Infospigot: The Chronicles

Boxing Day: A Critique

While perusing the Grand World Treasury of Digital Distractions for "information" about the various observances that take place December 26--including England's Boxing Day--I happened across the following. It's from the December 31, 1825, number of The Portfolio, a London magazine "Comprising the Wonders of Art and Nature, Extraordinary Particulars Connected with Poetry, Painting, Music, HIstory, Voyages & Travels."

BOXING DAY

At length the long-anticipated and wished-for day arrives; all classes from the merchants clerk down to the parish Geoffrey Muffincap, are on the tip-toe of expectation. Many and various are the ways of soliciting a Cristmas [sic] gift. The clerk, with respectful demeanour and simpering face, pays his principal the compliments of the season, and the hint is taken; the shopman solicits a holiday, in full expectation of the usual gift accompanying the consent; the beadle, dustmen, watchmen, milkmen, pot-boys &c. all ask in plain terms for a Christmas-box, and will not easily take a refusal; crowds of little boys are seen thronging the streets at an early hour with rolleu papers in their hands, these are specimens of their talent in penmanship, which they attempt to exhibit in every house in their respective parishes; four or five of these candidates for a "box" are seen collected together to watch the success of one, who, bolder than the rest, has ventured first to try his luck. Woe to the tradesman who gives his mite: a hundred applications are sure to succeed a successful one, and what with their hindering the usual business of their shop, and their importunities to shew their "pieces" the poor man has no peace of his life. The money obtained in this way is generally expended the same evening at some of the theatres. It is truly amusing to trace the progress of boxing-day with the generality of those who go from ddorto door collecting this customary largess.— To illustrate this I subjoin a short journal of the day's proceeding written by one of these gentry and forwarded to his father in the country.

BOXING-DAY

"Got up at 7 o clock—quite dark—struck a light, and cleaned my master's shoes; while I was about it, thought I might as well clean mistress's and little master's—mistress gave me 5s. last year. Mary, the maid, offered to take mistress's shoes up to her—would not let her—told her they were not finished, meant to take them up myself. Breakfasted at half past eight—could not eat much—went up stairs to ask the governor for a day's holiday, he grumbled, but gave me leave to go—put his hand in his waistcoat pocket—expected 5s. at least—all expectation,—he drew out his hand and with it his pen knife. I looked very foolish and felt my face as hot as fire—wished him a merry Christmas; thanked me, gave me half-a-crown, and said times were very bad—thanked him and went to fetch my mistress's shoes up; she gave me nothing; she may do them herself another time.—Dressed myself and went out a boxing—first to Mr. Scragg's the butcher—he told me master had not yet paid his Christmas bill—no go—went next to the bakers; got 6s. collected altogether £2. 12s.—called on Sam Groomly—went together to Pimlico, I stood treat at dinner; parted from him; and at about a quarter past four got to my dear Sally's to tea—took her and her sister to the Olympic—a very fine place—saw them home, and promised Sal to go and see her on twelfth day night. Got back to my lodging about half past twelve with 3s. 2½d. in my pocket—spent a great deal: but Christmas is but once a year."

This, like many other of our ancient customs, is much abused, and is made the vehicle for much annoyance; yet at the same time so much has been done towards depriving the lower classes of their amusements, that we cannot wonder at their making the most of those that remain.

J.W.F.B.

Family History Files: Tim Hogan

A long-ago teacher of mine--G.E. Smith, who taught English, literature, and a lot more at Crete-Monee High School in the 1960s and '70s--became interested in his family ancestry late in life. It wasn't an easy thing. I don't know a lot of his personal story, but I do know that his mother left his biological father very early in his life, back in the mid-'20s, and that he was raised by a stepfather he remembered as generous if not saintly.

Also late in life, he brought out a book of poems he had written as a much younger man. He hadn't intended to, he said, but when he started into the family history business, his work took on a different meaning: "It wasn't until I began to think, as a genealogist, about how anything written by ancient relatives--even in signature--was (or could have been) so extraordinarily precious that I decided to consider publishing. I realized that I, too, someday, would likely be a long-ago ancient relative to someone who was pursuing my family history."

