Word: bryants
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...were fighting a bad connection, Hathaway exudes the durability associated with oak trees, granite boulders and other sturdy natural acts of Maine. But he is also a stoic after the New England manner, accustomed to the coming and, mostly, the going of all things human. Piece by piece, the Bryant Pond he was born into, two houses down from where he lives today, has vanished...
When Elden was a boy, Bryant Pond boasted a dozen stores: a butcher's shop, a grain store, a milliner, a harness shop with cobbler's trade on the side. There was Chase's Variety. There was Cole's Hardware ("Quick sales and small profits," the proprietors used to say). An opera house, burned in 1928, was the pride of the town. An ice cream parlor and pool hall did business in the basement. Silent films with piano accompaniment were regularly featured. Young Elden popped the corn and hawked his products to customers at a nickel...
Hathaway has watched this Bryant Pond disappear along with Long's Lumber Yard, where they planed on all four sides, true and square, and a cannery where a boy could pick up a damaged tin of creamed corn for a free lunch on his way to a day of fishing. After so much loss, why should a crank-telephone switchboard in the back room of his home lay claim to immortality...
...been added as a topic requiring the utmost diplomatic discretion. "Some people have got the idea I'm carpetbagging on them," says Hathaway. But nobody speaks more affectionately of Elden than Alice Johnson, the chair of the Don't Yank the Crank committee, who came to Bryant Pond twelve years ago as an art teacher in the elementary school. She married another outsider and settled down in a handsome mid-19th century home by the lake. A Cuisinart and a microwave oven share the house with her crank phone. She is not a purist...
...political compromise. Why not both dial and crank? Her defense of the crank is deliberately unsentimental. She quotes praise from a computer programmer: "It's so old it's in the advance guard." But behind the crisp march of her logic, Johnson dreams of a Bryant Pond for her daughters, now 6 and 8, almost as idyllic as the Bryant Pond of Elden's childhood...