Tag Archives: History

A Night to Remember

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Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue. For they thought it was a ship that water would never go through. It was on its maiden trip, that an iceberg hit the ship. It was sad when the great ship went down.
It was sad, so sad. It was sad, so sad. It was sad when the great ship went down (to the bottom of the….) Uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants. It was sad when the great ship went down.

The Sinking of the Titanic, by Max Beckmann, 1913

In expectation of the centennial of its sinking the Saint Louis Art Museum pulled from its vaults, “The Sinking of the Titanic”, by Max Beckmann. The following text is the museum’s placard description of the painting. A photo of Beckmann with the painting in his Munich studio shows the large size of this work.

On April 15, 1912, the world’s largest luxury liner, Titanic, sank off the coast of Newfoundland; of the 2,200 passengers, 1,507 died. Beckmann was inspired by news accounts to produce this enormous canvas in which he focused on the lifeboats of the Titanic while placing the distant, brightly lit liner against an iron-red night sky. Beckmann sought to emulate a 19th century French tradition of grand paintings of contemporary events. Here, his theme is the struggle for survival; boats list dangerously or have overturned. The largest lifeboat is crammed with woman and children including one passenger still in her violet evening gown and earrings. Beckmann employs a palette of vibrant green and blue coloring to highlight the nightmarish quality of a scene in which ghostly heads can be seen floating in the water.

The Artist and His Painting

Much ink and many pixels have been devoted to the story of HMS Titanic. It is a story better told by others than me. That is why I’ve included the lyrics to the old camp song about the sinking, a song that I sung while a scout. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s submission is a novel contribution and the following acapella cover offers tribute to James Cameron’s remarkable movie.

Other than the artifice of 3D, Cameron claims that the only thing he change in this re-release is the stars in the sky. An astronomer had complained after the original release that night’s sky was wrong. Cameron has endeavored to correct this mistake. If it were only so easy to change the stars and destinies of the people onboard that fateful night.

Our Friendly Neighbor to the North

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1936 LaSalle Model 50 with Telltale Scotch-Plaid Hat

Dan was right all along. The following was taken from the pages of “The Legionary”, “The Fighting Man’s Magazine”. Published from Montreal, in June of 1943. Printed at the height of WW II, it was as true then as it is today. The magazine poses the following question: Is Canada’s excessive politeness a cover for something truly sinister?

Reasons to Fear Canada

  • Ninety percent of Canada’s population is massed within a 100 miles of the US border
  • Infiltration of the entertainment industry with comedians
  • Consistently staying just below the cultural radar
  • Seemingly endless supply of Tim Horton donuts and Scotch-plaid hats
  • Keeps insisting it “has no designs on America” and “only wants peace”

This is of course just a joke. The joke is made funnier, because it is the Canadians making fun of themselves. The joke is told in a magazine dedicated to the Canadian Army, at the height of WW II. A placard quoting the “Legionary”, was taped to the window of the above pictured LaSalle. This LaSalle was built-in Ontario and was painted Army Green. Placing the Scotch-plaid hat in the car’s front seat is just icing on the cake. Another visitor of the Easter car show asked the owner if some general had used the car. He just laughed, said no, but did not elaborate any further.

After years of vacationing at the family cabin, on the shores of Lake Superior, about a mile from Ontario, Dan began to develop a distrust of Canada, or as he liked to refer to it as, Canadia. It was probably the reaction that he got from his parents that caused him to play up this mispronunciation, but he ran with it and began to embellish conspiracy theories. It now appears that he was not the first to do this.

1940 Census – Sault Ste. Marie, MI

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The National Archives released the 1940 Census online. It was released Monday morning, but their website was so hammered with traffic that I couldn’t access it until early this morning. The census data is photocopies of the original handwritten forms. I seem to recall that good penmanship was a prerequisite for getting hired as a census taker then. I’ll let the reader be the judge of that. The image is full size. Just click on it to enlarge it. Click on it again for full size. The records are organized into enumeration districts. These are geographical districts that the Census Bureau used to partition the country. The above pictured page is one of 48 pages in enumeration district 17-22. The Soo is divided among some thirty districts. To look up anybody, you really need the person’s street address in 1940. I chose the Soo branch over the other three heritage legs, because the Soo was the smallest town. This probably did make it easier, but it was no piece of cake.

