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Franklin Roosevelt

The Fuller Brush Man Gets His Foot in the Door

The Fuller Brush Man for decades roved American cities and towns with a smile, a sample case and a good pair of shoes.

He sold brushes and brooms door to door, and he did it so skillfully that other salesmen knew not to follow him until he was well out of town.

Once in Pennsylvania, a Fuller Brush Man sold mops to two traffic police officers who stopped him for speeding. Another had to appear in a Texas courthouse for violating a bylaw. He paid a fine of $2.50, pointed to the dirty floors and sold $15 worth of brooms, mops and scrub brushes.

An idealized Fuller Brush Man.

One Fuller Brush Man even talked his way into President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, N.Y., and sold him $13 worth of matched brushes.

In 1936, Billy Graham worked as a Fuller Brush man and learned that sincerity sells. He prayed for sales success before every call. It worked; he was the top Fuller Brush salesman in both Carolinas.

“I believed in the product,” he wrote. “Selling those little brushes became a cause to me. I felt that every family ought to have a Fuller Brush as a matter of principle.”

1^st Fuller Brush Man

Alfred Carl Fuller, the first Fuller Brush man, was born in 1885 on a poor farm in Nova Scotia. The eleventh of 12 children, he had no hope of inheriting the farm. By 1903, several of his brothers and sisters had escaped what he called the “ox-team culture of the Annapolis valley.” They took the train from Berwick to Yarmouth, the night boat to Boston and the T to Somerville, Mass.

As a country bumpkin from Canada, Fuller had a hard time keeping a job–as a train conductor, a handyman and a wagon driver. Then in 1905 he found his calling as a salesman for the Somerville Brush and Mop Company. He would close his sale by helping the housewife with her cleaning chores.

Alfred Fuller and his family

“I washed babies with a back brush, swept stairs, cleaned radiators and milk bottles, dusted floors—anything that would prove the worth of what I had to sell,” he wrote.

Fuller saved $375 and set up a workbench in his sister’s basement with a hand-operated wire-twisting machine. By night he made brushes from wire, horsehair and hog bristles. By day he sold them door to door.

Hartford

In 1906, Fuller moved to Hartford, Conn., a city with special meaning for him. His wire-twisting machine was made in Hartford and his family Bible back in Nova Scotia was printed there. Fuller also noted Hartford’s Victorian houses filled with bric-a-brac, fancy radiator grills and decorative woodwork, all collecting dust.

By 1908 he had earned, and saved, enough money to marry a young lady from Nova Scotia, Evelyn Ellis. She worked behind a glove counter at Jordan Marsh, and she could outsell him. They had two sons, Avard and Howard.

In 1909, Fuller put a $10 ad for salesmen in a national magazine. “Why not get out of the rut you’re in? Take advantage of the opportunity which The Fuller Brush Company now offers you!”

Fuller Brush factory in Hartford

The little ad transformed the Fuller Company. By the end of the month, Fuller said, he had a national business with 260 salesmen. That year, the Fuller Brush Co. sold $1 million brushes, mops and combs

With pluck and perseverance, thousands of Fuller Brush Men would lift themselves from dead-end jobs to middle-class respectability.

They had signed a pledge to be courteous, kind, sincere and helpful.

The Pitch

When a housewife answered the door, the Fuller Brush Man greeted her politely. “I’m your Fuller Brush Man,” he would say. “And I have a gift for you.”

The average Fuller Brush salesman called on 2,000 to 6,000 families a year and rang 60 doorbells a day. Mrs. Housewife only got the free gift – the Handy Brush – if she let him in.

The Fuller Brush Man would then go into the living room “for a moment.” If it were raining, he’d step out of his rubbers, a size too large so he could get out of them quickly with no interruption to his sales patter.

Fuller Brush ad

Before the housewife could say no, he would demonstrate the free Handy Brush. Two out of three times, the Fuller Brush Man would finish his pitch and leave with an order of three to seven dollars.

Alfred Fuller, known as Dad to his employees, had come up with the idea of the free gift. He also developed the ‘big five’ method of selling.

Name the brush
Explain how it’s used
Tell what it’s made of
State the price
Explain why it’s worth that much.

Plus, smile.

But Husbands…

Dad Fuller once told a story about a housewife who, he realized, was more interested in him than in his brushes.

‘Do not lead me into temptation,’ she said coyly.

“I replied, ‘Madam, I am not leading you into temptation, but delivering you from evil.’

She laughed and bought three brushes.

Jokes about the Fuller Brush Man and Mrs. Housewife became standard at Rotary and Kiwanis dinners.

A mythical Fuller Brush man appeared in a Tijuana Bible, dirty comic books popular during the Great Depression.

A Tijuana Bible

The company fought the perception that the Fuller Brush Man preyed on lonely housewives. It advertised “every Fuller salesman is a gentleman.”

“After Mrs. Housekeeper had placed an order for Fuller Brushes, it used to be not unusual to find that the orders would not stick on delivery day,” the 1923 company newsletter reported. That was because Mr. Husband objected to her spending money on a man calling at the house while he was gone. Advertising in the Saturday Evening Post, the newsletter reported, solved that problem.

Maybe. But the Saturday Evening Post gave the Fuller Brush Man his name in 1921 when it coined the expression.

