Old Salutations to Willie

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wonderful post from 20 lines or less…enjoy!  MIndigo

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Old Salutations to Willie.

via Old Salutations to Willie.

Keeping on Track

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It used to be that keeping track of things wasn’t so important. (I suspect that this is one of the pleasures of reading good autobiographies.) Life was less accomplished, more experienced. And people had more time to notice details (of which there were more, what before the Standardization Revolution). Imagine a day where there is nothing to do, literally nothing. Not because of some crisis, but because in the normal course of affairs everything has been taken care of. That’s living.

These days I’m boggled by the pace that people keep up. It’s not that the work doesn’t need to get done, it’s just that many people seem to have trouble qualifying for work, so that others necessarily pick up extra tasks. & of late I’ve felt more than a little overwhelmed, trying to keep track of everything. Could be I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.

Everything’s important, right? So I’m feeling a bit blue that I haven’t finished working on the first part of mom’s memoir. I’ve had some work, which has helped with other parts of my life, but the question has to be: what’s most important?

I think it was Wendell Berry who remarked that we have to learn to be less greedy. There’s some solid wisdom there, grown out of practices from earlier generations.      MIndigo.

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Photo: Embroidered Curtain, 17-18th century; WikiCmns; Public Domain.

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Suggestions on Researching Your Family

src: WikiCommons

Mom started researching my family back in the late 1970s, when there were many fewer computers and the internet was still a dream. But over the years, she has gotten more technically savvy, and we’ve both learned something about the research process.  Here are some pointers:

1) Find the best library in your area and start using it. Make friends with the library staff, and especially the reference librarians, who often can point your research in new and interesting directions.

2) Tools of the Trade. You never know what might crop up in an old advertisement on the net or on a single slip of xeroxed paper. A notebook is absolutely essential for research, as are pens (bunched with a rubber band) and two or three sharp n. 2 pencils (sorry, folks, this isn’t deja vu, just coping with facts of computer failures). And, btw, remember index cards? An index card could save your life…use them!

3) Research Questions. Start by listing out the things you absolutely need to know. Then phrase them as questions. Keep the list short–no more than four or five questions to start. Set a deadline for answering each question. Then start researching.

4) Celebrate when you’ve answered the five questions to your satisfaction. Then repeat the process.

5) When you’ve answered twenty questions, start outlining your book. You might go the extra mile and select some favorite quotes and data to include.

6) Repeat the process. At the end of your 2nd set of 20 questions, write your book’s first draft.

7) You get the idea.

8) & one final thought: Organize, organize, organize! Happy hunting!

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Painting: Lesser Ury; WikiCmns; Public Domain.

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New England Christmas

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Here are some Christmas memories from mom’s memoirs:

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Grandmother’s (1935)

That winter we drove to Grandmother’s for Christmas—in a blizzard. The snow was falling hard when we left the city for New England, but Mama said she was used to driving in the snow. Once her mind was made up, nothing ever was allowed to get in her way. Bobby was driving down from Yale the next day, and Mama intended to be there.

She loaded up the old Packard the night before we left, even though it was parked on a side street. We cleared off the snow in the morning, just at daybreak, and were on our way. It was cold (this was before cars had heaters); I was wrapped in a blanket, and Mama had on two pairs of socks and her Persian Lamb coat and hat that came down over her ears. But as if to test our preparations, things got even colder during the trip, too cold to look out at the scenery, and I buried myself in my blanket. By the time we got to Massachusetts, Mama had drunk a whole thermos of coffee. Her face was red and she couldn’t bend her fingers. The roads got narrower the farther we went, and the snow got deeper, but Mama would never give up, and we crept along at a snail’s pace. It was the middle of the night when we finally arrived at Grandmother’s: Mama had said we would get there, and we had. That was all there was to it.

Christmas Eve (1935)

I was glad because I only had to wait one day for Christmas, and on Christmas Eve I was going to the children’s service at the Union Church. But the big surprise was the sleigh ride.

From Granny’s living room we could hear bells jingling and the pawing of horses. I ran to the window and saw four horses pulling a logging sled filled with hay and decked out for Christmas. Children were peering over the sleigh’s railing at me in our window. Mama and I could hardly contain ourselves—we dashed out to the sleigh, and the driver said “Jump in!” as he hoisted me over the rail. He was wearing a Santa’s hat. “Giddap!” he shouted, and off we went, stopping here and there for more kids to pile in.

