Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is the annual Christmas card reveal. clearly this year we celebrate the whole Butler crew, all eight kitties, including Hobo.
We are ensconced here at Oxford Avenue for the holiday duration this year. I have inaugurated the holidays by acquiring a violent stomach virus so this may be a bit brief. It’s an odd year, my first without my mom and I am feeling it even more keenly than I thought I would. I am usually pro-Christmas and manage holiday cheer even under duress. This year is tough, although I am curled up here in New Jersey with Kim and all the kitties which helps. Drinking fluids! No baking while this is going on.
Last year’s card – Blackie and Cookie solo in front of our apartment window.
The card has a double meaning this year as I leave Jazz at Lincoln Center for the very different world of fundraising for the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center. Animal lover and rescuer of animals as she was, all of us think Mom would find that an appropriate switch; she was always concerned that my job at Jazz was too exhausting for the long haul, with its travel and many nights.
AMC will be unlike anything I have done before and I don’t dismiss the difference and the adjustment – all fundraising is not the same. Still, my brain itches to engage with new challenges and I think building a full fundraising operation for them is the next best chapter.
Blackie is stalking around the New Jersey house; Cookie has returned to her safe spot under a chair in the bedroom. Beau and Blackie had a hissy hello last night. I think the other New Jersey cats remain largely unaware. There is always an adjustment period.
Kim has taken over my office for the duration and, after a few false starts for a new dip pen holder and something for his ink, he is inking away upstairs.
The original Pam Butler pencil drawing.
This year’s card was conceived of and drawn by me as a tribute to my new cat family and job – I include my original pencil for the first time. Kim inked it and added the logo which is properly Deitchien. Each cat gets a proper portrait. Kim added a little maniacal twist to Cookie who is chasing her tail (as she still does almost daily at 10 years of age) and Beau and Blackie are facing off a bit.
So our best wishes for the holidays and the New Year from us at Deitch Studio and Pictorama. Hope you enjoy it!
Pam’s Pictorama Post: First, thank you all for your lovely and thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post! Some came here, others via IG and some to me personally. It is a season for change for me and while hard I think it is a first step in forging the next great thing and will help build how Kim and I will be living in the coming years.
However, today is a real photo postcard that contains a toy and a cat – thereby combining several passions at one. It is a bit dark and I wonder if it has discolored and darkened with age.
It depicts a very good, fluffy kitty perched on the back of this very nice, most probably Steiff teddy bear. His tail seems to have been in motion behind him and is a bit of a blur, but otherwise kitty is is focused intently on something off camera.
Teddy is jointed and really was likely quite splendid if you could see him properly. I fancy I can actually see the Steiff tag hanging in the far ear. It is a dusty and ubiquitous looking flowered tablecloth that we can imagine doing much duty for the photographer.
On the back of the card it says, With fondest love & best wishes for a very happy New Year from Aunt Jessica. Love to Mother & Daddy. It was sent on December 31, 1910 from Liverpool. It is address to, Master W. Ledden, 24 [illegible) Street, London Road, Holyhead. On the half with the message there appears to be a further address which is pretty illegible too, 5-8 Clarence Grove, [Everlou?] The card has no maker’s mark or references.
Many of the postcards in the Pictorama collection are addressed to children and I always think of how much it must have pleased them to receive these cards in the mail, especially something a little jolly like this.
Perhaps my holiday vacation can be spent seeing which of the 7 indoor cats might become a photo model. (We are pretty sure we can just leave Hobo out of that experiment.) I think Beau and Blackie are the only real contenders – no one else seems to have the temperament in the least. Kim has always said he doesn’t think I should dress the cats up (yes, it has come up) so I don’t, but a future in posing with toys? I will let you all know if I have any success – but maybe I should stick to cookie baking!
Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is a personal post. For those of you who are just in it for the photos and the toys, you might want to go back to finishing the holiday cards (ours coming up next weekend!), but for others you might want to get that second cup of coffee and settle in.
