Author: Pam's Pictorama

Mack

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Truck and car parts are not generally within the usual Pictorama sphere of collectible, but I picked this up in Jersey last summer on one of our antique store junkets in Red Bank.

It has all the heft you would expect from a Mack truck hood ornament – as if it had a function and had to prove its worth. I guess it wouldn’t do for it to have been made skimpy and light of let’s say of aluminum.

Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

Hood ornaments started out life with a function – not that I entirely understand it, but something to do with the radiator. Turns out that they stopped putting them on cars for two reasons. First, because they were frequently literally ripped off of cars and stolen. Second, they were found to be particularly injurious to passengers in accidents. It would seem they are even quasi-illegal in cars now – although I happen to know someone who has a custom one of a beaver on her car.

Hood ornaments are a significant category of collectible. The Rolls Royce Flying Lady or Spirit of Ecstasy is the zenith of that particular area of collecting. It has a hotsy totsy history which includes intrigue, affairs and sky high prices for the item now. (The story is told best and briefly here.)

One of the variations on the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament on a Rolls Royce.

Rolls Royce is the only car that still maintains a hood ornament and theirs has resolved the issue by automating it to tuck into the hood for safety. Trucks seem to enjoy a different status and a variation of this Mack bulldog is still on their trucks.

Painted version of the Le Jeune Felix hood ornament, not in the Pictorama collection, alas! From a Hake’s sale catalogue.

More in line with my interests and budget, there are some wonderful Felix ones that enjoyed great popularity in the hereafter of collectibles. Oddly, I do not own one and I may get around to rectifying that at some point. They need to be mounted however and I am not handy that way. I have written about them a bit in an earlier post found here and this photo is as close as I come to owning one at the time of writing this. My bulldog could also use mounting, but an easier design than Felix, just need to find something to tuck under his front paws.

Mack trucks were founded in Brooklyn in 1900 and was making vehicles for the British army in 1916 where they got their (English) bulldog nickname. The bulldog was first affixed to the side of the vehicle in 1922. The bulldog as hood ornament takes its place about ten years later.

At a glance this appears to be as rare as claimed, a heavy British doorstop of the Mack dog.

About the early design one blog sites: The design was a front view of an English bulldog tearing up a book, and on the book was printed the words “hauling costs.” By 1932, a bored Alfred F. Masury, Mack’s chief engineer, created the ornament. A medical issue had sidelined Masury, leaving him looking for something to do with his hands. The answer: a carved bulldog. That same year, the carved bulldog figure appeared on the front of the Mack AB, a lighter-duty version of the AC. (The entire post can be found here.)

The number tells us what period he is from.

Meanwhile, unlike whatever prohibition there now is for automobiles, Mack trucks continue to boast these dogs and variations on them today. One site claims that the symbol is meant to convey solidness, dependability, but also openness to the future and of course speed.

Perched on a small jewelry box here. Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

The variation is largely the metal color of each, indicating different things about the vehicle which it is perched on. As I understand it the gold color is for vehicles which are 100% Mack parts and the chrome for lesser ones if you will. A recent addition appears to be a copper for electric vehicles. A bit of research shows that mine is a later dog, the numbers on his chest mean he was produced after 1986. I think his separate legs mean he was indeed a real hood ornament and not a decorative reproduction. He bears a studded collar with his name Mack and he stands ever ready for action.

There is something endearing about his chunky self, leaning forward on the prow of a truck, streamlined and somehow windblown he well exemplifies a bulldog, straining and pulling forward, a collar but no leash on this fellow.

Reading: de Horne Vaizey Cont.

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I continue to work my way through the available books by Mrs. George (nee Jessie Mansergh) de Horne Vaizey, as chronicled in early parts here and here. I have had a tough time reading with a consistent timeline so I have hopped a bit through her ten year, prolific career and have been spending a lot of time around 1908 and 1909 recently, with a few jumps to near the end of her life in 1917.

There is not a lot of deep biographical information readily available and I sketched out most of it in my second post about her. She had a good for nothing drug addicted husband who had the good grace to die and she starts publishing shortly after. What I didn’t know until recently was that her young daughter, Gwenyth, took one of her stories from a drawer and sent it to a magazine contest without telling her mother. Jessie won and the prize was a cruise where she met George de Horne Vaizey and they marry and meanwhile her career was launched.

From A Houseful of Girls, 1902.

So the question of what was really lighting a fire under her about writing is an open one – she must have enjoyed it, but was it a financial need? I always thought she wrote for a longer time before remarrying and needed to support her family. Nonetheless, write she does with tremendous output. Wikipedia counts 31 books in the span of her brief career (another site says 33) and I think we have to assume there were magazine stories published as well. (There appears to be a collection of them published either right before or after her death.)

Her books are not especially brief. I would say they average around 300 pages. Reading them electronically it is a bit hard to tell. Sometimes two or even three were published in a given year.

