The Carrollton Chronicle (Carrollton, Tex.), Vol. 27, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, December 12, 1930 Page: 2 of 8
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CARROLLTON CHRONICLE
T
By ELMO SCOTT WATSON
HEN you buy a big sheet of
Christmas seals, does it ever
JMk occur to you that there’s un
interesting story back of the
WJtaAkaddition of these little “scraps
iflPRVof paper” to the list of syni-
Mv hols of Christmas time? And
jjfjb do the names of Elnar Hoi*
boell and Emily P. Blssel.
come to your mind when you stick one
of these gayly-colored little stomps on
a Christmas package and send it away
to carry its message of Yuletide cheer
as well as the message that you are
thus helping in a great humanitarian
jwork? If not, they should, for it is
to a Danish postal clerk and an Amer-
ican Red Cross worker that we owe
the idea and development of the
Christmas seal.
Back in 1903 a man named Elnar
Holboell, a postal clerk in the post of-
fice at Copenhagen, Denmark, was
busy in the division of outgoing mail.
It was Christmas week and he was
literally burled in cards and letters.
’The faster he sorted the faster they
flowed in.
For a moment he paused in serious
thought; then his face brightened.
“These Christmas cards and letters
should have an additional stamp—a
benevolent stamp or seal at a small
price within the reach of all. Why
pot call it a Christmas stamp?
“Even a ‘two ore’ (about one-fourth of
a cent) stamp on all these cards and
letters would create a mighty sum if
the plan could only be realized. Christ-
mas is a time of generosity and good
will, when we send a kindly thought
even to those whom we neglect the
whole year through. Two ore each on
every greeting would mean a sum to
be reckoned with—well, then, to the
task!”
lie went with his plan to the head of
the postal service and others with In-
fluence and authority. And so, when
the first Christmas seal committee was
formed, including, among others, six
representatives from the postal de-
partment, the interest of the postal
employees was insured from the start.
In 2904 the committee met to <ijs-
cuss the purpose and use of the pos-
sible income from the Christmas seal,
and it was decided that the first ob-
ject was the erection of a hospital for
tubercular children, and, in general,
the income from the seal should al-
ways be for the fight against tuber-
culosis, in one form or another.
Upon application to the then King
Christian IX, Holboell secured the per-
mission to have a likeness of the de-
ceased Queen Louise on the first
Christmas seal, and the king became
so interested that he himself selected
the picture which he wished used.
Naturally, Mr. Holboell and his com-
mittee felt some anxiety over the out-
come of their first venture—an anx-
iety which proved to be without
foundation. The success was over-
whelming. The first printing of 2,000,-
000 was immediately increased to
6,000,000 and over 5,000,000 were sold.
Since that time a capital of 3,000,-
000 kronen has been realized, which
has been used for the erection of large
numbers of sanitariu and convalescent
homes for tubercular patients. Hoi-
boell, the modest postal assistant, be-
came postmnster at Charlotten Zund,
near Copenhagen, and u Danish cross
of Knighthood was his badge of honor.
He died of heart trouble in bis sixty-
second year on February 23, 1927, and.
ns was fitting, the Danish Christmas
seal for 1927 bore the picture of Einar
Holboell, whose idea has spread over
the entire world.
The story of how Miss Emily I\ BIs-
seirs name came to be associated with
the Christmas seal was told in an ar-
ticle by Leigh Mitchell Hodges which
appeared in The Survey last year and
jvhlch has been reproduced in pam
phlet form by the National Tuberculo-
sis association. His story of “The
First Christmas Seal” follows:
December, 1907—the World war
seven years ahead, but a deadlier
war at flood—tuberculosis taking
one-tenth of all who died from dis-
ease—folks everywhere wondering
what could be done to stem the tide.
Mid-morning, December 13 — a
ragged, dirty newsboy walked into
a Philadelphia newspaper office.
Reaching up to a marble counter
higher than his head, he put down
a copper cent
“Gimme one, me sister’s got it.”
(What he was given is the seal
illustrated above directly under the
letters “Ch” in the title of this ar-
ticle).
Noontime, December 9, 1907, In
Wilmington, capital of little Dela-
ware, two pretty girls in Red Cross
uniforms taking their place at a
table in the post office corridor, ask-
ing a quarter each for little pay en-
velopes thus labeled:
25 CHRISTMAS STAMPS
One Penny Apiece
Issued by the Delaware Red Cross,
to stamp out the White Plague.
