Welcome to The Fletcherizer, where we chew over the history, ideas, and personalities of the Roycroft Campus. Each month our team will dive into a Roycroftie topic, with plenty of features from our historic archive throughout the month. Stay tuned for a new feature each Friday. June 19th marks the 168th birthday of Elbert Hubbard, founder of the Roycroft Campus. To celebrate, June’s Fletcherizer will cover the formative years of Elbert’s childhood.
The Fletcherizer Volume 5 Number 4
Elbert Hubbard had four sisters and remained close to them throughout his life. In 1929, his sister, Mary Hubbard Heath, penned The Elbert Hubbard I Knew, filled with memories of their childhood. In one special remembrance, Mary writes:
“It is St. Valentine’s Day and Bert has brought back from the post office, where he went to meet the morning’s mail, a valentine, in a crisply embossed envelope, for Daisy [sister of Elbert and Mary]. The valentine is of lace paper, adorned with lovely cupids and flowers and red, red hearts, but it is for Daisy and the bright world turns for me into a place of bitter injustice and misery. I proceed to cry my eyes out and since I must keep them shut to better achieve that purpose, I do not see the pantomime that passes between mother and Bert, but I hear him say, “Oh I must have come away before the mail was all distributed, I’ll go back and see if there is anything more.” He fumbles in his treasure box in the attic for a while.
…
He arrives, glowing, a yellow envelope in hand, addressed to Miss Mary Hubbard. Swallowing my tears, I eagerly tear it open and find within a card of Abraham offering up Isaac, and beneath it the verse of Scripture, “Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life,” and also some writing, which later when I learn to read reveals, “A reward for attending Sabbath School for ten consecutive Sabbaths.” At first, I eye this valentine through undried tears with suspicion, but the unrestrained enthusiasm of my family over its artistic merits, wins me over and before night I will not exchange it for Daisy’s.”
Elbert Hubbard can be a contradictory and occasionally contested character, but there is no doubt that he had a lot of love in his heart, which carried him through his life.
*Fletcherize is a term coined in the early 1900s by Dr. Horace Fletcher, meaning to chew one’s food properly for better health. Elbert Hubbard would adopt the term to represent chewing one’s thoughts before speaking.
