When Oliver Jensen joined the Boy Scouts (February/March 1985), the organization was already about sixteen years old, and early growing pains had ceased. I was a Scout in the very first year, before Mr. Jensen was born.
Shortly after the incorporation of the Boy Scouts of America on February 8, 1910, Asa E. Lewis, principal of schools in Dallas, Pennsylvania, wrote to the National Headquarters in New York requesting that a troop he was organizing be registered, and that he be appointed Scoutmaster. National Headquarters, starting with nothing but a little information from the year-old Boy Scouts in England, was proceeding by trial and error. It eventually complied with Lewis’s request, designating the new troop Dallas, Pa., Troop No. 1.
We received the first edition of Handbook for Boys. No official equipment had been authorized at that time. The first item I recall was the pocketknife. It was recommended that tinned-steel canteens, pint cups, mess kits, and cutlery —Army surplus from the Spanish-American War—be purchased locally.
I enclose a picture of the first issue of uniforms. The narrow, light-colored strips at the shoulders supported a small haversack, which proved useless, being too small and painful to carry, and was soon changed. Leggings were of heavy canvas with metal stays, such as the ones women then wore in corsets. Belts were of heavy leather, with rings inserted at the side, and the buckle was a round metal insignia thrust through a slot.
No organization acted as sponsor for our troop. Some local businessmen subscribed funds to buy three twelve-by-fourteen-foot wall tents, but these were too heavy to carry and unsuitable for Scouting. Later, we got some Army surplus pup tents, made in two halves that buttoned together by flaps at the top, which were designed to be carried by two soldiers. We also got Army surplus blankets, which the boys bought individually.
Of all, my most enjoyable Scouting experience was camping during World War II with my two sons, a week at a time, over three successive years on North Mountain in the corner of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The oldest son became an Eagle Scout in Troop 281 in 1944. His two sons became Eagle Scouts in Troop 81 while living in Waterloo, New York.
D. A. Waters Gettysburg, Pa.
Trustworthy, Loyal, Etc.
Oliver Jensen’s memoir of Boy Scouting brought on a horrible fit of nostalgia. I’m still lost in a reverie of the days when I almost became a Boy Scout.
It was 1913 or 1914, Scouting was just spreading across the land, and it had finally reached our town of Menominee, Michigan. Word went out that a Scout troop was forming. The Reverend Mr. Curzon, pastor of the Methodist church, would lend the church hall for the new troop. We were just getting well started when Father Jacques called me aside after a Saturday catechism class.
Didn’t I realize it was bordering on mortal sin to get into something sponsored by the Methodists? And in the church itself, yet! he exclaimed. But, Father, we don’t meet in the church, I said. Makes no difference, it’s a Methodist building, he answered. My suggestion that I thought they were only renting the place was dismissed as of no consequence, and it was strongly intimated that the very foundations of the Vatican were quivering—or would when they heard about my actions—and Father Jacques would be held responsible.
Well, I didn’t want the good Father in any trouble. Besides, 1 really didn’t want to go to hell. But I was ashamed to tell the Scouts what a wimp I was, so I just quietly stopped going to meetings. I tried getting into something called Lone Scouts, which I rather hazily recall was sponsored by the magazine Youth’s Companion, but it wasn’t the same as getting together with the other guys.
How times have changed. About thirty years ago I was helping one of my sons with a Cub Scout group, and Mother Church still stood. The kids had changed too. I was demonstrating how to start a campfire, and I handed one of the boys an old-fashioned kitchen match—the kind you light on the seat of your pants, not on the side of the box. He looked at it curiously, turned it end for end, pressed it here and there, and then said, “How do you start this thing?” Shades of Baden-Powell!
Owen J. Remington Lancaster, Va.
Blossom’s License
Robert Uhl’s article on Christopher Blossom and the new generation of American marine artists (February/March 1985) brings to mind an important point that I like to emphasize with artists who attempt to portray real ships and waterfront scenes: They are no less responsible for their accuracy than are model-makers and authors. If they intend to depict a specific scene or ship, I say they are obliged to research their subject as would an author of a book or the builder of a model. Not all do, although many are very much aware of this and really do their homework.
