Walking the Berkshires

"Hope and Optimism in Spite of the Present Difficulties"

The title of this post is from a woodcut by John Muafangejo, a Namibian who was one of the great artists in this medium.  We are very fortunate to have an original print of another of his works in our home, a treasure from our years in southern Africa.  It would be well worth checking him out if you are unfamiliar with his work.

Here on the cusp of the New year, I shall resist passing somber judgments on the one that has passed or making predictions about the one that arrives tomorrow.  Instead, a few of the many things to which I'm looking forward, in no particular order:

• Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan.  Delicious or dreadful, a must see.
• Burrowing into the pile of books that came my way this Christmas.  At the top of the stack: Sippewissett, or Life on a Salt Marsh by Tim Travers, followed by Tom Wessels' The Myth of Progress, Toward a Sustainable Future.  Reviews to follow.
• Saving Windrock.  This year, for the rest of the century.
• A week on Monhegan Island.  It's been far too long.
• The last years of my 4th decade (39 in April).
• Raising a glass to toast a decade of ≠Khoadi //Hôas Conservancy and our friends in Northwest Namibia who have made it such a success.  1997 was indeed the "year of action", and Viv and I are grateful to have been part of it.  Wish we could celebrate with you in person.  Maybe on the 15th.
• A Northeast US tour by Richard Thompson.  Preferably at the Iron Horse or the Egg.  Somewhere close enough for us to get a sitter.
• The many simple pleasures of the seasons.  Tapping our maple tree.  The first wild leeks.  A clambake on Buzzard's Bay.  Fresh pressed cider.  Splitting wood.  Autumn leaves.  Winterberry. 

My very best wishes to one and all in the New Year.

General on a Mule: Algerian Caravan, 1922

In 1922, General John Biddle, SSC, DSM, Ret., toured Algeria and Tunisia by caravan.  He kept a  diary of his journey from Biskra to Algiers, through Tougqourt, Ouargla and Ghardaia, later compiled as a neatly typed manuscript with photographs that he gave to his cousin, my Gr-great Aunt Bess Ogden, and which is among the more unusual items in our family archive. 

Introduced by the author as "no tale of adventure, no dangers, nor escapes; just the telling of an ordinary trip of thirteen days through part of the desert of Sahara, under the competent and comfortable care of the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique", it is still a fascinating read.  Biddle is a descriptive observer, though his view is colored by the attitudes of his day.  As such, his account reveals as much about the author as the lands through which he traveled and the people he met along the way.

"There seemed no guide to direction.  A small trail indicated by tracks and some droppings might help, but the sand soon covers all; there are often cross trails and the camels going slowly wander around to graze.  The mules sink to the fetlock, and leave a small crater as the track, while the camels barely sink in, except a little at the toes.

An Arab dressed in black turban, black cloth coat, Arab white trousers, strong bare brown calves, and a rough wide rawhide heelless boot, carrying a rifle, walks and runs behind my mule and finds time to keep it going with word and stick.  After a while, he gives the gun to a camel-driver showing that even Arabs can tire.  It is like Vercingetorix with Caesar, but I don't suppose I go as fast..."

"...The Kabyles are the best of the Arab race.  They come from Bougie and westward.  They did the best fighting and now having been conquered, they make the best citizens, going to school, and as their country is poor, going all through Algeria to earn their living.  The Head caravaner at Tougqourt Ramdam and the chief I have Nazef, are Kabyles and fine, well mannered, good looking men they are.  Like the Virginians, they tell you they are the best of the country, and luckier than the Virginians, others agree with them."

Along their route, Biddle enjoyed the hospitality of the Caid of N'goussa, shown at left with his son and wearing a red blanket bedecked with medals from his service with the French.

"He is a big, handsome man 75 years years old, has had 16 wives and still 2 or 3.  Has one nice looking boy of 17 and 2 girls unseen.  Had a child a couple of years ago and did not see why i should not marry at my age.  I asked him what I should have to do to come here and find many wives.  He said I must be circumcised and believe in the Prophet.  As I protested a little he reconsidered a moment and then said that he thought probably that believing in the Prophet would be enough.  The Caid invited me to tea, dinner and to sleep.  I accepted the two former."

Though in his sixties, Biddle was an old soldier and loved the outdoor life. 

"...We ambled slowly at 6 or 7 kilometers an hour, stopping at Temacin to climb the minaret and see the oasis, and buy some dates which are cheaper than at Tougqourt.  Then a couple of kilometers further on, the mule riders stopped at the edge of a palmgrove for lunch; canned sardines, chunk of beef, two boiled eggs, cheese and fruit, wine and water, all this was good enough for anybody.  An hour later, the camel train having passed, we started and about two hours later, made camp at the edge of a palmgrove, dry and protected from the wind, but always lots of flies, especially on the old men and women."

There is a good deal more along these lines in the pages of John Biddle's caravan diary.  He died in 1936 and is buried at West Point where he once was commandant.  Apparently his medals were offered last August on Ebay, and like another old soldier he has faded away.  But still we have the record of a few weeks of his life out in the Sahara, a glimpse through his eyes of a vanished world.

"Skating Away (on the Thin Ice of the New Day)"

The muse leads me down unexpected paths tonight.  The spark was a series of archival photographs taken of my grandmother and her siblings nearly a century ago.  The one at left, in fact, is one hundred years old.  That's my great Aunt Margie bundled up under all those furs and bows.  Even at one year old, she took the world straight on despite such petty indignities.  She was a formidable person reared by formidable women, and the genealogical record she so remarkably preserved and from which these images now come is in my keeping.

