Letters of Franklin K. Lane | Page 9

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 other's shoulders, discussing subjects of 'vast importance.'"
His capacity for organized association developed rapidly. He had part in school orations, amateur plays, school and Sunday school clubs. Many of these he seems to have initiated, so that, with his school work, his life was full. He says somewhere that by the time he was sixteen he was earning his own way. His great delight in people, and especially in the thrust and parry of controversial talk, held him from the solitary pleasures of fishing and hunting, so keenly relished by his two younger brothers. One of them said of him, "Frank can't even enjoy a view from a mountain-peak without wanting to call some one up to share it with him." He writes of his feeling about solitary nature to his friend George Dorr, in 1917, in connection with improvements for the new National Park, near Bar Harbor, "A wilderness, no matter how impressive or beautiful does not satisfy this soul of mine (if I have that kind of a thing). It is a challenge to