When teenaged me tried to draw Cory Snyder

As I detailed in 2020, I was a big fan of MicroLeague Baseball as a teenager in the late 1980s. Using the "General Manager / Owner Disk," I created my own super team, called the Wallingford Smashers. For versimilitude, and because I never had a girlfriend during high school, I took the time to create a yearbook for each season of the Smashers' existence. (Yes, we're deep in The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. territory here.)

Anyway, I still have most of the yearbooks. For this one, I got creative and did my own freehand sketch of Cory Snyder, who in addition to being a Smasher in my fictional universe was a young slugger on Cleveland's real-world MLB team. That season Snyder batted .321 with 33 home runs and 81 RBIs for the Smashers, edging out Eric Davis for team MVP honors.

So this very poor drawing by me (sorry, Cory) completes the unlikely trifecta of Hideko Takamine, Toshire Mifune and Cory Snyder drawings on Papergreat. 

City of Wilmington, Delaware, scrip from 1862

Here's an interesting piece of U.S. currency history that was tucked away with some of my family's ephemera. It's a note measuring 5¾ inches by 2⅜ inches, with a value of 5 cents. 

It's dated September 1, 1862, and the text states: "Twelve Months after date the City of Wilmington Will pay FIVE CENTS to bearer in current funds when presented in sums of One Dollar. No. 2962."

There are two signatures at the bottom and two sketches of mystery women.

This is scrip, which is any substitute for legal tender. It was issued five months after the start of the Civil War, which went from April 1861 to April 1865. Coins were in severely short supply during the war. Many were hoarded because the metal used to make them had intrinsic value, and people had greater trust in coins than in paper currency. However, there was still a need for small change to keep the economy functioning, so these paper notes were created to take the place of pennies, dimes and nickels.

This one was never cashed in. So I reckon the City of Wilmington, Delaware, made a nickel off my family. Written at the top in pencil is Helen Simmons. Our family tree has a Helen Simmons Carey (1894-1957) and a Helen Gregg Simmons Chandler (1857-1913), the latter being my great-great-grandmother. I suspect this was hers, perhaps passed to her by her parents: Bauduy Simmons (1805-1882) and Ann Gregg Simmons (1811-1886).

Fabulous paperback cover: "The Word for World is Forest"

We don't get paperback covers like this much anymore! Search through the Papergreat archives for more artwork by Richard M. Powers. ... Also, apologies if some of the excerpts and review quotes are leaning into my depression regarding the state of everything.

• Title: The Word for World is Forest
• Additional cover text: "The mind-stunning science fiction masterpiece"
• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)
• Cover illustration: Richard M. Powers (1921-1996), though he is not credited anywhere in the book
• Publisher: Berkley Medallion
• Year of this edition: December 1976 (fifth printing)
• Original publication date: 1972
• Pages: 169
• Format: Paperback
• Cover price: $1.75 (in very small sideways type)
• Back cover excerpt: "The planet Athshe was a paradise whose people were blessed with a mystical awareness of existence. Then the conquerors arrived and began to rape, enslave and kill humans without a flicker of humanity. The Athsheans were unskilled in the ways of war, and without weapons. But the gentle tribesmen possessed strange powers over their dreams. And the alien conquerors had taught them how to hate..."
• Dedication: "FOR JEAN Who Went Ahead"
• Excerpt #1: It was unbelievable. They'd all gone insane. This damned alien world had sent them all right round the bend, into byebye dreamland, along with the creechies.
• Excerpt #2: With a promise of peace they would withdraw all their outposts and live in one area, the region they had forested in Middle Sornol: about 1700 square miles of rolling land, well watered.
• Excerpt #3: "When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.5 stars (out of 5). 
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2024, Royce wrote: "If we find life on other worlds, we will inevitably enslave its inhabitants, kill its inhabitants, or if they are superior, go to war with them. It’s just who we are. I hope we never find life elsewhere because I know us and it will end badly."
• Rating on Goodreads: 4.06 stars (out of 5). 
• Goodreads review excerpt: In 2020, Sean Barrs wrote: "I argue that it is an extremely important work of science-fiction because we could learn from it as a society. And this is why art is so radically essential. We have a distant future, and a distant alien world, we are dealing with intergalactic politics and racism across humanoid species, but the allegory is not too far from today. And that's truly terrifying."
• Blunt thoughts from Lawrence Burton, author of Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers: "I realise that James Cameron's Avatar borrows from a great variety of sources — Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dances with Wolves, and the Smurfs to name but three — but it really feels like a massive [bleeping] chunk of it came from this novella, albeit with a few other bits bolted on so as to save the effects guy being stood around all day twiddling his thumbs and looking bored."

