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.