Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This little fellow wandered into the house via one of the postcard shows. It seems properly autumnal for today, which for future readers I will note is November 1 and Marathon Day here in New York City. (It looks like a prime day for it at 41 degrees, sunny and less windy than it has been.) It is also the day after Halloween and the day the clocks roll back so a sort of busy weekend here in Manhattan. The yellow fall light is putting us in the harvest moon and speaking of that we have enjoyed a few enormous moons, one which was also a glorious red.
I can’t be absolutely sure, but I believe this little fellow is Rags, aka The Famous Rotography Cat. (An earlier post on him can be read here and another recent post with him here.) Here he looks young and somewhat kittenish, adolescent maybe, and like perhaps he had a long day of posing and is about to put his nose down and do some serious sleeping. So much for hard work that day.
In addition to Rags, I always think that the Rotograph photo studios must have had a constant, roiling pack of kittens churning through the studio for photos, although Rags was a constant star and ruled the roost into adulthood. (I just found that there is a children’s book dedicated to him and using Rotograph photos as illustrations.) I do hope all the little ones found good homes if they were no longer tiny and less useful to the photographers.
The basket here is one that could hold any kind of fruit but this time of year my mind turns to apples. Although our modern world makes apples available to us year-round (in reality they have always stored well in a cool place), there is nothing like the apples of fall here in the New York area.
I worked with someone at Jazz, Wynton’s former assistant Edith, who was a sort of apple expert and connoisseur. Evidently, she had deep knowledge of all the different kinds; we only discussed it once or twice. Although I am somewhat flexible, I have a deep affection and preference for Macintosh apples which sadly have fallen out of favor. For me their level of tartness and texture is just right, however I gather that being slightly softer they are harder to ship and therefore less desirable. Also, being open to certain fungus they are also unlikely to be organic.
I have toyed with planting a Macintosh apple tree in the yard in New Jersey. The winters are a bit hard for them I gather and I have not mastered the burlap wrap for the winter which I would need to. Meanwhile, I would plant in the late spring, hopefully in a sunny spot. Three to five years for first real crop. Worth thinking about.
Having said that (and digressed considerably), this basket could just as easily have contained peaches or pears or other things. There is a bit of wire (I would worry about that with the kitty) sticking up which actually gives the card a little more visual interest. The Rotograph copyright is just on the lower left of the basket and in script, A basket full. With the black table on a black background, it is all velvety dark and the surface of the card is mat, contributing further to this effect.
Unfortunately, this attractive effect also makes the written note at the bottom near to impossible to make out. It appears to say, From, baby Sleep (?) To Baby Bartes. It was mailed from Schenectady, New York on April 26, 1907 at 9 AM. It was sent to Carrie Bartes, West Berne, alt bo (?) NY. At the bottom it also says, c/o Mrs. Bartes. It was received in West Berne on April 27 with no time stamp. I don’t know what the alt bo referred to and instead of Miss it reads Mip – which a bit of research shows was either the way a double “s” could be written in script or, perhaps as a result, a title occasionally recognized as Mip replacing Miss on early marriage certificates etc. (This is really my fact for the day – I had no idea.)
In my postcard posts I feel like people often select an image of a cat and assign it to a pet they were visiting. Occasionally it is an actual picture of said real cat (obviously usually sent by the owner), but sometimes like this it is just a reference and you wonder if Baby actually looked like this or is it just generically cat. Also, the practice of sending postcards to children is very sweet and was a thing. I always imagine how much they must have enjoyed getting them and perhaps that is why they were preserved, tucked away over time. (Although there are clues that perhaps our Miss Carrie Bartes is still too tiny a tot to appreciate this when recieved.) Meanwhile, yes, postcards were sort of the cat videos of their day, being shared with friends and family.
The beginning of November marks the race to the end of the year – always a busy time for fundraisers. However, I have some excellent bits to share over the coming weeks so let the season begin.
