June 2, 2025 • 18 mins
Dive into the past with our latest episode as we explore two segments from John Nesbitt's Passing Parade in 1944. Discover the heartfelt tales of the 'hired girl' in the early 20th century and the profound changes brought by World War II that left some people eager to return to "Old Town." This episode is a beautiful reflection on childhood, domestic life, and the evolution of society. Don't miss this chance to connect with history and enjoy a nostalgic journey! Tune in now!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pardon me, are you?
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Adam Graham the very same?
Speaker 3 (00:04):
And this is my old time radio snack wagon.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to the Old Time Radio snack Wagon, where we
serve up a bite sized portion of old time radio.
And now here's your snack wagon host, Adam Graham.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Today we're serving up a double portion of the Passing
Parade with John Nesbit. I was thinking of sharing one
specific story from the Passing Parade, and in my search
I found the wrong one. But then I realized, even
though that wasn't what I was looking for, and the
(00:46):
one that I was looking for aired four months later,
the stories fit together and had similar thoughts behind them.
And this was during a time when Nesbit's Passing Parade
was a feature on the show of that great baritone
John Charles Thomas, and these segments were a little bit shorter,
and I think I can easily fit both of them
(01:09):
into the format of our Old Time Radio snack Wagon.
John Nesbund and most of the people in old time
Radio are from another time, but really they weren't formed
by or created by the world of the nineteen forties
and fifties. That's the world they helped make. They experienced
(01:30):
life before that and lived in a world that was
even more different than that of the forties and fifties,
and that world was changed before their eyes, and World
War two sped up that change. Well. Here now are
two segments of the passing Parade on that theme with
John Nesbitt from the John Charles Thomas Show, with the
(01:53):
stories the Hired Girl an Old Town from June fourth
and then October fifteenth of nineteen forty four.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
No no, Noah, nobody but you no no, I stick
I trade you for me. No no, no, no.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Nora, no no.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
For the past year, John Nesbitt has been parading past
our microphones a procession of the great.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
People of the world today.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
However, his chief character is not high up in the
ladder of fame at all. And yet I prophesy that
most of us know her very well. But that's a
matter for jn Nesbitt.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Now that hiring somebody to do your housework for you
is just one of those dim memories of the past.
We got to thinking that it was about time that
the old hired Girl was given a special citation in
our passing parade. It's about time that somebody told her story.
The story of the Hired girl, and her name you'll
remember was usually Nara or Bridget or Annie or Helga
(03:09):
or Lizzie or even Katinka. From a San Francisco newspaper
for the year nineteen ten, I copied this wantead wanted.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Good strong girl.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Must be regular church goer, no visitors permitted, cook, care
of children, laundry and sewing, downstairs cleaning, send photograph, birth
certificate or immigration papers. Wages eight dollars per month. And
found Now, if a hired girl came to the city
to work, she got better wages, but behind her she
(03:40):
left the sunlight and the clean air and much of
the dignity that she could know on a farm. And
we didn't call Helga or Annie a hired girl in
the city. We called her our parlor maid because it
sounded fancier that way. Beat out the carpets with the
big wicker swatter the old broom, Lizzie, shake the dirt
out of the velvet drapes. Elga, get up in the
(04:01):
ladder and climb up and dust off the chandelier's Bridget.
