MISTER CAMEL

This is Mr. Camel; he lives in my living room here in Maine.

He seems to have one and one-half humps, which puts me in a difficult position: Most camels have either one or two humps, by which they’re classified as either Dromedary or Bactrian camels.

A Dromedary has a single hump. Dromedaries are more at home in the hot deserts of Arabia.

The Bactrian is the two-humped model, which makes him better suited for the cold deserts in Mongolia. In reality, though, his humps are identical – big, tall humps with a definite valley inbetween – not like Mr. Camel’s.

So: One for a Dromedary, two for a Bactrian.

There.

Now you know.

My maternal grandfather, William W. Howell, was first and foremost a pediatrician (which gives him an excuse, I think, for not being clear on this hump business). He was a Harvard Medical School graduate (Class of 1900), and was associated with at least two hospitals – Infants in Boston, Faulkner in Jamaica Plain). He also had a private practice; his office was at 330 Dartmouth Street in Boston.

One of his off-hour hobbies was woodworking. He made lovely trays (all his grandchildren have at least one each) of varying sizes, made with wonderful woods and small brass screws. He cut, assembled and finished them in his basement; I remember the lovely smell of linseed oil and varnish that drifted up the cellar stairs into the laundry room in my grandparents’ house in Jamaica Plain.

He also made wooden toys to entertain his young patients – mostly pull-toys, cut from plain pine board. His waiting room had several of them, and kids apparently dragged these things all over his oriental carpet and through the doorway into his examining room.

There are two surviving toys: Mr. Camel is one, and my brother John has the other, Mr. Crow, a black bird with moveable wings and a beak that opens and shuts as you pull him across the floor.

Here’s a remarkable Small World Incident: When my parents moved into a house in Maine in the late 1950s, a neighbor came by to introduce herself – an informal Welcome Wagon, you might say. She saw Mr. Camel and Mr. Crow sitting together on a bookshelf in the den and flashed back forty years; she proceeded to tell my mother about her old family pediatrician in Boston who had toys just like that in his waiting room...turned out to be my grandfather, of course!

So, what do you think?

Is my one and one-half humped Mr. Camel a Dromedary or a Bactrian?

SAMUEL GIBSON ADAMS

Sepia Saturday #148

Sticking with the theme of policemen, here’s a Big Wig of 1880 or so: Samuel Gibson Adams (1825-1886), Boston, Massachusetts.

He was born in Brighton in November of 1825 to Milton and Esther Gibson Adams; his sister Roxanna was my great-great grandmother. They were two of five children, their mother died when they were very young, and they were farmed out to relatives and neighbors – a common practice at the time. While all of the other Adams children scattered, Samuel and Roxanna stayed in touch throughout their lives.

Samuel grew up in Brighton and Boston, and as an adult lived on Walnut Avenue in the city. He married twice (his first wife died) and had four children, one of whom – Samuel Gibson Adams, Jr. – died at 18 years of “inflammation of the lungs” (probably consumption).

He doesn’t look like a policeman in this photo – no brass buttons, no shield, no funny hat or billy club...but he wore a uniform when he started out as a Boston Police Department sergeant in 1861, a position that kept him out of the army – he managed to stay away from the battlegrounds of the Civil War. (He reminds me of Ulysses S. Grant in this photo, though!)

Sam was, apparently, pretty good at his job – appointed Captain of Station #7 in 1863 and, in 1878, became a Boston Police Superintendent, an office he held until 1885.

This photo was taken when he was a Suit, not a Uniform!

         

He was also good at keeping in touch with his sister. I have lots of old Christmas cards, Valentines, notes, etc., that he wrote to her over the years. I’ll post some of them later on. She notes in her diaries whenever “Sam” comes to call, usually with a basket of fruit (her favorite? Oranges), a bag of hard candy (which she loved) or some flowers. Sam and his family came to the family house in Newton Upper Falls for dinner often, and it was clearly a relationship that both he and Roxanna valued highly.

Samuel Gibson Adams died May 16, 1886.

