Another holiday postcard from my grandmother's album--an Easter bell with alder catkins and lilies-of-the-valley, postmarked "Prescott, IOWA, MAR 28 ?PM, 1908." It reads:
Dear Florence, How are you getting along? I made garden last week, that is, I planted some lettuce and radishes and raked the yard Saturday. Can't you come down for Easter? We are going to color some eggs Saturday evening after the children go to bed. Good bye. Susie
"To Greet You On St. Patrick's Day." There's no message or signature on the flip side, just the address: "Miss Florance [sic] Williamson, Prescott, Iowa, RR3" in black ink and the postmark "Des Moines 1912."
A year ago, I unboxed my grandmother's doll, cleaned her up, and determined to make a period dress for her. She's still sitting on a bookshelf, in her underwear, like many of us who work from home. The rules I found on period costume for antique dolls seemed to kill the fun of making doll clothes. This fabric was inappropriate, that trim was a synthetic fiber, any style ideas I had were not authentic. It was as if I had invited a really pedantic Civil War reenactor to live in my head.
My own dolly (from Christmas, 1962) was also inadequately attired. This year, when I dragged out the Christmas decorations, I was inspired to dress her up. She's a "Tiny Tears" doll, one of the types that you could "feed" water with a scale model baby bottle, and then you'd have to change her diaper. She has "tear ducts" that would also leak water. The little pink and white dress she came in has long since vanished, but it occured to me that the pastel baby yarn I had recently used for socks would be adequate to knit a dolly layette. I looked at a vintage knitting book from my mom's 1950's collection, and just made up a pattern for the "soaker" and the knit lace jacket. It entertained me greatly for a couple of evenings, and I feel confident it's "authentic" in style and materials.
Art of the Rural has a complete and interesting recap of the Stephen Bloom kerfuffle in "The Atlantic." I wasn't really curious about it until I read Matthew Fluharty's blog post. He includes a link to this interview with Bloom, in which Bloom characterizes his article as "satire" and "parody."
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
I read the article, and couldn't identify what, specifically, Bloom was parodying or satirizing. What I read was, mostly, an unsympathetic description of rural poverty. Why he (and The Atlantic) thought that another disdainful description of white people at economic and cultural disadvantage would be useful and informative is puzzling. There's been so much of it, ranging from the nineteenth century Hatfield--McCoy feud's national newspaper coverage to Bill O'Reilly ranting that drunken Appalachians should move to Miami and "get a job".
The Iowa article was so mean-spirited and so much in the mood of "white-trash" bashing that it reminded me of the appalling Gene Marks article, If I Were a Poor Black Kid, on the Forbes website. (Originally published as "If I WAS a Poor Black Kid"--I guess Mr. Marks is not quite as well-educated as he thought.)
"If I Were a Poor Black Kid" unleashed a flood of angry and funny responses, including Poorblackkid.com. Similarly, Bloom's Web article is now accompanied by a variety of responses, and helped inspire this much-viewed video:
Because of the vehement response to the Forbes article, several people have suggested that it is actually an Internet troll tactic, and that the outrage has raised Gene Marks' profile and readership. Perhaps that explains why The Atlantic published Bloom's grouchy and tired critique of his adopted home. Willie Geist's NBC interview above notes that Bloom is "in hiding" because he has received harassing phone calls. I certainly hope no harm comes to his family because of his flame-bait. That kind of behavior only reinforces Bloom's clue-less disdain.
A mouse built a summer nest in my box of Christmas ornaments and stuffed the stable full of chew-able ornament pieces. Once I picked the bits of paper from behind the Holy Family and glued the middle King back in place, things were nearly good as new--provided you overlook how I broke two little lambs off and glued them back before Mom got home when I was eight.
Cold, wind, and snow make this another good day for indoor activities (such as packing up Christmas decorations), and Princess seems to agree. Certainly there will be no mice in the manger in this setting.
Another holiday postcard from Grandma's album--this one was never addressed or mailed. It says "Erin Go Bragh--Upper Lake Kilarney." Happy St. Patrick's Day!
I confess I never quite outgrew my girlish fascination with doll clothes, doll houses, and miniatures. I quit making doll clothes because I needed clothes more than dollies did, and there were so many other things to do. However, browsing the Internet shows me that there are a lot of grown-up ladies (and gentlemen) who never put aside their interest in miniatures, scale models, dolls, and doll clothes.