Put this stamp with message bright
On every Christmas letter,
Help the tuberculsois fight,
And make the New Year better.
These stamps do not carry any
kind of mail, but any kind of mall
will carry them.
Mid-morning, December 11, 1907,
eighteenth floor of the North Amer-
ican building in Philadelphia, a day
member of the staff in his cubby-
hole. “A lady to see you,” passing
a card engraved “Miss Emily P.
Bissell.” “Is she good looking?”
“Sure.” “Show her in.”
Enter the secretary of the Dela-
ware Red Cross on unofficial busi-
ness. She had come to ask a favor
of the Sunday editor and thought
she’d pay her respects to the col-
umnist, who hoped the Sunday edi-
tor had granted her wish.
He had not. She had wanted him
to run a little story about this, tak-
ing a sheet of stamps from her hand-
bag. Delaware was worried about
tuberculosis, needed a few hundred
dollars to start caring for poor pa-
tients. She had read Jacob Riis’
story about the Danish Christmas
Stamp in the Outlook, wondered if
Delaware couldn’t issue one and sell
enough to build a small shelter—
here It was, but she was afraid—.
Downstairs went the occupant of
the cubby-hole, two steps at a time,
to the office of E. A. Van Valken-
burg, president and editor of the
paper that had been first to dis-
please the doctors by proposing pub-
licity as the weapon to use against
the white plague.
“Here’s the way to wipe out tuber-
culosis,” half-shouted the man from
upstairs, as he waved the sheet of
stamps under the editor’s nose I
“What the hell do you mean?”
A brief explanation. “Tell Miss
Bissell the North American is hers
from today."
“How soon can we hove 50,000 of
the stamps?” was asked of the lady
from Delaware. She gasped and
said she'd telephone from Wilming-
ton that evening. “Fifty thousand,”
she echoed as she left, “Isn’t that
too many?"
Ten o’clock the morning of De-
cember 13, 1907, u few thousund of
the stamps, they were so-called at
first, on sale in the publication office
and a few more at a booth in Wana-
maker’s. Also a top-of-column five-
bank head on page one of the North
American. Next day the whole edi-
torial space devoted to a plea to buy
these “bullets in the battle against
the worst foe.”
Next day a seven-column “spread”
on page one, and on December 18,
with the stamps selling by thou-
sands and telegrams from many
parts of the country asking about
them.
The presses In Wilmington couldn’t
print them fast enough, so a Phila-
delphia printer was enlisted. Through
its Washington correspondent, the
newspaper got the postmaster gen-
eral’s permission to put up a booth
in the Philadelphia post office lobby.
From Jacob Riis, on December 19:
“Good for you and for Philadelphia
and the North American. Keep it
up. I am glad the little seed I
sowed in the Outlook last summer
has borne fruit.”
Five days before Christmas the
governor of Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania branch of the Nation-
al Red Cross Indorsed the stamp.
Four days before Christmas an edi-
torial urged that “A Million Mercy
Messengers” be bought by the peo-
ple. Two days before Christmas
“Happy New Year” was added to
the stamp design, the demand hav-
ing grown so. The day after
Christmas more than hdlf a mil-
lion already distributed to city, state
and nation.
Then a flight of signed indorse-
ments from Washington, President
Roosevelt, Secretary of State Root,
Secretary of War Taft; from Balti-
more, Cardinal Gibbons; from other
places leaders in public life, phil-
anthropy and education all featured
on page one.
On January 8, a check for $1,013.97
sent to Miss Bissell, the proceeds of
the North American's part in this
preface to stamping out the plague
—several times the sum Delawar-
eans had wanted to raise and
feared they could not get. And as
much more from other sources in
Pennsylvania. All told, Delaware
and Pennsylvania raised $3,000 from
this first sale of stamps.
Meantime, the National Red
Cross stopped, looked and listened,
at an annual meeting, to Miss Bis-
sell and the cubby-hole man, and
slowly but surely decided to get be-
hind the stamp. So the field was
widened for the second round of
these harmless “bullets,” harmless
to all save the deadly germs.
On November 12, 1908, the first
gun in the second campaign was
fired by the North American, a page-
one promise to sell 1,000,000 of the
1908 stamps, and one month later
to the day it ordered its fourth mil-
lion. Meuntime—
Every day from November 12 to
January 1, the Red Cross Christmas
Stamp was a matter of first-page
moment, and many a day it was
given precedence over all other
news in the North American.
