Spring fashions past: the budget, the high-end, and the surreal

In honor of Easter and the fashions it has always entailed--new dresses, hats, and bright colors--we thought we'd showcase some of the catalogs and magazine images from the trove of ephemera that Tom got at an auction last fall to help us get a sense of what the fashionable woman (or man) was wearing in the 1930s and early 1940s.

First, from 1935, a flier featuring a line of Del Ray dresses for Spring, available from Rosenbaum's department store in Elmira, New York.

As the text reads, these styles were designed for the budget shopper, who could "indulge [her] thriftiest instincts by ordering [her] spring Del Ray dresses" for only a dollar and fifty-nine cents each.

I'll take one of each, they're so adorable!  Well, except maybe that mustard-and-green plaid number.  And the stripey thing.  And I'm not sure about the bows on #901.

At the other spectrum is Montaldo's "resort season 1942" selection.  Montaldo's was a very high-end women's dress shop in Columbus, Ohio (and elsewhere around the United States), which was in business from 1919 until the mid-1990s, when the company declared bankruptcy.

The images in this catalog are fabulous--like small portraits in pastel crayon.  And the women all look so stern and sophisticated.

As you can see in the small print, these aren't $1.59 dresses.  Oh no.  Prices range from $29.95 to $79.95, which must have been a fortune in those days.  But of course, if you've got the money to go somewhere for "resort season," then you're probably not worried about the expense of a new wardrobe for the occasion.

I think the image of the woman with the highly coiffed dog, above, is my favorite, but I have to admit that I'm also amused by the following.  An ancestor of Colonel Meow, perhaps?

Cooking on an entirely different planet were the fashions on display at the famous Hollywood party thrown by artist Salvador Dali in 1941.  The images below appeared in the Spring 1942 issue of a magazine called Game and Gossip.

Called "Surrealistic Night in an Enchanted Forest," Dali's party was definitely an outré fashion event.  Guests were supposed to wear costumes that represented their bad dreams.

Robinson Jeffers wearing a crown of laurels.  Yeah.  That's how weird that party was.  For live-action weirdness, watch this short newsreel about it.


So, there you go: a range of vintage fashion options to choose from for your Easter Sunday best.  I say you just can't go wrong with a unicorn hat.

Fifty ways to get home for Christmas, nos. 1 and 2: Just hop on the bus, Gus

Somehow, I suspect that riding a bus through heavy snow in a rural area during the holidays was never as romantic as these corporate holiday cards from General Motors' Truck & Coach division make it seem:

Are those buses actually on a designated road?  If so, the local residents really need to get on the municipality's case about the plowing situation.  This is why you pay taxes, folks!

--though I also like the idea of a giant old bus like this doing some off-roading to get its passengers right to their door in time for Christmas.

Time magazine, meanwhile, just sends Santa up in the kind of prop plane that you actually have to push to start, in this undated card/advertisement for last-minute gift subscriptions:

Hope our loyal readers are already safely arrived at their destinations, and don't have to rely on any of these forms of transportation to get there.  Happy holidays!  See the other pieces of Christmas ephemera from Tom's recent auction box lot here and here. 

Skylark, have you anything to say to me?

One of my sabbatical goals was to start voice lessons again.  I studied for about seven years in high school and college, and though it never "went" anywhere (obviously, I didn't become a professional singer), I enjoyed it immensely and have missed it ever since.  There's something about singing that's very Zen-like for me: it's effort, but from a totally different part of my brain and body than anything else I've ever done, and when it's going well I can slip very easily into that optimal sense of flow.

This time around, though, I didn't want to study classical repertoire like I did before.  While I enjoyed singing all those arias at the time, that music kind of leaves me cold now.  What I really want to do is sing jazz--not necessarily scatting (I'm not sure I'll ever loosen up enough to do that in a way that isn't deeply uncomfortable for me and any unfortunate listener)--but just a more relaxed, personal kind of singing that makes the best use of my range.

WVU offers private lessons through its community music program, and I found a local teacher who was willing to take me on, even though she's more classically trained.  I had my first lesson yesterday, and it was great fun--even doing scales and various silly exercises to loosen up the face and lips was a real blast from the past.  

But.

About midway through the lesson, I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of grief.  It caught me unexpectedly and swamped me for a few seconds, until I realized what it was about.

