| One of the first recordings made was in the village of Barnstable where Mr. Cataldo interviewed Captain E. Curtis Jerauld, who was then 89 and the oldest living resident of the village. Jerauld told how he made his first trip to sea when he was 12-years-old. This voyage ran three to four months off the banks of Nova Scotia. Jerauld said he spent at least 25 years at sea and was connected with it for most of his life. He recounted that every morning at sea, the crew's breakfast consisted of cod-fish chowder, and they would eat some kind of fish later in the day as well. "When we caught propoises, we'd put an iron in them," he remembered. "After we took off the blubber and saved the liver, we'd tie them up in the fore-rigging until it turned green, and then the men would eat it." "Aloes and rum was all of the medicine that we had about ship; it was used for all kinds of ailments. That is, aloe dissolved in rum. My father used to keep it right at the head of his berth under the pillow, and he used it for everything external and internal. And, I don't know, but eternally...it's a joke sort of...if you had a stomach ache and wanted physic, that's an old word for a laxative, you'd get a shot of that. And, also if you had a cut or anything of that kind, you bound it up and put that on. That's all you did to it...nature took its course and healed it up." |
| Miss Clara Jane Hallet was interviewed at the age of 93. Hallet still wrote a column regularly for the Barnstable Patriot and still tended her garden and kept house by herself. She recounted that in the early days, the schools received some of the fish money for their support. It came in a tax on each barrel brought into port. Some schoolmasters moved about taking pupils with them on the way to some farmhouse where other children waited for lessons. If any kind of wagon went by, there would be little faces peeking out of every window pane. In those early schoolrooms, the boys sat on one side and the girls on the other on benches without any backs. Discipline was strictly maintained and rulers were applied to the backside of any troublemaker. When a bachelor teacher arrived in a village, mothers with marriageable daughters would vie with one another to provide housing. The students had to buy their own books and materials and school teachers' salaries were a mere pittance. Kerosene lamps provided lighting and water was pumped from the well. Miss Hallet concluded her remarks by saying that it is inspiring to think that in spite of these seemingly endless handicaps, many of the country's most honored men and women began their education in similar small country schoolhouses. |
| Miss Sarah Boult was the oldest resident of Osterville in 1951. As the oldest resident, she held the Boult cane, a heavy cane of ivory with a silver top left by old Mr. Boult of the village to be held in turn by the oldest villager. Miss Boult recalled how the famous Crosby catboat got its name. Boat yards were very prominent on the Cape as most of the men followed the sea. Andrew Crosby and his two sons, Horace and Worthington, were building a boat that was designed differently from other boats in the their yard when Andrew died. The story goes that the boys ran into trouble and appealed to their Mother, Terza, who was a real spiritualist. She contacted her late husband for advice. He suggested a change needed to be made and the boys went ahead and finished the boat. When it was ready for launching, the old sailors and seamen gathered to watch the trial run, predicting the boat would be a flop. When she out sailed everything in the bay, they were properly astonished. One old sailor remarked, "She came about like a cat!" |
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