The Lml Collection, Volume Ii: G'nights:The Dialect of Home

By M.A. Lyons

The first boy cap on the first boy haircut, for the first day of school. All the tragedy of all change in that haircut to mother. Epochal barbering that shears away an era of life! Mother has saved one lock from the ruin. Sweetest years are locked away with that curl in mothers drawer.


First Day of School

Coal wagons are beginning to crunch the gravel driveways. They still use horses to haul coal in our town. The roar of anthracite down the shute draws all the children on the street. The coal man takes the ice mans place in their interest. The ice mans boy has gone back to school. Next week hell be in football armor and his customers children will cheer him as their hero.

Signs of Fall

Im not pounding her head. Im just patting it. Der, der, dont cry, ittle baby. Cant I just rub it? Why hasnt she got any eye winkers? Wont she get dirt in her eyes? What does she chew the air that way for? I guess shes hungry

New Baby

O, Dad, put it in the paper that Stewie found a snake. Ill tell you how to write it. Stewie Downs picked up a snake on the street where he lives an swinged it round his head an then he threw it away. Gee I most ran right into it on my tryke. I thought it was a piece of rope or somethin.

Know Somethin

Do you love me? How much, a bushel? Do you love Grammy a bushel too? How much do you love Mummy? Do you love the baby a bushel? How much do you love Tip? Just as much as the baby? Mummy only loves Tip half as much as the baby. She loves the baby and me the same and you and Grammy the same. I asked her if she didnt love Tip as much as the baby and she said no hes only a puppy. Poor old Tippy. I love Tippy two bushels and the baby two bushels and you three bushels and Mummy four bushels.

To Go To School Or To Be Sick?

But this coldness in greeting the expected Spring is broken down at supper:

We played a marble game this afternoon, begins the first grade member.

What was the game? encourages his mother.

Keeps.

Then philosophic crunching of his toast.

Dad, will you buy me some more marbles?

Catalogs Come

Boys have to be nagged now about rubbers and coats. But the season is especially hard on dogs. While the ground is muddy the best-bred canine is persona non grata in kitchen or entry, but he cannot yet dig to bury bones and so his bones litter the yard to be confiscated by neat housewife or reluctant husband.

Mud Season

Editors Preface

The roaring twenties were in full swing in Boston while my grandfather, Louis M. Lyons, was a reporter for The Boston Globe. After running down the big city stories of the day, he would take the 5:20 PM train north out of Boston to Reading where he would enter the family home on 24 Vale Road and greet those eagerly awaiting his daily return to being Dad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 28, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469106625

M.A. Lyons

Mary Ann Lyons, Ph.D. lives on a farm in Maryland with her family. She received her B.S. in Kinesiological Sciences and her M.A. in Physical Education, Health and Recreation from the University of Maryland-College Park, Class of ’75, ’82 and her doctorate in Educational Psychology-Human Learning from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Class of ’91. She holds an Advanced Professional Certification in Secondary Mathematics Grades 5-12 from the Maryland State Department of Education. She was a teaching professor/lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison 1991-1994 and a visiting full professor at Temple University in Philadelphia 1995-2000. Currently she is a tenured teacher of secondary mathematics for the Frederick County Public School System in Maryland, is the Director of the Louis M. Lyons Foundation and a Consulting Editor for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She is the grand-daughter of Louis M. Lyons. Frankee Lyons lives on the Red Sleigh Farm in Mount Airy, Maryland with her family. She is a rising senior at Linganore High School. Her bi-monthly newspaper commentary column is published in the Frederick News-Post and can be found on-line at www.FrederickNewsPost.com/columnists. Frankee is a volunteer docent at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a volunteer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and a Student Area Coordinator for Amnesty International. She is a member of her high school’s county championship Academic Team, the National Honor Society, the National English Honor Society and the National Merit Scholars Program. Frankee is a student in the Hood Start Program at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland where she studies History, Literature, Sociology and Media Production. Each day she surrounds herself with good books, great films, speedy technology, deep friendships, inspirational teachers, awesome grandparents, pleasure-seeking cats and her humorous, challenging, supportive, caring and loving sisters. Frankee is the great grand-daughter of Louis M. Lyons.

Book preview

G’Nights

The Dialect of Home

Louis M. Lyons

Editorialist 1927-1931

Edited by M.A. Lyons, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2007 by M.A.Lyons.

