By W. G. Moore
In
assembling the family history for the benefit of my children
(and others of the connection who may be interested)
it has seemed to me,
more and more, a pity not to make an attempt to
convey to them something
of my father’s character and the peculiar regard in
which all of his
children held him.
I have hesitated to do this before because in such an
intimate matter one would prefer to remain silent
rather than to risk
failure or even partial success.
I say “attempt” because
personality is not an easy thing to por-
tray. Then,
too, what I say is likely to be received with tongue-in-cheek
or, at least, skepticism, because boys, generally,
are supposed to ascribe
all of the virtues to their dads, whatever their
shortcomings may have been
to neutral observers.
However,
I think there was more to it than that, because we
the children did not have the same feeling toward
our mother and it is usually
the mothers who are idealized. She was a remarkable and admirable woman
in many ways, as anyone who knew her would readily
agree, but is was dis-
tinctly our father whom we revered.
It may
help to command the attention of the younger readers to
point out that family characteristics concern not only
the past, but may
well influence the future of its members. The scholarly French monk,
Mendel, by his researches with garden peas, not only
established the fact
of heredity, but worked out the chances of the
characteristics of the
parents being transmitted to the children. Anyone with Moore blood in his
veins, therefore, has a personal stake in the
qualities he may have inher-
ited, or that may crop out in his children, or even
his children’s children.
My
relation with my father was not the ordinary relation of father
and son. He
was never “dad” to me. I was the
youngest of five children by
a second marriage and he was sixty years old when I
was born, so there wasn’t
much chance of companionship. Also, when I as a boy, there wasn’t the easy
familiarity between parent and child that there is
not. What youngster to-
day ever defers to his elder’s opinions, or offers
the easy chair! I am
not complaining – I think it is fine – I am just
explaining.
You
will have seen from Mary’s history that father spent all of
his active life on the river (Mississippi and later
the Ohio) from all the time
he was twenty-one.
Steamboating attracted a lot of rough, tough men, both
as passengers and crew. Gambling and drinking were common among them and
the “mate”, who bossed the deck-hands (mostly black,
who lugged the freight
on and off the boat) had a vocabulary that even a
mule skinner would envy.
From the time the boat tied up at a wharfboat, or
put out its gangplank
along the river bank, this Simon Legree would be
yelling and swearing at
his gang to get them to move faster, so the boat
could get away. They
usually did move at a dog-trot, too, when they were
going back for another
load.
If you
would like to get a picture of the glamour and adventure
of steamboating in its prime, before railroads
amounted to anything, read
Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi.” He was a cub pilot, himself, to a
Captain Bixby, who is mentioned all through the
book, and it is interesting
to note that my father taught Captain Bixby the
river from Cairo, Illinois,
at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, to St.
Louis. “Learning the
river,” especially the Mississippi, was like
acquiring an art, what with the
constantly changing channel which one had to know
thoroughly and the sand
bars and snags one had to avoid in order to keep
from stranding or sinking
the boat.
One had to steer at night, too, as well as by day, without a
glimmer of a light.
Any light would be useless for seeing the course of
the river and would only make it more difficult for
the pilot to discern
the dim outline of the banks thru the darkness.
Well,
anyway, for forty-five years (1844 to 1889) father was
exposed, a long way from home influence, to
everything that ordinarily
makes men coarse, hard and dissipated. Yet he was refined in manner and
tastes, gentle and considerate toward both man and
beat to an extraordinary
degree, and I would stake my life on the assertion
that he never drank,
never gambled (though the knew the finer points of
poker from watching it
played on the boat), and never swore by as much as a
“damn.” At the same
time, he had the strength of character to command
the respect of men who
were quite the opposite in these respects. What was true of father, was
true of his two brothers and how this happened I
will never know. My guess
would be that they came from good stock and were
well raised. I will try
to illustrate the qualities I refer to, because I
realize that they are a
little hard to credit in the abstract.
Perhaps
it will be helpful in what I am attempting, if I start
with a brief account of my mother, because, harsh as
it may sound, some of
the virtues that my father exemplified so
beautifully were accentuated by
a lack of them in her. Mother had some qualities that her descendants
would be fortunate to inherit, but there were others
that it would be well
to keep a wary eye out for.
Mother
was tremendously energetic and enterprising, and interested
in almost everything – politics, travel, history,
literature, etc. She
read the New York Times from cover to cover, almost
to her death at eighty-
three, and she went to Europe by herself after she
was seventy. She had a
leading part in founding the Reading Club and the
Women’s Club of Portsmouth,
both of which must be at least seventy-five years
old and still going strong.
