Taft's Beverly summers
President had place in the sun on North Shore

July 29, 2004, Thursday THIRD EDITION
SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 973 words

HEADLINE: TAFT'S BEVERLY SUMMERS
BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

Compared with the 2004 Democratic National Convention, security at President William Howard Taft's summer White House 94 years ago in Beverly was remarkably casual.

"They didn't shut down anything," said Stephen Hall, interim director of the Beverly Historical Society. "Taft would just get in the car and go. [First Lady] Nellie [Taft] would go into the shops and buy hats and gloves.

"The speeches were just as spirited, and the campaigns were just as spirited. It was a much more familiar age, though it was more formal in other ways."

But the summer presence of the genial 300-pound Republican who was president between 1909 and 1912 dominated the social scene. A local newspaper published the license-plate numbers of his touring cars for easy recognition. Motorists in goggles and dusters formed a half-mile line outside the president's cottage awaiting his emergence for a Sunday drive.

Sightseers paddled dories to hail the presidential liner Mayflower, anchored off Woodbury Point with its white-gloved crew of 200, 16-piece band, and custom-made presidential bathtub.

The excitement was too much for his summer landlady. Maria Antoinette Evans, 12th-richest woman in America, had rented a 14-room cottage on her Beverly Cove estate to the president and his family for the summers of 1909 and 1910, only to have a cavalcade of newspapermen, visiting dignitaries, and gawkers descend on her solitude.

"Poor Mrs. Evans the Secret Service men were nailing telephones to trees, jumping out from behind bushes and scaring the horses," said Hall, who is co-producing a video on the Taft years when Beverly billed itself the Nation's Summer Capital.

So Mrs. Evans effectively evicted the president of the United States, informing him the summer lease would not be renewed in 1911.

She then had the former summer White House cut in half and floated by barge across the bay to Peach's Point in Marblehead, where it was reassembled. In its place on her Beverly grounds she installed an opulent Italian garden, today the site of Lynch Park, off Ober Street in Beverly Cove.

During the final two years of his presidency, Taft made his summer White House at "Parramatta," the 18-room former estate of late merchant and ship-owner Henry W. Peabody in the Montserrat section at 70 Corning St., now a private residence.

The tale of Mrs. Evans yanking the welcome mat from the summer White House adds to a certain Rodney Dangerfield element accompanying the legacy of President Taft, the only man ever to serve both as president and Supreme Court chief justice, but more widely recalled for getting stuck in the White House bathtub, and for finishing third in his 1912 reelection bid.

A short play, "Good Heavens, Mrs. Evans," was performed two years ago to raise money for restoration of a carriage house in Lynch Park.

"I always thought, what a funny story that you'd have the nerve to evict the president and move the house," said the play's author, Beverly writer Nancy Brewka Clark, whose research into the subject led her to a more sympathetic view of Maria Antoinette Evans.

Now, a video history of Taft's presidential summers in Beverly is being made by a former intern on the set of "The West Wing." Beverly City Councilor John Burke, who completed an internship on the set of the hit TV series as an Emerson College senior three years ago, has produced previous videos for the Beverly Historical Society about the younger Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the Rev. John Hale, a key accuser in the witch trials.

Burke noticed no memorial to Taft's summers in Beverly exists outside of a marker on the pew the president occupied at the First Parish (Unitarian) Church. "If you lift up the cushion, the old clippings are underneath," he said.

The 25-year-old city councilor is now working with Hall on a Taft video they hope to complete by Christmas. "That the president chose Beverly for his summer White House is something we should be very proud of," said Burke.

At the time, "Big Bill" Taft made a splash in Beverly. Local newspaper headlines trumpeted his comings-and-goings as well as his daily golf scores at Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton.

When the identity of the summer White House was revealed in 1909, hundreds of souvenir-hunters descended on Woodbury Point and ripped relics from the cottage, to Mrs. Evans' chagrin.

Twenty-one-gun salutes reverberated from a naval ship in Gloucester Harbor whenever the presidential yachts passed Eastern Point.

Rubber stamps were sold to postmark outgoing letters from "Beverly, Massachusetts, the Summer Capital."

Hall described how his father, as a boy, distributed the hymnals at the First Parish Church: "He found the hymnals in the Taft pew kept disappearing, probably as souvenirs for the locals."

The executive business of the nation was conducted that first summer of 1909 in rooms at the Beverly Board of Trade in the Mason Building on Cabot Street, where, a local paper wrote, the president would "run the gauntlet of pop corn men, candy vendors and suspender peddlers" to reach his office.

Images at the Beverly Historical Society's website show Taft attending the city's Fourth of July and Grand Army of the Republic parades in 1909, and laying the cornerstone of the YMCA building on Cabot Street in 1911.

Even as his political fortunes sagged, the avuncular Taft remained popular with Beverly, said Hall.

"The Republicans and Democrats [of Beverly] voted for him in 1912," he said. "No question the people of Beverly loved him."

Material for this story was drawn from the book "Boston's Gold Coast" by Gloucester historian Joseph Garland. For more on the Taft summer White House, see Beverly Historical Society's website: members.tripod.com/BevHistSoc/index.html

August 18, 2002, Sunday, THIRD EDITION
SECTION: GLOBE NORTH; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1125 words

HEADLINE: GLOBE NORTH 1 / LYNN;
THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS CAME ON FOR BASEBALL

BYLINE: By Mark Sullivan, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

For one evening, 75 years ago this summer, Lynn was baseball's City of Lights.

