that we have previously mentioned that very common household
thing, glycerin. At least it was very common not so long ago. Between 1942 and
1945 we were constantly reminded of the importance of glycerin in winning the war.
As everyone knows it is highly important in the making of explosives.
Formerly glycerin was collecteq bit by bit throughout the world as a by-product
of the manufacture of soap. We all recall the fat-saving campaign during
the war. Today it is quite different. Glycerin is produced from the products of
the great oil industry, and it can be made in almost unlimited quantity.
Very common things are the insect pests that eat up our gardens. Every season
sees some new insect killer put on the market.” How are these pest killers
made? The new fungicides and insecticides, the materials to treat seeds to insure
better germination and the nitrogenous fertilizers to stimulate their growth all
come from the great petroleum industry — the same folks who refine the gasoline
that is pumped into your car.
We are reading lately about the new amino acids, the building blocks of the
proteins, and the research scientists tell us that from the oil industry will come
these new aminos to supplement the existing proteins of the vegetable and animal
world.
We are now told that nearly half of all the products of the organic chemical
industry are derived from oil. The petroleum industry is growing to be more and
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more like the old woman who lived in the shoe, so abundant and varied are her
children.
*****
In these days when the papers carry so many items about commercialized amateur
athletics, it is easy to think the practice is new and previously unheard of.
But it is very old indeed. The columns of the Waterville Mail in 1896 make it
clear how the accusations flashed back and forth among the schools and colleges
half a century ago.
On January 3, 1896 there appeared in the Mail a letter to the editor signed
anonymously “An Honest Sport”. There had evidently been published in Harper’s
Weekly an article that attracted a lot of attention. Its reference to non-students
playing on the high school teams of Portland and Bangor had brought Maine some national
but undesirable publicity. The letter to the Waterville Mail, alluding to
the Harper’s article, went on to say:
“The Bangor papers take exception to the article and claim their team has
been run on the square. Perhaps the athletic standards in the Queen City have
been improved, but we do know that in former years the studies of some of their
players came under the heads of recess and football. Why Portland and Bangor were
selected in the Harper’s article we do not know. Certain it is that any other two
school elevens in the state could have been taken as bad examples. Probably nowhere
in the Union are school athletics in a more unsavory state than they are
in Maine today.
“It is pleasant to say, however, when we turn to the Maine colleges, that we
find conditions IIDlch improved. But there is room for still more improvement. One
college already imagines that the 1897 baseball pennant waves over her diamond
because two or three New England League players will enter that college next spring.”
The Bangor Commercial picked up that letter with delight. The Commercial said:
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“It is seldom that the Waterville Mail allows any belaboring of·Colbythrough
its columns, but we notice in that paper a most sensible communication from a
writer Who signs himself ‘An Honest Sport’. While he doesn’t mention Colby, we
all know what college expects baseball players from the New England League.”
The waterville Mail immediately retaliated: “The article referred to is
not aimed at Colby and has no reference to the athletic situation there. It has
particular reference to the fitting schools, the academies of Maine. We are not
aware that Colby needs any reproof for failure to encourage purity in athletics.
If all the other Maine colleges were as faultless in this respect, there would
be little ground for criticism.”
When games were played in any of the sports back there in the 1890’s, feeling
often ran high. The Waterville Mail carried a stern protest about tactics in the
Colby-Maine football game in 1896. Although Colby had won the game 10 to 0, the
Mail commented: “Hook, Colby’s quarterback, had one of his arms roughly twisted
by a Maine player, an act that had no excuse and which furnished an example of
dirty football Which was in striking contrast to the gentlemanly manner in which
the Colby men treated their opponents. II
That blast was too much for the Bangor Commercial. They let loose with the
following barrage: “The State College boys did well in Saturday’s game. They had
to play Colby’s mercenary team. Messrs. Scannell and Gibbons are not novices. One
of them is an employee of a waterville hotel. It is a pity to have such hired
sluggers introduced into Maine football. President Butler of Colby knows this is
not honorable. We hope that Colby team will this year be wiped from the face of
the earth, and that Messrs. Scannell and Gibbons will come in for all the extra
punches that can be introduced into the rough and tumble of the game.”
The Mail had its come-back all ready: “Messrs. Scannell and Gibbons came to
Colby from Phillips Exeter Academy. If one of them helps pay his way through college
by working in a hotel, it is a more honorable business than are the sneers of
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the falsifying writer in the Bangor Commercial. Those two fellows are bona fide
students and honorable young men. The Commercial’s insult to President Butler and
to Colby is beneath contempt.”
I know from experience that feeling between the academies was even more
fierce at times than between the colleges. Not only did I see the great battles
between Hebron and Coburn, and between Hebron and Kents Hill, during lJl.y eight
years as a teacher at Hebron, but I caught a glimpse of the bitterness of those
conflicts even before I ever saw the Hebron campus.
When I was in college an annual spring event was the baseball tournament of
the so-called Colby Junior League. The league was comprised of the four Colby prep
schools, Coburn, Hebron, Higgins and Ricker. The tournament consisted of three
games, the preliminaries being drawn by lot, then the two winners playing each
other for the championship.
A lot of hard feeling was caused by college students, not graduates of any
one of the schools, siding with one school — in succeeding years not by any means
the same school — and going out in large numbers to cheer that school to victory.
The college played favorites, said the partisans of the other schools; the tournament
wasn’t fair. At any rate, feelings finally ran so high that the annual
tournament was abandoned.
Well, as I said, my personal experience verifies the fact that those prep
school contests were heated affairs. One spring in my college days Coburn had
just defeated Hebron in the finals of the tournament on a Saturday afternoon. I
had returned to the fraternity house and was standing by a second floor window
overlooking the walk When I heard loud and high-pitched voices in angry argument.
As anyone within half a mile could hear, the bone of contention was the game that
had just ended. I stuck my head out the window to see if I recognized these arguing
combatants, now verbally playing the game allover again. I was amused, but
in light of What went on in those days, not wholly surprised, to see that the
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embattled conversation was between George Stanley Stevenson and William E. Sargent,
respectively the dignified principals of Coburn and Hebron.
*****
All the £uror over athletics half a century ago was not confined to the
schools and colleges of Maine. On June 22, 1897 the Waterville Mail commented as
follows: “In his recent lecture in this city, President Gates of Amherst incidentally
referred to the fact that the captain of the Amherst football team has
been dismissed from college for failure to maintain proper standing in his studies.
captain Callahan, who was referred to, is said to be one of the finest centers in
the whole list of college players, and it turns out that Amherst’s loss is Yale’s
gain, for Callahan has entered the New Haven institution. He can’t play on the
Yale team under the rules, however, until the season of 1898. Perhaps a year’s
retirement from football will give him the scholastic standing he lacked at Amherst.
*****
Back there in the 1890’s the big football game of the year was not Colby’s
game with any of the other Maine colleges; it was the annual Thanksgiving Day
contest between Coburn and waterville High School. In 1896 that game was played
on November 26, which is regarded as a rather late date for football in Maine.
Coburn won the game 6 to 4. On Friday the waterville Mail devoted three first
page columns to the battle. “The conditions for football playing”, said the Mail ,
“were the worst ever seen in this city. Instead of frozen ground, the teams had
to play on ice covered with snow, and it was wonderful how the men kept their feet
as well as they did. A drizzling rain that froze as it fell continued throughout
the game.”
Al together it proved a gloomy day for the high school, but somewhat comforting
by two winning points for Coburn.
*****
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Less than one per cent of humanity have caused most of the world’s major
troubles. And did you ever stop to think that those trouble-makers have all been
embued with a hatred of the basic truth of Christian democracy — the truth that
every human being is a child of God, deriving his human rights from God, not from
the State? Whenever a Caesar or an Alexander, a Napoleon, a Hitler or a Stalin
sets out to enslave mankind, he knows that he can succeed only by eliminating religion
and erasing.all reference to the fact that man gets his rights from God,
and that the ultimate purpose of government is to protect those rights down to
the last and ‘weakest individual. If the conquest-bent dictator can wipe out that
precious heritage that has comedown through 1,900 years, he knows his victory is
won.
perhaps you don’t belong to any church. perhaps you haven’t been inside a
church for a long time. Perhaps you just doni t like the churches. Well, that is
your privilege as a free American; but you may not always be a free American unless
a great many people continue to believe in and support the church.
For it is the church that, year in and year out, generation after generation,
keeps alive the precious truth on which our forefathers founded the government of
the United States; that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator
with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In this time of world crisis, when the very foundations of Christian democracy
are threatened, we ought to take seriously to heart the words spoken 250
years ago by William Penn: “Those people who are not governed by God will be
ruled by tyrants.”
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
98th Broadcast February 25, 1951
Among the commonest words on everybody’s lips these days is the word “security”
• I suppose if all the men and women in the world could put into a single
wOrd their greatest desire, that one word would be security.
But it is quite another matter to determine what security really is. When
is a man or woman secure? Men once thought it was a material thing, so they built
moated castles and turreted walls. But from the Great Wall of China to the
Maginot Line, physical defenses have never spelled security. Nor can it be found
today in jet planes and guided missiles and atom bombs.
There have been other times and other places in which security was thought to .
lie in law. “If we can only get a law passed”, people said, “we’ll have no more
trouble. ” Well, the Medes and the Persians passed such laws that men called them
“the laws of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not”. But where are the
Medes and the Persians today? Their inalterable laws did not make them secure.
probably most people think that money is security. “If we only had money”,
they say, “we WOUld. have no fear”. But money can be lost, inflation lowers its
value. Security is not spelled in dollars and cents.
By this time we know, with sad disillusionment, that security does not come
by political promises. We are not so ready today to follow the “vote-for-me-and-Iwill-
take-care-of-you” politician. There is no security in the privileges
that arise out of political power.
If security is none of these things, what is it? Security is not outside,
but inside. It is not material, but spiritual. It is something that lives in the
heart.
Did you see the heart-warming movie “I Remember Mama”? You won’t soon for-
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get the story of that Norwegian family living in San Francisco — living always
on the ragged edge of poverty. But they knew Mama had a bank account in the big
bank downtown, kept for an emergency. Emergenqie~ came, but they always found
a way to meet them without turning to the bank account. Yet just knowing it was
there held the family together and gave them strength. Years passed and the children
prospered. At last they said: “Now, Mama, we don’t need to worry about living
expenses any more. You go downtown, take all the money out of the bank,
and spend it on yourself.” Then Mama confessed that there had never been any bank
account.
Security is in the heart.
*****
We want to tell you tonight about another small-town newspaper. A north Kennebec
town that once had a newspaper was Clinton. The Clinton Advertiser was started
in 1877 by a man of several undertakings. Indeed he was Clinton’s undertaker, as
well as furniture dealer, Benjamin Foster. After a time he took into partnership
Miss Etta Pratt, and until 1903 the Advertiser was published every week by Foster
and Pratt. After Miss Pratt’s death, Foster sold the paper to a more recent undertaker
and furniture dealer of Clinton, Marcellus Cain, who published the Advertiser
for five years, selling it in 1908 to William Tracey. Tracey kept the paper going
for about a year. He is quoted as saying there was more glory than dollars in
printing a paper in Clinton. Anyhow the paper last appeared in 1909.
We think those publishers did very well to keep a paper going, week after week,
in so small a village as Clinton, foi32 years. They deserve a lot of praise for
their persistence, and probabl~ all of them were out of pocket in their laudable
attempt to give Clinton a newspaper.
For my information about Clinton’s paper I am indebted chiefly to Mrs. Lillian
Brown of Clinton, who has kindly sent me a copy of the Advertiser dated October 11,
1888.
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Three columns of the second page are devoted to short paragraphs under the
heading “Home Items”. Some of them are not what a modern paper would call news,
but they show that people in 1888 were talking about the same subject that claims
our attention today. I quote from the Clinton paper: “When is it going to clear
off? is the question asked by nearly everyone you happen to meet”. Another paragraph
later on: “The steady rain of the past few days has caused the river to rise
to a very high pitch for the time of year. II
Another: “So much stormy weather has greatly hindered the work on the Free
Baptist Church, which it was hoped to have finished before cold weather. It will
be ready to receive the plastering the first of next week.”
As for the news items, Mrs. Elvin Jaquith had made over a hundred dollars
worth of cheese; Secretary Gilbert of the Maine Board of Agriculture met with
Clinton farmers; Mrs. Lucy Witham of Richmond committed suicide by taking “Rough
on Rats”; and Rev. Osgood, presiding Elder of the Methodist District, preached on
“The Interest Felt by Angels in Man’s Salvation”.
As usual with these old newspapers, the ads are the best revealers of the
times. Dodge and Jaquith, dealers in Clothing, Shoes, Crockery and Glassware,
evidently sold other articles as well, for in a part of the paper separate from
their regular ad they announced the arrival of a lot of very nice, pure tea.
B. T. Foster, publisher of the paper, ran a full column ad of his own, setting
forth his fine assortment of lounges, chamber sets, looking glasses, crockery, curtains,
caskets and burial shrouds. The last item of his ad reads: “A good cloth
covered casket. $12 and upwards.”
Two carriage manufacturers advertised their skills: W. I. Brown and S. W.
Steward. L. Wright, the blacksmith, wanted folks to know that he now ran the shop
formerly occupied by C. Jaquith. Making use of that apocryphal yarn about George
Washington and the cherry tree, J. P. Billings showed an amusing wood-cut, and
under it the words: “I cannot tell a lie, either; I did it with one of Billing’s
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axes. All kinds of edge tools manufactured by J. P. Billings, Clinton, Maine.”
G. H. piper thought, now the crops were in, it was time he got paid for
the spring fertilizer. He advertised: “Notice. All parties indebted to me for
phosphate please settle their account on or before November first.”
I think the ad of D. G. Webber, Clinton’s dentist, is the only instance I
can recall of a dentist announcing as follows: “Gas free for extracting teeth …
Not all the ads originated in Clinton. Tuttle and Frazier, in the Burgess
Block, Corner of Main and Bridge streets, Fairfield., had a full column ad in
baseball jargon headed “A Base Steal Stopped”. They said: “In our game against
competitors, the latest feature is the clever stopping of a base steal, by whiCh
our opponents schemed to steal our trade by a sharp, secret cut in prices. But it
didn’t work. The pennant will go to the firm that undersells every other and
knocks all competition flat. That firm is Tuttle and Frazier. We don’t need base
steals. We’re making clean hits. Hit No.1 — A sweeping reduction in swmner
shawls and mantles. Hit No. 2 — Chevot shirting for working men and boys, to be
sold regardless of cost.”
Another Fairfield firm, D. W. Allen and Co., also advertised for the Clinton
trade, offering kitchen ranges from $18 to $45, as well as a splendid assortment
of parlor heating and oven parlor stoves. The pride of their collection, however,
was a stove called the sub Base, Which burned wood and was guaranteed to keep a
steady fire as easily as a coal stove. This stove, proudly said Allen, would keep
plants from freezing, maintain even temperature in a sick room, and keep everybody
in the house warm and comfortable.
We are grateful to Editor Foster for printing on his front page casual items
of Clinton in the long, long ago. In this particular issue of 1888 he was concerned
with town meetings in the 1840’s and results of the Clinton vote in the September
state elections.
The record is sprinkled with names that meant a lot to Clinton a hundred
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years ago — names that are still well remembered in the town. Among them are
Philander Soule, Francis Low, Samuel Burrill, RiChard Wells, John Stinchfield,
Mathew Pratt, John Totman and Sargent Jewell.
The Hunters were a famous Clinton family. There were James, David and Z:irnti,
and doubtless several others, back there in 1846, when James Hunter won his famous
law suit against the Town of Clinton. A raft of lumber, being floated down
the Sebasticook by its owner, James Hunter, had run against the abutment of the
bridge with suCh impact that the raft broke up and the lumber went its wild, unChaseable
way down the Sebasticook and the Kennebec. Hunter claimed damages of
the town, and, believe it or not, he collected.
*****
Knowing that some of my listeners are interested in unusual items from the
world of books, I want to tell you about a book 1,200 years old that has never
been printed.
Some time in the eighth century the monks of Kells in Ireland produced by hand
what has become one of the world’s most famous illuminated manuscripts of the
gospe1s. It has long been considered one of the world’s most beautiful books.
Although many attempts have been made to reproduce by hand the rich illumination
the drawn pictures, the laviSh capital letters and the ornamental page borders
they have never been successfully duplicated. Since 1661 the book has been
kept at Trinity College, Dublin.
Now at last, thanks to modern methods of color photography and color printing,
a Swiss publiSher, after four years of patient experiment, has produced a method
that makes possible printed copies of this rare old book. The printing is being
done at Berne, Switzerland, but don’t be too eager to own a copy. Only 120
copies will be for sale and the price will be $450 a copy.
The original hand-written manuscript of the Book of Kells contained 344 pages
and a binding of riCh gold. Some time in the eleventh century, when William the
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Conqueror’s Normans were invading England, thieves stole the book and stripped
off the binding. That gold binding was all they wanted; the precious book itself
they threw away. It was later found under a pile of sod, with five pages
missing. It is the remaining 339 pages that are now being printed.
Some idea of the color problem facing the printer is shown when we learn
that the original book contains more than 650 distinct shades. Yet the 48 pages
which will be reproduced in full color will have the exact shades of the original.
If you can’1::. own one of those $450 copies, perhaps you may some day visit
Dublin and see the original book. If you do that, you will see only two pages. In
the Trinity College library the book lies open. Every morning an assistant turns
over a new page. Any visitor who wants to see the whole book must· come back for
170 successive days.
*****
More than a year ago on this program I talked a bit about folk-etymology,
the process by which people fit strange words into familiar moulds — sparrow
grass for asparagus, cutlash for cutlass. I told you how folk-etymology accounted
for such words as primrose and rosemary (neither of which are roses), and for
pantry and buttery .(which have nothing to do with pans or butter), and I referred
to a few family names that originated by the same process. One of those names
was Simpson, as applied to families of French-Canadian descent.
Simpson is a very old English name. How did French-Canadian families happen
to have it? I told you that Dr. Julian Taylor, whose memory of Waterville went
back to years before the Civil War, once assured me that the French-Canadian family
name of Simpson was the English way of trying to say Sans Souci. The name Sans
Souci was very strange to English ears, but it sounded something like Simpson;
so Simpson the Sans Soucis in New England became.
Now Joseph Bolduc of Elmhurst Street, who has a rich fund of historical knowledge
and is a man very well worth knowing, comes forward with a more complete
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and very interesting explanation. Whether the explanation is fact or mere legend
out of old French Canada doesn’t matter much. It makes a good story anyhow.
It seems that long ago there came to Canada two brothers named Bureau,
with land grants from the Crown of France. One brother, thrifty and industrious,
located on good, fertile land, took good care of it, and prospered. The other
brother, happy-go-lucky and easy-going, took up a piece of swampy, brushland
nearer town, failed to clear it properly, and gradually found himself in poorer
and poorer circumstances. That happy-go-lucky brother came in time to be called
by his neighbors Bureau Sans Souci (Carefree Bureau). By the time the next generation
had grown up the Bureau part of the name was dropped, and Sans Souci became
the recognized family name. Generations later, when the Sans Souci, no longer
impoverished and thriftless, like the first possessor of the name, but hardworking
immigrants with ambition and zeal, came to New England, folk-etymology
changed the Sans Souci to Simpson.
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LITTLE TALKS ON ·COMMON THINGS
99th Broadcast March 4, 1951
It is a good American trnt to distrust people who acquire too much power.
The Famed Boston Tea Party was born in a distrust of monopolies, especially a
government monopoly. Raving been fed up on monopolies in Old England, the colonists
of New England jealously guarded the rights of the colomal legislatures
granted them in the royal Charters and by later precedents.
When the representatives of the several colonies gathered to write the COnstitution
of the new federal government they were careful to WTite into it these
words: ‘~e powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are
reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Not only did they
zealously guard the rights of the several states, they set up the further
safeguard of dividing the powers of the federal government into three branChes,
each a check on the others. They further saw to it that, while population should
decide the number of representatives in the lower house of the Congress, each
state should have the same number in the upper house.
Now notice how dictatorship, anywhere in the world, always acts. When Hitler
became Chancellor, his first official act through his stooges in the Reichstag
was to abolish the powers of the little German states. Lenin, tolerant toward the
Russian provinces, was scarcely in his grave when Stalin took away their powers.
l’bbody is so foolish as to claim that a new Hitler or Stalin will do the same
in the United States. But a lot of honest, straight-thinking Americans are worried
about the growing trend to place more and more power in the hands of a few
men in Washington. That is what this debate about troops to Europe is all about.
That is why some people oppose the molmting billions of federal aid to the states,
for he who pays the piper calls the tune.
More than a century ago Thomas Jefferson said: “When all government shall be
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drawn to Washington as the center of power, it will render powerless the checks
provided of one government on another and will become as oppressive as the
government from which we separated. tt
A century after Thomas Jefferson, General Eisenhower said: “The concentration
of too much power in centralized government need not be the result of violent
revolution. A paternalistic, hand-out govermnent can gradually destroy the will
of the people to maintain any high degree of local responsibility. II
Every time we run to Augusta instead of solving a problem at home, every
time Augusta turns to Washington for help, government gets farther and farther
removed from the grass roots. Of course certain matters must be the concern of the
federal government, but not all matters. Because charity begins at home, it doesn’t
have to stay there. But let it all drift off t.o Washington and not even charity
is left any longer at home.
So it seems appropriate that we turn our attention tonight to the good old
subject of town meetings.
*****
It is town meeting time again. Tomorrow the citizens of many Maine towns
will assemble for the annual meeting. Other towns will meet a week later. A few
have even abandoned the traditional Monday date and hold their meetings on Saturday.
But, by and large, allover rural New England, the firs t Monday in March is
still town meeting day.
Many men of my age think that town meetings have grown genteel and sophisticated,
like most other gatherings since the days of our youth. With the town
budget committees meeting in advance to recommend or oppose articles in the warrant,
with the voting for town officers by Australian ballot, sometimes on a
separate day from that on which the articles in the warrant are considered, with
the presence of women voters, and with even the introduction of amplifying
equipment into some of the town halls, we old-timers insist the town meeting,
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like the old gray mare, ain’t what she used to be. But perhaps we are just getting
old and forgetful. The old town meetings may have been more dignified and
less riotous than we seem to remember them.
My earlies t: recollection goes back not merely before the days of printed
ballots, but before any written ballots at all. Town officers were elected
merely by show of hands, or by having the voters file past tellers. And many
a row was caused right there. In one town I well :remember what caused the introduction
of the check list. A candidate for first selectman knew he was
going to have a bard fight. So he rounded up some recently arrived workers in
a local mill, rushed them past the teller for his side, and won the election.
Somebody soon found out that those rounded-up voters not only had not established
residence in the town but actually badn’t yet been naturalized as citizens
of the United States. Rather than let an embittered citizenry take the case
to the courts, the selectman resigned. The next year ., and ever since, that
town has used the legal voting list to check the voters for town offices.
In the old days the moderator had a real job. By the time I was old enough
to be elected mocierator of an Oxford County town — that was only thirty years
ago — the town meetings had calmed down a lot. Except for being challenged to
a fist fight by an irate voter whose motion I had declared out of order, I didn’t
encowter anyth:i.ng very exciting at that 1920 meeting. A couple of constables
rushed the irate and somewhat inebriate protester out of the hall and the meeting
went on about its business.
But that was well on into the twentieth century. Before 1900 town meetings
were tougher. To begin with, it was always a kind of holiday. I say a f’ktnd”
of holiday, for there was none for the clerks in the stores. It was one of
their busiest days. Many of the men coming in from the tams to town meeting
brought their women-folk along, and those women had saved up egg and butter
money for many weeks for this grand event. If a store clerk got to town meeting
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long enough to vote for officers he was lucky. He seldom got in his vote on
any article in the warrant,unless the proprietor of the store had an interest
in the article.
Most women of the village had no time for shopping that day. Their place
was in the kitchens of grange hall and church vestry. For promptly at twelve
o’clock noon, down came the moderator’s gavel as he declared the meeting in recess.
Then the arguing, sometimes very boisterous crowd, suddenly realized that
they were hungry and off they trooped to their favorite church or to the
grange hall. No one dining place was ever big enough to accommodate them all,
and sometimes a fellow had to go to two or three before he could find a seat.
But the food was tasty and abundant in all the places, and he fOmld one about
as good as another. What food it was – the heaping bowls of bakA!d. beans, great
loaves of brown bread baked in five pound lard pails, apple pies, mince pies,
squash pies, custard pies, cream pies, cut in real, man-sized pieces, not in
those tantalizing little samples one now gets in a restaurant. And coffee
gallons upon gallons of it — made in those enormous, old fashioned coffee pots
and served in those huge, straight-sided white mugs that would hold a full pint.
What did that meal cost the hungry voter? I recall very well how, in 1898, one
church was very nearly boycotted because it raised the price to 25 cents. When
the good women realized that the voters were passing them by, they quickly
put out a big sign announcing reduction of their price to the conventional 20
cents.
Whether it was the presence of women voters or simply a change in rural
customs, something happened about thirty years ago to take the sawdust off the
town meeting floor. That sawdust was just. as much a fixture of town meeting as
it was the inevitable accompaniment of the meat market. Smoking was not permtted
in the town hall because of the fire hazard, but that generation was a
generation of chewers and the sawdust served a useful purpose. Praise be, with
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all their habits, that is one with which the younger generation is not cOJlllllOD.ly
afflicted. Only in the South do you any longer see the advertising signs for
Eating Tobacco. Along with the old-time snuff it is gradually disappeariDg from
New England.
I xemember some of the prominent town meeting characters very well, and I
suspect they wem types whose counterparts could at that time be found in, almost
every town. Them was. the -Beverend Hacywho spoke fmquently and pompously
with a kind of Daniel Webster oratory. He could lend polish and importance to
the simplest subjects. Once the town was contemplating the purchase of a new
snow roller. Disgusted with the economy-miuded folks who wanted to pass over
the article, the Reverend Hac launched iDto a flowery tribute to sleigh bells
on the snow and their inevitable disappearance unless the roads wem well rolled.
The only trouble with Hac was that he was that ram specimen, a Democrat, in a
staunch Republican town. He had mpresented a New Hampshim district in the
national Congress when Grover Cleveland was Pftsident, and he never let folks
forget it, not even his Sunday parishioners. In town. meeting he was listened
to with reasonable- politeness, but the votes usually went the other way.
Then there was Uncle Brad, who was just naturally &gin everything. His
pet hate was the schools. Be had a natural gift for scathing sarcasm and I
can still see him waving those lanky arms as he fought the introduction of music
into the- curriculum. ”They want to take valuable school time away from mading,
writing and ciphering to teach my Silas to sing. Why, Godfmy mighty, that’s
like tryiDg to teach a sow to lay eggs.”
Once, through aGE aCCident, Une-le Brad arrived at a meeting late. ‘~t
they trying to do now?” he asked as, out of bmath, he nudged his way into the
crowd. ”They want to tumpike an old- road”, someone said. Uncle Brad got the
floor at once- and denounced the waste of Iloney spent modernizing old roads that
had ao- use anyhow. Not until the next speaker got the floor did Uncle Brad learn
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that be bad been denouncing a plan to iaproft the roac:l past his own fame
Thea. there was Joe. Joe was the perpetuaf seconder of motions. No sooner
would anyone make a motion than Joe would second it. T~e moderator ouly wasted
his breath by regularly pointing out that Joe had already seconded a 1IIIOtion on
the other side. He kept right on with the practice, to which be gaft his own
peculiar pronunciation, for he.always said, “1 second the emotion”. There
was indeed a lot of emotion in the way he said it.
Just once was Joe caught napping. He got engaged in a discussion with another
fellow while the ‘Eeting was trying to decide who should collect the taxes.
-The job usually went to the lowest bidder, and the fellow who wanted the job
badly had underbid everybody else by offeriug to collect for half a cent on the
dollar.
ODe of those wags that inhabit every tOWD. saw J~ ‘SabsOJ:ptiClll and said,
”1 move Joe collect them for nothiug”. Catching the spirit of the occasion,
the moderator asked, “Does anyone second the motion’l” Joe hadD It heard the
motion, but he heard the moderator’s question, aDd rose to the bait. ”1 second
the emotion”, he shouted. The moderator then declamd the motion out of order
and the half-cent bidder got the job. But Joe never heard the last of it.
‘l’he town aetiugs fifty· years ago were not all hUllor, explosive oratory
and big dinn.em. Huch sound bus1sss was done aDd a lot of leftl-headed d1scussion
took place. We should thaDk. a beneficent Providence or our New England
luck or sOlllethiug that the· town meeting still survives. It is all we
have left of real democracy in America. It is the only legislatift body on
earth where every voter, regardless of education or wealth or family status,
can have his say. When the town meeting decides an issue it is literally the
will of the people. We must never let the town meeting die.
*****
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We are pleased to leam that Clinton’s little paper “The Advertiser” is
remembered in other places besides Clinton. Mrs. Lucy Roberts of North Vassalboro
has loaned me fiVe issues of the little paper, which had been preserved by
her mother many’ years ago.
Usually my interest in these old-time village newspapers is confined to
the local items, but occasionally one of the boiler-plate pieces attracts my
attention. What those rural editors called boiler-plate was material all formed
and ready’ to print, which was· fumished them by some syndicate, and which
they used to fi11 up the colUIIIDS.
Such a piece of boUer-plate occupied much of the first page of the Clinton
Adverti_r on Nowmber 10, 1892. It is entitled “Geman Ideas about America”
and 18 a memorable example of ethnocentrism. That’s a big, hard word, but a
good one to know and remember. Ethnocentrism is the belief that the ways, customs
and cultuJ:e of one’s own COUlltry or ODe’S own part of the coUlltry ate superior
to all other peoples and places.
Considering the plight· of GermaDS today, it is interesting to know what
they thQught of us fifty years ago. Says the article:
”Though no longer considered a race of Indians, Americans ate supposed to
be a very UIlcivilized race of white men. Yet Germans believe that in the course
of time those savage traits of character will disappear and Americans will become
as polished as are the GexmaDS. Living as we do among Negroes and IndiaDS,
compelled to’ defend ourselves with pistols and bowie knives, surroUllded by deserts
and mOUl1taiDS, the GeDUlDS consider it remarkable that we are far enough
advanced to publish newspapers, and with great condescension they applaud the
rapidity of our progress. It
Local matten, I still insist, provide the cream in those old newspapem.
Boiler-plate, e’Vell on what the 1890 Gemans thought of us, is only the skilllled
milk. So I was pleased to note in the Clinton Advertiser of March 20, 1890 that
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a Clinton schoolteacher had the courage to defend herself against criticism contained
in the report of the school supervisor. She wrote: “How could a supervisor
be so blind to h:l.s duty as to retain the services of a teacher whose manner,
he claims, was boisterous and whose services were useless to the school.
He says that parents felt the same way. How could they, when no word of complaint
came to me during the whole term? If complaints were made and were
justified, why did not the superv:l.sor get rid of the bo:i.sterous teacher? On
the contrary, he made not a single complaint to me during his calls at the
school. The comments in his report are unjust and undeserved.”
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LITl’LE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
lOOth Bro.dust March 11, 1951
To H.roun-.l-hshid, C.liph of Bagdad, Sheherezade told her stories for a
thous.nd and one nights. Tbese yarns of mine have been spun for only a hundred
nights, yet you good listeners have already done a lot better than the Arab lis-
.. , .. ·teaer- ·did for the slave girl.. For you have cooperated in keeping this program.
going. More than a hundred of you have contributed items of interest and historical
value, and lam deeply grateful.
But you and I alike should remeaber what we owe to three other factors.
First, to the men of genius and science who have made possible radio c:ommunication,
the great IIodern industry represented here tonight by Mr. Carpenter. Second,
to Station WTVL, the success of which in our community has been due almost entire1y
to the vision, enterprise and determination of Mr. Carleton Brown. And
third, to the Keyes Fibre Company, whose vice-president and general superintendent,
Mr. Parsons, has so graciously recognized this hundredth broadcast. This
program. cannot possibly have added a Dickel to the sale of Chinet and Savaday
dishes. It was DOt intended to do so. It has not been trying to give anybody
softer hands or a cooler throat. It has been simply a public service, evidence
that a great iDdustrial company, instead of believing nthe public be damned”
believes “the public be served”. I want the officers of the Keyes Fibre Company,
several of whom are in this room from which I broadcast toDight, to know that I
am personally grateful for their sponsorship.
*****
From time to time we have talked about low prices of many years ago. Some
of those prices of the Augusta merchant of 1802 sound completely fantastic today:
butter, 10 cents a pound; eggs, 8 centS a dozen; geese, 6 cents a pound;
veal, 4 cents a pound; cheese, 7 cents a pound; and good, hard wood, three dol.:'”
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lars a cord.
But in the old days there were times and places where abnormally high
prices prevailed. A listener has recently sent me an old clippiug of 88 years
ago showing prevailing market prices in Richmond, Virginia on April 6, 1863.
Apples, $50 a barrel; butter, $3 a pound; COrD, $7.50 per bushel; candles, $3
per pound; coffee, $4.50 per pound; flour, $36 per barrel; sugar, $1.30 per
pound. With military victory still a possibility, the South was already financially
doomed.
*****
I was recently banded an interesting item picked up at the Meader house
on Main Street in Waterville, when the contents of that old home were recently
removed. It is a time table of the old horse-car railroad between Watervill.e
and Fairfield. The cover reads: “1888 Time Table of the Waterville and Fairfield
Street Rail.road, presented by P. S. Heald.” In the middle ‘Of the page is a picture
of a street-car drawn by two horses.
One thing about that lorse-car time table surprises me greatly. That is
the large number of Sunday trips. The cars ran every hour from. 9 A.M. t’O l. P.M.
on Sunday, then every half hour from 1:00 to 9:30 P .H. • But interestingly
enough, the half hour trips are marked w:lth an asterisk, notiug “Does not run
on stormy days”. Now wby was that? This is a sU’llllBer time table; dated Jul.y
16, 1888. So the reason could DOt have been snow block1ug the tracks. My own
guess is that in 1888 the picnic and res’Ort center of Bunker’s Island in Fairfield
was in full SWing, and ‘On rainy Sundays there was no ueed of half h’Our
trips to that resort. Can anyone confirm or refute that guess of mine. Is there
anyone still living who ever rode on those old horse-cars? I thiuk them must
be. Well, let’s start right now and rouud up the horse-car riders’ club.
*****
Those of you who listened to this program a year ago learned that I was a
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strong advocate of the Hoover COIIIIIlission. Mr. Hoover has lately become so much
involved in the controversy about sending troops to Europe that too many people
have forgotten about that commission whose report pointed the way to saving six
billion dollars a year in goverument expe1l8es.
We are told that we must scrape and save and sacrifice in order to provide
the money to save our nation from the enemy that would destroy us. Most of us
do not begrudge that money • We are ready to provide whatever is needed to defend
our country.
But the very government leaders who tell us that we mus t have added billions
for defense, tell us also that non-essential goverDJDent expenses must be
cut. That is logical and sensible. If the householder must cut his non-essential
expenses in order to pay his taxes, his government ought to cut its own nonessential
expenses as well.
But what is actually the case? IDStead of putting the sensible recommendatioDS
of the Hoover Commi.ssion into action, instead of cutting uon-essent1al
expenses, the departments and bureaus and agencies in Washington are doing just
the opposite.
A few days ago in the House of Representatives, Congressman Shafer of
Michigan pointed out that new civilian employees are baing added to the government
payroll at the rate of 1,000 a day, and that the Department of DefeDSe ac ….
counts for less than a third of those new employees. To the already huge army
of 2,181,000 civilians on the federal payroll, the govermaent expects to add
500 ,000 by the end of June, 1951.
Row let us take a closer look at this waste and extravagance with the taxPayer’s
money. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has 18,565 employees, an average of
ODe bureaucrat for every thirty Indians in the United States. In a small agency
like the Price and Cost of Living Division of the Department of Labor, theN
are five branches subdivided into ten sections. One of those ten sections is
called the Statistics Services Section, which in turn is broken down into three
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units, six sub-units and 17 supervisory units. The Federal Supply Office of
the Geueral Services Administration is divided into 4 branches, 17 sectioas, 27
uui ts, 24 sub-units, and 13 groups. No wonder the Hoover COIIIIId.ssion said:
“I’he overall job of an agency is usually broken down into such segaents
that it is difficult to detemiue the precrise division of responsibility. A
section increases and subdivides until it reaches the stage of a separate agency.
Then the vicious circle begins allover again. tI
Furthermore, many of those employees don’t work vel:)’ hard. As in most occupations,
the top men do work long, hard hours, and have to make many tough
decisions. But not so the great mass of government workers. A recent investigation
showed that 425 purchasing employees in four goverament agencies averaged
only 1.4 orders a day.
The same investigation showed a shocking waste of man-hours. A study of
48,000 employees in four agencies revealed an. average absentee record of seven
work-weeks (35 days) a year.
A lot has been said about our government’s need of publicity. Take a look
at the facts. The American people are supporting 45 ,000 Federal employees who
are engaged in dispensing information, publicity and propaganda. Remember that
the Hoover Commission called much of this activity by the unsavol:)’ name of
thought control. Many of those 45,000 employees are used solely to further administration
ideas, stir up pressure gmllps to influence legislation, and get
the American mind ready to take what the bureaucrats give us. The State Department
alone employs at home and abroad 5,029 persons in publicity work, at a
total salary cost of $14,000,000.
A lot of us have been interested in the Voice of Amadea, by which we try
to let the peoples of Europe and Asia know the truth about Amedcan democracy.
It originated as a wise, determined effort to offset the vicious Soviet propaganda
of lies. But what has happened to the Voice of America?
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Its 13,000 man operating force is larger than the combined full-time
staffs of the Associated Press, the National Broadcasting Campau, and MetroGoldwyn-
Mayer. Even if the Voice of America has some good effect, as it probably
does, we are paying the price of a seven-course meal for an appetizer.
The President of the United States has asked you and .. to accept saving
and scrimping, lower living standards, austerity of daily life, as part of our
patriotic job. But there is no W’cation that the merry bureaucrats in the
President’s own branch of the Federal government have any funny notions about
cutting expenses. Big goverument in Washington — in this hour of our nation’s
critical need for defense — is riding high, wide and handsome, and we taxpayers
are paying the fare.
Now I assure you this is all quite different from the way the old-timers
of the Kennebec Valley looked on government expenses, local, state or national.
During William Bryant’s long tenure as first selectman of Fairfield, his neighbors
said, he could tell you the exact financial standing of the town any hour
of any day of au, week in the year. Waste or extravagance with town money was
to him unthiDkable.
When the settlers up and down the Kennebec went through that winter of
suffering, following the year of no summer in 1816, they didD’t expect handouts
from Washington bureaucrats more numerous than the farmers themselves. The
generosity of neighbor Deacon Simpson of Winslow saw them through. When Jacob
Southwick of Vassalboro set up his potash plant, his fish seine, his long boat
and his village store, he didD’t apply for any aFC loan with or without a mink
coat. He did his own financing the hard way, by loans from men whom he knew,
who trusted him, and whom he paid a hundred cents on the dollar. When Martin
Keyes was trying to get the money to produce the paper plates, which his ingenious
invention made possible, he didn’t go to a Congressman or a five-percenter.
He went to his neighbors, Lawrence, Page and Newhall. With the help of those
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folks right at home he started what is today the great Keyes Fibre Company.
When shrewd Silas Hutchins of Waterv1.lle wanted to be sure of medical attention
for his family, he wasn’t looking for Socialized medicine, operated by still
another army of bureaucrats. He went at it the independent Yankee way, so that
Dr. Hoses Appleton recorded-‘in ‘llis ‘account book: ”Received of Silas Hutchins,
winter’s supply of wood for my house, as per our contract to cure your family
of the itch. II
This Kennebec Valley of ours is only a small part of the vast continent,
but in its develop-.ut it is typical of all America. It grew, as did the whole
nation, because men and women worked and saved, not loafed and squandered; because
they put first things first, and insisted that non-essentials must wait
until the necessities were secured. ‘lbey had a horror of debt, and got out of
it just as fast as they could. And most of all, tht;y believed that the basic
center of government is not Washington, not the state capitol, but the local
community, where solid, independent citizens, jealous of their rights and their
freedom, make sure that, in government as well as families, income always exceeds
expenses by at least a little margin, and that what isn’t essential is
. gone without.
*****
Not very often does one hear today the comment of a Maine selectman of
many years ago. Somebody proposed a costly piece of road building. ”’Twould be
a good thing if we could afford it”, he said. ‘lben he added a bit of wisdom we
might well heed today: ”But nothing’s a good thing if you can’t afford it.”
Perhaps even better than that saying is one attributed to an old-time
Maine citizen upon whom. a very slick book agent was trying to plant one of
those big, one-volume books of reference which college boys used to peddle during
the summer. “Don’t you want this beautiful, useful book?”, pressed the
agent. ”Sure tt, said that good citizen of Central Maine, If’ course I want it.
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But, young man, you just remember that up in this part of the country every
want ain’t a need. If
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
WIst Broadcast March 18, 1951
I had hoped tonight to finish the subject of Paul Revere bells. I can’t
quite do that, because I am still trying to get hold of a copy of a very rare
pamphlet published about 40 years ago, in which an investigator by the name of
Dr. Arthur Nichols listed all the Paul Revere bells that minute search could uncover.
As soon as I can get a look at that rare pamphlet I’ll tell you what
bells NiChols was able to locate in Maine.
Tonight, however, we can advance the subject a bit farther because of information
supplied by interested listeners. Mr. Foster of the Redington Museum.
is sure there is a Paul Revere bell in the city hall at Bath. There is said
to be another at Castine and still another at Machias.
Some of these present bells attributed to Paul Revere are not originals,
but later recasts of bel1s once made by Paul and his sons. Such a recast is
the bell at Waterford Flat. When the old church there was burned, the bell was
badly damaged though not completely melted. What was left of it was salvaged,
new metal added, and the whole recast. The same happened to the bell in the
Union Church at Solon. The story of that old bell comes to us through Mr. Lewis
Whipple.
Early in the nineteenth century a Paul Revere bell was hung in the tower
of Solon’s Union Church. The tragedy that overtook that old bell came in an hour
of triumph. On a July day in 1863 Solon heard the news of the Union victory at
Gettysburg. In joyous celebration all the church bells rang out. Now the ringers
of the old Paul Revere bell in the Union Church were determined that the
newer Methodist bell should not outdo their bell in loudness or in length of
ringing. In their ardor the ringers cracked the Paul Revere bell. Somewhat
muted and badly out of tune it clanged sadly on for thirty years. Then it was
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taken down and recast. Bung again in the church tower, its clear tones are
still heard every Sunday in Solon.
The person, however, who has given me most thorough information about Paul
Revere bells in Maine is F. L. Butterfield of China. Mr. Butterfield apologizes
for his penmanship, but I assure you, in spite of his 82 years, his handwriting
is much plainer than mine or that of half the students at Colby College or Waterville
High School.
Mr. Butterfield says there is a Paul Revere bell in Christ’s Church at
Gardiner — the old Gardiner family church; another in the old Knox Meeting
House at Thomaston; and a third in the old church at the corner of Park and
Pleasant Streets in Portland – DOW the Gmek Church of that city; and a fourth
was long ago taken from the ancient Congregationalist Church in Falmouth and
set,·· up in the Advent Church in Westbrook.
Mr. Butterfield wants to know if we have learned the name of the last steamboat
on our part of the river. Yes, as we said a few weeks ago, the last boat
to make regular trips was unquestiouably the City of Waterville. Mr. Butterfield
also wants to know the name of the City of Waterville’s immediate predecessor.
‘Hr. Butterfield says he used to see that boat close to where the
Lockwood Mill No. 2 now stands. Does anyone remember its name?
Now to get back to the Paul Revere bells. My neighbor and former colleague
at Colby, Professor George Parmenter, calls my attention to a fact which I
should have remembered, but dicln ‘t. It is that Esther Forbes, in her notable
book “Paul Revere and the World He Lived In”, tells about that very Paul Revere
bell in Farmington that I mentioned vaguely on this program a few weeks
ago. I asked if there is a Paul Revere bell at Farmington. Paul’s best biographer
says there certainly was one there when Paul himself was still aliw.
Paul seems to have been someWhat careless in the way he handled the business
transactions regarding his bells. He seldom had a written contract or any
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payment in advance. In 1808 he went so far as to deliver a bell to a young man
whose name. he did not even record or later remember. He had taken no receipt for
the bell, but had simply let the young man cart it away. Six months later he
began to wonder whether he was going to get his money. So on July 1, 1809 he
wrote a letter to a man he knew in Farmington, Maine. That letter has been pre …
served, and this is what it says:
nOn the 24th of November last we delivered a bell to a young gentleman who
said he was empowered to purchase a bell by the Trustees of Farmington Academy.
We delivered to him a bell weighing 495 pounds. At 42 cents a pound, the price
was $207.90. Tbe young man did not leave his name, but said he would call again
for the bill. As we have not seen him since, nor heard from the Trus tees, we
will thank you to require them to write us whether they received the bell or
whether they gave any person an order to purchase it.”
The immediate result of that letter was what Miss Forbes calls a dignified,
Sinister s:llenee. By this time Paul was really getting mad. He again wrote his
Farmington friend, Mr. Supply Belcher: “Are any of those Academy Trustees
gentlemen, or are they persons who care little or nothing for character?”
Neither Paul nor Hr. Belcher could get anything out of the Trustees, but
apparently Mr. Belcher informed Paul that the bell actually had arrived and now
called the Academy pupils to classes, and he gave Paul the names of the Trustees.
By this time two years had gone by and Paul had some excuse for wri ting
the fo1low:1ng sharp letter:
“We think it extraordinary that gentlemen of your respectability will not
so far respect your own credit as not to notice in any way our letters to you.
You know you have a bell, you know who it was purchased of, who purchased it
and on what terms, and you hear that bell every Sabbath call you to the House of
God, and you all J,tnow that bell is not paid for. lIlat am we to think of the
gentlemen who compose the Trustees of Farmington Academy?”
Now we know those Academy trustees were not dishonest. They weren’t trying
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to cheat Paul Bevere. They simply didn’t have any money. Miss Forbes suggests
that ”probably their flesh did creep as Paul’s unpaid-for bell solemnly called
them to the worship of God and their children to academy classes”. At any rate
they eventually paid the bill.
It is interesting to note how Paul Revere began to cast bells. His father
was an iron founder, whose business came to be called ”Revere f s Furnace,”. Paul
DOt only learned that trade, but was also trained as a silversmith. That led
him to consider the foundry as a place for something more artistic than simple
iron castings. Someone called his attention to a need at his own church in Boston.
When the British troops occupied Boston during the early part of the Revolution,
they tore down the Old North Church for firewood, but they did not
destroy the bell. That bell, recovered when the British evacuated Boston, was
hung in the tower of the Second Church, where Paul was a member. In 1792 the
bell cracked, and bad to be recast. EveryOne thought it would have to be sent to
England; no workman on this side of the Atlantic could do the job. But Master
Paul Bevere was determined to recast that bell. He succeeded, and in the fall
of 1792 into the tower of Second Church went a bell marked: “‘!he first bell
cast in Boston, 1792, P. Revere”.
That set Paul up as a bell-maker. He and his two SODS, according to the investigator
Nichols, cast 398 bells in the 34 years between 1792 and 1826. A
good many of those bells mus t sooner or later have reached Maine.
The most famous of Paul’s bells is not, however, in Haine, but where it
ought to be, right in his own city of Boston. In the tower of King’s Chapel on
busy Tremont Street, right around the corner from the Parker House, bangs Paul
Revere fS largest and most famous bell – a huge bell weighing 2,437 pounds, and
with a tone so completely individual that it can be recognized many miles _81.
Close as it is to the bell of the Old Park Church, no listener on a Sunday mor-
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ning would ever confuse the two, as that biggest of Paul Revere bells calls
worshippers to the service of a liberal religion, while the. Park Street bell
calls them to the hell-fire sermons of Brimstone Corner.
*****
Is spite of all the excuses that come out of Washington, SODle of us are
still old-fashioned enough to believe that one way to reduce the expense of
non-defense items in goverument is to stop the senseless waste caused by conflicting
agencies. A Missouri famer asked the Department of Agriculture for
advice on fertilizer. He got aDSwers from five bureaus in the department, all
the answers conflicting with each other. More than fifty federal agencies have
a hand in transportation, while our traditional transportation system puts up
a continuous fight for survival. Twelve different agencies deal with hOUSing,
37 with public health, 16 with preservation of wild life.
We are indeed the richest nation on earth, but even we cannot afford to
keep on· playing tag among the conflicting agencies that all claim jurisdiction
over the same field. Every loyal American should question the vast waste in
peace-time departments of government, the mounting proposals for new schemes to
spend more money.
Even if there wem no waste in these departments, there is another truth
we had better get firmly in our heads. It is this: We simply cannot have all
of everything we want while we spend billions for bullets instead of for butter.
And, as long as the threat of cODlDlUl1ist-doainated world looms over us, those
billiODS for bullets must be sp~t.
*****
As the town’ meetings go merrily on during this month of March, it is
intemsting to note what the town of Oakland was cODSidering in town meeting 70
years ago, or rather 69 years ago, to be exact. In 1882 Oakland was officially
the Town of West Waterville. The warrant for their town meeting of that year
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contained the following items: Article 9, to see if the town will vote to
raise a sum of money for the support of a free high school; Article 10, to see
if the town will authorize the several school dis tricts to choose their agents
for the eDSuing year, in district meetings lawfully assembled; Article 12, to
see if the town will raise a sum. of 1Iloney to improve the fire department; Article
14, to see if the town will vote to tax dogs; Article 16, to see if the
town will vote to assess the property of any cotton manufacturing establishment
to be located in West Waterville, at a named sum only, until said company commences
manufacturing; Article 19, to see if the town will vote to furnish
sCbool books to pupils at cost; Article 20, to see if the town will vote to
sell the old hearse and buy ruDDers for the new one •
. Of those articles, probably 19 and 20 strike most strangely on the modern
ear. In 1882 free text books had not reached the schools. It was really quite
an advance over the old method of requiring each parent to purchase his child’s
books where and how he could to the proposal in Article 19 of the 1882 meeting
to have the town buy the books at wholesale and sell them. to the pupils wi thout
profit. Many a year was to elapse before Oakland or any other town was to
. furnish textbooks free.
Article 20 reveals a CODIIlon practice in Maine towns three quarters of a
century ago. Not the local undertaker, but the town, owned the hearse used for
all burials. Some of those old town hearses were elaborate affairs with plumes
on each corner and fine carving on the panels. Even in the smallest towns the
driver usually wore a tall silk hat.
What did it cost to govem the Town of Oakland in those days? Well, in
1881, exactly 70 years ago, the total appropriaticma were $13,527. The total
valuation was $615,000, of which $433,000 was real estate and $187,000 personal
property. The tax rate was twenty mills.
The town had eleven school districts, the biggest of which was of course·
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Dist nct No.1, in the heart of the village. Its cost exceeded that of all the
other tea districts together, for lts expenditures were $1,418, whlle all the
others together spent only $1,177. Apparently the high school had only one
teacher, A. P. Soule, who received the munificent sala1:Y of $165 a term for
three terms a year, annual pay of $495. To operate all the schools of Oakland -all
eleven elementary districts plus the high school — cost in 1882 a total
of $3,090.
Evea in those days Oakland had its paupers. ‘!heir support cost nearly
half as much as to run all the schools of the town, $1,295. Back there 70 years
ago it was very unusual to find a town that spent more for schools than it did
for roads, but Oakland could claim that proud distinction. Compared with the
three thousand for schools, only $2,200 went for roads.
‘!hanks to a tabular statement in the town report of 1881, we know just
what wages each teacher received. Here are a few samples. Nellie Ham, at upper
pr1ma1:Y, got $3.00 a week and board computed at $2.00; Grace Dudley, at the Intermediate
School, got $5.00 a week and board; FaDIlie ~ton at the Grammar
School got $7.00 and board. The highest paid teacher was, of course, Allen
Soule at the high school, who got $14 a week •
. By no meaDS was Miss Ham. ‘s sala1:Y the lowest in town. Mary Downs in District
No. 6 received $2.00 a week and board reckoned at $1.40; Sarah Hallett in
No. 7 got $2.50 and board at $1.25; but the worst case was that of Belle Soule
in No.4, who got the princely pay of $1.50 a week and board at $1.35.
When we coulder that the school year then consisted of three tems of ten
weeks each, a total of thirty weeks, we can well understand that a teacher had
to have other employment simply to keep alive.
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LI’l’TLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
102nd Broadcast April 1; 1951
Thanks to Mr. Jotham Hobbs of Fairfield, I have had a chance to examine a
copy of Appleton’s Railway Guide for the year 1864. It contains, as the title
page says, “time tables, stations, distances, and connections upon all the railways
throughout the United States and the Canadas, together with 75 railway maps,
delineating the principal routes east, west, north, and south”.
By 1864 the Androscoggin and Kennebec from Portland to Waterville via Lewiston,
and its counecting road, the Penobscot and Kennebec, from Waterville to Bangor,
had become the Maine Central, but the road from Portland via Augusta to Waterville
and on to Skowhegan was still a separate line, the Portland and Kennebec
Railway. In 1864 Hollis Bowman was president of the Maine Central and C. M.
Morse of Waterville was its superintendent. B. H. Cushman of Augusta was Superintendent
and General Manager of the Portland and Kennebec.
There was only one train. daily each way between Portland and Waterville via
Lewiston, but two trains each way between Waterville and Bangor. Likewise there
were two trains each way on the other road between Portland and Augusta, but
only one between Augusta and Skowhegan via Waterville. One way fare from. Portland
to Bangor via Lewi6ton was $5.00; from. Portland to Skowhegan via Augusta it
was $3.00. Way fares were three cents a mile. The running time from Portland
to Bangor was 6~ hours; from Portland to Skowhegan 5 hours.
Some of the stations on the P & K bear names unfamiliar to mauy people today.
Between Freeport and Brunswick was a station called Oak Hill. Fairfield
Station is listed as Kendall:’s Mills ,Shawmut as Somerset Mills, Hinkley as Pishon
Ferry. On the other road, however, the stations are almost exactly the SSE as
today. Those between Waterville and Bangor were Kendall’s Mills, Clinton, Burnham,
Pittsfield, Newport, East Newport, Etna, Can.l and Hermon Pond. You will
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note there was then no station at Benton, and none at Northern Maine .Junction,
because there was no such junction, 1864 being much earlier than the building of
the Bangor and Aroostook.
Another Maine railroad listed in the guide is the Androscoggin Railway, from
Brunswick to Farmington. The stations were Little River, Lisbon, Crowley’s, Sabbatusville,
Leeds Crossing, Leeds Center, North Leeds, Strickland’s Ferry, East
Livermore, Livermore Falls, North .Jay, .Jay, Wilton, East Wilton and Farmington -a
total distance of 63 miles, for which the fare was $2.25.
Another road was called the Calais, Baring and Lewey’s Island Railway. Its
original line was six miles between Calais and Baring; the later extension from
Baring to Princeton was 17 miles. The time table announced that the trains connected
at Calais and Princeton with steamboats to and from Portland and Boston.
w. W. Sawyer of Calais was the road’s superintendent.
Still another road was the l3angor, Old Town and Milford, a thirteen mile line
on which the fare was 40 cents. It ran three daily trains each way, the first
leaviDg BaDgor at 6:00 A.M., and the last returning at 6:30 P.M.
A noticeable feature of all these early railroads of Maine is that none of
their passenger trains reached their terminus later than 7: 30 P.M.
In 1864 the Grand Trunk extended as far west as Toronto and Detroit. I thad
four di viaiODS, one of which (the Portland division) was the line so well
known to Maine people from Portland to Montreal. .Just beyond Island Pond, Vermont
was a station called Boundary Line, and twenty miles farther into Canada was
the station of Waterville. Forty 1Diles this side of Montreal was Britannia Mills.
The time table announced, ”’Xrains are run between Portland and Island Pond by
Portland time, between Island Pond and Montreal by Montreal time.”
I suspect few people now living ever heard of the Portland and Oxford Central
Railway. About it in 1864 the guide made the following a tatement: “This
road ia now open between Mechanic; Falla and Sumner (55 miles) .”and is in progress
to Canton Point on the Androscoggin River. The intermediate stations are West
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Minot, Bearce Road, Eas t Hebron, Buckfield, Sumner and Hall t s Mills. At )fec:hanic
Falls this road” connects with the Grand TrUDk. No time table received’.’ The modem
traveler will recogu1ze” this old Portland and Oxford Central as the begiuning of
what later became the Runford Division of the Maine Central.
Of course 1864 was long before the coming of Maine’s ten famous narrow guage
railroads, all of them now extinct.
