TIME MACHINES - SHADOWS ON THE LANDSCAPE

We have the Dutch to thank for the modern word landscape, one of those “borrowed” pieces of language which has taken on an enlarged meaning over the years. Holland, home to some of the greatest artists of the past, re- invented the word landshap to describe a painting style of the early 18th century which saw artists moving outdoors with their brushes and oils to record the beauties of field, stream and nature. The word literally meant “shape of the land”, so when it moved into English in the late 1700s, it began to find usage outside the realm of portraiture. Present day demographers in fact think of “landscape” in terms not just of the natural outdoor world, but of the land and its content as a dynamic and changing backdrop to people’s lives; including features made by man himself.
As I have traveled this land I love, with notebook, sketch pad and camera over a lifetime, I have sought to capture all that the word conveys. In this and some future columns, I will share some of what I have seen, in both images and words.
For thousands of years, agriculture changed little, production being limited to what one man with basic hand tools could plant, raise and harvest. A hard-working farmer with a hand-sharpened scythe for instance, might hope to harvest about one quarter of an acre of wheat per day, about what he could have planted while laboring behind a horse or an ox in a similar time span. Then, in the 1830s, an American “revolution” began. A young Vermonter named John Deere invented a self-cleaning, side-board iron-and-steel plow destined to change farming forever, at the same time a Virginian of Irish descent, Cyrus McCormick, patented a device known as a mechanical reaper. Suddenly, farm output quadrupled, freeing up entire segments of population to move into industry, literally changing American agricultural and the cultural landscape. From horse-drawn implements made from interchangeable parts, it was a short leap into a future powered by steam, then gasoline engines, all in time to open up the vastness of western prairie lands. The “shadows” of those marvelous and inventive implements still linger on the landscape, as graceful artifacts from our agricultural past.


Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts – a true living-history museum – seeks to recreate everyday life in a typical northeastern village of 1800. If you are lucky, you might get to see high-hatted farmers using a yoke of oxen to open furrows in the same way it had been done for centuries of time.


Spring flowers and meadow grass are backdrop for a horse-drawn cultivator which seems to languish in the same spot where it probably met its demise years ago, replaced perhaps by a tractor-motivated machine of greater efficiency. Wherever the artist or photographer may wander, such “stories” are waiting to be discovered.


With iron locomotives and ribbons of steel spanning the continent, it was inevitable that the huffing and belching steam engine would find its way onto the growing acres of wheat lands in the mid-west. The Wood Bros. of Iowa produced steam-powered threshing machines such as this one, between 1910 and 1919. Far too expensive for an individual farmer to acquire, “threshing rings” made up of multiple families would be organized, with one member designated to be sent away to a steam school, so that an entire farming neighborhood could benefit from its bountiful potential.


Offspring of Cyrus McCormick’s revolutionary invention, and renovated with rubber-tired wheels and a tractor towing hitch, this harvester was originally pulled by a gang of horses, and was capable of harvesting 16 acres per day or more, literally changing history.

Caption for title photo above:
Like some giant mechanical dinosaur from out of a sci-fi drama, this still-colorful piece of farming history is one of hundreds of such Utah landmarks.

IN SEARCH OF A TRUE VILLAGE BAKER

I first met Ray Powers more than 25 years ago, personally selling his wonderful hand-crafted loaves of peasant bread from the tailgate of his venerable Volvo at a farmers’ market in Rutland, Vermont. The chance meeting was to become – for me – not only an important chapter in my search for brick hearth bakers around the country, but the beginning of a dawning realization that my own life has been enriched by touching shoulders with a pantheon of remarkable people who live life purposefully and with a special passion for what they do.
After that first day, I found my way to the top of a wooded country road outside Wallingford to the yellow-painted farmhouse where Ray and Christine Powers had settled to raise a family and bake old-world bread. I spent much of the next three days, warmed by the immense brick hearth attached to the renovated country home, observing the process which converted naturally-leavened whole grain loaves from starter to finished product, while absorbing the unusual personal story of the two lives united by this task they loved. Fired by lengths of dry and cured hardwood fed to a baking fire which was started at 4:00 AM, the mammoth brick hearth – built by an itinerant bricklayer from Maine who was himself plowing new and unexplored ground – the oven would reach an internal temperature of 800 degrees. The first batch of 100 risen loaves would take only 25 minutes to bake, as billows of steam would be added to develop a crisp outer crust from time to time, with Ray constantly moving the loaves to different places inside with his long-handled wooden peel to insure a uniform finish.
A second batch of 100 loaves would go in next, with a reduced temperature of 600 degrees requiring an added 10 or 15 minutes of hearth time, followed by a third and final batch, all going on as Christine moved the finished loaves to just the right spot on the cooling racks which circled the hearth room, and readying the next baskets of rising dough in their time.
With the day’s baking completed, the husband-and-wife team would use a slab of unbaked dough to leaven a new batch of dough turning slowly in their ancient mixing machine destined to cure for 48 hours before the next baking day, producing at least three variations including whole-grain rye, French-style baguette and raisin-filled wheat loaves.
Warmed by the tons of brick and wonderful aromas of baking bread which surrounded us, and the meeting of minds shared as we lunched on slices of rye and fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes, I listened to the unusual story of the shared dream which had given birth to it all.
When the two met – rather late in life – Ray was a Jesuit Priest teaching students in an English school in Bagdad, Iraq and Christine was herself a Catholic Nun. Dating back to the fifteenth century, the “Society of Jesus” – the Jesuits - is one of the oldest and most mission-oriented orders in the Catholic Faith, and it is unusual for a Father with the SJ after his name to leave the calling. Ray and Christine however had each arrived at a point in their lives where they felt inspired to seek a path which would allow them to have a family. With a release from the church hierarchy, they married and began a search for a place to live and a work they could share. They wished to live in a country environment, and to pursue an artisan craft which would benefit everyday people and provide a simple but satisfying sustenance. Journeying across Europe, they fell in love with the whole concept of village baking, tied to a history which was honorable and an ethic which was planted in long-established roots. In all their travels in America, they felt most comfortable in the Green Mountains of Vermont where they bought an abandoned farm on Bear Mountain.
I once asked Ray if they had found success in the life they were leading. He looked at me and said: “It all depends on what you call success. We are raising two wonderful and talented children, we live in a beautiful place and are engaged in an honest daily task we enjoy. Our home is paid for, we have no debt more than thirty days old, and we have our faith.”
In a world and at a time when we are told by experts that the average working adult will change jobs seven times in a lifetime, I am comforted to know and be uplifted by people like my friends, Ray and Christine Powers – true VILLAGE BAKERS.


Ray Powers removes finished loaves of country bread from his mammoth brick hearth oven at the time of an early visit years ago. Ray bakes three days each week, devoting the other days to selling and delivering finished product.


It is reassuring each year to find Ray and Christine Powers of “Bear Mountain Bakers” still selling their hand-crafted loaves at the Rutland, Vermont Farmers’ Market, this picture taken at the time of a recent visit.

