Spelldown

Staten Island is a broad, semi-rusticky borough (Richmond) in New York Harbor, 57 square miles of suburb off the starboard beam of the Statue of Liberty. It is dotted with Dutch names like New Dorp, Kill van Kull, factories, and about 100 real farms. At least one of its 160,000 residents is nationally famed. He is hoary, old Poet Edwin Markham (The Man with the Hoe, Lincoln, the Man of the People), now an enfeebled, house-ridden codger of 87.

On Lincoln's Birthday the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce brought New Yorkers the voice of old Poet Markham, on a two-year-old recording, reciting Lincoln, the Man of the People. As a further treat it presented nine Markham poems about Lincoln, which Markham wrote in 1925, never before published or broadcast. On the air they were read by Virgil Markham, the poet's fictioneer son.

A rough-cut, reverent set of lyrics, they skimmed the Lincoln legend from hollow-log cradle to resurrection, not missing the Lincoln-Douglas debate, in which Abe's words "flashed home like singing bullets, Steve's jumped fence like frisky pullets." Liveliest lines: on an apocryphal schoolroom spelling bee in which Abe Lincoln and his sweetheart Ann Rutledge headed opposing teams. The spelldown:

Hear them spell, hear them yell:

Ypsilanti, Corybante;

Carthaginian, Carolinian;

Soporific, Hieroglyphic;

Phrenology, Anthropology;

Empyrean, Aeschylean;

Kalamazoo, Timbuctoo;

Tierra del Fuego floors

All that weathered Sycamores . . .

Abe stands pat on Yacht and Phthisic,

He goes big on Phlegm and Physic

But falls flat on Terrapin

Just to let Ann Rutledge win!*

*From Lincoln Lyrics, used by permission of C. C. Birchard & Co., Boston, owners of the copyright.

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