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| Jesse Halsey | draft | c1940 |
Monday, October 13, 2014
"we are prepared as Rotarians to takeour part in municipal service"
Sunday, October 12, 2014
“A Lady—Thinking Backward and Living Forward”
Introduction to Sermon c1926
Delivered in Avondale Presbyterian Church by Jesse Herrmann
[Pastor | 1916-1928]
Matthew 5:17—“I came not to destroy but to fulfill.”
One of my most vivid vacation memories clusters around a
weekend spent in Southampton, Long Island. Southampton, as you may know, is a
so-called fashionable summer resort. It is a popular rendezvous for men with
millions. But in the midst of these ultra-modern externals you distinctly sense
an invigorating atmosphere reminiscent of other days. I know of no community of
its size in America that has more direct human and material contacts with the
Colonial period than Southampton. On Sunday, I preached in the oldest
Presbyterian church in America, founded in 1640—twenty years after the landing
of the Pilgrims. Many of the permanent families in Southampton today are the
direct descendents of these founding fathers. Hard by this town is the
Shinnecock Hills Golf Course, where an Indian caddie carries your clubs, for
close by is a government reservation for the ancient Shinnecock tribe.
A man must be exceptionally dull if his memory and emotions
are not stirred in a place where the Indian hut, the colonial house, and the
Millionaire’s mansion stand within a stone’s throw of one another.
But the experience that I treasure most, after a brief visit
to Southampton, centers in a home whose presiding genius is a gracious lady who
has rounded out more than eight decades of life. For over fifty years she had
been the uncrowned queen and the unmetered priestess of that whole
community—mother to the orphan, friend to the wayward, and delightful companion
for the young and old. In a remarkable way she gathers up in her character the fruitage
of the past, the opportunity of the present, and the promise of the future. In
perfect blend the three tenses mingle in her person.
Her home clearly belongs to the Colonial vintage. Much of
its furniture was built and carved by skilled ancestors. During her youth, in
the open fireplace, now an interesting museum, all the meals were prepared. But
these antiques stand in marked contrast with the furnishings of her mind. On
the table the latest books are
found. Unless compelled otherwise by the visitor her conversation is
geared exclusively to the present and the future. The windows of her soul are
ever open to the winds of God as they blow from the four corners of the modern
world. The roots of life are deeply embedded in the congenial soil of the past,
but every branch is n intimate contact with the fresh breeze of a new born day.
In the person of this delightful character I find a living
commentary on my theme: “Thinking backward and living forward.” Her life
illustrates what Jesus meant when he said: “I came not to destroy, but to
fulfill.” He came to reveal the beauty and to unfold the value of the old and
to build them anew into the living tissues of today and tomorrow. There is
supreme need in our day for skilled hands and broad-gaged souls who can sense
the permanent values in the past and weave them effectively and artistically
into a new garment fit for modern wear. Men and women who can think backward
and live forward.
The Jesse Halsey Manuscript Collection. Special Collections,
Princeton Theological Seminary Library.
"to what purpose is this waste?”
The Jesse Halsey Manuscript Collection. Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
"My father used to sit and read the dictionary by the hour."
My father used to sit and read the dictionary by the hour.
As a boy I could never understand it, but I do now. He was one of the original
subscribers of the Standard Dictionary, paying five dollars in advance and when
it was impossible to publish at that price sending in the second five. As I
say, he used to read it by the hour. I never learned the dia-critical marking,
new style, and have always stuck to a Webster. In college days my roommate
talked me into buying a Standard. This I did, floundered around with the
pronunciation and wished I had a Webster. At the same time the president of our
college, Woodrow Wilson, had bought a Webster. This he did not like, wanting a
Standard. He mentioned the fact one day in a preceptorial division and I
offered to exchange. We made an even trade, as I remember. This was in 1908. I
have often wondered if his war speeches were abetted by my dictionary. His, I
used, up ‘til 1918 when it was stolen out of my study. I hope the appropriator
found Mr. Wilson’s name in it, ‘though I doubt if that was the reason it was
taken. For a long time I have coveted the Oxford Dictionary, the big one, but
the price was prohibitive. When in came down to within my reach I happened to
read Billy Phelps who says it’s pedantic for an individual to want it so I have
up my ambition and not very long ago became the proud possessor of the Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary, known in England as the S.O.E.D. I am sure that if
my father had had this he would have read nothing else, for the history of each
word is traced, and dated. So many many words came into the language, I find in
the decade following 1600. This, however, is more or less of a teaser. Someday
I am going to have the big one. This just starts you off on a hunt, and then
you go to the library to look up the full genealogy of your word. Today, I
wrote an appreciative review of a friend’s book, saying something like this—“He
weighs with a just balance. It is in the main however, Troy rather than
avoirdupois,” thinking that I had paid him a fine compliment indicating the
scrupulous discerning quality of his observation. I turned up Troy, however, in
the Oxford and found to my consternation, having mailed my manuscript,
something like this—B. fig. In allusion to the pound Troy being less than the
pound avoirdupois 1599, “There was Cresid and Nell was avoirdupois 1599.” My
friend wrote back in high dudgeon that I had done despite to his volume. Why
the magazine editor didn’t catch it I do not know, apparently he was no wiser
than I.