As I have alluded to in recent prior posts, I am finishing my last few days at Jazz at Lincoln Center. For almost seven years I have been their chief fundraiser and occasionally chronicled my work life here. The early days of figuring it out, nascent traveling with the orchestra, learning the rhythms and pace (very fast) of the place. I have likened it to leaping onto a speeding train.
JLCO taking a break outside of a Cracker Barrel restaurant during BBH Tour 2017.
Tonight I will attend my last Big Band Holiday concert as staff. Early in my work life I toured with the orchestra for Big Band Holiday, through Florida and much of the southeast. (That post can be found here.) I had made a nascent trip to Shanghai (and wrote about that here) in the first few months, but it was the Big Band Holiday tour that really made me understand what it was like for the orchestra when they were on the road and what was and was not going to be possible in terms of fundraising on those trips.
I wrote occasionally about the long Zoom-filled pandemic days – especially hard at a performing arts organizing which can no longer perform. I had to dig deep into my creativity to fundraise successfully, always hand in hand with Wynton Marsalis who proved to be an invaluable leader. Coming out of those pandemic days have been hard on managers. We are expected to mitigate both the needs of executive leadership and our staff. First the Great Resignation as folks settled into new careers and lives sometimes across the country from where they started.
Final evening at Dizzy’s this past week. Mary Stalling and the amazing Emmett Cohen Trio.
The longing to return to a pre-Covid office life is understandable, but not entirely practical as our staff has become accustom to more flexibility. Ours was a great office culture before Covid so it has been sad to see the office anemically filled, no longer teeming with musicians and bustling with energy. Sadly, longing for something doesn’t make it so. You need to create something new instead. A September mandated five day return to office was not the right catalyst.
As many of you know, my time there also morphed into the period I cared for my mother who had her final illness in New Jersey over the first four months of this year. I am beyond grateful for the thoughtfulness of Jazz at Lincoln Center and my colleagues while I traveled back and forth, frequently working days from there weekly until for a period at the end when I stayed in New Jersey. (Those days and that unusual time is in posts here and here.)
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Mom died in April and left me her house with five cats (plus Hobo, our outdoor pal). With the addition of Cookie and Blackie (the New York cats) that bring us more or less to eight. I became a crazy cat lady overnight – but I like to say mom had me in training for years! Kim and I packed the cats up and we spent five weeks in Jersey at the end of the summer. (A few posts about our lazy summer days can be found here and here.)
Without realizing it, I guess this brought me to the end of one period of my life and to the threshold of something different. I am not sure I knew that until late this fall someone put me in touch with the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center which was looking for someone to develop its fundraising arm. As I spoke with them I began to get excited about the opportunities I could see for them and my brain started shifting gears.
Paying a visit to Blackie at AMC. Was crawling on the floor trying to get him to eat tuna from my hand.
Some of you will remember that a year ago, Blackie was very sick and spent (and very expensive) week there while they saved his life after a dramatic infection suddenly took over his body. Although I mentioned it, I never posted about the very dark week we had while he was there. He was, in their words, a very sick kitty indeed and we are of course very grateful patients.
Blackie sporting a bright pink bandage after he came home.
The Animal Medical Center was founded in 1911 by a group of women who were volunteering for the nascent ASPCA and recognized the need for veterinary care for animals as well as their welfare. I plan to dig into this lore and I’m sure I will be sharing tidbits over time.
Today it is the largest animal hospital of its kind in the world, serving more than 50,000 animals a year. It is an elite veterinary facility where young vets train and research is done. I hope to help them expand what they do in these and other areas, including funding the free services they offer to the City’s police dogs and horse, our zoos and rescue animals which need surgical intervention.
Yoda the police dog being honored at the Top Dog AMC Gala this week.
I will miss my colleagues at Jazz, especially the endlessly talented musicians in the band, not to mention the nights at Dizzy’s – listening to Bill Charlap while the summer sun sets over Central Park – and the concerts in the hall. Dinners planned around the music and the stunning views of Columbus Circle. I will miss the daily encounters with folks who know me and I know them and we are part of a well-oiled machine together.
