Looking Back: Do you live in ‘Narrowville’ with the Waybackers?
Published: Thursday, April 04, 2013By Tedd Levy
oldsaybrookhistory@gmail.com
IN A WARM-HEARTED BOOK ABOUT CHARACTERS IN A TOWN CALLED NARROWVILLE, author Joe Cone (1869-1918) wrote that “there was no manufacturing in Narrowville, unless we make exception of the fairly prosperous ‘yarn’ industry which was carried on at the leading village store. Here yarns were spun unceasingly.”
His book, titled “The Waybackers,” reflects the life and times of many small towns in 1905 when Cone wrote it. He provides sketches of common folks that are humorous, clever, perceptive, and reflect human nature. Even today, his descriptions of everyday life contain flashes of insight that are inescapably familiar.
Cone was born in East Haddam, a direct descendant of Daniel Cone, one of the town’s first settlers. By the time he was 15, he went to work making fish nets for the American Net and Twine Company. In his spare time, he played cornet in the Moodus and East Haddam Cornet Bands.
Four years after he began working, the company moved to East Cambridge, Mass., and took 19-year-old Joe with them, where he became the head machinist and draftsman. Two years later, he married his childhood sweetheart, Emma Elizabeth Clevenshire.
He was doing well at the job, and the company sent him to work in Chicago and then Baltimore. By the time he was 28, he had learned mechanical drawing, was the foreman responsible for building special machinery, and, in the meantime, also took an English course at Harvard.
He was attracted to poetry and writing, drawing and music, and from time to time wrote for Boston and Connecticut newspapers and various magazines.
Even before moving to Saybrook, he gained some recognition for his cheerful writings and his poems were published in Boston newspapers and such national magazines as Life, Judge and Puck.
In 1899, he started a magazine called “Little Joker and Storyist” and in the same year published a book of poems called “Heart and Home Ballads.”
For several years he wrote a daily column of poems and commentary for the Boston Herald called “Uncle Ezra Sez.” During this productive time, he contributed to newspapers such as New York Sun, magazines like the Pictorial Review, Youth’s Companion, Suburban Life, Christian Endeavor World and Connecticut Magazine.
His active mind and creative talent ultimately caused him to leave the company in 1904 and move to Old Saybrook, where he purchased a home at 108 Old Boston Post Road with a small out-building, which he used as an office where he could write and where he started the Old Saybrook Print Shop.
He found fertile ground in Saybrook for his energy and writing. Meeting in his home in 1905 with many members of the old Saybrook Cornet Band, including baritone horn players Herbert and Frederick Stokes, proprietors of the town’s largest grocery store, and alto horn player Guiles Bushnell, a director of the Deep River National Bank, they organized the Musical and Dramatic Club “to raise a fund for the purpose of purchasing land and building a public hall thereon.”
They incorporated in November 1906 and began raising money by presenting plays, operettas, concerts and suppers. Joe and his wife, Emma, and daughter Irene performed in some of the plays. Among the large donors was Morgan Gardner Bulkeley who was born and raised in East Haddam and had a summer home in Fenwick. Finally, on May 26, 1911, a colonial revival-style brick building at a cost of $20,000 was completed and dedicated, today’s Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center.
One notable example of his earthy humor occurred at a time when automobile manufacturing was a competitive and serious manufacturing activity in Connecticut. After the prominent Pope Company in Hartford closed, many others also decided to end production.
Many of these firms were threatened with legal action by Henry Ford for trumped-up charges of patent infringements. To expose these underhanded tactics, Cone placed an announcement in the newspaper stating that he had been accepted as the local agent for the Hess Mobile, a nonexistent car that was a wind-up toy made in Germany.
It wasn’t long before the announcement came to the attention of Ford, who sent a letter threatening to sue.
“Our attorneys inform us that in some important mechanical features the Hess Mobile infringes upon patents owned and controlled by the Ford Motor Car Company, and I therefore warn you against further attempts at demonstration and sale under penalty of legal prosecution.”
During World War I, Cone put his mechanical skills to work making submarine engines at the New London Ship and Engine Company in Groton, today the Electric Boat Company. At the same time, he wrote nearly two dozen Home Guard Ballads published by the New London Day, and was chief bugler in the Saybrook Home Guard.
In support of the war effort, he wrote a short poem called “Pen, or Musket.”
I’ve a pen and I’ve a musket,
And I’m full of pep, I am,
And in case of war I offer
Either one to Uncle Sam.
I can launch a round of poems
That would win most any scrap.
If my Uncle wants the musket,
The musket it shall be;
If he thinks the verse more fatal
Let him leave the verse to me.
Shortly after, he was taken suddenly ill and operated on for intestinal obstruction at the Hospital St. Raphael in New Haven. The procedure was not successful, and his short life of 48 years came to an end on March 29, 1918.
The New London Day reported that “50 members of the Home Guard of which he was the chief bugler, marched at the head of the funeral party to the First Congregational Church which was crowded to its full capacity by friends ...”
The Rev. William F. White conducted the service, including a reading of Cone’s favorite poem, “The House on the Side of the Road.” His friends from Stokes’ Country Store served as pall bearers for the burial at Riverview Cemetery: Capt. John A. Ayer, Dr. William H. Wolfe, Herbert B. Stokes and William R. Bushnell.
“Joe just couldn’t help writing, and when he wrote he couldn’t help being cheerful and optimistic,” Newton Newkirk writes in the Boston Post. “His lines always breathed ‘help and hope’ and courage. And that’s why people read what he wrote and clipped his lines to carry around in their pocketbooks or paste in their scrapbooks.
“Au revoir, Joe, old friend — au revoir and good luck on the long journey. If there is a tear in my eye it is a tear of gratitude for your good humor and your comradeship. You lived to the end your creed of cheerfulness and the world is better and brighter because you tarried in it. So, bon voyage, Joe — good luck and God bless you,” Newkirk concludes.
Cone’s granddaughter is Anne Sweet, known to many Saybrook residents as an authority on early Indian life and author of “In the Shade of Sayebrook Fort.”
The Twentieth Century 23rd Psalm
The Ford is my auto;
I shall not want (another).
It maketh me lie down beneath it;
It anointeth my clothes with oil;
It soreth my soul.
Yea, though I ride through the valleys,
I am towed up the hills;
I fear much evil,
For its rods and its engine discomfort me;
I anoint its tires with patches;
Its radiator runneth over,
I repair its blowouts in the presence of mine enemies.
Surely, if this thing followed me all the days of my life,
I shall dwell in the bughouse forever.
~ Joe Cone
http://www.shorelinetimes.com/articles/2013/04/04/opinion/doc515c98e319309639946641.txt?viewmode=fullstory
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