When she was over eighty years old, she sat all day
with the earphones on,
listening to Hoover’s inauguration ceremonies. She couldn’t even take time
out to go to the table for lunch – Lucy had to bring
it to her on a tray.
She was a Republican from away back and it is a
mercy that she didn’t live
to see Roosevelt and the New Deal. She wouldn’t have liked John L. Lewis,
either.
Mother
was just as aggressive and forthright in the reli-
gious field.
There was no shadow of a doubt about what she believed and didn’t
believe.
This reminds me of Sinclair Lewis’ definition of a Liberal, which
I saw quoted in connection with his recent
death. “A liberal is a man who
is motivated by the belief that no institution –
political or religious
is perfect in all of its details.” Mother was no liberal.
My
mother didn’t believe in what were called in those
days “the worldly amusements” – dancing, card
playing and the theatre.
Also, she didn’t believe in kids having fun on
Sunday (what a long, dull
day that was!) although that wasn’t the way it
presented itself to her.
It was the Lord’s day and when we weren’t going to
Sunday School at ten,
Church at eleven, Christian Endeavor at six and
Church again in the evening,
were to read “good” books, learn the chapters of the
Bible, the catechism,
the First and Twenty-Third Psalms, and a few other
chapters. Here again I
am reminded of a quotation. This time it is what Disreali said of Glad-
stone – “He is a good man, in the worst sense of the
word.”
What
mother believed in for herself, she believed was
good for everyone else and she had the missionary
urge to do something about
it. So she
was forever instilling character and good habits into us, in-
sisting upon improving our minds by reading (of her
selection) and try-
ing to persuade her “worldly” friends to give up
dancing, etc., and become
good Christians.
She was forever working at this sort of thing.
Father
was religious too, being an Elder in the Pres-
byterian Church, but his influence on us was not by
precept on precept,
but in the only way it can be exerted effectively –
by beautifully
exemplifying the good life in his own
character. Father never said an
unkind or uncharitable word about anyone that I can
remember but mother
would frequently discourse at great length about
someone of whose conduct
she didn’t approve.
These incidents usually occurred at the table, where
there was a “captive” audience, and were very much
to father’s distaste.
He would first defend the person under
criticism. If that didn’t succeed,
he would try to change the subject, but if the
aspersions continued, as
frequently happened, he would leave the table in
protest – even in the
middle of a meal.
Of course, there was never any doubt in mother’s mind
about the righteousness of her judgments in these
matters.
I
leave it to the reader to judge whether it was
precept or example that made the greater impression
on the young wit-
nesses to these incidents.
Father’s great
consideration for people, without regard to their
station in life, is well illustrated by an amusing
incident that concerned
his brother William, to whom he was deeply
devoted. As far as I know, or
can imagine, the circumstances I am about to relate
are the only ones under
which father ever spoke crossly to his elder
brother.
One
morning at the office, when Uncle William was in his eighties,
he wasn’t feeling very well, but didn’t want to go
home. There was a house
on the property with the office that belonged to the
company and was occupied
by a John Schwartz – a sort of Man Friday to Uncle
William – and his good
wife Mary.
Mrs. Schwartz was a large, hearty woman, and as father used to
say of her, if anyone in that end of town needed
help, Mary Schwartz would be
the first person there.
It
wasn’t unnatural, then, that Uncle William should step over to
Mrs. Schwartz’s and ask if he could lie down on her
bed and just as natural
that she should welcome the opportunity to be of service
to an old man of
whom she was very fond and with good reason.
Well,
father didn’t know anything about what had happened, but
after a awhile he missed William and after looking
for him all through the
shops with success, he finally stepped over to Mrs.
Schwartz’s and asked
her if she had seen anything of Brother
William. Of course she said he was
in her bedroom lying down.
Father
went into the room with considerable concern and there was
Uncle William stretched out, fully clothed, his silk
hat over his face and
even his boots on!
It was the sight of the boots on the white spread that
took father’s eye and quickly turned his concern for
his brother’s health
into indignation at his lack of consideration for
Mrs. Schwartz. So instead
of asking Brother William how he felt, the first
thing father said was,
“William, what on earth do you mean by putting your
boots on Mrs. Schwartz’s
clean bedspread?”
