Reminiscences about Old Libraries by an Old Librarian, Part 2

       After three years at Colorado College, I decided I wanted to continue working on my PhD after all.  I was very interested in the literature of the Romantic period at that time and I read something about the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library at the University of Texas, a rare book library that specialized in the Romantics.  I got all fired up about going there and I applied for a half-time position in that library with the idea of  taking graduate classes the other half time. 

       This worked out well.  I was hired as a cataloger of rare books and although I ended up dropping out of the PhD program after one year, I continued to work at UT through the sixties and into the seventies, both in rare books and in the regular catalog department. 

       My first experience of a really big academic library was Cornell, where I got my MA in English literature.  My second experience was at UCLA (Master's in library science).  UCLA's library was a formidable, older set-up with closed stacks, that is, if you wanted a book, you got the call number from the catalog and then somebody paged it for you from the stacks.  However, as a library school student, I had stack privileges and I spent lots of time roaming those dark, gloomy, and somewhat intimidating environs.

This picture is from 2005, but it looked exactly
the same in 1966.  Whitman fired from the
observation deck at the top.  The Stark
Library was in the red-roofed level on
the fourth floor.

       Still, the UCLA library didn't hold a candle for weirdness to the University of Texas.  Here is a picture of the Tower.  It's a famous symbol of UT and at the time I was there, it housed the main library -- yes, most of those floors you see in the tower itself were occupied by stacks.  Most of the books are now housed in other, more up-to-date venues, but my memories are of the Tower. 

       I've written before of how my mother and I arrived in Austin one day after the Charles Whitman Massacre, where a young man went up to top of the tower and opened fire with a rifle on the courtyard below.  These days we've gotten kind of hardened to that sort of atrocity, but it wasn't so common in 1966.  Only two days after the massacre I was walking across that same area.  If we had arrived two days sooner, I might have been one of the people who was shot!

       My official employer was the Humanities Research Center, which not only administered the Stark Library but was building its own collection of rare materials, many of which were contemporary first editions, manuscripts by well-known authors, etc.  The HRC had its offices in the tower, so I immediately had to go up in the very same elevator that Whitman had taken two days before.  The Administrative Assistant in the HRC told me she had actually held the elevator door for Whitman so he could bring in a footlocker.  It contained his rifles, but she just thought it was a load of books destined for the collection.  You can imagine that security got a bit tighter after that!
       The collections in the Stark Library were a donation by the eponymous donor.  I won't go into the history; if you're interested, go here http://www.utexas.edu/tours/mainbuilding/interior/main400/
and here http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/books/holdings/stark/  You can see on those sites how grandiose was the venue where I worked!  I later worked in new HRC library.  By that time the Stark Library had been dismantled and turned into an office for the President of the University of Texas.  The pictures on the two websites are from that period (I couldn't find anything from the sixties), but I'm confidant that the view on the right below is of the room where I usually ate my lunch.  The furniture was all shabby Victorian, taken from Mrs. Stark's home.  The books were housed in locked cases around the periphery and on the balcony.  There were long windows with heavy Victorian drapes and there was a tall painting of Mrs. Stark which we staff members faced as we ate seated on a worn velvet settee and clustered around a coffee table.
       There was a funny story about the painting.  It showed Mrs. Stark standing by a table in 1890s dress and the Head Librarian, whom I will call Mrs. M. (things were very formal -- not even the student workers were called by their first names), pointed out a strange horizontal line across the center of the portrait.  She said Mrs. Stark thought she looked too short in the picture, so the painter cut it in two and lengthened her from the waist down.  If you thought about, it really was out of proportion.  Where her waist was and where her floor-length skirt ended would have made her legs impossibly long!
       The Stark hired its own cleaning staff, usually a student, so Mrs. M. could keep tabs on who came and went in this place that housed such a valuable collection. When I was there, the janitor was a young man who wasn't quite with it (this was the sixties, you know). He was not what you would call energetic. Mrs. M. talked about how he sat down to run the vacuum cleaner, and I saw him do it with my own eyes. Frankly, I do that sometimes myself these days, but this kid wasn't 73 years old!

