Radio Script #307
Little Talks On Common Things
May 27, 1956
Many times you have heard me te II how the Keyes Fi bra Company got its start from Martin Keyes’ observation that workmen in Upper New York State ate their lunches from chips of maple veneer. Tonight I want to tell you about another company that started from a simple idea. One of the chief compeTitors of our New England cotton mi lis has been the Callaway Company of La Grange, Georgia.
We don’t like to have those southern mi lis take away New England business, but we must recognize that there are southerners who are just as keen and just as determined as was our own Martin Keyes.
When Fuller Callaway was eight years old he somehow got hold of a nickel -the first money he had eve r possessed as his own. The boy wa I ked from the parsonage home in tiny Long Cane, Georgia, into the larger vi I I age of La Grange, and, passing up the allurement of candy, he bought three spools of thread, and took them on the ten mile walk back home.
The next morning Fuller Callaway started over the country roads, looking for a housewife who needed thread. He found one and sold her a spool for a nickel. Before noon he had found three and ended up with fifteen cents, a profit of 200% on his investment. He then invested the whole fifteen cents in nine spools of thread, went into the countryside and sold them. Soon he added needles and scissors to his stock. In two months he had a pack on his back, an eight year old pedd ler goi ng from farm to farm. From thati t was a steady c limb up the mercanti Ie and industrial ladder to the ownership of the great Callaway Mi lis.
A very common thing in our day is the general department store. Did you know it began just a little more than a hundred years ago? In 1852 Aristide Boucicant started the Bon March: in Paris. Not only was it a store with several departments; it was also a pioneer in the field of marked, unbargainable prices.
So fixed in the minds of both customers and merchants, al lover Europe, was the idea that there must be no established, advertised price on any article that, in 18th century France, the distribution of handbi lis announcing sales at fixed prices was prohibited by law. Boucicant changed al I that and made the fixed price idea take hold in many European cities. Only in the bazaars of the Mediterranean world of the Near East and in the Far Orient does bargaining stil I prevai I. My daughter found it the only method of trade in the Persian capital of Tehran, where she spent the winter of 1954-55.
It was Boucicant who introduced the practice of al lowing customers to return goods for exchange or refund. He also made it plain that people were welcome to come into his store just to look around, without any intention of buying.
That was unheard of before Boucicant’s day_ We Americans are so proud of the great department stores in New York and Boston, in Detroit and Chicago, in St. Louis and Dal las, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, that most of us suppose, of course, that the organization is an Ameri can invent i on. Thi s ti me we have to hand sorneth i ng to the French.
I n the chapter on narrow guage ra i I roads in “Kennebec Yesterdays” I made the statement that the Wi scasset, Watervi lie and Farmi ngton road lasted unti I 1925. It certainly did, and some years longer. Just to show you how careful one must be on these historical matters, let me tell you how I got the date 1925 for the c los i ng of the line.’
In Apri I, 1940 the Journal of the Maine Association of Engineers devoted its enti re issue to what it ca lied “Some I nteresti ng Phases of the [)eve lopment of Transportation in Maine”. After some fifty pages of historical comment, appears Appendix A~ “Chronology of Maine Rai I roads”. Under the date 1925 appears this statement: ”The W.W.& F.Railway Company abandoned their line.” took that for gospel truth and did not submit it to further examination.
A Sheepscot Va Iley woman~ who was a pup i I of mi ne many years ago at Hebron Academy, has called me soundly to task. She is Mrs. Ellen Weibhin, formerly postm i stress at Coope r’ s Mi II s • What actua I I y happened was th j s. The di rectors decided to close the road as unprofitable in 1925, and it did stop running for a few days, but local interests raised funds to buy it, and they continued to operate it unti I 1933. The last train on the narrow guage line from Wiscasset to A I b i on therefore ran ~ not in 1925 ~ but on June 16, 1933. I t was the· down trip from Albion to Wiscasset and, instead of ending, as last trips often do, in a celebration and memorial exercises, that trip ended in a wreck. Earl Keef of Albion~ who began his rai I road career as fireman and ended it as engineer on the old narrow guage line, has in his possession a photograph taken a mi Ie south of the Whitefield station, showing No.8 Engine and a flat car off the rai Is. On the back of the picture is written, “The last wreck on the W.W. & F. R.R.~ also the last train, June 16, 1933.”
The I ittle narrow guage never recovered from that wreck. It came near folding up in 1930, but Frank Winter of Auburn, who owned 1,750 shares of the stock, continued to operate it principally to haul his lumber to market, but The wreck of No.8 at Whitefield in 1933 was too much even for him.
Mrs. Weiblen calls my attention to the fact that two Colby graduates, who became prominent on the Maine judiciary, were officers of the W.W.& F. Although The president~ Carson C. Peck, lived far away in New York City, the clerk was Norman C. Bassett of Augusta, and one of the directors was Leslie C. Cornish.
