Hi, I'm John Clayton, and this is New Hampshire Crossroads.

Theme Music Today, we’re at the Littleton Diner, where we're going to be whipping up a special batch of pancakes.

Whole wheat pancakes, to be exact.

We'll tell you about the wheat a little bit later, but also on tonight's program, we're going to find out why there is such a resurgence of interest in the paintings of New Hampshire artist Maxfield Parrish.

His work is really about New Hampshire in a lot of ways.

He was an artist who, although raised to be very sophisticated, traveled throughout Europe at a very young age.

Once he moved here, he never really wanted to leave.

It's a absolutely beautiful place, and I think he just found this was where he could do his best work.

And his whole love of nature.

Clearly all he had to do was get up every morning, look out the window, and there was his material.

Also on tonight's program, we'll go to Water Village to meet a most unusual musical couple.

I've been asked to play everything from Leonard Skinner to Lawrence Welk, and I admit that I do neither of those justice on the standard dulcimer.

Music When you come to the Littleton Diner, you should know that you're coming to an establishment that's catered to the likes of Betty Davis and Michael Landon, Michael J. Fox, even Jean Claude Killy.

One of the reasons they come?

It may be these pancakes.

While Terry enjoys hers and Tanya dines on her homemade muffin, we'll find out a little bit more about why these pancakes are so special.

Music We are now going to whip up a batch of the special whole wheat pancake batter they serve here at the Littleton Diner.

Chris Williford, a Rutgers graduate, by the way, is going to be my guide.

Chris, how do we go about doing this?

Okay, first we need our eggs, ten eggs.

Ten eggs.

And crack them in here and mix them well.

Okay.

Now aren't there prefab pancake batters that would be a lot more easy to prepare than to go through all this?

For this product, we used to use just a regular batter, flour that you can buy in store, anything.

Just mix water.

But since we've changed to this product, we probably tripled our pancakes.

And I put that in there and mix that.

Littleton Diner, whole wheat pancake batter in the formative stages.

Believe it or not, Chris left me alone in the kitchen to make the pancakes on my own.

He did give me some instructions, though.

Lay out the batter, use the bottom of the ladle to smooth it around and get that nice circular shape.

What's amazing, though, is the texture of this batter is so different than anything I've ever made at home.

You can see how this whole wheat makes such a difference.

And we're going to find out why this whole wheat is so special later in the program.

But first we're going to go to Water Village to meet a most unusual musical couple.

(no dialogue) Music We identify ourselves by playing what we play, and try to mostly leave it to other people to decide how to, how to categorize us.

Because really, what we do kind of defies most of the standard categories.

Music Much of the music that we do play is folk music from one country or another.

So in that sense, we are folk music, folk musicians or, you know, even I guess some people these days call it world music as well.

And I guess you could kind of say that we're - I suppose you could say that that we are we are the world musicians of Water Village or - Some, somebody has got to do it.

Yeah.

Music I have well over a dozen stringed, fretted instruments, and we have a basket of percussion and drums hanging on the walls.

There are dozens of instruments floating about.

There are instruments in every room.

This instrument here is called a hammer dulcimer.

And it is the forerunner of the piano.

Here I have just like the equivalent of the piano hammer in my hand.

So you can do all kinds of things that sound great in dance music, all these little rolls.

And it's different on the dulcimer and it has this, this really, it's very good for dance music, Music I played the piano when I was in college.

I built my first hammer dulcimer, which was playable, wasn’t great, but it was good enough that I started learning to play.

And I went out on the streets of Portland and Cambridge later that year and got a terrific response from people.

And pretty soon I was a full time hammer dulcimer player without having really intended to do that.

Music I've been asked to play everything from Leonard Skinner to Lawrence Welk, and I admit that I do neither of those justice on the hammer dulcimer.

But the best thing about it is the children, because there's so many children that have never seen this instrument, which just has this automatic, interesting, toe tapping, hypnotizing quality.

And so usually when I'm playing, there's there's kids hanging, hanging around, people come along with, with babies, six months old sometimes, and hold them over the dulcimer so they can see and their eyes get wide.

You can see them kind of go like.

Music My first instrument, actually, like Beverly's, was the piano at about age five.

And when I was age 12, I took up the guitar.

Actually, my first guitar’s still hanging around with me, it, up on the wall over there.

And that was it for me.

That, I really haven't played much piano ever since that.

I could probably make a lot more money playing rock and roll guitar, and but it's not where I ended up going and not not through lack of interest in that music as just a heavier interest in what we do play.

Music What's fun for me, this music is very improvizational.

When you hear a Delta blues guitarist or a klezmer violinist or or an Appalachian banjo player, and there's something that's actually similar in all of those, something very real, something just, you know, it's music of the people.

And music of, of the rural areas of the world and, and that sort of thing appeals to both of us.

Music My next instrument after the guitar that I got serious about was the mandolin.

That we do share that kind of interest in lots of different sounds.

And you know, just go out and pick up an instrument and learn to make it do, do the sound that it does.

