Category: 1910-1913

This past Saturday, we went to a local jeweler to have my daughter’s first pair of earrings removed and filed down. Walking into the establishment with a small child on either side, an assistant quickly approached to offer a Hershey Kiss to each of the girls. 

That may have been designed to keep their hands occupied with the chocolate rather than the expensive bracelets and necklaces open for perusal. At the time, though, my one concern was how to avoid glass cases full of chocolate fingerprints. “Please save the kisses for when we get outside, girls”, I said.

As soon as I said it, of course, the Stanford marshmallow test came to mind. In the 1972 study, and in follow-up studies, 3-5 year old children that were able to wait for a reward (the marshmallow) proved to have better self-esteem, emotional coping skills and educational attainment later in life. Would my 3-year old show delayed gratification by heeding my request?

Well, friends, she ripped the wrapper a little BUT the conditions weren’t controlled so I figure it’s all good. (I’ll come back to you in 10 years). In the meantime, let’s talk about delayed gratification and the postcard. The postcard?

Yes! Before the age of instantly shared travel pictures over Facebook and Instagram you sent a humble postcard. Shorter than a letter – even shorter if on foreign ground and in need of additional stamps – the postcard makes it easy to say “I love you”.

If I didn’t love you, clearly, I wouldn’t have bought this postcard, written it, and hunted down the local post office to send it. Right? And I sent it to you, at your address, which I either knew by heart (!) or thought to copy down before I left.

What a joy when you receive one of these, when, pawing through the bills and junk mail, you come up with a photograph of an exotic locale. “Girls, look what came today!” It’s fun to flip the card over, to read the loved one’s handwritten note, and then flip it over again marveling that…there they were.

And yet, isn’t it even better when you’re the sender? What’s the first thing you do when you get home and talk to said loved one? “Did you get my postcard?” It’s almost like the confirmation that your missive reached its mark and made someone’s day allows you to relive that slice of vacation. Delayed gratification!

Today, the postcard I’ll share with you comes from the Golden Age of Postcards, a period from 1907-1915. This is also known as the “Divided Back Period”, because it was 1907 when allowances were made to have messages written on the left half of the back of a postcard. What a revelation!

Everyone ran to Woolworth’s and bought millions of 10-cent postcards to send to each other. The techy kids took it even further. They used Kodak postcard cameras that could print out a postcard-size negative of the picture.

The one-cent stamp on the above postcard was issued in 1912. Apparently in 1912 the postman was so familiar with the families of Grand Avenue that no house number was required in the address. Lena C. Moon sent the postcard, indicating that her husband Truman had taken it.

The Moons were family friends of the Dunnings and I will have more to say about them. For today’s post (and in an attempt to figure out the picture) I’ve researched the addressee, O.M. Gregory.

My best guess is that O.M. Gregory is the man in the suit and hat on the right of the picture with his wife at his side. That’s Aunt Kate, sure enough, in the middle. Whether that’s a couple on her right I don’t know, but the picture certainly has a “women’s rights” feel about it, doesn’t it?

By the way, how funny is that lady in the middle? Did she stand on someone’s back to get into the camera frame?

Who was O.M. Gregory?

Osmer Milton Gregory was born in 1870. By 22 years old, he had become a yard clerk at the O&W railroad in Middletown. He married Cora Belle Lawrence on January 11, 1899 and became a bookkeeper at a local bank. At some point, he took over the operation of a coal and lumber yard in Middletown.

The best I can guess about this picture is that the crowd has gathered under the overhang at the Middletown stop of the old O&W railroad. O.M. Gregory, being connected with the railroad, had *something* to do with it. It doesn’t matter too much, I guess.

What I love about this postcard is the hopefulness of it – both front and back. Lena’s note says that “she didn’t expect to find a thing on the negative” and yet there they are. There’s a group of people who look convinced that something good is coming.

Have a great week, everyone! Hope you’ve got good things coming to you, too…

That’s not an order. Please feel free to keep your children at home, if you like! It’s more of a funny commentary on how U.S. work, and children’s role in it, has changed from the time of these pictures (1912) to now.

Today, only about 1% of the U.S. are farmers or ranchers. I happen to know someone whose family still works a farm, but I doubt most people do. Contrast that with 1916 where the U.S. Agricultural Department estimates that farmers made up 32% of the population.

