Word: elden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...works. Somewhere in the modest stillness of Bryant Pond, someone rotates a crank, jangling the bell on the call box and generating enough current to cause a tab with the caller's number to click down on the switchboard in the pine-paneled back room of Elden Hathaway's house, also known as the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. One of the two operators, comfortably seated a few feet from an abandoned exercise cycle and at right angles to a gun rack, responds to the caller, voice to voice, and makes the requested connection by hand. If nobody picks...
Could anything be more of a family operation? And like every family, the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. had given everybody the illusion that it would live more or less happily ever after. Then Elden Hathaway turned 65, thought some, and quietly sold for $50,000 the stock in the business he had bought for $2,500 in 1951. Elden: who had strung Army field wire at $14 a mile to add to the 100 or so subscribers he began with. Elden: who had tinkered with one secondhand switchboard after another-Western Electric, Stromberg-Carlson, Northern Electric. Elden: who had pulled...
...fuss took Elden Hathaway by surprise. Shock is more like it. A cheerful bear of a man with a beard, a bristling brush cut and a voice that booms as if he were fighting a bad connection, Hathaway exudes the durability associated with oak trees, granite boulders and other sturdy natural acts of Maine. But he is also a stoic after the New England manner, accustomed to the coming and, mostly, the going of all things human. Piece by piece, the Bryant Pond he was born into, two houses down from where he lives today, has vanished...
...When Elden was a boy, Bryant Pond boasted a dozen stores: a butcher's shop, a grain store, a milliner, a harness shop with cobbler's trade on the side. There was Chase's Variety. There was Cole's Hardware ("Quick sales and small profits," the proprietors used to say). An opera house, burned in 1928, was the pride of the town. An ice cream parlor and pool hall did business in the basement. Silent films with piano accompaniment were regularly featured. Young Elden popped the corn and hawked his products to customers at a nickel...
...making every effort to preserve its civility. To the old list of God and politics, the crank phone has been added as a topic requiring the utmost diplomatic discretion. "Some people have got the idea I'm carpetbagging on them," says Hathaway. But nobody speaks more affectionately of Elden than Alice Johnson, the chair of the Don't Yank the Crank committee, who came to Bryant Pond twelve years ago as an art teacher in the elementary school. She married another outsider and settled down in a handsome mid-19th century home by the lake. A Cuisinart...