Welcome to the California Zephyr

This piece of ephemera is about the size of an index card and greets passengers arriving on the California Zephyr.

The California Zephyr has a long, storied and extremely complicated history, and if you're interested in that, Wikipedia and many a railroad buff have you covered. This card is from the iteration of the Zephyr train service that operated from 1949 to 1970. It was operated by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, Denver & Rio Grande Western and Western Pacific railroads, as noted at the bottom of this card. It was one of the longest train trips in the country, running between Oakland, California, and Chicago, Illinois. I strongly suspect that my great-grandmother, Greta Miriam Chandler Adams (1894-1988), rode the California Zephyr in the 1950s or early 1960s. 

The card notes: 

"Dinner in the dining car is on a reservation basis so as to avoid standing in line. Advance selection of dining hour by each passenger should provide reasonable assurance that a seat will be available at the appointed time. The Zephyrette will pass through the train each afternoon to see about your reservations for dinner that same evening. We earnestly request your cooperation by being in the dining car at the selected time. No reservations are necessary for breakfast or lunch in the dining car or for any meal service in the buffet car."

Yes, "Zephyrette" was a thing. In fact, the Zephyrettes were famous enough to have their own Wikipedia page. It notes that a Zephyrette was a hostess on the California Zephyr between 1949 and 1970. It further states: "To qualify, a prospective Zephyrette had to fulfill a variety of criteria, from being single and either a college graduate or a registered nurse to being between 24 and 28 years old and between 5 ft 4 in (1.63 m) and 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) tall. Once employed, Zephyrettes were expected to conduct themselves with 'dignity and poise' and also refrain from smoking or drinking while in uniform, among other requirements. Somewhat akin to an air line stewardess, the roles played by a Zephyrette were many, from hostess and tour guide to first aid responder and babysitter."

In addition to Wikipedia, there's an in-depth webpage on the Zephyrettes here. It adds this fun tidbit: "The Zephyrette was expected to pass through the train every couple of hours, checking on the passengers. If there were letters or postcards to be mailed, she would be happy to take care of them. If a passenger needed some item that wasn't available onboard the train, the Zephyrette would rush out to a local store during a station stop. (One Zephyrette took the shopping thing a bit too far, more than once spending too much time at the newsstand, and had to be put into a cab in Denver, rushing off to catch up with the train that had already left.)"

***

Today, Amtrak's iteration of the California Zephyr runs from San Francisco to Chicago, taking a little over 51 hours. As best as I can ascertain from Amtrak's confusing booking website, a one-way trip on the California Zephyr would cost, at minimum, $300 for coach. For some privacy and a place to sleep, the starting minimum would be near $1,000.

I've always imagined that I would enjoy traveling long distances by train, certainly more than I would enjoy traveling by airplane, boat or blimp. The California Zephyr sounds enjoyable and incredibly scenic, but I have no reason to be in San Francisco or Chicago, so I'm not sure what the point would be. I believe, unless I'm forgetting something, that the farthest I've ever traveled by train is from Philadelphia to Manhattan, which I've done numerous times. Basically a commuter-level trip. It would be great fun to take one of those long train rides across Europe and/or Asia, like the trips you see in the movies. Especially Horror Express. Because who wouldn't want to traverse the the 5,800 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas? (Of course, I'm completely setting aside 100% of complicating geopolitics and wars at this point, which would make such a trip impossible, because I need a momentary mental health break.)

Zacherley's 1960 Transylvania passport for fan club members

This night of a nearly full moon seems like an appropriate one for this post about a parody passport that TV horror host John Zacherle (1918-2016) made available to members of his fan club in 1960. 

Zacherle got his start as host of Philadelphia WCAU-TV's Shock Theater in 1957 (playing a host named "Roland") and after a year or so moved to New York's WABC-TV for Zacherley at Large (they added the Y to the end of his name, and it kind of stuck).

