Society before the Spanish-American War

by Walter Sherman Atwood (1887-1974)
December 17, 1965

Given the right circumstances, anyone born before the turn of the century, will recall now and then the comment about "the sins of the fathers." And this brings to mind at once such things as "sins of omission." It may be safely assumed that today's teenagers are not familiar with the context or implications of these phrases, but they might be expected to serve as a warning to old men which should prod them to be careful lest sloth be given as an excuse for omitting anything that might one day be held against him. The fact that my grandmother tried to get certain relatives to write down their experiences as they remembered them as far back as the beginning of the 19th century, and tried in vain, prompts me to throw caution to the wind and recount a few tales of the end of that century. I remember talking to my great grandmother who was 92 years old in 1891, and how nice it would be if she had written something about her surroundings when she was a four year old. So, I can well remember how she looked thanks to a picture taken in that year, and another of the house where she lived at the time, but pure memory is still able to remind me of the fragrance of boxwood which I first saw in her kitchen garden.

But before going further, I must mention the song made famous a few years ago by Maurice Chevalier; the song "Ah, yes! I remember it well." The fact that he remembered nothing at all very well made not the slightest difference, for he sung it superbly, and whether his pleasant memories were of a day in winter or summer made not the slightest difference in the happiness of the thought. Rome or Paris, day or night, hot or cold, joy was his main concern, and details can be overlooked under the circumstances. His performance was memorable.

If I err in details, there is no one who can correct them, and the first story involves the old house built by an ancestor named Orgin, and when his daughter left the house to one of her children it was known as the Waite house. When my story begins, Martha Orgin Waite was dead, and Edmund Waite, son Frank, and his wife Julia lived there. Today we have watched the recovery of Gemini Capsule # VII, which naturally reminded me that in or about 1894, a balloonist came to Lynn to show his talents and put up at great uncle Edmund's house. His demonstration was in its way a parallel or a foretaste of the current space flights. Since I was more or less connected with this balloon ascension, I believe my memory is reasonably accurate.

The balloon got off the ground on schedule, which the space ships have not always managed, but the man hanging below the balloon swung like a giant pendulum and slammed into the gable end of a tall building and broke his leg. Imagine the balloon dragging him up over the end of the gable and away over marsh and forest for a fifteen mile ride. And he had precious little power to select his landing or to maneuver the balloon down to earth. No one ever told me whether he had more than one broken bone or compound fractures, but it was an experience none of the spectators wanted to see again. But the man recovered and eventually went on his way.

In 1894 society was largely composed of individualists like the parachute jumper-balloonist who made all preparations for his work on his own responsibility. This involved supervising the making and rigging of a balloon and parachute, directing the preparations for filling the bag with hot air, transporting the heavy canvas from where it was to where it was going to be used, and then getting it to the next carnival or ascension, not to mention dickering for his fee and for a place to live and an expressman to locate the balloon and his parachute and deliver them to the next showplace. My relatives were truck men, and the man spent a few days with them. A rough and ready group, probably no one of them with more than four years of schooling, but comfortably well off, generous, respectable citizens, and above all, independent.

We must beware of comparing schooling with education: actual years spent in school are meaningless - it is the ability to profit by the school experience or any other experience that counts. An educated man may well benefit from contact with people with no schooling whatever, but it is more pleasing in the long run to talk with people who can offer a challenge in casual conversation. So it is a matter of little importance that Edmund's daughter, Susan, who married a man named Packard, a shoemaker, or as he would have said, a cordwainer - both without much if any schooling. But the fact that they had only one offspring, feeble minded Emma was no fault of their lack of schooling. The fact that Mr. Packard had a very serious case of asthma and that both parents died young, may have indicated a weak factor in physical and/or mental capacity. How well I remember the unpleasant smell of the vapors the poor man had to inhale as he made his boots in his own house, but the medication was mingled with stale cooking in an overheated house where even Saturday night baths may not have been a requirement for better living. And poor Emma could not converse for more than a few words with a two year old.

Such misfortunes today are hidden behind the social institutions designed for such concealment. But one of my playmates as a ten year old had a sister who could neither walk nor talk at the age of eight years. But Fred Cannon and his parents had no visible defects, so we assume that there was no proper delivery at childbirth. I remember a new doctor of the same period came to treat my father in his last sickness, and the poor young man could do nothing but pace the floor and say to himself, "There is nothing I can do for him." At least he did not shunt him off to the hospital where they would not have cared whether they did something or nothing.

Next door to Fred was Myrtle Nash, perhaps nine years older than I, whose parents treated her like a Dresden china doll. She was never allowed to talk to a man, but for some reason she once was allowed to send me, a ten year old, a valentine, and in the course of ten more years, before the folks realized it, I came of age unnoticed by them all, as a menace, that is.

On the other side of Fred's house was Everitt Stiles whose farmer father believed thoroughly in "sparing the rod to spoil the child." But he went to the extremes of chasing Everitt around the barn with an axe handle for a rod, which left no doubt in anyone's mind about who was boss, and what to do when the boss gave an order. Next to Everitt lived Ralph Bryer and his widowed mother, who made up for the lack of paternal authority by keeping an assortment of canes, rattans, straps and rods behind the kitchen door, so that instant retribution overtook Ralph on the slightest deviation from the prescribed course of conduct and duty. And when Mrs. B. showed us how to grow flowers and explained how we must cultivate and water the garden every day promptly after school, there was never any temptation that could have kept me from the assignment. Hence, I learned something about growing flowers not taught in college, and this small boys' world never ran into trouble with the police or our elders. In this environment, where did I alone get the idea of higher education? I doubt if the four boys concerned had ever seen more than six books in our own houses: We had a couple of hymn books, and a Bible and perhaps a volume or two of sermons.