And then after you've given the children their breakfast, take
my husband's tray up to him, boil the linen and
hang out the wash, Norah or else, what are we
paying you fifteen dollars a month for now? There was
one hired girl, and this piece is really dedicated to
her in love and dear memory, who came straight off
(04:21):
the boat to our old fashioned house in Boston just
before the last war. And she was the last of
a long line of Lizzies and Algas and bridgets, none
of whom had been able to survive the fact that
the four boys were in a kind of hero worship stage,
our heroes being the cats and jammer kids in the
funny papers. So we considered that a giant firecracker tossed
(04:43):
under the maid's bed was always good for a laugh,
And from time to time we little angels would lug
home a large snapping turtle from the public reservoir, and
just for safe keeping, you understand, we would put it
into the maid's bed. All of that I wished to report, however,
was before the entry into our lives of a Swedish
girl whose name was Effie. Effie was tall and clean
(05:06):
and blue eyed, and she had a mouthful of gold
teeth of which she was very proud, and she had
a ringing, hearty laugh that would start the dishes shaking
on the table, and she had an irresistible joy of
life that filled the old fashioned house like music. Effie
arrived on a blistering hot day one August, and by
afternoon she was already hard at work hosing down the
(05:26):
back porch to cool off the kitchen, and so this
seemed a suitable occasion for us to install over the
slightly ajar screen door one bucket of water, which was scheduled.
When Effie came back in and opened the door to
deposit three gallons of water upon her head. We considered
this a very neat engineering job and a suitable initiation
(05:47):
into our home for Efie. Just as we were completing
this installation, however, there was a roar of laughter behind us,
and we realized that Effie herself had arrived with the
running hose still in her hand. Holy lucky eye, said
my brother, We've been ambushed. And thereupon a water fight
raged over the back porch that made history. We made
(06:07):
a mass frontal attack at one point in the battle
in an attempt to get the hose away from Effie,
which resulted in the hoses exploding midway and drenching all
of us.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
To the skin, but thirty.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Minutes later, helpless with laughter and still very wet, we
formed a committee of appeal to our parents to keep
Effie from being told to pack her box and leave.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
At once. Effie had the stuff.
Speaker 5 (06:30):
You see, Effie was a champion in her own right,
and there was no more monkey business.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Within a week, she had us fighting among.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Ourselves over the privilege of helping her wipe the dishes.
And we were such reformed characters that the only relapse
into our old evil ways that I can recall occurred
on the occasion in which we stole the shoes of
her policeman friend, a gentleman who used to.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Drop into the kitchen after.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Supper and slip his brogans off under the table while
eating Effie's apple cake and Smergisbourne eight hundred and nine
plates of apple cake. Later, Effie married the policeman, and
she now lives in Boston with three fine sons.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
In the Navy.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
She was only a hired girl, and yet her laughter
rang through the sunlit years of our childhood, and with
the dignity of honest work, she could turn the humble
kitchen into the studio of an artist.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So Hail and farewell Effie. The hired girl, Nellie or Annie.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
Or Helga or Effie, has with this war begun to disappear,
perhaps forever, and we wish her happiness, because her life
was seldom a very happy one. And in her place
the tireless electrical servants do await us all tomorrow. So
it's a fair exchange, a new standard of luxury for us,
and a chance for the family drudge the hired girl
(07:49):
to raise her head from the laundry tubs now and
then and take a good look at the sky. Three
(08:16):
weeks ago, driving back home from a big barren ultra
modern military camphor had been doing some work. I stopped
on Highway one hundred and one by a sign that
I've been passing for years. One mile, it says, to
old Town. Now they have told me that Old Town
is one of the beautiful villages of America. And so
(08:37):
while the garage was fixing a flat and putting on
the spear, I walked down the road to Old Town,
and that mile of winding dirt road carried me back
for thirty years, clear back to childhood.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
For Old Town is a village that.
Speaker 5 (08:51):
Time has passed by since about nineteen five, And there
stands the steeple Church today, dazzling white with new paint,
and the lazy river, choked with willows, lies out there
as stone's throw across the barley fields, and the old
General Store is set high up above Main Street so
that you can back your wagon up to the porch
(09:12):
before it, And the wooden school house has its granite
corner stone that's proudly labeled built by public subscription eighteen
ninety three. Strolling slowly along the wooden walks and going
around the sycamores that grew right up through the boards,
and watching some kids in faded blue overalls playing one
(09:32):
a cat down the street, I must confess that I
suddenly landed in one of those moods that are as
sentimental as an irving Berlin walltz and I began thinking,
why can't we all go back home again to you,
old town.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Whether we called you old Town or.