According to an article on Zacherley.com (yes, he still has a fan website): "Zacherley was aggressively merchandised. One of the most fondly remembered souvenirs from that era was the 'Transylvanian Passport' which was available by sending two labels from Strawberry Cocoa Marsh Syrup to the manufacturer." Indeed, the back of my passport states "PRINTED IN THE MOONLIGHT BY COCOA MARSHMEN IN TRANSYLVANIA."

It's most fun on the inside, though. The text begins: "The undersigned CREATURE is hereby granted entrance to the SOVEREIGN STATE OR [sic?] TRANSYLVANIA DURING THE YEAR 1960; the year of the FRANKSTEIN JUBILEE."

The passport holder could check a box to classify themself as a He-Wolf, She-Wolf, Vampire, Mummy, Ghoul and/or Monster.

Then there's a spot to check boxes if the holder has been inoculated for Werewolf Fever, Moon-fright, Coffinitis, Sunrayphilia, Banana Blight, Fur Fullout, Egyptian Itch, Chronic Fangosis and/or Embalmer's Rash.

The "Restrictions" are described as follows: "This PASSPORT is issued by the AMBASSADOR-AT-LARGE with the understanding and condition that the BEARER CREATURE will travel only during the hours of DARKNESS and will do no EXCAVATING IN THE STATE GRAVEYARDS after visiting hours. WOLF-CALLING is restricted to nights of the FULL MOON."

The ambassador-at-large is, of course, Zacherley, whose photo and signature appear at the bottom.

There are quite a few books and magazines filled with information about Zacherley. If you're interested in horror hosts in general, a good place to start is Elena M. Watson's Television Horror Movie Hosts: 68 Vampires, Mad Scientists and Other Denizens of the Late-Night Airwaves Examined and Interviewed.

FINALLY AND, OH BY THE WAY, I've listed this passport on eBay, so that it can become someone else's prized piece of ephemera and so I can buy more cat food. The auction ends on the afternoon of March 8 and also contains a couple of groovy paperback short-story collections that Zacherley lent his name to.

Also, please share any memories you have of Zacherley (or other horror hosts) in the comments section. I'd love to hear them! 

 

1949 silhouette postcards from Ocean City, N.J.

Continuing with the theme of posting about some items I came across during the sorting and decluttering of family ephemera earlier this year, here are some 1949 postcards labeled "Silhouette by Greenberg" from Ocean City, New Jersey.

I'm mostly sure I know who these folks are, with one tricky one. Clockwise from the top left, we start with the tricky one. It's either my grandmother Helen or my great-grandmother Greta. I'd lean toward it being Helen. Then comes my great-grandfather Howard, followed by Mom, who would be about 18 months old if this was created in the summer of 1949. Finally, that's Mom's brother, Charles, who is slightly older.

Greenberg was in business for a good while, as I've seen eBay listings for similar silhouette postcards from as early as 1939. It's a good bet the business was located on or near the Ocean City Boardwalk. Greenberg was far from the only outfit making silhouette postcards in the United States in the middle of the 20th century. I'm guessing some popular tourist spots had a dozen or more vendors.

Ellie McCrackin, working for the website Postcard History, wrote this interesting history of silhouettes and the Wikipedia page goes into even more depth.

Semi-related posts

• Saturday's postcard: New Jersey trolley line in 1907
• 10 postcards showing Atlantic City as you've probably never seen it
• Partial mystery photo: Three women in Atlantic City, New Jersey
• Did you enjoy your weekend down the Jersey Shore?
• Two of my great-grandmother's nieces in Atlantic City in 1939

Book cover: Ida Chittum's "Tales of Terror" (1975)

