Easter rock and memories

This doesn't quite count as ephemera, because it doesn't fit well into an envelope. It's a 3½-inch-wide painted rock that was given to me as an Easter gift 45 years ago, in 1976. I'm not 100% sure anymore who it was from. But somehow it's stuck with me over the years, probably because it just sat in a drawer and then followed me around the country to different houses. It's hard to throw away a rock that has your name on it.

Painted rocks are a bigger thing now, probably bigger than in the 1970s. Folks put them in the own yards. Or they secretly gift them to other people's yards, mailboxes and front porches. Or they leave them along trails or at Little Free Libraries, as treasures to be discovered. In Montoursville, painted rocks made for a groovy school project. They're something that can be forever. Rocks stand the test of time; the opposite of ephemera. 

I'm not much of a Easter person. Today is for Christians. My memories of this holiday probably aren't much different than those of some others in Generation X. We used PAAS, crayons and vinegar to turn our hard-boiled eggs into masterpieces. Then we got up early on Sunday to check out our "Easter Bunny" baskets, the centerpiece of which was usually a hollow chocolate bunny. (There was also a lot of environmentally unfriendly plastic grass in those baskets in our day; that's one thing that's gotten better.) We searched the house for both the real eggs that we colored and plastic eggs filled with more candy. If we happened to miss a real egg, the smell would tell us our mistake a few days later. And if we happened to miss a plastic egg, it might be weeks or months before we happily stumbled upon it.

Later, Easter meant family brunches and suppers — at home, at a grandparent's house or at a restaurant. It's a nice rite of spring, bringing family together at a moment when the grip of winter has usually given way to warmth and the first blossoms. It's something to get cleaned up real nice for.

Now, Easter is a time of year when I post about holiday-themed vintage postcards and we can get nice seasonal candy, like Whoppers Robin Eggs and Zitner's Peanut Butter Eggs.

Book cover: "Sorry to Be So Cheerful"

• Title: Sorry to Be So Cheerful
• Cover subtitle: "Adventures of a true drab blonde"
• Author: Hildegarde Dolson (1908–1981)
• Cover and interior illustrations: Paul Galdone (1907-1986)
• Dust jacket excerpt: "How to be muddled though single" might be a suitable subtitle for this collection of light satirical pieces. For in these deft and witty pages Miss Dolson skips joyously over the problems of the embryonic copywriter, a visit to a cactus-studded Arizona ranch, a black eye in Paris, a visit to an astral masseuse, a boating expedition in Central Park, and her first flying lesson. ... These bizarre escapades, now gathered for the first time into book form, range in mood from merry to madcap, and offer hours of diverting reading for the young in heart.
• Publisher: Random House
• Dust jacket price: $3.50
• Year: 1955
• Pages: 207
• Format: Hardcover 
• Dedication: For Jan and Winslow Dolson with love
• Excerpt from "Author's Warning!": These first-person pieces were written over a period of twenty years, and the author implores readers to take the book piecemeal — say, a piece occasionally after meals — to avoid indigestion, or an acute case of the Evil I.
• Some chapter/essay titles: Proletariat with Duncan Phyfe Legs, Beast of Sea, Spilling Tea with Emily Post, Village Genius, I'm Saving My Hair for a Second-Hand Car, Let Me Fib Like a Lady, With All My Unworldly Goods.
• Best chapter/essay title: "Yoo-Hoo, Satan, I'm Idle"
• Excerpt #1: As a writer, I'm procrastinating and moody, with the added disadvantage that I have to think, or at least some editors expect me to think, which is equally debilitating.
• Excerpt #2: It's worse when my friends discover I'm actually seeing a man they don't know about.
• Excerpt #3: John Wilkes Booth had come to western Pennsylvania to prospect for oil, the year before he shot Mr. Lincoln, and had lived eight months in a boarding-house on the site of what is now the Elks Club parking lot.
• Goodreads review excerpt: In 2014, Austen to Zafón wrote of Sorry to Be So Cheerful: "As a 10-year-old, I would read anything I could get my hands on. Living with my grandfather, I discovered one shelf of dusty, forgotten books in one of the bedrooms. ... As a 5-grader in San Diego, I had no context for this book of humorous essays by a young woman journalist in the 1940s. There was something about it though that I loved because I read it several times and I still remember some of the stories. One was about Duncan Phyfe chairs. I had no idea what those were. ... Of course, I'm not making it sound funny, but it was. I should pull it out and read it again, now that have have almost 40 more years of perspective behind me."
• More about the author: This is straight from the book: 