Now bear in mind that this guide covers all the railroads in the Un.ited
States. There was no railroad yet through to the coast, though the Un.ion Pacific
was fast nearing completion. In 1864 the farthest west one could get by continuous
rail j,ouraey was St. Joseph, M:1ssouri, and the statement of the North M:1ssouri
Railway in this old guide we find especially interesting: “All persoas going
West into Northem Missouri, to St. Joseph or the State of Kansas, and all points
west of that state, should be careful on purchasing their tickets to see that they
are by the North Missouri Railway. ‘!hus the traveler comes through St. Louis, the
Great City of the West. Connection is made at St. Joseph with the Missouri River
Packet Company’s line of splendid steamers for all points on the Missouri River.
Also steamers to Leavenworth and Kansas City, and stages to all points in the inte
rior of Kansas.”
Another western road, the Mississippi and Missouri, an extension of the Rock
Island road, extended to Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the river from Omaha, Nebraska,
almost due north of St. Joseph. So, by either road, the traveler could
get about the same distance west.
I am sure all of my listeners know that the early railroads were richly endowed
with lands by a generous government, and the guide statements of all the
western roads contain offers of land. The North Missouri said: “On this line
the road lands are low and exceedingly fertile. No better lands in Illinois and
Iowa are selling for four times our price for these lands. Persons residing on
this line can get their products to market every day of the week except Sunday.”
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I am sure you haven’t forgotten what was going on in our nation in 1864 –
a great fratricidal war between North and South. Now there were plenty of railroads
in the South. What about their time tables in 18641 ‘l’here just wet:en’t
any. Most of the Virginia roads were by that time in Northem hands or completely
disrupted by the war. The same disruption was true throughout the
South. The guide gives the list of stations of as many as forty Southe~ roads,
but no train times. A mmber of the lines, especially in Westem Virginia, Kentucky
and Tennessee are labeled flU. S. Military Railway”.
*****
An interesting old newspaper was the Portland Tr8DScript. Through the
courtesy of Hrs. Grace Thompson I have had the pleasure of going through two
years of that old weekly paper, the years 1842 and 1843. Unlike most of the papers
of that time — and this was especially true of the Augusta and Waterville
papers — the Transcript was not a political paper. It took pride in the fact
that it represented no party. Its editor was Olarles P. Ills ley , and he called
his eight page sheet “A weekly journal devoted to literatut:e, news, etc.1f It
contained a lot of literature and a lot of etc., but precious little news. Host of
its so-ca1led news items were in fact editorial eouaents on the news rather than
factual accounts.
In 1842 the railroad reached Portland, and that must have been a big event.
But Editor Illsley was not exhilarated; he was only peeved. Be wrote: lYe see
by the papers that the railroad was opened with jollification on Monday last. We
notice a1s0 that gentlemen of the press were invited. The directors, however, took
good care to extend courtesies to the gentlemen of the political press only. We
trust their aiggared courtesy was not owing to the presumption that there are no
other gentlemen of the press save those who wallow in the mire of poUties. It
It was in 1842 that William Mathews, older brother of the Edward Mathews who
was murdered by Dr. Coolidge five years later, started the Waterville paper called
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the “Yankee Bladen. The Portland Transcript took note of its new contemporary in
these words: ”Mr. Mathews’ Yankee Blade is a neat folio sheet and is of true stuff~
highly tempered, keen as a razor, and we trust it will continue its way deep into
public favor. We like the fresh, independent style of its editor. Success to him.”
Editor Illsley apparently liked our Kennebec Valley. In his issue of June 11,
1842 we find the following account:
“The editor of the Maine Cultivator says he has been invited by all the editors
this side of the Connecticut to send them a Kennebec salmon. To do this
would be too much of a tax on his generosity. He however extends an invitation to
us, saying, tWe wi1l entertain you with the fattest salmon the market affords. Besides,
if you have never seen Old Kennebec, you have not seen the garden of Maine.
We have not only the best salmon in the world, but the fairest country, the noblest
river, the best farms, the prettiest villages and the handsomest maidens. fit
Editor I11s1ey replies: “It would be a pleasure to accept his offer. We
subscribe to all he says about Old Kennebec. We have been there frequently, have
tasted its salmon and feasted our eyes on its lovely maidens. If ever we should
pull up stakes, we know not a place where we would so soon pitch our tent as in
the delightful Valley of the Kennebec.”
A marriage notice in the old Transcript intrigues me. It says: “Married in
Brunswick, June 18, 1842, Mr. William Thompson to Miss Elizabeth Marriner”. I
wonder if Miss Elizabeth could have been any relative of mine.
There are a lot of items in the Transcript that deal with marriage, but none
more unusual than two which appear on the same page of the issue for September 17,
1842. One item reads: ”Married in Athens on Monday, August 8 at 10 0 f clock P.M.
by C. H. Herrick, Esq., Henry Stimson and Charity FoX.” The other item is this
one: “Caution. The public are cautioned against harboring or trusting my wife
Charity, lately Charity Fox, as she has refused to live with me, and I will pay
no debts of her contracting. Henry Stimson. Athens, August 12, 1842.11
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A vel:)’ short marriage indeed. Henl:)’ may have been chiefly to blaa, but
it is also possible that the girl was moxeFox than Charity.
*****
When we were telling you about William Bl:)’ant’s diary, we quoted his xeference
to the disillusioned Hillerites, when their pmdiction of the end of the world
in April, 1843 failed to come true. But in an issue of the Portland Transcript -that
of August 27, 1842 — we find the most amusing item we have ever encountexed
about the Millerites. Bere is Editor Illsley’s ca.ent: ”’l’he Millerites axe pmphesying
that the world will come to an end next April. Yet at the same time, in
this month of August, 1842, they am taking subscriptions for a newspaper one
year in advance. What’s the matter? Don’t they believe their own prophesy?”
Although Editor Illsley claimed non-partisanship on political issues, he
was not without bias. On September 10, 1842 he wrote: ”It has been said that
Pxesident Tyler intended to travel through the States; but it is now said that he
is not coming. Well, who cams? We would not give a fig to see his ugly mug.”
Bow many of you xemember Portland’s old United States Hotel? The building
still stands, facing Monument Squaxe, and now houses Edwards and Walker Barclwaxe
. Company. On his fxequent trips to Portland to visit the wholesale grocers, my
father always stopped at the United States Botel. For many years it was Kaine’s most
famous hostelry.
Well, Editor Illsley was present at the opening of that hotel, and he tells
us about it in his issue of October 29, 1842: ”Messrs. Dunlap and Kingsbul:)’ have
taken the establishment long known as the Cumberland House and have xechristened
it the United States Botel. They have mpapered, repainted, recarpeted and mfurnished
— in a word, have regenerated the whole place so as to make it rank A No.
1. Those who want mgalement, xefmshment, mpose and mclusion should drop in on
our friends Dunlap and Kingsbul:)’. It was our privilege to be invited to the opening
dinner which they gave to prominent citizens and all repmsentatives of the
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loca1 press. It was a magnificent affair — a menu of twelve courses and the finest
decorations. Take our word for it~ as the man said of the fat oyster, it oPened
rich. II
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LITTLE TAlKS ON COMMON !’UUtGS
103rd Broadcast April 8, 1951
How difficult it was, in the days before the building of the railroads, to
travel between places in Maine that are now within two or three hours ride of
each other is shown by an exchange of remarks a hundred years ago between the
editors of the Skowhegan Clarion and the Portland Gazette. The Clarion editor
had said: ”We owe Brother Illsley of the Portland Gazette something for the excellent
stories that have graced his columns. We have on hand a fine, plump
turkey, and frankly we don’t care for turkey • So we will make Brother Illsley a
present of it if he will tell us how to send it to him.”
To this offer Editor Illsley replied from his Portland sanctum thus: “‘Bow
are we going to get at that turkey, or rather how is the turkey going to get to
us? Can the postmaster at Skowhegan send it to us under a government frank?
We fear not. Nor can it conveniently be stuffed into a newspaper wrapper. Can’t
SOllIe traveler be coaxed iuto packing it in his trunk as he journeys thither?
Won t t the geual stage driver help us out in our extremity? Confound it! A
fine, plump turkey held out to us and we cannot reach it.”
The railJ:oad reached Portland from. Boston in the fall of 1842. It was built
rapidly, for in April it had come only as far as Newburyport. By the end of May
it had reached Portsmouth, and in NoVember came to Portland.
Before the railroad came, Portlanders had long been going on picnics, though
the word picnic was just coming into use. There was, in fact, considerable dispute
about its spelling. The Portland Gazette commented editorially in 1843:
”The Augusta Age, speaking of Pic Hie (sic) celebration in that place on the
Fourth of July, adopts the spelling Pick Nlc. The Kennebec Joumal spells it
Pick Nick. We spell it Pic Nic. We have seen it in a Philadelphia paper spelled
as one word, picnic. But we shall keep on correctly making it two words.”
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As a matter of fact, we know that picnic is not a very old word. It
appears to be a modification of the French pique-Dique, mock excitement, but
its exact origin is unknown. In Germany in 1750 it was a fashioa.able, social
entertaimuent to which each person present contributed a share of the provisions.
Its first mention in English writing was in 1800. How it came to apply
to out-of-door, mcreational meals no one knows.
The favorite picDic spot in Portland was Deering IS Oaks, refermd to by
Longfellow in his nostalgic poem ”My Lost Youth”. Outside the city the points
that drew summer picnickers were the islands in Casco Bay and grounds below
the twin cities near the mouth of the Saco River.
With the coming of the railroad, Saco saw a big picnic boom. Excursions
wem run from Portland all through the summer of 1843, and many summers afterward.
On July 30 the Gazette mcorded: “Some hundred or more of our ladies
and gentlemen visited Saco last week on a picnic excursion.”
The greatest railroad excursion out of Portland in 1843, however, was the
trip to Boston for the dedication of Bunker Hill Monument. Hom than a thousand
Maine people made that trip. Tie railroad having an insufficient number of
passenger cars for the special train, many of the passengers crowded into
freight cars of the old flat-car type, along the sides of which crude benches
had been placed. The train left Portland at 4 A.M. on the morning of June 16,
with Editor Illsley one of the passengers. It took Dine hours to mach Boston.
Putting up at hotels for the night, the Maine folks wem out early the
next moming for the events on Boston Common. Tlete was a big parade, in which
the Maine band, according to the Gazette, showed up every bit as good as the
famous Massachusetts band of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. Editor
Illsley paid tribute to the marching Irish, but said they couldn’t hold a
candle to the elaborate display of the MasODS, who were out in aprons and full
regalia. Let’s get a description of the scene on the Common in the editor’s
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own words:
”Every inch of ground was occupied. We edged our way a while among the
crowd, but were soon convinced that the hope of a man of our height seeing anything
of the show there was preposterous; so we backed out and took our
station in the street to watch the procession. After kicking our shins for an
hour or more, amusing ourselves by looking at the sea of heads which rolled
by in one ceaseless stream., the clash of cymbols, the bugle’s blast, and the
trumpet 1S blare announced the procession. It
I told you last week that Editor Illsley didn’t think much of President
John Tyler. His feeling is emphasized by the following passage in his accotmt:
tfGreat curiosity, of course, was manifested to see the President of the
United States. Be came in an open barroche, accanpanied by his two sons and the
President of the Bunker Hill Association. His appearance exe! ted respect ful
attention, but nothing more. Some of the papers spoke of the loud and repeated
applause bestowed upon him. We did not hear any. A few faint cheers were raised,
half a dozen feminine handkerchiefs were waved languidly. It was clear that
while the office commanded the people’s respect, the man had not their hearts.
The universal impression was that his presence threw a chill on the enthusiasm
which the occasion seemed so naturally calculated to call forth. There were no
hearty outbursts such as greeted the survivors of the Revolution, justly the
real heroes of the day. A friend of ours compared Mr. Tyler to an iceberg, casting
a freezing influence on all arotmd him. n
The procession was so long that, when the front was ascending Btmker Hill
in Charlestown, the rear had not left Washington Street.
Mr. Ills ley’s accotmt runs to three columns in the Gaze tte of June 24,
1843. Interesting as it is, it contains a notable omission, explained by the
fact that our editor missed the main event. He says: ”Not expecting to get
within gun shot of hearing distance of the orator, we did not go to Bunker Hill
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for the oration, but went to see the monument the following day. fI
Like so many of us who do not appreciate a great event until long after the
opportunity has passed, Editor Illsley did not know what he had missed 7 and in
his l.ong account he doesn’t even mention the orator by name. Probably, years
afterward, he wished he had at least tried to get near the speaker’s stand,
for on that 17th of June in 1843, 68 years after the battle, the address of
dedication of the lofty granite monument was delivered by Daniel Webster, and
his speech was one of the most famous orations in American history.
Nor does the Gazette mention the famous scene of 18 years before, when on
the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, the corner stone of the monument was
laid, and the same Daniel Webster delivered what schoolboys came to call the
First Bunker Hill Oration, and when at the orator’s side sat the greatest foreign
friend of the new nation, the Marquis de Lafayette.
*****
We haven’t mentioned murder on this program since last October, when for
three weeks we told you about the slaying of young Edward Mathews and the trial
of his murderer, Dr. Valorus P. Coolidge. Ton:t.ght we want to tell you about
the first murder trial held under the constitution of the United States, for
that trial was held in Maine, while we were still part of Massachusetts, 30
years before we became a separate State.
On July 10, 1789 Captain Henry Jordan of Cape Elizabeth was coming home in
his schooner Betsey when, ten miles out of Falmouth (then the name of what is
now Portland) he sighted and hailed another schooner. Her master, Captain
Thomas Bird, said she was the Rover, from the coast of Africa, bound for the
nearest American port.
“I am bound for Falmouth”, said Captain Jordan. “That’s the nearest port
there is, not more than ten miles. If you aren’t acquainted with this coast,
just follow in my wake and It 11 pilot you in. tI
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Both ships came into Portland Harbor and anchored near the Cape Elizabeth
shore. Within a few days an air of mystery surrounded the Rover. She bad
brought no cargo and seemed to be loOking for none. Ber whole crew consisted
of only three men. Several weeks elapsed, and the crew showed no sign of
moving the sbip, spending most of their time wandering about Cape Elizabeth
and Falmouth. No one could discover that they bad any definite object.
It so happened that in that month of July 1789 the Supreme Judicial Court
of Massachusetts was holding a .saion at Falmouth in the Dis trict of Maine.
When mysterious rumors about the Rover reached the ears of the Court, the judges
deemed it their duty to make inquiry. They accordingly sent for Robert Jordan
and William Dyer, two young men of Cape Elizabeth, who had become friendly
with the crew of the Rover and had visited the ship.
Now I am interested in that William. Dyer, because I think he may have
been a relative of mine. My paternal grandmother was a Dyer from Cape Elizabeth,
and the commonest names of the place were Jordan and Dyer. There were so many
William Dyers, in fact~ in my grandmother’s time that they wete called Henry’s
William, Eli fS William, Jabez’ William, etc. to distinguish them from one another.
At any rate my William Dyer and his friend Robert Jordan had indeed heard
strange talk aboard the Rover, especially when members of the crew were in their
cups. Young Dyer became convinced that there had been foul play aboard the
ship and that :Bird was not originally the captain. Dyer related an incident
that added to his convinced opinion. He said that one evening the two young men
and the crew bad consumed all the liquor in the cabin~ and Captain Bird told the
man Hanson to go into the bold and bring up a bottle of wine. Hanson didn’t want
to go. Captain Bird chided him and asked him what he was afraid of. “Are you
afraid you will see Connor?” sneered Bird. Then Bird himself jumped up and
went into the hold, Coming back with a bottle of wine. Hanson asked him if he
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bad seen anything of Connor down tbem. Whemupon Captain Bird told Hanson to
sbut up or be t d throw the bottle at his head.
Naturally young Dyer became curious as to who was Connor and what had
happened to him. ‘!he COlllFt also was cur.:l.ous, and issued a warrant for the arres
t and examination of the crew. Then followed such a chase as would have
delighted the heart of that old sea dog, my friend, Jim Comolly, who wrote so
many spirited yarns about the racing schoonets.
Before the rowboat bearing the posse could mach the Rover, her crew
hoisted sail and started for the mouth of the harbor. The officer of the pursuing
boat ordemd two more of his men to lay down their guns and put out a
pair of extra oars. ‘!be six oarsmen now buckled down to their work and sent
the craft leaping through the water.
By this time the Rover was under full sail, but could not take advantage
of the wind until she rounded the point at the entrance to the harbor.It became
clear that if she got to the point befom the rowboat overtook her, she would
get away.
Just befom the race reached the narrows between Cape Elizabeth and Bouse
J;sland, the rowboat came alongside, and the officer commanded Captain Bird to
heave to. The order was not obeyed, and the officer commanded two of
his men to train their guns on Bird. ‘!he latter then darted from the helm
and leaped down the companionway. His two companions speedily followed him,
leaving the Rover to steer her own course. ‘!he vessel, no longer obeying a
steersman, soon rounded to, and the men from the rowboat clambemd aboard.
Looking down into the cabin, they saw B1rd amed with a musket, and the
other two with cutlass and handspike, bidding defiance to their captors. The
officer closed the hatch, and with the help of some of bis men who understood
handling a vessel, soon tacked up the harbor and made fas t to one of the wharves
on the Falmouth side. There, before some fifty armed men, Bird and his coq»an-
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ions called it a day and meekly surrendered.
Examined separately, the three men showed no confidence in each other,
and each patently feared that the others would betray him. Pieced together,
their several stories agreed on essential points. The schooner belonged to one
Hodges in England and was commanded by Captain Ccmnor. They had been trading
for some time off the coast of Africa. Besides Thomas Bird, the other men ofthe
crew were Hans Hanson, a Swede, and Mathew Jackson, who said he bailed
from Newton, Massachusetts.
They agreed that Captain Connor was a vety brutal shipmaster, abusing his
men beyond endurance, and that finally they had sought revenge by taking his
life. Hanson and Jackson said that Bird had fired the fatal shot, while Bl.rd
contended that Hanson was the killer. All three agreed that the murder had taken
place in the cabin and that the weapon was a loaded musket which Captain
Connor kept there. They took the body on deck and threw it into the. sea.
Afraid to return to England with the schooner, they decided to come to
the Un1ted States, dispose of such articles as they had on board, sell the vessel
at the first opportwity, separate, and go to their respective homes.
Upon this examination and confession, the court committed them to the Falmouth
jail for murder committed on the high seas. At that time the supreme
judicial courts of the several states, with the judges of admiralty, were by an
ordinance of the old Congress, author1zed to try piracy and felony c01lllll1tted on
the high seas. But before the next session of court in Falmouth the new Congress,
under the new federal Constitution, had passed the act establishing the
U. S. Courts, committing the trial of crimes on the high seas to the circuit
court of the United States. That court held no session in Falmouth until 1790.
In June of that year Bird and Hanson were tr1ed, Jackson having turned state’s
evidence.
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Crowds attending the trial were so large that the court adjoumed to the
First Parish Meeting House. The jury acquitted Hanson, but found Bird guilty of
murder. On June 25, 1790 he was hanged in public at a gallows on MUI1joy Hill.
2-340
LI’rfLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
104th Broadcast April 15, 1951
Many times I have told you this program is made possible by the constant
stream of helpful contributions which pours in from listeners. A few weeks ago
I asked who knew anything about the opening of the resort area on Bunker Island
in Fairfield. Mrs. Mildred Pettee of Oakland Street, Waterville, has kindly
sent me an item taken from the Bangor Daily News of August 15, 1889. It 1:eads:
liThe Watervil1e Horse Railroad Company opened the Bunker Island Park last evening.
Fully 2,000 people from Waterville and Fairfield were present. The city
band of Waterville gave a fine concert and afterwards furnished music for dancing
in which over a hundred couples participated. The grounds are fitted up in
a most convenent manner. A long pavilion, 40 x 50 feet, furnished ample space
for dancing, while within a few feet of it is erected a bandstand. On the point
of the island the company has built a little observation house, and scatteted
allover the park are a large number of folding settees. A baseball ground and
a tennis lawn have also been laid out. The island makes an admirable summer
resort for local people who are wearied with a day’s toil or seek cool shelter.
The horse rai1road will undoubtedly make a big go of Bunker Island Park.”
There is the proof we sought — proof that the Bunker Island resort was
connected with the horse railroad. Mr. Ralph Patterson of Fairfield assures me
that his town’s well known resident and builder of the residence called the
“Cas-tIe in Spain” was promoter both of the horse railroad and of Bmker Island
Park. That man was Amos Gerald, among whose other interests were the Central
Maine Fair and Cascade Park, between Waterville and Oakland, which was in its
heyday when I was a student in college. It was Amos Gerald who built the Fairfield
and Shawmut , Railway, had a hand in promoting Merrymeeting Park
Dear Brunswick, and may have been interested in the interurban electric lines
2-341
that connected Bath, Brunswick, Lewiston, Gardiner, Augusta and Waterville. Quite
a man was Amos Gerald, even if he did put that hideously ornate ceiling on the
dining room of the Gerald Hotel, now one of the rooms where the Lawries display
their furniture.
*****
When I last talked about Kennebec ice, little did I realize that there
exists a documented chart of all ice houses on the river in 1882. Through the
courtesy of a listener I have had a chance to examine carefully that old chart.
The listener prefets to remain anonymous. I can only say that this is not the
first instance of his help. It was the same man who put me on track of the
saddle bags owned by Coolidge, the murderer.
This old chart is a valuable historical item. It bears the heading, “1882.
Issued by T. B. Chase and Son, Dealers and Brokers in Ice, 51 Commercial Street,
Boston, and Gardiner, Maine.” On the left hand side is a map of the Kennebec
River from the Augusta Dam to Bath, showing boat channels, position of buoys,
depth of water, position, capacity and ownership of ice houses. In the lower left
hand comer is a list of tow boats on the river. There were nine owned by the
Knickerbocker Company: Adelia, Resolute, Knickerbocker, Popham, S. J. Macy, City
of Lynn, American Union, Clara and Clarita. There were two operated by the
Kennebec Company: the Charlie Lawrence and the Stella.
On the right hand side of the chart are listed the names and capacity of
commercial ice houses on the Penobscot and Cathance Rivers, and at ports along
the coast from Biddeford to Vinal Haven.
Now this old chart explains something that has troubled me. Some time ago
I referred to the Knickerbocker Ice Company of New York. Three different persons
have called me to task, saying they remember well the wagons of the Knickerbocker
Ice Company in the streets of Pbiladelphia. Yet they admit that Knickerbocker
is a good old New York name. It was Washington Irving’s Diedrich Knick-
2-342
erbocker who became to New York what John Bull is to England.
This chart clearly shows that there were two companies. The KnickeIbocker
Ice Company of New Yotk was in 1882 the smaller company, so far as its Kennebec
houses were concemed, having only two with a combined capacity of 58,000 tons.
Tie larger company was called the Philadelphia Knickerbocker Company and had six
big houses with a total capacity of 188,000 tous. It boasted one of the largest
houses on the river, in the town of Pittston, where 65,000 tons of ice could be
stored under one roof. But not even that huge capacity was the rlver’s record.
That was held by the ice bouse of Abram Rich at Farmingdale, where winter after
winter were stored 80 ,000 tons. Haynes and IEWitt had a house at Richmond that
held 62,000 tons, and 50,000 tons could be stored by the Baltimore firm of Ober
and Son at Richmond.
Altogether, between the Augusta Dam and Bath there were 41 ice houses from
which ice was shipped to distant ports. Those 41 were in addition to the countless
small houses used for storage of ice for local use. The Philadelphia Knickerbocker
Company was by far the largest operator, but not to be scoffed at were
the four big houses of Russell Brothers on both sides of the river at Richmond
and Dresden. Interests from the national capital centered at Pittston, where the
Great Falls Company of Washington and the Independents of Washington together
accounted for 100,000 tons of ice a year.
Among these giants, controlled from the big cities, the local operators
strove valiantly for control of what was left of the holdings which had once
been entirely in neighborhood hands. The Kennebec Ice Company, awned by Gardiner
and Augusta interests, had big houses at Richmond and Pittston. Even the small
operators hung tenaciously on: G. E. Weeks~ with a house just below the Augusta
Dam for a mere 2,000 tons; C. A. and J. D. White, storing 5,000 tons at Farmingdale;
George Brown, with his little 2,000 tons near the entrance to Mer’IYmeeting
Bay; and Thompson Brothers, with the smallest house of all, storing only
2-343
1,500 tons opposite Swan Island.
Thanks to this chart we know that the Kennebec held the record for the harvest
and export of Maine ice. For, here recorded, is a complete list of all
commercial companies in Maine which shipped ice out of the state.
On the Penobscot River were 15 companies, storing and shipping in 1882 a
total of 146,000 tons. On the cathance River were 12 companies with 39 ,000 tons.
Along the coast from. Biddeford to Vinal Haven were 34 companies with 349,BOO
tons. And on the Kennebec were 41 companies with the huge total of 1,029,200
tons. The grand total for Z,Jaine’s exported ice in 1882 was 1,563,000 tons, and
that is a lot of ice.
*****
Perhaps you are getting tired or just plain sore to have me keep referring
to prices in the old days. I cannot refrain, however, from. bringing to your attention
the cost of painting a house half a centuxy ago. I have before me an
old account form, showing the cost of painting the big two-stoxy house at 275
Main Street, Waterville, opposite the end of Boutelle Avenue. ‘!be owner engaged
the well remembered local firm of Spaulding and Kenniston to paint that house in
May, 1900. Here is what their bill called for:
100 lb. lead $ 6.00
4 gal. oil 2.40
Color for blinds 1.50
Priming for blinds 2.00
Paint for steps and floors 2.00
Paint for sash .20
Total for material 14.10
Labor for painting house 25.00
Labor for hanging blinds 5.00
Total for labor 30.00
Complete cost of job $ 44.10 2-344
*****
During the pas t month I have seen the homes of four of the fOlmders of our
nation: George Washington, our first president; Thomas Jefferson, author of the
Declaration of Independence; James Monroe, prcmolmcer of the independence of the
western hemisphere from the domination of Europe; and John Marshall, the great
chief justice who, more than any other man, molded legal precedent in the nation.
I also walked the same streets where once walked George Hason, author of the Virginia
Bill of Rights, which became the model for the first ten amendments to _our
federal constitution, the document which we call the American Bill of Rights.
In a vehicle which. his ingenious mind would readily comprehend, though the internal
combustion engine was undreamed of in his day, I rode through Benjamin
Franklin’s long, straight Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, devoutly wishing that
old Ben were with us again to resolve some of the hopeless confusion that now
befuddles the national capital.
And I had some serious thoughts as I contemplated the lives of those men
of Revolution and Construction, those men who risked all to face the anger of a
British king, and succeeded in what we today know to be a harder task than winning
a war, the task of winning the peace. For out of thirteen bickering, jealous,
quarreling colcmies, those men and their gallant compatriots from Massachusetts
to Georgia made a united nation.
But it was not their political achievement, their successful statesmanship,
that focused my attention on my recent visit to the old colcnial capital
of Virginia. It was rather the evidence which surrounds the visitor at every
tum that those great Americans of the late eighteenth century were, above all
else, broadly educated men. They were not men of fixed specialization, ignorant
~f, and uninterested in all fields except their own specialty. Washington
surveyor, fanner, professional soldier, statesman, courtier — was a man who
read books on many subjects, who liked to talk about music and art, about philosophy
and religion. Mason knew the law; he was a master of jurisprudence
2-345
but he also knew flowers and trees and birds, and he was absorbed in several aspects
of medicine. John Marshall, giver and interpreter of our laws, was a
great classicist, to whom Latin and Greek were as familiar as English, but he
also carried on interesting experiments in what he called natural philosophy,
and what we would call physics and chemis try.
Probably the outstanding examples of liberally educated Americans of all
time were two of those fO\mding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Either could have been called the American Leonardo da Vinci, for as with the
great Florentine no subject the mind of man could touch was foreign to their
interest. Everyone knows that Franklin was printer, scientist, author, editor,
inventor, statesman and diplomat. He signed both the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, secured the friendship of France for the colonial
cause, reconciled the belligerent Philadelphia merchants and the peace-loving
Quakers, and was a great national figure; but he also identified lightning with
electricity, made the Franklin stove, organized America’s first municipal
fire department and first public library, started the academy which was to become
the great University of Pennsylvania, and in his famous Junto Club was ever
ready to discuss intelligently any subject \mder the Slm.
Those of you who have visited Jefferson’s stately home at Monticello have
seen with your own eyes the numerous objects which sprang from his inventive
genius. For this statesman and political philosopher was not only an architect,
deSigning his own Monticello and the magnificent buildings of the University of
Virginia; he also made clocks and thermometers, double doors both of which swung
open when one was turned, musical instruments, revolving tables and desks, laborsaving
devices for cooking and othe r household tasks.
Yes t these American forefathers of ours were broadly educated men. They
had succeeded in doing what we so much yeam to have the modern college do for
its students — make them not narrow specialists, but truly educated men and
women. We think that we live very busy lives, but perhaps by the standards of
2-346
Washington and Jefferson our lives are merely hectic rather than busy. They too
were busy men. But, when we read their diaries and their notebooks, and the
long, seemingly leisured letters that comprise their correspondence we know
they did something too few of us ever deign. to do — they took time to think.
That is the lesson 1 brought back from Old Virginia — the lesson that
perhaps the great changes in modem civilization, the multitude of its technological
gadgets, don’t make so much difference as we like to think. In 1951,
as in 1776, we still need men of broad understanding who take time to think.
2-347
Little Talks on Common Things
Volume 3
LI ‘fiLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
105th Broadcast April 22, 1951
The persistent rain and high water of recent weeks have brought many reminders
of the flood of 1936 and, to old timem, have aroused memories of earlier
floods. In the Kennebec Valley ~ have been fortunate this year. The recently
constructed dams and storage basins have done much to save us from overwhelming
waters.
It is not so in other parts of the country. Before the recent devastating
floods hit the Mississippi, the Red River of the North and other mighty
streams, damage had been done in areas much nearer to Maine. On a recent trip I
drove in ignorance into the little village of Mountain View, New Jersey, twenty
miles north of Morristown. We were told that the bridge across the river had
been open less than an hour, after being closed for three days. As we approached
the bridge we saw the reason. Great lakes of water stretched out over the fields
in all directions. Many homes stood with water up to the second story. Nmnerous
motor cars stood nearly submerged. Trains crawled over rails a foot under water.
We were told that a thousand persons were homeless in that rural area, so extensive
and so violent was the damage.
It is natural, therefore, that on this program our thoughts should again
turn to old time floods on the Kennebec. Mr. Alex Herd of Winslow has shown me
impressive photographs of the flood of 1901, a Kennebec deluge that happened
half a century ago.
‘!be Waterville Mail called it the womt freshet since 1832. You will recall
that the 1832 flood was one I talked about a few months ago, when I posed the
question, which brought the highest water, the freshet of 1832 or the one 104
years later in 1936. At any rate, it seems likely that, of the freshets on the
Kennebec in the last 150 years, that of 1901 was at least the third highest and
3-1
one of the most devastating.
One of Mr. Herd’s pictures shows the plant of Edward Ware and Company with
nter nearly to the top of the first floor windows. Another shows houses at the
Head of the Falls half way submerged. A third shows a building near the junction
of the Sebasticook and the Kennebec with all except its roof under water. Perhaps
the best picture is of the old covered bridge across the Sebasticook showing
the roachfay completely under water and the waves washing over the flooring
of the bridge.
That 1901 flood came, not in the spring, but at the beginning of winter,
just a week before Christmas. On December 13 — a fateful Friday, the 13th, it
was — the weather tumed unseasonably warm. All day Saturday the snow melted
fast, and there was a lot of it, because since Thanksgiving the snow storms had
been frequent and heavy. Saturday night it began to rain, and for 48 hours a
drenching downpour continued. The river rose suddenly and rapidly.
Mr. S. I. Abbott of the Lockwood Mills then told the Waterville Mail that
the deepest water he had ever previously seen over the dam, in his 26 years with
the company, was 13 feet, but on the moming of December 16, 1901, he measured
15 feet. The oldest residents declared that the island near the bridge was
never so deeply under water since 1832.
The night of Sunday, December 15 had seen damage begin. Tm Ticonic footbridge
went out at 2 :00 A.M. Daylight revealed that the approach from the foot
of Temple Street to the toll house waS still intact, but at 7 :30 the toll house
also started down the river. It started right side up and moved along in a dignified
manner until it reached the railroad bridge. The floor of that bridge
acted like a knife to cut the roof off the floating toll house, and ~ the time
it reached the Ticonic Dam, it was a complete wreck.
By Monday noon the situation at the Lockwood Mill was serious. The entire
mill was shut down, and the canal dam suffered bad damage. In even worse condi …
3-2
tion was Hollingsworth and Whitney, for the water had invaded their buildings
in such volume that all work had stopped for two weeks.
As for householders near the river, the Waterville Mail said, in its issue
of December 16: liThe residents of the Head of the Falls are suffering as they
usually do when a freshet comes. People living on the river bank began moving
out and getting to higher ground last evening. Before the foot bridge went out
some of the tenements were in danger, and this forenoon two or three feet of
water stood on the ground floor of most of them. One house was entirely surrounded
by water several feet deep. It was fastened by a rope to a stout tree a
rod or two up the river, though the tree stood as deep in the water as did the
house.”
Flood conditions don’t trouble us much today in what we call the gully between
Pleasant and West Streets, and on south, east of the lower end of Burleigh
Street. The years have seen much of that gully filled in, . including a complete
fill to enable Winter Street to cross it. But in 1901, when its old name of
Hayden Brook was familiar to every resident, people who lived near the gully
knew when there was a flood. Early Sunday aftemoon in that December of 1901
water began flowing into some of the houses in the Hayden Brook district. The
culverts were entirely inadequate. The sudden flow of water was blocked, rather
than carried off, by the culverts. Washouts resulted all the way from Ash
Street to Western Avenue.
On the Messalonskee water was up to the floor of the Gilman Street bridge,
and a crew of men worked all night to keep the bridge from going out.
On the Sebasticook the well known high water mark on the Bassett Store was
covered by water. The store was entirely surrounded and could be reached only
by boat. The covered bridge over the Sebasticook was moved from its foundations,
but did not go out. Cars loaded with iron held in place the two railroad bridges.
In Winslow the Reynolds saw mill could be reached only by boat. Out ~f· the
3-3
mill yards no less than 300,000 feet of lumber floated down the river.
All day Monday Waterville was cut off from telephone communication wi th
outside communities. Water backing into the power plants put out all of the
city’s electric lights, stopped the wheels of the street railway line, and disrupted
the facilities of the Union Gas and Electric Company.
People waited in vain for mail and passenger transportation. Not a train
could get into Waterville over any of its connections for three days.
What the 1901 flood did to the town is revealed by the very form in which
the Waterville Mail published its issue of Monday, December 16. TheMail was,
as most of you know, an evening paper, of full newspaper size, usually of eight
and sometimes twelve pages. This flood issue of December 16, 1901 is a little
four-page sheet, 11 by 8~ inches. For the size and format, the edi.tors gave the
following explanation:
“This morning we gave up all idea of getting out an issue today. The electric
company informed us that they were practically dead to the world and would
not be able to turn a wheel before Tuesday, perhaps much later. Finally the largest
job press in our office was rigged up for foot power, and we decided to
publish a paper in this abbreviated form. It will be noted that it contains no
advertising at all. For that omission we ask the indulgence of our advertisers.
We hope to get out a regular edition tomorrow, but we make no promise about it.”
*****
Very seldom do I recommend a book on this program. That is not because I do
not encounter a lot of books I should like to recommend. I t is, rather, because
I realize that reading is largely a matter of taste. In choice of books, as in
almost no other field, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
Nevertheless I cannot refrain from recommending the newest book about the
man whom, in the early days of this program, I called the greatest man Maine ever
produced. I refer to the man who was until recently the constant summer resi-
3-4
dent of his old home village of South China~ Dr. Rufus Jones.
The best biography I have read for many a day has come from the press
during the past month. It is called, “Rufus Jones, Master Quaker”, and was .
written by David Rerishaw. lifelong intimate friend of Dr. Jones. Like his
subject, Herishaw is a Quaker and a graduate of Haverford College. Unlike
Rufus, Reds haw hailed from Kansas and chose journalism rather than teaching
as a career. Herishaw is yotmger than Jones, in fact was a student of Rufus I
at Haverford, graduating from there in 1911, whereas Dr. Jones’s own class
was 1885.
With great understanding Herishaw depicts the South China background that
had such life-long effect on Dr. Jones; the tremendous influence of father,
mother and aunt; the determination to go to college; the decision to be a teacher;
and the even more momentous decision to lead the Quaker people tMay from
ascetic avoi.dance of the world into application of Quaker principles to world
affairs •
In one chapter Mr. Herishaw tells the thrilling story which I once heard
from Dr. Jones’s own Ups, how he and two other members of the Friends Service
Committee faced. the Gennan Gestapo.
After repeated rebuffs they finally were received at the chief offices of
Hitler’s secret· police. They were escorted through seven corridors, past cordon
after cordon of armed guards, and hearing each door locked behind them. Dr.
Jones presented a document, saying the Quakers had no political aims, only a desire
to feed hungry Jewish children. The Gestapo officers read the document
and seemed i.mpressed. Then their leader said, ”We are now withdrawing to report
to our chief. In about 20 minutes we shall tell you his decision.”
‘1l e Quakers were then left alone in the bi.g room. v..”hat did they do? They
did a typically Quaker thing. They held a prayerful period of complete silence.
It was lucky they did, for they later learned that a concealed microphone would
3-5
have inforned the Gestapo of any conversation.
Dr. Jones and his fellow Quakers won their request. They found the way opened
for extensive relief among the suffering German Jews. Dr. Jones always contended
that he could never fully explain the inconsistency and the mystery of that decision.
Why should Hitler’s Gestapo, which was itself deeply involved in causing
the tragic situation the Quakers sought to relieve, why should that hard-boiled
gang receive Dr. Jones. listen to his plea, and actually grant his request? Dr.
Jones often said he could think of only one plausible explanation. Perhaps some
of those Gestapo officers had been among the very children whom Quaker relief
had fed and kept alive after the first World War.
Next week I propose to devote a part of this program to the Quakers of the
Kennebec.
*****
In all that we read and hear about the Kefauver investigation of crime in
the United States, we hear much emphasis about what government ought to do, and
very little about what you and I ought to do. I wonder if all this emphasis
isn’t a symptom of the way we have been turning for the past twenty years. In
almost every phase of our lives we increasingly expect the government to take care
of us. Less and less are we willing to face responsibility for outselves. We want
the govemment to feed us, house us, tend us. bury us. And when we see something
wrong in the nat ion, we look to the gove romen t to fix it.
So it is small wonder that we shriek for legislation to stop the great crime
rackets that the Kefauver Connnittee has uncovered.
We need to be reminded that legislation of itself never cured any evils. We
had better place the emphasis in another place. It is wrong-doing, evil. what our
grandparents used to call by the no longer fashionable word “sin”, that is the
root of the trouble. Just so long as individual American citizens patronize the
numbers racket, place their bets on the horses, or play the slot machines, human
3-6
greed and natural ingenuity are going to provide the racketeers. Let more of
us have the courage to stand up and say that gambling itself is wrong.
3-7
LI’ITLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
106 th Broadcast April 29, 1951
I think we cannot repeat too often the facts about who owns the big industrial
companies. We hear so much talk about a few industrialists holding the
destiny of all America in their hands, that many people have come to believe
that a few people actually own the whole country.
One of the big companies that is submitted to a lot of vilification and
harsh cd ticism is E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company of Wilmington, Delaware.
Who owns that great company? On March 31, 1951 DuPont stock was owned by
131,421 shareholders, an increase of more than 15,000 over the previous year.
Now get this: 44 per cent of all the stockholders are women.
Isn’t it plain as day that a company like DuPont needs brainy, efficient
management? If its management is not efficient, the families represented by
more than 130,000 persons suffer loss, and of those losers, 52,000 are women.
*****
Every time our federal government decides to step in and do something more
for us, it usually also does something to us. Coercion is an ugly word; it is
quite different from persuasion. Can you force your neighbor to do anything if
he knows that you cannot injure him in his person, his property, or his good
name? Neither can government force us to do its will except by its powerful
threat to injure us — its power to make us pay fines, serve in prison, even
give up our lives.
Government is society’s jealously guarded monopoly of coercion, and we
would not have it otherwise, because we rely on government. for our fundamental
security — on local government for security against thieves. and. murderers, on
national government for security against the tyranny of a foreign power. But,
within the framework of that security, we prize something else that is charac-
3-8
teristically American — we prize fteedom. And every time the govemment in
Washington steps in to do the things that voluntary associations of men and
women have traditionally done for themselves and for each other, and ought
still to do, another measute of freedom is lost, and another step on the road
to totali tarian government has been taken.
I, for one, am not teady to believe that the gteat majority of Americans
want either an authoritarian government, threatening all life for us, nor a
socialist government trying to do everything for us. We want a govemment
which assures a good measute of indiv1d,ual freedom, and no glowing promises
of security can take fteedom’s place.
frfrfrfrfr
Along with the test of America, and indeed of all the world, the Kennebec
Valley owes much to the Society of Friends, commonly called the Quakers. Only
last week I repeated to you my conviction that, of all sons of Maine, the one
most deserving of a statue to represent our state in the national capitol’s
Hall of Fame is Rufus Jones. It is fitting, therefote, that we should devote a
part of the program tonight to the society of which Dr. Jones was the most illustrious
modern member, and what that society had to do with the development
of our Kennebec Valley.
In 1775, the same year that heard the death-dealing shots at Lexington and
Concord, starting the War of the Revolution, thete came to Newport, Rhode Island
a man who hated war and spread the gospel of peace. He was Dav:l.d Sands. He came
to Newport to attend the Friends Meeting, for he was alteady known as a Friends
mniste r at Cornwall, New York. At Newport Sands made his decision to travel
through the scatteted settlements of northern New England, visit the few Quaker
families he could find, and help them establish groups of their teligious faith
and even make the fonnal foundation of Friends Meetings.
It was in the midst of the Revolution in 1777 when Sands reached the Dis;..
3-9
trict of Maine. Forttmately he kept a joumal, so we know what happened when he
reached the upper Kennebec. He wrote:
”We had many meetings, though always passing through a wildemess cOtmtry.
We had two meetings at the house of Remington Hobbie at a place called Vassalboro
on the Kennebec River. We next proceeded up the river for two days t
through great fatigue and suffering, having to travel part of the way on foot,
finally coming to a Friend’s house, there being no other habitation within 45
miles. ”
The seeds sown by David Sands bore fruit. In 1780 the first regular Friends
Meeting in our region was established at Vassalboro. As one historian put it,
“As the settlers increased, many embraced the peculiar views of the Quakers.”
How did the Friends happen to be called Quakers? George Fox, founder of
the movement, called his followers Children of the Light. The name Quaker was
almost certainly given them in derision. In his joumal Fox wrote: “Justice
Bennett, in 1650, was the first that called us Quakers, because we did bid him
tremble at the word of the Lord.” On the other hand, Robert Barclay’s book entitled
“Apology” states that the Quakers got their name ”because of the trembling
Friends sometimes experienced in their meetings”.
Although they never disclaimed the name Quakers and indeed came eventually
to take pardonable pride in it, they have always preferred and still prefer the
name Friends. They are, and long have been, officially the “Religious Society of
Friends” •
Tie Friends Meeting House at Vassalboro Was opened in 1786. In 1788 was
confirmed the first marriage to be held in it. This was actually a double wedding,
for on the same day two sisters were married according to the Quaker custom;
Sarah Taber marrying Joseph Howland and Lydia Taber marrying Pelatiah Hussey.
Present as a w1.tness at that first wedding in the Friends Meeting House
was Remington Hobbie, the good Quaker at whose home David Sands had stopped in
1777. 3-10
A week ago little did I .think I should ever see the signature of Remington
Hobbie. much less see it on an original marriage document of a Quaker wedding.
But only a few days ago I did see that signature, and I saw it on what I regard
as a precious historical· document of ancient Vassalboro.
The document to which I refer is owned by Mr. Edward J. E.stes of Mohegan
Street, l-linslow, and it is the official statement of a Quaker marriage at Vassalboro
in 1791. It is not a photostat, not a copy, but the original document
with the names of 36 witnesses appended by their own hands.
No minister officiated at that or any other true Quaker marriage. The bride
and groom perform the ceremony themselves. This is the way Mr. Estes’ old document
reads:
”Peleg Dileno of Vassalborough, son of Peleg DUeno of Vassalborough, in
the County of Lincoln and State of Massachusetts Bay, and Sarah his wife, and
Ruby Hoxie, daughter of Hezekiah Hoxie of Vassalborough afo-resaid, and Elizabeth
his wife, having declared their intention of taking each other in marriage before
several monthly meetings of the people called Quakers, in the county aforesaid,
according to the good order used among them, their proceeding after due inquiry
and deliberate consideration thereon, were allowed by the said meeting,
they appearing clear of all others and having consent of parents.
“Now these are to certify all whom it may concern, that for the full accomplishment
of their said intentions this 27th day of the seventh month in the year
of our Lord 1791, they the said Peleg Dileno and Ruby Hoxie appeared at a public
assembly of the aforesaid people and others in their meeting house in Vassalborough,
and the said Peleg Dileno, taking the said Ruby Hoxie by the hand did
openly declare, as followeth: Friends, I take this my friend Ruby Hoxie to be
my wife, promising through divine assistance to be unto her a loving and faithful
husband until it shall please the Lord by death to separate us. And then
the said Ruby Hoxie did in like manner declare as follows: Hy friends, I take
3-11
this my friend Peleg Dileno to be my husband, promising through divine assistance
to be unto him a loving and faithful wife until it shall please the Lord by
death to separate us — or words of the like import.
“And the said Peleg Dileno and Ruby Hoxie, as a further confirmation thereof
have hereunto set their hands, she after the custom of marriage assuming the
name of he r husband.”
Now all through the document the name is spelled DILENO. But the signatures
of bride and groom stand out clearly Peleg DELANO Jr. and Ruby DELANO. The scribes
of that time were never careful about spelling, and it is not unusual to find
two or even three different spellings in the same document.
Now what makes this old marriage document of great local value historically
are the signatures of those 36 witnesses, for they show us clearly who was who in
Friends Meeting at Vassalboro in 1791. Rem. J. Hobby is certainly David Sands’
Remington Hobbie. There were several Tabers; besides the women were Silas, Jacob
and Bartholomew. There were a number of Husseys, including the well known patriarch
of the family, Isaac. Of course the Hoxies were there, for one of their
kin was the bride. Hezekiah, Silas and Abel Hoxie all signed the docwnent. There
were three Bowermans — David, Elizabeth and Peace; two Sleepers — Moses and
Hannah; only one of the Howlands — Joseph. And the first name, leading all the
other 35 is that of Vassalboro’s great pioneer, Joshua Fry.
How did Mr. Estes come by this valuable document? He isn’t quite sure. He
only knows it was in an old desk brought to Winslow by his mother many years ago.
The Estes family goes back many generations in Estes is still a vigorous man of only 71, but his father, a veteran of the Civil
War, was bom in 1840. After the war the veteran and his father, Edward Estes’
grandfather, conducted a hay and grain business at Getchell’s Comer. Somewhere
in the past Mr. Estes t branch of the family was related to the Hoxie’s and into
the Estes family, by some now unremembered route, came the marriage doc\Dllent of
3-12
Ruby Hoxie, written and signed when George Washington was President of the United
States.
I hope the diversion to that fine old marriage document has interested you
as much as it did me. Now let’s get back to the story of the development of the
Quaker movement in our vicinity. We had left that story with the opening of the
Friends Meeting House in 1786 and the double marriage held in it in 1788. By
1790 a number of Friends had settled in the eastern part of Vassalboro, near the
outlet of China Lake. In 17,98 a. meeting house was built there, called East Pond
Meeting, to distinguish it from the River Meeting. For many years the Vassalboro
monthly meeting alternated between the two meeting houses — the older one
at Vassalboro and the newer one at East Vassalboro.
In 1831 was built the well known brick meeting house at East Vassalboro.
In 1803 Abel Jones had come to China from Durham and had joined a small band of
Friends on the east sn-ore of the lake. In 1806 he married Susana Jepsen. the
first Friends marriage in O1ina. On the east shore, about three miles from the
north end of the lake, a Friends meeting house, known as the Pond Meeting House
the first in China — was built in 1807.
Prior to 1795 the Friends Quarterly ~eting at Salem included all Friends
east of Boston. That meeting did hold one session a year at Falmouth (the old
name for Portland) to accomodate the gtowing number of Friends in Maine. In
1795 a regular Quarterly Meeting was established at Falmouth, and by 1813 the
society had become so numerous in Vassalboro and China that Vassalboro Quarterly
Meeting was established and continued to flourish. The Vassalboro Quarterly
Meeting had thus been in existence for seven years when Maine became a State,
and it was that meeting which secut:ed the passage of Article 7, Section 5 of the
Constitution of Maine, which to this day exempts members of the Society of
Friends from military service of the State.
On a later program I want to tell you mot:e about those early Quakers of the
3-13
Kennebec, especially about their staunch religious beliefs which won the respect
of all their neighbors. And I want to tell you about some of them who,
as individuals, became nearly as distinguished as did Rufus Jones. But tonight
we have left only time to quote what was said of them in 1892 by the young man
who was then principal of Oak Grove Seminary. For that young principal was Rufus
Jones himself. In those days, long before he had become the great Quaker of
international fame, he wrote of those founders of the Kennebec Society of Friends:
“These people were with very few exceptions ignorant of book education. The
Bible was, in many cases, their only book. The heroes of faith pictured in the
Old Testament were the only heroes they ever heard of. David and Isaiah were
their poets. The Bible furnished their only history and their only ethics; it
was the child’s reader and spe,lling book. But with all their days devoted to
stubborn toil, with all the scarcity of books and their difficulty in reading,
these people of the wilderness grew refined and took on a culture and a grace
admired by all who knew them.”
3-14
LI TTLE TALKS ON COMM:>N THI NGS
101th Broadcast May 6, 1951
Wherever we see the ugly hand of corruption and political Influence at work,
this program wi II continue to make a loud protest. Our government is so big and
so confusing, at this mid-point in the 20th century, so bound up with red tape,
so crowded wi th bureaucrats just getting in each other’s way, that we can’ I II
afford to add the obnoxious fl ve-percenters and the gi vers of fur coats and deep
freezers to what Is al ready bad enough.
The revelations of what has been going on in just one state — Mississippi -make
us wonder what Is happenl.ng in the other 41 states. Before the Congressiooal
)( conmittee,) witnesses testl fled that party contributions were not on Iy necessary to
. get a job, but that there were standard price-tags on various jobs. To become an
RFD mal I carrier cost S150; to get Into the revenue office cost Sl,OOO. One
witness told the committee he has been a chump about an $600 to get Itj then found out the particular job wasn’t going to exist.
A small town businessman testified that he paid $300, then stopped payment
on the check. He related a talk with a member of the state party conmittee. The
committeeman told him that rationing was just around the corner, and that the
committee was looking for someone to set up as comty supervisor. A donation of
$300wQuhf be appreciated.
One memer of the Senate investigating group questioned a woman menDer of
the state party committee in Mississippi. This was one of his questlons~ “Did you.
understand, when you recommended a person who gave you a requested contribution,
that the federal agenc.y would appoint that person to the job?” “Of oourse”, she
rep lied, “that was the who Ie Idea”.
3-15
It Is a sorry situation indeed when there Is a price list placed on government
jobs. I wonder if I am alone In be Ileving the time has come for a whole
eth i ca I tone-up, a co~ lete mora I revl va I In our natl ona I Ii fee
*****
In the more than one hundred broa,dcasts on this program, I don’t recall
that we have ever mentioned the Kennebec Valley fire fighters. So let’s get in a
few words tonight about the Waterville Fire Department.
Between the b u I I di n g of Fort Ha I i fax In 1754 and the organ i zat i on of the
first fire company in 1809, the communliy springing up on both sides of the river
must have seen a lot of fires. Everything was then built of wood, and the lumber
mt lis along the river bank added to the plies of easi Iy combustible material.
Perhaps, hidden away In Waterville and Winslow attics are accounts of early fires.
Can anyone dig up an authentic record of fl re in Watervi lie or Wins low previous
to 18091
I t was I n that yea r that the firs t fire depa rtment was estab I i shed on the
west side of the river. Elnathan Sherwin, James Wood, Moses Dalton, Asa Reding …
ton, and Eleazer Ri p ley were elected fl re wardens. Those were the days of bucket
brigades, when the only way a fire could be fought In this locality .wasby passing
a long a I ine of buckets fl lied from some reservoi r or stream, or sometimes from
the ri \Ie.r.
Just when the f1 rst hand-pump engine was installed here is not clear. All
that we know is that Ab i J ah Smi th, Nehemi ah Getche I I, James Stackpo Ie and TI mothy
Boutelle were menDers of the fire company at the time. If, as we suspect, it is
the younger, not the older, James Stackpole who is meant, the fl rst of those four
to die was Ab I jah Smf th in 1841. A II I can say about it ton i ght is that, some
time between 1809 and 1841 Waterville bought a fire engine, which was simply a
big tub .Into which water was poured from palls, and was pumped out by an ordinary
single handled old-fashioned pump, through a very short and very leaky hQse. That
3-16
original piece of fire fighting apparatus In Watervl lie was called the “Bloomer”.
Actually the old Blooner was probably In operation before 1836, for In that
year begl n “the first records of the Waterville FI re Departnent wh I ch are sti II
prase rved. Whethe r it was ca lied Engi ne Company No 1 of the Ti con I c VI II age Corporation
quite so early as 1836 Is not entl rely clear, but that was the name It
certainly had before 1850.
Some time about 1854, Engine Company No.3 was organized. It secured a
first-class Button hand engine, which on July 4,1854 began a long career as
champion stream thrower among all the engines entered In those fiercely fought
contests among the old engine companies. On that fourth of July In 1854, just a
hundred years after the bui I di ng of Fort Ha I i fax, No. 3’s crew brought home from
Augusta a handsone silver trumpet as the winner’s prize. Five years later the
engi ne set a state record of 212 feet, 9 1 nches. That fi ne 01 d hand-engine
stayed in Waterville unti I 1891, when she was sold to an organization in Newton,
Mass., and was rechristened the ”Nonantum”. Under the new name the old pumper
surpassed even her Maine records. In a muster held in Providence in 1892 she
p layeda stream of 250 feet, 7 inches.
No.1 and No.3 were therefore the fl rst fl re companies in Watervi lie. No.2
Joined them,.:i.n 1878. It was located at the south end of the city. Unfortunately
early records of any engine, if at first they had any, are not preserved, but we do
find a record that No.2 company sold a hand-tub engine to parties in Bath for the
sum of $75 in 1889.
What a pity that Yankee fruga Ii ty di ctated the sa Ie of most of these 0 I den ..
gines. Wha”t a pity that Tlconlc No.1 could not still be seen in Waterville,
among other p recl ous re I i cs of the cl ty. One must go to Ellsworth to see that 01 d
engine, for it was sold to that Hancock County town in 1888.
Watervi lie’s fi rst steam fl re engine was purchased in 1884. A prime mover in
the project to get it, as he was a promoter of so many worthy public projects,
3-17
was Dr. F. C. Thayer. In fact the company was named for him, and the F. C. Thayer
Fire Engine Canpany laid Its hand-tub aside. It was not long before the last of
the hand apparatus left the €ity for good.
I have previously mentioned the old reservoirs scattered about the city,
some of which are said to be stl II capable) of use. Before his death Gene Crawford
had made a very carefu I mapp i ng of those reservoi rs, the best known of wh i ch is
near the present War Memori a I in Castonguay Square. We are told that 22 of those
old reservol rs were In use as late as 1887, when a municipal water supply was fi rst
brought I n from the Messa lonskee Stream. I t was that year of 1887 that saw the
installation of 50 hydrants on Watervi lie streets.
As late as 1880 some of the clumsy, 01 d leather hose was stili In use. The
record shows that in that year the town owned 1,300 feet of leather hose, 1,000
feet of rubber-lined linen hose, and 1,100 feet of rubber-lined cotton hose.
There seems TO have been little party politics in the FI re Department unti I
1888, when WaterY’ lIe became a city. The new charter called for the annual elec …
tlooof a chief engineer and two assistants. If the party in control changed at
the spring election, the employed drivers had to get out, and the personnel of each
company from top .TO bottom was reorgan t zed. What happened was the contemporary
existence of two sets of firemen, who served according to their political aftU ….
lations. Not unti I 1907 was the charter amended. Since that date a Watervi lIe
fireman, when once chosen, may serve unti I he wishes to withdraw, or has preferred
charges proved against him. As a result the efficiency of our fire canpanies was
greatly improved. More and more as men came to be chosen to fl II company vacancies,
just two questions were asked: “Wi II this man respond promptly to every
fl re call?”, and ”Wi II he stay on the job unti I it is finished?”
