Free When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood Page A

knew at once: The Rumford falls rivaled that legendary length.
    â€œHow did he measure it?”
    â€œBy eye.”
    â€œHow can you—?”
    â€œHe was brilliant, children.
Brilliant.
”
    A calculating man, Mr. Hugh J. Chisholm, Canadian-born son of a Scottish scholar. In a less capricious world, our Hugh might have become a scholar himself, but his father’s untimely end—drowned after tumbling off a steamer from Toronto—sent the heart-rattled son into the working world at the age of thirteen.
    Another fatherless explorer. But this time nobody looks at me. Father Bob’s visit has shifted the burden of pity from me to young Hugh. I listen along with everyone else, my chin lifted toward the story of us.
    â€œHow do you fall off a steamer?” somebody asks.
    â€œHe was a scholar. I suppose he was reading a book.”
    After digging potatoes for two soul-numbing days, young Hugh turned to selling newspapers on the Toronto-Detroit rail line with another boy, name of Thomas Edison, a kindred spirit, fellow genius, and lifelong friend.
    â€œAnd Thomas Edison, you’ll remember, was the inventor of . . . ?”
    â€œThe cotton gin!”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThe Stanley Steamer!”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThe telescope?”
    â€œChildren, this was your homework
two weeks
ago. Monica?”
    â€œThe electric light.”
    â€œThank you.”
    Hugh saw something in paper that brainy Thomas missed. By the time he beheld the unharnessed power of the Rumford falls, Hugh was a seasoned capitalist used to the long view. Well supplied with cigars, he lingered at the summit. Standing a little, walking a little. His boots made pacing traces in the crystallizing snow. He did this for more than an hour. More than two.
    â€œWhere was he?”
    â€œAt the top of Falls Hill. Only it wasn’t Falls Hill then. It was just a little path overlooking that raging waterfall.”
    Beyond the deafening miracle of the falls, there really wasn’t much to see on that wintry day. No sign of human striving but a trifling wreck of a gristmill, a smaller sawmill weathered to the bone. The sun-spangled water ribboning between Rumford and Mexico existed mostly unseen and unknown, a geysering thunder already changing shape in Hugh’s thrumming mind. He climbed back into the borrowed sleigh, afire with plans.
    â€œAnd his plan was . . . what, children?”
    Everybody knows this one: “The mill!”
    Did he imagine the smokestacks, the woodyards, the whistle that would alert generations of children to the hour of nine in the morning? Did he envision the logjammed canal, the footbridges and savings banks, the sidewalks and church steeples, the dress shops and the bowling alley, schools brimming with smart, ambitious children? Did he foresee the great steam cloud pumping like a signal at the heart of the valley, pumping like a heart itself, a heart made of sulphur and smoke?
    â€œWell?” Sister asks. “Did he?”
    â€œYes!”
    â€œAnd why is that?”
    â€œBecause he was an explorer!”
    â€œAnd explorers have what?”
    â€œCourage!”
    â€œAnd what else?”
    â€œGoals!”
    â€œAnd what else?”
    â€œImagination!”
    On the return trip, about a quarter mile from the hotel, St. Jude—who cared nothing for industrial daydreams and much for dinner in a well-stocked livery—bolted up a half-frozen hill, upsetting the sleigh and all its contents, including our town’s imagineer, now splatted on the ice with an additional shivery hour to ruminate on the glorious possibility of “building a city in the wilderness.” As the hard ground slowly numbed his hind parts, he thought of his old friend Thomas down there in his bright, warm workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, angling a way to deliver light to the masses.
    We laugh at the picture: our portly founder, flat on his backside.
    â€œThat’s