Congratulations, you're the oldest person in town! Please accept this stick.
For more than a century, New England towns have gifted ceremonial walking sticks to their oldest residents. In some places the honor remains, at least for those willing to accept it.
WHY WE ARE HERE
We explore how America defines itself one place at a time. In New England towns, antique walking sticks or replicas thereof are given to the oldest residents.
When electors in Rye, NH, honored the town's oldest resident for more than a century, the title came with a striking trophy: a gold-topped ebony walking stick, engraved with the town's name, which they kept for just as long. were allowed to keep as they could live.
But when the city celebrated its latest honorees in November — Marion Cronin and Barbara Long, born on the same day in 1921 — that stick was nowhere to be seen. Instead, city officials presented a less attractive replica; the original was safely stored in the city museum. There was a good reason for that.
Across New England, 700 towns once handed out walking sticks like the one in Rye's museum, a practice that began in 1909 when a Boston newspaper publisher, Edwin Grozier, started a brilliant regional marketing program. Determined to revive his failing Boston Post, he gave the slender sticks to towns in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island – mysteriously Connecticut and Vermont were overlooked – and requested that they receive “the compliments of the Boston Post to the Oldest Citizen.”
The ritual has endured, albeit not as powerfully as it initially began. Dozens of the now antique walking sticks have been lost or stolen. Some have been found after years of searching. And those who remain are much more closely guarded.
In reality, the walking sticks have been both treasures and headaches from the start. Tempted by the offer of a ready-made tradition, the cities accepted the gifts – and the not insignificant administrative burden that came with them. In passing their Boston Post canes from one elder to another, they had to navigate a thicket of sometimes delicate tasks: protecting the canes from theft and loss. Gracefully reclaim from grieving families after the death of a recipient. Finding the rightful honor – which, even apart from missing birth certificates and faulty memories, is often quite a task.
David Griffin, a semi-retired, long-time software engineer in Massachusetts missing and recovered Boston Post sticks trackedcalls it “a remarkable example of benign exploitation that the Postal Service managed to get the 700 cities to do all the work for them.”
In 1997, then a writer named Barbara Staples published a history of the sticksshe found that 97 of the 258 originally distributed in Massachusetts – more than a third – were missing. Walking sticks disappeared into attics, vaults and closets; they resurfaced in junk shops and online auctions. Once interrupted, the ritual slowed and stopped in many a city; sometimes it faded from memory and was forgotten.
In Bridgton, Maine, in 1995, a thief broke the lock on a display case in the town hall and stole the cane. The crime has been unsolved for almost thirty years.
“It's a classic cold case,” said Mike Davis, deputy director of the historical society in Bridgton, a town of 5,400 nestled among the state's scenic western lakes.
Mr Davis, 26, had not yet been born when Bridgton's walking stick disappeared. But like other hardcore history buffs in New England towns who have lost their walking sticks, he is fixated on finding it and reviving the long-stalled tradition.
In Watertown, Massachusetts, Charlie Morash spent twenty years searching for the town's missing cane, which may have been the first to disappear, after the death of the first recipient in 1910. Mr. Morash, a local for 35 years was a banker, routinely combed through antique stores looking for it until finally, in 2009, it turned up in the hands of an antiques dealer in Delaware – who wanted $1,600 for it.
Undeterred, Mr. Morash persuaded three dozen Watertown families to join in to buy it and take it home. To prevent another disappearance, the group also purchased two replica canes to gift to the city's oldest men and women, while the original was kept under lock and key.
Fifteen years later, to Mr. Morash's disappointment, the replicas are no longer distributed. Joyce Kelly, a member of the local historical society, said it had become too difficult to find willing takers instead of “no answers, hang-ups and 'no thanks'.”
As the decades passed, many elderly people became increasingly reluctant to participate in the tradition. Some were afraid it would reflect their vulnerability. Others suspected fraud. Some were deterred by rumors of a curse, said to damn those who dared to take the cane home.
“I think the cane was a product of its time,” Ms Kelly said. “People now see it as a reminder of their age and the limited time they have left.”
In Rye, the two centenarians celebrated in November were actually second: the real town elder, 105 years old, declined the cane because “she was too tired from her birthday party,” says Jane Sweeney, activities assistant at the seniors' complex. where all three women live.
The two winners didn't even get to keep the less impressive replica stick. It continued to emerge long enough for a photo shoot in their home, then was returned to Rye's white wooden council house and safely stored in a filing cabinet.
That was OK with Ms. Cronin, one of the 102-year-olds who had been nervous about the prospect of custody. “I was afraid I was going to lose it,” she said.
Mr. Morash, in Watertown, may be a future cane recipient himself. He turns 90 this year, smokes cigars every day and still works part-time in real estate. “I tell everyone it's the Heinekens!” he offered cheerfully when asked about the secret of his longevity.
In New Hampshire, Ms. Cronin attributed her longevity to positivity and “saying yes to everything.” Genetics likely also plays a role: Her mother, Mary Budd, also received sugar cane. Honored by Stow, Massachusetts, at the age of 99, she lived for almost another decade, to 108.
Early cane recipients had their own theories about longevity. One advised avoiding doctors, Ms. Staples said. Others prescribed heavy physical labor. Tilden Pierce of Plymouth, Massachusetts, attributed his diet to “Johnny cake and fat pork,” she wrote; he also thought that bathing too often caused weakness.
As Mr. Grozier, the publisher of the Boston Post, once said, “A man who has managed to cheat death is always an interesting figure.”
(Originally given only to the oldest men, the canes became mixed in most places in the 20th century. Still, there were some persistent holdouts: Manchester-by-the-Sea, in Massachusetts, presented his walking stick to a woman for the first time in 2022, perhaps as a result of the widening gender gap in life expectancy.)
In time, Mr. Grozier's publicity stunt outlived both him and his newspaper. The clever publisher had rescued it from the brink of bankruptcy and turned it into one of the best-read newspapers in the country, but the Post went bankrupt in 1956 under increasing competitive pressure.
“To some extent,” Mr. Griffin wrote by email, the canes have outlasted “the memory of what the 'Boston Post' part of their name even means.”
The tradition that sounded so simple when Mr. Grozier first coined it — in tribute to “the strength and longevity of New England manhood” — has instead revealed the endless vagaries of human nature.
For Mr. Davis, in Maine, the desire to recover his town's missing stick is tied to a larger mission: holding on to local history in the face of rapid, transformative change. The city's population has grown in recent years, he said, and real estate prices have soared, while social ties between the community have loosened.
“It looks promising on paper, but then you go to the store and you don't recognize anyone, and the old-timers say it doesn't feel like the town they grew up in,” Mr. Davis explained. “It feels increasingly important to try to restore and maintain these traditions because we want new residents to learn more about them and be a part of them.”
In that spirit, he plans to purchase a replica walking stick as he continues his search, and hopes to revive the tradition this summer in Bridgton.
Some say that the will to remember and appreciate the past is what matters most, even if the missing sticks are never found.
“In the end,” Mr. Griffin said by email, “it's not the goal, it's the idea.”