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Somerville Mass.

George Dilboy, Greek Lad, Wipes Out a German Machine Gun Nest

Gen. John Pershing called him one of the 10 greatest heroes of World War I. The City of Somerville, Mass., remembers him with a bust, an athletic field and a stadium. Three presidents honored him. So who was George Dilboy?

He was a 22-year-old Greek-American who died heroically at Belleau Wood in France. He had already fought in four wars on three continents when he fell while wiping out a German machine gun nest.

His commanding officer called the feat one of the most impressive sights he had seen. And the desecration of his grave created an international incident.

George Dilboy

George Dilboy was born Feb. 5, 1896 in Alatsata near Smyrna in what is now Turkey. He had six brothers and two sisters. As his father later said, they felt Turkish persecution. The family began immigrating to the United States.

George and one of his brothers arrived in Somerville, Mass., in 1908, to join their father. George went to school, and got a job in the laundry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also worked as a busboy at the Georgian Café. At the age of 16 he returned to his native land and fought for Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

George Dilboy

Then he came back to the United States, where he went to work at the Copley Square Hotel. However the summer heat forced the hotel to close. So he found a job working in a shoe factory in Keene, N.H. There he enlisted in the New Hampshire National Guard in June 1916. As a guardsman he served in the Mexican border campaign. Then in 1917, he joined the Army’s 103rd Infantry Regiment, 26th Division.—known as the Yankee Division.

George Dilboy undoubtedly had more battlefield experience than most of the men who enlisted as National Guardsmen in the Yankee Division.

The Western Front

Sent to France in the fall of 1917, the Yankee Division fought German attacks in the spring. On July 18, 1918, his company had orders to control the Bouresches railway station as part of the Allied counteroffensive at Belleau Wood.

Marines fighting in Belleau Wood

According to the New York Times, Nov. 5, 1923, German machine guns were punishing Dilboy’s platoon. His lieutenant started to go to the front to see how this nest could be flanked. A young lad with an automatic rifle jumped up and said: “Lieutenant, I can wipe out these men.”

The lieutenant answered, “Go ahead.”

Dilboy threw himself flat and wriggled through a wheat field, killing several machine gunners with automatic fire. A German sniper shot him twice, but he kept going. When he reached the machine gun nest he found two remaining Germans. He then stood up and received a burst from the machine guns, which cut off his right leg. Dilboy fell on his back and pushed himself forward with his left foot. He turned his head, aimed and killed the two men.

“Lying on his back, with his right hand uppermost, the lad motioned to his platoon to go forward, and died with a smile on his face,” the Times reported.

They buried his body on the battlefield, now the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, along with 2,000 marines and soldiers who gave their lives in the victory at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood.

Aisne-Marne Cemetery

Medal of Honor

Col. S.M. Shumway, his commanding officer, said,

It was one of the most impressive sights I experienced in the War. George Dilboy died facing the enemy, carrying on as long as there was the faintest whiff of breath in his body. He routed the enemy alone. He was as fine a soldier as ever served under the Stars and Stripes.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the authorization to award George Dilboy the Medal of Honor. In January 1919 the medal was presented to his father, Antonios Dilboy. “We came to this country from Smyrna, where my boy and other children were born,” he said. “We know and have felt the persecutions of Turkey.”

At his father’s request, George’s body was moved to his home town of Alatsata. Seventeen thousand people were said to have lined the streets watching his coffin carried into the church.

Desecration

But in 1922, Turkish troops occupied Alatsata. They broke open his coffin, scattered his bones and stole the flag.

The grave desecration infuriated President Warren G. Harding, who sent the USS Litchfield to bring back Dilboy’s remains. Harding also demanded an apology from Turkey. A Turkish guard of honor brought the boy’s remains to the battleship, with a new U.S. flag.

On Nov. 12, 1923, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. President Calvin Coolidge presided at the ceremony.

Headstone of George Dilboy at Arlingtonn National Cemetery.

Somerville named an athletic field and stadium after him. The stadium fell into disrepair, so the city rebuilt it in 2008. A bust honoring him stands in front of Somerville City Hall. VFW posts in Keene and Somerville were named after him.

He is believed to be the first Greek-American to win the Medal of Honor.

