How short is the life of man! Here a babe was born, who lived his infancy, youth, manhood; who achieved as one in a million; who died: yet the house of his birth—old at the time—still stubbornly stands as if to make mock of our ambitions. A hundred years ago Fairhaven had a dozen men or more who, with an auger, an adz, a broadax and a drawshave, could build a boat or a house warranted to outlast the owner.
I had tea in this house where H. H. Rogers was born and where his boyhood days were spent. I fetched an armful of wood for the housewife, and would have brought a bucket of water for her from the pump, only the pump is now out of commission, having been replaced by the newfangled waterworks presented to the town by a Standard Oil magnate. Here Henry Rogers brought chips in a wheelbarrow from the shipyard on baking-days; here he hoed the garden and helped his mother fasten up the flaming, flaring hollyhocks against the house with strips of old sailcloth and tacks.
There were errands to look after, and usually a pig, and sometimes two, that accumulated adipose on purslane and lamb's-quarters, with surplus clams for dessert, also quahaugs to preserve the poetic unities. Then there came a time when the family kept a cow, which was pastured on the common, the herd being looked after by a man who had fought valiantly in the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve, and who used to tell the boys about it, fighting the battles over with crutch and cane.
In the Winter the ice sometimes froze solid clean across Buzzards Bay. The active and hustling boys had skates made by the village blacksmith. Henry Rogers had two pair, and used to loan one pair out for two cents an hour. Boys who had no skates and could not beg or borrow and who had but one cent could sometimes get one skate for a while and thus glide gracefully on one foot. There was good fishing through the ice, only it was awful cold work and not much pay, for fish could hardly be given away. In the Summer there were clams to dig, blueberries to gather, and pond-lilies had a value—I guess so! Then in the early Spring folks raked up their yards and made bonfires of the Winter's debris. Henry Rogers did these odd jobs, and religiously took his money home to his mother, who placed it in the upper right-hand corner of a bureau drawer. The village school was kept by an Irishman who had attended Harvard. He believed in the classics and the efficacy of the ferrule, and doted on Latin, which he also used as a punishment. Henry Rogers was alive and alert and was diplomatic enough to manage the Milesian pedagogue without his ever knowing it. The lessons were easy to him—he absorbed in the mass. Besides that, his mother helped nights by the light of a whale-oil lamp, for her boy was going to grow up to be a schoolteacher—or possibly a minister, who knows!
Out in Illinois, when the wanderlust used to catch the evolving youth, who was neither a boy nor a man, he ran away and went Out West. In New England the same lad would have shipped before the mast, and let his parents guess where he was—their due punishment for lack of appreciation.
To grow up on the coast and hear the tales of the seafaring men who have gone down to the sea in ships, is to catch it sooner or later. At fifteen Henry Rogers caught it, and was duly recorded to go on a whaler. Luckily his mother got word of it, and canceled the deal. About then, good fortune arrived in the form of Opportunity. The young man who peddled the New Bedford "Standard" wanted to dispose of his route.
Henry bought the route and advised with his mother afterward, only to find that she had sent the seller to him. Honors were even. His business was to deliver the papers with precision. Later he took on the Boston papers, also. This is what gave rise to the story that Henry Rogers was a newsboy.
He was a newsboy, but he was a newsboy extraordinary. He took orders for advertisements for the "Standard," and was also the Fairhaven correspondent, supplying the news as to who was visiting whom; giving names of good citizens who were shingling their chicken-houses, and mentioning those enjoying poor health. Whether the news did anybody any good or not matters little—the boy was learning to write. In after-years he used to refer to this period of his life as his "newspaper career." Superstitious persons have been agitated about that word "Standard," and how it should have ominously come into the life of H. H. Rogers at this early time.
When the railroad came in, Henry got a job as assistant baggageman. The conductorship was in sight—twenty years away, but promised positively by a kind relative—when something else appeared on the horizon, and a good job was exchanged for a better one.
An enterprising Boston man had established a chain of grocery-stores along the coast, and was monopolizing the business or bidding fair to do so. By buying for many stores, he could buy cheaper than any other one man could. But the main point of the plan was the idea of going to the home, taking the order and delivering the goods. Before that, if you wanted things you went to the store, selected them and carried them home. To have asked the storekeeper to deliver the goods to your house would have given that gentleman heart-failure. He did mighty well to carry in stock the things that people needed. But here was a revolutionary method—a new deal. Henry Rogers' father said it was initiative gone mad, and would last only a few weeks. Henry Rogers' mother said otherwise, and Henry agreed with her. He had clerked in his father's grocery, and so knew something of the business. Moreover, he knew the people—he knew every family in Fairhaven by name, and almost every one for six miles around as well.