       The Stark Library also had a rooftop terrace.  In the picture of the Tower, it's the area in front of the red-roofed structure.  The grassy part had a resident tortoise named Epicurus.  My cataloging friend used to feed it lettuce, but one time she fed it a butterfinger, which it ate with relish.  Then it disappeared for a long period of time and she was afraid she had killed it, but it finally turned up no worse for wear.
       The library had its own cataloger and catalog department, which actually was the kitchen.  The whole place was very cramped for space.  It was a tiny room with a sink and cooktop, perhaps oven, too (I've forgotten), and refrigerator, and that's where the food for breaks or events was kept.  It also had two desks.  The long-time catalog librarian resented my intrusion on her space in the beginning -- she liked things done certain ways, and here comes this young whippersnapper with three years' experience being thrust into her world.  However, I'm very good at following instructions and I soon learned her ways.  In the end we became the best of friends and remained so even after I went on to other things, until she died in the 1990s. 
       The cataloging was not like anything done in an ordinary library.  The books were all 18th and 19th century imprints, and we collated every last one of them.  That means you page through and record the signatures from the bottom of the page, checking for errors in paging or missing pages.  You also looked for stubs where pages have been cut out and for tip-ins where new pages might have been inserted.  Handwritten marginalia and autographs were noted, and inclusions in the books, like notes or drawings, were extracted and sent to the manuscript collection.  Once, in a book from around 1815, I found a beautiful paper cut-out of a lion with a putto on its back playing a harp and my boss said I could keep it.  I still have it.  I framed it in a gold frame against a red background and I just love it.  Who has the patience to do anything like that these days?
       After I quit my PhD work, I went to the regular UT catalog department, but later when the Stark Library was dismantled, I rejoined my rare-book cataloger friend in the HRC Library.  I was just in time to help them move.  What a job!  I'll say only that she and I worked as a team unloading book trucks in the new library and shelving the books.  I ran into a first edition of E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ourobouros.  It was the first time I'd ever heard of it.  I had already read Tolkien and begun writing fantasy, and that helped me take off into other books of that genre.
       I have one more story to tell about my regular cataloging days at UT, but I'll put that in a third part to this post.

Reminiscences about Old Libraries from an Old Librarian, Part 1

       I have worked in really old libraries and in brand new libraries and in some of a middle age, and while the new ones were more roomy and convenient, it's the old ones that I have the fondest memories of, and also some of the weirdest.  All libraries have their eccentricities, but the old ones are like pixillated little old ladies and gentlemen.  You never know what they will do next.

       The first library I ever worked in (and the one where I studied as an undergraduate) was the one below.  I attended Colorado College from 1957 through 1961 and during that time I worked as a student assistant for the summer after my sophomore year (the summer after my junior year I took beginning German and I never tried to work and go to school at the same time -- I've never been a multitasker).  Then I worked again as a circulation assistant the summer after I graduated, before I went to Cornell to study for my MA.  In 1962 CC's brand spanking new Charles Leaming Tutt Library opened and I worked there  that same summer (starting only a few weeks after the building opened -- they were still laying carpet) before I headed to UCLA for my library science degree.  I was to return ito the new library in 1963 as Catalog Librarian, but that's a whole different story.

Coburn Library, Colorado College, 1894-1962
A Postcard View
From http://www.cardcow.com/103698/coburn-library-colorado-college-springs/

       Here is some information on Coburn Library from

http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/library/SpecialCollections/Walk/Coburn.html

The building was constructed of "peachblow sandstone quarried near Aspen."  It's a beautiful red stone and several of the early buildings on the campus were constructed of that material.  "Coburn cost about $45,000 to build. The major donor was the Hon. N. P. Coburn of Newton Massachusetts, a childhood friend of CC President Slocum. In 1940, to make room for the growing collection, a four-story addition with room for 60,000 volumes was built for $20,000."



