My grandmother's 1942 Medical Technologist card

Short post today today with an item from 84 years ago. It's my grandmother's (Helen Chandler Adams Ingham, 1919-2003) wallet-size blue card indicating that in 1942 she was certified as Medical Technologist as defined by Board of Registry of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists.

According to its website, the society was founded in 1922 by a group of 39 physicians to achieve important goals to further the laboratory in health care. Today, "ASCP continues to drive change in the U.S. and around the world through its many initiatives including the Leading Laboratories Recognition Program; Partners for Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment in Africa, which provides rapid cancer diagnostics, care, and treatment to Sub-Saharan Africa; the ASCP Foundation to support diagnostic medicine and public health; and numerous collaborations with PEPFAR to bring pathology and laboratory medicine to under-resourced countries," the website further states.

Around this general time (World War II), my grandmother was working at Bushnell Army Hospital in Brigham City, Utah. So this card may have been issued to her while she was there. I should try to piece together more information from that time of her life at some point.

Related posts

• My grandmother on the Wilmington Friends School basketball team
• Snapshot & memories: Family outfits of 1972
• A handful of artistic travel snapshots taken by my grandmother
• 100th anniversary of Bingham "rediscovering" Machu Picchu

Mid-century Christmas letter from Richland

During the recent sorting and pruning of old family ephemera I came across this homemade Christmas letter from some family friends who lived in "Richland" and said of it, "This is the town that 'Sam' built." 

That would be Richland, Washington. The area that became Richland was acquired by U.S. Army in 1943, built up by "Uncle Sam" and turned into a fully closed, secretive community — it didn't appear on maps! — in which many people worked on the Manhattan Project, though few people knew that's what they were actually doing. The veil of secrecy wasn't lifted until after the mid-1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

Of course there were other cities that Uncle Sam built, such as Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I'm going to guess this Christmas letter, with its nifty illustrations, dates to sometime between 1948 and 1952.

1964 receipt for my grandmother's Olympia SM3 typewriter

When Mom, Adriane and I moved from Florida into my great-grandmother's and grandmother's house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford in 1986, the upstairs room that had been used for storage and my grandmother's desk/office supplies was converted into my bedroom. It was absolutely filled with office supplies at first: pens, pencils, paperclips, tape dispensers, notepads, gummed reinforcements, staplers and much more. I still have a stapler and tape dispenser from that bedroom. Probably one or two other things, too.

There was also the typewriter that belonged to my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham (1919-2003), and today's post features the receipt for when she originally purchased it. It was an Olympia SM3 and it cost $65 in 1964, which is the equivalent of a whopping $677 today! I remember using it for some schoolwork and hobby stuff, although at some point I would have fully converted to my Commodore 64's dot-matrix printer. Later, I had a lightweight electric typewriter that I took with me to Penn State and that I used for the final Steve Jeltz Fan Club newsletter. (And, yes, I STILL need to do the damn post on the history of the Jeltz Fan Club.)

The typewriter was purchased at Central Typewriter Exchange on 3433 Walnut Street in Philadelphia. I can't find anything specifically about that business, but maybe someone who knows something will see this post and leave a comment. I have to think this is one of its few receipts still in existence. The purchase came with a guarantee for one year on shop parts and labor, according to the cursive note added to the receipt. 

There is a lot of information about Olympia SM3 typewriters online. On Paper Blogging, Michelle Geffken writes of "the gorgeous lines of a stylish typewriter body, with the heavy-duty work capacity that is true of all machines in the German Olympia line, the Olympia SM3." Geffken adds that Olympia SM stands for Schreibmaschine Mittelgroß or Medium-sized Typewriter, and that 800,000 were made between 1953 and 1957. It was apparently a favored typewriter of the likes of Harlan Ellison, John Updike and Patricia Highsmith. Geffken has a whole subsection called the Typewriter Diaries that you'll definitely want to check out if that's your jam.

Meanwhile, on Typewriter Review, Daniel Marleau describes the Olympia SM3 as "a reliable workhorse, from a solid body construction to keys that provide good response and feedback. When you first sit at this thing, you marvel at the beauty and how it exudes a certain egalitarian work ethic. These machines were meant for typing — lots of typing. Rolling paper in for the first time, a reassuring clicking sound is made, like loading a weapon for words. The platen moves with rigid precision."

