Letters of Franklin K. Lane | Page 9

quite stout, looked already too
old for this style," and so continued to be annoyed by the children, until
he put a forcible end to it. "He 'licked' one of the ringleaders," says the
chronicler, and won to peace. "As we grew to know Franklin ... his
right to act became accepted ... . There was always something about his
personality which made one feel his importance."
The little California community was impressed by the close intimacy of
the home-life of the Canadian family--closer than was usual in

hurriedly settled Western towns. The father found time to take all three
boys on daily walks. Another companion remembers seeing them
starting off together for a day's hunting and fishing. But it was the
mother, who read aloud to them and told them stories and exacted
quick obedience from them, who was the real power in the house.
There were regular family prayers, and family singing of hymns and
songs.
This last custom survived among the brothers and sister through all the
years. Even after all had families of their own, and many cares, some
chance reunion, or a little family dinner would, at parting, quicken
memory and, with hats and coats already on, perhaps, in readiness to
separate to their homes, they would stand together and shout, in unison,
some song of the hour or some of their old Scotch melodies with that
pleasant harmony of voices of one timbre, heard only in family singing.
Lane had a baritone of stirring quality, coming straight from his big
lungs, and loved music all his life. In the last weeks of his life he more
than once wrote of his pleasure in his brother's singing. At Rochester, a
few days before his operation, he reassured an anxious friend by
writing, "My brother George is here, with his splendid philosophy and
his Scotch songs."
His love and loyalty to past ties, though great and persistent, still left
his ideal of loyalty unsatisfied. Toward the end of his life he wrote,
"Roots we all have and we must not be torn up from them and flung
about as if we were young things that could take hold in any soil. I have
been--America has been--too indifferent to roots--home roots, school
roots. ... We should love stability and tradition as well as love
adventure and advancement." But the practical labors of his life were
directed toward creating means to modify tradition in favor of a larger
sort of justice than the past had known.
Resignation had no part in his political creed. "I hold with old Cicero
'that the whole glory of virtue is in activity,'" comes from him with the
ring of authentic temperament. And of a friend's biography he wrote,
"What a fine life--all fight, interwoven with fun and friendship."
[Illustration with caption: FRANKLIN K. LANE WITH HIS
YOUNGER BROTHERS, GEORGE AND FREDERIC]
All the anecdotes of his boyhood show him in action, moving among
his fellows, organizing, leading, and administering rough-and- tumble

justice.
From grammar school in Napa he went, for a time, to a private school
called Oak Mound. In vacation, when he was eleven years old, he was
earning money as messenger-boy, and at about that time as general
helper to one of the merchants of the little town. He left in his old
employer's mind the memory of a boy "exceedingly bright and
enterprising." He recalls a fight that he was told about, between Lane
"and a boy of about his size," "and Frank licked him," the old merchant
exults, "and as he walked away he said, 'If you want any more, you can
get it at the same place.'"
It was in Napa--so he could not have been quite twelve years old-- that
Lane started to study Spanish, so that he might talk more freely to the
ranchers, who drove to town in their rickety little carts, to "trade" at the
stores.
In 1876, the family moved from the full sunshine of the valley town,
with its roads muffled in pale dust, and its hillsides lifting up the green
of riotous vines, to Oakland, cool and cloudy, with a climate to create
and sustain vigor. In Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco,
Lane entered the High School. Again his schoolmates recall him with
gusto. He was muscular in build, "a good short-distance runner." His
hands-- always very characteristic of the man--were large and
well-made, strong to grasp but not adroit in the smaller crafts of
tinkering. "He impressed me," an Oakland schoolmate writes, "as a
sturdy youngster who had confidence in himself and would
undoubtedly get what he went after. Earnest and straightforward in
manner," and always engrossed in the other boys, "when they walked
down Twelfth Street, on their way to school, they had their arms
around each