FROM BULL RUN TO APPOMATTOX - NAVIGATING THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR

Driving south from Washington, D.C. on U.S. I-95 nowadays it takes just over an hour to reach the city of Richmond, Virginia, passing by places on the map with names like Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Spotsylvania. It stretches the mind of any first-time traveler to realize that for nearly four years mighty armies fought over and for this narrow strip of Virginia countryside dividing the two countries whose respective capitols were separated by those few miles. Ultimately that clash of arms and aims would involve most of the eastern part of the continent, touching the lives of virtually every American family with 3.5 million men wearing one uniform or another.
On a warm July day in 1861, no one could have foreseen such a future, even though the shots fired on Ft. Sumter had indeed lit the fuse. A newly-formed Confederate Army commanded by General P.G.T. Beauregard had encamped near the crossroads town of Manassas Junction, posing an obvious threat to the Oval Office itself, and rousing a response from Union General Ervin McDowell charged with responsibility for the defense of the Union Capitol.
On July 21st, 47-year-oldWilmer McLean, a local wholesale grocer and retired Major in the Virginia Militia, was sitting down to dinner with his family and their guest – Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard in their comfortable Manassas residence, when gunfire broke out in the front yard, a Union cannon ball actually falling through the roof and into the cooking fire. The occasion was the opening battle of the American Civil War, an engagement ever after known as “First Bull Run” to northerners, or “First Manassas” to Confederates. The prefix “First” became necessary, because just one year later, a “Second” battle would take place nearby (another win for the South, by the way).
Wilmer McLean, too old to return to active military duty and concerned for the safety of his family decided to move to a safer location, and so it was that four years later, they were relocated at Appomattox Courthouse – approximately 120 miles south of their former residence – when the war came to an end with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. Once again, an oddity of which that war had more than its share took place when the two sides sat down and signed the famous surrender documents there in the McLean home. Thus, on April 9th, 1865 Wilmer McLean could say the war which began in his front yard had ended in his living room.
Bull Run/Manassas exemplifies one of the challenges facing any study of the geography of that vast struggle. Union chroniclers usually named battles for some feature of the battle field while those from the Confederate side usually referred to the name of a place on the map: Manassas was a crossroads town while “Bull Run” was the name of a creek which ran through the area. The North’s “Battle of Antietam” for Maryland’s Antietam Creek was the “Battle of Sharpsburg” to men of the Gray; “Shiloh” referred to a small church building, while the fight which took place there was “The Battle of Pittsburg Landing” in newspapers of the Confederacy.
There were literally hundreds of battles fought for control of transportation hubs, river crossings, railroad junctions, sea ports or simply for commanding and strategic points of high ground. Other costly engagements took place where no one had planned them, but because two great armies happened to meet, such as Gettysburg. Sometimes some tiny and seemingly unimportant piece of geography became associated with a denomination those who fought there would never forget, like Malvern Hill, Savage’s Station, Gaines’s Mill, Stones’ River, Yellow Tavern or Five Forks. (When I visit such out-of-the-way places even today, the shiver that runs up and down my spine reminds me that I am walking on hallowed ground.)
Because the media of the day devoted so much space to the relatively nearby drama being played out in that 100-mile stretch between Washington and Richmond (where the men in Gray dominated victory for much of the first two years), the public of neither side realized that the larger war was being won by the men in Blue out west. The little-known “Anaconda Plan”, advanced by the venerable General-In-Chief Winfield Scott at the outset of hostilities and quietly accepted by Abraham Lincoln was being played out. Fort by fort, mile by mile, Confederate supply lines were being rolled up as Union forces – on land and water – were taking control of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Cumberland and the Tennessee, while the ocean Navy was making ever-more impregnable a blockade of Atlantic ports. Overseeing this western campaign was an unlikely candidate for any kind of fame; a failed Ohio shop-keeper and small-town businessman named Ulysses (Sam) Grant, about whom much more would be heard in the future.


Always an aristocratic gentleman, Robert E. Lee presents himself in full dress uniform with his sword for the surrender signing on April 9th, 1865 in Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Courthouse. Ulysses Grant, dressed in rough and informal “field wear” is generous in his terms as men such as Gen. George A. Custer, and Capt. Robert Todd Lincoln (representing his father, the President) look on. As this tableau unfolded, Lincoln in Washington had only five days to live.


Much of the original McLean house disappeared into the pockets of souvenir hunters long ago. The historic landmark and its parlor have been reconstructed in detail, and appear today as seen here.


Winfield Scott understood that the Confederacy could be defeated only by total economic collapse when he shared with Lincoln a plan for the eventual encirclement of the South’s supply lines. The press of the day made fun of what they called the “Anaconda Plan” as in this cartoon. Events proved Scott to have been right.

BEACHCOMBING FOR SEA GLASS Nature's Vanishing Legacy

The years between 1890 and 1920 witnessed the “hayday” of commercial glass. The two beverage bottles were designed to be refilled, while cobalt blue was a favored color for patent medicine. The small, hand-blown perfume bottle is a rare collector’s item and a personal favorite.

Fifty years ago I made my first sea voyage, courtesy of Uncle Sam; a 17-day, typhoon-tossed crossing of the vast Pacific. For entertainment, I watched from the troop ship’s fantail each day as crew members tossed the day’s garbage overboard - a potpourri of what was left over from feeding and caring for 1100 reluctant and none-too-happy passengers. At the time, I gave little thought to the fact that I was seeing a reenactment of what had been going on for 2000 years of maritime history, and even less would I have pondered the unknowable system of digestion by which man’s detritus - mere morsels certainly - would be processed into food for the fish and algae of the deep.
Among the refuse committed to the depths on the world’s great sea routes, and especially along the busy coastal shipping lanes near our own shores, were such items as jars, jugs, bottles, crockery and glass containers of all kinds, colors, shapes and hues. For hundreds of years. Ships from Europe had been coming here for two centuries before the Mayflower, and glass manufacturing was itself the first industry established at Jamestown in 1608.
It should come as no surprise that at least some of those glass remnants should come ashore, after being shaped and polished, altered and refined by years, decades and even centuries of processing by the sea. Those who – like myself and my family – have become itinerant beachcombers have developed and nurtured a special love affair with what we think of as “gem stones of the deep”. Their unique history, voyage and place of discovery make each “find” a gift from antiquity whose exact genealogy is worth pondering and cataloging.
Glass manufacturing dates back 4000 years, to a time when it was discovered that a mixture of 75% silica sand, 15% sodium bicarbonate, and 10% lime would become a molten sheet when heated to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit. Around 250 BC glass blowing took the process into a whole new set of possibilities, and the transport of liquids changed commerce. A New Jersey factory began making glass bottles in moulds in 1739, although the process would not be automated until the early 1900s. Mould marks on old bottles help to tell their age, just as “waves” in window glass suggests early casting techniques.
The color and shade of glass is another key to age: the addition of cobalt oxide began in the 1890s producing glass ranging from aqua to light blue. The Phillips Company’s milk of magnesia bottles were marked by the dark blue of this chemical; Pre-1900 soda bottles were another example, as were some early milk and poison bottles. Coca Cola bottles were blue-green until 1920, when the demand for “clear” glass increased. Antique flasks, goblets and lantern globes were often red (chards of this color are the “holy grail” of sea glass collectors today, with the orange of “carnival” glass so rare, that one “find” in 10,000 is considered fair odds.)
The yellow of “Vaseline glass” and the turquoise or lavender of certain canning jars add color to anyone’s collection, while white “milk glass” shows up in the cap liners of old “Ball” preserving lids.
The color, shape and “frosting” of ocean glass fragments result from long exposure to such factors as hydration, leaching, de-vitrification, erosion, pitting and abrasion. Their surface may show “crazing” or “crizzling” (indenting), and they tend often to be triangular in shape from the rhythmic action of surf and tides.
Sea glass does not come ashore just anywhere, and collectors are apt to be people who study weather maps, tide charts, and the shore environment. Along a thousand miles of Maine shoreline, we have come to confine our search time to a very specific location on John’s Bay, and another near Marshall Point.
Now, in the age of plastic and its cousins, sea glass is a vanishing phenomenon, and every tiny glistening sliver of frosty crystal caught by a spring tide is a gift as valuable as a real gem stone.
NOTE: On Oct. 25, 1865, a side-wheel steamship, the S.S. Republic, en route from New York to New Orleans sank in a Hurricane off the coast of Georgia. In 2003 - 138 years later - divers found the wreck lying at a depth of nearly 1700 feet, 100 miles southeast of Savannah. Along with much silver and other artifacts, they found crates of glass perfume bottles bearing the mark of “Isaac Edrehi Co.” of New York City, many with the glass stoppers intact. One of those bottles would look good in my collection: Isaac Edrehi was my maternal great grandfather.


