Eff-Stop Local: Small-Radius Travel

Sepia Saturday: The Great Falls Opera House

2012-01-29T11:01:00.000-08:00

My wife just ran across this essay by an uncle. By serendipity it totally fits the Sepia Saturday theme this week. We were touched by the story and I, after several weeks of reading Mark Twain, I am impressed with Mr. Morris's Twainly skills despite a handful of hackneyed phrases.

At the Opera House

by R. A. Morris

I was on a tour of inspection with the president of the Great Falls Council: “Have to make room,” he said, “for the younger generation, you know. I picked up the old Opera House for a song. $20,000 I think... eyesore and all that. Urban renewal without Washington having its nose in it too."

I turned to the “improvement.” The back half of a service staton had been leveled even with the street, with the rubble resulting from the demolition of the old Opera House. Progress 1966... Parking lot.

My mind’s eye flashed back to the dim past of over 40 years ago and to myself approaching the white glitter of the really grand Opera House with wonder and curiosity. A young gentleman of ten or eleven who would not be denied the excitement of the crowd (if not a peek at the performance, by some nefarious means or other).

The feature on this long-ago evening was a guy named Ignace Paderewski, a piano player. Nice features and a bob haircut on display out front. My bosom buddies departed at this point. They weren’t up to an evening of long-hair piano. I, however, had been conditioned to the classics by an older brother who played of long winter evenings until I had come to enjoy them,

The usual access of the non-paying guests was: up the drainpipe at the corner of the marquee, across the marquee to the balcony. This required very careful timing to avoid a racket. That night, however, all entrance was barred and only I, of all the freeloaders, was left. Everyone was inside but me; so, I sat on the hot sidewalk out front as though I lived there.

The sound, at first faint, gradually became louder until it occurred to me that they were opening the fire escape doors. I moved to the edge of the door where I might see the stage and no one but the performer could see me. There we were, the mighty Paderewski and I, face to face and not thirty feet apart.

The selections ran heavily to Rachmaninoff, my favorite. So, I got comfortable. I lay on my belly with my chin resting on my arms. There I stayed for the entire performance, never taking my eyes from the great one, and he not taking his from me except to take bows. Through the years I have asked myself why the great future President of Poland did it. Perhaps he wanted to see if he could hold the attention of one so young or, perhaps in some mysterious way, the feeling of the good life or the endlessness of time that I felt.

Who will know? I have always said that the President of Poland played a concert just for me when I was only ten years old or so. You see, I have always believed that because I know. The last bow he took after the finale was to the fire escape.

http://cataractcity.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-falls-opera-house.html

http://www.polishamericancenter.org/Paderewski.htm

Ruination

2012-01-21T22:33:00.000-08:00

Dockside, Aberdeen WA 2010
photo by Sean Bentley

My wife recently shared this link on Facebook: Sustainable Cities Collective. In the article, and the others it links to, is a discussion of the moral validity of photographing contemporary ruins — a “genre” which apparently has acquired the dubious sobriquet “Ruin Porn.”

As a large portion of my work documents what I see as the evocative beauty of urban ruins, particularly American ones, as well as "making lemonade" of an urban landscape that many consider (I hesitate to say "see") as simply ugly, I’m fairly distressed by the notion of art as pornography. It seems to issue from (as Spiro Agnew might once have said) primarily the pompous pens of politically correct professors. Below are a few representative paragraphs.

I’d love to get some feedback from my followers: Is it valid to portray the aesthetic value of derelict buildings without pedantically addressing social causes and solutions? Is it nihilistic or beatific? Can't a photograph work like a poem — which as W. H. Auden posits, "makes nothing happen" — by relying on the viewer's powers of association to "put the pieces together"?

Grocery
photo by Sean Bentley

From “Shrinking Cities: The Forgetting Machine” by Jason King

The idea of Detroit as a [sic] industrial powerhouse declining into a bastion of cliched ruin-porn makes it a [sic] much talked about as a cultural touchstone of the shrunken city phenomenon of the U.S. ...The statements made by the photographs... do not capture the essential rise and fall of Detroit, but seem to bask in the 'dead zone' shivering aesthetic of destruction....

From The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit by Jerry Herron

“I'm not just photographing derelict buildings," [photographer Andrew] Moore told an interviewer from the Detroit News, “I’m looking for beauty and their poetic, or metaphorical, meaning.” [Michael Hodges, “Opportunistic Art,” Detroit News, 1 July 2010, B1.]

...And that’s where the crucial transformation happens, with the museum conferring the status of art upon work that might otherwise be construed as photo-journalistic documentary. John Berger has referred to this process as “mystification.” [Berger says] “Fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action.” [John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972]

That is precisely the point of Moore’s work — to mystify into “poetic” inconsequence and remoteness the past that is represented by Detroit, and along with it the conclusions we might draw as a result. Those otherwise troubling conclusions, and the actions that might follow from them — actions undertaken in the name of shared responsibility — are now translated into matters of taste and technique. A sense of “bogus religiosity,” to use another of Berger’s terms, pervades the images; action is foreclosed, except for the connoisseur-like contemplations of the solitary spectator, who is freed to look at the worst, without any necessity of further exertion. The "naked" facts of Detroit, in all their frightening and accusatory detail, are turned into museum-piece "nudes," spot-lit on the gallery walls; they're titillating perhaps, but also unreal, just like a centerfold image is unreal; and the more gorgeous, the better.

...The images fail to capture the complex logic that links creation and destruction necessarily together — in Detroit and in America. Marchand and Meffre reduce everything they encounter to a dead zone of already-seen sights; they deploy a visual idiom that has all the wit and insight of a post-mortem Polaroid, with the same dismal color palette, and the now-to-be expected prohibition against any human being ever entering the frame. ...Perhaps the cliché-propagating idiom of ruin porn is so powerful that it simply takes over, duping otherwise intelligent artists into a tedious banality that not even the volume's pretentious scale and price can conceal.

Central District, Seattle
photo by Sean Bentley

from Detroitism by John Patrick Leary

...So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. ...[O]ther photos tend towards overwrought melodrama, like the photograph of an abandoned nursing home tagged with a spray-painted slogan, “God Has Left Detroit.” Moore leans on the compositional tactic of ironic juxtaposition, an old standby of documentary city photography since at least the days of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt. ...The irony is obvious, heavy-handedly so, yet the photographer’s meaning is less clear.