MoST of this information has been provided me by Ralph Gi Iman, present chief
eng! neer of the Watervi lie Fi re Department. Now I am sure sane of our listeners
can tum up a lot more information. Among the things we hope sti J I to mention
3-18
some evening are a few of Watervi tJe’s spectacular fires. In Dr. Whittemore’s
Centennial History appear these two short sentences: “The great fl re of 1849
swept the business section of the town, about the wharves and mi lis. The Moors
were the heaviest losers. fI We hope to learn and pass on to you a lot more about
that fire of 1849. Another great mi II fire occurred in 1859, when mi lis and
machinery were destroyed in three plants — those of Daniel Moor, W. and W. Getche
I I, and Furbush and Drummond.
00 any of you remember Waterville’s part in the famous Bangor fire of 1911?
I t came near the end of my sophomore year in co liege I and I was one of the Co Iby
students who managed to hitch a ri de to Bangor on the train that took the Watervi
lie apparatus to the big fl reo
Not until after 1900 did Watervi lie own any fl re horses. As early as 1885
two hired horses had been placed in the old fire station on Main Street, and in
1886 the first swing harness was installed. Those fine old grays that some of us
so much admired, they and their successors passed out of the picture in 1927, when
the department became completely motorized.
1’m sure a lot of my Ii steners don ‘t want th is subject abandoned here. So
beg of you, gi ve me a II the in formati on you can about 0 I d fire compan i es, 0 I d
hand tubs, old steam fire engines, old fire horses, spectacular fires — anything
that pertains to fire fighting In Watervi lie and vicinity.
*****
Through the kindness of Dr. O’Hara, Dean of the Tufts 0>1 lege Medical School,
have just seen an old folder entitled “Trolleying through the Heart of Maine”.
Its cover carries a picture of one of those old, open, summer-time trolley cars
with seats clear across the car. Over the trolley is the design of a heart shCMing
that part of Maine from Old Orchard to Watervi lie, and as far west as Mechanic
Falls and Turner. The inside spread is a picture map of the entire area, showing
the ral troads, steamship routes and the interurban trolley I ines. The folder is
3-19
not dated, but It was printed before the construction of the interurban trolley
line between Portland and lewiston. It does show the once familiar trolley
lines all around the ifllllBdiate vicinity of Portland, and the Interurban lines
from Portland to Old Orchard and Biddeford; to Westbrook, Gorham and South Windham;
to Yarmouth, Freeport, Brunswick and Bath; between Brunswick and Lewiston; fran
lewiston to Sabbatus, Tacoma Lake, Gardiner, Augusta and WatervIlle; fran Lew-
Iston to Mechanic Falls and Turner; and from Augusta to’ Is land Park and Winthrop.
The rest of the folder Is giwn up to descriptloos of trips, routes and
fares. On the Lewiston, Augusta an:d Waterville line the complete round trip
fare was $2.00 and the total round trip running time was seven hours. The round
trip fare fran Usbon Falls to Bath was 70 cents; from Lewistoo to Medlan,lc Falls
I twas 40 cents, and to Turner 50 cents.
But the folder’s feature announcement conoerns the Triangle Trolley,Trlp.
The announcement reads: “This Is one of the most delightful trips In Maine.
Starting from any point on the L.A. and W. Street Raf Iway between Bath and Lewis …
ton, you take the trolley vi a Tacoma Lakes and Spears Comer to Gardiner. From
Waterville the trip Is via Winslow and Augusta to Gardiner. At Gardiner you leave
the trof ley and, take the Eastern Steamship Company’s steamer, leaving Gardiner at
3:45 P.M. for the sail down the Kennebec River to Bath,stopping atQ:tdar Grove
and Richmond en route. You arrive at Bath at 6:00 P.M. in time to connect with
:” ( ..
the trolley leaving for Brunswick and Lewiston at 6:30. The most enJoyable way
to make this trip from points west of Tacoma is to leave your hane In the forenoon
and trolley to Tacoma,spendl ng the time until noon In boating and other p feasures
and having a fine dinner at Tacoma Inn, then taking the trolley after dinner for
Gardlne,r. To make the day even more complete, after arrival at Bath, one may
trolley to New Meadows, haw supper at the Inn, and trolley hane In the evening.”
Complete fare for that triangle trip, Including both trolley and boat tickets,
was one dollar.
car days.
People got a lot of pleasure for a little money in the old trolley
3-20
1I TILE TALKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
lOath BrQadcast– May 13. 1951
A listener recently asked me whether consumption of alcoholic beyerages was on
the increase I n the Un i ted States today. The I i staner sent me some figures for
1911. In that year the total consumption of distilled spirits amounted to
135,000,000 gallons, and the ·beer consumed fi lied two bl Ilion gallons.
Now, be I I eve It or not, accord I ng to the Worl d Almanac dt stl I led liquor production
in the United States reached its height in spite of seyere restrictions In
the last year of the Second World War, 1945, when the Bureau of Internal Revenue
reported taxes paId on the production of 1,175,000,000 gallons. In 1946,1947 and
1948 the figures dropped until In 1948 they were down to 420,000,000. Then In 1949
they shot up. aga I n to 450,000,000. I have not seen the figures for 1950.
Now these figures are badly misleading. The gallons of liquor on which federal
taxes are paid fal I far short of the total consumption., They take no account
of the vast quantity of Imported liquor, and they Ignore the completely Incalculable
amountof illegally made liquor. At any rate we can assure our listeners that consumption
has not decreased since that boom year of 1911 in the lIquor industry. One
thing Is sure; we would be very much better off If we had a lot less of It. If it
I s any comfort to fo I ks who wou I d I I ke to see more sob ri ety, we do have the figures
for retail sale of liquor in the three years of 1947, 1948 and 1949. While prices
I n genera I ,. Ii q uor inc I uded, have been goi ng up, the tota I do II ar reta i I sa les of
liquor have been going down. The total in 1947 was $1,916,000,000; in 1948 It had
dropped to $1,854,000,000; and In 1949 I t had taken an even sharper drop to
$1,760,000,000.
The figures for tobacco p-roductlon are rather interesting. If you want to
check my accuracy about them, take a look at page 665 of the World Almanac for 1951.
3-21
I tis i ncredi b Ie to me that In 1948 more snuff was produced in the Un I ted States
than in 1920; but here are the fl gures: for 1920 they were 34,349,000 pounds; for
1948 they were 40,809,000 pounds. The production of plug, twist and fine cut tobacco
have stead! Iy aecreased since 1920, as has also the production of cigars.
I tis of course the boom In ci garettes that accounts for the ove ra II ! ncrease. From
47 billion In 1920 the annual manufactur:’E) of the little coffin-nails has grown to
387 billion. In 1948 a total of a billion and a half pOlllds of leaf tobacco saw
more than th ree-fourths of I t go Into ci garettes.
I never fully realized what tobacco could mean to the whole economy of.a people
until I recently visited Colonial Williamsburg. The life of that Virginia
capita I of 200 years ago, so carefully and beautl fully restored by Mr. Rockefe Iler’s
millions, depended entl rely on the tobacco plant and the success of Sir Walter Ra ..
leigh In making Its use popular In England.
I n Willi amsburg they te II you frank Iy why they honor S I rWa Iter, though he
never set foot on Amari can shores. They know Just wtly the prl ncl pa I I nn was ca lied
the Raleigh Tavern, why portraits of Sir Walter and his Lady are prominently dis ..
played In the old capitol building. It was not because he helped found the abandoned
lost colony down the Bay at Roanoke Island, nor because he had some Interest
In the plans for Jamestown. It was because he made tobacco popular at the court of
Good Queen Bess, and soon afterward wi th a II gentlemen of Merrie England.For tobacco
became the life blood of Virginia. Some of those Williamsburg Inhabitants of 1951
wi II tell you they are very sure they know why Virginia In 1751 could have a Jef …
ferson, a Madl son, a Mason and a Monroe. Because she was the home of the wealthbringing
tobacco, they will tell you, Virginia just had to be the Mother of Presidents.
*****
A lot of our people stili seem to think the Labo.r Government of Britain has
been badly used and gross Iy mi srepresented. Perhaps It has, but weQJght not to be
3-22
deaf to such remarks as those made by an ordinary English merchant in a small town~
a man who all his life had hated the reactionary Tories — a man who looked for
better days under labor rule. That man sal d: ”The outstandi ng feature of our socfalistgovernment
is its glaring inefficiency. Under our old system, If a COlli””
pany became too inefficient, it fal led and something else took Its place. When
you abol ish profi t as a yardsti ck of efti clency I what do you put in r ts place?”
We I I, what do you?
Every critic of capitalistic society has pointed to it as a gross example of
man’s inhumanity to man, arrogant exploitation of human life. Socialism, they
said, would cure all that. But what of England today? The outstanding characterIstic
of the present British government is its growing callousness toward the very
thing it most loudly professes — ordinary hUman welfare. It is the beginning of
the same kind of callousness that marks Stalin’s Politburo or Mao’s government in
China. Take the British food situation, for instance. Vegetables that people a
few miles away sorely needed have been allowed to spoil in the fields. One British
housewi fe raised this piercing lament: “Ask Mr. Atlee why our chi Idren don’t get
as good food as we got in the worst days of the war”.
Regardless of what happens to the individual, the system must have Its way. A
British social worker on the government payroll was recently showi,ng a foreign tra ..
veler a group of big, government houses under construction. “Didn’t you tell me”,
the trave ler asked, “that some fami I ies are re luctant to move Into these apartments?”
”Yes”, said the social worker, “they don’t like giving up their smallapantment
houses, where the man had a bit of a garden to putter about in the evening. But this
is the way we are going to do it. We ‘I , make them learn to like it.”
There you have it — the fundamental disregard of human rights and human preferences.
“Take it and like It”. That is socialism In action in Britain. Do you want
it in Ameri ca1
*****
3-23
It has been some time since we referred to homely old Yankee expressions
I ike “leaning toward Sawyer’s” and “not worth a Hannah Cook”. let’s dig out a
few more of those spri ghtl y, tangy say I ngs toni ght.
Af1er what we have been through with the weather this spring, we ought to
apprecl ate grandpa’s meanl ngfu lsi mi Ie I “I t’s longer than a wet week”. When you
can’t find some jill> lement that you’ve put away, dl d you eve r say of the hi dl ng
p lace, “It’s as handy as a pocket In another man’s shl rtlt?
Up In my native part of Maine the old folks didn’t talk about March coming
in like a lion and going out like a lamb. “March is much more liable”, my grandfa
the r Wh I tney used to say, “much more I I ab Ie to come I n like a I i on and go out
Ii ke the devi In.
When someone would say of a new storekeeper or a new minister or even of a.new
second wife, ”Well, a new broom sweeps clelan”, my great;’;:grandmother Blake, whom
I remember well because she lived until I was twelve years old — my great-grandmother
would speak up sharp and clear: “Sure, a new broom sweeps clean, but an
old one knows the corners best.”
Through the ages, in all lands, there have been caustic proverbs to describe
persons of rather poor In1elligence. Here are a few of the good old crisp ones
from wes 1e rn Ma f ne: “He chops with the head of his axe” j “He hasn’t got a b ral n
In his body nor any place to put one”; “He don’t know nawthln and allus will”. Or
take this one: “You say she’s got brain fever? Can’t be. How can an angleworm
have water on the knee?”
The bigoted person of unyielding opinion Is said to be “so narrer-minded he
can see through a keyhole with both eyes”. And I have always liked an expressfon
that shows how clearly the old timers understood the connection between poverty
and laziness: “It’s a poor back that can’t press Its own shl rt.”
*****
Does anyone know the date and other facts concerning a wedding that is said
3-24
to have taken place on the old covered bridge over the Sebastlcook at Winslow?
That brIdge went out In the freshet of 1901; so the date must have been earl ter
than that. The story goes that one day~ as SquIre Josiah Bassett was leaving his
WI ns low home to go to Watervl lie on bus I ness. he” met a young coup Ie Just after he
crossed the bridge. “Aren’t you Squire Bassett?”, the young man asked. The
Squtre admitted his identity. ”We’re looking for you”,went on the young man. “We
want to get married.”
Squire Bassett was In a hurry. He had a lot of business to do tn Waterville.
But he cou I dn ‘t res i st the young b rt de’s appealing face • So he came to a qui ck
decision. He wasn’t going all the way back to his hOll19 on Lithgow Street; he
wasn’t even goi ng back to the Bassett store. But he wou I d accommodate the coup Ie.
“Let’s go back to the brl dge”, he sai d. So there, under the she Iter of the COyered
bridge, he pronounced the words which made the couple man and wife.
That. In substance. is the story. Did It really occur? When? At what time
of day? What were the names of the brl de and groom? Who were the legal witnesses?
.Can anyone put us on track of the answers? Who has any definite, dated
Information about that wedding on the Winslow covered bridge?
*****
I have devoted time on this program to several Kennebec tOtlns. Next week it
Is Benton’s tum. There’s a grand town that deserves your attenti on. It is
Benton next Sunday.
*****
S I nee I have been referring to Rufus Jones, the great Quaker leader, some
listeners have asked me wh i ch of Dr. Jones’ many books I II ke best. We II, I must
con fess that I have not read them all , but of the ha I f dozen wh i ch I have read, I
like best “A Small Town Boy” and “A Call to What is Vital”. The latter was published
only a few months before he died, but because it contains his completely
matured philosophy of life and the rich harvest of all his living, I think it is
3-25
his best writing.
Something of that phi losophy was revealed by the impression made on him when
he was on Iy nine years 01 d. Ft re almost comp lete Iy destroyed the vi II age of
South Chi na. He te lis us that, the night after the fi re, as he wa I ked a long the
street and gazed at the smoldering houses, the gaunt lone chimneys, and the
gapl ng ce II ar holes, he fe It sorneth ing had gone out of h is life, never to return.
Then, as the long years ‘rolled by, he came to see In that boyhood fire the evidenca
of how fleeting and transitory, how soon wiped out, are many things we hold
important, and how much greater, therefore, I s our need for someth ing that cannot
be wIped out. Rufus Jones found that something in unalterable faith in a living
God. He knew the mean ing of the comforting hymn, “Death and decay in all around
see; 0″ thou who fadest not, abide with me.”
Dr. ,Jones .. ,was master of memorable Illustrations. He often compared man’s experienca
with God to that of a person climbing Mount Everest. “At fi rst”, he
said, “there are many routes which gradually converge, and up to a cartaln point
there are many ways to trave I (by way of beauty, or of truth, or of goodness),
but at the very last for the final climb there Is only one way, the way of prayer.
The mystl c has been there, and he comes to te II us that beyond the conjectures
and inferences about the reality of God is the consciousness of enjoying His presenca
•
”Have a sense of what is vi ta I”, the Apost I e Pau I w rote to the church at
Philippi. If you want to know what that vltal’Hving Is, read Rufus Jones’ last
book, “A Call to What Is Vital”.
3-26
L I IT LE TALKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
109th Broadcast May 20, 1951
Ttlere are probably several Waterville families who CQuid have been called
trolley car fans half a century ago. know one of those families who were so
fond of trolley rl des that husband and:’ wi fe took many long trips entl rely by
trolley. One of their longest was from Waterville to ‘” Lynn·” Massachusetts, every
foot of the way by success I ve changes of tro I ley car.
When that couple were married in 1903, they took a two weeks’ honeymoon
through various parts of Central and Weste~n Maine without using the Maine Oen~
“,” .’
tra I Road except for the return journey from Gard I ner to Watervl lie. The I r trl p
.1: .~ .: .
began by team from Waterville to/}· Augusta, then out to T99uS by trolley, f,rom
Togus to Gardl ner by the 01 d Kennebec Centra I narrow gauge, then by boat, to
Bath, by trolley to Brunswick, Auburn, Lewiston, Portland, Old Orchard and Btdde.:;.··
I, ~” ‘,’ …
ford; side trips to various towns, and eventually by trolley to Gardiner, where
t~y ~ok their one broad gauge rai I road ride on the whole trip back to Waterville.
That couple, married 48 years ago, are well known and great·ly respected
citizens of. Watervl lie, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Vose.
*****
In light of the ceaseless wrangling about hours of business for the Water ..
vi lie stores”It is Interesting to see how they handle such matters In a.small
town in Scotland. I have already told you that I see quite regularly the weekly
issues of the Peeb lesh I re News, loaned me by the courtesy of that f.1 ne son of
Peebles, John Burgess. The News of March 23 of this year devoted two entire
col urnns to a meet I ng of the Peeb les Shopkeepers and Merchants Associ ati’on.
At that meeting someone made a motion that shopkeepers who desired to re …
main open on Wednesday afternoons during the summer months should be “I lowed to
do so. A member then pol nted out that such a vote would requl re an amendment
3-27
to the by-laws, which speci fical Iy cal led for Wednesday afternoon closings
throughout the year. Another member called attention to the statutory act,
passed by Parliament, requiring the shopkeepers in any locality to show a twothi
rds majorl ty J n each trade before putting into effect any change I n the exIsting
plan of half holiday in each week, and to give six weeks’ notice of such
change to all clerks.
The meeting voted to refer the matter to a conmlttee for consideration and
prompt report. They agreed that tl:le statute woul d be obeyed, and that a II merchants
would be bound by the outcome.
It is both a virtue and a fault of the New England Yankee that he is deter·
mi ned to protect and preserve his i ndi vi dua I independence. But even we Yankees
are smart enough to know that, in order to get a long together, we must have the
freedom of democracy, not the freedom of anarchy. There come ti mes when, for
the sake of the common we I fare, we must bow to the wi ” of the major! ty. Where
those Scotch merchants have the better of us Is In their abi Iity to enforce upon
a re I uctant mi norlty the wi II of the majori tv. When wi II our Watervi lie storekeepers
wake up to the same need?
*****
Last wi nter I wrote a letter to the editor of that Peeb lesh ire News, praising
one of his editorials which upheld the United States vigorously against
vicious attacks from certain quarters of England and Scotland. One never knows
how a letter like that will get around. I n the Peeb lesh f re News of March 23
appears another letter wri tten by an aged son of Peeb les now Ii vi ng I n Los Ange
les. He wrote: ”We out here on the Pad fl c Coast of the Un I ted States were
much interested in the letter of Dean E. C. Marrl ner of Co Iby Co liege, Waterville,
Maine. We are as far from that 0011 lege as you are in Scotland. But the
unusual thing about a letter from Waterville is that the News is read in all
corne rs of the wor I d. Dean Marri ne r menti oned the Burgess fami Iy, we I I known to
3-28
ne In rtPf young days. Far away In the Mohave Desert in California, I have a young
friend naned Carolyn Burgess. On my next, visit to her town I shall ask her If
she I s a re I at:. w of the 0 I d Peeb les family and of the p resent Burgesses of Waterville,
Maine.”
*****
I thas been some tl me s I nee we have mentioned the Kennebec town of Benton.
:,’,:
It is thei r turn toni ght, and for the i nformatl on wh I ch I pass on to you about
that town I am I ndebted to Mr. Chester E. Basford of Benton Station, who was the
chairman of the committee which arranged the celebration of Benton’s one hundredth
annt versary In 1942.
The original, Incorporated name of the town, when,lt got Its charter tn
1842 was Sebasti cook. How the name happened to be changed In 1850, to honor the
great Democratic Senator from Ohio, Thomas H. Benton, Is not entirely clear, but
that comMiilitywhi,ch was to become, a strong center of Republican polities In later
days was, at any rate, ~amed for a prominent Democrat.
The tatn was ort gina Ily a part of Cltnton,and events which led up to the
separation Incl uded bt tter strl fe between Benton Falls and Hunter’s Mills over
the annual election of selectmen. Hunter’s Mi lis was the old nane of Clinton
Village. The original selectmen of the new town In 1842 were Daniel Brown” An …
drew RI chardson and Andrew Grant. Benton ,!s fi rst representatl ve to the Leg’s …
lature w·as Orrin Brown. A lot of men have gone to Augusta to represent Benton
since then, but I am told that the only man from Benton who ever serwd In the
State Senate Is Ralph W. Pillsbury.
In the old days Benton Falls was quite a place. The David Reed home, nat
owned by Dick Dyer, publicity man for Colby College, was a well known Inn on the
stage route from Port land to Bangor. Here Maine’s on Iy vi ce-p res I dent of the
United States, H~nnibal Hamlin, was a frequent visitor. Here were held community
neettngs of all kinds from pol itlcal gatherings to religioUs services. Here, from
3-29
the bar which stl II remains In the front room, the genial landlord dispersed
his beverages.
Hann I ba I Hamli n had other associ atlons with Benton bes I des stopping at
the David Reed tavern. In 1874 he was elected president of the Kennebec Fibre
Company, whIch started what was long to continue as Benton’s principal industry,
the paper ml II at Benton Falls, now unhapp I Iy defunct. The treasurer and general
manager of The ml II was Col. Francis E. Heath of Watervl lie. He used to
dri ve dally from/hi s home In Waterville to the mill at Benton Falls. His team
was a sprightly pair of horses, and alongside ran his constant co.,.,anlons, two
beautiful seTter dogs. Col. Heath Is said fo have enjoyed especially fine relationships
with his employees, a policy carried on and even Increased by his son
and successor in the bus I ness, Edward W. Heath.
In 1899 was built one of the most un’.;que electric railroads in the country,
from Fal rfle I d to Benton Fa lis. On Iy Inci denTa lIy meant to carry passengers ~ Its
rna In purpose was to transport the products of The. ml II to the steam ral I road. The
I I tt Ie road was known as the lib roan stl ck tra in”. I t had a sing Ie car for passengers,
what carne to be called a funny Ii tt Ie car, wi th motorman and cooductor a II
the sane man ..
The Congregational Church at Benton Falls c·laimS file taSf f)etl cast at the
Paul Revere foundry In Canton, Mass. This was In 1828, several years after
Paul’s own deaTh. There 15 a legend, for which no-historical proof exists, that,
when the bell was being removed from the flat boat which had brought It up the
Sebastlcook River, It was dropped overboard, and that Its 720 pounds gave quite
a task to many. men and oxen before It was finally hauled up to what was then the
new dlurch. For 123 years that Pau I Revere be I I has hung and swung I n the be 1-
fry of the old meeting house at Benton Falls.
wonder t f any other Kennebec town outs I de of Benton has a memori a I school
desk? I n the. schoolhouse of what was long ca lied Dlstrl ct No. 5 at Benton Fa lis,
3-30
is a desk bearing a memorial tablet. It reads: “Asher C. Hinds, 1863-1919.
Scholar, statesman, parI iamentarian, when a boy studied at this desk.” Asher
HI nds was one of Benton’s most noted sons. He 1 s sti II known as the greatest
of Cong ress i ona I pa r I I amenta ri ans, se rv in gin th at cap aci ty un de r the two
great czars of the nati onal House of Representatives, Speakers Thomas B. Reed
and Joseph G. Cannon. So, 21 years ago, In 1930, the peop Ie of Benton honored
the memory of Asher Hinds by placing a marker on his old desk In the Benton
Fa II s school house.
How grateful we should be to the good folks of a hundred years ago who
patiently kept diaries. Such a man was Wi I Ii am K. Lunt JI who was just starting
in the business of what was to make him Benton’s most famous storekeeper when
he recorded in his diary: “December 31,1842. This is the last day of the old
year; tomorrOil begins the new. It fl nds me in bus I ness for myse If, and I hope
by strict attention to business, I shall gain the favor, goodwi II and patronage
of my townsmen as well as personal friends.” William Lunt was 21 years old when
he wrote those diary lines. He kept that store at Benton Falls unt! I old age
compelled his retirement. At one time he had a rival in Leonard Alexander, but
how much a rival may be judged from a story Benton people used to delight in
telling. One day a nei ghbor chi Id came Into Mr. Alexander’s store and sai d,
“Alec, give me a cent.” ”Why, Edna,”, said Mr. Alexander, “what do you want of
a cent?”, at the same time pull lng a penny out of his pocket and handing it to
the little girl. The chi Id grasped the coin and started for the door. Turning
a roun d, as she was about to cross the th resho I d, she sa i d: “I’m tak i ng It ove r
to Bi II Lunt’s store; he gives more for a cent than you do.’!
Does anyone sti II I iving remember Benton’s old merry-go-round? Near where
the Foot Hill Cab I n now stands, near the east end of the three brl dges, there
stood, sixty years ago, the home of James F. Tibbetts. About 1890, when Mr.
Tibbetts was a mil Iwright In the old Toiman mills, he decided to bui Id a merry ..
3-31
go-round. It was the fl rst constructed In Maine, and Mr. Tibbetts took a tour
of the Maine fairs. It had no prancing or flying horses, but only chariots with
seats. In the center sat a Fat rfleld man, Nate Tuttle, turning a wooden crank,
providing the motive pOfer. Mr. Tibbetts’ most famous passenger Is said to have
been the heavy-weight champion of the world, John L. SUllivan, who proved hlmoself
a better prize-fighter than merry-go-round rider, for his ride on Mr. Tib ..
betts merry-go-roUAd at the Unity Fair made John L. sea-sick.
One of Benton’s great ciTizens died only a few months ago. He was John Reed,
who had been born in the George W. Reed home In Benton, had been a pupil In the
same No.5 schoolhouse that has the Asher HI nds memoria I desk, and had married
Ell zabetb” granddaughter of the fi rst Asher Hinds, who had bul It at Qentoo Fa lis
the attracti:’te. spacious dwelling where the Hinds ,fami Iy were so long to live. In
recent yea rs thl s has been the grac I ous home of John and E I I zabeth Reed, for back
to the old, home they came on Mr. Reed’s retirement from a distinguished career.
Graduating fran the University of Maine In 1889, with a degree In Clvi I Englneerlng,
he turned at once to rail road construction, working for various roads on the
Atlantic seaboard until 1901. Then began his notable career In foreign lands.”He
bul It the first electric rai Iways in New Zealand and In the Phi lipplnes, and made
a survey and cost ana Iys Is of the much hera lded Tr.ans-Andean Rai I road In SO’uth
, …. :.,’.
America. For seven years he was engaged in the Federal Valuation of Railroads.
He was one of America’s greatest railway constructloo engineers.
Like most Maine towns, Benton once had an academy. On the site of ‘he present
No.5 Schoolhouse at Benton Falls stood what was known In 1842 as, the CI in ..
ton Academy.Op.ened in 1830, I t carried on for 00 Iy 28 years. I t was bul It by a
company of citizens, who intended to make it a female seminary. Unable to com-plete
the job, the company irurned the building over to the Methodist society,
which finished It and opened a co-educatlonal academy. When the building was
destroyed by fire In 1870, its use as an academy had already ceased, but for
3-32
several years its new owners had reserved the right to hold a high school In It
two terms each year. Whether such high school terms were ever held, after the
academy ‘offlcl.aIIY ceased to function, we do not know.
Anyhow, Benton I s one of the Kennebec Va II ey ‘s fine 0 I d towns I with a
memorable history and a prosperous present. All Kennebec citizens may be proud
of It.
3-33
II TILE TALKS ON OOMt«lN THI NGS
110th :,Broadcast May 27, 1951
Some time ago we passed on to you several interesting items from Drew’s
Rural Intelligencer, published in Augusta In 1855. In all fairness, It is time
that, – we ca lied attenti on to the fact that an Augusta newspaper stl II pub” shed
today was In ci rculation even earlier than 1855. I refer to the Kennebec Journal.
I have before me right now a copy of the Journal which is Vol. IX, No. 24,
dated Wednesday morning, March 2, 1853.
At a time when most newspapers were weeklies, the Kennebec Journal In 1853
was a I ready on I ts way to becoml ng a dally, though I t had not quite reached that
d I sti ncti on. I twas pub I I shed, th ree ti mes a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Frl,;;;
day. A greater part of thIs Issue of March 2nd Is taken up wIth the happenings
In the Maine legislature. There was sharp controversy between House and Senate
on a proposa I to grant al d to the Passamaquoddy I ndi ans to bui I d houses and
barns. Advocates pointed out and, mind you, this was a hundred years ago, that
even then the Indians’ hunting and fishing rights were giving out; they had be …
come poor and needy. The Indians remaining at Pleasant Point were vagrant paupers,
gettl ng thel r I i vi ng by makl ng baskets, wanderi ng about from p I ace to p I ace;
but those who were already at the place where the proposed resolve would aid
others to settle were relatively prosperous. Opponents said those Indians were
natura Ily sh i ftless and unre Ii ab Ie, that they wouldn’t stay on good Icilnd I f put
there, and any money spent helping them bui Id houses and barns was, Just so much
poured down the drain. Finally humanitarian Interests prevailed and the,bill
was passed.
The ,!-buse had Just cast their votes for Major General of the 8th Division
of the StateMi litia, electing E. C. Belcher with 69 votes to 45 forL,.D. Palner.
3-34
Some joker cast one VOTe for the Baskahegan Grant. IT wou I d be I nterestl ng to
know how that term originated. Where was Baskahegan and what was its grant?
Sorre of the petiTions presented in that 1853 Legislature strike us as very
strange today. At thaT time one secured a divorce, not in the courts, but by
petitioning the legislature. $0 one of the 1853 petitions was that of Calvin
Hopkins for divorce. Isaac Bragg petitioned to construct a plank road from Bangor
to Old Town. Samuel Chase petitioned for remuneraTion for clothes lost by
his ward George Minot~ in the burning of the Insane Hospital. John Dulin petitioned
for the right to change his name.
In one column of This issue of March 2, 1853 appears this jovial account of
the State Prison: “This institution for gentlemen who have been unfortunate in
business operations appears to be in its usual flourishing condition. Seventythree
of these unfortunate individuals are now avai ling themselves of the quiet
and wholesome Influence of this sequestered retreat, occupying their time princi
pa Ily In contemp I at i on and cobb II ng.”
*****
Some of the bewildering doings in Washington have led to the remaking of
certain dictionary definitions. Perhaps you would like to know what some good
English words have come to mean in the national capital.
A lip rogram” I s any ass I gnment that cannot be CO”” leted by one telephone ca II.
An “expediter” is one who confounds confusion with commotion whi Ie riding fast
trains or faster planes and staying at the best hotels. On that basis you could
make your own definition of an “efficiency expert”. He, of course, is a man who
trains expediters; and a “coordinator” is one who has a desk between two expediters.
The good old verb “to activate” means to make a lot of carbons and add a
lot of names to a memorandum. The phrase “under consideration” means “Never
heard of it”; “under active consideration” means ”We’re looking in the fi les for
it”. “In transmittal” means “We’re sending It to you because we’re tired of
3-35
be Ing hounded about It j it’s your turn A~”. A “conference” is a p lace where
conversatl(i)n Is substituted for the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of
thought. A “modification of pollcy”means a co~lete reversal whIch nobody
admits. “Synthesis” Is a co~ounding of detal led bewl lderman1- Into a vast but
comfortable confusion which offends no one. “Research work” means hunting for
the fellow that moved the files; as for the research itself, copying from one
book is plagiarism; copying from two books is research. And the poor “economic
expert”, the new definition for him is a man who tells you wha1- to do with the
money you would not have if you had followed his advice.
“‘ . :;.
*****
Some day an unbiased, objective study will be made of Father Rasle of col ..
onlal days in Norridgewock, and his part In the Indian wars of the l8thcentury.
So bitter was both the national and the religious feuding generated and perpetuated
th rough the years by the vi 0 lent death of Father Ras Ie, and the passage of
time has obscured so many of the facts that It Is difficult to tell what part the
missionary father really played In the politIcal and military 51-rIfe between the
“. ‘”
English and the French, In theIr bItter contest for control of the North American,
continent.
I n any event, because Fa the r Ras Ie was such a noted pe rson I n the 0 I d days
of the Kennebec Va Iley, we owe him attention on th i s program.
The flrst French miss I on on the St. lawrence began as early, as HH4 under
the patronage of Champlain. In 1625 three Jesuits set up a mission with Quebec
as Its center •• The first mission church was bui It opposite the mouth·.of.,the
Chaudiere, was endowed by a French countess, and was given the name of St. Jo..-
seph ofSlllery. Its first missionary of consequence was Father Gabriel Druillettes,
who patiently learned the language of the Algonquin Indians.
When the Abenakis of the Kennebec first came In contact wl1-h the Jesuits Is
uncertai nj but I t was sure Iy as early as 1631, when a party of Kennebec I ndi ans
3-36
went ‘to Quebec to buy beaver skins to sell to the Plymouth traders. We knOt that
in 1640 aA Algonquin from Quebec brought his fami Iy to Old Point at Norri dgewock,
and In 1642 an Abenaki chief was taken to Quebec for Christian baptism.
In 1646, when the Abenakis requested that a priest be. sent to them, Father
OJ”uil fe’ttes left Quebec on August 29 of that year, went up the Olaudiere 90 mi les
to Lake Megantic, crossed the di vide to the head waters of the Kennebec, ~nd in
the middle of September reached Old Point at Norridgewock, which was then the
prl nci pa I upper vi “age of the Abenakis.
Fathe r Druil1ettes di d not rema in at 01 d Poi nt .He went on dOtn the ri ve r to
Cushnoc (the Dresent site of Augusta) where he was kindly received by John Winslow;
‘then he took the long trip dOtn to the mouth of the river and along the
coast ‘to Castine, to confer with the Capuchin priests there. On his return he did
not go back 10 Norridgewock, but set up his first mission at an Indian village
about a mile above the Cushnoc tradl ng post, at Gilley’s Point. He ca lied that
mission ”The Mission of the Assumption on the Kennebec”. In 1647 Father Oruillettes
accompanied the Abenakls on their winter hunt to tIoosehead Lake.
After he returned to Quebec in the spring of 1647 it was three years before
he again returned to Maine. Then he went far beyond the Kennebec waters. He went
to BostOR and to Plymouth, to plead with the English settlements there for aid
to his I ndian friends against the marauding I roquols. In 1651 he went as far as
New Haven on the same errand, but he was ob I i gad to record in his Journa I that
“Christi an New Eng land woui d not be roused to protect the Christian I zed I ndrans
of the Kennebec.”
In 1685 the Quebec mission was moved across the St. lawrence to a point a
few miles up the Chaudiere, and its name was changed to the “Mission of St. Fran …
cis de Sa les”. Soon afterward Jesuit priests from that mission traveled a long
the Kennebec and built a chapel at Old Point, thus reviving the mission that had
been closed there for thi rty years.
3-37
Father Rasle came to the Old Point mission in 1693. One historical faction
contends that his mission was entirely rellglous~ to continue the conversion of
the Indians and hold them true to the faith and ceremonies of the Roman church.
Another group of historians decJare that Father Rasle’s reasons for coming to
Old Point were more pol itical than religious. As one historian puts it, “French
statesmen and Canadian governors sought through the machinery of the church to
manipulate the Indian tribes of Maine against the English.”
In 1694 the English stupidly arrested and imprisoned Sonescen, Chief of the
Abenakls, thus inflaming the tribe to war on the side of the French. Dreadful
massacres ensued. What are spoken of as six separate Indian wars occurred In the
next 30 years, though I t was a II a part of the long strugg Ie between the French
and English for supremacy. Each side paid the Indians for the other sides’
scalps. Both French and English kept prodding the tribes to kill the white men
on the othe r side.
In the midst of this hatred and bloodshed stood the priest. Was he merely a
religious leader of the Indians, or was he a national patriot of New France? The
English were sure he was the latter, and In 1721 the General Court at Boston de,..
manded of the Kennebec I ndi ans that they hand over Father Ras Ie to English arrest.
The Indians refused. So In December, 1721 Col. Westbrook led a battalion of 230
soldiers on snowshoes up the Kennebec. At Old Point they found Father Rasle’s hut
deserted and the priest hiding in the forest. They seized his books and personal
effects, including his precious manuscript of a dldtionary of the Abenaki tongue,
and his strong box. believe those two items are now preserved In the Maine
Historical Society at Portland.
The raid by Col. Westbrook, though unsuccessful, had terrible repercussions.
The Abenakls; now thoroughly aroused, went on the warpath. They ki lied and scalped
and burned. The worst disaster was the burning of the enti re settlement that later
3-38
became the town of Brunswick and the slaughter of some forty of Its Inhabitants.
Acti ng quick Iy, the government at Boston offered a reward of 200 pounds for
Father Rasle, dead or alive. On August 19,1724 Captain Moulton, with a party of
208 men, started out from Fort RI chmond, determined to capture Father Ras Ie.
Laavi ng the i r boats aT Ti con i c Fa II s, the Mou I ton party went ove rl and the twenty
mi les to Old Point above Norridgewock. Inexplicably they were able to take the
I ndi an vi Ilage by surpri se. Let us nON have the story as to I din Coverse Francis’
“Life ofSebast,j,an Rasle”:
“The Indians rushed out of their huts in terror and dismay, the warriors
seizing their guns and fired them wildly. The soldiers poured Into the Indian
ranks volley after vol ley. The hope less survi vors scattered to the she Iter of
the woods, on Iy to encounter ambuscades of sol diers. At the fi rst onset, Father
Rasle ran out of his dwelling to the place of the vi I I age cross. A few terror
stricken followers had gathered about him, as if to shield him or be shielded by
his priestly person. Suddenly the soldiers caught sight of his clerical dress and
recognized him as the person upon whom the hate of all New England was concentrated.
Selecting his breast as a target, they sent a shower of bullets that laid
him life less bes i de the miss i on cross.”
Thus died the most famous of those sturdy, devout Jesu I ts who mi n istered to
the Maine Indians in the 18th century. Whether he died a martyr to his faith, or
as a French plotter against the English, historians wi II continue to dispute for
many years to come. On one point the disputants firmly agree: Father Rasle was
a man of unflinching determination and courage.
3-39
LI TT LE TALKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
111 th Broadcast June 3, 1951
From time to tf.me on this program we have mentioned old-time newspapers from
many parts of Maine — Waterville, Augusta, Bangor, Portland, and fnom such sma I 1-
er p I aces as CI i nton, Chi na and Vassal boro. I th Ink th Is is the fl rst”,·, t.f.me,
,however, that we have called attention to a Belfast paper.
Tt!anks to one of our regu I ar II steners, Bi II Flaherty, custodl an of the
Keyes Science Building at Colby College, I have recently seen a copy of a Bele
fast newspaper printed’ almost a hundred years ago. It is Vol. 24, No. 21 of
the Republ ican Journal published by Wing and Moore at Belfastc on Friday morning,
June 11, 1852.
like all papers of the time, as we have previously reminded our IIs~ners,
this Belfast paper had several rates of subscript.fon. If paid In advanc~, the
rate, was,$1.50 a year; If paid within’ the year, but not In advance, It was
$2.00. Unlike, the situation today, the posta’i laws did not require paYll1l;lnt of
newspaper subscriptions in ad”‘ance nor did they require stopplng”‘j a subscriber’s
receipt ,of copJes if he fell Into arrears. Subscribers often refused to retnOve
papers from the post office, and the law protected the publisher until all arrearages
were paid, when of course the subscriber could cancel his subscriptton.
Court costs and lawyer’s fees were too expensive, however, for the average small
town publ I sher to brl ng suit for h is money, with the result, that many a paper
went Into bankruptcy because folks just didn’t pay. Eventually the present, much
needed law, requiring subscriptions In advance, was passed. But in 1852 the Belfast
Repub I i can Journa I pub I I shed under I ts tit Ie head on the front page these
words: “No paper discontinued until all arrearages are paid. All letters and
corrmunlcatlons, to secure attention, must be postpaid.”
That I ast sentence revea I s another nu I sance of a hundred years ago — sendl n9
3-40
letters with postage to be paid by the receiver. I f you wanted to vent your wrath
on s~one with whom you had quarreled down In Portland, let us say, from your
home’l n Watervl lie you could send him a postage collect letter — write him a voluminous
document of a dozen or more pages, weighing several ounces. You not
only could get the satisfaction of telling him, in ali kinds of language. just
what you thought of him, but you cou I d make him. pay for the p rl vi lege of readl ng
It. He had to’; pay postage on your vituperative letter.
But It was not a II one way. The fe I low down I n Portland coul d stt II retal tate.
He couid write an even longer letter, use heavier paper than yours, and
make you pay the postage.
Of cours~, human curiosity being what it Is, most letters were delivered and
paid for, but occasionally a cantankerous soul would let letters pile up In the
post office rather than pay the postage to get them. Such a man was one of Abraham
Lincoln’s customers when Lincoln was the young postmaster at New Salem,
Illinois. Lincoln finally took a pig In payment for the postage, sold the pig to
the fa ther. of Ann Rut ledge, and when he had to make up to the government the ml s …
sing postage on his customer’s accumulated letters, Lincoln found he had lost 32
cents on the dea I •
Many generati ons of patrons have known the Amari can House at Be I fast. In 1852
It had Just been taken over by Holmes and Baker. Thet r advert I sement in the Repub
I I can Journa I announces that they “have I mproved the House I n every part, new Iy
f Ittl ng, pal ntl ng and paperl ng the rooms, and dec lare It, I n respect to accomoda …
tions and table., second to no public house In Maine”.
Appended to th I s Amari can House ad is the earl i est reference to what came to
be called summer boarders that I have ever seen in any.Malne newspaper. It would
be inTeresting to learn how early the vacationing or resort or sumter boarder
business started in our state. r think I shall try to find the time some day to
ascerTain Just.when our great vacation Industry first began, and I shal L appreciate
3-41
ri ght now, any I nformati on that our II steners can gi ve.
Now here is what that Ameri can House ad of 1852 has to say: “To those who
are looki ng for a pleasant resort duri ng the warm months, we woul d say that Be 1-
fast, in its scenery, air, location, etc. is one of the finest places In the
state. ”
Whenever see one of these old newspapers I search diligently for unusual
adverti semen”ts, and I like to pass those un i q ue 0 I d-ti me ads on to you. How’s
th is for an odd one, from th is Be I fast paper of 1852:
“Picked up adrift. By the subscriber, in Penobscot Bay, on Sunday, May 30,
1852, a raft of logs. The said raft contains 53 sticks, supposed to be intended
for wharf timber, and is rafted with chains. The owner is requested to prove
property, pay charges and take them away. Harri son Sma II , South Prospect, Mal ne. n
Here’s anQther good one:
lIThis wi II certify toall whom it may concern, that I have this day sold to
my mi nor sons, E II Rack’ I ff and Joseph Rack I I ff, the I r tl me durf ng thei r mi nori ty
to act and transact bus I ness for themse I ves I n like manner as though they were of
age, and I shall claim none of their e’arnings, nor pay any debts of their contracting
after this date. Stephen T. Rackliff, Unity, Maine, May 18,1852.”
Last Monday evening, speaking at the 125th anniversary of the founding of
the Watervi lie Universalist Society, I had occasion to mention the great Universal
ist, Hosea Ballou. was therefore especially interested to find this small,
we II-h i dden pa ragraph in the Be I fast Repub II can Journa I of J una 11, 1852:
“We learn “that Rev. Hosea Ballou, senior pastor of the Second Universalist
Society, on School Street in Boston, died on June 7th at the age of 81 years. He
had been pastor of the same church s i nee 1817 and, at the ti me of his death, was
the oldest mini ster in Boston. He was Justly regarded as the patriarch of the
Un i versa list Ch urch.”
Now the point of that Item, as it concerned Central Maine, lies in the fact
3-42
that it was Hosea Ballou who, as guest preacher at an annual meeting of the Universalist,
· Association in Oakland In 1823 converted to the Universalist· faith
Jedl ah Morrill of Watervl lie, and it was Jedl ah Morrill who became the foremost
early supporter and benefactor of the Waterville Universalist Society which, after
125 years of sign I fl cant.”, service to th I s commun,1 ty” he Id a f itt Ing ce lebratlon
this week.
***** .,., ,
have read more Than once In old papers and letters that the graftl ng of
apple trees took hold very slowly In Maine, and that the reason was cider. A
hundred and twenty five years ago, when the Waterville Baptist Meeting House was
dedicated, when tile Waterville Universalist Society was founded, and when John
Quincy Adams was President of the United States cider was the universal rural
beverage In Ma I ne. I f you Judged by the accounts of the 0 I d-tl·me storekeepers,
you would think everybody drank rum all the time, but that Is not true. Rum came
from the West· Indies; it cost money. Cider could be made right at home. Very
se I dom does cl der appear I n the 01 d account books, because there was no sa Ie for
It In Ma Ine stores; everybody made h Is own. Househol ders put, I n a wi nter supp Iy
of cider just as they did pork, butt-er and cheese. Furthermore, although there
was sma II market· for it I n I oca I stores, It· brought $6 to. $8 a barre I I n the
Boston market. In 1826 it- was chiefly the newer towns of Franklin and Somerset
Counties that shipped cider to Boston, and It was a Farmington editor. of 1850
who commented shrewd I y: “When ci der I s the most· prof I tab Ie product of the orchard,
there I s no inducement to graft trees or seek the best tab Ie frul ts.”
What a difference Today, when Maine apples are known allover the country as
the finest, cleanest table fruit.
Speaking of apples” by 1890 Northern Kennebec had quite a reputation for that
fruit. By no means did Monmouth and Winthrop lead the county in apple production
at that t I me • The I a rge st Kennebec orch a rds 60 yea rs ago we re those of J. M. P t ke
3-43
of Wayne and Cook Brothers of Vassalboro, each of which had over 3,000 trees. The
largest orchard nursery was operated by Bowman Brothers at Si dney, with 75,000
nursery trees.
*****
We have said a lot about old-time farms and farming, but very little about
farm tools and mach,fnery. We owe that subject a few words tonight. We cherish
highly the gift of an old two-tine hay fork, hand-made certainly as long ago as
125 years, presented to us by that constant listener and contri butor to thf s program,
Mr. H. F. Sturtevant of Ten lots.
Untl I at I east 1840 a II the forks, scythes, sick les, axes, hoes and rakes
were made by hand by the vi Ilage blacksmith. In 1841 Jacob Pope of Hallowell
started making the first spring steel hay forks ever made in Maine. The business
grew in prosperity and was continued by Mr. Pope for thirty years. As early as
1820 Elias Plimpton of Litchfield had made hoes by machinery, but few farmers used
them until after 1840. At North Wayne In 1840 the first scythes ever made by
machinery In Maine were produced by R. B. Dunn.
One of the toughest jobs on the old farms was threshing out the grain. Using
the hand f lai I, hours on end, was a muscle breaking job. In 1826 the same Jacob
Pope of Hallowell, who made the fi rst steel hay forks, invented a hand operated
threshing machine. Hiram Ballou of Livermore, about the same time, invented a
th resh I ng cy Ii ndar, operated by horse power attached to an 0 I d ci dar mi II sweep 1
the horse traveling In a circle. Then in 1833 Samuel lane of leeds made an endless
chaf n one-horse power machi ne wi th a hi gh-geared cy II nder. By the next year, 1834,
when the Pitts and Wh I tman fami lies of Wi nth rop both made simi I ar mach I nes and not
very di fferent from lane’s and Pope’s, the law suits started over patents. The best
of these mach i nes consl sted of a wi nder end less chaf n of wood, mounted on wh I ch two
horses, instead of one, trod on and on, I I ke a squi rre lin a cage; and two horses,
I nstead of one, near Iy doub led the mach i ne ‘s speed.
3-44
By the time the law suits were settled the McCormicks, forerunners of the
great- I nternational Harvester, had adapted most of the principles and garnered
most of the prof! ts.
In 1877 Moses Bliss of Pittston invented a rrovable hay press. In the sane
year Samuel Lane of Hallowell brought out- a popular corn she I ler. Maine never
I acked I nventi ve gan i us, and what more feas I b Ie way to make Its i nf luence fe It
than ri ght at home on the farm. Much of the greatness of our Mal ne fore fathers
lay Indeed in the I r marve lous power of adjustment, to fl nd new ways to meet new
needs of new days.
3-45
LlTILE TALKS ON COMK>N THINGS
112th Broadcast J una 10, 1951
On this program we have frequently referred to old diaries, account books,
Journals and letters. Tonight, for the first time, we turn to another kind of
historical record of the Kennebec Valley, an old hotel register. Thanks to Mrs.
John Pi per, we have had a chance to exami ne thorough Iy the regl ster of the
Forks Hotel for the years 1872 to 1874. Even today The Forks, 24 mIles aboye
Bingham, where the Dean River Joins the Kennebec, Is an interesting place. It is
a common resort of hunters and fishermen, and maintains some of the most accomp
I I shed gui des I n the north woods.
Only five years ago Wateryi lie had a unique and Important connection with
The Forks. A contract was arranged by which all the chi Idren of high school age
were sent to Coburn Classical Institute. The gi rls In this group were housed In
what was formerly the Ware House, now the George otis Smith house on Park Street.
As long ago as 1872 a few people from out of the state came to The Forks for
hunting and fishing. Summer seems to have been the time of their appearance, at
least those who registered with landlord A. D. Murray at The Forks Hotel. Whether
G. F. Seave’rof Boston who registered on May 13, 1872 with Gen. R. B. Shephard of
Skowhegan, came on pleasure or business we do not know, but it seems clear that
two men who registered on July 16 were not on business bent. They were Charles
Theodore Russe I I, Jr. and WI II i am E. Russe II wh 0 set down the I r res f dances as
Harvard College, Canbridge. Vacationing also were G. E. White and mother of
Boston, who fl rst registered on August 17 for supper, lodgi ng and breakfast, and
again on AugUST 20. On the 21st came Miss L. A. DaYls from New York City, and
on the 25th a party of four men from Ebston. Throughout September scattered reg …
istratlons from Boston fi II the register.
3-46
But altogether the out-of-state registrations are very few. The old book Is
filled chiefly with persons engaged in lumbering, from the big operators to the
husky men who cut the t”lmber and ran the drives down the rushing streams. The
very first entry In the book Is Sam L. Whitten and two horses, Skowhegan. On
that fl rst page a Iso is a record that will stl r memod es I n at least one Waterville
man. It reads: t’H. Whipple and one horse, Solon.” On March 13,1872 ap ..
pea red W. B. Snow of Skowhegan with four oxen. On the same day Fa i rf I e I d made
Its first entry with A. Drew of Kendalls Mills. By the middle of March business
was picking up. On the 16th came F. Stewart with four rnan and sewn horses; on
the 18th Will iam Grant” with nine men; on the 19th O. Clark with nine men, ten
oxen and two horses. Watervi lie appears for the fi rst tl me on Apri 14th, when
Ernest Getche II arri ved.
Some of th~ old n~s are Interesting. Jackman Is always referred to as
Jackmantown, Fairfield as Kendal Is Mills, Oakland as West” Waterville. There are
sewral references to “Main River”, variously spelled “Main” and “Maine”. This
seems to Imply that part of the Kennebec above The Forks, but I am not sure. It
may have some other meaning. Coburn, Olnsmore, Square Town, Burnham Depot, Sandy
Bay, and Cleaveland are s.ome of the res I dences gl van. Moose Ri ver Is invari ab Iy
spelled “Mo()S” and Pari in Pond, “Parlen”. Scores of patrons put down their address
Simply with the single word “Canada”.
The truth is that very few people actually signed the register themselws.
The proprietor or one of his employees evidently wrote In t”he names, for whole
pages appear in the same handwriting. The spellings are at times weird. St. AIbans
appears as one word “Stalbons”. Belgrade Is “Bellgrad”, Watervi lie is1:’Watervil”.
Caratunk Is spelled at least five different ways. But always landlord
Murray found. some way TO des i gnate his guest – .. as when he put down “4 of Coburn’s
men”, or “Cleaveland’s -teamster”.
3-47
Occasionally when a guest personally signed the register he spread him.-self.
On June 8, 1814 we read: “James Welch, mas~r driver on Dean River”.
On Apri I 9, 1812 Land lord Murray gave a ba II, and the attendance was du Iy
recoraed. I nei denta Ily th f sis the fl rst record of women regl sterl ng at the hotel,
though many came afterwards. The Ham family was very much in evlaence.
There were Roscoe Ham and lady, Moses Ham and lady, Charles Ham and lady; Joseph
Durgin and lady came up from Bingham. There were Fords and Taylors, Halls and
WI “i amses, Dud leys and Thompsons, Fardys and Smiths.
On Iy one coup Ie stayed overn I ght, E. Ha II and lady. We wonder how much
quiet sleep the good woman got that night, for lodged In the same building were
eleven lumbermen, most of them from Canada. Nine of them are named, the others
described simply as “two Frenchmen”.
Indian guests were not unknown, though seldom named. On May 22nd the regis …
ter records E. L. Tucker and one Indian, East Branch. There are very few references
to children, but In July, 1812 appeared S. M. Perkins of New York with two
boys. What a time those Manhattan youngsters must have had on the edge of the
Maine wilderness 80 years ago.
When the spring drhe was underway The Forks Hotel was a busy place, but
there is no evidence that the little vi II age saw the wild carousing and the ta ….
vish spending that made Bangor notorious. Landlord Murray ran a strictly temperance
hote I, but probably he had Just as hard a time as any other proprietor
in Maine of those days in keeping his inn free of bootleg liquor. The fact that
whole faml lies, I Ike the Wymans of Malden, Mass., a father, mother and two daugh …
ters, came In three success I ve summers proves th~t The Forks Hotel was a hi gh
grade, respectable hostelry. I suspect there were many like them scattered all
over Maine I n those days when General Grant was Pres i dent of the Un I ted States.
*****
1.···::.. ,,…
3-48
As the time nears for opening of the harness racing season In Maine, It Is
appropriate that we recall some of the old-time Maine racers. I suspect that few
of our listeners realize that Kennebec County was once the most famous breeding
ground of race horses in the whole nation, quite as famous as the Kentucky Blue
Grass regi on is in our own day. Through the second and th I rd quarters of the
19th century the fame of Kennebec horses spread throughout the land, but It was
in the last quarter of the century that the county gained world-wide fame 1 when
the WaTerville horse, Nelson, established the world record of 2:10 at Grand Ra …
pi ds, M I ch i gan •
I T was more than a hundred and forty years ago, in 1819, when the Kennebec
Agricu I Ttlral Society offered a I iberal premium for bringing a good stock horse
into the county. The first great horse t:ehlnd the Maine breed was “Imported Mas ..
senger”, who founded a race of trotters that long had no superiors. That great
horse was brought from England to New York State in 1791.
Though “Imported Messenger” himself never saw Maine, his son “Winthrop Messenger”
was brought from Oneida County, N. Y. to Winthrop by Alvin Hayward in
1819. That horse died at Anson In 1834, but before h is death he had bred .a line
of troTters that won fame throughout the nation. In 1852 Sanford Howard, a noted
authori 1″y. on race horses, wrote: “Mal ne has furnished nearly all the trotting
stock of any note in the country.” And, in that respect, we may be sure that
Maine meant Kennebec County. Thompson’s History of Maine horses says: “ToWln …
throp Messenger Maine is more largely indebted for the superior speed of her horses
tha n to any othe r source.”
The first famous horse to claim WatervIlle as home was Emperor, bred by Samuel
Pullen in 1827. Two horses, Winthrop Morri II,-·Iocally known as “Slasher”,
and WinThrop Boy were brought to Waterville by Asher Savage in 1862. Thomas Lang
started his famous stud farm at Vassalboro in 1859. He started with three stal …
lions, Genera I Knox, Bucepha I us, and Black Hawk Te legraph.
3-49
Genera I Knox was one of the most remarkab Ie horses ever owned in Kennebec
Coun ty . He cau sed more money for pu rchase of horses to corne Into Ma I ne from
other states than did any other horse. In 1871 Lang sold him for $10,000, which
was a huge pri ce for any horse I n those days.
It was in 1882 that Charles, better known as Hod, Nelson established Sunny …
side Farm. Bes ides his most famous Nelson, he owned Susie Ietely and interest-
I ng Iy. Although I am acquainted wi th very few i ndi vi duals named I n the col UIIlS of
June 7th, I found the stories of absorbing interest. Roger Brace and Harold Todd,
Jr. c1eserve highest praise for turning out such a fine paper.
*****
Our brief talk last week about the old race horses stirred up a lot of interest
and has brought in a lot of new Information, at least new tome. A man still
living In Watervll Ie was one of the old time breeders and trainers of race horses.
He is Mr. Thomas BurleiJgh of Roosevelt Avenue. He was the owner of a famous horse,
St. Croix, the first horse to lower Nelson’s three year old record from 2:26 3/4
to 2 :26*- Mr. Burletgh assures me th,a’ both Ne Ison ‘s Grand Rap ids record of 2: 10
and his Rigby Park record of 2:09 were made with the old high-wheel sulkies. Some
professor of physics ought to figure o,u t what Nelson could have done wfth~one of
the modern, low-wheeled, pneumatic tire sulkies.
Mrs. Burleigh has among her many keepsakes of old days In Vassalboro a most
Interesting newspaper account of the homecoming of that famous horse, General
Knox, from a tri umphant tour of the MI dd Ie West. As I to I d you last week, Genera I
Knox was the most famous of the three horses with which Col. Thomas Lang started
his stud farm at Vassalboro in 1859.