Fine and Dandy

In 1923, a Pittsburgh theater usher named Albert Teetsel joined the company. A crackerjack salesman, he soon won promotion to district manager. Teetsel motivated the sales force by forming “Fine and Dandy” clubs. Every salesman had to answer the question, “How are you?” with “Find and dandy, how are you.” The company sold $15 million in 1923, the year it opened its huge new factory in Hartford.

Albert Teetsel, founder of the Fine and Dandy Clubs

Fuller Brush thrived over the next few decades. It weathered World War II by making brushes for the war effort, 40 million of them. In 1946, Fuller Brush had $41 million in sales. By 1960, it hit $100 million, with an expanded repertoire of cleaning and skin care products.

But local merchants objected to competition from door-to-door salesmen, and cities and towns began passing ordinances forbidding the practice. In 1931, police in the tiny town of Green River, Wyo., arrested a Fuller Brush Man for violating such an ordinance. The company fought the case in court, arguing its salesmen were not employees, but independent businessmen who bought their products from the manufacturer. They worked solely on commission, and the company paid no unemployment insurance workers’ compensation or Social Security taxes.

Every Fuller brush had a name

Fuller Brush won the case, but lost on appeal. The Supreme Court declined to hear it. The company then had to get around the legal requirement that its salesmen be invited into a house. So it came up with a catalog, which the salesmen slipped under the door. He promised to return to fill the order. It worked like a charm.

Fuller Brush Man in Pop Culture

The Fuller Brush Man also appeared in comic strips like Blondie and in Disney cartoons, with Donald Duck going door-to-door selling brushes.

In 1948, Columbia Pictures made a movie called The Fuller Brush Man, starring Red Skelton and Janet Blair. It opened in Hartford, and it did well enough to inspire a sequel, The Fuller Brush Girl, starring Lucille Ball.

In real life, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale worked as a Fuller Brush Man, which may be where he learned the power of positive thinking. Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens), Dennis Quaid, Vince DiMaggio and Dick Clark have, at one time or another, said they had worked as a Fuller Brush Man.

Then Avon Came Calling

In the early 1950s, the Avon Lady came hard on the heels of the Fuller Brush Man. Between 1953 and 1967, Avon sales rose 900 percent, Fuller only 47 percent. The company had tried Fullerettes in World War II, but it didn’t work too well.

By the 1960s, high wages and low unemployment made it hard to recruit men, and two-earner families meant fewer housewives at home. In 1965, Fuller Brush brought back the saleswoman. The food conglomerate Sara Lee bought the company in 1968 and moved manufacturing to Great Bend, Kans. By 1986 three-quarters of the sales force consisted of part-time saleswomen looking to ride “Mr. Fuller’s Opportunity Special.”

When Mrs. Claus started to take over

Finally, Wall Street got its talons into the Fuller Brush Company. After a series of acquisitions, the company declared bankruptcy in 2012. Six years later, Galaxy Brush bought the name, patents and trademarks of the Fuller Brush Company. Today you can buy Fuller products online.

“But there’s nothing like seeing a real Fuller Brush Man in action,” the company says on its website. “That’s why we launched a YouTube channel, where a modern-day Fuller Brush Man demonstrates the products for you.”

With thanks to Somerville: A Brief History by Dee Morris and Dora St. Martin, The Fuller Brush Man by Gerald Carson for American Heritage and THE FIRST FULLER BRUSH MAN by Ian Sclanders for Maclean’s.

Image: Fuller Brush Man poster By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20212147. This story was updated in 2022.

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A. Philip Randolph Heads the 1963 March on Washington

Of the thousands of people who go in and out of Boston’s Back Bay commuter rail station every day, how many pass the bronze statue of A. Philip Randolph with no idea that the 1963 March on Washington was his idea?

Randolph was both a great labor leader and a great civil rights leader, not coincidental when you consider racial justice means nothing without economic justice. At least that’s what Randolph – and his protégé Martin Luther King, Jr., thought. The 1963 March on Washington was, after all, the March for Jobs and Freedom.

Leaders of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A. Philip Randolph is seated in the center; John Lewis is second from right. Photo courtesy National Archives.

King called Randolph the “truly the dean of the Negro leaders.”

Randolph is credited with pushing President Franklin Roosevelt to ban discrimination in the defense industry and President Harry Truman to integrate the military. Considered the most important black leader in the 1930s and 1940s, he helped bring thousands of railroad sleeping car porters into the middle class.

Though Randolph grew up in Jacksonville, lived in New York City and made his mark on Washington, he also had an impact in Boston’s African-American community. Even today, his nine-foot sculpture in the train station may inspire commuters who take the time to read his words at the base: “Freedom is never granted; It is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.”

A. Philip Randolph

Randolph was born in Crescent City, Fla., on April 15, 1889, to a poor minister and a seamstress. He grew up in Jacksonville, where he and his brother graduated from an academic high school for African Americans.

He moved to New York in 1911, where he got involved in the labor movement and started a magazine called The Messenger. People considered it radical because it opposed lynching, the military draft and segregation.

A. Philip Randolph in 1942

Randolph got a taste of organizing in 1914, when he took a job as a waiter aboard a steamboat, the Paul Revere, which ran between Fall River and New York. He lied about his experience, and then he messed up one of his orders. He was reprimanded and put on probation.