Photo by Andrew Moore

... In requisitioning the ruin’s aura of historical pathos, ruin photos suggest a vanquished, even glorious past but, like the ruins themselves, present no way to understand our own relationship to the decline we are seeing. After all, this is not Rome or Greece, vanished civilizations; these ruins are our own, and the society they indict is ours as well. As a purely aesthetic object, even with the best intentions, ruin photography cannot help but exploit a city’s misery; but as political documents on their own, they have little new to tell us.

... Taken together, all the images of the ruined city become fragments of stories told so often about Detroit that they are at the same time instantly familiar and utterly vague, like a dimly remembered episode from childhood or a vivid dream whose storyline we can’t quite remember in the morning: Murder city! Unemployment! Drugs! White flight! Crime! Because the ironic appeal of modern ruins lies in the archaeological fantasy of discovery combined with the banality of what is discovered—a nineteen-eighties dentist’s office is not implicitly fascinating for anyone who inhabited one in its intact state—a ruin photograph succeeds in providing the details of a familiar story whose major plot points we can’t piece together.

from What Separates Ruin Porn from Important Documentary Photography? by Sean Posey

One of the best [sic] criticisms of photographs of abandonment, especially those made by photojournalists, is the failure to include people who live in these areas. There are still 700,000 plus people in Detroit, most of whom are African American. Their invisibility in photographic documentations is directly related to their invisibility in policy circles, or in discussions of urban revitalization. In a way, accentuating the lack of people leads to notions that no one lives in these areas. Ruins become more about the past and what once was, instead of the present. ...Photography is of course inherently problematic even outside the realm of urban exploration. Susan Sontag’s eloquent and groundbreaking book, On Photography ... points out photography as a medium often fixates on the very beautiful, the very ugly and monstrous, the beautifully ugly, and the beautifully monstrous. Photographs of decay are a classic example. This by itself further blurs the line between documentation, art, and straight up exploitation.

Defunct motel, Snoqualmie WA
photo by Sean Bentley

from The problem with regarding the photography of suffering as ‘pornography’ by David Cambell

Are photographs of suffering a threat to empathy? Some are, and some are not, but we need to know a lot more about how people actually respond to images before we can offer definitive conclusions. What if, rather than being emotionally exhausted, any lack of empathy comes from people deciding they just don’t want to know about atrocity regardless of the nature of the available pictures? There is much more thought to be undertaken around these issues, but one thing is clear – labelling everything ‘porn’ is not helping.

Well, I'll certainly agree with the last statement!

Sepia Dolls

2012-01-20T16:35:00.000-08:00

Having temporarily run out of personal subject matter for Sepia Saturday, I offer (for once!) a theme-related post. Here are a few gatherings of old dolls, which I always find, in their homunculaity (to coin a term), can't help but bring to mind one's own mortality.

Doll and hat forms, Arezzo, Tuscany 2007

This one benefits from clicking for more detail.

Dolls and antiquities, Arezzo 2007

On the shelf, Snohomish WA, 2011

Dolls and memorabilia, Snohomish 2011

STOP SOPA

2012-01-17T21:18:00.001-08:00

Eff-Stop Local is being blacked out today, along with many other websites, in protest of the SOPA.

Viewing the View

2012-01-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder to my handful of followers, if I fall behind here in local shots, never fear: I usually post at least once or twice weekly on my other blog of international photos, a page which I regret does not have even as many avid followers as this one.

To see the excuse for this shot for this week, for example, click, brothers, click with haste!

The Last Day of 2011

2012-01-01T13:20:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, 'stoppers!

The sun deigned to appear on December 31, so I skedaddled across the lake to the historic Ballard neighborhood of Seattle where I'd recently spotted some likely suspects.

2011 prepares to take the plunge

Two tiered reflection

Sunset colors

Negative permeability

Morning in the piazza

Portrait of the artist as lath

Quilt in multimedia

Where graffiti goes to die

Level 5

2011-12-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

For future reference, you're on Level 5.

Pike Place Market parking garage, Seattle

The Comfy Monster

2011-12-28T10:12:00.000-08:00

A mess of geometry at Pike Place Market, Seattle. I love the duct painted to resemble brick. I love the bright hank of twine slumming it on the electrical pipe. And, to paraphrase Colonel Kurtz, "The patina! The patina!"

Night and Day

2011-12-27T14:32:00.000-08:00

In the crepuscular parking garage, Pike Place Market, Seattle

O Little Town of Everett

2011-12-26T14:46:00.000-08:00

Mangers are not to be had for love or money in Everett, Washington, so Mary and Joe make do with a vacant used-car pavilion. Kris Kringle augments the three kings.

Moonsnare

2011-12-22T22:57:00.000-08:00

View from the bow of the Whidbey Island ferry on a night-time run...

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea--
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish--
Never afeard are we";
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

- Eugene Field

From poetry.literaturelearning.org

World in Grain of Sand Department

2011-12-21T16:26:00.000-08:00

Minimalist or maximalist, depending on how kozmic your point of view:

The subtle radiating colors here (well, ebbing waves, but hey) remind me of what I see when I press my fingers into my eyes after a long hard day. Also slightly reminiscent of, say, the shockwaves from a supernova.

This could be one of many beaches but just happens to be one near Westport, Washington.

The Birches

2011-12-20T17:02:00.000-08:00

A little red and green for the holiday season.

Near Grayland WA

Posse Homeward Bound, Racing the Storm

2011-12-17T20:45:00.000-08:00

Ocean Shores, WA

Sea-wrack Descending a Beach

2011-12-16T07:07:00.000-08:00

With this I've managed to put myself in mind of some of the Northwest School artists from the '50s such as Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and Morris Graves.

Things That Make You Go "Hmm"

2011-12-13T08:26:00.000-08:00

Concrete box of mystery, Lake Chelan, WA 2011.

A careful reading reveals the proto-sandcastle on the shore as well as the intriguing curve of floats demarking the swim area.

(Why is there a word ["cube," obviously] for a three-dimensional square but not one for the equally common three-dimensional rectangle? [I could say "rectangular parallpiped" but it's nowhere as succinct, now is it?])

Storm Brewing: The Identity Parade

2011-12-12T10:59:00.000-08:00

I've probably been watching too many TV police procedurals, but this array of antique implements near Maltby, Wasdhington, looked like a lineup to me.

Alleyway Boogie-Woogie (Study in Blues)

2011-12-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

An eye-catching backdoor melange from otherwise drab Eastern Washington.

Yakima, WA 2011

Apologies to Mondrian.