At least 32% of the nation’s children didn’t need to be taken to work because they already lived there. They milked cows, collected eggs, weeded gardens and fed chickens and horses. (Now, for a price, you can send your kids to Farm Camps and Farm Stays to do that.)

Sadly, in 1913, it wasn’t just chores that filled children’s days. According to The Good Years by Sir Walter Lord, some 20% of children in the U.S. were earning their living at that time. The cotton mills employed thousands of children, and not just in the South.

One small step forward came in June, 1913, when the state of Massachusetts passed a bill to set an eight-hour day for anyone under the age of sixteen. That was the “highest standard yet reached by a cotton mill state”.

In Georgia, another mill state, children still worked twelve-hour days in the name of industrial progress. In fact, the federal law prohibiting “oppressive child labor” (FLSA) was not signed into law until 1938. It took thirty-four years for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to get a national child labor law.

If you happen to be someone who feels that social justice moves too slowly in the U.S., I think that piece of history might be cheering. Moral awakenings don’t happen overnight. It took photojournalism, support of leading politicians and clergymen, and state-by-state battles over a period of many years.

Today, the idea of a room of ten-year old children spinning cotton, in the U.S. or in any other country, is unconscionable. But that was the result of the Progressive Era…”a warmhearted crusade for a finer, cleaner life”.

Another way life got finer and cleaner shows up in the next picture. With the invention of the roller cone bit for well-digging, wells could be built deeper and with less damage to the property. That roller cone bit (nicknamed “rock eater”) made a good bit of money for Howard Hughes, Sr. who filed the patents in 1908.

Howard Hughes, Sr.? You got it – father of Howard Hughes, Jr., subject of the very long Leonardo DiCaprio movie you may have suffered through in 2005. If you get your water from a well, you can thank Mr. Hughes’s roller cone bit.

That’s about all the history I can swallow for today. I wish you a happy long weekend (if you get Monday off) and a ‘thank you’ to our veterans and the people who care for them.

Last week we took a detour to 1892. I’ll return you now to 1912 where Ferris and Clara have just spent the day with cousin Evelyn Sly.

Evelyn was Clara Williams’ eldest daughter. If you go back to the 1892 graduation picture, I think you’ll see there’s quite a resemblance.

In this photo, Evelyn is only 14 years old. By 1916 she’ll become a student at Elmira College, a private liberal arts college which was an all-girls college at the time. Next, she’ll graduate from New Paltz Normal School, just like her mother. (We will get to that picture!)

Then, Evelyn will go one step further. At some point between 1917-1922, she will receive her B.S. degree from Columbia University in “practical arts”. She will then work for four years teaching before becoming a Home Demonstration Agent in Essex County, New Jersey.

Home Demonstration Agent? What on earth was that?

I’m so glad you asked!

In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act created a “Cooperative Extension Service”. The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) used this service to spread information about agriculture and home economics to rural families. The hope was that better education of rural communities would lead to improved living conditions for them.

Home demonstration agents, people like Evelyn, were the local representatives of this program. (If you’re interested, the USDA has some historical pictures and literature about this program here.)

After that, Evelyn became Assistant Director of the Home Information Bureau of Springfield, Massachusetts. From 1926-1928, in Springfield, she helped organize the Eastern States Exposition which is still a thing. She worked on the exhibits related to “all phases of homemaking” and gave talks during the exposition.

After she married Lester Blake, she was appointed Home Demonstration Agent of Passaic County, New Jersey. Her office was located in the County Courthouse in Paterson, where she could be “reached by any women of the county wishing aid in household problems of any kind”. Eek.

I’ve snatched a newspaper article from the Herald-News, December 28, 1932, to show you that I’m not making this all up!

How’s that curriculum vitae for a woman in the 1920’s? Impressive, right? I did a little peeking ahead in my grandma’s album to ensure we’ll see her again. If we ever make it to 1925, there’s a nice photo of Evelyn and her husband to share with you.

A widow by age 53, Evelyn retired to Sun City, Florida at 70 years old. Both her sister Mary and Uncle Ferris ended up there so I like to think they shared afternoons together later in life! (Their obituaries both refer to their membership at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church so it’s probable).

Given that she dedicated much of her life to the concerns of women, it may not surprise you that she was also a member of the Sun City’s Women’s Club. Here’s to you, Evelyn. See you at your graduation…

One of the pictures that I’ll share today shows Ferris and Clara playing with their cousin, Mary Sly, and with the children of a friend of Aunt Kate’s, Mary Louise Hart. It got me thinking about why we take pictures. What do we consider camera-worthy?