         



PIGGY PEARS

In 1883, a group of New England civil engineers went to Oregon to survey for the railroad. One of them, David Loring, came from Massachusetts, and when the town was incorporated in 1885, he named it after his home town back east – Medford.

Medford offered a perfect climate for fruit trees – grapes, peaches, pears in particular. And, because it was on the railroad line, there was plenty of opportunity to ship the fruit back east. Eventually, due to the incredible local production, Medford was known as the Pear Capital of the World.

Before the 1800s, wooden packing crates and barrels were stenciled for identification: product, producer, or, more often, product only. Pretty simple, really – PEARS.

But when railroads opened up the markets to many different producers, farmers understood that in order to survive in this new market, they needed a way to make their product more attractive to consumers – to make their crate of pears more appealing to customers than any other brand. They had to capture the attention of wholesale dealers who might buy crates of their produce for shipping and distribution.

So they each designed an individual packing label – a bright, colorful paper label with catchy graphics to glue onto the end of the shipping crate – a 10x7-inch marketing tool for promotion, distribution and identification. There were hundreds of orchards, and each one generated its own label. Some brand names you might recognize: Anaco (still around today), American Maid, Diamond, Duckwall (guess what’s on their label?) Federated, Peacock (again, guess...).

And one of them was Medford’s Highcroft Orchards...Piggy Pears.

In the 1950s, the technology caught up with the times: cardboard was being mass-produced; information was printed right on the cardboard instead of having a label stuck on a wooden crate. Cardboard was cheaper, weighed less, and was far more convenient; wooden crates (and their wonderful labels) disappeared.

But I’ve got my Piggy Pear crate – with label – in my house in Maine. Don’t you love her little cloven hooves, her basket, her Mr. Spock ears?

WOOLLY BEAR

It’s a face only a mother could love!

Pyrrharctia isabella in the adult stage is a Tiger Moth, but in this stage of the game we call him the Banded Woolly Bear.

I spotted him on one of the slate steps in my walkway, taking a nap, maybe, or just warming up on a cool fall morning.

I had to lie down to photograph him, stretch myself out on the back lawn and push the camera through the grass. He was harder to photograph than I thought: at the slightest provocation, this little guy curled into a ball (more like a tight comma). I had to wait, motionless, while he figured out things were safe enough to unroll, and when he did, he moved lickety-split across the flagstone!

I’d miss the shot, of course; I had to pick him up (he’d curl up instantly), set him gently back on the slate, wait for him to uncurl again.

It took five tries!

The Woolly Bear emerges in the fall. One of its favorite foods is the aster, so I always plant extras, and it also likes sunflowers, grass and clover. It spends the winter under leaves or other plant material; I mulch my lily gardens with lots of straw and compost, so my Woolly Bear population is always high.  

WBs survive the Maine winters by literally freezing solid – no heartbeat, no blood circulation...nothing!

In the spring, after they thaw out, they’re back again, but only for a short while. They spend a week or so feeding, then spin themselves inside a cocoon; the adult moth appears in about thirty days.

Old New England tradition has it that the Woolly Bear is a weather forecaster – the wider the orange-brown segment band in the middle, the milder the winter will be. (I’ve heard that some scientist actually collected data for ten years or so trying to prove this, but I’ve never found his results!)

If there are really thirteen segments to a Woolly Bear, and this fellow has four distinct brown segments (with a little spillover on either end), I’d guess that we’re looking at an average winter this year in Maine – lots of snow and moderately cold. I’m close to the ocean, though, and temperatures here are usually a few degrees warmer than inland.

What are weather predictors in your part of the world?

SEPIA SATURDAY

In response to Alan’s wonderful shot of the three (maybe four) sportsters, may I present this quartet of runners – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) varsity relay team of 1907!

That sturdy fellow second from the left is my grandfather (and Team Captain) Gardner S. Gould, MIT Class of 1907.

Here are some excerpts from that week’s issue of The Tech, the MIT newspaper...

“Victory was the result of the relay team’s trip to the Penn games. Close in every relay, with a fast total time, the best quartette of quarter-milers in years carried off first honors in a mile relay against Wesleyan last Saturday, at Franklin Field, Philadelphia.... Gould got the jump on his man and gained steadily, coming through with a lead of 20 yards. The time for this quarter was 54 4-5 s. Gould relayed to Gimson...” (third from left in the photo).