--Jesse Halsey
Clamming in Labrador
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| "The Boss & the Gang (College Students from U.S. College)" |
They didn’t know that many other groups, Indians and
settlers, have survived starvation winters by the same means as is attested by
the great shell heaps long the coast from Maine to Florida.
Joe Souley was a great person. He could neither read nor
write but he knew a lot about life and human nature. He has sailed the seven
seas and could describe ports, like Liverpool, that I had seen so accurately
that I trusted his description of those I had not seen. And year after when I
saw Yokohama, and Fuji, it looked just as Joe said it ought to.
Joe had worked in a copper mine up the coast at Tilt Cove
and knew how to use dynamite. He taught me how to blast, but he couldn’t temper
drills. They would be too soft and not hold an edge, or too brittle and break.
I had watched Andy Jagger in the blacksmith’s shop on the way home from school,
blown the bellow fro him, broken his twist drills, and learned many things from
him. I remembered that he heated things he wanted to temper to a “cherry-red” and
then dipped them in oil. Just what color cherry-red was while in a forge fire
memory didn’t say, but trail and error demonstrated that it could be done.
Great boulders stood in the way of our pipe lines and
cellars and much blasting was indicated.
(After his first Cottage Hospital was under roof, the
Doctor, so he told me, had thought of a cellar and got a miner to blast—the roof
was damaged! So we did our blasting first.)
Joe would have me hold the drill, then with a giant sledge
he would begin to strike while I turned the drill in the hole. Then brave man,
he took his turn holding while I . . . swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never missed—my old grandfather coming
to the rescue. (I am a great believer in atavism—or whatever it may be called.
Cap’n Harry, my grandfather, was a skilled mason (he built most of Greenwich
Village in New York, over a hundred years ago.) He once was known to have cut
the center out of a millstone to convert it into a well curb, cut it—on a bet—in
thirty minutes. He knew how to swing a maul; I’m sure he was there fifty years
later, for my help. (What’s fifty years among Yankees?)
--Jesse Halsey
1912
--Jesse Halsey
1912
Southampton C1887
Memory prompts me to go down the village street as it was
some 50 years ago. Following the old Indian trail, likely the early settlers
placed their houses along the winding way that they called the main street. All
the early houses, salt-box style, faced the south. The next generation built
their house close to the street, many of the porches coming out even with the
sidewalk. The street was wide and line on both sides by massive trees, many of
them spreading elms. The trail was deep with dust in the summer, almost
impassable with mud in the springtime, and in the winter rough with ruts.
The railroad came through about the time I was born, linking
the villages with New York, about ninety miles to the west. Before that, most
commercial and cultural connections were with New England; trading vessels
plying between Boston and New London, Stonington, and our Island. At the north
end of our Main Street there was a Scotch immigrant familiarly called Josh Ellison;
he had four boys and six girls. Five of the latter, as I remember, succumbed in
a diphtheria epidemic that swept through the village long before the time of
anti-toxins. The oldest boy became a very skilled cabinet maker and wood
carver. The second boy, John, went to work for the village painter. My older
sisters were painting their bedroom and wanted some cream colored paint for
wood work. They sent me, a boy of five or six, to the other end of the village
where the paint-shop was located. I delivered my order and came home with a
quart of the paint that John had mixed. When the girls applied it they found it
was a brilliant colonial yellow. My older brother commented at the supper table
that night, “The cream from John Ellison’s cows must be a deeper color than
from ours.” (I told this story to John Ellison last summer. He still owns the
paint business and half the local bank, but he did not seem to appreciate my
story.)