With thanks to Carved in Stone: The Story of George Dilboy by Richard Rozakis.

Aisne-Marne Cemetery By US gov – https://web.archive.org/web/20050405022608/http://www.abmc.gov/images/am1w.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6986605. George Dilboy headstone: By Arlington National Cemetery – http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/ANCExplorer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44946194. This story last updated in 2022.

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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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The Brahmin Rough Riders of New England

Some people believe that the Rough Riders were almost all cowboys from out West. After all, it had earned the nickname “The Cowboy Regiment.”

But that wasn’t entirely the case, as you shall see. Brahmins from New England with refined backgrounds also joined the Rough Riders.

Men from every New England state volunteered for Teddy Roosevelt’s U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders. Massachusetts had as many as 25. As a matter of fact, the actual commander of the unit, Leonard Wood, hailed from New Hampshire. Frederic Remington featured Woodbury Kane from Rhode Island in his famous painting of the immortal charge up San Juan Hill.

Col. Roosevelt and the Rough Riders on top of San Juan Hill.

Roosevelt had four recruiting stations out West, in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the Oklahoma/Indian Territories. He had vast experience in the West and knew the cowboys already knew how to ride and shoot. But Roosevelt knew another target-rich area full of ready-for-action men: His wealthy, pedigreed friends throughout New York and New England.

Roosevelt put out the word. They responded in droves from polo clubs, boxing clubs, duck blinds, steeplechase courses, yacht clubs, Ivy League athletic fields and glee clubs. Many had graduated from Harvard.

One Rough Rider, James McClintock, who hailed from California, said they were in it for the adventure.

The Rough Riders are the stuff of legend, having generated a movie, a television show and, of course, a President. They were, however, one of the shortest lived units in American military history. They only existed for four months and 13 days before they disbanded.

Rhode Island Rough Riders

Woodbury Kane, Newport;Joseph S. Stevens, Newport; Norman Maxwell, Newport; Charles Hatch, Newport; Joseph F. Flynn, Cranston.

Rough Rider Woodbury Kane

Woodbury Kane, a classmate of Teddy Roosevelt’s at Harvard, was born in Newport, a cousin of John Jacob Astor IV. A noted yachtsman, he belonged to the New York Yacht Club and served on the crew of the Columbia in the 1899 America’s Cup Race. He was also a noted big game hunter.

After graduation, he lived the life of a bon vivant in Newport and New York. In April 1898 he and other East Coast friends joined the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry.

After enlistment, he, William Tiffany and other East Coast friends donated two $7,500 Colt machine guns to the unit. When the unit expanded to a thousand men he received a lieutenant’s commission.

While serving in the Rough Riders he was always noted for being dressed to a T, no matter the conditions. While leading K Troop in the charge on San Juan Hill, he was wounded in the forearm. Kane was awarded a citation for gallantry and promoted to captain.

He spent the rest of his life living the life of a dandy until a heart attack cut him down at the age of 46. His obituary noted he left no children, but he did leave his beloved polo pony.

Vermont

Ira A. Hill, Grand Isle; Wallace Batchelder, Chester.

Wallace Batchelder graduated from Chester Academy in Chester, Vt., before enlisting in the Rough Riders. He later fought in the Philippines under General Wood. After his service he returned to Vermont, where he became a lawyer and chaired the state’s committee to elect Roosevelt President of the United States in 1904. He later broke with Roosevelt, who in 1912 sent him a telegram telling him not to support any candidate who didn’t support Roosevelt. Batchelder replied he wouldn’t support Roosevelt.

New Hampshire Rough Riders

Dudley S. Dean, Laconia; Walter F. Hickey, Nashua; Leonard Wood, Winchester.

Leonard Wood was the actual commander of the Rough Riders; Teddy Roosevelt was his second in command.

A descendant of four Mayflower passengers, he trained as a physician at Harvard Medical School. He served as a major general in the Army. When he came to command the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry in Cuba, he was a seasoned Indian fighter in the West and had already been awarded the Medal of Honor. After the Spanish-American War, he served as Governor-General of the Philippines and contended for the Republican nomination for President in 1920.

