by John Gould
Some scholars have long surmised that the ten lost tribes of Israel moved on until they became the North American Indians. Some don’t. I believe the testimony of Moroni supports this presumption. And I have discovered, and now reveal, that on their way those lost tribes paused long enough in Rome to gain some smattering of classical Latin, as I shall now explain:
Here in Maine we have a public television channel which originates a quiz show called, “So You Think You Know Maine?” Four contestants line up and a quizmaster asks them questions about Maine geography, history, institutions, personalities. One week came the question, “Write down the Maine county names that derive from the Indian.” That’s not much of a question. Maine has but sixteen counties, and the three oldest use English shire names—York, Lincoln, Cumberland. Washington, Hancock, and Franklin came from American heroes. As to the Indian names, there would be Androscoggin, Penobscot, Sagadahoc, and probably Aroostook. And when the four contestants on that TV show held up their cards, to prove that they did know Maine, all four of them had included Piscataquis!
But that’s not all! The quizmaster looked at the four cards and said, “Correct!” And with my old high school Latin toga in mind I sighed for the lost tribes of Israel, and turned off the TV so my wife and I could play cribbage.
While we’re at it, the new importance of old-time firewood might encourage the study of Latin, which did give us Piscataquis, if rightly applied. We were four children, and I was the first to discover the right time and the best place to do my Latin homework. There was always the evening session, but I found it helpful to rise early and run over my Latin one more time. In the depth of winter this meant coming down from a cold bedroom before daylight, into a kitchen that was relatively warm where the banked-up wood fire had dozed the night in the range. Behind our kitchen range was the copper hot water tank, which kept warm, and by it the chest of drawers in which Mother kept towels and other kitchen gear. So I would come down to kick open the front damper of the range, shove in some wood, and climb up to perch on the chest of drawers with my back comfy against the hot water tank. By the time I had run through my Latin assignment the kitchen would be toasty and Mother would appear to begin breaking eggs. I used that perch, and so did my brother and two sisters, and we parsed and passed. Which is a good kind of thing to have in your memory. It teaches that with a good wood fire a child may be comfortable and learn Latin at the same time. Nothing like a good copper hot water tank to help along the conjugations.
There was one bad morning. My younger sister, in her turn, came down to the kitchen, opened the damper, put in some wood, took the perch, and snuggled against the tank. Vercin-getorix was getting it for fair when the hot water tank reacted. It had been a very cold night and the dozing wood fire had not kept the water pipes from “catching.” As the fire roused, steam built up in the copper tank, and while my sister reclined and declined, a Vesuvius was hatching and making ready to astonish her. She was fortunate not to be blown through the roof when it went off. She managed to escape into the dining room ahead of the burst of steam, unhurt.
My sister then cranked the old magneto telephone, and when Gladys Mitchell, the operator, said “Number please!” my sister yelled, “Gimme a plumber!”
Gladys wanted to know, “Which one?” Is it not good to know that in a two-plumber town we had a high school that offered four years of Latin? Gladys might have rung Fred Taylor, who sang in the Baptist choir, but she didn’t—she rang Wildcat Smith, who did not but who was the chief of the fire department, and when Wildcat responded my sister shouted, “Our buster’s boilted!”
Wildcat immediately recognized that as a muted synecdochical accusative, and he came right away with a new buster.
Patriotic Peas
It’s a shame, really, that the rest of the United States doesn’t realize what Maine and Massachusetts do for Patriot’s Day. Otherwise unnoticed, Patriot’s Day goes back to 1775 when Maine was part of Massachusetts and Paul Revere rode to alarm the embattled farmers. It is the 19th of April and the anniversary of the Battle of Concord and Lexington, known in Lexington as the Battle of Lexington and Concord. In Massachusetts, to observe the occasion, Sunday soldiers in Minuteman uniforms do colorful reenactments, and Paul Revere always rides again. He is played, these days, by a zealous member of the Hibernian Horse Marines who has drunk a good breakfast, and there is some confusion with St. Paddy’s Day, which is also Evacuation Day and something like Patriot’s Day only different. The impersonated Paul generally contrives to fall off his horse now and again, and for the past ten straight years he has galloped through Medford Square, where he is supposed to stop for ceremonies, to a series of ineffectual whoas. Nothing of this sort happens in Maine, where Patriot’s Day is not now much of a patriotic occasion, although last year a summercater from Worcester showed up with red, white, and blue hotcaps for his tomato plants.
