Oh, that's what a mourning dove sounds like

I've been thinking recently about my grandmother's vinyl records that featured nothing but bird songs. She had about a half-dozen of them, and would play them on the living room record player cabinet that was about the size of a refrigerator turned on its side. They were probably from the late 1960s through early 1980s. I don't remember the exact titles — we got rid of all them during the house cleanout — but they were surely like the ones pictured above, if not those exact ones.

The record formats were similar. A Very Serious Man's Voice would guide you through different bird calls and songs. So it would go something like this...

Man: The Hoary Puffleg...

Bird: Chit-chit-chit-chit.

Man: ... The Hoary Puffleg.

(The Hoary Puffleg is not actually native to North America and would not have been featured on my grandmother's records. But I didn't want to miss the opportunity to get "Hoary Puffleg" on Papergreat.)

We've been doing a lot of bird and wildlife watching during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has kept us in our homes and neighborhoods for 98% of our existence since mid-March. (And we've been documenting our observations in the "What I Know About Flower Arranging" blank book I mentioned in 2014.)

Our backyard has three bird feeders, a bird bath and a tiny picnic table for squirrels and chipmunks (and the occasional bluejay) to dine on peanuts and sunflower seeds mere inches away from the four cats. Our wildlife roster includes birds, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels and a pudgy field mouse. I make sure all the feeders are full at least once a day, sometimes twice, and the backyard has truly become a haven for all of this half-tame wildlife. Chipmunks scurried back and forth near my feet the other day as I was outside talking to Dad. The birds, especially one catbird, are slower to fly to safety each time I venture outside.

And I've been observing more of the wildlife interaction, too. The cardinal couples that are most inseparable. The bold robins. Birds the size of a salt shaker that dart in and out among larger animals with seemingly zero fear. Birds that aggressively knock seed out of the bird feeder and onto the ground below, because apparently they prefer it that way. Or they're just jerks of the bird kingdom. And doves. So many doves. I think those ground-feeding doves are getting the bulk of the food I put out, because they're always there.

But I didn't put 2 and 2 together. I recently found myself wondering about an especially common bird call I'd been hearing throughout the day. It must be some especially cool bird, I thought. It almost sounded like an owl. Nope, Joan informed me, it was just those silly doves. I guess I would have known that if I had listened more closely to my grandmother's records.

Real Heroes Wear Masks (that cover the mouth and nose)!

I love everything about this hand-drawn poster, which has been in the door of Comix Connection in York throughout the spring and early summer. (The artist's name is Nicky.) The message remains important for everyone during this still-ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. It's great to see Nadia van Dyne, Lunella Lafayette and Kamala Khan among those reaching out to comic book fans with this guidance. Baron Von Papergreat would, of course, also always properly wear a mask in public.

Further reading

• The Atlantic: "The Real Reason to Wear a Mask" by Zeynep Tufekci, Jeremy Howard and Trisha Greenhalgh
• Washington Post: "When, why and how to wear a mask during this pandemic, according to the experts" by Teddy Amenabar. This article from June 18 begins: "It appears face masks are here to stay. The New York Times surveyed 511 epidemiologists and more than half of them predicted masks will be necessary for at least the next year, if not longer."
• The Conversation: "Comics and cartoons are a powerful way to teach kids about COVID-19" by Marina Joubert

Mystery snapshot: Pavilion atop hill

This undated snapshot is just 3⅝ inches wide (which includes a quarter-inch white border, which I cropped out, all the way around). It's a moody, contrasty shot of a pavilion and some well-dressed folks at the top of a round hill. The shadows cast by the tree branches are wonderful — perhaps even slightly forboding. One might guess this is early spring.

Who are these people? What is their event? Did they know they were being photographed? I come across a lot of old photographs like this that have only a number written on the back. I'm guessing these are proof photos and the number refers to the negative, so that people could decide which photos they wanted as proper prints? In many cases, I would think the proof photo is the only one that was ever printed. (How nice it would have been, though, if they had stamped a date on the back of each proof, too.)

If you want to check out more mystery photos, this March 15 post is a good place to start. See the list at the bottom.

