Al Bagley's Eternal Spring

Al Bagley’s Eternal Spring

The other day, while finishing up to last minute Christmas shopping at BJ’s warehouse, my wife Hillary insisted we add bottled water to the purchase.  Recent lake-effect snow days had triggered her emergency response system, and keeping some extra spring water around is always a good idea out here on the Buffalo frontier.  In short, I found myself dragging a five-gallon container of the pure stuff out to the car.

 As we hefted it into the trunk, Hillary noticed the big bottle cap.  It said the spring water was bottled by Polar Beverages, Worcester, Massachusetts, from several sources in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  Always on the lookout for reminders of our Laconia, N.H. childhood stomping grounds, Hillary remarked “Hey, one of the places on the container cap is Alton, N.H…! I wonder…?”

Alton is next to Laconia, and the bottle cap was no coincidence.

Dial back more than 50 years.  I’m in 7^th grade gym, in the Laconia Jr.-Sr. High School locker room, changing to hit the showers amidst the slam of metallic doors and the din of kids’ yelling and joking.  Suddenly I’m pinned against my locker and a huge, towering face, pressed to my nose, says “So you think you can take me, huh?”  I can’t quite recall what I said, but there was plenty of terrified stammering in it, and something to the effect that I surely didn’t say anything about him at all.

Fortunately the hulk let me down so my feet touched the cold concrete floor again.  Then he actually smiled, showed me his bulging bicep, and said, “Well, if you ever want to bet, just let me know!”  Of course, I never did place that particular bet, but there is another kind of bet I should have placed on Alfred R. Bagley.

Al was a big, burley guy, the kind who matures early as an adolescent, and makes everyone else around him look puny and hairless.  From then on he earned a wary, frozen smile from me in the hallways.  I was secretly pleased when he started calling me Jeff instead of “Bowen”.  Probably someone had told him my dad was the principal of the school, and that beating me up wasn’t a goo idea.  Anyway, our limited hallway encounters were reassuring because he usually smiled rather than scowling.   

High school years flew by, but I seldom sighted Al because, like all those special-ed kids in the 60’s, he was virtually hidden in an out-of-the-way classroom that adjoined our cafeteria.  As we used to say back then, that’s where the “slow” kids were.  Regardless of their disability, the slow learners were definitely self-contained—or imprisoned, apparently except for junior high physical education.   Mainstreaming and inclusion were terms no one had thought of back then; no one would for at least another decade.    

Al lived out in the hills of Gilford, a rural community next to Laconia.  Gilford is known best for its county-run ski area, now called Gunstock Ski Area.  In the early 60’s, my future wife and her family had just moved to Gilford, where Hillary’s dad, Warren Warner, took over as manager of Gunstock.  Warren hired Al Bagley to work the tows on weekends.  And Al was good at it – reliable, loyal, courteous, and kind to skiers who got tangled up in the tow rope. 

Al Bagley also loved to hunt deer and was good at that too, especially off season when it was illegal.  I am sure this endeared him to Warren.  I always suspected that in another life Warren would have jacked deer in a minute.  He always thought that the world was oversupplied with deer who deserved to be hunted down and thinned out by any means from flintlocks to archery to rifles of many different gauges.

Al Bagley and Warren Warner became fast friends, really great friends, over the years.  Al worked his way up to a tow supervisor at the Area, and from time to time he would invite Warren to cruise the woods hunting from Al’s quad.  Eventually Al had plenty of property on which to roam. 

It turns out that there were hundreds of acres of prime hunting land near where Al lived, and in return for hunting privileges from the owner, Al treated the old codger, who lived like a hermit on the property in a ramshackle house, with great kindness.  When the old man’s health declined, Al made sure he got food and provided transportation whenever it was needed.   

When the codger died, having no living relatives, he willed Al his house, an old Cadillac, and those hundreds of acres of fields and woods. It was a hunter’s paradise.  The woods would have been more than enough for Al.  However, one day, when Al was hunting an unexplored part of the property, he discovered a spring bubbling up from the ground.  The water was abundant and pure.  Al mentioned it to others and eventually started giving some of it away. 