Waiters and kitchen help had to sleep in a cramped, foul space below deck– the so-called “glory hole.” Randolph tried to organize the kitchen staff and waiters to demand improved sleeping conditions. Instead, he got fired on his return to New York.

A Fall River Line steamer, The Pilgrim

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

In 1925, a group of Pullman porters approached Randolph in Harlem and asked them to help form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The porters worked for the Pullman Company, which had a virtual monopoly on running railroad sleeping cars. The company, which only hired black men as porters, had more black employees than any other U.S. company.

Randolph accepted the challenge, with the motto, “Fight or Be Slaves.”

A Pullman porter, Chicago, 1943. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

George Walker of Marlboro, Mass., a porter, joined that first year, risking dismissal by the company. He earned $67 a month for 400 hours. “You ain’t supposed to get any sleep,” one Pullman porter testified before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915.

Within a year, 3,000 Pullman porters — 51 percent — joined the union, but the company refused to negotiate or even recognize it. Federal mediators ignored the Brotherhood’s complaints. In 1926, Randolph planned a strike, but when he heard the company had 5,000 strikebreakers on hand, he called it off.

That cost the union half of its members. Then came the Great Depression, and membership fell to 658 in 1933.

Organizing Boston

Randolph realized he needed community support, because, he said, the company “cannot stand up against the Brotherhood and the Community too.” In Boston, he enlisted the help of the black churches and local civic organizations.

A. Phillip Randolph in 1963

A music professor, John Orth, helped organize a citizen’s committee of black and white New Englanders to support Randolph’s cause. They included Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard professor, and journalist William Monroe Trotter. The committee put out pamphlets proclaiming their faith in the justice of the cause of the Pullman porters, including one that linked Randolph’s cause with New England’s ‘glorious and illustrious’ abolitionist heritage.

Randolph also needed President Franklin Roosevelt, who signed a fair labor law in 1934 that gave the Brotherhood more legal protection. Membership grew to 7,000 and forced the Pullman Company to the bargaining table.

William Monroe Trotter

Finally, A Contract

By 1937, the union negotiated its first contract with the Pullman Company. George Walker got a raise to $89.50 a month. By the end of World War II, porters earned $175 a week.

“Working on the trains was what helped me educate my children,” said Bennie Bullock of Mattapan in a 1980s interview. Bullock echoed the experience of other Boston porters. His three children all had college educations and went on to professional careers.

A. Philip Randolph statue in Boston Back Bay’s train station.

1941 March on Washington

On Jan. 25, 1941, Randolph began to organize a march on Washington to demand an end to segregation in defense industries. Using his contacts in the labor movement, the black media and the black churches, March on Washington Movement chapters formed throughout the country. By spring, Randolph estimated the July 1 march would attract 100,000 people.

President Franklin Roosevelt caved. A week before the scheduled march, he issued Executive Order 8802, which banned “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”

Flyer from the 1941 March on Washington. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Randolph called off the march, but vowed to fight on.

“Unless this war sound the death knell to the old Anglo-American empire systems, the hapless story of which is one of exploitation for the profit and power of a monopoly-capitalist economy, it will have been fought in vain,” he said.

A. Philip Randolph Leads the 1963 March

Randolph organized more protest marches over the next few decades. In 1948 he called for young black men to resist the draft, reestablished then as the Selective Service System. President Harry Truman, needing black votes to win election, issued Executive Order 9981, which integrated the military.

Randolph led several other protests during the 1950s. In 1960 he helped organize the Negro American Labor Council and served as its president. Along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NALC initiated the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Randolph, by then in his mid-70s, served as the titular head of the march. He recruited a 51-year-old labor activist, Bayard Rustin, to organize the event. Rustin and his team of 200 activists publicized the march, recruited marchers and scheduled platform speakers. They planned logistics down to the last detail: how many toilets would 250,000 people need, how many first aid stations, how much they should bring to eat.

On Aug. 28, 1963, 250,000 people, black and white, showed up in Washington, D.C. Many celebrities came, too, including Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, Lena Horne, Paul Newman and Sammy Davis, Jr. Marian Anderson sang He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez sang Blowin’ in the Wind.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew 250,000 people on Aug. 28, 1963.

A. Philip Randolph delivered the opening and closing remarks, calling the marchers “the advanced guard of a massive, moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”

Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech as the last speaker. It has overshadowed much of what happened that day, including the purpose of the march: economic equality.

Aftermath

President Lyndon Johnson awarded Randolph the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

A. Philip Randolph receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Johnson.

After decades of leading the civil rights movement, Randolph died in his apartment on May 16, 1979. On Oct. 8, 1988, retired Pullman car operators and dining car waiters attended the unveiling of the statue of A. Philip Randolph in Boston’s Back Bay train station.

The Library of Congress created an online exhibit. ‘A Day Like No Other,’ commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Click here.

Photo of A. Philip Randolph statue courtesy Boston MBTA under Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 2.0.

With thanks to A. Philip Randolph and Boston’s African-American Railroad Workers by James R. Green and Robert C. Haydn. This story was updated in 2022.

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Bridgeport Elects a Socialist Mayor Again and Again and Again

Bridgeport, Conn., elected a socialist mayor for 24 years. Jasper McLevy was beloved in the city despite his friendship with a notorious radical.

He came of age at a tumultuous time. He went to work the year of the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania, when a battle between strikers and Pinkertons resulted in 10 dead and many more wounded. Two years later the national Pullman strike failed when railroad agents and their thugs murdered 30 workers.

