Shouldn’t this really be the scary day. The 13th is a 19th century conceit, but the Friday business goes back to The Canterbury Tales at least. So much of Chaucer is often forgotten. Friday is frequently seen as the beginning of a good thing.
Monday the 13th still offends the apostolic notion of completeness. And yet we’re all back at the office. Monday the 13th. That’s disconcerting. Imagine the marketing the Jason people could have had there.
Chaucer to Jason in under 45 words. And they said it couldn’t be done.
(The exception to this hasty Friday the 13 is a good day idea being if you are paying for a service. Think long and hard about tire rotation or a roof repair done on Friday. Those diligent and hardworking people could be distracted by thoughts of the weekend too.)
Monday the 13th is a good day here. A great day, even. They often are. Taught a class, answered a lot of questions, discussed resumes and style. Generally tried to be helpful. Wrapped up a few small projects. Got handed a few more. Great Monday. For a 13th, that is.
I love this. Some of our classrooms have old newspapers on display. Some of the newspapers are national, historical front pages. This one is from the first issue of the 1925 edition of the Howard Crimson. The paper was just 10 years old at the time when students were still studying on the old Eastlake campus. This was a front page ad. Imagine the scandal of such a notion!
They led fashion, they did not chase it. What a great ad. Someone should run a mini campaign in this still today, just to see how it stands out from the contemporary fare.
Blach’s was a family-owned department store chain founded in 1885 by German immigrant Julius Blach. At it’s peak in the 1960s and 1970s they had five stores. In 1987, Blach’s filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but the reorganization couldn’t revive the company and they closed for good that same year. The invaluable BhamWiki records:
During the 1945 printers’ strike, which stopped the publication of all three of Birmingham’s daily newspapers, WAPI-AM posted news stories in two of Blach’s windows, organized by various categories. The resulting crowds, according to Time magazine, “all but blocked traffic past the store.”
The Blach’s building started as the Hood, built in 1890 to serve as the storefront for the Hood-Yielding General Merchandise Store. In 1910 it was converted into the 100-room Bencor Hotel and in 1935 it took the Blach name.
Here’s a view from just a few years after that ad. And this is it today:
It sat stagnant for much of the time after bankruptcy and was renovated in 2007, before the bank foreclosed in 2009. Now you can rent a loft there, apparently with the original hardwood.
Do you know what’s great about 100-year-old hardwood? No splinters! Makes every Monday better.
Some of the awards floating around in the Crimson office. We have another room in another building with quite a few awards. A lot of these honors go home with students. Even still, there’s an end table sitting here with these things, waiting to be joined by others. Every now and then I move them around, putting the ones in the back to the front. It is a good excuse to wipe a little dust away from them.
These are a bit older, so the names of the kids that won them are unrecognizable to the student-journalists working here now. One day I’ll look them all up and see what they’re doing now. These were people who were students before I came to Samford, so odds are I might have heard a name or two, but haven’t met them.
It is not unlike one of the drawers in my desk. A student signed it in the early 1990s, along with a note urging future people that sat there to save it because “it will be worth something some day.” He’s out in California and he has been at MySpace (at the right time) and at Netflix, so maybe he was on to something. There’s another name written in permanent marker within that desk drawer. It is his wife’s name.
I have a large stack of archived newspapers sitting next to my desk. One of my chairs was handed down from Maxwell Air Force Base — it still has their ID tag on the bottom — and I’ve learned a fair amount about the history of this place and a great deal about the sometimes colorful history of our department. But those two autographs in the desk are my favorite details.
And they graduated a several years before those awards were won, so really, between the autographs, the see-through trophies and today’s students we’re talking about four or five generations of students. Time does flit about prodigiously.
That picture was taking with my iPhone, which is indispensable as a snapshot tool. Of course this weekend, I’ll take a picture with my DSLR and be amazed at how much better that lens is. It should be, of course, but in tech you think of recency, and my phone is a few years old. The primary lens on my DSLR is a little more than a decade old, just a bit older than those awards. (I bought it as a replacement for one I dropped in a creek in Tennessee.) Maybe prodigious isn’t an expressive enough word.