I'm sure I have a photo of Beembom's Olympia SM3 somewhere in the family photos, but that would involve a search and will have to be a post for another day. 

A bookmark to finally begin the year

I've been in a bad rut to start 2026, and the spiraling state of our nation (to put it mildly) in what should be its celebratory 250th anniversary year certainly is a big contributor to that daily depression.

We have to find ways to keep plowing forward and I'm starting Papergreat's 17th calendar year with some short posts about items I've come across during some recent sorting and decluttering of family ephemera. Every January brings a fresh urge to purge stuff for sanity's sake. I hope this year sees more meaningful progress by me in that regard.

This is a greeting card that was designed to be a bookmark, if you detach the front cover of the card. It's stained and there's a tear at the bottom, but I've fixed that with tape and I'm going to put this in my pile of bookmarks and toss the rest of the card, along with the generic cursive message.

The bookmark was produced by Yorkraft and the card is printed with the following explanatory message: "Hand colored Book-Marks (Lese Ziechen), similar to this, with designs derived from religious symbolism, were used to mark the place many old Pennsylvania Dutch Bibles and Hymnals."

For some information about Yorkraft we turn to the York Daily Record and a 2016 Universal York blog post by June Lloyd. The company dates to at least the mid 1940s and manufactured "decorative signs and novelties, including Pennsylvania Dutch trinkets." Lloyd's post cites a 1946 advertisement that states: 

"YORKRAFT Pennsylvania Dutch… Greeting Cards and Gift items, for inspiration, draw upon a rich store of folklore and folk-arts of the Pennsylvania Dutch who have probably contributed more than any other group, to the Early American Folk Arts. Yorkraft has caught the charm and spirit of their decoration and design, their quaint speech and humor and their picturesque dress and customs, which still persist in Pennsylvania and to some extent in other parts of the country settled by Pennsylvania Dutch folks."

There are hundreds of Yorkraft items currently for sale on eBay, some dating to the late 1970s. I'm actually a little surprised that this is the company's first-ever mention on Papergreat. Items range from a set of blank Amish-themed notecards for less than $10 to faux stained-glass display pieces to Pennsylvania Dutch recipe booklets to a 1969 "Make Love Not War" wooden sign that's pretty damn cool and is listed for $329.99.

Painted rock in parking lot of Fry's grocery store in San Tan Valley

Christmas cats 2025

Merry Christmas! I didn't get around to all the Yuletide posts I wanted to do this month, because every day is endlessly busy and I fell out of my writing routine. But for Christmas Day I wanted to share photos of some of the indoor and outdoor cats here at the desert abode. (If you want to browse multitudes of past Christmas posts, start here.)

Above: These feral/community cat brothers are Creamsicle, left, and Splash. They're both a little under 3½ years old, with Creamsicle being the older one. Both sons of Mamacita. Both trapped and neutered quite a while ago. They spent part of Christmas Eve lounging and napping in our front window well.

Here's another of Creamsicle. He likes to playfully swat my hand when I'm feeding him and his mother cheese. We connected through the window last night. I've never really pet him but it's easy to imagine him being a decent indoor cat, in the vein of Bandit.

Brave Sir Oliver, son of Mamacita via her last litter, peeks out from underneath our Christmas tree.

There's nothing Christmasy in this recent photo of Lady Samantha Penguin, but I wanted to include her because she's such a pretty girl.

Big Boi, father and/or grandfather of nearly all things, stands near the Christmas tree. He's either waiting for treats or waiting for me to go sit on the sofa and watch a movie so that he can get many pets and then doze off. 

Venus — son of Cirque, grandson of Mamacita and nephew of Creamsicle — is our only indoor cat that won't let me pet him. But he sure loves me when it's time for food and treats. 

Mommy Orange (left), mother or aunt of many of our indoor kitties, sits in a cat bed with her daughter Nebula. They are often inseparable nap partners.

Pete loves hanging out underneath the Christmas tree. She spends most of her day with her sister IceBear.