Maine’s observance centers around green peas. Green peas are traditional for the Fourth of July, and the 19th of April, Patriot’s Day, is the last clear chance to plant and crop. It is astounding that the planners of our Revolution foresaw this, and arranged two holidays to meet the requirements of the seed catalogs. We resident Mainers try to get our first row of green peas into the ground as soon as possible after the frost leaves, and do not wait for Patriot’s Day as such. It’s the seasonal visitor who comes up from Massachusetts just because it’s a holiday there to see how his cottage wintered, to take off the battens and turn on the water, and to plant his peas. This has become ritualistic, and after he has done the Patriot’s Day chores he will return to Massachusetts and we won’t see him again until the next holiday, which is Memorial Day. The summer season is about to set in and while he may commute, his wife and children will come at school-out to stay until Labor Day.
We have one part-time neighbor who actually comes from Lexington, and the derring-do of the Redcoats means nothing to him. He hurries up the turnpike, and the minute he arrives here he telephones all around to say, “I’m home!” This proves life is valid only here on the nonresident tax list, and time spent in Massachusetts is wasted. “Welcome home!” we return. Then he takes off the blinds, opens the windows as aforesaid, and gets the picnic chairs and tables out on the porch so he can get to his tiller. He needs to go to the store for fertilizer, and if he favors the telephone peas he must set stakes and wire As the sun sets on Patriot’s Day in Maine the thing you hear is not a shot around the world, but the summer complaint bragging that his peas are in. One man who cultivates a small crevice between ledges out on an island always brags that he planted twenty-three rows, but his rows are only two feet long. He comes from Hingham.
Peas properly planted on Patriot’s Day will do all right. Our cold and wet Mays don’t hold them back, and when the man comes back for Memorial Day it’s soon enough to hoe them. We Mainers hoe sooner, but we’re here. Both of us come out about even, and Patriot’s Day planting will provide a July Fourth mess. So the rest of the country ought to take up Patriot’s Day the way we do. It makes our Fourth of July a real pea-picking holiday.
Natural Ingredients
Things in this mail order catalog are said to contain “only natural ingredients.” The hucksters have been around long enough so I am not beguiled into thinking this means anything in particular, but I found myself balancing it off against other items that “contain no artificial ingredients.” Maybe I have done what the people who make catalogs have never done—gone to the dictionary to look up ingredient.
Dominique LaPierre was one of the finest cooks ever to ply his trade in a Maine lumber camp, and his name is still legend along the West Branch of the Penobscot. He would give the recipe for his real-honest-to-gosh Kaybecker pea soup to anybody who asked for it—except that he always skipped his “secret ingredient.” Dominique, whom we called “Minick,” did make a dandy, and if you don’t use the true Quebec yellow split peas and beaucoup lard it won’t be pea soup at all. Anybody knows that, except the people who can pea soup. Mini
ck would start his pea soup about the third week in August, when the cruisers came in to lay out the choppers’ winter operation, and the huge pot remained on the back of his cookshack mogul until spring. The contents would go up and down with a tide suited to the lumber business, as Minick added and subtracted on a continuing basis. The old imparted flavor to the new. On some days the soup was less rigid and on some days a spoon would stand up in it, but the nutritional power remained about the same and Minick was much loved. At ice-out in the spring, Minick would hoist his pot of pea soup onto the wangan wagon, and he followed the drive, feeding four square a day all the way to the mill. Then Minick would have the bullcook scour and grease his pea soup pot, and he would go home to San’ Lazare in Quebec to comfort his bonne femme Rozee until August came again.