It was Just after the elvt I War in 1867 that General Knox went on his great
western tour. When the train bringing him back to Vassalboro arrived at the
rai I road station near Getchell’s Comer, a huge crowd was on hand to we I come the
hero. A school holiday had been declared. Arches had been erected and decorated,
and the whole length of the triumphal proceSSion from Getchell’s Corner to North
Vassalboro was lined with carriages that had come from the whole surrounding area,
and ind~d from as far away as thi rty to forty mf les. The school chi Idren marched
all the way between the two vi II ages, as did two brass bands. Seldom did any human
hero from the wars receive such a mlgh1y welcome as greeted that horse on
3-53
that day.
E. P. Mayo, then the editor of Turf, Farm and Hone, put into print in 1902
an Interesti ng story about Genera I Knox. Mr. Mayo then sal d that the most remarkab
Ie race ever trotted over the Watervi lie track was the contest between
General Knox and another celebrated horse, Hiram Drew. It occurred on October
22, 1863, when the elvi I War was at its height. Contemporary reports tell us
that people aTtended from every one of Maine’s sixteen counties. It was a conventional
three heats out of five battle. It looked as if the Vassalboro horse
was badly beaTen when the Drew horse won the fi rst two heats. Then General Knox
ShOtted his meTtle by winning the next two. The fi fth heat was preceded by feverish
arguments and more feverish betting. Great was Col. lang’s pride when
his famous General came hone the victor.
Col. Lang was a I ibera I patron of the Kennebec fai rs. In 1859 the North
Kennebec Agri cu Itural Society, wh I ch had been incorporated in 1847 wi th headquar …
ters at Watery) lie, passed a vote of thanks to Col. lang for his I iberality in
always giving to the society all purses won by his horses.
I be I ieve Watervi lie’s ti rst regu latlon ova I race track was constructed at.
the south end of the city in 1854. It was there for many years that the Watervi
lie Horse Associ at ion he Id 1 ts annua I exh I bi ti on.
Watervi lie was indeed quite a horse town. As late as 1900 Mr. Mayo could
wrl te: ”Watervi lie has for more than a century been prominent as a center for the
breeding and ownership of valuable horses, and it seems appropriate that she
should have within her limits today (remember this was In 1900) one whose name
is known not only through the length and breadth of this country but even across
the sea. We refer to the veteran Nelson, now in his twentieth year, with his
world’s record of 2:09.”
*****
Mrs. Bickford of App leton Street has let me examine some old letters that
have been in her fami Iy for many years. They are letters addressed to Seth Webb,
3-54
Esq., most of them to him at Knox, Waldo County, Maine; but a few of them carry
the address Freedom, Ma I ne.
The letters were all written by Samuel Webb, andhow the correspondence
started is explained in the letter of October 17, 1848. Writing from Baltimore
to Knox, Maine, Samuel addresses Seth in these words: “Allow me to introduce
myse I f as Samus I, the sl xth of that name of the Weymouth b ranch of the Webb family.
I haw heard of your visit to Weymouth and regret I was nat there to
greet you. My father heis often spoken of our distant relatives, the descsndarits
of the fi rst Samue I,. who left Weymouth for Maine. I have often resolved to
visit some of you and hope stili to ~o so.”
Samue I asked Seth many quest Ions about the fami I y and re I ated one touch Ing
Incident. It seems that, when the first Webb to come to Maine left Weymouth, he
left behl’nd in the care of relatives two sons, the chi Idren of his first wife. The
“. ::
new wi fe apparently didn’t care to take them along to the Maine wi ldemess.
According to the account In Samue I ‘s fi rst letter to Seth, twenty years af-
“‘, “.
ter the father~,s departure for Maine, those two sons went to Gorham .. to.see him.
Think of i.ltr From Gorham to Weymouth Is only a few hours’ Journey by modern
automobile. But It took the Webb sons several days to make the trip, and so in ..
frequent wascommun icatlon in those days that they had not seen thei r father for ,
a II of the twenty· yea rs • “.:,
Now let us have the story in the very words in which Samuel told It to Seth:
“As the sons approached the I r father’s res I dence in Gorham”, wrote Samue I ,. “they
J .. ;i ‘,~. “,’
; ….. ..
met with one of the I r half-brothers, told him who they were, but asked him not to
let the i r father knOllr of the I r coming. The hal f-brother went on before them. It
was nearlytwiJlght, and their father was standing In the door as.Samueland
Thomas came up. .They wished to see I f their father would recognize them. They
spoke to him as I. f they were strangers, asked him questions about the farm and
the town. He obviously had no idea who they were. Finally the half … brother could
3-55
hold In no longer, but burst out: ‘Father, don’t you know them? They are Samuel
and Thomas.’ ‘Oh, Samue I and Thomas’, cried the 01 d man, as he threw h Is arms
around them and wept I I ke a ch lid,! How the stepmother greeted the young men whom
she had left behind in Weymouth 20 years before the letter does not say.
Already, when he wrote Seth from Baltimore, Samuel Webb was on his way to
new fields of adventure, just I ike many another New Englander In 1848 and ’49.
For only four months after that first letter Samue I wrote Seth from New Orleans.
Samuel explains what he is doing: Ifl am on ‘rtf way to upper California over land
by way of the City of Mexico. As the journey Is long and dangerous, I could not
leave without expressing to you my heart-felt Interest in yourself and family.
Since I last heard from you, a son has arrived to bless us, and agreeable to universal
usage in our family, he too is called Samuel. This boy, who has just opened
his bright eyes upon me, I leave behind with his mother. These are no small
trials, but I go in the hope that I shall, in a few years, return to pass the
rest of rrtf days on the dea r 0 I d homes tead I n Weymouth. ”
What Samue I wrote Seth from San Franci sco, how he dl d I ndeed return to Weymouth,
and how after silence of eight years the correspOAdence was resumed in the
1860’s, we must reserve for a later broadcast. For tonight let us remember
merely that these are samples of neny such letters of their days, letters that
show the closeness of famt Iy ties spanning the breadth of a continent and making
life richer for-the I r endurance.
*****
It hardly seems possible that tonight completes 113 of these little talks on
common things. They have been very, very common. None of them has had any lasting
Significance, yet they have all had a purpose. By this time you know pretty
we II what that purpose has been — to ca II repeated attent i on to the fact that
what we ca” our Ameri can way of II fe comes out of a herl tage we must not Ignore
— that here In Maine, yes right here in the Kennebec Valley men and women long
3-56
ago laid the foundations of integrity, kindness and sympathy; of zeal, ambition
and hard work; of fami Iy loyalties and religious devotion — in short, the things
and the only things thaT can keep America strong.
So we bid you good-bye unti I September 16.
3-57
LI TILE TALKS ~ COt44ON TH I NGS
114th Broadcast September 16, 1951
It is good to be back on the air again and greet our many friends of the
radio audience. Except for one quick trip to Connecticut, I haven’t been out~
side of Maine all summer. Although I have been at Ifff office a part of nearly
every week-day, I have had a lot of leisure time and a very enjoyable July and
August. When peop Ie ask me why I d I dn It take a month’s vacation far away from
Maine, I think the answer of the proper Bostonian lady on Beacon HI II fits my
case very well. ”Why should I travel?” she asked. “I am already here.” Yes,
Why indeed should a Maine man go away from Vacationland In the summer? The time
for us to take our vacations Is In the winter or spring. That’s what I did when
I went to Wi II iamsburg last April.
*****
What a lot of griping we heard all summar about our Watervi lie streets. The
sidewalk superintendents who were sure they could do the reconstruction faster
than it was done were numerous and vociferous. But Mayor Squire and his city go-
. vernment gave clear and unanswerab Ie exp lanati ons of the seeming de lay. The
,;
trouble with many of us is that we want the things we want without Inconvenience.
Then when once we get those things, we forget all about the inconvenience. What
a comfort it is to ride over Charles street or Getchell Street or up North Main
Street today.. Now. really, wasn It it worth wai tlng for? Some day we I II be
ab Ie to say the same about Pleasant Street, Boul8 lie and Rooseve I t Avenues.
*****
I hope many of you had a chance to atl8nd the Lakewood lJ:teafe~ffi·i5 summer.
It was one of Lakewood’s most successful seasons. Apart fran the guest stars,
who a I ways add I uster to the various plays, the regu lar co~any was the best
si nee the days of Arthur Byron, Thurston Ha” and Jessamine Newcomb. But I won-
3-58
der how many agree with me that, In sp i te of good act ing, the plays themse I vas,
by and large, aren’t so good as were the plays of twenty years ago. As drama,
today’s plays are too often frivolous and inconsequential, and sometimes outright
boresome. The outstanding production of this Lakewood season was “Miss
Mabel”. It was not solely the superb acting of Li II ian Gish that delighted
the huge aud ience, but qui te as much the fact that R. C. Sherrl ff had gi ven
Miss Gish a real drama in which to reveal her talents. The psychological prob …
lem posed by that play Is one that the professors of ethics can quarrel about for
some time. Is intention to murder justi fied, if murder is the on Iy way to accomplish
a known good which Is completely unselfish and can in no way benefit the
perpetrator? Many a person who saw that p lay at Lakewood must have asked hi,”,”
self, what would I have done In Miss Mabel’s place?
*****
Mrs. Thomas Burleigh of Roosevelt Avenue has shown me a prized copy of the
Watervi lie Journal of September 23, 1834, publ ished by Mr. Burleigh’s ancestor,
John Burleigh. The Journal was one of Watervi lie’s earliest newspapers, a weekly,
and this particular copy Is No. 40 of Volume One. John Burleigh had evidently
got enough of the newspaper game in Waterville, for he published in his paper
the following announcement:
“Printing establishment for sale. The subscriber, wishing to close his business
in this vi I lage, the ensuing winter, and knowing from experience that It
requl res a long time to sett Ie newsplaper bills, offers for sa Ie the prJ ntlng of ..
fice of th’l!s paper. Possession will be given at any time. Also for sale, the
house he occupies; it being large and near the Academy, is well sl tuated for a
boarding house. (Signed) John Burleigh.”
Mrs. Burleigh has a lot of information about the old shipyard at Vassalboro.
The most famous ship ever bui It there was said to be the Ocean Bi rd, a brig
3-59
launched In 1848. It was the only ocean ship ever to leave Vassalboro, and
throngs of peop Ie congregated to see her start on her mal den voyage. She was
owned by John D. Lang, grandfather of Miss Sarah Lang, Watervt lie’s beloved
school teacher who died only a few months ago. The ship’s master was Captain
Gustavus Dickman. Mrs. Burleigh has a copy of the articles of agreement by
wh I ch the crew signed on. Pa rt of i t reads as fo I lows: “I t i sagreed between
the master, seamen or mariners of the Brig Ocean Bird of Vassalboro, whereof
Gustavus Dickman Is the present master, now bound from the Port of New York to
the morih of the Zambia River In Africa, from thence on a general freighting and
trading voyage of the term of six calendar months, that no sheath knives or profane
language shall be allowed on board.”
For wages the second mate got $20 a month; the seamen $.15 a month. On the
return voyage the log showed that a negro boy agreed to serve on the Ocean BI rd
for one year at a month Iy wa!!J8 of 25 cents. That return cargo I nc I udad 8,000
bushels of peanuts, said to have been the first peanuts ever brought to the Unl …
ted States.
*****
I recent I y encountered a curi ous Item ina copy of the Bangor News prJ nted
more than fi fty years ago. Let me read you tbat I tern: “Probab Iy there Is not
another case in the history of our state simi lar to one that occurred recently
in Bangor. There a woman married a widower with three chi Idren. The man is one
who never worries over his debts; in fact he is Inclined to take his ease and
let some other fellow do the rushing around. When he married the second time,
he stl II owed the undertaker for his first wife’s funeral. The new wife did not
like the idea of that long unpaid bill. So she found work washing clothes at
the unde rtake r’ s home, unt I I she had worked off the fu II amount of the b I II. We
wonder If in all Maine there Is another case where a second wife paid fora
fl rst wi fe’s funera I.”
*****
3-60
The most talked about incident of the summer did not take place in Washington
or Korea, In Berll n or I ran, or even I n San Francisco, but at a quiet p lacs
on the west bank of the Hudson above New York. Lots of we II knCMn un J ve rs I ti es
— VI rginla and Stanford .. for instance — have the honor system, whereby students
pledge themselves neither to give nor receive assistance in examinatloos,
and to report to the honor commi ttee of fe II ow students any vi 0 I at Ions .. they see.
ViolaTions do occur .. and the student honor committees do dismiss fellow students,
but The newspapers never hear of It.
Whether i t w~s because so many a total of ninety — were involved .. or be …
cause high pressure football played apart, or for some other reason, the auth …
oritles at West Point decided to make public the violation of the cadets’ own
system of honor code. A I most at once every man on every· Mal n Street fn Amari ca
felt free to express his unlnfonned opinion. Some of the most asinine remarks
about the Incident were voiced on the floors of Congress.
For rmt part, I refuse to argue whether West Point should or should not have
an honor ·system, or whaT Its penalNes should be. I want merely to set the re …
cord straight by pointing out a few facts. First, the honor system at West Point
: ‘\.
is nOT something Imposed by superior authority. It exists through no order from
the Pentagon .and through no choice of the commandant of the Academy and his staff.
It was created by the Cadet Corps I tse If, and has been carried on wi th the full
consent and enthusiastic approval of each succeeding generation of cadets. Second,
although nhiety is a large number to be Involved In the vlolatioo, let’s give
some of our attention to the two thousand mdets who we re not I nvol ved. And
third, there Is strong significance In the action taken unanimously by the honor
board of the cadets themselves, who Insisted that they so strongly believed in
the worth and efficiency of the honor system that they woul d themse Ives resign
from West Point In a body unless the violators of the code left the Academy.
Many people are telling us that the incident at West Point is Just a sample
3-61
of the moral break-dOltn in our whole nation, and there is much to support that
view. The b ri bi ng of p layers by the gangsters of the betting fraternity has
done irreputable damage to intercollegiate basketball. The Kefauver Committee,
about whose work I want to talk to you some night, has revealed not only the
suspected I Inks between crime and government, but an unsuspected tie between
crime and legitimate business.
It is Indeed proper that, when we think of the West Point cadets, we remember
that they attend a government school, whose conmanding offi cer Is responsible
to the Secretary of the Army, who in tum Is responsible to the Secretary
of Defense, who finally has responsibility directly to the President of the United
States. It is equally proper that we consider what kind of example is set
those West Po J nt cadets by the Wh I te House and the Pentagon. ‘n the Wh ite House
the President directs an institution that can set the tone for the nation. Now
in that same Wh I te House Is MaJ. Gen. Harry Vaughan, the Pres I dent’s mi Ii tary
aide, concerning whom there Is recorded testimony that he helped friends who
wanted government favors. He helped them get priority flights to Europe, per ..
mits to bui Id race tracks, to import molasses. He received gifts of deep freezers,
which he passed on to members of the cabinet. Only John Snyder of the
Treasury Department refused the Vaughan gifts.
One of Gen. Vaughan’s friends was the notorious John Maragon who was convicted
of perjury in connection with the disclosures of Vaughan’S favors. Maragon
went to jai I, but Vaughan went up the ladder from Brigadier General to
MaJ or Gene ra I •
The President’s aide on matters of appointments is one Donald Dawson. U. S.
News and Wor I d Report for August 17 poi nts out that Dawson has tw ice spent rentfree
vacat i ons ina $30 a day Flori da hote I — a hote I that rece fved a big loan
from the reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Everybody wonders how Mrs. Merl Young, the White House stenographer, got her
3-62
royal pastel mink coat, worth $9,500. They know only that while Mr. YOLWlg ostensib
Iy bought the coat for $8,540 from a New York furrier who also borrowed
from the RFC, the price was charged to an associate who also had dealings with
the RFC. But nobody wonders about General Davi d Crawford ~t the Detroi t Tank
Arsenal, who al lowed a defense contractor to pay his Washington hotel bill and
hand him expensive gifts, or about General Feldman, head of the Army Quartermaster
Corps, who was involved with the notorious five percenter, James Hunt. No–
body wonders, because Generals Crawford and Feldman are back In their old posts
wi th the same high rank.
Occasionally th Is moral de I inquencv f sso flagrant that not ewn the high ..
est influence can cover it up. General Bennett Myers, deputy chief of Army
AI r Force Procurement, was caught awarding contracts to a fl rm that he owned
himself. He served a sentence for inducing a wliness to comnlt perjury, and he
now faces charges of I ncome tax evas Ion.
~. ,:J”‘:’ .r
Now the point I want to make Is not the obvious one you are expecting. For
you expect me to say, what can we look for In the behavior of West Point 08-
dats, when responsible officials In the very government that runs West Point
act as we have Just described? Isn’t It In the whole American air today to say,
“Anyth I n9 goes I f you can get away with It?”
No, that is not my point at all. What I want to say Is this. I f we be …
Ileve our nat ion Is I n danger of mora I decay, if we want to see less of trimming
and corruption and deceit In high places, let us thank our lucky American ,stars
that we have left in th Is Ameri ca at least one p lace where a man ‘sword Is stl II
his bond, where honor is placed above gain, and where violation of man’s own
agreed codewf II not be tolerated. More power to that great institution — the
U. s. Mi litary Academy at West Point!
, ‘j 3-63
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
115th Broadcast September 23, 1951
We hear a lot of talk about InflatIon, but I find very few people who understand
much about it. I confess that I am quite Ignorant when It comes to the
confusing complexities of that subject. Yet I think there are some things about
I t even I can understand.
I n the first p I ace, It doesn’t take an I nte I I ectua I gen I us to know that a
dollar doesn’t buy as much as It did a dozen years ago. It Is true that, In
many occupations wages have a Ii ttle more than kept pace wI th the cost of living.
But even In faml II es I ucky enough to get those I ncreased wages, In f I atl on has
been tearing down the family’s future securl tv. A II one has to do to understand
that fact is to take a look at elderly people, especially widows,.trytng to
I I va on the I ncome of f I xed cap ita I. Take the case of a man who retl red In
1939, with a pension, social security benefits and savings to give him and his
wife a modest, but adequate Income for the rest of their lives. What are they
faced by In 19511 Inflated prices have knocked their well laid plans Into a
cocked hat. They have had to gt ve up many of the comforts they had ri ghtfu Ily
earned. They have had to accept a drastically reduced standard of living.
Do you own any U. S. savi ngs bonds that you bought In 19411 I n that year
you paid $75 for a bond that now, In 1951, has come due for a full $100. But the
purchasing power of $100 today Is only what $55 was In 1941. So In buying power
your bond Is actually worth $20 less than you paid for It. This Is not an argument
against government bonds. They are stt II one of the best ways of saving
for a ral ny day. My pol nt I s mere Iy that i nf latl on hurts everybody, him who
saves as we II as him who must pay the groce r and the I and lord.
Do you have a $5,000 I I fe I nsurance pol i cy that you took out 20 years ago?
I f your estate had got that money In 1940, the $5,000 woul d have bought just
3-64
about the same amount of goods as It would when you took out the polIcy. But not
so in 1951. That $5,000 Is worth only $2,750 In terms of 1940 buying power.
Another fact that seems obvious to me Is that many people Ignore the dangers
of inflation because there is so much money floating around. But the simplest
definition of Inflation Is that It is too many dollars chasing too few
goods. The money supply outstrips the goods available. The demand for goods
hard to get raises the prices. Between 1939 and today industrial production In
the united states has doubled, but in the meantime the money supply has trebled.
How dl d that happen? There were two major causes. The lesser of these was the
flood of prl vate loans made for installment credit; the greater was the borrowing
by the federal government to cover deficit spending. Next week I want to tell
.you some facts about th is government spendi ng.
*****
Have annual festivals In our local communities become, like the trolley car
and the “opry house” road shows, things of the past? We agree with a local c0.lumnist
who some months ago lamer:lted the passing of the annual Old Home Week in
local communities.
In sp i te of our des I re for constant change and our dread of repeti ti on In
pub I Ic events, there is something to be said for traditions that I Ink the pre'”
sent wi th the past and pol nt toward the future. Perhaps because the tams of
Europe are so much older than ours, the tradition of annual festivals has a
stronger hold there than In America. Almost the sole survival of our important
local festivals, annually repeated, is the Mardi Gras at New Orleans.
Because so many of my listeners came from Scotland or descend from Scotch
ancestry, and because we all know these Scots are such fine citizens, want to
te I I you about the annua I festl va lin the Scotti sh tC*n of Peeb les, some forty
mi les south of Edinburgh. Peeb les is the ancestral home of the WaterY Ille-Wlnslow
family of Burgess, and it is a very ancient town. Its castle goes back to
3-65
the 13th cen1″ury, and its present town government deri ves from a charter of King
James I of Scotland, creating Peebles a Royal Burgh. It Is by no means a town
that Is dead 1″oday, g loryl ng I n a lost and near ty forgotten glory. It is one of
the most Important Industrial centers on the Scottish border, boasting several
mills where some of the finest woolen goods in the world are produced. In fact
the cloth called iweed derives Its name from the river on which Peebles Is
situated.
NOt many (l)f the old towns of England and Scotland hold annual festivals,
just as do many towns on the continent. Of those In Scotland none Is more famous
than the Beltane Festival, held at Peebles In the month of June. It lasts
an entire week and Includes events of great solemnity as well as sports and hilarious
recreation.
It Is a glorious Old Home Week, as we II as a gay time for the local citiZens.
Former Peebleans come from allover the world. This year they assembled
from the Unl1″ed States, Canacila, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India,
Burma, South Ameri ca, Egypt and the Stldan.
Much at1″entlon Is given to the children. The Beltans Queen is a girl
chosen from what we would call the upper grades of elementary school, and her
maids of honor and male courtiers are young 91 rls and boYs. After a whole week
of festivities the climax Is the cr(l)wning of the queen on Saturday. The costu ….
ming is grand and decorative, with all the pomp and medieval garb of the guards
at London Tower or Buckingham Palace. The town provost, whom we would call the
mayor, and the bal I ie, who WQuld be our sheri ft, all appear in rich robes of of …
flce, and the burgh halberdlers, in thel r splck and span Uniforms, proudly carry
thei r halberds, authentic rei ics of the famous Battle (l)f Bannockburn.
A feature of the week Is the ceremony known as the RI ding of the Marches.
this Is headed by a man elected as comet of the year. He Is usually a man In
the early twenties, who comes from one of the older local families. He exercises
3-66
the privi lege of naming a young lady as comet’s lass. She is attended by the
ho I de rs of the same hono r for the two pre v I ous yea rs, an d his etten dants a re the
two previous comets, called respectively his right hand and his left hand supporters.
With a troop of followers the cornet makes the famous Ri ding of the Marches.
Originally this represented riding around the marches, that is, the boundaries
of the royal burgh, and it is said to represent the route once taken by a Scottish
queen. In recent years the route has been changed, so that convenient roads,
rather than the actua I boundaries are traversed on horse back by the c0lll>any.
Fe I iglous ceremonies, as one would expect who knOits Scotland, playa prominent
part In the week’s festival. In fact they begin on Sunday with a colorful
service at Cross KI rk, one of the 01 dest churches In Scotl and st! II in cont in ..
uous use, and an appropriate sermon by its warden. On Saturday the queen is
crowned on the steps of the Parish Church.
Let us see how the Peeb lesh ire News descri bes the scene of the crown i ng:
“The gaT Iy garbed court and their assembled elders are now all attention. A fanfare
of trumpets — the Be Itane Queen app roaches. The Cornet and his supporters
provi de a mounted escort, and cheer follows cheer as the Queen’s car draws forward.
The Sword-Bearer, First Courtier, and Second Courtier, with courtly mien
descend the steps. The sailors come to attention and present arms. The Queen is
accompanied by her chief maid of honor and six bewigged and properly arrayed
pages. Sedately they gather the Queen’s long, flowing robes, and very gracefully
Queen I rene occupies her throne.”
Everyone of his local readers knows that the reporter is writing about
young chi Idren, for the Queen herself is only 13 years old, and nany of her attendants
are younger. But those readers also know the reporter is not trying to
be funny. He knows that the crowning of the Beltene Queen is serious business.
The origin of the name Beltane we do not know, though it Is probably
3-67
associated with sane particular spot In the vicinity where in the middle ages or
In late Norman times an annua I fal r was he Id. I suppose you all know that
our county and state fa I rs descend from the vi II age fa irs common for centuries
in the British Isles. They have been Immortalized in such writings as the
drama ”Ba rthol emew Fa I rtf • Somet I mes they occurred more often than once a year,
but the annual fairs were more famous. They were always markets, where all
sorts of goods were exchanged, and quite natura Ily there came to cl uster about
them the Jugglers, clowns, forttlne te Ilers, and games of chance or skill that
have so persisted that, with pari-mutuel betting on the horse races, they have
a II but submerged the ort gl na I mean I ng of the fa Irs. What a farce It is to pre …
tend that most of our Matne fairs promote and exalt agriculture. To be sure,
they keep up a pretence of exhibits, some of them worth seeing. But almost no one
cares any longer who ra I ses the bl ggest sow or the best marked sheep, or even who
makes the best pie.
It would be an Interesting expert~ent to try one of the old-time fairs, such
as used to be held at North Waterford not far from my native town. Several times
I haw pe~led and pushed my bicycle overl[ those Waterford hills to attend that
fair. No horse racing, no stock cars, no.flreworks, no midway. JUst exhibits of
stock and produce, and the exquls1ite work of the housewives; Just a few booths
for hot dogs and lemonade, a home-made Afr~can dodger, a dart game, and plenty of
Itinerant salesmen of the novelties seen at the fairs for a century. The contests
too were decic:ledly home made — horse and oxen pull lng, foot races In the
dusty road, wrestling matches and weight lifting, and a tug of war. The base …
ball game was a scrub affair, played In a nearby pasture with sawdust filled
grain sacks for bases and such a mound between first and second base that the
first baseman could Just see the second baseman’s head.
But what a good time everybody had at what Waterford peop Ie called thel r
World’s Fair. Nobody has a better time today, even at Skowhegan, with all the
3-68
marva lous new entertai nment wh i ch that modern fal r provl des.
Well, let’s get back to that Beltane Festival. It has a long and honored
history. In 1621 King James VI, recognizing and approving grants made by his
predecessors to the Royal Burgh of Peebles, did grant to the burgh the right to
hold several fairs, the best known of which was the Beltane Fair. Hence on June
23 of this year at old Mercat Cross In Peebles the Town Clerk read the festival
proclamation, closing with these words:
“It is appointed by the Magistrate and Councilo.rs of this burgh that the
fair be held on the day of the crowning of the Beltane Queen, Saturday, 23rd
June, 1951. Therefore, In our Sovereign’s name, and by authority of the magistrates
and councilors, I proclaim the said fair to Instantly begin and continue
for 24 hours, with power and liberty to all His Majesty’s subjects to trade and
traffic one with another without let or molestation, charging them not to trouble
or molest one another for old or new quarrels, they paying the customs, use
and wont. Once. Tw Ice. T hri ce • God save the Ki ng! ”
Quite a lot of fuss to make over an old time custan and over a lot of children!
Well, perhaps It is, but we rather like what the editor of the Peebleshlre
News says about that: “Some folks tell us that Peebles brings its childhood Into
too much prominence. We do not agree. Not only are the chi Idran our citizens of
tomorrow; they deserve recogn I tl on In thel r own rl ght. It was a better man
than any of us who once said, ‘A little chi Id shall lead them’.”
*****
How much I s a b I II i on dol lars? The way Congress passes the approprl atl on
b I I I s nowadays, peop Ie ta I k about b I II ions as they once ta I ked about thousands.
Let us see for a moment I f we can visua I I ze a bill I on dollars • Now suppose a
person had a bl II i on dollars I n the year that Christ was born. Then suppose that
person had gone on living and was stili alive today. Now suppose also that he
was a very lavish spender, disposing of a thousand dollars a day, every day of
3-69
the year. He never added to his capital, he got no interest, he Just depleted·
his fortune by a thousand dollars a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Now get this: In the year of 1951, nineteen and a half centuries after he
started his thousand dollars a day spending, our hypothetical bl II lonai re would
sti II have 189 years to go before he disposed of all his money. That’s right – …
It wou Id take 2,740 years to get rl d of a billion dollars at the rate of a
thousand do liars a day.
3-70
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
116th Broadcast Septemer 30, 1951
You have often heard me speak of my nat I va town of Brl dgton. We II, th I s
summer It showed Its superiority over my adopted city of Waterville, and Ironically
enough paid tribute to this Kennebec city. Watervl lie people have missed
the I r summer band concerts. It seems there were no funds to provl de such a
luxury. But Bridgton, with only about one-seventh of Waterville’s population,
conducted all summer weekly concerts by the Bridgton Convnunity Band. At one of
those concerts e I gbt of the eleven se lecti ons were compos f tl ons of R. B. Ha II,
Watervl Ilets famous bandmaster and composer. In a little town In Cumberland
County one cou I d hear Ha II’s sp I rlted marches, but In his own cl tv’ of Watervl lie
the band wassi lent.
*****
Do any of you follow one or more of the rural Maine weekly newspapers? In
them you can fi nd many an amusing item. Here are a few that I recently gleaned:
“Grandma Wi IkfAs was being escorted home from baby-sitting by her son-inlaw
0ne night last week, when she heard a noise ahead of her In the driveway.
She asked him what It was. He said It was nothing but a tree squeak. Grandma
turned on her flashlight and two tree squeaks ran grunting across the lawn. She
says, since her son-In-law is a country boy, he must know what he is talking
about, but them tree squeaks looked an awful lot like hedgehogs to her.”
Classified ad: ”We specialize in Italians and hot dogs.”
The correspondent for one of the small communities to one Maine weekly
writes: ”When I went for the cows Saturday night I found Old Roxie choking on
what from the looks of th i ngs I took to be an app Ie. So I rus:hed back to the
barn for a piece of garden hose I keep for just such cases. I ran down the cow
3-71
run from the barn and down the lane to where Old Roxie stood. Major, our coil ie
dog, was right with-me~ Just as I was going to prod the piece of hose down
Roxie’s throat to push the apple down, I fell over the old dog. It tickled Old
Roxi e so she coughed up the app Ie • ”
The same correspondent also writes: “By way of the grapevine I hear that
the culprits who scattered nails on the road up this way were caught. One of
them got the seat of h t s pants warm Iy tanned.”
*****
Our hopes that Congress wou I d reduce the app rop ri at i onsfor waste fu I gove rnment
spending have not been realized. The same old pork barrel legislation went
on all sumner. Senator Douglas, Senator George and a few others tried vallantly
to stem the t I de, but to no a va I I •
Now the point about this reckless government spending that we can’t seem
to get through our heads is that it Is our money the spendthrifts are throwing
around. This spending is a hidden drain on every fami Iy pocket-book.
But there Is another point equally important. In time of national emergency,
when the very safety of our nati on I s at stake, unnecessary spending by government
agencies is a veritable fifth column working from within to do the very
thing Stalin most wants to see done — break the back of the American economic
system.
Not one American in a hundred realizes that tax collections In 1949 — before
Korea — exceeded the highest peak of tax collections during World War II.
The war peak In taxes was reached in 1945, when ta~s totalled $52,500,000,000.
In 1949 the take was 55 b I II ion do II ars, and the Korean campat gn had not yet
started.
Now just think that over. In 1949 you and’ were contributing to federal,
state and local governments more money than we did when our country was fighting
a global war with 11,000,000 men under arms.
3-72
Last year In addition to income taxes the average fami Iy paid $700 In other
taxes, most of .them hi dden and I ndl rect.
Twenty years ago the spending of our federal government amounted to less
than two-th I rds of the I ncome of the res I dents of Ca II forn fa. In 1949 that spend
I ng was equa I to the ent ire I ncome of a I I the states west of the Mi ss i ss I pp i •
You have heard me complain before on this program about the huge number of
. government employees. To say there are more than two million of them doesn’t
mean much. So let’s put it in a more concrete picture. Those employees, whose
sa I ar i es you and I pay, occupy floor space equa I to 170 Emp i re State Bu i I dings,
each 102 stories high.
It is an old saying that what we don’t know won’t hurt us, but in this matter
of taxes what we don’t know does hurt us a lot. It Is not the state sa les
tax, that we hear so much griping about, which really hurts. That is a visible,
understandable tax, whether we approve of it or not. But it is the hidden taxes
that pile up all along the way from the raw material, through manufacturing pro …
cesses, on the transportation and distribution of articles, right down to the
finished product on the retai ler’s shelves.
Here are a few facts you will find hard to believe, but The National Tax
Foundation, which keeps up a constant study of taxes, assures me they are true.
There are more than 100 taxes on a dozen eggs sol d In a ci ty; there are 116
taxes on a man’s suit of clothes; but as usual the woman beats the man, because
there are 150 different taxes on a woman’s hat.
The 56 billion dollar appropriation for the armed services will bear some
scrutiny, because those biggest of all our spenders, the procurement divisions
of Army, Navy and Air Force are no models of frugality. Yet few of us will
quarrel with the fundamental prinCiple that we must expect to spend a lot of
money for national defense. The taxpayer, on the other hand, has every right to
ask: “Is the money being spent as efficiently as possible?”
3-73
Nost government agencies are monopolies. ‘They have no cofl1)etitlon and thus
no fear of 1051 ng money or of gol ng out of bus I ness. The resu It Is almost unbel
ievable inefficiency. For instance, while private Insurance com;>anles handle
1,762 policies per man year, the Insurance Service of the Veterans Admin istratlon
is on Iy 25% as efficient as the prl vate compan les, hand I ing on Iy 450 pol i cles per
man year. Patients having tonsils removed In ci vii ian hospitals stay an average
of one and one-ha I f days. I n the Army and Navy hosp I ta Is the average stay Is 16
days. Does it make sense to an ordinary business man that the Army should take
288 separate steps to process a simp Ie order for buying onions, putting that
order through 18 subdl vis Ions and havl ng I t handled by messengers 110 times?
Every business and professional person knows the importance of records. Of
course the government must keep records. But what can we say of a record system
so great and so comp Ii cated that more than one government agency has not on Iy ad …
ml tted, but has rl ghteous Iy avowed, that it Is eas ier for them to start an Investigation
allover again than it is to find the papers on the same subject once
Investigated and completed? Yet, what can we expect when the government uses
18,500,000 cubic feet c:I storage space for records which, according to fl ling experts,
are nearly half of them completely worthless? Those dead records occupy
the equivalent of six Pentagon Buildings, and the Pentagon Is the largest office
building In the world.
The simple fact is that government spending today Is so big we must all pay
the bi II. It Is our money they are spending, not somebody else’s. No one Is
getting a free ride. When wi II the American people rwally wake up to what is
happening?
*****
The footba II season has now begun, and we are remi nded of intercollegiate
football in Maine, as reported in the. newspapers of half a century ago. At that
time each Maine college played two games with each of the ather three colleges,
3-74
fill ing out the season with games against the preparatory schools.
In 1896 the Colby schedule carried ten games. Besides the six with Bates,
Bowdoin and Maine, Colby played Andover, Exeter, Berwick Academy and a university
that has since abandoned football, M. I. T. That ten game schedule began
on September 30 and closed on November 18. Only three games were played on
Saturdays; seven were played on Wednesdays. Two games were played In the second
week in October; two I n the last week of that month. On October 7 Colby played
M. I. T.; then th ree days ,I ater, on Octobe r 10, went up aga I nst Ma I ne. On Octo-ber
28 the team met Exeter; then on Iy three days later on the 31st took on
Maine for the second time.
Someti mes the games were not so long as they are now, but without the forward
pass and the open field plays, the bodi Iy contact was terrific. The old
flying wedge, which was sti II in existance in my high school days, was a human
battering ram that gave both offense and defense a lot of punishment.
The game with M. I. T. In 1696 consisted of only 30 minutes of playing time,
two 15 minute halves. Colby won 4 to 0, which was the score of one touchdown,
made by Colby’s right halfback Gibbons.
Colby was dol ng we II that year, for on Iy three days after the M. I. T. game,
her eleven beat Mal ne 10 to o. But the team struck troub Ie when they met Bowdoln.
The Brunswick boys were victorious 12 to O. The Watervi lie Mall sai d of
the contest: “Colby was fal rly beaten. Her men were outplayed at every point
by the Bowdoin footballists. Colby’s line was easy for the Brunswick boys, who
also made long gains around the ends. Colby’s interference was pretty rocky. It
would be unwise, however, for Colby to lose heart over the defeat. let It be
the first and last of the season. There is stuff In the Colby eleven to beat
Bowdoin yet. When the Bowdoin team comes here next month, she should be paid in
he r own co in. ”
So the Colby crowd waited eagerly for November 11, whIch was then, of
3-75
course, Just an ordinary day, not Armistice Day. t’eanwhl Ie something went wrong
after the Bowdoin game so tllat the Colby coach resigned in a huff. So Marshall
of Dartmouth departed and Hopkins of Brown took his place. In those days athletlcs
were distinctly student activities; the college administration did not
emp loy the coaches; they were hi red and pai d enti re Iy by the Ath letic Associ ation.
That policy explains the following report In . The Waterville Mail of O~:,
tober 29, 1896:
“At a meeting of students yesterday afternoon iT was decided to engage W. B.
Hopkins of Brown to coach the football team for the remainder of the season.”
Apparently Hopkins put new life Into the team. On October 31, when he had
been on the campus only two days, they defeated Maine 4 to O. Then on November
I’
4 they beat Bates 8 to o. So on November 11, when the Brunswl ck hosts invaded
Watervi lie, the Co Iby team was at the peak of form. To the amazement of Impar’;’
ti al spectators they he Id the much superior Bowdoin team to a tie score of 6 to
6. It was not an official victory, but It was a mora lone.
*****
Is college football better or worse than it was tn 1896? There are argu …
ments on bothsldes of that question. In these days when the sport has become
so highly commercialized, there is something to be said for the old days.when
the game belonged to the boys.
*****
To remi nd us of how some of ollr common th Ings were greeted by our grandfathers,
when those th I ngs were new, let me read you a brief statement in the
Ma i ne Farmer’s A Imanac for the year 1878:
”Wi II wonders never cease? We have regarded the electric te legraph as the
greatest wonder of our age, but now comes a greater wonder yet – the telephone.
Not ma·n;r Signals, but the very sounds of the human voice, are reproduced so that
we have the curious phenomenon of two persons sl tuated at a distance of many
3-76
miles from each other carryl ng on a conwrsati on and recogn I z tng each other’s
voices as well as If they were In the same room. During the first pub’ Ic exhl …
bltlon of the Instrument, a ballad sung by a young lady del ighted an audience
six miles away.”
What would that young lady of 1878, to say nothing of the Almanac writer,
think If they could see television today?
Next week , have a rea’ treat for you. I want to ta’ I you then about the
diary of a Forty-NI ner, the fl rst-hand record of a Maine man who went to Ca 11-
fomla in search of gold. And with that promise, I bid you good night.
3-77
LI n LE TALKS ON COMK>N TH I NGS
117th Broadcast October 7. 195.1
Government spending, which I talked about last week, is really getting
pretTy bad, when one of the outstanding leaders of the administration for·ces in
the Senate demands a halt. That Senator is the veteran Tom Connally of Texas,
cha i roon of the Senate Commi ttee on Fore I go Re I at Ions. He says the recent I y
passed Foreign Aid Bill ought to have been cut by at least a bIllion dollars.
Logically and wisely Connally contends that we cannot abandon foreign aid altogeTher,
for it is only a form of insurance for our own defense against the
Soviet menace. But with equal logic the senator shows hOil much of the socalled
economic aid has been wasted and how some of it has actually been chan.”.
neled to help Russia. Mind you this is not the opposition party – … men like
BrewSTer and Wherry and Bridges — speaking, but that hardened old war horse of
the party in power, Tom Conna Ily of Texas. Perhaps he can at last beat some
sense into the free-spende rs in the executi ve departments.
*****
It is a thri Iling experience to read the original, hand-written diary of a
Forty-Niner, one who took the long over-land journey across the continent a hundred
years ago to the gold fields of Cal itornia. It is even more thri II Ing to
know that the diary was written by a man who later became one of Waterv! lie’s most
prominent lawyers and most loyal citizens. Through the courtesy of Mr. Walter
Heath” it has been my unusua I p r I v i I ege to read the da i I Y record kept by his
greaT-grandfather, Solyman Heath. Walter’s descent from Solyman comes through
Solyman’s son Francis, a Colonel in the Civi I War, and whom some of our oldest
residents remember driving dally to his mill at Benton, accompanied by his two
beaUTiful dogs. His son, Edward, Walter’s father, carried on the Benton business
for many years.
3-78
Solyman did not live In Watervi lie when he followed the lure of gold to
California. He was then a resident of Bel fast. He had been born at ClaremonT,
N. H. in 1804 and, after graduating from Dartmouth College, entered the profession
of law. He was already 45 years old when he started to cross the continent,
the father· of several children, some of them already in their teens.
For some reason Solyman Heath decided to take his son Wi Illam with him on
the long journey. What an experience for a 15 year old boy! That boy, though
destined to die a hero’s death at an early age on the field of battle, did survive
the rIgors of that terrIble trip across plains and mountains, worked a
while In a San Francisco store, then sl ipped off to China, from which distanT
land the anxious father soon had him returned by the intercession of the U. S.
government.
When The fami Iy came to Watervl lie in 1951 — Solyman having meantime returned
to Belfast via the Isthmus of Fa nama — William went to Colby College and
was graduated I n the famous c I ass of 1855 I a c I ass that lost th ree men on the
battle fie I d and that boasted such prominenT fi gures as Reuben Foster, Water …..
vi lie attorney who served both as Speaker of the House and Pres i dent of the
Senate in the Maine Legislature; 01 iver Gray who served with distinction as a
colone I In The Confederate Army and I ater founded Arkansas’ fl rst school for the
blind; John lamb, professor of Mathematics at Bates College; Joseph Pettengi II,
judge of the Kansas Supreme Court; and Larki n Dunton, renowned head of the Boston
Norma I Schoo I for 30 years.
Wi /liam Heath, like his father, became a lawyer and practiced in Minneapolis
from 1856 to 1858, served as U. S. Consul at M:>ntreal the next year, then
set up his law practice in Rockland. That practice was Interrupted by the Ci vi I
War. Company H of the 3rd Maine Volunteers was recruited In Waterville, with
William Heath as its captain and his brother Francis as its first lieutenant.
Both brothers rose rapidly in the service, William becoming Lt. Col. of the 5Th
3-79
Maine. He was killed In action, gallantly leading his men, at the battle of
Gaines’ Hi II, Virginia in June, 1862. “After the war the Waterv’ lie Post of GAR
was named the WI II jam 5. Heath Post in his honor.
Now let us geT Wi Illam and his father started on thei r toilsome Journey to
the gol d fie Ids. The diary i tse I f does not begl n unT i I 50 lyman Is beyond the
Mississippi. But on the first Inside page of the liTTle book is the following
undated passage:
“I n Ba Itlmore stopped at U. S. Hote I, where found a we II-kept house wi th
pol ite and attentive servants. At Harper’s Ferry, where darkies cut antics,
played on cymbals and shouted lusti Iy, all because an opposition eating house
had been established at half prices. At Cumberland nothing very striking but a
want of accomodations in Two stages. Agents of the di He rent stage I ines to
Pittsburgh vied for passengers, which is exceedingly foolish inasmuch as both
I I nes are actua II y one and the same th I ng. The trave Ie r does not II ke to be
treated ike a dog or a villain. Over the Allegheny Mts. we were transported at
a rapid rate. The road is In tolerable order, but since the nation has given up
the charge of it, i-t Is not much cared for.”
Then appear Three single line items, reading:
“14th left Baltimore for Cumberland.
“15th reached Pi ttsburgh.
“16th -to Whee ling.”
Then fol lows s t lence unti I the dai Iy Journal begins on May 5, 1849. The
first entry reads: “Arrived at Waynes Landing, Independence. Overflowing with
people, our company stored away in the attic with thirty others. We found our
bedding and lodged on the floor.”
From the forego i ng items it is not hard to work out 50 I yman Heath I s route
to the poi nt where The Journa I begi ns. There is some evl dance, from other
sources, that he sa i led from Be I fast to Boston, from whence he took one of the
3-80
regular packet boats to Baltimore. The 14th, the date he records as leaving
Baltimore, must have been ~he 14th of April, for the Intervening time Is about
right to bring him to Independence on May 5th.
From Baltimore, as his brief pre-Journal passage makes clear, he went by
stage coach intervals to Wheeling in what Is nat West Virginia, passing over
the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh on the way. At Wheeling he mUst have taken a boat
down the Ohio River and ~hen a short distance down the Mississippi to St. louis.
There he would take one of the many boats going up the Missouri to Independence
(President Truman’s home ~own), not far from Kansas City a~ ~he western extremity
of the state.
The route taken by Hea~h ‘s party — he had evl dently Joined a bi g wagon
train of emigrants at Independence — was by no means through unexplored country.
I t was a we II-marked and we I I-known tra I I th rough the South Pass of the
Rocky Mauntal ns. It struck out from I ndependence across northeast Kansas,
crossing the Kansas River, the Big Vermillion, and the Big Blue before going into
what Is now Nebraska. Then the route followed the valley of the’Platte River
northw.est to Fort Kearney, now the cl ty of Kearney, Nebraska.
Where the north and south forks of the Pj.atte unite to form the main rIver,
the trail crossed the sou~h fork and continued west along the bank of the north
fork. It crossed the Nebraska-Wfomlng border near Scott’s Bluff, where Is now
the famous Scotts Bluff Na~ional Monument. From there it went on to one of the
most famous trading and cavalry posts in the whole western country, Fort laramie,
which readers of Parkman’s Oregon Trail wi II remember as one of the most vivid
of the many frontier scenes depicted by that gifted New England writer. In western
Wyoming, near the Utah border, is the South Pass, the discovery of which In
1836 had enabled the first reasonably safe crossing of the Rockies by wagons.
Pass J ng just north of GreaT Salt ‘lake, the route runs down a fork of the Humboldt
River in Nevada, across the desert In the northwest part of that region,
3-81
along the rim of the great Carson Sink, and onto the Carson River 9Ft the NevadaCa
I I forni a border. Then comes the last c limb across Call foml a mountains to the
po I nt where the wate rs run I nto the Pac I f I c. The re I t was on I y a few days’
Journey to what men called “the diggins”, the rich new gold fields east of Sacramento.
Health left Independence on May 5; it was October 13 when he reached the
gold fields. A Journey that a person In an automobile can now make in three days
and that an airplane can cover In five hours had taken Heath’s par-tyflve months
and o.i ne:days, nearly ha I f a year.
It was a Journey where death constantly stalked thetraLI. I n fact the
most corrmon words in Solyman Keath’s carefu Ily kept Journal are the words dted
and dead and death. As every reader of western literature knows, there were the
dangers of Indian raids, of the loss of food and eqUipment when crossing the
hundreds of streams, of maddening thirst In the desert, of failing into mountain
chasms or being crushed by giant s I I des of snow and rock. But the enemy that
c I a imad most Ii ves, as the wagons made thei r tedious way westward, was not the
I nd I an, was not hunger nor th I rst. I t was an enemy se Idom ment loned In the
sTories of the pral rie schooner days. It was the dread cholera.
Heath’s party was only nine days out of Independence when cholera struck
them. Heath writes: “Bob, our only teamster who had been through before to California,
died today of cholera. Sick only a few hours.” The next day he re ..
-,’
cords: “Passed a new grave of some emigrant, then two dead bodies left unburied,
with a feather bed ripped open and feathers scattered all aroll1d.”
On the 18th they left two of their number behind with one team’s crew to
care for them. The next day Heath wrote: “The team left behind yesterday with
two sick men came in at ten 0′ clock at night with the report that both men had
died and were immediately burled. Five of our company are already dead, and we
have come less than 50 m lies from Independence. Yet it has not had a parti c Ie
3-82
of Influence on the great body of the camp. No one thinks of turning back.”
On May 20th Heath makes It cl ear that the ravages of the dread dl sease did
affect some of the parties. He wrote: ”While we were at tea, a six-ox team
with a fami Iy drove up from the Kansas Ri ver, bound for the States. They had
gone 15 mi I es beyond the Kansas, bound for Ca II fom I a, but the man and leader
had died of cholera, and the wi fe deci ded to return.”
Heath says that the extreme ravages of the disease were attributed to the
almost consTant rain. They had no completely fair day for weeks on end, and
streams were frequent Iy so swo lien they had to waf t severa I days before they
cou I d cross.
On May 25th they encountered another returning party, this time a train of’
three teams, Flot Just a single famll’y. They had turned back because the leader
had died of cholera. After that the returning teams became almost a dally occurrence
unTil they reached Fort Laramie, many days’ Journey from Independence.
On the 27th he recorded: “~ath a II around us. I n the Kentucky tra in a few rods
south of ours and in another camp a few rods east, death entered and took from
each a viCTim. They were buried this morning without coffins. They were sick
only a few hours, and without preparation were launched into eternity. With what
feelings they left I am not infonned, but these things seem to have little Inf
I uence on The I i vi ng.”
On the last day of May, Heath’s train suffered its seventh death from cholera,
and on the next day Heath’s own teamster succumbed to the disease. HeaTh
ends his day’s acCX)unt with his oft repeated mournful line: “Slow progress because
so weT. If
On June 4 came a cheeri ng remi nder of home, for they were vis I ted by a man
from a neighboring camp who, It turned out, was born in Belfast. But he brought
no cheerful news. He said that one of his company had been stricken with cholera,
and They were so short-handed they had to leave h 1m by the sl de of the
3-83
road. The man had suffl cient strength to craw I two mi les to a creek.
of emigrants passed, but refused to take him along. After two days,
company did pick him up, but he died that night.
Two trains
a th i rd
Heath’s own “train seemed to have a high regard for a man whom he calls simply
Mr. Smith. He is, In fact, the only man in the whole journal to whom Solyman
91 ves the ti t Ie of Ml ste r. He was, says So lyman, a Presbyteri an and a Mason.
So, when cholera claimed Smith as the train’s tenth victim, Heath was able to
write: “Mr. Smith was one of very few men who were buried In a coffin. The
break-down of a wagon furnished the wood. He was given full Masonic burial.”
And at that Mason i c funera I we leave Sol yman Heath ton I ght. Next week we
shall follow him further on his westward way.
3-84
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
118th Broadcast October 14 .. 1951
I have no doubt you are getting tired of my harping on government spending,
but It Is a subject that won’t bear letting up. It behooves every one of us to
keep I n formed of the as to und i ng facts.
Everyone of us wants to see the nation strongly and securely defended, and
we are willing to pay a high price for that security. But is there no limit to
what we can or ought reasonab Iy to do? The cost of 9i rdi ng our nation for possible
war is already going sky high. Four years of peace may be almost as expensive
as was the whole cost of World War II. In fiscal year 1950 we spent
nearly 23 bi 1 lions for defensej in 1951 it mounted to 61 bi II Ions; in fiscal 1952
a I ready author! zed are 108 b I I lions, and the end is not yet Ins i ght.
Now the least we can ask of such huge spendi ng is that it get one hundred
cents worth for every dollar. And the way the money is thrown around — at
the Li mestone Ai r Base, for Instance, to take on Iy one case near home — It is
at least a fai r question whether a lot of it isn It wasted. And how about that
huge ci vi I i an personna I I n the Pentagon? For everyone of them that rep I aces a
uniformed soldier we have only praise, but any visitor to the great five-sided
bui Iding can see a lot of idle sitting around. As one Congressman said the
othe r day, the bus i es t p I aces i n the Pentagon are the coffee counte rs.. at any
hour of the day.
We are to I d that, even if we keep out of war .. we must expect to spend
twenty per cent of the nat” i ona I income for de fense. That means that eve ry worker
in Ameri ca must work one day in every fi ve for the mil i tary p rotecti on of the nation.
Surely that is not t”oo high a price to pay to save our country, but it is
too high a price if waste and Inefficiency is the method, for that way the country
can not be saved.
3-85
*****
Last week we left Solyman Heath on the pral rles attending a Mason I c funera I.
By that time some of the company were getting enough. On June 8th Solyman wrote
in his Journal: “One of our teamsters has been discharged for fomenting discontent.
There has been a lot of growling, but I think very few are sympathetic
with It.”
Solyman himself was getting somewhat calloused by the experience, though he
was sometimes so sick — but not with cholera — that he could not wrIte in the
Journal for several days and had to cover the elapsed time in one day’s account.
Yet f tis wi th a touch of unca I loused sy~athy that he records the e lewnth
death. tIft took”, he writes, “a young lady only 18 years old, married Just before
we left Independence. was present at the wedding and recall with what
eagerness she looked forward to gohlen California.” But on the same day he
tells us that he passed a tent, where four men with spades waited for a sick man
to die, that they might bury him. “Such”, says Solyman, “Is the estimate of
I I fe on the p I a I ns. ” Then he adds, w f thout apparent emot I on, ”The sick man was
named Harlow from Belgrade, Meine.”
The re seemed to be no end to the p I ague. On June 24, when they had· been on
the westward trek for 49 days, it sti II· stalked their camp. On that day Heath
wrote: ”We have just passed eleven graves, all occasioned by cholera. We had
supposed we had passed beyond Its ravages, especially since we have had drier
weather, but we are horribly mistaken.” On that night they made near famous
Chimney Rock their fortieth ca~ since leaving Independence. Forty camps in 49
days shows that they had indeed had to rema in I n some of the camps more than one
day.
Yet they had now seen the worst of the disease. Only an occasional mention
of it from here to the end of the Journey, and no more deaths among thel r own
company.
***** 3-86
All of Heath’s Journal is by no means so grim and ghoulish as the passages
have Just been talking about. At the risk of making the whole program morbid
and doleful I have carried you through Solyman Heath’s experience with cholera
because that is’ the only way I thiFlk you can get the picture of hOff It haunted
the emi grants’ steps day after wearl some day.
But now let us take a look at some of So lyman’s more cheerfu I passages. He
never got over his wonder at the vast expanse of the prairie, the beauty of
the colored cliffs, the seeming closeness of the starry sky at night.
On May 26 he wrote: “Ever since leaving the creek, we have been on high
roiling pra i ries. From some of the hi ghest e levatl ons the view has liIeen en …
chanting. A Maine farmer placed here could ask for nothing tetter.”
On June 5th he set down th I s account: ”Have seen many ante lope and some
elk. Wonderful country, but no inhabitants. Not a Single wigwam In sight. Desolation
reigns on one of the fairest regions on the face of the earth. Yet In
the past few days we have traversed enough of ri ch soi I to furnish bread for the
whole world. When shall this land be settled? That Is an Interesting question .. ”
On June 11th he wrote: “Country covered wi th beautl fu I cactus. What a
magn I fl cent plant!”
On June 24th they ca””ed near the famous Chimney Rock. “At our distance”,
wrote Solyman, “it truly resembled a giant chimney shooting 300 feet into the
air. It Is of sandstone and has a large crack, Indicating that this remarkable
object of the plains wi II disappear in a few years.” We II, solyman, a hundred
years have gone by sl nce you looked on Ch I rnney Rock, and I t is stl II there.
On the 25th our diarist was given to a bit of rei igious reflection. “Today
we got our first f~r glimpse of the Rocky Mountains”, he writes. “How far away
we do not know. Distances are deceptive on the plains. A bluff that appears to
be not more than a mi Ie away may be six or eight miles. To a rei igious mind the
prairie views afford the very highest themes for reflection. Whether one gazes
3-87
upon the unbroken, treeless prairie, or turns upon these gigantic, broken,
storm-beaten cliffs, one Is led Immediately to the contemplation of the Divine,
and feels his own weakness and littleness amidst this wonderful display of
omnipotence. Yet how few who have beheld this have given a thought to the AIml
ghty Arch I tect.”
Of the Black Hills $olyman writes: ”These hills present a beautiful, deep
color, such as I have never seen before, and the shapes are conti nuous Iy changIng
like the figures of a kaleidoscope.” Two days later he tells us: “We have
been proceeding over a region which had evidently been swept by the ocean. The
region is terribly dry. The greatest droughts we ever have In Maine are pleasant
Showers co~ared to the burning on the Upper Platte. The moisture has evaporated
from my skin, rrrf face and hands are cracked, and It seems as though’ would dry
up. Yet I con fess I tis a reg Ion of magn I f i cent beauty. ”
On Jlllly 17 he says: “We are in sight of the Wind River Mbuntains, a magnlflee.
nt outline spotted allover with snow. We b,egin to take courage, In the
prospect of soon reach Ing waters that run the other way.”
The hot sp rings 0 f Wyomi I’Ig we re anothe r nove I expe ri enea • ”We came”, he
. says, “to some hot spri ngs covering a quarter acre. The water bubb led up fran a
marshy place. In some spots It was much hotter than in others. We parboiled
beans there for supper. I washed my hands and face .11’1 one of the springs, but
wi th some dl fficulty because the water was so hot. less than a hundred yards
distant was a spring of the clearest, coldest water, wonderful to drink. Within
such proximity are heat and cold, even at the surface of the earth.”
