Infospigot: The Chronicles

Friday Lawn Report

It seems like just a couple weeks ago things were still a little damp from the last of our spring rains. I mowed the lawn one Sunday, then went away on a short trip. I came back to find the dry season had taken over. Our little patch of lawn in the backyard, so recently lush, was already starting to go brown. So after mowing last weekend, I broke out a sprinkler (for the back only; our scruffy front lawn is pretty much a weed patch fringed with some plantings; so much for curb appeal, but then that's the price for my guilty relationship with outdoor water use).

After I turned the sprinkler on, I went back in the house to start coffee preparations. Looking out the kitchen window, I saw a hummingbird hovering just above the spray over the lawn. Getting a sip of water, I guess.

Friday Night (Chicago) Ferry

I'm not in the Bay Area to do our Friday night ferry ritual. So the next best thing was to do a Friday evening boat trip in Chicago. Ann (my sister) and Ingrid (my niece) and I drove downtown and caught a Wendella cruise from a dock just beneath the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River. The first third of the 90-minute cruise heads west to the South Branch of the river, heads down a little way, and turns around when it's just below Sears (Willis) Tower. Then it head back out to the lake, goes through the Chicago River lock out to the lake (there's a two-foot elevation difference between the lake and engineered river), then a short spin north from the mouth of the river, then south toward the planetarium and aquarium, then back into the river.

Yesterday featured shockingly fine mid-spring weather. It was a not-overly-humid 85 with a what we in the Bay Area call an offshore wind--the breeze was coming from the southwest and blowing out over the water, meaning the cooling influence of Lake Michigan was felt (and then only slightly) immediately along the shore. That beautiful day ended in a long evening of lightning, thunder, and pounding rain, and by mid-morning today the wind had turned around and was coming from the northeast, off the lake. The high here today was about 60. And on the boat this evening, it was quite cool. But as long as we were on the river, well below street level, there was hardly any wind. But I noticed that as soon as we headed out toward the lake, the tour guide who had been filling us in on the architectural scene along the river grabbed her gear and headed for the downstairs cabin. "I'll be back," she told me. "But the wind is blowing so hard out here you won't be able to hear me." The U.S. and Army Corps of Engineers flags flying at the western end of the lock were standing straight out in the breeze as we approached. I saw in the paper today that the lake's surface temperature is 43 degrees near shore, and as soon as we got out into that wind, it felt--well, pretty cold.

Then we turned around and came out of the tempest, back through the lock, back down the river. The scene above: the new Trump Building (second tallest in Chicago, a sign at its base boasts), with the Wrigley Building at right (decked in blue as part of a commemoration of fallen Chicago Police Department officers).

Air Blog: To Chicago

I managed to miss my scheduled flight earlier today by attempting one too many last-minute tasks before I headed out the door to the airport (including the daily Last Task Before Leaving, walking The Dog). I took BART out to SFO and knew I was kind of cutting it close and got to the baggage counter to check my bag about five minutes after they'd stopped taking luggage for my flight. Since they want you to be on the same plane as your baggage (think about why that is), both I and my bag got moved onto the next flight about an hour later. That was fine by me (though I might have emoted more if the delay had been four or five hours). My substitute flight was late, and for some reason the trip seemed much longer than the three and a half hours it was.

But all that's ancient history. I'm up on the North Side now, at my sister and bro-in-law's place in West Rogers Park. It's one of those perfect nights in Chicago, springtime or anytime: warm until well after midnight, but not humid enough that you feel like the warmth is hanging on you. It's calm and a little hazy but clear enough to see the brightest stars.

1940 Census: The Enumeration

The west side of the 8300 block of S. May Street, Chicago, in the 1940 census (click for a larger version.)

A while back, it occurred to me I'd better start recording the basics of some of the "how we're related" family stories I'd heard for a long time from my mom and dad. Not that the stories are terribly complex in my immediate family. My dad is an only child (translation: I have no first cousins on his side of the family). My mom was the only girl among six children; of her five brothers, four lived to adulthood, and all of them became Roman Catholic priests (translation: no first cousins, or rumors of first cousins, on her side of the family). A generation back, though, and there were lots of kids. Both of my grandmothers came from big families, and each of my grandfathers have four or five adult siblings. That's enough to create some complicated relationships, and as my parents' generation has passed on--my mom died in 2003, the last of her siblings followed just a few months later, and at 90 my dad has likely outlived all his first cousins--there's no one left to explain how all those family members you happen across in a cemetery or family tree relate to each other.

So, I've become mildly proficient at sorting through census records, and when the 1940 census came out this week, I was interested in tracking down family members.

