Radio Script #29
Little Talks On Common Things
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. 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 so called 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 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 assembled 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 state; 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 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 the U. 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 traveling circus? Waterville was 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 years? 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 gauge.
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 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.”
Year: 1949