Shall this be a winter's tale, then?  A whimsical look at Edwardian fashion and children being children in a timeless wonderland?  I though I was going there with you.

But this is also a dark time, here at the turning of the year.  A time of renewal and somber reflection, maybe, but for me and for others I love a time of grief and loss as well.  Our eldest child, a little girl we named Cora, was stillborn during this season of light and hope, and nearly 8 years later the grief is still fresh when I allow myself to feel it.  And now an old and recently reacquainted friend has lost her firstborn to stillbirth - a daughter they named Sophie - and I cannot turn away even if I wished it.

The loss of a child is a solitary grief.  There is, to be sure, the outpouring of love and sympathy and even the most distantly connected are affected. Those who have suffered such losses themselves recognize that dark place of the heart and understand it is impossible to know its unique impacts on another.  Only we can live our own lives, only we can take that final journey for ourselves.  And only a person who has suffered the death of one's child can know what it will mean to bear that unique burden.  We have to figure out how to do that ourselves, too.

When my great-aunt Margie was born, before anti-biotics and prenatal screening and a universe of medical advances, there were many more families who had lost children and many more failed pregnancies than is the case in much of the world today.  There were many more mothers who died in childbirth.  Take a walk through any older graveyard and what strikes you most are the many graves of young women, the heartbreakingly small stones of infants and young children.  People did not expect every pregnancy to be successful, every child to outlive its parents.  How they bore these losses I cannot imagine.  Faith, resignation and social conditioning alone do not explain it.

So now here we are, you and I, in a place I hoped to avoid, a place I would spare anyone if I had the power to do so.  I used to be much better at disassociation; you might even say I had a talent for it.  I am thinking tonight about my friend, and her little girl, and my own children (the living and the dead).

Shall we linger here, in these unsettled lands, with the icy wind scattering all questions unanswered?  Or shall we skate out over the dark water, the black ice after a hard freeze, the speed of our passage bringing tears to our eyes that even grief could not dislodge?  I remember ice like that, its unmarred surface gleaming like polished stone above a flooded cranberry bog.  My skates scored that obsidian plane in silver crescents, picking up speed, flying over the drowned plants that the ice would help preserve until the Springtime of their resurrection.  For a few exhilarating minutes there was nothing else in the world but the sound of my blades, the bite of the air, and my approach to that distant shore.

Emily and Elias are learning to skate.  I held each of their hands the other day as we teetered out among the other free skaters at the high school rink.  I was bent and anchored to their faltering, twisting path.  But their eyes were shining.  I knew that there would be many falls before the end, but they knew they were skating and believed they would soon do so on their own.  And so they lift me up.

Childhood is precious, as is life itself.  One child does not replace another, but somehow the heart expands.

Another winter, another snowfall.  More children have joined the first, facing the new day and whatever it brings with the mantle of love and fists full of snowballs.  Yours, perhaps, or mine.  Let us leave them to their play, these timeless children with sparkling eyes. For now, it will suffice.

The Cause and Cure of War in 1934

The week she spent in Washington as a delegate to the 9th Conference on the Cause and Cure of War in 1934 was one of the highlights of my Grandmother Athalia (Ogden) Barker's long life.  Just 23, an elementary school teacher and recent graduate of Smith College, her experience had a profound impact and one which she delighted in recounting in later years.  The lessons she drew from it, however, irrevocably changed after her personal experience of war in WWII, and in hindsight she saw her prior peace work refracted though that prism. 

One of the hardest gulfs to cross as an historian is the chasm between attempts to confront evil while avoiding war and the lessons drawn from those wars that follow nonetheless.  There is never enough historical distance for ideals like "an end to all wars" to seem anything but hopelessly naive as wars remains with us, despite all efforts - some even arguably successful - to prevent them.  Neville Chamberlain's name will remain a watchword for the failure of appeasement to contain fascism, his declaration of "peace in our time" proven so swiftly, tragically false.  It is very easy for history to dismiss him and those like him as anything from misguided to craven, and more than 65 years later I and undoubtedly the vast majority of you are convinced that nothing short of war could have stopped Hitler and Imperial Japan. Still, it is a very flat perspective.  The material in our family archive and grandmother's story put some contextual flesh and bones on the peace movement of the 1930s.

The National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW) was the brainchild of Carrie Chapman Catt, a giant of the Women Suffrage Movement and the foremost American feminist of her day.  The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment left the women's movement with a powerful new voice at the ballot but the need for new direction.  Catt believed that the tremendous mobilizing capacity of various women's organizations could be brought to bear on what many felt in the wake of the Great War was the most pressing issue of the day: greater understanding among nations and peoples of the cause and cure of war. 

Europe was reeling with millions of war dead and devastated economies.  The League of Nations, without US ratification, still tried to establish a means for nations to address their differences without coming to blows.  The challenge was great.  The Soviet Union had replaced the Kaiser as the greatest threat to Europe and its new, strong overseas ally the United States. Nationalism was on the rise and new communication technologies - notably radio and soon after "talkie" cinema- had like our modern-day Internet the potential to link people and nations together but also to reinforce divisive propaganda. 