In
relating the incident to me later, Mrs. Schwartz said with a
chuckle, “The old gentleman just replied, “Oh,
Mary’s strong, she can wash
it!” That
was all right with her, too, but it certainly shocked father.
Another
mark of father’s consideration for others was his attitude
toward paying bills. He wanted them paid as soon as they came into the
house; in
fact he didn’t like bills at all – he always paid cash on the
barrelhead himself, but it suited mother better to
have charge accounts.
If anyone ever overcharged, as occasionally
happened, he never wanted to
make a fuss about it; he preferred to pay the bill
and go some place else
the next timer.
Any creditor, especially a small merchant, doctor or den-
tist, will tell you that to be meticulous in paying
bills is nice trait.
Father’s
consideration for animals was as great as it was for
people. I
saw him many times pick up a spider, or a similar intruder, on
a piece of paper and take it outdoors rather than
just to swat it. One
time, and only one time, Ralph asked him if he could
hunt quail and
rabbits on the old family farm about six miles down
the Ohio, which was
an ideal place for the purpose. Father’s reply was, “Ralph, I would just
as soon you would shoot the horses.”
The
horses were perfectly safe, too, as this incident will show.
Almost every Sunday during the summer father would
hire a team and a big
surrey at the livery stable and drive us all to
Buena Vista, seventeen
miles down the river, to see his old mother and
sister. The journey down
and back seemed interminable to me because whenever
we came to a slight
rise in the road, father would slow the horses down
to a walk and when we
got to the top of the hill, he would let them stop
and rest. When we
would get back to the livery stable at night, horses
would show no
sign of sweat or fatigue and the proprietor would
invariably say, “Well,
Captain, they’re fresh enough to start out again” –
after a thirty-four
mile drive with a family of seven.
The
thing that made these gentle qualities conspicuous in my
father was that they were not associated with a weak personality, but
with an unusually strong one. He was a good six feet in height and , as
the Master of a steamboat, was long accustomed to
giving orders and to
having them obeyed.
When the occasion called for it, there was never
any question as to who was the boss. Apropos of this, there were two
incidents that happened when I was about ten or
twelve years old that
made a tremendous impression upon me and were a
little confusing at the
time, because they showed that father wasn’t a bit
gentle under certain
conditions.
On the
first occasion, father was hitching up the horse and
Edith and her friend, Ruth Thompson, were sitting in
the buggy with the
reins still lying on the ground. Old Frank was a willful creature, anyway,
and he kept edging over to the side of the alley,
putting his head down
and nibbling the long grass that grew there. Father had pulled up his
head a couple of times and told him to “stand still”
in tones that indi-
cated he meant it, but Frank didn’t know father (I
was his regular groom)
so he again edged over to the side and was just
about tot take another
nibble when, quick as a flash, father grabbed the
whip out of the socket
and hit him a resounding crack that raised a welt
across his back. That
was the last nibble Frank tried to take.
I
couldn’t have been more surprised, but what astonished me as
much as father using the whip on a horse was the
fact that the reins were
on the ground and the girls in the buggy. If the horse had plunged and
run away, as one might expect he would, the girls
had good chance of
being killed.
Bur father either didn’t stop to think about that or,
as is more probably, his only though was that a
horse was doing what he
had told him twice not to do and he had to be shown
who was the boss.
Fortunately, Frank new what it was all about. He didn’t run way; he
just stood still, with his head up, the way he had
been told.
The
other incident had to do with a household chores for which
I was responsible for a good many years – driving
the cow about a mile
to a pasture in the morning before school, and
bringing her home after
school in the afternoon. Ons this occasion, our cow didn’t want to leave
the other cows in the pasture – for romantic reasons
which I will not
go into. I
succeeded in getting her out of the pasture and started down
the road on which she was supposed to go straight
ahead, but when she got
to the corner of the pasture were there was a
crossroad aright angels,
she turned right along another side of the field where
the cows were and
began mooing away at the friends she was so loathe
to leave. I was on
Frank and raced ahead of her and turned her around,
but instead of taking
the road toward home when she came to it, she went
in the opposite direct-
ion toward the pasture gate. I galloped around the critter and started
her toward home again, but at the crossroad the same
thing occurred. After
this had happened several times I didn’t’ see any
end to it, so I rode home
and told father, with tears in my eyes, “I can’t get
Rose to come home,”
and described what had happened. He told me that a cow had done that to
him one time when he was a boy and he had cut
himself a good willow switch
and had whipped her until she was glad to come
home. I think hat for a
moment the sixty years that separated my father and
me disappeared and we
were just two boys, each having the same trouble
with his cow.