The snow had stopped; the sky was full of stars; and all the houses had lighted candles in their windows. Icicles hung from the eaves and shimmered on the trees. After the short church service, we sang carols together with the choir, and when we were finished, Santa burst through the front door to the sound of hooves on the roof. He stood at the front of the church and called each child by name to come forward. We each received a little red sack; inside mine was an orange and some nuts. Then we all jumped in the sleigh with Santa in the driver’s seat. The streets were black as pitch as he dropped each of us off, but the moon kept jumping in and out of the clouds. When I got off in front of Granny’s, she and Mama and Bobby were waiting for me with hot cocoa.

While I was gone, they’d trimmed the tree with popcorn and cranberries and little red bows. It was the best night of my life.

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copyright, 2010, Mood Indigo

image src: WikiCommons, author: jsorbieus

The Attic at the Library of Congress

 

Although I desperately wanted to find out the identity of my real father, there were reasons why I was not able to do research until my later years.

I met my husband, a WWII vet who wanted to do his part in making the United States the best country on the planet, while I was in college. We had a whirlwind romance and were married in 1951. After graduation, we went to Washington, D.C., where he took and passed the State Department’s Foreign Service examination, and we spent our married years abroad, raising our three sons.

I did enjoy one stroke of good luck while we were with the Foreign Service. Visiting my adoptive brother in Los Angeles, I was talking with the daughter of the lawyer who had handled the paperwork for my adoption. The lawyer had recently died, and his daughter said that she had found my adoption papers in his files. Believing that I had a right to know who my birth parents are, she mailed me the papers, which identified my mother by name.

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After almost thirty years, I returned to Washington, divorced and with two sons in tow. When my sons started college, I had enough time on my hands to begin my search.

I remember the day I realized that this was my moment: I had the resources near at hand to finally find out about my birth family. All I needed to do was visit the Library of Congress and search its records. I would ferret out all the missing pieces of my life.

It was an easy walk to the subway and an even easier walk up the block to the attic above the Library of Congress Bibliography Room (BR).

At one end of the BR was a service elevator with an old-fashioned screen door; the elevator car, which opened at both ends, was large enough to hold a carrel of books. Emerging from this quasi-time machine, one entered an enormous, well-lit space that housed the Library’s collection of city directories.

From my first visit, I loved the attic. Though I was working at that time downtown, I managed to spend as many working hours, evenings, and weekends up in the third-floor attic as possible. In my middle age, I discovered the seduction of research.

The attic was a very special place. There were no windows—each column had a light switch, and the first thing you learned was where the light switches were. All the lights turned off automatically every three minutes, throwing the entire room into profound darkness. A moment would pass, and someone would find a switch. As if nothing had happened, we would proceed with our searches for our victims of fortune and fate—until the next blackout.

Yes, the attic above the Bibliography Room was one of a kind, but other libraries must have had a storage or other marginal space where researchers could gather with their fellows, equipped with paper and pen, coffee cup, blanket, and flashlight, to continue their painstaking work.

And indeed, a kind of camaraderie developed between us as we plowed through the directories, which were a community’s address book before the invention of phones. Page after page, we worked together silently, one eye on the tiny print, one on the nearest light switch. We had much in common, in that huge, cold space—were, in a way, friends. It was cozy, almost.

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You might wonder how a city directory from early in the 20th century differs from one of our phone books in use at the beginning of the 21st. For one thing, the city directory was much more informative; each listing contained the street address, the name(s) of the people living at that address (including children), and the man of the house’s profession, if he wanted it noted. Here we have a hint of that period’s openness, a sense of safety that all too sadly is lacking from our own time.

Another thing to bear in mind is that even our largest cities were much smaller a century ago. The population of Los Angeles in 1900 was 350,000, and though the city was growing by leaps and bounds, it was easier to navigate and become familiar with its neighborhoods. Although there were 3 million telephone sets in use in the United States in 1904, neither telephones nor automobiles were common until the beginning of the 1920s.

One thing the directories did have in common with telephone books was their tiny print. Another difficulty were the many mistakes and typos in the directories’ listings. Finally, though cities were supposed to issue directories annually, there were years when no directory appeared.

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Despite these problems, I perservered and found the story of my parents—but it wasn’t the one I had dreamed of. Or even the happy, healthy life I had wanted for them.