Marmalade is our newest outdoor feral/community cat. He's not neutered and his presence appears to have upset the outdoor cat ecosystem and pecking order, which is a bummer. Looking at him, it's hard not to think he's got some of Big Boi's DNA somewhere in his ancestral line.

Finally, the skunks haven't been coming as frequently, or in as great of a volume, as they did during the summer. But this fellow made a Christmas Eve visit last night. It might be Double Dot or Em Dash, but I don't see them often enough to know for sure anymore. I gave him a couple pieces of homemade Christmas cookie and he gobbled them up.

Miami's merry mural

I recently took this photo of the holly-jolly Christmas mural in Miami, Arizona, that was painted last year by Sylves Cordero. The little town does a great job of decorating its downtown for residents and tourists, even after a brutal year that saw autumn flooding devastate parts of the town.

I still have some photos from a summer visit to Miami that I hope to post at some point. In the meantime, here are some past related posts:

• Psychogeography, snickelways of Miami, Arizona: August 2021
• Cathy's Little Free Libraries in Globe, Arizona

Screenshot & memories: Turntable and Christmas tunes

I've previously done a bunch of "Snapshot & memories" posts (see list below), but what is the fate of snapshots and our photo memories, moving forward? How many physical 21st century snapshots will there be in future drawers and albums and shoeboxes? Most of the pictures documenting our lives are on our phones and/or in the cloud. That seems a far more fragile existence than we had in the second half of the 20th century.

So now I sometimes find myself documenting screenshots. Here's one from December 29, 2013, that shows the record player/radio cabinet at the family house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford. It was quite the behemoth, with the records stored underneath. When I was growing up, it got most of its use when friends and family were over during the Christmas holidays. But the following generation had some different ideas, as I wrote in 2013: "Ye olde family turntable/radio has been playing some Katy Perry, Daft Punk and, I think, Eminem this morning. It's held up well so far after being powered up for the first time in probably over a decade."

Since it's December, this image got me to thinking about all the vinyl Christmas albums from that cabinet we listened to from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. Many of the songs were the standards we still listen to on the radio or music streaming services these days: Burl Ives, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, etc. But you'd be listening to a whole album by one artist before moving on to the next one, which allowed for Yuletide vibe shifts every 45 minutes, instead of every 4 minutes. And then you'd put thought into what record went on next.

These are some of the albums I remember being in that cabinet:

Holiday Sing Along with Mitch (1961) and Christmas Sing-Along with Mitch (1958)

The Andy Williams Christmas Album (1963)

There was at least one Johnny Mathis album, and probably more than one. None of the covers ring an exact bell in my memory, but this one seems likely: Christmas with Johnny Mathis.

Some of the following are guesses, because my memory is hazy. I wish I had documented these albums and written this post a quarter-century ago, even though I wasn't blogging then, unless you count UsedPandas.com. All of these family albums will be lost in time, like carols in snow.

We did have some compilation albums. This one from the popular Great Songs of Christmas series seems familiar.

We certainly had Perry Como. This one, The Perry Como Christmas Album, seems like it would have been in the cabinet.

And certainly we had Bing Crosby. Perhaps including some of his older ones, such as Merry Christmas, which was first issued in 1945 but saw many subsequent revisions and re-releases.

Finally, this one kind of rings a bell, and it was local: The Glorious Sound of Christmas by the the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Eugene Ormandy (1962).

I wish I could remember more specifics. I'm sure there was a Gene Autry album, a Nat King Cole album, a Burl Ives album and probably a Dean Martin album. In the 1990s, Mom added famous albums by Manheim Steamroller and Vince Guaraldi Trio (A Charlie Brown Christmas) to the festive mix.

Snapshot & memories posts          

• Adorable little me on Mulberry Street
• Kitchen at Willow Street house in Montoursville
• Me and Pop-Pop in the kitchen
• Commodore 64 corner
• (Missing) snapshot & memories: Thanksgiving
• Me & Cyrano
• Me in a Star Trek shirt
• All kids do these days is play video games
• Posing with a Saturn V in 1982
• The Phillies are hot, and so was I
• Relocated fire engine in Montoursville
• Family outfits of 1972
• Our little bookstore
• Well-dressed for first day of nursery school