Catt saw a paramount need for education, for a clearinghouse of information of goodwill and understanding that offered alternatives to militarism.  The alliance she forged in 1924 ultimately included  the American Association of University Women, Council of Women for Home Missions, Federation of Woman's Boards for Foreign Missions of North America, General Federation of Women's Clubs, National Board of the Young Women's Christian Associations, National Council of Jewish Women, National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, National League of Women Voters, National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, National Women's Trade Union League, and the National Women's Conference of American Ethical Union.  These groups represented 5,000,000 members, and in a nation of fewer than 120,000,000 constituted a formidable alliance.

Still, the NCCCW was not a radical group.  Although its members included Jane Addams and other progressive reformers, it took pains to stress that it was not a pacifist organization.  Time Magazine reported:

"Care was exercised in excluding professional peace societies and organizations of "pink" tendencies. This was to be a conference of "normal" women to undertake a common-sense study of the problem of preventing war, with a view of arriving at some common plank on which all could stand..."

The Swarthmore College Peace Collection Archive notes:

"The NCCCW emphasized education. Besides its annual conferences, probably its most significant program was its "Marathon Round Tables," which represented a network of guided local study groups. Its stated goals were 1) "to learn how to discuss"; 2) "to find the best way for public opinion to function"; and 3) "to search for a bolder and faster moving program for the abolition of war." Each year a new set of questions on peace and international relations was posited and information for study on the questions was provided. The program was active from 1927 to 1939."

These were reasonable people, committed to the ideal that humanity could uplift itself through commitment and dedication.  They were also pragmatists.  They believed that the root causes of war were above all economic but that they were also entrenched in racial, social, religious and national divisions and hatreds.  At the 9th Conference on the Cause and Cure of War in 1934, my grandmother heard Eleanor Roosevelt address the hard facts of peace:

"We do not like to sit down and face the causes that bring about war, but we have got to begin there.  We have got to face the fact that there are economic causes which bring about war.  We are learning in this country to face facts about economic causes, and many people, many groups of people, are learning that they have to change their ideals, they will have to change their ways of living, perhaps, they will have to change their values.  In the same way we must know the economic questions arising between nations more realistically than before.

We can have a League of Nations, a World Court, a Disarmament Conference and, unless we are willing to tell each other the truth, and to face the real causes which make nations jealous of each other, greedy of each other, hate each other, we shall get nowhere.  All these instruments are methods which can be used if the spirit is right, if the people really want it to succeed."

1934 was a watershed year for the NCCCW.  The nation was struggling to survive the Great Depression and economic considerations were paramount.  Totalitarianism was a clear and present threat to all that democracy, and the NCCCW, stood for.  The proceedings of the 9th Conference took full notice of the tide of nationalism and the threats to peace.  Japan had left the League of Nations over its occupation of Manchuria, while Hitler had come to power in Germany calling for "the disarmament of the principle powers and, failing that, the rearmament of Germany; the restoration, in part, of the German colonies; the revision of the Versailles Treaty; and the solution of the problem of the Polish Corridor."

Still, the delegates resolved to work for alternatives to war, and to strengthen their own democracy as an alternative to totalitarianism and dictatorship. 

There were many illuminating presentations throughout the conference.  A round table discussion on "Some Basic Obstacles to Peace" addressed topics are ranging as "the urge for territorial expansion" and "protecting national living standards as drivers behind an ultimate casus belli.  One panelist opined:

"The basic problem is due to the unequal distribution throughout the world of raw materials important for the new economy - a monopoly not in land but in capital.  One country controls 50% of the world's petroleum; another country is chief supplier of rubber for the whole world; one continent controls the greatest power resources of the world; such raw materials as cotton, sugar and wheat are not produced in such ratios as to make possible a political equilibrium among the nations of the world.  This makes for an inevitable friction."

The enormity of unequal distribution among nations was very much on the minds of participants and speakers alike.  So, too, was the power of centralizing nationalism to inflame prejudices and foster support for war.  To combat these forces, the delegates favored education and reason, greater international cooperation and understanding, but still there remained Mrs. Roosevelt's caution that "All these instruments are methods which can be used if the spirit is right" and useless otherwise. 

And there, I think, lies the rub. Needs-based negotiation works if all parties to the dispute adopt it.  But what if you are dealing not with centralized, nations but with transnational ideologies?  There are no straight paths.  Still, someone ultimately has to take a de-escalating step to reduce the likelihood of worsening conflict, to demonstrate another path.  Gorbachev did that, and de Klerk, though neither out of altruism and only after tremendous external pressure and the loss of support at home.

A highlight of the conference for my Grandmother as well as her fellow delegates was a formal tea at   the White House with President and Mrs. Roosevelt.  She had never met Eleanor Roosevelt before, but her Aunt Het (at right, and also at the Conference) had worked with her as fellow members of the NCCCW.  There was also a distant kinship.  Gran and Eleanor Roosevelt were 2nd cousins through marriage, having a great uncle in common - James King Gracie. Theodore Roosevelt, a nephew and 1st cousin to Het and Gran through the same marriage relationship, had sent roses from the White House to my great grandparents on their wedding day. 

Of the White House tea, Gran's diary briefly records:

"Mrs. R. is so gracious and lovely, the President inspires so much hope, and I was so close to both I noticed every line in their faces.  He addressed us shortly on peace - & our non-interference policy [in Latin America]."