In that heated climate, the Socialist Party attracted immigrants and workers who wanted better pay and working conditions. Businesses denounced them as dangerous radicals. Their message attracted the young man who’d grown up in a harsh working-class environment.

But McLevy, it turned out, wasn’t really a socialist. He was a politician.

Bridgeport’s socialist mayor,

Jasper McLevy

Jasper McLevy was born March 27, 1878 in Bridgeport to Scottish immigrants Hugh and Mary Stewart McLevy. His father worked as a slate roofer, as the men in his family had for generations.

The family lived in a working-class neighborhood near Seaside Park. As a boy, Jasper tried to sneak into the circus. None other than P.T. Barnum grabbed him by the seat of the pants and lectured him about honesty.

Hugh McLevy fell off a roof and died when Jasper was only 14. Jasper then quit the eighth grade and went to work to support his mother and eight siblings. He apprenticed to his uncle as a slate roofer and eventually started his own company.

Jasper also took a public speaking class at the YMCA, and in his first debate he argued that socialism was a false philosophy.

Despite his shortened education, McLevy avidly read serious books and studied every book he could find about socialism. A work of fiction, though, changed his life: the bestseller Looking Backward. In it, author Edward Bellamy envisioned a futuristic socialist utopia.

“I finally became convinced that Socialism was the only hope of the people,” he said.

He first ran for a minor city office at the age of 22 and lost. McLevy ran, and lost, in 20 other races for various offices before finally winning the mayor’s race in Bridgeport in 1933. He would serve as Bridgeport’s socialist mayor for 12 consecutive terms.

Socialist Mayor

By the 1930s, both Democrats and Republicans had pillaged the aging, bankrupt city. Then cost overruns and corruption in the construction of the Yellow Mill Bridge scandal came to light. Bridgeport was ready for a change.

The Yellow Mill Bridge. Courtesy Library of Congress.

McLevy seemed honest and down-to-earth, sincerely interested in reforming city government. He campaigned in a frayed suit and rumpled tie sometimes anchored to his soiled shirt with a safety pin.

In preparing to govern as a socialist mayor, he had studied Bridgeport as closely as he’d studied socialism. From 1900 on, Jasper McLevy attended every Common Council meeting held in Bridgeport and read every city document he could get his hands on.

Once in office, he began reforming city government with a vengeance. He sold the city limousine and sent his chauffeur back to police duties. He saved money by centralizing city purchasing, buying coal direct from the mines and renegotiating insurance contracts.

McLevy cleaned up corruption with an ordinance banning city contracts for public employees – the first city in the United States to do so. Private companies that had looted the city with trash collection contracts found themselves out of luck. City employees collected the garbage.

McLevy also benefited greatly from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which sent money and jobs to Bridgeport. Many Bridgeport residents viewed him as a friend, and they reelected him again and again.

Penny Pinching Socialist Mayor

McLevy’s favorite phrase was, “Let’s look at the record.” Over time, though, his record began to look less like a socialist’s and more like a businessman’s. He stopped repairing roads and bridges, and he started collecting parking fines – a lot of them. In 1937 the man who bragged of his friendship with convicted socialist Eugene Debs cut wages for city employees. He wouldn’t raise them for teachers for a decade.

During the winter of 1947-48, he didn’t budget enough for snow removal. When residents complained about impassable streets, he replied, “Well, it will go away, anyhow.”

He began to win friends among Bridgeport’s businessmen, like Robert Factor. Factor recalled in a 1999 oral history, “He was a master. Really a man with a limited education but tremendously astute and always told everything exactly as it was. I don’t think the man ever told a lie in his life. He was incapable of it.”

Critics later said he never seemed to work even though he sometimes wore overalls. After all, his roofing company had several employees and he owned a weekend home in Washington, Conn.

But he still got elected, year after year. His secret? He kept property taxes low.

James Blawie, in his 1951 master’s thesis on McLevy, noted that Bridgeport was a city of small homes and factories. Homeowners and businessmen wanted low taxes. To stay in power, McLevy gave it to them.

Municipal Sweatshop

McLevy still talked the socialist talk, but he didn’t walk the socialist walk. He ran the city like a municipal sweatshop. He fought city workers’ efforts to unionize. Then in 1947, his police superintendent broke up a strike at the Canfield Rubber Company.

Labor parted ways with him. Then, the chamber of commerce opposed him when he fought an 18-cent-an-hour pay hike for city employees.

In 1957, he lost his bid for a 13^th term to Samuel Tedesco, a 40-year-old lawyer. When McLevy died five years later, the Bridgeport Herald wrote in his obituary, “a despairing; bankrupt city [that]had called him forth as their savior from political corruption. He responded with the zeal of an avenging knight.”

James Blawie, on the other hand, called his record, ‘rather a dark one.’

It includes strike-breaking, discouraging city employees from organizing, and the constant effort to keep wages as low as possible.

With thanks to James Blawie for his 1951 master’s thesis at Boston University, Jasper McLevy, The Man, The Mayor, and his City, and to Sarajane Cedrone, Jasper McLevy: Bridgeport Votes for a Change, in Connecticut Explored.

Image of Jasper McLevy: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26046319.. This story was updated in 2022.

