Restoring telephone service after Hurricane Hazel in 1954

As Hurricane Irene bears down on the East Coast this weekend, I dug up this 46-page, magazine-style report that was published by the The Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania¹ and The Diamond State Telephone Company² 57 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Hazel.

Here's the Wikipedia summary of Hazel:

Hurricane Hazel was the deadliest and costliest hurricane of the 1954 Atlantic hurricane season. The storm killed as many as 1,000 people in Haiti before striking the United States near the border between North and South Carolina, as a Category 4 hurricane. After causing 95 fatalities in the US, Hazel struck Canada as an extratropical storm, raising the death toll by 81 people, mostly in Toronto.

One thing I find interesting about this killer storm is that it struck in mid-October. I don't think many people realize that a significant hurricane can strike that "late" in the Atlantic hurricane season. (If this ends up being an active season in the Atlantic, Irene might be just the start. Shudder.)

The report has a map detailing the path of Hazel through Pennsylvania that October:

The text with that map states: "Lashing out with 100-mile winds at her baleful eye, along a path between Carlisle and Lewistown, blasting forest giants down a 200-mile corridor, ravaging with enormous damage Philadelphia's famous Main Line, grounding power and telephone wires in fantastic and perilous tangles, brushing against an east-bound cold front to deluge the Pittsburgh area with 3.56 inches of water and to flood rivers and creeks -- Hazel was one of the most ruinous storms in the history of Bell of Pennsylvania and Diamond State."

The report states that almost 75 percent of the 127,335 telephones that were knocked out by Hazel in Pennsylvania and Delaware had service restored within 48 hours. (Most phone lines were knocked down by falling trees.)

Here are two additional photos from the report, along with their captions:

Above: HURRICANE HARRIED. Hank Fritz (below), Cable Splicer, and Bud Butler, Helper, both of Main Line District, both veterans of 12 days in New England with Hurricane Edna, put their experience to work in their home state, as they repair Hazel damage.

Above: GETTING THE PICTURE. District report center at Wilkes-Barre, one of six in Central Area, feeds information to area report center in Harrisburg. Pictured in Operation Hazel, Nancy Miller, General Clerk; Ralph Bigelow, Supervising Field Engineer; Barbara Puchalsky and Barbara Kompinski, Clerks; Elizabeth Hebert, Confidential Stenographer; Marie Trudnak, Senior Clerk; Theresa Partika, Chief Draftswoman; and Sammy Viccica, Installation Foreman.

Footnotes
1. The Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania is now known as Verizon Pennsylvania.
2. The Diamond State Telephone Company is now known as Verizon Delaware.

Keeping score at the 1982 Little League World Series

As the 65th annual Little League World Series continues this week in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and huge buzz¹ continues to surround the Keystone Little League team from Clinton County, I am reminded of the Little League World Series games our family attended in the early 1980s when we were living in nearby Montoursville.

We made it to multiple World Series games in 1981 and 1982 at Howard J. Lamade Stadium. My favorite part, as a 10- and 11-year-old, was how the stadium became a melting pot for baseball players and fans from all over the world -- Europe, Asia, South America, Canada...

The Little League World Series was also where I made my first foray into learning how to keep score in baseball -- a skill that would come in handy during my later career in sports journalism.

One of my first scorekeeping efforts came at the Little League World Series championship game on August 28, 1982, when Kirkland, Washington, defeated Chiayi, Taiwan, 6-0. I sat with thousands of others on the outfield hill at the stadium as Cody Webster (pictured at the top of today's post), Mark Swain and Mark Peterson helped lead Kirkland to the title-game victory, which snapped Taiwan's run of five straight Little League World Series crowns.²

In retrospect, I'd say my scorekeeping skills as an 11-year-old were OK. My first mistake was clearly using a pen instead of a pencil, given that mistakes were inevitable. Also, I got a nice assist from my dad on the Taiwanese names on that side of the scorecard.

This prepared me well for my later professional coverage of the South Penn League, Adams County Little League tournaments, high school baseball and softball in southcentral Pennsylvania, and a couple Baltimore Orioles games.