The story she told afterward gave far more significance to the meeting.  Gran said that she, along with many at the conference, came to Washington feeling that our armament policy was wasteful and wrong-headed.  As a school teacher committed to education, she took to heart that there were hundreds of thousands of children educated in shacks and one room schoolhouses while "one small cruiser costs more than the annual appropriation for the Department of State."  Someone at the tea - Gran sometimes spoke as if it had even been her - addressed the question to the President directly.  My Grandmother took great relish in recounting his response.  As she remembered it, FDR listened graciously to the case for disarmament and reinvestment in education at home, and then quietly replied; "We may well need those destroyers."  The President's wisdom was confirmed for my Grandmother with "lend lease" in which these ships were invaluable, and she always ended her tales about the Conference on this knowing note. 

In any case, she did not prove "a confirmed Democrat" as her diary gushingly records after speeches by Mrs. Catt and Eleanor Roosevelt at that evening's banquet, but rather a hawkish Republican.  C'est la guerre, but to her credit she did not smirk at her former misplaced idealism.  She was young and empowered and with people she admired and a noble cause that appealed to "the better angels of our nature" and still, despite clear threats, seemed possible.  Perhaps that is what was behind Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler: a good man mismatched against a ruthless adversary. 

Eleanor Roosevelt shared with the gathering her experience of motoring through Europe with her sons a few years before:

"We went through many small villages in England, Scotland and Wales, and in every village there was a central monument with more names on each of these monuments than it seemed there could possibly be people in the village.  They were the names of the boys and men who had died in the Great War.  Then we went to France and one day one of my boys said to me, 'There is a funny thing about motoring over here; you see only old men or very young ones coming out of the fields.'  'Yes,' I said, 'there are old men and very young ones, there are some a bit older whom you saw playing at war over the same fields where the war had just come to an end and where the generation just older than they had been completely wiped out."...Then we passed through acres and acres and acres of white crosses, representing all the nations of Europe.  If that is not waste, I do not know what is.  It is a waste of people, not for a short time but for a long time.  Out of all that waste has come what we have been through in these past years, not only in this country but in every country."

This was the frame of reference for those seeking an end to war in 1934.  How bitterly their hopes were dashed just a few years later in a war even more wasteful and destructive than the one that had gone before.  The NCCCW continued to meet and hold its conferences until 1939, when World War II put an effective end to the organization.  Yet they were no fringe movement and are not so lightly dismissed, however subsequent events may have proved their methods inadequate to the task of beating the Axis Powers.  Even my grandmother, who through the crucible of war ruefully recalled her prior support of schools over ships, felt that she had been part of something of import, of worth, and it confirmed for her the value of actively participating in debate and democracy.  Her aunts had won her the vote, but it was up to her to engage her mind, to question, and finally to use it wisely.  That was the true worth of her experience, and no small legacy.

Take it to the Bridge, James Brown

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, lay in state today in his gold casket in Harlem's Apollo Theater.  This Saturday, former U.S. President Gerald Ford will receive a state funeral in Washington, D.C.  That's about as much connection as I can safely draw between these two figures and their coincidental passing.  I confess I was aware of President Ford long before my funk became the P funk, being 6 years old in the summer of '74 when Nixon took flight from the White House lawn.  I have an irrational fondness for tricky Dick, whose staff saw fit to get him to answer my Kindergartner's letter that March asking how Watergate was going.  I vividly remember being on Sutton's Island in Maine with my parents crowding the telescope to watch Nelson Rockefeller sailing out on the bay and into the Vice Presidency, though I was more impressed by the red sails of my Uncle Rob's Genevieve appearing like a pirate near sunset with her bearded, collegiate crew. 

James Brown came later in my life but had a more profound, personal impact than Gerald Ford.  As a fine singer who does not play an instrument, I found myself at the periphery of the garage bands I longed to join.  I became a loyal roadie for the bands of lifelong friends, taking the lead in late night jam sessions but never the front man on stage.  All that changed in my senior year of college, when in addition to writing a thesis on "Race and Faulkner's Native American Subjects" ; living in a tower room of a dormitory at a women's college; managing a student owned pizzeria in the basement of another dorm at my own college; brewing Iron Pig Mega-Stout; and rebounding from the end of a long term relationship, I got the Funk.

The previous spring, I had been in the cast of a superb production of Godspell, and among the many things that made that show special was its outstanding rhythm section.  George Rush, bassman supreme and a fellow a capella singer, approached me afterward to see if I would like to sing in a band he was putting together.  This was not your average late 1980s R.E.M. / Deadhead / pre-grunge guitar-geek affair.  No, this was the Hiram L. Weinstein All-Star Memorial Funk Project (featuring the Subsonic Analog Horns), and we were going to drop da bomb on the vanilla suburbs up and down the Main Line west of Philly.

I was all over this idea, but having been on a musical progression that was very stuck in classic rock and British folk, I required a crash course in James Brown.  George made tapes and I listened, bug-eyed, to the likes of "The Payback", "Doing It To Death", "Licking Stick", and "Soul Power", and unlearning everything I thought I knew about singing (which as a classically trained vocalist took a lot of deconstructing).  It wasn't just the command he had over those driving licks and horn hits - Maceo and Fred and the rest - or the funky, funky drumming of Clyde Stubblefield that set his sound apart.  It was the way the man owned a stage that kicked it stratospheric.  Mumbling cross legged around a mike stand just wasn't going to cut it.   If I was going to deliver this stuff, it had to be at nothing less than a full tilt jungle boogie.

