[Granville-Hough] 26 Dec 2009 - Passing the Hat

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 11:14:29 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Passing the Hat - 26 Dec 2009

       We are all now familiar with collection plates, and we would be 
startled if we were in a church where someone's hat was passed around to 
collect the weekly contributions.  Now in my childhood, we did not come 
"as you are," but carefully took a bath and removed the week's grime 
from working in the fields, then put on our "Sunday, go to meeting" 
clothes and adult men donned their relatively clean, once a week hat. 
When the time came in our church service, one of the deacons would 
volunteer his hat for the collection, generally the one designated to 
count the money before turning it over to the Treasurer, who was my 
father in my childhood as he held that office until his death in 1936.  
"Passing the hat" was a common and well understood term in our early 
American history, and writers such as Mark Twain and others used it 
frequently with no explanation.  If you were a church member suspicious 
of your deacons, then you could volunteer your hat and stand around 
waiting to get your hat back and watch the money being counted.   Then 
my father took it and placed it in the Church Treasury, kept in our 
unlocked house on top of the clo'shelf in the living room.  Of course, a 
few feet away was my parent's bed and on the wall above them was a 
shotgun, ready for action.  We children had two rules, among others, we 
dared not disobey.  "Never touch the shotgun, and never touch anything 
on top of the clo'shelf."
    My uncle Tom Richardson was deacon for a Baptist Church in New 
Haven, CT, and he once came to church with my grandparents.  He observed 
the congregation still "passed the hat" just as they had done in his 
youth in 1910.  The next Christmas he brought two beautiful wooden 
collection plates.  He also brought two nicely engraved little plaques 
enscribed: "Gift from," then underneath that "Richardson family."
They had to be placed on the plates.  When they looked around for 
someone to do the work, who would they think of?  Of course, it was the 
grandchildren Hough boys, Dueward and Granville, who were handy in a 
blacksmith shop sharpening plows, making shipping boxes, making hickory 
axe handles, hoe handles, axletrees, doubletrees, and attaching all 
their metal parts.  We insisted we did not have the right tacks or 
hammer for this delicate work.  Besides, our blacksmith ship was a 
smoky, grimy place for working hot metal on an anvil.  It was Saturday 
and several aunts were visiting for the presentation next day.  They 
sort of taunted us by saying they could do it themselves if they were at 
their own homes.
    We borrowed our mothers tack hammer and then took some newspapers 
for a clean surface.  We then looked for suitable tacks, or very small 
nails.  This was in the Depression, and we kept old nails in a nail box 
and reused them over and over.  As we got down through the big nails to 
the smaller nails at the bottom, we even found square cut nails with 
square heads separately attached.  They must have been a hundred years 
old taken from some log cabin.  When we got to the bottom, we finally 
found some tacks we could clean up.  We selected four and very carefully 
attached one plaque.  Then on the second plate and  plaque and the last 
tack, we saw a tiny split iin the plate.  There was nothing we could do 
except file off the protrusions and say we had done the best we could.  
We let our mother defend us with her sisters, and she "got on her high 
keys" in proclaiming her boys had done the best they could with the time 
and tools they had.
    The presentation went well the next day and the church gratefully 
accepted the gift.  "Passing the Hat" was no more in that church.  But 
no one else ever asked Dueward and me to attach plaques to wooden 
collection plates.  Grampa.