My Own Sunshine Sketches

If you’ve never read Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, you’ve missed something. In fact, I just ordered a copy so I could reread it. I haven’t seen it since my college days, more years ago than I care to count. Predating Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon by just shy of a century, but much in the same vein, Leacock tells, as only a master storyteller can, the hilarious goings-on in a small town, where everyone knows each other and a significant number are blood relations.  It reminds me a great deal of the small New Hampshire town in which I grew up, with its two-room schoolhouse, post office in the general store, and one twenty-year-old fire engine.  Indeed, many of the locals were related to each other, coming primarily from two prominent families.  Here are a few bits and pieces of East Sullivan.

My parents bought an old house, unoccupied for thirty years, and restored it over the next few years.  While they were on the hunt for a “fixer upper” in the country, they happened to drive down an old county road beside which the house they eventually bought was sitting. Ironically, my mother, who seldom had unexpressed thoughts, upon reaching the end at bottom of the hill, remarked, “Who in THEIR RIGHT MINDS would ever live on a road like that?”  Our family would come up weekends and summers while my father worked on the house. We moved there permanently when I was in about the fourth grade.  The culture shock in moving from a suburban school to a much smaller country one, where I was one of six fourth graders, was just a little overwhelming.  We were “the new family” for a good ten years. Much later, when we were established, my father took civic responsibility seriously, serving on the school board and as town moderator.  That all was well enough, except that his hearing was progressively leaving him, which made running the town meetings interesting. He would from time to time use it as a cover for ignoring some of the more persistent and argumentative attendees.  On one particular occasion, when he’d explained a motion relating to something inconsequential about six different ways, a hand went up in the first row, and the hand’s owner stated, “Mr. Moderator – I don’t understand.”  He gazed down upon her with his signature half a smile and responded, “Bernice, I didn’t think you would.”  My father was not politically correct in any real sense, nor did he have a broad tolerance for, well, lesser intellects.  How he was reelected year after year, I’ll never know.

The town history describes in detail the local “hermit”.  Perley Swett lived off the land before it was “a thing”, on one of those back roads that is partly paved and then turns into a dirt road.  In his case, the dirt road further deteriorated into a barely passable path into the woods, ending up at his house up on a hill, where Mr. Swett lived with his extensive herd of goats.  I remember him as an older man with the longest white beard I’d ever seen.  The town really only saw him periodically when he attended Town Meetings in March.  Very rarely would he come to the village store, as it appeared his myriad relatives kept him supplied with whatever he needed that didn’t come from the land or the goats.  Local legend had it that people would periodically come to buy young goats from him.  After short intervals, the goats would disappear from their new homes and somehow find their way back to his farm.  Being pretty much indistinguishable from each other, the purchasers didn’t have any real recourse to claim their animals.  There was a bit of a misprint, or at least we think it was misprint, in a town history of about thirty years ago, showing a picture of Perley sitting in a rocking chair on his front porch, smiling out at the camera, with the underlay, “Perley Swett, just after he died.”

The volunteer Fire Department, as perhaps is the case in so many small New England villages, provided a fair amount of entertainment if little actual fire protection.  I remember the early winter morning when the fire alarm rang out across town.  Edgar Hastings lit a fire in the fireplace and a chimney fire resulted.  Of course, everyone in town threw on clothes and dashed to the scene – this was a major event.  We all were standing around watching a pretty impressive fireworks display coming from Edgar’s chimney, wondering where the official apparatus was. Several engines from Keene, the nearest city about ten miles away finally arrived and the professionals got the fire out in short order, climbing on the roof and squirting some foamy stuff that took care of it.  After a lengthy interval, the town fire chief came walking down the hill looking a bit embarrassed.  It seems that he’d been coming lickety-split down from the fire house and, not really paying much attention to the snowy roads and the weight of hundreds of gallons of water in the tank behind him, didn’t quite make the turn by the Ellis Road and sailed off into a tree.  Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt and was able to climb out of the truck and proceed on foot. In sort of a “silver lining” , it was an opportunity for the Fire Department to upgrade to a slightly newer and better truck, though not before a contentious debate at the next Town Meeting.  Many years ago, the Fire Chief (though not the one that ran into a tree) had taken a prevention course at the local mutual aid center, and came back with some brilliant new ideas. One was an Air Pack, a face mask and air tank used in fighting full scale building fires.  He demonstrated the unit, looking not unlike a refugee from the trenches of World War I, and proposed that the town purchase some of these units.  The reader should bear in mind that our first-responders never actually entered a burning building – they stood and waited for the professionals from Keene to arrive. The cost of these things was not substantial, but still worthy of a heated town meeting discussion. Years later, as the fire house was being cleared out, they came across these air packs, still in their boxes, sitting on a shelf where they’d been placed on arrival.  The hoses had disintegrated and the face masks were covered in mold. Thus, the units had to be thrown out, and another great small-town slice of history bit the dust, quite literally. Edgar Hastings, in a side note, ran the town switchboard.  Actually, his wife Frieda did, but every so often in her absence, Edgar would take over command. As I mentioned before, my parents had bought an old farm in town that was initially a weekend/summer type fixer-upper.  My father would call our neighbor on Friday afternoons in the cold weather before we left the suburbs, asking him to go down and turn the heat on.  He was attempting this one Friday, and happened to get Edgar on the phone.  My father asked to be “put through to Al Colby”.  Edgar replied, “He’s not home.”  This was not meant to be a helpful suggestion, it was a flat statement of fact, and that should be the end of it. Presumably, if one was a village resident, you realized that Edgar had dismissed you.  Not my father, used to operating in the business world.  He persisted.  “Would you please try him anyway?’  “Won’t do any good – he’s not home” came back the reply.  This interchange went back and forth for some time before my father finally ended the call with a look that can only be described as utter consternation.  Al Colby, our neighbor up the street, was a wonderful man who mowed the fields around our house for the hay.  He noticed that I loved watching him work, so one day he arrived with a cushion strapped over the hood of the tractor.  I rode proudly on that hood for a number of summers, king of the fields and totally captivated watching the hay fall in neat rows, then raked up and baled.  Looking back, it’s a wonder that I didn’t get clipped to shreds and baled up with hay, but it didn’t happen, and it’s one of my happiest childhood remembrances.