For one thing, I was born in March of 1929, just months before the Great Crash in October. In the aftermath, my father, who was an actor on the legitimate stage, had his career unceremoniously yanked out from under him. Along with millions of other men, he was out of work. And then the talkies came in. Hollywood bought up as many neighborhood theaters as it could, so even if the economy recovered, the old stage world was gone. In fact, of the many theaters he performed in during his long career, only a handful are still standing.

My father never really recovered. He had been a heart-throb, a matinee-idol in Oakland and Los Angeles, but was approaching 40. Ever resourceful, he moved into radio (just about the only growth industry at the height of the Depression) and held on during the mid-1930s. It was the cruel recession of 1937 that finished him off–there was no work, his personal life dissolved around him, and he moved into the Warwick Hotel, a residential haven for actors down on their luck. He died in March 1941, six months before his fiftieth birthday. His mother (my grandmother) was with him, and signed his death certificate. He was buried in the pauper’s section of the Hollywood Cemetery.

I cried and cried when I found out what happened to him—and, doubtless, to countless other actors. Recently, I am happy to report, the Hollywood Cemetery has been beautified and the pauper’s section is now quite lovely. I hope my father is enjoying his attractive new home.

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My mother lived an even more tragic life than my father. She was the daughter of well-to-do parents who were socially quite prominent. She was an only child; her parents dotted on her, and she lacked for nothing. In fact, a photo we have of her shows her on the deck of a ship standing in front of a life-preserver with Bermuda written on it. She was wearing a full-length mink coat, and we’re pretty sure that the photo was taken during the Depression.

She seems to have been strong-willed and was a leader of her young social set. She and her friends spent time at the beach; organizing social events such as birthday parties, teas, and marriage receptions; and attending movies and live theater performances. It was during a play on L.A.’s Broadway that she met my father, the actor, in 1928. They evidently had a romance, and I was conceived during that summer.

My grandparents’ social position made it difficult for them to accept an illegitimage grandchild who had been fathered by an actor. I was given up for adoption shortly after my birth in the spring of 1929.

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I spent many days in the attic above the Bibliography Room, oblivious to anything going on downstairs in the real world, and the lives of my birth family began to come alive.

Then, one day, I knew it was over. After two or three years of work, I realized that the room had yielded up all it had to offer concerning my family. And just in time—that year the first computers invaded the Library, which changed personality almost overnight. The city directories, imperfect and precious repositories of information regarding everyday lives, disappeared upstairs, where they were disassembled to help the people typing their data into computers. We researchers did our best to learn how to use the computers, but there weren’t enough teachers. Thank God I knew it when the Library was still a library, and not a research center.

But I had got what I came for. I had built the outlines of my birth family’s history—my young mother, her (quite important) parents, and most of all, my birth father. I had some sense of them as people, and I knew that I was a part of them.

Finally, my life was beginning to make sense. My mother’s father had been a builder, and I had always wanted to be an interior decorator; I had inherited his sense of space (and no-nonsense, can-do attitude). I had also dreamed of being a pop singer, and my father was a song-and-dance man. I could accept myself in a way I never had before.

Babar in French

Cover of the 2nd Babar book; Src: Wikipedia

One of the more effective techniques Marie Diane used to teach me French was Babar. Jean de Brunhoff’s series appeared at the start of the 1930s, perfect timing for me, with new books appearing every one or two years thereafter.

I loved Babar. He was a gentle elephant who became for me the essence of dapper: he wore a grey bowler (or a golden crown, since he was the king of elephants) , a red vest (or bow-tie), and of course black patent leather shoes with spats.

And  how could I forget the monocle?

He was whimsical and sweet, and he drove a wonderful voiture (car). It was a sort of winky-dink contraption with wood accents on the outside. And reading about him was always comforting, because you knew he was always on your side.

Getting copies was no problem; Marie Diane brought the latest book back for me whenever she went to France (where the series was an instant success).

And of course an English-language edition appeared quickly…but that wasn’t the same. Thank you, Marie Diane, for introducing me to this elegant elephant king!

Egg or Porridge?