I have been thinking about her heroines as I read and as they grow in interest with her increased skill as a writer. They stop being simply likable (beautiful and loveable – gray eyes, long lashes) fairly early on and start to become more complicated. In Flaming June (note that the painting above is of the same name and was well known at the time – was she making reference to it? Frederic Leighton, 1895 – I say yes!) she has an American main character with a Western accent which, while effective, gets a bit tedious to read after awhile. (She also had a character with a lisp in one volume that started to drive me nuts. It seems to be a fashion for writers of the time to show all the accents they could write with.)

Also from A House Full of Girls.

However, over time her women grow into complex characters who are sometimes more interesting than likeable. For example, the woman in Flaming June is hot tempered and extremely independent. Much of the plot, and what happens to her both good and bad, centers on this quality as well as her stubbornness. It makes the story tick and, without being a spoiler I will say, gives it a somewhat quixotic ending.

In addition to greater character development her plots become more interesting and she leaves off the basic sort of worn tropes about school days and money acquired, lost and acquired again which were the bread and butter of her early writing and certainly for women authors of the day. A young woman of middling income decides to take a basement flat in the city and dress as a much older woman so that she will be free to help people in a way that an attractive young woman could not. (The eponymous volume is The Lady of the Basement Flat, 1917.) The story is worked however so that she also has a life at a country house where she is herself – of course the two weave together at some point. However, what a concept!

From Etheldreda the Ready, which I am currently reading, 1910. Definitely not one of her more likeable heroines! Etheldreda is utterly self-oriented and conceited, thus far anyway!

In What a Man Wills she takes a sort of well trod narrative path with a wealthy, ill, elderly man who invites four nieces and nephews for a long visit to decide who will be his heir. While, again without being a spoiler, I would say she doesn’t manage an entirely new take on it, she does well with expanding it and again, not afraid to make one of her main characters flawed.

Her women, even her heroines, can fall victim to vanity and greed, if not quite all the way to ambition. (She does poke fun at women authors occasionally with a sort of self-deprecation.) They are often a bit forward for the time and space they live in – especially those who reside in or come to find themselves in small rural towns. Financial ruin comes to people and families on a routine basis, but with a sort of detail that makes you think that for those who lived on investment income they way many people did at the time, that this was a very real event.

Her characters opine on the limited options for women – that they are not trained for anything to prepare them for life or possible ways to make a living. Therefore their fortunes hang largely on their ability to marry well – or remain dependent on a male relative or someone else to settle money on them. In the end this depends on how attractive they are and can make themselves and some of the more forward characters have a real struggle with this very real problem.

From The Lady of the Basement Flat – sadly I don’t have one of her dress as the elderly version of herself!

Frankly, the male characters tend to be a bit more one dimensional; she came from a large family and almost all of her characters do. Therefore, there are always a few brothers for color and plot development and of course there are suitors, and although we are privy to fewer of their thoughts and motivations, they are generally not fleshed out like the women are having they were often an end goal which offered security and a home in addition to whatever romantic interest was brought to the table.

The closest we come to the male prospective in the somewhat brilliant novel, An Unknown Lover. This is a complicated plot and while there is a woman at the center of it, we do get into the heads of both her epistolatory lover and brother and their motivations which help drive this story. Thus far I would say this is her best, published in ’13 so she is flexing her muscles, but not yet at the end of her life.

From Daugther of a Genius, 1903. A ner’do well father dies leaving his children to rely on their wits and creativity to make their way.

So my interest in women authors at the turn of the last century continues unabated. Watching them chafe at the conventions that defined their lives and dictated how they could live – sometimes these very conventions sentencing them to penury without a way to survive. It has been interesting to place her historically before some of my other beloved authors such as the adult novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Edna Ferber (a few of those posts are here and here, but there are others!) but interesting to add her to the timeline. Also, the play between the British authors and the American is interesting as women in the United States seem to have been freer to pursue a living more broadly than their British counterparts earlier on – and the conventions of our society a smidge less confining.

As stated in my earlier posts, Jessie de Horne Vaizey spends the last years of her life bedridden and dies in 1917. I learned recently however that it was first typhoid, then eventually arthritis which confined her to bed and she died unexpectedly during an operation for an appendicitis – so what made her an invalid is not what killed her. She does some of her characters painful rheumatic complaints, usually elderly men, but clearly she knew what she wrote of – and as someone who suffers from it myself, I can only imagine the kind of pain she must have had without the meds of today to help alleviate them. There are also many plot instances of long recoveries from illness, not unlike her typhoid I assume. She was my age when she died, but she made the most of her almost two decades as an author.

Tulip Time: Part Two

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I continue my second part, tulip treatise today with an odd alignment that came out of tulip talk recently here at Deitch Studio. As occasionally occurs here over leisurely morning work, reading and discussion sessions, Kim and I meandered through both my tulip triumphs in New Jersey and his interest in this book and comic as outlined below and these posts were born. Welcome to The Black Tulip and part two of the Pictorama post.

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I commence with a full admission that before I met Kim Classics Illustrated comics were at best known to me in a theoretical way – a sort of punchline to a joke about not having read a school book assignment – as in clearly they read the comic book version. I confess I have never actually read one to date.

A pile of the comics within eyeshot, next to Kim’s desk, while I write this morning.