I was
again surprised at such stern measures, but it didn’t
take me long to get the whip out of the buggy and to
cover the mile back
to that cow.
This time, when she turned up the wrong road, I was right
behind her on Frank, lambasting her at every
jump. After a surprisingly
few applications, believe it or not, she turned
around of her own accord,
marched back to the right road and headed for home
as peacefully as one
could ask.
The thing worked like magic, just as my father had said, and
I felt that I had been let in on one of the great
secretes of nature.
These
two incidents, one with a willful horse and another with a
contrary cow, certainly confirm the validity of the
saying, “Beware the
fury of a patient man.”
As I
think further of father as a little boy teaching that cow
to do as he told her, contrasted with the other
little boy in similar
circumstances coming home in tears, it seems evident
that he acquired his
masterful qualities at the hour birth and not as the
result of bossing
a steamboat drew.
being Captain of steamboat was clearly effect, rather
than cause.
Another
quality that distinguished my father was his complete
integrity. I
can’t imagine him ever “pulling a fast one” of any kind,
under any circumstances. If my judgment is worth anything at all, his
integrity was one hundred percent. Lots of people who are honest to all
intents and purposes, can rationalize something that
they want very much
to do , but which is not strictly on the up-and-up,
or at least is on the
cheap side.
J.P. Morgan, the elder, used to say, “People have two reasons
for what they want to do – a good reason and the
real reason.” That, in
my opinion, is a very sage observation. Father wasn’t like that. He
always thought straight. I think that came naturally to him and
probably
he wasn’t even tempted to do anything devious or
shady. I was fortunate
enough to be closely associate din business with a
man like that when I
was in Europe (Mr. Doty). He was a square shooter by nature. During
World War I we handled car contracts that totaled
close to a hundred
million dollars, but I never saw him even play with
the idea of doing any-
thing that wasn’t absolutely fair and square. that’s the way father was.
My own impressions of father were confirmed by what
was told
me repeatedly by men who had served under him on the
boats. Long after
he had quit the river, Ralph and I occasionally went
down to the wharf-
boat in the evening when we heard the Bonanza or one
of the other big
steamboats of the White Collar Line (the one in
which father long held
an important interest) whistle, in deep-throated
tones, for the landing.
We would go aboard while she was putting off and
taking on passengers and
freight. We always
met someone who had worked with father and they often
would send for others who had worked with him, so
that we frequently had
quite a little reception. These men invariably spoke in high terms of
father and among other qualities mentioned was the
fact that he never got
excited – no matter what happened. Boats were always a fire hazard,
often got stuck on sand bars in summer, had to
battle ice in the winter,
and were liable any time to strike a snag or a log
and knock a hole in
the hull, so there was plenty of opportunity to blow
one’s top.
One
old fellow told me of a time when father was looking for
a ship’s carpenter and he had applied for the
job. He asked father if he
wanted a man just temporarily or if the job might be
permanent. He said
father replied, “The job will be good as long as you
and I get along
together.” I
thought that sounded a little brusque and felt a bit em-
barrassed, but apparently the old man didn’t think
so, for he chuckled
in a pleasant sort of way and said he was with father for twenty-five
ears.
There
was quite a number of old darkies in Portsmouth who
had worked on the Bonanza for many years – from Uncle
Ben Johnson, a
man of unusual dignity and ability who had been
Chief Steward in charge
of the kitchen and dining “saloon”, down to mere
waiters, or cabin boys.
I knew these men pretty well because, during the few
years between the
time I was old enough to leave my mother and not old
enough o go to
school, father frequently took me on the boat with
him to Cincinnati.
Those were great moments for a boy, because I slept
in the Captain’s
quarters on the top deck and had the run of the boat
– when I could
elude the darkie who had me in charge. Then, too, being the Captain’s
boy commanded certain consideration. For example, I could always count
on some frosted cakes from Uncle Ben when I called
at his pantry, which
was one of my favorite hang-outs.
In after years I would
often meet these veterans on the street
and they always stopped and asked about father and
frequently told me of
some incident that illustrated the respect in which they
held him, of
which this is a good example. One of these fellows had been a waiter,
with the considerable privilege of running a news a
and cigar stand on the
side. He
told me that father had given him strict instructions that the
Police gazette ( a low-life sheet which I believe is
still published)
should never be on the boat, but as it was quite a
favorite with some of
his customers, he always kept some copies sub
rosa. One day a man who
wasn’t familiar with the regulations, left a copy on
the stand, in plain
sight, with its invariable photograph of a voluptuous
lady in “tights”
occupying the whole of the front page. As bad luck would have it, father
happened along at the moment and what followed left
a lasting impression
on that darkie.