Dad.

In part, I'm doing this because at the end of his life, I saw how vital music was to him--it was, in many ways, the thing that most sustained him and gave him the deepest pleasure and peace.  And I realized that it's something I not only admired but envied in him, his ability to sustain that hobby and passion until the very end of his days.  I wanted to rekindle that love, which I shared with him, in my own life.

While my new voice teacher is excellent, I think it's fair to say she's not a pianist.  In fact, she pretty much "accompanied" me in the same way I accompany myself at home: by picking out the melody with the right hand, or just hitting the first note in a measure, and then going acapella from there.

Midway through the lesson, I wanted my dad.  My dad, who could play almost anything by ear, or in a pinch, from a fake book.

Dad at the piano(s)

Wanting to keep my own interest in music separate from his, we very seldom played together.  And now I'm sorry that we didn't play and sing every damn time we saw each other.

And it also made me miss my longtime voice teacher from all those years ago, Carol Marty. She died in 2012, and when I heard the news, I felt freshly guilty about having lost touch with her.  Not only was she my teacher, but she was also a good friend, and in addition to formal lessons, we frequently went out to sing old tunes from the 20s and 30s at a nursing home in east Columbus, often followed by lunch at the Kahiki.

Again, adulthood--or my theories about it--got in the way.  Though I doubt I could have articulated it at the time, I think that after I'd graduated from college and started working, continuing lessons was a final tie to my adolescence that I wanted to sever.  

But yesterday, I appreciated her in a whole new way.  Not only was she a great voice teacher, she was a remarkable pianist, and a very skillful, sensitive accompanist.  I know I wasn't as aware of and awed by that as I should have been at the time, but I sure am now.  In the midst of picking my way through Hoagy Carmichael's "Skylark" yesterday, I wanted nothing more than for Mrs. Marty to be there, playing a lush accompaniment, the two of us gauging each other's tempo and phrasing so that voice and piano would not just synch, but together create something more full of life and movement than either alone could.

As a teenager and a young adult, I was blessed with two incredibly talented accompanists who took my interest in music seriously, nurtured it, and who went a step further and loved me.  And sometime between 4 and 5 p.m. yesterday, I finally understood that.  Too late to thank either of them.

In honor of the great Linda Ronstadt, who recently announced that Parkinson's disease has left her unable to sing a note, I'll post her version of "Skylark."  A nice reminder that if you've still got the pipes, you've gotta use and cherish them.  Will do, Dad and Mrs. Marty.  It's the best tribute I can make to you both.

(Not necessarily my favorite arrangement of that song, however...I prefer the spareness of this one.)

The hog whisperer

I think it probably goes without saying that I was a weird kid.  I was also a kid who was obsessed with cats.  I hounded (no pun intended) my parents about getting a cat until they finally relented.  When we went to Cat Welfare to pick out a kitten, we took along our family friend Dottie, who had three cats of her own and who had taught me very carefully how to properly pick up and hold a cat.

Dottie demonstrating proper cat-holding
 technique on the day we got Ginger, my first cat 

--and me holding one of Dottie's cats.

This technique has worked with pretty much every cat I've ever had up until the present: our black cat, Stella, doesn't like to be picked up or held at all, and has let me know in no uncertain terms that not only is this technique not "proper," it's tantamount to abuse, and if I keep it up she'll report me to the authorities.

Still, the method has generally served me well, especially on one particular occasion.

My grandmother lived in the very small town of Athens, West Virginia, and when I was growing up, we'd often go down to visit.  Trouble was, there wasn't a whole lot to do in Athens, and the options were further limited by my grandmother's ideas about what was proper for girls to do.  So, I often entertained myself by walking through the cemetery that was just down the hill from her house.  There was a path at the back of the cemetery that led down to a barn and a small pond on some land she owned further down the hill, and it was kind of fun to play "pioneer" down there.

One summer day when I was about eight or thereabouts, I was on my way back from the pond, wandering through the cemetery and reading the headstones, when I caught a flash of something furry out of the corner of my eye.  A cat, perhaps?  It was about the right size.

I followed it and discovered that it was, instead, a groundhog.  He was just ambling along, and when he noted me following him, he stopped.  I crouched down and made the usual clucking noises you make to get a cat to come to you, and much to my surprise, he kind of wandered over in my direction.