Miss Dolson says, "I'm a self-made spinster who crows too much about it, especially when I get paid by the word. I also paint, but so far no fool has turned up to pay me for that." She came to New York from Franklin, Pennsylvania, in 1929 on the day known as Black Thursday (more because of the stock market crash than because of her arrival).

Her other books include: How About a Man, We Shook the Family Tree, The Husband Who Ran Away, Guess Whose Hair I'm Wearing, Heat Lightning and Please Omit Funeral.

Wikipedia notes that, about a decade after the publication of Sorry to Be So Cheerful, Hildegarde "met mystery writer Richard Lockridge, and Lockridge quickly decided he wanted to marry her. Dolson loved her Greenwich Village apartment, and Mr. Lockridge lived in the country. He had two beloved Siamese cats, and she preferred dogs. Despite the obstacles, within a few months of their first meeting Lockridge and Miss Dolson married in May 1965. Lockridge would refer to Hildegarde as either Hildy, or The Lady." 

Of course, our marital status does not define us. And the phrasing "Lockridge quickly decided he wanted to marry her" is problematic, at best, when it comes to what should be a mutual decision on marriage. Richard Lockridge wrote a whole book about their swift courtship (which came after his first wife, Frances, died in 1963), titled One Lady, Two Cats. I think I'd much rather read Hildegarde's perspective on it. 

• Final note: I'm probably one of the few people who has two books by Hildegarde Dolson on their shelves. The other is The Great Oildorado, which is subtitled "The gaudy and turbulent years of the first oil rush: Pennsylvania, 1859-1880." It can be seen in last year's Shelfie #5. I think I might also want to track down her autobiographical book, We Shook the Family Tree, some day.

Something that's a bit more amusing

Management apologizes for the academic stuffiness of the previous post. Here's a clipping that's a bit more fun. It's about the Loch Ness monster, from the October 12, 1941, edition of The Charlotte Observer.

Another peek at the past predicting tomorrow

Here's another captivating postcard from the 1976 "World of Tomorrow" postcard set that was published in the Soviet Union. Floating head and giant eyebrows aside, what did the young adults of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics really think the future would be like in 1976? That year, in the middle of the Leonid Brezhnev era, they were watching their CSKA Moscow ice hockey team lose a tension-filled "goodwill" game against the Philadelphia Flyers. Some were reading the Chronicle of Current Events samizdat publications on the sly. They were listening to Sir Cliff Richard play a dozen concerts "behind the Iron Curtain" across the Soviet Union. The standard of living in the Soviet Union that year was generally thought to be about one-third of the American level and slightly less than half of the level in France and West Germany. So huge floating heads would certainly have seemed farfetched.

Those young adults of 1976 are in their mid to late 60s now. Did some ever believe they'd see a day when they'd live in a nation called Russia, instead of the Soviet Union? (And yet find themselves under the oppressive rule of Vladimir Putin.) Other former citizens of the USSR found themselves in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia and other "new" republics — not that I'm any kind of expert on the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Today, wherever they are, they find themselves in a world of big-screen televisions (perhaps as large as the sci-fi screen on this postcard), worldwide internet, VKontakte and Instagram, ongoing military interventions, Pussy Riot, figure skaters Anna Shcherbakova and Evgeni Semenenko, and much more.

