241: Chacallit’s rise . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 1 continues
Chacallit’s rise in the haberdashery industry was purchased at the expense of some self-esteem. The men’s-furnishings business took itself quite seriously in those days, and the name of the town, because it did not suggest high seriousness, top-notch standards, and vaulting aspiration, might have stood in the way of further growth. When the Excelsior Celluloid Collar Company became interested in building a mill in Chacallit, Excelsior officials made clear their feeling that the company would find it an embarrassment to be known as the Excelsior Celluloid Collar Company of Chacallit because of the humorous connotations of the name of the town. “We fear,” the board of directors said in a letter to the mayor of Chacallit, “that in a short time we would be known, not openly, but behind our collective back, in a snickering, mocking way, as the Whatchamacallit Collar Company.”
Stormy meetings followed, but soon the citizens of Chacallit made an offer that satisfied the company: they offered to rename the town Excelsior. (According to diaries and letters from the period, there was some interest in changing the name of the river to Celluloid at the same time, but nothing came of it.) A precedent was established, and throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, whenever a larger and richer men’s furnishings company hesitated about building a new mill there, in a town named for one of its rivals, the citizens would vote to change the name of the town. As a result, the place was known at various times as Acme (for Acme Fancy Buttons), Premier (for Premier Furnishings), Hermes (for Hermes Brand Gentlemen’s Necessities), and Atlas (for Atlas Glovers & Hatters).
Late in the nineteenth century, however, the attitude of Chacallitans changed. Ralph Waldo Emerson never visited Chacallit (the difficulty of winter travel in the Whatsit Valley in those days kept him from venturing into Chacallit on his winter lecture tours), but there was an Emersonian flavor to the decision reached by the citizens of Chacallit in 1883 (just shortly after Emerson’s death) to revert to the “rightful name of this place, Chacallit, now and forevermore, and be no more the pliant whore of industry.”
Some have argued that the people of Chacallit (or, more accurately, of Dr. Scott’s, as the place was then known — for Dr. Scott’s Links and Studs) sensed that they had made themselves far more ridiculous in the eyes of the rest of the world by attempting to escape their past and to please each new suitor than they would ever have been made by the name Chacallit and were, therefore, returning to the earlier name in the simple spirit of “enough is enough.” However, I think the Chacallitans may have been moved by nobler sentiments than that. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson had written:
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. . . . At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. . . . My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Chacallit’s own Transcendentalist, Wilhelm Huber, my great-great-grandfather, a sharp-witted descendant of Inge who refused to be silenced, expressed his abhorrence of Chacallit’s name-changing in remarkably similar terms:
This business of changing the name of our town is a foolish practice. . . . We imagine that if we call ourselves Naples, or Rome, we will become intoxicatingly beautiful, and the Naples Collar-Pin Company will come a-courting, or the Roman Sleeve Garter firm will affiance us, and we will then, at last, be laughingstocks no longer. We tear down our old signs, erect our new signs, and embark next morning on a new life as Naples, but in our mirrors we still see the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that we meant to flee from: our giant, ourselves.
By the turn of the century, Chacallit was again Chacallit, and the town was supplying suspenders, cuff links, collar stays, belt buckles, tie tacks, and the like worldwide.
[to be continued on Wednesday, April 20, 2022]
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