Or maybe he didn't: to be honest, I don't remember.  I like to imagine that I enchanted him, like a groundhog whisperer, and he realized that I was a Trustworthy Gentle Person.

At any rate, he stopped, or moved slowly enough that I was able to pick him up, flip him on his back like I'd been taught to do with cats, and carry him back to the house.

I remember being so excited to show everyone what I'd found in the cemetery--my very own pet groundhog!

My mother, of course, tells me that the adults were freaking out when I came in the house cradling a groundhog, but didn't want to alarm me (or the hog).  So, they very helpfully suggested putting it out on the fenced-in stone patio behind my grandmother's house, where I could visit with it.  And my dad (in typical fashion) maintained enough presence of mind to snap a picture.

The groundhog and I stayed out there for quite awhile.  I probably fed it something; I don't recall.  What I do remember is that when I got up the next morning, the groundhog was gone.  I was disappointed, though in hindsight, it was remarkable that it stuck around at all after I put it down!

A few years ago this incident came up at a family dinner and my parents said they supposed the groundhog was sick; why else would it let a kid pick it up and carry it around?

To be honest, though I was well into my forties by then, that thought had never occurred to me.  For the first time ever I was able to see the event as an adult would: Holy crap, does that thing have rabies?!  Put the pest-ridden wild animal down slowly, little girl. 

In addition to the photo, that's the thing I'm most happy to have taken from that experience: the knowledge that at one point in my life, I was innocent and trusting and bold enough* not to worry about such things.

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone!


*and stupid!  Did I mention stupid?

******************UPDATE*********************

Here's my mom's version of events.  Needless to say, I did not witness Chuckie's escape.

We were in Athens for an overnight stay on our way to visit the Beegles and their horses in Charlottesville and then on to Williamsburg. 

You decided to take a wander--unbeknownst to us--to the cemetery.  That's where you discovered Chuckie, as you called him, sitting tamely among the markers.  You scooped him up and carried him back to Grandma's.


Yes!  Dad and I were startled and a bit worried.  It seemed strange to us that a wild animal should be so amiable--perhaps he was sick.  Rabies flitted through our minds.   It took some persuasion to convince you to part with Chuckie:  he would not be happy as a house pet, he was used to country life, we wouldn't know what to feed him, etc.,etc. Finally you reluctantly agreed to free him and he scuttled away--under the washhouse as I remember. And your parents tried not to be too obviously relieved. Now we have the picture and the memory, thanks to Dad with his ever present camera.

The cards of Christmas past

I am a tradition killer.

It's been years since I've sent out Christmas cards en masse, though in the last couple of years I've sent out Valentines to folks who sent us holiday greetings.  I'll probably do that again come February, though at last count, Tom and I had only received about five cards in the mail.  I've received several holiday e-cards from people who used to send "real" cards, but in general, the custom of sending these obligatory annual missives seems to be dying a slow death.

That's fine with me, for the most part, since they seem like an added duty at a time of year that's busy and stressful enough.  But looking at the handful of cards we received, I also remembered how much I loved retrieving December's mail from the box when I was a kid, looking at all the different kinds of handwriting, the postmarks from places that seemed far away and exotic to me at the time.  It was a real treat when my parents let me open them, and even when I didn't get to open them myself, I enjoyed reading them.

In some ways, they were like condensed history lessons about my parents' pasts:  where they'd lived, what they'd done, who they'd been long before I was born.  There were many old friends of my parents who I only knew through their cards, like my dad's college friend Jim Dukas, who was a professional actor in New York City.  His cards were always the funniest ones, and I remember his distinctive, slanty writing that was sort of halfway between print and cursive.  I actually met him during a high-school trip to NYC, and in many ways, I felt like I'd always known him.

It's certainly true that we have multiple, ongoing, and more immediate ways of keeping up with old friends these days (Facebook, I'm looking at you), and I certainly wouldn't want to give up social networking in favor of a once-a-year holiday update.  But those interactions are (we trust) largely private: you can't display your Facebook wall like you can display a collection of Christmas cards.  And of course, they're even more ephemeral that ephemera, as we've written about here before.