Assembled by color, these pieces of “sea glass” were collected over a period of years, each one with its own story. Pieces of blue or red glass have become extremely rare along the Maine coast.


The art of hand-blowing glass has changed little over the years. This modern-day artisan is preparing a glob of newly-molten glass to be blown and shaped into a goblet.


Factors as distant as the alignment of the earth, the moon and Jupiter have an impact on the tides which sweep ancient pieces of sea glass along the ocean bottom and onto a rocky beach. Receding storm tides are especially prized by beachcombers.

THE KEEPERS’COMPANIONS The Untold Side Of Lighthouse Life

Visitors to the picturesque Owls Head light station who do not know the whole story, are often mystified by this simple granite marker placed on the green hillside beneath the stubby light tower. It was added by admirers many years after the death of the dog who was actually buried some distance away, but close to the bell with which his life was associated.

By the birth of the 20th century, more than 1800 lighthouses ringed the approaches to North America; vital guides to navigation and outposts of maritime safety. Before the days of electricity and automation, these lights were manned by employees of the U.S. Lighthouse Service, often families living in or near the light they maintained and operated, almost always remote from the “outside world” and dependent upon their own skills of self-reliance. It was a lonely and dangerous life, especially for those families who endured the isolation of an offshore island existence. Not only were they required to haul taxing quantities of whale oil, (or coal oil) from storage shed to lantern room, where the lenses had to be cleaned and maintained in all kinds of weather, but they were largely responsible for their own food and well-being. In some cases, the supply ships from the Lighthouse Service called to drop off supplies only three or four times a year.
Babies were born, raised and schooled at such remote stations, and so it was not unusual to have a milking cow as a “family member”. John Grant, the tenth keeper of distant Matinicus Rock off Maine’s mid-coast, brought a cow named “Daisy” on a six-mile boat ride from Matinicus Island to “the rock”, where only a few blades of grass dared to survive. “Daisy” made friends with a rabbit, and the two played together until the rabbit died. Left alone, the cow would often be seen gazing wistfully toward the distant shore, bellowing sadly. In other cases, a cow would be required to swim on her own to an offshore island, towed by a small boat.
Next to chickens in fact, a family cow was most often the companion of a lighthouse family, and in the case of the Mobile Middle Bay Light in 1916, the cow needed for a newborn baby’s welfare had no pasture at all: This was an octagonal “screw-pole” lighthouse built on steel posts driven into the bay, and the cow was confined to a wooden platform deck fastened just beneath the light and living quarters!
In 1900, a severe winter gale drove the schooner Clara Bella onto the rocks of Maine’s “Two Bush Island”, near the lighthouse where keeper Norton was unaware of the event due to the noises of the storm. His barking dog “Smut” however, led him to the rocky site, bringing about the rescue of the boat’s crew, who embraced the dog in overflowing gratitude.
Even more widespread was the fame of a Springer Spaniel named “Spot” who lived with the Augustus Hamor family manning the light station at Owl’s Head, an important light overlooking the entrance to Penobscot Bay. “Spot” had learned to ring the fog bell by pulling on its rope – especially when he knew his special friend Captain Stuart Ames piloting the Matinicus mail boat was leaving or entering port. An exchange of greetings took the form of Ames sounding his horn and “Spot” barking a welcome. A particularly bad storm struck that part of Maine’s coast around 1939, when high winds had drifted snow in such a way as to silence the fog bell, then draping the region in deep fog. By late evening, the mail boat had not returned, and Spot napped fitfully indoors. Suddenly, amid the storm’s fury he rushed outside and down to the shore where he began barking. Then, the distant sound of a ship’s horn penetrated the deep fog, and Spot continued his barking until a phone call advised the Hamors that Capt. Ames was safe at home.
Other stories of “lighthouse companions” abound, from keeper Ted Pedersen’s swashbuckling cats who made friends with a pair of wild red foxes who then learned to feed from the keeper’s hand at his Cape Sarichef, Alaska station, to a cat who learned to dig clams for a lighthouse crew.
At a time when communications from remote light station to shore was problematical at best, many keepers bred “homing pigeons”, many of which became close pets sharing space in the lamp room of a light tower, but who had been born and introduced to a “home” location ashore.
In our newly-wed days we shared a residence with the Coast Guard couple who manned the lighthouse in Mukilteo, Washington. There we were entertained by the generous nature of a Retriever who regularly launched himself on an early-morning swim toward distant Whidby Island, returning later in the day to present a good size salmon at the feet of his owner; with much wagging of tail!
Perhaps this whole reflection on the companionship of people and animals was summed up best by Lighthouse Keeper Zebediah Strout, Keeper of Maine’s Portland Head Light in his diary for Christmas, 1910:
Dear Lord, on this Christmas Day, we are far from the mainstream of life, down here at a lonely lighthouse on the coast of Maine, but we are happy here, and happy that you are around us. . . We haven’t a stable of animals, such as He was born in, but we have a good dog, Bosun, that helps me light up and put out; a parrot, Bill, that was given us by our good friends; Mother Cat who keeps us free of mice; and Bess, our good mare who lives in the barn with Mother Cat. We thank you for all that we have this day. Amen


Operated by the U.S. Coast Guard since WW II, Owls Head Light stands on a point of land 80 feet above the sea and overlooking the vast expanse of Penobscot Bay and the Port of Rockland, Maine. In the late 1930s, it was home to Keeper Augustus Hamor and his family and a famous dog named “Spot”. (I have made it a point to revisit this favorite place on each and every visit to coastal Maine).


One of the few surviving “Phillips striking bells” similar to the one often tolled by “Spot” the fog-bell dog. Owls Head today boasts an air horn which is triggered automatically when fog forms. (It is best not to be standing near when that happens)!