The latter became one of the most noted of Maine’s chief justices, and the former was a Iso a rrember of the supreme bench. Mrs. Weiblen has passed on to me serre interesting stories about the narrow guage. One of these concerns an accident which occurred in Mrs. Weiblen’s own vi Ilage of Cooper’s Mi II s. An automobile and a locomoti ve met at a cross i ng. The engine hit the car fair in the middle between front and rear wheels. The driver was unhurt, but quite annoyed to find his car in two separate pieces, broken right in two by the collision.
In the early 1920’s the W.W. & F. had one of the most unusual private cars to be found on any line in the Uni ted States. I n order to inspect the line whenever he wished, without waiting for a train, Manager Sam Sewall mounted a Ford Mode I T on whee Is to fit the rai Is, and drove it up and dc1tm the tracks as his p ri vate conveyance. The first conductor’s punch ever used on the W.W. & F. is in the possession of Alfred Rancourt of Whitefield, who worked his way up from section hand to conductor. At Cooper’s Mi lis lives Edwin Brown, who worked 32 years for the old narrow guage~ first as a brakeman and finally as a section manager. From his present residence Brown can look down on what was once his old section house.
The now abandoned narrow guage up the Sheepscot Val ley had ambitious origins. It was to connect Wiscasset harbor with the great grainery of the West by way of Canada. But the founders’ ambitions outran their performance. The line neve r reached Quebec; it never got to Farm i ngton; it di dn ‘t even get across the l<ennebec to Watervi lie. A II that functi oned was its 43i mi les from Wi scasset to Albion, over which its trains took 3 hours and 20 minutes if all went according to schedule, which it seldom did. For a time the up and down trains were supposed to meet at Whitefield, where there was a good siding. But frequent was the day when one train waited half an hour before the other came along. Sometimes orders would be received for the trains to meet at North Wh i tef i e I d, on I y to have another ha I f hour’s wa it. The Ii tt Ie narrow guage came to deserve, in no small degree, its nickname for ‘vI.W.& F. — Weak, Weary and Feeb Ie.
My nearest ne i ghbor, Char les Crosby, reti red ra i Iway rna i I cl e rk, is the son of one of the road’s ori gi na I promoters, who was a Iso inventor of the Crosby steam guage and whistle. In 1927 Charles Crosby made an impassioned speech, imploring the citizens of Albion and other towns to take over the road and run it themselves. Mr. Crosby sTi II has a stock certificate attesting to his faith in the enterprise, which the citizens of the Sheepscot Valley did manage to keep going for five more years.
Ouri ng those five years from 1927 to 1932 it was the toot of the narrow guage whistle that saluted Don MacMi I Ian as he lefT Wiscasset each summer for the Arcti c, and when MacMi Ilan returned in the fa II, it was the same W.W.& F. whistle that welcomed him home. When the line finally closed in 1933, it had 90 cars — two of them coaches, two baggage cars, and a II the rest f I at or box cars. Though it once had nine locomOTives, in 1933 it had only five. There were eight regular stations along the line, but in fact the train would stop almost anywhere on signal. One writer has said: “It has 1110 mOire concern for regular depots than does an urban trolley car. A man stepping out of the woods with a suitcase is signal enough. A woman waving a handkerchief is equally effective. The train stops for a can of milk beside a tree, while the baggage man makes out a way bill.”
A woman in Weeks MillS, on hearing the train approach one day, ran out to stop it, waving her apron. The engineer shut off the steam, released the air, and brought the tra into a stop. Swi ngi ng to the ground, he asked the woman wh at she wanted. “We II, I’ve got e I even eggs and the hen t s on. You just wai t ti I I she lays, then take the dozen eggs to Wi scasset, se I I them at the store, and get me a spool of No. 60 white thread and a bottle of vani Ila.”
For 31 years the best known engineer of the W.W.& F. was E. W. Jackson. It was he who used to te I I the story of the woman wi th eleven eggs. George Li ncoin was freight manager for 25 years. The lack of specialization of employment on the line is shown by the case of Harvey Bean, conductor for 15 years. One day Harvey was sweating away transferring baled hay from his own train to a Maine Central box car in Wiscasset. One of the town’s merchants saw what was happen’i ng and said, “Why, Harvey, I thought you were the conductor. What are you doing handling hay?” Harvey’s explanation was revealing: “Don’t you knOll that everybody on this road has to work?”
The little narrow guage became notorious for accidents. At one time a wri ter in the Lewi ston Journa I commented, “There have been so many acci dents on this line that whenever a trip is made without accident, everybody cheers.” One day a party of a hundred or more Masons boarded the train at Wiscasset for a picnic up the line. When the train spurted up to gain speed for a steep grade, the whole train left the track, went scooting across a fie Id, and jUfl1)ed a brook. Nobody was hurt, but there were the Masons on the wrong side of their picnic brook.
So rt was for 37 years that, from Alb i on a II the way down th rough Weeks Mi I Is, Head Tide and other hamlets to the blue waters of the Sheepscot River, peop Ie re lied on the Ii tt Ie narrow guage, with its ha I f-p i nt cars, its wheezy old engines, and its toy-sized tracks.
And wi th the echo of that 01 d narrow guage wh i st Ie ri ngi ng in our ears, we must say good ni ght for 01 d ti mes ‘ sake.
Year: 1956