We used to sing

Going through a box of musty sheet music, it struck me that we don't sing much any more. 
Many of the pieces have names written on them: Mary Stuck, Mary E Keen, Marjorie Keen, Marjorie Smith, Grace Kwick, Grace K Keen..
Here is just a small part of the contents of that box.
I don't remember anyone actually playing any of these songs on the piano, but I know that both of my parents sang bits of all of them at one time or another - enough that I could probably still sing them.

It isn't that we sang at family picnics and holiday dinners.  It is just that the songs were around, somehow in the collective consciousness.
Maybe this happened because more people were listening to fewer radio stations, so had more songs in common?

I recently mentioned at Karen's house that my friends and I would sing folk songs* at slumber parties, and the response was, "What a weird childhood you had!"    Apparently my children and grandchildren didn't/don't sing on school bus trips, either.  I'm not sure who is weird. 


I'm sure we all sing along with the radio in the car.
Sometimes that tends toward strange, yes.  I make a point of listening for "Maoz Tzur" every Hanukkah, so that I can sing along.   And "Now Is The Month of Maying" reliably shows up on NPR every May 1.  But I also sing along with oldies and the occasional catchy country song, at least when I am alone.

In a slightly different category, maybe, but still in the class of unofficial singing, one of my treasured memories is of the Tower Hill Vocal Ensemble breaking into four-part Christmas carols (and possibly bits of Britten's Ceremony of Carols) while waiting for a table at Howard Johnson's after caroling at unremembered homes.   We were good, so the customers loved it.

Music makes such strong memories.
Tower Hill music might be its own post sometime.


-----------------
* specifically:  Michael Row the Boat Ashore, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Lemon Tree.. 
Probably limited to what could be accompanied by two or three chords on our ineptly played guitars.

Souvenir from New York City, probably 1997

I'm not sure what else can be said.
It is an impressive 16 page menu of drinks and cigars, and I have a matchbox to go with it.

Kinda spooky.

Actually, it was,  Even at the time.  I don't consider myself much of an acrophobe,  but I didn't like being there.  It wasn't a bar I would have liked even on street level, which I'm sure didn't help.  Really just wanted to go back down.

The other World Trade Center connection was a Ben & Jerry's purchase in the PATH train station.
Years later, at Harrah's in St. Louis in 2004, I bought another Ben &Jerry's cup, and realized that the last one had been in New York.. Another weird moment.

Check out the new update to the post about Axel's woodworking.
http://stuffstories.blogspot.com/2011/11/this-pincusion-rocks.html

Kwick comedians

Sometimes when we only know people when they are old, we forget that they were once much younger and less dignified....

Nils/Grandpop, Grace, Gerda/Grandmom (or maybe Alice?), Raymond.  Late 1920s.

A Ruth Berlin work history

Cousin Ruth could almost have a blog of her own.
Rather than make an entry every time I find another postcard,I've pulled together what I have into an almost chronological list. It is a rather dry account, but at least the outline is all in one place.  Supporting snapshots are not particularly informative, but will be scanned into the Ruth Berlin online album at some point.  "Good help" seems to have been passed around among the richest families in New York.  Ruth certainly worked for a number of them.

Ruth Berlin was born in 1892 in Sweden, and came to the U.S. in 1912.
The 1920 census shows her in Manhattan, in the household of J. Clifton Edgar, a professor of Obstetrics st Cornell.

The first of her jobs for which we have documentation was with H.C. Frick.  She worked for that family from the fall of 1920 to May, 1923,  at both Eagle Rock

http://stuffstories.blogspot.com/2012/01/ruth-worked-for-hcfrick-at-eagle-rock.html
and at 1 East 70th in New York, currently The Frick Collection.
(find a picture)

Ruth's cousin Victor sent her a letter to the Frick mansion in New York City.

In the summer of 1923, Ruth went to Sweden.
She returned in October 1923 on this ship, the S.S. Frederik VIII

From April 1924 to October 1926, Ruth worked for John D. Rockefeller.
Here is the reference she got when she left.

Two Residences, it says.  If there was one in New York City, she worked there.  Otherwise, one must have been Kykuit in Tarrytown, in the Hudson Valley (photo from Kykuit website)

The second was The Casements, Rockefeller's winter home in Ormond Beach, Florida

Ruth talked about the staff all getting dimes from John D.   He was famous for doing that.

There is a gap of over a year before the next long-term employment.
I think that means that the undated 4 months at Black Point was during the summer of 1927.