A number of years back Kim discovered a guy on 86th Street who was selling them. Not every day of the week, but most weekend days and maybe a few others piles of them on a table with their bright yellow logos being hawked. Over time they began their siren song and Kim was lured into slowly acquiring both those remembered from his youth and then ones he had missed along the way. Slowly his collection grew if haphazardly. I can’t remember now if the fellow gave up before Covid or it was the pandemic that did his periodic business in. And it wasn’t a constant flow, but an occasional addition would be made via eBay. Although he might give a quick look when I was with him it was generally a mission he completed on his own – an excuse for a walk on a nice day and presumably some comics chat.

A better look at that pile. This is just the tip of the iceberg of Kim’s collection.

Kim, a voracious reader and particularly of classic literature, seems like an unlikely candidate however most recently he uses these as sort of massive supplemental illustrations to something he is reading. (The man is devoted to illustrated fiction in all its guises.) A large trade paperback on the history of Classics Illustrated found its way into the house recently and, although he is a committed Dumas fan, his purchase of The Black Tulip I believe was a result of his reading of that. The novel is on its way so he has not commenced reading it yet.

Classics Illustrated (which has lodged in my brain as Classic Comics) had a 30 year run, from 1941-1971, launching with The Three Musketeers. With printing and reprinting and the collecting of them, it can be a deep and largely affordable vein of comics collecting. If Kim were writing this there would be color and lore I cannot provide – thoughtful observations about the various artists who illustrated them, some who were wrapping up a career during the heyday of comics.

The opening pages of our rather tatty copy.

The Black Tulip (based as noted on the novel by Alexandre Dumas) was illustrated by Alex A. Blum (1889-1969) and I would say his illustrations are definitely part of the appeal of the comic. The story takes place during the tulip craze in the Netherlands of the 1600’s after the introduction of the plant from the near east in the preceding century. As you probably know, tulips were wildly sought after and the bulbs traded like gold or cocoa on a world exchange. Fortunes were made and lost in tulips and even poor and middle class families might stake their fortunes on the waxing and waning of them.

Queen of the Night variety of tulip – appears to be pretty much as close as we come to black.

The plot of the novel is the race to develop a truly black tulip and the nefarious individuals who would do anything to capture a $100k guilder prize for the development of it. (For the record, a true black tulip does not exist even today and a very dark purple one called black is as close as one comes.) Since Kim is planning to read the original novel as well so I will have to ask him if they explain why black seemed so desirable – I prefer red and orange among others myself. (It should be noted that blue does not exist either – only a sort of lavender to blue.)

The jolly cover caught my imagination and a stroll through the comic is not disappointing. For the record, there is a column in the front cover called Student Boners which claims to be funny mistakes made on regional state exams – along the lines of Name two explorers of the Mississippi – answer: Romeo and Juliet. There is a bio of Dumas and encouragement to read the full novel at the back. Throughout there seems to be a layer of an in the service of sort of self-conscious educational mission.

The back of the book – free comics tattoos with your purchase of 10 issues.

Along those lines also included at the back is a plot summary of the opera Boris Gudenof (what did kids make of that?); a bio of Alfred Nobel (Inventor of Dynamite!); and an unrelated short story about a dog. Kim informs me that the books had to be weighted with a certain amount of text in order to get a book rate for mailing. (This is part of the eventual undoing of the company as they ultimately lost this status.) There is an emphasis on the great literature these are based on (There have been no greater story-tellers than these immortal authors) and on reading in general.

A page from a story to be published next year called Apocalypso.

As I alluded to above, these comics were a fixture of Kim’s childhood and a recently completed page from an upcoming story for his next book shows a young Kim and a friend in a room littered with them. (We had some discussion over which covers would be featured.) As for me, well my generation had Cliff Notes (which also took a final bite out of these comics) instead. I never read them, but I am sure they were far less romantic and potentially interesting as Classics Illustrated and in addition I doubt that anyone collects them today.

Tulip Time: Part One

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It’s spring time in full bloom here at Deitch Studio and I bring you a somewhat unorthodox Pictorama post about tulips today. It’s a two part post where Kim and Pam meeting of the minds post as our nascent floral interests convened this month.

I will start by saying that I have loved tulips since college where I remember seeing my first gorgeous bunch of them in someone’s room, a wonderful harbinger of spring. I think they were apricot colored and I guess the whole concept of cut flowers was very adult as well. While we grew flowers in New Jersey my mother, at that time, was not so big on harvesting them, preferring to let them run their course in the yard.

I am a big fan of vases filled with tulips, all colors and types. Trim the stems and add a couple of pennies – if in the sun or a warm spot they will force quickly. A cooler shaded spot to keep them longer.

Those yards of my youth consisted of sandy stony soil and were resistant to cultivation, despite my mother’s best efforts. As a result her purview was focused. She produced a credible vegetable and ultimately herb garden and managed to get shrubs and trees to grow, but less so bulbs of the annual variety like tulips. (Although someone gave her stunning and unusual iris bulbs which were perennial and a few of which exist in my yard today. Perhaps a future post on them.)

From my former office at Jazz. I generally had cut flowers on my desk each week.