There were 15 of us in Hiram that inaugural year.  George had all this back story about the name of the band - Hiram being the son of the late, great Lester Weinstein, an electric mandolin player who was supposed to have died in a bizarre feedback accident - but only George had any real credibility, having another gig going with a blues band called Gutbucket that played gigs in Philly. The rest of us had reasonable talent but a lot to prove.  In addition to me there were three other vocalists (2 of each gender), a six piece horn section, 2 on drums and percussion, lead guitar, keyboards, and bass.  We were college kids from Haverford and Bryn Mawr, plus a couple of long haired suckas from the communal hippie house where George lived.  We practiced all fall and had our debut at the December Snow Ball.

You should have been there.  Hiram hit the stage like a runaway soul train and flat out tore the roof off the sucka.  We did "I Got You" , "Give Up the Funk" and "Sex Machine".  We did Tower of Power and Parliament.  We did some Jackson 5 and Walter "Wolfman" Washington's "You Can Stay (But That Noise Got to Go)."  We did "Respect" and "Fishbone's "Party at Ground Zero"."  It was glorious.  Far freakin' habit forming.

We had gigs every week and packed the house every time. I sang "Brick House" at Bryn Mawr and watched ultra-radical lesbians in combat boots surrender gleefully to the beat.  We headlined a "Rockin' Down Apartheid" benefit with an even bigger funk band from St. John's College, a behemoth called "Two Fettered Apes" (see Brueghels painting, right, for reference) with 26 members, two rhythm sections, and a band leader who looked like Scooter from the Muppets and wore a scarf like Dr. Who.  Their most memorable song - I hesitate to say "best"- was an original called "Mammary Gumbo."

Thanks to James Brown, I got the feeling.   Hiram became a Haverford College institution, with more than a decade run before (maybe) the last time.  I went off to Africa with a different set of mixed tapes than otherwise and turned on a whole bunch of isolated Namibian school kids to something other than Celine Dion - though they did know Michael Jackson, post Mo'town.  I knew enough to call the local radio station in Worcester, MA during my grad school years and be not only the fifth caller but the first four as well and secure two tickets to Maceo Parker's New Year's Eve show that year in Newport, RI.  At my wedding, with my oldest friends sitting in on guitar and base, I delivered my beloved a righteous version of "Brick House." 

My glory years have a soundtrack that is 98% funky stuff and James Brown has a lot to do with that.  Take it to the bridge, JB.

Amateur Theatricals

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts..."            

              - William Shakespeare, As You Like It

It is a proven fact that whenever a large family gathers for even a modest length of time, some child or other will proudly announce that there will be a play and then proceed to dragoon all and sundry into the cast.  The audience, no less captive than the actors, is eventually treated to the hastily rehearsed, largely improvised and unremittingly comic performance of the director's vision. 

I've been on the giving and receiving end of such extravaganzas on numerous occasions.  Over Christmas my daughter Emily attempted to cast her grandmother as a wicked witch, and on the theory that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I played the part instead with a Pythonesque falsetto.  Emily made an excellent straight man, and there was a dramatic duel with wrapping paper tubes up and down the stairs which ended when Elias unraveled my cardboard blade.  After the finale she announced:"that was the best play ever!"  A girl after my own heart.

How we amateurs love a stage!  A look into the archives confirms that our family has had more than its share of Thespians, grandiose orators and lovers of costume over the years, but I suspect that there were certain periods in American history when such pursuits and amusements were more common than at present with all our virtual, electronic diversions. The program of Historical Tableaux at the head of this post, for instance, was presented by the D.A.R. in Elizabeth, NJ, and featured several of my ancestors in period costume - or what they imagined that to be.  That is my great grandmother at left, Madge (Olmsted Ogden), photographed in 1898 in powdered periwig and masquerading as some 18th-century dame or other, perhaps Marie Antoinette.  There are piles of old photographs of this family in costume, either for various "ethnic" dances or for amateur theatricals at the Elizabeth Country Club.  Not having reason for or interest in membership in such organizations myself, I nonetheless suspect that there is little call today for dressing up in anything more outlandish than polo shirts and tennis whites, but back then they surely enjoyed dressing up: the more outlandishly the better.

There is evidence that an even earlier generation took part in such  performances.  This image from June, 1868, depicts two collateral relations (Margaret "Tippie" Gracie and Harriet Mayo) striking poses in their roles from a production entitled "Popping the Question."  Just who proposed two whom in unclear, but from the expressions on their faces it is reasonably to guess that the relationship between these characters may have been that of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law to be.  Fashions being what they were in this period, I am grateful to whomever penciled the explanatory details on the back of this photograph; otherwise one might have assume this was their everyday attire and read more into their glowering looks than circumstances merit.

The only legitimate professional actress in our family was Eva G Barker, my Gr-gr-great aunt, whose carte de visite identifies her as an "elocutionist", a profession somewhat more seemly for a woman of her time than actress.  Elocutionists taught the art of oratory, proper diction and public speaking, which even so was not usual for women in the 1870s.  The back of the card provides more details, however, and reveals that Aunt Eva herself graced the stage with one of the most notable actresses and foremost woman performing Shakespeare in her age: Helena Modjeska.  In addition to Shakespeare, Modjeska was the first to produce Ibsen's A Doll's House in America, so this was highbrow stuff for my ancestor - none of your vaudeville fripperies for Miss Barker - and therefore a more respectable vocation for her in the eyes of her Midwestern family and the public than otherwise.