Which brings us to this year's collection of holiday ephemera (as opposed to this year's).  My mom's ongoing basement excavation recently unearthed a file folder of handmade Christmas cards that my parents sent out in the 1950s and 1960s.  My dad, as I've mentioned here before, was a keen amateur photographer, and he also apparently had access to a typesetter and a silk-screening setup at his office.  So, they designed and sent out a different card every year.

I'd only seen one of these before, so it was quite a surprise to me to see pretty much the whole run of them come out of the file folder.

This seems to be the first iteration, from when my parents were still living in Morgantown, before my brother Mark was born:

The 1954 edition, with Phillip and Pam

Fortunately, the "Hathmark" logo (!) on the back of each card lets us know when each was produced.

So, here they are, in order of appearance:

1956: Contract with Santa.  Pam's comment: "That looks like the contract Dad drew up for me when I was five and started getting an allowance" (a document she still has, natch).

Add caption

1958: Slightly derivative model, with a copy of a Thurber illustration on the outside and an Ogden Nash ditty on the inside

1959:  Apparently, there was someone at Lazarus, a big department store in Columbus, making cutout silhouettes of children before the holidays this year.  These are the images made of Phillip, Pam, and Mark, transferred into the holiday card.

There's a story behind the 1960 edition, above, which I hadn't heard before.  The drawing at the top is the work of my brother Mark, who was about five at the time.  My parents had a contest to decide which of the three kids' pictures would go on the front, and Mark's won.  My Dad apparently decided to improve upon the original by adding a belly button right before he printed it.  When Mark saw the final version, he burst into tears, saying, "My man has no clothes on!"  That'll teach you not to mess with a masterpiece.

1961 edition, on the same silver-speckled paper as the previous year's card

1962: Classic Pieta, my mom

's handwriting, and the last of the speckled paper. 

And this elaborate, multi-lingual folding number from 1963:

There are, of course, extras: two-sided sheets, one side in red and one in green, ready to be cut up and folded.

1964:  Rented old-fashioned clothing, Victorian pose, and an actual tintype print glued into each card.

The tintype was the only one of these handmade cards I'd ever seen before, and there's a reason why, as the 1965 edition foreshadows:

So, there you have it:  my arrival apparently ended this tradition.  My parents still sent Christmas cards, but store-bought ones.  So maybe I'm not so much a tradition-killer as a tradition-modifier.

And I'll continue modifying it now by wishing our readers ( all three of you) a very Merry Christmas (or whatever December holiday you observe) and a bright, beautiful 2013.

Some Early Influences

Last Fall, when I was wrapping up the comics course, a student asked me what the first comics I ever read were. I hemmed and hawed for a minute and said I'd have to give a three-part answer. First, I remembered reading the occasional Archie or Richie Rich comic book when my brothers and I were kids, though I have no idea where they came from; we never had superhero comics to read, that I recall. Second, I remembered loving Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (in the 1963 Dell paperback edition); I taught He Done Her Wrong in that class, so the students knew just what I meant. Third, I recalled how thoroughly my brothers and I had read the old Mad Magazine paperback reprints my dad had kept from when he'd bought them in the early 1960s: we read those books over and over, until they were probably entirely worn out.

For those of you who don't know He Done Her Wrong, it's a brilliant 1930 (almost) wordless comic (and comics) novel, telling the tale of a Great Northern woodsman, his flapper girlfriend, and the slimy, mustachioed villain who aims to break them up. The woodsman chases the villain and the girl to New York City, various adventures and misadventures are had by all, but ultimately the hero gets the girl, is discovered to be the heir of a lumber magnate, and the villain's most dastardly plan is stopped by the timely intervention of a friendly moose. It's brilliant and hilarious and it deserves to be better known.

But I assume everyone knows about Mad Magazine. The 50s Mads that we read were reprinted in The Bedside Mad, Mad in Orbit, and Son of Mad (and there must have been a fourth volume we had, I think). These old Mad stories have, in the meantime, become recognized as classic, influential comics, fueling virtually the entire Underground comix movement of the 1960s and 70s, and cited as a formative influence by major figures like Art Spiegelman, among others. 

When I look at them now, and remember the Wacky Packages stickers I used to collect in the early 70s, I am not at all surprised to remember that Spiegelman worked on those Wacky Packages: much of the silliness and the anti-commercial, anti-Madison Avenue aesthetic of the Wacky Packages comes straight from those old Mad Magazines

Over the years, I've picked up my own copies of these books, and I glanced through them recently and could hardly believe just how much of them had remained—somewhere—in the back of my brain. 