Interior View of Coburn Library, ca. 1895

Thanks to
http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/library/SpecialCollections/Walk/Coburn.html

       "The building, judged inadequate even after the addition, was razed in 1963. The statue of Winged Victory of Samothrace, seen here in an interior view ca. 1895, disappeared around that time. We hold out hope that it will come back home to roost one day."

       This interior view may be from 1895, but when I was in college, it looked exactly like this, except the addition at the back had done away with that half-moon window.  Everything was decked out in beautiful warm-hued, polished woodwork. The rare book collection was housed in a locked closet in the upper left hand of the picture, reached by a metal circular staircase.  Nike was still there in my time -- when I was pondering my reading at a table, I used to look up at that statue in some fascination.  The circulation desk was always over there at the left, and I presume the small card catalog seen at the left in the picture included all the books the library contained in 1895.  By my time the library had maybe 100,000 books (I honestly have forgotten, so I don't swear by this figure) crammed into that small space.

       You see those balconies at the upper right?  By my time bound periodicals were shelved there, and sometimes a little old lady would ask you so sweetly to get a volume down for her. What can a student assistant do but comply?  You had to climb up a really tall ladder while dangling halfway out over the edge of the balcony.  Honestly, it was scary! 

       Not seen in this picture (which looks north) is the balcony at the southern end of the main room.  It housed the materials in the historical ranges of the Dewey Decimal system and it seems like I was always stuck with shelving books there.  Of course there were no elevators.  You had to load up a tray of books (you know how heavy books are) and carry them up a steep, cut-back staircase, and then keep going up and down a ladder with a few books each time.  Maybe that's why I have so much arthritis in my shoulders now!  I've hauled books around all my life!

       The 1940 addition was bare-bones -- just metal stacks in about four levels -- but at least the ceilings were low and it was supplied with carrels with slit windows, so you could look out over the quadrangle when you were studying.

       Do any of you remember the smell of old libraries?  New libraries smell like fresh paint and plaster and carpet chemicals, but old libraries smell like musty, unsunned storage caves -- paper dust and old crumbling leather bindings and book glue and a touch of printing ink and furniture polish and maybe some disintegrated bookworms thrown in for good measure.   A wonderful, nostalgic smell that I can still conjure up for myself!

       Now, the spookiest and most aromatic part of Coburn Library was the basement.  It contained storage for government documents.  I presume you all know that many libraries are repositories for government documents; they automatically receive at least a selection of everything printed by the GPO.  You know how much paper the government produces.  Any academic library worth its salt has a librarian solely in charge of government documents, and those materials take up a heck of a lot of space.  In Coburn it was the basement.  It was lit only by drop lights and they didn't stay on all the time.  There were no centralized switches for the lighting, so in the evening when the library closed up, somebody had to sweep the building, turning off the lights.  If somebody requested a document in the daytime, you would have to go down there and find it for them, turning the lights on as you went.  Some of the aisles were piled with overflow from those sections of shelving. 

       There is a cartoon that I think came from the New Yorker, but I'm not sure.  I've been trying to find it online but without any luck, alas, so I'll describe it.  It shows a female librarian between two stacks with a bunch of books piled on the floor just like I used to see in the Coburn basement.  Sitting on top of the books (with a drop light overhead) is a skull draped with cobwebs and the woman is regarding it with the most horrified expression.  I used to feel just like that when I had to go down there.  It wouldn't have surprised me at all to find a mummified body!  Murder in the Library!  I think that's been done in more than one mystery novel! 

       It pained me that they demolished this quirky old building.  I would have liked to see it preserved and put it on the Register of Historic Buildings.  But the college needed the land for a new administration building and auditorium, so ... Coburn is gone never to return.

       And by the way, if anybody out there knows the location of that Winged Victory, please get in touch with me!



A Bit of Personal Whimsy: Why on Earth Do We Dream What We Do?

