The Park Bench
Featured Writer,
Thomas Ross
It was in the latter half of 1909 that the observations reported here really began, though they can have no real substance until a year or two later. Tom welcomes your comments.
�2003
The world was a bright place with grassy land through which a calm river flowed. A tall house stood amid the grass with flowers around it. Small creatures scampered about. There was a pretty boat on the river, later known as The Nautilus. Many observations were made from this boat as it cruised up the river and down into the harbor where the stream ended.
Several other boats, among them the tugs named the Petrel and the Pilot, plied the river while numerous craft could be seen in the harbor that was clearly visible from the yard of the house. Most admired of these craft was the Harbor Queen that had a stern wheel, while other vessels had propellers or sails. Water flashing and foaming from that wheelwas a delight to see.
The boats did not have the waterways to themselves. One evening, a very large log drifted down the river with a bonfire in the middle and loggers having a festive time on each end.
Just downstream from the land where the tall house stood, was the cottage of a charming bald old man named Mr. Flanagan who let a cat lick his head and could make rubber bands placed around it pop off by wiggling his scalp. He promised one day to unscrew the top of his head so his brain could be seen in action like the brains of the glass cat in an Oz book. (The name of the licking cat was Mossy.)
In the house was a cylinder phonograph with a morning-glory horn, and provided with three records, �Red Wing�, �The Sword of Bunker Hill� and �When You and I Were Young, Maggie�. At times, �The Sword of Bunker Hill, Maggie� was heard. The phonograph was much admired for the smoothness with which its cylinder rotated in its gleaming silveriness.
For a time there were two boys in the tall house, then a girl was added at about same time as the house burned down. The burning was first noticed from the Nautilus, as the family of the boys prepared for a cruise. A small flame was seen alongside the chimney, right in line with a pile of kindling a visiting girl had placed alongside the chimney a short time before. Probably a coincidence.
After the house burned down, it was replaced with a single-story building that was occupied until the year 1915. There were two Christmases in that house and much enjoyment when toys, mostly made in Germany, took the forms of trains, zeppelins, and boats, reflecting the mechanical skill of that industrial country. Likewise, the Christmas trees showed the same skill in their ornamentation.
As to the phonograph, the charred remains of its clockwork motor lay in scorched ground between the new house and the river. When two men in a rowboat were seen approaching the landing of the Nautilus, one boy, with astonishing insight, concluded they were coming to collect for the phonograph, and threw the pitiful motor at them with, "Take your old phonograph!�
One year, the Christmas tree was decorated with small comic human figures having wiggly brass springs for arms and legs. The little girl wanted these, and �What could she do to them with her little hands?� Foxy Grandpa and Happy Hooligan were not quite the same with their limbs extended to the utmost.
There was a Fourth of July when the Nautilus rested quietly in the water and the launching of a windjammer was viewed. The craft slid smoothly down its ways, bright with colorful flags and pennant to nestle in the water. A splendid sight! Meanwhile, an airplane,looking in profile like an array of sticks making their way through the sky, circled the launching area. That evening, near the new house, there were fireworks, and tissue-paper fire balloons were released to float over the distant woods.
The boys were delighted with flying things, kites, balloons, and eventually, airplanes, model and real. One time there was a call for a top that would spin in the air. The best the toy store in the town across the river could do was supplying a common string-wound top with a swivel that permitted it to hang like a gyroscope on the end of the string.
In later years, there were airplanes that looked more like mosquitoes than flying assemblies of sticks. Some of these landed in the seashore sand near the town called Pacific Beach. They were examined with delight by the boys, and on landing, were met by big girls who developed the reckless habit of flinging themselves upon the moving wings as the planes taxied to stop. A non-girl who later earned the name of �Hag-Headed Edna�, took a lively interest in the young barnstormers, as the pilots of the planes were then called. The last of those visiting airplanes had a short lower-wing and so powerful an engine that it went the way it was pointed instead of wafting upward.
This foreshadowed the swift roaring monsters that later made battlefields what they became.
Looking back to the house beside the river, there was a time when the boys fancied themselves troll-fighting goats, and when the girl was not idle. While the boys were trip-trapping on a bench, she was, in the character of �the ripping goat�, relieving such books and magazines as came within her reach of their excess pages.
One evening she hauled on the tablecloth in the kitchen. The glass kerosene lamp, lit at the time, followed the cloth to the floor Flames arose, but the girl�s mother immediately flung a small thick rug onto the blaze. That looked, to one boy, like feeding the flames, but instead it smothered the fire!
The girl had a celluloid Kewpie doll with hinged arms for a bath companion. Between baths, it stood on the warming oven, beside the stovepipe of the kitchen stove. This ended when the girl�s father, Puckishly, touched a lighted match to the dried doll, which flung up its arms as it burned. The girl�s mother screamed, but the doll made no outcry.
Still, the sorrows of the greater world were creeping in. The Titanic was spoken of, and presently joined by the Lusitania. In conversation between two men the remark was made that the English had decided to let the colonials have a taste of the bitterness of war. Hindsight indicates that Gallipoli was being discussed.