Great links: Homemade maps describing life during COVID-19

Irene Palko of Glasgow, Scotland, via Bloomberg CityLab

Bloomberg CityLab unveiled the results of a thoughtful and inspiring project on June 18. It's titled "How 2020 Remapped Your Worlds: Through homemade maps, readers shared perspectives and stories from a world transformed by the coronavirus pandemic" and was put together by Laura Bliss and Jessica Lee Martin.

The premise was simple but brilliant: "In April, CityLab asked readers to share homemade maps of their lives during the coronavirus pandemic. The more than 400 maps we received are so many windows into what people around the globe have experienced through this extraordinary crisis, as well as its sprawling social consequences."

I highly encourage you to scroll through CityLab's curation of some of the maps from across the world. It's quite the wonder, and also quite a historical document — one that I hope finds its way to a print format.¹

Each map is "accompanied by the words of the mapmaker, edited for clarity and flow," according to CityLab. Those words are yet another window into this time. Just a few excerpts:

• In Bolivia: "A lot has changed: We communicate more, we collaborate for food purchases and we are in solidarity with each other."
• In the Netherlands: "I’ve retreated into my own world and drawn a map of the place I go to. My life has become more humane. More relaxed. It seems to me people tend to notice each other more, greet each other more."
• In France: "The earth is not round anymore. I represented the single kilometer around my house where I can walk, run, ride my bike. Beyond this limit is the unknown. It is forbidden. I feel like I am in the Middle Ages."

Enough of the excerpts. Please take some time to browse the CityLab collection, and perhaps think about what your own map of 2020 might look like.

Footnote
1. Tweet earlier today from Laura Bliss: "We're working on it :)"

Old postcard of Twin Oaks in Natchez, Mississippi

The only thing that piques my interest in this staid and stuffy bedroom is the blanket at the foot of the bed. This location is Twin Oaks Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi — a city named after Indigenous peoples who were violently erased from the region and then built up with the back-breaking labor of Black slaves.

Here is the info from the back of the undated postcard, which is also shown below:

• A Deep South Card
• Published by Deep South Specialities Inc. of Jackson, Mississippi
• DS-674
• Color photo by Dusty Rhodes (probably not the wrestler)
• Mirro-Krome Card by H.S. Crocker Co. of San Francisco

The caption states: "Built in 1812 on Spanish land grant. Was occupied by Federal troops during the War between the States. Home of Dr. and Mrs. Homer A. Whittington. Twin Oaks is shown by Pilgrimage Garden Club."

The phrasing in that short caption is significant. Within the Confederacy, the U.S. Army were referred to as "federal troops." And, per Wikipedia, the nomenclature War Between the States "was rarely used during the war but became prevalent afterward among proponents of the 'Lost Cause' interpretation of the war." Furthermore, again per the concise and helpful explanations on Wikipedia, "the Lost Cause of the Confederacy ... is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology that holds that the cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. The ideology endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the war as a struggle primarily to save the Southern way of life, or to defend 'states' rights' such as the right to secede from the Union, in the face of overwhelming 'Northern aggression.'" The Lost Cause ideology served to undergird nearly a century of Jim Crow laws that left Black Americans impoverished and incredibly disadvantaged in nearly every aspect of American life and society. "Nostalgia" for the Lost Cause around the time of World War I led to the erection of many of the Confederate monuments that are thankfully and finally coming down this summer.

Homer Alexander Whittington died in August 1996 at age 90. He had served as a doctor in Natchez for 56 years, according to his obituary in the August 16, 1996, edition of the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi. Further, Dr. Whittington was an Episcopalian and a member of many clubs and lodges.

Twin Oaks Plantation later came to be owned by popular chef Regina Charboneau, who turned it into a bed and breakfast and cooking school. The property is now for sale this summer — the original circa 1830 (not 1812) house and a six-bedroom guest house — for $889,000 (as of May 2). Full details and a set of lovely professional photographs are available at this Realtor link.