Bottled spring water was nothing new in the 1960’s.  Poland Springs, Maine had been in the business for years.  But spring-fed water was gaining in commercial popularity as the trend toward healthier lifestyles accelerated across the decades.  

Before too long, Al Bagley set up a small bottling operation at a site in Alton, N.H. near the spring he had fortuitously inherited.  Tanker trucks would arrive from all over New England to suck up and pay surprisingly good bucks for H2O supplies. 

No doubt about it, Al Bagley did quite well financially, selling out more than a decade ago to a company called L&G Bottled Water Company which is still located right there in Alton, N.H.  My guess is that Al still gets a cut of the profits, but his real passion was and still is hunting.  He stayed loyal to his friends, and Warren Warner remained one of them to the end.

Thus our destinies interweave.  I am sure the connections are described somewhere in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent books about tipping points and outliers.  Would Al Bagley have realized such success had he lived in a city?  Had he not been “slow” and guided by his teacher toward vocational pursuits?  Had he not been a truly dedicated hunter?  If bottled spring water had not become so popular?  If he had not been a kind, considerate person who really did care for an incapacitated old codger, just as he took pity on me back in junior high?

Interesting to speculate, isn’t it?  At Christmas time, as I write this, I’d say that speculation is only part of the story.  I’d like to think that being in the right place at the right time is helpful but not definitive to one’s destiny.  In the end, it’s about the relationships we create with others, and the passion that we have for what we do.  For Al, the relationship and the passion came together in Alton, N.H., where he loved to hunt and found a perfect way to enable itn wealthy perpetuity. 

This Christmas and for the upcoming year, like Al Bagley, may each of us find an eternal spring somewhere on our property, one that empowers us to do what we really love to do, to practice and share it with our friends, and to become really good at it.

JMB

12/09           

A Remembrance of False Teeth

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

My grandfather Henry Bowen’s false teeth had quite a reputation, according to stories my father told me more than once.  Apparently they fitted him poorly and were too loose.  So regularly when he drank hot tea at the dinner table, his teeth would fall onto his dinner plate with a loud clatter.  Dad also told me that on one icy, slippery day in Portland, Grampy lost his teeth and had to chase them down one of the city’s hilly streets.

I recalled those stories the other day when I was told about a local fellow who recently passed away.  His expensive and beautiful false teeth were removed before burial and returned to his wife who didn’t quite know just what to do with them.  Coincidentally, the floor of their garage was being repoured with cement, so thinking it was a shame to let good teeth like that go to waste, and in memory of her deceased husband, she asked the contractor to embed the teeth in a special corner of the garage.  One is tempted to think that perhaps, during his life, she had wanted to run over him more than once, but in any case the contractor reassured her that he could pop out the set from concrete anytime she wanted.  Imagine this: every time you enter the garage, there are your spouse’s teeth grinning up at you.  This lady’s decision certainly did have some teeth in it.  Unlike my grandfather’s choppers, the embedded set will never fall out when exposed to heat or cold!  The Fixodent Company really needs to do a television ad about this bizarre but thoughtful remembrance.  

FIFTY YEARS OF REFLECTION ON FOUR YEARS AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE

By Jeffrey Bowen’67

My wife Hillary and I are nearing our fiftieth wedding anniversary.  Our son Seth (40), and daughter Carrie (42), are both happily married and we have two sweet adolescent grandchildren, Sam and Willow.   I owe Williams a good deal of credit because all this started when I met and fell in love with Hillary Warner in my junior year. 

 She became a wonderful feature of my college life, really at times a relief from its academic stress. We married in 1967 after her many visits to the campus from miles away.  In fact, on a snowbound weekend in December 1967, we spent our honeymoon (between term papers at John Hopkins) at the Williams Inn.  I can still see us skating around the Williams hockey rink amid the flakes.  Just the two of us.  It was magic.