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9 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Bobby Kennedy

Many viewed the death of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as the loss of the last great leader. Assassins’ bullets had taken the lives of his brother, President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. All three men led the struggle against discrimination and poverty, though to varying degrees.

The story of Bobby Kennedy’s life has been told many times: How he became tough and competitive to hold his own among his eight siblings. How his brother named him the youngest U.S. attorney general in history. Then how he evolved into a compassionate populist, an advocate for poor minorities and working-class white people. And finally, how he died at 42 while running for president of the United States.

He thought he’d be killed, not his brother. He learned about John F. Kennedy’s assassination while having lunch at home in Virginia. His reaction:

I thought they’d get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it…. I thought it would be me.

But here are nine things you may not have known about Bobby Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy

1. Bobby Kennedy, New Yorker

He didn’t really grow up in Boston. In 1927, when Bobby Kennedy was two, his father moved the family to a New York City suburb to escape anti-Irish discrimination. Joseph P. Kennedy, though, would become one of the richest men in the United States. (Someone commented he was the only person driven out of Boston in his own railway car.)

The Kennedy family lived in Bronxville, N.Y., until 1938. Then, President Franklin P. Roosevelt appointed Bobby’s father U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and the family moved to London.

Later, of course, he ran and won a race for U.S. Senate from New York in 1964, amid charges of carpetbagging.

Senate candidate Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention

2. Not Much of a Student

He flunked third grade. The seventh of nine children, he had a hard time adjusting to school. He attended 12 different schools before graduating from Milton Academy and going to Harvard.

Before entering college, though, he had enlisted in the Navy. In 1944, he started his naval training at Harvard and then relocated to Bates College.

Kennedy (second from left) at Bates. Muskie Archives and Special Collections LIbrary.

3. Barroom Brawler

He got into a bar fight when he turned 21, the first time he ever drank too much. Shortly after his birthday, he celebrated by buying a beer in a bar. Then he bought the house a round. When the patrons began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to someone else, he smashed a beer bottle over one of their heads.

He got into another bar fight at 30, when as a Senate lawyer he rode undercover with New York City police officers. When a drunk insulted him in a bar, Bobby Kennedy asked him to step outside and hit him in the face, breaking his nose.

4. Philatelist

He collected stamps. So did Franklin Roosevelt. In 1935, Roosevelt learned Bobby Kennedy was a fellow philatelist and sent him some stamps from his collection. FDR’s letter read,

Dear Bob:-
Your Dad has told me that you are a stamp collector and I thought you might like to have these stamps to add to your collection. I am also enclosing a little album which you may find useful.
Perhaps sometime when you are in Washington you will come in and let me show you my collection.

5. Ronnie Beat Down

Bobby Kennedy lost a debate to Ronald Reagan, then governor of California. On May 15, 1967, the two men debated the Vietnam War on television. Reagan believed Bobby Kennedy had gotten him fired as host of the television program, GE Theater, and so he studied hard for the debate.

In the end, Ronald Reagan humiliated Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy stormed out of the studio and said to an aide, “Never again put me on the stage with that son of a bitch.”

6. Spiritual Rivalry

Ethel Kennedy

He dated Ethel Skakel’s older sister for two years before dating Ethel. Ethel had fallen in love with Bobby Kennedy at first sight, but then had second thoughts. When Bobby started dating Ethel after he got dumped by her sister, she thought she wanted to become a nun.

“How do you compete with God?” he asked, but he won the contest.

7. Bobby Kennedy, Amateur

He had no rock climbing experience when he became the first person to ascend Mt. Kennedy, named for his brother after he was assassinated. He joked that his experience amounted to little more than climbing to the top of the stairs at home and shouting for help. In April 1965, Bobby Kennedy broke away from his climbing team and reached the 14,000-foot summit himself as National Geographic photographers took photos.

His brother Ted told UPI:

I wish to point out for the record he is not the first Kennedy to climb a mountain. I climbed the Matterhorn in 1957, which is higher, and I didn’t need the help of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

8. Bobby Kennedy vs. Jimmy Hoffa

He hated Jimmy Hoffa, and Hoffa hated him. Bobby Kennedy spent seven years trying to convict the Teamsters Union president for corruption. They once tried to one-up each other about how many push-ups they could do. Hoffa claimed 35, but Bobby Kennedy claimed he could do more.

Delivering Senate testimony on organized crime, 1963.

Hoffa said Bobby had a weak handshake and deliberately misspelled his name ‘Bobbie.’ As Hoffa later recalled, “I used to love to bug the little bastard.”

As chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, Bobby Kennedy dragged Hoffa before hearings in an effort to nail him on perjury charges. As Attorney General he formed a special ‘Get Hoffa’ squad within the Justice Department. In 1964, Kennedy’s Justice Department finally did get Hoffa with a conviction for jury tampering.

9. Clairvoyant, Sort Of

He predicted Barack Obama’s presidency in 1961, but he was off by seven years.

That year, Bobby Kennedy told an audience,

The Irish were not wanted there [when his great-grandfather came to Boston]. Now an Irish Catholic is president of the United States … There is no question about it. In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.

He made the same prediction in 1968, and he was spot on then.

Bobby Kennedy speaking at a civil rights demonstration

This story was updated in 2022. Photos of Bobby Kennedy courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Featured image By Sven Walnum – https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/SWPC/001/SWPC-001-021, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85646434

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Neshobe Island, The Algonquin Round Table Summer Home in Vermont

During the 1920s and 1930s, rumors about the crazy doings on Neshobe Island flew through the resort hotels along Vermont’s Lake Bomoseen.