Dean was an All American football quarterback for Harvard from 1888 to 1890. He participated in the charge on San Juan Hill. That was not to be his last military adventure. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant colonel In the U.S. Army Air Force. He was the executive producer of the play Winged Victory, which ran from November 1943 to May 1944. He lived until the age of 79, passing away in 1950.

Dudley Dean, football star

Dudley’s son John H. Dean played football for Harvard too. At Harvard, he befriended Joseph P. Kennedy and they spent summers together at Cohassett, Mass.

Maine

Guy Muncie, Calais; Harrison J. Holt, Portland; Frederick C. Wesley, Bangor.

Harrison Holt graduated from Phillips Andover and Harvard. Upon his Harvard graduation in 1898 he enlisted with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. After the war and some business ventures in Mexico he joined the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser as a reporter. Later in life he wrote novels and detective stories, including The Calendared Isles, a Romance of Casco Bay (read it here) and Midnight at Mears House.

Connecticut

Edward C. Hall, Wallingford.

Unlike most of the Ivy League Rough Riders, Edward Hall graduated from Yale, not Harvard. Upon graduation in 1894, he went to work for Westinghouse and did a brief stint at a North Dakota ranch before enlisting with the Rough Riders. After the war he joined General Electric in Lynn, Mass., then transferred to the Schenectady office, where he died in 1912.

Massachusetts

Harry A. Curtis, Boston; Prescott H. Belknap, Brookline; John D. Hubbell, Boston; Rufus K. Thomas, Boston; Wellman H. Saunders, Salem; John P. Gardner, Boston; Guy H. Scull, Boston; Harry A. Davis, Boston; Francis B. Crowninshield, Marblehead; William H. Mitchell, Salem; Winslow Clark, Milton; Edward F. Donnelly, Boston; Michael F. Hogan; William T. James, Fitchburg; Arthur M. Leroy, Boston; Raymond Morse, Springfield; Edward A. O’Brien, Charlestown; William J. Tudor, Boston; Harry C. White, Somerville.

Francis Boardman Crowninshield, another Harvard graduate, went on to become a noted international yachtsman. He fought with Troop K of the Rough Riders and took part in the charge up San Juan Hill. In 1900, he married Louise DuPont from the famous chemical family. In 1911, he won the King of Spain’s Cup in Spain, now among his many trophies at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Mass.

Rough Riders. Image courtesy New York Public Library.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

This story updated in 2022.

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Frederick Small Commits the Imperfect Murder of 1916

Frederick Small, an awful little man, thought of himself as an astute businessman. He wasn’t.

An abusive husband, he thought he committed the perfect murder when he killed his third wife in a remote lakeside cottage.

He didn’t.

Florence Small, 3rd wife of Frederick Small

His sister-in-law was afraid of him. She said he used to stretch out his hand and say, “There is a hand capable of anything.”

Except getting away with murder.

Frederick Small, Serial Husband

Frederick Small

He was born in 1869 in Portland, Maine, and attended local schools.

At 20, he married Nettie Davis of Minot, Maine, and set up a grocery business. Nettie died in childbirth and his business failed, so he moved to Boston to try his luck there.

The Boston Globe later described Frederick Small as undersized, crippled in one leg and altogether inconspicuous — but also noted he had figured prominently in the newspapers over a score of years.

Throughout his checkered career, Frederick Small had filed a sensational divorce case and fallen victim to three mysterious fires.

When he first came to Boston he took a series of lowly jobs — as a hotel clerk, a waiter and a chef. In 1893 he finally found his calling and began to dabble in real estate. After he made some commissions, he opened an office and played the stock market with some success.

On July 31, 1899, he married Laura Patterson of Everett, Mass., and moved to the Boston suburb of Somerville.

The next year a farm he leased in Hudson, Mass., burned down after two fires mysteriously started on the premises in one day. Small had insured the property heavily, but investigations found nothing.

Sensational Divorce

In 1909, Frederick Small’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. His real estate debts caught up with him, and to make up for his deficits he sued his wife. Laura Patterson Small had carried on an affair with Arthur Soden, president of the Boston Braves, railway magnate and ex-president of the Boston City Club.

Boston City Club

Frederick Small sued Soden, and after a three-year trial he got his divorce and a $10,000 settlement. The judge excoriated the Smalls from the bench.