Music Beverly shared that vision with me of wanting a live space to record our music in.

And so we, we began the search for a building like this.

So we looked at old churches, town meeting halls, other grange halls, any one room schoolhouses.

We were looking above all for just a live room.

It didn't, we didn't want, like, a huge, we weren't looking for a cathedral like acoustics.

We wanted a very natural but large room sound.

And a room that felt like it wanted to be performed in.

And when I first walked in here, I thought this, I could feel how much music had been played in here, and the way that it just sort of invited the best that you could do.

We've met various people from the Ossipee area who say that they came and their grandfather played fiddle in here, and they would be dancing, and the floor would be shaking.

The real reason for this room, although we also do some living in it, really is primarily for the making of our music.

This is our recording area, computer central.

It's real nice.

Once we bought the building like this, we basically threw away the digital reverb unit.

Of course you've got to work around the school bus schedule, which, you know, they come by from about 2:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon.

You don't really want to be recording.

You can hear the squeal of the brakes as they come to the corner, and - You should hear it when the wind blows.

The whole thing goes creek, creek.

No.

There will be no recordings happening at high wind warning days.

Music We've been told occasionally playing some piece together that people cannot separate who's doing what.

That the two instruments meld as one.

And that's the high.

That's the high point that we're going for.

When we can hit that.

It's when you make a sound that is, as Beverly said, the the greater than the sum of the parts.

Music Music Gotta work on my backhand.

Music This is it.

The finished product, and the acid test is to serve it to the owners, Bobbie and Everett Chambers.

You folks ready for this?

All set.

Oh, you bet.

Okay, now, Bobbie, I have to ask you.

You were watching me in the kitchen.

What do you think about my flipping technique.

John, you can use a little help, but I think, I think you got it.

And you can, at this point, I think you can give up your day job.

You’re hired.

Okay, I'm going to work on my technique.

But first of all, I want to talk about what goes into these pancakes.

As you look at them now, there's a texture to them that's really different than other pancakes.

I noticed it on the griddle, but even the finished product, you can see there's a lot of meat to these pancakes.

They're really filling.

We, when Ron Murro started the grist mill and was turning out a product, we bought a bag of his flour to see how they would go.

We had, up to that point, just used traditional pancake mix, threw some water in it.

And those were the pancakes we served here.

And we tried to mix Ron’s mix, and it's just super.

That whole wheat flour that so many enjoy is milled right here in Littleton.

Just down the street from the Diner sits the same buildings that have graced these riverbanks for more than 200 years.

In 1798, local millers stayed busy here, turning out the same type of flour that's used today up at the Littleton Diner.

Music For so many years, these were familiar sights in communities around New Hampshire.

Farmers would bring their grain to mills just like this, to be ground into flour.

Then, as large automated enterprises took over, the wheels that drove these massive gears were stilled.

Music It wasn't until recently, with the help of a local family, that these sounds, known only to a few of the local elders, for once again booming from this timber structure.

Music Ron Murro, a local engineer with an interest in mills, oversaw the reconstruction.

A couple of business associates of mine had these buildings.

They picked them up in an auction in the 92, ’93 time frame.

They didn't know exactly what to do with them, but they knew they had significant value because they were really the starting point of the village of Littleton.

My interests lie in architecture, engineering, history, business, and, both the Eames’ and myself like to do things that are worthwhile for the community.

So we, I put a proposal together said, basically saying, why don't we restore the the mill buildings?

Music Basically, the intention was to replicate as closely as possible to what they would have done back in 1798.

Music Everything was put together here, with the exception of the machining of the metal parts, which was done outside, all the construction of the frame, the gears was done in-house by my son.

By your son?

Yeah.

Does he have any background in mill operations, or is he just a skilled carpenter?

Chris learned the woodworking art, from when he was, like, 13, 14 years old, where we built a post-and-beam barn together.

And he has, he's very precocious in mechanical aptitude and was able to put everything together.

Music So the process now, Ron, the wheat goes from the hopper, down the chute into the mill itself.

How far apart are the stones?

The stones are pretty close, so probably less than a 16th of an inch.

There is an adjusting mechanism called a tenter, where you can adjust the spacing if you want a finer grind or a more coarse grind.

For those of us who are mechanically challenged, Ron.

These are the stones.

These are miniature.

These are miniatures of the stone.

Yes.

And the grooves?

The grows are furrows.

And you'll see when these if one represents the bed stone, the bottom stone and the other the runner stone, you can see that the grooves are sort of curved, like sickles in the same direction.

However, when you turn one over, the grooves reverse themselves so that when the top one turns, you're getting a scissoring action which drives the grain to the flat portions of the stones which grinds, breaks the hull, and drives it to the periphery.

Music Can I make some flour?

Sure.

All you have to do is open the little gate on the hopper.

Slowly?

Slowly, and the grain will come down, fall into the chute and drop into the eye of the stone.

And then there is a wiper going around the circumferential portion of the stones, and the grist is dropped into a collection hopper.

And that's what we have right here.

There's a fair amount of dust that's generated.