• Title: Tales of Terror
• 
  Author: Ida Chittum (1918-2002). According to her profile page on IllinoisAuthors.com, "Ida Chittum was educated through the eighth grade in a one-room schoolhouse. She was a prolific reader and advocate of literacy. Her love for all living things as well as her warm sense of humor are evident in her many published children's books." She had a talking mynah named Poo Bah and was a friend to stray animals. Her other books included A Nutty Business, Clabber Biscuits, The Empty Grave, Farmer Hoo and the Baboons, The Cat's Pajamas, The Ghost Boy of El Toro, The Hermit Boy, and The Secrets of Madam Renee. (Some of them appear to be quite rare, though, on the used market.) In an article by Mardy Fones that was published in the Oct. 1, 1978, edition of the Decatur Sunday Herald and Review, Chittum explains that she used the front of a brown envelope to rough out chapters and then stored the completed chapters inside, annotated with brightly colored corrections and notes to herself. There are a website and a Facebook page devoted to Chittum's legacy.
• Illustrator: Franz Altschuler (1923-2009)
• Book dimensions: 7.5 inches by 10.5 inches
• Provenance: My copy was previously shelved in the Edmeston Free Library in Edmeston, New York. (The library is inside a gorgeous old building.) Stamps say it was checked out various times between 1980 and 1992.
• Publisher: Rand McNally & Company.
• Series: Rand McNally published Tales of Terror alongside a few other truly spooky books for children in the mid 1970s. The other volumes include Monsters Tales and Horror Tales (both of which I have and both of which are psychedelic collections edited by Roger Elwood) and Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures.
• Publication date: 1975
• Pages: 124
• Format: Hardcover
• Original price: I can't confirm. I saw one reference to $4.95, but that seems a little low, by at least a couple dollars, for a hardcover in 1975.
• List of stories: The House the Dovers Didn't Move Into; Vision of Roses; Uncle Ned Kunkle; The Twins; The Snipe Hunt; The Yellow Cat; Giant; The Feather Reader; The Woman Who Turned to Paper; Sod Miller's Money; Print on the Window; The Haunted Well; The Special Gift; Bring Back My Teeth; The Lovers; the Cruel Girl; The Twisting Wind; and Courtland Wethers and the Pit.
• Excerpt from Ida Chittum's introduction: "These stories of the hills are taken from my childhood in the Ozark mountains, those scenic hills in the south central part of the United States that are now, for the most part, national forests and wildlife conservation areas. There, every visitor was a storyteller — a source of mystery. Having no books I read the folks who came calling of a Sunday afternoon. The hills were fertile grounds for listeners. These are accounts of a passing way of life, stories of a people who lived out their lives never seeing the outside world or expecting to, any more than one sees into heaven before dying. ... In a sense these stories are mysteries — accounts to wonder on and ponder over. They are tales that need telling before they are lost or forgotten."
• More about this book: In the 1978 Decatur Sunday Herald and Review article, Chittum adds: "We lived on a 40-acre fruit and tea farm — that's persimmons and sassafras sprouts — between St. James and Salem, Mo. When you live with people in the country as I did, you become one of them. They're different than city people. They have more time to be closer to nature in every way. ... Where we lived was five miles from any other house so anyone who came through was as welcome as the sunrise, and they had their stories to tell. ... About 50 percent of these stories I know to be true." (Chittum adds in the article that her "know to be true" stories include a personal encounter with Bigfoot.)
• Excerpt #1: "The strange part, though, was how the footprints of Enoch Schradder, a slender man, were sunk so deep in the earth all the way from the ravine into the timber, as if he were carrying a very heavy burden."
• Excerpt #2: "If Sod every changed his aging bib overalls or took a bath in the cheerful creek which tumbled past his shed, no one would have known it from walking downwind of him."
• Excerpt #3: "Folks around about considered it a marvel the way Ada learned to travel in the vast, timbered area without getting lost. They didn't guess her guide was Geoffrey, and she never said, fearing that the slender thread of joy that ran through their friendship might be broken by those who couldn't understand."
• Rating on Goodreads: 4.82 stars (out of 5). One of the highest ratings I've ever seen.
• Goodreads review: In 2020, Maria wrote: "I read this so often my elementary school librarian refused to let me check it out any more. The illustrations are excellent and greatly contribute to the mood of the book. I treasure the copy I have now."
• Rating on Amazon: 5 stars (out of 5)
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2017, Cynthia wrote: "I first read this book when I was in I think third grade. I feel in love with it instantly. It's still one of my very favorites ever."
• 
  Thoughts and memories from The Haunted Closet blog in 2008: "The beautiful, yet vaguely disturbing illustrations perfectly capture the tone of these tales of drowned children, restless ghosts, magic spells and malevolent wildlife." In 2010, one of that blog's commenters added: "When I was younger I lived in southern Illinois, not far from the Ozarks that Ida Chittum depicted. We checked Tales of Terror out of the library over and over and it stuck with me down the years. The stories were weird and eerie but had the ring of truth to them as well. Some were so sad and beautiful and others were full of dark humor. In our family we often refer to Uncle Ned Kunkel as though he were a relative. And that cover with the faceless people and the illustration that goes with the first story about the house that didn't get moved into are still some of the scariest pictures I can dream up." And in 2012 another blog commenter relayed this personal story: "Mrs. Chittum lived down the road from me, in a very tiny town in Illinois. As memory serves (again, from the mind of a very young child) she lived in an old Victorian house. How fitting! I'll have to check facts with my parents to find out if that is true or not! I remember being scared to death after a visit to her home. She told us a story (could have been from one of her books, I don't know) of the monster that would grab the uncovered feet of kids & drag them off, never to be seen again ... I was never so scared in my little life!! I couldn't peddle my bike fast enough to get home ... and to this day, I cannot sleep with my feet uncovered!" (For what it's worth, I cannot sleep with my feet uncovered, either.)
• This book's availability: In great news, a hardcover reprint is available for the very reasonable price of $22.99 on BookBaby and Amazon. One person writes on Amazon: "I had an old falling-apart copy that was the only one I could possibly afford, due to it being such a rare find, so I was very glad to see this book republished in an affordable volume." Ida Chittum would be rightfully thrilled that in 2026, these tales are not being lost or forgotten.

