|
Imagine a scenario in which an outdoors-loving President takes a sudden weekend leave frorn the White House to join up with three of the most powerful industrialists in the Western world at a campsite in the mountains of Western Maryland, where the three ride horses, shoot rifles, chop wood and eat and sleep in tents beside a babbling brook. This is just one of the kinds of things that happened during the years earlier this century (1916 - 1924) when Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone — accompanied in the early years by naturalist John Burroughs — went out on annual summer camping junkets which took them through most of Eastern America and on which, on any given day or evening, they never knew just what route they would be taking or where they would end up.Thus in August 1921 new President Warren G. Harding joined the camp at Pecktonville for a weekend just as described above — an encounter memorialized in Camping With Henry and Tom, Mark St. German's acclaimed 1995 off-Broadway play. There to Breathe the Beauty recaptures, in anecdote and photograph (275 of them), the spirit and record of those remarkable trips during which these giants willfully ignored the demands of their industries and their "normal" lives to cavort like boys over the rough roads and open terrain of an America on the edge of the automotive age, enjoying a series of adventures so rash and delightful that it is almost impossible to imagine any four such powerful and famous men duplicating the feat in this overpopulated, hyperfast, media frenzied, stressed out age of ours. While we, at this remove in history, remember these names, few of us may remember that these men not only knew each other, but were close friends — brothers under the skin. Edison and Ford shared the circumstance of having had almost no "formal" education at all: Ford, 15 years Edison's junior, worked as a youngster, as a machinist and engineer for the Edison Company, and in I930, just before the great inventor's death, Ford honored him with a memoir, Edison As I Knew, Him. Among the astounding 1,300 patents secured by the Wizard of Menlo Park was the process for the production of rubber from American plants, a process intriguing to Firestone, who, like Edison, had been born in a tiny town in northeast Ohio, hard by the big cities of Akron and Cleveland, where he would build his empire and which was just a fast ferry ride across Lake Erie from Ford's own empire—land of Detroit. Eventually, Edison, Ford and Firestone all acquired property and built homes just blocks from each other in Fort Myers, Florida, thus establishing the lower Gulf Coast as one of the favored retirement locations in the country. The name of the Catskills native John Burroughs is not as well known today as those of the other three men; but to his contemporaries Burroughs was as revered a naturalist and writer as John Muir. Burroughs was a confidant of such famous contemporaries as Walt Whitman and Theodore Roosevelt and published over 300 of "the best examples of the nature essay written in the nineteenth century" (Frank Bergon); the book published in 1920, one of his two dozen-plus books, was called Accepting the Universe. Burrough's spirituality was a common light that (as is made clear in this book's special Introduction) the others leaned to as they tinkered with their inventions. Today his spirit fourishes in annual seminars sponsored by the John Burroughs Memorial Association. Of course the core group was necessarily accompanied by drivers, cooks, and so forth, and other family members — notably the Firestone sons, Harvey Jr. and Russell — and business associates and other Friends almost always went along even if only for part of the jaunt. The seed for the annual expeditions was planted by Edison during the I9I5 Pan Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Save for the 1923 venture to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the travelers stuck to the Eastern mountains: three of the trips took the troupe through roughly the same Vermont/New Hampshire territory, with the most ambitious outing being the1918 southern trek through the Blue Ridge and Smokies. In addition to the 1921 Harding caper, in 1924 the group, headquartered at Ford's historic (and newly-purchased) Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, paid a brief visit to President Calvin Coolidge in Vermont. In addition to the 275 vintage photographs, There to Breathe the Beauty, is rounded out by custom maps and itineraries detailing every stop on the trips. |
|||
|
P.O. Box 424 Dept. B Dalton, PA 18414 PHONE: (570) 563-2244 OR (570) 563-1266 FAX: (570) 563-1151 E-MAIL: scalp2@epix.net WEB SITE CREATED and MAINTAINED BY UPDATED 10/24/2006 |
|||