Although I feel I could easily be sucked into the world of dressing vintage dolls or even creating fanciful cloth dolls, I'm going to confine myself to making clothes for this one doll. To that end, I've put together a collection of links that I found helpful, informative, or just interesting.
For now, Grandma's dolly is going to sit around in her underwear. Once that would have been indecent, but nowadays, it just means she telecommutes. The silk dress dress didn't dissolve or shrink from washing, as I had feared, but it was so badly stained that I won't be putting it back on her.
I wonder what my mom would have made of e-commerce. It only took me half an hour to learn that this is what collectors call a "flathead" china doll, most likely made in the waning days of "lady dolls" (as opposed to "baby dolls") as the little girl's gift of choice. Although this doll is in relatively good condition and has most of her original clothes, she is just one of the common dollies. Collectors pay the big bucks for rare dolls that were never played with.
Meanwhile, after washing and ironing her complicated lingerie, I'm feeling fond of her and thinking about making her some new outfits. I believe I can make an acceptable period dress--perhaps a wrapper with an apron, or a shirtwaist and skirt. I do have those seven plastic tubs of fabric scraps, and fitting doll clothes is much simpler than fitting human clothes. Dolls don't need wearing ease and don't ever complain.
Recently I pulled my grandmother's china doll out of the box I've kept it in since clearing out my mother's house in 1996. Mom, in her turn had kept it in a box after clearing out her own mother's house in 1963. Mom used to show me the doll occasionally, telling me it was a valuable antique which we would restore "someday." She kept some vintage fabric scraps and 1960's magazine clippings with the doll.
I've decided to end the family tradition of not knowing what to do with this doll. I could clean it up and display it, sell it, or perhaps find some way to preserve it in storage, but I no longer keep stuff just because I'm afraid to get rid of it.
As a little girl I was frightened of the doll--it made me think of graves and corpses. Opening the box, I found it was just as creepy as I remembered. It was dressed in a silk gown my mom had told me was made from "Aunt Ella's wedding dress," meaning her dad's sister. The dress had a number of brown stains, was grey with dust, and smelled musty.
I undressed the doll (imagining how horrified my mom would have been to catch me playing with it) and suddenly, it looked more pleasant and friendly. (I couldn't bring myself to take a picture of doll, dress and all. It was too disturbing.)
In the first picture, it's just wearing a chemise and some lace scraps that were sewn on, not fashioned into a blouse. I clipped the threads holding it on and removed the chemise.
The stockings and shoes are sewn and pinned in place, and I didn't have confidence that I could replace them. The doll body is made of muslin stuffed with sawdust, not kidskin, as Mom had thought. It has kidskin forearms and hands with individually-sewn fingers. The painted hair shows some wear on the back, suggesting that my grandma played with her, but Grandma must have been big enough to avoid dropping a 22-inch doll on its china head too often. I'm guessing she might have been six or seven, which means she got the doll about 1890.
Other than these skeins of Rambouillet yarn, I have little to show for the past few days. I thought I might get through a winter without a head cold, but a virus got a hold of me, and my mental acuity has not been too sharp. Fortunately, spinning is something that doesn't require much concentration, and I have compressed a big plastic bin chock-full of fleece bats into a dozen skeins of yarn, freeing up about four cubic feet of closet space.
You may recognize my ancestral pincushion posing next to the yarn, sporting its collection of hatpins. My grandma and her mother must have been brave women to use these fierce implements to fasten down their hats.
A heart made of roses and an arrow made of something I don't recognize--the only floral message I understand here is "To my valentine" entwined with forget-me-nots. I can't read the post office in the postmark, either. All I know is that it was addressed to Florence Williamson and mailed February 13, 1909 somewhere in Iowa.
Last week Sherry's latest batch of cool "Stuff#21" sent me on a chain of hypertext links that led me back home again, literally and symbolically. Starting close to home with Kentuckian Wendell Berry, Sherry found Berry and Bob Dylan together in a blog post at The Art of the Rural. Now, I was once a Dylan fan, and I still remember ALL the lyrics to "Highway 61 Revisited," but I fell out with Bob when I was a senior in college. I was driving south on Iowa Route 169, just outside of Adel, when "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" came on the radio. "...You just kinda wasted my precious time," Bob sang, as I'd heard him do so many times before, but this time, something dawned on me. "You whiny, self-centered S.O.B.!" I said, perhaps even aloud, as I switched off the radio. If only there were less of my own "precious time" between insight and understanding, I might have avoided some not-so-great life-choices. Still, it was a start.