Front Cover: Louis M. Lyons with Richard, Reading, Massachusetts

Edited By M.A. Lyons, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Selected articles are republished with permission courtesy of The Boston Globe.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

36212

Contents

Editor’s Preface 

Louis M. Lyons 

Volume II  

Introduction 

One 

His Fifth Birthday 

Two 

First Day of School 

Three 

Signs of Fall 

Four 

The New Baby 

Five 

Anybody Seen a Rabbit? 

Six 

Going to Bed 

Seven 

All Right For You 

Eight 

News From School 

Nine 

Supper Time 

Ten 

Reading 

Eleven 

Grammie Kinnin, 1834 

Twelve 

Know Somethin’? 

Thirteen 

My Other Mitten 

Fourteen 

A Pony, Please,

to Go With a Scrapbook 

Fifteen 

’lectric Train 

Sixteen 

Who? Why? What? When? 

Seventeen 

Nice Puppy 

Eighteen 

Christmas List 

Nineteen 

Santa Knows 

Twenty 

Christmas Presents 

Twenty-One 

Four Times Three 

Twenty-Two 

After School 

Twenty-Three 

So’s Not to Be Late 

Twenty-Four 

Where’s the Soap? 

Twenty-Five 

To Go to School—Or to Be Sick? 

Twenty-Six 

Corduroy Knickers 

Twenty-Seven 

Five And A Half 

Twenty-Eight 

Winter Windows 

Twenty-Nine 

Catalog’s Come 

Thirty 

The Mud Season 

Thirty-One 

A Penny’s Worth 

Thirty-Two 

Schickted 

Thirty-Three 

Spilled the Milk 

Thirty-Four 

Jinny Had a Party 

Thirty-Five 

Two Letters on Onions 

Thirty-Six 

Terrible Exciting 

Thirty-Seven 

Clothespins 

Thirty-Eight 

No More Balloons 

Thirty-Nine 

Circus 

Forty 

One More Story 

Forty-One 

Transplanted 

Forty-Two 

One Piece for Mary 

Forty-Three 

Putting in the Wood 

Forty-Four 

Which is Cuckoo? 

Forty-Five 

Ready For School 

Forty-Six 

Do Tooths Turn? 

Forty-Seven 

Coat, Cap, Shoes 

Forty-Eight 

Natural History 

Forty-Nine 

No School 

Fifty 

P.S.—(For Santa) 

Fifty-One 

Shoe Lacing 

Fifty-Two 

Measles 

Fifty-Three 

Kept Abed 

Fifty-Four 

Cardboard Soldiers 

Fifty-Five 

Snow to Shovel 

Fifty-Six 

Puzzles 

Fifty-Seven 

Good Dentist 

Fifty-Eight 

Big Game 

Fifty-Nine 

Rubberboot Weather 

Sixty 

Three R’s Plus 

Sixty-One 

Pussy Willows 

Sixty-Two 

Housecleaning 

Sixty-Three 

Feathers for Hats 

Sixty-Four 

Goin’ to Get Gum 

Sixty-Five 

The Veneer Mill 

Sixty-Six 

Apparently a Suicide 

Sixty-Seven 

A Radical’s Progress 

Sixty-Eight 

The Man Who Asks Coolidge 

Sixty-Nine 

A Christmas Piece 

Seventy 

Not Bad Enough 

Seventy-One 

Where Good Teachers Come From 

Seventy-Two 

In Dad’s Office 

Seventy-Three 

Me ’n Ruggles 

Seventy-Four 

C as in False 

Seventy-Five 

Clothing for Lowell 

Post-Scripts 

Reading—The 30’s 

Remembering Mother 

Growing Up in Reading 

For Those Who Have Left 

Bibliography 

About the Editor 

The Louis M. Lyons Foundation

Dedicated

to the

Preservation, Research and Education

of

Conscience and Integrity in Communications

WITH conscience AND INTEGRITY

Volume I

The Ruralist

Columnist 1920-1922

Volume II

G’Nights

The Dialect of Home

Editorialist 1927-1931

Volume III

War Scribe

First Reports Out: Europe Post V-E Day

Foreign War Correspondent 1945

Volume IV

A Pause to Copy

Memoirs of Louis M. Lyons

Journalist

Volume V

Pruitt-Igoe: The True Story of Bidwood #19

Louis Lyons’s self-proclaimed first and only lesson in journalism was delivered by the copy editor of the Boston Globe in 1919, Harry Poor, who told him not to write remarkable in a news story; remarkable was reserved for editorials. Poor told his cub reporter that the job of a news story writer was to make the reader say, Isn’t that remarkable.

