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pageant. He had a reputation for putting on
pageants and plays, and in Dublin, New Hampshire, he kept the
summer colony amused with entertainments at the outdoor theatre on
his place. He was a very ingenious and versatile person,
primarily an artist, but also a well-known Egyptologist; before the days
of color photography he made paintings of the interiors of Egyptian
tombs in minute detail. Locally he was known for designing the figures
on Dedham pottery. He was a friend of my parents, and they were
instrumental in getting him for the pageant.
The Smiths occasionally came out to spend a weekend with
us — in fact my first proposal was to one of their daughters when
I was about six — but in preparation for the anniversary doings, Uncle
Joe and Aunt Corinna, his wife, spent several days while
the show was being organized. Uncle Joe made an enormous cornucopia on
our back porch, which was later trucked down to the Winsor field and
filled with fruit and vegetables. He made the skeletal frame out of
laths and heavy electric wire, and once properly shaped he pasted strips
of newspaper from wire to wire to make the contraption look solid.
My job was to tear paper into strips of the proper
length and keep him supplied, and at
the same time keep myself out of trouble. However, somewhere along the
way I did something that displeased him and he got perfectly furious. I
took to my heels, then, about halfway round the house, he
caught me and slapped me several times and told me
firmly that my services were no longer required. Needless to say, the
horn was finished without my assistance.
The Winsor farm, where the pageant was held, was the largest single
landholding in town and covered an extensive area of fields and woods
and pastureland, crossed by numerous woodroads |