But the 1940 data has a twist: There's no name index. Meaning that you can't find your relatives by going to some nicely organized website, plug a name in to a search blank, and find them in the census (that will come later, after the Mormon-organized army of volunteer transcribers does its work). Instead, you need to know where your family lived--and the more precise the idea you have, the better. In the case of some of our Chicago family, I know the my mom's and dad's childhood addresses off the top of my head. Those are places we visited as kids and have been back to, just to take a look at them, as adults. At some point over the last decade or so, I also figured out my mom's mom's parents exact address on the South Side.

The newly released records are organized by Census Bureau Enumeration Districts: the patches of territory assigned to the 120,000 census takers who recorded the 1940 population. An enumerator was supposed to be able to cover an urban district in two weeks, a rural one in four weeks. For city areas, that was at least 1,000 people, and an enumerator might fill out forty pages of census schedules (forty people to a page) while visiting every domicile in the district.

As I said, there's no way of digging individual names out of the millions of pages of census records released this week. But through the work and technological savvy of a brilliant San Francisco genealogist named Steve Morse, you can find people if you have a reasonably precise idea of where they lived. Morse created a site called the Unified 1940 Census ED Finder, which is the front end for a database that apparently contains information on every block of every street in every U.S. community. If you know someone lived at West 83rd and South Racine streets in Chicago, Morse's site allows you to plug that information in, along with other cross streets, and discover the enumeration district where your person lived.

In 1940, my mom's family lived in the 8300 block of South May Street, a block over from 83rd and Racine. Morse's site shows that was Chicago Enumeration District 103-2222. The enumerator, Bezzie K. Roy, filled out thirty-six pages of in visiting the district's households. You never know when you start looking through those thirty-six pages whether you'll find the people you're looking for on the first page or the last--I think you're at the whim of the enumerator, though maybe there was a method to the job (for instance, start at the west edge of a district and move east, or something like that). In this case, Bezzie Roy visited my mom's block on page three.

The family lived in a two-flat building. My mom, who was 10 when the census was taken, lived on the ground floor with her parents and four brothers. Her grandmother--my grandfather's mother--lived upstairs with two of her grown daughters (such a deal for my grandmother, living downstairs from her in-laws). There they are, eight lines at 8332 S. May Street. That in itself seems to be a mistake. My mom had identical twin brothers, Tom and Ed, who would have been 6 at this time and who are not listed here. It's hard to imagine my grandmother, who was the one indicated as having supplied the information, not listing everyone in the family. Where are the twins?

The other thing I'm struck by in seeing this simple list of names is how much it doesn't say. Edward D. Hogan, my mom's father, had been diagnosed with lung cancer by this point and only had about 14 months to live. Eight months before this census record, my mom, Mary Hogan, had survived a drowning that killed John Hogan, one of her older brothers. A month after that, my mom's grandfather, Tim Hogan, who lived upstairs, died. I've thought a lot about what it must have been like in their household at this time. But as you page through the records of this block and all the neighboring streets, it's certain that other homes harbored stories that simply aren't visible in this enumeration.

(Click the images for larger, readable versions).

Journal of Self-Promotion: 'Roof of California'

I have a sense of when I've stayed on one topic too long, and this is one of those times. But bear with my carrying on about Tioga Pass just a few minutes longer. As mentioned (and pictured) earlier (and then mentioned again, elsewhere), I drove up across the pass last week on a blitz-style Yosemite tour with my nephew Max. I also brought a sound recorder along and wound up talking to people we met along the way, and that led to a radio story that aired Thursday morning on KQED's "The California Report.". Oddly, because of a problem with the The California Report site, the link to our airing of the story is still acting weird for me. story. But the piece also aired on KPCC in Los Angeles, and here's the link to the story as it played there:

Clear skies in the Sierra Nevada open up access to Yosemite.

OK--that is it for now. Until I get the picture that Max shot of me walking around wearing shorts on the frozen lake.

A Semi-Blue Post-Christmas

Forgive me a moment of post-holiday wistfulness as I stare into the glare of our sunny, dry January.

Has anyone come up with a word for this "it's all over" feeling I experience as the page turns on New Year's Day? It's not quite sadness. It's not quite regret. It's not quite a pining for the holidays, with all their promise and hope, both material and immaterial, to continue. Yet it's somehow all of these, hardened by the knowledge "Well, that's that. We won't be back here again."