Father ended his remarks with the promise that if it ever
happened again, he would throw his whole stand into
the river, and I was
assured that he would certainly have done it, too.
At this point, I stepped
back from the canvas to squint at what
I had brushed in and I find that the portrait is
quite incomplete. The
character lines are there, but what might be called
the “expression” is
lacking. One
can have all of the virtues of the saints, but is he is
unamiable and lacking in personality, the total
effect is hardly worth
preserving for posterity. You wouldn’t understand, but these latter
qualities in father are well attested by the fact
that he was a very
successful steamboat captain.
If you
had lived in the steamboat era, you would know that one
could not be successful in that business without
having numerous friends
along the river who would hold their freight for
your boat and arrange
their trips so that they could travel with you. To have friends like that
demanded both character and personality.
The Bonanza,
a side-wheeler, was the largest boat on the Ohio
River and dominated the traffic between Cincinnati
and the up-river towns
that she served, from the time she was built, which
was before my day,
until the construction of the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railway in the early
nineties.
Father designed her, supervised her construction and, as far
as I know, was her only master until he decided to
call it a day, in 1889.
This will explain why the Bonanza is something of a
legend in our branch
of the family.
Here
end my own encomiums on father, but I would like to add,
before closing the record, a tribute by an
outsiders, which was not unique
in my experience.
When I went to Ann Arbor to school, I was told by our
next door neighbor in Portsmouth that I must be sure
to look up Mrs. James
Murfin, who had gone there from Portsmouth many
years before to educate
her two sons.
When I got there, I didn’t know a soul in the town or
university and I learned that Mrs. Murfin was a very
prominent and popular
person, so one Sunday afternoon I went around to
call, with a good deal
of diffidence, as I naturally felt that I had a very
slender claim on
her friendship.
Imagine my surprise when, after I introduced myself, she
threw her arms around me and kissed me. Seeing that I was a bit taken
by surprise, she hastened to explain in the warmest
terms ho much her
husband and she had thought of my father. She was most kind and helpful
to me during my two years at Michigan.
I had
fully intended to stop here; in fact I never thought I
would get this far, but if any reader is still with
me, he may like to
hear a few other things about the family that seem
to belong in the record.
You might
like to know how father got started in the steamboat
business so far way from home, and how he got on in
the world. Father
was not only a good man (in the best sense of the
word), but he also
believed strongly in amounting to something. New Orleans is still a
long way from Portsmouth, unless one goes by plane,
and it was many times
further then.
Uncle William was the first to go and what a lot of courage
and enterprise that must have taken. He got a job with a Captain Young,
who operated several boats on the lower
Mississippi. Captain Young must
have liked his new hand, because it wasn’t long
before he suggested that
Uncle William send for his younger brother,
Enos. Father made good, too,
because they eventually sent for the youngest
brother, Sam.
Captain Young had two
sons, Duvall, about the age of father,
and William, the age of Sam. The first became father’s
bosom friend
and the second, Uncle Sam’s. These friendships lasted thru all of their
lives and even extended to the children. Mary’s middle name, Young, was
chosen out of regard for this family.
Father’s
first job was as night watchman on the boat.
I suppose
that all this required was to stay awake and to make
the rounds to see that
no fires started and that nobody stole the
boat. There was plenty of time
and opportunity to learn the river, and father must
have taken full advan-
tage of it because Captain Young said he never saw a
man learn it so fast.
In a short time he was able to become a licensed
pilot and that put him
in the big dough - $250 per month. That was a lot of money when eggs
were a dime a dozen, butter twenty cents and coffee
fifteen cents, per pound,
(I recall such prices myself) and, of course, he had
his room and board on
the boat – for free.
Inasmuch
as father did not drink or gamble (tobacco was his only
vice), I wouldn’t be surprised if he salted down at
least $225 per month.
He told me that as fast as he accumulated a thousand
dollars he bough
St. Louis bank stock and I suppose that increased in
value at a good rate,
with the rapidly expanding economy. Later, Uncle William started charter-
ing and operating boats on the Yazoo River, in
Mississippi, and even built
one himself (Steamer Hope). Father then began putting his money into
that
enterprise.
