The week in images

I thought about doing some short explanatory text, but I'll just let future Papergreat Scholars™ weigh in.

1955 swizzle party

I have zero idea why my grandmother or great-grandmother kept this invitation and pasted it into a scrapbook. It's for a one-hour "Swizzle Party" (there were some issues on the spelling) starting at 6:30 p.m. on May 23, 1955, at Waterloo House. I assume that just means a cocktail party, possibly with a focus on rum. That date was a Monday, which I guess is a little interesting.

On that date, the Page 1 banner two-deck headline in the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal screamed "PENTAGON REPORTED SHOCKED BY ADVANCES IN SOVIET AIR MIGHT." Perhaps a little too alarmist in retrospect?

Much lower on the front page is a one-column article with the headline: "GOV'T AWAITING FRESH ADVICE ON RESUMING SHOTS" This concerns the initial distribution of the polio vaccine. After Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine was declared safe and effective in April 1955, mass immunization began almost immediately. Several companies were licensed to produce the vaccine. Within weeks, however, cases of paralytic polio began appearing in children who had just been vaccinated. Investigations traced the problem to vaccine lots produced by Cutter Laboratories.  

Michael Fitzpatrick, writing for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, further explains: "In April 1955 more than 200,000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10."

Tighter federal regulation and oversight soon remedied the situation and safe polio vaccinations resumed. The United States has been polio-free since 1979 and the Americas have been polio-free since 1994.

My family has a coat of arms?

Came across this small piece of paper in one of the endless envelopes...

COAT OF ARMS

The Coat of Arms of this Chandler Family was prepared by Miss Fanny Chandler, from an original cut and obtained, from an original obtained from the Herald's College, London, by the Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler, D.D., of Elizabeth Town, N.J., when he was there in 1775.

The crest borne on the closed helmet above the Coat of Arms is that of a Pelican in her nest, wounding her breast to feed her young with her own blood — an emblem of parental affection expressive of the family motto "AD — MORTEM FIDELIS". The mantle cut and jagged hanging from the helmet indicates the faithful service of the wearer; the gauntlet, his prowess.

Heraldic colors on the shield are designated by the direction of the lines.

"HE BEARETH CHECKIE, ARGENT AND AZURE, ON A BEND OF THE FIRST, SA., THREE LYONS PASSANT, GULES,"

BY THE NAME OF CHANDLER

So I'm guessing that my great-grandmother, Greta Miriam Chandler Adams (1894-1988), is related in some tangential way to Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler (1726-1790), which I could surely confirm if I took the time to sort through my grandmother Helen's genealogy papers and charts, written in her sometimes-hard-to-decipher cursive.

Corroboration concerning this coat of arms can be found, for now anyway, at this RootsWeb page. (Chandler was a moderately common surname in England, originally describing someone who made and sold candles.)

As far as the pelican feeding her young with her own blood, it's called vulning and it's a symbol with a deep religious history that I'm not nearly qualified enough to explain. Victoria Emily Jones, in a 2025 article on Art & Theology, explains how the pelican was "one of the most popular animal symbols for Christ in the Middle Ages" and that vulning has allegorical parallels to the spilling of Christ's blood on the cross giving life to his children. It's much more complicated than that, though, as Jones explains in the heavily-illustrated article. 

Additional information and artwork can be found at the Anglican Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn, the Center for Humans & Nature, and the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art.

(By the way, in the real world, pelicans do not actually wound themselves to feed blood to their young. They give them fish — sometimes regurgitated — and stuff.)

Sort-of related posts

• Teaser post: 1937's Chandler Pageant
• Historic Montoursville church is closing its doors
• Another day, another mystery ancestor photograph

Weirdest thing I'll purge this year

I'm continuing to downsize and this takes up way too much shelf space, so I posted it to my neighborhood's "free stuff" Facebook page with this note: 

Gift cemetery

For my first post on here, I promise this will be the weirdest thing I ever post and then it will be much more normal after that. This is a model cemetery that was clearly someone's art project long ago. Maybe it fits someone's aesthetic or model railroad??? It's about 8.5 inches by 12 inches. Comes with an unattached sheep that is disproportionately sized compared to the cemetery. .... Just want to see if anyone is interested because I'd hate to toss it.

If  there are no takers, I'll at least keep the sheep.

Snapshot & memories: At the Penn State computer lab

Here's a picture that someone (probably Jessica Hartshorn) took of me at a Penn State University computer lab in either 1992 or 1993. Wearing my lucky, lumpy USFL hat, I am surely working on a class paper or project for which I had been procrastinating. I was a bad student in college who didn't put much effort into most classes. Let's just say that my grade-point average would have made me a strong contender for the Cy Young Award if it were my ERA. I was a bad student because I spent most of my time at The Daily Collegian, writing, editing and/or paginating stories for the five-day-a-week student newspaper. I wanted to work in newspapers after college, so I figured that was my hands-on education. And here I am in 2026 still working for one of the dwindling number of newspapers in the United States. It didn't hurt, either, that the folks at The Daily Collegian were awesome and well worth spending endless hours newspapering with.

I have felt bad for years, though, about how little effort I put into my classes. Penn State's liberal arts curriculum offered classes on many fascinating topics that Older Chris would love to spend time on, especially in the realms of history, literature, social sciences, health and the arts. If only some of us could have had our later-in-life passion for continuing education when we were 19, 20 and 21...

I also regret that I haven't yet written much about my college days on Papergreat. When I began this blog in 2010, I was only 17 years removed from graduating from Penn State and it felt far too recent to qualify as "history." But now I wake up and it's nearly 33 years since I left Happy Valley with my diploma. I'm older than the majority of my professors were at the time they graded my low-effort papers, probably while shaking their heads (unless their graduate TAs did the grading).

And now I fear I've waited too long. My memories of Penn State are no longer crisp and detailed. They feel more like dreams I can recall if I close my eyes. I don't have a ton of ephemera from Penn State anymore to spur recollections. And I have very, very few pictures from my four years on campus, which seems bizarre but that was life before these times in which I take two dozen cat photos per day with my phone. There's this photo from my junior and senior year dormitory room (where you can also see the USFL hat in the background), and some photos from THON, but very little beyond that, until Graduation Day. I should have packed a camera for college in 1989! I can think of a hundred things I should have documented with snapshots. Sigh.

I'm going to try to do a better job in the coming months (and years?) of using ephemera as the jumping off point for telling stories about my days at Penn State. They're as worthy of preserving for posterity as postcards from 1915 or vernacular photography from 1935 or travel brochures from 1955. And those stories involve dear friends who represented the very best part of the college experience. 

Other snapshots and memories          

• 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

Mom's 1968 letter from Hussian School of Art

Continuing with the theme of posting about some items I came across during the sorting and decluttering of family ephemera, here's a letter that Mom (Mary Ingham Otto, 1948-2017) received from Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia in June 1968, when she was 20 years old. 

This would have been after she left Lycoming College. One year after this, in June 1969, she married my father. And another 1½ years after that, in December 1970, I was born. So I really don't know for sure how Mom's second year at Hussian School of Art unfolded. I know she was extremely talented and rightfully proud of her art skills, which included sketching and sculpture. I posted a few of her pieces here shortly after her death in 2017. Excellent works, but I don't know if those few pieces show the extent of her talent. Most of her artwork is in my sister Adriane's possession.

Hussian School of Art had opened in July 1946. According to Wikipedia, "John Hussian, a member of Philadelphia's art community and a renowned lecturer, was encouraged by what is now the Philadelphia Museum of Art to open a school for veterans returning from World War II."

It changed its named to Hussian College in 2015, but then abruptly closed in the summer of 2023. Beth Shapiro, who had been director of the college's bachelor of fine arts program, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “It is heartbreaking for these students who have put all this time and energy in." 

A nifty Gritty fiddlin' on the roof, saved for posterity

A just want to share this for posterity because it's awesome-sauce and I want to do my tiny bit to help it never get lost.

On Feb. 5, Joshua Raclaw skeeted: "We put on an all-Yiddish community production of fiddler on the roof in Philadelphia and cast member and local artist Sofie Rose Seymour created the most amazing show poster that ever was."

On Instagram, the artist added:

This production of Fidler Afn Dakh was a labor of love, put on by a community of folks with a range of prior theater experience (including none!) and prior Yiddish experience (including none!) who got together and made something impossibly beautiful and unlikely and special

For a little while, there was a shtetl called Anatevke alive in West Philly, where you could hear a whole world in Yiddish, ful mit harts, with queer and diasporic and Jewish joy and grief and love

I made this poster as a thank you gift for our director Isy and music director Tim, who gekholemt a kholem that we’d put this crazy thing together in a month, and for our cast & musicians, who were crazy enough to do it

***

We must preserve and heartily support the arts and history and all cultures and the incredible creative output of human beings. 

Mid-century New Jersey election ephemera

Here's a 75-year-old piece of election ephemera. I'm not even sure where it came from. It urges voters to vote "yes" on the school bond issue and "Elect Experienced Executives" Brace Eggert, Julius C. Engel, James C. Forgione, Martin J. O'Hara and Russell B. Walker.

I say I don't know where this ephemera came from because it's apparently for an election near Stephenville, New Jersey, located in the northern part of that state. There are no family connections to that area that I'm aware of.

I'm sure it's Stephenville (or an enclosing municipality) because all five of these guys show up in the sprawling Wikipedia entry for Stephenville, which goes into massive detail about the political goings-on there in the middle of the 20th century. Forgione was at one point the mayor of the former Raritan Township that became Edison Township in 1954. The other four were township commissioners, with Walker being chairman of the health board. There was much drama over local development and especially issues with septic tanks and the sewer system. The section of the Stephenville Wikipedia page that merely covers the years 1948 through 1953 is nearly 5,000 words. I might suggest it only if you suffer from insomnia. You'd have much more fun with Papergreat's large category of Ruth Manning-Sanders posts.