Unparked

2011-12-09T07:14:00.000-08:00

Continuing after a lamentable day's lapse with my daily December posts (in my defense, I did post on my other blog), today's festive photo is my parting view of Microsoft Corporation, whose ivied halls I flounced out of this summer after a fifth of a century toiling for the corporate behemoth.

Hibernation

2011-12-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

Near Hylebos Waterway, Tacoma WA

Array #1

2011-12-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

The afterlife of a door, outside the antique shop.

A Foggy Day

2011-12-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try to do a daily post to wrap up the year. Here's today's photo, taken at Seattle's Pike Place Market...

Bump Bump Bump

2011-12-04T17:36:00.000-08:00

Interbay

2011-12-02T17:59:00.000-08:00

Kicking off the end of the year with some archiportraits from the industrial no-man's land between Magnolia Bluff and Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.

Danger: Remote control locomotives!

Slight Return

2011-11-30T10:23:00.000-08:00

I recently realized that Jimi Hendrix's grave and memorial lies only 15 minutes from my house. Yesterday I and Stella the dog visited it. Interestingly the only other visitors at the time were also middle-aged grey-haired fellows. And yet the memorial showed signs of being frequented by young musicians and affectionate members of the opposite sex.

In the distance, Mt. Rainier

Yes, those welcome spots of cheerful color are lipstick prints

Many guitar picks were laid around the site; note the "little wing"

Palimpsest

2011-11-28T14:55:00.000-08:00

Container, Tyee Ringdall Middle School, Bellevue WA

Sepia Antiquing

2011-11-25T15:27:00.000-08:00

This week's Sepia Saturday porthole on the past features a collection of still lifes or dioramas from my recent trip through an "antiques mall" in Snohomish, Washington.

In all of these, but particularly the first, there's a distinct sense of the inhabitants having literally disappeared from the scene, leaving their inscrutable artifacts for us to infer meaning from. It's worth (I think) enlarging each of these and perusing the details.

The lights left on but no one at home

Tchotchke diptych

Ikons of a quiet life

Lying in state

Left where Grampa dropped it

Meanwhile, in the shed...

Day of Thanks

2011-11-22T21:40:00.000-08:00

The American Thanksgiving (coming up Thursday already!) is an old-fashioned kind of holiday, and while reviewing my photos (these depict my family's 2008 celebration) I began getting the whiff of an old-fashioned presentation... the second shot feels rather Rembrandtian, and the last of one of those moralistic Flemish still lifes of deliquescent repast.

The traditional performance for the grandparents

The traditional feast for friends and family

The traditional carcass

And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day

2011-11-21T21:43:00.000-08:00

Seldom is heard a discouraging word.

Factory, South Seattle

Shopfronts, Mighty Tieton

Warehouse, Toppenish

Sepia Saturday: The Family Fairies

2011-11-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

My father told me how his grandmother, Maggie Bredin Bentley, insisted that Irish fairies had come over with her family on the boat to America and now lived in the barn out back.

Alas, this is not a family photo.

My Bredin ancestors hailed from the village of Ballymagroarty, near Derry. They included my great-grandmother Margaret; her father William; grandparents Ezekiel (born ~1795) and Margaret Laird Bredin; great-grandfather Edward (born ~1775); and great-great-grandfather James (born ~1755).

I don’t know where the family originally came from: possibly Scotland. Reportedly, Bredin (sometimes spelled Braden) dates back to the 8th or 9th century, appearing in the Domesday Book. “It is supposed to represent the Danish form of the pronunciation of ‘Breton,’ which was originally ‘Brayton.’”

Her father William was a farmer. Here he appears in a landholdings document.

Margaret (Maggie) was born 1851. In 1865 at the age of 14 she travelled from Ireland to Philadelphia PA with her parents (and 3 younger siblings) on the Lady Emily Peel (853 tons, built in Canada in 1864). Here's her sister ship, the Minnehaha.

Here the family appears on the ship's passenger list.

“In the 1860s the McCorkell Line demonstrated that first-class sailing ships could compete with steam on the North American passenger run. They had five ships plying between Derry and the US cities of New York and Philadelphia: the Mohongo; Minnehaha, Stadacona, Village Belle and Lady Emily Peel. 'The Song of Hiawatha' by Henry Wandsworth Longfellow was a source of inspiration in the naming of many of the McCorkell ships... By the 1870s sailing ships could no longer compete with the speed, comfort and reliability of the transatlantic passenger steamers. In 1873 the Minnehaha made the last passenger voyage by a Derry-owned ship to New York.” [www.londonderryport.com]

Currently I have no photos of my direct–line Bredins, but here are the brother of William M. Bredin, Ezekiel (1803-1895), and his wife Jane Bredin (b. 1820, she was their cousin). They lived in Drumcorn, on the other, east, side of the river that runs into Lough Foyle.

It’s not clear why the Bredins travelled on to Michigan, if it was their final destination all along. Early settlers in Livonia, which was organized in 1835, included James Grace; Margaret Bredin first stayed with the Graces when she arrived.

Livonia circa 1860

In 1869 Maggie, now 18, married John Bentley (born 1850 in Livonia MI, died 1922). Alas I have no known picture of John. They had two children, George (1885-1955) and Clyde (1888-1962).

Here’s a 1915 plat map of Livonia, showing William Bredin’s long rectangular parcel and John and Margaret Bentley’s irregular one nearby.

Margaret died in 1919, a year after her grandson, my father George Nelson, was born. He had no report of the fate of the fairies.

Sources include:
http://livonia.lib.mi.us/Livonia/middlebelt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg
http://www.mccorkellline.com/
and thanks to Lynne Bredin of Cookstown, Northern Ireland, for the family photos!

Farm Fall

2011-11-16T14:54:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid I rolled my eyes when, every year, my folks piled me into the car for a countryside drive "to look at the fall colors." I just didn't get it. Well, last weekend I visited a "U-Pick" farm near Eugene, Oregon ...and I capitulate, OK, OK, it was durn purty. But I must confess if there wasn't rusty old equipment mixed in there, I mightn't have taken out the camera.

Backroads

2011-11-14T09:29:00.000-08:00

A few notable walls from a Veterans' Day roadtrip through the back of beyond, Oregon.

Study in asymmetry, Junction City

Harrisburg

Weathering, Halsey

Peace and Love, Halsey

Sepia Saturday: Histrionics

2011-11-09T16:04:00.000-08:00

In honor of the hundredth post of the Sepia Saturday blog, I present another brief excerpt from my great-grandfather's diary, relating an event that happened one hundred years ago, in 1911.