As I moved from my own farm-girl epiphany to other posts at The Art of the Rural, I learned that Charlie Louvin had passed, Hamper McBee is on the You-Tubes, and there's a lady living in the "American Gothic" house, hellbent on saving the world through pie.
Beth Howard's blog is The World Needs More Pie, and of course, she's right. She says of herself:
I was born in the neighboring small town of Ottumwa, a place I never thought I'd return to because it seemed so "backwater," but now Ottumwa is where I do all my shopping, go to movies, and on the rare occasion, grab a burger at the classic 1930's diner, The Canteen in the Alley. I left Iowa to travel the world, I've lived in places including Nairobi, Stuttgart, New York and most recently Portland, Oregon. And now...Eldon, Iowa. It's like Grant Wood said, "I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa."
Now, I have a few reservations about an Iowan who calls Ottumwa, Iowa (population 25,000) a small town. Cromwell (population 120), where I went to school, is a small town. Eldon (population 1000), where the pie-evangelist lives in the house Grant Wood painted, is a small town. Ottumwa is one of the big towns on the Burlington Northern Line, which ran through My Antonia and A Lost Lady and Creston (population 7500), the semi-big town where my parents bought groceries and I went to high school. Still, she might have been addressing New Yorkers, so I'll let that slide.
Ms. Howard has a whole media empire at her The World Needs More Pie, but I'm mostly hung up on the connection in my memory between Grant Wood and pie. I did my undergraduate studies at Iowa State University, which was adorned with quite a bit of WPA art. The library had a set of Grant Wood murals. I thought they were spectacular and strange, and I spent quite a bit of time looking at them, particularly the Agricultural Arts and Home Economics Arts panels. I have a vivid memory of a huge, columnar woman wearing a perfectly smooth gingham apron in a kitchen, with a spherical cooked fowl and a geometrical pie on a table. However, a look at the Web page Grant Woods murals at ISU shows no such image of a Grant Woods-painted pie. The columnar apron is there alright, but I guess I hallucinated the turkey and pie. (The dorm food was really bad.)
I guess it took Beth Howard to complete my dream of Grant Woods pie.
Here are more surprises from my mom's box of Kodachrome slides. 1954 is a guess--my parents lived in this house from about 1952 to 1956. You can see why southwestern Iowa winters are so hard on trees.
I vividly remember what the Cromwell Band uniform smelled like, although I cannot describe it now any more than I could then. The cat does not appear well pleased by it either. I do not remember my flute being that large in relation to my arms. Below, the band is assembling for the 1963 Thanksgiving parade. These slides were a surprise--I don't remember Mom taking these pictures.
Here's a picture of my grandmother, Florence Williamson Hunt, the postcard collector in my family. The postcard album I've been using to decorate my holiday postings for the last few years is something Florence put together while living with her parents on their farm, prior to her marriage in her early 30's. In this photograph, she's moved to town (Creston), widowed, and in her 70's.
Grandma had an extensive flower garden at "the house in town," and she had a large collection of African violets on her window sills. As a little girl, I fixated on these flowers with fuzzy foliage, and I've tried to grow them myself with limited success.
Fortunately, the office and bedroom in our new house have plenty of winter sunlight, and my current crop of African violets has been blooming quite cheerfully. I have Grandma's crocheted table toppers scattered among the houseplants.
Kodachrome slide from 1951 or 1952. My Aunt Verla, Uncle Bill, and cousins Cathy, Bobby, and Denny. Aren't they cute?
The last few days I've been scanning a box of old Kodachrome slides my mom shot with her spiffy Exacta 35mm camera in the early 1950's. It's the camera I fell in love with as a teenager, using black and white film. A few years ago, I sold the camera on Ebay to a collector in Germany, sort of a photographic repatriation.
I've never seen these images before--they were something Mom always told me she'd show me someday, but it never happened, and it was purely by chance that I found and kept the metal slide box when I emptied her house in 1996.
It's sort of spooky to see images from her life long before she was my mother. In fact I was so focused on this glimpse into her life that I didn't notice I was scanning the images in a format my photo editing software doesn't much like. I want to print some of these pictures to send my cousins (Do you suppose they know how cute they were?), so I need to convert them to a different file format in batch mode.