Speaker 5 (09:49):
Riverdale or Junctionville or Pleasant Valley or Parsons Corners, whatever
your name, you were a place where we lived out
our lives in peace and simplicity, and where we knew
each other every fault and virtue, and where we gossiped
a lot but always helped each other.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
When the trouble came.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
You, Old Town, are the dim lost place where I
carried Mary Jones books to school along these wooden walks
and hooked catfish out of the quiet pool above the dam.
Your shady streets were lined with tidy little houses, each
guarded by its white picket fence and its veranda cool
in the shade of the cecil Bruner, sturdy little houses
(10:28):
built to out last time, set on great granite blocks,
chiseled with careful panes from the quarry down below Tom.
And if you climbed the steep attic stairs from the
great bleak kitchen below, you could see the hand hewn beams,
pegged together with patience and skill, as if their builders
had said, here in this house, many generations shall live
(10:50):
exactly as I have lived, to know the grateful warmth
of shelter after a day of toil, and the lazy,
friendly ticking of the hall clock, and the calm of
night when you looked up through the clean air.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
To see the stars.
Speaker 5 (11:08):
Can we never go back home again to you old town,
and leave to day with its flaming wars and roar
of noise and crash of giant machines. Must the clean
smell of clover be drowned in the fumes of gasoline,
and the quiet stars lost in a cloud of smoke?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Can we never go back home to yesterday?
Speaker 5 (11:31):
And then I left the tree shaded streets of Old
Town and walked back to the great modern highway, humming
with traffic, and I began to remember something else about
Old Town, something else beside the slow, cool river and
walking home with Mary Jones, that forty years ago, when
villages like Old Town flourished in our land, in those sturdy,
(11:52):
rose draped houses that look so quaint and inviting, there
also lived so much human misery that it would shock
us in silence to day that one person in every thirty,
for example, died of typhoid caused by polluted water systems
or no water system at all, And that every winter
a hundred and five thousand old folk died from pneumonia
(12:13):
in those damp and badly heated rooms, and that tuberculosis
raged unchecked in the sunless houses, and that women bore
their children in unspeakable agony or lost them. While the
doctor without telephone was being brought by a boy on
a farm horse over the dark and muddy fields, and
that ignorance killed helpless millions, because no public library stood
(12:34):
with open doors on Main Street, and yet no radio
sent new calls to learning, crackling through the sky. That
the poor were paupers, and we expected them to be grateful,
just to be kept alive. That a hired girl in
nineteen five got eight dollars a month and a room
in the attic, And that men's wives turned from pretty
girls of seventeen into bent, bodied, exhausted middle age at
(12:57):
thirty five, eyes dimmed from soil by the kerosene lamp,
and aching backs from doggedly pounding, dirty clothing that sinks
in the cellar, and the skin of their hands and
faces hard and seamed as old parchment from the blaze
of heat from the coal range in that pine floored kitchen.
Yet there was beauty in old Town, and there was
(13:17):
kindliness there, and patient and peaceful sunny afternoons. But there
was never the leisure to enjoy them. For it was
also a trap that held us in the grip of hard,
relentless labor from dawn to dark. More changes yet are
ahead of us, all more things done by the machine,
(13:38):
and more hours of freedom to study and grow and
search for happiness in new town where our children will
live their lives tomorrow. A new town glistening and modern,
ablaze with light.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Still needs to grow gracefully.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
All.
Speaker 5 (13:53):
We'll admit, we've got to handle these fine, shining automobiles
that have turned Main Street into a parking lot. And
we've got to find ways to let the elm trees
grow tall and mighty along the walks again. But we
can't go home again, not you and I. No pathway
leads back to yesterday, and the gate is locked, and
(14:14):
we lost the keys the day we entered this century
of change. And it's goodbye old Town and Mary Jones
and the dusty roads and the hired girl hanging out
the clothes to dry while the sign points forward.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And we would never.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Really go back to you again, old Town, even if
we could find the lost way.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Welcome back. What I appreciate about this but is his
very unique way of honoring the past and understanding what
was beautiful and charming about it, but leading the audience
to a point of moving on. It's as if he's
speaking at a funeral foreign era. Now, of course, the
(15:12):
end of the Hired Girl had been accelerated by the
coming of World War II, as women were needed to
fill jobs left by men and perform vital work in
defense plants. This gave them new opportunities, and doubtless it
would be hard to get them to return to that
sort of low grade domestic work, and certainly not at
(15:34):
the same wages. And the industrial post war explosion began
to bring more of the electric servants that Nesbit reference.
