<\/p>\n
Still living in a Waterville nursing home at the age of 91, is a gracious lady who, 70 years ago, won a contest that gave her a memorable trip to England at a time when such trips were not so common as they are today.<\/p>\n
The lady is Mrs. Grace Ricker Kennedy, who at the time of her trip was a teacher in the Clinton schools. Her home was in Clinton and it was the host of friends she had in that town who so effectively rallied to her support that she won the contest.<\/p>\n
What was that contest? In 1906 the Waterville Sentinel, then only a few years old as Waterville’s morning paper in competition with the evening Waterville Mail, decided to seek a boost in its circulation through a contest called the Great Contest of Women in Northern Kennebec and Somerset Counties. Coupons were published regularly in the paper each worth a certain number of votes, but the highest pile of votes could be secured by getting new subscriptions. Votes came in during the period of the contest for many different women.<\/p>\n
When it was over and the final count was tabulated, Grace Ricker had 258,275 votes, a lead of 18,000 over the second place contestant, Clara Dore of Athens. Helen Butterfield of Waterville was third and Alice Rackliff of Augusta fourth. The second place winner got a trip to Florida, the third a library of a hundred volumes, and the fourth a gold watch.<\/p>\n
Miss Ricker’s teenage sister had a conspicuous part in her victory. She is now Mrs. Maisie Dixon of Clinton, a well known newspaper correspondent. Clinton then had its own weekly newspaper, the Clinton Advertiser. In its issue of January 25. 1906, the paper published by Marcellus Cain, said: “Grace Ricker, our contestant in the Waterville Sentinel’s contest, assisted by her host of friends, has put forth every effort to win one of the prizes. If we do not succeed in sending Miss Ricker to Europe, we hope she will stand up well in the list when the final count is rendered.”<\/p>\n
That local publicity, itself stimulated by Sister Maisie, stirred a lot of additional support for Miss Ricker. Not only Maisie covered the highways and hedges for votes, but even their aged grandmother solicited subscriptions. And help from a
\nsmall army of neighbors and friends assured success.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Dixon says it was not a conducted tour on which her sister went to the British Isles, but an independent trip, on which she was accompanied by a Waterville family of experienced travelers, Mr. and Mrs. H. R. Dunham and their daughter. The trip started when the party sailed on the Carmania on July 3, 1906, for a trip that extended for two months. After a brief stop in Ireland, they went on to England, where they enjoyed the usual sights – the Tower, Westminster Abbey, changing
\nGuard at Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, and other London scenes. There were visits to Oxford and Cambridge, to Shakespeare’s Stratford on Avon, to Glascow and Edinburgh, and into the Walter Scott country of the Scottish Highlands. All Miss Ricker’s expenses were paid by the Sentinel, and before she left Maine she was given a purse of
\nspending money for further enjoyment.<\/p>\n
The year 1906 was a fine time to be in England. Queen Victoria had been dead only five years, and the memory of her long, dignified reign caused some gasps and lifting of eyebrows at the doings of the more liberal court of Edward VII. Britain was then not only mistress of the seas, but also an empire on which the sun never set. Rudyard Kipling, now in disrepute as a chauvinist writer, was then the hero of English literature.<\/p>\n
East was East and West was West. and never the twain were supposed to meet except under orders from London.<\/p>\n
In 1906 England was still conscious of the victories of the armies in the Boer War, where young Winston Churchill got his start on the road to head of government in the Second World War. The trials and tribulations of World War One were then eight years in the future. Allover Europe were relatives of Edward VII sitting on numerous thrones.<\/p>\n
Travel in England, then conducted almost wholly by train or stage coach, was leisurely and unhurried. Two months gave Miss Ricker plenty of time for the voyage across the Atlantic both ways and left between five and six weeks to see the sights without losing breath. The present-day hasty tours, jumping from one spot to another, running from bus to bus, was then unknown. It was a splendid view of the British Isles that this Clinton girl got as a result of her victory in Central Maine.<\/p>\n
In 1911, Grace Ricker was married to Guy Kennedy, of what was then the John Deere Plough Company, now the manufacturers of all sorts of farm machinery. For thirty years, they resided on the Clinton-Burnham Road.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Kennedy’s hobby was painting in oils, and she was also a poet of no small accomplishment.<\/p>\n
I want to share with you now one of her poems, entitled Daybreak.<\/p>\n
“Silently the dawn advances,
\nIts golden glory floods the sky.
\nIn heavenly splendor says to all the world,
\nA new and untried day is nigh.<\/p>\n
Its miracle is free to all God’s creatures
\nFrom lowly cat to Palace of a king.