Then from the summer of 1928 to June 1932, Ruth was working on Park Avenue for G.B.Salisbury.

 Who was G.B.Salisbury?
The 1919-20 Annual Bulletin for the Harvard College Class of 1889 reports that he "is doing business as Salisbury, Worth & Sloan, brokers,at 74 Broadway NYC" .   That's all I have found.

Edit 1/28/2013:
The 1930 census has a Ruth Berlin listed as a servant in the house of Charles Pierre on Park Avenue. This must be 'our' Ruth because the nationality, birth date, and immigration year are right.  Don't know how to square this data with the "four years" in Mrs. Salisbury's 1932 note except to notice that the Salisburys and Pierres lived in the same apartment building at the time of the census.
It would be amazing to be able to say that she had worked for Pierre, because he is the Pierre of the Pierre Hotel on Central Park, which opened in 1930



From Park Avenue, Ruth went to Tuxedo Park, to Ledgelands, home of David and Isabelle Wagstaff for several years. All I know about the Wagstaffs is that they were listed in The Social Register.
Ruth left them when they closed the house, it says.

1937 through 1941, we only know what Ruth was doing during the summers.

1937.  The Breakers. A Vanderbilt estate.   One of the largest in Newport.
Ruth was First Housekeeper for the summer.
The Countess Szechenyi, nee Gladys Vanderbilt, inherited the house from Cornelius II.

Summers 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1941 were spent with the W.K.Vanderbilt household.
We know this from the letter here

The summers must have been at Eagles Nest on Long Island.

When she was taken  on permanently, her duties would have taken her, in season, to the Vanderbilt residence on 5th Avenue.  Perfect.

From the Vanderbilts, Ruth went back to Tuxedo Park, to an estate called Kincraig, owned by George G Mason. I have found nothing to enlarge on this data.
Ruth was there for almost four years.

There was a short term of employment with Walter Chrysler in 1949.
I'll bet that she didn't like being away from New York City.

Then in 1950, Ruth started work for Mrs. G. F. Tyler in Bucks County, PA.  This was her last job.
The Indian Council Rock estate was full of art and there were extensive gardens with sculptures.
The estate was left to Temple University, but is now Bucks County Community College.
There are a lot of pictures from this property in Ruth's albums.

Ruth became a U.S. Citizen during her time with Tylers, in 1956.

Ruth worked at this job until the house was closed after Mrs. Tyler died.

Ruth was in Bucks County until 1964, when she was 72.
She moved back to New York City in her retirement.

It's All Yours. 1961. Eighth Grade Operetta

This is the heavily annotated script for our Operetta.  The show was a Really Big Deal for me.
I got to be 'Coordination and Direction', which meant getting out of a lot of classes to go to rehearsals to document blocking decisions, etc.  It also meant staying late at school and going in on Saturdays to work on songs or make stencils and hang out with Mr. B.

It is a subject on which I can bore people to distraction.
At the 25th class reunion, it briefly became a game to try to find something I did not remember about the show. (Not entirely sure it was the 25th.. One of the gatherings at Tepe's that a lot of people attended.)
"What did Dave Conklin do in the Operetta?"
"Dave Conklin was not in our class that year"
"Yes he was! He started in Kindergarten!"
"He was in England for a couple of years.  He was not in the class in 8th grade."

Here is the list of who did what.  Yes, I did re-type it.  The original ditto is really faded.

Obviously, I could go on and on.
I'm proud of knowing the Delaware State Song and being able to add it into the Song of the Underground.  I got to sit with John McDevit in the Gourmet Club scene. I still know all the words to Susie Diver's great song.

I will skip over a rant about the fact that we did not get to have an evening performance (and follow-on party!) because of some scheduling person not paying attention and booking health guru Bonny Pruden to speak at Home and School - or something like that.  We missed out on a party, though.  Not fair.  Wanted that party.

Herewith a bit more of the show.
Feel free to ask me about it.  I'm likely to sing if you do, though.  Be warned.
You can read the whole thing if you want to.  I have scanned all the pages and put them here

Keens sure kept a lot of stuff - 1953 Christmas card

 

I just ran across this card mixed in with completely unrelated papers from 1958.

This is a Christmas Card to me in 1953 from my first grade teacher!

Interesting that it is signed in cursive when we, theoretically, could only read printing.

Her first name was Olive, which I thought was really funny. 