The two pieces contrasts but filling the same theme. The
first was more personal, with the tribute to Fie and
the story of how she tamed these wild boys and
(15:55):
found a life for herself in a new world. But
again it captured the idea of the world as it
was and how it was changing. The description of the
world of the early twentieth century is shocking, and most
of us can't really imagine how challenging life was back then,
but Nesbit and those who are older than him could.
(16:18):
To us, it might be a startling revelation. To them,
it was a reminder of how far the world had come.
Nesbut's thoughts at the end reflected very much the spirit
of the era in dealing with the changing world. It
was acceptance, but He tendes that with wisdom and a
bit of cautions, he knows that there are challenges ahead.
(16:41):
How well we've met the challenges that Nesbutt mentions and
what others we face today are certainly matters for debate.
He offers some real food for thought. More than eighty
years later, as the world continues to change and we
figure out how to move forward in it, it's time
for me to close up the Old Snackwagon. But don't worry.
(17:04):
We'll be back with another serving of old time radio
goodness before you know it. If you want to enjoy
some of our longer form podcast, you can feast away
at my website at Great Detectives dot net. Your emails
are also welcome at Adam at Snackwagon dot net.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
The Old Time Radio Snackwagon comes to you from Boise, Idaho.
Your host is Adam Graham. Sound production is by Ryn's
Media LLC. You can listen to past episodes of the
Old Time Radio Snackwagon as well as connect on social
media at our website at snackwagon dot net. Email suggestions
(17:42):
for episodes to Adam at Snackwagon dot net. This has
been the Old Time Radio Snackwagon.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Until next time. Good bye,
Pardon me, are you?
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Adam Graham the very same?
Speaker 3 (00:04):
And this is my old time radio snack wagon.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to the Old Time Radio snack Wagon, where we
serve up a bite sized portion of old time radio.
And now here's your snack wagon host, Adam Graham.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Today we're serving up a double portion of the Passing
Parade with John Nesbit. I was thinking of sharing one
specific story from the Passing Parade, and in my search
I found the wrong one. But then I realized, even
though that wasn't what I was looking for, and the
(00:46):
one that I was looking for aired four months later,
the stories fit together and had similar thoughts behind them.
And this was during a time when Nesbit's Passing Parade
was a feature on the show of that great baritone
John Charles Thomas, and these segments were a little bit shorter,
and I think I can easily fit both of them
(01:09):
into the format of our Old Time Radio snack Wagon.
John Nesbund and most of the people in old time
Radio are from another time, but really they weren't formed
by or created by the world of the nineteen forties
and fifties. That's the world they helped make. They experienced
(01:30):
life before that and lived in a world that was
even more different than that of the forties and fifties,
and that world was changed before their eyes, and World
War two sped up that change. Well. Here now are
two segments of the passing Parade on that theme with
John Nesbitt from the John Charles Thomas Show, with the
(01:53):
stories the Hired Girl an Old Town from June fourth
and then October fifteenth of nineteen forty four.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
No no, Noah, nobody but you no no, I stick
I trade you for me. No no, no, no.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Nora, no no.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
For the past year, John Nesbitt has been parading past
our microphones a procession of the great.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
People of the world today.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
However, his chief character is not high up in the
ladder of fame at all. And yet I prophesy that
most of us know her very well. But that's a
matter for jn Nesbitt.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Now that hiring somebody to do your housework for you
is just one of those dim memories of the past.