Performances by children were popular in the Olmsted family as far back as the 1880s, when this  playbill was printed. Uncle Ned Olmsted (then age 8) appears as Ole King Cole, a role he reprised in subsequent  productions.  A cousin, Emma Florance, appears as one of the extras in the "Ding Dong Dell" segment, as does Archie Ogden, my Gr-grandfather, who would marry his childhood sweetheart Madge Olmsted nearly a quarter century later. The Olmsted sisters Madge and Kate were also enthusiastic performers, adopting roles as varied as Little Bo Peep (depicted by Kate Olmsted), "Miss Pole, purveyor of Cranford gossip" (again by Kate), and "Miss Betty Barker, retired milliner and proud owner of a cow" (Madge Olmsted).

Not only the stage but the boardwalk attractions of the photographer's booth tempted my ancestors into outlandish costume.  Here Madge Olmsted and an unidentified reveler celebrate the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago by adopting traditional German attire and hoisting a festive stein for the camera.

I know these people from long ago, hamming for the camera in their frocks and feathers, strutting timelessly across their stage in life's rich pageant.  I see the same twinkle in my daughter's eyes, and puckish smile in my own.

Tag Lines: Dotting Doggerel from Christmas Past

Ours is a family that delights in wordplay, that toasts by composing new lyrics for old standards.  My grandfather, brought up to understand that conversation at table must either be edifying or minimal, was astonished at the banter of the boisterous Ogdens.  Here he records in his diary of 1934 impressions of his in-laws that have stood the test of time:

"All the Ogdens excel at a type of conversation which is rarely heard in our family.  It is light, witty, laden with gossip and more especially with the 'semi-sex' life of the members of the family and all friends.  They never pick a topic for discussion and attempt to gain anything from the conversation.  Thus it is most unproductive.  But it surpasses in wit, quick retort and humor."

An example of this tendency is found in a long-standing Christmas tradition that made full use of my Great-grandmother's light heart and lively wit.  Christmas Dinner at 454 Westminster Ave. in Elizabeth New Jersey featured numerous family members at the groaning board, and beside each place a holiday favor concealing a small gift within.  The notes attached to these gifts were in verse of her own devising, and gave clues both to the contents of the package and to the character of the recipients.  As with her Christmas lists discussed in the previous post, Gr-grandmother Madge (Olmsted) Ogden recorded these poems for posterity in another of her ruled notebooks, still preserved in our family archive.

A few of her Christmas jingles have already been highlighted here in a post about her suffragist sister-in-law, Esther "Het" Ogden.  In the decade leading up to woman's enfranchisement in America, several of the Christmas poems composed by Madge take playful note of where others in the family stood on this issue.  In 1916 Uncle John Owen Stearn's Jr., a confirmed bachelor and thoroughly Anti-suffrage, found this note attached to a box of pipe cleaners:

" Old Santa Claus is giving you a useful gift this year/ A little bunch of cleaners to make your pipe burn clear./ But is it not superfluous to give this gift to you? / For all your hopes are realized, your "pipe dreams" have come true...In fact there's nothing left for me to wish you in this poem/ Fort Wilson's in the White House, and Woman's in 'the Home!'"

Not to be outdone, the following year, Aunt Het the suffragist received a present with this encouraging tag:

"Old Santa is a kindly soul and likes to give each year ' The present that you want the most at Christmas dinner here. / Your gift to-day has cost a lot and was most hard to get / But Santy had it in his pack to give someday to Het./ 'Tis not a golden laurel wreath within this small surprise / But something you will wisely use and also greatly prize."

It contained a small ballot box.

As for Madge's views on votes for women, her own present in 1914 came with the following revealing lines:

"Dear Mother says she cannot be a suffragette like us / Because with all her children small she hasn't time to fuss; / But really she is doing lots for Suffrage, please take note, / For she's training up five voters while we work to get the vote!"

Politics have long been a favorite family preoccupation, and aside from Suffrage there were divided party ties at the holiday table.  In 1924 Het's elder sister, Aunt Bess Ogden, found a toy donkey at her place with these lines on the tag:

"...Surely no one is more constant, nor more loyal to a friend / And when Bessie has convictions she will hold them to the end. / To her party she is loyal: "Only Democrats can save us / From the G.O.P. dominion; all should vote from Bryan and Davis." / That you know was e'er election: some did not vote as did Bess / But the outcome now is History and we need no longer guess! / Loyal Bessie has a present from old Santa Claus to-day / Just a Democratic memory - take it with our love we bray!"

My Great-grandfather Archibald Gracie Ogden liked "baseball, highball, golf ball too", so his sentiments toward the Eighteenth Amendment, which went into effect in 1920, need not be surmised.  His present that year was a cocktail ice pick with the following lines of verse:

"'Conservation is vexation, Subtraction is far worse. / Substitution is 'the limit", Prohibition is a curse! / Gone are the glad days of cocktails, Whiskey, beer and all things nice / But in counting up your blessings, don't forget they've left you ice! / You'll not find a silver corkscrew tied within this package gay - / But please don't pick faults in Santa for the gift he brings to-day."

I can find no evidence either in the written family record or in our oral tradition that Prohibition made teetotalers out of any of us, then or since.

Often the poems were more substantial than the gifts they adorned, and clearly the family loved this tradition: the younger members no less than their elders.  My grandmother's gift in 1916, when she was not quite six, was a pen-knife and a cautionary limerick:

"Now Athalia, our dear youngest daughter / Can see what old Santa has brought her / I fear what you get / We may some day regret / Pray use it, my Dear, as you oughter."