The next day $olyman found at the base of a mountain a I arge stream of hot
water, in which he took what he termed “a delicious waSh, the temperature being
about that of high-toned dish wate r.” Then he adds, “last 1’1 f ght at our ca”1l
water froze an Inch thick.” That was on August 18th. They were Indeed high up
in the Rockies.
3-88
Many persons have an entirely wrong picture of these journeys across the
cont-inent in the prairie schooner days. They think of a fam; Iy starting out
alone with wa~on and oxan, or perhaps horses, and making their lonely hazardous
way across the plains and the mountains. The truth Is that the journey, though
hazardous, was anything but lonely. The emigrant had plenty of company. By the
time that Solyman Heath reached Independence in May, 1849 emigrant trains were
leaving the Missouri town every two or three days. A train might be composed of
as many as fifty wagpns, though thirty was a more usual number. Often the persons
I n one of the trai ns numbered 200, and there were trat ns that had doub Ie
that number. There were whole faml lies — men, women and chi I dren. There were
single, unattached males. There were the professional teamsters, and In some
cases even slaves. Solyman Heath found plenty of other people to talk with all
the way to California.
Travel In those bands or trains was necessary, not only as protection against
hosti Ie Indians, but to insure safety for those whose wagons broke down or whose
draft ani rna I s di ed or strayed away. Then it was very important to have someone
along who, If not a regular doctor, at least knew something about the care of the
sick.
Solyman Heath’s journal gives us striking information about the numbers of
people who were lured to Call fornia by the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill.
On June 5, SOlyman set down this record: “Met three teams returning. Said they
had lost most of their oxen by stampede and had to turn back. They told us that
there are more than 5,000 wagons ahead of us, that 4,000 had passed Fort Kearney
in the last month.”
When, on the national holiday of July 4, they crossed the south fork of the
Platte, Solyman wrote: “We were determined to get ahead of the mass waitl ng at
the upper crossing. There are said to be over 2,000 wagons waiting there to get
3-89
across. So we took the lighter passenger wagons across on a ferry farther down
stream, and the baggage wagons managed to get across with great difficulty some
distance above, but not so far as the upper crossing where the congestion existed.”
Cross I ng the Platte was a major event of the tri p and dese rvi ng of recogn.tion
on the holiday. So Heath tells: “It being the Fourth of July, a dozen of
our passengers ce lebrated, after the cross I ng, with a large a Ilowanceof whiskey,
brandy, songs and wit, which latter grew keen as the bottle went around. A due
quan-tlty of powder was exploded, with the usual noise that characterizes the
hoi i day in the States.”
In a group of people, living closely together under such trying circumstances
for several months, peace and harmony did not always reign. You will
reca I I that they had to di scharge a teamster because he was foment.og dl scontent.
It was only three days after that Fourth of July crossing of the Platte that
some-thlng really exciting occurred. Solyman thought It worth a detailed account
in his precious Journa I. ”We came near”, he te lis us, “havi ng a dl:l8l In caq> between
an Englishman and a Frenchman. The former called the latter an S .O.B.,
and -the Frenchman demanded satisfaction. They had no seconds, but went out some
30 rods, armed with pistols. Naturally most of the ca~ followed along. After
getting on the ground, the Englishman recanted his charge, and they walked back
again, as whole as they went out, to the great amusement of the passengers.
When they got back the Eng II shman sa i d: ‘Gent I emen, I do not th Ink Mr. LaMa 1-
pheu is an S.O.B.; I think he is a pretty good bas.’ Thus the matter ended, with
the parties good friends.” Evidently that word beginning “bas” was no insult at
a II.
However plentiful the co~any and however exciting the Journey, Solyman
would· have been less than human had he nat suffered occasional pangs of homesickness.
Yet he entll’Q’Sts such fee I I ngs to the Journa I on Iy after he has been
two fu II months out of Independence, and more than th ree months from home. On
3-90
July 5 he wrote: “last night I lay In the light of soft. mellow moon, thinking
of home, wi fe and chi Idran. These thoughts cheer rather than depress me.
love to contemp late the probab Ie enjoyment of each member at home.”
July 15 was, for some reason not clear to us, an espeCially trying day for
Solyman. That night the journal received these words: “Our Journey Is becoming
tedious. It is altogether too long. and the food is much too monotonous. Already
three months have passed since I left horne, and It all seems like a dream.
I often wonder how those at home have fared, for no word from them has reached
me. ”
With those thOtlghts of home we leave Solyman Heath ton.igi!t, promising you
that next week we shall get” him through to the gold fields.
3-91
LI TT LE TA LKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
119th Broadcast October 21. 1951
In recent weeks I have so often opened this program with crftlcal remarks
about our lavish government spending, I want to sound tonight a more cheerful
economi c note. U. S. News and World Report assures us that the cost of Ii ving
is not likely to rise much in the next few months. Mi Ik may be up a cent a
quart, bread may cost a cent a loaf more. But meat is as high as, It is likely
to go. I n fact by winter pork and ch Icken will be p lenti fu I and a bit cheaper.
Shoes are se II ing s low at present prl ces, the new prf ces on woolen sui ts are not
as high as expected, and cotton products of all kinds are so abundant that their
prices are not likely to advance.
So keep your chin up. Our dollar may stili be worth 50 cents by mld-winter.
*****
Now I et us get 50 I yman Heath on toward his Ca I I forn i a goa I •
As ml ght be expected, good news or good traw ling er:ll I wned 50lyman’s spl rIts,
Just as bad traveling, bad food and bad news depressed them and turned his
thoughts toward home. On July 25 he wrote: “We learr:l that San FrancIsco Is
blockaded by Smith to keep out the foreigners, and there Is a good deal of
troub Ie with them In the dl ggi ns. A II around our ca~ is desol ati on and ever ..
lasting barrenness. Thoughts of home constantly with me today.” The entry for
August 28 reads: “Last night some discouraging news from Cal ffornla spread
through the camp, wh f ch had percepti b Ie effect on a II of us. Have I come so far
from my home and loved ones for naught?” Then on the very next day Solyman wrote:
“Tonight we had some reliable good news, which has had a marked effect. Such Joy
I have seldom seen. On Iy two days I ater the news was mi xed: “We have rece
I ved”, wrote Heath, “both favorab Ie and un favorab Ie reports from Ca I i forn I a
today. Plenty of gold, out sickness devastating.”
3-92
It was natural that a man from Maine, where springs and streams and lakes
supply abundant water, should hays something to say about the lack of thet
blessed commodity on the western plains. On May 18, only two weeks out of Independence,
Solyman wrote: “We have traveled today over apparently limitless, but
waterless pralr.!e. At last we came to Bu II Creek, where near two Indian lodges
we found a fine spring, and took what we wanted to quench our thirst. No New
England man eysr understood the worth of water until orosslng the plains.”
On September 9, as they came to the Nevada desert and passed the horrlb Ie
Sink, Solyman let us know how much he disliked tt, in no uncertain terms. “The
earth is widely covered with a white crust”, he wrote. “It Is entirely destitute
of ysgetatlon. Everything around us looks I ike a dried up lake. Here we are
without a drop of water for animals or men. What water there Is contains huge
quantit ies of sa It. We trave I two hours, then rest, and so continue untl I we
reach drinkable water, which is said to be 25 mi les distant as I write these lines.”
ThaT was September 9. Two days later Solyman was able to say: ”We hays at
last passed the 60 miles of desert. A II day long we had no drfnkab Ie water. At
five o’clock we reached some wellS, which had a pittance, but It was salt and
suJph,urous. Both passengers and animals have suffered intensely from thirst,
made worse because the day was terrib Iy hot.”
WhaT relief Solyman and his company must hays felt when they came at last
to the Ca rson RI ys r •
Besides thirst and tasteless food and frequent lack of grass for the horses
and oxen, there were the repeated passages of hills and mountains. After having
made the difficult ascent and descent of the South Pass of the A:>ckies, how discouraged
the emigrants must have felt when they found crossing the Sierras even
harder.
On September 24 Solyman ta Iked with two men who had passed the canyon of
the Sierras and had returned. They tol d him It is a very hazardous passage.,
3-93
much harder to make with wagons than any of the heights In the Rockies. On the
nex1″ day Solyman’s party got three miles into the canyon and there had to camp.
”We could not get through”, Solyman recorded. “With the greater part of the
train we could go only three miles.” But on the next day they did ge1″ through
what Solyman agreed were the worst p laces he had ever seen for wagons. “We have
ascended steep hills fl lied with boulders,” he wrote, “the mules often tumbling
down. We passed over ledges whf ch looked forml dab Ie even for a foot passenger.
We managed to get over the first ridge with loss of only two wagons. The whole
canyon Is strewn with the wrecks of wagons, harnesses and dead animals. Never
do I wish to go over that grollld again.”
But they were not over the worst of It ye1″. On the next day Solyman wrote:
“Ano1″her ridge now lies before us, specked with snow. We are now twen1″y miles
from 1″he grand summit, to reach which wi I I cost much patience and tol n’ And
plen1″y of tol I 1″hey did have. They lost three more wagons, one man broke his
leg, four mu les were ki I led, before they made the passage, less than a ml Ie long,
to the summit, where the waters on 1″he other side flowed to the Pacific.
If Solyman had read Keats, which few Americans had in 1849, he might well
have canpared h Imse I f with the discoverer who first saw the blue Pacl f Ic from
the peak in Darien.
One would 1″htnk they would now find easier traveling, but not so. On the
very day after 1″hey found the waters flowing westward, So/yman tells us:
“Reached the most difficult ridge we have yet encountered ~- five miles of the
roughest climb. Wagons repeatedly upset, two broken into kindling. We passed
snow banks 15 feet deep, but so hard packed that the heels of my boots would not
make half the impression on it that they made on the earth. At last we reached
the western s lope and once more camped on grass.”
Heath had no encounters with Indians on the war path. Most of the Indians
3-94
were friendly, and often they passed through known Indian country without seeing
a sing I e red man. On I y ten days out of I ndependence they saw two I nd I an lodges I
but did not go near them. Two days later they camped In Pottawatomle Indian
territory, but saw no I ndl ans. On the next day, however, Heath reported: “Th1i”ee
I ndi ans were prow Ii ng about our camp last night, probab Iy to stea I horses.”
By the first of June they were in Pawnee country, but according to Heath,
“No Pawnees have yet showed themselves. It Is understood they are at war with
the Comanches.”
On June 3rd they got a scare. They were overtaken by another company, who
reported a man had been found scalped. A few hours later, Heath’s own company
found a body In the same condition.
On June 8 Heath wrote: ”We have had no trouble with Indians, but we met
another emigrant train that had exchanged shots with Pawnees, who stole some of
thei r oxen.” I n fact, when the I ndl ans were hostl Ie, they seemed bent on stampedf
ng “horses and cattle I n order to get the anima Is, rather than I ntendl ng any
personal harm to the travelers.
When they reached Fort Laramie in Wyoming, Heath was able to record: “We
have seen no sign of Indians for the past week. It is hard to believe we are In
Indian country.” They had passed through the vast Sioux territory without seeIng
a Sioux. But In Nevada they encountered the friendly Shoshones. Heath says
of them: “Our camp was visited today by Indians of the Shoshone tribe; not grave
and taciturn like the other Indians we have seen, but volatl Ie and laughing.”
Heath was so I nte res ted I n certa I n I nd I an customs th at he recorded them at
length. On May 27 he wrote: “Today we encountered the grave ·of an I ndi an ch lef.
The burial place is fenced around and covered with logs. The body does not appear
to be under the earth at all, but is placed in an easy, recl inlng posture,
with the face toward the setting sun. The body is covered allover with cloth,
and a bow and arrow rest at Its s I de.”
3-95
The account on June 22 is even more detailed: ‘~e saw today how the Sioux
dispose of their dead~ In a large oak tree, forty feet from the ground, was a
wicker basket, and in it a body with all its property. There were many ornaments,
and what was rather strange, a tin dipper. The basket was covered with
buffalo skins, all nicely painted, and showed a becoming respect for the dead.
Such trees the Indians never cut down, and their indignation is aroused if they
fi nd the trees have been disturbed by emi grants. The trapper of whom we bought
some skins thought a white man had married a Sioux and that we had passed today
the tree where her corpse was elevated. Some fool ish trave lers had vio lated
the sanctity of the grave by cutting through the skins that covered the remains,
and it is by no means improbable that some Innocent white man wi II lose his Ii fe
for this violation.”
Every American school chi Id, though he or she may never have seen an Indian,
knows how Indian babies are carried, but the practice was so new to Solyman Heath
that he recorded it with great astonslhment. ”We saw two squaws riding on one
pony. They cerrled a baby about four months old. It was tied firmly toa board,
laced up tight In some kind of skin, and hung to one side of the saddle. The
board was so arranged that the chi Id could be quieted by a motion, when, like
our chi Idren, It began to cry. It was the most singular contrivance I ever saw
and looked mi ghty uncomfortab Ie.”
Solyman Heath’s journal ends so abruptly that it leaves many questions unan~
swered. With the help of Walter Heath, I shall try to find some of the answers,
but events of this kind that happened a hundred years ago are dffffcuitto reconstruct
unless there is a carefully written record.
It was on October 7 — five months and two days after leaving Independence
that Heath reached the upper diggins in California. This is his record:
”We reached the upper diggins about noon, where we found most of our people who
had gone on ahead of the wagons from the Carson RI ver. I got dinner at a tavern
3-96
of the poorest kind, but it went well, for I sat In a chair and at a table with
a cloth on it for the first time in five months. had some good bread, apple
sauce, a pickle, and coffee — but at the high price of one dollar. The valley
is full of ca””s, and all folks are busy digging. Some of our folks have al’-.
ready done remarkab Iy we II .”
The next day Heath was at a p lace called Weaver Creek, where he found a
good boa rd I ng house at th ree do I I ars a day. Of the ye I low meta I he wrote: “Go I d
Is plenty, but to get It is work of rather disagreeable kind.”
Evidently the wagon train was stili going deeper into California to the
lower gold fields, for on October 12 he had a rather trying experience. He
wrote: “I walked ahead of the train to the Jobnnon town and got my dinner.
There I found three of our men, packed with their bedding, saying the train had
gone the other way and left us in the lurch. Noth I ng to do but go ahead on foot.”
But on the next day Solyman had hitch-hiker’s luck, even though the day,
Friday, the thirteenth of October, was ominous for all superstitious people. It
was “the day when S~»yman wrote the last entry In the journal. It reads: “Su~
ceeded In getting a ride most of the way down to the city. Found the city with
no place to lodge. Boarding is high, lodging higher, and as yet I have not been
ab Ie to find any of our fol ks. Drank strong Iy of brandy and found my legs a
Ii tt Ie better.”
What was the Mormon town to wh I ch So lyman wa I ked ahead? What was the ci tv
which be’, finally reached? Was ItSacramantoj was it more likely one of those
mushroom gold towns that had the word City attached as part of Its name; or was
It perhaps San Francisco Itself?
And, biggest question of a II, why does the diary end here? There are severa
I b lank pages left In the book. In fact just under the entry for October 13
appear the words “Saturday, October 14”, but nothing else. Old Solyman start
3-97
to wrt fa someth I ng there, and why dl d he stop?
What success did Solyman have In California? How soon did he return to
Maine? These are questions we hope some day to answer, and if we succeed we
shall share those answers with you.
3-98
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
120th Broadcast October 28, 1951
When I talked recently about myoid time visits to the North Waterford Fair,
had no Idea it was sti II called the “World’s Fair”. Mr. J. E. Shields, RFO
NO.3, Waterville, assures me that it Is. He sends mea newspaper ad of this
year 1951 which reads: “Now hear this! At North Waterford — World’s Fair.
Friday and Saturday, September 28 and 29. Farmer’s Day Friday, Horse Pulling
at 1:00 P.M. Midway — Shows — Freddie’s Beano. Dance both nites to Judkins’
Orchestra.”
Mr. Shields tells me that he too often attended the North Waterford Fair,
but I I ke me he has not attended Its I nce it was moved off Ma I n Street.
*****
A good friend has taken me to task for talking in too general terms about
government spending. ‘~hy don’t you get down to brass tacks and be specific
about I t?” he asks. A” ri ght, here goes.
I suggest we can get a long very we II wi thout government loans for snake
farms and fur ranches. I question the value of American tax-payers providing
ski-lifts in Austria, Cadi I lac cars for officials in Athens, and lavish enter~
talnment of visiting delegations of all sorts from foreign lands, with hundreds
of our own officials getting In free on the food, the wine, and the shows.
We are getting so accustomed to the Santa Claus state that we cannot see
the harm it is doing to the very people it seeks to help. Not long ago the London
Economist, by no means a Tory paper, made a study In England of the Income
and outgo of low income fami lies — those receiving less than $1,400 a year.
That careful investigation revealed whi Ie the handout benefits of Britain’s welfare
state amount to 57 sh ill i ngs a week, on an average, for each of these low
income fami lies, the taxes required to pay for those benefits cost the very same
3-99
,faml lies 67 shillings a week. In other words they could ha’ye bought for themse
I ves the very same handouts for ten sh III I ngs a week I ess than they were payI
ng I n taxes to get the handouts.
We are Indeed a very rich country, undeniably richer than Britain, but ordinary
conmen sense tells us that there Is a saturation point somewhere. Even to
come anywhere near ba lanei ng the present natlona I budget, the Treasury needs ten
billion dollars of additional revenue. Now suppose the Congress decided on the
i nconeel vab Iy drasti c measure of confl scat I ng a II I ncome above $10,000. Even
that unheard-of measure would yield only 3! bi Illons. To get the needed ten
bi I lions would mean confiscation of every dollar of everybody’s Income above
$4,000 a year.
I cannot be too emphatic about this. Reckless government spending with Its
consequent burden of taxation Is drying up the sourees of new investment, Is
giving to self-perpetuating government agencies more and more power, Is taking
away from the peop Ie the chance to provi de for the I r 0 I d age. Every year the
government is claiming a larger and larger share of the national Income for Its
own governmenta I purposes. I f there I s any truth I n the maxim that the best
government is that which governs least, we have a government that grows steadily
worse and worse. Free Institutions died in Nazi Germany because the state became
all powerful. That must not happen In America. It will not happen If the
conmon people, the ordinary voters of America, will resist the somethlng-fornothing
fallacies of the Santa Claus state.
*****
A long time ago on this program I said something about big trees. I have
recently learned that a new claimant has appeared fonthe title of Biggest Tree
In the World. It is the Tule cypress of Santa Maria del Tule, six miles from
Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. It is so large that 28 persons, touching fingertips
on outstretched arms, can barely encircle it. Five feet above the ground its
3-100
girth Is 113 feet? and its d I arrete r Is 36 feet.
The Tule cypress makes no claim to being the tallest tree, because it is
actua lIy broader than it is ta II. Its hei ght Is 140 feet, but its branches
spread for 150 feet. Many experts believe the Tule cypress to be the world’s
oldest living tree, perhaps as much as 6,000 years old. It has outlived conquests,
revolutions, natural cataclysms, even civilizations. There in southern
Mexico may today exi st the 01 dest I i vi ng th i ng on earth.
*****
Through the courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Vose of Waterv! I/e I have seen
some very old papers from the town of Swanvi /Ie. That pretty /Itt Ie town near
Be I fast was Mrs. Vose’s ancestra I home, and 134 years ago her great-grandfather
Jacob Earres was the Swanvl lie tax co I lector •
The fact is that in 1817 there was no Swanville. It was Swan Plantation,
not an incorporated town, and as a plantation had no local taxes, but under the
laws of that time its Inhabitants did have to pay state and county taxes. So In
the spri ng of 1817 the assessors, James Leach and Joseph Smart issued the following
warrant to Jacob Eames, Col lector of Taxes of Swan Plantation:
“In the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you are required to levy
and collect of the several persons narred in the list herewith committed unto you,
each one his respect i ve proport I on of the tax or assessment of $21 .23 granted
and agreed upon by the General Court at Boston on the 16th day of February, 1817,
for defraying the necessary charges of securing, protecting and defending the
sarre. II
Jacob Eanes collected the whole amount, and among other papers I was shown
the receipt for $21.23 issued to him by the treasurer of the Commonwealth, Daniel
Sargent, on December 12, 1817.
The lists committed with the warrant are two, both in the same little black
book. One list is the state tax, the other the county tax. I am sure you wi II
3-101
be Interested to know how much Individual taxpayers had to pay. The basis of
both state and county tax consisted of three factors: polls, real estate and
personal property. The poll tax was five cents for the county and three cents
for the state. The man who paid the biggest tax In Swan Plantation In 1817 was
John Brown 3rd, whose county tax was 51 cents and his state tax 34 cents, a
total tax of 85 cents. Most of the taxpayers paid less than 50 cents, a few of
them only the combined poll tax of eight cents.
Collector Eames seemed to have made a bit on the county tax. He collected
$32.38 and turned over to the county treasurer $30.68, apparently receiving a
conmlssi on of $1.70 for rounding up that tax collection from more than a hundred
d I ffe re nt taxpaye rs •
I th I nk somebody overcharged Jacob Eames for his rum, for a rece Ipt dated
In 1804, the very year when the account books of an Augusta merchant show that
rum was selling for a dollar a gallon, reveals that Jacob paid $5.25 for 3i
ga lions of West I ndl es rum. There ought not to have been fl fty cents a ga lion
difference In the price between Augusta and Belfast. Somebody got cheated.
Most interesting of all the Swanvl lie papers which Mrs. Vose showed me was
a letter wri tten In 1803 by a son of Jacob Eames from Provi dence College – …. not
the present college of that name, but the much older Rhode Is land Institution
that Is now Brown University. The subject of the lettar Is the same as that
received even today by hundreds of fathers with boys In college, but the language
would startle a modern youth quite as much as it would his father.
suppose everyone knows that, ear Iy I n the nineteenth century, boys and
girls, young men and young women, writing letters to the I r parents, followed
carefully the Emi Iy Post rules of that day, which required a very formal and
dlgnl fled sty Ie even in the most Intimate letters. Young Eames’ letter is worth
your hearing just as he wrote It; so here it is:
3-102
“Honored Sir: In a mixture of prosperity and very distressing adversity,
seize this opportunity to Inform you that I enjoy a tolerable measure of bodily
health, though very far from being so In my mind, and I entertain the pleasing
hope that this letter will find you In the same enjoyment. I have been very
happy, as after much trouble and pains, I found myself at last In college. But
alas! Money is wanting, and I am afraid the want for a little will ruin rrPf
future happiness and prosperity. When I set out “to go to college, I laid out
“to fit myself and maintain myself in college for one year. I should have done
“this I.f I could only get my Just dues. But my uncle has not been In a capacity
to pay me but a very little. Consequently I am behind two quarters, amounting
with other things to not less than $70. The fl rst quarter I pal d with money
got by keeping school. At college a year is divided Into three parts called
quarters, and It is the law of the college that each scholar shall square off at
the end of each quarter. But they had so much pity on me as to wait untl I the
expl ration of this Quarter, and there is no probability that they wi II give way
any longer. Wha”t can I do? I am without friends to afford me any assistance.
A kind and affec”tlonate parent you have always been to me. I think you did in
some measure app robate my gol ng to co liege. I ndeed I di d not expect the need of
ass I stance so soon, but if you ever planned to gi ve me any assi stance, It coul d
never be more seasonab Ie than now. You yourse I f must see that I stand in indis …
pensable need of help Immediately. A part would be better than none, though I
be I leve the college wi II demand the whole or expel me. I have briefly stated
my circumstances, and I presume you will find them as I have represented them.
The time my payment will be out Is the latter part of September. I hope, si r,
you will not fa i I me at that tl me. My most sincere regards to mamma and brothers
and sisters. Yours affectionately, J. Eames.”
As I have mentioned before, letters at that time had no envelopes. en what
would have been “the open face of the folded letter Is written the address: To
3-103
Jacob Eames, Belfast, Maine. Then down in the left hand corner are these words:
“To be forwarded with dispatch.”
Now comes the Ironical touch to this different kind of touch. Postage in
those days was paid by the receiver, not the sender. The postage on this letter
Is clearl y gi ven as twenty cents. So the 01 d man actua Ily had to pay twenty
cents for the privilege of being hit up by his son for $70.
01 d Jacob send the money? We wish we could say that he did, for we think
the boy wrote a very appealing letter. But 148 passing years since 1803 have
dimmed the record. We do not know what response young Eames received in his
very distressing circumstances that made him not so well in mind.
*****
Sxlty years after that letter from a college boy, S. M. Mi Iler, Jacob Cunningham
and Miles Stackpole issued a warrant for a special town meeting in
Swanville on November 21, 1863. The purpose, as stated In the warrant, was to
see what sum of money the town wou Id vote to raise to pay bounty to vol unteers
that should enlist to make up the town’s quota of ten under President Lincoln’s
ca II for vol unteers. The tatn voted to pay each YO I unteer $200.
Now remember that the CI vi I War had then been gol ng on for two and a ha If
years. Gettysburg had been fought, the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued,·
and of course more than one Swanville youth had already joined the Union forces.
Yet, just before Thanksgiving In 1863 that tiny Hancock community had to furnish
ten more men for the army.
The elvi I War, judged by its Impersonal statistics, was a mere skirmish com …
pared with today’s titanic combats. But it was blood and tears to communities
I ike Swanvi lie. Those ten who made up that November quota were just as precious
to mothers and wi vas and sweethearts as are our own boys today.
3-104
LlTILE TALKS ON CO~ON THINGS
121 st Broadcast Novemb_er 4, 1951
Everyone Is fami liar with the words in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Of
the people, by the people, for the peoplelf • Did you ever ask yourself what that
first phrase means? What is government of the peop Ie?
Most of us can make a good try at explaining what we mean by government by
the peop Ie and government for the peop Ie. When we speak of government by the
peop Ie, we mean government that I s democratic iR form, where tho votes of the
people, either directly as In the town meeting, or Indirectly through their popularlyelected
representatives decide on the actions government shall take on
all sorts of matters affecting tho Individual.
Government for the people Is familiar enough, because it Is all the rage
today. The we I fare state is government for the peop Ie run wi I d. I nits best
sense government for the peop Ie means a government that Is beneft oenti n operation,
that gives true consideration to the welfare of all the people, not the
we I fare of some of the peop Ie.
But what in the world Is government of the people? Recently I found a
closely analyzed, penetrating answer to that question in the latest book of one
of the world’s greatest living phi losophers, George Santayana. In his 1951 book
entitled tlDomlnations and Powers”, Santayana says: “lincoln could not have meant
by his phrase ‘of the people’ a mere vague anticipation of the other two phrases.
He did not mean simply that people require a government. What he meant was that
the government, to be preserved, must be not only delOOcratlc In form and beneficent
In action, but precious and dear in Itself, popular and homely, the People’s
Own Government. No government, therefore, of aristocrats; no kings, no
great landowners, no bureaucrats. Let a II off I cl a Is be pial n men, drawn for a
short period of service by the general voice of their comrades, from the plough,
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the mine, the workshop, and the office. And, since power corrupts, let them
return soon to the I r 01 d occupati ons.”
These words of SanTayana’s are worth our ca 1m ref lectl on. ‘n th I s day,
when the processes of government have become exceedingly complex, when the public
has come more and more to trust the judgment of the life-long office holders,
It is well for us to ask this question: “How long, under these circumstances,
can government of the peop Ie remal n the peop Ie’s own government?”
I suppose a lot of you don’t agree with me, but it is my firm conviction
that every tl me we transfer a loca I prob lem from Wateryi lie to the state leg} slature,
and every time we let the federal government in WaShington step In to
do what a state ought to do for I tse If, we drl ve another naf I I n the coffl n
of gove rnment of the peop Ie.
*****
Mrs. Bessie Proctor of Winslow is the owner of a rare and very Interesting
little book, published in our own State of Maine 119 years ago. It is indeed a
little book, only 5t by 3t Inches and less than a quarter of an inch thick. Yet
It conTains 114 closely printed pages of what we, a century later, find to be
fascl naTi ng information.
The book Is entitled “The Maine Register and United States Calendar for the
Year of Our Lord 1832~ It was published in Portland by G. Hyde and Company,
with the press work being done In the prlntshop of the Portland printer,A. Shirley.
On both the cover and title page appears a Iso the name of the centra I
Maine distributor of the volume, Glazier, Masters and C0lll>any of Hallowell.
The first dozen pages are devoted to the almanac for the twelve months of
1832, and as is sti II customary in some of the almanacs of our own day, opposite
severa I dates I n each month are named hi stori ca I events that occurred on those
dates. As mi ght be expected, some of these events referred to famous battles of
the War of 1812 or the Revolution. For instance, opposite January 8 we read
3-106
”Battle of New Orleans, 1815″, and oppos ite January 18 “Battle of Cowpens, 1781”.
But there were events other than war that had Important niches I n the memory of
fo I ks In 1832. For Instance, the I tem for January 19th reads “Co I d Fri day of
1810”, while January 31 says “Cold Tuesday of 1815”. For March 4 the notation
is “FI rst Congress met 1789”, wh i Ie March 23 records an i ncl dent now forgotten
by all save meticulous historians: “Penguin taken 1815”. The Item for June 18
Is of course the Battle of Waterloo, and July 4 is quite fittingly “Independence
1776”, but we wou I d today make I itt Ie Qf the I tems for the next two days, July
5 and 6. The former reads “Algiers taken 1830″, and the latter says ”Battle of
Chippewa 1814″. The almanac edlter .considered an appropriate item for July 10
“Columbus born 1447”. So short a time before were stlrrln.g events In France
that July 29 tells us “Charles X dethroned 1830”.
The item for August 31 reveals the old custom of local time rather than our
present standard time. The Item reads “Sun and clock together”. Apparently
that was so unusual that It warranted a record. September 14 records the burning
of Moscow In 1812, November 24 the Peace of Ghent 1814, and December 20 the land …
Ing of the Pilgrims In 1620. The Item for the last day of the year, December
31, is “Montgomery killed 1775″.
So f leett ng I s fame, so forgetfu I are the sons of men, that many of these
recorded events mean very Ii tt Ie to us today.
It Is interesting to see how the county seats have changed since 1832. This
old book gl ves the dates and p I aces of a II court sess i ons for that year. Somerset
Court-was held not at Skowhegan, but at Norridgewock, which In 1832 was not only
county seat, but nad the largest population in the county. Hancock Court met
at the old town of Castine, not at Ellsworth. In fact, instead of 16 counties,
Maine had only ten In 1832 — some of them, Lincoln, Penobscot and Washington,
for Instance, being very large. The six counties not known In 1832 are Androscoggin,
Aroostook, Franklin, Piscataquis, Sagadahoc and Knox.
3-107
In those days the Courts of Probate met not only at the county seat, but at
other convenient places in each county. Besides at Augusta, the Kennebec Probate
Court met at Monmouth, Mt. Vernon, Farmington and Winslow; the Lincoln court
at Wiscasset, Topsham, Bath, Nobleboro, WaldOboro, Warren, Thomaston and Richmond.
Waterville was well represented in public affairs in 1832. Timothy Boutelle
was a member of the state senate and H. Dearborn was in the house. Asa Redington
was chairman of the county cOlmlissioners. Justices of the Peace and Quorum were
Moses Appleton, Asa Redington, Ebenezer Bacon and David Wheeler. William Dorr
and Thomas Ki mba II were deputy sheri ffs. Attorneys at the common p leasl were
James Stackpole and W. A. Evans.
Some of the unique offices listed are inspectors of lime and lime-casks,
provers of fire-arms, commissioner of wrecks, pi lots of Quoddy Bay, inspectors
of pot and pearl ashes, inspectors of butter and lard.
The Maine Medical Society, in addition to the usual offices of presiding
secretary, etc., lists seven of its members as censors. It doesn’t say hO’l act!
ve they were. Remembe r it was 15 years later, in 1847 I when one of the i r number
was censorable enough to be convicted of murder — the notorious Dr. Coolidge
of Watervi lie.
A short section of the book is devoted to colleges. Under this heading were
I isted not only Bowdoin and what is nCM Colby, but also Maine Wesleyan Seminary
at Readfield (now Kents Hi II School), the Bangor Theological Seminary, and the
Bangor C I ass i ca I School.
When the book went to press, Bowdoin was without a president, Wi IIiam Allen
having resigned In 1832 after a presidency of eleven years. The Bowdoin faculty
consisted of six persons, of whom one held the two posts of professor of modern
languages and librarian, Henry W. Longfellow. The total number of students was
156.
3-108
Seven years before this 1832 date, there had been established at Bowdoin
the Maine Medical School. Today In 1951 Maine has nomedfcal school and the es …
tablishment of a good one would admittedly be so costly that we are not likely
to get one soon, despite interest of the Maine Medical Association. It didn’t
cost much to start a medical school In 1825. This old Maine Register tells us
that the Maine tledicalSchool was Incorporated with a grant of $1,500 and a
promise of $1,000 annually from the state. The first named of Its four professors
was John de la Mater, professor of the theory and practice of physic.
This medical school is one of the few topics to which the register devotes
an entire consecutive paragraph, rather than a mere list of Items. The
paragraph reads: ”The med f ca I lectures commence about the 20th of February and
continue three months. The fees of admissi·on are $50. Graduating fee, including
diploma, $10. The medical library is already one of the best in the United
States, and continues to be enriched by new works, both foreign and domestic.
It contains 2,700 volumes, embracing all the more important works In medicine
and collateral branches. During the interval between the annual courses of
lectures the medical students may attend the college course of lectures on mine
ra logy and natura I ph I lospphy • ”
President of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Bowdoin in 1832 was none other
than Stephen Longfellow, father of the young professor and librarian. For the
annua I meet I ng I n that year Congressman George Evans was the orator and Henry W.
Longfe I low was the poet.
Less space Is devoted to Watervl lie Co liege than to I ts twenty year sen lor,
Bowdoin. Colby’s first president, Jeremiah Chaplin, st!” headed the college In
1832. It had the same nUnDer of faculty members as Bowdoin, six, of whom the
best remembered in story and legend is George Keely, professor of mathematics.
The number of students is not stated, but Commencement Is gl van as the last Wednesday
In July. Watervi lie’s famous lawyer and landowner, Timothy Boutelle, was
3-109
treasurer of the corporation and president of the associated alumni, not one of
whom had then been out of college so long as our class of 1940 today.
The Maine Wesleyan Seminary at Kents Hi II had apparently gone in for other
fields besides the academic. Alden Packard headed its agricultural department
and Wi Illam Reed is listed as superintendent of the mechanical department. In
fact its academic staff consisted of only three persons, who are designated respectively
as principal, instFuctor in the languages, and assistant in English.
The Bangor Classlca I School was evidently a preparatory school for Bangor
Semi nary. I t was under the same board of trustees. The statement te lis us: “To
such as have the ministry In view, tuition Is offered gratuitously. To all
others, and It is open to any young man of good moral character, the tuition Is
$16 a yea r • ”
Wages and sa I aries were low t n those days, but so a Iso was the cost of living.
Probably President Andrew Jackson’s $25,000 a year was more than equivalent
of President Truman’s salary today. The Governor of Maine got $1,500, the
Chief Justice $1,800, the Justices of C9mmon pleas $1,200. The vice president
of the United States received $5,000, and each cabinet member got $6,000, except
the Attorney Genera I, whose sa J ary was on I y $3,500. Tlite sen I or ass t stant postmaster
general got $2,500, and the federal superintendent of mails $1,700, with
8,450 post offices under his Jurisdiction. At the Portland District Court the
presiding justice got $1,800. Our foreign diplomats were used a_little better.
Our envoys plenipotentiary to foreign countries received $9,000 outfit and
$9,000 annual salary. The poor secretary of legation, doing most of the work In
the foreign embassies, got only $2,000 a year.
In 1832 the Watervi lie postmaster was He J I Chase, and at West Watervi lie
(now Oakland) the office was in charge of E. Hallet. F. Payne conducted the
Wins I ow post offi ce, and the one at Kenda lis Mi lis (Fal rfle J d Village) was under
W. Loring. J. Locke ran the office at Bloomfield (now Skowhegan).
3-110
One page of our little book gives Maine oensus figures for 1830. The total
population was 393,383, with 1,207 negroes, 223 of whom were In Kennebec County.
No county had fewer than 20 blacks, and there were nearly 500 in Cumberland.
Lincoln, which then covered a vast territory, had almost as many people as Cumberland,
57,000 to 60,000, and Kennebec was a close third with 52,000. The smallest
county was Washington, with 21,000 people.
One of the most interesting pages in the book pertains to the Canada Road.
It ran from Augusta up the west side of the Kennebec, through Sidney to Watervi
lie, thence to Fairfield Center and Norridgewock to Madison, Solon and Bingham.
Last spring I told you about the tavern conducted at The Forks In the 1870’s.
That was by no means the first inn at the junction of the two rivers. For the
next stop above Moscow is given as Temp Ie’s Tavern, Forks of Kennebec and Dead
Rivers. Then Baker’s House, Parlin Pond; Holden’s House, Moose River; Hi Iton’s
House, Main Branch of the Penobscot; Highlands or Canada Line; and Jona’s Camp.
Moscow is named as the last@ incorporated town in Maine on the road. There is no
mention by name of what is now Jackman. The book tells us: “Between Jona’s
Camp and Owen’s are severa I log houses, some of wh i ch a’re tenented and some abandoned.
The trave ler wi II fl nd the sett lers dl sposed to afford every accomodati on
in their power. Owen’s House, the next stop after Jona’s Camp, is 66 miles from
Quebec. The traveler pursues his course on the easterly bank of the Chaudiere,
through a delightful country, and over excellent road. The settlements are of
French origin, and connected throughout, more so than in the interior of our own
state. Moreover the people are in every respect hospitable and interesting to
the trave ler.”
Owen’s House was situated at the junction of the Chaudiere and River de
loup, in the Parish of St. Charles. The stopping places between there and Quebec
were,~st.Joseph’s Parish, Ste. Marie Parish, St. Henry Parish, and Point levi, on
3-111
th Iss J de of the St. Lawrence, opposi te the 01 d City of Quebec.
Altogether we have found this a most fascinating little book, and we are
very grateful to Mrs. Bessie Proctor for giving us an opportunity to examine It.
3-112
LITTLE TALKS ON COt+1ON TH I NGS
122nd Broadcast NovembAC 11, 1951
I s there no way to stop, or at least di mi ni sh, the waste and extravagance
of our government? LIsten to this glaring example. The War Assets Administra~
tion had some storage space going to was1e In an Army carq> In the Middle West.
The Commodity Credit Corporation was, at the same time, looking for space to
store fl va to ei ght mil Ii on bushe Is of gral n. FI va men, who knew of the sf tua …
tlon and who also knew how slow and stupid the officials of different government
agencies are in dealing with each other — those five men got busy. They first
leased the ArTttf camp space from the War Assets Administration. Then they tum …
ed around and sub leased it to the CommodltyCredi t Corporati on, at a profit of
$382,000. The whole proceeding took them less than a week. A right smart prof
I t for a week’s wC!>rk.
Now don’t miss the main point of this story. That space didn’t belong to
the War Assets Administration; it belonged to the United States of America, and
what is the Uni ted States? It Is you and I, the peep Ie who pay the taxes to buy
the space originally. That army camp surplus storage space belonged to you and
me. The inefficiency, the callous Indifference, of the men who operate our government
agencies, mi Iked you -and me and the other taxpayers of America of
$382,000 for property that we already owned.
*****
It is Impossible to keep up with the numerous alphabetic agencies that now
Infest Washington. How we used to laugh about them back in the 1930’s, the WPA,
the NYA, the NRA and a few others. The cartoonists had a field day with !hem.
Humorous verses and witty stories about them went the rounds. NOt these expand ..
ing and overlapping agencies are so many and so costly they aren’t funny any
3-113
longer.
Recently U. S. News and Worl d Report pub II shed a two page spread under the
heading ”Washington Alphabet”. The magazine makes no attempt to gIve a co~lete
list, for in the Pentagon alone there are more than 1,500 approved abbreviations.
50 U. S. News Ii sts only those abbrevi at Ions wh I ch the average ci tl zen ought to
know in order to understand dally newspaper accounts. The I ist contains only
113 of the thousands of alphabetical agencies which infest our government. Many
of them are of course faml liar to a II of us. We a II know the Wacs, the Waves
and the Wafs. We have heard a lot about the RFC (the Reconstruction Finance
.Corporation) and the NLRl (National Labor Relations Board), Right here In Water …
vi lie we have a unit of the ROTC, and this radlo.station is subject to control
by the FCC (the Federal Comnunl cat I ons Convni 55 Ion).
But how many of you ever heard of the FNMA (Federa I Natl ona I Mortgage Association),
entirely separate from the HLBB (Home Loan Bank Board), which is In
turn quite separate from the HHFA (Housing and Home Finance Agency), which again
has nothing to do with the PHA (Public Housing Administration)?
This alphabet soup’has become so thoroughly stirred that sometimes exactly
the same set of letters refers to two different agencies. For instance, DMA may
mean Defense Manpower Admi n I strati on or Defense MI nerals Adml n Istrati on. OSC may
refer to the Office of Secretary of Commerce or the Office of 5011 Conservation.
When GPO Isn’t the General Post Office It is the Government Printing Office.
But why go on? U. 5. News po I nts out that these agencl es I many of wh I ch we
have never even heard of, will spend 69 billion of our dollars between July 1,
1951 and June 30,1952. The s<:,d truth is simply this: our government is trying
to do so many things which private enterprise once did and might stl II do, and
is creating so many conflicting and overlapping agencies to do them, that it is
Impossible for the right hand to know what the left hand is doing.
*****
3-114
You will recall that last winter I devoted several broadcasts to the entrancing
diary of William Bryant, Fairfield pioneer. I became curious to know
where Wi I II am Bryant is buried. No one of the living relatives seemed to be
sure. So I made the rounds of the rural burying grounds in Fairfield. thought
pe rhaps t"h i s grand 0 I d pi onee r of the town lay in the Ii tt Ie cemete ry at the
Junction of the Skowhegan and Fairfield Center roads, not far from his home between
there and Pishon's Ferry. But I could not find the marked grave of any
Bryant there. The same proved true of the little cemeteries In the northern and
western parts of the town.
M:lanwhi Ie I thought I would take a look at the grave of Wi IIlam's son Cyrus
Bryant, who himself lived to the age of 85 and whom older people stili living in
Fa i rfle I d remember very we II. Severa I persons tol d me they were sure Cyrus Bryant"
is buried in the village cemetery at Fairfield.
So one day this summer I found the graves of Cyrus Bryant and his wi fe Olive,
in the older part of the Fairfield Village Cemetery. Cyrus outlived the Vassalboro
girl who became his wife by more than eleven years. She had died in 1892,
whi Ie h~ lived untl I 1903. It must have been a great blow to Cyrus and Olive
when they lost their only son. For beside them In the cemetery lot lies Fred L.,
son of C. F. and O. P. Bryant, died November 24,1886, aged 25 years.
What" was my surprise and delight when, a few lots away from that of Cyrus,
encountered two other headstones, marking graves I had been seeking allover
Fairfield. One of those stones reads: "William Bryant, died June 15, 1867, aged
86 years, 5 months." The other stone has this Inscription: IILydia, wife of Wi 1-
laim Bryant, died May 22, 1858, aged 77 years, 3 months, 22 days".
So quite fittingly, right there at Kendal Is Mills lies Wi IIlam Bryant, not
far from the old town hall whose records he knew so we II, and even nearer to
the bridge where his wife took toll on a long-ago Thanksgiving Day, and nearer
still to the highway over which he drove the youngest son Haley down to Water-
3-115
vi lie, to start him on the long voyage to Australia from which Haley would never
return. And beside him lies lydia, who had a system of predicting the corn ha,…..
vest, who shed Tears as she darned Cyrus' socks for his draft ca II to the Aroostook
War, and who died clutching a tintype of wandering son Haley in her hand.
They have lain in the Fairfield Cemetery a long time now — she for 93
years, he for 84. They were never wealthy, never prominent, scarcely known
olftside their own community. But they were the sTaunch, honest, religious folk
which has made Maine character a mark of distinction allover the world.
*****
It is easy for us to consider the present Time as a very special time of
troubles. With The long-drawn-out, fruitless struggle In Korea, with the vastly
mounting national debt, with the great burden of increaSing taxes, we do Indeed
have plenty of Troub Ie. am not re lenti ng one iota on what I haw sal d and
shall keep on saying about the senseless, almost criminal waste In federal expenditures.
BUT I will admit that for myself, as well as for all ofyol:J, It
may help us feel a liTtle beTter to take a brief, backward look.
Thl ngs do seem preTty tough for us here I n Waterville in 1951. But just consider
for a moment what was happening here seventeen years ago In 1934. That
was when I i vi ng was so cheap — porter house steaks 29 cents a pound, a suit of
clothes $20, a good rent $25 a month. Yes, 1934 was at the height of the great
depressi on.
Mr. lewis Whipple, who was treasurer of the City of Watervi lie In that year,
has shown me a page of the Watervf lie Senti ne I for September 5, 1934. On that
single page are revealed that the city was nearly bankrupt, that the mayor had
just died, that the previous winter had ki lied thousands of central Maine's app
Ie trees, and 1"hat the workers at the lockwood MI lis were on strl ke.
The city's Total apor:'oPN TH I NGS
123rd Broadcast November 18, 1951
When new taxes are contemplated, most of us howl loudly, “Leave us alone;
layoff the little fellow; soak the rich.” Even more loudly we demand that the
bl g corporat J ons be soaked long and hard. What we forget and ought especl a II y
to remember is that if the power to tax is the power to destroy, the saying applies
equally to individuals and to corporations.
Recently Congress has been facing the question, hON much of the defense cost
should business firms continue to bear? There is a saturation point beyond
wh I ch the burden becomes so great that the powe r to tax becomes the powe r to destroy.
For too tight a squeeze on profits definitely undercuts the capacity of
private industry to finance new plants and equipment needed for the defense effort.
Industry admits that in World War II it received significant plant expansion
help from the government, and it admits that some of those RFC lOans were
not too savory. But today — unlike 1943 and 1944 — private Industry Is financing
almost all of the huge program to exp’and production. And about two …
thirds of the money that has been plowed Into the expansion and improvement of
our Industrial machine since 1945 has come out of profits.
The busi ness corporations of America must have fal r treatment, as fal r as
that given individuals under the tax laws, or else the private enterprise system
in Amerl ca I s doomed.
*****
Mrs. Theodore Kloss of W8st Street has shown me an old scrap book of cooking
recipes. The book was put together some time between 1860 and 1870 by some
ancestors of Mrs. Kloss in Maine’s Penobscot tc.” of Bucksport. The recipes are
all cl ipped from newspapers and are grouped together by subjects. They begin
with meats. Fi rst appears a picture of a cow with the various beef cuts clearly
3-120
marked. Then come direct Ions for com I ng bee f, pick I I ng tongue, smok’ ng hams,
trying lard, salting pork, and making sausage.
In those days long before modem refrigeration, folks found clever ways to
keep meat. One of the pasted Items in Mrs. Kloss’ book is headed, “Beef-steak
for Winter Use.” It goes on to state: “Cut the steaks large and have ready a
mixture of salt, sugar, and finely powdered saltpeter. Sprinkle the bottom of
a large Jar with salt, lay In a piece of s1eak, and sprinkle over It some of the
mixture, then put in another steak, sprinkle, and so on unti I the Jar Is filled.
Sprinkle the mixture on the top, then cover with a p late with a weight on It,
and set in a cool, airy place, where It will Rot freeze. This needs no brine,
as I t makes its own. Twenty to th I rty pounds may be kept pe rfect Iy sweet In
this way.”
Meat was not expensl va when this scrapbook was made. One long cl ipping,
exto I ling the vi rtue of young pi g pork over fat hog, menti ons that butchers were
then pay i ng three cents a pound on the hoof for bee f, and on Iy H cents for hogs.
Two pages are devoted to a long clipping headed, “A Lesson in Carving”, giving
detal led instructions how to carw every variety of meat. Gentlemen carvers all,
listen to this advice! “Many authorltte~ lay down the rule that one must never
stand when carving. I f a person Is tailor the chai r quite high, there Is no
doubt that It may be more graceful for the carver to keep his seat, especially
when the p Ieee de resl stance is sma II and eas I Iy carved. But when he confronts
a large piece of beef, mutton or ham, it Is certainly easier and we believe more
graceful to carve s …. anding. Anyhow, If fashion and common sense here come Into
co Iii s Ion, we prefer the latter.”
A fte r meats, the next sect i on of the scrapbook Is given ove r to soups, If t …
erally scores of recipes for soup of every variety and description. Then come
directions for making hash — meat hash, fish hash, red flannel hash, and just
3-121
plain hash. There are several pages devoted to sandwiches. Yes Indeed, the
sandw I ch was known and we I I II ked long before 1860.
There are numerous recl pes for cooking fish — not mere I y the sa It water
varieties Ii ke cod, haddock, ha II but and f lotllder, but dl rect ions for baking
pickerel, frying brook trout, and salting deJtm barrels of fresh water smelt.
this scrapbook Is not a complete cook book. It Is devoted entirely to the
cobkllilg of meat, fish, soups and eggs. It does not contain recipes for making
bread, biscuits, or pastry of any kind. Probably the housewife had plenty of
those recipes tucked away In a drawer or pasted In some other book.
*****
You may recall that, when I talked about the first prescription book at the
hundred year old drug store now operated by Robert Dexter, I tol d you what Interested
me more than the prescriptions was the book In whIch the prescriptions
were pasted, for that book proved to be the acoounts of Watervl lie’s Ilqoor
agency for the years 1845 and 1846.
Likewise, the book In which Mrs. Kloss’ recelpes are pasted Interests me
even more than do the recipes themselves. That book Is called the “Maine Subscribers
Business Directory for 1861″. By counties, and by toms within each
county In alpbabetlcal order, are given the names of persons of varlolils occupa …
tlons. Unfortunately the pasted recipes cover the pages devoted to both Cu”…
be r I and and Kennebec Co un”” I es, so I do not know who got the t r names ment i oned
In Waterville or In my n, ative town of Bridgton. But the Fal rfleld entries are
Intact, and they are amazingly Interesting. Do you remember my telling about
the old photograph taken from the hili In Benton and showing …. he triple span of
covered bridges across the Kennebec at Fairfield? You may recall that I expressed
rrrf own surprise a …. the number of ml lis visible .in …. hat picture. This
old bus I ness di rectory conta i ns the names of eight dl fferen …. factories at Ken~
dalls Mills alone. They were operated-respectively by William Connor, E. and
3-122
N. Totman, Gibson and Newhall, Fogg Hall and Co., Samuel and Crowell Taylor,
H. C. Newhall, 51 las Bates, Moses Fogg and J. and J. Foss.-
Other names that have come down to our am day were Vickery and Lawry, dry
goods; Stephen Wing, furniture and crockery; Samuel Eilts, lumberman; Charles
Piper, teacher and fanner; Edward Rollins, dealer In stoves; Joseph Nye, deputy
sheri ff; Wi II i am P. Nye & Co., dry goods — and perhaps most Interesting of all,
here recorded In the old directory fs the father (j)f the man who, fn our day, was
hero of that best-seller, “Cheaper by the Oozen”, for here recorded is J. H.
Gf Ibreth, stoves, hardware, iron and steel, proprietor of the Island Nursery •
As one g lances over the lists for various Ma Ine towns, one Is struck by the
uniqueness of some of the occupations recorded. In Swanville, for Instance,
the re was WI II I am Smart, ax hand Ie man, and J. Q. Adams (doubtless named for the
President John Quincy Adams), who was listed as stave and shingle man. In Unity
R. B. Hussey was farmer and blaster, Benjamin Chandler was keeper of temperance
house, and H. B. Rice was harness maker and trimmer. Over in Steuben G. W.
McCurdy was a horse tamer, Will iam Dyer was a boat caulker, A. E. Trundy was
farmer and bootmaker. In Calais Wi II iam Marsh was a boom man, and In Topsfield
the entry after the name of Lonna Bean is “for the mite society”.
Up in Harvey Eaton’s town of Cornvi lie, James Frost was selectman, overseer
of the poor, and mechani Cj George Sanford was fanner “and brlckmaker; Wi II fam
Richards was fanner and stone cutter; and about every thl rd man In town was
listed as farmer and dea ler in stock.
Up in little Concord, across the river from Bingham, there must have been
a lot of sheep f n the 1860 ‘s, for no less than seventeen men are II sted as far.,..
mers and wool growers. In Canaan C. H. Smith was proprietor of the stage line,
Abe I Prescott was tanner, currier, harness and shoe man, and Jesse Dorman was
manufacturer of satfnet, carder and cloth ler.
Over in Searsport Walter Nichols was soldiers’ pension agent; Isaac Blethen
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dealt In corn, flour, glass and crockery ware; Emery Sawyer was a general soliciting
agent; and D. S. Simpson was a cabinet maker who also sold fUrniture
and paper hangl ngs.
A parT of th Iso I d di rectory Is devoted to genera I i nformatl on. There f s,
for Instance, a section on Maine’s principal rivers. Of the Kennebec it says,
“This river, by Its two principal branches, the Dead and the Moose Rf,vers, rises
in the norThwestern highlands near the sources of the Androscoggin. Moose
River, after an easterly course of about 70 miles, enters Moosehead Lake. It
Is boatable nearly its whole length. The Dead River branch has a longer course
and joins The main river about 20 mi les south of the lake. The river bears the
name of Kennebec only from the lake, and after a course from that point southerly
for a hundred and fl fty miles through a ferti Ie and picturesque country,
it jo I ns the sea at Georgetown and Ph I ppsburg. The tl de rI ses to Augusta, to
which it is navigable for small vessels; to Bath ships of large draught ascend.
To The Forks of the Dead Ri ver the ascent is 570 feet, to Anson 407, to Watervi
lie 219. At these points and some others there are rapids and falls. The level
of Moosehead Lake is 960 feet above sea level. The territory Included In
the whole Kennebec basin Is 5,300 square miles.”
A page Is devoted to Maine lakes. This was long before the days of our
vacation bus I ness; so note how lightly the writer s I ips over the Belgrade Lakes.
He says, “I n the mntral and more cultivated parts of the state are numerous extensive
ponds, which furnish many faci lities for trade and intercourse to the
I nhab ItanTS on thel r borders. Among these are the Pushaw, Sebec, Newport, the
Be I grade and W I nth rop ponds.”
Interesting is the section devoted to Maine’s schools and colleges. In the
396 towns of Mal ne, with thel r 628,000 I nhab i Tants, there were in 1861 a tOTal
of 4,146 school districts, but only 3,946 schoolhouses. The aggregate expendl …
ture for school purposes by all towns, diSTricts, and the state Itself was
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$616,000.
I am sure many of our listeners can, It ke me, remember when norma I tral nl ng
cOlilrses were taughT in the academies of the state as well as In the established
normal schools. That all began In 1860; so this old subscribers directory In
1861 was gl vi ng a f rash accQunt of someth I ng b rand new In Ma f ne e ducat i on. The
state had appropriated $3,600 for the establishment of oor”lllal schools in 18 exIsting
seminaries and academies which agreed to introduce a department for the
Instruction of teachers. The directory proudly reported that, only one year
after passage of The act, 566 persons were availing Themselves of this plan.
Eighty-nine of them were enrolled In the nonnal course at Kents HI I I, 53 In the
Maine state Seminary at Lewiston, 23 at Hampden Academy and lesser numbers at
Bridgton Academy, Eastern Maine Conference Seminary aT Bucksport, in the academies
at Thomaston, Newcastle, Paris, Bloomfield, Freedom, Eliot, LImerick, North
Yarmouth and Presque Isle, and in New Sharon High School. It Is especially
noteworthy that the boys exceeded the gl rls. Prepari ng to be teachers in those
norma I courses we re 303 rna les and 263 fema les.
tiThe advantage of education in Maine”, says this report of 1861, “are not
lImited to common schools. There are two col leges, we I I endowed and furnished
with able InstrUCTors and suitable apparatus; these are the college at Waterville
and Bowdoin College at Brunswl ck.” Of our own col lege the report says: ”Waterville
College was incorporated in 1820, and was established by the Baptist de ..
nomination, but is open to all sects and classes. It has received donations
from the State as weI I as from Individuals. The number of students in 1860-61
was 122. Its library contains ten thousand volumes. The President is James T.
Champlin, D. D., who Is assisted by four professors and one tutor.”
Another section of the directory is devoted to a list of Maine newspapers.
There were then sf x dally papers in the state, two in Port land, two In Bangor,
and one each in BaTh and Lew I ston. The Kennebec Journa I was then stl” a weekly
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paper, as was also the Eastern Mal I in Watervi lie. The PorTland dal lies were
the Eastern Argus, which fifty years ago the Republicans in my boyhood town used
to call “the lying Argus”, and the Portland Advertiser. The Bangor papers were
the Whig and Courier and the Evening Times. The Bath paper bore the same name
that I t does today and that i t did un de r the long ed i torsh i p of Frank N i ch 01 s -the
Bath Times; and the lewiston paper, forerunner of what was long Maine’s best
known evening news sheet, was then called the lewiston Falls Journal.