The judge said Laura Small needed “no great inducement to be led astray.” He called Frederick Small “an indifferent husband” who knew his wife was cheating on him but didn’t care because he could profit by it.

Smooth, Suave, Agreeable

In 1913, Frederick Small took a rest cure at a farm in Southboro, Mass. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Curry and her two daughters ran the big old place.

Mrs. Curry called him “smooth, suave and agreeable,” and he won the heart of her daughter Florence.

Two weeks after he arrived in Southboro, Frederick Small married Florence Curry. He quickly seized control of the family’s property, turned Mrs. Curry and her other daughter out of the house and took Florence to a lonely cottage in Ossipee, N.H.

The day they left Massachusetts, his Southboro property went up in flames. He was accused of leaving a delayed-action incendiary device behind, but no one ever proved it. Small collected $10,000 in insurance money.

Ossipee

The Small cottage before the fire

In Ossipee, Frederick Small presented himself as a successful retired stockbroker. He spent much of his time tinkering in his workshop, trying to come up with an invention that would make him a fortune.

Florence led a lonely and miserable existence. Her husband cut her off from her family and her religion. Her sister visited once and said she feared him so much she slept with a paper knife under her pillow. Florence told her Frederick Small drugged her.

He once beat her with a bootjack and threatened the doctor who came to tend her wounds. Their neighbors grew accustomed to hearing her screams across the lake.

Ossipee Lake

Florence Small was 12 years younger, three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than her husband. Still she put up with his abuse.

Once, while boating on Lake Ossipee, Florence fell into the water. She felt certain her husband would let her drown until another boater came along. Frederick Small then made a great show of rescuing her. To top it off, he tried to get a Carnegie medal for saving her life.

On Sept. 28, 1916, Frederick Small summoned a coachman, George Kennett, to pick him up at 3:30 pm and take him to the railroad station. Frederick Small said he had to go to Boston to check on his investments. He waited outside for the coach. When Kennett arrived, Frederick Small yelled goodbye to his wife and climbed into the coach.

At the station, Small joined Edwin Conner, a local schoolteacher and insurance agent who had sold him a $20,000 life insurance policy on him and his wife. Conner had insisted that both Florence and Frederick Small sign the policy. He also sold Small a $3,000 policy on the cottage.

Fire

The two men checked into a Boston hotel and Frederick Small mailed Florence a postcard at 8:40 pm. Then he and Conner saw a movie. At midnight they returned to the hotel. The desk clerk told him his cottage was on fire and he should call right away.

Small and Conner raced back to Ossipee in a hired car. When he reached the smoldering ruins of the cottage, Small broke down, apparently inconsolable.

A search party found Florence Small’s head and torso in the basement. The flames had spared them because she fell through the burning floor into several inches of lake water in the basement.

When told, Frederick Small responded, “You mean there’s enough to be buried?”

A Person of Interest

People from Ossipee heading to Small’s hearing

Someone had made sure Florence Small died. The murderer strangled her, shot her in the head and bludgeoned her face into a bloody pulp.

The medical examiner, George P. Magrath, noticed a strange substance on her body that ultimately explained the unusual intensity of the fire. It was slag left by thermite, a welding compound used by railroads. When investigators searching through the burned cottage found a Colt .32 that belonged to Frederick Small, he became a person of interest in the murder.

Arrest and Trial

Small protested he’d been a hundred miles away when the fire broke out. But further investigation produced an alarm clock with wires and spark plugs attached, and the grocer reported he’d delivered five gallons of kerosene to Small’s cottage just before the fire.

Small, hoping the power of suggestion would work on George Kennett, insisted the coachman had seen him kiss his wife goodbye. Kennett firmly maintained he had only seen Small shout goodbye into the house.

Examination of Florence Small found her lunch in her stomach, which indicated she died hours before the fire.

Small was arrested and tried at the brand-new Carroll County Courthouse in Ossipee. On Jan. 8, 1917, a jury found Frederick Small guilty of murder.

Insisting on his innocence, Small sought a new trial. New Hampshire’s attorney general reported, “the facts were too plain and abhorrent to be misunderstood.”

Frederick Small was hanged on Jan. 15, 1918 in Concord Prison.