On June 24, 1927, the Lynn Papooses and Salem Witches of the Class B New England League played an exhibition game under the glow of 72 1,500-watt floodlights at the General Electric Employees Athletic Association Field in West Lynn.

It was the first time professional baseball teams in an organized league had played at night under artificial illumination.

The managers of the big-league Boston Red Sox and Washington Senators were among the 5,000 spectators who filled the park on Summer Street for the spectacle arranged by General Electric to test the possibilities of baseball under the lights.

Also in the stands was then-15-year-old William "Chub" Fallon, of Lynn, who three-quarters of a century later still recalls the excitement that surrounded the game.

"It was quite a thrill," said Fallon, a retired letter carrier and former longtime city councilor and school committeeman who celebrated his 90th birthday in June and 60th wedding anniversary in July.

"I couldn't figure out at first how they could see the ball. But the illumination was very good, and you could follow the ball quite well."

The first professional night game remains a point of pride in this city.

But Lynn was not the first seaside community in Massachusetts to make night-baseball history - not by a long shot.

Nearly 47 years before, on Sept. 2, 1880, in the South Shore town of Hull, employees of the Jordan Marsh and R.H. White department stores played a game of baseball under a makeshift lighting system on the grounds of the old Sea Foam House near today's A Street Pier.

That game, illuminated by three 100-foot towers bearing 108 lamps with carbonized cotton filaments that produced a glow equivalent to 30,000 candles, is commonly agreed to have been the first played at night by electric light.

Of what significance are these bits of local baseball trivia? Ask David Pietrusza, of Scotia, N.Y., former president of the Society for American Baseball Research and author of the 1997 book "Lights On! The Wild Century-Long Saga of Night Baseball."

The light bulb had been invented by Thomas Edison only 11 months before the Hull game was organized by the Northern Electric Light Company of Boston to showcase its streetlight technology, Pietrusza said.

"The baseball wasn't a big deal," he said. "Electricity - that they were lighting anything - was the newsworthy part."

Numerous experiments in night baseball would take place over the following decades, he said, with barnstorming teams trying various forms of artificial illumination, including lamps mounted on trains. "People get ideas very quickly," he said. "It takes a while to get the bugs out."

Baseball, he said, presented unique challenges that made it a singularly useful proving ground for outdoor lighting systems: The field covers a great expanse that must be illuminated. If the lights are too bright or too dim, batters lose sight of oncoming fastballs, with hazardous consequences. Set the canopy of light too low and fly balls soar into darkness before reappearing, to the bafflement of fielders.

"As I look back now, it was hard to follow a long hit," Farrell recalled of the Lynn game. "As the ball went up in the lights, it was hard to follow down. A line drive you could tell easily."

Nevertheless, what General Electric accomplished that night in Lynn - and would celebrate decades later in television commercials - was no small achievement, Pietrusza said.

"It was a tremendous engineering marvel," the baseball historian said, "which is why the people in Lynn were so proud of what they did."

Lights were adopted across much of minor league baseball by 1931, he said, with night games proving vital to the economic viability of the minor leagues during the lean years of the Great Depression.

The first night game in the major leagues was played at Cincinnati in 1935, and by the end of the 1940s, lights had been installed by all the big-league teams, with the notable exception of the Chicago Cubs, whose Wrigley Field remained sunlight-only for another 40 years.

The first night game in Boston major league history was played between the New York Giants and the Boston Braves before 36,000 fans at Braves Field on May 11, 1946, nearly 66 years after the lights went on in Hull.

That significant firsts in night baseball took place in Massachusetts was testament to Boston's place as a baseball capital and to the region's industrial prowess, Pietrusza said.

He recalled a 1998 book by Mark Kurlansky, "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World," that examined how the famous fish helped build the economy of New England and North America. Night baseball can be viewed in a similar way, he said, as an aspect of an industry that helped change society.

The Lynn game, won by the hometown Papooses, 7-2, was to have been played the previous evening with Babe Ruth - in the midst of a record-setting 60-homerun season - in the lineup. The Yankee star had hit two homers in a doubleheader against the Red Sox in Boston that afternoon, but the scheduled exhibition that night was washed out by rain.

Promoted by General Electric engineers to sell floodlights and by New England League president Claude Davidson to boost interest in his struggling baseball enterprise, the 1927 game at GE Field was a technological success, according to baseball historian Charlie Bevis of Chelmsford.

But the innovation didn't catch on in the New England League, because while the league's eight clubs in Lynn, Salem, Lawrence, Haverhill, Nashua, Manchester, Portland and Lewiston would likely have profited from night baseball, they couldn't afford the lights, he said.

Seventy-five years later, the game is the stuff of lore in Lynn.

"Obviously it's a source of pride," said Lynn Museum librarian Diane Shephard, "especially because of GE and the link with local industry. It is something that people comment about: 'Lynn, the City of Firsts.'

"They called it 'The City of Shoes and Electricity,' " she said. "The electric trolley cars were early here, and Lynn had street lights early, because of GE."

Has there ever been a battle for North Shore-South Shore bragging rights to night-baseball history?

Nah, say the locals.

"Hull is 40 years ahead, so there's not much," said youth baseball coach Edward Lothrop, who watched eight years ago when the 1880 night game was reenacted in Hull. A team captained by Gov. William Weld faced a lineup of local officials during festivities marking the centennial of the Hull Light Company.

Declares Lynn Mayor Edward "Chip" Clancy: "There is no rivalry. Everyone has his claim. We're just happy to have a piece of the pie."