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Quincy Mass.

The Puritans Ban Gambling and a Whole Lot of Other Things

The Puritans had barely arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when they banned gambling. And then they banned a lot of other things.

On March 22, 1631, the General Court issued the following ordinance:

Must have missed church on Sunday, or went dancing after services

It is … ordered that all persons whatsoever that have cards, dice or tables in their houses, shall make away with them before the next court under pain of punishment.

More social control soon followed. Seven months after they outlawed gaming, the Massachusetts Puritans decided to punish adultery with death (though the death penalty was rare). They banned fancy clothing, living with Indians and smoking in public.

Missing Sunday services would land you in the stocks. Celebrating Christmas would cost you five shillings. The only holidays they celebrated were Election Day; Commencement Day, to celebrate college graduation; and Training Day, which involved military exercises. Oh, and Thanksgiving.

Young single men were especially suspect. Just to live in a community, they needed the express permission of the town if they weren’t married or had no servant or if they weren’t a public officer. The penalty for breaking that law was 20 shillings a week.

Haunting Fear of Someone’s Happiness

No wonder H.L. Mencken said, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

H.L. Mencken

Mencken, in his Book of Prefaces, attacked the Puritans in an essay, “Puritanism as a Literary Force.” In it, he argued the Puritans banned ideas–other people’s ideas, that is.

The Puritan’s utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution – these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States.

One idea the Puritans censored was that anyone should spend Sunday afternoon playing or watching sports. In England, King James I had tried to counteract Puritan influence by ordering his Book of Sports read in every church. The book encouraged certain fun activities after Sunday services. Those included archery, leaping, vaulting, Morris dances and Whitsun-ales.

The Book of Sports also said people could either conform or leave. So thousands of Puritans sailed to New England between 1620 and 1640.

Puritan Fun, Sort Of

Thomas Morton went to his grief breaking Puritan rules. A free-thinking entrepreneur, he set up a trading post in the future Quincy, Mass. He called his little settlement “Merrymount.” He horrified his neighbors in Plymouth by consorting with native women.

Supposedly a portrait of Myles Standish painted in 1625, but first published in 1885 and of questionable authenticity.

One May Day Morton went too far. He put up a Maypole, something the Puritans abhorred. Myles Standish led a party of armed men to Merrymount, seized Morton and put him in chains. Then he chopped down the Maypole.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about it in his story, The Maypole of Merrymount. “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire,” he wrote.

To be fair, the Puritans did have some fun. They allowed hunting, fishing and archery, and they held athletic contests (never on Sunday though). They drank beer, wine and liquor, but not to excess. The Town of New Haven in 1656 required that anyone licensed to serve alcohol had to make sure his customers didn’t get drunk, didn’t drink past 9 pm and didn’t ‘continue tipling’ for more than an hour.

The Puritans had a reason for their dour outlook. They viewed life’s pleasures as nothing but chimeras, especially when compared to the happiness of heaven.

Richard Baxter, after Robert White painting,(1670). No Maypole for him.

Puritan theologian Richard Baxter explained,

I cannot but look upon all the glory and dignity of this world, lands and lordships, crowns and kingdoms, even as on some brain-sick, beggarly fellow, that borrows fine clothes, and plays, the part of a king or lord for an hour on a stage, and then comes down, and the sport is ended, and they are beggars again.

Puritanism Lingers

The Puritan sensibility over time loosened gradually, though not completely. In 1756, the priggish John Adams wrote, “Let others waste their bloom of life at the card or billiard table among rakes and fools.”

Christmas didn’t win wide acceptance in New England until after the Civil War.

And in the 20th century, critics would call Boston-born Bobby Kennedy “the last Puritan.” They viewed him as ruthless, idealistic and not a lot of fun. One FBI agent recounted how J. Edgar Hoover tried to catch him in an indiscretion. “We used to watch him at parties, where he would order one glass o scotch and still be sipping from the same glass two hours later.”

With thanks to The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620-1730, edited by Alden Vaughan. This story was updated in 2023.

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Amelia Earhart, Reluctant Bride

Amelia Earhart handed an extraordinary letter to the man she was about to marry just hours before their wedding in Noank, Conn.

Amelia Earhart, Library of Congress photo

“You must know again my reluctance to marry,” she told publisher George Putnam. “I must extract a cruel promise, and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together.”

They were together for the next six years until Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while trying to fly around the world.

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart, was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kans. Her maternal grandfather was a well-to-do banker and judge, but her father was an alcoholic country lawyer. During her childhood the family moved frequently, and it took a while for Amelia to find herself. She tried junior college and worked as a nurse’s assistant in World War I, thought about entering Smith College, enrolled at Columbia, then quit to spend time with her parents in California.

In Long Beach, she took her first ride in an airplane. It lasted 10 minutes. That was enough for her. “I knew I had to fly,” she wrote.

Amelia Earhart tried college again, tried teaching and social work in the Boston area. She continued to fly out of Dennison Airport (later the Naval Air Station Squantum) in Quincy, Mass. She promoted flying, acting as a sales representative for Kinner Aircraft,. She also wrote columns about aviation and laid plans for an organization for women fliers, eventually called the Ninety Nines.

‘Would you like to fly the Atlantic?’

One day in April 1928, Amelia Earhart got a phone call asking her, “Would you like to fly the Atlantic?” Charles Lindbergh had done it, and the publisher of his bestselling book, George Putnam, had been asked to promote a female flier.

George Putnam and Amelia Earhart

Putnam was an heir to the G.P. Putnam’s Sons publishing company and an adventurer in his own right. He had led expeditions to the Arctic and to Baffin Island. He was married to Dorothy Binney, the daughter of Crayola co-founder Charles Binney, and had two sons.

