Dusty Trails

Every morning on the train, a canned voice bids us ask the conductor if we have any questions. Every morning, I reply, "What ever happened to Amelia Earhart?"

I note this week, one mystery solved. A colorfully enbroidered jacket purchased on E-bay was found to have originally belonged to a Marine stationed in Shanghai, 1937-1940. He likely knew a former Hospice patient I attended, sixty years later in Mansassas, Virginia, who, also stationed in China at the time, was called upon to search for Earhart after she vanished.

A letter was delivered to my desk recently containing an inquiry wanting to know if the World War I-era bond belonging to his great grandfather, which he'd just discovered in a bureau, might yet be redeemed. The building where I work was constructed in 1919 to sell those very bonds, of which, this one, had completed a ninety-year journey to its point of origin.

This sort of thing keeps happening - could it be if you merely live long enough such everyday serendipties are inevitable per certain cosmic odds?

Upon invitation to lecture at St. Francis of Assisi on social justice, I began with the concept's modern origin during Reformation England when responsibility to minister to the poor was transferred from the local parish to the national government. After Virginia's settlement in the late 1600's, ten such State poor houses were built. After innumerable consolidations, the function was assumed by private interests, yet, in that very same town of Manassas, the present old age home for indigents still stands on the original spot of the 1690 poor house.

In searching for what endures, some trails are fruitful, others, dead ends. Reading H.L. Mencken brings to mind the fellows I worked with thirty years ago who began their careers in turn, twenty years prior, on Chicago's Printers Alley. These rough, tough, so-called 'white-shirt' mechanics, never travelled without a pipe gripped tightly between their lips and bottle of Schnapps in their briefcase. Whether engaged in manufacturing a book or an envelope, their lives were devoted to achieving the untroubled elegance of humming machinery, no matter the cost. Like, Mencken, there is no longer a place for those who view the world as filled with inefficient, therefore inferior, impediments to their erstwhile self-proclaimed brilliance. Mencken in all his prejudices is virtually unreadable today; the oldtimers, from whom I learned a trade, are, likewise, despite their unparalled mechanical skills, unemployable.

Currently on my shelf, plucked from the obscurity of the library, initially, upon a general antique appearance, reside bound magazine collections by Lardner, Runyon, Connelly, Kaufman, Parker and Fitzgerald and Woolcott; mostly forgotten names, unless, like Fitzgerald, for great novels, or Runyon, for entertainments like Guys and Dolls. You read them now just to savor the grand American style of their era, but also, as when reading anything by men such as A.N. Wilson, Christopher Hitchens, or the recently departed William F. Buckley, to sniff and peck along trails they've blazed, discovering for yourself the fruitful connections which at any time may come out of nowhere.

Woolcott casually mentions the first ever sports agent, George Floyd, who negotiated a contract in 1886, on behalf of Mike 'King' Kelley, who invented the hook slide, and hit and run, and who played for the Boston Beaneaters, who held Spring Training in Richmond, Virginia, where, in 1954, the year I was born, Luke Appling was the Colt's manager, and who I saw play in an Old Timers game in 1965 at Yankee Stadium. You may think these connections contrived or tenuous, but please allow for this: upon opening the mail, yesterday, there was a letter announcing that which otherwise would have gone unnoticed: as the latest candidate for enshrinement in The Southern California Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals: Mike 'King' Kelley.

There is far less hope for the resurrection of other forgotten Woolcottian heroes, like Elizabeth Bergner, whom in 1934 he calls 'the ablest actress in the world today,' or Charlotte Saunders Cushman, who in 1835 "went on to become one of the greatest actresses of her day," or Olga Nethersole, Eva La Gallienne and Sol Smith Russell, whose existence I can only validate, on the internet, which, if it doesn't generate a hit, as it does for even the most obscure, means for certain the poor souls will soon forever be lost when the last few obscure books, their final home, are culled.

Edmund Burke wrote, society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are not yet to be born." The writers who languish, forgotten on dusty library shelves, convey through time, not only things gone, but that which still serves to instill meaning and purpose. Of the characters that populated his universe, Woolcott wrote, "they constitute an implicit reminder that there was once a way of life called America, that it still exists and that it is worth cherishing. It will abide when much that we now think important is dust scattered down the wind."

There is thus eternal truth, though, lest we forget, all remains subject to the folly that humanizes the grandest notions. Woolcott intended to be laid to rest in Clinton, New York, close to his alma mater, Hamilton College. His ashes were mailed to Colgate University in Hamilton, New York instead. Upon discovery, the remains were forwarded to Clinton, where they arrived, 67 cents postage due.