1949 silhouette postcards from Ocean City, N.J.

Continuing with the theme of posting about some items I came across during the sorting and decluttering of family ephemera earlier this year, here are some 1949 postcards labeled "Silhouette by Greenberg" from Ocean City, New Jersey.

I'm mostly sure I know who these folks are, with one tricky one. Clockwise from the top left, we start with the tricky one. It's either my grandmother Helen or my great-grandmother Greta. I'd lean toward it being Helen. Then comes my great-grandfather Howard, followed by Mom, who would be about 18 months old if this was created in the summer of 1949. Finally, that's Mom's brother, Charles, who is slightly older.

Greenberg was in business for a good while, as I've seen eBay listings for similar silhouette postcards from as early as 1939. It's a good bet the business was located on or near the Ocean City Boardwalk. Greenberg was far from the only outfit making silhouette postcards in the United States in the middle of the 20th century. I'm guessing some popular tourist spots had a dozen or more vendors.

Ellie McCrackin, working for the website Postcard History, wrote this interesting history of silhouettes and the Wikipedia page goes into even more depth.

Semi-related posts

• Saturday's postcard: New Jersey trolley line in 1907
• 10 postcards showing Atlantic City as you've probably never seen it
• Partial mystery photo: Three women in Atlantic City, New Jersey
• Did you enjoy your weekend down the Jersey Shore?
• Two of my great-grandmother's nieces in Atlantic City in 1939

Mom's 1968 letter from Hussian School of Art

Continuing with the theme of posting about some items I came across during the sorting and decluttering of family ephemera, here's a letter that Mom (Mary Ingham Otto, 1948-2017) received from Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia in June 1968, when she was 20 years old. 

This would have been after she left Lycoming College. One year after this, in June 1969, she married my father. And another 1½ years after that, in December 1970, I was born. So I really don't know for sure how Mom's second year at Hussian School of Art unfolded. I know she was extremely talented and rightfully proud of her art skills, which included sketching and sculpture. I posted a few of her pieces here shortly after her death in 2017. Excellent works, but I don't know if those few pieces show the extent of her talent. Most of her artwork is in my sister Adriane's possession.

Hussian School of Art had opened in July 1946. According to Wikipedia, "John Hussian, a member of Philadelphia's art community and a renowned lecturer, was encouraged by what is now the Philadelphia Museum of Art to open a school for veterans returning from World War II."

It changed its named to Hussian College in 2015, but then abruptly closed in the summer of 2023. Beth Shapiro, who had been director of the college's bachelor of fine arts program, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “It is heartbreaking for these students who have put all this time and energy in." 

Screenshot & memories: Turntable and Christmas tunes

I've previously done a bunch of "Snapshot & memories" posts (see list below), but what is the fate of snapshots and our photo memories, moving forward? How many physical 21st century snapshots will there be in future drawers and albums and shoeboxes? Most of the pictures documenting our lives are on our phones and/or in the cloud. That seems a far more fragile existence than we had in the second half of the 20th century.

So now I sometimes find myself documenting screenshots. Here's one from December 29, 2013, that shows the record player/radio cabinet at the family house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford. It was quite the behemoth, with the records stored underneath. When I was growing up, it got most of its use when friends and family were over during the Christmas holidays. But the following generation had some different ideas, as I wrote in 2013: "Ye olde family turntable/radio has been playing some Katy Perry, Daft Punk and, I think, Eminem this morning. It's held up well so far after being powered up for the first time in probably over a decade."

Since it's December, this image got me to thinking about all the vinyl Christmas albums from that cabinet we listened to from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. Many of the songs were the standards we still listen to on the radio or music streaming services these days: Burl Ives, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, etc. But you'd be listening to a whole album by one artist before moving on to the next one, which allowed for Yuletide vibe shifts every 45 minutes, instead of every 4 minutes. And then you'd put thought into what record went on next.