Here, for posterity, is my full scoresheet from the 1982 Kirkland-Taiwan game. Below that is the Kirkland team picture that was included as part of a four-page program insert on the eight teams in that year's tournament.³

Footnotes
1. Check out this great blog entry on Keystone Little League by York Daily Record/Sunday News business editor Cathy Hirko on The Southpaw.
2. ESPN produced a "30 for 30" documentary on the Kirkland Little League team's championship and its aftermath. I haven't seen it, but this New York Daily News article gives it a mixed review.
3. Fun tidbit: The Latin American representative in 1982 was Coquivacoa Little League of Maracaibo, Venezuela, which included future major-leaguer Wilson Álvarez.

Requiem for a 129-year-old encyclopedia volume

I'm a sucker for an old book that seems to be beyond help or hope. Earlier this year, our family was strolling through the Market & Penn Street Farmers' Market¹ in York, visiting old friends and shopping for vegetables.

We came across a shelf full of free used magazines, most of which were 5 to 15 years old. Sitting on the bottom shelf, sticking out like a sore thumb, was a lone, warped volume of an 1882 encyclopedia set:

VOL. XIV
STRANGULATION
VEGETABLE

Clearly, this book couldn't be left behind any longer. It came as absolutely no surprise to my wife that I snapped up the battered book and asked her for a quarter to drop into the styrofoam cup labeled "Donations."²

The book is in bad shape. The back cover is warped and doesn't lay flat; the spine is half-detached from the binding; and two pages, including the title page, are fully separated from the binding.

But it's still a book.

It's 800+ pages are just one volume in a larger compendium -- published in America by S.W. Green's Son from the Edinburgh and London edition of Chambers's Encyclopædia -- of Western civilization's knowledge in the late 19th century.

Some of the contents:

SUHL, a t. of Prussia, province of Saxony, and government of Erfurt, is situated on a small stream, called the Lauter, in a romantic valley on the s.w. side of the Thuringian forest, 32 m. s.s.w. of Erfurt. The Suhl, which in the Sorb-Wendish dialect means salt, is probably derived from the salt springs, formerly much worked. Mining is extensively carried on in the neighborhood, and has been so for centuries. The principal manufactures are iron and steel wares, chemical preparations, paper, and leather. Suhl, celebrated in the days of chivalry as the "arsenal of Germany," still maintains its ancient reputation as manufactory of arms. Pop. '75 10,721. Its history is very interesting; see Werther's Sieben Bücher der Chronik der Stadt Suhl (1847).

TORPEDO. During the war between Great Britain and the United States in 1812-14, this name was applied to certain mysterious boats invented by Fulton and other Americans for the purpose of navigating beneath the surface of the water, and injuring the the bottoms of hostile vessels. In those days of hand-to-hand naval war, these designs (which, by the way, were failures) were looked upon as little less than diabolical. The progress of destructive weapons during half a [century] has removed this aversion.

TOTEM. The ruder races of men are found divided into tribes, each of which is usually named after some animal, vegetable, or thing which is an object of veneration or worship to the tribe.³ This animal, vegetable or thing is the totem or god of the tribe. ... Numerous tribes with totems exist in America, in Australia, the South Pacific islands, and in central Asia; and there are some reasons for thinking that such tribes were once numerous even in Europe among races belonging to what is called the Indo-European division of the human family.⁴

VAMPIRE (Ger. vampyr), called also by the Servians vukodlak, and by the Wallachians murony, is, according to the popular belief of the Slavonic, Romanic, and Greek population of the Lower Danube and the Thessalian peninsula, a blood-sucking ghost.⁵ In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, beings of a similar nature existed - the Lamias, beautiful phantom women who, by all sorts of voluptuous delusions, allured youths to them in order to feast on their fresh, young, and pure blood and flesh. And among Greek Christians there is a belief that the bodies of those who have died in excommunication are kept by the devil in a kind of life; that they go forth from their graves by night and suddenly destroy other men, and also by other means procure food, and thus keep themselves in good condition. They are called Burkolakkä, or Tympanitä; and the only way of escaping from their molestation is by digging up their unwashed corpses and burning them, after the removal of the excommunication.