I used to take pictures to document anything special or out-of-the-ordinary. If I went on a hike with a friend, I would take a picture. If I was travelling or dressed up to go somewhere, that’s when the camera would come out.

With children and cell phones, I’ve lost my grip a little on what’s worth documenting. Or maybe everyone else has…I can’t decide. What’s decidedly funny is that my phone currently holds as many black-and-white photos images from 1912 as it does recent shots of the kids.

So back to the pictures. We’ve seen both Grandma Sly and Mary Sly before, in a picture from three years back. The new faces are Doris and Marie Louise Hart, daughters of Marie Louise Hart (née Little) and Thomas Riego Hart.

A friend and contemporary of Aunt Kate’s, Mary Louise (Lou) was born on May 26, 1872 in Middletown, NY. Her father (Theron) was a lawyer and Special County Judge in Orange County. I found a nice bio about Lou from the announcement of her marriage:

Miss Marie Louise Little has long been recognized as one of Middletown’s brightest, most to be admired young women. She graduated from Wallkill Academy four years ago with honor, and read an essay at the commencement exercises which won her high praise from the critics present. She followed her educational course at Vassar.

Miss Little is a sweet-dispositioned young lady, with a grace and dignity which are remarked whenever she appears. Her presence was always desired by the young society people of this city, who found her in a vivacious, sparkling companion.

March 26, 1894

Within five years of her marriage to Thomas, the couple had three children:

• Thomas Riego Hart Jr.: born October 09, 1895
• Marie Louise Hart: born October 4, 1897
• Doris Hart – born June 28, 1899.

At the time this picture was taken, Thomas would have been 17 years old. He will later serve as a lieutenant in the Sixth Division in France during WWI. Upon his safe return, he will practice law and marry Miss Ruth Mowen. Together they’ll raise two children, Barbara Hart and Thomas M. Hart, in West Orange, New Jersey.

Marie Louise would have been 15 years old in the picture. She may not have felt much like entertaining preschoolers but there she is. She’ll eventually marry Frederick W. Landers of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, teach music, and raise John Quincy Landers and Frederick W. Landers jr., there.

Doris, 13 years old in the picture, will have a teaching career too. She’ll settle in Hewlett, Long Island and care for her mother in her old age. The admirable Lou Hart, in short, produced a line of equally bright descendants.

Oh! And I realized that we have actually seen Lou Hart before. She was at the party at Julia Lawrence’s house (the lively-looking one in the hat). I’m so pleased that I could identify a woman at that gathering, after all.

As for my doubts about whether I’m taking enough pictures of my children, I’ll say this: yes, I may “lose” some moments. Everything will be lost, though, if *someone* doesn’t start printing things out and labeling them.

If it wasn’t for my grandmother’s meticulous record-keeping I wouldn’t have any idea who spent the day with Ferris and Clara. Putting a name to a picture truly means attaching a life to it. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a couple of empty baby books I should attend to…

I felt stumped on how to write an interesting post about the Dunning family dog. Desperate, I reached out to my 8-year editor. “Why don’t you write about the history of dogs?” she suggested. “But isn’t that boring?” I grumbled. Then something extraordinary happened.

Stories about dogs began cropping up in my life in an uncanny way.

The first incident seemed like a mere coincidence. I’d been speed-reading the Odyssey to help *someone* with a Classics course. Cue Argos the dog. If you (like me) haven’t read the Odyssey since you were 13 years old, allow me to re-introduce you:

According to Odysseus’ servant, Eumaeus, Argos was a hunting dog par excellence. But with Odysseus away for 10 years, the dog fell on “evil times”. The women didn’t take care of him, and the servants, lazy with the master away, had left him “full of fleas” and “lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung”.

Yet as soon as he heard his old master’s voice, he “raised his head and pricked up his ears”. Odysseus had returned to Ithaca disguised as a beggar so couldn’t give himself away by embracing his dog. Yet even the warrior hero couldn’t fully hide his emotions:

“As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, he dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaeus seeing it…”

The Odyssey, Homer

I thought this was remarkable. First, that as far back as the 8th century B.C., some men had this close bond with their dogs. Second, that after dismissing my daughter’s suggestion to write about the history of dogs, my life literally led me to one of the earliest stories about dogs.