I find change painful and as I navigate the first holidays without my mom, this additional parting of the ways has sometimes overwhelmed me. Change is hard. Growing is hard, but you need to pay attention to the voice that urges you forward to the next thing.
Tonight, a final Big Band Holiday concert in the hall. Then we head to New Jersey for three weeks at the end of this week. Obviously I will post from there, but I am hoping it can be a few weeks of cookie baking and reflection. The new gig starts mid-January. So we gently close one chapter and head to the next.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: In both life and in collecting I show a marked preference (purfference?) for cats over dogs. Having said that, it isn’t that I don’t like dogs and I think if I had more resources, including space, I might collect dogs too in greater or even equal shares. (To say nothing of additional pet ownership which cannot currently include canines.)
Last Christmas I wrote about a black and white toy dog I carried insistently everywhere as a child – Squeaky. (As it happens I still own Squeaky and that post can be read here.) I suppose it isn’t surprising that I was very involved with and possessive of my stuffed animals as a child, early signs of a collector. I was a bit linear in my affection – first it was Squeaky who was carried everywhere, followed by a Koala bear my father brought me from a work trip to Australia. The bear had no name, but he was carried until he was bald of fur (probably rabbit fur, sadly, in retrospect) in spots. I no longer have him unfortunately although I did find this type of toy and shared previously here. There were probably earlier denizens who I do not remember.
Me and Squeaky. This is a Christmas morning shot, but I don’t think it was when I got him. Just professing my undying affection for him probably!
My childhood was also filled with a series of real pooches, from our German Shephard Duchess to a rather maniacal mixed breed hound named Charlie Brown. I like dogs and generally they like me. Occasionally I find my enthusiasm gets the best of me and discover I have encouraged a very large dog to try sitting on my lap as a result. (When this happened with a friend’s German Shephard it did give me some pause. There was also an enormous Tibetan Mastiff who like the cut of my jib when he met me and just about knocked me over with love.)
Has a little green tail! The only green bit on him.
All that leads to today’s purchase, a gift from Kim who offered to grab him up for me! This new guy came via Instagram and our friends in Texas @Curiosities. There is something about him that reminds me of blankets of my childhood. Some of his color is fabric overlays (the red on his jowls) and other is painted on. His nose and mouth are sort of shaved into the surface “fur” or texture of his face. He has glass eyes and I think a friendly dependable expression. There is pink under his mouth which I think is a random addition but works with the color scheme overall.
Squeaky!
I am told that the original seller said he was German, or at least that he came from Germany. He has no tags. His colors and design make me think of Pendleton blankets, a Canadian export embraced in my childhood as well. His red ribbon is worn and I assume is original – matches the red on his face perfectly. His ears (which are stiff with wire) have been carefully resewn in back. He’s about 12 inches high, including his ears.
He is much softer in person than I imagined and he is somewhat stained with years of love and handling. I think the orange stripe from his mouth and on his cheeks are especially interesting. He is made up of a fascinating bunch of colors. In sum, he is a handsome fellow who has been much loved.
So another dog sneaks into Deitch Studio and the Pictorama collection. May the kitties beware!
Pam’s Pictorama Post: T-shirts are yet another sub-genre of Pictorama. I never made a conscious decision to add them to the collection, but I find I occasionally snap one up.
I generally eschew the older used ones – not that I have anything against used clothes; I have bought from thrift stores and vintage for years. However, there is a convention on eBay where, oddly (at least to me), people sell old t-shirts (or attempt to) for vast sums. I guess there are some super rare Felix t-shirts out there that fetch those sums, but I have a sort of a mental cap on what I think a used t-shirt should cost, no matter what is on it. Anyway, despite all of this, a slow trickle of t-shirts are archived here. (A few of those posts – including some vintage Kim Deitch designed t-shirts – can be found here, here and here.)