The family of interest on this page are the Finlaysons, Anne’s mother’s family. It is the second family on the page. It was a large household, at least by today’s standards, with nine people living under one roof. If you remember your history, in 1940 WW II had started the previous year and America would enter the war the next year. I am reminded of the old curse, may you live in interesting times. Here is a link to the key, of what each of the different columns on the form mean.

Interpreting this form, it appears that Anne’s grandmother answered the questions. Anne’s grandfather was an assistant cashier at the First National Bank. I belive that he eventually rose to run the place. Their house cost $4,500. Anne’s mom, “Bubs”, was in fifth grade and was eleven years-old. It is difficult to read the form. Time and photocopying have not been kind to this form. This is the standard sized photocopy. High definition ones may be easier to read. Now that I’ve found the Soo, census, I guess that there are three more households left to do. Now which enumeration district is Bowen Street in?

As postscript to this post, I wonder about the nameless census taker. Nameless, because even though he signed the form, I can’t make out his or her signature. I can make out the date, April 8th, almost 72 years to the day. I wonder was he a local guy, he was certainly a long named one. I can make that much out. If he was local, how did his friends, neighbors and acquaintances feel about him asking these personal questions? Now a day it is all computerized, but back then it was a man at the door, “Good morning, Mam, I’m from the Census Bureau. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Old Town, Saint Chuck

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Lewis and Clark Keel-boat Replica

Old Town is the original downtown part of Saint Chuck, or more formally, Saint Charles, MO. It was the site of the original state capital of Missouri, before it eventually moved to Jeff City. I mean Jefferson City. There has always been something about Saint Louis that has rubbed the rest of Missouri the wrong way. When the state first formed, the out-state delegates to the first state convention, or those not residing in Saint Louis, refused to allow the state capital to be situated in Saint Louis. It ended up just across the Missouri River in Saint Chuck. When the Civil War came along, Missouri’s persecution of Saint Louis kicked into high gear and continues to this day, but that is a story for another blog post.

Anne drove out to Saint Chuck and met me for lunch. OBTW, I call Saint Charles, Saint Chuck, because IMHO, it is chuck full of rednecks, hillbillies and Republicants, but at least in Old Town there is a semblance of civility and culture. Speaking of culture, we had lunch at the Trailhead Brewery. Trailhead sits on the south end of Old Town and is a stone’s throw from the Katy Trail. Now that the weather is getting warmer, we’ll have to make it back out there for biking. Here, “getting warmer” is a bit of an understatement, we’ve set multiple temperature records this week, climbing up into the eighties. Not bad for early March. I hope though that this record-setting pace does not continue into July.

So, lunch at a micro-brewery and me with nothing, but ice tea. Anne had a beer, but I had a hot afternoon on the gridiron to look forward to. Ding! Grid is still not done. We had lunch on one of the patios, which are now four-season. After lunch, I went back to work. Anne indulged in some shopping therapy; she is only now recovering from her cold. Damn those runny nosed gutter snipes! Old Town is chuck full of all sorts on little shops. I hope that my repetitive use of the word chuck hasn’t caused anyone to up-chuck. She found one of her favorite quilting stores and then a loved knitting shop, even though it had moved down the block. She sat right down and began knitting there for a while.

We had our first tornado drill at work, which considering this evening’s weather outlook, seems rather apropos. Anne pretty-much made it home, before the rains came and I at least made it to my car. Rain washed highways, make for a very long slog home. The weather forecast for tonight includes a lot of heavy bass and long drum solos. Rock-On!

Race

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The Mississippi by John Steuart Curry, 1935

The comedian, Chris Rock, once joked about Black History Month. He complained that the shortest month of year had been picked, February. Weather-wise, February was also the worst month of the year. Rock’s complaint was that with twelve months to choose from, why did black people end up with the shortest and most dismal one. This year at least, Black History Month was granted an extra day. If Black History Month was allotted the maximum thirty-one day, then yesterday would have been February, 31st, instead of March 2nd. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume the former, and grant this amateur blogger one more day of grace to write this up. Last night, we went to see The Rep’s production of David Mamet’s play, “Race”.

Mamet is a connoisseur of four-letter words, but when it comes to the four-letter word, race, I prefer another David, David Blight. He is a Yale professor and author, and is on an iTunes U lecture series about the Civil War; he is my preferred instructor on the subject of race. Mamet’s white lead states that there is nothing that a white person can say to a black person about race. According to Blight that hasn’t stopped white people for the last 150 plus years from trying. Blight leavens these white voices, with black voices and composes a symphony, on this pivotal period in American history and in American race relations.