       Last night I had a really goofy dream -- goofy enough for me to want to share it and possibly make you chuckle.

       It seemed there was a new TV station starting up and they were building a news team.  (I presume this is from my having watched so much wildfire coverage lately.)  I had been hired as a news anchor.  Unfortunately, they signed me to do sports (a subject I know nothing about; the only sport I follow is ice hockey).  But I must have needed a job because I took the assignment. 
       But the other strange thing was that all the anchors had to top off their reports by singing a song. (?)  When my turn came, I sang "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts."  Is anybody here old enough to remember that song?  Here is what the Wikipedia article says about it:

" 'I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts' is a novelty song composed in 1944 (as 'I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts') by Fred Heatherton, an English songwriter and published by Box & Cox Publications (ASCAP). In 1949, it was a top-ten hit in the U.S. for Freddy Martin And His Orchestra with vocalist Merv Griffin and sold over three million copies.  The following year, it was a number-25 hit for Danny Kaye. It celebrates the coconut shy (coconut toss) at funfairs."

       When I was in the 4th or 5th grade (about 1950), I learned to play a little on the ukelele and I just loved that song and learned to sing it and accompany myself on the ukelele.  I would mimic Merv Griffin's rather phony British accent fairly well, I do think.  I did it once at school for show-and-tell.  Obviously I was a lot less inhibited as a child than I became later! 
       As a child, I didn't really understand what was going on in the song, although I got the sense that it was some kind of game at a fair.  In fact, I only just now learned from Wikipedia that the coconuts were not the thing that was being thrown, but the prize you were throwing balls at (see the article Coconut Shy in Wikipedia.) You're never too old to learn something new!
       I'm sure that ancient memory of singing that song as a child was why I picked it to sing in my goofy dream!

      Here is a link to the Merv Griffin version.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf670orHKcA  Enjoy!

Nostalgia: Why Do We Keep "Stuff"?

       I wrote this after being inspired by Jack Urquhart's post "My Life in a Box."  It really struck a chord.

       My mother and I lived together almost my whole life.  Her stuff was my stuff.  And she had a lot of stuff.  She was a high school teacher of Spanish and English, and she taught in a lot of different schools when I was growing up (hence, I attended a lot of different schools).  She always called herself a gypsy -- she enjoyed moving around.  She said working in different places was the only way she got to see anything new.  However, she always said that every family ought to have a big family house with a big attic where all the possessions of generations could be stored forever.

       During our peripatetic life, she left most of belongings at my grandparents' house, in the basement.  Well, grandparents don't live forever.  After my grandmother died in 1957, my uncle continued to live in the house and my mother felt obligated to remove her stuff from the premises.  And she may have gotten rid of some things during that process, like a lot of my baby clothes.  I really don't know because I was a freshman in college and didn't have much time to help her.  She didn't need help at that point.

       But she was still left with a large hoard, and she rented storage space for it.  It included her college textbooks and various mementos from her earlier life, along with quite a few of my grandmother's possessions shipped out from Missouri in the early 1920s.

       A few years later, the storage space was going to be torn down, so she was faced with finding another alternative.  That was about 1963.  I had my first library job and we bought a house.  Yay!  We had a basement and an extra garage at the back -- a place to store things!

       Then in 1966 I decided to go back to grad school and continue working on my Ph.D. with the intention of becoming a rare book librarian.  We sold the house.  And that's when we started hauling all that stuff around the country with us.  When your possessions are out of sight in a basement or garage, there is very little inclination to rid anything out, and then when you're faced with a move, there's no time to do it.  It's easier to just box everything up and ship it.

      We had a whole roomful of boxes and wherever we moved, we always had to rent a place with an extra bedroom so we could store the stuff.  And my mother never ridded it out.  She got older and everything gets harder as you get older.  Besides, you acquire even more stuff as the years pass.  She had her stroke in 1983 and after that it was hopeless.  After we bought the house where I live now (in 1987), I tried once to make a beginning.  I hauled out a box and opened it and took out items and showed them to my mother and I would say, "Can we throw this away?  What about this?  How about getting rid of this?"

