Robert Frost, taking attendance

The city of Methuen, Massachusetts, is seeking a $3,000 grant to preserve an 1893 attendance register. Robert Frost kept the register while teaching at Methuen’s Second Grammar School.

Three details I notice:

The students’ ages appear to be marked in years and months — 12-3, 13-11. Common practice?

Absences appear to be marked by the half-day.

“T” must stand for good old “tardy.”

Methuen seeking $3,000 to preserve Robert Frost document (Boston Globe)

Clifford Hicks’s new Alvin Fernald novel

Clifford B. Hicks. Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure. Cynthiana, KY: Purple House Press, 2009. $17.95.

Alvin Fernald, a brainy, excitable boy with a knack for adventure, is the hero of nine novels published between 1960 and 1986. The second, Alvin’s Secret Code (1963), was the formative book of my childhood. The news that Clifford Hicks, now eighty-nine, has written a tenth Alvin Fernald novel seems to me like news one gets in a dream, though the news came in an e-mail from Mr. Hicks to his many correspondents.

Alvin’s Secret Code seems to have helped inspire this new novel. Here as there, a visitor comes to Riverton, Indiana, with a story from the past. Here as there, a cryptic message points to the location of a Civil War treasure. In Alvin’s Secret Code though, the visitor’s story is contained within a chapter. Here, the past becomes the substance of the novel, in the form of a journal written by Caleb Getme, a (fictional) young man who escaped slavery and went on to live in the White House and later work as a printer. Caleb’s journal is a compelling invention, one that would bring many a young reader into contact with some of the brutality and bravery of the American past. The journal accounts for more than half the novel’s pages, which means that there’s less of Alvin, his family, and his friend Shoie here than a reader might have hoped for. I wondered whether Alvin’s father would still be smoking a pipe in 2009, but Mr. and Mrs. Fernald are nearly invisible. Alvin’s sister Daphne though is an especially bright and lively presence, doing yoga and displaying her knowledge as a dictionary reader. And the novel reveals how Alvin and Shoie met and became best friends, something I don’t recall reading about elsewhere.

What I like most about Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure is its author’s wise refusal to march his characters into the twenty-first century. Alvin’s room has an Inventing Bench, not a computer. No one owns a cellphone. Yet nothing seems to be missing. Mysteries are solved not online but with face-to-face interviews, visits to the local historical society, and kid power. Here's what Professor Liam O’Harra, whose visit sparks the story, says about Alvin, Shoie, and Daphne:

“Your father and several other residents of Riverton have told me you kids know more about the layout of the town and its surroundings than anyone else. You ride your bikes tirelessly around it from one end to the other, day after day.”

The heck with Google Earth. In Riverton, Indiana, kids on bikes still rule. Clifford Hicks thus reinvents both past and present in this novel. I hope that Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure finds its way to Alvin fans both young and nearly young.

Thanks, Rachel and Ben, for such a great gift.

Related posts
Clifford B. Hicks (1920–2010)
Out of the past (On reading Alvin’s Secret Code in adulthood)

Weekly World News in Google Books

I think of the Weekly World News as a contemporary Metamorphoses. (Sorry, Ovid.) In this newspaper, poodles turn into children; statues walk and talk. Can you prove that it didn’t happen?

Found by chance: many issues of the Weekly World News can be had at Google Books.

“Child Obeys Xmas Text.”

[New York Times, December 26, 1909.]

Brake-beam: “a horizontal beam or rod on a wagon or railroad car that operates the brake shoes” (Webster's Third New International). “Brake-beam tourists” were those riding the rails.

Rocking the home

Our family played music at a local nursing home this afternoon, as we have for many Christmases. I played guitar and soprano uke; Elaine, viola and sopranino recorder; Rachel, violin; Ben, cello. We use a book of Christmas music marked with Post-it Notes and play the songs we like, some sacred and some secular, ending late in the alphabet with “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” As often as I've had this experience, I’m still always amazed to see nursing home residents grow more engaged and animated as they listen to music.

Today was an especially good day, and after playing what we thought was our last number, we had a request, for “Silver Bells.” We winged it (in D). And then we tried a number we had chickened out on earlier in the afternoon, “Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree,” which Elaine calls as the most persistent holiday earworm of all. We had a blast, in, yes, a new old-fashioned way: uke, viola, slap-cello, and Rachel and Ben’s voices. I can say in all modesty that we rocked the house, or home.

A related post
Music memory

Merry Christmas

[From Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962).]

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, from Ebenezer, the Cratchits, and me.

Related reading
A 166-Year-Old Manuscript Reveals Its Secrets (On the Christmas Carol manuscript, New York Times)

Inappropriate metaphor

My son Ben caught it: “MSNBC just called the midwest ‘the nation’s midsection.’”

Related reading
All metaphor posts (Pinboard)

Father Knows Best Christmas episode

From the first season of Father Knows Best, “The Christmas Story,” first broadcast on December 19, 1954. The Andersons’ strange encounter with old Nick becomes even stranger when you know that the actor playing Nick is Wallace Ford, probably best known as Phroso in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). Enjoy.

Verizon data charges

I’ve been awaiting our Verizon bill, curious to see if it would include data charges of the sort that David Pogue has been writing about. The bill arrived today, with $5.97 of such charges, all from hitting a key on a new phone by accident. So I called Verizon and asked that the charges be dropped. I was told that accessing the Verizon Wireless Mobile Web homepage incurs no charge, though that’s just how we incurred these charges. A bit of argument back and forth, and our bill is now back to its usual amount.

Verizon’s number: 1-800-922-0204.

A related post
Verizon’s $1.99 typos

Corrections of the Times

From the New York Times Corrections column:

A stollen recipe last Wednesday misstated the amount of active dry yeast in ounces. It is a quarter ounce, equal to one package, not 1 3/4 ounces.

["Pioneer Women," I Love Lucy. March 31, 1952.]

Lucy’s recipe called for three — not thirteen — cakes of yeast.