(I did entertain the possibility that the card was from Dorothy Moore, which would have made sense in the 1958 box.  However, this is not Dorothy's writing, and I believe that she would have signed it "Dorothy Moore" and sent it to all three kids, not just me.)

Documentation Mania - 1966 trip

In 1966, the Keens, realizing that there might not be another opportunity for a trip as a family, went to England again.  This time the trip also included Switzerland and France, which we had not visited in 1958.
There is a scrapbook that covers that trip.  Really covers it, but with hardly any commentary or narration. It seems to believe that the stuff tells the story.  Somewhat true.
Of course, there are also lots of pictures - mostly slides - somewhere, too.

I'm just going to put the pages back in the box.  They contain communication with travel agents and Reg Moore about arrangements and some fairly conventional souvenir stuff like programs and postcards.
And more..

Plane tickets over

many Paris Metro tickets

every bit of paper from Hotel InterContinental in Geneva

Movie tickets - American movie with French subtitles

Customs and mailing labels for wool from Scotland

And, perhaps most amazing - 

yes.  ends of film boxes

That's enough.  You get the idea.

If you ever wonder what we had for lunch in Cherbourg the day before we sailed for home you now know where to look.

Hyde Park Hotel, Knightsbridge

The famous Hyde Park Hotel in Knightsbridge.
Today this hotel is the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, a five star establishment.
It was upscale in 1958, too.
My father, Newlin, lived here for the first part of the time he worked on the Hemel Hempsted project 1958-59.
There is a surprising amount of documentation of this time.  Or maybe not so surprising.
At some point, Daddy sent us a brochure with some pictures of the hotel, showing where he ate breakfast...

And here is the breakfast menu.

We also have several weeks worth of itemized bills:

3 pounds for the room, 6 shillings service charge, 9 shillings for breakfast.

By the fall of 1958,  Newlin had moved to a less posh establishment in Kings Langley, close to Hemel Hempsted rather than close to the DuPont office on Jermyn Street in London.

Card Table houses

In 1973, Grandmom (Grace) made a card table cover for Paul.  Paul's Palace.  Karen had just been born, and Grandmom wanted to be sure that Paul knew that he was still special.

Not many years later, she made another, more generic, card table playhouse. Hagstrom's Hut.

I know for sure that this one was used.

When Abby was little, I figured that I should do what grandmothers do, so I made her a house, but before she was really big enough to want to play in it.  Good thing you can see out of it.  Only after a couple of grownups had crawled in and waved to her through the window was she willing to try it.

It didn't seem at all necessary to make any more for the other kids.

driving parents crazy on car trips

Okay.  Keen car trips.
You can play alphabet.
You can see how many different license plates you can find.
You can play that geography game where you have to name a place that starts with the letter the last name ended with.
You can play Ghost.
OR
You can sing.
You can sing silly songs.
You can sing rounds.

Pretty standard stuff; pretty standard squabbles.

BUT
You can find other things to sing.
I know of someone who said that she and her brother would sing in seconds.  We never did that.
But you can do some mind-bending other things.
Like 
1) Sing a round with everybody singing the same words at the same time while the tune is being sung as a round.  Hard to do.  The more familiar the song, the harder it is.  Difficult for two people to keep going.  Try it with three!

2) Sing the words "George Washington Bridge" to the tune of  the old 'Cranapple Juice Drink' ad, just one syllable after another over and over with no regard for phrasing all the way to the end of the verse.  It actually comes out even. (turns out that the tune is "when you are in love, it's the loveliest time of the year" recorded by Mario Lanza.  Thanks to Newlin for knowing that.)  Not sure why it is more fun to sing the Bridge than the Drink, but it is.
                   *** ----OR ---- ***
This is the one that gets to the listeners the most..
3) Sing a song with the words one syllable off from the tune.  Our specialty was Yankee Doodle.  Just sing 'Yankeekee Doodle" to the first 5 notes and the extra syllable puts you one off for the rest of the song. Takes concentration.  And it doesn't come out even, of course.

Maybe I just had a weird childhood.

There was a Hagstrom trip once in the 80's where we tried to make interesting and long sentences using only 6-letter words.   "Seeing Larry's killer escape, Martha framed George."  "Martha should attend church."  I think this exercise grew out of some Paul project having to do with trying to guess six character passwords.

 

The Little House - woods, creek, .....

 

Grandmom and Grandpop Kwick's house.

This is the way it always looked to me.  However, in 1947 it looked like this, before the front porch and garage were added.