Returning to Mametland, “Race” is set in the present. It is a four actor play. There are Lawson and Brown, the white and black male law partners. There is Strickland, the rich, white defendant, accused of raping a younger black woman. Then there is Susan, also young black woman, and recent addition to the firm. Only Susan’s character has no last name. Mamet’s stacatto dialog spans two acts, and multiple aspects of jurisprudence. The subject of race is intertwined throughout these discussions. Lawson argues the law, but the crux of his argument always returns to race.

The Civil War was this nation’s struggle to expunge the stain of slavery. Read about the 13th Amendment. This war’s death rolls dwarfed all other American wars, both before and since. Even with this sacrifice, it took another hundred years before Civil Rights gained any traction. We are now sitting fifty years beyond that point. This is also the timeframe of Mamet’s play, except that all of the characters, save maybe Susan, are too old to successfully digest this last half century in race relations. This gives Mamet’s play a stale, dated feel. Its opening joke about OJ only underscores this sense. Only the recent DSK scandal, offers this play any touchstone to the present. That event dealt more with relations between the sexes rather than the races. Mamet confronts similar sexual issues, but always returns to race.

John Steuart Curry’s painting, “The Mississippi” has little to do with race, save that the family that is stranded, is black. Curry also painted farm animals, caught in similar predicaments. These paintings depict the 1927 flood, a scourge visited upon man by God. Race is a scourge that man alone devised and someday, we shall overcome.

The West

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I started watching Ken Burns’s PBS series, “The West”. Rey and I watched the first episode last night and I watched the second episode this afternoon. I’m a big Ken Burns fan, so I don’t understand how I could have missed this series. If you’ve seen one Ken Burns’s documentary, then you are familiar with his combination of historical images with modern-day photography. The modern live action helps bring to life the grainy black and white stills from the past. Burns also combines celebrity voiceovers, reading historical letters and text, with talking head interviews of subject matter experts. One such expert is Scott Momaday, an author and Kiowa. He tells the most marvelous story about the creation of Devils Tower that I’ve paraphrased below. It was featured in the segment, before the white man arrived, back in the time when dogs could talk.

A boy was playing with his seven sisters. Pretending to be a bear, he was chasing them. Miraculously, he was transformed into a Grizzly Bear. His sisters ran screaming from him. They ran by a tree stump that called out to the girls, “Climb on me and I will save you.” They did, and as the bear approached, it began to grow. It grew so tall that the bear could not reach them, scoring the stump’s sides, it could not climb it. The stump grew so tall that the sisters were carried into the heavens. They became the seven stars that form the Big Dipper. – Kiowa legend

Sunday has been a cold, wet and dreary day. We went out for brunch to the City Diner. The above picture was taken while we were waiting to be seated. Rey left for Tennessee from the diner. Anne knitted the afternoon away, finishing the second sock of a pair. Now she has to go back and finish the first sock. She worked it this way, because she was unsure of how much yarn she would have. She and Dave also watched the Rams lose. Dave is staying over tonight and not returning to Purdue until tomorrow.

I watched the second Ken Burns episode and then I thought that this afternoon would be perfect for making a movie. I could make my own little Ken Burns like [lite] documentary. I spent an inordinate amount of time noodling around the Library of Congress website, before I finally gave up in disgust. They have lots of great material, but almost all of it is still under copyright, and as such is not available online. Then by chance, I found Wikimedia Commons. I knew about this resource, but it didn’t immediately come to mind. I typed in a search for “Saint Louis” and was rewarded with ~2,500 entries. I’ve selected two to include with this post that I could never taken.

The first shows Saint Louis, Missouri, as viewed from the space shuttle (STS056) at night, on April, 1993. This is of course the year of the great flood and you can see some signs of it in the unusually wide dark spaces, north and south (left and right) of downtown. The flood didn’t hit full on until July, but I suspect that the water was up even in April. The second photo shows the U.S. 25th Infantry on bicycles, notice that they are all dabbing. It is captioned with, “On June 14, 1897, Lieutenant James Moss, U.S. Army, led his bicycle corps of the 25th Infantry, from Fort Missoula, Montana, up wagon trail and Indian path, to St. Louis, Missouri, arriving July 16, 1897.” After spending all afternoon researching this supposed documentary, I didn’t have time to actually make it, but you can expect that this will be a well that I shall dip into again.