Meeting In The Mountains -NH Publisher’s Notes

PHOTO: Joe Dodge, founder of the Appalachian Mountain Club White Mountain Hut System.

by Robert Hanaford Smith, Sr.
Weirs Times Contributing Writer

Unusual happenings and astounding feats are related by those who live and work among the mountains of New Hampshire and some of those tales were told during a gathering of the New Hampshire Weekly Publisher’s Association on September 12th in the year 1949.
The notes about the meeting include some political opinion, but also show the importance of the press in promoting the Granite State. The year 1949 would have been the first year that Sherman Adams served as New Hampshire’s Governor. The notes, which were probably used in an issue of The Laconia Evening Citizen were written by E.J. Gallagher, the publisher of the newspaper who, with his wife, attended the Association’s meeting.
The meeting of the publisher’s association was held at the Waumbek Resort in Jefferson on a Friday night and included some tall tales. One of the featured speakers was a man who Gallagher described as a visitor from afar – Joe Cook from Madison, Texas. Madison is three miles from the Mexican border and the newspaper Joe Cook published had won many prizes which led to Joe being elected president of the National Editorial Association.
In his speech Joe had to brag about the State of Texas and how big things were down there. He said that they have a thirty pound rock which they hang on a fencepost in Texas. He claimed, “When the wind blows 50 miles an hour, that 30 pound stone extends horizontally from the post, like a flag in the breeze.”
Mayor Clint White of Lancaster introduced the next speaker after the Texan had concluded his bragging. The speaker, Joe Dodge, was presented as the mayor of Porkey Gulch, but in fact was the man who had been in charge of the Appalachian Club huts in the White Mountains since 1922. Porkey Gulch was a reference to Pinkham Notch where Dodge had been stationed when he first went to work for the Appalachian Mountain Club. It became known as a place with an abundance of porcupines. Joe wanted everyone to understand that New Hampshire had its own greatness and spoke of a man in the audience who had spent five winters on Mount Washington and could “back up any defense of New Hampshire’s grandeur.” That man was Ken Gould of Meredith and Laconia.
Joe Dodge went on to say, “Up on Mount Washington we have a stone that weighs a ton. It hangs there at the summit. When the wind blows 50 miles per hour it merely trembles. But when the wind is 200 miles an hour, that one-ton stone levels off on a perfect right angle from the post.”

Mr. Dodge had more to say about activities on the mountains, particularly the work of building the Madison Hut and the Lake of the Clouds Hut to accommodate mountain climbers. Much of the work was done by students who, in the work on the Madison Hut carried materials up the mountain and for the Lake of the Clouds Hut carried materials down from the top of the mountain. Those materials were taken to the top of Mount Washington by the cog railroad and then carried a mile down the mountain to the construction site. One man was mentioned as having set a record for carrying cement bags down the mountain to the location of the hut. He was nicknamed “Batch” because his last name was Batchelder. On October 7, 1940 he began work at 4:30am, carrying 100 pound bags of concrete on his back down the mountain. He made ten trips down the mountain to the Lake of the Clouds and back again on that day. He was paid two and a half cents a pound for his work, so received $25 with two dollars of that being deducted for his board. Weighing was done at the end of the trip to make sure that the full amount of concrete made it to the hut location.
The New Hampshire publishers were addressed by the executive director of the National Editorial Association concerning their annual meeting which was to be held in Providence, Rhode Island in June of 1950, but would also include trips to Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.
The director, Mr. Eck of Chicago told the group that Rhode Island had committed to giving $8,000 for the convention, Massachusetts $4,000 and Maine $1,000. Governor Adams had been asked to donate $2,000 from his contingency fund from New Hampshire, but his secretary had sent a letter to the publishers asking if the money couldn’t be raised by private donations.
The sentiment of the publishers seemed to be that it would be to the State’s advantage to provide the $2,000. It was pointed out that in 1926 Governor Winant had appropriated $10,000 from the state publicity department when the National Editorial Association met in New Hampshire. That convention included a trip to Laconia and a ride on the big lake on the Mount Washington when it was a side-wheeler.

One of the men at the Waumbek, publisher Arthur Morris of the Littleton Courier, remembered that after the 1926 meeting New Hampshire received a lot of publicity because editors in 48 states wrote articles for their newspapers about the Granite State.
The Democrat National Committeeman, Emmet Kelley of Berlin expressed the opinion that if Democrats ran the state government the $2,000 would be forthcoming, and that it was worth it for the 500 people who would be making a trip to New Hampshire during the convention. Special trains were to take the group to Bretton Woods with a stop at Manchester for lunch, and a possible stop at the Weirs. The editors were scheduled to stay overnight at the Mount Washington Hotel and spend 48 hours in New Hampshire even if they didn’t get an appropriation from the state.

The Executive Secretary of the White Mountain Region Association, Ashley Hazeltine, was also a speaker at the 1949 meeting in Jefferson, and with good reason, because he arranged for the publishers to receive free trips at several mountain attractions including the cog railroad, auto coaches on the toll road, the tramway, and the flume.
I don’t suppose that there will be many conventions taking place in the White Mountains or anywhere else in New Hampshire this Fall of 2020, but I also expect that enough people will dare defy the virus and come to the state to view the foliage that keeping one’s distance from others may not always be an easy assignment.
I must add that Joe Dodge was in charge of the AMC huts for many years and a lodge in Pinkham Notch now bears his name.

Robert Hanaford Smith, Sr., welcomes your comments at danahillsmiths@yahoo.com