I say archived and that is not entirely accurate either. Some are archived and others find their way into favored wardrobe. There was a post about an especially Waldo looking cat on a baseball shirt I bought from a company in Japan – after a considerable international exchange! (That post can be found here.) I purchased two (by accident) and I wear them all the time. They are among my favorite shirts.
Poshmark was selling it black recently.
Baseball shirts are preferred – love the three quarter sleeve for running. Actual t-shirts are of less interest for wear. I run in sweat wicking fabrics because I don’t like a soggy cotton shirt and my preference for wearing has always been sleeveless. I find short sleeves constricting. I have been known to cut the sleeves out of my t-shirts, but am not especially inclined to do that to these purchases of somewhat rarified tees. Another option is sleeping in them (atop of my beloved elephant toile pj’s which I memorialized here – I am wearing a new flannel version even now as I type!) although I am a bit partial to v-necks for that purpose. (Yes, I cut the necks out sometimes too!)
Therefore, somewhat unconsciously, these items are more collected and kept than purchased for consumption. Today’s acquisition is an older and considerably worn item, but it wasn’t much money and I liked his faux Felix self. His body is the bike and rider with wheels added. He has claw paws which grip the wheels and his mouth is pursed in a whistle – to alert folks that he is streaking by. Sweat is flying off him and his butt fur is a bit ragged with effort. Someone did a fairly splendid job drawing this.
Both shop photos from the Men’s Journal article below.
Close attention made me realize that he sports a little cap that says GSC and he has what could be considered a tattoo on his arm which says LA. This t-shirt originated at the Golden Saddle Cycle shop which was founded in 2011, but appears to have closed in 2022 due to the loss of its building at 1618 Lucille Avenue in Los Angeles. It was, according to online testimony, a much beloved repair and sales shop owned by Kyle Kelly that carried some of their own line of merchandise. Described in an online Men’s Journal article as part shop and part clubhouse it was a place where bike enthusiasts might show up for a part and find themselves instead whiling away an afternoon.
If the thought of riding a bike on the streets of Manhattan fills me with some trepidation the idea of riding one on the streets of Los Angeles really sets off warning sirens, but I am not fearless that way. I will stay trotting along slowly on my two feet, although I may reconsider doing it in this nifty shirt.
Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today’s is an odd photo postcard I picked up recently. In 1902 Kodak introduced photo postcard packages were able to print their negatives right on them and I imagine that this card, sent in 1905 seems to be of this genre.
As I envision the making and using of these cards (something I actually have spent some time pondering) I wonder if they made a little pile of them at a time or only printed the one off. Will I someday be searching through eBay or a pile of photos and find the exact card but with a different message? (Imagine my surprise!) It seems like it could happen, but it never has to date.
This card, as is declared decoratively at the top, was sent on December 21st, 1905 from Berlin, New York. After some serious study, it appears to have been sent to Mr. J. E. Whiteker in Barnstead, New Hampshire. (There’s one word I can’t quite figure out – center? outer? Barnstead.) There is also a notation in pencil in the upper right corner, 7/27/75 15￠.
Shown as a plump puss with a fairly satisfied look on his face which belies the message to some degree. He is perched on some sort of print fabric and behind him there is a check tablecloth piled high with books.
The message on the card appears to read as follows, Dear Brother (?) This is the cat that didn’t kill the rat – we didn’t get a good picture. (Serve?) him a good Xmas dinner and make him grovel for it. “A personal Christmas to you from us. Herbert. Clearly a message of great holiday cheer.
Inability to execute a rodent notwithstanding, kitty looks pretty well fed and happy. A smile lurks in his genial expression. At a glance, he doesn’t really have the promising appearance of a rat killer, although with cats looks can deceive I suppose.
Miltie, napping nicely.
This sort of stripe-y tom is reminiscent of several of the New Jersey crew I inherited. Milty, a stray from Newark and Peaches, rescued from a basement in Long Branch, both fall into this distinctly indistinct category of cat. Most notably, our outdoor man, christened Hobo by me a few years back, fits this bill as well. (Peaches hates Hobo and looks the most like him!) The ongoing Hobo story is known to Pictorama habitués, but his tale is below.