That line about the actual words of a forebear being "so extraordinarily precious" stuck in my head. I've listened to perhaps hundreds of hours of stories about my dad's family and my mom's, and recently I was struck with a little sense of urgency about setting down at least the basic outlines of what I've heard. So far, that's mostly involved cemetery visits and creating the beginnings of a family tree (through the very expensive and sometimes-worth-it Ancestry.com). There's a bit of an addictive thrill in tracking down someone you've been hearing about your whole life in a century-old census record: Wow--there they are, just like Mom and Dad said, in Warren, Minnesota, or on South Yale Avenue in Chicago. But records only take you so far, and they don't really give a voice to the people listed on the census rolls or on the draft records or on Ellis Island arrival manifests.

I imagine my family is like most in that whatever words were ever written down have mostly fallen victim to fastidious housecleaning, negligence, dismissiveness, or lack of interest. You know: "Who'd ever be interested in that?" or, "Does anyone want this old stuff?" (I think pictures are the occasional exception to this rule. Plenty get thrown away, but the images have an intrinsic interest for a lot of people when they can't readily identify the subjects of the photos.) Chance, mostly, and, less often, selection determine what survives. My dad has a collection of letters his father wrote to his mother during their courtship and early in their marriage, a century and more ago. I believe they are numbered and I remember hearing that after my grandfather, Sjur Brekke, died, in their 26th year of marriage, my grandmother continued to read those letters for years afterward. There used to be another set of letters, too--my grandmother's letters to my grandfather. But at some point she destroyed them. The story I've heard is that she considered them too personal for others to read. Wouldn't we Brekke descendants love to get a look at those.

Over to my mom's side of the family: They were Irish and stereotypically more voluble than my dad's Norwegian clan. But not much has survived (that I know about) beyond the oral tradition. One rather amazing exception: my mom's grandfather.

I don't know a lot about him, but Timothy Jeremiah Hogan was born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1864 (I'll let him tell that story), lived as a child on the Great Plains (ditto), raised a family, including my grandfather Edward Hogan, in central and northern Illinois. He was a railroad man, working for one of the roads back there (on the Wabash, I believe, but don't know for sure). He was said to have spent a lot of time riding alone in the caboose and taught himself to play the guitar. He was losing his hearing at the end of his life, was described as taciturn and short with most of his grandchildren, and was reportedly heartbroken when a favorite grandson drowned in the summer of 1939. He died himself a month later.

Another thing about Tim Hogan: He had a typewriter, and he used it. He composed poems on the typewriter, and song lyrics. Here's one of his poems, about two of my mom's brothers (that's them in the picture at right) shortly after their first birthday:

October 7th.1934.
AN ODE TO OUR LITTLE
TWIN BOYS TOM, AND ED
*********************
Early in the morning
When they open up their eyes
Laying in their tiney little beds
Rolling over, over
Both the same size
Cunning little round bald heads.
You couldent help but love them
With their smileing eyes of blue
Remember it was GRAND DAD told you so,
Charming little twinners,
Only new beginers
You can almost see them grow.

Tim wrote letters, too. We only have a handful of them, but below are a couple that he produced in 1936 when he was trying to do a little biographical/genealogical research of his own. The first (click pages for larger images; full text is after the jump) is to the clerk of LaSalle County, and he's hoping to find records of his family's residence from around the time of his birth.

The second letter is to the Railroad Retirement Board. He doesn't explicitly mention it here, but I recall a couple of my mom's aunts, Tim's daughters Catherine and Betty, saying he was trying to establish his date of birth in relation to a pension that might be due.

One question I have about these: Did he send them? As he says, he's earnestly interested in getting answers. So my guess is that these are copies of versions he sent. I haven't found any records in the sparse collection of family documents to suggest what answers he might have gotten. The full text of the letters is available through the link below. If the lines break in an odd way, it's because I tried to stick to how he broke the lines, starting nearly each new line with a capital letter. I've also tried to copy his punctuation and spelling.

Web Billiards: Alfred, Lord Tennyson Edition

Kate (the Redoubtable One) related the following:

A teacher colleague of hers, a published poet, has started a poetry blog. On said blog, her colleague had written a post on Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses." It's a well-known and widely quoted work, and I'll lay odds that you've encountered this conclusion somewhere before:

"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Kate encountered one line she was wondering about: "... To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars. ..." What exactly does "baths" mean in this context? Like so many of us do for so many hours of the day, she went looking for an answer online. One of the potential answers returned in her search was the following, on a site called Cruiser Log. I kind of think Odysseus would have taken this guy on as a crewman:

Title: To Sail Beyond The Sunset, And The Baths Of All The Western Stars (Or the other way, that's cool too)

Home Port:Venice Beach, CA
Location Now:United States
Posted 15 August 2011 - 01:21 AM

I'm looking to crew on any boat going any place. Deliveries/passages/cruising/shakedowns/adventures/surveys/secret missions/artistic escapes/jail breaks are all copacetic.