Yeah.

But again, no OSHA in 1798.

So no masks were worn.

Now, this is a fairly coarse grind right now.

Music Is a very coarse grind.

But again, some customers really prefer that coarse ground.

And then you would run it, subsequently run it through a sifter so you can get out your white fine flour or medium flour.

Music So the next time you polish off a stack of flapjacks up at the Littleton Diner, take a short stroll down to the river's edge and see where it all begins.

Music You know, more and more, I’ve found that there's a real art to making these pancakes.

And for our next story, we're going to look at the work of a real artist.

We're going to Plainfield, New Hampshire, to examine the resurgence of interest in Maxfield Parrish.

Music There's been a real resurgence of interest in Parrish's art in the last, I'd say, ten years especially.

And I've been very interested in looking at an artist who was, at one time, considered to be one of the most popular in the world.

Maxfield Parrish.

For the first half of the 20th century, his work was seen everywhere, on magazine covers and in advertisements for everything from Jell-O to tires.

He was one of the most popular artists and illustrators in the world, and he lived and worked right here in Plainfield, New Hampshire.

Music His work is really about New Hampshire in a lot of ways.

He was an artist who, although raised to be very sophisticated, traveled throughout Europe at a very young age.

Once he moved here, he never really wanted to leave.

It's an absolutely beautiful place, and I think he just found this was where he could do his best work.

And his whole love of nature, clearly.

All he had to do was get up every morning, look out the window, and, and there was his material.

Music It's ironic that of the thousands of works of art Parrish produced here in Plainfield, New Hampshire, the town has no paintings or illustrations by Parrish.

But Plainfield does have something far more unique.

It has this.

Music This is a stage setting designed by Maxfield Parrish for the Plainfield Town Hall.

In 1916, William Howard Hart, who was one of the artists with the Cornish art colony, wanted to build a stage for the town of Plainfield.

He asked the townspeople if they would pay for the foundation if he paid for the remainder.

So they voted a town meeting in the affirmative, and local carpenters were hired.

They built the stage, added it on to the end of the town hall.

Town Hall itself was built in 1798.

He asked Maxwell Parrish, his friend and neighbor, to design the stage set.

It was designed for the first play, which was done on the stage in August of 1916.

It's a woodland setting.

The play was called The Woodland Princess.

It's a children's fairy tale.

The central focus of the Parrish stage setting is Mount Ascutney, which is also the central focus of Plainfield and the towns around Plainfield.

And Parrish himself was as local as they come, and as self-effacing.

I think Mr.

Parrish was was not high handed or patronizing in his dealings with the people of Plainfield.

Mary Cassidy's family owns the farm right next door to the home which Parrish built here in Plainfield.

She knew Parrish and his family all her life.

We all thought he was a delightful soul.

Always pleasant and, enjoyed conversation.

When people in the last few years are asking about impressions of him, a smiling man with a twinkle in his eye.

I always thought that he looked exactly the way an artist should look.

Had this beautiful white hair and this great profile, but he was just the most ordinary man you ever saw in your life.

Besides the show at the Courier Gallery, Parrish's life and work has also inspired Portsmouth's Pontine Movement Theatre to write a play about him.

It's called Cornish Castles, and here they perform it at the Plainfield Town Hall in front of Parrish's stage set.

I'll be 91 in July, and I find it's not the same as 19.

Oh, you have no idea.

Well, his work, to me, a lot of it looks like stage sets anyway.

It's inherently dramatic, and his characters, his figures look like characters from plays very often, so I think it translates very easily to stage from that point of view.

And also the fantasy element of his work, I think, really is really suited to our visual style of theater.

Thank you.

(applause) Parrish’s work also inspired a musical tribute by Bob and Robin Orfant of Madison, New Hampshire.

They were inspired not only by his art, but by a visit to his studio before it was sold and rebuilt.

In fact, the music in this story is from the songs recorded by Bob and Robin Orfant.

Music Her name is Catherine Reed and she posed for Parrish for this picture in 1933.

The thing that excited me the most was that I got $5 for posing for him.

That was a fortune to me at that, at that age.

It's more than I made for three months of building a fire every morning at the school.

I was a janitor.

I'm proud of that.

You know, I put that frog in there because I was telling him about my friend and I going frog hunting, and he got a big, he must have gotten a (inaudible) out of me.

I'll tell you.

I was such a tomboy, anyway.

I'd a lot rather be known for my cooking.

Music Maxfield Parrish died in 1966 at the age of 96.

His home, The Oaks, burned to the ground in 1979, and his studio has been sold and rebuilt.

Maxfield Parrish.

One of those jewel- like secrets hidden away in a small town in our New Hampshire.

Music Theme Music Well, we hope you enjoyed tonight's edition of New Hampshire Crossroads.

And until next week, I'm John Clayton.

Pancakes are up.

Theme Music A video of this program is available for $19.95, plus $3 shipping.

To order your copy, note the program number on the screen, and call 1-800-20NHPTV.

VISA, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover accepted.

Theme Music