\nThis day is ours to fashion to our liking
\nThe gift of God from His eternal spring.
\nSo let us strive to do His holy bidding,<\/p>\n
With thanks for life and all our blessings here;
\nAnd greet each dawn with courage and thanksgiving
\nFor this, the wondrous life we hold so dear.”<\/p>\n
It is with great pleasure that we give this gracious, elderly lady a place on Little Talks on Common Things.<\/p>\n
Several times this program has referred to Colby’s notorious graduate, General Benjamin F. Butler, probably the most controversial military leader of the Civil War. Butler graduated from Colby in the Class of 1838, when classes at the Waterville institution had been conducted there for only twenty years. How long ago that time seems to us today, 138 years before the present 1976.<\/p>\n
Butler entered college in the fall of 1835, being accepted into sophomore standing. There were then 22 men in his class, including such later well-known figures as Crosby Hinds of Benton and William Shepard, a nationally recognized mining engineer.<\/p>\n
What was Colby like in Ben Butler’s day? For one thing, the cost of attendance was cheap, even considering the low wages of that time. Compared with the present tuition of $3,000, it was then $32 a year. Table board, now over $800, was then $36, or one dollar a week. Room rent for the entire year was $10. Unbelievable as it now seems, a student could then get through college on less than $100 a year.<\/p>\n
Few students purchased textbooks in 1838. At a very low fee they could be rented from the college. Unlike the modern practice, textbooks were then seldom changed, so that the same identical copy could be used by a dozen or more students before it wore out.<\/p>\n
In Butler’s day, the curriculum was definitely fixed. All freshmen studied the same subjects at the same time. All sophomores had their own identical subjects, and the same was true of juniors and seniors. Written examination were rare, but oral exams were frequent and strenuous. Classes were conducted by the recitation method, not the more common lecture method of the early 20th century, nor the more informal discussion method of today. The recitations were memorative; that is, literally a memorizing of the text, which must be repeated to the instructor without deviation of a single word. Both students. and faculty took for granted that if it was in the book it must be true. The modern skeptical
\nattitude says, “If it’s in the book it can’t be true.”<\/p>\n
What did Ben Butler study at college? Principally Latin, Greek and mathematics, the core of the ancient liberal arts curriculum. He did hear Maine’s noted agriculturist, Ezekiel Holman, give lectures on chemistry, but he saw no text on that subject and performed no experiments. What we today call physics was then termed Natural Philosophy, and for that in his senior year Butler did have a text, but there were no experiments until more than half a century later, when the great physicist, William Rogers arrived at Colby. The present earth and life sciences – biology, geology, and their allied disciplines – then came under the title of Natural History. In junior and senior years, therefore, Butler did get a smattering of science, on which he spent altogether less than the equivalent of one college year.<\/p>\n
When Butler was a student, the Workshop was a feature at Colby. It had been instituted early in the 1830s not so much to give opportunity for student earnings as to provide an outlet for youthful energy. That was long before the coming of
\norganized sports – baseball was not played at Colby until the 1860’s, football not until the 1890s. Nor was there any gymnasium. Youth being youth, the students had to let off pent-up energy somehow, especially in those days of strict puritanical discipline. So the administration figured a good way to let them do it was to work in the shop. A further. inducement, they allowed a student to sell the product of his labor there.<\/p>\n
It was entirely a carpenter shop of which the products were chiefly simple articles of household furniture. The instruction was good, because master carpenters of those days were often skilled cabinet makers. As one would suspect, the college lost money on that workshop. It was never a financial success, nor did it succeed as a safety valve of energy. Students still
\nwent on downtown pranks, stealing signs, moving steps, and putting carts on rooftops.<\/p>\n
However, Ben Butler later wrote that he earned $30 in that shop. With annual tuition then $32, he earned nearly enough for one year’s tuition fee.<\/p>\n
One unusual feature of the curriculum in Butler’s time was his access to a modern foreign language. The year before Butler’s entrance, there had joined the faculty as Prof. of Modern Languages, the new local Baptist minister, Samuel Francis Smith, who became renowned as the author of the national anthem, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Smith had studied French at Harvard, and he taught that language at Colby. His students couldn’t get a very heavy dose of the subject for he was permitted to teach it to any one class for only two terms of a single three-term year. But even that brief introduction did mark Colby as one of the earliest small colleges in the country to teach a modern foreign language.<\/p>\n
Another language to which Butler was introduced was a single term of Hebrew, which he detested. Of far more interest to him was a term study of the Constitution of the U.S. That was more useful to a man who would later be a Governor of Mass., a candidate for President, and during his life a member and leader of three different political parties.<\/p>\n
Year: 1976<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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