Saturday's postcards

That's Devo, circa 1978, in the middle bottom.

For Postcard Saturday, here are some of my dandy recent arrivals from fellow Postcrossing members. 

• Lisa, a longtime Hello Kitty fan, writes that she just moved to the Vancouver, Washington, area and enjoys "being out in nature appreciating all the wildlife and beauty," including opossums and bald eagles. 
• Tilly, who sent the postcard in the top center, recently moved from right here in Pinal County to Wisconsin and says she misses the warmth. My response: It's 91 here today, and I'm a little weary of the endless warmth we're now going to have until Halloween or later. Tilly works in the antiques business and doesn't like cold pizza.
• Júlia in Slovakia writes that she loves gardening and talking to her parrots.
• Christa in the Philippines writes: "I was very happy to read your profile, especially where you wrote about accountability & transparency. It is also something we experience (or the lack thereof) in the PH. While I did not end up in journalism, I also enjoy writing (and journaling) as a means to practice good English, and to write about interests."
• Carol, who has sent and received more than 17,000 Postcrossing cards, writes: "First, let me say that I know how important good journalists are these days. I have my favorites. I was dismayed to see that a third of the staff of The Washington Post was laid off. But Bezos hasn't been a friend of the people, anyway. My fav book reviewer, Ron Charles, was laid off so I subscribed to his Substack."
• Renee sent the amazing postcard shown in the lower left above. She writes: "Hello and greetings from Iowa. ... I'm a retired librarian, widow since 2021. ... I share my days now with Sissie my 8 y.o. cocker spaniel and build doll houses." She adds in her profile that she likes books (of course!), playing the guitar and listening to metal turned "up to 11"! 

Finally, here's a lovely illustration of King Ghidorah, that meddling three-headed dragon.   

What George Michael sang 36 years ago

What does it mean when you wake up the in middle of the night and have a song in your head that you haven't thought about in decades? How and why do the brain's electrical byways even dredge up something like that?   

That was George Michael's 1990 lament "Praying for Time" for me, two nights ago. It wasn't even part of a dream, to my knowledge. I just woke up around 3 a.m. when nature called and it was right there, rolling about:

The rich declare themselves poor ... 'Cause God's stopped keeping score

So weird. Yet so timely, perhaps? Michael's commentary was correct for its moment but also prescient about ours.

