045- A Tooth for Paul Revere

Set up with the everyday grind, tie it out from the summer heat. Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape. Escape, designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

You are spurring a lather to horse through darkened streets, trapped by two hostile armies with a kit of magic in your pocket, and the American Revolution in the balance. Tonight, we escaped to an earlier day and to the workshop of a famous wizard, as Stephen Vincent Benet told it in his delightful story, a tooth for Paul Revere.

Some say it all happened because of Hancock and Adams, and some put it back to the Stamp Act and before. In this sum that hold out for Paul Revere and his little silver box. But the way I heard it, the American Revolution broke out because of Lige Butterwick and his My great aunt was a butter wick and I heard it from her. Every now and then she'd write

it out and want to get it put in the history books but they'd always put her off with some trifling sort of excuse. But the way she told it to her kids, sitting there before the flickering fire on some blustery blowy night, it sounded spooky enough and wonderful enough to be as true as the Union.

History books bar. You don't get the right of things from such. In the story of a nation, it's the queer corners that count, the tales that get whispered down through families. Now take Paul Riviere, for instance. All most folks think about is his ride in a horse, he was a silversmith by trade, and there was a kind of magic in that hand of his. I could