REMEMBERING SIGNS OF THE TIMES

For a generation or two of us who grew up with Studebakers, DeSotos, Packards and Hudson Hornets, driving across America’s two-lane highways was an adventure made more tolerable, and even interesting by the humor and whimsy of a special breed of sign-painters who seem to have expired with the birth of the Interstate system. There were colorful murals three stories high on roadside barns extolling the virtues of such necessities as “Mailpouch Tobacco” and “Royal Crown Cola”,and Sunday drives in the country were saved from ever becoming boring as passengers kept an eye peeled and necks craned in anticipation of the first sighting of those ubiquitous shaving cream messages which seemed to pop up at every rural turn in the highway. “BENEATH THIS STONE/LIES ELMER GUSH/TICKLED TO DEATH/BY HIS/SHAVING BRUSH/BURMA SHAVE”, or “CATTLE CROSSING/MEANS GO SLOW/THAT OLD BULL/IS SOME COW’S BEAU/BURMA SHAVE”.
What most Americans didn’t know was that these roadside symbols of business entrepreneurship didn’t emanate from some corporate giant with unlimited advertising resources, but a tiny family-owned enterprise in Minneapolis. Clinton Odell’s Burma-Vita Company was about to go broke in 1926, when his son, Allan Odell got the idea of experimenting with roadside advertising. With two hundred dollars worth of recycled lumber and two cans of paint, he kicked off the campaign along a rural stretch of Minnesota highway. No one really expected anything to come of it. American men had grown up using shaving brushes; who could expect them to suddenly change to a “brushless” shaving cream?
But it worked. The little company began to prosper, and the roadside signs spread across the country: “IT’S IN THE BAG/OF EVERY MAN/WHO TRAVELS/LIGHTLY AS HE CAN/BURMA SHAVE”.
The format was always the same: A series of six red-and-white signs topping eight-foot posts sunk just off the highway right-of-way, on ground leased from farmers happy to receive a small rental check. “SALESMEN,TOURISTS/CAMPER OUTERS/ALL YOU OTHER/WHISKER SPROUTERS/
DON’T FORGET/YOUR BURMA SHAVE”
Behind every thoughtfully crafted message was the kind of humor the public identified with:”LISTEN BIRDS/THESE SIGNS COST MONEY/ROOST AWHILE/BUT DON’T GET FUNNY”. No one who drove our nation’s highways could fail to know about the product which soon became the number two selling male toilet commodity; especially with such reminders as “YOU’VE LAUGHED/AT OUR SIGNS/FOR MANY A MILE/BE A SPORT/GIVE US A TRIAL/BURMA SHAVE”.
Appealing to the romantic side of their male audience, the whimsical sign-painters came up with such messages as TRY THIS CREAM/A DAY OR TWO/THEN DON’T/CALL HER/SHE’LL CALL YOU/BURMA SHAVE” or “USE OUR CREAM/AND WE BETCHA/GIRLS WON’T WAIT/THEY’LL COME/AND GETCHA/BURMA SHAVE”. Another guy attention getter said “A CHIN/WHERE BARBED WIRE/BRISTLES STAND/IS BOUND TO BE/A NO-MAMS/LAND. …”
Alert to the need for driver safety, the Odell folks turned some of their byway efforts in that direction with gems like “AROUND THE CURVE/LICKETY SPLIT/BEAUTIFUL CAR/WASN’T IT” and “ALTHO INSURED/REMEMBER KIDDO/THEY DON’T PAY YOU/THEY PAY YOUR WIDOW/BURMA SHAVE”. Drunken driving became another target of the Odell safety campaign with such ingenious messages as “VIOLETS ARE BLUE/ROSES ARE PINK/ON GRAVES OF THOSE/WHO DRIVE AND DRINK”, and “CAR IN DITCH/DRIVER IN TREE/MOON WAS FULL/AND SO WAS HE/BURMA SHAVE”
Sometimes I dare to wonder if all change is good. Sometimes driving across the great uninterrupted stretches of often- featureless U.S. Freeway, I find myself searching the roadside vistas, hoping that up ahead I’ll catch a glimpse of those six familiar red and white signs from out of the motoring past.

Travelers on old highway U.S. 66 would have seen such “signs of the time” as these familiar red and white “Burma Shave” reminders. The novelty of this unique form of advertising helped to make this small Minnesota cosmetic company a household name.

PREPAREDNESS TIP

The difference between “Preparing” and “Hoarding” comes down to a matter of timing. If we acquire and store goods and commodities during times of availability and comparative “plenty”, we are exercising prudence and good sense; it is something we have been advised and counseled to do throughout our lives, and grows out of long experience. That activity is part and parcel of “preparing”. If however, we postpone that practice until a time of scarcity and widespread economic distress, we may well invite the label of “hoarding”, in addition to paying a higher price for almost everything.

THINKING INSIDE THE BOX Gardening In Small Spaces

Increasingly, I find myself speaking to groups made up of apartment or condominium dwellers, both young and starting out in life, and older and in the process of minimizing the size and complexity of their living environment. Many perceive their particular lifestyle as being incompatible with the idea of being more self-sufficient and alien to the desire to enjoy the fulfillment of a meaningful home garden. I hasten to disabuse them of this illusion, warning them that I could easily take up three or four hours of their valuable time doing so; after a lifetime of gardening in four states, in mountains and deserts and in all kinds of climate, I am passionate about planting, nurturing and harvesting my own crops. Even though I presently have several acres available for growing things, I still prefer to garden in raised beds and moveable containers. The reasons are many.
I don’t enjoy hours and hours of weeding & cultivating. I prefer not to bend over any more than necessary. I wish to use as little water and fertilizer as possible. I always aim to produce an early harvest, outsmart early frosts at the other end of the season, and be able to actually move growing plants from one place to another. It is also nice to be able to go away on extended journeys without coming home to an army of weeds that have taken over, or to find myself tired of the whole “keeping-up” battle through the long hot days of summer.
My basic garden “space” is a four foot by four foot square, with multiples extending to 4’ X 8’, allowing me to be able reach into the heart of the bed from each side. This enables me to practice “square-foot gardening”, rather than dealing with long rows with wasted space for walking, irrigating and re-cultivating, all of which takes time, space, and encourages weed-production.
In each square foot of space I can produce either 16 small items such as carrots, baby beets, or onions, or 4 larger plants such as lettuce, Swiss chard or parsley. Of course each tomato, pepper or cauliflower plant will require its own square foot of private territory. Keep in mind though, that square-foot gardening invites “succession planting”, so that as each mature plant is harvested, something else takes its place; another reason why advance garden-planning is important. Fast-growing veggies such as radishes and even baby carrots can be sewn amongst and between longer maturing crops, where space is available even briefly. Even tall crops like corn can be grown efficiently in this manner, with up to 24 stalks sharing a single four-foot square bed. (Pollination actually loves this kind of “block” arrangement.)
And then there is another concept for getting the most out of limited space, and that is where my “vertical” garden comes into play. I prefer to plant pole beans rather than the space-consuming bush varieties. You can either “companion-sew” them at the end of a bed where the shade they provide might help other nearby plants, or take advantage of a sun-warmed wall or building side where they don’t compete with other growth. Other vegetables such as cucumbers, squash and even melons can be trained to grow vertically, making use of space not otherwise in productive use. (Save those cast-off pantyhose to act as “suspenders” for heavy fruit when tied to the growing mesh.)
Rather than use space for a small potato patch, I plant mine in several large – bushel-size – clay pots, adding soil around the growing vines as they reach for the sky. In a good year, I can expect 30 or more mature tubers from each planter, merely by reaching down and pulling them by hand from soil that never gets hard and dry and never needs weeding.. In fact “container-gardening” is a refinement of the whole idea of gardening in small spaces. My last ripe tomato of the 2010 season was harvested in a sunny indoor pantry on January 1st, and a half dozen good-size ‘maters are already on this year’s plants at February’s end before they even go outdoors. I have a friend who grows a huge crop of Italian figs high on Salt Lake City’s east bench year after year by growing the trees in large movable containers on wheels, permitting her to roll them indoors each fall.
As gasoline prices rise, and trips to the store become ever more costly, perhaps it is time to start thinking – and growing - “inside the box”.

NOTE: The book “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew” has been a perennial favorite since its first publication in 1981.


In only fifteen square feet of raised-bed space, 24 spinach plants keep company with 12 heads of lettuce, 24 baby beets and a year-old parsley survivor. This bed is constructed for waist-high convenience and has seen use both outdoors and in this spring greenhouse.


A “square-foot” approach to gardening makes sense even when room to grow is not the only reason. In this “experimental” trial garden, competing varieties of lettuce plants from around the world are on stage to have their merits compared and monitored by Al’s friend, Shep Ogden in southern Vermont.


A pair of early tomato plants get to spend some time “getting acquainted” with the outdoor raised bed which will be their home in the near future – a process known as “hardening-out”.