The lights are still hanging on our house and will for a week or two longer (we have to leave them up at the very least so our nephew Max can see them, right?). They'll come down, though, and I'll have a pang. Not for the lights themselves, but maybe for what they might represent: a wish to project something joyous and hopeful (and cool) to all our neighbors and all the passers-by. I have one neighbor, up the street and around the corner for us, who seems to deal with the post-holiday mourning period by maintaining one light display after another throughout the whole year. At the very least, he'll give us Valentine's, Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween, and Thanksgiving light displays.

Resolution, for the season to come: Find some other small way to project that holiday light to others. And now back to January.

as i stare down the last hour of our extended holiday and watch the lights, lights no longer shining in anticipation of a celebration to come, no longer carrying a promise of something anticipated but still surprising in the deepest shadows of our short days, lights shining out now maybe with a little insistence that the season isn't, should not be over, lights maybe a little bittersweet because they may shine in place of other hopes and disappointments of the season adn the longer year juste passed.

The Lewis O. Brekke Story, or Documentary Inquiries into The Life of a Non-Relative

While recently pursuing Irresistibly Absorbing Research on the origins of Oakland's King's Daughters Home, I happened across a resource that is itself irresistible and absorbing: The Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection of historic U.S. newspapers. It's an archive of selected papers published between 1836 and 1922. In doing a quick trace of the history of the King's Daughters establishment, several stories from the old San Francisco Call, part of the Chronicling America collection, helped fill in blanks.

I went back the next day to see what else might be there. Since I've been doing some genealogical research, I thought I'd look at what Minnesota papers might be in the archive. My grandparents lived in several different towns up there in the 1910s and '20s, and my dad was born in a little town in Marshall County called Alvarado. It so happens that Marshall County still has a weekly paper published in the county seat--the Warren Sheaf. The Sheaf turned out to be one of the papers digitized and included in the Chronicling America archive. I looked for the issue published the week my dad was born, in September 1921, and came across the following in the "Alvarado News" column:

"Born to Rev. and Mrs. S. J. Brekke last Saturday at the Warren City Hospital, a bright baby boy. Congratulations."

Going through the Sheaf turned up lots of mentions of my grandfather, Sjur Brekke, who was a Lutheran minister and pastor for several Norwegian congregations in the area: in Alvarado (a town of only a few hundred which at the time had a separate Swedish Lutheran congregation with its own minister), in Viking, at a rural church called Kongsvinger, and apparently in at least one other town. Any time something was doing at the churches, the Reverend Brekke got a mention. Every once in a while, my grandmother, Otilia Sieversen, would make print, too--usually when entertaining guests or when off visiting in one of the neighboring towns in Marshall County.

I cast my search net wide, and looked for any mentions of "Brekke" in Minnesota papers in the archive; my grandfather had a brother, Johannes, who lived with his family in the Fergus Falls area around 1920. Johannes was a traveling Lutheran preacher, so I was thinking maybe I'd come across some mention of him. But I didn't, and since Brekke is not an uncommon name in Minnesota, I got quite a few hits of folks who don't seem to belong in the family annals. The most remarkable of these involved someone named Lewis Olson Brekke.

I made his acquaintance in the pages of the St. Paul Globe of Friday, July 10, 1903, under this headline:

Brekke's Fifth Wife
Uses the Horsewhip

The story, at right above, is a classic police blotter item blown up to separate-item proportions--a marital spat that ends with an ugly scene on a crowded street. The account's picture of Mrs. Brekke setting upon her cheating spouse with a whip is vivid. But the prize detail for me is, "...Mrs. Brekke, who was riding a bicycle, leaped to the buggy." She sounds like quite the acrobat.

So that's that. The unfortunate L.O. Brekke is beaten by his wife, made an object of fun in the local press, and retires to lick his wounds and his pride. Well, no. There's more to Mr. Brekke's story. He turns out to have been a sort of running joke for reporters covering the courts in MInneapolis. The year prior to this scuffle, several accounts appeared that detailed a divorce action between Lewis Olson Brekke, the L.O. Brekke of the story above, and his wife, Laura Runbeck Brekke. The Minneapolis Journal reported she had sued for divorce on grounds of "cruel and inhumane treatment" but "could not substantiate her allegations." Then Lewis sought a divorce on the same grounds, citing his wife's alleged habit of "throwing various articles of furniture at his head whenever his back is turned." He said he feared to sleep nights lest Laura attack him, that she called him "vile and indecent names," and that her " 'carryings on' with a married neighbor had scandalized their acquaintances." He also claimed he had discovered that she had a common-law husband and thus their marriage was never valid. (In the pages of the Globe, anyway, this way by no means an isolated case. The divorce action featuring the abusive wife appears to have been one of its staples during the turn of the last century. A chance reading of several pages of the Globe finds wives taking swipes at husbands with butcher knives, throwing crockery, wrestling over bicycles, and dumping ice water on their spouse's heads. And that's before "Fatal Attraction." We could have the seeds of a dissertation here.)

