I have to wonder whether my book Quaking Dover is my way of saying farewell to my Friends and congregation in Dover – or of staying in touch, now that I’ve moved further east.
Only time, of course, will tell.
Category: American Affairs
The Vampire Shift, as I recall
how asocial
how essential
In all of the holiday festivities
In the colonial era, neither the Congregationalists/Puritans at First Parish nor the Quakers/Friends observed Christmas.
So much for singing festive carols or decorating a tree.
The Friends didn’t sing at all, actually, unless it was somehow spontaneous.
At First Parish, meanwhile, a bass viol was introduced in the 1700s to accompany the hymns.
That gave way in 1829 to an organ built by Bostonian William M. Goodrich. In 1878, the instrument was rebuilt and repositioned by Hutchings-Plaisted of Boston, with alterations in subsequent years.
In 1995, a thoroughly revised instrument was unveiled, the work of Biddeford, Maine, Faucher Organ company. A hybrid of the original pipes and of newer electronic and computer elements, it’s a monster machine capable of rattling the house and shaking the bottoms of your feet.
I am glad we simple Quakers don’t have to pay for its routine maintenance, though I am grateful for those who do.
Not bad for holiday festivities, including accompanying a community-wide Messiah sing.
It’s not the only option in town, either. For some, those carols have to wait till the end of Advent, when the Twelve Days begin.
And, for the record, the Greek Orthodox start celebrating Christmas 12 days later.
Back to the precarious nature of scalloping
The crews are out in our deep cold and often nasty winter weather, not just fishing but also shucking before landing their haul. Most of them head out before sunrise, as I hear from my home.
Are they crazy, as some of them contend, or just dumb, as others jest? Even both? It’s more than honest work, no question.
In our zone, boats are limited to a crew of three and a maximum harvest of two buckets of shucked scallops a day. That’s ten gallons, or nine to ten pounds total. Doesn’t look like much for a day’s haul, especially when you factor in paying for their labor, the boat, gear, fuel, insurance, and the fact it’s seasonal and very cold work, even before the regulations that hold draggers to three days a week. Try making a living on a three-day, limited season, income. Good luck!
Officially, ours is a 50-day run spread over four months, but in reality, an earlier cutoff kicks in on short notice to preserve the stock from depletion. In effect, “It’s over, guys,” arrives in the captain’s email, post haste. Last year, that eliminated 17 fishing days, a third of the season. More than an entire month, actually. By dumb luck, my daughter and I were at the docks just in time to stock up a gallon in our freezers.
At least we’re not managing a restaurant.
As this season? We’re holding our proverbial breath. My, those morsels do taste unbelievable.
(Divers have a different schedule, even more limited.)
Think of that when you wonder about the seemingly high price of heavenly shellfish.
As for some of Dover’s conventional histories
I’ve previously mentioned newspaper editor George Wadleigh as a fascinating source of Dover historical narrative.
The Rev. Jeremiah Belknap, a renowned historian, proved far less helpful when it came to the Quakers. They seemed largely invisible to him.
I largely ignored the Rev. Alonzo Hall Quint, another Congregational minister, whose historical notes had been read by Wadleigh, probably when they were originally serialized in the Dover Enquirer from 1850 on. One of my reasons was practical: the scanned ebook edition of the book is nearly unreadable. Besides, even in retirement, I have only so much time. One point worthy of revisiting in the original would be the use of “inner light” in 1855 – if accurate, that would be the first reference to the Quaker doctrine anywhere. Previously, it was Inward Light, with a much different focus. I’m assuming this was a “correction” by John Scales in editing the full book edition published in 1900. Scales himself authored an independent colonial history published in 1923.
One source for later research would be the journals of the Rev. Enoch Place, a pioneer of the Free Will Baptist movement. He visited Friends Meetings in his travels from Strafford, which would offer a fresh perspective, as well as presiding at thousands of burials, baptisms, and weddings from 1810 to 1865. His might balance the histories of the period that revolve around Dover’s downtown mills.
$20 for a martini?
Sardi’s in Manhattan?
A legendary bartender, being quoted in his retirement story in the New York Times, was amazed.
I have always been shocked by prices in the City, but for once it doesn’t seem so far out of line. Not that I go out that often.
For the history student, I see some doctoral dissertation possibilities
There’s so much more I’d like to know about details related to my Quaking Dover story, but I’m not a professional historian.
Some of these could be fodder for a Ph.D. dissertation.
- An examination of Dover Friends book of minutes dealing with young men who enlisted in the Revolutionary War would be one.
- Or of where individuals went in their religious affiliations after leaving Friends.
- Even Richard Waldron’s full biography.
- A list of the clerks of the Meeting and another of the recorded ministers and elders would be helpful.
- Or an examination of the actual functioning of the provincial charters, especially the so-called “proprietary colonies.”
- And, oh yes, a genealogical index of New England Quakers like William Wade Hinshaw’s encyclopedic indexes of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Ohio.
- I would even like to see an understandable examination of English settlement in Maine in its colonial years. Where, for instance, did the settlers go after watching from sea as smoke and flames rose from what had been their homes and villages in a fateful five-week period of 1676, eradicating all English from east of Casco Bay?
The collapse of NBC
I don’t mean the cracker company, either, the one known as Nabisco, for National Biscuit Company. Or was that Baking?
No, I’m thinking of what was once the broadcasting monolith, first in radio and then in television, the one that projected a peacock logo at the onset of color programming.
The financial struggles for traditional mass media in the digital age are well-known, but broadcasting has been hit perhaps even more drastically than newspapers.
As a child of the ‘50s and ‘60s, I’m still shocked at the disappearance of AM radio, especially its powerhouse clear-channel signals. My daughters, savvy as they are in tech matters, don’t even know what AM is. These were coveted media, and getting a license for even a daytime frequency in a metropolitan market could be a coup. Think of WKRP in Cincinnati for the insider view. Instead, though, owners have allowed many of these to go silent. As for FM? The real competition is from streaming and satellite.
We gave up our TV years ago after realizing that whatever we wanted to watch was available online. Still, I was stunned the other day to discover that NBC no longer has an on-the-air outlet in Boston. That was unthinkable. Nobody would give up a network affiliation and go independent. Yet, as I learned, it isn’t anymore.
The trigger came the other morning when I was gazing at my Yahoo news feed and clicked on the latest Patriots football gossip from NBC Sports Boston, one of the primary regional sources. Wait, I thought. Why isn’t this identifying a station? Or at least a channel?
And that’s when I went down the proverbial online rabbit hole and found out that the once mighty network exists solely on cable in the nation’s tenth largest media market. Even the Tonight Show.
As for its entertainment lineup?
There are good reasons we’re turning to the new seasons at Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc. Besides, we can watch those shows at our convenience, not the network’s.
I must admit finding it hard to keep up with all of these changes. How about you?
With an early flight
It took her longer in line at the Starbucks than to get through the TSA screening.
Even so, she discovered that the alternative of driving 15 hours was still the quicker way to reach her destination.
Another thing about that warship that was commissioned in Eastport a few months ago
It’s nothing like the plastic models we bought as kids and then glued together. The battleships and war aircraft. This one’s shaped like a giant awl or very dangerous letter opener or our digital thermometer for cooking.
It’s dark gray, like a black hole, for solid reason.