Members of the super-hardy brassica family, these young cabbage plants get a head start on the season in a winter-like setting they love.
All Photos by Al Cooper

THE LAST DOUGHBOY

Three days ago, an item on the Associated Press news wire caught my attention: In Morgantown, West Virginia, Frank Buckles had passed away quietly, at the age of 110. He was America’s last surviving veteran of World War I, and therein lies a story whose aftermath is still shaping world history today.
It all started with another news item which by rights, ought to have caused little more than a raised European eyebrow or two; on June 28, 1914, the heir-apparent to the Hapsburg throne in Austria-Hungary, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, were assassinated by an 18-year-old student radical while visiting Sarajevo, Serbia. Thirty days later, Austria declared war on Serbia, and a series of mutual defense treaties began to come into play. First, Germany declared war on Russia, then within another few days, Belgium and France. On August 4th, Great Britain declared themselves at war with Germany, and the dominoes came tumbling down. Within weeks, twenty-seven nation-states had declared war, and what became known as “The Great War” (eventually World War I) was underway.
Protected by two oceans and a calculated sense of political and social isolationism, America watched as what had started with a single terrorist act exploded into vicious warfare across three continents, even as a generation of neighboring Canadians were dying by the thousands on far-flung battlefields. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, an academic and political “Progressive” dealt mostly in peace-loving platitudes and promises to keep his country out of the fray, while finding it more and more difficult to remain “neutral”, especially as German U-boats threatened American shipping.
Finally, on April 6, 1917 – after nearly four years of unprecedented bloodshed – the United States joined with the Allied Nations by declaring war on the “Central Powers”. Under the command of U.S. Army General John J.”Blackjack” Pershing, an American Expeditionary Force was assembled and sent off to the battlefields of France, where the conflict had settled into bogged-down trench warfare, where thousands died every day, fighting for a few meters of useless shell-churned soil.
During the 3rd battle of Ypres in the summer of 1917, within a five-mile square of Flanders fields, casualties surged to 850,000, with the Allies suffering 140,000 dead! The word Passchendaele and the red poppies which grew there have become symbolic of the human tragedy played out there. (Two inches of ground changed hands for every soldier’s death; ground which would be lost again in following weeks!)
In time, U.S. intervention helped to turn the tide of war, saving Paris from occupation and bringing to bear an immense economic capacity the Central Powers could never match. Five million American volunteers –“ Doughboys” -- would serve and a high price in lost and damaged lives would be paid. In a larger sense, the world would never be the same: the concept of “total war” had been born, and of the nearly 18 million dead, 6.8 million were civilians. Across Europe, two generations of men and boys were gone, leaving behind one million widows and three million orphans. The “Great War” represented a true watershed in the devaluation of human life, and would serve to define the way wars of the future would be fought.
While artillery, the machinegun, and poison gas brought about the greatest number of battle casualties, there arose a new kind of wound no one knew how to treat. For want of a better term, it was known as “shell shock” and was too often written off as war-weariness, or even cowardice; no one had thought up the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” yet, and millions of America’s “doughboys” came home to face years or even a lifetime of emotional suffering.
The “Great War” – the “war to end all wars”- not only failed to live up to that lofty expectation, but actually set in motion events and circumstances which would make the wars to follow almost inevitable. While the United States would be thrust into a position of leadership, England would cease to be the world’s greatest empire; national borders would be redrawn, new nation-states with mixed populations invented from left-over bits and pieces, revolutions spawned and arbitrary peace conditions imposed which would insure lasting enmities and crushed economies. The Versailles Treaty would produce fertile ground for the birth of Nazism and the rise to power of Adolph Hitler; and the stage would be set for the expansion of Communist influence around the shrinking globe. Japan, a member of the Allied Powers would feel “short-changed” in a division of the spoils at war’s end, and would nurture a history-changing direction in foreign policy.
All of this crosses my mind as I revisit the memories of growing up with a father who returned from that war with wounds that followed him through life, and I silently render a special heart-felt salute to Frank Buckles, the last American “Doughboy”.

NOTE: Frank Buckles enlisted in 1917 at the age of 16 serving in England and France. Later in life as a civilian, he was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during the early days of WW II and spent three-and-a-half years as a POW. He devoted his late years to memorializing WW I “Doughboys”.


German and Allied “walking wounded” make their way to an aid station during the Battle of the Somme, July 19, 1916. Nearly ten million had already died by the time the U.S. entered WW I in April, 1917.
Imperial War Museum Collection


U.S. Marines and French Army soldiers gather on May 30th, 2010 to mark the 92nd anniversary of the battle of Belleau Wood which took place near the cemetery in the photo in 1918. It was in this battle that the U.S. Marine Corps established itself as a legendary fighting force, and it was here that Auburn Forest Cooper, 20th Co., 5th Marine Regiment - father of the writer – was seriously wounded.
U.S. Marine Corps. Photo

UNCLE TOM & DRED SCOTT The Slide Towards War

The name of Josiah Hensley may not be well known in today’s school classrooms, but for a Connecticut-born teacher living in Brunswick, Maine in 1850, the narrative he composed inspired her to write a novel destined to become what some scholars still call the most important piece of American literature ever published.
The budding author was named Harriet Beecher Stowe, the educated wife of a professor at Bowdoin College, and she called her novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. A passionate abolitionist, Stowe had been captivated by the revelations depicting life on a Maryland plantation as related by a former slave, Josiah Hensley, who had escaped to Canada. For a largely-naïve northern public, the book struck an immediate chord and within a few months, 300,000 copies were being shared by American readers, to say nothing of the dramatic stage plays and traveling road shows based on its pages.
As much as any other single event, the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” further fueled the abolition movement in the North while infuriating the slave-holding South. Divisions in the nation’s governing bodies became even more strained, and the road toward separation and Civil War more clearly marked.
If there was a “final blow” to any possibility of resolution, it came in the form of the U.S. Supreme Court’s activism in the most controversial decision in all of the high court’s history; and here we run into two more important names: Roger Tanay (pronounced Tau’nee), and Dred Scott.
Roger Taney was born to a slave-holding Maryland family, rising to make a name for himself both as a successful lawyer and politician. Breaking with the Federalists over the War of 1812, he became a prominent Democrat and a vocal advocate for slavery and for states’ rights. He endeared himself to Andrew Jackson, for whom he carried the torch even in the face of extreme opposition. He served the Jackson administration as U.S. Attorney General, and briefly, as Secretary of War. When first nominated for a Supreme Court Justiceship, he failed to win support from Congress, but when Chief Justice John Marshal died, he gained approval to replace him after much wrangling in Congress where he was not exactly revered.
Dred Scott was a black slave who long served a military master, Major John Emerson, who took Scott with him from slave-holding Missouri to stations in Illinois and then to the Wisconsin Territory, both “free” entities, over a period of many years of Federal service. Scott had even been permitted to marry. Upon their return to the South, and the death of the Major, Dred Scott was encouraged by friends to petition for his freedom, on the grounds that he had now lived for many years in “free territory”. Emerson’s widow refused, and the petition went to the courts, finally finding its way to the highest court of the land in 1857 as DRED SCOTT v SANDFORD. (The widow’s business and legal affairs were managed by her brother, John F.A. Sandford.)
Under heavy pressure from ardently pro-slavery U.S. President James Buchanan, Judge Taney wrote the court’s final opinion which was so controversial – even among the Associate Justices – that one of the dissenters retired from the high court in utter disgust. Taney said in essence that since the founding of the Republic, Negroes had never been, and never would be citizens, and therefore Dred Scott had no standing to even have his case heard. Period!
But Taney did not stop there. The Taney court went on to say that Congress did not have the power to outlaw slavery in the new territories, or anywhere else for that matter, thereby overturning the Missouri Compromise and every other Act defining the long-standing boundaries between slave and “free” states. Not only did the decision sustain the notion that slaves were the private property of their owners, but that anyone attempting to interfere with that right would be subject to penalty under the law. By extension, black residents of the northern states who had been free voting citizens since the earliest days of nationhood had been redefined as aliens of a lower order, and states in which slavery had long been outlawed now found themselves challenged by federal doctrine.
The 1860 census found that of 8 million residents of the eleven southern states which were about to leave the Union, 4 million – fully one half – were black slaves, and in states such as South Carolina and Mississippi, the slave population actually outnumbered free whites.
After Uncle Tom and Dred Scott, only the formal secession of the Confederate states and the cannons facing Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor remained to ignite the fuse which would bring a long bloody war to America.