And, like the rest of us, they have seen life derailed by COVID-19 for the past year. The pandemic has affected them in different ways, though. The Russian people are among the most hesistant in the world to take or trust COVID-19 vaccines. (Not that the United States doesn't have its own challenges in that regard.) That distrust is seemingly rooted in years of being fed lies by the government and frustration with an oft-ineffective state health care system. It doesn't put them in a good spot, at this moment, to successfully navigate this health crisis. The same goes for many of the former Soviet republics.

All in all, if you had told the 22-year-olds of Moscow or Minsk in 1976 what 2020 and 2021 would look like, I'm not sure how cheery they would have been about the whole deal. They might have preferred the big scary eyebrows.

How I got to Fuzzy Wuzzy

Another week, and not enough ephemera blogging. With this nifty illustration from a mid-20th century label for Maine-based Fuzzy Wuzzy brand Cat Food (packed by Sherman Denbow Fisheries), I'll be finishing February with just five posts. I blame Google.

Seriously, I blame Google. In the time I've had online this weekend, I've had an epic run of web-surfing. I've followed the bouncing links through Amtrak itineraries; troubled Highway 1 at Big Sur; the Xixax film forums; Joel Coen's upcoming The Tragedy of Macbeth with Denzel Washington (plus other upcoming films); latest news from Indian Country Today; the War of the Roses; the Enchanted Booklet Instagram page; protective cases for iPhones; the Unspooled podcast Facebook community; the films and documentaries of Werner Herzog;  Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma; Philadelphia Phillies spring training updates; curve-billed thrashers; Arkham House books; Sound of Metal and especially Paul Raci's role in the film; Cave of Forgotten Dreams; The Ninth Configuration; gila monsters and the likelihood of me being killed by one in Arizona; The Green Fog; back to Werner Herzog; Eszter Balint; Sylvain Chomet (partially in connection with Jacques Tati); Philippe Petit; Ross McElwee; documentaries about Indigenous peoples of the Americas; the latest news about the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine; kaiju face masks; a Twitter thread about Cop Rock recommended by a former Daily Collegian colleague; the artwork of Timothy Ide; Glastonbury; psychogeography; today's weather here in Florence (a "chilly" high of just 60); the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland; author Lauret Savoy; the history of role-playing games; the pandemic and American sports; the uninhabitability of Mars; the person on my neighborhood community Facebook page who's unhappy about barking dogs; and ... Fuzzy Wuzzy brand cat food.

Phew.

Now I'm winded. I think I'll go for a walk.

Here's that full Fuzzy Wuzzy label, for posterity:

Famed Americus Hotel smorgasbord in Allentown, Pennsylvania

These two old postcards feature the "award-winning" Pennsylvania Dutch style smorgasbord at the Americus Hotel, located at Sixth and Hamilton streets in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Looking at the images more closely, you can see a gelatin mold, fruits and vegetables, what appears to be a dessert table, pies and pastries, and a whole lot of lobster tails. 

Dad remembers going to this buffet as a kid. He writes:

"In the late 50s and early 60s, Bambi and Pappy would take us to the Americus Hotel on Sundays for their smorgasbord. That's where I got introduced to lobster. We would spend 2 hours plus making a five-course meal from the smorgasbord. Lobster then all sorts of fancy desserts. Mom and Dad weren't rich, but back then that may be have $30 total. I think that hotel is still there today."

Indeed, the historic Americus Hotel is set to reopen this spring after a multimillion-dollar makeover, according to The Morning Call (subscription required, as journalism is not free); the reopening was supposed to be sooner but, like many things, it has been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discovering Robert Dale Owen

Just for fun — I'm a barrel of laughs at social gatherings — I went to Newspapers.com to find its oldest clipping that references my new town of Florence, Arizona. It came at the bottom of Page 1 of the August 21, 1869, edition of The Weekly Arizona Miner of Prescott, Arizona, and you can see it in its entirety above.

And who is this progressive-sounding Robert Dale Owen that L. Anthony of Florence writes of? Owen is a political figure about whom I was not aware, and a fascinating one at that.