Speaking of such, Blossom’s painting of the Ardnamurchan entering Port Blakely harbor certainly catches the spirit of the year 1903 and the Puget Sound shoreline. But he shows the sawmill much too clearly from the ship’s position. The mill lay way back up in the bay, past the recently abandoned shipyard of the Hall Brothers, which was to the right, and closer to the entrance or wider neck of the bay. From the ship’s position on the sound, you cannot see the sawmill at all. The lofty skysail yarder he shows in the distance, stern to the dock and bows pointed out, could be the German 4mbk [four-masted bark] Wandsbek. While the bones of this vessel now lie off the breakwater in Santa Rosalia, Mexico, the wheel hangs in the tween deck of the museum ship Balclutha in San Francisco.
And I get the clear impression from the other Blossom paintings shown that the main, fore, and crojack yards are much too high above the deck. But opportunities for error are endless, and one shouldn’t kick too much.
Harold D. Huycke Marine Surveyor Edmonds, Wash.
Robert Uhl replies: True, the Ardnamurchan’s lower yards do seem a mite high. Since she was headed into a lumber port, could that have been deliberate, to allow space for deck loads? When my ships (steamships) carried deck cargo, a lot of uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous adjustments had to be made. At first I thought Ardnamurchan had pole masts, but a photo in Tall Ships of Puget Sound shows her with conventional lower, topmast, topgallant, et cetera.
Christopher Blossom agrees you are right about the sawmill and pleads guilty to possible oversimplification. Still, painters like Turner, Homer, Whistler, and their ilk exercised artistic license in background detail to include an interesting structure or feature, improve composition, or give depth to a painting.
Woolworth Sitters
In “The Time Machine” for twenty-five years ago (February/March 1985), there appears a very interesting story and photograph of the sitters-in at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960.
Can you supply the names of these immortals? Rosa Parks and her bus have become fixed in the folklore, but the four students at Woolworth’s seem to have achieved an anonymity almost surpassing that of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (whose name actually was, I believe, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding). It would enhance the record if you could provide these identifications.
Watson Smith Tucson, Ariz.
Two of the four students shown in our photograph were not among the first group ofsitters-in on February 1, it turns out, although they occupied the Woolworth seats on the next day, February 2. The students apparently sat in shifts. However, we have located all the names. The four students who sat at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro on February 1 were: Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair, Jr. (who has since changed his name to Jibreel Khazan). The men in our picture are, left to right: Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Billy Smith, and Clarence Henderson.
Devon Memories
I was a seventeen-year-old quartermaster aboard LST 515 (“What Happened Off Devon,” February/March 1985), which was skippered by Lt. John Doyle and carried the flag of Comdr. B. J. Skahill. I was transferred to a land-based amphibious group shortly before Convoy T-4 sailed to disaster in Lyme Bay.
My duties aboard LST 515 were on the bridge, so I had observed the everpresent tension between Doyle and Skahill. There is always tension between the captain of a vessel and the flag officer of the squadron, because, though the safety of the ship is the responsibility of the captain, he is at the same time outranked by the flag officer. To show his independence, Lieutenant Doyle often would contest Commander Skahill’s suggestions, though always when Doyle was within his rights as captain to do so. So I’m not at all surprised that Lieutenant Doyle ignored Commander Skahill’s order not to return to the area of the sinkings.
I say this not to disparage Lieutenant Doyle, who was a brave and competent officer, but only to refute any innuendo that Skahill was more interested in his own safety than in picking up survivors. Skahill was a kind and gentle man, who once astonished me by his effusive solicitude over a thumb I bruised. I saw him display his contempt for anyone who showed timidity in the face of danger. He once reprimanded an LST captain for inching his ship out of place in a convoy into a less exposed position. This followed a U-boat attack on us in which we lost two ships. The message was hotly worded. I know. I was the one who sent it on the blinker.
Sanford H. Margalith Santa Monica, Calif.