We got to thinking that it was about time that
the old hired Girl was given a special citation in
our passing parade. It's about time that somebody told her story.
The story of the Hired girl, and her name you'll
remember was usually Nara or Bridget or Annie or Helga
(03:09):
or Lizzie or even Katinka. From a San Francisco newspaper
for the year nineteen ten, I copied this wantead wanted.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Good strong girl.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Must be regular church goer, no visitors permitted, cook, care
of children, laundry and sewing, downstairs cleaning, send photograph, birth
certificate or immigration papers. Wages eight dollars per month. And
found Now, if a hired girl came to the city
to work, she got better wages, but behind her she
(03:40):
left the sunlight and the clean air and much of
the dignity that she could know on a farm. And
we didn't call Helga or Annie a hired girl in
the city. We called her our parlor maid because it
sounded fancier that way. Beat out the carpets with the
big wicker swatter the old broom, Lizzie, shake the dirt
out of the velvet drapes. Elga, get up in the
(04:01):
ladder and climb up and dust off the chandelier's Bridget.
And then after you've given the children their breakfast, take
my husband's tray up to him, boil the linen and
hang out the wash, Norah or else, what are we
paying you fifteen dollars a month for now? There was
one hired girl, and this piece is really dedicated to
her in love and dear memory, who came straight off
(04:21):
the boat to our old fashioned house in Boston just
before the last war. And she was the last of
a long line of Lizzies and Algas and bridgets, none
of whom had been able to survive the fact that
the four boys were in a kind of hero worship stage,
our heroes being the cats and jammer kids in the
funny papers. So we considered that a giant firecracker tossed
(04:43):
under the maid's bed was always good for a laugh,
And from time to time we little angels would lug
home a large snapping turtle from the public reservoir, and
just for safe keeping, you understand, we would put it
into the maid's bed. All of that I wished to report, however,
was before the entry into our lives of a Swedish
girl whose name was Effie. Effie was tall and clean
(05:06):
and blue eyed, and she had a mouthful of gold
teeth of which she was very proud, and she had
a ringing, hearty laugh that would start the dishes shaking
on the table, and she had an irresistible joy of
life that filled the old fashioned house like music. Effie
arrived on a blistering hot day one August, and by
afternoon she was already hard at work hosing down the
(05:26):
back porch to cool off the kitchen, and so this
seemed a suitable occasion for us to install over the
slightly ajar screen door one bucket of water, which was scheduled.
When Effie came back in and opened the door to
deposit three gallons of water upon her head. We considered
this a very neat engineering job and a suitable initiation
(05:47):
into our home for Efie. Just as we were completing
this installation, however, there was a roar of laughter behind us,
and we realized that Effie herself had arrived with the
running hose still in her hand. Holy lucky eye, said
my brother, We've been ambushed. And thereupon a water fight
raged over the back porch that made history. We made
(06:07):
a mass frontal attack at one point in the battle
in an attempt to get the hose away from Effie,
which resulted in the hoses exploding midway and drenching all
of us.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
To the skin, but thirty.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Minutes later, helpless with laughter and still very wet, we
formed a committee of appeal to our parents to keep
Effie from being told to pack her box and leave.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
At once. Effie had the stuff.
Speaker 5 (06:30):
You see, Effie was a champion in her own right,
and there was no more monkey business.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Within a week, she had us fighting among.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Ourselves over the privilege of helping her wipe the dishes.
And we were such reformed characters that the only relapse
into our old evil ways that I can recall occurred
on the occasion in which we stole the shoes of
her policeman friend, a gentleman who used to.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Drop into the kitchen after.