—The Editor

Editor’s Preface 

Louis M. Lyons was a twentieth century American print and broadcast journalist, son of Massachusetts, who was born in September of 1897 and who died in April of 1982. The body of work he left behind spans the spectrum of communications and events of that century. His legacy rests with those who see the world and comment with conscience and integrity. The Nieman Foundation for Harvard University’s School of Journalism annually awards journalists whose exemplary work represents the best of communications with conscience and integrity. This award is named in honor of my grandfather, Louis M. Lyons.

America in the early 1960’s was difficult for this wordsmith. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was deeply felt by him. The moral compass of the country was disturbing to him, primarily the issues of race relations here at home and the bloodbath in Southeast Asia. Personally and professionally overwhelmed with the loss of hope, these national disgraces and the lack of inspirational leadership, he listened to the comforting advice of his friend, publisher Alfred P. Knopf. Knopf implored him to write his memoirs to gain perspective on where we’ve come as a country and to offer hope for where we are to collectively go forward together.

The typewriter on the desk in his den on the second floor of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Kenway Street became his retreat. He wrote there during the late winter of 1963 through the early spring of 1964. His style of writing was stream of conscious. His memoirs became a conversation from his heart, beaten out by hand on the keys of his weathered manual word machine. The chapters were not written in the chronological order of his life. They do, as was his intent, flow together effortlessly. Meant to be delivered as a rough draft copy to Knopf, they were left unpolished, the edges untouched by a copy editor. Months into this endeavor, the shock of Alfred Knopf’s untimely death resulted in the manuscript being boxed and shelved away in a third floor attic of his home. Without his friend’s presence eagerly awaiting the read and with the loss of his encouragement, the project ceased to exist. Decades later, shortly before his own death, the box was found. His perusal of the contents led him to compose his final thoughts.

The manuscript was pilfered by well-meaning friends after his death and pieces were re-produced out of context by many, including the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Nieman Foundation in their Nieman Reports. Indeed, the effort of his original manuscript renewed his own memory as a few years later he undertook the massive literary effort of writing a comprehensive history of The Boston Globe and writings for the Nieman Foundation. Themes found in his previous writings pre-1963 wind their way onto these pages. An overlap is obvious. He comments on this in his final thoughts written in 1981, wistfully remarking that he wished he had had the manuscript in hand when he subsequently wrote the books and other writings because it would have made the tasks so much easier.

After his death, the original manuscript was kept by his widow Totty at Kenway Street. After her death, it was lovingly hidden away in the sock drawer of his youngest son, Thomas Tolman Lyons, for many years and then transferred to his second son, my father, John Winship Lyons, where he kept it hidden in the back of his top desk drawer. Totty’s daughter, Sheila King, kept a full photo-copy of the manuscript along with the original final thoughts in a box deep in the back of the top shelf of her daughter’s closet.

In the spring of 2004 the family decided to allow the manuscript to be made public. By unanimous agreement, the children of Louis M. Lyons gave me, his granddaughter, the distinct privilege and honor of being his final editor.

I then began an exciting journey through the life and times of my grandfather. Transcribing the memoirs into a digital format became the thrust of my initial efforts. After purchasing a laptop computer, my daughter (his great granddaughter Margaret Jessee Lyons) and I spent a week in July on the Outer Banks of North Carolina beginning what would turn into an eight month task for me of digitally preserving the original manuscript in preparation for editing and publishing.

After having read through the manuscript several times, and in the midst of transcribing and editing them, by the fall of 2004 I decided I was ready for the road. I traveled from my farm in Maryland to Cambridge, Boston, Springfield, Reading, Norwell and Newburyport in Massachusetts to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C. I retraced his steps, speaking to his children, his remaining colleagues and his contemporary professionals and walked the same streets and roads as he did while contemplating the same sunrises and sunsets of his life. During my travels, after a day or evening of being the recipient of first class meals, hospitality and warm talks of memories of my grandfather, I would retreat to a hotel room and continue the clacking input of his memoirs to digital disk, the next day finding me back on the road.

The text of the memoirs revealed tangents of writing that were not well known to his family nor to his colleagues. Hidden within the pages were slivers of revelations that sent me off in new directions. He mentioned that he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor a column called The Ruralist and His Problems which led me to the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston to talk with their curator and librarian archivist. Showing them the original manuscript and elements of his writing samples, they agreed that he could be the heretofore anonymous writer of these columns. In those days columnists’ writings were considered the property of the publisher and therefore writers were not given bylines. Fires had destroyed their business records from the early part of that century, and so they were unable to document his contributions to their organization.