The weekly papers were nurnerous In Maine ninety years ago. There were the
Aroostook Times, the Oxford Democrat, the Piscataquis Observer, the Somerset
Farmer, the Port I and Transcri pt, the Be I fast Repub II can Journal, the Bri dgton
Reporter, the Ellsworth American, many of which are sti II known today. But long
since gone and all but forgotTen are the Saco Democrat, the Paris Pioneer, the
Skowhegan Clarion, the Richmond Rising Sun, and the Dexter Gem and Gazette.
There were plenty of religious weeklies, which ran the alphabet from the Augusta
Age, through the Maine Evangelist to Zion’s Advocate. AT Mt. Vernon was
published a monthly called the Young Folks’ Monitor, whi Ie down In Portland they
had another way of taking care of the young folks through the Maine Teacher.
Yes, there was a lot of publishing in Maine a century ago.
One section of this old directory Is headed “Population of some of the principal
cities and towns of the United States”. This Is an eye opener, for in
1860 there were only eight cities on the whole country with more than a hundred
thousand people. They were, in order, New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore,
Boston, New Orleans, St. louis and Cincinnati. Chicago had only 80,000.
Portland was larger than Worcester; louisville, Kentucky had more people than
Washington, D. C.; and New Bedford was larger than Dayton, Olio. Cleveland was
a mere pigmy compared with Cincinnati, having only 43,000 peop Ie to the latter’s
160,000. In fact in 1860 San Francisco had considerably more people than Cleveland,
but los Angeles isn’t even mentioned.
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Ne~ week I want to te II you about some of the advertiserrents I n that 01 d
di rectory of 1861.
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LI TTLE TALKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
124th Broadcast November 25, 1951
Again our distinctly American festival of Thanksgiving has come and gone. I
wonder whaT folks of fifTy years ago would have said if they had been told ThaT
In 1951 chicken and turkey would be cheaper than beef, pork and ham. They JusT
wouldn’t have believed it.
In my boyhood turkey was a Thanksgiving luxury. Only the town’s wealthy
elite cou Id afford one; and when I say wea I thy I mean a fami Iy that had an an-·
nual Income above a thousand dollars. At my father’s store we used to measure
those faml lies by their purchase of eggs. When, about this time of year, the
price of eggs rose to 36 cents a dozen, we used to say now only so and so can
afford them.
My faTher sold hundreds of chickens every Thanksgiving, but I do not recal I
his ever having a turkey In the store in those years between 1900 and 1912, when
I knew tbe p lace best. I do recall going home from college fn 1910 and eating
turkey at my grandmother’s on Thanksgl ving Day, but that was a very special oc-
. caslon, tor my aunt was being married, and the groom fumished the turkey.
Were Thanksgiving Days colder fifty years ago than they are now? Frankly
don’t remember much snow at Thanksgiving, but I can remember good skating. The
fancy, boarded, out-door rinks of our day were then unknown. So I am not talking
about flooded back-yard areas. am talking about frozen pauls and streams. Of
course we never had Thanksgl ving skating on HI gh I and Lake or on the main channe I
of Stevens Brook. But we did skate, many a Thanksgiving aftemoon, on the pooled
I n lets of The stream and on the big bog near The tannery.
J(.jst once I remember snow for Thanksgiving. I’ve told you about it before.
It was the Terri flc storm when the steamer Portland went dOffn. was seven
3-128
years 01 d, and I reca II the snow banks higher than my head where my uncle p I led
the snow as he shoveled grandma’s paths.
Whether in colder or wanner weather than half a century ago, Thanksgiving
Is sti II the great American home gathering fest I va I. Long may it survl ve as the
gracious annual symbol of the American home!
*****
Congress adjourned about a month ago, not to resume its sessions unti I January.
What d t d the first sess i on of that 82nd Congress acco~ II sh?
It appropriated 89 billIon dollars, 61 bIll f on of them for defense. It authorized
7i billions of aid to foreign countries. l”t approved the building of 6
bl Ilion dollars’ worth of army, navy and air bases abroad. It approved expansIon
of the Air Force from 95 groups to 140. It extended controls oVer prices, wages
and materials. It uncovered scandals in RFC, the Bureau of Internal Revenue,
and other agencies. It changed the Taft-Hartley Act to permIt union shops wlth-
;,.”i ~:. ‘”,. ”
out plant elections.
The 82nd Congress has thus far fat led to do any”thlng about the national
gamb I I ng menace; l”t has not gl van statehood to A I aska and Hawa I I; It has done
nothing about the 5″t. Lawrence Waterway; It has taken no action on Federal AId
to Education; It has not transferred to the states “the titles to tidelands; it
has not yet abol ished the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; it has not tumed
its hand on the preSSing question of civl I rights.
U. S. News and World Reports sums up the case as follows: “Congress adJourns
wi th the Fa i r Dea I left on Ice, new wei fare plans she I vad. But by Its
actions the .Unlted 5″tates will be made the world’s stroogest power., Mi I itary
aid abroad wi II be immense. Business wi II continue “to live lI’lder controls, but
with safeguards against abuse. Money will flow In a free and easy way, with 89
billions to spend.”
*****
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When I talked last week about the old directory which contained Mrs. Kloss’
cooking recipes. I told you I regretted that many pages had been tom out as
we II as others pasted over. What was my de I ight when, two days after the broadcast.
Mr. Lewis Whipple left at my door a complete unmarred copy of that same
old directory. I shall refer to it again In a few weeks, but tonight I want to
call your attention only to some of the advertisements In the back of the book.
There are 80 pages of advertising. Many of them are full-page ads of Maine
hotels. One was the Preble House, which I am sure our older listeners remember
we II. I t stood on the northeast comer of Congress and Preb Ie Streets where now
a large office bui Idlng rears Its head. This 1860 ad says of that famous hotel:
“Preb Ie House, Portland, Me I ne. Th Is new hote I is now camp le1ed and open for
the accommodat Ion of trans i ent and pe rmanent boarders. I tis the largest hote I
In the state, possessing all the modern Improvements and is fl rst class in
every appointment. Charles M. Adams, proprietor.”
The picture of the Augusta House in I ts ad In th I s book looks much as that
famous hotel looks today. It was then run by Harrison Baker, who announced that
“porters are In attendance to convey passengers and baggage to the House from
al I rail road and steamboat stations free of charge.”
U. M. Thayer advertised another hotel In Augusta, the Kennebec House, on
the corner of Water and Winthrop Streets. “This house”, he announced, “has been
newly flttea up, enlarge(i, and elegantly furnished, and possesses all modem Improvements
for the conven lence and comfort of I ts guests. A I arge I Ivery stab Ie
Is connected with the house. Stages leave here from all towns in this viCinity.”
ARothe r hote I, whose picture looks Just as I used to know the p I ace forty
years ago, is the Stoddard House at Farmington. In 1860 Its original proprietor,
S. F. Stoddard, was·still alive. “This hotel”, says his ad, “situated on Broadway
In the beautiful village of Farmington, the shire tom of Franklin County,
and the terminus of the Androscoggin Rai I road, wi II be found a pleasant and at-
3-130
tracTive resort at all seasons of the year. Mr. Stoddard, with an experience
of twe lve years as I and lord and proprietor, Is competent and ever ready to attend
to The call, wants and comfort of company in the best possible manner. Guests
taken to and from the depot free of charge.”
I ~gret to say that wh i Ie many of those hote I ads take a fu II page, that
for The Elmwood in Waterville occupies only one inch of one column. IT says
simply: “Elmwood Hotel, Waterville, Maine. J. L. Seavey, proprietor. Comer
of Main and College Streets, near the depot.”
One of the most lavish ads is that of the Bethel House, west side of the
common, Bethe’, Ma I ne. W. J. LoveJoy, the prep rletor, announced that he had
!lrecently remodeled this well-known house, and refurnished it throughout with
new furn i ture. A carri age is inconstant attendance at the depot to convey passengers
to the House. Mr. Lovejoy Is also agent for the British and American
Express Co. He also runs a mall coach from Bethel to Errol, N. H. via Newry,
GrafTon, Upton, Umbagog Lake, and Cambridge on Tuesday and Friday of each week.”
Another picture that looks very fami liar is the Thorndike H9tel in fbckland.
Away back there in 1860 I t had an enTrance on the come r of Sea Street as we II
as one on Main Street. Other hote Is advertised in the dl rectory, some of them
remembered, some long forgotten, are the Columbian House at Bath, the Penobscot
House at Hampden Corner, the York Hotel In Saco, the Eveleth House at WinterporT,
the Waldo House at Frankfort, The Maine Hotel at Damariscotta, the Commercial
House in Rockland, and the Mansion House at Morri II’s Corner.
As you might expect, I. M. Singer Co. of Broadway, New York, took a fuJ I
page TO advertise their sewing machines, but even more space — two full pages
was Taken to advertise Wi II lams and Orvis’s unequa led doub Ie-thread fami Iy sewing
machines for $25, guaranteed to be the equal of the more expensive machines.
“We have demonstrated”, says the ad, “that as good a machine, for all practical
uses can be made for $25 as for $150.” This was a slap at the best of the
3-131
Singe rs, wh I ch cos t $150.
Se I dom nowadays do we eve r see an adva rt i se r re fe r by nama to a compet I tor,
but they pulled no punches back in 1860. Th is Wi II iams and Orvl'”§’ iI’:-_: ”We
have compelled other manufacturers of sewing machines to reduce their prices.
During the three years that we have been in business, the Grover and Baker Co.,
Wheeler, Wilson and Co., Singer and Co., and all other responsible manufacturers
have reduced the price of their cheapest machines from $75 to $40. We produced
so good a mach ine that our competl ~rs had to take the hint. But let the pub II c
remember that our machines are stili the best and are $15 cheaper than the
cheapest of any othe r manufacture r. ”
Do you knat that grand old Portland firm of Kendall and Whitney? Well, they
were in business ninety years ago. They advertised as wholesale and retal I dealers
In agrlcu-Itura I Imp lements, woodenware and seeds. I th ink I had never knatn
the fl rst names of those partners unti I I saw them In th Is ad. They were Hosea
Ken da II an d Anwn i Wh I tney •
A fu II page Is gi van to the ad of J. D. Cheney, manufacturer of ne lodeons
and harmoniums at 135 Middle street, Portland. He advertised an Harmonium with
two banks of keys, of 41 octaves each, four fu II sets of reeds and one and onehalf
octaves in pedals. It had ten stops and included all the varieties of the
thousand dollar pipe organ.
Sanborn and Carter of Port land announced that they had for sa Ie the fu II
series of Greenleaf’s mathematics books — not only the well-known arithmetic,
but also the Treatise on Algebra and the Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry.
Di d you ever hear hat George C. Shaw started bus iness in Portland? When
was a res I dent of that city In 1921 the re we re two I arge George C. Shaw ma rkets,
one in Congress Square and one on Preb Ie Street Just around the comer
from ~nument Square. But in 1860 the Shaw business was much more modest. His
ad in the old directory reads: “China Tea Store. New Teas! New Teas! No.
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135 Middle Street, Portland. Choice tea and pure coffee. A good assortment of
sugars cheap. China Tea Co., George C. Shaw, proprietor.”
Predecessor of the famous fish firm of George C. Lord Company of Portland
was the fl rm of Dana and Company. They wanted the pub II c to know, not on Iy that
they had been in business for fifty years, but that they had plenty of stock for
a I I cus tome rs • The i r 1860 ad says: “Our us ua I stock I s as fo I lows 300,000
Ibs. large cod, 100,000 Ibs. medium cod, 200,000 Ibs. pollock, 5,000 boxes herring,
1,000 bbls. mackerel, plenty of tongues and sounds, napes and fins, and
100 bbls. tanners’ oi I. Of salt we have 40,000 bushels of Turks Island, 40,000
bushels of Liverpool, and 2,000 bags of Ground Butter salt.”
, was pleased also to see among these 1860 ads that old friend, Ayer’s
Sarsapari Ila, “For the cure of scrofula, eruptions, ulcers, pimp les, blotches,
tumors, salt rheum, deb) Ilty, dyspepsia and indigestion.”
On the inside back cover Is the sort of ad you never see today. Our papers
are filled with real estate ads, to be sure, but none like that which the Ulinols
Central Railroad Co. presented In this 1860 directory. It reads: “Rich, rolling,
prai rie lands. Farms for one thousand dollars in the most ferti Ie state in the
Union. Rich prairie land at the low price of $12 an acre. That we have sold
over a thousand of these tracts a I ready th i s season is best proof of the ri chness
and great va I ue of these I I , i no I s lands. The I I II nol s Centra I R. R. was
finished in 1856, but It through a sparsely settled country. This season, after
only four years, it takes to market over 13,000,000 bushels of grain, besides
many cattle and hogs. The lands now offered for sa Ie are adjacent to the raj I,..
road. A tract of 80 acres will make a good, comfortab Ie honestead.”
*****
As we come to the c lose of Thanksg I vi ng Week, I et me ca II your attention to
the Thanksgiving proclamation issued by the Governor of Maine 121 years ago. Mrs.
Wi liard Rockwood of Lawrence Street has shown me a framed copy of that proclama-
3-133
tion signed by Governor Jonathan Dunton at the Counci I Chamber of the State
Capitol In Portland on October 26, 1830, proclaiming Thursday, December 2 as a
day of thanksgiving and praise, and requesting the people of Maine on that day
to assemb Ie at thei r usua I p I aces of pub Ii c worsh I p, to render thanks to the
great gl ver of a II gl fts.
I did not realize that, in such proclamations in the early years of Maine’s
statehood, the Governors paid attent.ion to events abroad, but listen to these
words of Governor Dunton’s 1830 proclamation:
”Wi th i n less than a year we have seen the banner of the cross float trf umphantly
over the regions of infidelity. We have seen the proud ottoman, whose
mountain barriers have for ages defied the power of Invadi n9 armies, become a
humb led pri nce, and Greece, in whose fate Chri sti an and ph i I anthrop ist have taken
so lively an Interest, disenthralled from his power. In another part of the globe
we have seen an infidel nation of pirates driven from their stronghold. Wherever
we turn our eyes, we see the i ron rod of the oppressor and “the crimson spear of
the conque ror broken be fore the breath of him who ru las the dest I ny of nat i ons. 11
So a hundred and twenty one years ago for the conquest of Christian arms
and for the peace and liberty in our own United States, Governor Dunton asked
the people of Maine to be duly thankful.
3-134
LI TTLE TA LKS ON COM~ TH I NGS
125th Broadcast Oecermer 2, 1951
What is the principal cause of extravagant government spending? It Is
time we faced squarely up to that question, and we don’t like the answer. Because
the answer is human selfishness. Because you and I want some special
bene fit for ourse I ves or our own I oca I I tv more than we want the we I fa re of a II
the peop Ie, we expect representati ves to the legl s lature or our Congressmen to
trade the I r vote for another fe I low ‘s pet project I n return for a vote for ours.
MaIne people want some bIg spending done on QuoddYi Kansans want subsidIes
on wheat; Montana wants another big dam. So the log roiling gets under way.
I n both houses of Congress the very same men who cry loudest for cutting down
expenses vate for one need less project after anothe r because on Iy by so voting
can they get votes for projects wanted I n the i r own states, good or bad. Attempts
to consolidate the very expensive work of the Veterans Administration have been
constantly thwarted because of selfish interests. Naturally no state wants to
lose a veterans hospital, but the government has the clear duty to choose the
most efficient plan of operation, regardless of what happens to one hospital.
Let me give you an example of this sort of thing nearer hane. The State of Maine
now operates fiw teacher-trainIng institutions for the preparation of elemen …
tary school teachers. Not one of those schools is fl lied, and three of them
could each accommodate twIce as many students as they have. Maine needs five
teacher-training institutions about as much as a chicken needs five legs. But
you Just try to close one of those schools. You would have half the population
of the town where the school is located weeping down your neck. No, I suspect
we shall go right on speriding for five of these schools many years before any
legis lature has the courage to close one or more of theM,.,;”
Now It is not the legis lators and the Congressmen who are to b I arne; it is
3-135
you and I. We a re the ones who I ns I stth at our rep resentati ves act that way i f
they want to stay In offl ce. So there Is a lot of truth I n what E. A. Evans
wrote In the New York World-Telegram way back last spring. ThIs is what he said:
“Suppose citizens bombarded their Congressmen with letters saying, In effect:
‘Forget our states, our districts’ special benefits for a while. It won’t
ruin us to do without federal money you’ve been trying to get for us. But inflation
can ruin us un less Congress stops mere Iy talking about government economy
and does something about It. That’s the job we want you to help do for us.’
Well, some Congressmen might drop dead of surprise. But those who survived the
shock might slash a whale of a lot of unnecessary spending out of the national
budget. It’s worth tryl ng.”
Of course, nobody paid t.h8 slightest attention to Mr. Evans’ suggestion.
How do I know that? Because the words I have Just quoted were reprinted In the
July issue of the Readers Digest, where, I’ll bet, among some ten million people
who regularly see that magazine, more than half the folks I istening to this
broadcast read them. And what did you do about It?
*****
On several occasions I have mentioned the old-time schools of Watervi lie
and sane of the other Kennebec towns, but I do not reca” that I haw sa i d anythi”
9 about the Fai rfle Id schools of long ago.
Recently, through the courtesy of Mr. Jotham Hobbs of Fairfield, an elderly
gentleman with whom I had a delightful visit last summer, I had opportunity to
examine a report of the supervisor of schools of the tOoln of Fairfield almost a
hundred years ago. It was the report for the year ending March 1, 1858.
let us see what the Fal rfle Id schools were like in that year when out in
III inols was he I d the most famous series of poll tica I debates in our history,
those between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham lincoln. Fairfield wasn’t much interested
in those far-away debates, he Id to determine who shou Idrepresent
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Illinois in the U. S. Senate. Fairfield folks had concems of their own, among
them the ca~ of the town’s schools.
It didn’t cost much to run the schools a hundred years ago. In 1858 the
town of Fairfield appropriated $1,500 for all of its schools; the State contributed
$386, making the total school expenditure for Fairfield $1,846. That
amount was divided among 25 school districts. There were usually a summer term
and a winter term in each district, but sometimes a district had only one term
In the year, and in the various districts the length of the term differed
widely. In the rural districts, removed from the settlements like Kendall’s
Mill s or Somerset MI lis (the 01 d names for Fal rfi e I d Vi II age and Shawmut), a
chi Id was lucky if he got more than a dozen weeks of school in a whole year.
At Kendall’s Mi lis In 1857-58 there was a winter term of eight weeks, a
summer term of ten weeks, and — what was unusual for those times — a fall
term of six weeks — a total of 24 weeks. On the other hand in District No.3
at Nye’s Corner, there was only a summer term of ten weeks — only that one term
In the district during the entire year. In District No.4 at Plshon’s Ferry
(now Hinckley) there were a summer term of seven weeks and a winter term of five
weeks. In District No.9 at Fairfield ~eting House (at what is now Fairfield
Center) the~ were a twelve-week summer term with 72 pupils, and a winter term
of nine weeks. District NIO. 6 at Quakertown had winter and summer terms of
eight weeks each.
The supervi sor of school s — the man who submi tted th is report for the 25
schoo I districts to the town — was E. K. Boyle. I n that far-off day he had
much to say about the disadvantages caused by having so many small schools. The
school bus was then 75 years in the future; so Supervisor Boyle had no solution
to the problem. But he presented the problem frankly In these words: “One
of two conditions must exist in our more sparsely populated districts; either
some of the scholars must walk to a school at considerable distance from their
3-137
homes, where they can have decent advantages for learning, or they have a poor
substitute for a schoolhouse nearby, where term after term a mere handful of
scholars assemble to drag out five or six hours a day, without any suitable
teacher, or any advantages to make the school hours interesting and profitable.
There are too many schools scattered over this town. It is better for a scholar
to walk two mi les to attend a ,,::’School of sufficient numbers to make him emulous
of keepi ng pace wi th the smartest schol ars, than to wa I k ha I f a mi Ie to attend
a school where he is the only scholar in a class.”
These oid-time school reports were decidedly frank in their conments, and
this one of Falrfie Id in 1858 is no exception. Of District No.3 the supervisor
said: “In this district Is nothing that can be dignified by the name of schoolhouse.
In the district are some fine scholars, though most of them are young;
and they go to school in 8 bui Id1ng hardly fit for a sheep pen. What seats they
have in the building are entirely unsuited to convenience or health, and in cold
weather nothing has power to render it comfortable against the cold except a
gigantic fire apparatus capable of warming all out of doors. If the powers of
evil could invent some prison-house, and make it as repulsive as possible to
the free and Joyous spirit of a child, they could not hope to surpass this
schoo I house. II
“In District ‘No. 4”, continues the report, “there is another hut in which
the scholars attend school. It is not quite so bad as that in No.3, but it is
bad enough, and the schools in this district can never be the kind to keep young
people out of state prison or county Jail until there is a more suitab Ie bui 1-
ding.”
Not all that Supervisor Boyle says atJout the teachers are words of praise.
“In Miss Fossett’s school at Kendall’s Mi lis”, he wrote, “there was manifest,
toward the close of the term, a lack of interest among the scholars.;’ Mr. Norton’s
school”, says the supervisor, “was not very profitable. He is quite young
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and is too I nexperl enced to take charge of a schoo I. Mr. Johnson worked hard,
yet he wanted much of the energy requisi te to the successful management of a
school of this size. Irregularity of attendance had very injurious results,
and Mr. Johnson did little to cause the pup! Is to have a des I re to attend.
James Freeman Is a young man of good parts, excellent character, and a fine
scholar. His discipline was not so good as could be wished, but his system of
instruction was excel lent. We noted to our regret, when we visited the school,
that The younger scholars seemed fl lIed with an Inordinate desire to exhibit
the I r powers of locomoti on.”
The supervisor Is even more critical of the school at Fa! rfield Center
taughT by I. N. Richardson. “On our first visit to the school”, he says, “It
appeared satisfactory; the teaching seemed active and the scholars industrious
and orderly. Having occasion to visit the school again, at the request of parents
In the district, we found it, so far as progress is concerned, stationary
— the scho lars drl vi ng around at random among the i r books and stud I es, like a
ship set afloat without helm or rudder. Satisfied that the school was doing
the scholars little good, we advised the teacher to leave, which he accordingly
. did.”
Supervisor Boyle often tempered his praise of a teacher. In Miss Rebecca
Norton’s school at Ohio HIli, he admitted were to be found some of the best mathematl
clians and best grammarians in town. “The scholars he17e”, he wrote, “rank
far above the average il,n other districts. Yet”, he added, “there Is one great
fau It I n Miss Norton as a teacher, and that is want of energy.”
The suprevisor had an eye out for likely teacher material, however. He noted
that MI ss Marl a Lawrence at Oistri ct No. 7 was “a young I ady possess i ng a
refined and critical mind, who with experience will make a grand teacher.”
Mr. Boyle complains that It Is hard to get reports from the school districts.,
even accurate word-of-mouth Information about the schools. ‘~e visited the
‘_, 3-139
schoolhouse at Somerset Mi lis three times during the winter term,” he says, “but
each time we found no school in session. It was with this school as with many
others; we had to guess when it would commence, when it would be keeping, and
when it was like Iy to be comp leted.”
“In District No.7”, the supervisor says, “we understand a winter term was
taught by Mr. Newell Hoxie, but since we had no notice of its commencement or
close, we did not visit it.” Of District No. 10, Mr. Boyle wrote: “We have now
received a register iaforming us that there has been a winter term taught by
Miss Marinda Jewett. It was our first notice of the existence of such a school,
and it was therefore not visited.”
What we today consider essential school statistics are missing from this
report. It gives us no inkling of the total number of pupils in the town:’,s 25
school districts. Only occasionally does it give the enrollment in anyone
school. The whole thing was quite haphazard, and the school supervisor evidently
had trouble finding out whether some of the schools held sessions at all,
to say nothing of how many pupi Is attended. It is difficult to determine how
much the teachers were paid, but the average appears to have been about two
dollars a week. One interesting fact brought out by this old-time report is
that, in the summer term, all the teachers were women, whi Ie in the winter term
all but six were men. Those male teachers were supplied by students from the
colleges, all of which had a long winter vacation for the sale purpose of giving
the i r students a chance to earn someth i n9 toward the i r co liege expenses by teaching
a term in the oommon schools. If the pay was two dollars a week, they
couldn’t have earned much toward college expenses. True enough, but they could
have made a start, for tuition at Colby was then $15 a term.
*****
Among the possessions of Mr. Jotham Hobbs, who showed me this Fai rfield
school report for 1858, is a letter written to an ancestor of his concerning
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teaching school in Fai rfield. The letter was indeed written in the very year
we have been talking about, for it Is dated Apri I 21, 1858. It reads: “Mr.
Hobbs. Dear SI r: Upon reflection with regard to the school In your district,
have come to The cone I us i on that I cannot take I t for less than three doll ars
a week. I would like it at that price, but should not feel that I was doing myself
justice to take IT for less. If you wish Ire to have it, please let me
know th is week. Yours tru Iy, Jenny T. Ware.”
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LITILE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
126th Broadcast
Some of you wi II remember how Waterville was honored last June by the pre-
Sence of Mrs. Gi Ibreth at the Colby Commencement. Mrs. Gilbreth, you know, was
the heroine mother of that very popu lar book “Cheaper by the Dozen”, written by
her son and her daughter. What I find unfami I I ar to many Watervl lie peop Ie is
the fact that Mrs. Gi Ibreth~s famous husband, Frank Gilbreth, world-renowned industrlal
counselor, came from Fairfield, Maine. To be sure, he left town when
he was a young chi Id, but back In the 1870’s the Gi Ibreth family was very well
known i n Fa i rf I e I d.
Through the courtesy of Mr. Stephen Wing of the Watervi lie Savings Bank, I
have had opportunity to examine several letters signed by Frank Gt Ibreth’s father,
J. H. Gilbreth. They are all on the Gilbreth printed letter-head, which
reads as follows: “J. H. Gi Ibreth, dealer since 1855 In Hardware, Farmers’ and
Mechanics’ Tools, iron, steel, stoves, paints, oils, varnishes, and building material.
Manufacturer of tin and sheet iron ware. Corner Main and Bridge
Streets, Kendalls MI J Is, Maine. Also proprietor of the Fairground Farm (130
acres) where can be seen Gi Ibreth Knox stock. Also pure Jersey stock, and Cheshire
and Yorkshire swine from the best families in the country.”
These particular letters deal with Mr. Gi ‘breth’s attempt to clean up a
matter of land purchase. On May 5, 1871 he wrote to Wi” jam Dyer, president of
the Waterville Savings Bank: up lease do me the favor to write me the amount you
and the trustees thought proper for me to pay to have a quit claim of the lot of
land and bui Jdings east of the Main Street or County Road, as it is called, at
the Bodfish farm. If you forgot to present the subject to the trustees, please
th ink of I t at your next meet I ng. ”
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On September 23, when Mr. Gf Ibreth was about to start on a journey, he
wrote to Mr. Dyer a letter which contains a final sentence that Is typical of
the Implicit honesty of business men of that time. He wrote: “I could not get
to WaTervi I Ie this afternoon unti I after your business hours at the bank, so
am sending you the Winslow mortgage by mai I as collateral with his notes you
haw. must leave on a trip early tanorrow morning. If this is not all satls …
factory, of course I wi II do what is satisfactory.”
The last of the three letters is dated December 12. It 1s signed “Solon
Bunker for J. H. Gi Ibreth” and reads: “Mr. Gi Ibreth has been quite sick since
you were here and wishes me to say that he needs the money very much.”
ThIs is all a bit confusing, and we can only conjecture what it was all
about. We think, however, that Mr. Gilbreth succeede€l In straightening out com…
pletely his affairs with the Watervi I Ie Savings Bank.
It is a long tl me since I have seen any stationery It ke that on wh I ch the
Gi Ibreth letters are written, though I saw lots of It as a boy. I t is fol ded
into four pages, like modern socIal stationery, except that It is ruled. At the
top of the fi rst page is printed the letter head. And now canes the odd point
with which many of you may not be fami I jar. The enti re fourth page is devoted
to advertisements. I know in Bridgton fifty years ago that was the way many
business men paid for their stationary — by seiling advertisements to be placed
on it by other business men — I suspect that was done. in Fai rfie Id, when J. H.
Gi Ibreth provided himself with this stationery about 1870.
Who were some of the dea lers who carried ads on the back of Mr. Gi Ibreth’s
letters? . There were F. Kendrick and Brother, manufacturers of carriages and
sleighs; Frank P. Wing, dealer In furniture, feathers, and caskets; Tukey and
James, who made curtain fixtures; E. H. Evans, the druggist, who also sold books,
fancy goods, and jewelry; J. F. Dealy, the meat man; and S. S. Brown, counselor
at law. Since in 1870 Kendal Is Mi lis was a famous center for lumber and wood
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products, the ads of the lumber dealers and ml II operators predominate. There
are no less than seven of them: N. Totman and Son; Newha II and Gibson; E. Totman
and Co.; John Phi Ibrook. Woodman, Lawrencs and Co.; Emery, Bradbury and Co.;
and C. and J. M. Fogg.
But the most Interesting ad of all is one printed upside down in the lower
left-hand corner. It was obviously placsd there by Mr. Gilbreth himself. It pic,..
tures a trotter, harnessed to a high-whee led su I ky lead ing a heat of nine entries
to the wire in front of the judges’ stand at a race track. Beneath the p icture
is printed: “Gi Ibreth Knox, 2:26 3/4; best half In a race, 1 :10*; best
quarter, 34i seconds. The sire of Lothair, sold for $5,000 when three years old.
Gi Ibreth Knox was awarded the two highest prl zes at the New Eng land Fa I r In 1869.
First prize, Maine State Agricultural Society, 1868. J. H. Gilbreth, his owner,
is also a dealer in hardware, stoves, agricultural tools, etc. and is agent for
the CI ipper Mowing Machine for six counties. Comer of Main and Bridge Streets.”
*****
Inasmuch as we have started out with Kendalls Mills tonight, let us keep on
with some more facts about the tQl/n of Fairfield. It was originally In both of
the same countids’;wlth Watervl lie. Did you catch what I said — both of the same
counties? For Waterville and Fairfield alike were originally In Lincoln County,
which covered at one time a huge tract of land noW divided Into six counties, an€!
parts of a seventh and an eighth. Kennebec Comty was formed in 1799, and from
that year unti I 1809, both Waterville and Fairfield were in Kennebec. Then,,·
wi th the organ I zing of Somerset County in 1809, the county I ine passed between
Watervi lie and Fal rfie Id, p lacing the latter in the new county.
LI ke Waterville and Wi ns low, the land ti ties of Fai rf ie I d go back to the
year 1661, when Artemas Boris, Edward Tyng, Thomas Bratt Ie and John Wins low purChased
fran the Plymouth Colony what Is known as the Kennebec Patent. It embraced
all the land west of the Kennebec River between Topsham and Norridgewock and
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cartal n lands on the east sl de of the rl ver above Augusta.
More than a century later, In 1781, John Winslow, a descenoant of one of
the four who purchased the Plymouth rights, granted, together with his associates,
heirs of the other purchasers, a cartaln tract of land to Joseph Nye of
Sandwich, Massachusetts, and Joseph Dirnmock of Falmouth, tvlassachusetts. tt .was
described as “a parcel of land lying on the west side of the Kennebec River
above Fort Halifax and Tlconlc Falls, In the coun.ty of Lincoln, containing by
estimaNon 11,700 acres, exclusive of roads. For that tract, covering nearly
all of the territory now occupied by the t~n of Fairfield, Nye and mirriffioc~”paid
1,800 pounds, lawfu I s II ver money. One hundred and twenty years earl fer, the
first John Winslow and his three associates had paid 400 pounds for the entire
vast tract from Topsham to Norridgewock. But of course that was only shortly
after the notorious purchase of Manhattan Island by the Dutch for $24.
Under the terms of the purchase Nye and .Dirnmockwere r~uired::-!to layout” a
road, eight rods wide, to be completed across the tract within five years, and
kept fit for trne I I ng by carts. They were a I so requi red to di vi de the tract
into sixty lots and obtain settlers.
Nye and Dimmock proceeded to sell lots to acquaintances in Falmouth” Sandwich,
and other Massachusetts t~ns, at a price of thirty pounds per lot. Among
those first settlers were three Nyes, four Bowermans, five Tobeys, two Lawrencas,
two Blackwells, two Atwoods, and such other well known Fairfield names as Wing,
Kendall, Shepard, Emery and Holway.
In the early days the largest settlement was not at what is now Fairfield
Village, but at Fairfield Center, with North Fairfield running it a close second.
On what was I ater known as the Abe I Hoxie farm, was born A I den Bowerman, the
first white child born in Fairfield.
There had been seft lers near the ri ver, however, not far fran the present
Fairfield Village, as early as 1776, when one who Is called in the records Peter
3-145
Pushard (was he actually the first of the Pishons of Plshon Ferry fame?) built
a log house not far from where the Fairfield rai I road station now stands.
Fourteen years later, in 1780, 93neral Wi II iam Kendall bui It another log
cabin south of Pushards. He also built a bulkhead across the mi II pond and
erected a small grist mi II, bringing his mi II stones up from Gardiner as far as
TI con I c Fa lis by boat, and from there to Fat rfie I d by ox team.
General Kendall is said to have been Fairfield’s first freemason, becoming
such in 1804. On his death in 1827 he was buried with masonic service in the
01 d cemetery on Emery Hi II. He was the first of Fa i rfie I d ‘s many mi II operators,
not only grinding grain but also sawing lumber in considerable quantity_ When
we remember that General Kendall had come to Fairfield in 1780, It Is remarkable
to note that his son, George Kendall, lived unti I 1900, dying at Fairfield in
that year, six months after he had passed his one hundredth bi rthday. He is one
of the few men I have ever heard of whose life spanned exactly all the years of
the nineteenth century.
Fairfield was incorporated as a town in 1788, thus making it 17 years
younger than Wi ns low, but fOurteen years 01 der than Watervi lie.
The fl rst tow,n meeting was he Id at the home of Seth Fuller on August 19,
1788. The first selectmen were Josiah Burgess, Elihu Bowerman and Joseph Town.
Samue I Tobey was both town clerk and treasurer. Lemue I Tobey and Danle I Wyman
were elected tithingmen. The importance of lumber to the tewn was shown by the
choosing of James Lawrence, Daniel Shepard, Jonathan Emery, and John Nobel as
surveyors of lumber. Gideon Holway was constable, and Thomas Blackwel I was
elected to an office common in old England but less common in American towns,
that of hog reeve. J ames Huston was appo i nted to see that “the snares we re not
made waste of”. Does anyone know what that meant?
The records of that first town meeting In Fairfield show that the custom
of letting out the collection of taxes to the highest bidder goes back at least
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as far as 1788. For at Fa I rf ie Id in that year Joshua B I ackwe II offered TO
collecT the taxes at ten pence upon the pound, and the tam voted to accept
hi 5 offer, although the clerk wrote It “except”. That clerk was authorl zed
to provl de h imse If with BOoks for the town and to bring in The charge at some
future meeting for the town TO pay.
We have some know ledge of what taxes Collector B I ackwe I I had to round up,
for ten yea rs I ate r taxes we re assesse d on 90 Fa i rf i e I d res I dents. The highest
tax paid by anyone of the 90 was $3.23.
As we have said the fi rst houses were log cabins. The fl rst frame house is
said TO have been built by Gideon Holway near what was called the Moosehorn, and
the fl rst frame house In Fa I rfie Id Vi II age was the Wi II iam Emery house, where
Benedict Arnold spent several days waiting for his bateaux to be tarred before
his expediTion continued up the river.
IT was five years after incorporation as a town that for the first Time
Fairfield raised money to support schools. The amount was 25 pounds to be paid
in grain and produce.
After Genera I Kenda II ‘5 mills there were severa I smal I saw ml lis erected,
and beTween 1820 and 1830 developed the big block of saw mills for which Kendalls
Mills became famous. These were completely destroyed by fire In 1853 at
a loss of $100,000. They were rebui It, even expanded, as photographs taken in
the 1870’s clearly show. Another devastaTing fire in 1895 wiped them out, and
on Iy a few were ever rebu i It.
The fi rst store in the vi I I age was rtJ1 by that giant of a II trades, Genera I
Kendall, and the first post office was in the store next north of Lawry Brothers.
From 1848 to 1873 the toll bri dge was operated by Capta in Wi II iam Bodf ish.
Did you know that Fairfield once had an academy? In 1857 a school called
Bunker’S Seminary operated in a brick building at the comer of Lawrence Avenue
and Newha II Street.
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lowe so much to Mr. Stephen Wing for a large part of this information about
old-Time Fairfield, that I want to conclude this program by paying respects to
his family line, which goes back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Only two years after Winthrop had founded that colony in 1630 a widON, Mrs.
Deborah Wing, came to Boston In the ship “Wi “lam and Frances”, with her four
Sons and her father. They settled at Saugus and founded the Wing family in
America.
As time went on, one of the Wings moved to Sandwich, where he became a
neighbor of the Nyes. By 1700 some of the fami Iy had come to Maine, settling
chiefly in the general area of LlverlYPre, Wayne, Canton and Peru.
Stephen I s a name that frequent Iy appears in the Wing genea logy. From one
of Deborah’s sons, Stephen, bom in England in 1621, dONn to the present Steve
Wing of Fai rHe Id, there are nine generations and five of the nine names are
Stephen. The present Stephen :Wing’s father was named for a president of the
United States, for he was called Frankl in Pierce Wing.
And with that sa lute to the Wings Ib i d you good: IJ 19ht •
3-148
liTTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
127th Broadcast December 16, 1951
Mrs. E. H. Rockwood, whose copy of Governor Dunton’s 1830 proclamation I
told you about a few weeks ago, has shown me other documents of surprising Interest.
Mrs. Rockwood’s father, Horace Lovering, came to Waterv! lie In 1886 to
begi n a long career wi th the Mal ne Centra I Ra I I road. He came from the Eastern
Railroad, later merged with the Boston and Maine, where he was clerk. The interes
tl ng documents I n Mrs • Rockwood t s possess I on are two huge sheets, one a
monthly report, the other an annual report, showing the performance of locomotives
on the Eastern Rai I road In 1882. 8eisdes the signature of Mr. Lovering,
the papers bear the signatures of A. Pillsbury, master of rolling stock, and
Charles S. Sergeant, auditor.
These documents are amaz I ng examp les of beautl fu I penmansh I p. Many persons
who have seen the papers refuse to be I I eve that they are hand-wri tten, but careful
examination, showing erasures and corrections, reveals that indeed they were
done by hand — and the hand was that of Mr. Horace Loveri n9, whose letters and
figures look like meticulous steel engraving.
When did the railroads completely substitute coal for wood as a fuel? I
should certainly have guessed that the conversion became complete, except on
obsolete branch lines, long before 1880; but such was not the case. During the
year ending September 30 .. 1882, the consumption of wood by all locomotives of
the road was 9,,514 cords. To be sure the road used 56,000 tons of coal in the
same period, but nearly ten thousand cords was a lot of wood. Wood was already
prov! ng more expens I ve than coa I, as we I I as be I ng more cumbe rsome to carry, for
whl Ie the rai I road paid $4.94 per ton for its coal and $3.38 per cord for its
wood, it got 41 miles to a ton of coa I and on I y 26 mi les to a cord of wood.
3-149
In 1882 the Eastern Rai I road had two divisions. The longer was called the
Eastern and Portland Division and Branches; the shorter was the COOlpany Division.
Total wages paid TO englnemen and firemen for the whole road, switching engines
and a II, was a I itt Ie over th I rteen thousand doll ars •
Another interesting point was that in 1882 the rai I roads were sti II using
-tallow for certain lubrications. That year the Eastern used 15,000 pints of
01 I and 51 pounds of tallow. A printed heading tells us that one pound of tallow
was equal to one pint of oi I. Some of the other printed heads read: ”Headlight
oil not I nc I uded in mi les run to a pint of oi I ; one passenger car I s rated
equal to three loaded freight cars, when one engine hauls both; five empty
fre I ght cars rated equa I to three loaded fre i ght cars.”
This ‘-882 report lists 104 locomotives operated by the Eastern. They are
consecutl ve Iy numbered from one to 104. May we assume that those were the acTua
I engi ne numbers? I f so, the road’s or! gl na I Engl ne No. 1 was stl II I n operation.
At any rate No.1 on This list Is the smallest of the 104, weighing
only 17!- tons, conTrasted with No. 98’s 41 tons. IT had four drives of 50-inch
diameter and had been made by Hinkley and Wi Iliams. About twenty of the engines
had been made In The Eastern’s own shops, though the largest were products of
The R. I. LocomoTive Works.
In 1882 No.1 was a switch engine at Salem, and Its engineer was H. F.
Carleton. Big Nt:). 98 ran between Boston and Portland In charge of F. Carter.
have a Iways been struck by how many ral I road engl neers bear old Amari can names,
and In this reporT of Horace Lovering’s we find the fami liar names of Adams,
Hayes, Brown, Gray, Page, Fuller, Franklin, Dodge, Thomas, Emery and Lormard,
and of course half a dozen Smiths. The old American fami lies certainly took to
rai lroading.
*****
Bi II Flaherty, custodian of the Keyes Science Bui Iding at Colby College,
3-150
has given me a copy of a True collector’s Item — the specia I issue of the Bangor
Commercl a I printed on The occasion of the famous Bangor fl re (;11 1911. I t Is
printed on coated paper wiTh very clear cuts, shOflng the fi re at various stages
and the burned districts after the fire was over.
I am sure many of our listeners remember that fi re we I I. I was a sophomore
in Colby at the time, and it was an exciting event, because the W:lterville Fire
Department went to the scene by special train. A vast area on the east side of
the Kenduskeag Stream and up over the hi II all the way to Broadway was swept by
the flames. The damage exceeded three ml II Ion dollars. NOT only business
blocks and residences, bUT also several churches were deSTroyed. The state milI
tl a was ca lied out, and aT the he Ight of the conf lagratl on the city was under
martial law to prevent lOOTing. The city was without electric power or telephone
service for days; The electric railroad line to Old Town and other points
was totally disabled.
A visitor to Bangor Today would never realize the awful destruction of that
windy April night forty years ago. A new and much better Bangor arose like a
phoenix from the ashes. One result was Bangor’s attractive and convenient civIc
center, where are now located the Post Office, the high school and the public
library.
*****
A very unusual prinTed item is owned by Mr. Jarvis Thayer of Pleasant
Street. It Is a pamphleT of 24 pages, printed in Portland at the office of Thomas
Baker Walt In 1791, and sold by him at nine pence a copy. like nearly all
the printed wor;ks::,of thaT day, It bears a long title: “A narrative of the extraordinary
sufferings of Mr. Robert Forbes, his wife and five chi Idren, during
an wnfortunate Journey through the wi Iderness from Canada to the Kennebec River
in the year 1784; In which three of their children were starved to death. Taken
partly from the mouths of the survivors and partly from an Imperfect Journal,
3-151
and comp lied at the I r request.”
It is an amazing story for which the author, Arthur Bradman 1 vouches the
solemn truth In a one-page appendix.
Under the ,guidance of what The narrative calls three Dutchmen, Mr. Forbes
with his wi fe and fi ve chi Idren set out from Nouve lie Bois on the Chaudlere RIver.
Winter still held on In thaT region, for it was the 17th of March, 1784.
The ch I I dren we re Mary aged 7, Peggy 5, Katha r Ine 3, Robe rt 15 monThs and the
oldest, John, a lad of 13.
Their goods, provisions and The four youngest chi Idren were hauled on hands
I eds ca lied I nd I an s Ie I ghs. The adu I ts and the boy John made the i r way on snowshoes.
After nine days of difficult traveling, they were obliged TO leave the
ri ver valley and soon found it imposslb Ie to get the sleds any farther over the
rough terrain. So they decided to leave the woman and four children in a rudely
constructed camp whl Ie the others pushed on to what was various Iy called lake
Chaudiere and Megantlc Pond. Now let us pick up the story In the writer’s own
words.
“The next morning, to the dismay of Mr. Forbes, the three Dutchmen took to
Themselves the provisions and al I the baggage of any consequence, and frankly
Told Forbes that they had no intention of returning with him to his family, but
would now leave him and make thei r own way through to the Kennebec. Notwithstanding
Forbes’ importunities, They left him with only one poor axe, a small
fi relock, and two I ittle loaves of bread, Here was a fami Iy, now without
guides or compass 1 and destitute of provisions, nine days’ Journey from the
nearest Inhab I tants of Canada and not less than 150 mi les from any dwe II iogs on
The Kennebec.”
They had to make the Important decision which way to go. Because he had
found a not long deserted camp aT Megantic Pond, Mr. Forbes thought the Indian
who had lived there might stili be in the viCinity. If they could find that In-
3-152
dian, they might find both food and guidance to the Kennebec. So they decided
to go on. The oldest girl — though on Iy seven — now had to join her mother
on foot, while the oldest brother tried to haul one child on a sled as Mr.
Forbes hau led the other two.
Because of a raging storm it took them three days to reach the Pond, where
Mr. Forbes had hidden the two loaves of bread. Hew relieved the family were
when they did find the Indian, who proved to be a Christianized Indian called
John BapTist, whom they had known before in Canada. John had shortly before
Ki lied a moose and gave the Forbes fami Iy a II the meat they cou I d carry, and
agreed to pi lot them to the Kennebec. But be,f.ore they could start out the In'”
dian’s squaw was taken violently i II and he could not leave her. So he made for
Forbes a crude map on a piece of bark, marking carefully the bends, falls and
carryl ng p I aces a long the ri ver.
Their relief caused by the new provisions and the Indian’s help was short
lived. They found traveling very difficult — rocky ledges, high mountains, and
steep preci pi ces block i ng the I r way. Long before they got to the ma In ri ver,
their provisions again got perilously low. So they decided that Mrs. Forbes and
the young children should remain in the forest In a hastily constructed camp
whi Ie husband and son kept on until they should find a habitation, secure aid,
and return for those left behind.
It was on April 12 when Mr. Forbes and John left Mrs. Forbes and the small
children. Ten days later the travelers had not yet reached any settlemenT, but
they did encounTer two hunters, JonaThan Crosby and Luke Sawyer, who supp lied
them wi Th food and conducted them to The sett lement at Seven Mi Ie Brook, a short
distance above Norri dgewock.
Three men of the settlement agreed to return with Mr. Forbes to rescue the
wife and chi Idren. After thirteen days the party returned, unable to find Mrs.
Forbes. It was now 24 days since Mr. Forbes had left his family, with only a
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pound of moose meat and half a pound of tallow. Everyone, therefore, believed
they mwst be dead.
By th Is tl me the Kennebec and Its tributaries were in fu II flood. Mr.
Forbes could not prevai I on the settlers to help him make further search untf I
the waters abated, for they said, ”What is the use of our risking our lives when
we know your famt Iy cannot possibly be living?”
On May 28 a party led by James McDona Id of Seven Mile Brook di d set out to
seek the remains of Mr. Forbes’ fami Iy. Now let us pick up the narrative again
In the words of the old pamphlet:
“On the second day Qf June they arrived at the place where Mrs. Forbes and
he r ch i I d ren ha d been left. He re, to the I rg reat as ton i shmen t, they foun d the
mother and one of her chi Idren al ive. It was now 50 days since they had been
left with nothing besides the small quantity of moose meat and tal, low. Nor had
they found any other nourishment except cold water and the ins I de bark of the
fir tree. And in addition to this, they had been forty-eight days .wlthout fire.”
All the chi Idren had lived for 38 days after Mr. Forbes departure; then
the youngest was first to succumb; wi th in two more days Katharine and Mary died.
It was fi va-year old Peggy who proved strongest of the ch I Idren, and who was
found alive with her mother.
The rescuers carried Mrs. Forbes and the chi Id on a bier by land and in a
canoe by water unti I they arri ved safely at Norri dgewock.
Now remember that this pamphlet is a contemporary account. It was published
not as a legend, years after the event, but as a recent occurrence only
seven years after the Forbes family’s harrOlting experience. On the final page
the author has pri nted the fol lowi ng postscript:
“Mr. Forbes and his wife with their two surviving children, one born only
a month after her rescue, are now I lying ir:’l the town of New Gloucester about 25
miles fran Portland. Mrs. Forbes, far from the emaciated state in which her
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rescuers found her, is now a I arge and corpu lent woman. And the ch i I d, to
which she give birth soon after her arrival at Norridgewock, Is a healthy and
very promising boy.”
*****
This program in the course of a year uses a lot of words, probably far too
many. But I hope even we are more economical of words than are some of the
folks down in Washington. Listen to this contrast. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
contains 266 words; the Ten Commandments have 297 words; the Declaration
of Independence took 300 words; and the order of the Office of Price Stabilization
on the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
128th Broadcast
Each year on th i s parti cu lar Sunday we devote our program large Iy to
Chri stmas.
Of course Christmas, as we know it, began as a Christian memorial of the
birth of Chr I st, and we depa rt fa r from its true sp’ rit I f we fa i I to recogn i ze
each Decembe r 25th what the pe rson and the teach i ngs of Jesus mean to us today.
Yet the actual festival which became Christmas began at least two thousand years
before Jesus was born. It was, in certain pre-Christian lands, the annual festival
which renewed the world for another year.
As I am sure most of you know, one of the oldest civilizations in the
world was thriving 4,000 years ago between the rivers, for “between the rivers”
is what the word Mesopotamia means. The rl vers were the Ti gris and the Euphrates.
On the banks of one rose the ancient city of Nineveh; on the other grew
up historic Babylon. In the northern part of that pear-shaped land between the
rivers was Chaldea, from whose very ancient town of Ur Abraham set forth into
the land to the westw’ard, the land that came to be called Palestine.
To the Mesopotamians the New Year was a tine of crisis. After the crops
had been harvested the empty bra-ln fie Ids told that Ii fe was dying. Then the
god Marduk who had, according to Mesopotamian legend, routed the monsters of
chaos, bui It an orderly world and created man — Marduk had again to do b:lttle
with the monsters so that death might not become complete. Thus he renewed the
world every year.
‘n th i s annual struggle man conca I ved it his duty to he Ip as best he cou I d
to purify himself of the evi Is which his sins of the past year had brought upon
him; to renew the strength which the year had drained away; and, if possible,
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to find a substitute who could take the consequences of the sins which he had
committed. This last was, of course, the idea of the scapegoat. If you are at
all familiar with the Old Testament you know tow often the scapegoat — the ene
who bares blame for others I deeds — is referred to.
Now it is interesting that this old New Year festival in Babylon lasted exactly
12 days, just as the Christmas season has always lasted in England. Because,
/Ike the old year, the king was supposed to die in order that he might
accompany Marduk into the underworld of the monsters and battle by his side. Apparently
even those tough-minded Babylonians and Assyrians, to whom all human
life seems to have been notoriously cheap, couldn’t quite stomach the idea of
ki II i ng off a king every year; so they estab I I shed the custom of a mock king.
An ordinary fellow, sometimes actually a criminal, was dressed up in royal robes.
He was feasted and honored, granted every known luxury; then he was stripped
of his royal garb and immediately executed.
As the festival went on, the ceremonies were meant to show that Marduk was
gradua I I Y P reva iii ng ove r the forces of death, and the I ast days of the twe I ve
were given over to wi Id rejoicing, as at the modern Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
The Babylonian festival observed an interesting custom. Masters and slaves
exchanged places; the slaves commanded, the masters obeyed.
Marduk and his fellow gods have long ago disappeared, but to this day —
in the Balkans, in Central Europe and in England — there is sti II an end-ofthe-
year festival of twelve days, with troops of masqueraders and carol-singers,
not so different from those which the ancient tablets depict as celebrating in
the streets of Baby Ion 4,000 years ago. Ch i I dren in the Ba I kans st i I I recl te
magic verses as did the chi Idren of Nineveh. Just as in old Babylon, a wooden
image of Marduk’s opponent was burned in a bonfire, so in Rumania and Bulgaria
a young man of the fami Iy chops down a speci a I tree and brings home the log to
bum in the fireplace with a definite, special ritual.
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Out of the land between the rivers the festival of the year’s renewal
spread westward — first to Greece, then to Rome. In ancient Italy the festival
was called the Saturnalia, in honor of Saturn, god of the seed-time. It belQan
about the middle of December and continued untl I the first of January. In Its
midst came December 25, the day, according to Roman calculation, when the sun
was seen for the shortest time, and after which he would appear longer and longer,
and impart strength to the grat Ing th Ings of earth.
When we cons I der that I t was the period of the Satumal ia, with Its emphasis
on December 25, that became our Christmas, it is somewhat Ironical that
the early Christians in Rome didn’t think much of the Satumalla. It probably
was a boisterous, h ilari ous kind of Mardi Gras. Yet modem schol ars be I ieve it
wasn’t so wi Id as early Christian: writers represented it. Most of the people
were simply merry, not debauched. They masqueraded in the streets, ate big
dinners, visited friends, and exchanged gifts. They decorated their houses
with boughs of laurel and other trees, with lighted candles and lamps. As master
of the festival and lord of the reve I they chose a slave, remindful of the
time 2,000 years before In Mesopotamia when masters and slaves exchanged places.
Now to the early Christians the most important thing that had ever happened
was the coming of Christ. It was the beginning of a new era. Although no one
knows for certa In the exact day on wh Ich Jesus was born, the ear Iy Christian fathers
settled on December 25. The bi rthday of Christ thus became in danger of
being swal lowed up In the pagan merry-making of the fbman Satumal la. So the
Christian fathers set out to make Christmas a strictly religious celebration.
Eventually the fbmans became Christians, but as we all know too well today, the
Satuma I la remained. The merry-making, the gl ft-giving, and finally the conmerclal
Izlng of the great Christian festival have done much to obscure Its true
significance. But thanks to the Christian Church — Protestant and Catholic – ..
peep Ie are every year reminded that December 25 Is more than a holiday, a holy
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day, the birthday of the Savior of Men.
The Roman Empire fell in ruins, but Christmas and Its festival did not die.
All through the Middle Ages it was remembered and observed. In all the medieval.
walled towns of Europe holly, Ivy and evergreens were str:ung up, candles
were I it, and mummers c lowned through the streets. The peop Ie chose ~Dot”·~~, ,
a mock king, as had the Babylonians 3,000 years before, but a lord of Misrule,
an Abbot of Unreason, who presided over the Feast of the Fools. The old fbman
Satumal ia was far fromltarned; the early Christian fathers would never have re”‘”
cognized this festival of the Middle Ages as the Christmas they intended.
All the Norse lands, where the Vi kings he Id sway a thousand years ago, seem
to ha ve known the bo is fa rous rout of the twe I ve nights. Those 01 d Norsemen knew
a vast di fference between summer and winter, far greater di fference than Mesopotamian
or Greek or Roman ever experienced.
By October the harvest was In, the cattle housed. Ahead stretcR the long
months of cold. There is not enough fodder for all the animals. It is time to
thin out the herds and preserve the meat. It is just the time to invite friends
and ne I ghbors to a feast. But some of the meat must be ofte red to the gods
to Odin and Freia; otherwise +hev wi II not give us a goodly new year.
Odin was the god of the ferocious Norse warriors, and he was the leader of
the Wutende Heer, the tumUltuous army host, perhaps best translated as the raging
rout. I n tenth century Norway It re fe rred to the who Ie season from Ha I 10000een
to the end of winter.
It was in Northern Europe that Santa Claus was born. They called him, as
you knOll, st. Nicholas. Unl ike our Santa Claus, the European st. Nicholas today
wears a broad-brimmed hat and rides a faithful olB white horse. In fact, to
European children St. Nicholas dces not come on Olristmas eve, but on the eve of
December 6th, which is known in many lands as st. Nicholas’ Night.
Interestingly enough there was a real st. Nicholas. He lived in the last
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quarter of the third and the first Quarter of the fourth centuries. Sti II a
young man, he was made Archbishop of Myre, and died on December 6,326. He is
the saint of sailors, for whom In danger he Is the last and only help. Since I
I n the m I dd Ie ages fIB rchants we re the us ua I passenge rs on sh Ips, St. N I cho I as
became the patron saint of merchant travelers. Even pirates claimed his protecti
on.
Somehow he became also the protector of chi Idren. He developed the habit
of slipping gifts to them in the dark of the night, and in lands where there
were big chimneys and open fi replaces, the story grew that he came down the
chimneys with his bag of gifts.
What was the origin of the Christmas tree? No one knows the rLgtJt answer,
but we do know enough about it to get rid of some of the wrong answers. One legendary
account of the Christmas tree has it that Martin Luther was out walking
one night, and seeing the stars as suggestion of lights, he placed candles on a
fl r tree to brighten up Christmas for his own chi Idren. Others have it that the
Yule log is the ancestor of the Christmas tree. An old medieval legend contends
it is the symbo I of the Tree of Ll fe that stood in the Garden of Eden. In
fact; as late as the 18th century, in parts of Germany one could buy little fig.:.:
urines of Adam and Eve and the serpent to p lace under the Christmas tree.