Now, Minick’s “secret ingredient” was nothing but pond water. Pond is pronounced pound—Chain of Ponds is shine-a-pound. And most pond water in Maine is potable—or it was in the long-log days up-country. So h’every morn-NING Minick would send his little cookee down to the “pound” to fetch two pails of wattaire for the pea soup. Spring water and well water just wouldn’t suit. In the winter the cookee would have to chop ice to get pond water, and Minick believed the little pieces of ice made a difference. His mixture (mixture being no more than a combination of ingredients) was too popular to question this belief, so Minick always insisted on pond water, and voila!
So, and talk about ingredients! One day the cookee came back, and he had a chunk of ice with a big fish frozen in it. Wan dem t’ings you call heem wananish, but we Mainers know it as a salmon. Minick hove the ice, fish and all, into his pea soup pot—and there was a triumph! They still talk about that pea soup all up and down the Penobscot River. Finest pea soup Dominique LaPierre ever made! Tasted just like fish chow-daire.
It occurs to me that you probably cannot find a more natural ingredient than pond water, and I can’t feel that a salmon would be artificial. The health food people would probably object to Minick’s mixture. But I can see him now, whenever somebody asked him how he made his pea soup. He would lay a finger by his nose in the best manner of the Cordon Bleu, and he would enumerate. Five hundredweight split peas, two hogsheads salt pork, and so on. You could go right home and start a batch. But he never said pond water—just water. That’s why nobody ever made so fine a pea soup as Dominique LaPierre.
Around the World
When Mother bell advertised that operators would announce their names—“Good morning, this is Nancy. May I help you?”—I resurrected a truism that I’d uttered years ago: That the telephone company is run by a bunch of people who don’t know how to run a telephone company. The new way, the advertising said, will make telephone service more personal. Gracious! Back when Myrt and Gladys sat at the switchboard, telephone service was personal, and friendly, and in many ways more reliable and useful. But Mother Bell’s minions scrapped all that and forced the impersonal upon us until telephone service needed just one thing to bring it back to sense—personalities. Permit me to relate about the time I wanted to telephone around the world.
Mother Bell scheduled a series of advertisements that said, “Now you can talk around the world!” Thinking of Magellan and the good press he got for the small time he put in, I decided I’d like to be the first person to talk around the world, so when the first advertisement appeared I dialed the operator at once. We had toll centers then; I don’t know where mine was, but the girl offered to help, except that her tone of voice was neither Myrt nor Gladys. She was impersonal as a sheet of plywood. “Yes,” I said, “now, let’s take this slowly. I’m on an unusual tack, and I anticipate resistance. I beg your indulgence, and hope you’ll bear with me.”
“Is this an emergency call?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
So I told her I saw in the magazine that I could now talk around the world and the idea intrigued me. I said, “I can’t very well talk around the world to myself, so I’d like you to ring my neighbor across the way, Jim Tucker—he’s home now and I can see him through his window.” Fact is, I could see his telephone on the wall right by his elbow. Be amusing, I thought, to see him jump when the bell rang, and reach for the thing, and then see his reaction when I told him we were talking around the world. So I gave the toll operator his number.
She said, “But that’s a local call! You can dial that yourself.”
“You haven’t been paying attention,” I told her. “I want this call to go around the world.”
The silence was total, and extensive. “Hello, hello!” I said. She said, “I’ll let you talk to the supervisor.”
The supervisor indulged me, and seemed to grasp what I had in mind, but she was baffled. She did say, “Oh, I understand . . .” with a rising inflection that meant, “Boy, oh boy! Have I ever got a ding-dong now!” But she honestly gave me the right answer. She said, “I’m frank to tell you, I wouldn’t know how to set that call up.”
“Well, Frank,” I said, “somebody somewhere must know how to set it up, or this advertisement wouldn’t be in the magazine. Why don’t you go to work on the idea and call me back?”
