"WISH YOU WERE HERE"

I live in the central village of a seaside New England town old enough to celebrate a 375th anniversary this year. Those of us who live beside tidal bodies on or near historic places like Sandwich, Massachusetts come to expect new discoveries as an ordinary course of events, not by way of invention, of course, but through a diary or letter found beneath attic floorboards or foundation stones uncovered to reveal the outline of a 17th century house.


In places like this, unimagined discoveries await you on a beach or in a closet or inches below the grass of your backyard. When we were replacing a small porch at my house with a large deck, for example, we dug up an 1868 coin and a small pale blue-green glass bottle with a one-inch tall circular neck atop an eight-sided container presumably for ink. I’ve often told company that “it may have been made right here at the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company.”

Some forty years ago my friend and neighbor Carol, then editor of the town’s weekly newspaper, attended a selectmen’s meeting when the discovery of a unique piece of Sandwich’s glass industry history was announced. The official 1879 stamp of the Glass Blowers Union had lain undisturbed in an attic until the property’s change of hands brought it to light. For the small gathering the seal was inked one final time and a few prints were made. Knowing my interest in town history Carol saved one for me. It’s in a small frame in my living room, along with other treasures of great interest and dubious value.

Recently I was at the Sandwich Glass Museum talking with Katie Campbell, director of the Sandwich Glass Museum and the Sandwich Historical Society, about my recently published biography on Sandwich native Thornton W. Burgess, an influential naturalist and children’s author. In fact, many members of Burgess’ family were well-known in the historic glass factory’s management and production – Watermans, Spurrs, and Chapouils ─ and Burgess as a boy sold his mother’s popular molasses candy to factory workers. On the way out of the museum I stopped to chat with staff members Robert and Caitlyn. Casual mention of my little ink well and the seal imprint produced an unmistakable gleam in their eyes.  So I walked home, retrieved my prizes, and brought them to the museum for curator Dorothy Hogan-Schofield to inspect when she returned to work.

Yesterday I went to collect them and learn her opinion. The glass ink well was manufactured, Dorothy reported, but, alas, most likely not at the Boston & Sandwich Glass Factory. (No more entertaining speculation!)  The stamped imprint was interesting, but, in fact, the museum had at some point acquired the union seal itself which she kindly offered to show me along with other exciting pieces, including the small, dark utilitarian desk at which the seal had been used.

“Have you seen the post card exhibit?” Dorothy asked, and escorted me around the corner for a quick look at the museum’s newest exhibit which is based on early 20^th century postcard views of familiar town locations. Many items are organized by street, so residents, homeowners and tourists alike can easily relate to the contents. “Look, here’s School Street,” I said exclaiming anew at my favorite postcard scene that shows Thornton Burgess’ birthplace on a lovely, broad tree-shaded street.

“And there’s the Casino!” I said, pointing out postcards of the large town’s community building that once stood on School Street. “Thornton Burgess was the keynote speaker there at Sandwich’s 300^th anniversary dinner. “For the 250^th they set up a tent behind the Casino big enough to accommodate 2,000 people,” remarked Dorothy. “Really?” I said. “Oh, here’s the boardwalk!”  I leaned closer to the display case to read its construction date: 1875. I realize that it was still fairly new when Thornton Burgess crossed it in March 1879 with other townspeople hurrying to see the gigantic blue whale that had washed up on the town beach.  

“This is one of my favorites,” commented Dorothy. We stopped before a scene at the Town Beach showing several completely clothed women on dry land standing near a passel of children in the water, none fully immersed, which reflects nothing but common sense to anyone familiar with the bay’s ridiculously cold temperatures. Nearby are images of the now highly desirable residential Town Neck area when it was a cow pasture. I recall Burgess’ story of herding cows there as a young boy in the late 1800s. One got onto the nearby railroad track and to his horror was run down by an approaching train.

I’m aware of imposing on the curator. But it’s early on a gray winter morning and there are few visitors. We can spend a few more conscience-free minutes savoring this marvelous collection of images and items that capture the classic, tranquil beauty of our town, a place she and I know and love well. Here is documentation, not that we need it, that so much has been unchanged by the passage of time.