Harriet Beecher Stowe, a teacher at the Hartford Female Academy, crafted her sentimental novel about life on a Maryland slave plantation to focus public awareness
on the horrors of slave life. Her book became the second most read book of the 19th century, next only to the Bible.


Roger Taney (1777 – 1864), shown in an 1848 daguerreotype by famed Civil War era photographer Mathew Brady, became the fifth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court,
where he presided over the history-making Dred Scott decision. He was described unkindly by critics as a “supple, cringing tool of Jacksonian power”.

“UNBROKEN” Surviving A War That Has No End

In her landmark best-seller, ”Unbroken * * * A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”, Laura Hillenbrand (SEABISCUIT) takes on a subject few have plumbed to the depths achieved in this 2010 masterpiece. I have read it once cover to cover, and now again for the purpose of underlining, in-depth study and note-taking. Except for those who are super-young or emotionally fragile, I wish that all Americans would read it.
The story of American POWs is a many-told tale, and generally speaking, one that most of us have been exposed to. Mostly though, those stories revolve around the European Theater of operations in WWII, and then often with tongue-in-cheek as in the likes of “Hogan’s Heroes” or as dramatized in Hollywood’s version of “The Great Escape”. Only in “Bridge On the River Kwai”, and a handful of made-for-television specials have we focused on the suffering endured by those who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of our WWII Pacific enemies. It is something of an eye opener to realize that among POWs of the Germans and Italians, 5% were killed or died as prisoners. In Japanese prison camps on the other hand, 30% - three out of every ten – did not come home. What’s just as important is that for most of those who did, the trauma resulting from the brutality they had suffered haunted them for the remainder of their deeply damaged lives.
In researching her book SEABISCUIT, Ms. Hillenbrand kept running into sports headlines about a famous Olympic one-mile runner from Torrance, California by the name of Louis Zamperini, the first American to come close to clocking the “four-minute mile”. That led her to the story of his wartime experience, and the beginning of a writing project which would occupy the focus of her working hours for the next seven years. (And therein lies another story, quite as remarkable as the book which would follow.)
The arrival of war in the Pacific brought an end to Zamperini’s 1940 Olympic bid, and instead found him training as a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Corps in a B-24 Liberator, a four-engine bomber often referred to as the “flying coffin”. By late Fall of 1942, Louie and the rest of the nine-man crew of a “Liberator” named “Superman” were flying regular combat missions out of Midway Island over the countless miles of open ocean in the Central Pacific campaign, at a time when the Empire of Japan had conquered and occupied virtually every piece of real estate from China to Hawaii, with Australia and New Zealand in their crosshairs, and America’s west coast soon to be within striking distance.
On May 27, 1943, the crew of “Superman” were awakened early with orders to join the search for a lost B-25 bomber. With their own plane so severely damaged in an air battle that it had been junked for spare parts, they were forced to take off in a bad luck Liberator known as the “Green Hornet”, whose engines were barely capable of getting the lame B-24 airborne. This was destined to be a bad luck day for the nine close friends and two passengers. Following the failure of first one, and then a second engine, the “Green Hornet” crashed into the sea, swiftly taking all but three of its crew to the bottom. (The high-winged B-24 was notorious for its inability to survive such an event.)
For the next forty-seven days, under constant attack from sharks, and living only on a few fish and seabirds and an occasional rain shower, Louis Zamperini and his pilot friend established an unprecedented record of survival as their tiny raft drifted westward for 2000 miles, sadly burying their waist gunner in the sea along the way. But the worst of their story still awaited them; ahead lay two years of imprisonment and enforced slave-labor at the hands of an enemy whose code of warfare looked upon surrender as the ultimate loss of face. For reasons which will never be completely explained, Louis Zamperini became the special target of daily dehumanizing brutality on the part of a Japanese NCO named Matsuhiro Watanabe – nicknamed “The Bird” by the POWs who quickly learned to despise and fear his psychotic behavior.
Already a skeleton weighing less than 70 pounds by the end of his ordeal at sea, the former American athlete then endured two years of daily beatings, torture and physical and mental trauma, in two of the most terrible of Japan’s 91 POW camps, where disease, malaria, beri beri, dysentery and starvation took their own unimaginable toll, even without the sadistic cruelty of guards like “The Bird”.
“Unbroken” is not just a chronicle of one man’s survival of war’s worst terrors, but of the long road to recovery and redemption which ultimately took him back – fifty years later - to the land of his suffering, and to the personal forgiveness of the very men who had robbed him of freedom and dignity.
Today, Louis Zamperini is 93, and has replaced his runner’s shoes with a skate board.

NOTE: In addition to seven years of meticulous research work, Laura Hillenbrand conducted 75 interviews with Louis Zamperini for the book, and yet has never met with him face to face; Suffering from a disease known as “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”, she lives her life as a highly productive, best-selling author within the confinement of a 1500-square-foot home, and counts a trip to an adjoining room as a great victory.


First Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, USAAF examines one of 594 shell holes perforating the skin of “Superman” after a day of deadly combat in the skies over a tiny Pacific island named Nauru, in April of 1943. The B-24 its crew had come to love never flew again after that engagement.
USAF Photo


A faded archival photo of a Japanese soldier named Matsuhiro Watanabe (“The Bird”) reminds us of a time and a place when 140,000 Allied servicemen suffered behind barbed wire far from home in Japanese POW camps. An imperial order to kill all POWs on August 25th, 1945 was only interrupted by the atomic bombing of Japan. Avoiding capture and trial as a “war criminal”, Watanabe never apologized for his activities, and when invited to meet with Zamperini, he chose not to. He died in 2003.