There was a white marble gravestone in the basement of our old house at the time we moved in.  The name on it was “Prudence Mason”.  We knew that Rufus Mason had built the house in the 1820’s, and that his daughter, Hattie, had carved her name in the attic door. A little research turned up the history that Prudence had been Rufus’ first wife, and had died quite young. She was buried in the town cemetery. Years later, when Rufus died, a larger family gravestone replaced the earlier version, but so that the original perfectly good marble wouldn’t be wasted, his children brought Prudence’s monument home and repurposed it as the top for the pickle barrel.   My parents, anticipating a visit from some friends that had senses of humor much like theirs, decided to set it up in the back yard with a fresh mound of earth.  All was going well until, as I was helping, the stone fell on my foot and cracked a bone. The nurse in the emergency room asked what had happened, and I, without really thinking through my answer, said “I dropped a tombstone on it”.  That response, and the look it elicited has, I’m sure, stayed with her throughout her life.  For several years, a small bird would perch on the headstone, and one of us would remark that “Prudence was back.”

I have recollections of being a part of Old Home Day our first year as full-time residents.  A family friend made costumes for my sister and me. We were Rufus and Prudence Mason in period outfits that were, as I recall, remarkably elaborate.  It was my first top hat experience. My mother was miffed that we didn’t win “best costume”, although as new comers, that probably wasn’t in the cards.  My mother made a concerted to effort at acceptance, although she usually denied it. There’s an old New England expression, “Open shet’s a sign of wet.”  It means, as the farmers all knew, that when the leaves are twisting  in and out in the wind (open and shut), rain is coming. My mother had stopped at the village store to pick up a few things, and a couple of the older villagers, Martin Swett and Pete Scripture, were sitting on the front bench talking about the weather.  Herself made an ill-fated decision to join in.  She called through the car window, “Well, gentlemen, you know what they say – open wet’s a sign of shet.”  As they sat looking stunned and bewildered, she calmly rolled up the window and quickly drove away. I’ve learned since that time that when you come in to a community, particularly one that is small and very protective of its own, you’re not about to take home any prizes.  You have to blend in for the first twenty-five or thirty years until acceptance slowly grows. Don’t try too hard.

Out in the woods, about half a mile or more behind the town hall, there was a large stone engraved with the founding of the town and the location of the first meeting house.  The road had long since disappeared and grown up to full-fledged forest.  Several volunteers had gone out with chainsaws and cleared at least some of it because a town-wide picnic was planned to celebrate the bicentennial. On the appointed day, a bunch of the town’s families set out to hike back into the woods, along the trail, to the monument.  It was actually quite impressive, a natural stone standing upright about fifteen to twenty feet.  The local minister read a prayer, several town officials spoke, then we all ate and drank from our picnic baskets.  We’d been there I’d guess about two hours, and were getting ready to head back when we heard a struggling, revving car engine, grinding of gears, and spinning of tires.  Thus arrived Dick Pelkey, our part time assistant road agent, in an advanced state of inebriation.  He was to Sullivan what Otis was to Mayberry. His car appeared through the trees, skidding to a stop in front of the stone.  He climbed out of the car as we all watched, speechless, and promptly tripped and fell. Nobody could figure out how he made it over all the huge tree stumps and boulders, in a car no less.  We figured that the trail back would be littered with car parts.  It remains one of the great fascinating tales of Sullivan.

We often think that big cities have a monopoly on print-worthy stories and events, but that’s not really true. Small towns, with their deeply personal relations, their unique and sheltered perspectives, provide lots of profoundly humorous material – some merely a soft chuckle, some laugh-out-loud. As I look back on my early life in a small town, I’m thinking . . . . . more that makes me smile.