Speaker 5 (06:53):
Supper and slip his brogans off under the table while
eating Effie's apple cake and Smergisbourne eight hundred and nine
plates of apple cake. Later, Effie married the policeman, and
she now lives in Boston with three fine sons.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
In the Navy.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
She was only a hired girl, and yet her laughter
rang through the sunlit years of our childhood, and with
the dignity of honest work, she could turn the humble
kitchen into the studio of an artist.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So Hail and farewell Effie. The hired girl, Nellie or Annie.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
Or Helga or Effie, has with this war begun to disappear,
perhaps forever, and we wish her happiness, because her life
was seldom a very happy one. And in her place
the tireless electrical servants do await us all tomorrow. So
it's a fair exchange, a new standard of luxury for us,
and a chance for the family drudge the hired girl
(07:49):
to raise her head from the laundry tubs now and
then and take a good look at the sky. Three
(08:16):
weeks ago, driving back home from a big barren ultra
modern military camphor had been doing some work. I stopped
on Highway one hundred and one by a sign that
I've been passing for years. One mile, it says, to
old Town. Now they have told me that Old Town
is one of the beautiful villages of America. And so
(08:37):
while the garage was fixing a flat and putting on
the spear, I walked down the road to Old Town,
and that mile of winding dirt road carried me back
for thirty years, clear back to childhood.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
For Old Town is a village that.
Speaker 5 (08:51):
Time has passed by since about nineteen five, And there
stands the steeple Church today, dazzling white with new paint,
and the lazy river, choked with willows, lies out there
as stone's throw across the barley fields, and the old
General Store is set high up above Main Street so
that you can back your wagon up to the porch
(09:12):
before it, And the wooden school house has its granite
corner stone that's proudly labeled built by public subscription eighteen
ninety three. Strolling slowly along the wooden walks and going
around the sycamores that grew right up through the boards,
and watching some kids in faded blue overalls playing one
(09:32):
a cat down the street, I must confess that I
suddenly landed in one of those moods that are as
sentimental as an irving Berlin walltz and I began thinking,
why can't we all go back home again to you,
old town.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Whether we called you old Town or.
Speaker 5 (09:49):
Riverdale or Junctionville or Pleasant Valley or Parsons Corners, whatever
your name, you were a place where we lived out
our lives in peace and simplicity, and where we knew
each other every fault and virtue, and where we gossiped
a lot but always helped each other.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
When the trouble came.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
You, Old Town, are the dim lost place where I
carried Mary Jones books to school along these wooden walks
and hooked catfish out of the quiet pool above the dam.
Your shady streets were lined with tidy little houses, each
guarded by its white picket fence and its veranda cool
in the shade of the cecil Bruner, sturdy little houses
(10:28):
built to out last time, set on great granite blocks,
chiseled with careful panes from the quarry down below Tom.
And if you climbed the steep attic stairs from the
great bleak kitchen below, you could see the hand hewn beams,
pegged together with patience and skill, as if their builders
had said, here in this house, many generations shall live
(10:50):
exactly as I have lived, to know the grateful warmth
of shelter after a day of toil, and the lazy,
friendly ticking of the hall clock, and the calm of
night when you looked up through the clean air.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
To see the stars.
Speaker 5 (11:08):
Can we never go back home again to you old town,
and leave to day with its flaming wars and roar
of noise and crash of giant machines. Must the clean
smell of clover be drowned in the fumes of gasoline,
and the quiet stars lost in a cloud of smoke?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Can we never go back home to yesterday?
Speaker 5 (11:31):
And then I left the tree shaded streets of Old
Town and walked back to the great modern highway, humming
with traffic, and I began to remember something else about
Old Town, something else beside the slow, cool river and
walking home with Mary Jones, that forty years ago, when
villages like Old Town flourished in our land, in those sturdy,
(11:52):
rose draped houses that look so quaint and inviting, there
also lived so much human misery that it would shock
us in silence to day that one person in every thirty,
for example, died of typhoid caused by polluted water systems
or no water system at all, And that every winter
a hundred and five thousand old folk died from pneumonia
(12:13):
in those damp and badly heated rooms, and that tuberculosis
raged unchecked in the sunless houses, and that women bore
their children in unspeakable agony or lost them. While the
doctor without telephone was being brought by a boy on
a farm horse over the dark and muddy fields, and
that ignorance killed helpless millions, because no public library stood
(12:34):
with open doors on Main Street, and yet no radio
sent new calls to learning, crackling through the sky. That
the poor were paupers, and we expected them to be grateful,
just to be kept alive. That a hired girl in
nineteen five got eight dollars a month and a room
in the attic, And that men's wives turned from pretty
girls of seventeen into bent, bodied, exhausted middle age at
(12:57):
thirty five, eyes dimmed from soil by the kerosene lamp,
and aching backs from doggedly pounding, dirty clothing that sinks
in the cellar, and the skin of their hands and
faces hard and seamed as old parchment from the blaze
of heat from the coal range in that pine floored kitchen.
