The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

I AM a lover of winter sports. I enjoy them in retrospect, and the closer to the fireplace the better. My most vivid experiences have that pristine quality of a First Time—that breath-taking impression of virgin snow seen early in the morning. They seldom have been repeated.

Winter sports were of the common or suburb variety back in Elizabeth, New Jersey, when I was a boy. We skated and played shinny on Salem Dam and Bunnel’s Pond. There were no hills where I lived, so when the snow came, we had to invent ways of using our Flexible Flyers.

Our favorite winter sport (circa 1910) was to book rides on the delivery wagons which ranged up find down North Broad Street. With the rope attached to your sled passed over the axle or through the iron bracket at the rear you could be lowed quite a way. Most drivers were rather hostile to this sport which added to its excitement ; especially the drivers of coal wagons, who would rock us with chunks of coal if they saw us adding to their weight. But the Bamberger wagons were an easier, swifter mark. With their two horses, they hit a good clip, and because of the solid doors at the back the delivery men couldn’t see us. As I remember, my cousin Allan Church was once lowed all the way to Newark. He had some difficulty getting back.

I got my first taste of a New England winter in 1913 when I spent January and February with my Navy cousins at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. There the snow was a fixture. We were shut in by three different blizzards. I here, for the first lime, I walked between walls of snow higher than my head. There I first saw skis, and there for the first time I caught a fish in the dry dock.

The Navy Yard possessed one of the largest dry docks in the world, and in the course of my visit a ship was floated in for repairs. Word went to all the Navy families when the time came to let the water out. In our rubber boots, we kids clumped flown to the dock and watched the water recede lower and lower in the giant stadium. We followed it down until at last, when it was only three feet deep above the floor gratings, we could see the fish swimming frantically against the current. Then we’d slosh into the icy water, pick out a big cod and drive him toward the rim, until with a sudden dip of our arms we had him in a fast embrace and were staggering up the stone.

That was a good winter sport, and there is another which I also associate with Portsmouth. One of the officers of t he Yard had a big family of daughters— very attractive girls in my eyes, especially Kit. When we came indoors at dusk either in their house or ours, we played a version of Cops and Bobbers which involved a good many closets. That was a nice winter sport, too, as I remember.

After college my work settled me in Boston. I became habituated to the snow, the ice, and the enmity of the wind and was lured by my friends into other winter pastimes. Early in my stay, I had my first toboggan ride. We had heard that there was good tobogganing in Dedham and five of us, t wo couples and an odd man, went out to have a try. There stood the runway pointing down the beautiful long slope of the golf course. As a member of the. Club, I acted as host. There were no other tobogganers around — which might have warned us but didn’t. All I noticed was that the snow in the runway had packed to a hard, fast ice and that the wooden sides were bare.

We placed the toboggan on the take-off and I got in first. “Come on now,”I said, “wrap your arms and legs around me and then sit light.”Jim gave us a good shove, jumped on the stern, and down we went. Because there was so little snow in the chute, we careened from side to side and I thought I heard an outcry as we picked up speed. The wind in the face felt fine, and by the time we hit the snowy crust we were really going. As we slowed down, I turned back to the crew expectantly. The girls, I noticed, seemed to have tears in their eyes, probably the wind.

“Great stuff, wasn’t it?" I said. “Great stuff, hell!” said Jim, who was standing somewhat lopsidedly in the snow. “Help me pull this out, wall you?” and as he turned his flank toward me, I saw a splinter the length of an arrow emerging from his tweed. Evidently every time we touched the wood my crew had picked up splinters. The girls’ mittens were burned through and the backs of their hands were peppered. There were splinters along their legs and several large ones in Jim’s. We retreated to the Club House. I put the toboggan away and poured out some consoling bourbon for the injured, who were silently applying needles, hot water, and Dioxygen. Nice day’s work.

It took a doctor to separate them from that loose wood. Indeed, as I look back, it seems to me that doctors are indispensable in winter sports. One surgeon of whom I am fond used to take his annual vacation on the ski trails. For some time, I wasn’t sure whether he did this for pleasure or business: as the ski trains took more and more of the middleaged to the higher and higher slopes, there were always a goodly number of arms, legs, and collarbones to be set on the spot or in the hospital at Hanover. But when the doctor broke his own leg on a Sitzmark at Peckett’s, I knew that he had simply caught the bug.

Eventually the time came when I had to try it for myself; under the incitement of my friend Jim, I let curiosity get the better of me.

The plan was this: on a Thursday evening Jim and I would motor up to the Baker River valley in New Hampshire. There we would be joined by Roger, a veteran of those slopes. Friday evening I would lecture at the Absqunssett Women’s Club; Saturday I would make my debut at Tenney’s Hill; and Sunday we would try the golf course with its steep slopes down toward the river.

The lecture went off well enough but I cannot say the same for Tenney’s Hill. In my borrowed skis and ski boots, I felt and must have looked like a fish out of water. The snow was covered with a firm, gleaming crust and it seemed safer to all concerned to conducl me to a little dell on the lower slope. There was a small pine tree, then a down grade, a little run across the flat, and another rise to another pine tree. This was to be my course, and by holding on to each tree, I could get myself straightened out before each run. With plenty of rude advice, the boys left me and went upstairs. My method was to scrabble, using my hands as much as possible (I had no poles) up the crust to the pine tree, stand erect, point my skis downhill, and go as far as I could before I fell down, then scrabble up for the other tree and turn around.