I can’t remember precisely when Hobo showed up except that I believe it was after mom adopted Stormy, a gray and white kitten who was also being fed at the backdoor. Like my mom’s other rescues, she showed up persistently and was looking increasingly poorly when mom trapped her with the intention of spaying and releasing her. She turned out to be a very shy, but good natured kitty and she never returned to the outdoors. (She still chases her tail, like our Cookie!) Therefore, Hobo probably came into the fold around April of ’22.
Stormy.
Hobo, a bit of a reprobate, has resisted trapping. He’s a wily fellow who, when he is around, will ask for meals several times a day, leading me to think he has worms and wondering if I might slip something for them into his food. Last year this time mom was fairly focused on trying to get him trapped and in before the winter, but try as Winsome and I might we could not entice him in, making me wonder if he had been trapped in a cage before.
Peaches and Hobo. Next to Peaches is a favorite toy rat which is often a gift on my bed when I am there.
Unlike the others mom eventually trapped and adopted (I inherited five cats, plus Hobo from her when she died in April – yes, plus two here in NY), Hobo has the real earmarks of a life lived outside. I’m sure he looks older than his years and of course living the outdoor life, while sort of swinging and intriguing, is likely to drastically reduce his life span. (A Peaches to Hobo comparison below!)
Over the summer I had a video texted to me by a horrified Winsome who came across Hobo feasting on a rat! Evidently he had also brought her a dead mouse – gracious acknowledgment of the many meals she has given him. Clearly however he was supplementing his protein with a bit of a la carte dining. I had the opposite reaction and said he deserved a promotion and give that cat some treats! (We are not far from the water and we are always somewhat in danger of being overrun by rats.)
Sadly, Hobo seems to be on the lamb these days and hasn’t shown up in more than a week. Winsome reports daily and has tried leaving food out for him in case he is visiting at odd hours. It isn’t the longest he’s been gone and I believe (hope) there are other folks in the neighborhood who feed and look out for him. (We’ve seen him picking his way, very dignified, through other yards and down local streets.) We are decamping for several weeks in New Jersey and I am hoping he reappears then if not before.
Edit: I received an update tonight that Hobo showed for a late dinner! We’re very glad he is back in the fold.
Pam’s Pictorama.com: Last week I mentioned stumbling onto Radio Dismuke in passing. While in Cold Spring over our anniversary we happened into a shop where it was playing. They had thoughtfully provided a printout page by the register with the log on info. I snapped a photo. Later that week I remembered it and tuned in while at work. It is a glorious discovery.
From what I have gathered, the station started as one man’s hobby, programming and playing his vast collection. The documentation of it online seems to mostly date from 2016 when he (Dismuke) made the decision to place his collection and the station in the hands of an Austin, Texas archive. There is a Board and donations can be made to it as a 501(c) (3) organization. He continues to program it, although I gather there are evidently occasional guest programmers (I haven’t hit on those yet). It rolls along 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like an alternate reality.
Although occasional period commercials play and there are periodic station identifications, there is no disc jockey or voice of. The playlist is vast and the throughlines can be mercurial. The quality of the recordings is fairly universally good. There are radio transcription, 78’s and who knows what else. The variety is blissfully wide. I bless Mr. Dismuke for having the foresight to attempt to ensure and secure the future of his station this way.
Today while wandering around the site I discovered that there is a section of program notes and essays with music as well. I have to explore further. I have also subscribed to their emails so we’ll see what that brings.
As a young adult, even a teen, I shopped around for a music that suited me. Of course as a Jersey girl of age in the 1980’s, I listened to a bit of Bruce and other contemporaries of the time. My sister Loren had a prodigious interest in music and collected albums of both popular and classical music. She was musically gifted. Violin was her primary instrument, but she played piano and flute, and was even known to hop on bassoon in a pinch. Music both from her own making and from her stereo issued forth at all hours and whenever she was home.