IN QUEST OF UMAMI AN ARGUMENT FOR SLOW FOOD

Each year, a growing number of country villages across Italy cordon off their downtown areas and host open-air street festivals dedicated to the celebration of “slow food” – a phenomenon which has given birth to an international counter-insurgency movement decrying the world’s obsession with what for want of a better term we call “Fast Food”. While I tend to be suspicious of all “movements” which threaten to become socio-political cults, I find comfort in the renewed focus on the idea that we would be happier people if we took more time to savor and appreciate the food we eat.
As a young boy, I was invited by their son to spend some time on a small farm in upstate New York, owned by an Italian family we had come to know in a more urban environment. The parents of my friend were immigrants from Sicily, and on their newly-acquired farm they had embraced a return to the country life they had once known in the “old world”. While I was already thoroughly-indoctrinated into the ethic of family dining (I had a mother who required our attendance at the kitchen table if we wanted to eat), I was unprepared for life with the Bruno Bralla family, where the thick board table was piled high with a dozen different kinds of smoked meats, sausages and cheeses, including rounds of Provolone and lengths of Pecorino which hung from the low ceiling on cords and from which each person was free to cut off slices and chunks. We each were equipped with a wooden platter, a large very sharp knife, a thick glass of red wine, and total freedom. One could choose home-cured veal, pancetta, salami, mortadella, capacolla, breseaola, prosciutti, or a variety of pickled peppers and marinated olives, which we could pile on the half-loaves of crunchy bread we pulled apart by hand. It took an hour to eat, all the while Senior Bralla regaled us with stories of his former life as a smuggler in the Italian Alps. And you had time to taste everything in its own moment!
Science tells us that we humans possess four well-known and long-identified taste centers, scattered around the mouth, tongue and palate. We distinguish sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and from these neuro-sites, signals are sent to the brain. They help to activate the metabolic system that converts what we eat into what our bodies need and, given time, when we should stop eating. (Satiation takes about twenty minutes.) All of this is interesting and helpful, but there is more.
Since around 1908, we have known there is a fifth taste center. Isolated by Professor Kibunae Ikeda of Tokyo University, it was given the Japanese symbol for “delicious taste” which translates into the spoken word “umami”. The closest word in the English language which has some equivalency is “savory”, thus a food which is imbued with umami we might say is possessed of “savoryness”, or perhaps, “meatyness”. The chemical which produces this taste quality is a glutamate, and can be found in many non-meat foods, such as cooked mushrooms, certain kinds of seaweed and in things like anchovies, and pastes made from these sources.
One of the joys of cooking lies in the art of using ingredients, combinations, and kitchen science to discover and amplify the almost limitless nuances of tastes and flavors with which to bring pleasure and enjoyment to those who dine with us. In no other venue can we touch the creative possibilities available to us in quite the same way. This being true, why don’t we slow down, leave the world outside, and give the inner self time to explore, savor and relish the culinary gift of the moment ?
Years ago we were able to visit with the late Scott and Helen Nearing on their self-sufficient homestead on Maine’s Point Rosier, where they had settled to live and write about their search for happiness. They explained to us why they chose to eat with chop sticks from the simple wooden bowls in which they served up the daily fare from their gardens, berry patches, orchards, root cellar and greenhouse. “We have found”, Helen said, “that we are better able to concentrate on each morsel, consider where it came from and give our palate the opportunity to celebrate life deliberately, piece by piece”.
From a health standpoint, we are told that if we eat slowly, we will improve digestion, avoid high acidity, and eat less. Some say it can amount to a lifelong weight-control strategy. What I know for sure is that good food, well and lovingly-prepared is too great a gift to take for granted or to disrespect with thoughtless, thankless and “high-speed” consumption. In my quest for the mythical umami, a fifth taste tells me this is true.

A simple meal of fruit, crusty peasant bread, and a well- aged cheese invites diners to eat slowly, enjoy conversation, and linger long enough to savor time spent in carrying out an ages-old human tradition.


A meal guaranteed to titillate all five taste centers, a Dutch oven of home-made file gumbo brings together four diverse culinary cultures in an amalgam of at least fifteen key ingredients; a marriage of Spanish “Creole”, French” Cajon”, Choctaw Indian, and African “Carib” food traditions.

Photos by Al Cooper

A QUIET KIND OF INTEGRITY TRAP DAY ON MONHEGAN ISLAND

It will come as no surprise to those who know me and follow my word-ramblings that I cannot hide for long my special love for coastal New England; it is a sad burden to bear if a year passes without a return to my private “Mecca-by-the-sea”, no matter how brief.
It has become my Maine habit to rise early each morning in order to pay an anonymous visit to a nearby wharf where I can observe the start of a “fishermen’s day”, as lobster boats line up at the fuel dock, take aboard blue barrels of bait, and, amid the burbling of diesels and the cry of gulls wend their way, one by one, through the narrow passage from New Harbor to the waiting Atlantic.
On one memorable occasion, I was late in getting there, disappointed to realize I had missed the moment. The local “fleet” had already sailed. All except one boat. I watched as a lone teen age boy, in yellow boots and ragged jacket prepared his small, unsophisticated lobster boat just beneath the overhanging dock from which I watched. I was not alone. Within easy ear-shot were two old-time “locals”; grizzled men of the sea who no longer plied the trade, but were always there, watching, measuring, still attached by a lifetime of memories to a way of life which would always define them. Finally, the neophyte lobsterman cast off, his final purchase – a six pack of Coca Cola – lowered to him by dock workers, as the two old timers watched critically. I could sense a touch of mild disapproval, even in their silence. Then one took his pipe from his mouth, and amid curls of blue smoke said to his companion in a grudging bit of Down-East understatement “Wal, he may be late, but he always goes”.
You would have to have grown up among these seemingly-gruff, and unarguably laconic “Yankees” to understand – as I did – that a great compliment had just been shared. Over the years, that mental picture and those words have stayed with me: “He may be late, but he always goes”. There is much to be said for the old fashioned virtue of persistence; that inborn tenacity which drives people to honor some tradition, cause, or ethic even when it is difficult or uncomfortable to do so. Inherent in the lives of these Maine lobster fishermen can be seen a respect for old values, and a quiet kind of integrity which never fails to warm my heart and restore a flagging pride in my race.
Lobsters from the cold waters of the northeast are – to be sure – the king and queen of seafood. However, to the truly initiated, a “Maine Lobster” (Homarus americanus) is in a special league, and a “Monhegan Lobster” is supreme. In the waters around Monhegan Island, nature, (and man) have been especially kind to this culinary crustacean which, for a number of reasons grows larger and more delectable there. And they sell for a higher price! Many years ago, the lobstermen of Monhegan got together and decided to limit the length of their fishing season and the size of their catch, believing that the extra-large specimens should be protected as “breeders”;all of this when there were no such limits on lobstering in other Maine waters. What’s more, they discouraged (in their own way) poaching by “outsiders”.
As a matter of long tradition, their self-imposed season would run from January 1st into the month of June, the exact starting day determined by common consent in an annual meeting. For weeks, the local fishermen would stack their repaired and weighted traps beside the island’s wharf as they prepared for the magic day known as “Trap Day”, honor bound to the idea that all should have an equal chance of success. This ideal came to a test one year when the wife of one of their number was taken seriously ill, and was being treated in a mainland hospital, where her husband remained at her side. Not only did the Monhegan men see to it that his traps and boat would be ready upon his return weeks later, but that no boat would launch until they could all launch. “Trap Day” on Monhegan Island – to this day – takes place when everyone is ready to go.

Lobster traps help to frame the approach to Monhegan Island’s lone dock, connected by a network of hiking trails to Cathedral Woods, the stone lighthouse and the 200 foot cliffs which drop off sharply into a breaking sea on the island’s east side. The small harbor is protected by tiny Manana, an islet where Viking artifacts have been found.


Maine lobstermen at Round Pond help each other to load traps, floats and gear for a day off-shore. From here, it is a twelve mile run out to Monhegan. A two-man crew might maintain and harvest from 100 to 200 traps, attached to floats painted with their unique licensed color scheme. Each float might be tied to six or eight traps which are usually “pulled” daily, in all kinds of weather.


An old and weathered “fish shack” acts as a community bulletin board on Monhegan Island, a favorite destination for artists and tourists in the summer months, but year-round home to fewer than one hundred hearty residents. The entire island comprises little more than one square mile. It was probably the first point on the New England coast to have been visited by Europeans.
All Photos by Al Cooper

