From the Archives

Inclement weather has precluded much flaneuring recently so here are some shots of rows of things in the Fremont district of Seattle, from 2005...

The arrested idols

The Frigidaire graveyard

The ghost door parade

The hits of Spring

Sepia Saturday: My Father Reminisces

My college-age father, George Nelson Bentley, Jr., and his father, George Nelson Bentley

I discovered "Uncle Clyde: A Comedy" while going through my father's innumerable papers and old manuscripts after his death.

Nelson (no one called him George) was a prolific journalist in his youth, keeping diaries all through his teens; additional notes on his day-to-day life, particularly sports scores, appeared in The Daily Blah, the one-page newspaper he produced by hand for several years. Although diary entries for 1933 don't mention a late-April blizzard (some did occur in earlier months), they do show that he began regularly, if somewhat reluctantly, going to the Old Dutch Mill in May during his fourteenth year. (Prior to that, he had often worked at the Elm General Store, which his father, George, had operated with his brother Clyde.)

A younger George Bentley Sr. and his diminutive brother Clyde

"Uncle Clyde: A Comedy" was to be part of a longer work. The manuscript is marked Chapter 1, and is followed by a fragment of a second chapter. It probably dates from no later than the early Fifties, before Nelson stopped writing prose altogether (he'd produced many stories, essays, critical pieces, and prose poems while in college, and a full-length novel by 1945, in addition to many poems).

The story was written, in Nelson's accustomed pencil, in a spiral notebook evidently dating from the Forties; however, the handwriting and the signature on the cover appear to be more recent: his angular and cramped hand, familiar to his students, is barely decipherable at times.

Clyde's "Old Dutch Mill"

Uncle Clyde: A Comedy - by Nelson Bentley

It was during a somewhat violent blizzard in late April, 1933, that my weird period as an employee of Uncle Clyde actually began. My sister Margaret and I, at 4:30 in the afternoon, were having a blissful game of tiddlywinks in the Breakfast Nook; between casual snaps we gazed out across fields 18 inches deep in snow, over which fell swirling multitudes of large, soft flakes the width of agates. Lying 25 feet outside the window was Chingo, our cylindrical chow, the top of her woolly back and her paradoxically gentle countenance sticking sphinxily from a snowbank.

I was 14 and Margaret 12; the days were still ringed by make-believe quite undisturbed by facts such as my shoes being worn to the point where each resembled a hungry crocodile. The drifting pace of the days was calm and nearly pure with timelessness. As I snapped an adhesive-patched and wildly warped red tiddlywink into the air, watched it clink on the rim of the glass jar and fall back to the cotton mat, and then, while Margaret as Lady Bluntboots of Houndsditch uttered a derogatory "Ha!", gazed placidly into the blizzard, I was only one minute away from the indirect inauguration of my career and the transition from a land of pretend to that of stark reality.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Unseasonable

Uncommonly blizzardish this week, and I ventured out for a neighborhood recon.


Steps



Vortex




Swerve




The fence

Apropos of Nothing

The joy of shape.

This is a picture of me capturing a rare example of a curvilinear triangle.
Its habitat is the elevator lobby of the Univ. of Washington parking garage.

The Daily Blah

My father was addicted to writing from an early age. Furthermore he never threw anything out. I have inherited that foible. So my basement houses a great collection of his juvenilia, including letters, class notes, doggerel, novels and stories, and "prose poems" from grade school through the University of Michigan, where he finally graduated in the late 1940s with an English Masters.


For many years, at his small school he had posted on the bulletin board issues of his hand-produced newspaper, The Daily Blah. After high school he collected the issues and glued them into scrapbooks, which were at last handed down to me at his death in 1990. I had heard of them for decades and only now saw the actual product. Here are a few choice issues. I recommend clicking for full details!


Most of the issues concentrated on sports scores, either of his animal baseball team or, in highschool, the Redford Union teams and their local adversaries.


He also included cartoons under the name "Lew Kneas" (Loonies), cartoon strips (including Bill Libb the Detective), and caricatures of his school mates and faculty.


Occasionally if the news was exciting enough, such as the death of Will Rogers, he'd issue a special edition.


My favorite pieces are the long, amusing stories of local goings-on. The Sept. 10, 1934 issue gives us a great insight into life in the Detroit area during Prohibition.


His prose fairly roils when describing the Reford Union games. At the time (his mid-teens) he envisioned pursuing a career as a sports writer.


Here his family's fabled hunk of junk, the Marmon, is immortalized, as well as the practical jokers he grew up with.


In his adult years he wrote voluminously about his rural childhood, with very funny and colorful descriptions of the bizarre characters (not excluding his family) in the hamlet of Elm -- now incorporated into Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. This thrilling Feb. 17, 1936 issue foreshadows those writings, featuring his father George as well as a couple of uncles in an episode reminiscent of a W.C. Fields comedy.