I came to the museum with two small discoveries in hand, and left yesterday with a wealth of discoveries of a different kind, thanks to a collection of commercial art, collectibles, and handwritten messages on simple postcards. Whatever you do, make time between now and June 2014 to visit the Sandwich Glass Museum’s special exhibit “Wish You Were Here.”

And if you experience one gasp of surprise, one thrill of discovery while visiting this special exhibit, ask the staff to pass along your thanks to the curator who will undoubtedly be upstairs completely engrossed in assembling the museum’s next major exhibit.

 

          

 

              

A MAN WHO LOVED DEEPLY

With Valentine's Day approaching, I'm reminded of the privilege I had as a writer to witness a special love story that I would like to share again... 


A few years have passed since I accepted the invitation of my neighbor, author and columnist Jim Coogan, to give a talk to the Sandwich Men’s Club on my book Nature’s Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess.  Good questions followed the presentation, but one stayed with me: “What kind of man was Thornton Burgess?” 


It was not a difficult question to answer. You don’t spend four and a half years researching and writing about one individual without getting to know your subject as well as, if not better than, family. It’s a question I long wrestled with when organizing Burgess’ biography. Understanding his personal and
professional relationships, character, and personality had to precede writing about his illustrious career path as a renowned writer and naturalist. 


 As I stood before the audience, thinking how to best describe Thornton Burgess, much ran through my mind. I immediately pictured him as mid- to late life photographs showed him: a substantial man, six feet tall, glasses, pleasant, amiable, with a certain lightness about him that suggested a ready sense humor. I thought of the man who understood young children so well and wrote stories for them for more than 50 years, who cared passionately for the welfare of wild animals.


 “He was a gentle man,” I began and went on to elaborate on that and other qualities.  It was later when I realized that I had failed to mention one vitally important trait in Thornton Burgess, a trait easy to miss in a man whose professional output and success had been so visibly his measure.
 
He was, in fact, a man who loved deeply. My confidence in that comes less from knowing the height of his happiness in love than knowing the bottomless depth of his sorrow in love’s loss.


 Thornton Burgess was married twice. In 1905 he married Nina Osborne, 24, an adorable and popular young woman who shared his love of the outdoors enough to agree to a tent camping honeymoon in the Adirondacks. He called her his “little girl,” and indeed she looked it. Four hundred people attended their wedding and about half that number came to the reception at their home. Ten months later the same minister who had presided over the joyous wedding conducted a funeral service for Nina who had died the day after giving birth to a baby boy. Unbearably anguished and distraught, Burgess was unable to attend. Within less than a year he had married the woman he adored, witnessed or learned of her death, and become a father.  

Written about eight months after Nina died, journal excerpts quoted in Nature’s Ambassador depict his grief:


“I have scattered a few flowers on the grave of Her who was the light of my life and who only a year ago so bravely and cheerfully looked forward to her hour of traivel [sic]. I shall try at least to be cheerful. I owe it to my friends. But O I am so lonely…


“It is thirty-three weeks tonight since my little girl entered the larger life and still I cannot reconcile myself. Still I cry “Why? Why? Why? Why is faith so poor a comforter?”


“Thirty-eight weeks ago tonight that my little girl was taken ill. I’ve lived years. I wonder when and where I shall meet her. God help me to guide her boy right.”   


He had no choice but to rally. There were bills to pay and mouths to feed, for his mother Caroline and infant son Thornton W. Burgess III were dependent on him. Five years later he remarried to Fannie Johnson, the widow of Burgess’ colleague at Phelps Publishing and the mother of two teenagers. In the decades that followed, the Burgesses provided a reliable core of financial and emotional support for their three children and 10 grandchildren.

When Fannie died from various health problems in 1950, Burgess, then 74, was completely devastated. “My Lady (his nickname for her), my beloved, passed at 9:15 and my heart is broken,” he wrote. “I am utterly desolate…”


In the effort to hold himself together, he found refuge in three activities: writing, driving out into the western Massachusetts hills, and visiting friends and familiar places on Cape Cod. But beyond these diversions he grieved to the depth of his being.