Sweet dreams!

Footnotes
1. Established 1866.
2. I also snagged a 1958 issue of the religious magazine Horizons and two 1970s issues of The Workbasket. Score!
3. Wow.
4. Wow again.
5. This encyclopedia was published in 1882 -- 15 years before the publication of Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

Happy 125th birthday, Ruth Manning-Sanders

On this date 125 years ago -- August 21, 1886 -- Ruth Vernon Manning was born to John Edmondson Manning and Emma Manning (nee Brock) in Swansea, Wales. Ruth, the youngest of the three Manning girls, grew up to marry artist George Sanders, become Ruth Manning-Sanders and create a rich literary legacy of more than 90 books (and hundreds of retold folk and fairy tales) during the 102 years of her life.¹

Happy birthday, Ruth!

While no book has ever been written about Ruth Manning-Sanders, many have written independently about her contributions to children's literature and folklore, the outstanding quality of her work and her legacy.

So for her birthday today, here is some commentary and praise about Manning-Sanders that I have gathered, interspersed with some photos of the many Manning-Sanders volumes that I am proud and fortunate to have sitting on my bookshelves.

Judith Ridge: "a fantastically eccentric and effective way with language"

Judith Ridge has mentioned Manning-Sanders several times in her blog entries on Misrule, the home of Australian children's books online.

In the June 29, 2010, post "Old Favorites, New Audience," Ridge discusses reading Manning-Sanders stories to a group of contemporary young children:

I decided, though, to read them a story that has stayed with me — dare I say, haunted me! — for more than thirty years. She's perhaps not all that well known or remembered these days, but Ruth Manning-Sanders was one of the most popular authors among my friends. I remember whenever we'd go to the Auburn Library, we'd go straight to the M shelves to borrow (and re-borrow) one of her wonderful collections of folk tales.² I loved A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales, A Book of Princes and Princesses — I love all of them, but I especially loved A Book of Ghosts and Goblins and in that book, I most especially loved the story "Golden Hair". ... So I read "Golden Hair" to the kids at Oxley Park and I can tell you — this ghost story has not lost a shred of its power to enthrall. And that actually doesn't surprise me. Manning-Sanders was an extraordinary writer, with a fantastically eccentric and effective way with language*.³ It was as much the power of her language as it was her stories that captured our imagination as children — and the children in that classroom at Oxley Park, far from Wales and the west country of England where she lived and worked her days.

Ridge also writes about Manning-Sanders in the blog entries "How Diana Wynne Jones changed my life (In Memoriam)" and "Lucy Mangan's Biblio-Attachments."

I strongly recommend that you check out her website and blog.

TimT: "She comes across as an affectionate aunt"

On the Will Type For Food blog, TimT wrote about Manning-Sanders in the March 29, 2009, post "Ruth Manning-Sanders, revisited." Here's an excerpt:

I'm currently reading Folk and Fairy Tales, as retold by Ruth Manning-Sanders. Right through infants, primary and high school I can remember reading books of fairy tales retold by her: she was a prolific reteller of other people's stories. Check out the selected bibliography of her works on Wikipedia - and it's just a selected bibliography! - including such curios as A Book of Magic Horses. I lost touch with Ruth there for a while, but I'm glad to have got this book of Folk and Fairy Tales from the Flinders Street bookstore. She comes across as an affectionate aunt - a little prim and proper, but never trying to educate her readers. Unlike other writers - say, Thurber or Kipling - she never looks for the 'moral of the story'. In the introduction she writes:

It is the prime requisite of the fairy tale that it should end happily. I remember as a small girl hurling the book I had been reading across the floor in a rage, because the heroine, instead of marrying the hero and living happily ever after, just went and died. A thing she had no right to do.