I am old enough that radios were certainly ubiquitous and hugely inexpensively available. While there was a kitchen radio for family consumption, it sat atop of the fridge where we couldn’t reach it until we were old enough, tall enough. It was generally on news radio, (CBS News radio where mom’s brother worked), but mom would give into music occasionally.
This is remarkably close to the model I had.
I had a transistor radio that I was extremely proud of when I was about 8. It was a small black Sony. It really seemed like the height of technology and vaguely magical. It was later replaced by, in turn, a very swinging 70’s model that was sort of a twisting plastic donut that kept its radio bits where it swung apart. This was very cool, but didn’t have legs. At some point I found or was given a white table model with gold trim and all were eventually replaced by a series of clock radios. (We were a clock radio family – my father rose to one daily and I guess he figured we all should. In New York I still use one, although in New Jersey and for travel I depend on my phone.) This eliminated the need for batteries and as I often listened in my room I only missed the magic of portability slightly.
Found on Pinterest. I think mine was even yellow…
I loved finding radio programs where stories were told or books read. Think Jean Shepard. I’m not so old that I remember dramas or series acted out on radio. However, there were shows where snippets of books were read or the sorts of things that would be podcasts were broadcast. I wasn’t very good at remembering when these shows were broadcast so it was hit or miss, but I’d go looking on a weekend afternoon or lazy summer day an occasionally be rewarded.
In true Butler tradition I still use a clock radio and this Sony cube has long been the current incarnation.I wake to WQXR classical music.
Jazz started to interest me fairly early on, but what I heard was sort of largely to one side of what really appealed to me. Almost without realizing it became apparent that what I liked was early jazz, pre-1940, but it was awhile before I think I entirely put that together. And it was hard to find. Like the stories, I would stumble on it here or there, but certainly didn’t find anything dedicated to it until I was in college.
I have written at length about the period of listening in college and ultimately discovering Rich Conaty’s show. (That tribute post to him can be found here.) Therefore, I won’t go over that territory again. Rich helped me quantify that it wasn’t only jazz, but really all popular music of the 20’s and 30’s (and perhaps a bit on either side) that I most coveted.
Rich Conaty. While researching this I found that WFUV has made his shows available digitally on their website.
However, with Rich’s death I never found a radio replacement. His station, WFUV, is an eclectic college station and there is, to my knowledge, no attempt to replace his show, nor to play the many decades of archived material. Phil Schaap filled the bill, if differently, at Columbia University and on their station. Kim and I became weekend listeners to his show, trading Rich’s Sunday night spot for a longer one on Saturday nights. Sadly, Phil lost his battle with cancer in 2021. His daily morning show Birdflight, about the life and music of Charlie Parker, is still played in its morning slot.
Phil was also a fixture at Jazz at Lincoln Center where he had taught their Swing U adult ed courses for many years. I would catch up with him in the kitchen and chat – always jazz or baseball. (I know nothing about baseball and very little about jazz compared to Phil. He’d quiz me and I would fail.) Once in awhile he’d lope into my office and have a chat. That was more rare. His presence accounted in part for my interest in taking the job there. Despite my inability to remember dates and details, Phil was overwhelmingly supportive of my fundraising efforts on behalf of the music and always expressed his gratitude with enthusiastic abundance.
A young Phil Schaap.
I find it hard to listen to Phil or Rich now, both their voices so very distinctive, without getting sad so I don’t listen to the rebroadcasts of Phil’s shows. WKCR continues dedicated presentations of jazz beyond Birdflight, but I lost the habit of listening while I work entirely during the pandemic. Kim loves the music, but he finds it distracting when he’s working so unlike my office, I didn’t play it while working from home during the pandemic years.