I've sailed across the Pacific, in the Caribbean, and all over North America. I can stand watch, tie a bowline, converse pleasantly, get the job done, and grill. My (non-grill) cooking leaves much to be desired (but not my cleaning).

I sail for free, unless you are a commercial operation or a paid delivery. (Don't ask me to crew for experience on a paid delivery, please.) I can't contribute to food costs, generally.

I'm based in California. I'm 21. I'm blond. I can fly anywhere to meet you (miles, baby). I'm experienced, and free. I'm resourceful, and listen to how you want to run your boat, regardless of my previous experience. My schedule can be tossed overboard: your's is what matters. Talk to me. ...

Harry

'Curious Abrupt Questionings'

"...I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me."

--Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

'Will Rogers Says'

We came across a copy of American HIstory magazine, not among the periodicals I have heretofore perused. Among the stories the editors tease on the cover: "First Twitter: Will Rogers tweeted 85 years ago." (Really? I was thinking Samuel Pepys [Peeps] was the first Twitterer, but then I remembered he was really the first blogger.)

Anyway, the article is not yet online. It recounts how he began sending telegrams with brief observations to The New York Times in 1920 and how that turned into a daily feature in hundreds of American papers. The article has a couple of dozen of his brief messages, that were published under the headline "Will Rogers Says." He's fond of taking on the wealthy, the pompous, and the Republicans of his day (the closest voice I've heard in our day, though one much more self-consciously political, is Jim Hightower, the Texas guy). For instance, this came a couple months after the 1929 market crash:

Beverly Hills, Calif., Dec. 25, 1929--Passed the Potter's Field yesterday and they was burying two staunch of Republicans, both of whom died of starvation, and the man in charge told me their last words were, "I still think America is fundamentally sound."

And another, the day after FDR took office in 1933:

Santa Monica, Calif., March 5, 1933--America hasn't been as happy in three years as they are today. No money, no banks, no work, no nothing, but they know they got a man in there who is wise to Congress, wise to our big bankers and wise to our so-called big men. The whole country is with him. Even if what he does is wrong they are with him. Just so as he does something. If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, "Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow."

Guest Observation: Minorities, Majorities

From Lincoln's First Inaugural Address:

"If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. There is no other alternative, for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. ...

"A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left."

Guest Observation: The Salmon

Kate was tidying up around the house yesterday and found a folded sheet of paper under our bed amidst the great clumps of dog hair that had accumulated there (mute testimony to the incompleteness of my periodic vacuum-powered housecleaning). On the paper was the following poem about the salmon, and about other things too. Kate said the paper must have been mine, and it must have, given my sometimes-preoccupation with the fish in question. But I can't remember how I came by this piece at all, and I don't really remember having read the poem. David Whyte is a Scottish poet, I believe, whom I know for a book he wrote back in the '90s called "The Heart Aroused." It was a call for humanizing the workplace, for recognizing the role of creativity to excite individual passions, a recognition he argues leads to more satisfied employees and more successful employers.
Song for the Salmon
by David Whyte

For too many days now I have not written of the sea,
nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents
we find between the islands

For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon
threading the dark streams of reflected stars,
nor have I dreamt of his longing
nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn

I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes,
to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt,
nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon.

I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean
opening its white hands on the seashore,
nor the salted wind, whole and healthy
filling the chest with living air.

I have not heard those waves
fallen out of heaven onto earth,
nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction
of a thousand miles of ocean
giving up its strength on the sand.

But now I have spoken of that great sea,
the ocean of longing shifts through me,
the blessed inner star of navigation
moves in the dark sky above
and I am ready like the young salmon
to leave his river, blessed with hunger
for a great journey on the drawing tide.