Photos courtesy Tamworth and Ossipee Historical Societies except for Ossipee Lake, By Ken Gallager at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17976952.. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Heroic Last-Minute Rescue of the Old South Meeting House

Of all the dramatic events that took place at Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the battle to save it from destruction in 1876 was one of the hardest fought.

The Old South Meeting House in its early days as a museum. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The odds against saving the revered building seemed impossible. The very concept of historic preservation hadn’t taken hold in New England yet. Old South sat on very valuable land, though it had fallen into a shabby artifact, the sidewalk in front of it crowded with peddlers and hawkers.

And time ran very short.

At the last minute, Boston’s 19^th century leaders stepped in to save the legacy of their 18^th century forbears. They used the same tools to save the Old South Meeting House as those that had made it historic: rhetoric, organization, patriotism and civic action. And they couldn’t have done it without the ladies.

It was the first successful effort to preserve a historic building in New England – and one of the first in the United States.

Old South Meeting House

The Puritans built Old South Meeting House in 1729. Judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for taking part in the Salem Witch Trials there. Benjamin Franklin was baptized on the site. Phyllis Wheatley thought about freedom while attending services at Old South.

Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley.

In the run-up to the American Revolution, colonists often gathered at the Old South Meeting House to protest British rule. At a time when only 20,000 people lived in Boston, overflowing crowds came to hear James Otis, Joseph Warren, John Hancock and Samuel Adams denounce the tea tax, impressment and the Boston Massacre.

On Dec. 16, 1773, 4,000 angry colonists showed up at Faneuil Hall to discuss the tea crisis. Faneuil Hall couldn’t hold them all, so as many as 6,000 gathered at Old South. Then they adjourned to Griffin’s Wharf for the Boston Tea Party.

Samuel Adams understood the historical importance of the old Puritan meeting house. “The transactions at Liberty Tree were treated with scorn and ridicule,” he wrote, “but when they heard of the resolutions in the Old South Meeting-house, the place whence the orders issued for the removal of the troops in 1770, they put on grave countenances.”

The British Got It

The British understood its importance, too. During the Siege of Boston, the British vandalized symbols of the patriotic cause. They stole William Bradford‘s 1620 manuscript Of Plymouth Plantation, hidden in Old South’s tower. And they turned the Old South Meeting House into a riding school for Gen. John Burgoyne. They gutted the interior, burned the pews and dumped loads of dirt and gravel on the floor. It took eight years to restore the building.

Lowell Warren, once president of the Old South Association, said, “My wife swears she can still smell the British horses in the stairwell.”

Old South Meeting House, American Revolution interior in Boston. Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia.

A century later the Old South Meeting House narrowly escaped destruction when the Great Fire of 1872 swept through Boston. The conflagration burned 65 acres of the city, destroyed 776 buildings and killed 30 people.

“I heard the Old South clock strike,” said an eyewitness. “I don’t know what hour, and I know the thought came into my mind that perhaps it would never strike again.” Only the timely arrival of a fire engine from Portsmouth, N.H., saved the old building.

Old South Meeting House Sold

After the Great Fire. The Old South Meeting House is in the background. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Snobbery almost destroyed what a raging inferno could not. By 1877, the neighborhood had grown crowded and noisy. The congregation decided to build a new church in the fashionable new Back Bay neighborhood. They moved historic artifacts, including the bell, into the New Old South Meeting House and put up the land under Old South for sale.

The building itself sold at auction on June 8, 1876 for $1,350 – the value of its parts. The spire was covered with copper, and the building contained a lot of lead. Removal was to be completed within 60 days.

All seemed lost. The clock had been removed, the masonry was under attack and copper was being taken from the building. Then George W. Simmons & Son, prominent Boston businessmen, stepped in and bought the right to hold the building uninjured for seven days. Simmons posted these words on the clock tower:

The Eleventh Hour!

Men and Women of Massachusetts!

Does Boston desire the humiliation which is to-day a part of her history since she has allowed the memorial to be sold under the hammer”

Shall the Old South Be Saved?

Simmons bought just enough time so others could organize the fight. On the sixth day, his son helped arrange an extraordinary public gathering at the old meeting house. Every seat was filled, and in the gallery sat the ladies of Boston.

They had a daunting challenge. They needed to raise $400,000, an enormous sum, to buy the land on which the meeting house stood.