Ironically, my discovery of Radio Dismuke has come as I finish my time at Jazz at Lincoln Center and popular music of the 20’s and 30’s pours out of my office there again for now. (The internet has of course long replaced the desktop radio that I had while at the Met – although I still have it and could probably put my hands on it right now.) It is of some comfort to me that when I am sitting in a new chair in a different office in a few months that I will take Radio Dismuke along with me. In recognition I made my first online gift to them. I hope that it will be the first of many.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: This photo has been on my desk for a long time and it drifted to the top of the pile today. As I write on a chilly November morning, summer and swimming is already a distant memory while the long winter days of January, February and March lay, daunting, ahead. It reminds me that it has been many years since I have been swimming in the ocean, or even a smaller natural body of water.
I thought about taking up swimming during the pandemic. I think I would need a few lessons to get to the point where I am swimming laps successfully. I may still do it. Long term the low impact of swimming may make better peace with my arthritic body than the endless pounding of running.
This photograph has a remarkably dreamy quality. The way the definition of the water disappears, yet there are just a few people going way out to the horizon line. The four women are wearing old-fashioned bathing caps, but even the somewhat saggy bathing suits don’t mar the timeless quality of the image. We see their reflections, but not below the surface. It manages to reach across time which is what the best old photos do for me.
Years ago I wrote a post (found here) based on the quote, save something for the swim back, and that quote comes to my mind when I look at this photo. The post was about the struggle I was having in the fall of 2019 where I did feel I was drowning at times. Little did I know how much would change in the next six months when March of 2020 rolled around.
This image feels like the liminal space between things – those times where we are parked in one of the great waiting rooms of our lives. That’s not to say those periods are fallow. I wrote several times about the time I spent caring for my mom during her final illness. (One of those posts can be found here.) While it was a world away from everything else, it was a time I learned a lot. Time seems to slow and morph. It is a period that seems to be outside of the ongoing time-space continuum of my life otherwise.
I have been in a similar space again recently as I began to commit to leaving my current position at Jazz at Lincoln Center and moving to another, very different one. That weird period when you realize that you are probably leaving, but you haven’t committed yet and are not ready to tell anyone. You stop investing in the future of what you are doing beyond a point because you won’t be there to do it so you are mentally treading water. However, after six and a half years I gave notice right before the holiday and more about that adventure in coming weeks for readers who stick around.
Lastly, to note: this is a photo postcard, but it is mounted on another piece of cardstock. I did not purchase it so it has the rare distinction of not being of my choosing as is virtually everything posted about here. Pictorama is pretty much wholly curated by me. However, this card arrived in the mail last December and there is a note from the fellow cartoonist Robert Crumb to Kim on the back. And we decided however, that the photo merited its own place here in Pictorama.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: A few weeks back I wrote a bit about our anniversary which we celebrated with a trip to Cold Spring, which is where Kim and I spent our one-day honeymoon. (That post can be read here.) We found Cold Spring largely unchanged in the intervening decades, although a tourist ferry landed at lunchtime while we were there, crowding the town with people who were leaf watching and enjoying the first nippy days of October. Some of the antique stores had folded or morphed together. One that had always featured vintage Halloween items either melted down into something else or is gone entirely, I could not tell.
However, one of my purchases that day was this trio, two Mickeys and a Minnie. Some quick research shows a similar, larger band composed only of Mickeys. However, Worthpoint sold these three pieces together, in lesser condition. Each piece is etched with Mickey or Minnie Mouse. And on the back of each, it is noted that they were Made in Japan. (These figures are very similar to a single Bimbo figure I came across and wrote about here. If not the same manufacturer, very much of a piece. It would appear he too had his own band.)
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
Bisque attracts dirt and is easily chipped and mine are in better shape than the ones auctioned previously on Worthpoint. However, ultimately I did find a set in the original box, below, sold on Heritage. (Note to self, Heritage sells something other than original art and comics? Huh.) There were originally four pieces and the missing piece appears to be an accordion playing Mickey. Part of my brain wonders at the Mickey to Minnie ratio – was it somehow okay to multiple Mickeys, but Minnie was singular? You have to look a bit to see the Minnie-ness; I missed it at first. This set was evidently produced in the 1930’s.
