Category: 1913

Today is Ash Wednesday for people of Christian faith – a day when we’re asked to think about our mortality and the need to reconcile with God. Big stuff, in other words. Big, upsetting stuff for anyone who generally pushes those kinds of thoughts away.

I did a fine job of ignoring the question of mortality (probably every day except Ash Wednesday) until I started writing this blog. But there’s no getting around it now. If I’m not posting pictures of the deceased, I’m searching through old newspapers to get their bio from an obituary…death has become part of my every day life.

And with that, I’ve necessarily begun to think deeper about what makes a good life. What makes a life that’s worthy? At the end, will any of us be able to say, “right, so it’s all reconciled then.”

In fact, I fretted about this point back in graduate school when I was knee-deep in my thesis and full of doubts. I remember being out to dinner at a cozy restaurant in Buenos Aires with a group of international kids from the program (all in our 20’s at the time).

I can’t even remember how we got into it but I recall talking about the privilege of our experience there and the – maybe – misplaced idealism that our study of public policy would actually make anything better. I remember looking out across the candles on the table and asking, sort of desperately, “do you think I’ll be forgiven?”

And how Constantine – the German boy across from me smiled with sympathy and said, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things…”I’m kidding. I don’t remember what he said, just that whatever he said – and the way he smiled at me – relieved my guilt tremendously and made me feel that I would be alright.

Constantine – a very tall guy, incredibly warm and easy-going…I found out that he passed away a year or so, ago, of cancer. ‘We are dust and to dust we shall return’. When I heard the news my mind went right back to that short scene from the restaurant – to the look on his face and the certainty he had. It still brings me peace.

Today’s photo from the album is of Merritt (my grandmother’s father) with Burr Copley. As per a newspaper from July, 1915 “Burr C. Copley, a graduate of the Cornell class of Agriculture of 1913…whose home is at Unadilla, has been teaching at Monticello the past year”.

I suspect they became friends for a short time, either through agriculture or the church or maybe both. Burr would have been 24 in 1913. After a time, he settled in Canton, Mass. with wife Marion. They had Helen May, Burr Copley Jr., James Wesley and John R. Tragically, Burr Jr. died at football practice in October 1937, only a senior in High School. Burr Sr. lived to 87 years old and knew multiple grandchildren and great-grandchildren…no doubt there are great-great-grandchildren by now.

So now I am very excited to share a poem with you that I managed to snap right off a subway train in 2018. (It was placed there by Poetry in Motion, an arts program launched by the MTA together with the Poetry Society of America). I can tell you it was with great self-consciousness that I took this picture, right before the doors closed on me, heading to work.

I can’t think of a better poem for the NYC subway where plenty of captains (or at least majors and colonels) of industry ride around thinking themselves uniquely invincible. I also can’t think of a more appropriate poem for the first day of Lent. Enjoy and a hug to you all.

Happy Valentine’s Day! I never really liked this holiday, to be honest. Love is such a deeply personal thing to me and Valentine’s Day seems so brash. BE MINE. KISS ME. I choose YOU. I always fell into the camp of those who wanted to rebel against the saccharine nature of it.

The holiday comes across much nicer, I think, in this phrase from an old newspaper:

February 14 is Valentine’s Day – a day in which love missives are exchanged between friends and between loved ones. The custom is founded and sustained by a sentiment which is as natural as it is beautiful.

The Brooklyn Citizen, 1913, Feb 09

Love. It’s way too big and complicated a topic for this post so I’ll politely remove love of God, love of neighbor, and romantic love from the discussion. In fact, I’d like to restrict today’s topic to “love of home”, in connection with the photo of the house where my grandmother and father grew up.

Not everyone experiences a “love of home” thinking about the place from which they came. Plenty of people had horrific upbringings or moved too much to feel that there was one established place to call home. Others see it as real estate, pure and simple.

I have the tendency to personify things so loving what is essentially bricks and mortar still makes complete sense to me. Whenever I read Howards End I feel a real sympathy for Mrs. Wilcox who loved her country house (and all its surroundings) so dearly. In the following passage, the narrator explains how Mrs. Wilcox wanted to bequeath the things she loved to someone who would appreciate them:

To them Howards End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir…Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it—can passion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood?