Then at church this Sunday, again!

 The New Testament lesson was the story of The Rich Man and Lazarus. Instead of Odysseus dressed as a beggar, Luke 16 tells the story of a real beggar named Lazarus. He lives in misery at the gate of a rich man who completely ignores him.

In verse 21, Lazarus is said to be “longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.” Per my internet searches some people think that the dogs are showing compassion (in contrast to the rich man). To me it sounds like adding insult to injury. 

He’s hungry, he’s got open sores and on top of that the street dogs are licking at him. Even Argos the dog, flea-bitten and laying on a pile of manure, had a better life. At least a tear was shed for his lousy fate.

Thankfully, things evolved by the time of Bruno the dog. By the twentieth century, in the U.S., dogs had become part of the family. The pictures suggest that Bruno loved the Dunnings and vice versa.

I couldn’t figure out why they named him Bruno. There was Bruno, Duke of Saxony, who died in 880. Also, Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), a German philosopher. Maybe they just liked the name Bruno. Surely they didn’t realize that Bruno is the #1 unluckiest pet name.

So my last coincidental dog text came from the mystery book I started reading this week. In the 3rd of the Jackson Brodie series by Kate Atkinson one of the characters helps heal her trauma with a dog:

“Love me, love my dog”, Dr. Hunter said, ‘A woman’s best friend.’ Timmy, Snowy, Jumble, Lassie, Greyfriars Bobby. Everyone’s best friend. Except for poor Laika, the spacedog, no one’s friend.

When Will There Be Good News, Kate Atkinson

I had to laugh. Even the mystery book I chose for pleasure reading ended up listing contemporary dog stars. Except for Lassie, the names were new to me. If you’re interested, here’s the chronological run-down:

Greyfriars Bobby: Skye Terrier from Edinburgh who spent 14 years guarding the grave of his owner until he died himself in 1872.

Jumble: Mutt dog from “Just William” stories about a young schoolboy William Brown. (1922)

Snowy: Wire Fox Terrier from The Adventures of Tintin (1929)

Lassie: Collie dog from a 1940 novel that was adapted to the 1943 movie, Lassie Come Home.

Timmy: Mutt from The Famous Five children’s adventure novels written by Enid Blyton (1942)

Laika: Stray mutt from Moscow. Launched into Outer Space on Sputnik 2 in 1957 where she died of overheating.

It may just be that once you start paying attention, dogs are everywhere. I pass two German Shepherds every day in the Times Square subway station. There’s a black labrador retriever in the lobby and street outside our office to sniff out trouble. (He will let you pat his head and say “good boy”!)

Having grown up with dogs myself, it makes me happy even just to see them. Did you have a beloved family dog growing up? What memories did you share together?

Some 1,000+ years ago, the Anglo-Saxons named September ‘Haefast Monath’ or Harvest Month. September was the time when the last of the produce was collected from the fields. Even back to the bible, that process of gathering up brought a sense of fullness and joy.

In Orange County, NY, September is still prime harvest month for onions. Corn, too, of course. Just this Monday I rolled a local cob around in some butter and chewed across it typewriter-style to great fullness and joy. 

The school bus has returned to our house on weekday mornings. If I’ve managed to hustle the girls out the front door in time, we have time for a quick run around the front yard. (Just enough for the dew wet their socks.) Then,“The bus! The bus!” and a mad dash through the path nearly covered by flopped-over black-eyed Susans.

Today, as most days, I held my smaller daughter on my hip and said “look!” pointing across the road. As the bus pulled away, she could spot the window from which “sissy” smiled and waved back. It occurred to me that September always feels like this kind of happy/sad goodbye.

Is now a good time to cue the Neil Diamond? “September moooorniiiiiiiing…”

I warn you against listening to that song again (like I did). I’ve got that part of the refrain replaying in my head and I can’t stop it. The sentiment of it clashes so greatly with the rushing of breakfast, teeth, hair, socks, shoes, etc. that it’s almost laughable.

At any rate, I was talking about goodbyes when – really – today’s post is about ‘hello and welcome’. Here is a picture of the McEwens and the McMillians visiting with Eleanor, Merritt and the children some time in 1911.

Who were the McEwens?

George W. McEwen was a farmer, born in 1859. In 1906 he worked at Sunny Side Stock Farm in Mechanicstown, a fact I know only because his name appeared in newspaper advertisements selling eggs from there.

