A Backward Glance at Eighty: Recollections & Comment

In 1913, at eighty years old, Charles A. Murdock turned his gaze backward across a life that had watched America transform. Born on his grandfather's farm in Massachusetts, raised in the shadow of his father's tavern in Boston's Pemberton House, Murdock chronicles an America of comb-makers and village schools, of winters so cold the Connecticut froze solid. But this is no mere catalog of bygone days. Murdock writes with the earned wisdom of a man who left New England's clamming shores for California's sunlight, who built a reputation in San Francisco's circles of liberal religion while never forgetting where he came from. His memoir captures something increasingly rare: the satisfaction of a life fully inhabited, simply told. Whether recounting the local economy of toothbrush manufacturing or the particular happiness of rural New England, Murdock offers readers a gentle, unhurried tour of a world that existed before the automobile, before the telephone, before the century's violent upheaval. For anyone who suspects that speed has cost us something essential, this backward glance is a quiet invitation to remember what stillness once held.