One day [David’s wife] Lena got rattled and angry and grabbed a plate from the table and threw it at David. It was his quick dodge that saved him from getting hurt. The plate struck the kitchen door and broke into splinters. When she sat down in her chair facing David, with her bare arms akimbo in an aggressive posture, she asked, “Well what do you intend to say now?”
David said, “I hardly think you’ll ever learn to behave ladylike.”

My sister Julian says:

"This scene is almost identical to a scene my mother describes during her childhood, in which Helen [our grandmother, David and Lena’s daughter] grabbed a stack of plates from the nearby hutch and flung them to the floor. Apparently Art, my grandfather, had not taken her side in forcing their children to finish her carefully prepared oyster bisque. Learned behavior?
... My mother’s recollections of her grandfather are of [a] quiet, gentle, blameless man. Grandma Lena was always criticizing him, according to her. 'What do you know?' Lena would say at the dinner table. But ...David portrays himself as someone who is very much in control of the situation, i.e., Lena. Not vice versa.
...It’s interesting to think about the way a child (my mother) would have perceived a scene like the one above. Absent the 'ladylike' comment, David would have seemed quiet and blameless, right? Thus, the version of David we hear growing up."

Myself, I wonder if this plate-throwing thing was a product of its time, rather like "kids these days" adopt the behaviors they see on TV? Case in point:

Artwork from the book George McManus' Bringing Up Father

Near the End of the Age of Petroleum, Part III

2011-11-08T17:28:00.000-08:00

Footprint of one of the gigantic petroleum tanks now removed from Mukilteo, Washington, on the edge of Puget Sound.

[Header photo from Google Earth]

Liveable Loveable City

2011-11-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

The latest in traffic calming verbiage, from historic Issaquah, Washington.

Lead into Gold, and Other Pastimes

2011-11-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

Haven't taken too many brand-new lemon-to-lemonade local photos recently ... so just a reminder to my followers, if I fall behind in timely posts here, remember to check The Eff-Stop, my European archive, which I typically update once or twice a week. This week I look at medieval alchemists' gear in the Aboca museum in Sansepolcro, Tuscany.

Weekend Signage

2011-10-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

Spotted last weekend, perhaps the last sunny roadtrip for several months.

Safety Glasses Required [Woodinville WA]

No Littering [Maltby WA]

BBQ [Snohomish WA]

Near the End of the Age of Petroleum, Part II

2011-10-25T20:15:00.000-07:00

Trekking through rural Washington I come across these relics of an earlier age...

Yakima WA

Mazama, WA

Maltby, WA

Carnation, WA

Mystery Chair of the Week

2011-10-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

This scene reminds me of K-I-S-S-I-N-G but that's just the way my mind works.

Crepuscular Mirrorbirds

2011-10-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

Two shots of swallows from Spencer Spit, Lopez Island, sandwiching one from Mutiny Bay, Whidbey Island. I love how sunset really heightens the reflectivity of water.

Tabula Rasa

2011-10-10T19:38:00.001-07:00

Tabula rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behaviour, and intelligence. The term in Latin equates to the English "blank slate" (or more accurately, "erased slate"), which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk, but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa.
Wikipedia

Aftertaste of Menace

2011-10-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

One night in Chinatown.

Seattle, April 2011

Ladder

2011-10-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

Whitewalls

2011-10-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

"WALL," Tieton, WA

"Trout Inc.," Manson, WA

Fruit warehouse, Manson, WA

For more monochrome, visit The Weekend in Black and White.

Memory and Music

2011-09-29T09:58:00.000-07:00

This week's Thursday Theme (not to mention Sepia Saturday) involves Memory. While some will argue that smell is closely tied with memory, I maintain that music is just as strong a signifier of times past.

My father was born in 1918. He grew up with a piano in the house, one of the few luxuries his family could indulge in, and spent his childhood listening to the radio. As an adult he seemingly had the following songs from his youth running through his head at all times, for he would burst into sentimental song at odd moments. These are all old 78 RPM recordings found on YouTube.

Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra

Far Above Cayuga's Waters (Cornell Alma Mater)

Growing the Garden

2011-09-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

Shots from the Holy Cross Lutherans' community garden constructed this summer in our neighborhood. Design by Pomegranate.

The Day the TVs Died

2011-09-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

Shaft

2011-09-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

Not often that you see an empty elevator shaft just waiting to be caught in the act.

Sepia Saturday: Occult

2011-09-16T18:03:00.000-07:00

James Morgan Pryse (left), with HPB in a "bath-chair" and her private secretary G.R.S. Mead

Having nearly exhausted my own family history, I have begun making inroads on my wife’s.

I was soon pleased to discover that one of her great-uncles, James Morgan Pryse (Jr.), was somewhat of a celebrity, being a prolific occultist author and a confidant of no less than the (in)famous Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Who was this Pryse fellow? Read on!

The Pryze family lived in Tredegar, in Monmouth Co., Wales. The patriarch, whose name may have been the easy-to-remember Pryze Pryze, had a son, David, who married one Gwynfed Morgan in 1821. The couple had three children, including James Morgan Pryse, who was born April 15 (my own birthday!), 1826. Gwynfred reportedly died in 1832, and around 1838, David emigrated to America with his children, where he (or the immigration folks) changed his surname to Pryse. He eventually settled in Ohio, and died soon after in 1842.

James Sr.

James Morgan Pryse (Sr.) became “a preacher of some repute,” roaming Ohio, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. Aside from his Presbyterian leanings, he also peculiarly belonged to the Welsh order of Druid Bards. You can take the man out of Wales, but you can't take the Celtic mystic out of the man. Reportedly he often published his writings in both English and Welsh, in Presbyterian-related newsletters or journals. On May 19, 1848, he married Mary Morgan (1825-1903) in Ravenna, Ohio. They had several children, one of whom they named, with little effort, James Morgan Pryse Jr. Before his father died, in 1891, Junior was taught the legends of the Druids along with the Presbyterian doctrines. Giving up studying law for a perhaps more ethereal career in journalism, he moved frequently during his early adulthood; he even helped to create a Utopian colony at Topolobampo, Mexico, that allegedly influenced urban planning ideas of Ebenezer Howard; and from his home in New Jersey, James edited the colony’s periodical.

The dashing James Jr.