Truly misleading book cover: "Witches' Sabbath"

So, let's get some of the confusing parts out of the way first. For reasons I cannot fathom, this gothic romance novel, Witches' Sabbath, was alternately marketed as a horror novel with this Paperback Library edition. It is not a horror novel. The last line of the 1962 Kirkus review makes that quite clear: "A little overwrought, but a patently potent, romantic entertainment." We can further see that it was originally meant to be marketed as a romance (and was, in fact, award-winning within that genre) via these two other covers.

And, regarding the author: This cover states that it's "Charity Blackstock writing as Paula Allardyce." Those are both pseudonyms, actually, so it's kind of weird to have one pen name writing as another pen name (and disclosing it as such). The actual author was Ursula Torday, whose name's letters could have been reworked to create Saturday Lour, which would have been yet another good pen name.

Now, on to the rundown...

• Title: Witches' Sabbath
• Author, per cover: "Charity Blackstock writing as Paula Allardyce"
• Author: Ursula Torday (1912-1997)
• Cover blurb: A haunting mystery of love and evil "filled with real horror, suspense, eeriness." ⁠— San Francisco Chronicle
• Additional cover text: A Black Magic Novel of Terror
• Publisher: Paperback Library (52-527)
• Number on spine: 7 (presumably its number within the Black Magic Novels of Terror)
• Cover price: 50 cents
• Year: First printing, August 1967 (originally published in 1961)
• Pages: 174
• Format: Paperback
• First sentence: It was a magnificent mid-June day of the best summer of the century when Tamar Brown arrived at Lanchester, the station for Meadway Bois.
• What's Meadway Bois? The tiny (and fictitious) English village at the center of this tale. It's a good village name.
• Last sentence: Mr. Kingham knocked purposefully on Mrs. Leigh's door.
• Random sentence from the middle #1: Abigail's cottage had been built in Elizabethan times; Tamar, for all she was small, had to stoop to avoid knocking her head on the low beams.
• Random sentence from the middle #2: Humphrey was not at his best in moments of crisis.
• Humphrey Sloane mansplaining things to Tamar: "You Lunnon ladies are terrible iggerant. It's a witch bottle, with the face of a bearded gent on the front of it. You put bits of your enemy in it — nail-clippings and suchlike — and boil it up. Very tasty. Abigail did that for Ann Leigh who began to spit pins afterwards, which must have been a little trying. She certainly had it in for her, what with killing her baby and all."
• Does Tamar end up with Humphrey? No. She ends up with someone named William, who's not much better.
• Hey, that was a spoiler! Sorry. If you're really sore, I'll mail you some nail-clippings and you can make a Papergreat witch bottle to get revenge.
• Internet review #1: On Goodreads, Charlotte wrote this in 2019: "I was expecting a thrilling Pagan mystery, potentially delving into past timelines and the age of suspicion and witchcraft. I was sadly disappointed. ... The misogyny of Tamar's relationship was absolutely staggering; I couldn't fall in love with her choice of man as I was expected to, as I couldn't see him as anything more than an emotionally stunted brute."
• Internet review #2: On Picterio, @cobwebs_and_creepers wrote this circa 2017: "This book is... not so great. Interesting enough storyline though, about lovely redhead Tamar who is writing a book about Abagail [sic], the legendary witch of tiny village Meadway Bois. Surprise! ⁠— Tamar bears an uncanny resemblance to the long-dead beauty."
• About the Black Magic Novels of Terror: Apparently there were nine titles total, all published in 1967 or 1968. The other eight were The Witch-Baiter and The Haunted Dancers, edited by Charles Birkin; The Torturer, Scream and Scream Again, and The Darkest Night, by Peter Saxon; Drums of the Dark Gods by W.A. Ballinger; The Dead Riders by Elliott O'Donnell; and The Black Art by Rollo Ahmed.
• Rollo Ahmed sounds like a pen name: Yes, but it's not. Abdul Said "Rollo" Ahmed was an Egyptian-born Black man who studied and wrote about the occult and remains a bit of a history mystery.

The very grave back cover

My great-grandfather's personalized playing cards

These days, you can get a personalized deck of playing cards for, what, about $15? A little less? Print-on-demand services make it easy peasy.