I also love this anonymous comment on TimT's blog entry, which gets to the root of how Manning-Sanders' legacy is spanning multiple generations: "I came across this blog when searching for old RMS books. I just remembered getting every single one from the library when I was a little girl and devouring them. Now I want my little daughter to discover them too and am looking for the old editions with illustrations as I remember them."

Marcus Crouch: "Every present-day story-teller must be in her debt"

In the February 1989 edition of Junior Bookshelf, Marcus Crouch wrote a tribute to Manning-Sanders in the wake of her death the previous October. Some excerpts:

Her personal preference seems to have been for the humorously bizarre, and she had a liking for dragons, ogres and other grotesques. She liked humble, unheroic heroes, simple people keeping their end up by means of cunning and persistence. ... Every present-day story-teller must be in her debt. Her work is peculiarly suited to the domestic, one-to-one story-telling session. It forges a link between speaker and hearer whose strength is best appreciated in the home rather than the hall and classroom. ... For many long-lived writers, death is followed by eclipse. I hope that publishers will [continue to re-release Manning-Sanders'] priceless treasury of folk-tales. We would all be the poorer for their loss.

I'll second that! It would be great if a modern publisher could reprint Manning-Sanders' anthologies (although only if they remain paired with the wonderful illustrations by Robin Jacques).

Footnotes
1. Information for this section comes from Manning-Sanders' Wikipedia biography, of which I have served as the primary author and culled from a wide range of sources.
2. The library is also where I discovered Manning-Sanders, as I detailed in this previous post.
3. Ridge has footnotes in her blogs, too. This particular one is related to Manning-Sanders:

"*I didn't think of that as a child reader, but I discovered it from the inside years later when I was working at The School Magazine and discovered, to my astonishment and delight, that we had unpublished Manning-Sanders stories on file — and I got to edit some of them! Not that you'd dare do much more than a light run-through for fear of disrupting her delicately, yet complexly constructed prose. Apparently the long-lived Manning-Sanders had a similarly long-living daughter, who sent her mother's unpublished stories to the School Magazine — and I'll leave it at that for Jonathan Shaw to fill out the story in the comments!"

Unfortunately, Mr. Shaw has NOT yet "filled out the story" in the comments of Ridge's blog entry.

Saturday's postcard: Aerial view of Wrangell, Alaska

Here's a postcard from the early 1970s along with some facts and background about Wrangell, Alaska, that I have "wrangled" for you:

1. It's really in the middle of nowhere, way down in the southeastern panhandle of Alaska. If you want to get to or from Wrangell, you're going to need an airplane or ferry. Traveling by a combination of ferry and car, the closest major city is Juneau, Alaska, which is only 200 miles away but the trip apparently takes about 12 hours.¹

2. To get from Wrangell to Anchorage, Alaska, using only car and ferry, would be a 1,022-mile journey taking 34 hours. By comparison, it's 1,077 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Des Moines, Iowa, and that trip would only take you about 17 hours by car -- half the time.

3. While Wrangell Island has been occupied by the Tlingit peoples² for thousands of years, Wrangell, in the northwestern corner of the island, is a non-native settlement.

Russians began fur-trading at the site in 1811. In 1834, Baron Ferdinand Friedrich Georg Ludwig von Wrangel (pictured at right), who was in charge of Russian government interests in Russian America, ordered a stockade built in the middle of what is now Wrangell Harbor. This is considered the founding date of the city, which passed to British hands in 1839³ and American hands in 1867.

4. The "Wrangell History" page on the Wrangell Chamber of Commerce website contains some fascinating tidbits that have been compiled by Pat Roppel and the Friends of the Library. Check it out and read all about a "prohibition drink" that involves raisin pie, yeast, water and a hot stove; a colorful description of the city at the turn of the 20th century; seafaring superstitions and more.

5. The aforementioned chamber of commerce website also lists the "perks" of living in Wrangell, which include:

• Parents welcome in school
• No gangs
• Volunteer in schools
• Fantastic Public Library with Free Internet Access
• Medical Facility with Doctors on staff
• Wrangell Fire Department has excellent response time
• Senior Citizen Meals on Wheels

Also, my wife would be pleased to to hear that Wrangell offers workshops and classes for scrapbooking.