Graffiti on a secluded stairway in Catalina, Arizona

To change world takes one random act of kindness

Be kind!

Postcard from my great-grandfather to my grandmother*

*I think

This postcard was mailed from Hotel Ruiz Galindo in Fortín de las Flores, Veracruz, Mexico, to Bushnell General Hospital in Brigham City, Utah, sometime in the early to mid 1940s. (The six-cent Mexican stamp used was issued in 1940.)

The card was mailed to Mrs. J.G. Ingham. That would be my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham (1919-2003), who worked at the hospital during World War II. She was married at the time to Jack G. Ingham. 

I'm pretty sure that the short note ("This is a gorgeous place. Expect to return home shortly.") was written by my great-grandfather, Howard Horsey Adams (1892-1985), who signed as "Poppa." But I'm not 100% on that. 

One of these days I need to see what I can find out about Jack Ingham. He and my grandmother had divorced by the early 1950s. I have a fair number of photos of him, but not much in the way of biographical information, and he was never discussed much when I was a child. 

Setsuko Hara's sketch of Toshiro Mifune in "Tokyo Sweetheart"

I finally came across the perfect companion to the 2021 post Hideko Takamine caricature from "Kita no san-nin." Maybe I'll start a subcategory of drawings shown in mid-century Japanese dramas.

In the 1952 film Tokyo Sweetheart, directed by Yasuki Chiba, actress Setsuko Hara portrays Yuki, a street sketch artist who has a meet-cute with Kurokawa, a good-hearted man portrayed by Toshiro Mifune. Yuki does the sketch of Kurokawa that's shown above. It's a pretty good sketch, though it only gets about three seconds of screen time; some artist definitely did their job well behind the scenes.

Tokyo Sweetheart is a fun film overall. It's full of misunderstandings, machinations and switcheroos, mostly involving a valuable ring and its less valuable replica. It's not all screwball comedy, though. This is devastated post-war Japan, so there are money troubles, the reemergence of the Yakuza (though they're comically portrayed) and a storyline involving a dying sex worker who wants only to reunite with her mother.

The scenes involving Hara and Mifune are the most enjoyable. They didn't appear in many movies together and this might be the film in which they have the most shared screen time. (I haven't seen Kurosawa's The Idiot, though.) It's fun to imagine an alternate timeline in which Hara and Mifune co-starred in a series of Thin Man-like films, or had their own Bogart-Bacall or Grant-Hepburn energy. 

A review of Tokyo Sweetheart on Japanonfilm notes: "Neither Hara nor Mifune were known for romantic comedies, so the arrival of this is a welcome extension of our understanding of both those stars. ... One extra layer of interest is the way it adapts the tried and true romantic comedy formula of western film into the context of Japanese society." 

Here are a few more images from the sketching scene in Tokyo Sweetheart:

Find someone who looks at you

the way Setsuko Hara looks at Toshire Mifune here.

Mifune does not enjoy behind laughed at.

And there are a few more images here.

Thursday shelfies

BONUS (Snugs, looking a bit evil, a few days ago)

Old ad for "The Black Cat" on WBKB's Shock Theatre in Chicago

This nifty old advertisement for 1934's The Black Cat popped up in one of my Facebook groups. Channel 7 in Chicago was known as WBKB from 1953 to 1968. Its "Shock Theatre" was one of many such shows that launched around the nation when Universal sold its syndication package of 52 classic horror films — called Shock! — to local television stations in 1957 (through Screen Gems). 

Thus was spawned the phenomenon of local TV horror hosts. WBKB's version ran from 1957 to 1959 and featured Marvin, his companion Dear and hunchback Orville, along with a band called the Deadbeats. Dear's face was never seen until the final episode, according to Wikipedia. "Shock Theatre" was remembered fondly by one commenter in IMDb.com in 2014:

"For early television played late at night, this show was the best. The goofy music and the scary things on the show scared a little kid like me half to death but I loved it. Especially Marvin's humor. The movies were old time horror classics like Dracula and Frankenstein, etc. I wish I could get some of the episodes. I don't know if WBKB in Chicago kept any of them or not. Any show named Shock Theater in any other town just copied what was already done in Chicago. Marvin even took some of the show on the road to local ballparks like Comiskey. His band was great also. It even had a guy playing accordion in the band. I would love to see episodes of Shock Theater, even online somewhere."

Here are a couple stills from The Black Cat, including Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff playing chess, and Karloff leading a pre-Code satanic ritual in a German Expressionist setting.