E.M. Forster, Howards End

In fact, Mrs. Wilcox’s feelings for her estate turned out to originate from E.M. Forster’s deep love for the house in which he grew up, called Rooksnest. “I took it to my heart and hoped…that I would live and die there”, he wrote. Like the character he created in Mrs. Wilcox, Forster understood how a lifetime of gathered sentiment could give life to a house:

Much more than just a house, for Forster, Rooksnest came to represent English country values—a connection to place, a respect for individuality, and a commitment to the contemplative life—that were increasingly threatened by the urbanization and industrialization sweeping Edwardian England.

Penguin Reading Guide for Howards End

Not having lived in my grandmother’s house, I can’t say I have too much of an attachment. Yet when I look at the photograph there’s a twinge of wistfulness. The farm in Howard’s End stood as a symbol of “the economic and social foundation of England, the centre of moral and social stability, of habit and custom”.

The same could be said of farm homes like my grandmother’s, in the U.S. It’s not that life was easier or better then (certainly not for most people) but that it had weight to it missing from the Age of Information. Work, leisure, family and friends weren’t spread over the physical and digital universe but within miles of that one plot of land:

In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect – connect without bitterness until all men are brothers

E.M. Forster, Howards End

Connect – connect without bitterness. For me that means coming to terms with the fact that – yes – something has been lost. When my parents recently sold the house that I grew up in, my family lost the sights, sounds and smells that had been familiar to us for decades. But in that loss, we’re connected with everyone else because it’s such a universal experience.

No one says this better than Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “One Art”.

So that’s my act of rebellion for this Valentine’s Day. Instead of selfishness (BE MINE, KISS ME) I’m going to think about losing. If I know that everything I love will necessarily be lost, I can focus harder on the act of loving – and connecting – in the present. So sayeth Buddha.

Now here is a love poem for you lovely readers. I had written a version of this ages ago and just realized, digging around frantically, that it must have gotten lost somewhere. Here’s to hoping that *sometimes* what comes after may be an improvement upon what was lost!

 Ode to my Blankie
  
 They say I am too old for you
 That childish things be put away
 But to your yellow threads I cling
 Upon you, my head wants to lay
  
 Your days of tug-of-war are through
 But threadbare cloth does still endear
 I’ll wear you as a veil no more
 But ‘til death promise you my ear
  
 O holey, holey thou art holey
 You whom time cannot replace
 When I sleep it’s you who solely
 leave your mark upon my face 

- Martha Gonzalez

When’s the last time you read a lead paragraph in a newspaper that left you feeling good? Still thinking?  Allow me to share one from 117 years and 5 days ago:

“The new Grand Central Terminal was thrown wide to the public at midnight last night. Out of the excavation and the scaffolding, to the accompaniment of whistles and blasting and the chorus of the riveting machine, the new station has risen amid the wreckage of the old.”

New York Times, 02/02/1913

After ten years of excavation and construction, a ‘grand’ announcement was certainly in order. This past week, I researched the event and came up with 4 things that I learned about it. I hope you find it as interesting as I did!

1. The rebuild of Grand Central started with a plan to switch from steam locomotives to electric trains.

A train crash on January 8, 1902 killed fifteen people and injured 38. The public clamored for improvements to the system. Within a week, the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad announced plans to improve and expand Grand Central. Part of the plan – defined by year’s end – was to create a new double level for electric trains.

“All this terminal city, this assemblage of buildings of such varied purposes, was made possible by the installation of the electric motor. The scheme could not have been carried out – it could not even have been conceived – in the day of the dirt and smoke and noise of the old steam locomotive”

New York Times, 02/02/1913

2. Before 1913, the trains ran aboveground. A major part of the rebuild consisted of excavation of rock and earth (90 feet worth) in order to lower the tracks below ground.

“The old Grand Central was considered the marvel of its day, but when it became outgrown and the directors of the New York Central and the New York, New Haven and Hartford began to consider the ways and means for building its successor they undertook a task larger than the task of replacing the old station by a newer and larger one…

…this was made possible by the realization that the railroad could put its “air rights” to some good purpose. For decades it had owned the land where the tracks thrust their way down to the very heart of the island and there spread out to form the huge gaping, dirty, unsightly train-yards that helped so largely make the idea of smoke and noise inseparable from the nineteenth century conception of a big railway station.”

New York Times, 02/02/1913

3. Once the tracks were below ground, William J. Wilgus (chief engineer) realized that the area above could become valuable real estate.