This vibration went on for some time. Midway in it I was joined by a bedraggled-looking woman of my years, unknown to me but presumably the wife of one of the heroes. After watching me from a distance, she evidently thought my method was as good as any and so, like a couple out of Thurber, we took turns until night fell. Then her husband led her away and I clumped after the boys, dented and very aware of my thirst.

The crust was a little harder on Sunday when we visited the golf course. My legs had stiffened during the night. I wanted to avoid falling as much as possible. Even Jim and Roger seemed a little more cautious as they skirted the nob of the glistening glacier, the snow-covered hill giving precipitously to the ninth green. From where I stood holding tight ly to my tree, it looked as if Jim were trying to dissuade Roger from going down but the veteran was for it. “Well, here I go,”he said. And leaning forward, he went.

I never saw anybody go so fast. Nor hit the snow so hard. No turns were involved. He just rushed straight down until he hit. Jim, sensing disaster, slowly made his way around the back side of the hill. I couldn’t see what was going on and J certainly wasn’t going to move. Eventually they made their way back to where I stood. Roger’s forehead was red and bruised; t he bridge of his nose was bleeding. “Well,”he said, “that’s enough for one day.”And we look off our skis and drove home. As I say, there always has to be a First Time, but there’s no law against its also being a Last.

Those who are giving and receiving lectures this midwinter will be grateful to Emily Kimbrough for the natural gaiety with which she itemizes her adventures as a speaker. Miss Kimbrough has the delightful gift of self-ridicule: the picture which she drew of herself in that dreadful tweed costume with hat to match (it was especially run up by the local seamstress for her trip to Europe with Cornelia Otis Skinner) I have never forgotten. And nowhere she is again, introduced as the successful coauthor of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay and holding forth to women’s clubs with results which are sometimes embellished but always laughable.

Her lecture tours run for six weeks at a stretch (I gat her she does two of them each year) and hardly a day passes without one or more of what she calls her “grotesqueries.”Some of these, as I have said, are embellished. When the professor of English who escorted her back to the hotel after the meeting of the Students’ Literary Society, pausing in her room to diseuss an article in the current Atlantic which he had come up to borrow, suddenly blurts oul what Emily calls his “rather personal speech,” I am surprised (as she was) and delighted, for here is the story to end for all time that old chestnut about the virgin who could travel anywhere as long as she was chaperoned by the Atlantic. But when, after Emily has turned him down, the same professor walks violently into her closet, mistaking il for the door, and on re-emerging disappears down the hall carry ing on his back “three wet rayon stockings and a net brassiere.”I think Miss Kimbrough is laying it on just a little thick.

The unexpected is always lurking to waylay a lecturer on a tour, and when you have such a flair for the unexpected as Miss Kimbrough, with a sharp sense of observation and a clear memory of what was said, the results are highly readable. Miss Kimbrough’s efforts to open a bottle of ginger ale, which turn her bathroom in the Netherland Plaza into a Cincinnati shambles; her railroad troubles as she runs behind schedule; her nervousness before and during those wonderfully charged introductions; her inability to keep her figure when she is out on the “chicken patty circuit”; her struggle with the Texas audience that got out of hand, — these are just a handful of the more delightful passages in . . . It Gives Me Great Pleasure (Dodd, Mead, $2.50).

As I have suggesled, Miss Kimbrough has chosen to stress the Helen Hokinson aspect of her tours, and Miss Hokinson’s illustrations of her text seem altogether natural.

Cheaper by the Dozen (Crowell, $3.00) is a boisterous, breezy family chronicle, the true story the more incredible for being true — of how an inventive and immensely capacious American engineer, Frank Bunker Gilbreth by name, and his game and surprisingly durable wife, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, raised their twelve children and kept, unceasingly on the go. From 1010 to 1924, Gilbreth, Inc. (which meant father and mother) made a pot of money as “efficiency experts" and were first in the field of “motion study,”whatever that. means. Certainly they came nearer to attaining perpetual motion than any other American household of their time.

Cheaper by the Dozen is written by two of their attractive redheaded dozen, Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., of the Charleston News and Courier and his sister Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, and just to hear them tell it one gets a brisk, not to say fatiguing, notion of how the family must have trotted around, keeping up with Dad. “ Dad was a tall man, with a large head, jowls, and a Herbert Hoover collar. He was no longer slim; he had passed the two-hundredpound mark during his early thirties, and left it so far behind that there were times when he had to resort to railway baggage scales.” Dad never did things by halves, he did them by the dozen. He was great on surprises: boxes of Page and Shaw, cameras from Germany, a dozen Plymouth hens; two victrolas for the upstairs bathrooms, which would play French and German language lesson records, white typewriters; and for summer he invested in two lighthouses on Nantucket, with a cottage squeezed between them.

I don’t question the veracity of all this; I just w ish it sounded more like life. The story would be better were there more landmarks in it of time and place by which the reader could steer. Of them all, Mother alone has the identifying touch, and when Mother goes swimming at Nantucket, we see her and for a time are back in the land of the plausible.