“It is splendid,” said President
Taft at tlie meeting of the Red
Cross in Washington, December 8.
Two days later the first page of the
North American came out with a
border of the stamps in red and a
three-column facsimile likewise col-
ored. Other newspapers in many
parts of the land were Joining the
procession. When the curtuin wus
rung down on this act, in Junuary,
the net result of the stamp sale
throughout the nation was $135,000.
“I never could have believed it,”
said Miss Bissell.
“Gimme one—” and how the tinkle
of that copper coin hns grown!
Annual sales of Christmas seals
amounted to $53,000,000 to date,
from this source alone. Yet the
money Is the least part of It. The
message is what has counted most.
Between them, the death rate from
tuberculosis has been cut in half.
And it is still going down. Its fate
is sealed.
4®. 1810, Western Newspaper Union.)
(Prepared by the National Geographic
Society. Washington. D. C.)
| ’Alt up in the jungles of French
rH indo-China, some 300 miles from
X the doorstep of the world as meas-
ured in distance, a thousand
years in the past as measured in time,
and eons back in the unknown as
measured in history, is Angkor, one of
the most puzzling works ever contrived
by the hand of man.
Temple and town and network of
dim and forgotten shrines, it repre-
sents a culture that must have been
far in advance of anything coeval with
it and a power that must have been
virtually irrestible even in Asia, where
men ut arms were plentiful and war-
fare was a favored business.
But the culture died aud the men
who hod built it disappeared, and for
hundreds of years the forests of ban-
yan and bamboo bid from the eyes and
memory of the world what had been u
metropolis of a million Inhabitants.
Two generations ago a French nat-
uralist broke through the wall of jun-
gle in a search for specimens of trop-
ical life and came upon a spectacle
such as the slaves of the lamp might
have contrived for Aladdin. Before
ldin, in the quivering silence, rose the
live towers of a vast step pyramid, a
stone tapestry representative of an art
aud architecture like nothing else with-
in the ken of man.
A moated wall surrounded it and a
cloistered gate upou a causeway that
led to its rocketing staircases; and,
for all that, Jungle growths-were close
about its lower stage and odd clumps
of verdure grew from its arched roofs,
it seemed that life had been in Its
shadowy galleries only a moment ago.
The temple was virtually intact.
No Trace of Man Except Ruins.
The astonished visitor looked about
for the ashes of altar fires and stood
listening for the footsteps of returning
priests. It seemed incredible that a
people could have evolved a civiliza-
tion such as that typified by the great
temple and then have vanished with-
out any of their neighbors hearing
of it.
But there were no human beings iu
the empty halls, nor was there trace
of man, save in the ruin of his works
In the walled city to the north.
It is now more than sixty years since
the stunned eyes of Mouhot, the nat-
uralist, looked upou the magnificent
heights of Angkor—more than sixty
years since the greatest detective story
in the history of the world was laid
out with its million stony clews to
puzzle the savants. Today, with Its
principal remains classified and ticket-
ed, its inscriptions translated, and its
monuments lifted out of the jungle,
Angkor is still the vast and silent
mystery that it was In the beginning.
The world knows more about it now.
Splendid automobile roads, cut through
what was once a thicket of bamboo
and is now an endless rice field, bring
the traveler, on regular schedule and
with little personal discomfort, from
Saigon, at the foot of Asia, to the bun-
galow on the edge of the Angkor moat,
in a few hours. Yearly hundreds of
visitors from all parts of the world
are seeking out this odd corner and
carrying away with them amazed re-
ports that will lure other hundreds.
And yet, were it not for the fact
that these tremendous zlkkurats re-
main much as they were when they
were first built, defiant of time and
weather, by the Tonle Sap (Great
Lake), the incredible tale of the civ-
ilization that built them and vanished
would rank as it did In Mouhot’s time,
as a noue-too-cleverly-eonstructed myth.
Discovered by Mouhot.
Two generations ago the modern
world had never heard of Angkor. A
dense forest spread across Indo-China.
French trude was confined to the
coast, and there wus no commercial
truffle on the Mekong river north of
Pnompenh for the reuson that Cam-
bodia’s resources, the same resources
thut had given this region a possible
Identity us the Golden Chersonese of
legend, were ns deeply carpeted with
useless verdure as the hidden cities
of the North.
