Word: hathaway
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Could anything be more of a family operation? And like every family, the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. had given everybody the illusion that it would live more or less happily ever after. Then Elden Hathaway turned 65, thought some, and quietly sold for $50,000 the stock in the business he had bought for $2,500 in 1951. Elden: who had strung Army field wire at $14 a mile to add to the 100 or so subscribers he began with. Elden: who had tinkered with one secondhand switchboard after another-Western Electric, Stromberg-Carlson, Northern Electric. Elden: who had pulled...
...fuss took Elden Hathaway by surprise. Shock is more like it. A cheerful bear of a man with a beard, a bristling brush cut and a voice that booms as if he 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...
...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...
...town is making every effort to preserve its civility. To the old list of God and politics, the crank phone has 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...
When Elden Hathaway was eight or nine, his father installed electricity in the house. It was in the middle of winter, but when the job was done, the father turned on all the lights in the house, and Elden ran out in the road and jumped up and down to see the miracle of all that light blazing into the night. Over half a century later, Hathaway can still remember the excitement. Progress was a simple matter then...