Radio Script #35
Little Talks On Common Things
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 summer. 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 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 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 news writing. Yet here was a magazine of international repute, saying of little Prince Charles of Edinburgh, “Without the moral support of his mother, 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 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 government 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.
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 introduced 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, Justice 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.
Year: 1949