◆ SpookStack

or re enn nn nen nee Ne Ee OL ee RP ee wae ee Se ee situated, and the date when the family first settled there. So during the several trips that my father and I took to- gether that summer, I brought back a dozen or more stones and made them the basis of an “Ancestral Walk”. My sons and [ with hammers and cold chisels carved the names, places, and dates on these stones and set them in the walk. Since we were not masons and did not know how to carve well, our lettering was as crude as could be found on the tombstones in any old New England church-yard. This walk was naturally interesting to my family and friends, but who else could get very much excited over a row of stones carved with such old New England family names as Holt, Bowen, Ehot, Corbin, Chandler, Aspinwall, Eaton, Tappan, etc. It then occurred to me to collect stones from the homes of men and women whose names would be known to everybody and fit them into another walk on my farm. Therefore, the next summer when my calleague, Pro- fessor A. J. Hanna, and I were motoring through New England raising money for Rollins, we decided to start a. collection of stones from the homes of celebrities. Thus if we saw a sign at a crossroads pointing to the right and saying “one mile to the birthplace” of Daniel Webster, or Franklin Pierce, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, we would detour down that read and obtain a stone. After we had collected about twenty stones, the great moral deBate began. Collecting, I fear, is something of a selfish, Han-glorious, exhibitionist, and egocentric pursuit {note | every collector “gloats” over his collections and with wpatpride he insists on showing them to all and sundry who visit Mm). So Mrs. Holt and I had many a debate a3 to whether or not we should keep these stoncs for oursclves or donate them to Rollins College. Finally generosity pre-- vailed and we presented them to Rollins, Then we dis- covered what everybody discovers who puts the precept into practice—that while it is blessed to receive, it is more blessed to give. Accordingly I found my interest in develop- ing the “Walk of Fame” at Rollins to be far more absorbing than would have been my interest in developing the same walk on my own homestead. That nucleus of some twenty stones that we got the 4 t ' AO RR TE pt me ey oe first year has now grown to about 600, and more are com- ing in almost every day. We have to make it an invariable rule that only stones of nationally or internationally known men and women can be admitted to the Walk—no local celebrities. For instance, we would accept no stone from the home of an eminent Floridian who woud noc be similarly known in Maine or Oregon, and no stone from Massachue setts that would not be known in ‘Texas. Of course there is a borderline, but as a rule we accept stones from only the homes of men and women whose names come up, or nearly come up, to being “household-words.” I find, even so, that some of the stones are seldom known by our visitors, though they ought to be. For instance, almost no visitor to the Watk knows that Paul Morphy of New Orleans was the greatest chess player that ever lived, that Professor, Willard Gibbs of Yale was undoubtedly the greatest modded mathe- matician of pre-Kinstein times, or that Doctor Morton of Sterling, Massachusetts, discovered ether (my father told me that when my grandfather, the old country doctor, heard of the discovery of ether, he wept to think that he would never have to torture people again when operating on them). I was once explaining the Walk to a large group of students, and when I came to the Adelina Patti stone 1 asked how many had never heard of her. About thirty hands were raised. . Everybody at Rollins is now a committee of one to bring in stones. 1 think we have virtually all of the Ameri- cans of undisputed first rank, and we have all but about 30 or 40 of those of the second rank. All the Presidents and Chief Justices of the United States are repreedated and half the Signers of the Declaration of Independengt. But Kings and United States Senators are not admifted ex-officio, They have to be Kings and Senators plus. :-Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania, Mary Qucen of Scots, Senators Elihu Root and Charles Sumner are typical exceptions that prove the rule, Already we have many stones from forcign coun- tries, but this is a field which naturally is nowhere nearly so complete as is our collection from the United States, It is @ curious fact that only two men of the 600 in the “Walk of Fame” got there as a result of material achieve- ment and success, These are Rockefeller and Carnegie, 5 ‘bela. Sata Ls ae