6. Wrangell has a newspaper, the Wrangell Sentinel, which claims to be the oldest continually publishing newspaper in Alaska. And it has a library -- the Irene Ingle Public Library. But it does not appear to have its own bookstore.

Opportunity knocking?

Footnotes
1. All travel times and distances are from Mapquest.
2. The Native Languages of the Americas website has a outstanding collection of links to Tlingit folklore, legends and mythology. One of the important mythological figures is "Property Woman," a spirit with curly hair who brings prosperity to anybody who catches sight of her.
3. The British Hudson's Bay Company leased the fort in 1839 and named the stockade Fort Stikine.

Some wonderful reading elsewhere on the web

The internet is so crammed full of great stuff that we should never be at a loss for finding something interesting to read. But sometimes it's just a matter of giving each other recommendations about where to find the truly cool stuff.

Here's a collection of terrific sites where you can read about ephemera, books, history and more.

Do you have a great site to suggest along these lines? Include it in the comments below. I love finding new places to add to my favorites!

On the Ephemeraology blog, Mel Kolstad has had terrific recent posts on block type and tokens.

On Forgotten Bookmarks, Michael Popek has featured a fascinating old sports team photo and a movie inside a book. (Also, check out Popek's "Forgotten Bookmarks" book that's coming out later this year!)

On A Pretty Book, JT Anthony has had dandy recent posts regarding books about Texas and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

On Preserving York, Blake Stough has authored some nifty entries on an old photo of schoolchildren and an old vaccination certificate.

On Rebecca Joines Schinsky's The Book Lady's Blog, in addition to a gaggle of great reading suggestions (including "The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City" by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti), recent posts have included Mid-Year Reflections on Book Polygamy and The Top Ten Books That Influenced J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tracy's Toys (and Some Other Stuff) featured an entry about the comical-looking 1968 board game Pie Face.

On Odd Things I've Seen, J.W. Ocker saddles up beside a life-size portrait of "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

Finally, as today is Friday, you should be checking out the Friday Reads website! Happy surfing!

Julie got an A on her spelling test

This old spelling test was tucked away inside a tanned old copy of "Cyrano de Bergerac" by Edmond Rostand.

Julie Mudge did well on her 20-word test, spelling everything but destinies correctly. She aced resort, martial, forging, supplication, remonstrated, tyrannical, indulge, inviolate, basely, cope, formidable, adversary, irresolution, supinely, delusive, phantom, invincible, vigilant and inevitable.

Belated kudos to Julie Mudge for her excellent effort!

Also, I like the way she dots her i's.

Addendum

I think there's a strong likelihood that Julie Mudge is the late Julie Mudge Caruso of Hanover, Pennsylvania, who passed away earlier this year at age 74.

Advertisement for Hires Root Beer from 1892 children's magazine

Sorry I was away for a couple days! It's been kind of the perfect storm (somewhat literally) of (1) a thunderbumper that fried our home computer's hard drive; (2) an extremely long day at work on the first day of high school sports practice in Pennsylvania; (3) and then, happily, the Otto family taking a mini-vacation to see my mom in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, and attend a Phillies game.¹

But I have a couple makeshift tricks up my sleeve to get things rolling again...

Here's an advertisement for Hires Root Beer that took up one quarter of the back cover of the June 1892 issue of Wide Awake, a children's magazine:

Wide Awake was published monthly from July 1875 until August 1893 by Daniel Lothrop. It was eventually merged with another magazine of its type -- St. Nicholas.²

Footnotes
1. Final score: Phillies 9, Diamondbacks 2. Most amusing moment: Watching Phillies rookie reliever Michael Schwimer walk to and from the bullpen while sporting a pink Hello Kitty backpack, part of the bullpen's hazing ritual.
2. I highly recommend the detailed history of St. Nicholas magazine that the website Flying Dreams has put together. It's a truly stellar and historically valuable labor of love.