Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Read Online Free Page A

he recalled, “generally the leader among the boys.” One of their favorite gathering places was a salt marsh near the river’s mouth, which had become a quagmire due to their constant trampling. Under Franklin’s lead, the friends built themselves a wharf with stones intended for the construction of a house nearby. “In the evening when the workmen were gone home, I assembled a number of my playfellows, and we worked diligently like so many emmets, sometimes two or three to a stone, until we brought them all to make our little wharf.” The next morning, he and the other culprits were caught and punished.
    Franklin recounted the tale in his autobiography to illustrate, he said, his father’s maxim “that nothing was useful which was not honest.” 18 Yet, like many of Franklin’s attempts at self-deprecation, the anecdote seems less designed to show how bad a boy he was than how good a leader he was. Throughout his life, he took palpable pride in his ability to organize cooperative endeavors and public-spirited projects.
    Franklin’s childhood days playing along the Charles River also instilled a lifelong love for swimming. Once he had learned and taught his playmates, he tinkered with ways to make himself go faster. The size of people’s hands and feet, he realized, limited how much water they could push and thus their propelling power. So he made two oval palettes, with holes for his thumbs, and (as he explained in a letter to a friend) “I also fitted to the soles of my feet a kind of sandals.” With these paddles and flippers, he could speed through the water.
    Kites, as he would later famously show, could also be useful. Sending one aloft, he stripped, waded into a pond, floated on his back, and let it pull him. “Having then engaged another boy to carry my clothes round the pond,” he recalled, “I began to cross the pond with my kite, which carried me quite over without the least fatigue and with the greatest pleasure imaginable.” 19
    One childhood incident that he did not include in his autobiography, though he would recount it more than seventy years later for the amusement of his friends in Paris, occurred when he encountered a boy blowing a whistle. Enchanted by the device, he gave up all the coins in his pocket for it. His siblings proceeded to ridicule him, saying he had paid four times what it was worth. “I cried with vexation,” Franklin recalled, “and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.” Frugality became for him not only a virtue but also a pleasure. “Industry and frugality,” he wrote in describing the theme of Poor Richard’s almanacs, are “the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.” 20
    When Benjamin was 6, his family moved from the tiny two-room house on Milk Street, where fourteen children had been raised, to a larger home and shop in the heart of town, on Hanover and Union Streets. His mother was 45, and that year (1712) she gave birth to the last of her children, Jane, who was to become Benjamin’s favorite sibling and lifelong correspondent.
    Josiah Franklin’s new house, coupled with the dwindling number of children still living with him, allowed him to entertain interesting guests for dinner. “At his table,” Benjamin recalled, “he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse which might tend to improve the minds of his children.”
    The conversations were so engrossing, Franklin claims in his autobiography, that he took “little or no notice” of what was served for dinner. This training instilled in him a “perfect inattention” to food for the rest of his life, a trait he deemed “a great convenience,” albeit one that seems belied by the number of recipes of American and French culinary delights among his papers. 21
    The new home also allowed the Franklins to accommodate Josiah’s