“The Tech men found the track very slow and much dug up after the many relays. They were also bothered with the high wind on the stretch which slowed down the times in all the events...Tech had a mighty good team, one that every Tech man ought to be proud of.”

“...one that every Tech men ought to be proud of?”

Tsk, tsk...

“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”  -- Winston Churchill

SLANGWHANG

Most of you know that I’m writing another book, a novel that spans roughly a century between the early 1800s and the early 1900s. What you don’t know is that I spend at least an hour every day doing research of some kind or another.

There’s a lot to learn, and not all of it is of the earth-shattering, history-changing variety. Truth told, most of it is pretty slow stuff; clothing, food, farming technology, sheep breeds, crop rotation systems, stone wall physics, different styles of wagons and chaises, etc. But getting it “right” matters – not only to me, but to others who read historical fiction.

This morning I spent an hour or so reading about 19^th- and 20^th-century American slang – after all, if my characters are going to talk to each other, it’s important that they use the common expressions of their time. Some slang is very clever and funny (but on the saucy side and, therefore, unprintable); some of it is simply puzzling.

Here, presented alphabetically, are some of my favorites:

alley-apple – a piece of horse manure (early 1900s)

dog’s nose – a drink containing beer or ale mixed with gin or rum

duck-fit – a fit of anger, a tantrum (and anybody who’s seen and heard an angry duck knows how descriptive this is!)

floss around – socialize, be seen around town (1920s)

galloping dominoes – dice

high cockalorum – a self-important person (1880s)

hitchy – nervous, agitated

hookshop – a brothel, especially a cheap one (consider the term “hooker”)

megger – a movie director (from the use of a megaphone to yell instructions to actors on set -- 1920s)

Monday man – one who steals clothes from clotheslines (Monday was the traditional washday for housewives)

Noah’s boy with Murphy carrying a Wreath – old lunch-counter term for ham (Ham – get it?) and potatoes with cabbage (1920s)

Snollygoster – somebody who talks a lot but doesn’t say anything (1860s)

weenchy – a little bit, as in “a weenchy” bit of salt, please (1900)

zapped drap – a skirt with a zipper (1940, which is a bit late for my book, but still intriguing)

Your assignment – should you choose to accept it – is to make comments to this post using one (or more) of these terms! And it’s perfectly fine if it’s slangwhang, an 1830s term for...

...absolute nonsense!

LOUIS PRANG'S INTERLOPER

Louis Prang was born in 1824 in a Province of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father was a textile manufacturer, and Louis grew up comfortably in that trade, working with his father for many years. After a while, his youthful political activities irritated the Prussian government (he was a bit too revolutionary for his time) and he was forced to emigrate, first to Switzerland, then to Boston in 1850.

He became a fairly successful lithographer, carving wood engravings for book illustrations. He eventually started his own business, L. Prang and Company, working in advertising and other business art. The company also printed maps, some of which were used (by both sides!) during the Civil War.

In 1873, he started printing Christmas cards – he is often referred to as the Father of the American Christmas card – and also manufactured a series of what were called “album cards,” which were used in scrapbooks. (Scrapbooking is nothing new, although the use of the gerund form certainly is trendy: I have several of my great-grandmother’s diaries in which she often mentions an evening spent “pasting scraps.”)  I’ve stumbled across quite a bit of Prang’s work in scrapbooks I’ve found in flea markets and antique shops.  I’ve got a few of his Christmas cards, too, and I’ll post some in December!

Louis Prang relocated his Massachusetts company from Roxbury to Springfield in 1897. He died in 1909 and is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain.

This card depicting the Muses was one of Louis Prang’s scrap album cards. The Muses were the goddesses who ruled over the arts and sciences. They are known collectively as the younger muses, and they influenced poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, dancing, astronomy, astrology, etc.

There were usually nine muses, but this card has ten.

So, which one is the interloper?

Make your guess in your comment, and feel free to be wickedly creative!