That enterprise moved to Canton, PA and in later years I find various advertisements where he’s selling cows. The address listed as R.D. 2 in Middletown which, actually, may mean he worked at Dunning Farm. Here’s an example from 1919:

FOR SALE – Registered Holstein bull and heifer calf, from 2 to 4 months old; up-to-date breeding

His wife, Mary, sits beside Aunt Kate in this picture. She was born in 1862 and married George when she was 30.

Who were the McMillians?

John Henry McMillian, born in 1847, owned a real estate and insurance business on 25 North Street in downtown Middletown. If the numbering hasn’t changed, it’s currently either a dental clinic or a nail salon called “Fancy Nails”.

He lived with his wife, Margaret (Maggie) at 14 Wickham Avenue, in Middletown. The McMillians were friends of the Dunnings through 1st Presbyterian Church. In a March 1892 newspaper, I found a note that Mr. McMillain was re-elected as elder there.

Margaret is the first person I’ve looked up who was born in a foreign country. I dug around a little to find that she came to New York from Hesse Kassel, Germany with brother, Edward Alonzo, and parents, Israel and Catherine.

By 1870, that family settled in Warwick where Israel did very well as a farmer. When he was 40, Margaret’s younger brother Edward moved in with the McMillains where he would die of an “attack of pleurisy” at the age of 47, in 1895.

Cassie, the McMillians’ daughter, has her birthplace listed as Germany too. Also a first for me, she is listed on the census as “adopted daughter”. In this picture she’s 34 and continued to live with her parents into their old age. (They still live together on Wickham Avenue as of the 1930 census: John, 83, Margaret, 77 and Cassie, 53).

How about those hats?

Aren’t they wonderful? Ladies’ hats tended to be large in 1911. (Think about the hats from the movie Titanic, only one year later). Both women’s hat styles are considered Edwardian even though King Edward passed away a year earlier.

Merritt’s hat is known as a bowler hat. According to historyofhats.net “it was favored among cowboys and railroad workers, criminals and lawman alike, because it was close-fitting and stayed firmly on the head even when the strong wind blows…” Practical, probably like the wearer himself.

Possible conversation topics?

A few months before this picture was taken, on June 22nd, 1911 King George V’s coronation took place in England. You may think that would be a distant event. In fact, when King Edward died in May they played “God Save the King” in Broadway shows and the NYSE was closed the next day (This from The Good Years by Walter Lord).

Crisco shortening came out in August 15, 1911 so maybe the ladies would have offered an opinion on using that for apple pies? The men might have talked sports. The Yankees set a record on September 20th for recording 12 errors in a double header. (Um, whatever that means).

On September 17, the first transcontinental airplane flight took place from New York to Pasadena. It took over 82 hours. Could they have imagined that someday it would only take 6 hours? After scanning our bodies and suitcases?

So that’s what I’ve managed to ‘harvest’ from that picture! As always I feel like Time, that worm, ate through the kernels ahead of me. At least I get the sense that the Dunning home was a welcoming place…always a spare chair out on the porch.

“September moooorniiiiiiiing”. Stop it, Neil. That’s enough.

Do you know that song? If you’re like me, you can sing two lines of one verse of it:

‘Mid pleasures and palaces
Though I may roam
Be it ever so humble
There’s no place like home

The song was published in 1823 and became a favorite of homesick Civil War soldiers on both sides. The tune is also played at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939) as Dorothy repeats that line “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” It’s a sentiment that any of us who grew up in a happy household can understand.

Around the time of the song’s release, Catherine Arnout and Henry Dunning (my great-great-great grandfather) set up their home (a homestead, really) near Mechanicstown, NY. They raised five boys there:

Charles Seely (born 1828)
Henry White (born 1830)
Horace (born 1833)
William Arnot (born 1839)
Edward Payson (born 1836)

Each of the brothers appear to be named after someone important at the time. Charles Seely was a well-known British politician and industrialist. Henry White was one of the founders of Union Theological Seminary (UTS) and a professor of Systematic Theology there. William Arnot was a Scottish minister and theological writer, and Edward Payson was a Congregational preacher.

Horace, my great-great grandfather? Was he named after the Roman poet? Or more likely for Horace Mann, educational reformer? Like so many other things, it’s anyone’s guess now.

