A Warning to the Wife to Look Out for Strangers...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

My husband, James, and my stepdaughter, Zoe, came to visit me at the Museum of Old Newbury today. They did a whole lot of stopping and pointing and gasping, because, well, there is a whole lot of eye candy lying around here, arranged in ways to confound and delight (sometimes by accident).

On the second floor landing, there is a strange tableau. An oversize carved, painted arm, complete with exquisitely ruffled cuff lies next to a baluster fragment. Behind them is a tiny, framed newspaper article. They both bent over it, squinting, until I made the executive decision that we would pick it up and hold it six inches from our faces. The tiny print was a missive from Newburyport’s own Lord Timothy Dexter, well-known to you, dear reader, I am sure.

But, just in case you’re tuning in from the actual moon, Dexter (1747-1806) was a Malden-born eccentric, self-educated businessman who moved to Newburyport in 1769, married very well, and managed to turn a profit on some rather unorthodox items, including stray cats, junk currency and bed warmers.

He was snubbed by Newburyport’s elite and retaliated by writing pithy diatribes in local newspapers, eventually publishing a book called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones in 1802, in which he consolidated his complaints about his wife, his neighbors, politics, etc. He introduced himself as “the first Lord in the younited States of A mercary Now of Newburyport” and the “Lord” stuck. In the second edition he added eleven lines of punctuation at the end so readers “may peper and solt it as they plese.”

The small article was an early effort, printed in 1792 in the Essex Journal and New Hampshire Packet, to enlighten his fellow man (and woman) on the dangers of, oh, just about everything.

TO MANKIND AT LARGE, it begins. “I am greater in views of men and things than College-learnt men, because they get in the habit of being waited upon, and use is second nature: They can tend upon business about half the time of a man of middle-learning.”

Okay, so far, I say to myself. Then it gets weird (er). “…we are among roaring lions, seeking who they can devour; a warning to the wife to look out for strangers.” James turns to me. “Hear that, wife?” “Loud and clear,” I say.

Dexter closes his article with a sorry-not-sorry. “Wishing well to all my fellow creatures as I go through the world, for peace sake, I ask the pardon of mankind for telling the truth.”

And this is where I lose hours of my life. “For peace sake?” I say to James. “Is that where ‘Pete’s sake’ comes from?”

We gasp, a new truth revealed in the teeny print in front of us. “Wasn’t Pete short for St. Peter?” I recall someone once telling me that it was preferable to substitute the name of a saint to the name of God, which is why so many near curses employ the name. We are yelling back and forth. “For the love of Pete!” “What in the name of Pete?” etc.

I go reverently to the Oxford English Dictionary. “For Pete’s sake,” first used in 1903. But here in the Museum of Old Newbury, we have “for peace sake” in 1792. Bam. I am a linguistic Indiana Jones.

Later, I was in my office, looking out for strangers, when I thought, as I so often do, of the faux blasphemy employed by my dear great-aunt Emily Noyes Poore. She certainly mentioned “Pete,” though she also enjoyed “Jiminy Cricket,” “Jumping Jehoshaphat” and “for Cripes’ sake.” There was also the classic, "Ye gads and little fishes," a less-serious version of "Ye gods," veering dangerously close to paganism.

She only swore twice for real, that I can recall. Once, explaining why she never married, she said that when her older siblings (she was the youngest of six) began courting, they “acted like fools,” and sensible Emily thought the whole things “a bunch of s***.”

Later, while working in a historic house, and eternally in possession of either supernatural sensitivity or an overactive imagination (the jury is still out), I told her breathlessly of an encounter I thought evidence of a haunting. She snorted. “Well, that’s a bunch of bull****,” she said, categorically refusing to acknowledge the doors in the ancestral Poore house that seemed to close by themselves, audible footsteps in the attic and those million times a day she somehow knew that I was headed for the porch fridge to drink Hawaiian Punch directly from the can. “For Pete’s sake,” she would say, before I moved an inch.