Next down the street came “Uncle” Sam Bishop. I remember one
day as a boy coming home from Camp’s Pond with a big load of wood. Mud was
deep; the horses had all they could pull. As we came by Uncle Sam’s house he
called out to me, “Choose a good rut, boy, you’ll be in it for a long time.”
Back of the present circumstances there may have been a subtle philosophy.
Next door lived Walter Jagger whose buildings were always
freshly painted, his whole farmstead meticulously kept and his farm work was
always a week ahead of anyone else’s. He took the latest agriculture journals
and was in many ways the most progressive man in the community. Naturally at
the time when the little red school houses gave place to a union school and
later added a high school, Mr. Walter was the president of the school board.
The first graduating class of the new high school put on a “banquet” at the one
hotel that catered to the summer visitors. The first course was bouillon served
in double-handled cups. Mr. Walter, who presided led off by adding cream and
sugar to his cup and saying so all could hear, “The sailors always start the
day with coffee, but I suppose New Yorkers who don’t get up until noon have it
for dinner. Just why they have to have two handles on the cup I do not know,
but here goes.” “Strange tasting coffee,” he remarked, “but one has to keep up
with the times.”
His brother [Charles A. Jagger (1862-1914)], living nextdoor, was the editor of the local paper. He had a Ph.D. from a Germanuniversity and had real literary skill. Having some financial resources (his
father had been a 49-er in California) it is doubtful if he ever made his
newspaper pay. In cold weather it was scarcely legible because the ink stayed
sticky in the cold pressroom. Dr. Jay had political opinions and maybe
ambitions. He was always in controversy with someone in the village, the
President, or the Congressman. He could lay it on thick and his editorials were
the talk of the village, and I imagine of the whole county. He was killed when
his primitive automobile, likely . . .
Oysters
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| Copyrighted 1934 by The Union News Company, N.Y. |
Here, “way out west” as our down-east fathers thought, by
express (“re-iced” as it said on the box) they came, those FirePlace
oysters—big of shell, fat to fullness, firm yet tender, just waiting to be
opened! And with the Long Island oyster-knife that we keep handy, opened they
were and devoured!
“A well know edible bivalve mollusk” (oysters virginca)
found along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast of North America,” says the dictionary.
Another kind is found on the Pacific Coast and a gold digger (of the
forty-niner kind) who went to the golden state wrote that they were “scarce and
small.” John Smith who skirted our coast in 1612 found “creuises (whatever they
are), oysters, cockles, and mussels.” The Plymouth laws in 1661 inacted “five
shillings shall bee payed to the cuntrey for euery barrel of oysters that is
karried out of the government.” (Five shillings translated into our value might
mean as much as $10.00.)
The oyster appears in many metaphorical expressions, for example,
Knickerbocker’s History has “Every place was shut as tight as an oyster.”
Persons have been known to enjoy themselves “like and oyster in the mud.” “Dumb
as an oyster” appears in our literature and Carl Sandburg quotes a sunburned
Westerner as saying, “You ain’t got the sense God gave an oyster.”
And it’s an old time business. Ben Franklin in 1726 has
“oyster merchants fetch them from other places.” Narragansett had a governor in
1777 who was an “oyster-pickler.” “Oyster-venders,” “oyster-planters,”
“oyster-traders,” “oyster-men,” “oyster-openers,” “oyster-gatherers,”
“oyster-pirates,” and “oyster-merchants,” have appeared all up and down the
East Coast all through the years.
In 1761, Conner in his diary says, “We anchored at Southold
harbor by oyster ponds on Long Island,” and the Huntington town records (1857)
this—“over and across the cove to the old oyster pond dam.”
Recipes for oyster pies, oyster patties, oyster soup, oyster
stew, oyster currie, oyster gumbo, and oyster loaves appear in newspapers and
cookbooks all across the last hundred years.