What must have made Henry extremely proud (if the naming of his sons is any indication of his religious zeal) was that no less than two of them became important preachers in their own right. What’s more, his first-born, the Reverend Charles Seely Dunning, ended up marrying the daughter of Reverend Henry White (Maria Haines White) for whom his second-born was named.

I know that sounds a little crazy! I have to assume that Henry Dunning and Henry White had some sort of mutual acquaintances. Or could the world really have been so small?

Sons Henry W. and Horace grew up to be farmers. Horace inherited the homestead and Henry W. lived on an adjoining farm. Horace and wife Clarissa then raised their five children there. (My grandmother would later raise her five children there, too).

By 1911, when this photo was taken, Horace’s wife Clarissa had passed away, and two of the children had left the house. Horace Henry (1865) married Addie Gale and started up at his own farm nearby. Smith G. (1867) had settled in Ohio and started a family of his own. This, after having attended Princeton, followed by McCormick Seminary in Chicago, followed by missionary work in Africa.

In the 1910 census, only Henry Dunning (then in his 70s), and unmarried daughters Louise (47) and Kate (40) lived there. It would seem to me that the census took place just before Merritt moved there with Eleanor and took over the farm. In 1914 they will rebuild it and…you guessed it…there are renovation pictures coming.

Phew! That’s a lot of genealogy for a few paragraphs.

You may be relieved to know that besides Aunt Kate (seated on the left in the photograph) I can’t positively identify any of the other women she invited to the house. One’s last name is Jordan and another’s last name is Burrows. It was a beautiful day for a get-together.

The narrator in my book questions whether today’s generation can even understand what ‘home’ felt like for someone of our grandparents or great-grandparents’ generation:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it…but it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Most people don’t live for generations in the same house anymore. Most people, of course, don’t have a farm to hand over. But it’s rare now to even live your entire childhood in the same place. A friend from college argued that every child should move at least once in their life: she thought the experience of change and dislocation was a good sort of ‘growing pain’.

I’m not big on pain. I feel lucky to have lived in one house my entire childhood. Even now – children in tow – there’s a “no place like home” sort of feeling when I walk in and see the bookshelf here, the sofa there. So much of our lives is virtual and changeable these days: it makes the touch and smell of an old bedroom that much more comforting.

I agree with my book’s narrator: my generation and my children’s generation may never go home again in the same way. Yet it’s also true that you can’t move forward without letting something go. Maybe we just need to learn how to live deeper wherever we find ourselves?

Writing about my grandmother’s photo album on the internet is a sort of attempt on my part. What about you?

Here come the last days of August! Before anyone feels entirely ready, a smattering of dead leaves starts to collect on the sidewalk. We look out the window at 7PM or 7:30 PM and think, “It’s darker. It’s getting darker already.”

Since starting this blog about my grandmother’s family I’ve meditated more than usual about how time passes. This is the season though – that transition between Summer and Fall – that everyone feels it. “Where does the time go?”

Strangely enough, that feeling was expressed on the very first page of a book I began reading last week. The narrator records himself saying his location and date into a tape recorder. He reflects that even has he does this, his action has become part of the past.

“I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was.”

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

A little daunting isn’t it? At every moment, we’re writing our personal histories.

Before I started college, I met with a cousin of mine who recommended that I keep a journal during my time there. “You’ll have so many big thoughts”, he told me, “and if you don’t write them down, they’ll be lost.” 

For years I filled up journals with my ideas. I never read the old ones – I just kept writing. Eventually we bought a house and relegated them to a big cardboard box in the basement. Some time after my first daughter was born and I felt time slowing down a little, I decided to excavate.

I wanted to read my old journals. I couldn’t wait to see what my younger, more ‘alive’ self had to say about the world!

Well.

Talk about depressing. Far from “big thoughts” I had written about studying, parties, boys and calories; I sounded insecure, anxious and stupid. So stupid! I sat there with the journals strewn about me, dumbstruck.

I thought I had recorded something meaningful. Instead it was a ten year history of egotism: reality-TV-level navel-gazing. My 30-year old self was not impressed by my 18-year old self. But was that really fair of Older Self?

Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that that flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was…I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones…plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.”

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Whereas talk of ‘nothing staying the same’ and ‘constant movement’ exhausts me (sorry Heraclitus), this idea of adding on, of continual building really appeals to me. If I am cumulative, then it’s natural that something I wrote as a teenager wouldn’t sound very wise.

No need for shame.

