Boris Karloff - Story Of Wood

An anthology series presenting tales of suspense and the supernatural, often featuring the host in chilling narratives.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Boris Karlov speaking. I am here with the
story for you from the files of the reader's digest
This is the story of the most versatile of all
living substances. It is held man in his cradle. It
warmed his hearth. It will make him his last long home.
This is the story of wood. When living, a tree

(00:26):
sweetens the air where it breathes, it lays the dust
and tempers the wind. And when it is fell'd, soorn
and seasoned, it lays bare the hidden beauty of its
heart in figures and grains more lovely than the most
premeditated design. Touch any object made of wood, the table
top of bright maple, the chopping bowl of cleanly birch,

(00:50):
a paddle wall of knotty pine, the lean strength of
an ash rake handle, or a tobacco pipe of briar.
Pass your fingers over this wood, then press your full
palm upon its firmness. Compared with metal or clay or stone,
it still seems warm, still living out its useful days.

(01:12):
Wood has gone into the very fiber of our nation.
With a thousand and more native species of trees, the
United States started out with the greatest forest heritage that
ever felt the lot of a lucky people. Our first
exports back to England from the Jamestown Colony were from
the forest mighty pines for masts, pitch, turpentine, black walnut.

(01:36):
When British shot fell back harmless from the live oak
sides of the fricked Constitution, then she got her name
Old Ironsides. And when the Backwoods boys fought beside Robert E.
Lee and their homespans died with butternut, they were known
as butternuts. The cabin where Lincoln was born was made
of the logs of that grand old tree, the American

(01:59):
white oak, and the rails that he split were black walnut.
Wood fired the racing steamboats on the Mississippi and fed
the first railroads. We spanned the treeless plains on ties
cut from eastern forests, on rims of hickory and spokes
of oak. Pioneers rolled west to the Pacific, and there

(02:20):
new woods came to hand, red woods and Douglas fir
three hundred feet high, timbers such as man had never
seen before. Form and plan are in the very structure
of wood. From the moment that it begins to grow,
it can overcome upstacle split rocks apart and travel far

(02:41):
in search of water. It can adjust to circumstances, it
can endure with an immortality all its own. Wooden piles
under the streets of Venice have been found intact after
a thousand years, and white cedar in the swamps of
eastern Virginia as lay buried and estimated three thousand years,

(03:03):
yet is now being dug up to day and soared
into boards that may last another thousand. Say if you
like that wood has no thoughts and no tongue to
speak them. But let him who says this look into
his own heart and produce for us a thought that
will warm the hearth of a friend, or endure a

(03:23):
thousand years. I found the story of trees in a
back issue of The Reader's Digest, and there's an article
in the current December issue describing a very pleasant way
of looking at them. Three thousand, one hundred and eighty
four miles of them to be exact, all across the
American continent. Thousands of people contribute to this journey, an

(03:46):
army of maintenance crews, signals and despatches, electricians, butcher's pastry cooks.
For this particular tree watching device is a veritable super
hotel on wheels. It is, of course, a stream train.
There's a whole article about the Century and the Super Chief,
both top streamliners, in the December Reader's Digest, and it's

(04:08):
a fascinating one. I'll be joining you soon for more
transcribed stories from the Reader's Digest past and present, but
until then, this is Boris Karloff saying good bye.