The summer vacationers heard that famous people lived on the dinky island on the large lake in western Vermont.

They were right, but they could not confirm the rumors for themselves. Neshobe Island served as the private club of New York’s famous Algonquin Round Table and their even more famous guests.

Neshobe Island

Vivien Leigh visited Neshobe Island after winning an Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht finished their screenplay for Wuthering Heights there. The landscaping was done by Gerald Murphy, the Mark Cross heir who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional character Dick Diver.

And Harpo Marx took off all his clothes and waved an ax at snooping tourists.

“The thing we cherished most about the island, along with its natural beauty, was its isolation,” Marx wrote in his autobiography, Harpo Speaks.

Lake Bomoseen

Old Vitriol and Violets

Lake Bomoseen, just north of Castleton, Vt., is the largest lake within Vermont’s borders. In 1924, drama critic Alexander Woollcott rented seven-acre Neshobe Island just a quarter mile from Lake Bomoseen’s shore. He loved the island so much he bought it and turned it into a private club for his closest friends.

Woollcott was born in Colt’s Neck, N.J., and grew up in his family’s ramshackle 85-room mansion. He had no use for his father, a Cockney ne’er-do-well. When his father came round the breakfast table to kiss his sons goodbye, ‘Aleck would slyly thrust an upright fork above his ear in the fond hope of puncturing the paternal jowl,’ wrote his biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams.

Alexander Woollcott

Woollcott grew up to become a drama critic, radio personality, New Yorker columnist, author and member of the witty group known as the Algonquin Round Table. It was Woollcott who first said, “All the things I like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening.”

He was bitchy, fastidious, bookish, flamboyant and so pudgy Harpo Marx called him an escapee from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He proposed marriage to five different women, but each laughed him off.

James Thurber called him Old Vitriol and Violets.

Neshobe Island Club

Woollcott socialized with the media celebrities of his day, and he invited some of them to be charter members of the Neshobe Island Club. They included such Algonquinites as writer Alice Duer Miller, playwright Beatrice Kaufman and illustrator Neysa McMein, along with New Yorker co-founder Raoul Fleischmann, songwriter Howard Dietz, actress Ruth Gordon and publisher Harold Guinzberg.

Alice Duer Miller

There were only 10 members at any one time, and memberships could be bought and sold. Each member paid $1,000 to spend the summer on Neshobe Island.

They worked a little in the rustic house, talked a lot and played a lot at sports and games. Not everyone enjoyed it.

Vincent Sheen and Dorothy Parker sat in a corner and drank. “Alec was simply furious,” wrote Sheen. “We were in disgrace. We were anathema. we ween’t paying any attention to his witticisms and his goddamned games.”

Harpo Marx

Harpo Marx, the goofy, silent, harp-playing Marx Brother, received an invitation to Neshobe Island in the summer of 1927 from Alexander Woollcott.

To Harpo, the invitation was more than a feather in his social cap.

“It meant you had been nominated for the Alexander Woollcott Roster of Who’s Who,” he wrote. Then Harpo received an invitation for a second visit, joining the company of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, Ethel Barrymore, Noel Coward and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Finally Woollcott asked him to join as a member.

Years later he waxed nostalgic about, ‘the reading of plays around the fireplace, the wonderful voices of the Lunts, Ethel Barrymore, Ruth Gordon and her husband Gregory Kelly.’ He remembered,

The sound of music coming across the water on Saturday nights from the open-air dance on the mainland, tinny and gay, like a crazy, woodland honky-tonk (the only times we ever felt tolerant toward the tourists).

On his first visit to Neshobe Island, Woollcott met Marx at the boat landing. Harpo drove up in a dilapidated car.

“What do you call that?” Woollcott said.

“My town car,” Marx replied.

“What was the town?” said Woollcott. “Pompei?”

Neshobe Island Rules

Woollcott ruled the island like a benevolent despot, setting down rules and directing activities: cribbage, poker, or party games like anagrams and Murder.

Harpo Marx

Breakfast was at 7 a.m. Cocktails ended the day, but intoxication was forbidden. When they played the Murder game, Woollcott wouldn’t allow dinner to be served until the murderer was discovered.

Under the rules, the secretly chosen murderer was to catch a ‘victim’ alone and say, ‘You’re dead.’ The person chosen as the district attorney had to identify the murderer.

Harpo Marx was once the murderer. He knew the women guests sometimes used a bathroom at the back of the house, so he sneaked back and wrote the death message in lipstick on the toilet paper. Under the rules, the victim had to stay where he or she was. For the next five hours the islanders looked for the murder victim. They were all hungry, but Woollcott refused to serve dinner. Finally at 11 p.m. Alice Duer Miller was discovered in the john.

Woollcott, who played the district attorney, immediately fingered the lightly educated Marx because he had written “YOU ARE DED.” Then he stormed off to bed.

Tourists

Everyone had to take a morning dip no matter how cold the lake. Woollcott, with his protective layers of fat, seemed impervious to the cold water, and read books propped on his belly while floating on his back.

Marx once caught tourists on shore looking through binoculars at Woollcott swimming. To Marx’s delight, they mistook Woollcott for Marie Dressler, a homely, heavyweight comedienne.

