Garfield Gives
Reminiscence of
Artist L. C. Earle
Lawrence C. Earle, the artist who died suddenly Sunday,
and Charles W. Garfield were friends from boyhood, and Mr. Garfield
relates the circumstances of their first meeting.
"I was about 10 years old and attending the Seymour
school in Paris township. During the recess hour we were playing around
the school when a man and a boy stopped to look on. The boy, a little
older than I, was Lawrence Earle and the man was his father. They were
out squirrel hunting and carried beautifully made small calibre rifles.
The rifles of course interested us immensely and we gathered around to
look at them and to discuss their relative merits as compared with
shotguns for squirrel hunting.
"The senior Earle seemed to like our looks and finally
he called us around him and said he had a proposition to make. He said
he would give a rifle exactly like his own to the boy in school who
stood the highest in his classes at the end of the school year. We
called to Miss McBain, who was our teacher, and he repeated his promise
and put it in definite form. This was a great incentive to hard study
that winter for all the boys.
"At the end of the school year four of us had exactly
the same markings. They were Will Parsons, Marcellus Alger, Frank
Seymour and myself. How to break the tie was something of a puzzle and
we solved the problem by three of us withdrawing in favor of Will
Parson, because he was a cripple, and he received the prize."
GRAND RAPIDS PRESS, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER
25, 1921; p. 17