“With the coming of the electric motor the old steam locomotive was banished, and from that banishment the builders of the new terminal developed the idea of roofing over the tracks and the trains and building above them as though the road had suddenly come into possession of scores of vacant lots.”

“Park Avenue from Forty-fifth Street to Fifty-sixth and the cross streets that formerly stopped abruptly at either side of the yawning train yards are now appearing as streets, some of them already in use.”

New York Times, 02/02/1913

4. They had to rebuild Grand Central while keeping the trains running.

“One of the things that will always be remembered about the new Grand Central is that it was built amid the wreckage of the old. The never-ending business of the terminal had to go on uninterrupted…The earth and stone dug and blasted there in the train yard had to be carted away in dirt cars, which added a long string to the already heavy and complicated traffic of the terminal.”

New York Times, 02/09/1913

If you’re interested in knowing more, the New York Times published a great article with lots of old pictures for the 100-year mark.

Good or bad, I couldn’t keep from ‘reconstructing’ this historical rebuild as a metaphor for life changes. This idea of excavating and carting away the refuse while still making sure that the trains come in and out on time just seems so similar to personal growth in a busy adult life. 

Edit your resume and look for other possibilities but don’t neglect your current job! Be more patient and flexible with your kids but uh-oh! the slime has died their hands blue and who’s going to vacuum up the couscous? One builds and one excavates with the trains running in and out because that’s life.

No ribbon-cutting ceremony, no, but hopefully when it’s done you can feel that your life added that much more onto that of your ancestors, “built amid the wreckage of the old”.

When you keep trying your hardest and feel that things are being wrecked all around you, I think it helps to keep a picture of transcendence in your pocket. The phoenix rising from the ashes. The Resurrection. Or a poem! The ‘rising’ of Grand Central led me back this week to Maya Angelou’s amazing poem” Still I Rise” which you can find it here.

Big old family hugs to you all!

Happy last day of January 2020! We’ve made it through the coldest month of the year. The darkest of mornings. We had the fortitude to take down the pretty holiday lights and can now finally enjoy some extra natural light. 

(It’s there, I promise – the clouds just keep getting in the way). When we see a sunset, we will see it later and later. I know this, of course, because I check it daily on the New York sunrise/sunset calendar.

It’s true that some people do not dislike the winter. I remember when my sister took her children skiing once and came back to breathlessly extol its virtues. “There were families,” she told me, “they were smiling and enjoying themselves!”

It was like a revelation: fortunate people don’t spend the winter climbing the walls. They take chair lifts! So…if you have a spare $500 I highly suggest a day of skiing with your family of 4. Otherwise, you can do like I do and take a nice, brisk walk. 

In fact, I found a January 1913 newspaper article supporting that notion: 

“Sometimes a woman will feel all out of sorts, heavy, miserable and blue. Her first thought is of food; she believes she needs a good cup of tea and something to eat. But she does not. What she needs is fresh air, a brisk walk, and upon returning home a light lunch…”

Madame Armand, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 24, 1913

So dictatorial and yet so sensible! I love that tone of the old newspapers. Today’s pictures feature Ferris and Clara enjoying some outdoor time. Based on their clothes they are either on their way to or coming back from church.

• 

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They are clearly having fun trying to scale the fence and then the tree. It immediately struck me that my husband and I would never allow our own girls to do that in their Sunday best. Or maybe…at all…because ‘fences aren’t meant to be climbed on’.

Even as I say it and know it as my voice I realize how needlessly overprotective it sounds. Funny how we imagine our grandparent’s generation to be the conservative one and yet, in many respects, they gave their children more freedom to explore. 

Then again, Ferris got kicked in the head by a cow and lived with a dent in his head. Hard to get it right with parenting!

In the last few weeks at school, my daughter has been making crafts for Chinese New Year. (They introduced a Mandarin language program there which has been amazing). She just brought home a puppet dragon that she made using a paper bag. 

This morning she put it on her hand and waved it around. The dragon said, “Hello, my name is Ava. I like rainbow color. Goodbye” and I only know this because my daughter translated it from Mandarin for my benefit. It makes me so proud that – at 8 years old – she has already moved somewhere beyond my scope of knowledge. 

In 1913, very few New Yorkers had probably heard of Chinese New Year’s or knew whether it was the Year of the Rat or the Year of the Monkey (or that such a thing even existed). To my happy surprise, though, it turns out that my grandmother was born in the Year of the Rat…the same cycle we are entering as of January 25, 2020.