Mechanics Monument

I stopped downtown on the way in to work yesterday. To give blood on Bush Street. When they'd gotten my pint, I walked down the street and got a cup of coffee (no longer recommended by the blood donation people since caffeine is a diuretic and they want to make sure you build up your fluids after you're tapped). Right there where Bush meets Battery and Battery hits Market is this monument, the Mechanics Monument. It was created in honor of Peter Donahue, the cofounder of the city's Union Iron Works, which I believe was the first heavy industry on the West Coast. Here's a description of the monument from Gray Brechin in his fine and irascible history, "Imperial San Francisco":

"Douglas Tilden's heroic group of five nude men straining to punch a steel plate commemorated both the family that had built the West's first foundry and the mechanics who built the Donahue fortune. [Mayor] Phelan ... reminded the crowd that from the Donahues' primitive foundry, once located just a block away in Tar Flat, had grown the might Union Iron Words whose ships had earned San Francisco worldwide fame and wealth."

President McKinley was in the city to unveil the monument in 1901, but begged off because his wife took ill.

(And: another view of the monument a few years after its dedication.)

Berkeley Fourth: The Knuckleheads' Turn

I confess: I think whoever it is in the neighborhood who's still setting off firework as we're moving toward midnight is (are) knucklehead(s). Never mind that even "safe and sane" fireworks are supposedly banned in Berkeley. From the little I saw strolling up around the corner this a little after 10, there was a bad mix of alcohol and clueless adults trying to please their mostly unsupervised kids. At one point, someone through a smoke bomb (apparently accidentally) in front of a cyclist who was riding down the street. Someone else sent up a couple of low-rise skyrockets without any apparent consideration of where the live cinders might come down (a neighbor's roof and a redwood tree).

Knuckleheads.

In the distance, lots of ordnance going off. And some of it really is ordnance. Amid the loud pyrotechnics and potentially digit-severing small explosives, one hears occasional series of very regular, rapid reports. One presumes those come from fellow citizens celebrating the Second Amendment by firing off surplus 9-millimeter ammo. Distant sirens sound continuously. If John Adams could only see what his great anniversary festival has turned into.

Anyway. Here on our placid street, long before the concussive terrors that descend with the lowering of night, we had our Fourth of July picnic. A staple of this celebration: a watermelon-seed-spitting contest. Various categories of contestants, from young uns to novices to "pros," try for distance (our neighborhood record: 43 feet and some inches) and accuracy. We also have what started out as a "trick spit" category and has now turned into a sort of improv theater "spit skit" -- often referring to politics or sports or popular movies. In the past, we've had take-offs on "Star Wars" ("The Phantom Melon"), "Titanic," and "The Sopranos" ("The Seed-pranos").

What's the flavor of the event? Here's today's "trick spit," "The King's Spit." And yes, this actually was performed.

In a nation that long ago shed the chains of monarchy … and that has plenty of problems without having to deal with a bunch of hereditary narcissists … who gives a spit anymore about the royals? We do!

And since that’s the case … we want to bring you a very special moment in the history of the House of Windsor … where Prince Bertie is getting ready for his public debut – his very first solo spit … in front of the whole neighborhood.

Bertie

Hello, everyone. I have … a very special slice … of watermelon … from my dad … the king!

Crowd

Oooooohhhhhhh!!!

Bertie

Here … goes!

(Dribbles a seed onto his shirt).

Give Me That Old Time Vituperation

We often hear that we live in an era of remarkably blunt, if not downright ugly, political rhetoric. To me, the "rhetoric" seems to consists of patently loony claims--that the president was born in Mecca, brandishing an AK-47 among a family of bloodthirsty jihadis, for instance--that gain currency through relentless repetition.

Anyway, I happened across this the other night. It's an account in the late Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" featuring Hiram Johnson, a Progressive Era politician who, among other things, championed the state's now-jaded ballot initiative system. Here's Johnson, talking about "General" Harrison Gray Otis, a figure he apparently did not think much of:

"Hiram Johnson was addressing a crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium when someone in the audience, who knew that Johnson's talent for invective surpassed even the General's, yelled out, 'What about Otis?' Johnson, all prognathous scowl and murderous intent, took two steps forward and began extemporaneously. 'In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy,' he said in a low rumble. 'We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in his senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that its disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent--that,' Johnson concluded in a majestic bawl, 'that is Harrison Gray Otis!' "

(As my friend Steve notes elsewhere: "Imagine anyone these days using a phrase like "he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon." A way to call a person a bastard." And indeed, I had meant to look that term up. Here's what the OED has to say about it (under "bar"):

6. Heraldry. An honourable ordinary, formed (like the fess) by two parallel lines drawn horizontally across the shield, and including not more than its fifth part. bar sinister: in popular, but erroneous phrase, the heraldic sign of illegitimacy....