A Tribute to Excellence...

These are the days of penicillin, aureomycin, vitamins A, B, C and X, Y, Z, each one prescribed by your physician for a different type of ailment. This is indeed the age of specialization. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something in the family medicine chest which would cure burns, cuts, lameness,colic, cramps, bruises, etc., especially the etcetera? There was such a panacea some years ago.

Do any of you who read this column remember Red Sea Balsam? It was a cure for all the ailments listed above. It had several other selling points as well. Not only was it for internal and external use, but it was good for man or beast. Why did such an amazing panacea ever disappear from the market? One wonders.

This terrific medication was sold in the days before our modern high-powered advertising, but the chaps who sold it locally were pretty smart salesmen at that. They distributed their wares from a smart-looking carriage whose sides proclaimed in billboard fashion the virtues of their product and which was drawn by a really handsome pair of red and white horses, named, no doubt Red Sea and Balsam. The two salesmen rode in comfort in cold weather with a robe of grizzly bear skin, or it may have been the hide of a Tibetan yak, over their legs.

All this is utterly fanciful you say. No indeed. There is documentary and photographic evidence for all the above to be found in one of the several hundred photographs which were taken over a period of many years by the late H. K. Cummings and which he left to the Snow Library. Through the kindness of the Cape Codder and the work of Lillian Quinn these irreplaceable pictures of an earlier Orleans have been reprinted and will be on display in modern—type albums in the new Snow Library when it opens early in July. This collection will bring back many memories to the older folks of this community and will acquaint many others with the physical appearance of the town and its citizens of an earlier day.

It is, for instance, difficult to realize today that the monument to soldiers of the Civil War once had no trees anywhere near it and that the hill upon which the Town Hall stands was also bare of foliage.

Some of you may remember A. E. Doane who delivered milk. The dairy companies of today could well take a leaf from his book, judging by the picture of him and his milk wagon set for the daily delivery. Brother Doane anticipated modern salesmanship by many years by appearing as a neat and well-dressed purveyor. He was not only neatly dressed, he wore a complete suit of clothes, including vest. He was garbed further in stiff collar and very full and flowing tie. As a crowning touch he wore a flower in his buttonhole.

Does your milkman wear a flower in his buttonhole? Of course not. Yet how modern merchants prate of modern salesmanship. They could well take a leaf from the salesbook of Brother Doane. Let the cynics scoffingly remark that when the picture was taken he was probably ready for church and thus posed beside his milk wagon and faithful steed. How many milk salesmen today get dressed for church and pose, with a flower in their buttonholes beside their high-powered trucks? No, those people of fifty, seventy and ninety years ago had lot on the ball, even if they lacked all the electrical and mechanical devices with which we are blessed. After all they were our parents and grandparents, were they not?

All this writing about the past makes me too look back a bit. Last evening another class was graduated from Orleans High School, the twelfth since I have been teaching here and the twenty-seventh since I became a teacher. I certainly am far from being aged and decrepit but it is difficult to realize that some of the boys taught when L was a beginning teacher now have children who are this month receiving college degrees. The Roman poet Horace had a phrase for it, "The fleeting years glide by."

For a teacher there is always a sense of wonder at graduation time. You see these young people completing another important phase of their lives and you wonder how much of what you tried to teach them they will remember and put into practice. You wonder what and where they will be ten, twenty, thirty years from now. This year’s graduating class is particularly close to me for they began their school days in the first grade the same day I began teaching in Orleans. So another milestone passes. And on September 8----(copy lost)