At Williams I learned how to research, write, and think across a broad liberal arts spectrum of coursework in American Civilization.  I enjoyed writing about unusual topics.  Most provocative and fun was my culminating senior honors seminar paper (encouraged by Professor Fred Rudolph) titled, “Party Women, Party Weekends at Williams College.”  To complete this paper, I sifted through reams of Williamsiana stored in a little room behind the main desk at the Stetson library, interviewed a houseparty queen from the 1920s who lived nearby, and corresponded with alums who had seen the first cars to arrive on campus.   This was more than an academic paper.  It was an adventure.  I called myself a social historian and declared at the outset, “I have treated extensively a confounding, nebulous subject – women and man’s thoughts about women – as a means of showing how houseparties and their implicit moral tones have evolved.  Nearly every word I utter about women is biased.”  So true.  

Other courses still live in my present.  Thanks to American Art and Architecture professor Whitney Stoddard, whenever we arrive in a community, I put labels on the architecture.  Also, by assigning us the task of building plans for a summer vacation house on an actual plot, he inspired the handicraft triumph of my life.    

War and American Society with Professor Zilversmit highlighted the history of America’s conceptions of collective security.  The course occurred simultaneously with our developing entanglement in Vietnam.   After four years in the USAF, with a tour in Vietnam, I have come to realize that we baby boomers live chronically in the presence of war and the absence of peace.  We constantly retrofit national security to justify our needs.

Music offered a buffering, fun-filled experience at Williams, partly because my trombone always led the marching band down Spring Street.  To this day I marvel at the precision of large university marching bands.  Too bad they never have learned the superior famous scatter formation of the Williams marching band, directed by our forgiving conductors Irwin Shainman and Fran Cardillo.  

My years at Williams were a powerful launching pad.  They propelled me toward married life eventually in a healthy rural environment in rural western New York.  They led me to a professional career in public education.  Thus I spent 20 years as director of research for the New York State School Boards Association. They encouraged me to embrace the dynamics of American politics embodied locally in school boards.  Thus I served as a school district executive for many years.  The gorgeous setting of the college enabled me to appreciate beauty in writing, photos, and music.  I still pursue all three.

My time at Williams nurtured an understanding of the word community.  American history and democracy are anchored on the bedrock of small-town community life.  Hillary and I, both retired superintendents of schools in adjoining rural districts, have realized that community is self-renewing.  Now we have the space, time, and choices to create new and different variations around it.  Never do I forget how much of my destiny was shaped by sitting across from Mark Hopkins on the end of a log.       

  JMB1016

     

SNOW BEAST
Somewhere south of East Aurora
A peaceful flake or two
Suddenly became a luminous curtain of fog.
The high beams just blinded her,
But the lows died in their tracks.
She thought about turning the headlights out.
Street lights can be landmarks.
She clicked off the radio and two-fisted the steering wheel.
Back and forth, up and down, pulsating around the car,
The snow suspended all time and space.
So really, where IS the road?
Then faint tracks told her
Others could be crawling toward the same destination.
She saw dim lights up ahead
Creeping in a 10 mph line through the snow mist,
Like an electric snake wrapped in a shroud.
At the head, a big plow blew billows of white spray apart
Like the prow of a ship parting waves on a stormy sea,
Making for ports of Chaffee, Sardinia, and points beyond.
Plaintively, she called:
What's your weather like?
I looked out the window, and saw
Nothing much going on!.
She replied,
Check the radar! I am crawling in a snow-bound hell!
So I did, and there it lived on my radar screen.
Just a few miles north,
A big green and pink wound on the landscape,
Obliterating, deepening, alive and replicating
at 2 inches an hour, borne from an unfrozen lake.
The snow beast was playing with her life.
Then out of the maw she saw the best ad ever:
A Burger King sign!
There is hope she told me as she found the beef.
Finally I saw the tractor beam of her headlights
Guiding her into the garage.
She blew through the door, and announced:
AND WE LIVE HERE WHY??
As we watched a few harmless flakes swirl softly outside,
White moths playing around our porch light,
Numbly we wondered,
Just when and where does beauty become the beast?
JMB-March 2016

Lost Moments

Lost moments are the traces that
Time has left behind.
They dwell in secret places
Where you seldom pay them mind.
Now and then you sense them
When they gently brush your face.
They linger just a moment,
Then they disappear in space.
Yet they leave you with a feeling
Like some sweet dear friend you knew.
You think you see them in your dreams,
But their face escapes your view.
Lost moments find their way back home
Through years and years of time,
Discovered in a song or scene
As if to send a sign,
To tell you old is new again,
And tomorrow you will meet.
But when the moment happens,
It's gone before you speak.