These are some of the albums I remember being in that cabinet:

Holiday Sing Along with Mitch (1961) and Christmas Sing-Along with Mitch (1958)

The Andy Williams Christmas Album (1963)

There was at least one Johnny Mathis album, and probably more than one. None of the covers ring an exact bell in my memory, but this one seems likely: Christmas with Johnny Mathis.

Some of the following are guesses, because my memory is hazy. I wish I had documented these albums and written this post a quarter-century ago, even though I wasn't blogging then, unless you count UsedPandas.com. All of these family albums will be lost in time, like carols in snow.

We did have some compilation albums. This one from the popular Great Songs of Christmas series seems familiar.

We certainly had Perry Como. This one, The Perry Como Christmas Album, seems like it would have been in the cabinet.

And certainly we had Bing Crosby. Perhaps including some of his older ones, such as Merry Christmas, which was first issued in 1945 but saw many subsequent revisions and re-releases.

Finally, this one kind of rings a bell, and it was local: The Glorious Sound of Christmas by the the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Eugene Ormandy (1962).

I wish I could remember more specifics. I'm sure there was a Gene Autry album, a Nat King Cole album, a Burl Ives album and probably a Dean Martin album. In the 1990s, Mom added famous albums by Manheim Steamroller and Vince Guaraldi Trio (A Charlie Brown Christmas) to the festive mix.

Snapshot & memories posts          

• Adorable little me on Mulberry Street
• Kitchen at Willow Street house in Montoursville
• Me and Pop-Pop in the kitchen
• Commodore 64 corner
• (Missing) snapshot & memories: Thanksgiving
• Me & Cyrano
• Me in a Star Trek shirt
• All kids do these days is play video games
• Posing with a Saturn V in 1982
• The Phillies are hot, and so was I
• Relocated fire engine in Montoursville
• Family outfits of 1972
• Our little bookstore
• Well-dressed for first day of nursery school

Book cover: "Dangerous Island"

Mom loved this book when she was a kid, and she shared it with me when I was a kid, so it's my go-to example of a book that bonded us because we both enjoyed it in our childhood. From some of the comments on Amazon and Goodreads, it's clear that we're far from the only family in which this book was beloved across generations.

• Title: Dangerous Island
• 
  Author: Helen Mather-Smith Mindlin. There's very little on the internet about her, but the dust jacket gives us some background: She was "born in Kansas City, Missouri, but spent most of her life in California, Hawaii and Florida, with some time in New York, Chicago and St. Louis. At present, she lives in Boca Raton, Florida. She attended school in both Illinois and California." Additionally, "she has written scenarios in Hollywood and feature articles for King Features Syndicate and for the Los Angeles Times Magazine Section. Her interests include not only writing but also yachting, fishing, dogs, wild animals and playing the accordion." The only other books I found her associated with were Inside Our Earth, Strange Animals (illustrated by Charles Mather-Smith) and 1958's Volcano Trap, which features the same characters as Dangerous Island and is a followup adventure, presumably involving a volcano.
• Illustrator: Manning de V. Lee (1894-1980). His full name was Manning de Villeneuve Lee. He was born in Summerville, South Carolina, and died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There's a lot of information about his life on the Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists.
• Publication date: 1956
• Publisher: Dodd, Mead & Company. (This is the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club edition.)
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 178
• Dust jacket price: $2.75
• Dust jacket excerpt: "A delightful combination of high adventure and fantasy that might almost be true. When the mooring on their raft breaks loose from the Jersey shore, three young children, two boys and a girl, are carried out to sea and become castaways on the most amazing island. ... A most satisfactory book."
• Author's dedication: To my son.
• First sentence: It had been terribly hot in Philadelphia and as it was just the beginning of summer, with even worse weather ahead, Mr. and Mrs. Warren had decided that Frank and Dorothy should be in a cooler spot.
• Last sentence: In fact, some people believed there never had been a Rock Island!
• Paragraph from the middle: As the children walked back to the cave, they noticed their Bath Tub rock was not longer there, either. It had been at the ocean's edge and now, it too, was completely covered with water. This seemed to be another warning that they were positively sinking, but the fact that it was still a clear day, with no fog anywhere in sight, gave them fresh hope of rescue.
• Rating on Goodreads: 4.21 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review excerpt #1: In 2020, Heidi wrote: "My fourth grade teacher read this book to the class (1957). We were all spellbound and loved every minute. Over the years I remembered the story but couldn't remember the title properly. Another librarian helped me to rediscover the book and I was delighted to have been able to obtain a decent, used copy."
• Goodreads review excerpt #2: In 2011, Dave wrote: "I read this abomination under duress, back in '76 -- and I hold a grudge against my teacher to this very day. Tearing a fourth-grader away from his Poe, his Tolkien, his Stoker (and his totally cool books on dinosaurs, Indians, knights, rocks, plants, folktales, ghost stories, etc.) and forcing him to read this kind of dross is child abuse."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.9 stars (out of 5)
• Amazon review excerpt #1: In 2020, "Kindle Customer" wrote: "This was one of my mom's favorite books as a child, she even signed it in 5th grade in the 1950s. Thirty years later, I read Dangerous Island and fell in love with the adventure, and also added my elementary aged signature to the front page. Last month, I read it to my 8 year old — he's now added his signature under ours. 
• Amazon review excerpt #2: In 2011, W. Thompson wrote: "I was telling my kids about this book and how my mom read it to me every summer from the time I was five until I was able to read it myself (it was her copy when she was a child and her mom read it to her). ... I have since read this book several times to my children. A wonderful story that I hope my children will someday read to their kids. Too bad Disney never made this into a movie."
• Another mention: In a 2020 column praising mail-order book clubs for the Star Tribune in Minnesota, W. Scott Olsen recalls that Dangerous Island "was perfect for a young Midwestern boy. ... I am sure this book is responsible for my love of sailing stories and the Coast Guard. This book was Indiana Jones long before Indiana Jones. A trio of friends in danger? A bit of Harry Potter there. This book made me a reader." 