There was an oyster war in 1654 between the New Yorkers and
the Jerseyites. (That latter were called clam diggers.) The New York Tribune of
December 20th, 1861, records the re-opening of the oyster trade and
related the difficulties of the oyster business occasioned by the War between
the States. Oyster fisheries, oyster packing-houses, oyster canneries, oyster
traffic, oyster laws, and oyster commissions are mentioned.
A whole fleet of oyster gathering boats appear, not only a
plain “oyster boat” and the ungainly “oyster scow,” but “oyster schooners,”
“oyster pinkies,” “oyster pungies,” and even an “oyster canoe” was used for
tonging in Chesapeake Bay.
In Harper’s Magazine of 1882, we read that “the ship was
both a fruiter and an oyster boat prosecuting these callings at different
seasons,” so that the Century Dictionary definition of an oyster-boat as “a
shucking house constructed on a raft” would not appear to be entirely correct.
General Putnam in the Revolution had authority to commission
oyster boats for privateering and in the War of 1812 some were so employed.
“Oyster clubs,” “oyster suppers,” “oyster parties,” “oyster
banquets,” as well as “oyster roasts,” are recorded.
Nichols in his account of “American Life” (1664) says that
“gentlemen living upon the rivers, ponds, and inlets in the vicinity of New
York have their oyster plantations as regularly as their gardens.” Scribner’s
Monthly (1870) speaks of “oyster farms” and another writer in 1888 speaks of an
“oyster field supplying a bounteous repast.” The “oysterman” appears in New
York in 1755 and “he could clear eight to ten shillings a day.”
Oysters are sold in “cellars,” “houses,” “depots,” at
“stands,” and in “shops.” In 1875, the Chicago Tribune on the fifth day of
September records that “Wilson’s is decidedly the most handy and convenient
oyster-parlor in the city.” George Ade in his fables frequents an “oyster bay.”
The hang-out of a certain thief was an “oyster shanty,” and the “oyster bar” is
still with us. “Oyster cellars” did not at first include gentlemen among their
visitors” (Watson’s Philosophy 1830).
Oyster lime, obtained from the shells, is an ingredient of
many plastered walls in colonial and later houses. “Wonder Working Providence”
(1654) speaks of, “the country that affords no lime but what is burned of
oyster shells.” In 1853, Fowler, in his “Home For All,” advises that “those
persons who would economize have only to order those very shells which the
oysterman has to pay to have carted away, carried to your building spot.” As
early as 1853, an Almanac discloses that “all land on which clover is grown
must either have lime naturally or that mineral must be artificially supplied
in the form of stone-lime, oyster-lime, or mar.”
To “Oyster” is used as an intransitive verb and the
Brookhaven town records in 1767 record that “The Trustees shall . . . [missing
page 4]
. . . seaboards from Maine to Florida. Morton (1667) explains
that many of these are twelve or fifteen feet high. Hawkins (1787), “At the
lower part of the bluff is a bed of oyster shells.” Paulding (1817) writes from
the South, “There are large masses of oyster shells along the banks.” New Haven
(1642), “The common fields called the oyster shell fields.” Providence (1723),
“eight acres upon oyster shell plains.” New York (1885), “Oyster shell bank.”
So with Weld (1799) in his “Travels” we record that on the
day that the FirePlace Oysters came from Ellsworth in Greenport, that “oyster
meat formed the whole of our dinner.” Someone in 1902, in a New York paper
speaks of “the twenty-five cent democratic oyster stew” so we must add that
ours cost more than that by a considerable amount—but was entirely worth it.
We enjoyed the oysters and the reminiscences of home; how
our boys one summer went to the FirePlace Camp and how in the patriarchal days
of Lyon Gardiner and his succeeding proprietors, the signal fires to call the
Gardner’s Island boat were kindled at the “fire place” from whence our oysters
came out of deep water, sea salted, and fresh (all at the same time), and “fat
as butter” as the saying goes; “like a piece of pork” in texture and everything
else that a Gardiner’s Bay oyster ought to have and be.
And because Bronson Alcott said that one ought to live above
the table we have with the generous help of the Dictionary of the American
Language, put together this tribute to this succulent bivalve.
“If I am not here when you awake
Just hunt me up with an oyster-rake.”
(Billings “HardTack” 1866)
--Jesse Halsey
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