I have read lots of entries in his old diaries stating that
he had sent William Such and Such amounts.
When
the Civil War struck, father and Uncle William turned all
of their holdings into cash and beat it to St.
Louis. They had between
them eighty thousand dollars in gold, which
certainly wasn’t bad for a
couple of farmer boys, as early as 1860. (What a
spot to get in a plug
for that old fashioned virtue, thrift, but I will
refrain). I happened
to know what they had because an older cousin told
me they considered
buying a steamboat that was for sale for eighty
thousand dollars and they
had just enough to swing the deal. However, they figured that with a
civil war on, it was too risky. They really missed the boat, for the
people who bough her chartered her to the government
right away for
moving troops and made a profit of three hundred
thousand dollars during
the war.
The
boat that father was on used to get into St. Louis once a
week at the same time that Uncle William’s boat was
there and they had a
few hours together.
They met in this way on the day that Ft. Sumter was
fired on and of course they discussed gravely the
momentous potentialities
of that action.
Cousin Louie Ricker (Uncle William’s daughter) told me,
not many years ago when I went to see her on one of
my infrequent visits
to Portsmouth, that her father had quoted my father
as saying, “William,
this thing won’t end as long as there is a slave in
this country”.
I
would like to point out to my younger readers what a very
sagacious and far-sighted observation that was to be
made at the time
the first shot was fired. In the first place, most
people don’t realize
that it was secession and not the slavery issue that
started the war. The
threat of freeing the salves was only made to force
the South to lay down
its arms, and the Emancipation Proclamation was
issued against the advice
of the entire cabinet – if I remember my Carl
Sandberg and Robert Sherwood
correctly.
Then, too, the length of wars is extremely hard to predict in
any case. When World War I started, the general
opinion was that it would
last only a few months – largely because it seemed
impossible that such
an upheaval could continue for very long. It was quite a while later and
came as a great shock, when Lord Kitchener said that
it would last for at
least four years.
Even with that experience to guide him, Senator Borah,
who had long been Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, made
his famous comment during the early phase of World
War II, that it was a
“phony” war.
We found there was nothing phony about it before we got through.
Before
ending the steamboat part of these reminiscences, I must
include quite an extraordinary coincidence that my
cousin, Elizabeth Ricker,
told me about.
She became interested in stamp collecting and some dealer
sent her a printed booklet of the items had had to
offer. In a section
devoted to rubber cancellation stamps of the early
days, was one under the
classification “Packet Boat”. (I well remember when the Bonanza carried
the mail).
Because of the family’s association with boats, she took a
second look at this particular stamp and to her
great surprise and delight,
this is what she read, enclosed within an octagonal
frame which also included
a small drawing of a steamboat:
|
St.
Louis, Cairo and New Orleans Railroad
Line Steamer CHAMPION E.
B. Moore, Captain Duvall
W. Young, Clerk Leaves
New Orleans for Cairo
and St. Louis March
25 |
That
would be before the Civil War. The
Clerk on a boat
corresponded to the Purser on a ship. He as the business manager –
handled the passengers, made out freight bills, paid
the accounts, etc.
Cousin Duvall, as we called him was with father in
this capacity until
they both quit the river. By the way, the distance from New Orleans to
St. Louis was 1051 miles – quite a journey for a
steamboat that didn’t
make more than about twelve miles an hour.
I
mentioned awhile back that father never got excited. Well,
it seems that this quality, ordinarily so
commendable, can be overdone,
at least mother thought so on a certain occasion and
I think you may be
inclined to agree with her.
1884
was the year of the great flood in Portsmouth.
I heard
about it all through my youth and it was always a
great trial to me that,
try as I would, I couldn’t summon the slightest
recollection of it.
Imagine the yawl from the great Bonanza being tied
at our very gate and
Fanny slipping off a plank into the water and I being
there without
having these events register the slightest
impression on my consciousness!
But then I was only eighteen months old, so I suppose
it isn’t too strange
that even a record flood, with all of its attendant
excitement, failed
to leave any impression. “Oh, the little more and how much it is, and
the little less and what worlds away.”
We
lived on Fourth Street, quite a distance back from the river,
and our house was several feet above street
level. The water had risen
and risen until one evening it was just one inch
from coming onto the
first floor.
The carpets were still down and everything in its usual place.
Father was still ”calm” and wouldn’t help move
things up stairs because
he maintained that the water would not get into the
house. That is not
quite as extraordinary as it sounds, however,
because when a river leaves
its banks and spreads over a very wide area, it
takes a terrific volume
of water to cause a further rise.