                         "Here we have the little cottage" it says in Ruth Berlin's handwriting.

In 1947 this pre-fab house came on a truck to Naaman's Road.

I have the floor plan with notes on modifications, bills, etc. to document the occasion.

I always knew that my parents moved out of the upstairs of the Brown House in 1947 when I was a few months old, but it seems that everybody else moved out of that house around then, too.

The back of the Little House had a clever feature.  See the chute?  It directs beer cans into the bin under the porch.  The three-pronged drying rack on the right hand post was also in frequent use (kitchen towels).  The round thing on the left post is a thermometer.

To grandkids and other visiting young relatives, the most important feature of the house in the summer was the creek.  (pronounced "crick" please)
I do remember these individual rocks.  really.  Especially the ones in the second picture.
We spent a lot of time jumping from one to another, arranging to fall into the water accidentally on a regular basis.  We caught minnows and skate bugs in tin cans in the creek,too.

And then there was the woods.  The controlled woods on the house side of the creek.  The woods with flowering bushes and bulbs planted near the rocks.  Huge piles of leaves raked up and burned in the fall.

And endless mowing.  

I can remember Grandpop mowing a *lot*.  With a push mower.

In one corner of the woods, near the creek, but farthest from the house, we kids built many very small fires, sometimes big enough to cook hotdogs.  It was there that we pitched our big tent one summer. I think the tent and our camping experiments should have their own blog post some day.

We did spend a lot of time in Grandmom's woods when we were small.

I love this picture, as much for Grace's caption as anything.

 Gerda in her woods.

Then I just recently found these pictures that say 1952 on them.  It looks like Grandpop (Nils) was still clearing and maintaining this woods when he was 77. (!)  We know this tree was in the back of the Little House because the concrete well cover shows in the second picture.  The trellis is a good clue, as well.

Apparently these woods were pretty important to my grandparents, too.

There are also memories and pictures of events inside the Little House, but those can wait for another day.

Untangling Swedish names - Grandmom's siblings

I've stumbled into an interesting tangent while going through the Kwick pictures.
Because I had his e-mail address, I shared with John Olson my online album of scanned pictures from Mother's family.  John (whose first name is Walter, and has also been known as Junior) is my second cousin.  His grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.

Right away he suggested that one of my pictures is mis-identified, and is actually a portrait of his grandfather.
He is right.  It is not Olaf. 
So.
This is Nils Adolf Olson (Ohlsson, Olsson, whatever) and his wife.

Oh.. I know Nils Adolf.
He is the one in this remarkable postcard, sent to his sister Gerda in America in 1919.
I'd never paid much attention to it before, except to think it was pretty strange.

On the back, he basically says goodbye; that he has a high fever and no appetite and will be in this hospital for the rest of his life.  Thanks for everything.
He was 44.

There followed a lot of new pictures from John, and the rediscovery of old ones I have had for a long time.  Here is one that John sent.  I don't have the original, of course, but it looks to be formally mounted on cardboard.  The middle guy is Walter, Nils's son, who could not have been more than 18 at the time, because he came to the US when he was 19.  John's opinion is that none of these people is sober in this picture.
I had always heard that at least some of the family emigration happened because coal mining was really the only work available in their area of Sweden at the time.

So.. names.
Why are the people in this part of the family called Olson, when two other brothers are called Krantz, and when the gravestones of their parents says Krantz?

I had been told that Krantz was a military name, but I never heard of Olaf or Axel being in the military in Sweden.  What I have learned from John is that Ola was in the Kings Guard.  So current theory is that Krantz was Ola's military-assigned name, but he didn't use it after he left the guard, so his children were called Olson (or some variation of that name).
Then in 1901 Sweden passed the Names Adoption Act which required that everyone have a name that would be passed down.  The idea here was to end the use of patronymics, which were just too confusing with a more mobile population.

SO.. (almost there), I think that Olaf and Axel took Krantz when they emigrated, either because of the new law or because it was simpler. And Ola and Johanna were buried as Krantz because of the new law.  Their other children kept Olson. Apparently they had that option, as well as the choice of how to spell it. "Ohlsson" was a more common spelling than I had been led to believe.  Grandmom (Gerda) used "Olson" and considered her sister's use of "Ohlsson" to be unnecessarily fancy.

Enough.  People who get all excited about these things can be tiresome, I know.

Having discovered Gerda's brother Nils, maybe I will find pictures of her other siblings who stayed in Sweden.  Stay tuned.