Too Competent
Having been an editorial cartoonist for the newspaper PM in New York City during the Roosevelt years, I was delighted with Charles Monaghan’s piece about political art (October/November 1984). Naturally I kept close watch on the party conventions in those days. Permit me to take exception to one statement in a picture caption: “Truman was assailed as incompetent but joined the ticket… after Roosevelt dropped Wallace as too radical.” FDR did not drop Wallace willingly. He fought hard to keep him, but powerful conservative Democrats continued threatened to block FDR’s nomination. It was they, not he, who considered Wallace a radical. World War II was still on, and FDR wanted to finish the job, so he accepted Truman, thus getting an unprecedented fourth term.
As to Truman’s competence, he was too competent. His senatorial committee investigating war contracts and procurement procedures was doing such a good job that a lot of people wanted him out of the Senate at all costs.
Melville Bernstein Falmouth, Mass.
Anesthesia Forever
Dr. Gwilyn B. Lewis’s letter on “Holmes on Anesthesia” (February/March 1985) was overly optimistic about Holmes’s term going unchallenged “until the end of time.” In 1957 a number of anesthesiologists, recognizing that modern anesthesiology dealt with more than just insensibility to touch, tried to have the name changed to nothria. This might be translated as “torpor” or “sluggishness” and thus include all the states of insensibility—pre-, intra-, and post-surgical —which members of that branch of the profession induce.
The effort failed because the meaning of the Greek word nothria was shown on investigation by a classical scholar to include also “post-coital languor.” Also, the modern Greek nothria is used for stupidity and dullness. Except for that research, Holmes’s terminology might have been superseded, and “the tongues of every civilized race of mankind” might have spoken of nothria and nothrotist.
Arthur G. King Cincinnati, Ohio
Neighbor Mark Twain
Coley Taylor, the author of “Our Neighbor, Mark Twain” (February/March 1985), was luckier than I by about eight years. My uncle and aunt, John and Mabel German, bought eighty acres of Connecticut rocks and a 1740 Dutch home on Diamond Hill Road in West Redding in 1917. The house belonged to Albert Bigelow Paine, who was then living in “The Lobster Pot,” a rambling house adjoining Samuel Clemens’s property.
Clemens was gone by the time I, as a twelve-year-old, had my first visit to Stormfield, his former residence. I recall it well. It was a gray, ominous, windy day in November. A group of us drove to the entrance of Stormfield and walked through the overgrown fields, filled—as Mr. Taylor recalls—with small cedar trees.
Being the smallest of the group, I was delegated to slip through an open window in the basement of the house, find my way through the eerie darkness, climb the main stairs to ground level, and unlock the front door. An illegal but reverent and respectful tour of the house took place with bated breath, so as not to disturb the ghosts.
Every weekend, every holiday, and every summer vacation was spent at Redvale (my uncle’s name for his farm) for many years until, late in World War II, the place was sold. I met Mr. Paine frequently, and, as a matter of fact, my cousin is named for him. He was a tall, stately man; so tall, in fact, that he repeatedly hit his head on the old New England ceiling beams in his home, until he had them hand-axed to half their thickness. This allowed him to proceed up and down a step or two from room to room usually without bodily harm.
One rainy summer night in 1923, the phone rang at 1:00 A.M. The operator spoke with a great sense of urgency. “All men, hurry! Stormfield is on fire!”
I was there at the end. Water was too far away for the hoses, so chemicals were used (for the first time that I can recall). No use, sadly. The blaze was almost controlled when the chemicals ran out. The fire picked up again, and we lay in the wet grass as rifle and shotgun ammunition exploded over our heads.
The house had been sold some months before to a family of four, and they had been more or less camping out as they did repairs, modernization, and painting. It was said that the fire was caused by paint rags. Be that as it may, the family never came back to rebuild. There was nothing left but the foundation.
Before the fire got out of control, some items were saved. 1 recall helping to get out the billiard table and a tremendous hand-carved mantelpiece that had surrounded the fireplace.
Mr. Taylor was luckier than I. He knew the great author face-to-face. I knew him only secondhand.