Wendell Phillips

Several people spoke, and then abolitionist crusader Wendell Phillips took the platform and gave the speech of his lifetime. An eyewitness reported on the remarkable oration:

Wendell Phillips, by Matthew Brady

The memories of the past crowded to his mind, and he spoke as if pleading for the life of one condemned unjustly. The mantle of the Revolution seemed to have fallen upon him, and he appeared to be the natural successor of Samuel Adams.

(Read the speech here.)

Then and there, the people of Boston started a fund to save the Old South Meeting House and collected several thousand dollars on the spot.

20 Ladies of Boston

On July 13, 1876, the congregation’s leaders agreed to postpone the sale of Old South for two months, but the buyers had to come up with $420,000 and ask for no further delay.

It seemed an impossible task, as Boston’s wealthy citizens were in the country or at the seashore during the summer. What’s more, there was no precedent. No historic building had ever been saved from destruction in New England.

Then the ladies stepped in.

Twenty wealthy Boston women bought the building for $3,500, more than twice what the owner had paid for its scrap value. They proposed to restore Old South, and to move it somewhere if the land couldn’t be purchased.

The Old South Meeting House in 1898

For a while nothing seemed to happen. Then one summer day the fire department put the old clock back in the tower, but the public couldn’t understand how or why. Then on Oct. 18, 1876, the papers passed for the preservationists to buy the Old South Meeting House. They paid a down payment of $100,000, and took a first mortgage of $225,000 and a second mortgage of $75,000.

Eventually the donor of the $100,000 down payment was revealed: Mary Tileston Hemenway, the wealthiest woman in Boston. Her husband had died in July on a trip to Cuba.

A Look at History

“American history is to us the most interesting and the most important history in the world, if we would only open our eyes to it and look at it in the right way,” she said. “I will help people to look at it in the right way.”

Still, the hawkers and peddlers had to be thrown out and the building had to be cleaned and restored. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes,Sr., and Louisa May Alcott took to the meeting house stage to plead for support. Others plunged into a frenzy of meetings, crafts fairs, balls and poetry-writing to raise money.

Membership on a committee to restore the Old South Meeting House became a status symbol. “Not to have been a member of some committee, proves you to be of the common people,” commented a newspaper writer.

Mary Sawyer Tyler, then living in Somerville, sold bits of wool for the cause. Sixty years earlier she had been a Massachusetts farm girl whose little lamb followed her to school one day. Mary Had A Little Lamb was by then a well-known poem. Mary still had two pairs of stockings knit from the lamb’s fleece. So she unraveled them, cut them into short pieces, attached them to cards with her autograph on them and sold them.

Old South Meeting House Saved

On April 9, 1877, a great ball was held in the Boston Music Hall. It was ‘one of the most extensive and elegant balls ever given in Massachusetts,’ and it raised $2,500.

The Old South Association formed and opened the Old South Meeting House as a museum in 1877. It then launched an educational program in American history and citizenship. It also published primary documents from American history as Old South Leaflets. Students from all over the country and the world came to “Children’s Hour” activities, Young People’s Lectures and essay contests.

Old South clock being painted, early 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Painting the Old South clock, early 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

They’re still coming. The Old South Meeting House is open daily from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm. For more information click here.

With thanks to History of the Old South Meeting-house in Boston, Volume 50; Volume 282, By Everett Watson Burdett. This story about Old South Meeting House was updated in 2022.

Images: Old South interior By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76947597.

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Leonard Nimoy Gets a Hand Up From JFK and EPP

In 1956, a 24-year-old taxicab driver named Leonard Nimoy got a call to pick up a Mr. Kennedy at the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles.

Leonad Nimoy, mid-1960s

It was Sen. John F. Kennedy, who needed a ride to the Beverly Hilton. He was speaking for Adlai Stevenson, then running for president. Kennedy had yet to achieve national prominence but Nimoy, who came from Boston, recognized him. They struck up a conversation. Kennedy asked him what he was doing in Los Angeles. Nimoy explained he wanted to be an actor. Kennedy gave him some advice he never forgot.

There was something else Leonard Nimoy never forgot: The Elizabeth Peabody House. Both Kennedy and the West End settlement house played important roles in Leonard Nimoy’s journey to become the famous fictional character, Mr. Spock.

Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse

Leonard Nimoy was born March 26, 1931 in Boston’s West End. His Jewish parents had immigrated from Iziaslav, Soviet Union, now Ukraine. Max, his father, owned a barbershop in the Mattapan section of Boston. His mother, Dora, was a homemaker. Living in the same apartment were his grandfather and grandmother, who only spoke Yiddish.

He grew up in a crowded tenement in the West End among Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. He and his older brother Melvin spent a lot of time at the Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse in the neighborhood.

1911 proposal for the Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse

The settlement house, now a community center in Somerville, was named after Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement. She was an educator and the sister-in-law of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. The settlement house once stood on the spot where for years a sign read, ‘If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.’

Elizabeth Peabody

The Elizabeth Peabody House had a mission to help immigrants integrate into America’s democratic society. It offered classes on kitchen sanitation, personal hygiene, language, dental care and how to apply for a job. It had a gym, sports program and a science lab.

Melvin Nimoy hung out in the science lab. He subsequently graduated from MIT and became a chemical engineer.

Leonard preferred the Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse, a 375-seat legitimate theater he once described as ‘a gem.’

Leonard Nimoy, Actor

At eight years old he was hanging around the playhouse when someone asked him to sing. He did, and the next thing he knew he had the part of Hansel in a children’s production of Hansel and Gretel.

Leonard Nimoy continued acting in children’s theater until he was 17, when he auditioned for Clifford Odets’ play, Awake and Sing. It was a story about a Jewish Immigrant family very much like his own – three generations living in an apartment. One character was even a barber, like Max Nimoy.

Leonard got the part. It changed his life. He recalled, “That Awake and Sing production was a major, major event for me. It was the first time that I was playing in an adult piece of theater for an adult audience, and I was portraying the juvenile in a family much like my own.

“I related totally to this character… I was playing this kid who was struggling with the same issues I was struggling with: How do you discover who your are? How do you figure out how to get a decent job? How do you find the right girl? And how do you work your way through the dynamics of these family issues and dramas and tensions, which were very much like my own?”

Blessing

He then decided it would be a blessing to work in the theater, and a blessing soon came his way. He received a half-scholarship to the summer theater program at Boston College. The other half of the scholarship came from the director of another settlement house called the West End House.

His parents objected. They wanted him to attend college and pursue a career. Or they wanted him to learn to play the accordion, because he could always make a living that way. His grandfather encouraged him to act. He did.

Richard Rober and Leonard Nimoy in Kid Monk Baroni, 1952

Always Room

Leonard Nimoy got a job selling vacuum cleaners that summer. He then saved enough money to pay for tuition to the Pasadena Playhouse. He took a train west and began studying theater.

His acting career, though, was interrupted by a stint in the Army, marriage and the birth of his first child. He started to drive a taxicab to make ends meet. Which is when he got the advice from Kennedy during their conversation on the way to the Beverly Hilton:

…we chatted a bit about acting and politics. At one point he said, “Your business is the same as mine. There’s a lot of competition.” And we laughed about that, and then he said, “But keep in mind, there’s always room for one more good one.”

“And I took those words very much to heart.”

Leonard Nimoy Day

Nimoy first played Spock in a television pilot for Star Trek in 1964 and then for another 50 years on the big and small screens. He made his final performance as Spock in 2013. He had another career as a film director, performed on stage, recorded record albums, exhibited photographs and wrote two autobiographies.

Nimoy died Feb. 27, 2015.

In 2021, outgoing Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, a first-generation American, declared Leonard Nimoy Day on March 26. It would have been his 90th birthday. The purpose, read Walsh’s proclamation, was “to honor the West End native’s contribution to the arts in roles like Mr. Spock on Star Trek, as well as his dedication to the community.”

“Leonard Nimoy brought honor upon his native city with his accomplishments as an actor, writer, producer, director, poet, photographer, and philanthropist,” the proclamation read. “Leonard Nimoy, through his fictional character, Mr. Spock — half human, half Vulcan — gave the immigrant, the refugee, and the oppressed, a hero for ‘the Outsider.’”

With thanks to A Hand To Guide Me by Denzel Washington. This story about Leonard Nimoy was updated in 2022.

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