About sixty children today, from Jane Lew Elementary. Coward that I am, I mostly lay low in the library doing paperwork, hiding from the hubbub. But only for a time. Just down the hill from my open window is the open-air ampitheatre and as I pecked away at my keyboard I grew slowly aware of numbers of small people filing by the window and making their way down among the board seats. And then it came, straight out of the blue — C R R R A A A A C C K K ! ! ! — a really tremendous sharp report that rattled the windows and elicited an excited whoop from the assembled crowd. I went to the window and looked down the hill and saw Okey Simmons standing on the open-air stage in a great cloud of white smoke, flintlock musket in his hands and a big grin on his face. The children were jumping up and down, shouting in wild approval, while their teachers, rather more subdued, exchanged uncomfortable smiles. I, for my part, was reaching into my eighteenth-century leather hunting bag, not for powder or shot, but for a tin of aspirin . . . That Okey, he always like to fire off a double load for the kids.
After lunch, another of our interpreters, Lee Miller was due to teach an artisan class on tinsmithing to about 30 students. We all formed up around the picnic table, then trooped off in a long straggling line past the fort and down the hill through the ancient apple trees covered in bloom to old annex building close to the inlet. This was my first chance to see Lee in action. He certainly looked like a bonafide frontier character, with two-days stubble on his mug, blue waistcoat & matching blue workman’s cap. By the time I showed up all thirty kids were pounding away merrily at their tin squares, whacking their punches and making the most incredible racket. At a certain point Lee decided to give them the benefit of his considerable knowledge and launched into his lecture, holding an eighteenth-century hammer above his head. I couldn’t imagine anyone making himself heard above such a cacaphony, but then I had never heard Lee in full force. That man can bellow like a bull. At once the hammering stopped and every young face looked up, open-mouthed, at this large shouting man in front of them. Lee didn’t seem to notice that the hammering had stopped, though, he just kept hollerin’, – walkin’ up and down between the tables, holding one arcane tool after another in the air, explaining what each one was and what part it played in the transition from the frontier to the dawn of the industrial revolution, in his great booming voice, with every youngster focused upon him with absolute attention. How much any one of them took away about the dawn of the industrial revolution is difficult to say, but they will certainly not forget that voice. I expect, as well, that they will not forget his helpfulness, his cheerfulness, or his abiding patience as he moved among them after his lecture, helping each one in turn as they hammered out an intricate design on the tin, giving each of them in turn his full attention.