Anyway, that picture is on the iPhone, filtered through Trey Ratcliff’s brilliant 100 Cameras app. I think the screen filter was called “When I was dirty and you laughed.” It gave the picture a certain level of cool color to an already monotone composition. I liked it, I posted it because I never use that app. Shame.
I have three folders of photography apps on my phone. I should never miss an important moment.
I did not talk about phones in class today. The “we’re all reporters now” speech will come up a bit later this semester. We did talk about Joe Paterno and the unverified night of mistaken news. I walked the class through the details and showed off the Storify I made that night to demonstrate how rapidly all of this unfolded. Looking back, only this far removed, the errors in minutes seem staggering. The lesson, friends, is verification. So we talked about that. The class was very much interested in the Onward State’s apology and resignation from the managing editor.
It is a great way to give the “We practice our craft in the public eye” speech again. I give that one a lot, it seems.
We also set up WordPress sites today. I have my tutorial on that down pat, now. “Let’s say I want to do this … but that only gives me a link and I wanted to embed the video.” In two clicks I’ve demonstrated that mistakes are possible, correctable and given students a better way of presenting information.
I’d like to thank WordPress for cooperating entirely in that effort.
It has been an adventurous day. In short order I was almost sideswiped by a car hauler, a dump truck and an 18-wheeler. It seems my car has that new invisible paint we’ve all heard so much about.
The tradeoff was hearing the DJ crack his microphone between songs and say “Monday in America in the middle of winter.” Then Etta Jones began to sing Trav’lin’ Light. Surprisingly her version, a superior take in my opinion, of the now 70-year-old Johnny Mercer song doesn’t seem to exist on the Internet.
The song played and I found myself stuck in the DJ’s aperitif. He had this husky, breathy, beatnik tone. And I thought what a remarkably obvious and obviously unremarkable series of things to say together.
Monday — we feel it
America — oh that’s where I am
Middle of winter — the trees are bare
The song wears on though, this delicate, unfolding and Etta Jones just sighs “No one to see I’m free as the breeze No one but me
And my memories.” And you think, yeah, OK, Monday, America, Winter. I see what he means. Look at that sky.
And then a song later he does it again. “February. Pitchers and catchers report in … 10 days” and a song. I’m unfamiliar with this particular DJ’s work, but I wonder if he can carry this all year long. I bet late July and August he becomes desperate for things to say. There isn’t a lot to say between the fireworks and Labor Day.
“Hot today. How’s that pool? Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Four more weeks before the kids are back in school.”
“Hot dogs. On the grill again. Try it with some relish this time,” and then you hear Thelonious Monk.
So while there is no Etta Jones version on the Internet, there are plenty of Ella Fitzgerald renditions as you might imagine. This one is from 1964. The song was 18 years old. She’d been singing for three decades already:
Anita Day, in her prime, did it in 1963 in Tokyo, where there was apparently a big demand for big band/jazz.
But we’re skipping over that because of course there’s Billie Holiday:
And now you have your Valentine’s Day music. Push play on that album in the kitchen, or in the hallway. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet works in unexpected places.
Anyway. No one can see my car. Tonight I was in the left lane of a two-lane, one way street. Sitting at the red light waiting for the change of the signal and a woman from the side street turns right, which is almost into me. She bites the corner instead, dragging her exhaust probably saying a few things under her breath about the problem. Several, I am sure, were aimed at me. But then again I was in the right lane, which in this case was the left lane.
Do they make blaze orange vests for cars? It might be the season.
When he walked at his graduation at Auburn William H. Holley, like many before and since, shook the hand of the university’s president, Dr. Bradford Knapp. The governor was Bibb Graves. Know those names?
The oaks at Toomer’s hadn’t been planted yet. Toomer’s Drugs was still competing with Homer Wright as the local top druggist. (Wright’s phone number: Nine.) S.L. Toomer simply referred to his place as The Store On The Corner.