Pnompenh, the capital of the King-
dom of Cambodia (western portion of
the Indo-Chinese peninsula), was a
village of nipa thatch and bamboo, a
comic-opera metropolis, where a des-
pot ruled in fear of his life over a
semisavage, if not completely savage,
people.
Saigon, the present capital of French
enterprise in the East, was Just rising
from the marshes south of Annam.
What might lie hidden In the masses
of foliage to the north, no one knew.
During these troublous times M.
Mouhot passed up the great river into
Tonle Sap and made bis discovery.
Archeology, already thrilled by the
translation of the Rosetta Stone and
the unbelievable bit of detective work
which led to the decipherment of the
Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions, turned
its attention at once to this new field.
For half a century learned men
toiled here unceasingly to prove at
length only what had been suspected
from the first, that a highly intellec-
tual people had built up in this valley
a civilization, and that however incon-
ceivable experience might show such
a thing to be, their marvelous culture
had been sunk without a trace.
Once, and not so long ago, the Jour-
ney to Angkor could be made only by
boat—a tedious passage that took five
days. The stories of travelers who
made the pilgrimage in those days are
long recitals of hardship and contin-
uous descriptions of Impenetrable
jungle.
There Is no reason to believe that
these uccounts were at all inaccurate.
But conditions change rapidly in Indo-
China. A lace pattern of paved roads
has been traced all across this end
of Asia.
Now Easy of Access.
Motor transport, more flexible and
faster than the typical oriental rail-
road, has brought the upper reaches
of the Mekong valley to within a few
—hours of Saigon; and paddy fields,
spreading out and beyond the old |
horizons, have pushed the Jungle j
steadily rorthward.
Today one may ride for hundreds of
miles without seeing any trees save
in far scattered clusters, and it was j
only yesterday that the tiger and ele- J
phant walked here, unmolested heri-
tors of the physical kingdom of the
Khmers.
Beyond a bank of water lilies In
the still moat, beyond a cloistered wall
that seems to have neither beginning
nor end, the great bulk of Angkor Yat j
drives its stone wedge into the sky.
A pilgrim looks upon it through misty
eyes and with an odd constriction of
the throat, for there is only one Ang- ;
kor Vat. There is no such monument
to a vanished people anywhere else
In the world.
The sun is setting now, and the gold
lias come back to the minarets. The
lacework of carved rock is fragile
as cobweb in the gathering shadow,
and with the half light of early eve-
ning the central pyramid has taken on
an awe-insplriug size. It seems futile
to record Its grandeur. One does not
describe an Angkor. He sits and gazes
at it in silence and amazement.
The name Angkor has been some-
what loosely applied to these ruins.
There are two principal groups: Ang-
kor Vat, the temple, and Angkor Thom,
the town. The word Angkor is be-
lieved to be a native corruption of the
Sanskrit Nagara, meaning capital.
Thom is a local word, meaning great
or grand. Vat is an appellation desig-
nating a temple and is generally as-
sociated with Buddhism.
Wonderful Step Pyramid.
Angkor Vat was the last important
work of the Khmers and remains to-
day the finest expression of their pe-
culiar art. Built as a shrine to Hinda
gods and apparently devoted to Vlshu,
Siva, and Buddha in turn, it has de-
parted a long distance from the par-
ent architecture of the Hindus. It is
a step pyramid which rises through
three cloistered stages to a group of
five miterlike towers, of which the
one In the center ie dominant.
The temple area is about a quarter
of a mile square and is surrounded
by a moat and a high wall. A cause- j
way crosses the moat and strikes {
through u gate pierced in the middle
of the western wail, whence It leads
to the portico of the first stage. The ;
lower galleries measure nearly 250 feet !
on a side. The facade is five times as j
wide as that of Notre Dame of Paris.
It Is the history of Angkor Vat that
no beholder can judge accurately how
high It really is. The towers are loft-
ier than the tallest palms of the jun-
gle, but they are lifted still higher oy
tricks of perspective that form the
most Interesting part of their design.
In the mass, Angkor is as impressive
as the Pyramids of Egypt, more strik-
ing as an artistic ensemble than even
the Taj Muhal. But it is not for these
attributes that the dazed pilgrim would
classify it as the most fascinating
place In the world.
i The Boyhood • ;
i of Famous
| Americans fiuienu
! ■ i
Vice President Charles Curtis
The Cheyennes were on the war-
path. They were out to exterminate
the Kaws. Vastly
superior In num-
bers, they attacked
their enemy at the
Council Grove res-
ervatlon. The
Kaws were In a
perilous position.