The Neshobe Islanders fought for and protected their privacy. Though the Vermonters didn’t bother them, the tourists did.

Once Alice Miller took a walk and rushed back to report tourists picnicking on the beach. Marx tore off his clothes, put on a red wig, smeared himself with mud and war-danced down to the shore, brandishing an ax. No more snoopers appeared that summer.

Dorothy Parker also wore nothing but a hat for three days, which Woollcott tolerated, except she also got drunk on those days. He then asked her to leave.

5 members of the Algonquin Round Table: (standing l to r) Art Samuels, Harpo Marx (sitting) Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott.

Croquet Obsession

The Algonquin Round Table is credited with popularizing croquet in the United States, and Woollcott is enshrined in the Croquet Hall of Fame.

When Woollcott wanted to play croquet on Neshobe Island, everyone had to play. He got Harpo Marx hooked on the game. He also got Harpo into the Croquet Hall of Fame.

They competed ferociously for some very high stakes. Marx lost $900 to Woollcott in his first week of playing on Neshobe Island.

Once, when Woollcott drove Marx’s ball into the woods for the third time, Bea Kaufman found him sobbing his heart out against a tree, wrote Margaret Case Harriman in The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table.

Nothing – absolutely nothing – made Woollcott as happy as a good croquet shot.

“When Aleck sent an opponent’s ball crashing down through the maples of Neshobe Island, he would swing his mallet around his head like David’s slingshot and whoop, “Buckety, buckety! Buckety, buckety! Buck-ket-ty-buck-ket-ty-in-to-the-lake!,” wrote Marx.

Or, wrote Marx, “He would dance around the court on his toes, kicking his heels together (unaware that his shorts were falling down), and singing in the exuberant soprano of a cherub in a Sunday-school play:

I’m des a ‘itto wabbit in de sunshine!
I’m des a ‘itto bunny in de wain!”

End of the Club

The Neshobe Island Club ended abruptly on Jan. 23, 1943.

Woollcott was broadcasting his Town Crier radio show from New York when he got agitated defending Franklin Roosevelt’s war policy. He stopped in midsentence, wrote “I AM SICK” on a sheet of paper and collapsed of a heart attack. He died a few hours later.

Images: Lake Bomoseen, By Jc3s5h – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44282020.

With thanks to Harpo Speaks, by Harpo Marx. This story about Neshobe Island was updated in 2022.

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Six Oldest Libraries in New England

Identifying New England’s oldest libraries is no easy task. In the early days of European settlement, book collections took many different forms.

Many New England libraries evolved over time from private collections to public institutions. Philanthropists founded some, while collective town actions resulted in others.

Many New England towns claim to have the oldest libraries in their state. In New Hampshire, for example, the Portsmouth Athenaeum was founded as a private library in 1817, 16 years before the Peterborough Town Library. But Peterborough, funded by taxpayers from the start, claims to be the oldest tax-supported library.

We decided to exercise our editorial prerogative and limit our list to the oldest libraries that lend books. So Peterborough in, Portsmouth out.

Here are six of the oldest libraries in New England, one in each state. If you have a candidate for oldest library, please mention it in the comment section below this story.

Scoville Library

Connecticut’s oldest library is in Salisbury.

The Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury, Conn., started in 1771 when a local blast furnace owner named Richard Smith offered to buy 200 books from London. But the rest of the town had to chip in, and 39 people contributed. On the third Monday of every third month, patrons could borrow and return books. The library fined them for damaging books, usually by greasing – letting candle wax drip on the pages.

In 1805, another local philanthropist named Caleb Bingham donated the Bingham Library for Youth. Then Miss Harriet Church donated the Church Library. Town Meeting in 1810 voted to authorize selectmen to spend $100 to buy more books for the town library.

The library now claims to be the oldest publicly funded library in the United States.

Jonathan Scoville in the 1890s left $15,000 in his will to build a library for the town’s books, then kept in Town Hall. Miss Grace Scoville bought a tower clock, which still chimes on the quarter hour. Salisbury Cathedral in England sent the library a 15^th-century stone carving, which the library placed above the fireplace in the reading room.

The library has recently redesigned its interior and now has 30,000 items, including the original books, genealogy and history of the town. Incidentally, settlers came to Salisbury after the discovery of iron nearby, and during the American Revolution the government took over the iron works to cast cannon.

38 Main St., Salisbury, Conn.

Witherle Memorial Library

Maine’s oldest municipal library is in Castine.

The Witherle Memorial Library in Castine, Maine, began in 1801 as a private collection of books that only paid subscribers could use. The Town of Castine took over the library in 1827 and established it as Maine’s first municipal library in 1855.

Local ships chandlers George and Mary Witherle donated the money for the land and the building’s foundation. The building itself was finished in 1913. Today the library has more than 13,000 volumes and local history collections, including the story of Castine’s founder, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. It also includes the history of the Penobscot Expedition; books by and about Civil War journalist Noah Brooks; and the letters of Union Army soldier Henry Butler to his wife during the Civil War.

41 School St., Castine, Maine

Sturgis Library

Barnstable, Mass., has one of the oldest libraries in New England and the oldest US building used as a library.

The Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Mass., is the oldest building in the United States to house a public library. The original part of the library was built in 1644 as the house of Rev. John Lothrop (also spelled Lothropp or Lathrop).