Fortunately, I have ImageMagick on my Linux box already, and it has awesome command line tools (about which I know very little, so far). I do know how to convert a file format:
rebecca@hecate:~/Moms_slides$ convert covered_bridge.tiff covered_bridge.jpg
Of course, I need to do batches of convert. I could read the ImageMagick documentation (but if that were easy, I would have done it years ago). Or, I could make an executable file of convert commands, and run it. There was a time when I wrote sed and awk scripts in my sleep (I really did--I dreamed about shell scripts.) I was afraid I couldn't remember, but a little help.txt file in an archived directory jogged my memory, and I was back in business directly.
In the spirit of my help.txt files, where I kept a record of how I did whatever needed doing, here's how I converted a big pile of tiff image files to png image files.
rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ ls *.tiff|
awk '{print "convert "$1, $1".png"}'|
sed s/.tiff.png/.png/ >temp
rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ chmod +x temp
rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ ./temp
And here's what the executable file looks like:
rebecca@hecate:~/Pictures/Moms_slides$ head temp
convert 5kids_easter2.tiff 5kids_easter2.png
convert 5kids_easter.tiff 5kids_easter.png
convert 5kids_pinecones.tiff 5kids_pinecones.png
convert 5kids_xmas.tiff 5kids_xmas.png
convert bill1.tiff bill1.png
convert bill2.tiff bill2.png
convert bill_junglegym.tiff bill_junglegym.png
convert bobby_blocks.tiff bobby_blocks.png
convert bobby_easter.tiff bobby_easter.png
convert bobby_junglegym.tiff bobby_junglegym.png
It took a lot longer to write up this help file than it did to convert 75 images to a format I can send to my printer. (For what it's worth, my photo editing software can read tiff files, just not the ones created by Xsane, the scanner software I use.)
Here are some Web resources on sed and awk that I wish had existed when I was learning those wonderful programs:
This pincushion has been on my to-repair list for years. In fact, I believe it was on my mother's to-repair list throughout my childhood, and may have been on my grandma's to-repair list before that.
Although my mom kept it with her sewing gear, it's not that sort of pincushion. It was made to sit on a lady's dresser, and to be stuck full of hatpins and the sorts of pins they used to fasten their apron tops to their dress bodice-fronts.
This particular pincushion was handmade at home, most likely as a gift. I believe it dates from my grandma's post-card collecting days, from around 1900 to 1915. (After she was grown up, but before she was married with kids.) The body of the cushion was machine- and hand-sewn of pink cotton sateen, and stuffed full of sawdust. The decorative cover is crocheted of very fine cotton thread. I washed it and starched it with spray starch, but I'll probably look for some stiffer starch to make the ruffles stand up better.
I had originally planned to make a new cushion to display the crocheted cover, but I had this pretty blue silk left over from re-covering a lamp shade. (The silk was salvaged from a favorite shirt.) It's a match for my bedroom walls, and it was a quick project to simply "slip-cover" the original cushion and pull the crocheted cover over the top.
Do you suppose crossing something off my late mother's "to-do" list has some sort of karmic significance beyond just finishing a sewing project?
"With Best New Year's Wishes--1911." The sentiment hasn't changed much in 100 years, with a four-leafed clover for luck. This card is addressed to "Miss F. Williamson, Williamson [the post office was in the store her uncles owned], Adams County, Iowa" and postmarked "St. Paul, MINNESOTA, Jan. 31, 1911, 2 pm." The message reads "Dear Florence, I wish you a Happy New Year. I am going to spend New Year's Eve skating. From Your Friend, Edna C."
"A New Year Thought and Wish" features a garland surrounding a verse: "To greet you now, kind words I send, and wish 'A Happy New Year, Friend.'" The leaves and stems of the garland are silvery, and the card has a strange texture that makes the leaf surfaces seem to "pop out" at the viewer. The postmark is "January 10, 1913, Des Moines, Iowa," and it is addressed to "Miss Florence Williamson, Prescott, Iowa, RR 1." I can't read the signature, but the message reads "How are you all? We are in usual health. Having a big poultry show. We heard some of you people were in Des Moines a while ago. That is not the way to treat your friends. A Happy Year to all."
"Merry Thoughts--New Year's Greeting." It's another floral holiday card, this time with a golden good luck wishbone. The year is unreadable on this card, but it's addressed to "Mr. W. A. Williamson, Prescott, Iowa" and postmarked "Northeast Pennsylvania, December 28, 6 pm." The message is "Wishing you all a glad New Year--Maggie." I believe that would have been my great-grandfather's sister. I hope we all enjoy merry thoughts in the new year, and pansies too.