Meanwhile, the lovely if extremely finite, nature of tulips fascinated me. I always say, there’s nothing more dead than a dead tulip. However, if true, in some ways there’s nothing more vibrant than one it its prime – their life and death cycle perhaps being part of the appeal. As plants they hit the ground running, so to speak, and once they hatch from their bulb they race to a full stem, bloom tightly folded. And then, bam! It opens. Amazing! Before you know it, the plant is spent and that’s pretty much it.

If left in the ground you can get a second showing the following year. When I worked for Central Park we had an annual Tulip Toss where the spent bulbs were dug up and replaced with fresh. The bulbs were given to smaller parks and interested individuals who would plant them the following year with a less reliable yield.

Now, I have mostly enjoyed my tulips as cut flowers indoors. However, as Pictorama readers know, I went gardener last year after inheriting the house in Fair Haven. Although I confined myself largely to herbs and veggies, one of my final acts of gardening in the fall was to plant some tulips out in the front yard.

Photo from a friend’s trip to Amsterdam this year.

As many know, a siren call to all wildlife are bulbs, seeds and flowering plants. Now, I try to take a pretty philosophical view of critters munching my blueberries and strawberries (read about that a bit here if you like), and I think mom planted the berries for the birds, but the seeds, bulbs and flowering plants (think geraniums) make me a bit sad. Anyway, understanding that it could result in spring disappointment, I planted a row of tulips and one of daffodils (less tasty it seems) in the front yard.

Our backyard is fenced and I generally do not have deer visit back there (although bunnies, chipmunks and squirrels abound, as well as myriad birds), but the front yard is fair game and can pretty much be considered a buffet for the plant munchers.

Nonetheless, I ordered some bulbs from a nursery and spent a chilly, dirty and backbreaking afternoon of planting last fall. I was a bit late getting them in which was a strike against me.

Last year’s strawberry plant. It wintered over and is laden with blooms already. The birds, bunnies and I will have strawberries galore this year.

My trips to New Jersey are somewhat sporadic and dictated by both things that need to be done there or other things which need to be done in Manhattan and keep me here. However, the women who look after the house and cats keep a weather eye on my garden as well and send frequent reports.

The tulips were not eaten as bulbs and low and behold – they came up unmolested. Now the race was on for me to get to New Jersey before a strolling four-legged resident feasted on them.

I had forgotten that I had purchased these brilliant bright orange and red ones. I zipped down to New Jersey and caught them in their full glory. So cheerful! Their straight stems and gaping blossoms opening to the sun and sky in the morning and shutting down again at night. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed them.

I left on a Monday night and by Tuesday morning the report came – they were gone. I am so grateful that the critters waited for me, but I guess ultimately they proved to be an irresistible nosh.

By coincidence, last night I was catching up with a Frank Borzage directed film I had never seen, Seven Sweethearts. I am a huge Borzage fan and will sit down for any film of his I haven’t seen and TCM is doing a sort of mini-tribute to him this month. They appear to be focusing on the later films. (Why anyone would show Borzage and not show Lucky Star – an all-time favorite film – I have no idea. I collect stills from them and have written extensively about my love of his silent films here and here for starters.)

Charmingly artificial Borzage background on this still from Seven Sweethearts.

Now, I can’t really recommend this 1942 era film, except Katheryn Grayson (dressed of course in Dutch girl garb) is in fine voice. I wouldn’t say I didn’t enjoy it – there are some unmistakable Borzage touches including some very charming fields of faux tulips. The setting is an imaginary location called New Delft, a sleepy tourist town where some people come and never leave. Central to the town and the plot is a hotel owned by S. Z. Sakall who is Papa to seven daughters – five with sweethearts at the start of the film. Alas, none can marry until the oldest sister and she’s an aspiring actress so no interest in marriage there. You can fill in the rest. It is pretty available to be streamed online (free or nominal fee) and at the time of writing I caught it on the TCM app after a showing late on Thursday night.

All this to say tulips figure largely in the film and there are scenes, glass shots and charmingly artificial sets, of acres of tulips. I especially liked a scene where Katheryn Grayson tells Van Heflin that these tulips can tell the weather – that they close up with the darkening of the sky before the rain. It reminded me of mine, gently opening and closing in the front yard.

Last little fellow who popped up after all the others.

Meanwhile, I got a report that one lone little tulip showed up after the fact and I have the photo you can see above. Tomorrow, a bit more on the background of tulips and, oddly enough, where they intersect with comics.

Puzzling Felix

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Pam’s Pictorama Toy Post: Today’s toy has languished on a shelf for quite a while. It came in the big box of Felix purchased from an obscure auction last year which spewed out everything Felix related from a rare kerchief to a pile of annuals. (Tidbits and treasures from this box in previous posts can be found here and here. Some annuals remain as future posts!)

These hand puzzles are not exactly rare and I have seen some come and go on eBay over time and somehow it was a long time before I got into the game. I finally purchased the one shown here in 2019 and wrote about it here. I couldn’t resist it with its graphic image of an angry Felix with mice.

Pams-Pictorama Collection from a prior post.