James moved to Los Angeles and in 1886 joined the Theosophical Society. Soon he was one of its most active members; he was so active that he moved once more, to New York, to work for the society's Aryan Press. In 1889 he moved yet again to London at the request of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the society’s cofounder, where he worked with her to found HPB Press. Blavatsky asked him to publish her Esoteric Instructions.

HPB and a gaggle of her more mystic cohorts

In 1894, following Blavatsky's death, the restless Pryse moved to Ireland to work for the Irish Theosophist. There he wrote the book The Sermon on the Mount, the first of a series of theosophical treatments of the Bible and Christian theology. In 1895 Pryse returned to New York to work with William Quan Judge, the head of the American Theosophical Society, which had broken with the international theosophical movement. After Judge's death the following year, Pryse uncharacteristically stayed put in New York and became involved with the Theosophical Society of New York, a branch which had broken with Judge's successor, Katherine Tingley. Pryse's next books were published by that society's Theosophical Publishing Co. In one of these, Apocalypse Unsealed, Pryse published the secret key to decoding the esoteric meaning of the book of Revelation.

After 15 years in New York, Pryse returned to Los Angeles, where he wrote what many consider his most important text, The Restored New Testament, a theosophical translation of the New Testament. While continuing his affiliation with the larger Theosophical Society and writing articles for its periodicals, he led independent gatherings in Los Angeles. In 1925 he founded the Gnostic Society (possibly the first modern group to describe itself as Gnostic) with six people who met in his home to discuss his metaphysical interpretation of Christianity. The society disbanded soon after Pryse's death on April 22, 1942, but has been revived.

A good many of Pryse’s works are still available on Amazon if you're sufficiently intrigued.

Alas, there are few photos of Pryse, but a fair number for Blavatsky, who frankly was more photogenic, if rarely able to keep her hands from her own throat.

Sources:

Answers.com

RootsWeb

Wikipedia

Blavatsky Archives

Rural Ruins

2011-09-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes driving through the country hereabouts reminds me of visiting the dinosaur exhibit in a museum... massive old ribcages, shattered and patched.

Stanwood, WA

Lopez Island, WA

For more monochrome, visit The Weekend in Black and White.

I catch on why a horse, why a chicken, why a this, why a that... I no catch on why a duck.

2011-09-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

Next month the historic, if perilously fragile, Alaskan Way Viaduct will begin to be brought down. Gone will be the spectaculastic views of Puget Sound and the Olympics as you drive along the waterfront... but those views are available from a number of locations. What will truly be gone will be the sensory extravaganza of walking under the brontosaurus legs of this two-mile stretch of concrete. I thought I'd preserve a few shots of that experience. For starters: the viaduct is one of the tenuous shelters for Seattle's homeless.

Dog Day Loading Dock

2011-09-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

Depth of summer in the nether parts of Eastern Washington. Water towers lurking behind faded signage. Camouflaged graffiti. Mysterious meters. Pavement parched under a cobalt sky. Shadows of telephone wires trisecting weathered walls. Loading bays silent and windows boarded up. Weeds. The flicker of a single swallow fifty feet up.

Yakima WA

Toppenish WA

Crepuscular Pool

2011-09-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

Sunset, Wapato Point, Lake Chelan

Click for larger versions.

The Use of Blue

2011-08-31T22:21:00.000-07:00

Cle Elum, WA

Outside Wapato, WA

Toppenish, WA

Near the End of the Age of Petroleum

2011-08-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

I've been scanning the roadsides for the telltale canopies that once covered the gas pumps...

Cle Elum, WA

Ellensburg, WA

Countdown: 12,11,10, 9... Bellevue, WA

Easton, WA

After the afterlife, Aberdeen, WA

Camouflaged,Bellevue, WA

Future not foretold, Eugene, OR

Chelan Alley Passegiata

2011-08-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

The chiaroscuro, the cubisme, the Maxfield Parrish palette... not to mention the trompe l'oeil... after sunset, just behind Woodin Avenue.

This American Life

2011-08-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

Four hot, dry days in Eastern Washington culminated in a three-hour shamble through an antiques mall in the town of Cashmere. What caught my attention among the usual plethora of random still-lifes was the preponderance of aged hunting paraphernalia and trophies in this rural locale.

Antlers 4 Sale

For hunting fish, fowl, varmints, and the occasional steer.

If the hollow points don't work, try the axe. The "Indian" blanket is an ironic accent.

Decor for any cubicle.

A Little Old Shack by the Railroad Tracks

2011-08-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

The Ink Spots-In an Old Shanty Town by redhotjazz

Sepia Saturday: Minsk to Minnesota

2011-08-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

Welcome to another Sepia Saturday!

For decades, my family knew little about my mother’s paternal grandfather Isaac Singer (1857-1924). Her father Art, Isaac's only son to stay alive out of a dozen or so children, told us his father had been a furrier when he’d immigrated to the States in the 1880s, expertly matching mink pelts for color. My mother thought he been born in Odessa, Russia, and on some census forms he claims he was from Minsk. Art was hazy at 79, but thought his dad's surname had been "something like Yarminelsky" until the Ellis Island folks changed it willy-nilly, as they did so many other Jews with multisyllabic names, to Singer.

Fast-forward to the present. I was bopping around on Ancestry.com, as is my wont, this time looking up family trees for people descended from Arthur’s sisters, such as Nettie Singer. And bingo, there she was.

And her mother’s name was there too -- listed as (wait for it) “Nettie Jermelensky.” The Nettie part is wrong (it was Mollie), but AT LAST there was not only a reference to the pre-Singer surname, but it was a clear variant on the one we’d assumed was a wild guess up till now!

I attempted to get in touch with the person [I’ll call him Biff Y] who created the family tree, but received no response. Sleuthing a bit further I contacted some of the later names on the family tree -- and it panned out!

After introducing myself, the question I posed was whether "Jermelensky" was apocryphal, or was it perhaps written somewhere – say, in a family photo album? The reply was that there was no written confirmation of the original name “but I have always heard it as Yarmolinsky; perhaps different vowels?”

I visited JewishGen.org, and sure enough, the Ukraine (home to both Odessa and Minsk) is festooned with similar surnames:

YARMALINSKI
YARMOLINSKAYA
YARMOLINSKE
YARMOLINSKII
YARMOLINSKIY
YARMOLINSKY
YARMOLYNTSKI
(There was NADA for “YarmaNELski” or similar.)

