Apple: Meet Tree

 

I had a lot of fun growing my beard recently, and Herman Melville liked it, too... Those curly locks were sacrificed for MOvember, and they are fondly missed. However, duty calls! 

And to soothe my hurting heart and freshly scraped face, I would like to pay homage to the only reason I am able to grow a decent beard: 

I am my father's son. 

When it comes to beards, Dad knows a thing or two. His beard-growing prowess is legend-hairy! 

When I was a young lad, living with my Mom and Dad and little brother in Lincoln, Nebraska, Dad saw an advertisement for a beard growing contest. This contest was sponsored by a local bank to celebrate Nebraska's Centennial of Statehood. 

Not only did Dad enter the contest, but he won the top prize for the best overall beard. Some details are in the article below. Let's assume the date was a typo! 

Dad was 28 years old in this picture. The contest was announced just 6 months before the judging, so his beard was less than six months in the making. 

Here is a picture of Dad's prize-winning
beard for the Nebraska Centennial in 1967

All of the grooming was done at home. Dad had some help from Mom, and the results were spectacular!  

Contestants dressed in period costume. Dad dressed as a banker might have been in 1867. He had arm-bands that bankers used to keep their sleeves pulled back tightly and some round spectacles that I borrowed and accidentally broke while enacting Ebenezer Scrooge in a middle school production of A Christmas Carol. Mom dressed the part too, with a beautiful yarn-dyed taffeta gown she made herself. I was six at the time and I remember Dad grooming his beard on Sunday mornings before church and listening to the men bantering about it after service. 

After winning the local contest in Lincoln, he went on to earn 2nd place and a big trophy in the Lancaster County contest. 

Nebraska revived the popular pioneer days beard contest for its Sesquicentennial in 2017 but I think Dad's beard and outfit will never be topped.

Herman Melville Likes Your Beard

Beards: They're not for everyone. But those who get it, get it.

 Herman Melville gets it! 

Tolstoy, Whitman, Dostoyevsky, Hugo—none of them said anything of note before they grew their beards. Still, we all know what happens to a man’s facial hair when he’s aboard a boat for too long. 

Here are 25 unique words or phrases that Melville used to describe beards in two chapters (84 and 85) of White-Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War, his 1850 novel based on experience crewing a U.S. frigate, the USS Neversink, in the South Seas for 14 months.

Melville’s Alternative Names for Beards:

1. the crop

2. suburbs of the chin

3. homeward-bounders

4. fly-brushes

5. long, trailing moss hanging from the bough of some aged oak

6. love-curls

7. Winnebago locks

8. carroty bunches

9. rebellious bristles

10. redundant mops

11. yellow bamboos

12. long whiskers

13. thrice-noble beards

14. plantations of hair

15. whiskerandoes

16. nodding harvests

17. viny locks

18. the fleece

19. fine tassels

20. goatees

21. imperials

22. sacred things

23. admiral’s pennant

24. manhood

25. muzzle-lashings

I selected just 10 of Melville’s 25 evocative words or phrases for my beard meme. I might pick a different set of 10 on another day. Which 10 would you choose?
 

Our Muse

Herman Melville

(1819-1891)

The Bard of Beards

Here is a little context for Melville's whiskery vocabulary. The Captain of the USS Neversink issued an unpopular decree. All sailors with long hair must cut it short, and all those with long whiskers must trim them down to Navy regulations. This decree was met with various levels of consternation from the crew, ranging from reluctant obedience to out and out mutiny.

In Chapter 85, The Great Massacre of the Beards, Melville recounts the story of Jack Chase as he took his turn with the barber. About to be shorn, Jack gave a soliloquy to his beard:

“My friend, I trust your scissors are consecrated. Let them not touch this beard if they have yet to be dipped in holy water; beards are sacred things barber. Have you no feeling for beards, my friend?

"This beard has been caressed by the snow-white hand of the lovely Tomasita of Tombez—the Castilian belle of all lower Peru. Think of that, barber! I have worn it as an officer on the quarter-deck of a Peruvian man-of-war. I have sported it at brilliant fandangoes in Lima. I have been alow and aloft with it at sea. Yea, barber! it has streamed like an Admiral's pennant at the mast-head of this same gallant frigate, the Neversink! Oh! barber, barber! it stabs me to the heart.—Talk not of hauling down your ensigns and standards when vanquished—what is that, barber! to striking the flag that Nature herself has nailed to the mast!"

Melville, the Bard of Beards! At one point he complains that the hair and beard regulation is "directly opposed to the theocratical law laid down in the nineteenth chapter and twenty-seventh verse of Leviticus, where it is expressly ordained, "Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard." But legislators do not always square their statutes by those of the Bible."

As Melville aged, he cited that Bible verse to justify a rather distinctive squared-off beard style.

“Ye shall not shave the corners of your head round, 

neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.”

—LEVITICUS 19:27