What’s more, if we are cumulative, then it makes sense that we’re drawn to exploring our grandparents’ history. The effort of trying to identify who these people were and how they interacted with the world need not be a pointless exercise.

Al contrario. Au contraire. (However your relatives might have expressed it!)

It can be a way of connecting yourself to a world that feels increasingly virtual. I may feel like I’m drifting without purpose. Yet generations of people worked with a furious purpose to put me here. Why not use our roots to feel grounded? Isn’t that what roots are for?

(Speaking of roots, is that a wysteria wrapping itself around the house’s entrance? Just curious.)

How’s that for a picket fence? What do you think the white thing is there beside the ladies? Do you keep a journal – is it worth starting again? 🙂

Fall, 1910: Schinook the family horse has been hitched up to escort Eleanor, Clara and baby Ferris to town for a Saturday afternoon’s shopping. Clip-clop, clip-clop. There they go, leaving three tracks in the grass…the middle one made by the horse’s hooves, of course!

In 1910 cars were just starting to outnumber horse and buggies. Ford produced the famous Model-T in 1908 but he wouldn’t set up his factory in Highland Park, Michigan until 1913. Cars were no longer just a rich man’s toy as in 1900, but neither had they yet taken over as in the next 5-10 years.

Horses were still doing lots of jobs in 1910: they delivered groceries, they served as taxis, they pulled steam and pumpers to fires and harvesters over the farms. New York City had plenty of stables and carriage houses for horses. Rows of these stables, called mews, have now converted into expensive pieces of real estate.

There were certainly downsides to this mode of transportation, however, quite aside from the welfare of the animal itself. Allow me to fill you in!

5 Horse and Buggy Drawbacks

1. Dead Horses: While the well-to-do took care of their animals, many city horses were overworked to the point that they dropped dead in the street. The cost and difficulty of removing a 1,000+ pound beast meant that their carcasses were often left to rot, attracting flies and breeding disease.
   
2. Manure: The average horse produced 15-30 pounds of manure per day. PER DAY. In a city like New York with 100,000 horses, the Sanitation Department could not keep up with these…deposits. Again, flies, disease, stink and great expense for the manure removal.
   
3. Runaway Horses: Though, certainly, horses went much slower than automobiles (10-15 miles per hour) they could get spooked and cause accidents, too. I reviewed articles from the Middletown Times Press from 1906, searching by the keyword “runaway”. From just April 18-25, I came up with three separate incidents:
   
   • April 18: Barber Shops Peril: Runaway Horse Tries to Enter Through a Window (You can’t make this stuff up.)
     
     April 24: Killed by a Runaway (58 year old man dies of injuries sustained in a runaway on Thursday, on the Cocheton turnpike).
     
     April 25: Lively Runaway: A horse ran away on West Main Street…the wagon was smashed .
4. Crossing the Street: Electric traffic lights had not yet been invented. Policemen helped direct traffic, around 1910, with the help of sempahores. (A semaphore was a tower with moving arms to signal “go” and stop”).
   
   Prior to that, in an “age of numerous vehicles which constantly imperil innocent childhood”, according to the Buffalo Enquirer from September 1897, “the following from an English magazine seems very pertinent, and worth teaching to the nursery folk:
   

Look up the street, look down the street,
Before you leave the gate;
If horses’ feet the cobbles beat,
Stand very still and wait.

Look up the street, look down the street,
If nothing there you see; 
With footsteps fleet, my toddler sweet,
Cross over carefully.”

And last but not least…#5:

Isolated communities: At this time in history, when telephones were still scarce and there were no radio or televisions, communities were far-removed from one another. Each community had to depend on its own food, entertainment and civil society.

Depending who you were and where you found yourself, that could certainly be seen as a drawback. Notes Frederick Lewis Allen in The Big Change, “a trip to see friends ten miles away was likely to be an all-day expedition, for the horse had to be given a chance to rest and be fed.”

You’d have less friends. You’d also, necessarily, have a smaller view of the world at large. Things were already starting to change though.

The World’s Fair was held in St. Louis in 1904. Among its displays were an Alaskan tribe, a Japanese pavilion and a Congolese Pygmy. The success of the fair (an estimated 20 million visitors…”Meet Me in Saint Louis“, anyone?) attested to the fact that people had an interest in different communities and cultures.

