Looking Back: Earl Young's pet goats
CHARLEVOIX — One hundred and fifty years ago, Charlevoix Courier editor Willard A. Smith included this in the Feb. 7, 1874 issue. It is a wry description of the life and travails of those who fill that newspaper position, written by one of America’s most popular early humorists, Josh Billings.
Billings was born in 1818 (died 1885) as Henry Wheeler Shaw, and took his pseudonym in the late 1850s when he began writing seriously (or humorously, is it were). He was the one who popularized the famous saying, “The wheel that does the squeaking is the one that gets the grease.” All his idiosyncratic spellings and grammar that follow are exactly as printed:
“A Definition of an Editor. We have seen many definitions of many names, words and phrases, but the following of an editor, given by Josh Billings, is about the best we have ever encountered:
“An editor is a male being whose bizness is to navigate a nuse paper. He writes editorials, grinds out poetry, inserts deths and weddings, sorts out manuscripts, keeps a waste basket, blows us to the ‘devil,’ steals matter, fites other peoples battles, sells his newspaper for a dollar and 50 cents a year, takes white beans and apple suss for pay when he can get it, raizes a large family, works 19 hours out uv every 24, noze no Sunday, gits dammed bi everybody, and once in a while whipt by somebody, lives poor, dies middle-aged and often brokenhearted, leaves no munny, is rewarded for a life uv toil by a short but free obituary puff in the nuse papers.”
In the same vein, 50 years later, the Feb. 6, 1924 Charlevoix Courier had this to say: “Yes, Yes, The’re [sic] But Few Who Don’t Make Them. Commenting on mistakes in the columns of daily and weekly newspapers, an exchange (source of news or commentary items) had this to say:
“We made mistake in last week’s issue of the Courier. A good subscriber told us about it. The same day there was a letter in our postoffice box that didn’t belong to us. We called for 98 over the telephone and we got 198. We asked for a spool of No. 50 thread and when we got home we found it was No. 60. The train was reported thirty minutes late. We arrived at the depot twenty minutes after train time and the train was gone. We got our milk bill and there was a mistake of ten cents in our favor. We felt sick and the doctor said we were eating too much meat. We hadn’t tasted meat for two months. The garage man said the jitney was missing because it needed a new timer. We cleaned a spark plug and it’s run fine ever since. Yes, we made a mistake in last week’s issue of the paper.” Amen.
Recently, the Charlevoix Historical Society received the long thought to be lost memoirs of Earl A. Young, Charlevoix’s renowned builder in stone. It’s a hefty manuscript of 97 chapters, many of them very short, that came close to being, but was never published for reasons still unknown. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6:
“Different experiments were tried by some of the lumbermen for cleaning up their slashings, and in the very first years of the century, W. W. White of Boyne City brought in 500 angora goats to clean up a section of cutover timber. Actually, the goats, with a reputation of foraging on anything, made a good showing. Mr. White soon found that his herd of 500 was becoming depleted by poachers and rustlers, coming from some distance to steal the white Angoras. Mr. White was a friend of our family, and before Christmas in 1902 (the Young family arrived here in 1900) had a matched pair of beautiful male Angoras brought down in a sleigh from Boyne City as a Christmas present for me.
“Immediately these two beautiful animals, that we named Keno and Plato, because family pets and were a common sight as we would drive them about after school. Levi Shay, local harness maker, made a beautiful set of light brown leather harnesses, and for a couple winters the goats were a great source of pleasure. In the summer they would be put out at the Grandy farm on the Boyne City Road, where they were eventually put out to pasture. It was very easy to train them and they actually seemed to enjoy being harnessed together to the specially built sleigh. We intended to keep them well penned up, but many times our good intentions were ignored by our pets and there would be an hour or two some days when Keno and Plato became everyone’s friends.
“They soon learned where they were welcome and could expect a handout, or where they were not welcome, such as when they would walk into Major Green’s law office (on Bridge Street) and start to eat the blotters off the desk. Also Shorty Smith, the local bill poster, found that our pair of pets would often wait until he had left a new job of bill posting, then they would stand on their hind legs, reaching up to seven or eight feet with their front hoofs, and scrape down and eat the freshly posted advertising bills. The goats also delighted in climbing from the top of fish boxes onto the sloping roof of the (American) Express office (also on Bridge Street, near the bridge ), through the ridge of Wilbur’s Dock warehouse (on the waterfront that is now the Beaver Island Boat Company area), where they would stand for an hour at a time baa-ing at everything in sight. They were definitely town pets that were tolerated and loved.
“About two years ago (ca. 1966), walking down Mason Street, a friend we have known for a lifetime came out of her home and said, ‘Earl, I have saved this for you.’ And she handed me a picture of my goat team. This picture was taken nearly 70 years ago and I had given it to her when I gave her a ride one day after school.”
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— Contact reporter Annie Doyle at (231) 675-0099 or adoyle@charlevoixcourier.com
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Looking Back: Earl Young's pet goats