Well,
one inch was close enough for mother and she took over at
that point.
When she went into action, things moved! She got hold of
several “darkies” and before the family went to bed
the carpets and all
the first floor furniture except the grand piano,
were stored on the second
floor. The
piano was raised up a couple of feet on stool.
I hate
to say this, but in the morning there were two feet of
water in the house.
No
account of the Moores would be complete without at least
suggesting the flavor of Uncle William’s
personality. He was the oldest
of the three brothers and quite a character – both in
the serious and
facetious sense of that term. H must have been eighty years old by the
time I knew who he was (He lived to be eighty-nine),
was tall, solemn
looking, and always wore a black or blue suit –
mostly Prince Albert –
and a silk hat, except in summer, when he
substituted a straw. Altogether,
he was a distinguished looking man. He was manager of the Foundry until
within a few months of his death, and to the last he
was always the first
man on the job.
The hours in those days were from seven to twelve and
one to six.
Seven o-clock was pretty dark and cold of a winter’s morning
- even for a young man. The only concession he made to time was to go
home about four
o-clock in the afternoon.
The
way Uncle William ran the Foundry – and ran it very success-
fully for many years, strange as it may seem - is
well illustrated by the
following incident.
The
company had a wide reputation for building superior engines
and boilers for steamboats. This was quite natural because Uncle William
knew from his own experience with boats how to
design them, and the shop
was well equipped and well run. At the time of my story, they had just
built six large boilers for the “City of Pittsburgh,
“ which was a new boat
and the largest on the river. When the boilers were about to be installed,
a government inspector condemned them for use on the
river, on a technicality.
River
boilers were built under close United States inspection
because of the hazard to life if they should blow
up, as they occasionally
did. The
original boilers on the boat had been built by a company in
Marietta, Ohio, but had proven unsatisfactory for
river use because of
unsuitable design.
The Marietta company was annoyed when the new boilers
were ordered from another company. They happened to know, too, that there
had been a slight change in the government specifications
for drilling the
rivet holes in the boiler plates, of which our shop
had not been informed.
The Marietta people made it their business to find
out that the new speci-
fication had not been followed and were thus able to
prevent the boilers
being installed on the boat. Another six boilers were immediately ordered
from our shop, but this left the original six on the
company’s hands.
The
superintendent of the boiler shop was a very enterprising
man, so he went to Ironton, about twenty-five miles
away, where there were
a number of blast furnaces and steel mills that the
shop did a lot of work
for. He was
confident that one of these would be glad to get the boilers
because they were immediately available and because
boilers built for steam-
boats were superior to any others, due to federal
specifications and inspection.
He
sold them all, as he had expected, at the first place he
called.
So far
Uncle William knew nothing about the matter, but he heard
about it the next morning and immediately sent for
the superintendent.
He said, “Adam, I understand you were up to Ironton
yesterday afternoon
and sold the City of Pittsburgh boilers.” Adam, of course, confirmed
that he had, no doubt feeling pretty good about it,
too, until Uncle
William said, “Adam, I don’t want you ever again to
do anything like
that. The
Belfont Furnace (the purchasers) knows were our shop is and
if they want any boilers from us, let them come to
us.”
Whew! That’s the way many reputable companies used
to do busi-
ness – on their reputations, but times were already
changing. Manufacturers
were starting to send out salesmen and they were
taking business away from
those who were waiting for it to come to them – no matter
what their
reputations had been. Uncle William was a fine figure of a man, but he was
old, and the new-fangled ways were too much for
him. The Portsmouth Foundry
and Machine Works didn’t last many years after that,
though it its day it
had built steamboat engines and boilers for rivers
as far away as the Yukon
and had build equipment for mills and furnaces in
Southern Ohio, Kentucky,
Alabama, and even in Pittsburgh.
Mother
importuned father for years to persuade Uncle William to
retire in favor of a younger man, but father took a
lot of punishment rather
than to risk hurting brother William’s feelings –
for the mere sake of sal-
vaging his own half interest in the enterprise. This will underline what
I said before – that father though a lot of his
elder brother.
Uncles
William was a man of many interests.