Kipple 'n bytes: Thoughts on what we do and don't preserve

In recent days, I've coincidentally read two things about adult children cleaning out a house full of their late parents' belongings. The first is the short story "Cleanout" in Naomi Kritzer's stellar 2017 collection, "Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories." It's ultimately a sci-fi story, but buying into the fantastical part isn't necessary to appreciate the truth of a passage like this:

"Because there was a lot to go through. Our parents were immigrants from some former Soviet republic with a lot of mountains, and after coming to the U.S. with just the clothes they were wearing, they apparently never threw anything away ever again. We all started in random spots. Magda with the kitchen, packing up bags of warped cookie sheets and chipped frying pans with the nonstick coating peeling off to donate to whichever local charity took housewares. Nora in the basement, because so much down there was water-damaged and mold-saturated she could just haul it straight out to the Dumpster we'd rented."

The other piece I read, which was part of my editing work for LNP | LancasterOnline but didn't feel like work at all, was "What is kipple, and how did it take over my life?" by Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian. In the August 3 piece, she writes about the long, slow process of cleaning out her late father's house, including the seemingly endless drawers she has come to dread going through.

And what is kipple? Well, here comes the sci-fi element again. It's an invented word from Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — the book that served as the basis for the 1982 movie Blade Runner. 

As Abcarian explains:

"The word is used by the book’s protagonist, Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter assigned to kill some uncannily human-like robots who have escaped involuntary servitude on Mars and returned to Earth, where they try to pass as people.

"So what, exactly, is kipple?

"'Kipple,' Deckard explains in the book, 'is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. [Dick’s incredibly prescient vision of a digital newspaper.] When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it.'"

For Abcarian, the kipple she must deal with involves exhausting numbers of tiny decisions. Should she keep various roles of tape that might come in handy? A magnifying glass? Rubber bands? The "electric cords for ancient tech" or "all those stick-on felt circles that protect the wood floors from scratches"? 