As to my grandfather's initial skepticism, whether such merry doggerel was edifying at the time is doubtful, though it sheds great light today on the personalities of my forebears, not to mention certain traits still much in evidence in our clan today.

Five Decades of Gift Giving

In the first year of her marriage, my great grandmother, Margaret "Madge" (Olmsted) Ogden, started keeping a record of gifts received by each family member.  She would unfailingly maintain these entries in a lined notebook for nearly fifty years: from 1904 through 1951, the year before she died.  It was a habit passed on to subsequent generations and still maintained by my mother, who could no more sit at ease on Christmas morning without with a yellow pad and pen in her hands than my Dad could sit in the stands at a ballgame without his pencil and scorecard.

In 1904 the family had more resources than any time before or since, thanks to a windfall inheritance from a wealthy uncle.  The man of the house, Archibald Gracie Ogden, received an umbrella, a gold collar stud and a brass watch box.  Furs were in fashion, with various female members of the family decked out in squirrel and lynx muffs, but there was also a book for Uncle John O. Stearns Jr. entitled "How to Know the Wild Flowers."  Portraits of family members, lamps, scarves and bridge sets appear on the list.  Nieces and nephews received rag dolls, toy stoves and candy. 

The following decade saw 5 Ogden children added to the household.  In 1912 the brood received a circus tent.  The girls were extensively bestowed with doll paraphernalia, while young Archie (age 3) got a hobby horse, big brown stuffed bear, and toy soldiers.  Various adult family members received India China plates, cups and saucers, and $5 gold pieces. in 1918 my Gr-aunt Margie (then age 13) received an electric grill!

The lists grew longer as the family expanded.  Sometimes Madge would keep a record of cards received as well as gifts given.  Starting in 1913 she regularly affixed that year's Red Cross Christmas stamp on the inside cover of her notebook.  Children aged and football helmets and shirt waists replaced dolls and lead soldiers.  My teen-aged grandmother got a Kimono and silk stockings in 1925, the year of her first communion!  My great Aunt Esther received pearls and a poetry anthology.

The depression recked the family finances, and my gr-grandfather's death in 1934 was a heavy blow.  Gold pieces no longer went to distant cousins - pickles and "don't forget pads" were more the style - and items like cellophane plate covers and laundry bags make their first appearances.  Still, there were fashionable items for immediate family members.  Margie got rhinestone earrings in 1935, and also bloomers, while Dayton enjoyed a pair of pigskin gloves and six pair of socks. in 1937, they year he married into the family, my Grandfather received an ice mallet and bag - what was commonly called a "Jigger Whacker."

Madge Ogden was by now a grandmother, known as "Gar" to the youngest generation which would eventually number 12 cousins.  At this time Gar was living in New York and Margie with her, so the Christmas record includes $10.00 tips to the building superintendent and elevator operators, with more modest amounts for the milkman, laundry boy and newspaper boy.  For the benefit of regular readers and cousins Tigerhawk and Charlottesvillain, in 1946 your father the historian received copies of "The Last of the Mohegans" and "Oregon Trail", a jigsaw with two blades, and a tie pin, while your grandfather got 50 matches in a holder and a cork bottle stopper.  My grandfather got a book on bugs which I expect delighted him.  My mother, then 4 years old, got an Indian tom-tom, a paper doll book and Santa soap.  Uncle Dayt got a glass martini pitcher and swizzle and some bar stoppers - my, this is a drinking family - and Uncle Archie some airmail paper and a pack of cigarettes, foreshadowing his many expatriate years in London and the throat cancer that sadly would claim his life. 

By 1951 - her last Christmas - Gar writes in a darker, unsteady hand but her gifts still illustrate the care that went into choosing them for those on her list.  My mother the lover of birds got a hummingbird feeder - and pearls, quite possibly family jewelry.    Her grandchildren Johnny and Ned Henneman each unwrapped leather writing cases and striped neckties, suitable for their subsequent academic careers. My grandfather received matches embossed with the name of his beloved weekend home "Windrock."

We have by any measure a remarkable family record.  What is even more remarkable is the depth and breadth of the material in our archives.  Items like the nearly half century of Christmas memories preserved by Margaret (Olmsted) Ogden from 1904-1951 make their time and mine seem no time at all.

Holiday Spirits

There wasn't much snow in Elizabeth New Jersey when this picture was taken in 1919.  That's my grandmother, Athalia (Ogden) Barker, with her little brother Dayton.  The Great War had just ended, reflected in the cut of Dayt's winter garb of military coat and overseas cap.  Gran had recently survived the Great Influenza that took one of our Gracie relatives in pregnancy as well as the lives of 20 million other souls around the world in that terrible plague.  There was not enough snow for a sled, but their wagon makes a serviceable photographer's prop. 

The younger of five children, Gran and her little brother were especially close throughout their lives.  Here they enjoy skiing together in 1936 when Dayt was was at Williams and Gran was engaged to my Grandfather, Robert Barker.  None of us in my generation had ever seen Gran on anything so incongruous as skis, but here was proof that she was capable of even more than we imagined. Likewise the two piece bikini, a gift from my Grandfather in 1944 while on duty in the Pacific, always made us grin when we looked at the picture at left.  The glowing smile on my grandmother's face is evidence not only that she adored her brother, but the joy the whole family felt at having him posted stateside after more than 2 years of active duty as a naval intelligence officer with a bomber wing in the South Atlantic.

