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 half barrels contained 98 pounds of flour. Or didn’t you know that 196 pounds of flour make a barrel?<\/p>\n
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 “Elijah ‘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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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’s famous story “The Lady or the Tiger”.<\/p>\n
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 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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
People have debated that story for half a century. 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.<\/p>\n
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. 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 <\/em>the .day of ordeal. Tomorrow Jason will open the door and I shall run to his arms.” There the letter ends.<\/p>\n “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 <\/em>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 swung both doors open with himself shut safely between them and the wall.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0 did we do with him? Why, we crucified him along with another thief, up there on the hill beside the Nazarene.’ ”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 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 <\/em>too great.<\/p>\n Is reading in bed a common thing? If so, what kind of books do you read in <\/em>bed? If you are like me, you want bedside books that will not entertain you, but rather will put you to sleep. That is <\/em>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 <\/em>the car radiator.<\/p>\n “One of my surest bets is <\/em>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 <\/em>rambling, confused, hysterical. If you don’t go to sleep before you have read forty pages, you’d better call your doctor.<\/p>\n “Then there is <\/em>Henry James. Counting his commas is <\/em>better than counting sheep, for once in <\/em>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 <\/em>always the Congressional Record. \u00b7But 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 <\/em>cloth, beside the bedside lamp.”<\/p>\n 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 \u2022. Every observant person knows 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n “People think you are dead if you don It drink.”<\/p>\n “I do it just to be sociable. I don’t like the stuff; I just choke it<\/p>\n down.”<\/p>\n “When I drink I feel important.”<\/p>\n “Drinking takes me right on up.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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. 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.<\/p>\n Year: 1949<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read the script for “Little Talks” program #9, broadcast on January 9, 1949<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[741,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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