I later went to the well-stocked King County library and looked up the name in a massive book of Russian genealogy, which told me that the family name of Yarmolinski "probably came from the village of Yarmolyntsi." It turns out, however, that there are three of those, relatively close to each other, between the general area of Minsk in the north and the general area of Odessa in the south.
Yarmolyntsi, Sums'ka
Yarmolyntsi, Vinnyts’ka
Yarmolyntsi, Khmel’hyts’ka

There are records of a couple of Isaac Singers (not an uncommon name -– perhaps all victims of unimaginative immigration officials) arriving in the States in 1886; they claim to be Austrian or German. Strangely, Isaac on occasion put down his nationality as German. His death certificate correctly says Russian.

Similar to his as-yet unknown in-law counterpart Ben-Zion Blumenfeld (their children would marry twenty years later), Isaac Yarmolinski seems to have come over the year preceding his family; at that time it consisted of his wife Molly (b.1860), and three daughters whose Americanized names were Sophie (b. 1876), Nettie (b.1878), and Annie (b. 1886).

I guessed that after Isaac’s name was changed in New York, when he sent for the family, he advised them to use Singer at the outset. I subsequently found this passenger list online, arriving in the U.S. 30 September, 1887. They steamed on the German Empire via Hamburg to West Hartlepool, to Liverpool, to New York.

Taube Singer (F) Born abt 1859
Scheine Singer (F) abt 1879
Chane Singer (F) abt 1880
Tulke Singer (F) abt 1886

An attached document showed them having last lived in Bobruisk, Ukraine.

Minsk is only about 80 miles from Bobruisk. My guess then is that these respectively are Molly, Sophie, Nettie, and Annie, before they changed their first names to go along with the new American surname. The birth years are pretty dang accurate, and it’s the right number of passengers.

Eventually I was contacted by a direct descendant of Nettie Singer, who said “I am quite sure that you are correct about the group who came together to the USA... I remember Grandma [Nettie] telling me that she was about 8 years old when she came, but she did not tell about her life in Russia and, unfortunately, we kids didn't ask. Back then, the future was important and the past more or less forgotten.”

In the foreground, Arthur's sisters Annie, in the striped dress, and Sophie in the black dress, with his wife, my grandmother Helen. Riva, a daughter of Annie, is standing with Arthur. Late 1940s.

Tree

2011-08-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

For more trees, see Theme Thursday.
For more monochrome, visit The Weekend in Black and White.

In the Interior

2011-08-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Easton, Washington
Click for enlarged diptych panels.

Wall of Red

2011-08-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

Quick trip to Yakima, Washington, where 75% of the nation's hops come from. Who knew?

Island Patina

2011-07-30T22:17:00.000-07:00

It's been a slow summer so I continue to mine my Lopez Island shots.

At the floating bookstore

Where something was

At the swap meet

The cistern

Something There Is That Does Not Love a Wall

2011-07-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

But I actually am fond of walls, especially thoroughly weathered ones. This retaining wall near an Issaquah, Washington, shopping mall has caught my eye for some months now and I finally got a chance to get close to it, camera in hand, on a rare sunny day.

The Sea Monster

2011-07-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

Found among the tidepools.

Cabin in Process

2011-07-16T22:40:00.000-07:00

Still lifes around the construction site, Lopez Island.

Victory of the Weeds

2011-07-13T21:45:00.000-07:00

Still more scenes from Lopez Island, Washington, where moss is the dominant species.

The Age of Oil

Barnhenge

Sea of Grass

Form Follows Ferry

2011-07-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

Face

Horizontal Ladder

Sport

Leavings

Vertigo

Safety

The Patriots

2011-07-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

Island Mandalas

2011-07-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

Campfire

Jellyfish

Piling

Wood, Metal, Stone

2011-06-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

Surfaces from Lopez Island...

Happy old trawler

Antique harvester

Pioneer canoe

Clinic helipad

The Green and the Red

2011-06-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

Ghosts of trucks past on Lopez Island, rusting and enjoying the big sleep while the foliage takes over.

Island Indigenous

2011-06-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

Spent several nights on Lopez Island, Washington. Here's a sampling of the plethora of great huts to be found there.

Beach hut for rent!

Garage hut

Mysterious business hut

Artistic hut

Skeletal hut

Sepia Beach

2011-06-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of the preceding postcards I take a try at electronic hand-tinting in the attempt to "improve" these badly yellowed snaps from my folks back in Michigan in the late Forties.

I might add that from my personal experience, I don't think I can remember my dad ever going swimming. He was typically under a tree, fully clothed and probably off in a poetic trance.

The original

The Tinted

And the Monochrome.
Which dost thou prefer?

Hand-Tinted

2011-06-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

My father arrived in Seattle in the autumn of 1952, ready to start his teaching job at the U of Washington. Aside from his brief stint in California bootcamp, I don't think he had ever been outside his home state of Michigan. He had never had spaghetti, let alone see real mountains or saltwater. My mom has several of the postcards he sent her as he made the big move.

On Thursday September 18 he mailed a whole passel of postcards to her, to whet her appetite for the big move.

Parrington Hall was the building he was to teach most of his classes in, and his office was in a portable "annex" outside it amongst towering chestnuts.

Sepia Saturday: University Avenue c. 1950

2011-06-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

Some of my earliest memories involve this street, in fact this block. My parents lived four blocks south of here and one block east, in a tall brownstone apartment across the street from the University, where my dad taught English. My mum would stroller me up and down "The Ave" daily.

Moving north along the "parade" from right to left... we ate at Lun Ting's Chinese Cafe regularly (with its pagoda-like awning), where middle-aged waiters in grey pajama-like uniforms with red piping brought us magenta-edged tiles of barbecued pork. We bought books (oddly enough) at the University Bookstore, and once I got the hankering, bought my 45s there as well. It's still there, though it has expanded greatly. At the far end of the block we patronized Bartell Drugs, whose sign always reminded me a bit of a teddybear's head. You can see it against the white of the bank across 45th Street where my folks eventually based their mortgage when they bought a house a few years later. And beyond the ubiquitous Penney's department store in the distance is the edifice of the Wilsonian Hotel; it became a retirement home, where blue-haired, mustachioed ladies wearing woolly coats the color of barbecued pork hobbled daily to Manning's cafeteria across the way...

As the Mallory Apartments in the background, decades later a good friend of mine had the bad luck to be strolling past when he was struck in the skull by a piece of steel dropped by a window-cleaner on the top floor. He recovered after a lengthy coma but I never again walked along that stretch of sidewalk.

More Sepia Saturday here...