Today’s is a joyful dancing Felix of dreadfully sloppy execution. Like the other, it was made in Germany and is marked as such. How these cardboard and cheap metal bits have lasted through a century of pockets and playing I cannot imagine. The cheap metal inside and out is pitted and rusty.

For some reason for me these toys always conjure up an image of a young newsboy taking a break and pulling it out of his pocket to play with circa sort of 1927 or so. Sometimes it is an errant night watchman killing time. I don’t know why – it is always men and boys I imagine in this role.

I find the two small metal mice quite cunning as are the metal traps I guess they are? I hadn’t actually thought of them quite that way, but am now as I really consider it. In addition there are two small balls and I would think the challenge is a ball and a mouse in each trap. I have attempted it and it is both engrossing and difficult. I discovered that the mice only go into the traps nose first, can’t back them in, or at least that is true of one which, incidentally, has a slight upward curl to his tail. Ha! Someone was thinking when they designed this.

The cardboard back, worn from use and handling. Hard to believe it is around 100 years old!

I know I had dexterity puzzles like this as a child although for the life of me I cannot remember the images on them or the tasks required; I suspect they were simpler. I have a dim memory of them mostly being rolling small balls into a face or something along that line. This would have seemed quite sophisticated to my then pint-sized mind.

I suspect that now that two of these have entered the Pictorama collection of course more may follow. We’ll just see about that.

The Three Month Mark

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It seems like an odd moment perhaps to have a progress report today, but my mind is deeply there right now so here we go. I have been writing all week – an endless litany of editing and producing so perhaps it is just hard to turn that part of my brain off.

I have had reason to reflect on how in fact the discipline of writing this blog twice a week every week (since summer of 2014) has formed and honed my nascent skills over time. It has its own voice of course, and that is different than most of my writing for work, but it does help me add a lighter tone to some of the newsletter things we produce and just produce the sheer volume required.

Weirdly fundraising work is a lot of writing. I am not sure it is ever presented that way to aspirants in the field and no one gave me a writing test back when I started. (We still took typing tests! It was at the very end of that era however as computers were just phasing in.) However, unless you work in an enormous shop where all of the proposals and materials are produced by dedicated staff, you end up writing a heck of a lot. (My friends in those large shops assure me that they need to do a lot of editing of that work too because they understand the particulars best.)

Little girl I was holding was a bit smaller yet than this one here.

I give a basic writing test to most applicants – as much to make sure that they transfer information accurately and follow directions as anything else. Folks who will need to do a lot of more complex writing are asked to either do a more advanced test or submit previous proposals or writing samples. When it comes to the basic test I am often shocked by the errors. I mean they could share it with a half dozen of their friends before submitting and I wouldn’t know, yet many don’t seem to bother and there are often egregious errors.

On the other hand, I have also had excellent writing tests submitted by people who were less engaging during the interview process – and let’s not even start with what Zoom has done to interviewing. (Although now it is the accepted first step for every interview.) I try very hard to have an in-person with finalists, although I just hired someone who was moving back to NYC from San Francisco. He seems to be a good hire, although about six inches taller than I had anticipated. He sent a photo of his cat Moose along with his application which of course I found endearing. Moose is a marmalade tabby.

Not Moose, but somewhat like him.

Leaving the writing of others aside, the demand has meant that I have been writing a variety of things pretty much since I walked in the door back in January. While much of this kind of writing and editing is second nature to me, being in such a different organization and trying to capture it has been a challenge. I find myself writing proposals to fund medical equipment I didn’t imagine existed (a 3-D printer which could be used to create everything from a new beak for a Great Horn Bill or a replacement joint for a pup) to writing direct mail copy for an appeal.

A turtle like this one, but not this one!

But how to capture the essence? What’s it like to stand in a back hall and see a tiny turtle no bigger than a half dollar being rushed by for care by specialists in exotic animals. (It was so moving to think someone cared so much for this tiny guy and could even tell he or she wasn’t well.) Or to cuddle a scared tabby kitten from a rescue group which is being evaluated for surgery on a malformed leg so she will be adoptable. (We raise money for the funds to pay for such surgeries and it was my first real encounter with a beneficiary.)

The vets and techs (and really everyone there) love these animals fiercely and they are single-minded in the best outcome for the animal.

Pre-pandemic I bought flowers weekly for my office, but gave it up when we returned to work. This week I bought some in memory of my mom and the one year of her passing. Reminded me how nice it is to have flowers around!

Meanwhile, I have written previously (read it here) my own office is a block away in a somewhat decaying residential building which leaks and lacks public access. (The photo at the top was taken from the rooftop space at our building.) My staff yearns for the ability to have pets in the offices as is allowed down the street in the main building. I hope to negotiate this at some point and install an office comfort cat, but fear at best in reality it will add a cat to my own menagerie on the weekends. (This is the only place I could ever work where the response to I have seven cats is not shock, but more along the lines of – Oh, eight would be great!)

So that is a small slice of life at the new gig – more to come I am sure.

Mom and Snoopy

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today’s post is of a family photo, something I haven’t done in a long time, and it is one of my mom. The one year anniversary of her passing is tomorrow.