The columns were written in the early 1920’s while he was living in Springfield, Massachusetts and writing for the Springfield Republican. His wife’s mother and her sisters Ruth and Ethel were practicing Christian Scientists, even though he and his wife were not. Through his earlier work as an agricultural reporter in Springfield and his then current position as a reporter, his knowledge of the western Massachusetts’ countryside, seasons, harvests and farmers’ issues was vast and deep. The archivist had me follow her to the microfiche files of the Christian Science Monitor, where we spent the afternoon searching out an example of these early columns, of which we found two. The writing was his. I was told that the archives of the paper had invested in ProQuest, a process of scanning the newspapers for digital preservation and then meticulously cataloguing the information. This service was not available for the public to peruse or research in their library. As a child of card catalogues and the stacks, having completed my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertations on typewriters with bottles of white out in the pre-computer age, I cringed at the thought of hours beside boxes of rolls of microfiche, trying to piece together these columns with a bucket of quarters in the middle of my local library. Back at the hotel I made a round of calls and found that the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. had the ProQuest of the Christian Science Monitor all the way back to the beginning of the paper. This meant that the early 1920’s would be part of this file. They invited me to come and research my grandfather’s work using their resources. I drove straight down to D.C. from Boston through the night, afraid that the person that I had talked to that late afternoon would somehow change their mind by the next morning. It was worth the ride. I spent the next few days in fourteen hour stretches sequestered in a basement room with complete access to the archives. The museum was undergoing renovations at the time, and so for my inconvenience they gave me free prints of his columns and all the other coverage of his life covered over the years by the Christian Science Monitor. I left clutching all 128 columns of The Ruralist and His Problems and feeling profoundly the kindness of strangers.

Feeling a newfound confidence, I returned directly to Cambridge to the WGBH studios in search of anyone or anything reminiscent of my grandfather. He was one of the first radio news broadcasters and then one of the first television news anchors for the station. To my delight the head of WGBH took my call and enthusiastically recalled his memories of my grandfather. He invited me to the studio directly. I showed up promptly. I was met by the head of the preservation department. She was delightful and introduced me to a young man whose duties were to catalog on the computer the warehouse of radio and television tapes and to help select those worthy of digital preservation, an incredibly expensive process and therefore reserved for only a highly select few. He immediately told me a story that happened to him many months before when he came upon film tapings of Edward R. Murrow being interviewed by Louis Lyons. He slipped the films to the union technicians in the building and asked them to transfer them to videotape, a process that also was expensive and done only after a highly selective process. He said he knew these tapes were exceptional, after all, Edward R. Murrow! He then began seeing Louis Lyons tapes everywhere and occasionally would slip one down the hall to his buddies in the tech shop to have them transferred to video format.

The computer screen in front of him was blazing with columns of dates and names and programs. He picked up a small cardboard box, opened it revealing an old wheeled tape from a radio program long ago. He explained that these tapes would deteriorate if played now, and therefore only one play through would be left and that play through would have to be done by a certified technician that would be preserving it to the next level of technology. After that play through, the tape was unusable. Many of the tapes disintegrate during the process. He rolled his chair across the room and dug out a handful of videos.

Offering to set me up down the hall with a video machine, he settled me in front of a screen, showed me how to manipulate the controls, switched off the lights and closed the door. I then watched hours of my grandfather interviewing Murrow, Navy Admirals, freedom rider photographers and others. My favorite was a Christmas program where he traded places with Julia Childs and they filmed in each other’s studios pretending to be the other. She could be seen developing strips of film with the conductor of the Boston Symphony and he making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in her apron at her kitchen counter with her fancy knives. A pre-broadcast taping of his anguish and anger at hearing of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was riveting. I wept. Seeing my grandfather alive again and hearing his voice after 22 years since his passing was unbelievably moving. I am glad I was alone.

I had to rewind the first tape three times because I found it hard to pay attention to the content of the interview. I was focused on his hands, his face, his voice, his eyebrows, his coat jacket, his tie, his collar; everything except the words exchanged between him and Murrow! While rewinding one of the tapes, I became bored and sketched the initials LML with the dates 1897-1982 on a piece paper and used a thumbtack to attach it to a blank bulletin board in the room. Hours later, the young preservationist stuck his head into the room and asked me how I was doing. We chit chatted while I gathered up the tapes. He stood dumbfounded in the center of the room. I asked