The Best Pie They Ever Tasted (Martin Page, part II)

In his cypher book, Martin Page let his artistic skills shine, but when the time came to put his life into words, Page resorted to idiosyncratic text in an idiosyncratic format.

Long before Jack Kerouac taped sheets of paper together and fed them into his typewriter to create the On the Road scroll, Martin Page decided that individual pages were too limiting for what he had to say, so he glued about a dozen sheets of individual paper into two scrolls, one measuring nearly six feet in length and the other just over four*.

The text of the scrolls is written in a spidery hand, possible indicating the shakiness of advancing age. Since no description would really do the text justice, here are a few selections:

Jokes, like this one, are common—

A young man stepped into a bookstore and said he wanted to get a young man’s companion. Well, Sir, said the book seller, here is my daughter.

Or observations on issues taken from his life (spelling and punctuation left unchanged)**—

One of my acquainces died Childleless and left his Wife by will as long as she remained his widow avaluable house and all his Personal Property, that she might live independent she made agreat take soon got married, the nexday his Brothers cam in and tooke all of her property and left her poor, her husband that maried for the property found it all gone he left her, would it not be best to give the Wife whare thare is no children such a part on of his Property free and clear of any incubrance, whare tharer is children it belongs to them after Her derth, a man has right to Prevent his widow from marying after he is didd
They come to us, we must soon go there.

Or the occasional gnomic passage that completely defies description—

What bones governs the world the cutridge bon the bull Ballet Bon and Bun et Bon, Interest is the King who Rules the world.

And for anyone planning a menu based on historic recipes, Page’s codfish and potatoes recipe sounds pretty good (you might consider pairing it with Benjamin Franklin’s milk punch)—

With the Cook I went to work pounding up dunfish Codfish and new Potatoes in the moster with a Little flour Plenty of fresh Butter a little mustard Oil Clover mau and Pepper as thisck and fine as Indian Bread dow, put in the Pan and baked a little when put on the table asked what it was I told them Fish and Potatoes, a baked Pie, they made the mount of Their dinner of 8 it was Excellent the best Pie They Ever tasted

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* “Reminiscences,” in the Martin Page Papers, MSS 599, Box 1, Folder 14, Rhode Island Historical Society. Transcription folder 14a. www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss599.htm

** Transcription by Harriet Sprague Doolittle Rosch, one of Page’s descendants.

Chronicles of Brunonia

A fascinating collection of student-produced historical narratives (a number of them using materials from the Rhode Island Historical Society’s collections) are available at Brown University’s Chronicles of Brunonia website. The narratives are the final product of work done by students in Beth Taylor’s creative nonfiction writing workshops, and they draw their inspiration from primary-source materials at institutions like the Historical Society and Brown’s John Hay Library. The following is a list of stories that make use of RIHS materials (with précis provided by the authors):

• “Charlotte Perkins Gilman; letters to Martha” (Abigail Rabinowitz)
  Starting in 1878, teenage friends on the East Side of Providence
  become inseparable, then go their separate ways when Martha weds. But even as Charlotte gains fame as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper and as an activist for women’s rights, she never forgets Martha.
• “Little Caesar(historical narrative)” (Austin Kennedy)
  The Diary of Giuseppe Zambarano offers a glimpse into the life of a
  young immigrant from Italy in the late 1800s, who builds a business
  and family on Federal Hill in Providence.
• “Lucy and the Chinese bandits” (Meryl Rothstein)
  Lucy Truman Aldrich, born in 1869 to a prominent Rhode Island family, travels to China in 1923 and is kidnapped by bandits.
• “Miss Edna Krouner at Vassar in 1908″ (Elizabeth Loeb)
  Miss Edna Krouner, of Wakefield, Rhode Island, embarks on her first
  year at Vassar College and learns about everything from crushes to
  Marxism and the Vote for Women.
• “Mutiny! A high seas misadventure” (John Sheehy)
  A tale of piracy aboard the Vineyard, a brig, that set sail from New
  Orleans to Philadelphia on November 9, 1830.
• “Providence’s Black Chinese; a love story” (Luke Tsai)
  In 1901, Chung Yik, one of the city’s “best-known Chinese
  restauranteurs” and his wife, Cynthia Monki, survived the burning of
  their Charles Street apartment.
• “Searching for home; accounts of a sea captain’s wife” (Stephanie Bernhard)
  Cynthia Sprague Congdon’s tales of being aboard ship then recording
  her life in East Greenwich, R.I. when she received word that her
  husband was lost at sea during a storm
• “States of mind; the founding of Rhode Island’s first hospital“
  (Alex Eichler)
  The story of the founding of Butler Hospital in Providence, R.I. or,
  as it was originally called, Butler Hospital for the Insane.
• “Stories from the Good Doctor’s farm; colonial southern Rhode Island“
  (Alison Klayman)
  For a short period in the mid-18th century, the MacSparren farm
  flourished at the hands of an assortment of free, enslaved and
  indentured workers. In such a small-scale plantation, typical of
  colonial southern Rhode Island, the social hierarchy was constantly
  repositioning itself to accommodate emerging colonial ideas about
  race, sex, and religion. This story, based on the diary of Reverend
  MacSparren and other historical documents, imagines the personal
  relationships between those who worked and lived in such close quarters.
• “The things they planted” (Molly Jacobson)
  Almost four hundred years ago, Roger Williams and his companions
  paddled down the Seekonk River and landed on the Rhode Island shore. Surrounded by wilderness, with no outside aid and scarce resources, these first settlers slowly raised their farms and homesteads, scavenged for food, and drafted laws for their community.
• “The vampire disease” (Victoria Chao)
  At the turn of the century, a deadly disease swept Europe and the
  Eastern United States. In the span of four years, George Brown, a
  farmer in rural Rhode Island, lost his wife and two daughters to the
  disease. Faced with the prospect of losing his only son, George is
  convinced to seek and destroy the alleged vampire responsible for
  these deaths…
• “Waiting, 1938″ (Alice Lovejoy)
  The story of the famous hurricane of 1938 as revealed by the
  meticulous notes of David Patten, managing editor of the Providence
  Evening Bulletin at the time.
• “The wreck of the Bark Montgomery; an East Greenwich family at home and at sea” (Margo Irvin)
  The story of a storm at sea from both the point of view of the
  captain, John Congdon, and his wife on shore, Cynthia.