I wrote frequently about the surprisingly interesting time caring for her at the end of her life, here and here, and at her death I wrote a brief tribute to her here. However, a friend suggested that I find a photo of her to frame for my office as a way of recognizing the anniversary so I dug through some mountains of pictures in New Jersey last weekend and emerged triumphant.

Many years ago my mother’s mom put together a photo album for mom and her brother John for Christmas. I don’t remember seeing my uncle’s, but mom’s, although slim, is made up of wonderful early childhood photos of her that I had never seen. Mom’s father died young of a heart attack. He was much beloved to me during the short time I knew him (Poppy!), but I was only about four or five when he died. There aren’t a huge number of photos of him at all so it is extra nice to find these.

However, in addition to those photos which are mostly Betty and John as small kids with their various pets, mom had tucked a number of other early photos in and today’s photo is from that batch. This would have been taken around 1969, mom was still wearing her hair a bit long – she cut it short a year or so later, Snoopy just out of kittenhood.

Without knowing for sure I am fairly certain that this was taken at our house in Englewood, New Jersey, It was a tiny, cozy two bedroom cottage on Jones Road and across from what seemed to a tiny tot me to be an enormous park. (Actually, a google search shows a very substantial park on Jones Road, so perhaps my childhood estimate was more accurate than I think!)

Mom is holding the very first pussy cat in a long line of pets, Snoopy. I think I named him, for the comic strip and because he had black spots – he was a cow spotted kitty. In retrospect it is hard to believe that my older sister would have allowed me to name him (she was bossy!), but nonetheless that is my memory.

Snoopy was just a great cat. You’ve heard tales of my dressing him up in doll clothes and pushing him in my doll stroller – also playing circus dog with him and the German Shephard, Duchess. He was a lovely, easy going boy cat. He and the dog were buddies and unlike the dog, he rarely got into trouble (there was the time he walked across wet red paint on the porch and then through the kitchen, but that would be the exception that made the rule) and was loved by all equally. I believe his origin was as a barn cat – friends of my parents had a farm in South Jersey and supplied us with rather excellent cats for many years.

It’s funny that seeing him so many years later (his life was sadly cut short by an Akita several years later) his spots and markings are surprisingly immediately familiar. Black over one eye. I can remember petting him when I look at this.

My guess is that dad was trying out a new camera as this has a hallmark of being a rather posed photo. Dad wasn’t typically at his best with still photos. If anything I am better with those and lesser with moving images and he the opposite. He had an extraordinary eye for shooting movies, but somehow it didn’t quite apply to still images. This photo for me is an exception however. It captures mom and Snoopy perfectly and even reminds me of the wonderful garden at that house where these trees likely were. (When we moved to the shore, probably later that year, it was many years before we lived in a place with a garden and our first home was sandy, often salty soil right on the river, which flooded frequently. Mom struggled mightily to at least have a vegetable garden and some scrubby trees. Readers know I now glory in keeping up the garden my mom created at the house I inherited.)

One thing of note for me is that mom appears to be wearing both a watch (although on her right arm and she was right handed) and a wedding band. Mom never wore either later in life. I think she went through a series of wristwatches when she was younger and gave up – her active life and hands constantly in things probably did both that and the ring in. I know that the early version of her wedding band wasn’t gold (turned her finger green!) and she stopped wearing it. Years later my father gave her a gold band which I now have, but to my memory she just almost never wore jewelry. (Early arthritis in her fingers exacerbated this. I fight it in my own hands, especially with the fingers I broke a few years ago running.)

She is wearing a camel colored sweater coat, a very mom color. If it was a few years later jeans would be on the bottom half of her, but this early it was probably a skirt or some other trousers. She has a white (cotton I bet) top under the sweater. Mom was very allergic to wool and gave it up early in life. She wore a lot of polar fleece later on.

There is a little tear on the left of the photo where the color emulsion has peeled. I need to keep this in a not especially light or hot place I think. The color is faded.

Clearly I take after my father’s side of the family in this regard as I consider the purchase and wearing of jewelry to be one of life’s great pleasures! (I have written about some of my favorite finds here and here.) My paternal grandmother loved jewelry (Gertie! There’s a whole post for her here.) and my dad inherited that love and bought us three women in his life jewelry frequently. As a result, I have all of mom’s (virtually unworn) and my sister’s which tended toward a more contemporary design than the vintage pieces I am drawn to.

While it is mostly accepted that I resemble my mom more than my dad, I’ve not been sure about that as I age and look somewhat more like Gertie. Having said that, the resemblance between me and mom is strong in this picture, the differences in our coloring being less evident. (Mom was extremely freckled, fair and green eyed – I am fair but less freckled and brown eyed. Her hair had red tints that mine never had.)

Finding this photo was a gift and I am grateful! To have mom and Snoopy together to consider in this picture is a treat I had not anticipated and I cannot think of a better way to honor her life and the sad anniversary of her passing. Thank you mom.

Cats in Hats

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Good morning! Sunny April day here and today’s picture post presents these three self-possessed looking miscreants curled up in a variety of battered chapeaux. Although this was evidently used as a Valentine greeting (written in admirable script at the bottom), I am thinking of it as a nod to the season and time to break out my straw hat.

