ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 31, 1997 TAG: 9703310098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NORFOLK
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
The crowd loved the half-hour talk, according to 1907 newspaper accounts. But the notes will go back in the box.
Mark Twain came to Norfolk in 1907 and thrilled a crowd at a fair with a brief, joke-peppered speech. When he finished, Twain pressed his notes into the hands of the man who had brought him to town for the occasion.
Ninety years later, those three yellowed and slightly torn typewritten pages have re-emerged in the archives of Norfolk's Chrysler Museum of Art.
Archivist Joe Mosier recently stumbled across them while looking through boxes of papers on an unrelated subject. Mosier doesn't know how the speech ended up at the Chrysler.
This is actually the second time the speech was discovered in the museum's archives. In 1978, another archivist inventoried the speech and stuck it in a box, where it was forgotten.
``That happens with all sorts of old stuff,'' Mosier said. ``You don't have display space to put everything up. With some things, the interest is in the eye of the beholder.''
The speech will go back into the box, at least temporarily, for safekeeping.
Twain gave thousands of speeches, and this one doesn't appear to contain any major revelations about the ``Huckleberry Finn'' author.
But it is interesting that he was persuaded to deliver it less than three years before his death in 1910, said J.D. Stahl, an English professor at Virginia Tech who has written about Twain.
``Toward the end of his life, he was really weary of doing that sort of thing, because he had done it so often,'' Stahl said. Twain had been forced to go on a world lecture tour a decade earlier to recoup losses from a bad investment, he said.
It's also possible that Twain typed the speech himself, since he was one of the earliest of the prominent writers to use a typewriter, Stahl said. The typewriter was patented in 1867, with the first successful portables appearing in the early 1900s.
The speech also may be of interest to Twain scholars because it is not edited, unlike those in published collections of his work, said Steven Eichner, a library assistant at the museum.
``This is a case where you're getting much closer to his speech as it was actually heard,'' Eichner said. The pages even include typos such as the word ``verry,'' and parenthetical stage directions such as ``consults Admiral.''
Remarks jotted in pencil on the last page say these were the notes for Twain's banquet speech at the Jamestown Exposition on Sept. 23, 1907, ``and which he extemporaneously elaborated on, in his usual inimitable way. He handed them to me.''
The note was signed by Hugh Gordon Miller, a former Norfolk resident who became a corporate lawyer in New York.
A published notice of Miller's death at 86 in 1962 says he brought Twain to Norfolk for the exposition, a kind of world's fair commemorating the 300th anniversary of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America.
The crowd loved the speech, according to newspaper accounts. Twain ``convulsed the audience for over a half an hour,'' wrote the Norfolk Landmark.
Mosier, however, doesn't think the speech is that funny.
``It's not his best work. It's obviously a knock-off in return for a free dinner. But from a personal viewpoint, it's fascinating to hold onto the document that Mark Twain held.''
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS Archivist Joe Mosier, who rediscoveredby CNBthe speech, doesn't think it's Twain at his funniest.