Obligatory sports references: George Bohler was coaching both the Auburn football and basketball teams that year. The football team was 1-8, beating only Howard College. Snitz Snider — Olympic track star and future legendary high school football coach — was hurt much of the season. Another key player Babe Taylor — who, as a tackle, dressed at 6-feet-2 and “around two hundred pounds” as a tackle (Auburn’s current punter is bigger) — also had nagging injuries during the down year. Bohler’s basketball team went 3-13. At least the baseball team was posting winning records! Cliff Hare Stadium? Hardly.
The Bank of Auburn, in the back of Holley’s senior Glomerata, advertised four percent on your savings. Burton’s Book Store was the place to get your dusty tomes. J&M was decades away. Samford Hall, Comer, Mary Martin, Smith and Langdon Halls were all a part of campus. Ramsay Hall was brand new. Perhaps you’ll have heard of Holley’s dean: Bennett Battle Ross of Ross Hall fame. That building was still being erected when Holley graduated.
If those things don’t sound conceivable, don’t worry. Auburn’s oldest living alum has a few years on you. Holley celebrated his 105th birthday Wednesday at the Henry County Nursing Home in Dothan (Auburn stuff was everywhere).
His walk into the real world coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. The 1929 graduate would work as a pharmacist in Abbeville and soon after helped soldiers get their prescriptions in France during World War II. When the Army let him go he settled with his wife and family in Headland, Ala. He became a pillar of that community where he handed out medication until he retired in 1973. His son Bill, a 1971 Auburn graduate, took over the druggist desk. His son has since retired.
Holley’s Auburn kids: Elizabeth (’59) and Bill Jr (’71):
But the elder Holley refused to slow down long after retirement. He has maintained two farms, one in his hometown of Samson, Ala. and another in Headland. He was famously building fence lines by hand well into his 90s. He has four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren in his life. He maintained his driver’s license well beyond his centennial, “just in case.”
His API diploma, made of sheepskin, still proudly adorns a wall in his bedroom.
As he told Auburn Magazine, learning about Newton’s first law in a physics class has played a big role in his long life. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Living Right, he said simply, is the key. He’d know.
This is the weekly opportunity to post a lot of pictures that haven’t yet landed elsewhere on the site. Here’s a handful, there are even more in the January photo gallery.
One day one of the gymnasts will leap into the air and forget to land:
Look at the expressions on her teammates’ faces in the background:
Nobody has more fun on the floor than Bri Guy:
In the Hunt Seat arena. Horses jump things there, and this is currently the extent of my ability to comment on the sport intelligently. I’ll have to fix that:
I’ve never seen Nosa Eguae anywhere around town where he didn’t have a handful of people come talk to him. He likes equestrian events, too, apparently:
Oklahoma State’s team is called the Cowgirls. The name is bejeweled on the back of their outfits. It was in juxtaposition of all of their serious, championship-caliber riders. You can just see her championship belt buckle in this shot:
Stop! This is part of the routine:
On today’s big bike ride, mile 20, middle of nowhere and feeling fine:
At 26.4 miles in I’ve already gotten lost, figured out where I missed a turn and thought to myself “You’ve always wanted to see what is happening in Crawford. Press on …”
Here’s Crawford in a nutshell, an unincorporated community of perhaps less than 1,000 people, it was settled in 1832, as Crocketsville. A few decades later the state legislature changed the name. It boasts one of the oldest Masonic lodges in the state. A prominent church was built in 1910 using bricks from the original county courthouse. You can apparently see some of the workers’ (slaves mostly) handprints in those old courthouse bricks now making up the church.
Didn’t see that church, I was going in the wrong direction. Not sure about the history of this building though:
Nothing happening at the local co-op, about 34 miles into the ride:
I don’t know if the church planners put this place up with an idea of how the sunsets would play, but it worked out for them:
This next picture is 41 miles into my ride. I’ve been here before — behind where I’m standing as the photographer there is a gas station full of nice people that sold me Gatorade one hot summer day last year — but I didn’t notice this advertisement:
It is safe to say this mural is pre-1980, when Texaco drilled on Louisiana’s Lake Pelgneur and accidentally pierced the roof of the Diamond Crystal salt dome beneath the lake:
Within seven hours the entire 1,100-acre lake was empty and two drilling rigs, a tugboat, eleven barges, a barge loading-dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud and trees and three dogs had disappeared into the sinkhole at the bottom of the lake. The whole scene was described by witnesses as resembling a draining bathtub with boats bobbing around like toys before being sucked under. About 30 shrimp boats that were in the canal were beached as the canal emptied into the sinkhole, and were refloated later when the lake and canal refilled with water. Nine of the eleven barges would eventually pop back to the surface. Amazingly, no human life was lost in this spectacular accident.
What does that say? I haven’t been able to afford exterior paint in 30 years? No one has come along and offered to make it say “See Rock City”? I really like salt and my sodium levels are unfortunately high?
I wanted to do 60 miles today. This is with about 14 miles to go, and it was the last I would see of the sun:
I managed to get 52 miles. It was dark and cold. When you can’t see the bumps in the road you call it an evening. And then you put on several layers to warm up.
An email conversation spent me on a late evening genealogy search. My known family tree only goes back so far, it seems. Some people aren’t interested in doing the research. We have common names. We are from a typically inconspicuous rural lifestyle, so there aren’t a lot of newspaper mentions.
I haven’t done any real genealogy research, the extent of my primary searches have come from old digitized newspaper copy, but I do enjoy digging through the hard, good work of others.
So in this conversation today I realized there were names I’d forgotten and names I couldn’t recall ever knowing. I started searching. I got back an extra generation and found two new surnames. I also found the obituary of my great-great grandfather. He was a World War I draftee, and died in his home. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.
(Update, from several years later … In digging this up to search out one key point, I now think I was wrong about the people in the family tree. I can’t find the original thread anymore, and later clicking and surfing has given me other names. So I’ve put a strike through the parts below that now seem erroneous. Still, one side of my family was Dutch, though.)
These were the ads on the obituary page of The Alabama Courier (Athens, Ala.) on Thursday, February 28, 1946. (The Courier was established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969. They’ve been publishing as the News Courier since.)
Miss your loved ones? Bury yourself in work! The nuts and bolts of the Army Air Corps will see you through! The coveralls are free, but you’ll earn the stripes.
This is from the Ads You Don’t See Anymore department of the newspaper:
I couldn’t find any mention of the Clem Brothers Gin, but I’ll ask around. The closest thing I can find is a lumber concern over in Georgia.
Ahhh, a glamorous night out on the town. You’ve put on your best coat, your wife is wearing that beautiful dress. And the maitre’ de can set you up at the best table! “We’ll take the milk. Christopher’s.”
“Garçon! This is from a different dairy. Please take it back.”
I can’t figure out if this was the local logo or something that died out before the muscle car era, but here’s the Dodge ad:
A man named Robert Mills had worked at Draper Motor Company for about a year when this ad came out. After a decade on the lot he bought the dealership in 1955. It stayed open at least until he retired, in 1979. Can’t find anything about the place after that.
The Plaza Theater was on the square in neighboring Athens:
The movie, West of Pinto Basin, was released six years before, in 1940. My how the world changed in between. The IMDB blurb for the movie: “Three cowboys fight a saloon owner who is trying to grab up all the local land by engineering stagecoach robberies so an irrigation dam can’t be built.”
Can’t miss, right? It is a durable plot. Shows up in a lot of westerns.
Here’s the Zorro serial, in full:
Three people are killed and a stagecoach crashes off a cliff into a creek in the story’s first two minutes, before the first word is spoken. They do a great cliffhanger at the end of the episode, too. (You can watch the entire story at the Internet Archive.
And, yes, the title says Zorro, but the character is Black Whip. Released in 1944, the serial was meant to capitalize off of a 20th Century Fox remake of The Mark of Zorro. Republic couldn’t get Zorro, and so this was how they solved the problem. (See? Hollywood has been out of ideas before.) The serial is set in Idaho and the main theme is a fight to prevent and ensure statehood by the villains and heroes respectively. You wonder if other territories had other Zorro spinoff franchisees. A different color, a different weapon and some hero could pay a few royalties to the Big Z and save the day, and probably a few Hollywood production companies, too.
One last thing on the Zorro serial: James Lileks has a theory that projects from this period always have a Star Trek tie. So I ran the entire cast and crew through the Star Trek filter — it zooms along at warp speed don’t ya know … — and found exactly one match. Tom Steele was a stuntman on Black Whip. He started in 1932 and worked until the mid-1980s. He appeared in Bread and Circuses as Slave #2. He has the best stuntman bio ever:
Stuntmen are often selected because of their resemblance to the star they are doubling for. In contrast to this, many of Republic Pictures’ western stars in the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Allan Lane, Bill Elliot, Rex Allen and Monte Hale, were selected in part due to their resemblance to Steele, who would do their stunts.
The Added Joy? It was a cartoon short from 1937, back when Mel Blanc was uncredited.
But I digress. The Plaza opened in 1939 and sat 340 people. (The city itself had about 4,300 at the time.) In 1954 a newspaper ad said the theatre would be closed temporarily starting in June, but it never reopened.
Here’s where the theater stood:
Last year, the Courier reported that a non-profit community organization that prettifies the downtown area asked the current owner of the building, a pharmacist, to improve the façade of the old theater. The dilapidated stucco came down, the brick underneath was still in good condition.
BABY CHICKS – The KIND THAT LIVE. As opposed to the chicks that, you know, die.
It verily screams out at you on the obits page.
Anyway. In my paternal grandfather’s family I gained an extra generation — Smith’s are tough to trace at a casual glance — dating back to my great-great-grandfather.
Now, my paternal grandfather’s mother? She told me when I was very young about some uncles who fought in the Civil War. I was young enough to be enthralled by this, but not smart enough yet to ask if she knew any details. If she were still here I might be able to tell her a few things after this bit of reading.
It was her father’s obituary we started discussing here. I picked up a thread on rootsweb that allows me to go back 13 more generations. Assuming these various people’s hard work is correct (I see a few logic errors in chronology in some peripheral details, but let’s assume the big stuff is accurate) we can go back to a man named Eltekens, in 16th century Midwolda, Groningen, Netherlands.
The Hendricks family, again I didn’t even know this name until today, came over to the New World in 1662. (In my mother’s family a young man came over on the Mayflower, so my roots are fairly deep, it seems.) Albertus Hendrickssen became Albert Hendricks. He was a house carpenter, owned land in Pennsylvania and was a constable and a juror.
This would have been his land around the turn of the 18th century:
Albert’s particular son that matters to this story, Johannes (or John), was a shipbuilder. His second wife extends the chain a bit closer to my family. He had two children in Philadelphia before dying in 1709. It was John’s son, James, that moved the family south. He found himself in North Carolina in the early 1740s. He had nine sons and “several unknown daughters as he left no will.”
James Jr. changed Hendricks to Hendrix. He is believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War. James Jr.’s son, Larkin, moved the family to Alabama in 1830 or earlier.
Larkin’s son, William, and grandson, Joseph, lived through the Civil War — though I don’t know if they fought. Joseph also read about World War I and the Great Depression in the local paper. He was a farmer, and he died in 1933 at the age of 88. His son was James, the World War I draftee, my great-great-grandfather at the beginning of this post.
At least one branch of my family tree has been in that county for nine generations and 180 years. It’s only been a county for 196 years. (They should really own more property don’t you think?)
All of this is more than you wanted, of course. But when you do this sort of thing it is good to write it down and make good sense of it all. That way you can bore your friends endlessly at parties.