Speaking about "Praying for Time," he told The New York Times this in 1990: "It’s my way of trying to figure out why it’s so hard for people to be good to each other. I believe the problem is conditional as opposed to being something inherent in mankind. The media has affected everybody’s consciousness much more than most people will admit. Because of the media, the way the world is perceived is as a place where resources and time are running out. We’re taught that you have to grab what you can before it’s gone. It’s almost as if there isn’t time for compassion.” 

This is the year of the guilty man

Your television takes a stand

Fast forward from TV to the internet and endlessly scrolling social media.

Those who once called television a "vast wasteland" had no idea what would follow within a half-century.

Two nights ago I woke up to "Praying for Time." This morning I woke up to another unsurprising war.

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.

Book cover: "Big Freeze"

Much of the United States has been suffering through a big freeze in recent days, but it's already 80 here in the Sonoran Desert. We have gnats and dust.

• Title: Big Freeze
• Author: Bellamy Partridge (1877-1960). I was absolutely positive that I'd featured him on Papergreat before, most likely for his 1958 book on the history of auctions, Going, Going, Gone! But I was wrong. Huh.
• Dust jacket illustrator: Paul Galdone (1907-1986)
• Book design: Maurice Serle Kaplan
• Publisher: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company
• Publication date: 1948
• Pages: 236
• Format: Hardcover
• Dust jacket price: $2.75 (the equivalent of about $38 today)
• Dust jacket expert: "Bellamy Partridge's new historical novel tells a dramatic story of old New York, when the city was a small but cocky town of a mere quarter million. It was in 1832 that David Wakeman, a young engineer just out of college, passed through the city when hordes of people fleeing the cholera scourge were streaming to the country. On his way to Philadelphia — to take a job on the new aqueduct — David was appalled at the sight of the panicky fugitives, for he was convinced, as many were not, that it was the medieval system of wells which so many cities still used for their water supply that was spreading the deadly infection. When, in time, New York came round to his way of thinking, David was called back to carry to completion the work on the Croton reservoir and aqueduct."
• Dedication: "This book is dedicated to HELEN my researcher and collaborator, my wife, and still my friend"
• Excerpt from "A Word to the Reader": "In writing this novel I have had access to the century-old collection of books, manuscripts, records, documents, and diaries belonging to the American Institute. Back in the days when New York was a small town — small in the sense of having none of the utilities and modern conveniences which make city life worth the living — the Institute was a great power for progress and improvement, and for a way of life it called The American Plan. Among the ambitious aims of the Institute was a determination to get an adequate water system into New York City; for even after the population of the place had passed a quarter of a million, New Yorkers were still pumping water from their own wells and cisterns. The only plumbing they possessed was in the back yards. Almost inevitably there was a big water fight which lasted for years; but the library of the Institute was, so far as I know, the only organization which compiled a fairly complete record of these hostilities."
• About the protagonist: Of David Wakeman, Partridge writes: "The plot ... concerns the love affairs of an imaginary young engineer I have called David Wakeman. That I have ascribed to David a large part of the credit and responsibility for building the Aqueduct was a matter of necessity as well as convenience."
• Excerpt from 1948 review by Charles Lee in The New York Times: "The plumbers will hail Mr. Partridge for serving, in a sense, as their laureate in this oblique tribute to their essential place in modern society. Aqueducteers ought to drink his health in the vital liquid of their profession. And readers with a touch of old-fashioned conscience and a taste for somewhat lavendered narrative and poeticized justice will give him their huzzahs. This reader must put it on the record, however, and with full appreciation of the story's simple charms, that 'Big Freeze' is not top-shelf Partridge. Some interesting historical footnotes are worked into the text, but the story is thin and slow, and the characterization trite."
• Related reading: An in-depth November 2019 Smithsonian Magazine article by Jonathan Schifman is headlined "How New York City Found Clean Water." It details the long process that led to the building of the Croton Aqueduct. It fears Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, among many other figures, and covers some of the same ground as Partridge's novel.  