And there was word of a wonderful fair in San Francisco and a trip to that was planned. To the terror of one small boy, a sea voyage in a sailing ship was considered. He could not forget what happened to Sinbad and the Swiss Family Robinson, and trembled all the time he was aboard a windjammer. Once back in the Nautilus, he immediately stopped trembling.
Before departure, thought was given to a toad, called Digger, who lived in a hole beside a place where there was often a rain puddle, between the house and the river. It was thought that Digger would be happier in a vegetable garden, and safer, so he was moved to that place which lay just across a small ditch from the rest of the yard. No sale! Digger knew just where he wanted to be, and came hopping back. There he was left.
The trip south was made aboard a train, and no thought was given to the real perils of rail travel in that time. One highlight of the trip occurred when, in a station, a hobo was observed riding the rods, the bracing of the rail cars frame. He was given an apple lowered on a string, but driven off the rods shortly thereafter.
The fair was wonderful. An entire locomotive had its working parts cut open to permit observation, and a three-dimensional map showed, in crawling lights, where trains were running all over the land. A model of quite a large section of countryside, showed in diorama with moving models of trains, how the rails served agriculture and commerce. One room featured cutting instruments and also had a model of the ocean, complete with moving ships. A golden serpent crawled around the rim of the exhibit.
There was a tower of jewels, just a lath-and-plaster construction but decorated with little glass jewels dangling in front of mirrors. The effect was dazzling, making the tower a fairy castle in the high summer sun.
A small steam roller model moved back and forth on a small table, but did not run over the edge. When removed from the table, it did not alter direction, but continued to move one way until restored to its table. A blower exhibit showed how common rubber balls could be kept in the air. A perforated piece of armor plate showed what modern artillery could do to a battleship.
A long train ride through mountains and tunnels was followed by a trip in an open car, through dusty roads to a house full, mostly, of old ladies, where two young ladies, also present, were given goldstone crosses from the fair. The place was called Peoria, and Illinois. There was a farm nearby, with wonderful cutting and threshing machines, and one that took corn kernels off the cob. Fireflies filled the air at night, and bob-whites and whip-poor-wills mingled their songs with bright mornings. There was a Fourth-of-July party during which a girl dunked her Teddy Bear in the lemonade. Two farm boys brought back buggy whips from town, and learned how useful they could be when they made the mistake of building a fire behind their little sister. Unfortunately, the whips did not survive their use. This must have saddened the boys.
A farmer had a missing thumb, resulting, he said, from a half-hitch of rope attached to a runaway calf. From that place radiated especially, the delightful smell of tobacco that permeated his entire person.
From the farm, there was a long trek in an old Franklin with tires that would go flat, and like Italian tires to-day, announced their condition with �wop wop wop� During one tire-repair stop, a mud turtle was found atop an ant hill. Those ants that walked on his upper lip had to walk no farther, for the turtle�s sticky tongue could reach up to his eyes. In one place, where there had been a cloudburst, unidentified swoggins were found in the grassy bottom of a huge pool.
Later in the trip from Illinois, there was a stop at a farmhouse turned restaurant where two farm boys had a little top that was spun by a spiral plunger. The farm boys showed how it would walk around the room while spinning, but that top had vanes! To the boys from the house beside the Hoquiam river, those vanes meant flight! One boy noticed that it lifted a fraction of an inch from the floor when he spun it. A man then demonstrated its full capability. Spun with vigor, the top rose eight feet aloft. At last, a top that spun in the air!
One boy from by the river wanted to buy the toy, but then, try to get it away from its newly enlightened owners!
The trip was marked with many spectacular views of rivers, falls, and mountains. Particularly interesting was the landscape around Butte, Montana. There was no live vegetation, yet the place was yellowish-green from copper-bearing fumes. Even such dead trees as still stood were the same color.
Along the way, the girl of the dunking-lemonade ate the plush gloves and shoes off her Teddy-bear, perhaps motivated by the tangy taste. When a shoemaker restored the coverings with leather, the girl marched in a circle, chanting �Teddy has new shoes�.
Yakima, Washington, was a place of orchards and hop-fields. Indian chants could be heard there in evenings. Astonishingly, Mr. Flanagan was there, owning an orchard, and a horse named Beaucephalis in memory of Alexander�s favorite steed. The horse could be seen, sometimes, reaching over a fence and having peaches right off a tree.
The trip ended in a seaside village. There was a cottage there from which a strange piece of rolling-stock could be seen on the nearby railroad. This, called the gas-car, looked like the hull of a ship upside-down.
An event in the cottage was when a newspaper came with a two page picture of a horse-faced man who was identified as president of the country, who, it was said, had kept America out of the war then raging in Europe.
A Christmas passed in that cottage, then the scene changes to Carlisle, a logging town,and a company house. There, word came that America had entered the war against Germany. Now the war was to be one to end all wars. The company house was none too comfortable, and the company did not pay in money but only in coupons redeemable in the company store.
Seattle was the next stop, where the next residence was in a Swiss-style house that had been built by a pioneer in what was, at the time, open countryside. The town had quickly engulfed the place, then claimed it for unexpected taxes. The old Swiss gentleman occasionally visited it wistfully. In that house, in 1919, there came a new boy baby, just a day before Lincoln�s birthday.
There was a tenseness in the town, reflecting symbols of young people gone to war. Then there was the Spanish influenza epidemic that claimed lives everywhere. People wore gauze masks over their mouths to avoid spreading the disease.
All tenseness was relieved by the feel of air sweeping from the ocean�s vastness on return to the seaside village called Moclips. There was a year there in a fine old house with simulated brass hinges and a real brass knocker on the massive front door Then there was a year in an Adventist community in a place called Moheris Valley.
Within a mile of Moclips, on return to the coast, a new house was built beside the railroad track. That place had its advantages and disadvantages, among which latter was the need to risk walking on the tracks or at least crossing them on the short way to the ocean beach. The roaring twenties roared themselves out during the time there.
The impressive thing about the twenties was the massive stupidity of captains of industry and social thinkers during the time, not to mention the gullibility of the public at large.
Henry Ford, not a believer in history, presumed to dip into history as he saw it by saying permanent prosperity had come to the country because it had a sense of progress and that the Greek civilization had fallen because Greeks had no sense of progress. He felt that continued manufacture of Model-T�s was his contribution to progress. Thomas Edison shared in the optimism of the time, and pointed out that the player piano principle was one of the great principles of all time. (He was right, though the principle was first shown in the Jacquard loom.) Of course, the full development of the idea awaited the invention of the transistor, and perhaps, whatever comes next.
While these ideas were soaking in, industry, and business in general, charged down the primrose path. The idea of the installment plan was developed and exploited to theutmost. Not only houses and automobiles, but also radios and eggbeaters were bought on the installment plan and all business leaned ever more heavily on credit. It seemed that credit could cover everything. However, credit managers were not sound asleep. When it was noted that working people were in debt amounting to two years of their annual wage,credit managers began to clamp down.
Super-salesmen had been crossing the land, charged with the instruction to bring in ten percent more business each year than the year before. People could not buy, and often did not need what the super-salesmen were promoting. This resulted in overloading the credit of consumers and with overloading the shelves of both wholesalers and retailers. With foreclosure of many credit accounts, viable demand dropped. Factories could find no outlets for their products, so laid off producing employees. Depression was in full swing.
President Hoover stopped construction on the dam that now bears his name. The stoppage was in accord with the economic thinking of the time, but that thinking lost the President the next election. Franklin Roosevelt replaced Hoover in the White House, restarted construction of Hoover dam, and started construction of Coulee Dam along with many other public works. These works did not solve unemployment and seemingly drove the government�s own economy hopelessly into debt. Concerns about the debt vanished when the President challenged the expansion policies of the Japanese empire. Japan responded by heavily damaging the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
The officers� playground that the outpost had become was unprepared for war, but was quickly converted back to its intended service, and the American public, sympathetic with conquered western Europe and beleaguered Britain, was in accord with the President in declaring war on both Germany and Japan.
The war was a bitter one, but Germany collapsed in four years, partly in consequence of repeating Napoleon�s error of trying to fight near Moscow in the Russian winter. Japan fought on until convinced of the futility of fighting by destruction of two cities by the new atom bomb.
For a while, the might of America was unchallenged as sole possessor of the atom bomb, but Russia astonished the world by the short time it took to demonstrate an atom bomb of its own. A nervous time ensued when the financiers of the world felt as bad about Russia as the crowned heads of Europe at first felt about American Democracy. Indeed there was a close parallelism, as early American ambassadors sometimes taunted the rulers of Europe with the suggestion that American Democracy would automatically replace them, much as Communists taunted all other systems.
The world realized, however, that no major wars should be fought with nuclear weapons. A cartoon in a magazine showed a bemedalled ape, plainly a military personage of some importance, saying, �But can�t we have little wars?�. So there have been little wars: Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars, and a multitude of lesser slaughters.
So much for the backward look. What of the future? It is, as it always has been, inscrutable, but several possibilities may be considered:
We may consider the predictions of the evangelists, that the end time will arrive. After all, we do now have chariots that rage in the streets, that glow like torches and run like lightning.We have been experiencing a great increase of knowledge. The case for the end time is much stronger than it has ever been before.
The next possibility is war with nuclear bombs, poisons, and biological agents. This would be another end time as far as present civilization is concerned, though fragments of humanity might survive.
Barring these dooms, humanity will surely have to deal with its own creation of artificial intelligence. The various courses that might be followed then have been well explored in science fiction, and are seriously under consideration by Bill Joy of Sun Microelectronics.
This narrator�s counsel is, wait and see.
Tom Ross is
"Looking Forward"
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