We now know that none of these theories about the origin of the Christmas
tree can be true. We know, for instance, just how the tree got mixed up with
Adam and Eve. December 24, on the medieval church calendar, was Adam and Eve’s
Day. As was customary with the miracle and mystery plays in the Middle Ages, the
legends of the Garden of Eden were p lay-acted in the castle court yard or the
market square. The actors trooped through the town, with Adam carrying the
Tree of Life, on which apples were hung. The Christmas tree itself is much
older than the Adam and Eve mystery plays, but It is easy to see how the Tree
of LI fe of the December 24th festi va I became mixed up with the Christmas tree
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of Decenter. 25th.
One th Ing we do know: the Christmas tree Is one certain contribution of
the common peop Ie to the features of Christmas. Not the church, not the nobi I.:..
Ity, not the legends of the meisterslngers or the gleemen, but the practice of
the peasants created the use of Ch’rlstmas trees. The fl rst printed reference
to what must have been long a custom is found in a forest ordinance in Alsace,
dated 1561, which says: “No peasant shall have for Christmas more than one bush
of more than e’ ght shoes’ length.” But an 0 I d book of 1605 has th I s sentence:
“At Christmas time In Strasburg fir trees are set up In the rooms, and on them
are hung roses cut from many-colored paper, app les, wafers, gl It and sugar.”
In many European countries the tree is not stood in a noom; It is hung, and
hangi ng the tree seems to be a very 01 d custom Indeed. A tree-ti p was hung sometimes
from the rafters, sometimes In the window, sometimes over the doorway, upside
down. Wherever it hung, the tree was always decorated in gay colors.
How did the Christmas tree come to America? It is pretty well authenticated
that no Christmas tree was set up in America until it was erected in the caRl>
of an enemy. For it was the Hessian soldiers, mercenaries of the British crown
in the American Revolution, who set up the first Christmas tree in Philadelphia
on the December 25th when Washington’s ragged army was close to starvation at
Val ley Forge. The Hessians had known the use of the Christmas tree in their
Ge rman home I and.
There is a lovely Viking legend which tells us that, sometime In the ninth
century, the Lord sent to earth his messengers, Faith, Hope and Charity, to select
the fi rst Christmas tree. They chose the bal sam fl r because it bore so
many crosses on every tree and branch, and it was high as hope and wide as
love.
But the most beautiful story of all comes out of medieval Germany. On a
Christmas eve long, long ago, says the story, a fierce blizzard raged about a
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woodsman’s cottage deep in a lonely forest clearing. A timid knock was heard
at the door. When the woodsman opened It, on the th resho I d stood a sma I I ch I I d,
hungry, cold, exhausted. The fami Iy took him In, warmed him, fed him, and put
him to bed. I n the morn I ng the ch i I d sa I d: “The re is noth I ng I can give you
beyond what you already have except one thing.” Then from a fir tree he broke
off a branch and handed It to the woodsman. “See this evergreen tree, how it is
green and al.ive at Christmas time, when all the world seems empty and dead. Let
it be to you a sign of faith that does not die.” And that, says the old story,
Is the way the, Christ chi Id chose the fl r as the fi rst Christmas tree.
*****
In the midst of our holiday festivities, let us not forget that a fervent,
almost desperate financial campaign Is sti II going on to save the American legion
Building. Operation Fescue Is now In charge of Harold Hersom. He and his
committee are working hard during these days when most of us are celebrating. It
is the bus I ness not on Iy of the veterans of two worl d wars, but of a II the
citizens of our community, to decide promptly and vigorously whether they want
a community building as a memorial to our soldier dead, or whether the building
must be turned over to commercial purposes. Doane Eaton woke people up to the
need. He started Operation Rescue. Now Harold Hersom is trying to rescue the
operation. Who is going to rescue him?
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LI TTLE TALKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
129th Broadcast December 30, 1951
Recently, when I was riding up and down an escalator In a Boston department
store, I got to Th Inking aboUT esca lator clauses In American industry. The me>tive
behind those escalator clauses, now affecting more than three mil lion workers,
Is laudable. It is, of course, an attempt TO keep real wages reasonably
in paee with money wages — That is, to keep the money received consistent with
the cost of commodities.
The PresidenT’s Council of Economic Advisors said, ”The maintenance of real
wages during inflaTion cannot in fairness be dlsal lowed.” thaT statement may
well be open to debate. In fact It might more truthfully be said that The maintenance
of real wages during inflation cannot be allowed.
By th Is tl me most peop Ie know why we are havl ng Inf latl on. S I nee we cannot
increase our total production fast enough to meet defense needs In addition to
clvi lian needs, That means increasing scarcity of goods in clvi lian demand. But
the money rece I ved by the workers for the product I on of defense materl als Is
·avallable In ever increasing amount to compete for the goods that are in scarce
supply. More money Is put inTO the hands of the people to buy less goods. So
prices go up. ThaT is inflation.
Now if anyone group of people enjoys wage escalators that automatically
gear wages to the cost of living, they enjoy discrimination aT the expense of
the rest of the people. If the favored group, having a retenTion of real wages,
can buy goods at i”f lated pri cas without any sacri fl ee, they are gi van unfai r advantage
over the many mill ions of other Americans. That is an unfai r distribUtion
of the sacri fices we are al I expected to make because of defense mooi Ilza …
tlon.
The on Iy rea I I y fai r way to hand Ie inf lation I s to prevent it. But once
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it is under way, the burdens should be reasonablv distributed among al I groups
of our peop Ie.
*****
let us take another look toni ght into that old Subscri ber’s Bus i ness Di rectory
of 1861. That is the book which fl rst came to my attention through Mrs.
Theodore Kloss showing me her copy In which were pasted those Interesting cooking
recl pes.
same book.
Then Mr. lewis Whipple shQled me a complete, unmutllated copy of the
I t was then that I learned the book had apparent Iy been pub fished
through subscriptions, and that only those business and professional men who
subscribed got their names in the book.
What was my delight to find under Bridgton the name of Dixie Stone, dry and
West India goods, groceries, paints, 01 Is, and crockery. Dixie Stone was the
man who, for more than fl fTY years, conducted the store that came into my father’s
hands in 1890. It was Dixie who used to bring Jamaica rum up through the Presumpscot
Canal and over the lakes to Bridgton landing. I never heard of his seiling
gingerbread, as did that merchant down In Augusta early In the century, but
before Maine adopted prohibition in 1851 he certainly sold a lot of Jamaica rum.
By the time my father acqui red the store, that business was done. The nearest he
came TO it was J,amaica ginger.
What would strike many of us today as strange, even eccentric, was my father’s
prejudice against cigarettes. All his life he never smoked and never Touched liquor.
But in his store he sold plug tobacco, twist tobacco, fine cut tobacco, and
cigars. But no cigarettes. No sir, not one of those coffin nails would go over
his counter. By the time when he closed out the business in 1912 and moved to
Massachusetts, cigarette smoking had become common and accepted, but sti II no cigaretTe
was ever sold in that store as long as he owned it.
Eccentric as it all seems today, it would take a very bold man to assert
unreservedly that my father was wrong. What has the cigarette really added to
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American clv’ I I zat i on?
Now let’s get back to the Subscribers’ Directory. Here’s a look at the
Waterville pages. The listof those subscribers Is lead by Edwin Noyes, Supt.
of the A. K. and P. K. R. R. The second name is that lawyer whose 4ger diary
entertained us a few weeks ago, Solyman Heath. Other names are N. K. Boutelle,
physician; John Ware, President, A. K. and P. K. R. R.; A. A. Plaisted, cashier
of Tlcon Ic Bank; Webber and Hav! land, i ron founders; C. K. Mathews, brother of
the man whan Dr. Coolidge murdered; C. Wi lIiams, proprietor of the Wi lIiams
House, where the autopsy on Ed Mathews’ body was performed. Some unusual occupations
in the Waterville list are George H. Atkins, oyster saloon; S. C. Lassell,
forger for locomoti ves; Laforest Simpson, gunsml th.
Down In Vassalboro some of the labe Is were even more unusual. Everybody
knew the boat builder, J. D. Lang, who is I isted simply as manufacturer. But who
remembers Henry Goddard, mop handle man; Hi ram [be, plowman; and T. B. Nichols,
egg man?
Believe it or not, in the Sidney list is a man labeled as shipmaster. He
was Charles Coffin.
Page 121 was missing from Mrs. Kloss’ copy of the directory; so when I referred
to the Fairfield subscribers listed on page 120 knew nothing about
those on the missing page follOWing. Mr. Whipple’s copy brought them to light.
There I found myoid acquaintance of the Bryant diary, Wi lIiam’s oldest son Cyrus,
who is I isted in 1861 as farmer. John P. Connor is given the same occupation.
George Woodworth was then the Fairfield station agent and John Nobel was postmaster.
Unusual occupations showed up in Fairfield as well as in other towns.
H. B. Maynard was bateau bu i I der and Henry Coil um was ti np late worker. Dan ie I
Chase is listed simply as captain.
Up I n Skowhegan Coburn and Wyman were the most prominent attorneys. Abner
Coburn, benefactor of Coburn Classical Institute and one-time governor of Maine,
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was president of the Skowhegan Bank. Alonzo Coburn, on the other hand, is listed
simply as fanner. The town had a saddler, William Tucker.
Recall ing the wonderful trips I used to have as a boy, going with my father
to the wholesale grocery houses in Portland, I was curious to see which of
those fi rms knew so well at the turn of the century were In existence as long
ago as 1861. I found Just one company that had the same name In 1861 that it had
in 1900 — Charles McLaughlin and Co. But the beginnings of other familiar firms
were apparent in the earlier names. J. and D. W. True was of course the later
D. W. True Co. Davis, Twitchell and Chapman became the Twitchell Chaplin Co. W.
and C. R. Mi II i ken turned into the Mi III ken Tom I inson Co.
It is interesting to note that at least four business houses operating in
Portland in 1861 are sti II operating there under the same names 90 years later in
1951. They are Kenqall and Whitney, Emery and Waterhouse, James Bailey an’dCa.
and H. H. Hay.
was p leased to note among the names of Portland attorneys one Watervi lie
man and another who had a lot to do with Watervi lIe a dozen years before. The
first was Josiah Drurrmond,one of the most famous of Waterville attorneys, and
the outstanding Masonic leader of Maine, who by 1860 had moved to Portland. The
other was George Evans, the Gardiner attorney who had defended Coolidge at the
murder trial of 1848.
Of the eleven Portland hotels listed in the 1861 directory Just one is in
existence today — the Falmouth. The old U. S. Hotel is now the Edwards and
Walker store In Monument Square, and the Preble House was torn down to make way
for a business block. I have no idea what became of the American House, the International
House, and the Commercial House, to say nothing of George Hay’s Temperance
House, J. P. Miller’s Albion House, and John Holtt’s Grand Trunk House.
My paterna I grandmother was a Dyer, and th Is 0 I d directory 9i ves a lot of
space to both the Dyers and the Marriners at Cape Elizabeth. Silas and George
3-166
Marri ner were bOTh sh i pbull ders; Jabez Marriner kept the genera I store; Mi Iton
Dyer was town clerk, but a II the other nine Dyers named In the di rectory were
farmers.
In the Gorham section of the directory 1 found the name of my maternal
great-grandfather, Eben Blake, and of his father Ithial Blake. I never knew
great-grandfather Eben, but I did know his wUe, great-grandmoTher Sa·r.ah, who
Ii ved to the age of 92, when I myse 1 f was 12 years 01 d. She was a great story . r’
teller about the old days in what was then wi ldemess at West Gorham, and some
of her most thri 1 ling yams concerned great-grandfather Eben’s experiences driv
ng an ox-team between Standish and Portland. Once, according to her account,
a wi Idcat attacked the oxen; on another tri p the team was stal ked for miles by
wol ves. But somehow great-grandfather a Iways managed to come through Slafe.
In 1860 no less than five railroad lines ran out of Portland: the Grand
Trunk with a staTion on India Street; the Portland, Sam and Portsmouth, with
its depot on Commerci a I Street; the Kennebec and Portland, wh I dl had Its sta ..
tlon on Kennebec Street close by the station of the York and Cumberland on the
same street; and the Androscoggin aAd Kennebec, which used the Grand· Trunk station
on India Street. This was long before the days of Portland’s Union Station,
and in fact before the bui Idlng of the Portland and Ogdensburgll which became the
Mountain Division of the Maine Central.
***~~
It’s a long time since said anythIng on this program about my favorite sub~
ject of word origins and word uses. Let’s turn to a few of those tonight.
The word staTionery, strangely enough ll originates from a custom when few people
could read and write. Scriveners — often they were clerical monks — set
up what they ca lied stations I n the churchyards and market squares, where they
read letters ser:1T to people who could not read, and wrote letters at the people’s
dictation. In time, as more people learned to write, paper and other materials
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were sold at these stations, and the dealers became known as stationers.
The word academy had its origin In Greek mythology. Helen, stolen by Theseus
I was recovered by Leda, her mother, wi th the aid of an Athen ian named Academus.
The gratefu I Spa rtans purchased a grove on the outski rts of Athens and
presented it to their benefactor. It later became a public garden called the
Grove of Academus. Late in the fourth century before Christ, Plato lived in a
house adjoining this grove, where he often walked and talked with his pupils.
He did th i s for forty years; so peop Ie came to ca II Plato’s schoo I the Academi a,
academy.
One of the interesting things that has happened to a few English words concerns
nouns beginning with N. As time went on the initial N of a few of these
nouns was slipped off to join the article Aj hence a napron became an apron, a
nauger became an auger, and a numplre an umpire. Even adder used to be nadder.
Do you know how we got the term blackmail? It was this way. Robbers along
the Engl ish-Scottish border levied tribute on merchants and travelers in exchange
for protection. In Scotland the term for rent was mail. Rent or mail
might be paid In silver, orin cattle or grain. Si Iver rent was white mall. Payment
in cattle or grain was black mai I. These robbers preferred payment In cattle
and grain, to feed their men and horses. Hence enforced payment for protection
or the withholding of damaging information came to be called blackmail.
Most people know that the King James Bible, in the thirteenth chapter of
First Corinthians, says “faith, hope, charity”, whereas the revised versions say
“faith, hope, love”. Clearly what we understand by spiritual love comes much
nearer the mean lng than does the word charity. How did chari ty ever get into
the trans I ati on I n the first p lace? The Greek word Is agape. When St. Jerome
trans I ated the New Testament into Lat! n in the fourth century, he was determined
to avoid the Latin amor as a translation of agape, because in Latin amor was
not only the general word for love, but also represented the God of erotic
3-168
passion. So Jerome subst’rtuted carltas — a very unfortunate choice, because
in 4th century latin it was a colorless, vague word, simp Iy a substantive from
the adject i ve cara, dear or precl ous — so that the usua I mean I ng of carl tas was
dearness or preciousness.
Fran caritas we get our English word charity, which has always meant about
What It means today — the merciful giving of alms.
The term criss-cross Is of extreme Iy Interesting orig in. You probably knO*
the old folded boards from which children learned the alphabet two centuries ago
were called hom books. Invariably the first-fold was decorated with a cross. It
was usually placed Just before the letter A. Sometimes the whole alphabet was
ar-nanged In the form of a cross. The cross ttse I f was called the Olrlst cross,
to distinguish it fran the letters that followed, and the row of letters forming
the alphabet was called the Christ Cross row. Just as tn the modem pronunciations
of Chris-tian, Christmas and Christopher, Christ Cross was always prooounced
criss-cross. Ultimately It took on the meaning of a series of crossing lines.
Some words of dignified meaning today had very low origil’ls. The next time
you hear anyone bragging about being a constable, remind him that the word origina
Ily meant tender of the stab Ie, and when you see anyone perked up about being
a steward, tell him the first stewards were sty wards, keepers of the pigs.
And with -these words about wo rds, we bid you goodn i ght •
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LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
130th Broadcast
As we enter into.,the new year of 1952, It seems as if public “”,rality had
never sunk so low. The scandals in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. the influence
peddlers in Washington, the raw deals in the RFC, al I bring to light a
condition of graft and corrupti,on that extends widely through our government.,
Why is this the case? What is happening to personal confidence and public trust?
I t takes ne i ther a soci a I ana Iyst nor a psych I atri st to te II us what is
fundamentally the trouble. It is the old story of human greed and human frai Ity,
but it is a new story of the kind and quantity of temptation. It is the price -an
extremely high price — that we are thus paying for the extension of government
power into almost every phase of our lives.
We have no excuse for the businessman who bribes a public official or even
one who pays fees to the five percenters who claim influence in the agencies or
even I n the Whi te House I tse If. We do not excuse; we mere I y seek to exp I ai n why
the temptation placed upon them is greater than businessmen have ever known before.
Today a businessman can be fined or sent to jai I for working his employees
too long, for paying them either; too much money or not enough, for charging too
high prices. He can be given or denied loans. He can prosper with the help of
government al lotted materials or go broke because the materials are denied him.
His tax deductions for business expenses can be accepted or turned down. Intricate
laws govern his business activities.
Now the point is “that all of these regulations over the businessman are administered
by human beings persons who can be harsh or lenient, watchful or
neglectful, play fair or play favorites.
To “the bus i nessman a contract or tax adjustment may mean thousands of dol-
3-170
lars. It may keep him in business or drive him out of it. How great then is the
temptation to use a favor or a fee where the hand of an equa Ily human and fa I Ii
b Ie off i c I a lis ready to rece I ve It.
Meanwhi Ie the government I tse If is spendl ng bl “Ions upon b I “Ions in the
armament program. The present Truman administration in six short years has spent
304 billions. Congressional Investigations have shown that by no means all of
the orders rep resented by these b I I lions were p I aced on merl t or for the lowest
price. Those investigations have all too clearly revealed that, as spending
grows, political pull, strategically placed mink coats, TV sets, airplane trips,
and free vacations accompany the growth.
Of course we need a deeper sense of moral I ntegrlty in pub Ilc life. But let
us not forget that it gets harder and harder to maintain that integrity if we
keep on putting more and more power in the hands of government officials. As men
in the Wash I ngton agenci es get more and more opportun I ty to reward or p un I sh ,
more and more control over the datdy lives of all of us, the greater Is the temptation
to reach those officials by favors, gifts, or outright bribes.
It is not a pretty picture that the investigators are turning up day by day:
the picture of unsavory Individuals, some even with prison records, able to get
choice licenses, able to line up scarce materials, because they are very chummy
with officials of high rank. Not only must we try to have honest officials; we
must also find some way to keep so many officials from getting so much power.
*****
Thi sis the year when we ce leb rate the 150th ann I versary of the i ncorporatlon
of Watervi lie as a town. The Citizens Conmlttee of 100, appointed by the
outgoi ng mayor I Hon. Russe II Squl re, under authorl ty voted by the Ci ty Government,
will hold Its first meeting In the administration of the new mayor, Hon. Richard
Dubord. That meeting wi II be held in the Municipal Court Room, City Hall, Thurs-
3-171
day evening of this week at 7:30. It is an II’fl)0rtant meeting, for the committee
must decide what kind of celebration shall be attempted, when it· shall be held,
and of what the program shall consist. Every member of the committee should make
a spec I a I effort to be present.
*****
As a chi Id I somehow escaped what so many of my conte~oraries endured -repeated
doses of Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup. We nCffl know that this patent
medicine never cured anything, that it simply drugged infants into such a stupor
that they stopped cryi ng. But our grandmothers certain Iy swore by it.
A I ittle booklet called Mrs. Wins low’s Domestic Receipt Book was recently
shown me by Mrs. Mary Stob ie. I tis for the year 1876, though the i nscrl pti on
reads: “This book wi II be Issued annually, with entirely new receipts. By preservl
ng the I ssues and sewi ng them together, you will have I n a few years the
best collection of receipts in the country.”
On the Inside cover the old-time remedy Is heralded with these words: “Mother!
Mother! Mother! Are you disturbed at night and broken of your rest by a
sick chi Id suffering and crying with the excrutiatlng pain of cutting teeth? If
so, go out at once and get a bottle of Mrs. Wins low’s Soothing Syrup. It wi II
relieve the poor little sufferer immediately — depend upon it. It gives rest to
the moTher and relief and health to the chi Id, operating like maolc.”
The book let seems to have been the joint prt>duct of Jeremiah Curti s & Sons
and John L. Brown & Sons, both of whom he I d severa I patents for madi ci nes. So we
find Brown’s Bronchial Troches for coughs and colds, especially recommended for
singers and public speakers; Brown’s Vermifuge Comfits and Worm lozenges, guaranteed
to get worms out of chi Idren’s intestine.1 tracts; and Brown’s Household
Panacea and Family Liniment, which was sure to cure cramp in the limbs, rheumatism
in all Its forms, neuralgia, worms, tooth ache, sore throat, pain in the
stomach, bi Iious col ic, cholera, chapped hands, spinal comPlaints, chills and
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fever. It was, says the ad, purely vegetable and all-healing.
Now let’s take a look at some of the recipes in this 1876 publ icatlon. Some
of them certainly provided for healthy appetites of big fami lies. Here, for instance,
are the Ingredients of a single cake: one pound of flour, one pound of
butter, one pound of brown sugar, ten eggs, two pounds of currants, one-half
pound of cl tron, nutmeg and cinnamon to taste.
Here’s another cake: one pound of flour, one pound of sugar, one-half
pound of butter, four eggs, one cup of cream, one pound of raisins, nutmeg and
cl nnamon.
Here’s one ca lied imperl a I cake: one pound of flour, one pound of sugar,
one pound of butter, one pound of raisins, stoned and chopped, one -half pound
of blanched almonds, one-quarter pound of ci tron, eight eggs, two g lasses of
Wine.
These were all what we would call fruit cakes and expected to be rather
rich, but qere is one with no fruit at all. It is called Rai I road Cake: one
pound of flour, one pound of sugar, eight eggs, one-half pound of butter, one
teaspoon cream of tartar.
How many of you ever heard of pork and apple pie? Here is the recipe: line
a tin basin with pastry. Nearly fl II It with quartered apples; spice with pepper,
and cover with thin slices of salt pork. Put a paste on top and bake an
hour I n a mode rate oven.
Among the miscellaneous — not the cooking — recipes is this one: How to
cure sma II pox without ca I ling a doctor. For adu Its gl ve one tab lespoon of
brewer’s yeast in 3 tab lespoons of sweetened wate r th ree t I mas a day, and keep
the patient on a mi Ik diet. Th is wi II cure without leaving a pock mark.
What a time our grandparents used to have with tough meat! No wonder the
old recipe books contain many d I recti ons for tenderl zing meat. Here is one: To
those who have worn down their teeth masticating poor, old, tough, cow beef, we
3-173
wi II say that carbonate of soda will be found a remedy for the e’li I. Try it, all
you who love delicious, tender dishes of beef.
Apparently artl ficfal coloring of butter was uncommon in 1876. A quarter of
a century later I can remember some of the colorless butter that came into my
father’s store from the surrounding farms, but by that time'” the best butter
makers were using the vegetable coloring that came In small bottles. But back
in 1876 we find this recipe to make ye Ilow butter in winter: put in the yolks
of eggs just before the butter comes, near the end of the churning. This practice
is kept by many as a great secret, but its great value requires publicity.
That centennl a I year of 1876 was a year of financia I depress ion. Consequently
we are not surprised to find in the booklet this heading: “A Few Hints
for Hard Times”. Here are the hints: Rutabaga, grated and prepared as you dp
cabbage, makes an excellent substitute for that article. Today, when cabbage is
about as cheap as turnips, that advice strikes us as strange.
Here’s another: pumpkin pies can be made wlthout”‘- mt Ik, by using water instead.
We think they are as good as when made of milk. Custards can also be
made with water, instead of mi Ikj also puddings, especially the baked India
pudd I ng. Just add a few pieces of butter.
Did you ever hear of “almacks”? I cannot find the word in any dictionary.
Anyhow, here In the 1876 Receipt Book is a redpe for almacks: Take 4 dozen
rl pe plums and sp lit them; two dozen app les and two dozen pears, pee led and
cored. Stew all together without water. When well b~tended, take out the
plum stones and stir in three’~ pounds of sugar. Boi I gently, stf rring often,
for an hour. Then spread on flat di shes, and dry et ther in the sun or in a cool
oven. When nearly dry, mark it in square cakes. Sounds rather good at that,
those a I macks.
*****
~ome ti me ago on “th is program I referred to the Canada Road. At that time
3-174
I did not know it was Lewis Whipple’s grand uncle, Jim Jackman, who supervised
the clearing of that famous road in 1828.
Before that date cattle raised in the settlements north of Skowhegan, as
we II as those a II a long the Kennebec down to Merrymeeting Bay, were dri ven to
the Brighton Market near Boston. For Instance in 1817 when Abner Coburn, the
benefactor of Coburn Classical Institute, was 14 years old, his father collected
a drove of catt Ie in the settlements above S,kowhe:gan, and young Abner was one
of the drovers, trudging on foot from Skowhegan to Boston and back home again.
Not unti I Uncle Jim Jackman cleared the Canada Road from The Forks north of
the Bingham Purchase to the Canadian line, and a road was brought south from the
St. Lawrence to meet it, were Somerset cattle driven to the nearer and more
profitable Quebec market.
In 1827 the Maine Legislature appropriated money and contracted with Uncle
Jim Jackman to supervise the road building. Sumner Wh ipp Ie, who was born in
1817 and lived unti I 1902, wrote for the old Somerset Reporter several articles
about the old days in what is now Jackman. He says he was told the following incident
by an old man, Charles Grant, who as a young fellow had worked on the
road.
When the job was nearing the Canadian I ine and they were getting an opening
wide enough for a team to go th rough, the crew ran short of rum. Capt. Jackman
— as Uncle Jim was usually called — ordered a man to go to Canada for a supply.
The man returned wi th a barre I of rum and there was rejoicing in the camp. It was
a very hot day, and the sun was pouring down into the opening they had cut in
the forest, and the work of removing roots, stumps and boulders was arduous. The
men de~nded frequent rest. But Capt. Jackman kept them going with, “Boys,
we’ll take another dri nk of rum and then a II get to work, because we must hurry
up and finish this road. We must have it to get the silver through. We need
that si Iver very much.”
3-175
The reference to silver is verified by SurmerWhipple’s recorded memories
of his own ch I I dhood • “The Humph reys, then II v I n9 InS kowhegan”, he w rote In
one of those old Somerset Reporter articles, “dealt in horses and cattle. As
they came horne from Quebec they s topped at father’s a I I night. When they came
in, they brought thei r saddle bags. In the evening they talked of the succsss
who! ch was I n the sadd Ie bags, all in s i I ver. The ch I I dren had to see I f they
could lift It. I, being the oldest of a large family, could do so ($1,000 In
silver weighs approximately 64 pounds), but when about half way down the line
of children they came toone who could not 11ft it, nor could any of the smaller
ones. ”
Not only cattle, but dried app les and other produce went over the new road
to be exchanged for precious si Iver in Quebec. In lent the Maine fishermen
reaped a harwst, for Sumner Whipple tells us, “Then the Frenchmen, unable to
eat meat during the 40 days of Lent, came in long trains to purchase our cured
and ~alted fish.”
Captain J 1m Jack..” after the road was built, saw the need for a tavern
in that region. So he bui It a house in the southeast part of Jackman Plantation,
sawing out the boards with a whipsaw — a very slow procsss. Here he
Ilwd for 15 years. After he was 75 years old he went to California, but returned
after a few years, settled up his affairs in Maine, and went to Kansas
to live with his daughter, Mrs. Solon Ward. There he died at the age of 83.
AI I that is left of J 1m Jackman’s 01 d home bes I de the Quebec highway, a
short di stance beyond Parlin Pond, Is a c:e liar hole. The once cult I vated
fields have reverted to wi Iderness, but along the Canadian border, men say,
sti II sta Iks the ghost of J 1m Jackman, shouting to his road crew, “Hurry up, we
must f In I sh the road and get the silver through.”
3-176
LITTLE TALKS ON COMKlN THINGS
131st Broadcast January 13, 1952
It looks as if we are In for another round in the spiral of inflation, as
wages and prices chase each other upward. As raises and bonuses go to Industrial
workers, it Is hard for the boss to get any credit for the raJ1se. All the
boss does Is pay the bill. Because of recent federal laws, it Is no longer possible
for an employer, with a union in his plant, to pay a Christmas bonus of
his own free will. He cannot raise wages, share profits, or pass out other benefits
to his workers on his own volition. He must first consult the union. If
he doesn’t, he may find the government on his neck.
It Is even questionable whether an employer can present Christmas hams or
turkeys to his employees. It all depends on how the NUB interprets its atn rulings.
The ruling says an employer is free to make a genuine Christmas gift,
but It does not say how much he can spend for It before he begins to break the
ru les.
A genul ne ra i se can a Iso get an emp lover in wrong with NU~. I f wage ta I ks
are deadlocked, he cannot give a pay raise untl I the deadlock Is broken. Even a
raise required by law to meet the minimum pay rule of the Wage-Hour Act may have
to be discussed with the union. More than once the NUB has Insisted that, before
bringing the pay rate up to the 75 cent minimum, the employer must first
notify the union, thus giving the union a chance to get credJet for the raise.
Now this radio program is not opposed to organized labor. We believe that
organizations of workers and organizations of employers are both Justified In
our modern industrial society. What we are talking about is the increasing tendency
for government to give all the benefits to one side. Equal treatment of
both employers and workers Is the only hope of halting the upward inflation
sp I ra I of wages and prl ces.
3-177
*****
This program devotes so much time to the good old days, f suppose many of
you think I long for those old days to return again. Not so, I assure you. The
other night, as I was putting up my car, I thought how simpler It was than put.,.
tl ng up my veh I cle of 40 years ago. I wou Id get tack from that 01 d grocery
route from Bridgton to Sandy Creek after seven o’clock, and before I could have
my supper I must wash off the ice-crusted fetlocks of the horse, put a double
blanket on him, warm h Is mash and feed h 1m. Then I must water him and bed him·
down before I could go to bed myself, completely exhausted — because that old
nag and I had started out together at ha I f past s r x on that wi nter morn I ng.
An automobile eats a lot when it Is traveling, but It doesn’t eat and
doesn’t need bedding down when Its trip is done. What Is more, a horse wasn’t
something you could park like a car beside the curb and, barring thieves, be
sure to find It when you returned. You had to tie a horse to a hitching post or
a tree, and If you tried the latter, the tree’s atner might sue you for damages,
for, un” ke a car, a horse will gnaw at a tree trunk. And the 01 d-sty Ie hi teh”,
Ing weight wasn’t always securllty. We had one old gray mare who would drag a
twelve pound weight with her mouth, a quarter of a mile while the driver was deIi
verlng a sing Ie basket of groceries.
How would the average citizen of 1952 like to go back to the days of perpendicular
roads, unmanageable horses, and the occasional hazard of parachut-
I ng out of the wagon seat? A II was not s unsh I ne and roses I n the good 0 I d days.
*****
Nevertheless we are going to keep right on talking about some of the interesting
happenings of the long, long ago.
Last week we told you about the building of the Canada Road from The Forks
to the Canadian line above Jackman. That leads us to a discussloo of some of the
old stage routes and highway connect ions I n other parts of Maine before the
3-178
comi ng of the ra II roads. You wi II reca II that I t was not unt, I 1842 that the
railroad reached Portland, six years later when it got as far as Lewiston, and
almost exactly the mid-century, December 1849, when it reached Watervi lie.
By what routes did people travel early in the century? That 1813 almanac,
to which I referred a few weeks ago, gives the route from Portland to Caratunk
Falls, and it is quite a different route from the way one would travel between
the two places today. It didn’t go anywhere near either Brunswick or Lewiston.
It went from Portland to Falmouth to Gray, then to New Gloucester, Poland and
Minot. From there it went to Tumer, Livermore and Jay; then to Wi I ton ,and Farmington;
then to Mercer and St)arks, and on to Norridgewock, Anson and Caratunk
Falls. Notice that the route never crossed the Kennebec, but kept west of the
rive r a I I the way.
The most favored route from Boston to Bangor was called the Upper Road. It
went through Medford, ~ading, Andover, Haverhl II, Plaistow, KI ngston and Exete
r — a common route today — then across to Portsmouth, by fe rry ove r the PI scataqua
to Kittery, and over the old post road through York, Wells, Kennebunk,
Saco and Scarboro to Portland. Then It followed the st! II well known route to
Falmouth, North Yannouth, Freeport, Brunswick, Topsham, Bowdoin, Gardiner, Hallowell
and Augusta. But it did_not pass tlirough ~elther’-Waterville or Winslow.
At Vassalboro it turned east to Harlem (what Is now called China Village), from
there to Fa i rfax (modem A Ib Ion), then to Un Ity, then over the Di xmont Hi 115 to
Hampden and Bangor. The distance from Boston to Bangor by that route was 234
mi les.
By 1813, however, the almanac was announcfng that the best road from Boston
to Portland was not the Upper Road, but a newer route, past Lynnfield Hotel,
Topsfield Hotel, Newburyport, Hampton Falls, Greenland, Dover, Somersworth, Berwi
ck, ():)UghTY’S Fa lis, We lis, Kennebunk, Saco and Stroudwater — 112 mi les from
Boston to Portland — almost exactly the mi leage of the old Eastern Division of
3-179
the Boston and Ma i ne •
As long ago as 1813, seven years before it became a separate state, Maine
was al ready prosperous. Its seven banks had capital of $1,320,000. Its 87 post
offices did a good business. Education had taken finn hold, for there were already
19 academies, situated at Berwick, Limerick, Portland, Bridgton, Gorham,
Wiscasset, Warren, Newcastle, Bath, Hampden, Be I fast, BI ueh III, Fryeburg, Hebron,
Hallowell, Bloomfield, Monmouth, and Farmington.
In that part of Massachusetts whf,ch is In the territory of the present
Commonwea Ith, there were 14 counties and 296 tams in 1813. It Is a I most incredible
to note that Maine then had more than two thirds as many towns, 204,
and more than half as many counties, eight. Every Maine school chIld knows that
our state now has sixteen counties. What were the eight counties In 18131 They
were, in order fran the New Hampshi re border, York, Cumberland, Uncoln, Oxford,
Kennebec, Somerset, Hancock and Washington.
Kennebec County then had 31 towns, the names of some of which sound very
strange 10 modem ears. Yes — rl ght here In Kennebec County were the towns of
Dearborn, Fairfax, Harlem, Kingsville and Malta. In 1813 Kennebec also includedsome
of the prominent towns now in Franklin County1: Farmington, Wi Iton,
Cheste rvi lie and Temp Ie.
Travel was so difficult in 1813 that the county courts were held not merely
at the county seats, but at several places In each county. In Kennebec, for
instance, 1813 sessions of court were scheduled for Augusta, Monmouth, Mt. Vernon,
Readfield, Waterville, Winslow and Vassalboro. The Somerset courts sat at
Norridgewock and Canaan, not at Bloomfield — for Norridgewock was then the
county seat. The Lincoln county courts were widely scattered, sitting at Wiscasset,
Newcastle, Wa I doboro, Warren, Dresden, Bath and Topsham.
*****
Some of those old academies mentioned In 1813 were sti II going strong half
3-180
a century later. In that 1860 directory we referred to a few weeks ago is an
advertisement of Gorham Seminary — a gl rls’ school fomed to comp lement the
old Gorham Academy. That old academy building, by the way, stili stands, pretty
m\JCh Intact, on the grounds of the present State Teachers College at Gorham.
That 1861 seminary ad Is quaintly fascinating. listen:
‘~y an aCT of the last legislature the Maine Female Seminary and Gorham
Ma Ie Academy have become one Inst Itutlon known as Gorham Seminary. The seminary
bui Iding wi II, as heretofore, be a boarding school for· young ladies, as the union
is to effect only recitations and other general exercises. The building Is
heated ent Ire Iy by furnaces, from wh Ich hot at r Is takeD–to each r:oom separate Iy,
thus obviating the {nconvenience of stoves, and securing a more equable and more
healthy temperature. The school year Is divided into four terms of eleven weeks
each. J. B. Webb, principal. tt
*****
After the rai I road was pushed beyond Port land Into Central Maine, the ads
proudly announced how fast a person could go from one point to another. In that
1860 directory a Boston and Maine ad said: “Portland and Boston. Two trains
dally In each direction. Leave Portland 8:45 A.M. and 2:30 P.M.; leave Boston
7:30 A.M. and 2:30 P.M.” Now qet this: “On Saturdays passengers on the 2:30
t ra I n from Boston can go as far as Augusta the same night.”
But in 1860 the favorite mode of travel between Maine and Boston was not
ra i I road but steamboat. The Portland and Boston Steamboat Line advertised its
three new sea-golng steamers, the Forest City, the Lewiston and the Montreal.
The fare between Portland and Boston was $1.25 In cabin, $1 .00 on deck.
Even 1860, to say nothing of 1813, was before the days of Standard Time.
That 1860 dl rectory gives the follOo·ling local time as faster than Port I and time:
Augusta 1 minute, 39 seconds; Watervl lie 2 minutes, 16 seconds; Bangor 5 minutes,
50 seconds; Houlton 9 minutes, 32 seconds; and Eastport 13 minutes, 10 seconds.
3-181
Even Cape Elizabeth’s and Yarmouth’s ti~s are glwn as different fran Portland’s,
the former 13 seconds faster, the latter 16 se:conds •. -~,– .. –:f-
Of times given as slower than Portland, Saeo was 44 seconds, KennebUnk 55
seconds, with Boston s lower by 3 minutes, 15 seconds.
My native town of Bridgton, according to the statistics in the 1860 directory,
had lost population in the ten years since 1850, failing from 2,710 to
2,558. But the 01 d town had 402 oxen as compared wi th 232 horses and 597 mi Ik
cows.
Watervi I Ie, on the other hand, had Increased its population from 3,900 to
4,400. It was one of The few towns east of Portland that, In 1860, had more
horses than oxen — 370 to 340. It had not so many milk cows as had Bridgton,
only 589, but It raised nearly three times Bridgton’s production of wool
8,867 pounds to 2,300. Watervi lie just edged out frriI native town in the production
of cheese, 10,500 pounds to 10,395. But Bridgton was ahead In the produc-i
tlon of butter, 54,785 pounds to 53,105.
A tremendous amount of butter came from those 01 d farm chums In 1860. I became
curious to see wh I ch was the I argest butter-producing town at that time In
Maine. You would never guess. It was the tiny town of Greenwood — a tewn which
many central Maine people have never heard of,-though many folks know two of the
, .~. .
town’s vUlages, BryanT’s Pond and Locke’s Mills. Yes, it is the little town
between Paris and Bethel. That town of Greenwood, which had only 878 people in
1860, produced and marketed 171,828 pounds of butter in a single year, 195
pounds for every man, woman and chi Id in the town. Second came Waldoboro with
129,000pounds; third was Augusta wiTh 107,000. Then came Wells, over in York
County, with 95,000; Then Gorham with 91,000; and sixth was Vassalboro with
84,000. Those six towns alone pnoduced 678,000 pounds of butter.
3-182
llTILE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
132nd Broadcast January 20, 1952
Not al I the scandals about the income tax concern the Collectors of Internal
Revenue and their employees. Among the tax payers themselves are plenty of
crooks. Tax ch i se If ng is big bUS iness. I t costs the government a b i ilion and
a half dol lars every year. The Investigations, long overdue, are at last making
ita II too c I ear that ce rta I n taxpayers who know the ropes, or at leas t who know
the right people, have been managing to beat the tax laws year after year.
Now the tax dodger’s work Is comi ng out I nto the open for a II of us to see.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue is now wise to most of the tricks, and U. S.
News and World Report issues a timely warning that anyone who thinks he can get
away with it Is in for an unhappy surprise. Inflating deductible business costs,
side payments that fail to show up in business records, under-counter -dealings,
cash transactions without the passing of any paper, kick-backs from salaried
employees — these and many other sharp practices are well known to the revenue
offl cers.
But even if you can get away with it, think twice before you try it. Suppose
every citizen in America were that kind of cheater. What sort of nation
would we then have?
*****
I am interested to learn that the Watervi lie Rotary Club wi II produce, with
local talent, next Wednesday evening in the American legion Bui Idlng, that exciting
popular play “The Night of January 16th”. My own interest in that play
stems from the fact that it marked my one and only personal appearance on the
stage of the lakewood Theater. When ”The Ni ght of January 16th” was produced
there, a few years ago, I was chosen to serve as foreman of the Jury on the
opening night. Yes, the Jury for that play is chosen from the audience. Who wi II
3-183
be the twelve members of the jury when Rotary puts on the play next Wednesday
eveni ng?
*****
One of the richest mines of historical information about the Kennebec Valley
has been accumulated through the years in the home of Arthur Ellis of Fairfield.
Before her death a few years ago Mrs. Ellis was one of the region’s best
known historians and genealogists. She collected, arranged, and preserved many
precious documents of the old days.
It was my privi lege a few weeks ago to spend an afternoon with Mr. EI lis
— a very rewa~dingexp~r}Eince. Thou9h_ nea,:_’ y_ 85 years 0 I d, Mr. Ell is reta i ns
an alert mind and an extraordinary memory for facts, names and relationships
of long ago. Living in the house where he was born in 1863, Mr. Ellis is sur~
rounded by hundreds of mementos of the old days — the cruel looking gadget with
which his great-grandfather used to pul I teeth, scrap books galore, legal documents
and letters that go back more than a hundred years.
Mr. Ellis’ mother was a Howard, and her grand:f;ather — Mr. Ellis’ great—::-i
grandfather — was one of the most prominent residents of Sidney in the early
days, Dr. Ambrose Howard. Genealogists have long known that the family names of
Howard and Hayward are the same. In the year 1635 two brothers, John and James
Hayward came from Somersetshlre, England to what is now Danbury, Mass. Soon John
went to I ive in Bridgewater in the family of Captain Mi les Standish. James went
to Bermuda and was never heard from again.
John Hayward’s son Jonathan was a major of mi litla. His son Abia’ graduated
from Harvard in 1729 and became a physician. He changed the fam; Iy name to
Howard. His son Daniel married a Hayward just before the Revolution In 1772. It
was his son Ambrose Howard, great-great-grandson of the original immigrant, who
came to Sidney late in the 18th century as the town’s first physician. Not only
was Ambrose Howard a doctor; he was also storekeeper, postmaster and justice of
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the peace. He died In 1835 and I want to tell you tonight about his wi I I and
the Inventory of his estate.
Ambrose Howard’s wi I I was signed in Sidney on March 4, 1834, a little more
than a year before his death. The witnesses were John Sawtelle, Edwin Arnold,
and Columbus Howard. In usual legal language the wi I I begins: “I, Ambrose Howard
of Sidney in the County of Kennebec and the State of Maine, physician, do
make and pub I ish th Is, my last wi I I and testament.”
Much has been made of an item in Shakespeare’s wi tI, wherein he bequeathed
to his wife his second best bed. Ambrose HOWard did better than that. The
first item of his wi II reads: “I give to my wife two of the best feather beds,
bedsteads, cords, under beds, bolsters and pillows. I give her two of the best
coverlets and two of the bedsteads, al I the woolen blankets, and al I sheets and
pi I low cases, and al I the towels and table cloths. I give her four of the best
bed comforters. I give her six of the best dining chairs, one large and two
small rocking chairs. I give her a bureau, two blue chests, all the fancy baskets
and bandboxes, and my traveling trunk. I give her one 3! foot table, one
table with a drawer and lightstand. I give her one dozen best teaspoons, half a
dozen best tablespoons, and a dozen best knives and forks. I give her one
water pa I I and one mi I k pa I I, two sma I I wash tubs and one pounding barre I, one
meat tub and one Iron-bound butter firkin. I give her one pair wrought-Iron and
irons, one crane, and six pot-hooks, one fire pan and tongs. I give he r one
cow, one large looking-glass, two of;'”the best wooden trays, al I the best earthen
plates, one sma I I meat dish, one pudding dish, and one large pewter platter, all
the sma I I glass bottles, one three-pint green glass bottle. I give her one soap
barre I, one wooden mortar, and two of the best lime cas.ks, the two best cand lesticks,
the best pair of snuffers, and the candle box. I give her one bushel basket,
one cross-hand led peat basket, and one pa I r of sma I I s tee I yards. ”
More than a hundred years after that wi I I was written, it certain Iy strikes
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us as strange to see bequeathed to a wife the kind of property we today take for
granted as belonging to her anyway — bed clothes, table linen, dishes, knives
and forks. But those old timers like Ambrose Howard knew both the law and the
custom. If they waAted a surviving wife to have any of the household articles,
the surest way was to particulari ze them, Item by Item, in the wi II.
When Ambrose Howard made th I s wi /I, his 01 dest son ,Erasmus Darwin Howard,
was seeking his fortune in far-away New Orleans, and on sane future pragr:am I
want to tell you about a letter which Erasmus Darwin wrote his father in the same
year, 1834. But. tonight we are talking about the father’s will. He remembered
the absent son: “I give to my oldest son, Erasmus Darwin Howard, a note Which
he gave me for $268.40, dated May 1, 1832, payable on demand with Interest annually.
give him an order he drew on me In favor of Daniel Ormoby, dated
Aprl I 28, 1828. give him an account I have against him, the balance due on
which Is $308.62. I give him Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy, Darwin’s
Loononla In two volumes, Foster on Popular Ignorance, and six volumes of the
New York Mad I ca I Rapos I tory. ”
Next comes the daughter, Marla Dunbar Brown. In June, 1828, he had loaned-)
Marla a hundred dollars. He now declared her released from the debt. He gave
her an additional hundred dollars, to be paid $50 a year, In each of the first
two years following his death. And for good measure he also gave Marla one CCN.
Like most of the careful businessmen of a century ago, Dr. Howard wanted
to make sure that his debts were cleared. He didn’t take any chance on his executor
sett II ng the debts I n hi s own way from the res i due of the estate, but
rather he laid down specific directions: “It Is my will that the half of the
ml lis that I bought of Wi II iam Lovejoy and wife, and the mill house and the store
stand I ng near It, be sol d to pay a debt lowe to Samue I Dunbar, Esq., and the
surplus, if any, be appropriated to pay my other debts. It Is my wi /I that a
debt of about $300, due me from William and Hiram Lovejoy, be collected and let
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out on undoubted security on interest payable annually, punctually collected
and paid to my wife so long as she remains my widow.”
It was the second son, Barnabas Dunbar Howard, who was made executor of
his father’s estate. He was apparently the doctor’s favorite, for to him was
left “a II the rest, resl due and rema inder of my property whether real or persona
I, not disposed of the foregoing bequests, after paying my Just debts and
funera I cha rges.” Since no rea I estate, except the ml II, ml II house and store
have been mentioned, we may assume that the doctor’s dwel ling went not to his
wIfe, but to this son Barnabas.
The doctor also wanted to make sure that Barnabas had proper facilities
for cultivating the mind. One item in the will provides: “It is my wi” that my
medical library be sold, and that my executor appropriate the proceeds to pur~.1
chase such books and periodical publications as are calculated to Improve his
own min d and the min ds of his fam I I Y • ”
Accompanying the will, preserved among Arthur Ellis’ papers, is a complete
inventory. The big foolscap sheet is headed, “Inventory of the estate of Ambrose
Howard, late of Sidney, tn the County of Kennebec”. The whole estate was
appraised at a little more than $5,000, which was a comfortable amount in those
early days of the Kennebec Valley. The items run to four long pages, and lists
objects valued as little as twenty cents. Naturally the larger items of real
estate come first. They were one undivided half of home and farm bui Idings,
valued at $1,000; one undivided half of saw and grist mill with all the machinery,
tools and land attached, valued at $950. Another dwelling house with outbui
Idings and land was set down at $200; the store with land at $200; four acres
of wi Id land at $20. His principal pew in the Baptist Meetinghouse was valued
at $37.50, another pew at $8, and one-fifth interest in eight undivided pews at
$10.
Next comes the I I vestock: a horse at $30, a cow at $22, a two year old
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hei fer at $16, four ca Ives at $6 rap iece, and eight sheep at $2 ! ap iece.
The farm machinery Included four ploughs, two harrows, one cart and rigging,
a wood sled, a wagon sled, six ox chains, one ox yoke, one cart tongue, axes,
wedges, forks, hoes, rakes, scythes, a wheelbarrow, a horse trace, and a grindstone.
Although five hay forks were put down at 25 cents apiece, one manure
fork was valued at a dollar. Except for the cart, which was entered at $18, the
entire outfit of farm tools was valued at less than $40.
There was, however, a chaise and harness, said to be worth $45, a buffalo
robe at $2.50, and a saddle and bridle at $1.00. A winnowing machine was entered
at $6.00.
Think of the price of lumber today, then note this entry: “215 feet clear
pine boards, $4.30”. Two white oak plank — we are not told the length — were
I I sted at $1 .00. Among the sma II i terns I s a cod line at 20 cents. Does th Is
mean a fish line, or is It somethl ng else? I f the former, what was a doctor up
In Inland Sidney doing with a cod line?
Only $42 was allowed for four stoves and thei r funnels. In spite of the
great length of this inventory, it amazingly contains no furniture except a
writing desk, val ued at $1.75, but it does carefully list bed spreads, quilts,
coverlets, blankets, sheets and pillow cases. Two spinning wheels are valued at
$1.25, one winder at 40 cents, two tenters at 50 cents, and two cheesehooks at
42 cents.
The doctor’s entire wearing apparel is apprai~sed at $36.76, and his library
at $75. Especially interesting is the list of his professional Items: “phials
and contents $3.60, medicine $8, saddlebags and contents $6, Instruments for extracting
teeth $2.50, case of Instruments $2, a mortar and pestle $1.50.”
The appraJsers took due account of the doctor’s debtors, some of whom owed
him substantial amounts. The Interest was faithfully computed and Included. We
have already seen that his son Erasmus Darwin Howard owed him nearly $600; son
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Bamabas owed $25.60. The Haywards — you will recall that Hayward and Howard
were or I gina I I Y the same name ,. so these Haywards we re p robab lyre I at I ves — the
Haywards owed Dr. Ambrose right and left. Ezra owed him $52.59; Edmund $12.85;
Samuel $26.13. The Hutchlnsons, the Arnolds, the Perrys, the Smi leys, the Reyno
Ids, and the Lovejoys were a I lin the doctor’s debt, though some of the amounts
were very sma II. Seth Pe rry, for instance, is recorded as ow ing Dr. Howard $1.02.
Several Items in the long inventory I am not able to identify. I have no
doubt some of my I i stene rs can te II me what exact I y they we re. Anyhow here they
are: a rockeriron, an fron squim, a junk bottle, a clock reel and a close stool.
*****
We have Just time enough left for a few more words about words.
I am frequent Iy asked the origin of the word “fan” as app I ied to a follower
or supporter. We cannot be quite sure how it originated. Some people contend
that it referred to the palm-leaf fans commonly used In those hot open stands of
the baseball parks in the 1880’s. Others hold that fan is a contraction of fancy.
At any rate a . hundred years ago an ardent follower of any sport was called
a fancy. The most probably explanation is that it is a contraction of the adjective
fanatic.
The origin of the word “fanatic” itself is more interesting. The Roman General
Sulla, whi Ie on his famous campaign against Mithradates in Asia Minor, had
a dream that the goddess Be Ilona urged him to return to Rome to foresta II p lotting
enemies. His success, on following her advice, caused him to erect a temple
or fane in her honor. He brought priests from Asia Minor to establish sacred
rites. and conducted worship for Bellona. Those rites were scenes of religious
frenzy, tearing of clothes, self-mutilation, and scattering of blood on the
spectators. The Romans called such frenzy “fanaticiesll , inspired by the fane.
Finally, tonight, you may be interested to know that glamour and grammar are
word relatives. In days when most people could not read or write, grammar —
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Latin grammar, of course, for that was the only kind studied all through the
Middle Ages — was supposed to be able to work magic. In England a person who
could work magic with Latin mumbo-jumbo was called a grammary. In Scotland he
was a g lamer. About 1800 5 i r Wa Iter Scott brought the Scott i sh vers i on, wh i ch
he spe lied “g lamour”, into genera I use as a synonym for cham. But bear in mind
that the word charm Itself originally meant working magic. As time went on the
English word “grammar” came to be associated with linguistics, the study of
words; whi Ie glamour came to have its present meaning. So perhaps you may some
day yet come to see some glamour in grammar.
As we close tonight, let’s have two or three more of those interesting word
origins we occasionally talk about.
What is the origin of “dumbbell”, the exercising device, and what is its
re lation to the s lang term “dumbbe II”, a s low-witted person? I n the e I ghteenth
century it became fashionable for persons In the upper classes of English
society to strive to atta In the muscu lar deve lopment of the be II-ringers, who
were famous for their strong ams. So at first a device was made to simulate
the bell-ringers gallery without the bells. Joseph Addison, the essayist and
founder of that early and most famous periodical, the Spectator, had one of
these devices in his bedroom. It consisted of a rope, attached to weights, runn
i ng over a pu Iley from the ce i I I ng. A wooden bar, knobbed at both ends to keep
the hands from s II pp lng off, was knotted to the other end of the rope and hung
just within reach of the person about to take the exercise. He could thus duplicate
the bell-ringer’s motions and regulate the weight in order to demand various
degrees of strength. Since there was no bell, it was called a “dumb bell”.
later it was discovered that the rope and pulley was excess baggage; that the
same resu It cou I d be obta i ned by simp I y I I ftl ng the bar.
This kind of dumbbel I has nothing to do with the slang phrase, however. That
slang was originally directed only at the female sex, because it is a corruption
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of “dumb belle” — a young woman, beautiful but dumb — and In time it lost its
sex distinction and became applied equally to slow-witted men.
Is there any connection between infant and infantry? Yes, indeed there Is.
In medieval Italy the personal attendant of a knight was called an “infante”,
probably because he was likely to be little more than a boy. A collection of
these retainers was called Infanteria — infantry. By the way, the origin of
“infant” is from the Latin “in fans”.– not speaking.
3-191
LlTILE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
,
133rd Broadcast January 27,1952
In the midst of the mounting evidence of graft, bribery, and corruption in
the federal government today, it Is well to remind ourselves that no political
party has a monopoly of this evl I. Twice before In our history scandals have
rocked the government, and on both of those earl ier occasions the Republicans
were in power. Clearly It is not either political party, as such, that is
to blame for the corruption, but the men and the methods that control the party
in power under given circumstances.
The first great Washington scandal came in the administration of Ulysses
S. Grant, who was president for eight years from 1869 to 1877. Though himself
honest and scrupulous, Grant headed a regime in which graft was rampant. Before
the Investigations were over, not only department employees and bureau heads
had been implicated, but seven cabinet officers, a White House secretary, half
a dozen members of Congress, and several relatives and in-laws of the President
himself. Grant had been president only six months when Black Friday hit the
New York Stock Exchange. That panic resulted In an attempt by Jim Fisk and Jay
Gould to corner the nation’s supply of gold. They thought they had been able
to reach and fix A. R. Corbin, the President’s brother-In-law, who was Secretary
of the Treasury.
Then wholesale bribery was revealed in the New York customs house, followed
by the multi-ml Ilion dollar scandal of the company organized to build the Union
Pac i f I c Ra I I road. One of the p remote rs of th I s company was Cong res sman Oakes
Ames of Massachusetts, who engineered gifts of Union Pacific stock to fellow
Congressmen I n exchange for the I r votes. One of the bene factors was S chy Ie r
Colfax, Vice-President of the United States.
A I I th i s had occurred be fore the elect i on of 1872 when Grant was a cand I …
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date to succeed himself. His reelection was at once taken as free license to
plunder. He had done nothing 10 chase the crooks out of his first administration.
At once the Navy Department began an orgy o,f squandering on ship repair
contracts. The whiskey ring, led by Grant’s own private secretary, Gen. O. E.
Babcock, plundered the government of more than four mill ion dollars in taxes.
War DepartmenT officials got mixed up in the Illegal, but highly profitable,
sale of weapons to France in the Franco-Prussian War. Shakedowns and kickbacks
were the common thing In trade with Indians; bribery and blackmal I accompanied
the collection of back taxes for the Treasury. Before Grant left office In the
spring of 1877, the scandals had implicated his attorney general and his secretary
of the Navy, War and Interior. There was scarcely any agency of the federal
government in Grant’s admin I stration that was not Invol ved in an t rregu I arlty
of some sort.
Although no persons now alive remember from any personal recollection at
the time the scandals of the Grant regime, the Harding scandals are vivid In the
memory of a lOT of persons of my age. Whi Ie Harding was alive the corruption was
pretty well covered up, but soon after his death the scandals broke wide open.
The Veterans Bureau showed graft In hospital contracts, and its head, Col.
Charles Forbes, was convicted of fraud. Then the Teapot Dome scandal broke.
Secretary of The Interior, A Ibert Fa II, became party to a scheme to lease the
va I uab Ie 011 depos its in Wyoming to private interests led by Edward I»herty and
Harry Sinclair. Fall’s payment for his official part in the deal was to be
$300,000. He was convicted of accepting a bribe and went to prison.
