Then he’d bus them over to sleepy little New Castle, several
thousand contented folks sweetly vegetating 25 miles south of Philly on the
Delaware River, have Governor Mike Castle greet them in the town’s vintage
Court House and then, and then—ship the folks back to Philly aboard a sunset
cruise.
Neat idea, no? Well, almost. Except nature nixed the
notion—because the tide would be flowing back to sea, thereby turning a 90-minute cruise into a maddening four-hour
slog. It gave a new twist to the term au courant. Still, this fluke of nature was about the only flaw
in a tremendously instructive three days, an academic phenomenon as rare as a
multi-faceted genius like Franklin.
Almost half of the attendees were Ben buffs, amateurs who
followed the scholars around and listened attentively to their high-IQ
emanations out of sheer love of the man. Consider my luncheon table: To my left
was a 40-year-old male nurse and ethnicist from Glenside who confided in me
later that he had hired Philly’s Ben-imitator, Ralph Archbold, to greet guests
at his wedding reception.
Next to him was the 40-year-old director of the Illinois Tax
Assistance League. I teased him that a Springfield, Illinois, man could be
arrested for defecting from Abraham Lincoln worship. His rejoinder was that he
had had it up to there with Abe-pushing, and that Ben had become a welcome
relief.
Next to him was a half-retired professor of chemical
engineering from the University of Florida who confided that he got hooked on
the old charmer when he tried to get his sons to respond to Franklin’s
autobiography with the same enthusiasm he had felt when he was their age. When
they groused and sulked, he reread the book—and got seriously hooked, so much
so that he has written a book on Ben’s love lives that Hastings House published
a few years back.
Another 70ish amateur, the retired board chairman of
Washington’s public TV station, was armed with a sheaf of photocopies of his
piece in the Washington Post explaining
Ben’s penchant for young ladies. He bristled a bit at the sexy title some hip
copy editor had affixed: “Our Founding Flirt.” But I found his essay as perky
as the headline.
One of the five international scholars contributing to the
symposium, a Frenchman from Lyon’s Jean Moulin University, heads their American
studies program. (Jean Moulin was the Resistance fighter who tangled with Klaus
Barbie in Lyons.) Next to him was a 40ish exporter of General Electric products
from Manhattan. What a bunch of buddies old Ben has accumulated.
The table conversation made me ashamed that I had a Ph.D. in
American Civilization yet knew so much less than they did about one of the
country’s seminal figures. They talked chapter and verse, footnoting blithely
as they swapped their expertises over such arcane topics as the sad fact that
Ben in London didn’t know that his wife had died until months later. One
informant knew the name and sailing dates of the vessel bearing the bad news to
Ben as he sailed blithely past it on his way back to America.
And they even stumped the scholars with deceptively simple
posers at the symposium itself, such as, “Did anyone actually call Franklin
‘Ben?’ The professors’ collective response: “Huh?”
Wandering around New Castle, I locked onto the frequencies
of some other Bennies. Like a deputy attorney general. A clothing salesman from
Newport, Kentucky. A hardware salesman from Baltimore; he was a real
revelation. His Ben shtick was
collecting all the medals struck in Franklin’s honor—he has an astonishing
500-plus already.
He’s got a deposit down on the most expensive one he’s lusted
after to date, the ceramic mold for an Augustus St. Glaudens medal that was
never actually cast. It was vetted because the pose of Ben naked to the waist,
decorated with laurel leaves (a la Horatio
Greenough’s George Washington) was deemed “tasteless” in the 1890s. O
tempora, o medals.
But the most interesting Bennie to me was one Knox T (“Call
me ‘Bud’”) Long, an American history teacher from Moorpark College, north of
L.A. This 54-year-old has turned the loss of detached retinas to the gain of a
new career as the Ralph Archbold of the West Coast. What started out as an
effort to inject some positive notes into the massive disillusionment of his
post-Vietnam, post-Watergate classes has bloomed into a second career. In June,
he’ll lay this trip on the First Amendment Conference in Dallas. A few more big
engagements like that and he says he’ll risk leaving teaching for good.
Archbold gave Long great encouragement on his visit to
Philly. Now into his Franklin gig for 17 years, Archbold displayed the
magnanimity that most folks saw in our city’s spiritual godfather by inviting a
dozen of the Bennie groupies to a free feed at the Dickens Inn, followed by the
dessert of watching Archbold use his Franklin-era press to pump out printed
souvenirs.
I asked Ralph if he wasn’t beginning to O.D. on old Ben,
especially during this year of wall-to-wall Franklin. “Absolutely not,” was his
genial reply. “I’m learning so much from these scholarly papers that I’m too
busy trying to figure out how to fit the new material into my act to feel OD’d.
This has been Ben Heaven for me.”
Mid Atlantic magazine
was preparing a major feature on Archbold, and Ralph was proudly waving advance
proofs at me as he sailed off into the sunset. Whoops. Make that got back onto
the bus to Philly. Sorry, Professor Lemay. You can’t have everything perfect.
That’s one thing Ben surely learned.
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, December, 1990
No comments:
Post a Comment