But I'm guessing that, in the middle of the 20th century, personalized cards were a bit more of a luxury item. My great-grandfather, Howard Horsey Adams (1892-1985) had several decks, all like this one. I kept one of them when we cleaned out the house on Oak Crest Lane. They have a bit of Art Deco flair, with his initials HHA becoming nearly symmetrical.

I have no idea who the manufacturer might have been. Or why I'm keeping them at this point. I play cards approximately twice a decade. I have this deck and the cultural awareness playing cards. I should definitely stop there.

A dramatically stained introduction to the MicroLeague Baseball posts

The years and spills have not been kind to this piece of my personal ephemera from the late 1980s. It's a dot matrix printout of a boxscore from a game of MicroLeague Baseball on the Commodore 64.

As you can see through the stains, this was a historic (imaginary) moment, because Roger Clemens of my Wallingford Smashers pitched a perfect game against the famed 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers.

MicroLeague Baseball was the computer game I played the most from 1987 to 1990. It's amazing how far electronic/computer baseball games came in less than a decade. I had 1979's Epoch Digit-Com 9 Baseball (below, left), which was far less common than Mattel's smaller handheld electronic game. The Epoch game featured a variety of pitches and the ability to play one-player or two-player games. And it had very distinctive audio, which I was reminded of in this YouTube video. In the first half of the 1980s, I also played a lot of Intellivision's Major League Baseball and the tabletop Statis Pro Baseball, which involved endlessly sorting piles of player cards and action cards and consulting many different outcome charts, just like J. Henry Waugh.

Then MicroLeague Baseball came along. It was released in 1984, but I didn't buy it until 1986 or early 1987. It was a strategy game. You didn't need to be great with a joystick or mash a button. Outcomes, much like Statis Pro Baseball, were determined by statistical probabilities based on players' abilities. And it was easy to simulate whatever you wanted, across all of baseball history. The 1927 New York Yankees could face the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, for example. (I staged many eight-team bracketed tournaments, and the 1975 Reds almost always came out on top.)

Then it got really fun with a MicroLeague Baseball accessory, the General Manager-Owner Disk. (My friend Matt and I called it the Jam-Owner Disk.) It allowed you to create your own teams and players and edit together rosters using players from across baseball history. And thus the Wallingford Smashers were born. The Smashers were a shameless powerhouse collection of baseball's best players from the mid 1980s. As you can see above, the Smashers' lineup for this historic game featured:

CF Kirby Puckett (RIP, 2006)
SS Tony Fernandez (RIP, 2020)
3B Wade Boggs
1B Don Mattingly
CF Rickey Henderson (RIP, 2024)
2B Danny Tartabull
LF Ruben Sierra
C Ron Hassey

A couple of wonky notes: Matt and I went strictly by the information on games played by position published weekly in USA Today, back when that was the bible for baseball statistics. If you played a single game at a position, you became eligible to play that position in MicroLeague Baseball. Tartabull played 31 games at second base for the 1986 Seattle Mariners. So that, combined with his powerful bat, earned him the job of second baseman for the Smashers.¹ Also, you might be wondering, Ron Hassey?!? When there were so many other great catchers of this era? But Hassey, for those who remember, had very good OPS seasons in 1985 and 1986, making him extremely valuable within the statistics-driven MicroLeague Baseball engine. And the game didn't care if the player had a small sample size of at-bats. So, two great MicroLeague players during this time were 1986 Jeff Stone and 1987 Sam Horn. Horn was especially legendary for his (unrealized) potential, and there is now a Boston Red Sox fan website named after him.

It is also clear that, in setting the lineups for this game, I gave Clemens some extra help toward his perfecto by removing the 1963 Dodgers' three best hitters — Frank Howard, Tommy Davis and Ron Fairly — from the starting lineup. That wasn't very sporting of me. But a perfect game is still a perfect game. The boxscore is not, however, perfect. Was the final score 4-0, 5-0 or 6-0? Sadly, there is evidence for all three of those possibilities.

More on MicroLeague Baseball to come!

Darkest Phillies Timeline Footnote
1. A decade later, the joke was us Philadelphia Phillies fans. Tartabull signed a $2 million contract to bat cleanup for the 1997 Phillies and promptly went 0-for-7 before suffering a season-ending foot injury.