A nice gig for your mid-70s

Continuing with items I came across during the recent sorting and decluttering of family ephemera, here's a letter that my great-grandfather, Howard Horsey "Ted" Adams (1892-1985), received in August 1968 to confirm a post-retirement consultant position with The Welsbach Corporation of Philadelphia. I hope to write more about Welsbach and my great-grandfather's work there at some point (add it to the list, right?). For now, suffice to say that he was an electrical engineer and in the late 1960s Welsbach was still involved with electrical construction and infrastructure contracts.

The contract was for $6,000 and was set to begin on October 1, 1968, a few weeks after Howard's 76th birthday. It included having an office at his disposal and required that he be available to the chairman of the board for consultation on company matters. Today's equivalent of $6,000 is about $56,500, so this was a pretty lucrative gig atop my great-grandfather's retirement plan and other savings. Having specialized expertise was valued and paid well! Somehow I don't foresee anyone retaining me as a consultant for journalism or copyediting matters if and when I reach age 76. 

"With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike ..."

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issued this sharply worded three-page order today that is important to share and amplify for the historic record during this semiquincentennial year in our fractured nation. 

Biery's words are worth your time. 

Cat photo memories from 2020

In the COVID-19 summer of 2020, I tweeted this out with the caption "a Bergman film, but with cats." Someone wittily replied that it could be Purrsona. I have long since deleted my Twitter/X account, for obvious reasons. But I still have a record of this tweet because I printed it out and tucked it away inside a Roger Ebert film review book.

Titan, in the front, passed away in 2024. But Mr. Angelino (middle) and Monkey (back) are still with us as our two oldest kitty-cats. They are good boys.

Here's another photo of Monkey from that same year, when I documented all of my bookshelves in Shelfie 2020. My bookshelves have changed a good bit since then.

My Weekly Reader: "Kentucky Has a Singing Festival"

Kismet! This is a companion post to a Papergreat post from exactly nine years ago today. Nine years! Gosh, it especially seems like time flies sometimes. With regard to the June 10-14, 1940, edition of My Weekly Reader, I had previously featured the front page photo of photographer/folk festival promoter Jean Bell Thomas (1881-1982). 

Here's the entire front page of that issue, with the photo of Thomas plus the article headlined "Kentucky Has a Singing Festival." The article states that the festival is held not far from Ashland, Kentucky, "near a little log cabin" in which Thomas lives. The 1940 article indicates that the festival had been going on for 10 years. That jibes with what I read on this website, which states that the American Folk Song Festival, founded and organized by Thomas, was held from 1930 until her retirement in 1972.

The website (which seems to pull from Thomas' Wikipedia biography) further states: "The festival followed an unchanging script that Thomas said was intended to show 'authentic sequences in America's musical history.' Overall it reflected the belief of Thomas and many of her contemporaries that the speech patterns, songs, and other traditions of early British Isles settlers still survived in Appalachia." 

Fortunately, some recordings of the festival have been preserved.

My grandmother's 1981 trip to China

In 1981, the year before she took a safari trip to Africa, my grandmother Helen traveled from Wallingford, Pennsylvania, to China. My non-expert understanding is that tourism to China only began to be easily accessible to Westerners around 1978, as part of the "Reform and opening up" following the 1976 death of Mao Zedong, whose Great Leap Forward was arguably the deadliest and most disastrous policy implementation by any leader in world history.

This is a letter from Tours A La Carte that my grandmother received prior to the trip. It contains some "helpful tips" from another tourist who had recently returned from China. You can read the whole thing for yourself, but some of the highlights include encouraging anti-pollution masks, a reminder to take lots of Kleenex and a fork and knife (because some places offer only chopsticks), and a suggestion to pack granola bars to serve as snacks. 

It also has some tips on what to wear to the Great Wall of China, which my grandmother did visit, as you can see from some of these snapshots she took: