Pretend to be interested. Demand food. Demand everything, really. Go hide when you don’t want it. And sleep in such a way that makes everyone jealous.
iPhone
28
Apr 11
For some: Here are your pieces, pick them up as you may
What can you say in the echoes of a day like we’ve just seen? The lucky are blessed beyond measure. Others are setting about the grim business of rebuilding their lives or mourning their losses. There’s no sense of solace. Only blistered hands and red-rimmed eyes. In one place things look just as they did a day before. A short distance away it can appear as if a bomb ripped the heart from a community. For many this is a normal Thursday. For some this is the first day of their new, unexpected life. What can you say to that? What do you feel beyond the mystery of chance and the knowledge of your puny, human vulnerability?
Once in a while you are afforded a glimpse at the absolute best humanity has to offer. The outpouring of support, money, material and manpower some of those communities hit by yesterday’s storms are already receiving is remarkable.
Officials are turning volunteers away in some communities until then can bring a little more order from chaos. Boxes can’t be emptied and replaced fast enough. People are aching to help, donate, ship, whatever. Blood drives in some places had to close today because they had too many donors.
The worst can bring out the best. Sometimes that’s what it takes. Today’s dire problems are going to be next week’s heavy burdens, next month’s inconvenience and next year’s worries. Hopefully that kindness and those giving spirits will endure while the storms’ survivors overcome.
26
Apr 11
Picture day (Show and tell)
This weekend my grandmother was talking to The Yankee about how she used to decorate her trees for the grandkids at Easter. You see it every now and then still, but when we were young this became the colorful yard decor of spring. My grandmother strung plastic eggs through her giant show trees on colorful strands of yarn.
She invented this decoration. Ask her, she’ll tell you.
Anyway. My grandmother went on the search for photographs to complete the story. Before my grandmother’s birthday dinner I looked through a few of the pictures myself, which is how I ran across this one.
These are my great-grandparents. The back of the photograph said it was their 60th anniversary, which would put this snapshot in early 2000. He died just under two years later. She died earlier this year. He was a farmer, she was a homemaker. I’ve written about them here from time to time, so I’ll try not to repeat myself. In sum, they were sweet, lovely, kind, gentle, Christian people. I miss them a lot.
Just to put all the pictures from around the site in one post …
I found this picture of them last Christmas at my aunt and uncle’s home. This would have been their youngest grandchild, if I am not mistaken:
This one is on the wall at their home. My great-grandfather was going off to Europe as a medic. The little boy is my grandfather.
As far as we know this is the last picture of the two of them together. We buried them each with a print.
(None of these are particularly sharp, obviously. With the exception of the last photograph they are all cell phone pictures of a print. The last picture is an upsized version of a digital image that’s been floating on my hard drive for a decade.)
25
Apr 11
Of peanut butter and Dr. Strangelove
Just wrapping up our falllout shelter, time capsule dive from the weekend. To recap: at my grandmothers we were invited to explore the old shelter, which was installed for storms and, maybe, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The period is write, based on some of the logos and clues like old radio call letters I found in the shelter. There are seven or eight pictures two posts below — conveniently highlighted in the link above, as well.
These are the last of our findings.
Fifty-year-old recipes are mildly interesting. You just sort of assume your grandmother could already make everything, I guess, and didn’t need Betty’s help.
And she hasn’t changed much. The first Betty Crocker was a real person, portrayed by actress Adelaide Hawley Cumming. She died in 1998 at 93. Look familiar? She played the role until 1964, so this is probably a transitional box, given the timing. When she was on everyone’s television and every woman’s kitchen Cumming was as popular as any lady in the country.
I thought this was a fairly steady image, but it seems Betty Crocker is always changing. She found the fountain of youth in 1955, became a member of the workforce in 1980 and her complexion changed a bit in the 1990s. Later, the image of Betty Crocker was said to be a composite of 75 different women.
This box of mashed potatoes sold for $.35 in the early 1960s.
This is the emergency food, meant to last one person for 14 days. All of the smaller cans are drinking water. (There’s another layer beneath those cans.) The large can to the left is what you were supposed to eat. Appetites, and drinking needs, seemed to have changed a bit over the years.
Love the can labels though. We opened one and it was fine. Not suitable for drinking, but no odd color or funky smell. If you’re supposed to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day this little can wasn’t cutting it. Not sure of the explanation behind the discrepancy, unless dehydration since has really improved 400 percent since the Kennedy years.
We tried to remove the wrapper from that large can in the box, but it just tore and fell away. The Multi-Purpose Food is “protein-rich granules fortified with vitamins and minerals, pre-cooked, ready to use.”
There are directions. But if you read them closely you learn that this can’s servings are designed to give you 450 calories per tasty, grainy meal. It is pre-cooked, so you don’t have to break out the Sterno. The bad news is you’re going to want to eat this with something else to ward off fall out shelter malnutrition.
In the event of nuclear attack, pre-cooked granules go great with tomato juice! Or soup and crackers! It is yummy on a peanut butter spread!
The box suggested the contents would be all you’d need. Someone should ask General Mills about this. This product is soy-based and has an interesting history:
In the late 1950s, however, the product was reformulated to contain simply toasted soy protein (TSP, toasted defatted soy grits) fortified with vitamins and minerals. This new Multi-Purpose Food contained 50% protein and was completely pre-cooked; a 2-ounce serving provided 40% of the daily recommended protein allowance and one-third or more of the requirements for 10 major vitamins and minerals for a 154 pound (70 kg) adult male. MPF was made in Minneapolis by General Mills until 1980. In an era when protein malnutrition was considered the basis of world hunger, MPF was viewed as a concentrated protein supplement that could be incorporated into many indigenous foods.
[…]
From September 1946 until 1955 the Foundation distributed the equivalent of more than 36 million 56-gm (2-ounce) meals of MPF (2,016 tonnes total) to 86 needy nations via 126 relief and welfare organizations, chief among them the United Rescue Mission. Actually, virtually all of the food was shipped in sealed #10 cans, mostly to missionaries, doctors, and the like who operated soup kitchens, hospitals, or clinics. In the peak years of distribution in the mid-1960s, shipments were roughly 50 to 90 metric tons a year . . . never a very large amount by typical relief standards. Yet MPF garnered widespread publicity for soy and for the concept of relief feeding
Here’s more on the stuff.
We opened the can. It was a very fine powder. If only we hadn’t already enjoyed our dinner.
The box itself hurts our timeline. The Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization was in existence from 1958-1961, making this box older than everything else I can date from the fallout shelter.
Perhaps my grandfather had been holding onto it for a while, thinking it had a good shelf life and when his shelter was installed he carried it underground.* Maybe the name of the department was just to good to pass up for the product’s makers. The list of the agencies’ successors:
Emergency mobilization and general preparedness planning: Office of Emergency Planning (1961- 68) Office of Emergency Preparedness (1968-73) Office of Preparedness, General Services Administration (1973-75) Federal Preparedness Agency (1975-79).
Of Surviv-All Inc. I can find only one mention. Dr. Strangelove’s America: society and culture in the atomic age, by Margot A. Henriksen, tells us they also sold shelters and radiation suits. I’m sure those were top-quality materials at $19.95, even in Kennedy-era money.
Surviv-All, if it wasn’t sued into oblivion, is a name ripe for a return to the marketplace.
*Update: My mother chimes in, thinking I am right, recalling the shelter was installed in 1961:
PRIOR to the installation, Daddy volunteered with the Civil Defense, Rescue Squad, etc. in Florence. He was a HAM radio operator and took emergency medical training offered by the Red Cross. It would stand to reason that he would move the emergency survival supplies to the fallout shelter as the Cuban Missile Crisis intensified.
Dad could get the information sent from the US government to the Civil Defense programs before the average citizen had heard the information. I recall several nights he had to go to downtown Florence unexpectedly, although I didn’t always understand why. Add all this up, and it would make sense that the Emergency-Paks possibly (and probably) came from the Civil Defense office in Florence.
22
Apr 11
Under north Alabama
Thirty miles on the bike this morning. I toyed with the idea of 40, but glad I decided against it. The theory is that there are always 10 more miles in me somewhere. And I think that’s true. Feeling achy? Pedal 10 more. Got a cramp? Readjust and push through for 10 more. Feeling dehydrated? Ten more, no problem.
But then I thought, Ya know. You’re going to be in the car a lot today. Maybe you shouldn’t find any more reasons to cramp up mid-drive.
And so it was. And I did not have any uncomfortableness as we ventured to north Alabama this evening. There’s a birthday to celebrate tomorrow. We got to my grandparents in time for dinner — they chose the nearby catfish joint, which has become a regular destination.
The hush puppies are a bit overly greasy, but otherwise the place is good. Swamp John’s started as catfish in a gas station. (You can do that in this part of the world, and it is good. If you know what you’re looking for.) He started catering, selling out and now has three restaurants in the northwestern corner of the state. He’s done that in a decade. And he’s done that in a place where catfish is a staple of the diet, so it isn’t as if there’s no competition. There are at least a dozen other catfish joints in the county, says the all-knowing Google Maps.
This store has a mural covering a back wall of the place that features the nearby TVA dam. Be sure you notice it, or someone will point it out to you. The place just down the road, Newbern’s, has a large panoramic photograph of when the dam was being built as a WPA project.
For years I imagined all of these places pulled their product out of the Tennessee River. I knew better, but it was more fun that way. It is all farm-raised, even my aunt’s place in the next town over, where the creek drips right through their backyard. I’d never given much thought to where these places must get their shrimp. Being 350 miles inland would push it a bit for being catch-of-the-hour.
We cleaned up my grandmother’s hydrangea. She has a giant patio off her back porch, which is hemmed on three sides by privacy fences. They aren’t enclosed, but afford you access at any corner. In my life there have been two fences there, a brutally bad red fence and a natural color that’s in place now. It is starting to age a bit, too, though. At one corner of the fence there is this giant plant which always provided a natural speed bump for rambunctious children. My grandmother could grow anything. She could take the lettuce from her salad at the catfish place, plant it in the ground and win a prize with it before the season was over. Everyone knew it, everyone admired it and even the kids knew not to mess with her flowers. If you were playing tag, you had to negotiate that corner carefully, or sprint the length of the fence for the next opening. The bush is so big now, though, that passage is impossible.
So we’re snipping off old growth and breaking up stalks and limbs and my mother, in one of her well-timed moments of spontaneity, says “Let’s go down into the fallout shelter.”
I’ve never been down there. It has been in that yard since my mother was a child, and has always been a mystery and a focal point of yard play, but I have never been invited into the mysterious metal caverns until today. Everyone seemed shocked by this, which is odd, because no one ever offered me a tour. And anything mysterious or old or some place I’m not supposed to go, is a place in which I’m interested.
I have pictures.
This was a four bed shelter, and this is about half of the space. Note the support beam down low with now decades old canned vegetables. Some of them have failed seals, but some look pretty good. We opened one of the ones that still looked promising. The beans smelled fresh, at least.
In this box: enough food and water for one person for 14 days. (If you could supplement the supplementary food with some other calories and you didn’t mind being thirsty for two weeks.
This is the hand crank to recycle the air. The mechanized part is still free. My mother says she remembers the sound. As best she recalls the shelter was installed around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, but they had it primarily for the area’s stormy weather.
There was a bag of cereal samplers down there. Eighteen packages of 12 favorites. I couldn’t wait to see the logos and the fonts.
But this bag of cereal had been down there for decades. The shelter was clean enough for being underground, well-built and dry, but hardly sterile. Time marches on, and it crunched through the flakes and raisins and left nothing behind. What little moisture was in the shelter probably came from the breakdown of the contents in that cereal bag. Opening the thing, gently as I tried, destroyed all of the thin cardboard inside.
Remember, it isn’t what you know, but who you know, and I know Crackle.
Sugar Stars and OKs. No one remembers these cereals. The things you note, though, are the Hannah Barbera character endorsements and how much sugar figured into the name of things in the middle of the 20th century.
Sugar Smacks. I remember these from my own childhood. They were renamed Honey Smacks in the 1980s when we decided to get healthy. Or at least when we decided marketing makes us healthy. Then they were simply known as Smacks for a while. And now they are Honey Smacks again. Healthy! But not really.
If you’re looking to carbon date the stuff we found down there, a church flier referenced a local radio station that only used those particular call letters during the first part of the 1960s. Quick Draw carried the Sugar Smacks brand from 1961 through 1965.
More pictures, and the birthday party, tomorrow.