That day in the same store I purchased a nice Steiff duck which I wrote about in the post mentioned at the top, here. Perhaps the very best thing about that store was an internet radio station they were listening to, Radio Dismuke. This station, based on a singular collection which continues to be programmed by its founder, plays music from the early decades of the 20th century. I have been happily listening to it on a regular basis since discovering it. The station, which runs 24 hours a day, can be found here and do check it out if early jazz and dance band music is of interest to you. (For my remembrances of the great Rich Conaty, radio DJ who largely introduced me to this music, read the post here.)
Kim and I meet Rich at Sophia’s in 2010, Maureen Solomon on my left.
Kim has said that Radio Dismuke is a bit like you bought an old radio at a flea market and turned it on to find it playing the tunes of its day. He’s hit it spot on. There is no DJ, but the occasional period commercial is inserted, as is the periodic station identification. They are a non-profit and I assure you they are getting my support this season.
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
I do own another Mickey Mouse band, very small and made of china, purchased on a work trip in Lyon, France. Sadly one of the pieces has broken subsequently so I don’t feel I have been a good steward of it. (A post about it can be found here.) However, it is maybe notable that a proliferation of multiple Mickeys making music seems to have been so popular in his youth, and these radio tunes are the perfect partner.
Pam’s Pictorama Post: These cat related bits wandered in together from Miss Molly (@missmollystlantiques) who said her mom found them. They are similar to a post I did a few months back with an interesting cat piece that Miss Molly sold me, but evidently not from the same point of origin. (That post, The Fish Eater can be found here.) My guess is that these did not relate to each other earlier in life either and the Burdock Blood Bitters and the cat head show evidence of having been hand trimmed. All show signs of having been pasted down so they came out of an album.
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
The Burdock piece was a trade card for a patent medicine. It still has some information about the product on the back, including that it hailed from the Foster, Milburn & Co., Buffalo, N.Y. Kittens seem like a benign if misleading representation of this particular stomach cure. These kittens also seem oddly placed in this basket – not really sitting on anything, floating. This piece is the heaviest, made of card stock. In a sort of sleepy state this morning (concert last night for work) I started down the rabbit hole of Burdock root and Burdock Blood Bitters online this morning.
Burdock, the real deal.
One entry tells me that an 1918 bottle of bitters that was tested contained zero burdock and excessive amounts of alcohol and lead. Although it was ostensibly most frequently used to settle stomach and digestive ailments (think constipation and liver and kidney problems), the company also claimed that it would work to purify your blood (whatever that means) and cure nervousness. The internet seems to be willing to grant that Burdock root is high in fiber and especially high antioxidant and something called pre-biotic qualities. Herbal remedies with it abound on the internet today.
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
The seated kitty is holding a rat under one paw and whatever his origin, he is on very light paper, slightly embossed. You probably can’t see it, but he has a couple of fangy teeth bared. It presumably hails from some sort of rodent killing product ad. Although is bow is untied he looks otherwise unruffled, almost surprised that he is holding that ratty fellow.
For the Hobo fans, I will pause and tell a recent tale. (For those who are just entering the story, Hobo is the tough old male stray who visits our backyard in New Jersey. I fed him and even tried to trap him at my mother’s behest, but he is wily and although he enjoys his handouts he will never get that close.)
A recent through the screen door pic of Hobo. King of outdoor cats.
Anyway, after mom died we continue to feed him and the other day the caretaker of cats and house, Winsome, because to her horror she stumbled across Hobo behind the bushes in the front yard munching (and crunching – she sent a video) on a rat. (Evidently he had left a mouse for her earlier in the day so she shouldn’t have felt so bad!) I told her he deserved a promotion.
Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.
Lastly there is a cat head, slightly embossed, which appears to be the only one that was constructed for pasting down. Hard to see but even the whiskers and the hairs are defined and it is professionally finished although it seems to fit all of a piece with these two more recycled bits.
I’m sorry the original page of this Victorian album arrangement no longer exists, but happy to welcome these small bits to the Pictorama collection.
Pam's Pictorama 