October – about this month Sam telegraphed Alfred P. Burbank:

Dear Sir:

  Go to Sheol.

    Yours Truly.

P.S. No, don’t do it. Go to the other place. My future is uncertain & If the worst comes to the worst, it will be an alleviation to know that it isn’t as bad as it could have been, anyway [MTP].

Sam also wrote Francis Pratt a long complaint about the contract with Pratt & Whitney about lagging work schedules:

The case seems to me to stand thus: When our last tracing went to you on the 17th of September, (for it was the last — the later drawing was but a courtesy, & for the convenience of your workmen, & was endowed with no official life or significance, it being merely second-hand drawings,) the Company was already 3 months behind its contract with us. It has fallen behind every day since then. It has not now two months left in which to furnish the machine, even by the most lenient reading of the contract. It seems to me that the only way to comply with the contract from this out, is to immediately put on all the men & all the machinery that Mr. Bates can make use of, & afterward only increase or diminish the force according to his expressed desire & decision [MTPO].

Early in the month, “several days” prior to Oct. 14, Sam had his palate cut out and the healing was slow [Oct. 14 to Webster & Co.]

The Clemenses also invited Grace King for a weekend. She’d been staying at the inn in Farmington, Conn. [Bush 37]. (See Oct. 7 entry).

Sam’s notebook carries a scheme to:

Dress up some good actors, as … Bunyan characters; take them to a wild gorge & photograph them…. [Sam would then build a] stereopticon panorama of Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress [which] could be exhibited in all countries at the same time & would clear a fortune in a year. By & by I will do this [MTNJ 3: 334].