Shangri-La

2011-06-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

If it weren't for a couple of observant rugrats, I would have missed this tarnished gem in the forest.

In fact I have missed it, many a time; it's on the Shangri-La Trail, on Radar Peak, in the Cougar Mountain Wildland near my house, where periodically hike with Stella, our ChocoWeimaDor I (and other less furry members of the family).

This hunk o'steel is evidently a relic dating from the Cold War when there was an anti-aircraft base on the top of the mountain (really a high hill, overlooking Lake Washington toward Seattle).

I've Googled extensively trying to ascertain what kind of car this is/was, but the closest I can come is that cars around 19423 had the requisite amount and configuration of chrome. This one is missing all the identifying logos and insignia.

Elephants' Graveyard

Post-War Target Practice (since the Russians never made an appearance)

Frank Gehry's Dream (thanks to Robin for the idea)

Apres-Midi d'un Plymouth

Homunculi

2011-06-07T19:26:00.000-07:00

A drive-by reflection on the workaday world.

Newcastle Cemetery

2011-06-06T19:56:00.000-07:00

The old Newcastle(Washington) Cemetery contains mostly the graves of the families of miners who toiled in the surrounding hills at the end of the 19th century. The mining and logging towns closed down after a mere 50 years or so and this secluded spot overlooking tiny Lake Boren became overgrown with ivy, blackberry, and shrubbery while the fir trees grew ever taller. As is usual, the gates were unlocked for Memorial Day. The Newcastle Weed Warriors have done a great job clearing the undergrowth and sniffing out the hidden graves.

Death did to me short warning give
Therefore be carefull how you live
Prepare in time do not delay
For I was quickly called away

Silent Alarm

2011-06-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

Maltby, Washington

Antiquing in Snohomish

2011-05-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

Compartmentalized

Ce n'est pas des farm implements

Americana

Petrified Wood and Dead Goddesses

Ghosts

Sepia Saturday: Memorial Day

2011-05-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

Next weekend is Memorial Day in the U.S.

My mom's older brother Mort (Arthur Mordecai), always a bit of an outsider, disappeared from our radar in the late 1980s after the death of their mother. We knew only that he and his wife had moved relatively near us, to Tacoma, from Los Angeles. He never got in touch.

Last year I discovered on the Web that he had died just a few months earlier. I visited the Tacoma newspaper offices and found out the obituary had been supplied by a rest home. I contacted that establishment and left my number so that they could forward it to his surviving stepson Steve.

He called me back and let me know that Mort's ashes had been interred at the local military cemetery. He had served in WWII at Guadalcanal (a traumatic experience that did not help his mental state any). Steve said that he'd tried to get Mort to contact his sister but he simply wasn't interested. Very sad.

At any rate last weekend I found my way to the cemetery, which is nestled in the countryside, and located his marker. It's the lower right-most one.

Adjacent to it, hundreds of empty plaques ominously await the names of future military casualties and veterans.

Escape

2011-05-13T17:52:00.000-07:00

Missile Peak, Bellevue WA

More escapes at ThemeThursday.

And more monochrome at The Weekend in Black and White.

The Frame

2011-05-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

I love the ready-made still lifes that open trucks provide.

Behind the hardware store, Bellevue WA

Farmer's Market, Bellevue WA

Here's an earlier one.

Land of the Free

2011-05-04T20:17:00.000-07:00

Evidence of residence in forgotten corners. The homeless aren't just holding begging signs at freeway offramps.

Shed in the woods with Old Glory, Newcastle

Sleeping under the stars near Lake Bellevue

Abandoned campsite with pink sandals, Renton

Earth Day Newcastle, WA

2011-04-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

A day in the park with some ostensibly green folks.

Scrappy teens

Time out to text at the bamboo clothing booth

Easter Bunny escorts

Waiting for custom at the henna hut

All prepped for hungering hordes

Antique farm equipment display

Sleepless

2011-04-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

Hm, the start of a new series, methinks.

Reposted in honor of Theme Thursday.

Sepia Martian Puzzler

2011-04-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

I probably read too much science fiction. Be that as it may, I find myself quite often wondering what an errant Martian would make of our hijinks here on Earth.

Case in point, as Rod Serling would say, this photo. A select audience (you know who you are) will know exactly what to make of this, to say nothing of recognizing the subjects. The rest of you Martians, good luck.

WAG WAG WOOF WOOF SNEEZE GROWL OWOOOOO

For more random and perhaps curious revelations, visit sepiasaturday.blogspot.com.

Tele Visions

2011-04-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

In the 1980s I sort of weirdly inherited an old color TV from my grandmother's cousin. Aside from finally enjoying my own color TV at the advanced age of 30 or so, I enjoyed playing with the color, brightness, and contrast controls: something that is a lot harder to do nowadays digitally. And then with my old Pentax I could effect multiple exposures by rewinding. Here are a few hypersurreal images that resulted.

Imagine

Superpharaoh

Infinite image

Virtual wilderness

Inexplicability

Staredown

Barrens

Lightness

Away

Moss Rocks

2011-04-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

Strata: Mossy Hieroglyphics

2011-04-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

Had to jump out of the car and creep along the side of the busy road to get this wonderful barn roof just outside of Duvall, Washington.

Patchwork, Weller and Seventh

2011-04-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

Twilight meanderings in Chinatown brought me to this old shopfront.

Sepia Saturday: The Coast

2011-04-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

An iconic shot from my past - what is not clear from this photo is that the crashing waves of the Pacific as they surge into Grays Harbor, Washington, are just on the other side of those boulders that my father so blithely is perching on.

Having grown up on a Michigan farm, he developed a passion for the sea when he moved to Seattle. He developed a habit of writing his poetry in sight of large bodies of water.

I inherited this habit and honed it to perfection in my teens when I would drive to the beach at night and slouch there, pen in hand staring out through the fading light. This odd behavior at least once provoked a cop to rap on the window and see if I was all right.

However as you can see in this photo I am not amused by being held above the breakers, which I might never have seen before (I look to be about two yeas old).

FaaaAAAaaaces

2011-04-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

A bit late for Theme Thursday this week, but here is a case of pure camera fun.

Piper and I discover the bedroom mirror is warped.

I start to get a swelled head.

Hey, this is amusing.

Whoa, how about that!

But seriously...

Demonic glee ensues.

Sepia Saturday: Poets Letting Loose

2011-04-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

Back in the Seventies my folks used to host the occasional Halloween costume party for my father's poetry students. Here are some shots from a couple of them. See if you can spot me. We are all slightly sloshed on mulled wine. What a bunch of hippies!