His first edition
Audubon speaks of his fondness for birds. He was
also very keen on geology
and knew from his reading that the Ohio River marked
the line where the
glaciers from the great Ice Age melted and deposited
the well worn boulders
that they had carried down from the north in their
frozen embrace. on
holidays, he used to take one of his grandsons (Carl
Ricker) and row up and
down the river in search of glacial boulders. He had his trophies arranged
around his yard and on each side of the front
entrance. He even built a
conical pyramid of them capped on the top with a
special price – a perfect
sphere.
Another
of his varied interests was a great fondness for cats.
I remember that he always had one beside him in the
library, where he spent
most of his time when at home. I recall being much impressed by an adver-
tisement he put in the “Daily Blade’, just after an
old favorite had passed
away, offering fifteen dollars for one with
tortoise-shell markings. That
was a big price, both as the dollar went in those
days and because the only
breed current at the time was the alley species. I remember looking our own
pussy over wistfully, but I couldn’t discern any markings
that might pass
as tortoise-shell.
Uncle
William had a weakness for almost anything in the enter-
tainment field.
He never missed a circus – even in his eighties. I
particularly remember this because of the natural
fascination the big top
has for a boy, coupled with the fact that it was not
on the very brief
list of entertainments that mother approved for
me. It didn’t do me any
good, either, when Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show
on Earth was in town,
to point out that Uncle William was going. Her convictions were too solid
to be dissipated by the sound of the calliope or the
panoply of the parades.
Mother’s objection to the circus, if you had known
her, was obvious. There
were two ladies in the cast – the bareback rider and
tone on the
flying trapeze, who wore tights! Uncle Tom’s Cabin and trained dogs were
about the only shows I had seen before I went away
to school. Oh, boy!
What a world of fascination the theatre opened to me
then. The Wizard of
Oz, Floradora, John Drew, Maude Adams, Otis Skinner,
Ethel Barrymore,
Henry Irving (his last appearance in the U.S.), Mrs.
Fiske (in one of whose
productions I carried a spear), and many
others. In those days I had strong
legs, a good eyes and boundless enthusiasm, so it
never entered my mind that
having to view this fascination world from a seat in
the top gallery was
anything but the greatest privilege.
Uncle William
was a man of rather few words and, of course, very
few of those were wasted on a youngster of my
years. In fact, I was rather
awed by his patriarchal presence, and one had to
shout to make him hear,
so I didn’t try very hard to engage him in conversation. One summer’s
vacation during high school I was working in the Foundry
and was starting
across the street with a wheelbarrow load of sand
when one of my friends
drove by with a strange girl beside him. I greeting my friend as best I
could without dropping the wheelbarrow and though no
more of it. Uncle
William was just starting to come from the other
side and when the buggy
had passed and we met in the middle of the crossing,
to my complete
astonishment he started to jump all over me. He thought, if you please,
that I had “winked” at the girl and he was reading
me a lecture on such
conduct – a not very heinous offense, even in those Victorian
days, but
still offensive to Uncle William’s code. I swear
that I was completely
innocent, and the only way I can account for Uncle
William’s misapprehension
is, that as a youngster I used to blink my eyes a
good deal and that was
what Uncle William had mistaken for a wink. I was more awed than ever by
Uncle William after that.
Apart
from that incident on a street-crossing, I can remember
Uncle William giving me only one piece of advice and
that was so unusual
and so indicative of the old gentlemen’s personality,
that I recall it
clearly. He
had been confined to his room with some illness and father
or mother suggested that I should go around to see
him. I was sure my
visit would be of little interest to Uncle William and
calling on him
was certainly no treat for me, but of course there
was nothing to do but
to go. He
was in his big, four-poster, canopied bed, which made him look
all the more pontifical.
I don’t
recall any of the conversation; in fact, I am sure
there couldn’t have been very much between such extremes
of age and
temperament, but I do remember clearly his saying,
apropos of nothing
that had gone before, “Willie, always be careful
about choosing your
friends. I
never met anyone that I though was worth having as a friend,
so I never had any”. Can you tie that! He didn’t
have more than one
or two that I knew of, either, and they weren’t
intimates.
I am
sure that remark didn’t come easily. He
was trying hard
to say something to me out of his long experience that
would be of real
help to a boy.
In reflecting on it many times since, it has always seemed
to me that it revealed a lack of companionship in
his life that was pathetic,
but at the same time showed a dignity and integrity
of character that was
extraordinary.
The old gentlemen had high standards and he didn’t com-
promise them just because our little community did
not product, in his
generation, men who measured up. That is the reason, no doubt, that he
lived so largely with his books, his cat, and his
interest in birds,
boulders, etc.