Any number of lines, I am sure would easily count as 'kernel stories' among me and my brothers: “Bumble—fumbled” and “Plastic Sam” and “Billows, not Pillows!” 

 This last phrase, from the Mad comics version of Longfellow's “The Wreck of the Hesperus” echoes in my memory as much as certain lines of the poem (“Last night the moon had a golden ring, And tonight no moon we see” says Peg-leg Popeye to the captain). 

 And I have to confess—I know this poem only from this version, and I really can't imagine it without the Mad panels, which make the tragic, sentimental story into a comic romp, complete with an amazing formal passage without drawings at all: comics without pictures, a perfect counterpoint to Gross's wordless novel. 

Thirty-five years ago, when I was reading these books for the first, and second, and umpteenth time, I had no idea what sort of impact they would have on me, even though I know that then I didn't get all the jokes. But having recently written extensively on the necessity of seeing as well as reading, I can't help thinking that it was the dense joke-packed illustrations of these old comics that trained me early to look closely at what I was reading.

It is often said that collectors are driven by the powerful force of nostalgia, and I usually don't think that's at all what's behind my kind of collecting. But I have an affection for these books, and even for “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” that can't be explained in any other way.

Endings and beginnings

Spring is the season that reminds us that each new beginning is the ending of something else.

When I'm walking to campus across the High Street bridge, seeing the trees on the banks of Decker's Creek leafing out and catching a glimpse of a moutainside painted in shades ranging from the palest green to russet, Robert Frost's lines "Nature's first green is gold/ Her hardest hue to hold" often run through my mind.  In April, every day brings the emergence of some new wonder even as yesterday's fades.

Can you tell I'm feeling sentimental lately?

I spent this afternoon at the annual conference the College of Education holds where the graduating class from the 5-year teacher education program presents on their classroom research projects.

I facilitated a couple of sessions for the English education soon-to-be grads, and realized while I was sitting there that this is really the first class of students that I've seen through their entire program, since I'm finishing my fifth year.

The students in the photo, Brent and Carrie, were both students in one of the best sections of the young-adult lit class I've taught thus far.  It was one of those classes full of amazing students who collectively create something even greater than the sum of their individual parts.

We initially bonded over our mutual disdain for Sharon Draper's Tears of a Tiger, a book I didn't really care for but had included because it's required reading at both of the high schools in town.  It was one of the first novels we read, and after about half an hour of discussing it, someone finally asked, in a tentative voice, "Why did you choose this book?"  Suddenly we all heaved a mutual sigh of relief, realizing that we all felt the same way about it.  From then on, there was no holding back.

That was in fall 2009, the semester my father died.  In fact, the only things I remember about that fall are Dad's illness, and specific moments from the young-adult lit class.  I missed a week of school right after Thanksgiving for the memorial service, and I was anxious about going back to work afterward.  But every one of the students in that class sent me an e-mail while I was gone to offer their condolences and to express their sympathy, and when I went back, I almost cried, I felt so much like I was back home.

(And then Emma played guitar and sang a very funny song she'd written about Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak [believe it or not], and I laughed until I almost cried again.)

A couple of the folks in that class have graduated already, but most of them will be graduating in May.  Brent, on the left, has been in at least three of my classes, starting in the fall of 2008.  Writing a letter of recommendation for him recently, I thought about how lucky I am to be able to be a part of some students' lives for these particular years.  A music-teacher friend of mine once remarked that middle-school students were her favorite to work with, because they were just starting to figure out who they are.  I love working with college students for the same reason--and because they're so full of potentials and possibilities for the future.

I never thought I'd be the kind of person to say this, but what the hell: it's true.  Not having any children of my own, some of these students truly come to feel like my kids.  The love and pride I feel for them is overwhelming at times.  And many of the WVU students I've grown to feel that way about were in that fall 2009 class:  Brent and Carrie, but also Emma and Jake and Paige and Rachel...you get the idea.

It's been a long, hard semester, and I'm not going to be remotely sorry to see it in my rearview mirror.  And I won't be sorry to see these students graduate and take their gifts into the world.  But I will be sorry not to see them around.


(As long you're reading such schmaltz, you might as well listen to some, too, right?)