They faced death.
The chiefs met
in council. They
had to get a mes-
senger through to
Topeka for aid if
they were to sur-
vive. They select-
ed an eight-year-old boy to carry the
news of their plight through the lines
of the Cheyennes and across 57 miles
of prairie that separated them from
Topeka.
Charles Curtis was the lad picked
for thut hazardous errand. He took a
supply of dried buffalo meat, won his
way through the Cheyennes, and trot-
ted and trudged all the way to Tope-
ka to get tlie aid that reached the
Kaws in time to save them. That was
in 18G8, when the West was really
wild and woolly, when buffalo roamed
the plains, when Indians still fought
and scalped.
The boy’s father was a white man,
a New Englander of good birth. His
Indian heritage came through his
mother, a descendant of White Hair,
famous Osage chief. White Hair was
the grent-great-great-grandfather of
the lad who brought relief to the be-
leaguered Kuws. The boy was attend-
ing school at the Kaw agency, living
there with his mother’s people, when
the Cheyennes took the warpath.
The little fellow, destined to be-
come leader of the United States sen-
ate and vice president of the United
States, was brought up in the Indian
tradition that fortitude, ability to
stand hardships, and physical superi-
ority were traits to cultivate from
the cradle.
Before his mother died, which was
when he was three, he had learned
to swim and to ride. His mother had
put him on the back of an Indian pony
when he was a year old. It was she,
also, who taught him to swim. He
could follow a trail, catch fish and
hunt when he was of the kinder-
garten age of the present generation.
He was born in 1860 in a log cabin,
near tlie banks of the Kansas river,
in what is now North Topeka. The
great outdoors of the prairie was his
early school room. There he learned
the lessons that were of so much help
to him in getting his feet on the first
rungs of the ladder of success.
After his mother's death he went
to live with his Indian relatives, but
following the Cheyenne raid he re-
joined his father, staying with his fa-
ther’s parents at North Topeka. There
he entered the grade schools, attend-
ing them during the winters until he
was sixteen.
Almost born on the back of a pony,
be spent his summers as a jockey, rid-
ing in races at the country fairs. He
was famous as a Jockey all over the
state and the frontier country by the
time lie was ten. He rode the horses
of his father and other owners in the
sprint races that were such a fea-
ture of western fairs those days.
He was riding at a Kansas City
track when Jesse James and his gang
held up the course in 1872. The ban-
dits were after money only, but the
lad thinking they might steal his fa-
vorite horse, hid the animal until they
rode away.
While he got a bad fall when a
horse bolted with him in a race, the
marks of which he still carries on his
face, he didn’t quit racing until his
wise Indian grandmother advised him
to leave horses alone and study, that
he might amount to something in life.
She gave him this advice after he
started with her tribe on a migration
to Oklahoma, then Indian territory.
Persuaded by her to return to To-
peka, he resumed his schooling. He
drove a hack at night to pay his way
through high school. He turned down
a fine contract as a Jockey so he
might follow the advice of his Indian
grandmother and get an education.
He was a good student, once his
mind was made up to find a career
for himself. He made particular
strides in elocution, and delivered the
commencement address when he was
graduated. It so impressed the wife
of a lawyer in the audience that she
Induced her husband to take the
youngster into his office.
That is how Charles Curtis began
the study of law that was to help him
reach sucli high places. He was ad-
mitted to the bar in 1881. He went to
congress in 1892, rose rapidly to a
commanding position as a legislator
and was his party’s successful nom-
inee for vice president of the United
States.
(©i by The North Am.rlc.n N.w.p.p., Alli.nct.)
Odd Refill, for Qu.it
A trained dog stays when told to
drop. Old "Lookout," a hunting dog
belonging to Charles Lanier, was told
to lie down when two quail flushed
silently, Indicating that their nest
was near.
The dog obeyed lmpodlatelv but
the young ones could not be found
Finally a curious stirring of the set-
ter's silky "feathers" revealed that
14 baby quail had taken cover be-
neath the motionless dog.—St. Nicho-
las. 4
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Martin, W. L. The Carrollton Chronicle (Carrollton, Tex.), Vol. 27, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, December 12, 1930, newspaper, December 12, 1930; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth728731/m1/2/?q=%22%22~1&rotate=270: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Carrollton Public Library.