Yet there was beauty in old Town, and there was
(13:17):
kindliness there, and patient and peaceful sunny afternoons. But there
was never the leisure to enjoy them. For it was
also a trap that held us in the grip of hard,
relentless labor from dawn to dark. More changes yet are
ahead of us, all more things done by the machine,
(13:38):
and more hours of freedom to study and grow and
search for happiness in new town where our children will
live their lives tomorrow. A new town glistening and modern,
ablaze with light.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Still needs to grow gracefully.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
All.
Speaker 5 (13:53):
We'll admit, we've got to handle these fine, shining automobiles
that have turned Main Street into a parking lot. And
we've got to find ways to let the elm trees
grow tall and mighty along the walks again. But we
can't go home again, not you and I. No pathway
leads back to yesterday, and the gate is locked, and
(14:14):
we lost the keys the day we entered this century
of change. And it's goodbye old Town and Mary Jones
and the dusty roads and the hired girl hanging out
the clothes to dry while the sign points forward.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And we would never.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Really go back to you again, old Town, even if
we could find the lost way.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Welcome back. What I appreciate about this but is his
very unique way of honoring the past and understanding what
was beautiful and charming about it, but leading the audience
to a point of moving on. It's as if he's
speaking at a funeral foreign era. Now, of course, the
(15:12):
end of the Hired Girl had been accelerated by the
coming of World War II, as women were needed to
fill jobs left by men and perform vital work in
defense plants. This gave them new opportunities, and doubtless it
would be hard to get them to return to that
sort of low grade domestic work, and certainly not at
(15:34):
the same wages. And the industrial post war explosion began
to bring more of the electric servants that Nesbit reference.
The two pieces contrasts but filling the same theme. The
first was more personal, with the tribute to Fie and
the story of how she tamed these wild boys and
(15:55):
found a life for herself in a new world. But
again it captured the idea of the world as it
was and how it was changing. The description of the
world of the early twentieth century is shocking, and most
of us can't really imagine how challenging life was back then,
but Nesbit and those who are older than him could.
(16:18):
To us, it might be a startling revelation. To them,
it was a reminder of how far the world had come.
Nesbut's thoughts at the end reflected very much the spirit
of the era in dealing with the changing world. It
was acceptance, but He tendes that with wisdom and a
bit of cautions, he knows that there are challenges ahead.
(16:41):
How well we've met the challenges that Nesbutt mentions and
what others we face today are certainly matters for debate.
He offers some real food for thought. More than eighty
years later, as the world continues to change and we
figure out how to move forward in it, it's time
for me to close up the Old Snackwagon. But don't worry.
(17:04):
We'll be back with another serving of old time radio
goodness before you know it. If you want to enjoy
some of our longer form podcast, you can feast away
at my website at Great Detectives dot net. Your emails
are also welcome at Adam at Snackwagon dot net.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
The Old Time Radio Snackwagon comes to you from Boise, Idaho.
Your host is Adam Graham. Sound production is by Ryn's
Media LLC. You can listen to past episodes of the
Old Time Radio Snackwagon as well as connect on social
media at our website at snackwagon dot net. Email suggestions
(17:42):
for episodes to Adam at Snackwagon dot net. This has
been the Old Time Radio Snackwagon.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Until next time. Good bye,
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