Noel Perrin: The Godfather of Thetford Bloggers
We are fortunate to have had the grandad of all small town bloggers live & work in our midst for 25 years. Noel Perrin was musing on “this, that and the other” long before there even was a name for it!
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Mr. Perrin came to Dartmouth College in 1959 as a member of the English Department. He was, by that time, a respected professor of literature however it seems that something in the Hanover air or water (or perhaps the maple syrup?) must have been inspirational to him. He uncorked 10 books (6 of them about the very soil he worked) in the 25 years he called this home and another two which were published after his death in 2004. And in his delightful writing you can trace the path from Mr. Perrin (intellect and New Yorker) to Farmer Perrin (intellect and Thetford, Vermonter)!
This guy must have been a character and I feel that I knew him just from the wit and the horse-sense he packs into a paragraph. One of Mr. Perrin’s most endearing qualities is his quickness to point out how much he didn’t know and how clumsy he was to learn a rural way of life. At the same time he was not shy to point out contradictions in the RUGGED & TRADITIONAL aspects of Vermont which he called the “Last Stand of the Yankees”. Take this great section from his book First Person Rural (published in 1978 by David R. Godine):
Excess capacity to store all that maple syrup, don't you know.
“…the public image of Vermont and its private reality seem to be rapidly diverging. My favorite example comes, of course, from the maple sugar business. Suppose you buy a quart of maple syrup in the village store in South Strafford. It comes in a can with brightly colored pictures on it. These pictures show men carrying sap pails on yokes, sugar houses with great stacks of logs outside, teams of horses, and all the rest. They are distinctly last-stand pictures.
But suppose you decide to go into the sugaring business for yourself. When you write away for advice, you get a go-modern or private-reality answer. You are told not to hang pails at all, much less to carry them to the sugarhouse on a yoke. Instead, install pipes. Don’t bother to cut any four-foot logs, oil gives a better-controlled heat. And finally, your instructions say, the right way to market the stuff is to put it in cans that show men carrying sap pails, sugarhouses with great stacks of logs…”
Excess capacity to store all that maple syrup, don't you know.
“…the public image of Vermont and its private reality seem to be rapidly diverging. My favorite example comes, of course, from the maple sugar business. Suppose you buy a quart of maple syrup in the village store in South Strafford. It comes in a can with brightly colored pictures on it. These pictures show men carrying sap pails on yokes, sugar houses with great stacks of logs outside, teams of horses, and all the rest. They are distinctly last-stand pictures.
But suppose you decide to go into the sugaring business for yourself. When you write away for advice, you get a go-modern or private-reality answer. You are told not to hang pails at all, much less to carry them to the sugarhouse on a yoke. Instead, install pipes. Don’t bother to cut any four-foot logs, oil gives a better-controlled heat. And finally, your instructions say, the right way to market the stuff is to put it in cans that show men carrying sap pails, sugarhouses with great stacks of logs…”
He loved poking fun at how the urbanites he left behind viewed and misunderstood life in small towns like Thetford, Norwich, Lyme and Hanover. Take this paragraph from a letter to the editor of The New Yorker magazine in 1963 regarding a cartoon that Farmer Perrin didn’t see as quite accurate:
“I think there’s something I shall henceforth call The Wooden Bucket principle at work here. By this I mean a tendency to imagine almost anything in the country as simpler and more primitive and kind of nicer than it really is. Picture calendars are the most familiar example. Every time I see a calendar decorated with a photograph of a New England Village, I look, and I am never disappointed. There’s a little village nestled among the hills. There’s the white church. There the majestic maples. What about the filling station? It’s been cropped. There are never gas stations in pictures of New England villages. Those big orange school buses don’t generally get into such pictures either nor does the town shed, with a couple of modern of road scrapers lying around out front.”
This guy had things nailed, didn’t he? A kind of “everyman’s” urban refugee! These are WONDERFUL reads on a chilly winter night.
With thanks to Terry S. Osborne (who lives to this day in Noel Perrin’s farmhouse in Thetford VT) for prompting my sister & me to read these wonderful books!