The two tabbies, who are remarkably identical, are curled up in the first two hats while my sort of tuxie friend is vacating his black one. The disintegrating straw hat is the most interesting, not sure what is perched on the side – a tossed out cigarette? A bit of paper? What I call a claw paw grips the brim. Comfy kitty in the first hat fits nicely, tail curled around himself, the very tip pointing out. The odd fellow (or gal) out appears to be a tux or tuxie mix of some kind, hard to tell as his entire back half is in this black hat. The bad guy hat!

All three kitties have had their attention drawn off camera in the same direction. To that extent at least they are posed.

Someone has scratched into the negative, The Latest Thing in Hats in Wilawana. PA. According to my (albeit limited) map reading on Google, Wilawana appears to be a small town near the Chemung river and on the border of New York state.

In penned script on the back it reads, With love, From Mrs. ME Knighte and For Beulock Cosaiy [?] Wills NY Hamilton Co. However, there is no stamp so it was hand delivered or ultimately put in an envelope.

Dad in his white hat, more or less dead center of this photo.

My father was a devoted wearer of hats. I have written about Dad’s career as a news cameraman for many decades. (One of those posts can be read here.) At more than 6’5″ and with a ubiquitous fisherman’s hat on his head he was easy to pick out in a crowd and we would look for him on long shots of events on other news stations. Although a cotton fisherman’s cap (usually a fairly crisp, newer one) was most frequently worn to work, the older ones and a series of baseball style caps were employed outside at home. My father kept his hat on a great, small bronze statue of a running horse which I (sadly) no longer have, on a table outside our kitchen with his keys in it. I’m not sure I ever saw my father outside without a hat and prescription sunglasses.

The style of hat most frequently worn by my father.

The rest of the family did not sport hats. I cannot remember my mother wearing one, even on the coldest of winter days. (Mom would head outside with her short hair wet and the ends would freeze. She was hat resistant.) My sister Loren skied and therefore must have worn the occasional winter hat, although I can’t remember it and must feel she eschewed them in general. Edward (who may be reading this) was not especially inclined toward them either. (Ed, have you become a hat wearer?)

The much beloved Buck Jone Rangers hat.

I had an early inclination to hats, but in practice did not really figure them out until well into adulthood. There is my much sweated in cotton baseball cap for running (from the Gap, no logo) which reminds me of Dad’s, keeps the sun and sweat out of my eyes and also helps keep my hair up. Winter running requires a warmer (but washable) hat however – sometimes a hood too – something over my ears. The NJ variant is bright yellow green so I don’t get shot in the woods or runover in the low morning light.

I am very devoted to hat wearing in the cold in general and have a series of wool hats, always one stuffed in my purse in the transitional seasons, just in case. I lean toward a loose black wool one these days. As a kid I delighted in stocking caps and went through a stage of rather electric long ski hats that were popular for a bit. I was employing a wool cowboy style one in winter (sun protection, but good in light precipitation) until it was accidentally taken from a party. It was returned to the hostess, but I have yet to retrieve it from her. That one came from a hat store in Red Bank, NJ near where I like to have brunch if I first come into town on the weekend, the Dublin House.

This time of the year I break out one of a few straw hats. I like a small brim fedora style straw hat, although it has been pointed out to me that if keeping the sun off my face is my motive (which it is in large part) that a wider brim would serve better, but I don’t seem to be able to commit to those hats the way I can to a smaller one. For one thing my head size is small and it has helped to learn that a large hat is awkward on me. I like being able to smush it into my bag if needed. Like Dad I have adopted prescription sunglasses.

These days the favored hat is an aging straw one purchased in the airport on the way back from a business trip. I was in an airport in Arizona I think, on a leg back from California, San Diego I want to say which makes it a number of years ago now. I was killing time and vaguely in the market for a new summer hat. As these things go, I had no idea that I would still be wearing it daily for 2.5 seasons a year for so many years to come. It has only become every so slightly disreputable.

Recently purchased and subsequently installed hat and coat rack in NJ.

It’s elderly cousin is a blue straw version which was purchased in San Francisco on a donor visit years ago when I worked at the Met Museum. I had gone to visit an elderly (and remarkably fashionable) woman out there, Mona Picket, who was appalled that I was wandering around California in spring time without a hat so we went to a department store and bought me this one. Mona has subsequently passed on and I do think fondly of her when I wear that hat. It is very nicely made (and terribly expensive) and will probably outlast me if I continue to care for it.

Last summer Kim and I were on our way to meet people for dinner on the lower Eastside and I stopped us in our tracks to go into a store and buy a rather electric blue one. It was actually a yellow cousin which caught my eye but they did not have that color in my size. This blue one got a lot of action last summer and is my “good” work hat now.

Kim is an inveterate hat wearer in the tradition of my Dad. I’ve seen him through numerous baseball caps since we met, all of which somehow crossed his path and acquired somewhat (although not entirely) indiscriminately. To my memory, in some order or other, the following baseball hats have been employed: a blue Tar Heels one, a favorite was one acquired at a reading he did in Seattle for Fantagraphics, and the sort of stone favorite was a Buck Jones Rangers hat – the remains of which sit on a shelf over my head even as I write.