       The answer was always "No, I want to keep that."  It took forever to look at the things and think about them, and I just didn't have time.  Finally, in considerable impatience, I just put everything back in the same box, sealed it up again, and returned it to its niche in the spare "bedroom."

       So my mother never got to go through her things, but she would have kept everything anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter too much.  My grandmother had something of the same experience.  As she got older, she would say to my mother, "Genevieve, I've got to get out on that sleeping porch and go through some of those things."  My mother would offer to help her.  But the older you get, the harder it becomes to accomplish anything.  My grandmother never got around to looking through her stuff either.

       I try to learn from vicarious experience.  After my mother died in 1997, I spent the next two and a half years ridding out that bedroom.  It was like opening up a buried treasure -- it was fun, actually.  I never knew what interesting thing was going to emerge from the next box.  I had at least half a dozen yard sales (and by then this included all my uncle's stuff as well), and I sold things to an antique dealer.  I made about $3000.  At the end of all that, I actually had a guest bedroom!  But I kept quite a bit myself, like my grandmother's Indian head, and a lot of really old family pictures, many of which I framed and hung on the walls, and my grandmother's jewelry (like cameos and jet beads), and also a lot of nice china and glass pieces (I did sell some of that).     

       Now I'm considering getting rid of more stuff, although I'm reluctant, because everything I kept has sentimental value.  Books are a serious problem.  I never get rid of books, except maybe a few textbooks and some mysteries and other things I'm not attached to.  But I also tend to keep magazines.  I have Smithsonians dating back to about 1990.  They are such a good resource, but I have no index to them, so I can't access them.  I'm trying to psych myself up to putting a small number of them in recycling every week (I could sure use the shelf space for the books I've been buying lately!)  So far I've recycled the Nature Conservancy magazines and the Consumer Reports, and all my gardening catalogs, and I'm starting on the calendars from Smithsonian and Nature Conservancy and American Museum of Natural History that I kept because they have such nice and informative pictures.  Sigh.  The best way to get rid of printed material is not to look at what you're throwing away - just stick it in the recycle bin and forget it.

       So I guess after all is said and done, I'm my mother's daughter -- she was a mama packrat and I'm a baby one.  But I'm a sadder and wiser packrat for surviving all the hassle caused by "stuff."

Holiday Nostalgia: A Recipe for Bishop's Cake

       A recipe is the last thing you'd expect to find on one of my blogs, but something got me to thinking about eatables I used to make (I never cook or bake these days), and I remembered Bishop's Cake, and I thought, gee, if I'm never going to make it again, I ought to share this on my blog so other people could enjoy it this holiday season and in the future.

       It isn't a recipe that comes from my grandmother or  farther back in family history.  In fact, I got it from somebody I worked with in the 1960's.  But then that's ancient history for a lot of the people reading this!  It's a fruit cake, but don't let that name put you off!  It's not the type of fruitcake that you would ever take to the Manitou Springs Fruitcake Toss after Christmas and chuck down the field with a catapult!  It's scrumptious!  It has none of the coarse, sour, bitter stuff like candied citrus peel or citron or even candied pineapple.  And I don't know why it's called Bishop's Cake -- that's just the name my friend gave it.  It's definitely fit for a bishop, or a king!

 

Bishop's Cake

 

Mix together:

3 eggs, well beaten

1 cup granulated sugar

 

Add:

2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

2 cups chopped walnuts

1 cup candied cherries (as I recall, I left them whole.  You could use red and green mixed for extra  color)

1 cup chopped dates (add gradually for even mixing.  I used the pre-chopped, sugared date bits because I'm lazy.  They are a little drier than the whole dates.)

 

Combine and sift over this mixture:

1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

 

Mix well.  Add a small amount of water if the batter is too dry to hold togther.

