Monday, October 6, 2008

Making molasses


Known for the ingredient in an old-fashioned Blue Ridge mountains taffy, a deadly disaster in Boston circa 1919 and a gang of comic robbers who used it in 1871 to blind shop owners, molasses was once made by the tubful in the backyard of one Wake Forest resident's East Nelson Avenue home.

In a November 1964 article of The Wake Weekly, Oscar L. Merritt showed reporters how he made cane molasses by the batch, keeping alive what he said then was almost a passing scene. According to the article, "Merritt, who was reluctant to reveal his age, has been making molasses for about 40 years and has had his present equipment since 1934. He said when he began making it people laughed at him, until he turned it into a profitable venture.

"The process is slow and tiresome beginning with a primitive cane mill powered by a mule pulling a long pole in a circle. The pole is attached to gears which turn two rollers that flatten cane stalks being fed into it by hand ... The juice is drained into a bucket. When full, the juice is strained into a keg several yards away where it runs into the cooking pan.

"Starting at one end, the cane juice runs alternately through ends of seven copper trays about four feet long and about eight inches wide. The wood fire is hottest about midway, where the juice boils and changes into molasses. Merritt maintained almost a continuous skimming with a copper scoop with holes in it to take off the waste. The thick molasses then drains out from the last tray when a wooden plug is pulled."

Each batch fills 22 half gallon jars, Merritt said, which he turned around and sold for $2 apiece.

"It's a lot of trouble and I wouldn't fool with it if folks here at home didn't like it," Merritt said.

Mmmm. You can almost taste it.

The homemaker of today


In April 1964, Rebecca Lynn Green, daughter of a school piano teacher and professor of old testament interpretation at the seminary, won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow scholarship and a trip to New York with her home economics teacher, Mrs. R.H. Forrest. Becky intended to use the $1,500 prize toward attending Westhampton College at the University of Richmond. Central to her taking top honors was the essay Becky wrote about her ideal household.

The home, she wrote, would be one of "love, well-distributed responsibility, sound moral and religious convictions, freedom of thought and speech, and opportunity for the development of individual interests, ambitions and talents."

Talk about a prediction!

A passing fad


In 1957, a nonreligious group of humanists won tax exemption for their organization, putting them on par with churches. Following another court case four years later, the term "secular humanism" was coined as way of defining the beliefs of those who derive morality without spiritual guidance. The concept has disturbed the Christian church at all levels since, and led to a March, 1966 seminar on the seminary campus about it, featuring John E. Steely, professor of historical theology and Dr. John Eddins, professor of systematic theology, among others. The men (and the journalist covering the event) did not use the term "humanist," or the phrase "secular humanism," in any place but one, instead preferring the substitute label "the death of God movement," and pinning on it the rise of Marxism and Nazism.

Eddins offered a harsh prediction for the movement: "It's a fad ... the theologians, and those possessed of real piety, will not succumb."

He also took umbrage at the movement's criticism of lack of proofs in God's existence, saying, "the best representatives of Christian thought have never said God could be scientifically demonstrated or proved. He is known by faith and worship."

Steely took a more pragmatic tack: "I can't see that they offer any more effective ways of coming to grips with the social issues of today than the church has, despite the church's slowness," he said.

Slowness to respond to modern conditions was also of concern to Eddins, who issued this warning to his own brethren: "Their answers may be out in left field, but the church must find better ones if it is to win a secular world."

No death of God representative was invited for rebuttal.

(Photo above is of the new faculty building, Patterson Hall, enshrouded in fog)