It's not clear how the Brekke divorce suit came out--maybe the stories relating the outcome have not been indexed--but I'm guessing that the "Mrs. Brekke" who resorted to the horsewhip is one and the same as the one who struck fear into her husband's heart by hurling household objects at him. You'd really like to have a picture of this couple; the best I can do is uncover some of the traces they (and he especially he) left in government documents through the years.

Lewis Olson Brekke, born in Norway, about 1852, emigrated to the United States in the early 1870s, lived in Iowa in the '70s, in Minnesota in the mid-'80s, then moved to Minneapolis in the early 1890s, and to the Seattle area after 1905 sometime. Lewis was about 50 when accosted by his bike-riding spouse, and Laura Brekke was about 15 years his junior. In the 1900 census, taken in April, she was listed as a servant living in Lewis's household (the other residents were Lewis's 13-year-old daughter, whose name was recorded as Ammanda, and three women boarders). Lewis was listed as divorced. Lewis's and Laura's relationship bloomed into something else, and they were married in Sepember of that year.

Was she his fifth wife, as the headline says? Maybe. Perusing census and marriage records through FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com--yes, it's possible to have too many research tools at hand--Lewis shows up in the company of several previous spouses: May (or perhaps Mary) Halvorsen, whom he wed near Decorah, in northwestern Iowa, on December 26, 1874; in an Iowa census taken in 1885, he's reported as widowed, with three children; later that year, he married a Kari (or Karie or Carrie) Boxengaard in Spring Grove, Minnesota, about 20 miles up the road from Decorah; in September 1893, he married a Phoebe Slocum (she doesn't sound Scandinavian), in Minneapolis; and then in 1900 we have him tying up with Laura. In later years, he moved to Washington state, and in the 1920 census, nearly 70, he reported himself as married, though no wife was living with him.

As I mentioned before, his divorce and horse-whipping didn't mark the first time the papers had some fun with him. On Oct. 5, 1892, the St. Paul Globe reported on an apparently fraudulent lawsuit that Lewis had brought against an erstwhile employer:

"The damage case of L.O. Brekke against S.E. Olson & Co. [a Minneapolis "dry goods" store] is over, and the finding of the court is for the defendant. Brekke sued the firm for damages, claiming that while in the firm's employ he sustained injuries in the store elevator which would render him lame for life. The list of injuries was a long one, as was the number of witnesses who corroborated Brekke's testimony. The defense introduced evidence from people who lived in Decorah, Io., Brekke's old home, which proved conclusively that the plaintiff had received the injuries he referred to twenty years ago. He had been lame for the same number of years, and long before he ever dreamed of coming to Minneapolis. Brekke's divorced wife testified he was lame when she married him long years ago. The case was tried in the United States district court before Judge Nelson."

A few years later, the Globe dropped in on Lewis as he pursued his duties as deputy state boiler inspector for Hennepin County. He was described as being "considerably incensed" over complaints from residential property owners who felt he was overstepping bounds to "examine every little boiler and toy engine in the city." Later, he lost out in his bid to be chief boiler inspector for the county, a patronage job.

In various census returns, Lewis listed his occupation as "engineer" or "inventor." And sure enough, he shows up in the U.S. Patent database for several devices registered over a period of more than 30 years. While he was undergoing his troubles with his soon-to-be horsewhipper, he patented a "folding footboard for iron bedsteads" and apparently started a company to manufacture them. What was the purpose of his innovation? As detailed in the patent application, it sounds like something out of "Seinfeld":

It is a well known fact that many people object to iron bedsteads simply for the reason that they have no footboard against which the clothes maybe tucked and against which the feet may if desired be pressed. A permanent footboard of the proper dimensions would be objectionable for the reason that the bedclothes could not be thrown over the same in the day time or if so thrown would give to the bed a very awkward and unusual appearance. I believe I have solved the problem in practical and simple manner by providing a footboard which has a folding upper section adapted to be turned flat upon the foot end of the mattress so that the bedclothes may be thrown over the same and the bed given the same made up appearance as if there was no footboard provided. At the same time this folding section may be turned up before a person retires and the bedclothes may then be tucked between the footboard and the mattress. This being done there is nothing objectionable to the bed and the same footboard accommodation is afforded as with an ordinary wooden bedstead.