Line a loaf pan (I forget the dimensions -- 4x8? 5x9? -- just the regular size) with wax paper and spoon the batter into it.  I always decorated it with a row of walnut halves down the middle and rows of cherry halves on each side.)

Bake at 325 degrees for 1 1/2 hours.  Cool in pan, then lift out with the waxed paper and peel it off the bottom.  The cake is compact, so you don't have to worry about having it fall apart.

 

Ooh, it's delicious -- my mouth is watering!  I mean, what could go wrong with the combination of chocolate chips, cherries, nuts, and dates?

 

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!  And happy holiday eating!

 

Nostalgia Post No. 3: My Grandmother's Indian Head

[The idea for this post came from one of Sandra Tyler's blog hops in which the prompt was to write about some nostalgic possession.  The hop was closed before I got around to it, but I thought the idea I came up with would make a good post, anyway.  I even managed to get some photos (I am not much of a photographer.)]

       It sits on the floor and the cat is scared to death.  She's never seen at eye-level a nearly lifesize plaster bust of a Native American Chief in full-feathered headdress.  She skirts the edge of the living room, never taking her saucer-sized eyes off this menacing object.  We all laugh hilariously.  LOL, for sure, if that abbreviation had even been known back in the mid-1960s.

       I've been hauling that thing around ever since then, through many moves.  Right now it's sitting on the sideboard in my dining room, surrounded by antique photos, as you can see above.  That's my grandmother at the left of the lefthand picture, with two of her friends, taken in the 1890's when she was a "teenager" (another term never used in those early days) and the belle of the small town.  And that's my grandmother in the middle picture, taken about 1913, with my mother on the right and her brother on the left.  I called my grandmother "Mimi."  And we always called the bust "Mimi's Indian head."

       In the early years of the 20th century there was a craze for all things having to do with the Wild West, and that included everything to do with Indians (I can't be politically correct in this article, because it would simply be risible to say "my grandmother's Native American head.")  This bust was one of a pair that sat on the mantle back in my mother's childhood home in Missouri.  You can see our Chief has a name: Skin Cote.  The other was of a common Indian, with braids, a headband, and a single feather, and he was named "Lone Wolf."  I never saw Lone Wolf.  When my grandparents moved to Colorado in 1922, they stored a lot of things in Missouri, and somebody broke into the warehouse and stole many of their possessions, including Lone Wolf.  My grandmother never got over that violation; she mourned her losses till the end of her life.

       In the picture above, the photograph at the right shows my great-great grandparents -- the parents of Mimi's mother.  Their name was Killey and he was from the Isle of Man, which in itself has always fascinated me.  That's one of her sugar shells and his Bible (printed in about 1-point type) sitting in front of the picture.  They say he made his own shoes and she scrubbed her wooden floors on her hands and knees with sand.  They homesteaded in Iowa and the family story says that parties of Plains Indians (probably a lot like Skin Cote and Lone Wolf) used to come and steal all the food in the house, while the family stood by meekly, not daring to protest.  That is, the raiders took everything except the butter -- that, they would place up on the top shelf of the cupboard and let it be!  But the scariest thing was that they would take little Sarah (my grandmother's mother) on their horses and ride off with her.  Her mother never knew whether she would ever see her child again.  But they called her their little Princess and they always brought her back safe.

       One other humorous anecdote regarding the bust comes to mind.  In the mid-60s (in fact, after that very move I spoke of at the outset), my mother and I lived in Austin, Texas, where I was doing graduate work and working in the UT rare book library.  We had dragged all our possessions with us, including my grandmother's Indian head.  Our landlord -- a rather pixillated man, I must say -- saw it and scratched his head.  "What's that?  Some kind of hand lotion?" he said.  My mother had no idea what he was talking about.  Afterward, I said to her he must have thought it was an advertising piece, promoting some kind of skin care product called "Skin Cote"!