“That’s not my name,” she said, and when I asked her what her name was she wouldn’t tell me. “It’s against regulations,” she said. And the next afternoon I had a call from a manperson who said he was the traffic superintendent, and could he be of service? I told him of my burning desire, again looking across the way at my neighbor’s telephone. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the way I heard it.” I got the idea my burning desire had been well discussed in telephone management circles, and he had been instructed to talk me out of whatever it was I wanted. This he began to do.
Well, I never did make that call. The man from traffic ran out of prepared remarks shortly, and reverted to a manner that I must admit was personal. He told me right out that some countries that would be relaying such a call were not technically ready to do so, and that fear of failure made him leery. He certainly conveyed his own belief that the call would not come off, and then he said, “Besides, those ads mean you can now talk anywhere in the world—we never meant ‘around’ the world.”
So I said, and I thought with some reason, that maybe Mother Bell should change the wording of her advertising.
And, do you know, in a couple of weeks the wording in those advertisements was changed, and I read, “Now you can call anyplace in the world!”
And a personalized voice will say, “Hello, this is Barbara . . .”
Speed-Letters
Any Suggestions about how to handle these cussid speed-letters?” asked Neighbor Nate out of the blue. Me, if some company writes a speed-letter to me, I cross it off my list and take my trade across the street. They’re uncouth, rude, discourteous, and irritating. You know what I mean—these readymade forms with carbon paper, so when you use one you have a copy for yourself, one for the addressee, one for the town library, one for filing with IRS, one for the school board, one for instance, one to make ready, and all for one and one for all. Oh, yes—and one for the other chap to use for his reply. The speed-letter is supposed to be the busy man’s friend, but if the joker doesn’t care enough about me to use a decent letterhead and compose a polite letter, that’s that. I told Nate I pay no attention to the things.
“Well,” said Nate, “the one I got, I think you might do something with it. Didn’t you hear the fire engines last night?” This is Nate’s story:
Said he was talking to Larry Hedstrom last March, and Larry said he had found the best stuff for cleaning chimneys. “Chimbleys,” he said. Larry had been to Nova Scotia, and he picked the stuff up in a store there. Digby, he seemed to think. Little plastic container with a blue powder in it, sort of, and it said to lay a spoonful on the embers of a fire, either in a stove or a fireplace, and—puffo! All clean all the way up the flue. Larry said he tried it when he got home, and it was just the greatest. Took a mirror and looked up his chimbley, and it shone like a bottle. Beats anything else I ever hear’n tell of, he
said.
So Nate asked him what it was called and he couldn’t remember, but when he got home and found the little plastic container he telephoned to Nate with the address. Said it was called Floo-Scoot and it was put out by the Mukluk Chemical Works, Limited, in Coreopsis, Nova Scotia. (Names of places and people have been changed to protect the guilty). So Nate ups and writes to the Mukluk Chemical Works, Limited, in Coreopsis, Nova Scotia, and he tells them he would like to buy a supply of their Scoo-Floot, or whatever it is, and where can he find it in the Boston States? Nate told me he had a very dirty chimbley at the time and he was hoping for a quick reply, but it was three weeks before he got a good letter expressing pleasure at his interest in their product, and telling him it was distributed in the United States by the Wigwam Distributing Corporation of Walpeeko, Michigan, and Wigwam would be in touch shortly.
Nate said about that time the spring broke up and he put in a row of peas and painted the shed. The garden came along, although he got some late blight on his Early Rose potatoes, and then he got the haying done a good week ahead of common. Didn’t feel the need of a fire as the summer wore along, but he still had that dirty chimney on his mind because it sure did need cleaning and it probably would fire off with the first coolish evening. Then Nate picked his factory beans and got the wood under cover. And come September there was a coolish evening, and he touched off a few kindlings and his chimbley caught. I didn’t hear the fire engines, but Nate said things were nip and tuck for an hour or so. Then Nate says, “So in this morning’s mail, I gets this cussid speed-letter from the Wigwam people, and they tell me Floo-Scott can be had from Brigham’s Hardware Store down in Springfield, Massachusetts.”