Jeff Bowen -- April 2017

Bicycle Trekking -- Then and Now

Bicycles Rediscovered

Bicycles Rediscovered

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

A few years ago, my wife Hillary and I decided to revisit a form of recreation we had both enjoyed as children – bicycles!  Although we had never quite lost our balancing skills, the hilly terrain around our area has caused a different imbalance.    Lots of our time is spent pushing the bikes uphill, but it takes almost no time to shoot downhill. “Hey, this is all good exercise” is our mantra.  

We thought ahead and tried to buy the right kind of bicycles.  We discovered it helps to anticipate the surface you will travel – pavement, gravel, mud, and maybe snow and quicksand.  These determine desirable tire size and tread.  There are mountain bikes for rough goat paths, touring or road bikes for pavement, racing and BMX bikes for competition, and ultimately, hybrids for the undecided.  We chose hybrids.

Then came gears.  Remember those three simple gears that used to click on your English bike handle bars?   Or even the brawny cruisers with coasting breaks you could stomp on to skid and impress your friends?   Sometimes these reappear with fancy bells and baskets, but I suspect many of them now collect dust in museums and basements.

These days bikes may have two or three chainrings around the front wheel, and seven to 11 gears or cogs in the back.  The front ones make big changes, the back ones make smaller changes in pedaling pressure. They work in combinations numbering up to 33.  Of course, you have to find the shifters which live on either side of your handle bars.  Once found, your range will be somewhere between developing a hernia in the lowest gears to furiously pedaling and getting nearly nowhere in the highest gears. 

As we continue to learn, the pleasures of bike trekking have enriched our lives.  We see what is going on around us, and underneath us where road repair may be seriously needed!  Wild life crosses our path, and beautiful country views emerge.  Photo opportunities cause many delays.   Noisy rushing traffic no longer causes a panic because we are trussed up in brightly colored spandex and bike helmets.  It also helps that we pray at regular intervals.    Never do we feel we are in a race as we sit rather upright holding traditional handlebars.  Other riders lean over curved bars and seem to be competing in the Tour de France.  

To date our bike treks have included the Maine coast, along the Danube River, and around Amsterdam (with two million other cyclists) as well as Prince Edward Island in Canada.  Dr. Gordon Comstock and his wife Ginger inspired us to take a PEI bike tour arranged by a company that reserves bed and breakfast accommodations along a “rails to trails” route that lets you travel at your own pace.  

Cycling has made us more aware of the bicycle’s fascinating history.  Think of that oddity with the big front and tiny back wheel.  Invented in the 1870s by a Frenchman, it was nicknamed a penny-farthing model.  Although it had pedals while many earlier types did not, it was unwieldy and suitable mainly for athletic males.  Frequent accidents actually led to new terms in our language – taking a header, and coming a cropper.     

By 1900, bicycling had gained enduring popularity.  Front and back wheels were approaching the same size.  Improvements in the design and engineering were linked historically to the newly invented automobile, and even to future airplanes.  The Wright brothers ran a very successful bike shop, which financially supported and inspired their dream of manned flight. 

Seldom does a week go by without our finding some new merits in cycling.  For instance, the appearance of the roadster with a step-through frame unquestionably enhanced women’s freedom (as did bloomers).  A hundred years ago Susan B. Anthony said they had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. “I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.” I agree and prefer to ride along.    

Note:  For more history of the bicycle go to Wikipedia or Smithsonian web sites.