Then in 1907, Theodore Roosevelt decided to send sixteen battleships and 14,000 men on a voyage around the world. In addition to showing off our Navy, the Great White Fleet improved international relations, making 20 stops across six continents. Again, the public enthusiasm for that trip seems to indicate that people in the U.S. were increasingly curious about the world beyond our borders.

In short, there’s a reason that people use the phrase “horse and buggy” to refer to things that are out-of date. It’s a mode of transportation that was too limiting for the country we were quickly becoming.

Since Eleanor couldn’t take a picture of the kids pretending to drive the car, here they are pretending to steer the horse. I might call that questionable parenting. Then again, I may be helping my grandchildren on to a driverless school bus some day so no judgement here!

At some point, as children, my sister and I received music boxes in which to store our personal treasures. My sister’s had Noah’s Ark on top of it and played “Talk to the Animals”. I don’t recall what mine looked like but it played “In the Good Old Summertime”, a song first published in 1902.

There’s a time each year
That we always hold dear
Good old summertime

I spent an inordinate amount of time winding up that box to listen to the music going crazily fast, then slower and slower before finally giving its last little ‘ting’. Only to wind it again. I’d watch the ballerina pirouette round and round, transfixed by who knows what.

With the birds and the trees’es
And sweet scented breezes
Good old summertime

Summer is just the season for this sort of ‘zoning out’. There’s more time in the day to make room for leisure: a swim, a walk, lawn games. The good weather gives us an excuse to lay our domestic chores aside for the moment and enjoy being outside.

Of course, as an adult it’s a fight to clear your head, even in summer. Does the car need a new transmission? Should we be putting parental controls on the ipad? Oh great, the freshwater animals are dying off.

In July 1910, when these pictures were taken, summer disorder resulted from the “fight of the century” between Jack Johnson (a black man) and Jim Jeffries (a white man). That a black man could even fight against a white man in a prize fight was an extraordinary thing in those days.

This fight only occurred because Johnson had beaten (white) Tommy Burns in Australia in 1908 to become Heavyweight Champion. Jeffries was therefore picked out as the “great white hope”: a white boxer who could win the title back to ‘redeem the race’. (Let’s pause and give thanks that the phrase “redeem the race” sounds so out-of-touch to today’s ear).

No trouble annoying
Each one is enjoying
The good old summertime

There happens to be a Ken Burns documentary on this event called “Unforgivable Blackness”, which I highly recommend. The website provides background into it and how Johnson’s flamboyant personality and marriages to white women increased the stakes of the fight.

“Johnson did not seem to care what whites thought of him, and this bothered most whites a great deal. He was not humble or diffident with whites.” You can imagine the historical significance, then, on July 4th, 1910, when 20,000 people gathered in Reno to watch Johnson fight Jeffries.

You might also imagine what happened when Johnson dominated and knocked his opponent out in the 15th round. Race riots erupted all over the country, resulting in a number of black deaths. The film of the fight was soon banned in some cities for fear that the images would incite more violence.

My relatives undoubtedly knew of these events. (Riots even broke out in New York City). My best guess is that, as regular church goers, they followed the church’s beliefs that two men bashing each other for money was an immoral and un-Christian act.

In fact, the churches didn’t want the Johnson-Jeffries fight to happen at all. I found this account in the New York Times from July 4 which gave me a little laugh. “There was scarcely a church in the state to-day that didn’t send its plea up that some thing will happen to prevent its so-called blot on the fair name of Nevada.”

The fact is that as troubling as most of the ‘big news’ events are, they rarely touch our lives directly. Eleanor would surely not recall the summer of 1910 as the summer that Johnson knocked out Jeffries. She might instead remember it as the summer that Ferris took his first steps.

Likewise, I won’t remember this as the summer of shooting sprees. This was the summer I had zinnias in my planters and my daughter had the lobster bathing suit. The difficulties of the country bite at my ankles like annoying flies that I’m fortunate enough to swat away as needed.

In summer, especially, we all need that. I’m aware and saddened, though, that then as now, many people don’t have that luxury.

I’ll end with a very idyllic picture of Eleanor and Ferris enjoying each other’s company. Don’t you love how there’s a little piece of hair that’s come out of her bun? That imperfection makes this photo even more beautiful to me.

Strolling thro’ the shady lanes
With your baby mine;
You hold her hand and she holds yours.
And that’s a very good sign.
That she’s your tootsie wootsie
In the good old summertime.