A Minute
For
William Wood
Encyclopedia Bill, or Billy were a couple of his nicknames; however, he preferred just Billy.
He loved finding out new things and encyclopedias were a good source. Billy couldn’t understand why anyone would sell a 26 set of books for as little as $2.00. It seemed that every book sale that he went to, there were these special deals and so he owned many sets. He would look up the short articles and compare how each author explained the term. He could be thought of as the forerunner of Wikipedia.
Billy was very sociable and he liked to discuss various philosophers, not only American, but English, French, and even Russian. He didn’t realize that not everyone had the same amount of interest in these topics as he had. He liked Herman Melville. Herman Melville lost his father when he was 12 years old and Billy knew how that felt. He identified with Billy Bud, Melville’s final book, published after he died. It was a story about the clash between innocence and evil and between social forms and individual liberty.
Another characteristic that Billy had was that he was very conservative. He didn’t want anything thrown away if it had a potential use. His problem was finding the time to put them to use.
Billy loved people and he loved animals. Sometimes his dreams were beyond being practical.
Billy loved Allen’s Neck Meeting. He organized the painting of the building on the clambake grounds. He helped remove the outhouses from both the Clambake grounds and the Meetinghouse. He served as clerk of Building and Grounds.
He was a well meaning fellow and he just ran out of time. It could happen to us all.