Seasonally a series of straw cowboy hats followed and there was one purchased at a K-Mart on a trip to Butte, Montana; a business trip for Kim. (Read about that trip which featured a whorehouse museum here!) For a cheap hat it lasted a good long while.

Kim keeps a bright Kelly green leprechaun-ish bowler around for wearing on someday other than St. Pat’s. Early in our relationship I stretched my wallet and purchased him a very good Stetson as a gift. It languished for several decades before it evolved into use and has now been his daily hat for a number of years. It is getting a good worn-in look and gets frequent compliments.

Kim was willing to pose for this out-the-door pic earlier.

I just installed a coat and hat rack in NJ. However, much in the style of my father, our hats are piled near the front door, some decorating an unused lamp. I do try to resist the temptation to put hats on the cats, but sometimes the Devil wins on that one.

Miltie, senior feline of NJ, in a hat from a post earlier this year.

Scaredy Cat in Bloom

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Although I purchased this card from a US vendor it appears to be European. There is something written in a language I cannot recognize or discern. I assumed it was American as it reminds me of one in my collection from Seattle. Nothing other than that pencil note is written on the back and it was never sent.

I am not positive of the type of flowers on this float although they might be daffodils. Kitty sports a big bow. Big hard whiskers stick out of the sides of his mouth – tail in the air, sticking straight up in a traditional scaredy cat pose. Of course once start I thinking it is European then I can decide that the houses in the background are European.

Plants awaiting planting! Strawberries and pansies, a sad bit of basil in the back.

From the women’s hats we can more or less date the photo to the thirties. It doesn’t look especially warm, definitely spring not summer, there are jackets and layers. It’s interesting that although there is a big crowd, no other floats are at all visible if they do exist – or is this one the only one?

As I write from New Jersey today the cats are romping around the house. Beau has found a bright pink mouse and has decided to chase Stormy – ending in a nice scratch on a new, catnip infused scratching box. He slept on top of me all night which is his habit when I come here, but he’s all wound up now.

My tulips and daffodils in the front yard.

I found that my efforts last fall have paid off in the garden, tulips managed to make their way up, as have daffodils, somehow making their way despite hungry deer, squirrels and their brethren. Today will be spent planting some early lettuce, cucumbers and pansies which are a cheerful favorite. It turns out that the strawberries and many of the herbs have wintered over. My fig tree has tripled in size living inside this winter, but some of our nights might still be too chilly to bring it outside. I also bought a small grapevine and raspberry which I will find a place for in the yard.

Lettuce, grapevine, raspberries and cucumbers hiding. A nice dahlia and peony waiting to be planted as well.

So I leave you as I head to my first day of digging for the season. More and the fruits of my labor to come.

Tiled

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today’s item was one of those now you see it now you don’t – and back again items on eBay. I was surprised and disappointed when it was pulled from sale and equally delighted when mysteriously it was relisted. Evidently it was from an estate sale of tiles. It was listed as from the 1930’s and it is in very good condition so it is hard to say.

I immediately had a vision of a fireplace in an Arts and Crafts style cottage somewhere lost in time, decorated with cheerful Felix tiles! Clearly I would buy the house just for that. (I have a friend whose father heard of a house being torn down with great fireplace tiles and he got permission to go and take them out. They are at the Met Museum now.)

Felix appears to be going somewhere and pointing in that direction, and he has an umbrella which seriously makes me wonder about what the other ones in a series might have looked like. Were they all weather related? Felix in the sun and snow? There are a few minor imperfections in the tile, a small chip or two where the glaze bubbled. It is a very good likeness of the cat though, I must say.

Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

In all my years of looking at vast amounts of Felix items I have never seen another. I have, in my years of collecting, seen an odd thing where sometimes you find something you never saw before and then you start seeing a few more. That happened with the these Felix holiday cards below which I wrote about here.

One other cartoon tile was being sold and I am sorry I didn’t try to snatch it up, but I got so confused by this one being pulled off I lost my focus. It is below and sold for about the same price. This one (is it Betty Boop’s sidekick Bimbo?) was identified as being from Mission Art Tile California. I can’t really find tracks on that either however. It appears to be in similar mint condition.

Not in the Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

I grew up in a house with two massive brick fireplaces. My parents purchased old bricks before that was popular in building and they also bought an enormous beam from a barn which was halved and used as mantels for both. The ancient wood fascinated me, full of worm holes!

We used the downstairs fireplace constantly in the winter months and I do really love sitting by an open fire. My mom later converted it to gas which was somewhat disappointing, but we still used it a lot. The house she left me in NJ has a small brick fireplace, but to reline the chimney (it seems they would pour a ceramic liner into it?) and make it truly safe would cost a bundle so I doubt we will have fires there. I have purchased and set a small fire pit in the backyard to make up for this loss and I hope to be able to engage in using it in the coming warming months.

It makes me happy to imagine a world where fireplaces might have been decorated with jolly cartoon characters. Now that I know about these I will look for more – you never know, I might be able to remodel mine one day!