In this picture: The Wine-Dark Sea, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay

In this picture: Betsy Ross, Emily Dickinson, and um...

In this photo: Lenny E. Beast and Betsy Nealen

In this picture: Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot

In this picture: Dylan Thomas and "Fern Hill"

In this picture: Edgar Allan Poe, Jeremiah, Hester Prynne, Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Omar Khayyam, Henry W. Longfellow, Euripedes

Be sure to check out the other memers at Sepia Saturday!

Who Wants Yesterday's Paper

2011-03-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

Wilkommen! Today's Theme Thursday concerns itself with PAPER. Sorry, iBook/Kindle fans, paper is the best. Plus...it's recyclable.

"Nothing will hold us back"

Compression

Past events

Three Squares Two Ways

2011-03-12T20:59:00.000-08:00

Still life captured at an antiques store and espresso shop in Renton, Washington.

Crash Triptych

2011-03-07T09:45:00.000-08:00

Sepia Saturday: Steam Packet

2011-03-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

As I’ve related earlier, my great-grandfather came to the U.S. from Latvia in 1884 with his mother and siblings. A few years ago, before I’d found his diary, I was trying to find out more about him; I began searching the Internet for passenger lists that might show their arrival. What I found (on Ancestry.com) had enough confusing inaccuracies to cast doubt on its relevance, so I saved a copy but relinquished the search for the nonce.

However, last week I revisited the issue, armed with further data gleaned from the diary in the last year or two. The facts I had to start with:

David and family supposedly arrived in NYC (Castle Garden) in late summer 1884 from Hamburg via Glasgow.
Included on the boat were David (about 21), Leah (his mother, about 35), Herman (about 19), Jennie (about 13), and Rose and Margaret (younger; their birth dates unknown).
The diary seems to indicate that his sister Freda (who would have been about 12) apparently emigrated later, in 1912 with her grandmother.

I started my new search on CastleGarden.org (the facility pre-dating Ellis Island, which I had not known about several years ago). Quickly I found this transliteration of a passenger list, apparently of a Blumenfeld family (one of relative parental age), arriving Sep. 10, 1884. They are shown as Russian by birth (Latvia not being a country at that point), and traveling from Hamburg via Glasgow.

Aradil, male, 14, farmer
Cheim, male 19, laborer
David, male 21, laborer
Leham, male 40, laborer
Maup, female 5, child
Rachel, female 11, child
Sewiche, female 16, laborer

Their ship is named the Devonia.

Despite the numerous encouraging coincidences, several irksome questions struck me:

Obviously the names except for David’s are pre-Americanized. They are handwritten rather badly (left-handed, I believe) on the passenger list, so these transcriptions from Castle Garden are dubious, to say nothing of the roll-taker’s ear for names and his spelling capabilities.
That said, it makes phonetic sense to Americanize Cheim to Herman, Rachel to Rose, Maup (which I read as Marya on the original) to Margaret, and Leham to Lena.
Aside from the slight age discrepancy, if Leham were Lena, why is she labeled Male?
Who is “Aradil”? A cousin? Why isn’t this person mentioned in the diary?

Anyway, I sent this circumstantial evidence to my cousin, who immediately hopped into the fray and discovered a second passenger list online, this one for a steamer named the Prague, sailing from Hamburg to Glasgow, August 24, 1884, with a Captain Mackenzie at the helm. The handwriting was clear and flourished, and listed the following, all from the Blumenfelds’ home town of Tuckum:

Leha, female 40
David, male 21
Chaim, male 19
Simche, female 16
Fradel, female 14
Rachel, female 11
Margola, female 5

The family’s ending destination is listed as New York. David’s and Chaim’s occupations are accurately listed as tailor. This is all pretty irrefutable. So now I had several revelations:

their original names
birthdates for the youngest siblings
Fradel (Freda) came over with the family in 1884
Leha (Leah) was several years older than I’d thought
the record from the Devonia is indeed theirs
and the story as David told it in his novelized diary was accurate

Arguably the biggest revelation was, always go for a second opinion. Whoever created that New York passenger list was unfamiliar with Hebrew names and spelling, and had dreadful handwriting to boot. He also seemed to have a bit of problem with determining gender, or perhaps with simply filling out the correct box on a form!

Unable to stop, I did a bit of further research on the two ships.

Devonia (pictured at the top of this post) was a 4,270-ton ship, built by Barrow Shipbuilding Co. in 1877 for the Anchor Line. Her length was 400ft x beam 42ft, straight stem, one funnel, three masts (rigged for sail), iron construction, single screw and a speed of 13 knots. There was passenger accommodation for 200-1st, 100-2nd and 800-3rd class. Her last voyage on this service commenced 19th Oct. 1893. After this, she made an occasional voyage for Barrow Steamship Co., but was mostly laid up until July 1899 when she went to Hamburg for scrapping.

A ticket like the ones David and his family would have as passengers on the Devonia

The Prague was a 1077-ton ship, built by Barclay, Curle & Co., Glasgow, in 1872 for the Leith, Hull & Hamburg Steam Packet Company. It was sold in 1916 to D. Pavlatos & Co., Piraeus, Greece, and renamed the Lefkosia. On May 11th, 1917, on a voyage from Valencia to St. Louis (Rhone) with a cargo of sulfuric acid, she was scuttled by the German submarine U-34, six miles from Cape Tortosa. There were no casualties.

Thanks to, and related info at: gjenvick.com

norwayheritage.com

http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?142828

http://www.uboat.net/wwi/ships_hit/3549.html (see a picture of the captain who sank the Lefkosia!)

Be sure to visit SEPIA SATURDAY!

Sepia Saturday: Silver Pennies

2011-02-25T17:32:00.000-08:00

Both I and my wife still have our childhood copies of this collection of poems for children. I know my folks read to me from it. The minimalist art deco illustrations haunt me still; they evoke not only my childhood of half a century back but a simple, romantic, dreamworld, just past the age of empire, unreachably distant and yet strangely outside of time.
This is perhaps my favorite poem from it, also haunting in its bare and mysterious bones.

Silver Pennies clearly resonates for many people, as is proved by its presence on the following sites.

The Marlowe Bookshelf

Daoine Sidhe

VLS Photo: The Art and Culture of Inspiration

Arthur’s Classic Novels

Told Tales

Check out more illustrations from old children’s books here:

Kat in the Cupboard (flickr)