I think many of us can relate to this. I was fortunate, in way. I was able to tackle about 95% of Mom's possessions while she was still alive. My sister Adriane and other family members helped, too. Over the course of many weekends over many years, we cleaned out the house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford that was filled with four generations' worth of stuff. Floor by floor, room by room, closet by closet, shelf by shelf and drawer by drawer. And we got to do it with Mom there. So it wasn't a funereal atmosphere, and we were able to ask her about the things we were sorting through to determine whether it was trash, something to donate or something to keep. We got to hear the stories and the context. So that made it almost fun, even it it meant a labor-intensive weekend of moving trunks and filing cabinets in the damp basement, going through three dozen half-used spice bottles, battling cobwebs in the garage and shed, and half-crouching to avoid banging one's head on the beams in the super-humid attic, which had the highest percentage of stuff that went straight to the trash.

And, yes, so many drawers. But with Mom there, they were fun to sort through. Each one a tiny adventure into the past. A chance to laugh, wonder or shake our heads. Perhaps all three at once. 

I can fully understand how the joy would be mostly absent if you had to go through all those drawers alone, though I'm probably an outlier in that I still find such excavation fascinating. (Hence this blog.)

So, I have a Catch-22 of sorts. I'd love to be around as a participant/observer, like Mom was, when my accumulation of stuff is sorted through and sent off to wherever it best belongs. I want to share in the rediscoveries and explain the meanings and provenance behind certain things. I can consult on what's junk and what might have some shreds of value. 

On the other hand — and this is the part that's never fully in our control — I fear leaving others with the job of having to sort through everything without me. The thought of leaving them all that stressful work that's my fault for being a ... well, packrat isn't quite the word. How about I call myself a "history hoarder"? So much of what I've accumulated is paper. There are the books, yes. But also the ephemera. So much ephemera. So many printouts, too. Printouts of articles, blog entries, emails, Facebook posts and tweets. My envelopes full of this stuff are semi-jokingly referred to as the printernet. As in, "Chris prints out the internet."

But am I wrong to do so?

I've written often about the preservation of online content. It's the thrust of the whole Lost Corners subsection of posts. I'm far from the only one with these concerns. I mean, it appears that we can't even preserve crucial digital information at the highest levels of government and national security these days; what hope is there for all those bytes of data that are culturally relevant but far less critical to democracy?

To that end, I recently read (and will be printing out!) a Twitter thread by The Cultural Tutor (@culturaltutor) about the Digital Dark Age. Some key points made there:

"99.9% of the world's information is stored digitally, and one day it might either be lost or inaccessible. ... It's tempting to imagine that people in the future will know more about the 21st century than any previous era in human history. After all, the internet and digital technology has allowed us to document literally everything. But that's not necessarily true... 

"So what is the Digital Dark Age? It's the idea that the 21st century will one day become an 'informational black hole,' that there'll be a scarcity of records from our era. How? This has two elements: the longevity and the accessibility of our current forms of data storage.

"Hard drives last for three to five years before they begin to degrade and eventually fail, while solid-state drives rarely last longer than a decade. So unless you transfer the data on your laptop or phone - it'll be gone in a dozen years.

"What about the cloud? Information on the cloud is stored on servers, which is also where most digital information is now stored. But servers last for ten years at most before they need to be replaced.

"All of which means that, without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will degrade and be lost in less than two decades. So all that content online which documents life in the 21st century is far from permanent. Quite the opposite..."

The full thread goes into much great detail on just how worried we should be about the preservation of digital information. So, yes, I'll keep printing things and putting them into envelopes. The questions then become: Will the envelopes ever be opened? And who will open them?

* * *

Note: The photo at the top of this post is my little plastic chest of drawers. It started, years ago, as the home of my office supplies at my work desk at the York Daily Record. Over the years, I've filled it with all sorts of little treasures, baubles and bits of ephemera. And I've forgotten half of what I've put in there. At 9 inches wide by 7 inches tall, with 15 drawers, it doesn't take up much space. And there's still a little bit of room inside, amazingly, for some small things to be tucked inside in future years.