Born on January 1, 1913, my gram just fits into that 1912 cycle. Women born in the year of the rat are said to be organized and to place great value on the family. (She did!) They are also known for producing large numbers of offspring (5!) I also found the adjectives “adaptable”, “observant” and “stubborn”.

You might think “adaptable” and “stubborn” clash with each other and yet grammie managed to be both, I think. You don’t have five children without learning to adapt. You don’t live into your 90’s without learning to adapt. But this is the way I make my cranberry sauce, darn it.

Did grammie do a daily walk? Or did she have a daily swim? I must be getting old because I can’t remember. All I remember is that she never missed her daily exercise and that I’m sure she’d agree with the last bit I clipped from another January 1913 newspaper:

Fresh air and sunshine! Nature’s two great prophylactics – to be had without money and without price – to be had for the taking – and like most things so easily obtainable, too little prized…

Minerva B.T. Angell, Domestic Science Expert, MIT, January 26, 1913 edition of The Buffalo Sunday Morning News

A big hug and a winter smile to you all!

Don’t throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day

“Everything Old is New Again”, co-written by Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager

Happy 2020! Have you already had to cross out the “19” and correct it to “20” when writing the date? (I have caught myself doing this a few times already). Curiously enough, just as we move into a new year ‘for real’, I find that I’ve displayed all my album pictures from 1912 and can move into a new year in the album: 1913.

New Year’s Day 1913 was especially important because my paternal grandmother, Marjorie E. Dunning, was born. 1/1/13. I haven’t confirmed it but I’m pretty sure her middle initial stands for Eleanor, her mother’s name.

Besides being the coldest of the month in the Northern Hemisphere, January always comes with a special sort of malaise. You’ve spent too much on the holidays and now find you need to replace the furnace (anyone?) You’ve had a mediocre year-end review and are yet enhanced to further enhance the value proposition in 2020 (show of hands?)

When I think of January, I can’t help thinking of the vulgar refrain “same sh__, different day” except it’s “same sh__, different year.” And yet. There are those among us who embrace this month with the opposite attitude. Calmness, cheer, pleasure, well-being…resolutions are made and gyms fill up.

I wonder if the fact that my grandmother was born in January changed the conception of that month forever in her mind, and in Eleanor’s. Maybe it felt natural for them to view January as a hopeful beginning. Thinking about the new year and these baby pictures of my grandmother, the phrase that came to me was “everything old is new again.”

Everything old is new again. One interpretation could be the marketing one, where styles are rehashed after a period (high-waisted jeans, for example?) In fact, the cover of the Pottery Barn magazine this month features a ‘Round Milk Glass’ chandelier which I immediately recognized as similar to the gasolier from my earlier post.

“Inspired by a European antique, the Callahan Collection has a sleek sensibility and statement-making style that echoes the original.“

The other way to think of the phrase is to look at the same thing but with a change of perspective. Everything old is new again. I knew my grandmother as an old woman but here she is as a baby. The photo is from 1913 but it’s new to the mind of every single person who sees it.

The trick of January, I think, is figuring out how to look at the same things in a new way so that the impression you’re left with is one of possibility and opportunity rather than the “same sh__”. Or as an actress I read about in the NYT yesterday put so nicely, “…to look at the future not as a daunting bleak abyss of hell, but an exciting adventure”.

One new perspective I get seeing these pictures of my infant grandmother – baby Marjorie – is that maybe the utilitarian part of her was there even before she became aware of her surroundings. She’s bundled up and stuck in what looks like a wooden box because…I suppose…it was a practical way to keep her upright.

Then again, she was born a Capricorn and I can confirm that she exhibited a number of Capricorn-like traits. Clear-eyed, down-to-earth, a hard worker, practical, disciplined, stoic. She loved gardening and reading (both things that Capricorns are prone to doing). I know astrology isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I always find it fascinating.

The other gigantic happening on my grandmother’s birthday was the beginning of the Parcel Post (of the U.S. Postal Service). On January 1, 1913, food, dry goods, drugs and other commodities began to be delivered. This was an especially big development for the country’s rural residents (54% of the U.S. population in 1910).

To think that today I get itchy trying to wait two whole days for my new furnace’s filters to be delivered.

I look forward to sharing more 1913 pictures with you this year and hope you are starting 2020 on a positive note!