I don't find any evidence that Lewis got rich off the revolutionary "swish and swirl" footboard. Or off his other inventions: an improved kerosene lantern, an improved stove and furnace grate, an improved grain-binder, and a draft equalizer (a device to make sure that three-horse teams would plow or pull evenly).

Loose ends I can't tie up: What happened to those four kids of his? And where did he end up? He had one more turn in court that I can find--testifying in a 1909 death inquest in Washington that he had heard against his drunken landlord threaten to kill his wife shortly before her body was found on nearby railroad tracks. Then there's the 1920 census, and then nothing--no inventions, no newspaper stories, and apparently no more buggy rides with women friends.

Holiday Greetings from the Exterminators

From my brother John, in New York.

First of All Martyrs, King of All Birds

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze,
Although he was little his honour was great,
Jump up me lads and give him a treat.
—"The Wren"

Of course, in Ireland and like parts, the "king of all birds" was singled out for some rough treatment the day after Christmas. A somewhat sanitized version of the song, on The Chieftain's "Bells of Dublin" album, alludes to the death of the wren, but doesn't explain how it came to expire. Liam Clancy's much earlier recording of a traditional number, "The Wran Song," doesn't leave much doubt about what had happened to the bird: "I met a wren upon the wall/Up with me wattle and knocked him down." In fact, if you're inclined to explore further the Irish (and fellow Celts') Christmastime wren customs, here's a book for you, "Hunting the Wren: Transformation of Bird to Symbol."

A brief passage on the traditions of the wren hunt: "Typically, on the appointed 'wren day' a group of boys and men went out armed with sticks, beating the hednges from both sides and throwing clubs or other objects at the wren whenever it appeared. Eyewitnesses described the hunting of the wren in Ireland in the 1840s:

For some weeks preceding Christmas, crowds of village boys may be seen peering into hedges in search of the tiny wren; and when one is discovered the whole assemble and give eager chase to, until they have slain the little bird. In the hunt the utmost excitement prevails, shouting, screeching, and rushing; all sorts of missiles are flung at the puny mark and not infrequently they light upon the head of some less innocent being. From bush to bush, from hedge to hedge is the wren pursued and bagged with as much pride and pleasure as the cock of the woods by more ambitious sportsmen."

And why is the wren "the king"? According to the book above, the appellation goes back to a fable apparently current in several cultures and in Greece and Roman tradition ascribed to Aesop: various birds vied with the eagle for the title of the king of birds. One by one, the eagle out-soared them. But the wren--the wren concealed itself in the eagle's feathers, and as it sensed the eagle was tiring, flew up and away, farther than the eagle could reach.

But enough of the wren. I really want to talk about December 26, also known as Boxing Day (what's that about? Here's a rather tart view from early 19th century London) and St. Stephen's Day. The latter is of special note for me, since my dad's first name, and mine, are Stephen. A few years ago, my friend Pete offered up a find from an encyclopedia on Roman Catholicism on the life and times of St. Stephen, who is remembered as the first Christian martyr. The capsule version of his trouble is recounted in the New Testament book of Acts. Therein, it's recorded that locals in the Greater Holy Land area didn't appreciate everything Stephen, whom Jesus's apostles had appointed a deacon and put in charge of distributing alms to poorer members of the community, had to say on theological matters. He was accused of blasphemy, hauled before the Local Religious Tribunal, and tried. During the trial, he continued to outrage his accusers, whereupon, according to Acts 8:

"...They were cut to the heart: and they gnashed with their teeth at him. But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looking up steadfastly to heaven, saw the glory of God and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. And he said: Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. And they, crying out with a loud voice, stopped their ears and with one accord ran violently upon him. And casting him forth without the city, they stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man, whose name was Saul. And they stoned Stephen, invoking and saying: Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And falling on his knees, he cried with a loud voice, saying: Lord, lay not this sin to their charge: And when he had said this, he fell asleep in the Lord...."

A few years ago, I was in Paris and after wandering through the Latin Quarter and up toward the Pantheon, landed in front of a church where the denouement of this story is depicted above the entrance. I only slowly put the name of the church, St. Etienne du Mont, together with the story of St. Stephen (Stephen=Etienne en français). I stand by my earlier description of the scene (picture below): "Immediately above the doorway ... Stephen is about to earn his way onto the church calendar despite the presence of an angel who, though appearing benificent, doesn't seem the least inclined to stay the hands of a bunch of guys who look not at all hesitant to cast the first stone." One detail of this image I didn't notice before: The sculpture was done in 1863, a good 240 years after the church was dedicated.

Lights

The manse on Holly Street, in (nearly) full holiday regalia, with the moon riding shotgun in the clouds.