The Rest of the Story...

Dear Diary,

The snow hasn’t started yet which was a bit of surprise when I woke up this morning. I am sure it is on its way but in the meantime I though I would indulge in an old memory via this sampler, stitched by my grandmother over 75 years ago for my mother and father when they got married in 1941. It hung by the door in the house where I grew up and after my mother died in 2002 I claimed it. It has hung in my entry since then.

Back in the late 1970’s I use to love to listen to a radio show hosted by Paul Harvey called “The Rest of the Story”. He would take a familiar story and give what we now call the “back story”. So here is the back story to the sampler.

This is part of a very famous poem by Sam Walter Foss who lived in a house on School Street in Tilton, New Hampshire. The house, which was built in 1783, is still there and looks very much like my house, a common New England farmhouse. Foss read The Iliad by Homer when he was in school, I did too, and in Book VI is this sentence, “He was a friend to man, and lived by the side of the road.” Now we know where Foss got his inspiration for the poem, or, as Paul Harvey would say at the end of of his radio show, “Now we know the rest of the story.”

I’ve added a photo of the old map that shows my house, the red dot, right by the side of the road as houses often were back in the 19th century. No one wanted to shovel a long driveway! I can certainly understand that. My house was built in 1851 by Isaiah Fly so was only 7 years old when this map was drawn up.