Lothrop immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, having been imprisoned in England as an outspoken Puritan who advocated independence for congregations. He was pardoned after he agreed to leave for the New World. Lothrop landed in Plymouth and settled in Barnstable on Cape Cod in 1639, one of the town’s first settlers. In New England, Lothrop strongly supported the separation of church and state.

He married twice and had 13 children. Today his descendants number 80,000, including six U.S. presidents (the Bushes, Franklin Roosevelt, Millard Fillmore, James A. Garfield and Ulysses S. Grant).

One of his descendants, William Sturgis, made a fortune in the China trade. When he died in 1863, he bequeathed his family home, $15,000 and his books for a public library.

The first two rooms of the house were used for religious worship, so the Sturgis Library also has the distinction of being the oldest building in the United States used regularly for religious services. The Lothrop Room is quintessential early Cape, with wide pumpkin pine floorboards and a beamed ceiling.

It’s located on the Old King’s Highway, and has 65,000 books the Cape Cod History Collection, the most important collection of its kind in the United States; the Kittredge Maritime Collection, one of the finest maritime collections on the East Coast; and the Lothrop Genealogy Collection.

3090 Main St., Barnstable, Mass.

Peterborough Town Library

oldest libraries Town_Library,_Peterborough,_NH

Taxpayers started one of New Hampshire’s oldest libraries.

The Peterborough Town Library, founded in 1833, is the oldest taxpayer-supported free library in New Hampshire.

Unitarian minister Abiel Abbot had the idea for a collection of books owned by the people and free to everyone who lived in Peterborough. The State of New Hampshire made money available for it. A capital stock tax had been intended to build a state university, but it didn’t raise enough money. Hence, the state created a Literary Fund, and Peterborough decided to use it for books.

On April 9, 1833, Town Meeting approved the library on the principle that, like the public school, it deserved maintenance by public taxation. The people of the community should also own and manage it.

The town bought 100 books and put them in Smith and Thompson’s General Store, along with the post office. The postmaster acted as librarian until 1854, when the town appointed Miss Susan Gates to take care of the town library books. In 1873, the growing collection of books moved to Town Hall. Within two decades Peterborough had 6,000 books and not nearly enough room. So in 1893, the town gave the library own building designed by noted bridge engineer and summer resident George Shattuck Morison. The collection now includes more than 50,000 volumes.

2 Concord St., Peterborough, N.H.

Redwood Library

A great philosopher founded one of New England’s oldest libraries.

The Redwood Library and Athenaeum started off as a 45-member literary society founded by Bishop George Berkeley, the great Irish philosopher. Berkeley moved to Rhode Island in 1729 to start a college. The Company of the Redwood Library in Newport, R.I., was founded in 1747 for the purpose of ‘having nothing in view but the good of mankind.’

Newport merchant Abraham Redwood gave the library 500 pounds sterling to buy 751 used books from London.

When the British occupied Newport in 1776, they used the library as an officers’ club. Many of the books disappeared. In 1806, the library began advertising for their return, but didn’t get many back. In 1947, the library staff tried again and recovered 92 percent of the missing volumes or copies of them.

Peter Harrison, the first professionally trained architect in the United States, designed the building. He later designed Newport’s Brick Market and Touro Synagogue. Ezra Stiles, who later helped found Brown University and served as president of Yale, served as its most well-known librarian.

The Redwood Library and Athenaeum is the oldest community library still occupying its original building. Unlike the Peabody Library in Vermont, the Redwood is private. It began charging $10 for admission in 2016.

50 Bellevue Ave., Newport, R.I.

Peabody Library

Thetford, Vt., has one of the oldest libraries in New England because of George Peabody.

The Peabody Library in the Post Mills Village of Thetford, Vt., was built in 1867, making it the oldest active library in the state federation of public libraries. George Peabody gave it to the town as a gift.

In the first decade of the 19^th century, Peabody was a teenager from South Danvers, Mass., who wanted to visit his grandfather in Post Mills. Too poor to pay for a horse or carriage, he walked for 10 days He chopped wood for innkeepers along the way and slept in their stables. Once he arrived he then spent the winter with his grandfather and became close to his aunt and uncle.

By 1867 Peabody acquired great wealth and gave some of it away from his home in England. He gave the village $5,000 to pay for land, building construction and 1,500 volumes from a London book dealer. Peabody founded and endowed museums at Harvard, Yale, and Salem, Mass. He also gave a Peabody Conservatory of Music and Peabody Institute Libraries in Baltimore, Danvers, Newburyport, Mass., and Georgetown, Mass. The town of South Danvers renamed itself Peabody in his honor.

Today in Thetford the one-room library building still has a long wooden table and rows of white bookshelves. Two curved staircases lead to an open balcony. Everything in the building is original except for the carpet and the paint.

Today the library has 6,000 volumes, DVDs, audio, e-books and WiFi – which some people who don’t patronize the library use while sitting outside.

7922 VT Route 113 (Junction of Routes 113 and 244), Post Mills, Vt.

End Notes

Images: Scoville Library By Phinisi Stuart – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21632787; Sturgis Library By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22634220; Redwood Library, By slgckgc – The Redwood Public Library, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38248325; Peabody Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Post Mills, VermontUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29767643

This story about New England’s oldest libraries was updated in 2021.

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