Amelia Earhart of course said, ‘Yes,’ to flying across the Atlantic. On June 17, 1928 she took off with Wilmer Stutz and Louis Gordon from Newfoundland and landed in Wales 20 hours and 40 minutes later. No matter that all she did was to keep the flight log. She was a celebrity. On their return to the United States, they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade and a meeting with President Calvin Coolidge.

After the flight, George Putnam continued to promote the Earhart mystique. In 1929, he divorced his wife. He asked Amelia to marry him. She said no.

The Letter

He asked her again four times. Finally in October 1930 she said ‘yes.’

They planned on a small, no-fuss wedding, but George blurted out the secret and reporters besieged them. Finally they decided to get married in Connecticut at George’s mother’s home in Noank, a fishing village in the town of Groton. One Friday evening they decided to do it the next day.

Feb. 7, 1931 was a bitterly cold day George’s mother didn’t have time to decorate the house with flowers, but did light a crackling fire. They had no guests, just three witnesses: George’s uncle, the judge’s son and George’s mother. Amelia wore a brown suit with a crepe blouse and lizard-skin shoes.

Amelia Earhart, Library of Congress photo

Just before the ceremony, she handed George the four-page letter. She described things they had already discussed: her reluctance to be married and her request that he let her go after a year if she wasn’t happy. She also wrote, “”I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.”

No Wedding Here

George didn’t waver. After her death, George explained that Amelia needed to have a measure of freedom.

“She did know it for an element without which she personally could not do, as some plants can do without water but cannot survive without air,” he wrote.

Morgan Point Lighthouse in Noank

George borrowed his mother’s platinum wedding band for the ceremony. Afterward, Amelia drank a glass of wine, put on her fur coat and left with George in a car to an unknown destination.

George phoned his secretary to ask her to break the news. An hour after they left Noank, reporters inundated the town with phone calls. The bewildered postmistress said she didn’t think there’d been a wedding that day. George’s mother said, “They didn’t tell me where they were going so that I shouldn’t be able to tell.

One year later, Amelia did not ask George for a divorce. He gave her plenty of space and the marriage worked for both of them. She later wrote,

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

Firsts and Last

She became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic on May 20, 1932. She set other records, including seven women’s speed and distance records.

Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937 while attempting to fly around the world. Putnam published her biography, Soaring Wings, in 1939.

With thanks to The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart by Mary Lovell. This story was updated in 2023. Image of Noank By Rhvanwinkle at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17981375.

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Two Famous Phrases, One Shipyard

The Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass., has a connection to two famous phrases.

“Mr. Watson, Come here, I want to see you,” was the first.

The second: “Kilroy was here.”

One Famous Phrase

Mr. Watson, of course, was Thomas A. Watson, who helped Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone. Watson was born in Salem, Mass., in 1854. A talented young electrical mechanic, Bell hired him to build experimental devices for transmitting voice.

On March 10, 1876, Bell and Watson were working in a boardinghouse attic at 109 Court St. in Boston. Bell uttered the famous phrase into a device that included a liquid transmitter. Watson, in the next room, clearly heard him.

There is some controversy about what Bell actually said. In his lab notes he wrote: “Mr. Watson, Come here, I want to see you.” Fifty-four years later, Watson recalled Bell said, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.”

There is also some controversy over who really should get credit for inventing the telephone. The device resulted from work by many individuals. But Bell and Watson developed the first commercially viable telephone.

Thomas Watson

Watson had loaned money to Bell during their telephone experiments. Bell paid him back – and recognized his contribution to the invention. He gave him a 10 percent share in the company that would become the Bell Telephone Company.

Watson then took the money and bought a farm in Braintree, Mass., where he began working on marine engines. That led to the creation of the Fore River Engine Company, which became the Fore River Shipyard. Watson later moved the yard to Quincy, after an initial order for a 50 horsepower engine led to orders from the U.S. Navy for battleships.

The launch of Lady Lex from the Fore River Shipyard

Kilroy and His Famous Phrase

James J. Kilroy was an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard during World War II. He said he used the famous phrase, “Kilroy was here,” to mark rivets he had inspected as ships were being built.

Later, sailors would find the phrase in places like sealed hull spaces. That no graffiti artist could have reached those spaces contributed to the mythical quality of the phrase. GIs began scrawling the famous phrase along with a doodle of a man peering over a wall (or the side of a ship). They were especially fond of leaving “Kilroy was here” doodles in newly captured areas or landings.

On Dec. 23, 1946, the Associated Press reported the elusive Kilroy had been found.

According to the AP, the American Transit Association held a contest to establish the identity of the real Kilroy. A James J. Kilroy, of Halifax, Mass., satisfied the ATA that he was the real deal. He said he worked at the Bethlehem Steel Company’s Fore River Shipyard, inspecting battleship parts during the war. To satisfy his bosses that he was on the job, he wrote “Kilroy was here” after he’d inspected work.

A Streetcar?

The Association then awarded a streetcar to Kilroy for winning the contest. The Kilroys, who had nine children ages six months to 15, intended
to attach the streetcar to their dwelling to make room for their brood, the AP said.

He died in Boston on Nov. 24, 1962, at the age of 60. The New York Times added a further revelation in his obituary the next day. “He said he … grew tired of being asked to descend into tanks he had already inspected,” the Times reported. “Thereafter, he related, every time he inspected a tank he would chalk on the lid, ‘Kilroy was here’.”

The “Kilroy was here” doodle is engraved in the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C.

This story was updated in 2023.

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