RAILS, MAILS and PUPPY DOG TALES

Sometime in 1831, and probably on a South Carolina railroad, a local postmaster in a hurry got the idea of asking a locomotive engineer to hand-carry a mail pouch to another destination along the line, thereby beating the best stage coach delivery by a noteworthy margin. This, and other such experiments, no doubt brought attention to the British Railway System which had begun doing the same thing on the Liverpool to Manchester route a year earlier, using special mail carriages. On July 7, 1838 the U.S. Congress designated all railroads as official postal routes, and the age of steam was poised to alter the whole concept of communication across the growing expanse of North America.
In 1862, as the American Civil War was entering its second year, the “railway post office” came into being, with converted baggage cars put into service on the Hannibal & St. Joseph railroad, which in turn connected with the Pony Express. In the years to come an important step forward was made when cars were especially designed to facilitate the sorting and bundling of mail en route, eliminating the need for pre-sorting at both ends, and making possible delivery at way points in between.
Railroad Postal Offices (RPO’s) would become the very backbone of rapid mail delivery in America, and would remain so for another century, finally phasing out in the 1960s, as commercial aviation and the Interstate highway system matured, and railroads declined. (As a matter of fact, many railroad systems had depended on U.S. Mail contracts for their existence as passenger traffic had fallen off.)
Over the years, the RPO turned into a highly-efficient “post office on wheels”, manned by a select group of mail clerks who worked long hours on their feet in a 70-mile-per-hour, clicking, rolling and bouncing environment, where they had to memorize hundreds of details of information in order to anticipate ultimate destinations spanning thousands of miles of delivery routes; they were unable to rely on printed references or schedules of any kind. As a youth, I knew one of these devoted postal employees, who was seldom at home, but sound asleep during the hours when he was. He was the father of a “best friend”, and I came to think of him as a “ghost”.
In order to serve the many towns through which passenger trains traveled without stopping, mail pouches were picked up from high-speed hooks suspended beside the tracks at the same instant a RPO clerk would kick a sack of mail for that destination out the open door. It should be pointed out that this was dangerous duty anyway. Because the mail car was at the front of the train, (usually right behind the coal tender), derailments, collisions and other train mishaps found the crews in an exposed position.
And that brings us to the second part of this story.
On a cold autumn night in the “blizzard year” of 1888, postal workers in Albany, New York found a puppy nestled among a pile of mail sacks in their office. A mixed-breed terrier, the waif became a resident of the place, finding a mysterious attachment to mail sacks, whether fabric or leather. He seemed only happy and content when in contact with the U.S. mail. One day, he thus managed to find his way to a mail train and embarked on his first rail journey, returning to the Albany post office to the amazement of his benefactors who continued to feed and care for him. This was just the beginning of a travel career which would span nine years for the “Post Office Pooch” who picked up the name “Owney”. (Nowhere can I find any recorded origin for the name.) Wishing to insure his care and safe return from the increasingly distant journeys, the workers affixed a harness and label to Owney, requesting as well that postal employees at distant destinations would attach some kind of tag or adornment as evidence of his travels.
In the years to come, Owney would accumulate a total of 1,017 tokens, medals and trinkets, each of which would be preserved by his caretakers at the Albany office. Owney became not only the mascot of the Albany staff, but a sought-after traveler on cars of the railway postal service where he was looked upon as a “good luck” mascot. As long as the Terrier was cuddled among the mail bags loaded aboard, no accident would ever befall a train on which he rode. (Between 1890 and 1900, 80 railway postal clerks were killed and 2000 injured in a record number of wrecks and accidents across the U.S.!)
As if his hundreds of rail journeys were not record enough, Owney made a round-the-world trip, by steamship and train in 1895, visiting Japan (twice), China, the Suez, Algiers and the Azores, returning to Albany 132 days and 143,000 miles later. Convinced that the traveling terrier must belong to someone of importance, Japanese officials issued Owney an Imperial Passport, entitling him to travel anywhere in the world.
Worn out and nearly blind, Owney retired from the Postal Service in 1897, and died shortly thereafter. . A preserved Owney stands today in a glass display case along with his collection of tags and tributes at the U.S. Post Office Museum in Washington, D.C.

Shown with some of his one thousand-seventeen medals, Owney the Postal Pooch is pictured late in his adventuresome life. Smithsonian Photo


The interior of a Railway Post Office of the 1940s shows the system of folding mailbag holders, and the crowded working area in which the highly-trained RPO staff sorted and processed mail. A fully restored postal car can be seen at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento.
Catskill Archive Photo

THE ROAD TO SECCESSION – PART II THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

Returning to historic events along the road to secession in America’s first century, it can quickly be seen why the U.S. Congress of 1850 could easily be called an “equal opportunity” legislature. Before the session was over, there was something for both sides to hate when it came to the question of slavery, and what to do about it. In their effort to walk a balance between the forces of abolition and defenders of slavery, they came up with what was fondly proclaimed to be a “great compromise”, allowing California to join the Union as a “free” state (placating northern sentiments), while passing a tough “Fugitive Slave Act” which infuriated those same citizens by promising jail and stiff fines to anyone assisting people of color escaping slavery in the south in an effort to court southern sympathy. In the end, it accomplished neither.
For years, Congress had sought to mollify both sides of the controversy, first by allowing new states to make their own choice by “mutual consent” (resulting in the “Kansas Wars”), and then by parceling out “free soil” and “slave state” status in alternate doses. Now, with the Fugitive Slave act the law of the land, northern abolitionists found themselves actually required to support and enforce the very doctrine they hated.
The state of Vermont had outlawed slavery when it became a sovereign republic in 1777, and it was quick now to act to nullify the new act written in Washington. Wisconsin followed suit, setting off a nullification scare which shook Congress and the courts, beginning a slide toward some kind of a dissolution of the paper-thin union in the eyes of a growing proportion of the citizenry.
For years, northerners of several persuasions had been openly aiding escaping black slaves, either harboring them or transporting them to friendlier locations. Rather than to discourage this activity, Congress unwittingly gave it a new impetus, ushering in a phenomenon known as “the underground railway”, an unorganized but well-oiled network of co-conspirators who secretly acted as a lifeline for fleeing slaves from the southern states. From New York and New England in the east to Ohio, Indiana and Michigan in the west, a map of escape routes, beginning in border states like Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, would have looked much like a railroad system map, even though railroads seldom played a role in the movement of this covert traffic flow.
It is popular among some present-day writers to downplay the effectiveness – and even the significance - of this piece of history, just as it is in vogue to echo the claims of the 19th century “lost cause” writers on the subject of slavery itself. In part because I grew up in Vermont where diarists and family historians had kept faithful records, and where I knew of old homes in many towns and villages which still contained the “hidey holes” in which escaping slaves had taken refuge (even within the memories of some octogenarians of my time), I hold a very different view. I believe the records which claim that more than 100,000 fugitive slaves made their way through this clandestine network, in which the state of my youth played a key role because of its border with Canada, and because of the high level of motivation of its populace. NOTE: On October 19th, 1864, the border town of St. Albans , Vermont was attacked by a troop of Confederate soldiers who had made their way to Montreal in order to wreak punishment on the people of Vermont in this northern-most action of the Civil War.
Many of the facilitators – including Harriet Tubman, who made at least 19 dangerous journeys into the heart of the south to guide escapees ¬– were free blacks who placed themselves at great risk. Members of the Quaker religion were also committed to the covert effort, and perhaps chief among those was an ancestor of mine named Levi Coffin, descended from the same settler of Nantucket who was my eighth great grandfather. Levi is credited with personally saving more than 3000 individual runaways. William Still, a prominent Pennsylvanian often sheltered as many as 30 “contrabands” a night in his Philadelphia home, acting as one of many “conductors” along the route of the “Underground Railway”.
Sympathy for the abolition movement was not exclusive to the people of the North. Only one out of ten southerners owned or traded black slaves in 1860, and it is likely that the “escape routes” began with secret help along the so-called border states. As we shall see in a forthcoming article, sentiment in favor of secession was anything but unanimous in the general population of such soon-to-be Confederate states as Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia. In fact, the present state of West Virginia was “born” when the citizens west of the mountains voted their way OUT.


An April 24, 1851 poster warns colored people in Boston to protect themselves from “slave catchers”. Because a sizable reward was paid for the return of escaped slaves, it was not unusual for free men of color who had never been slaves to find themselves in chains and heading south.


The Levi Coffin house in Newport, Indiana is today a National Historic Landmark. This photo shows the secret indoor well which was required to sustain temporary “guests” riding the “Underground Railroad” heading north to freedom.