Reading through his journals I began to notice something unusual in the entries that followed Fannie’s death. Each one started with the same words: “I’m glad I belong to you - my Lady.”   Surprised at the repetition, I turned to the next week. Every entry began exactly the same way. I continued turning pages and discovered that week after week, month after month, for a full year, Thornton Burgess began his journal with those tender words of Fannie’s that reminded him of their lives together, words he wrapped around his twice-broken heart like a poultice: “I’m glad I belong to you.”


 Burgess was remarkably generous to his family members, supporting them as family had supported him and his mother in their poverty in Sandwich. He forgave infuriating (and costly) youthful transgressions. He was a loyal and lifelong friend to many. And his love of nature and wildlife, the heart of his dozens of books and thousands of stories, lectures and radio programs, was sustained from childhood into his final years.


By all accounts, Thornton Burgess was a man who loved deeply.

Live Radio Interview

                                   

                                     

The prospect of being interviewed recently on live radio was exciting, but I felt a little nervous as I drove to Woods Hole and parked behind the large house that is home to WCAI FM, the Cape and Islands NPR station. Talk about a view! Offices here face the daily sunrise over the Elizabeth Islands and overlook the Woods Hole waterfront, alive year round with sailboats, fishing boats, and Steamship Authority ferries entering and leaving the harbor. 

After being ushered into a room dominated by a large sextagonal table covered with microphones, headsets, wires and booms, I sat down to wait for WCAI’s Mindy Todd. The popular and seasoned host and producer of The Point, a weekday program on critical issues of interest, had invited me here to discuss my new biography Nature’s Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess.  A 20^th century author who brought conservation values and nature education to generations of children, Burgess was born and grew up in Sandwich about twenty miles from WCAI offices. He was also the host in the 1920s and ‘30s of the Radio Nature League which may have been the first nature program on the air specifically directed to children.

 I watched a program being broadcast in an adjacent room. A longtime writer, I truly love the process of gathering information to shape and package for unseen audiences. In about fifteen minutes I would be called on to provide information to a similarly unseen audience -- but with no opportunity to delete, Google, revise or reflect for a day or two. Would I remember important names, dates and events? What if I coughed or sneezed? Who could have understood my mixed feelings better than Thornton Burgess!

 He relished the challenge of exploring a new medium as a different way to promote his children’s books and syndicated stories, but the first time Burgess walked into a broadcasting studio, he was at a distinct disadvantage. He had never seen or spoken into a microphone. He didn’t own a radio set and understood practically nothing of radio technology or production. The station manager briefly instructed him where to sit, introduced him, and left. Burgess was a seasoned lecturer accustomed to audiences of thousands, but he felt like a complete fool reading one of his stories to an empty room.

I, however, was put at ease immediately by Mindy Todd who walked into the studio with a welcoming smile and warm handshake.  After she settled into a chair at the table, we chatted casually for a few moments. I was almost caught off-guard when she began to introduce me to WCAI listeners. She had obviously read Nature’s Ambassador carefully, and moved smoothly from topic to topic with questions that ranged from the writer’s Cape Cod childhood to his motivation for writing and the source of Peter Rabbit’s name (Burgess or Beatrix Potter).

Before I knew it, our half-hour was up. She thanked me for joining her and suggested we continue the conversation in a future interview. Off the air we tentatively planned a program with Smithsonian researcher Marcel LaFollette, author of Science on the Air (University of Chicago Press, 2008) which describes the popularization of science in the early days of radio and television.

Please tune in to The Point with Mindy Todd on February 18 at 9 a.m. to hear our conversation about the days of early radio and the role of Thornton Burgess and Smithsonian curator Austin Clark in bringing natural science to a newly-discovered audience of children and adults.

 … and later in the month I will be the on-air guest of Mark Lynch, host of “Inquiry” on WICN in Worcester. Tune in on February 27 at 3:00 p.m.

In a future “Said and Done: A Writer’s Blog” post I’ll look more closely at Thornton Burgess’ Radio Nature League and its unique importance to conservation.        

Photo credit: Jennifer Junker