       Skin Cote sat on the floor in Mimi's house when I was a little girl and I used to squat down and examine him in fascination.  I was told by a dealer to whom I sold a good bit of stuff after my mother died that he was worth about $100.00.  Imagine how much more he would be worth if I had the pair!  But I don't think I'll sell him -- he can sit there in my dining room until I die, and then somebody else can give him a new home -- because he always makes me think of my childhood, of my heritage, and of my much loved grandmother "Mimi."

Something Different: Another Nostalgia Post Like the One at Christmas

  THIS POST IS NOW PART OF

THE OLD-POST RESURRECTION HOP!

       Lately I've been so tied up in permissions and publishing updates and the posting of sample chapters that I haven't added anything very entertaining to this blog.  So, I decided to talk about what is an archaic time for many of you denizens of cyberspace who are in your 20s or 30s or even 40s.  And the time is the 1930s.

       And no, I don't go back quite that far, but my mother did.  She was born in 1909 and graduated from high school in 1927, right before the Great Depression.  Her father (my grandfather) was in some ways enlightened for his time.  He vigorously condemned smoking, saying that putting all that tar and nicotine into your lungs would kill you, and he counseled my mother  that she shouldn't count on having a man to support her and and should develop some way to make a living on her own.

       When she first graduated from high school, she worked in a shop as a salesperson (a totally different story that I may elaborate on someday), but after three years of this she decided she didn't want to do that all her life, so she went to college -- the same college that I attended many years later.  It was here in Colorado Springs where I live now -- the Colorado College, a small, private, liberal arts institution that is well respected throughout the United States.  She started in 1930 and graduated in 1934 -- right in the depths of the Depression.  My grandfather, who was a real estate broker, gave the College a house that he owned to help pay her tuition.

       My mother majored in Romance languages, taking four years of Spanish, three years of French, and two years of Italian, and became a secondary school teacher.  But when she graduated, she couldn't find a job and even resorted to taking a cosmetology course and working in a beauty shop for a while.  Finally, however, she got a job -- I think it was 1936 -- in a tiny town in southeast Colorado called Hartman.  I believe it still exists today.  Anybody out there in Hartman reading this?

       Remember, this was not only the Depression, it was the Dust Bowl, and southeast Colorado was right in the heart of the Dust Bowl.  The town was losing people, but it did have a consolidated school -- grade school and high school all in one building, I believe (I couldn't swear to some of this).  The superintendent was a woman and she proceeded to tell my mother that she would not only be teaching Spanish and English (obviously in a school of that size one had to teach more than first and second year Spanish) -- she would also have to direct all the school plays, teach algebra, coach girls' PE, and (because my mother could play the piano) direct the glee club ("choir" to you)!  My mother always said that she needed the job so badly that she would have swept the floors if her superiors had asked her!

       She was always good in math, fortunately, and could manage the algebra, but the text book that they were using had no answer book!  So the first year she had to work out every problem herself before she could correct the students' exercises!  It wasn't exactly easy!

        The school was so small that everybody could know everybody else.  If there was a play practice, students had to have a note from their parents saying they could  stay late at night.  After the practice, they would make hot cocoa and stand around and "chew the fat" ("talk," to you).  The glee club consisted of a lot of singing around the piano.  There was radio, of course, but no other electronic gizmos.  The girls played softball or exercised indoors for PE.  The boys all thought my mother was beautiful, and I'm sure she was -- people told her she looked like Greta Garbo. 

       Another thing a teacher had to do in those days (at least if they were the sponsor of the junior class) was manage the Junior-Senior Prom, which required picking a theme (I think my mother used a Dutch theme once, and once a Hawaiian theme, or maybe it was pirates).  Plans could be bought from companies that specialized in that sort of thing, but you still had to make lots of crepe-paper decorations.  There was also a competition at Christmas for the best home-room decorations and I believe my mother won it consistently.  You could even have a nativity scene in those days and nobody objected.  Of course, I doubt if there were very many people in that area at that time that didn't have a Christian background.

