Radio Script #73
Little Talks On Common Things
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, 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.
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- 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 accustomed ways 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
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 graduated 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 wa s 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 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.
Year: 1950