Per Wikipedia, Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877) "was a Scottish-born Welsh social reformer who immigrated to the United States in 1825." After becoming a U.S. citzen, he became involved in Indiana state politics and later represented Indiana in the U.S. House of Representatives for four years. His legacy includes:

• He helped oversee the peaceful commune of New Harmony, Indiana, which was first settled in 1814 by members of the Harmony Society who had come west from Harmony, Pennsylvania. 
• He was a strong advocate for women's rights, laying the groundwork for provisions in the Indiana state constitution related to women's property rights, voting rights and freedom in divorce. (Some of this was done in conjunction with Sarah T. Bolton.)
• In 1862, he wrote a series of letters "that favored the abolition of slavery and supported general emancipation, as well as a suggestion that the federal government should provide assistance to freedmen."
• As an Indiana state legislator, he helped build the framework for a taxpayer-supported system of free public schools.
• In Congress, he introduced the bill to establish the Smithsonian Institution.
• He wrote a book titled The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next. He was a Spiritualist who raised questions about the authenticity of the Bible.

Owen is one of the peripheral figures in Garrett Epps' book Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America. When I looked this book up, I discovered I had already marked it on Goodreads as something to check out. The Washington Post's 2006 review mentions Owen and his involvement with the 14th Amendment.

Sunday night stream of consciousness from Saguaro-vania

Superior, Arizona. About 30 minutes northeast of our new home. (Photo by me) 

We arrived at our new home in Florence, Arizona, last week after a 3½-day drive that took us through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and then into Arizona. That dash across the country in the Honda Civic has already become somewhat of a blur in my mind. I have no recollection of anything in Ohio, possibly because we were enjoying a Jim Steinman playlist. We had dinner and spent a night in Indiana. We had a sunny morning and nice drive in Illinois. In Missouri, the roads around St. Louis were the worst of the trip. As we continued through Missouri, we had hundreds of miles of billboards touting either caverns or raunchy roadside attractions. Oklahoma was flat and lovely and we could drive very fast on the toll roads. But after a night in Oklahoma, we found ourselves delayed the next morning by freezing rain in Oklahoma and Texas — part of a multiday Deep South winter weather system that has now led to a Federal Emergency Declaration for Texas. 

After we made it through that, the weather warmed up greatly in western Texas. We made a short pit stop in Vega, Texas, for Munzees and to snap some pictures that I'll feature in a future post. In the flat, hot nothingness of New Mexico, we made stops in Route 66 favorite Tucumcari, which I'd like to visit again someday, and Clines Corners, which has a Rest Stop Extraordinaire but little else of note. As darkness fell in New Mexico on the third day of driving, we had a slow, winding driving through the El Malpais National Conservation Area before crossing into Arizona. Our final night on the road was spent in Show Low, Arizona, where there was snow on the ground! We passed many "Elk Crossing" signs, but saw no elk. 

On our final morning of driving, between Show Low and Globe, we traversed the Salt River Canyon, which was simultaneously one of the most breathtaking and white-knuckle drives of my life. Once was enough. At least it was in broad daylight and the roads were excellent.

The moving van is supposed to arrive here in Florence tomorrow. Inside, there will be many boxes of books, old photos, postcards and ephemera. In a way, it will be like starting the Papergreat exploration/excavation all over again, with fresh eyes. That seems both exciting and daunting. I want to this blog to be fun, not stressful or something that feels like an obligation. So I hope the time and inspiration strike me in sufficient measure in the coming weeks and months, as I also take time to adjust to life in the Western U.S. 

My great-grandparents, Greta Miriam Chandler Adams (1894-1988) and Howard Horsey Adams (1892-1985) were in their mid to late 50s when they moved into their oft-mentioned house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, circa 1951. (Mental note: Get that exact date and put it in a post.) That ended up being a house crammed with decades of family history. To me, it just seemed like they always lived there; and I got to be the one to clean it out in the 2010s. 

Being age 50, it kind of feels late to be starting over in a blank slate of a house and a blank slate of a community, but I'm years younger than Greta and Howard were when they moved to Oak Crest Lane. There's plenty of time for seeding this desert dwelling with memories and ephemera.

Soon, the books in this room will outnumber the cats. We hope.