In this era more attention was paid to patent medicines and nostrums than to diets. The oil burner intended to take the place of a coal or wood burning stove was a fire hazard, and very inefficient, but cheaper. And it seems to have been assumed that girls were born with the instinct for cooking. My father taught my mother about cooking after they were married. We enjoyed the most excellent home baked bread anyone could wish for, and one iron clad rule at meal time was that I must eat at least one slice of bread before having any dessert. As a matter of fact we didn't always get dessert, and I came to enjoy the bread so that I might have been told to eat less of it if anyone had been aware of the result of too starchy a diet. But since cooking was not taken seriously at that time, naturally diet was almost a foreign word.

In the sixth grade, I remember very well sitting in considerable physical discomfort which I could not quite understand, and so never complained about it. I was so afraid that I would never be able to pass in the horrible subject known as Mental Arithmetic that I vaguely concluded that my physical distress was caused by this bugbear. Something like twenty years later, the cause of my uneasiness was revealed by my own studies of food and nutrition. I discovered that I suffered from heartburn all through the sixth grade. Until you have eaten Fried Bread you would not understand.

The main object of eating seemed to be to fill up the vast void of a growing boy's stomach. Bread was started in the evening and set aside to rise overnight. At breakfast, the dough was kneaded a bit a then put in pans to rise again before baking. But a handful of dough about the size of a snowball was dropped into a frying pan (known in those days as a spider) full of hot lard (pig fat) which was the only known cooking fat. When this lump of dough turned brown on one side it was turned over to brown on the other, and then was split open and buttered to serve as the main food at breakfast almost every day of the week. People today who advise against the eating of hot breads probably are quite unaware of this early example of the bread that was responsible for this precaution.

When you have seen this old fashioned standby, eaten it, and have felt the burning sensation way down inside, will you then be able to understand the relation between cause and effect. But anyone who lived to reach the adult stage could feel pretty sure that his digestive system was really most efficient. A weak system never could have survived the Fried Bread. But it tasted so much better than it sounds!

It might be excusable to conclude these remarks with a bit of gossip which should be taken not too seriously, but it illustrates what might well have been happening here and there in a primitive society. An old great aunt raised a very large brood, as was customary among more or less illiterate people, and her dishes kept getting broken, until there were not enough to supply the family if all were to eat at the same time. But there were plenty of hardwood chairs in the kitchen, and the seats had been fashioned with a slight depression which was supposed to conform more or less to the part of the anatomy it was supposed to accommodate.

But the story goes that instead of letting the children sit in these chairs, they used to put slices of bread in the chair and add dollops of molasses. The children could kneel on the floor and sop up the molasses with the bread, and finish up the meal by licking the chairs clean.

Let me repeat, this is hearsay. I never saw it, and I do not recall ever sitting in a wooden chair in this house.

We are not finding fault with the past generations, but are looking at them from a great distance. Perspective of time is likely to improve the view. And if conditions and environment have changed, life experience permits a more accurate understanding of things. It is possible to overlook all sorts of failings and condone faults and yet obey the commandment to honor thy parents.

As school progressed, interest in other societies increased. We made the acquaintance of "Marion the Doc" in 1907. I was working in a drug store in 1904 when I first saw Marion Cowan in her drug store, with the degree of Ph.G. a graduate in Pharmacy. She was ambitious and by 1906 she had won an M.D. as the second women doctor in Lynn. She prescribed adrenaline for my chronic nosebleeds, which no other doctor had heard of. Brand new doctors sometimes come equipped with the latest information that experienced ones have not yet encountered. We got very well acquainted with her, and knowing her ambitions were not too surprised a few years later to learn that she was elected to the State Legislature, and thus entitled to use the new title of Hon. And within a year, a wealthy man named Burroughs evidently had used this title as a term of affection for they got married and lived in a fine home on the best street in town. While in high school, my biology teacher invited the class to her home for a farewell party. She was a doctor's daughter and they lived on the other end of the same street as Dr. Cowan-Borroughs, but Dr. Pinkham's house with tall columns was a new world for many members of that class that were invited to that party.

Working for Alvan T. Fuller three summers in Boston meant that as a Cadillac demonstrator, I not only met wealthy people, but as an "experienced" driver was invited to the homes of many of these people who wanted a number of lessons in driving and care of the car. Mr. Fuller gave them my services to deliver them home in their new car, but I was hired by the client after the first driving lesson.

And most important of my contacts with a different order of social life came with the happy chance of friendship with my chemistry teacher, Harriett Crosby, biology Prof. Weysse, who became lifelong friends, with the learned Rev. Moses Wright, whose interests included many things in addition to a very conservative and sensible religion, and with the Gordon family. Your mother and I sang in the church choir which grandfather had charge of. His education was limited chiefly to the N.Eng. Conservatory of Music, which was then as famous as the N.Y.Julliard school is now. Your grandfather studied the pipe organ there, but the church had to get along with a reed organ. Miss Crosby was the first to tell me that I should go to college, then Mr. Wright added encouragement, and most of all, your mother with much tutoring in Latin, all contributed to a new and better way of life than any of my ancestors knew.

A carpenter by the name of Pevear made the red bookcase which now holds many of my books for Elizabeth's room at 367 Broadway to fit in a small corner of that room. In the choir was a tenor whom everyone called Lark Roberts, a fancy name for an expressman with a tenor voice whose name was really Larkin. In the same way, a town character was called by everyone Oat Brown and his name was Otis. The Gordon family and the Goodrich family were old Lynn families, but they did not leave as many records as the Waite family, but all except the Atwood families left better heirlooms than average, which leaves the Atwood family with little to boast of unless it is the documented fact of two Simeon ancestors, my grandfather and great grandfather respectively.

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