Thomas Mi Iler, custodian of alien property after World War I, was convicted
of accepting $50,000 from the former German owners of a 6 mi II ion dollar property,
for enTering into a deal to hand the property back to them. When Jess
Smith, a close associate of Attorney General Daugherty, committed sui ci de, the
investigators Thought they had better take a look in that dl rection. They found
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$50,000 of the a lien property account had found Its way into Jess Smith’s bank
account. Then they learned that the Attorney General had control of the Smith
bank account.
Now the present scandals in the Truman administration are following the
01 d fami liar pattern. Notice that both the others followed immediate Iy after
the c lose of a great war, the Ci vi I War and Wor I d War I. Another great war
has now been fought. like his predecessors, Mr. Truman Inherited a government
with suddenly expanded powers and greatly expanded personnel. That sort of
thing necessitates delegation of more and more responslbl Ifty, and less opportun
tty to check on the subordinate’s performance.
But there is more to It than that. Thus far Mr. Truman has shown no evidence
of being any more energetic and determined to clean up the corruption In
his administration than Grant and Harding were to clean up theirs. All three of
these presidents have a tendency to protect their appointees. All three appointed
to new positions men who were forced to resign from others. It seems
more than I d Ie rumor that Tom Murphy refused the profi,fered Job to head a cleanup
In ‘Bstigatlon because the President’s closest advisers persuaded him not to
give Murphy a free hand in naming his associates and employees In the pending
investigation.
The honest and painstaking President Hayes cleaned up the Grant mess and
won back for the federal government the people’s respect. After Calvin Coolidge
appointed independent, non-political prosecutors to clean up the Hardl~g oil
scandals, the confidence of the nation returned. It can indeed be done again.
It I s not too late for Presl dent Truman h imse’ f to do it. I f he fa I Is, another
Hayes or another Coolidge will surely come along.
*****
So many I isteners have responded to my request for information about a
clock reel that I am really ashaned of my i~orance in asking the question.
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It appears there are a dozen or more old clock reels in the homes of this area,
and one of them is on publ Ie exhibition at the Redington Museum of the WateNrf\’-‘
vi lie HI storlea I Soc lety.
A clock reel was an old-time device for winding, and at the same time
measur ing, yam. The cl rcumference of the ree I was so arranged that, when a
knot of yam had been measured off, the reel gave a sharp click, the way a
clock strikes. Knowing how many kmots made a skein, the operator had only to
count the clicks to measure the skeins of yarn.
Many I isteners have told me what a rocker Iron Is. I think the clearest
explanation is one written me by Mr. Jotham Hobbs of Fairfield. He says: “A
rocker Iron is a piece of iron fastened on the under side of the rocker, or
frontal beam, of a cart or sled, to turn on a similar piece of Iron fastened
on the front axle, held together by a king Din to permit free movement.”
A Junk bottle, Mr. Hobbs fa lis me, Is a strong glass bottle for porter or
ale. But not a soul has come forward with Information about an Iron squim.
*****
We have devoted time lately to Fairfield, Sidney, Vassalboro, Oakland and
Clinton. It is time we turned again to Watervi lie’s mother town of Winslow.
Through the courtesy of Mrs. William Abbott Smith, I have seen the Winslow
school report for 1879. The report is signed by the Supervisor of Schools,
A I den Bassett, who was, I am to I d, the father of my ne i ghbor, Mrs. I ra Be Iyea.
Winslow had 18 school districts In 1879, and some of them were in nearly
as bad shape as those school districts In Fairfield that I told you about a
few weeks ago. Supervisor Bassett summed up the situation In these words: “The
success attending our schools is as good as can be expected when we consider
the fact that, in our eighteen districts, more than thirty different teachers
have been employed. There is no uniformity in textbooks, even within the same
school. In some of the schools the teachers have hurried their pupils over the
3-195
pages and they had little or no understanding of the principles.”
Supervisor Baseett had something to say about parents who side with their
children against every teacher. He wrote: “In a well regulated school, govern ….
ment Is one of the first requisites. Children sent to school are expected to
obey a II the rules of the teacher, which are essential to the good of the scholar
and the sChool. But on entering some schools, we find scholars who think
their wishes should be consulted In regard to this and that; and finding, for
once In their lives, that their feelings are not regarded, they enter a complaint
to their parents, who think there is no one perfect but their own children.
The parent sympathizes with the child, is sure the teacher is wrong,
and won’t send the chi I d to that teacher. The ch i I d stays at home and the par.;,·,
ent thus breaks the state law.
“Parents should see that their children are at school regularly and punctually.
When absence or tardiness cannot be explained by sickness, parents are
at fault. They should avoid speaking I II of the teacher in the presence of ‘ .
their chi Idren, for if the chi Id sees that his parents have no confidence In
the teacher, the schools falls to benefit him. The school does not depend upon
teacher or supervl sor; as are the parents, so is the schoo I.”
Each of the 18 districts had an agent, who really ran the school, with only
very general responslbi I ity to the supervisor. Some of those agents are we II
remembered Winslow names: George Blackwe II in District 1 j Henry Pollard in District
4; Wi II iam Warren in No.7; John Webber in No.9; W. V. Hayden In No. 12;
Alvah Wheeler In No. 15; and A. E. Ellis in No. 18.
As I have told you before when I talked about old school reports of other
towns, I am always amazed at the frankness with which those reports talk about
the teachers. Of Miss Eastman’s school this Winslaol report says: “I was not
told when the school would close, and I vIsited it but once. At that time the
appearance of the school was not flattering to Miss Eastman.” That was the fall
3-196
term. Miss Eastman gave way to a Miss Flagg in the winter term, of whom the
supervisor wrote: “The scholars could not pass a good examination, and the
order was not so good as It shou Id be In a we II regu lated school.”
Of Miss Merrill In District No.6, the supervisor was doubtful but not
wholly condemnatory. “This was Miss Herri II’s first school”, he reported. “She
labored hard, and with experience she may make a good teacher. In some branches
a fa Ir degree of improvement was made.”
He gave even more praise to Miss Lunt in District 7. He said: “Miss Lunt
Is a graduate of Portland High School. She labors hard and is a good Instructor.
The school passed a good examination at the close of the term.” Then the supervisor
makes iT appear that what he Is really doing Is damning with faint praise,
for he says: “If I was to find any fault it would be that the teacher is a
liTtle too mi I d in government.”
Miss Murray In District 8 got off even worse: “At each visit”, said the
supervisor, “The school seemed well disposed, but was not studious, and I think
bUT little proficiency was made in the studies.”
Even in District 10, where the teacher was a daughter of the district agent,
the supervisor minced no words. ”I was called to vIsit this school, and after
examln ing I t I thought it was not a profitab Ie term, and I advised the teacher
to close it.”
Of the teacher in District 2, The report says: “Although she had taught
two schools previous to this, she lacked judgment as a teacher, and but little
or no good res u Ited from th is schoo I • ”
Of Miss Harding in District 11, the supervisor. commented: “She offered
ass i stance to The pup i Is wh lie recl tlng, so that they rather depended on her.
Consequently The examination was not satisfactory. But, as this is Miss
Harding’s firST school, she no doubt wi II do better next time.”
By no means were all of these criticized teachers women. The supervisor
3-197
could be just as harsh when dealing with a man. This is what he wrote about
Wi II lam Furber In District 15: “At my fIrst visit, the school was In perfect
order, and the recitations were prompt; but soon afterward there seemed to be
a disposition with soma of the scholars to break up the school. I was called
to visit the school twice, and the last time expelled two scholars. Mr. Furber
had lost control, but after my Interference things went more smooth Iy. He may
yet make a successful teacher.”
When you encounter a report in which a supervisor gives adverse opinions
so frankly, you are incl fned to pay more attention to those whom he praises.
You get the Impression that his praise, like his blame, is completely sincere.
To MIss Minnie Smith in District No.5 he gtves very high praise. “I visited
the school near the commencement of the term”, he says, “and was pleased with
the order and instruction. The parents and scholars speak very highly of Miss
Smith as a teacher, and I have reason to be Ileve the term was successfu I. Mlss
Smith Is a graduate of the Waterville Classical Institute.”
Of Marcia Varney in District 3, the supervisor says: “She exhibits superIor
qua II ties as an instructor, and her schoo I was we II prepared, the scholars
showing that they had been well disciplined in their studies.”
High praise went to George IFlles in District 8: “The district was fortunate
in securing Mr. Ff les, who has taught this school several times successfully.
He is an active, hard working teacher, and gives his scholars many
practlca I questions to sol vee The scho I ars are to be commanded for the I r gent
leman Iy conduct.”
Miss Jennie Davies also met with Mr. Bassett’s approval. “Miss Davies is
a good Instructor and gave universal satisfaction. She teaches her scholars to
be respectfu I in the I r address, wh Ich I s too much neg lected by teachers generl'”
ally. This school was studious and passed a good examination.”
How well were these teachers paid? The highest paid teacher was Joseph
3-198
Garland In District 18, who got $11 a weekj George Files in District 8 got $8
a week; R. O. Jones in District 2 got $6; Wi Illam Furber In No. 15 got $5.
Miss MIAnle Smith was the highest pa I d woman teacher, gatt Ing $5 a week
in cash and board valued at $1.75 a week, a total of $6.75. The lowest paid
teacher was a girl in District 10, who got only $2.00 a week in cash and board
va lued at $1.25. That poor gi rl may have gone hungry more than once, because
the prevailing board rate throughout Winslow’s 18 school districts In 1879 was
$2.00 a week. Most of the teachers, In fact, received $3.00 a week in cash
and board valued at $2.00.
Even as late as 1879 there were large faml ffes on our Maine farms. Those
old district schools were by r:1O means so small as one might Imagine. If the
whole enrollment had been gathered into one school, there would have been 321
pupils under one roof. That Is an average of 18 pupils to every one of the 18
districts. There were In fact 48 pupi Is In Ofstrict 18; 29 in District 7; 27
in District 12. Onty two districts — No. 13 and No. 16 — had fewer than ten
pup i Is.
We II, anyhow, teach ing schex> I was a pretty tough Job seventy years ago.
3-199
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
134th Broadcast February 3L.J…952..
What a vast quantity and variety of those old a Imanacs must have been ci rculated
by the patent medicine companies a hundred years ago. An almanac was
then almost as common a medium of advertising as calendars were in my boyhood.
I wonder if anyone in Central Maine has a collection of those old advertising
almanacs, especi a Ily the patent medi ci ne ones. I f so, I shou Id like to hear
about it.
One Interesting copy that recently came to my attention was Wright’s Pictorial
Fami Iy Almanac for the year 1854. This almanac was apparently the annual
publication of Dr. Wi lIiam Wright of 169 Race Street, Phi ladelphla. The work
was printed by Brown’s Steam Power Printing Office, Ledger Building, Phlladelphia.
Through some sort of connections Dr. Wright had set up distribution offices
at 165 Chambers Street, New York, and at 10 Tremont Street in Boston.
In his foreword Dr. Wright acknowledges the popularity of an almanac for
advertising purposes. He says: “This being the most popular medium of advertising
at the present time, I cordially acquiesce in the necessity which calls
for it, and have taken some pains to meet it. I have endeavored to make the
astronomical calculations entirely reliable and accurate, the medical matter
useful, and the miscellaneous matter and the illustrations entertaining. It only
remains to send it forth on its mission, and In so doing I ava! I myself of the
opportunity of returning in proper person my most sincere thanks for the kind
appreciation of my medicines which has brought them into almost universal use,
and of giving assurance that no efforts of mine shal I be wanting to sustain
the I r reputati on.”
Dr. Wright apparently didn’t much care how his almanac was distributed,
provided it got around. His obvious, sole purpose was to give it the widest
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possible circulation In order to make his medicines better known and to increase
their sales. On the back cover he published the following notice to
dealers: “This almanac wi” be supplied to agents as usual, without any cost
other than the expense of transportation fnom Phi ladelphla, to indemnify which
they may, at’ the I r opti on, se II the a Imanac at the pri ce fixed upon the ti tie
page.” ”Orders should always be sent
considerably In advance of the time they wi II be wanted, so as to prevent disappointment.
When agents are located off the regular rai I road and e<press
routes from Ph i I ada I ph i a, arrangements sholill d be made to have the a I manacs :' ,.,
packed with other goods to be forwarded from the Atlantic cities. others than
agents wi Ilbe supplied with almanacs at the rate of 25 copies to the dozen
boxes of pi lis o'f syrup purchased. Booksellers, periodical agents, postmasters,
and peddlers, who buy none of the pills or syrup, will be supplied at the rate
of one dollar per hundred."
On one point Dr. Wright was very modern, far ahead of his time. The gulllbl
Iity of people is amazing, and in spite of plenty of scientific evidence that
no one cou I d p red I ct the weathe r more than a few days in advance, in th Is en-
I I ghtened year of 1952, there are plenty of peep Ie who have fa I th I n what an
almanac says about the coming year's weather. Yet a hundred years ago Dr.
Wright published on the inside back cover of his almanac these words: "Nothing
is sa i d about the Weather th Is year I n our a Imanac. I t Is on I Y just to state
to the public that they know about the weather for the coming year as we do. No
mathematician or astronomer, however able, can possibly cypher out the weather.
When such predictions are seen in almanacs, they should be regarded as mere
guess work, entitled to no confidence, and as likely to fail as to be true."
Dr. Wright claimed for his almanac the amazing circulation of half a mil-
I i on cop ies. I nteresting to us is his fi gure for Ma ine — equa I to h Is comb lned
c I rcu latlon in New Hampsh I re and Vermont. Wh I Ie he cl aimed 10,000 for each of
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those states, he said he circulated 20,000 in Maine. He claimed 150,000 for
the two states of New York and Pennsyl~nia, but what Is more astounding, he
said he circulated 10,000 copies in California, 5,000 in Texas, 5,000 in Iowa,
15,000 in Missouri, 2,000 in Arkansas, and even 5,000 In the West Indies.
One table in this almanac gives the population of some 60 American towns
and cities for the two censuses of 1830 and 1850. Among the 60 places there are
only two in Maine — Portland and Bangor. In those twenty years Portland had
grown from 12,000 to 20,000; Bangor from 2,800 to 14,000. Boston had mone than
135,000 people as early as 1850; New York's population had already passed half
a million. Philadelphia, on the other hand, was then smaller than Boston, while
Ba It i more was cons I derab Iyl arger. On Iy 40,000 peop Ie lived In the national
capital, Washington, fewer than 30,000 lived in Chicago, and only 17,000 In
Cleveland. The six largest cities in order of size In 1850 were New York, Baltimore,
Boston, New Orleans and Cincinnati; and those were the only cities that
had mone than a hundred thousand peop Ie. Ne I ther San Francisco nor any ather
p lace in Ca II forn ia I s even manti oned. The sma I lest p lace listed among the
sixty is Nashville, Tennessee, with its meager 10,000 people in 1850.
What did Dr. Wright's almanac advertise? A whole page is devoted to
Wright's Indian Vegetable Pills of the North American College of Health. The ad
says: "The hand of a benef I cent creator has planted every country with its own
proper antidotes against effects of soi I and climate upon the human being. The
aboriginal Indians, taking advantage of that fact, possessed a vigor of constitution
unsurpassed by any other race. It is from such roots and plants as gave
health to the Indians that Wright's Indian Vegetable Pi lis are compounded'! Some
of the diseases they were promised to cune or relieve were asthma, dropsy, dyspepsia,
fits, ague, gout, jaundice, neuralgia, small pox and yellQlt fever. The
other product was Wright's Indian Vegetable Syrup, which contained the same ingredients
as were in the pi lis. You could thus have the cure in solid Or
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liquid form; you paid your money and took your choice.
Dr. Wright graclflously allowed a little space to other advertisers though,
as explained In his announcement of advertising rates, he strictly barred the
ads of any other med ica I men. There is a ha I f page ad of the 00 II ar Newspaper
of Phi ladelphia, proclaimed as the cheapest family paper in the U. S. The sub,..
scription rate was indeed only a dollar a year. For that small amount the !"-':-r',~
reader was proml sed 52 issues of stories and nove lettes, articles on agricu Iture
and news — a II pri nted on a par r of mammoth printing mach Ines costing $45,000
and capable of turning out 20,000 impressions an hour.
Another ad was headed: "A sure way to get rich. Freedley's Practical
Treatise on Busi ness. The best book on money making ever pub Ifshed. Prlce,
$1.00. Don't fail TO get this book; It will pay you well."
Another ad told the readers that book agents were wanted. "Persons in every
town and vi IIage of the U. S. may hear of safe, pleasant and profitable employment
In the circulaTion of new and useful pictorial works."
Anthony SchmidT of 409 Main Street, Buffalo, advertised that he dealt In
German and English books, mantle-piece clocks, fine pictures and picture frames,
looking glasses, toys, wax candles and tapers.
We have often mentioned the Inconvell'lence caused by the different local ,.
times a hundred years ago. Dr. Wright attempts to dispel some of the confusion
with a statement addressed Simply, "To the Reader". It says: "There are two
kinds of time used In conmon almanacs for the sun's rising and setting. One Is
clock time, and the other Is apparent or sun time. Clock time Is always right,
whi Ie sun time varies every day, and Is alternately too fast or too slow. According
to apparent time, the sun will always rise or set at six o'clock when it is
at the equinox, but this Is never the case according to clock or true time. If
the sun was In the meridian, the noon mark, at 12 o'clock every day, apparent
time would be true. Peep Ie ~enerally suppose it Is 12 o'clock when the sun is
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In mid-heaven. This Is a mistake. The sun is so Irregular that It does not
come to the meridian oftener than four times in,a whole year. When the sun Is
at the noon mark, It Is noon, but not 12 o'clock very often.-
''The var I att on of the s un makes a d I ffe rence between I t and a II true t I mepieces,
and produces two ktnds of time. The sun cannot, therefore, be depended
upon for correct time, without applying to it what Is termed the equation of
time, or the difference between clock and sun. Add to apparent time when the
sun Is slow, and subtract when It is fast. This almanac Is In clock time."
*****
As the 1952 presidential campaign gets under way, some amusing verse from
the pen of Representative Ed Chase of Portland may weI} I claim our attention. Ed
Chase being a staunch Republican, this is distinctly Republ ican verse, but I am
sure whatever your poll tics, you wi II find I t rather pat.
"Ma I den-coy In his I vory tower,
Draftable maybe, Is Eisenhower.
Party pros we II versed In craft
Beat the sticks on behalf of Taft.
Six or eight of lesser size
Cherish the hope of compromise.
Watching rivals torn asunder,
Humb ler fol k are prone to wonder,
Finding quite hard to understand
Why supp Iy shou I d exceed demand."
*****
How we" do you know your own state of Ma ine? I want to te" you ton ight
about some of Maine's unusual place names, and I assure you that no longer ago
than 1910 — a I ittle more than 40 years — every one of those p laces was the
official name of a post office in our state. Old you ever hear of Letter C?
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That was a post office In an unorganized township in the Rangeley region. In
1910 It had a population of seven persons. Its settlement is now called Middle
Dam.
Maine once had a place named for a fish. In the town of Kennebunkport
There was a post office called Alewives. ~deration was once the official name
of West Buxton. Ketchum is a settlement In RI ley Plantation north of Rumford.
Down In Washington County In the town of Cooper is a place called Cedar, while
Coal-Kiln Corner Is in the town of Scarborough. Eureka Is a place right near
Wate rv I I Ie — one of the sett I emen ts I n the town of Sidney.
Everyone knows that Maine is covered with place names taken from Europe,
p I aces like Norway, Sweden, DEmma rk and Nap les, four of the tCMns that border
my native Brldgtonjnames from Asia, like China and Canton; names from Africa,
I ike Carthage; names fran South America, I ike Peru; and numerous names from the
Bible, like Bethel, Canaan, GI lead, Hebron, Lebanon, Mars HIli and Shi loh. I
wonder, however, If you know that in Maine there Is a Jerusalem, an Eqypt and
a Corea. Jerusalem Is a settlement 30 mi les north of Farmington; Egypt is a
p lace in the town of Franklin; and Corea (spe lied with a C, not a K) Is In the
town of Gouldsborough.
In spite of the long boundary line between Maine and Canada, there is, so
far as I know, just one p lace off Icl ally ca lied Boundary. I tis a sett lement
in the town of Bridgewater. Lynchtown, an unorganized tCMnship embracing Parmachenee
Lake, had eight peop Ie In 1910. It probab Iy got I ts name from some
family named Lynch, not from a necktie party. Tim was once an offici.al post
office In the town of Eustis; Pea Cove is a p lace in Old Town. But I think of
all the Maine post offices listed In 1910, the prizes are taken by Mosquito and
Sunshine. Yes, forty years ago, mall could actually be addressed to Mosquito,
Maine in Forks Plantation, or to Sunshine, Maine on Deer Isle.
We have many names of British origin dotting the map of Maine. We expect
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them and take them for granted. But did you eve r not ice how many names we have
of German origin, in spite ·of the fact that almost the only German settlement
in early Maine was at Waldoboro? Yet, scattered over Maine, we have Bremen,
Brunswick, Dresden, Frankfort, Lubec and Vienna.
Lege:nd has It that the town of Pol and, where the Ri ckers dew loped the
famous spring, owes its name neither to the European country nor to a fami Iy of
that name, but to a famous Poland China boar, owned there In pioneer days, the
sire of the best pigs In the region for many years.
I suppose there are even more picturesque names of Maine localities which
never got into the records because they never had a post office. I wish you
folks would help me make a collection of those old names. Off hand, as we close
the program tonight, I think of two: Hungry Hollow and Monotony. Hungry Hollow,
when I was a teacher at Hebron 35 years ago, was a well known, but decidedly
run-down hamlet between South Paris and West Paris. Monotony was the fitting
name for an i sol ated, dreary collecti on of ha I f a dozen houses on the southern
edge of Fryeburg. Now who wi II add names to this collection?
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L1TILE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
135th Broadcas"t Februa ry 10, 1952
Now that Congress is aga i n In sess Ion, we are al I i nte rested to know what
legislation it wi II pass. Unlike the program that precedes this one on the air,
over this station, we are not given to predictions of things to come. We can
only tell you what leading members of Congress themselves say about legislation
ahead.
Senator George and Representative Doughton, the leading authorities on
taxation within the Congress, both state emphatically that taxes will not be
raised again in 1952, and we may look for no further change in social security
and we I fare laws.
On foreign policy that veteran senator, Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, says foreign econanic aid wi II end in 1951,
just as originally planned, but that military aid will probably continue. He
says there wi I I be no Ambassador to the Vat I can, that the Senate w I II never ap.,.
prove It. The Japanese Peace Treaty will be ratified, but the St. Lawrence Seaway
Is a dead issue.
On mill tary affai rs Senator Russe II, chaf rman of the Armed Services Com ..
mfttee, hopes "there wi II be early enactment of Universal Military Training, but
no Senator or Representative is bold enough to predict its passage. Propone·ntst:,,of
UMT know that they have a fight on their hands. There are a lot of people
in the United States who do not want to see us tied to a permanent ml litarlzation
of youth, and those peop Ie have strong support in the Congress.
As for labor, not even the bitterest enemies of the Taft-Hart ley Act four
years ago now expect its repea I. They admit that I t has worked rather we 1/
and needs minor amendments, rather than repeal. As for oommunism within the
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ranks of labor, Representative Barden, chairman of the House Cormlittee, says:
"I think CIO and AFL have done a good job of cleaning house, and they found that
indeed some house cleaning was needed. Unfortunately there are still a few
un ions In wh i ch the colTmun i sts hoi d power. II
What about government controls? Representative Spence, chairman of the
House Commi ttee on Bank i ng and Currency, fee I s sure that we do not now have
suffidient control to fight inflation and sti II carryon defense production at
a high level. That, as we have more than once pointed out on this program, is
the crux of the problem. How can Increased defense production and decreased
clvi I ian production do otherwise than bring higher and hi gher prices as long as
the workers have more and more money to spend for fewer goods? Let us repeat
again what we have tried to emphasize before: No partial control solves that
kind of problem. You can't solve it by freezing prices and profits, and letting
wages alone. You can't accomplish much by control of processing and trade without
contro I ling raw mate ria Is at the i r source. I f we have a s i tuat i on that demands
all-out control, let's have It. If we have no such situation, take off
all controls and let free enterprise do·cky Mountains in search of
the buffalo and other game of the Far West”. But what Howard calls a “Provi ..
dence -that watches over the strangers in a strange land” Intervened. At last
he found a job in New Orleans. Before leaving Maine he had learned the carpenter’s
-trade, and in those days every carpenter worth his salt was a’-cabinet
maker. Howard was no exception. He found a room for which he had to pay what
was then an exhorbitant rental of ten dollars a month, and determined to set
up In business as a cabinet maker and joiner. He got his chest of tools and a
few other possessions trucked up from the ship, where they had lain since his
arriva I. Then he obtained sufficient lumber to construct a work bench and began
work on the most essential articles of furniture for his own needs — bedstead,
chai r and tab Ie. Then he te II s hi s father about hi s first work for pay in New
Orleans:
“The first job I performed was working the molding 00 the mislon (sic)
channels of the ship Ceylon, which I wrought entirely by hand, as I could find
no sui-table molding tools In this city. I had scarcely finished that job when
the sh i p was run into by another vesse I, wh i ch carried away her starboard mt d-
3-210
ship works. That gave me another job of three or four days.
“After fi nishing on board the Ceylon and arranging my shop and household,
app lied to my I and I ady for further patronage. She is a French lady, an 01 d
rna I d of about 45 years — and a much better woman than anyone wou I d expect to
find renting quarters in New Orleans. She gave me encouragement, and a few days
later gave me a job repairing another house that belonged to her. That job gave
me emp loyment for near Iy a month. Then she recommended me to other members of
her fami Iy who in turn recommended me to their friends. Thus, through the kindness
of Mi ss 5T. Vertorby, I have prospered.”
Other men from Maine were down there in New Orleans, and young Howard made
the close acquaintance of John Cottle of Windsor, Maine, a lad of 19, who had
graduated from Ch I na Academy, served an apprent i cesh I pin Bangor, and had come
down to New Orleans, as he said, “to make five or six hundred dollars and return
home in the spring with enough money to set up in business for himself near
his father’s p I ace in Wi ndsor.” Li sten to what Howard wrote about young Cott Ie
and his hopes of fortune: “Poor disappointed youth of self-sufficiency and
vanity. After six weeks of wading through the mud — spending nearly all his
funds and meeting with a continual series of disappointing expectations — he
was tempted through despair to try his fortune with his last money on the roulette.
The result was what common sense might suppose, Finding him destitute,
I invited him TO live with me. He was with me about five weeks before he obta
i ned any bus i ness, and he rendered me some ass is tance on the heavi es t work on
my job. Finally he obtained employment in a baking establishment at $25 per
month. Then the bakery burned, but he fortunate I y got another job where he is
now recei vi ng $30 a mnth.”
After Cott Ie got settled on hIs job, Howard took in another Mal ne youth,
Nathan Sims of Union, who, I Ike Cottle, had graduated from China Academy, and
had then determi ned to go to sea. So he sh ipped on the bark Tamerand of Thom-
3-211
aston for New Orleans and thence to Europe. But on the voyage from Maine to
New Orleans, Sims learned~ as Howard puts it, that “his constitution was not
at all adapted to a sea-faring life.” So he obtained the captain’s leave to
stay In New Orleans rather than sail across the Atlantic. Howard describes
Sims as “a young man of good sense about 23 years old, having a good English
education with principles and habits of the old Puritan stamp.”
Young Howard was concerned about some of the financial affairs he had left
unsett I ed InS i dney • He gave his fathe r the fo II ow i n9 Ins truct ions: “The ha rness
and saddle were company property with bi II of sale to Elisha Hayward. The
crosscut saw belonged to Sawyer and myself in common. The Smith Co. papers
delivered to Mr. Ames, who Is treasurer. Please inform me In your next letter
whether you have settled with Newell and Henry Lovejoy. Ask Sawtelle and Bailey
if S’alwyer has taken up rrrt note. lowe Char les Ham I I n a sma II trl fIe, or he
owes me, I do not know wh i ch • I a I so owe Asa Red i ngton five sh i I I I ngs that I
ough t to have pa i d • P I ease attend to these ob I i gat Ions on my beh a I f. It
You have heard me say on several occasions that these old letters were
mal led without postage stamps and no envelopes were used. The letter itself
was ingeniously folded and the address written on the outside. This letter of
E. D. Howard’s is long — writte n on pages one, two and three of a foolscap
size sheet, with the fourth page left blank to make the outside folding and
carry the address of the letter. Now comes a practice with which I had never
been fam; I iar in such old-time letters. Having finished the third page, Howard
goes back to page one and continues the letter between the already written lines
of that page. I assure you that practi ce does not make the letter any eas ler
to read 118 years later, but I finally managed to decipher It, as I have been
te I I I ng you.
Now why didn’t Howard simply use another half sheet of foolscap, fold It
inside the four page sheet, and thus save his father the trouble of making out
3-212
that inter-lined script? Interestingly enough I found what is probably the
answer in that 1813 edition of the Farmers Almanac, loaned me by Mr. Lewis
Whipple. In that old almanac are published the rates of postage. Thl$ is the
way they read:
“For every letter of single sheet, delivered by land, 40 mi les, 8 cents;
90 mIles, 10 cents; 150 miles, 12i cents; 300 mi les, 17 cents; 500 mi les, 20
cents; more than 500 miles, 25 cents. Every double letter, of two sheets, Is
to pay double the said rates, every triple letter, triple the rates. Every ship
letter, originally received at an office for delivery, 6 cents per sheet.’T
There you have It. Letters” for which the receiver, not the sender, always
had to pay postage, were charged for, not by weight, but by the number of
sheets. So, mindful of his father’s pocket book, young HC»Iard economically used
just one sheet of paper, managing to get five pages of writing on three pages,
by going back and writing between the lines of pages one and two. A young man
with that kind of Yankee thrift deserved to prosper in New Orleans.
3-213
LITTLE TALKS ON COMMON THINGS
136th Broadcast
One does not have to go back a hundred years to find entertaining items in
the rural newspapers. I never tire of reading some of the country correspondence
in our Maine weeklies today. let me give you a sample of one correspondent’s
work in a Maine weekly newspaper dated January 4, 1952.
“Mrs. R. L. has been very sick the past two weeks. Can’t seem to find out
Just what the trouble Is. She is sti II feeling so miserable that she can only
stay up a short time and then crawls back into bed again.”
”We have a modern Scrooge in our neighborhood. FreddIe took Bi t I A. to
the County seat to do his shopping one day and promised to take hIm the next
day to the doctor if our car would start. In the meantime Bi II asked Scrooge
If he’d help Freddie start the car. Scrooge said No. Seems like some people
can’t ever be agreeable, even around Christmas time.”
“We sure got left out the other night when we all tUrned out to see Santa
down at the vi Ilage. Nine famt I ies from this neighborhood took all the kids
and grown-ups down those five mi les, then there wasn’t any party after all. It
had been postponed, but no one down in the village had the kindness to let us
know. ”
*****
Mrs. Mary Stobie has produced for me another of those Mrs. Winslow Race
ipt Books, th i s one nine years 0 I der than the issue , referred to a few weeks
ago. This issue of 1867 has exactly the same kind of cover as the issue of
1876, but many of the recipes are different. For instance, I did not know that
common hard crackers were ever made at home. I ignorant Iy thought there was
no such thing as those round, common crackers unti I they were factory, or at
least bakery, made. But Mrs. Winslow gave the folks in 1867 a recipe for hard
3-214
crackers. Here it is: ”Warm two ounces of butter in as much skimmed milk as
will make a pound of flour into a stiff paste. Beat It with a rolling pin and
cut it Into thin biscuits. Prick them full of holes with a fork. About six
minutes wi II bake them.”
Look at the ingredients of what folks in 1867 called a cheap, common cake.
How cheaply could you make it today? t lb. of butter, 2 lb. of flour, 4 eggs,
I lb. of sugar, 1 pint of mi Ik, rind of a lemon, 1 lb. of currants. What the
book calls a better common cake contained a whole pound of butter, 2 Ibs. flour,
2 Ibs. currants, a pound of sugar, a quarter pound of a Imonds, a ha I f pound of
raisins, a good lot of cinnamon, allspice, cloves, lemon peel and a whole dozen
of eggs.
I have often heard my father, who was born in 1861, say that In his boyhood
he never saw granulated sugar, that fully refined granulated came Into the
country stores of Ma ine we II I nto the 1870 ‘s, and was not too common when, in
1881, he went to work In a market near Metropol itan Boston In Watertown, Massachusetts.
This recipe book of 1867 proves beyond dispute that the sugar referred
to is not fine, granulated sugar as we know it today.
One recipe is headed “To clarify sugar for sweetmeats”, and it begins,
“Break as much as required in large lumps”. Another recipe says, “Take an
equal weight of sugar in large lumps”. Another says,· “Take six ounces of finely
pounded sugar”. Still another: “Take a large piece of double refined sugar.”
My father could remember those Irregular shaped lumps of sugar, but he said
they seemed to him thoroughly white. Probably by his time most of the sugar was
what Mrs. Winslow’s book calls double-refined. But my grandmother could well re_
member· the dirty-looking ye Ilowi sh sugar that everybody used. She once tol d me
that her mother, down In Cape Elizabeth, always had a huge lump of that yel lewish
sugar hung over the dining table, suspended from the cei ling by strings.
From that lump the diners chipped off tiny pieces for their tea and coffee. In
3-215
sunmer the lump was surrounded by netting to keep off the files.
Many th I ngs that we pick up ready made at the store, wi thout the s I I ghtest
inconvenience, our grandparents went to much trouble to make at home. Today
there are plenty of preparations to apply to chapped hands. But this is how
Mrs. Wins low in 1867 tol d home fol ks to make the I r own app I I cat Ion for chapped
hands: “Mix a quarter pound of unsalted hog’s lard, washed first In common wa ..
ter and then In rose water, with the yolks of two new-laid eggs and a spoonful
of honey. Add as much oatmeal or almond paste as wi I I work into a paste.” It
Is Interesting to note that this recipe contains two ingredients that were later
heralded In a famous patented skin cream — honey and almonds.
If you ran out of ink In 1867 and didn’t want to buy the poor stuff they
then sold for Ink In the stores, you of course made a new supply for yourself.
But you had better not be In a hurry. The recipe tells you why: “Take a gallon
of rain water and three quarters of a pound of blue galls bruised. Infuse them
three weeks, stirring dally. Then add four ounces of green copperas, four
ounces of logwood chips, six ounces of gum arabic, and a wine glass of brandy.”
The 1876 recipe book says nothing about Mrs. Winslow, but tn 1867 her re.,.
medles were new enough to warrant some word of Identification. So a half page
Is devoted to telling the public that “Mrs. Winslow is a lady who, for upwards
to thirty years, has untiringly devoted her time and talents as a female phy …
sician and nurse, principally among chi Idren. In consequence of her famous
Soothing Syrup she Is becoming world-renowned as a benefactor of the race. Chi 1-
dran especially rise up and bless her. In this city of Phi ladelphla vast quan …
tlties of her soothing syrup are used dally. Mrs. Winslow has immortal ized her
name by this Invaluable article, since she has saved thousands of chi Idren fran
an early grave.”
And with that epitaph we say goodbye to Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.
*****
3-216
Did you ever hear of One-Eleven Cigarettes? I never did untf I a few weeks
ago, when Pau I Marshall, a student at Col by Co1 lege, brought me an empty wrapper
of that old brand. He says it was found between the floors of the old
Unitarian Church, here in Waterville, when that edifice was torn down to make
way for the block now housing the First National Store, Penney’s and Western ~ir.,.~.~.
Auto. It was apparently a standard package, containing 20 cigarettes, and Its
price was 15 cents. So it must date back fairly early in ciga’rette making days,
because fO cents was the price of the favorite brands around 1910. It was a
product of the American Tobacco Company, which printed on the wrapper’a guarantee
that “if for any reason this package Is unsatisfactory, you can get your
money back f rom the dea ler”. On the face of the package I s an In d I an head, and
beneath it the numerals “111”. Under that are the words “One-Eleven Cigarettes”.
On the reverse side one discovers why these cigarettes were called One-Eleven or
111. For on that reverse side is printed “111 — one for mildness, Virginia;
one for mellowness, Burley; one for aroma, Turkish. Now who is there among our
‘I i steners who remembers One Eleven Cigarettes?
*****
More than once on this p~gram we have talked’ about the old steamboats, especla
II y about the City of Watervi lie, and the big boats that raced between Ha I …
lowe II and Boston. But I don’t th ink we have ever ment loned the first steamboat
that ever came to Maine. It was a tiny vessel named the Tom Thumb, and it put
fA at Bath in the summer of 1818, only eleven years after Robert Fulton had
pushed his Clermont up the Hudson from New York to Albany. The salt-water farmers
of the Kennebec Jeered at the Tom Thumb, Just the way the Dutch farmers of
the Hudson had laughed at “Fu I ton ‘s Folly”. The queer mach lnery that drove her
side wheels easily Induced laughter. But the Tom Thumb proved a success. She
kept going on short trips out of Bath for ten years, taking excursions up and
down the Kennebec between Bath and Augusta.
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Except on the ocean and on the Great lakes, steamboat days of any kind are
on Iy legend to the younger gene rat I on today. Never again can we have the thrill
of that wonderful trip fran Boston to Bangor, with all the beauty and variety of
Penobscot Bay.
When steamboats were first bui It, there seems to have been little thought
of their replacing sail as cargo carriers, just as with the first automobile,
there was no thought of trucks. So between 1815 and 1825 there were put on the
coastal and inland waters many small steamboats whose chief business was running
pleasure excursions. Such a boat was the Kennebec which, strangely enough
never operated on the Kennebec River. In the newspapers of 1822 Captain Seward
Porter announced that the Kennebec would operate excursions between Portland and
North Yarmouth regularly all summer. They were venturesane souls who dared voyage
on that boat. She was made from the hul I of an 01 d flat-bottomed scow and
was equipped with an engine that was always breaking down, and a boi ler that
was always in danger of blowing up. She lasted for nearly a dozen years, however,
before she ran on a ledge and sank. Fortunately she was then running with no
passengers, and her crew of three men got ashore safely.
I t was a long time before the strict maritime ru les for safety oontrolled
the steamboats, and many lives were lost because of careless operation and lack
of safety methods. But I f safety was di sregarded, looks and appearance became
Important very early. By 1830 many of the boats were painted white and green,
with stripes of brown and yellow, even gold. Paddlewheels were red and prows
carried ga I Iy co Jored figureheads. Passengers rode on neat Iy ra i led decks under
bright striped awnings. But it was years later than 1830 before any boat
had a decent lavatory. When the weather was rough, comfort went with the wind.
The companies made much of the fine meals served on board, but some of the patrons
complained that even if they felt well enough to partake of a meal, the
fare was invariably the same — ham and eggs.
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*****
Among the Ken nebec towns that once had a newspape r was the town of Ch i na.
have recently seen Vol. 3, No. 44 of The Orb, published at China, Maine on
Novembe r 3, 1 836 • do not need to te II you that, in those days, most of the
newspapers were violently partisan, and the Orb was no exception. November 3,
1836 was just four days before the preSidential election, and In heavy black
type two columns wide and a full colurm long, the Orb came out for its candidate.
He re I wo rd for word, I sits st.atement:
“Ship Ahoy! From whence come ye? From the country of monarchy and oppress
Ion. Where boun d? To the port of I I berty and prosperity. See then that ye
fall not out by the way. Be it remembered by every elector of the State that
on Monday, November 7, they are notified to meet In their several towns and
cities, to exercise one of the first rights guaranteed to any people by our
constitution ••••• Fellow citizens, with a faithful citizen at the helm, our Ship
of State has for the last eight years been safe Iy conducted through storms and
tempests, and our good captain is about to resign his command, and you are to
elect a suitab Ie person to fi II the Important station. Martin Van Buren has
been named as a candidate for the exalted station, and the candidates for electors
are named under our editorial head. They are all good rre;n and true, and
will, we trust, race I ve the undi vi ded vote of the Democracy of the State.”
The captain who had reSigned his command was, of course, Andrew Jackson.
The Orb was obvious Iy a (Smocratlc paper, strong Iy supporting Jackson. I n fact
most of the pape rs and most of the peop Ie In Ma I ne were on that side of the political
fence. The old Federalists and the new Whigs stood little chance in
Ma i ne be fore 1 840 • I n fact when ou r Massach use tts ne I ghbor, John Qu I ncy Adams,
was elected Pres i dent in 1825, Ma ine di d not give him her vote.
In 1836 the China Orb proved to be on the winning side, for Van Buren was
elected by a SUbstantial majOrity. It was a different story when Old Tlppe-
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canoe, Wi Iliam Henry Harrison, entered the 1>icture In 1840 and became the
first Wh i g presf denT.
In 1836 Maine was entitled to ten presidential electors, and among the
success fu I Democrat I c cand i dates for that off I ce we re Raue I W I II i ams of Augusta
and John Hamblet of S610n. Maine then had five Congressional Districts — not
called by number as they are n()w, first, second and third, but by names: the
Waldo District, the Cumberland District, the Lincoln District, the Washlngtoo
District, and the Penobscot and Somerset District. The Orb’s supported candidate
for Congress from the Lincoln District, which then included Watervi lie,
was Jonathan Cilley.
It t s sanetlmes surpri 51 ng to us who have so long been used to Maine’s
fairly stable population, to real ize how fast other states have grown In comparI
son wi th Maine. Wh lie Mal ne had ten presi dentia I e lectors In 1836, New Hampshire
had only seven and Connecticut only eight. Eight was also the number for
New Jersey, whl Ie I I Iinois had only five and Missouri only four. Even Louisiana
with Its very old city of New Orleans had only half as many electoral votes as
Maine. Now In 1952 there are very few states of the present 48 which do not have
more electoral votes than ours. That is the price we pay for a stable population
with very little increase In a hundred years.
Like most of Maine weekly papers a century ago, the Orb contained very
little local news. One local item tells us that a fulling mill in Vassalboro,
belonging to John Rowe, had burned the previous Saturday night. Another fire had
destroyed a one-story, doub Ie house, on what was ca lied the Feed farm, be long Ing
to Col. Phil ip Morri II, a half mi Ie from Bel fast Village. It was said to have
been one of the oldest frame houses in that town.
Let’s close our program tonight with the solemn note which the editor of
the Orb strikes regarding manners and morals. He was evidently one of those
straight-laced Puritans pretty convnon a century ago. Here Is his editorial:
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“A romp, as some girls are called, is a good natured sort of girl with
little mind and less taste. When she is merriest she Jumps the highest; when
she is grave aAd sober she is a fool, because a romp has little intellect. A
country romp is pleased with a ditch, because it gives her a chance to Jump
across it, and she loves app les in the orchard, because she can cI imb trees to
get them. A town romp is a great talker of scandal whi Ie she employs her
clenched hands beating her listener’s shoulders. Romping is bad business. It Is
at variance with decency of taste. The manners of a romp are the fondl ings of
a bear. I would have all such females picked out of society and sent up the
Missouri to colonize a new Amazonian land. If they did not clvi lize the Indians
somewhat, they would fight them, and that would answer the same purpose.”
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LI TT LE TALKS ON COMMON TH I NGS
137th Broadcast February 24, 1952
Can you remember way back to those days when we used to look upon Franklin
Roosevelt as the champion government spender? Poor Mr. Roosevelt! If he
were only around today, wouldn’t he think he had been a miserly skinflint compared
to his successor?’! As AI Smith used to say, take a look at the record.
In all of the 156 years that the U. S. Government had been In operation
between 1789 and the death of President Roosevelt on April 30,1945, the fed ….
era I government took from the peop Ie and the corporations total taxes of 248
billion dollars. In the six years from May 1,1945 to June 30,1951 the pre,..
sent adm I n I strat ion took I n taxes $260 bill Ion – … twelve b 1111 on more than the
preceding 32 administrations had taken in a century and a half. Yet, despite
the staggering amount taken In taxes, the present administration closed its
1951 books in the red by $7,470,000,000 — a deficit twelYe times as great as
that of 1950.
But the worst Is yet to come. The deficit for the current year ending
June 30, 1952 is estimated at $8,200,000,000. For 1953 it will Jump to
$14,400,000,000.
On June 30, 1951 the tota I federa I debt was $252 billion; next June it
will be $260 bill ion, and In June, 1953 it will be $275 bi Ilion ..
Everybody knows we are a rich country. But how rich? Rich enough 10
spend and spend and spend and tax and tax and tax and still owe 275 billions
of debt? Somewhere there Is a limit, and when It comes, beware the crash!
*****
Numerous I isteners have told me during the past week that they expect me
to talk about big snow s10rms of the past and compare them with the little
flurry we had last Monday. don’t want to disappoint those listeners entirely,
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but I’m not going to make any comparisons between particular blizzards past
and present. I want to make just these brief comments about big storms In
genera I.
First, our individual memories are tricky. Most of us remember a big
storm because of some unusual personal experience connected with it, and because
we have no such personal experience connected with another storm, we
forget al I about it. I simply do not remember any big storm in 1935, but the
Watervll Ie Sentinel of that year carries the undeniable record of a huge
crippling blizzard. But I certainly remember the storm of February 28,1920,
which began with rain freezing solid, then topped it with 18 inches of snow.
Why do I remember that storm? Because my son was born that day, and I spent
15 anxious hours on a train from Portland to Boston, and didn’t see my son In
the Waltham hospital untl I more than 24 hours after he had come into the world.
My second comment is that we are today more helpless In a big storm than
our grandparents were. In our recent storm we were fortunate not to lose electric
current. But only last winter, within five mi les of America’s greatest
city, peop Ie litera II y had to go to bed to keep warm. Not an 0 i I burner cou Id
function, there were no I ights, no telephones, no milk deliveries, no transportation.
Fifty years ago a big storm was no such problem. The storm didn’t put
out the kerosene lamps or shut off the telephone, because in most homes there
wasn’t any_ The house didn’t get cold, because there was a wholerwlnter’s .
supply of wood out in the shed. Nobody went hungry, because mother had a whole
barrel of flour in the pantry and vegetables and fruits of her own canning In
abundance. As for mi Ik, if the family lived in the vi I I age and didn’t have a
cow, someone put on snowshoes and went to a neighbor in the village who did
have one. Yes — we pay a price for our advancing civi lization. The more we
have, the more dependent we are.
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My third and final comment on big storms concerns the children. That is
something that hasn’t changed with the fifty years. They don’t depend on elec~
. tric current or Internal combustion engines. They get out their steds and have
a grand time. We who are older and who think we are so much wiser than any
child may well take note of this: In a battle between nature and civi Ilzation,
a chi Id’s sympathy Is always with nature.
*****
One who delves into the old records about the common folk of the Kennebec
Valley in by-gone days, as I love to do, is again and again Impressed by the
va I uab Ie service rendered by persons who persuaded aged peop Ie to put into
writing, before it was too late, their recollections of pioneer days. We ought
to do more of that sort of persuading in our own day. Right here In Water”
ville are men and ~omen who ought to put Into written form thei r recollections
of sixty and seventy years ago — recollections that may otherwise pass into
oblivion.
Hence I am very grateful tonight that a little more than a hundred years
ago, In 1848, a man and wife, John and Abigail Nichols, finally induced one of
the first settlers of Fairfield to record his memory of the early days. The
settler, then an aged man, had come to the wi Iderness that later became Fa I rfield
In 1782. He was Elihu Bowerman who, with his two brothers, settled In
the Vicinity of North Fairfield, became a prominent citizen and officer of the
town, and was the man who made the survey Into lots of the Nye and Dimick purchases
-~ those original sixty lots, of which the ten in the southwest corner
stl II bear the community name of Ten Lots.
So let us give attention tonight to what Elihu Bowerman wrote Mr. and Mrs
Nichols about that earliest settlement of Fairfield. Some time in October, 1777
Mr. Bowerman’s father, a soldier In the Revolution, became so III with dysentery,
a common camp disease, that he was sent home for rest and recovery. At
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the same time his mother’s mother was taken violently III. Grandmother and
father died within three days of each other, leaving Mrs. Bowerman with nine
chi Idren, the oldest only 14 years of age. That oldest was Elihu, and on
him fell the responsibility as male head of the fami Iy. For six years, unti I
1782, when he was 20 years old, he faithfully worked to help his mother keep
the fam i I y together in the i r Mas sach usetts home.
For some time, apparently, there had been talk of migrating to the Dis ..
trict of Maine, and in the spring of 1782 Elihu, with the young wife whom he
had recently acquired, came to Fort Halifax. With him also were his two brothers
Harper and Zachary.
On what is now the Watervi lIe side of the river Elihu hired a room in a
private family, where his wi fe could lodge, whi Ie he and his brothers struck
farther up the river into the wi Iderness. After Elihu had paid his wife’s
room rent for a per i od in ad,vance, he says that the tota I cap I ta I wi th wh I ch
the three Bowerman brothers struck out up Martin Stream was only 25 cents. The
only way they could get food was either out of the forest, or by working out
for one or more of the 01 der !=iett lers down ri ver near Watervi lie. During the
summer, Elihu says, he and his brothers worked out about two-thirds of the
time, for which they were paid in provisions, never in money; and the rest of
the time they felled trees on their own lot and prepared to build a log house
in the fal I. When autumn came they did put up the log house and covered it with
bark, using bark a Iso, liidd over the bare ground, for a f Iocr.
Their mother was not we”: so It was decided that Harper should spend the
winter with her. On the other hand, the log house seemed now ready for a woman,
and Eli hu ‘s wi fe moved out of her Waterville room into the log dwe II fng
on Martin Stream. Elihu says they were not without furniture, but all of it
made only four loads on a hand sled.
t n the preceding summer the brothers had ra ised a few potatoes on the farm
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of Remington Hobbie,the Vassalboro Quaker whom we have previously mentioned
on this program. Mr. HOOble allowed the brothers to store their potatoes in
his cellar, but the early winter was very severe, and before January the potatoes
were a II frozen.
let us now turn to Elihu Bowerman’s own words in his statement to the
Nichols: “Our provisions were all gone”, he writes, “and we had nothing left
to purchase more with. But soon I met a man In Winslow that would let me have
corn and wait for his pay unti I spring. That corn, with about 25 pounds of pork
and some smoked herring, with the frozen potatoes, were all the provisions we
had for the whole winter. We got our corn ground and carried It home on our
backs, a di stance of 17 mi les. The on Iy bread we had for 16 months was made
by mixing a little of this corn meal with our frozen potatoes, then baking the
mixture like johnny cake over our open fire. We had no vegetable sass of any
k I n’d.
“late in the winter we hau led about 700 feet of boards four miles on our
hand sleds from a saw mi II to our house, put some of them on the roof in the
parts where it leaked through the bark worst, and the rest of them on the floor.
That board floor was a lot warmer than the bark on the cold ground. We had no
nails and not a square of glass in that log house. It was a hard winter, but
never once did I wish myself back in my native land, nor did my wife once murmur
or complain. It was a hard life, but we were not discouraged.”
A II that wi nter the iron Iy beverage other than water was boxberry tea,
without milk or sugar. How they must have relished the coming of maple sugar
time. “That spring”, wr6te Elihu, “we made plenty of sap sugar, which was
the first sugar of any kind on our table.”
That pioneer life was hard on women. Elihu’s wife had not seen another
woman for six months, when in March she decided that the time had come to pay
a visit to a neighbor who I ived a mi Ie and a half away. So. Mrs. Bowerman put
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on snowshoes and went to see her neighbor. She made a nice long cal I -~
six hours — and came back in fine spirits.
When the snow was gone and spring had really come, the Bowermans got
possession of two cows, so that mi Ik and butter were then added to the sugar
which the maple trees had supplied. Those cows had no fenced pasture, but
ran in the woods, and Eli hu says he chased those creatures hundreds of mi les
that first summer, often going barefooted, though he was a grown man.
Living conditions were much improved by the fall of 1783. By that time
the brothers had burned two acres of fe lied trees, cleared the ground of logs I
sowed rye, planted corn, potatoes and beans. So, writes Elihu, “in the fall
of that year we had plenty of rye and corn meal, some potatoes and other sass,
with mi Ik, maple sweet and butter as much as we could desire.”
When winter came, Elihu decided he must make sure how his mother fared
down in Massachusetts. He made the long journey only to find her, as he had
suspected, in t I I hea Ith and having a hard time financially. So he persuaded
her to sell the property and come to live with him in the Maine wilderness.
Elihu disposed of the old home for $700, his mother getting her legal third,
and the rest d i v i ded among the nine ch i I dren •
For manv years Elihu’s mother had been used to living in a frame house
and in the midst of neighbors. When she got her first sight of Elihu’s log
dwelling on Martin Stream, she expressed her disappointment. She told Elihu
the p lace looked more like a cow shed than a house. But when she was f Ina II V
se’ttled in the house, with most of her chi Idren around her — for now all but
two of the nine had come to Fairfield, and three besides EI ihu had homes of
their own near by — it seemed to her, as Elihu puts it, “like Joseph’s meeting
with his brothers in the land of Goshen.” The elderlv Mrs. Bowerman accepted
the wi Iderness and the log house grateful IV, for it brought her fam! IV
togethe raga in.
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Elihu says that by 1785, when his sister Waite married Benjamin Swift
and settled two mi les away, allof his brothers and sisters except one sister
who had recently died, were now married and in their own cabins between his
house and the Swifts. This gave his mother opportunity to visit with all of
her living children, and it meant a lot to the old lady unti I her death In
1794 at the very advanced age of 95.
How did Eli hu Bowe rman happen to come to the Kennebec Va II ey I n the first
place? Soon after his father’s death in 1777, although Elihu was only a boy
of 14, he was determined to get Into a region where land was cheap and opportunity
for its development good. So he says: “It was in 1700 that I made my
first journey TO the Kennebec on the lookout for land.” That summer he
worked for John Taber at Vassa I boro. Taber persuaded the youth to attend
Friends Meeting at the home of Charles Jackson, a little below Vassalboro town
landing. At that time no member of the Bowerman family had Quaker Inclinations.
Although the Bowerman manuscript does not say 50 exp I icftly, the reader
can eas I I y I mp I y that the Bowe rman fam Ily got the i r chance to sett Ie In th I s
reg ion through the kind Iy he I p of the Vassal boro Quakers — Jackson, Taber and
perhaps most of all Remington Hobbie. They helped the Bowermans get their
land and unquestionably helped them in many ways through the first, most difficult
years. And it was because of them that the Bowermans became resolute
Quakers and finally established the active and Influential Friends Meeting at
North Fairfield. But at first, of course, they had to go far to attend a
meeting. In fact, Elihu says he subscribed $6.00 which he earned by working
In the hay field for a Sidney farmer at 75 cents a day.
The Friends of Fairfield were thus attached to the Vassalboro Quarterly
Meeting, and It was quite a journey to attend services there. Elihu wrote,
“At that time our roads were no better than cow paths, and we had no horses.
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Men and w.ornen had to go on foot to attend meet i ng at Yassa I boro, an d a fte r
the meeting corne back on foot to Fairfield, a distance of 14 miles. In winter,
before we had horses, I have known our young men to take the ox sled
and some of our women on it, and carry them to Vassalboro meeting. They went
and came as lively and cheerful as though they had been in a superfine four~
wheel carriage.
“After we obtained horses, the trip to Vassalboro was faster, but there
were sti II no real roads, only beaten trails. Of course there were no bridges.
When the water was low in the Kennebec and the Sebasticook, we often rode
across. Sometimes, when the water was half way up a horse’s side, a woman
would have a man on each side of her to prevent her falling off into swift
water. remember that once a man and a woman, riding on the same horse, both
fe II off, but fortunate Iy Into shoa I water. They went back to shore, wrung
out their clothes as best they could, and rode on nine mi les to meeting with””
out dry cloth ing.
‘~here we usually crossed the Sebasticook was a narrow ledge with uneven
bottom. The water ran swift oVer the ledge, and on Its lower side” where the
horse had to go, was four or five feet deep. It was a dangerous place” especially
for a woman.
“At our Kennebec crossing the bottom was covered with small, round rocks.
It was not easy footing for a horse. We started diagonally down, then in the
middle of the river turned diagonally upstream to a sma I I island, then
straight across on the treacherous round rock bottom. We took this route
scores of times, often in miserable weather; yet’ never heard man or woman
speak of the danger or show any fear.”
After ten years the settlers at North Fairfield decided they ought to
have a meeting house of +heir own. On the knoll where in 1952 the Friends
Meeting House at North Fairfield still stands there was then an unoccupied
3-229
house of two rooms. There the Friends convened. On bus lness meeting days the
men and the women separated. On one such day, while the men conducted business,
the floor gave way and let them down a foot or more. That experience, wrote
EI ihu, “set us thinking how we could get a better meeting house. At last we
concluded to bui Id a house 25 feet square. We infor,med our Vassalboro
Friends of the plan. Eefore building we decided we needed a larger house, so