       One thing you didn't want to do was get caught in a dust storm.  My mother said you could see them rolling in across the prairie.  Things would get as black as night  and the dust would sift in under the doors and on the windowsills.  My mother bought her first car in 1937 -- a little Ford that cost $600.00 (quite a sum when you're making $100.00/month on a 9-month contract) -- because without transportation she was really stuck in Hartman.  One time she said she went to a nearby town and a dust storm rolled in and she didn't think she would ever get home.  But obviously she made it.

      My mother stayed in that school for four years and went back later during World War II and taught there another two years.  She always said it was one of the happiest times of her life.  It was a different time, for sure.   But it only goes to show that happiness does not depend on high technology or instant communication; it depends on human relationships and the sense of fulfillment one gains from a rewarding job.  I wouldn't want to go back to that time (because of medical advances, for one thing; even penicillin hadn't been discovered yet), but there are positive aspects to that kind of lifestyle that perhaps we have lost today.

Seasonal Change of Pace: Christmas Cards and Nostalgia

       An article in our local newspaper entitled "Has Facebook Killed the Holiday Card?" stimulated me to write a seasonally-oriented post.  Anyone who has noted my picture on this website or on Twitter will understand why I now quote something Prf. Tió'otu A'a'ma (one of my avian off-worlders) said:  "I am no longer – how do you Earthers put it? – a chicken of the spring.” Just last Thursday I performed the annual holiday ritual -- I mailed out a small number of paper greeting cards.  They go mostly to friends who are as old or older than I am and who don't even have computers (imagine that!) or are in nursing homes, or whose email addresses I don't know.  But I send to others simply because it's the one time a year that I get in touch with them and I want to send a real letter.  And besides, as the article in the newspaper went on to say: "Email and text greetings don't look good on the mantel."  It's like that "Pearls before Swine" strip a week or so ago, where Pig read the newspaper on his eReader and then used the device to line his birdcage.  Paper does have some uses that electronics just can't fulfill!

       But that's a digression.  I wanted to talk about my mother.  There can't be anybody in the world who loved greeting cards more than she did.  When I was a child and even after I got older, if we went into a card store, there was no getting away in under an hour.  My mother would look at every card on the rack and I would be chafing and getting impatient, dying to get on to something more interesting.  And my mother never threw away a single card (Christmas, birthday, Easter, Valentine, anything) that anybody ever sent to her.  After she died in 1997, I spent two and a half years going through all the stuff she had accumulated during her life and in every box I opened would be a packet of greeting cards.  I still have them all; I collected them together and organized them by date (that's the old catalog librarian's response) and I have several boxes of them sitting right here across the office from me at this very moment.  They range from material dated in the first twenty years of the twentieth century (the only part of the collection with some monetary value, I think) all the way up to the present, because I still keep all the cards I get (alas -- a small number compared to the way it used to be.)  I do that because the act of preserving greeting cards was engrained in me from babyhood.

       The collection is actually quite interesting because it shows how the greeting card evolved over the past century.  In the '30's and '40's, cards were fairly small and the paper wasn't very good and they often had glitter that came off all over you.  The high point was the '60's and maybe early '70's.  At that time Hallmark really outdid itself -- beautiful, big, gilded reproductions of old masters' paintings at Chistmas and orginal art of high quality and careful craftsmanship.  Then it began to decline as costs went up.  Everything became generic-looking and uniform and basically cheap -- a dime-a-dozen sort of result for a much higher price. 

       Anyway, I'm sure my mother would be glad to know that I have kept her hoard.  I've always thought maybe the collection could go to some museum of card history or of cultural history after I die, but the most likely outcome will be that the cards will go in the recycle bin or the trash.  Oh, well, carpe diem.

       By the way, the newspaper article found that lots of people (even the "chickens of the spring") still like to send paper greetings at Christmas, even going so far as to design their own, and that Hallmark is not in danger of going out of business -- yet!

       Now I want to wish everybody a happy holiday season and good cheer in the coming new year!  Next post, I'll be back in my own world!