Congratulations, You’re the Oldest Person in Town! Please Accept This Cane.
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For over a century, towns in New England have presented their oldest residents with ceremonial canes. In some places, the honor endures — for those willing to accept it, that is.
WHY WE’RE HERE
We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In towns across New England, antique canes or their replicas are bestowed on the oldest residents.
For more than a century, when selectmen in Rye, N.H., honored the town’s oldest resident, the title came with a distinctive trophy: a gold-topped, ebony walking cane, engraved with the town’s name, that was theirs to keep for as long as they might live.
But when the town feted its latest honorees in November — Marion Cronin and Barbara Long, born on the same day in 1921 — that cane was nowhere in sight. Instead, town officials presented a less fancy replica; the original was safely locked up in the town museum. There was good reason for that.
Across New England, 700 towns once handed out canes just 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 scheme. Determined to revive his failing Boston Post, he gave the sleek canes to towns across Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — puzzlingly, Connecticut and Vermont were overlooked — and requested that they “be presented with the compliments of the Boston Post to the Oldest Citizen.”
The ritual has endured, if not as robustly as it first began. Dozens of the now-antique canes have been lost or stolen. Some have been recovered after yearslong searches. And those that remain are much more closely guarded.
In truth, the canes have been both treasures and headaches from the start. Enticed by the offer of a ready-made tradition, the towns accepted the gifts — and the not-insignificant administrative burdens that came with them. In passing their Boston Post canes from one elder to the next, they would have to navigate a thicket of sometimes delicate tasks: Protecting the canes from theft and loss. Gracefully reclaiming them from grieving families after a recipient’s death. Finding the rightful honoree — which, even barring missing birth certificates and faulty memories, is often a tall order.
David Griffin, a semiretired software engineer in Massachusetts who has long tracked missing and recovered Boston Post canes, calls it “a remarkable stroke of benign exploitation that the Post managed to get the 700 towns to do all of the footwork for them.”
By 1997, when a writer named Barbara Staples published a history of the canes, she found that 97 of the 258 originally distributed in Massachusetts — more than a third — were missing. Canes disappeared into attics, vaults and closets; they resurfaced in junk shops and online auctions. Once interrupted, the ritual slowed and halted in many a town; sometimes it faded from memory and was forgotten.
In Bridgton, Maine, a thief broke the lock on a display case in the town hall and stole the cane in 1995. The crime has remained unsolved for nearly three decades.
“It’s your classic cold case,” said Mike Davis, assistant director of the historical society in Bridgton, a town of 5,400 set among the state’s scenic western lakes.
Mr. Davis, 26, was not yet born when Bridgton’s cane vanished. But like other hard-core history buffs in New England towns that have lost their canes, he is fixated on finding it and reviving the long-stalled tradition.
In Watertown, Mass., Charlie Morash spent 20 years searching for the city’s missing cane, which may have been the first to vanish, after the death of its first recipient in 1910. Mr. Morash, a local banker for 35 years, routinely combed through antiques stores looking for it until finally, in 2009, it surfaced in the hands of a Delaware antiques dealer — who wanted $1,600 for it.
Undeterred, Mr. Morash persuaded three dozen Watertown families to pitch in to purchase it and bring it home. To prevent another disappearance, the group also bought two replica canes to bestow on the city’s oldest men and women while the original was kept locked up.
Fifteen years later, to Mr. Morash’s disappointment, the replicas are no longer handed out. Joyce Kelly, a member of the local historical society, said it had become too hard to find willing takers instead of “no answers, hangups and ‘no thank you’s.”
As decades passed, many elders grew increasingly reluctant to partake of the tradition. Some feared it would broadcast their frailty. Others suspected a scam. A few were scared off by rumors of a curse, said to doom those who dared take the cane home.
“I think the cane was a product of its time,” Ms. Kelly said. “People now think of it as a reminder of their age and limited time left.”
In Rye, the two centenarians celebrated in November were in fact runners-up: the true town elder, age 105, declined the cane because “she was too tired from her birthday party,” said Jane Sweeney, activities assistant at the senior living complex where all three women live.
The two honorees were not even allowed to keep the less impressive replica cane. It emerged long enough for a photo shoot at their residence, then was whisked back to Rye’s white clapboard town hall and securely stashed in a filing cabinet.
That was OK by Ms. Cronin, one of the 102-year-olds, who had been unnerved by the prospect of guardianship. “I was worried about losing it,” she said.
Mr. Morash, in Watertown, is quite possibly a future cane recipient himself. He turns 90 this year, smokes cigars daily and still works part time in real estate. “I tell everyone it’s the Heinekens!” he offered gleefully when asked the secret of his longevity.
In New Hampshire, Ms. Cronin attributed her long life to positivity, and “saying yes to everything.” Genetics also likely play a role: Her mother, Mary Budd, was a cane recipient as well. Honored by Stow, Mass., at 99, she lived almost another decade, to 108.
Past cane recipients had their own theories on long life. One advised avoiding doctors, according to Ms. Staples. Others prescribed hard physical labor. Tilden Pierce of Plymouth, Mass., credited his diet of “Johnny cake and fat pork,” she wrote; he also thought bathing too frequently caused weakness.
As Mr. Grozier, the Boston Post publisher, once said, “A man who has managed to cheat death is always an interesting figure.”
(Originally gifted only to the oldest men, the canes went coed in most places in the 20th century. Still, there were some stubborn holdouts: Manchester-by-the-Sea, in Massachusetts, presented its cane to a woman for the first time in 2022, perhaps reflecting the widening gender gap in life expectancy.)
In time, Mr. Grozier’s publicity stunt outlived both him and his newspaper. The savvy publisher had rescued it from the brink of bankruptcy, and built it into one of the best-read papers in the country, but the Post folded in 1956 under growing competitive pressure.
“To a certain 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 back when Mr. Grozier first conceived it — as a tribute to “the vigor and longevity of New England manhood” — has instead revealed the endless vagaries of human nature.
To Mr. Davis, in Maine, the longing to recover his town’s missing cane is tied up with a bigger mission — holding onto local history in the face of rapid, transformative change. The town’s population has grown in recent years, he said, and real estate prices have soared, while social ties binding the community have loosened.
“On paper, it looks promising, 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 more and more essential to try and restore and maintain these traditions, because we want new residents to learn about and be a part of them.”
In that spirit, he is planning to purchase a replica cane while he continues his search, and hopes to revive the tradition in Bridgton as soon as this summer.
Some say that will to remember and value the past is what matters, even if the missing canes are never found.
“In the end,” Mr. Griffin said by email, “it’s not the object, it’s the idea.”
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