He went scratching on.
The lights we saw ahead of us were those of Painesville, Ohio, another manufacturing and trans-shipping city like Conneaut and Ashtabula, and this was the Grand River we were crossing, a rather modest stream, it seemed to me, for so large a name. (I learned its title from a picture postcard later in the city.)
One should be impressed with the development of this picture postcard business in American towns. What is there to photograph, you might ask, of any of these places, large or small? Well, waterworks and soldiers' monuments and the residences of principal citizens, and so on and so forth. When I was a boy in Warsaw and earlier in Evansville and Sullivan, there wasn’t a single picture postcard of this kind—only those highly colored “panoramas” or group views of the principal cities, like New York and Chicago, which sold for a quarter or at least fifteen cents. Of the smaller towns there was nothing, literally nothing. No small American town of that date would have presumed to suppose that it had anything of interest to photograph, yet on this trip there was scarcely a village that did not contain a rack somewhere of local views, if no more than of clouds and rills and cattle standing in water near an old bridge. By hunting out the leading drug store first, we could almost invariably discover all there was to know about a town in a scenic way, or nearly all. It was most gratifying.
This change in the number and character of our national facilities as they affect the very small towns had been impressing me all the way. When I was from eight to sixteen years of age, there was not a telephone or a trolley car or an ice cream soda fountain (in the modern sense of that treasure) or a roller-skating rink or a roller skate or a bicycle, or an automobile or phonograph, or a moving picture theatre, or indeed anything like the number of interesting and new things we have now—flying machines and submarines, for instance. It is true that just about that time—1880-1886—when I left Warsaw for the world outside, I was beginning to encounter the first or some solitary examples of these things. Thus the first picture postcards I ever found were in Chicago in 1896 or thereabouts, several years after I had visited the principal eastern cities, and I would have seen them if there had been any. The first electric light I ever saw was in Evansville, Indiana, in 1882, where to my youthful delight and amazement they were erecting tall, thin skeleton towers of steel, not less than one hundred and twentyfive feet high, and only about four feet in diameter—(you may still see them in Fort Wayne, Indiana)—and carrying four arc lights each at the top. Fifty such towers were supposed to light the whole city of Evansville, a place of between forty and fifty thousand, and they did, in a dim, mooney way. I remember as a boy of twelve standing in wonder, watching them being put up. Evansville seemed such a great city to me then. These towers were more interesting as a spectacle than useful as a lighting system, however, and were subsequently taken down.
The first telephone I ever saw was one being installed in the Central Fire Station at Vincennes, Indiana, in 1880 or thereabouts. At the time my mother was paying the enforced visit, later to be mentioned, to the wife of the captain of this particular institution, a girl who had worked for her as a seamstress years before. I was no more than eight at the time, and full of a natural curiosity, and I remember distinctly staring at the peculiar instrument which was being hung on a post in the centre of the fire station, and how the various firemen and citizens stood about and gaped. There was much excitement among the men because of the peculiar powers of the strange novelty. I think, from the way they stared at it, while Frank Bellett, the Captain, first talked through it to some other office in the little city, they felt there must be something spooky about it—some legerdemain by which the person talking at the other end made himself small and came along the wire, or that there was some sprite with a voice inside the box which as an intermediary did all the talking for both parties. I know I felt that there must be some such supernatural arrangement about it, and for this reason I too looked with awe and wonder. As days passed, however, and considerable talking was done through it, and my own mother, putting the receiver to her ear, listened while her friend, the wife, called from somewhere outside, my awe, if not the wonder, wore off. For years, though, perhaps because I never used one until nearly ten years later, the mystic character of the thing stuck in my mind.
THE BRIDGE THAT IS TO MAKE FRANKLIN FAMOUS
It was much the same thing with the trolley car and the roller skate and the bicycle. I never saw a trolley car until I was seventeen or eighteen years of age, and then only an experimental one conducted on a mile of track laid on North Avenue, Chicago, by the late Charles T. Yerkes, at that time the principal traction magnate of Chicago. He was endeavoring to find out whether the underground trolley was a feasible thing for use in Chicago or not and had laid a short experimental section, or had had it laid for him. I was greatly astonished, when I first saw it, to think it would go without any visible means of propulsion—and that in spite of the fact that I had already seen the second cable road built in America running in State Street, Chicago, as early as 1884. At that time, our family having come to Chicago for the summer, I ran an errand for a West Madison Street confectioner which took me to a candy manufacturer’s basement in State Street. There, through a window in the front of the store, underground, I saw great engines going, and a cable on wheels spinning by. Every now and then the grip of a car would appear and disappear past an opening under the track, which was here. It was most astonishing, and gave me a sense of vast inexplicable mystery which is just as lively today as it ever was, and as warranted.
In regard to the bicycle, the first one I ever saw was in Warsaw in 1884—a high-wheeled one, not a safety!—and the first pair of roller skates I ever saw was in the same place in 1885, when some adventurous amusement provider came there and opened a roller-skating parlor. It was a great craze for a while, and my brother Ed became an expert, though I never learned. There were various storms in our family over the fact that he was so eager for it, staying out late and running away, and because my mother, sympathetic soul, aided and abetted him, so keen was her sympathy with childhood and play, whereas my father, stern disciplinarian that he was, objected. Often have I seen Ed hanging about my mother’s skirts, and she, distressed and puzzled, finally giving him a quarter out of her hard earned store to enjoy himself. He ought certainly to have the most tender memories of her.
The first ice cream soda fountain I ever saw, or the first ice cream soda I ever tasted, was served to me in Warsaw, Indiana, at the corner book store, opposite the courthouse, subsequently destroyed. That was in 1885. It was called to my attention by a boy named Judson Morris, whose father owned the store, and it served as an introduction and a basis for future friendship, our family having newly moved to Warsaw. It had just succeeded a drink known as the milk shake, which had attained great popularity everywhere the preceding year. But ice cream soda! By my troth, how pale and watery milk shake seemed in comparison! I fell, a giddy victim, and have never since recovered myself or become as enthusiastic over any other beverage.