Uncle Dayt was the life of any party, and his recitals of "Casey at the Bat" at weddings and banquets were legendary.  In one notorious episode, his reunion class at Williams called for Casey and when he reached the climax, not just "the air was shattered by the force of Casey's blow" but also a plate glass window as the magnum of Champagne flew from his grasp and out of the restaurant.  His classmates promptly passed the hat, paid for the window, and undoubtedly called for another round.

Gran will be 96 next month, and Uncle Dayt passed away last year at 92.  Gran and Aunt Lib, Dayton's wife, are the last of their generation in my family.  These are the days when the veil between gathered loved ones and those I imagine celebrating with us on that other shore grows as thin as a flurry of snow.

In Dulci Jubilo!

update: (12/26/2006) At least one holiday spirit seems to have objected to the inclusion of the bikini shot of my grandmother, as it mysteriously vanished from this post after it was published.  Sorry, Grandpop, but here it is again. :-)

Dedication

I almost missed this slim, two volume set on my great-aunt's shelves when her effects were settled.  The spines cracked, the leather flaking off in russet smears, they sat unobtrusively among the histories of old New England and New Jersey and a volume of David Hume published in Philadelphia during 1778, the year of British occupation.  Most of the books in Aunt Margie's estate went to an antiquarian, but I was looking for anything with family connections and the dedications inscribed inside these shabby tomes lifted them from obscurity and placed them within that genealogical category. 

They are 1824 editions, volumes 1 and 2, appropriately enough, of  "The Antiquary."  The writer is identified simply as "the author of Waverly."  Sir Walter Scott had achieved such fame and recognition through that novel that his authorship was identified in this way in many of his subsequent writings.  They were published in Great Britain and are in otherwise unremarkable save for their inked dedications.

I deduce from the identifying moniker at the top of the page, A. I. Olmsted, that they once belonged to the library of my Gr-gr-gr-great uncle Anthony Isaacs Olmsted of Philadelphia, and passed when he died to the family archivist, his brother Henry Morse Olmsted, and so on through the generations to me.  They are not dedicated to him, however, and therein lies a story still shrouded in considerable mystery.

The longer of the two inscriptions, reproduced in the image at left, is transcribed below in full:

"Presented to Benjamin Weeks By William Manston on board the Ship Superb lying in Cowes Roads on the 22nd day of February 1830 the birthday of the Illustrious WASHINGTON."

The other dedication is briefer, but locates Cowes Roads off the   Isle of Wight in the channel of the Solent.

There are many clues and unanswered question in these few brief lines.  Benjamin Weeks is a puzzle and more on him follows, but William Weeks was an uncle by marriage, one of four merchant mariners to marry four daughters of my 5th great grandfather, Samuel Gilmore of Philadelphia.  Many were captains in the transatlantic and China trade and two were lost at sea.  One of those lost was Captain Isaac Isaacs, whose letter of instruction for two voyages to Canton in the early 1820s is discussed here, and the other was Captain William Weeks.  My ancestor, Henry Morse Olmsted, picks up the tale in a lively reminiscence written in 1898 entitled "A Short Chapter of Practical Socialism."

"(Of) Captain Weeks I never knew anything except by the tradition of the family...went on a voyage to the NW Coast of America and was never heard of - He left a boy & a girl...The four sisters at a period far beyond my memory lived together and the Weeks two and the Olmsted four lived with them & the family had but one purse...The earnings of the Captains and the inheritance from the dying ones was common property for the Widows & the children...The Weeks daughter married well.  She died at an advanced age in Morristown, leaving grandchildren who are in France."

A portrait of Captain Weeks was also part of the family collection until the 1980s, when quite  unexpectedly the long lost French cousins reappeared - now owners of a fine Chateau producing Cognac for export - and my generous Great Aunt Margie chose to repatriate their ancestor's likeness to his progeny.  Here she sits at right, beneath the nautical gaze of Captain William Weeks and his direct descendant, Philippe Vallantin Dulac of Logis de Lafont (Merignac).

As for the rest of the book's inscription, the Ship "Superb" was not one of the nine to have born that name in the English Navy, as none was commissioned at the time these books were gifted.  I suspect it was Benjamin Week's vessel, and that he was the Week's son mentioned above and probably hailed from his father's home port of Philadelphia. This remains to be proved, but it is the most likely explanation - the son of mariners going to sea himself - for how these books came to the family.

I do not know who William Manston was but suspect he was an English associate of Benjamin Weeks.  Note that the dedication tellingly says "the Illustrious WASHINGTON" instead of "our."  Indeed, Washington's birthday was one of our first and most revered national celebrations, recognized and celebrated even before his presidency in honor of the general's service in the Revolutionary War.  As a nationwide federal holiday, however, Washington's Birthday was only established in 1885, and now it is whichever Monday in February falls between his birthday and Lincoln's.  Times change.

The Revolution and the War of 1812 were far enough in the past in 1830 to permit such transnational patriotic fellowship - although my ancestor Captain Moss Olmsted, who married another of the Gilmore girls - spent time during the latter conflict as a captive in Britain's Dartmoor prison.  Merchant shipping sheltered at Cowes Roads waiting for a favorable wind to sail up the Channel to London or out to sea, and February being a cold and stormy month I can well imagine Benjamin Weeks cooling his heels at anchor and entertaining his business associates on board.  A toast on Washington's Birthday and a thoughtful gift between former adversaries now allies would not have gone amiss. 

Thus a tangled skein begins to unravel.  Ain't genealogy grand?