Folks:

Here is an anecdote from the 1st chapter of the memoir, when Mom was still quite little. Her adoptive mother had brought in a *French Governess* (named Marie Diane–and also frequently called Mamselle) to give Mom the advantages of culture at an early age. The only problem was that Marie Diane spoke no English, and Mom, of course, knew no French. Here is one result of the language barrier:

 After that, I didn’t see much of Mama; I was on my own with Marie Diane. We communicated in sign language at first, but somehow I always seemed to know what she was talking about, and gradually I learned to understand her words and even to repeat after her during our meals in my room, served on the table with folding legs. If I wanted the butter, I had to call it le beurre, or she wouldn’t hand it to me. I learned that gentil meant nice, and that if I flushed my panties down the toilet, I was méchant.

I also learned some tricks. Once, I told Mama that I didn’t get porridge for breakfast any more; I only got a plain old egg in a shell, and Mamselle chopped off the top with her knife and made me eat it out of the shell with a little spoon.

Mama said, “Well, I never!” and turning to face Marie Diane so she could read her lips, said carefully and slowly, “In America, we cook our eggs before we eat them.”

“Mais, bien sur! (But of course!)” Mamselle replied, leading Mama by the arm to the kitchen. She got hold of the hourglass egg-timer, and, turning it up and down furiously, insisted, “Trois minutes! Ni plus, ni moins! (Three minutes! Neither more nor less!)” Mama looked to Anna, our Swedish cook, for help with translating, but Anna only put her arms around my shoulders and said, “I donna understand her neither.”

“I want porridge with syrup for breakfast!” I wailed, pressing my advantage.

Faced with the insurmountable barrier of language, Mama capitulated, and after that I got to eat breakfast in the kitchen so that Anna could supervise. It remains a remarkable fact that, while Mamselle and I slowly learned each other’s language, Mama never picked up a word of French.

Toy Store

Here is an anecdote from Mom’s memoir.  Read, enjoy, and provide feedback, if you are so moved. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Toys

As winter was coming on, I was invited to a birthday party by one of my schoolmates. So Mama and I took a cab one evening to the famous F.A.O. Schwartz toy store, then located on Fifth Avenue at the corner of 58th Street. Although I was not to be the beneficiary of our expedition, this was still my first trip to the store, and I was excited.

It didn’t take me long to find a toy to admire. As the cab pulled up to the store, I saw a huge doll house in one of the display windows. We got out, and the house was so spectacular that even Mama stopped to admire the workmanship. The doll house was larger than usual and was in fact a minature replica of a real house. The exterior was white clapboard with black shutters, and the interior was filled with the most gorgeous reproduction furniture. There was a chandelier in the dining room with real electric lighting that could be turned off and on. There were two bedrooms and two bathrooms and a kitchen, all with appropriate furnishings. A sales clerk, noticing our attention, came over and removed the roof, revealing an attic.

Once inside the store, Mama started a conversation with the clerk about toys that might be appropriate for a six-year-old boy, leaving me free to inspect the many wonderful offerings. What I picked out of all the goodies meant to captivate a child’s heart wasn’t the stores famous plush toys; the first thing I noticed were the shelves of wonderful dolls behind the cash register. The dolls were so beautiful, all lined up in rows; I’ve never forgotten their frilly dresses and bonnets, little bare feet sticking out over the edge of the shelves (some had on white booties). While I was admiring them, I thought about what Mama had told me about going somewhere and picking me out from all the beautiful babies to choose from. I felt warm all over just thinking about it, but when I asked Mama, who was talking to a sales clerk, if she’d come to a place like this when she got me for her own, the clerk laughed so hard Mama grabbed me by the arm and marched me out of the store. We hadn’t even got the birthday present, a fact that Mama remembered after a moment, and we reentered the store, where Mama made her selection.

But I was so happy and excited by the idea of coming from F.A.O. Schwarz, it didn’t bother me that Mama was mad, and for quite a while I continued to believe that I had been chosen from a row of dolls at a toy store.

© 2010 Mom’s Memoirs

How we got started

Last winter, I found a copy of a memoir 

that my mother had been compiling over decades–since at least the late 1970s. The typescript (which she had composed on old wordprocessors) was 113 pages long and contained anecdotes of her childhood, from her earlier memories to her entry into college and marriage to my father. I decided that I would put the entire manuscript on the computer and see if it was publishable.

So far the story is not that unusual, but there was one further consideration behind my decision: my mother is still alive, and I thought that now was the moment, if I was to get the full story and she was to see her writing in print.

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So at this point, the manuscript is on the computer & being edited, and we’re thinking about getting it published in paper and on the web. Any suggestions for the next steps? We’d appreciate constructive advice. Thanks!