Stay-at-home shelfie #10

Oh my, there's much to note here on this special shelf. First off, there are many books that I've written about on Papergreat: From the Earth to the Moon, Doctor Dolittle in the Moon, The Vanishing Shadow, The Ghost Parade, The Iceberg Express, Mystery at High Hedges, But Once a Year, and The Angry Planet.

Dangerous Island was one of Mom's favorite books when she was a kid. Then I read it in the early 1980s and loved it, too, which gave us a nice added bond through juvenile literature. She also passed down her love of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, and those are still treasured volumes on my shelf. I acquired The Donkey Rustlers and Snowed Up because, like The Angry Planet, they are illustrated by Robin Jacques; I hope to write about them some day. The Gormenghast novels have long fallen into the category of "I really think I might want to read them some day, but never have." Interplanetary Avenger was written by Caroline Luzzatto, one of my former colleagues at The York Dispatch. She writes for The Virginian-Pilot now. And the 1928 classic Millions of Cats is a book that Ashar and I loved reading together when he was young.

Three members of the Bridge Gang

As an addendum to the post "Two decades of keeping the running bridge tally," here's a photo, probably from the late 1960s, of three of the bridge participants. From left:

• Mom
• George Langis
• Susie Langis

The original photo is only 1⅝ inches across, so this is the best I could do with the quality. Best guess is that this was taken in Lycoming County. And Dad, the other original member of the Bridge Gang, probably took it. Or possibly it was my grandmother, Helen.

The cat bookends Mom gave me

Facebook reminded me this week that I posted this photograph there 3 years ago, on February 10, 2017.

It had the caption, "The cat bookends have been deployed, Mary Ingham Otto!"

I wanted her to know that one of her gifts had gone to excellent use.

I'm glad I posted it when I did, because she died suddenly less than three weeks later. It's crazy to think that was three years ago. It's a cliche, but in some ways it seems like it was yesterday and in other ways I feel like she's been gone for a decade. It's been a long three years.

We've also moved during that time. We no longer have that bookshelf. And I no longer have some of those books. I liked the three-volume The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night, translated and annotated by Richard F. Burton, which was published in 1934 by Heritage Press. It had been my grandmother's. But it took up a lot of shelf space, and I knew I was never going to read it, so I sent it off to find a new Forever Home. No sense keeping books on shelves when others can enjoy them. I still have the cat bookends, of course. They are deployed in a couple different spots now, doing fine work.

Two decades of keeping the running bridge tally

In the 1960s, my parents went to Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where they met each other and also met a couple, Susie and George, would who become their decades-long friends. Mom and Dad were married in June 1969, and I came onto the scene in December 1970, while Dad was stationed at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, near Oceanside, California. The three of us eventually made it back to Pennsylvania, settling in Montoursville, a few miles east of Williamsport.

On Christmas Day of 1972, my parents sat down for a game of contract bridge with Susie and George, and they decided to start a running tally.¹ That tally continued until October 10, 1992 — almost 20 years and one divorce later.

On that first day when a running score was kept, the names were listed as Alan (Dad's nickname), George, Iggy (Mom's nickname) and Susie. Susie edged out George for the most points that day.

The yearly breakdown of documented bridge sessions goes like this:

1972: 1 (Christmas Day)
1973: 5 (including Christmas Day)
1974: 2
1975: 9 (although three are grouped under one session)
1976: 4 (including New Year's Eve)
1977: 15 (bookended by January 1 and December 31)
1978: 10 (including January 1; one entry is for two dates)
1979: 3
1980: 3
1981: 4
1982: 8 (including Fourth of July & Thanksgiving)
1983: 0
1984: 0
1985: 4
1986: 0
1987: 0
1988: 0
1989: 0
1990: 0
1991: 0
1992: 2

The running scores over these many years were documented on just three sheets of paper — very efficient. When Mom died, I inherited the black clipfolder that held the three scoresheets, along with a little card detailing how to score all the trumps, tricks and rubbers of bridge. (Full disclosure: I have only played a couple of times and don't really understand the game. It seems to involve some bluffing, though with very strict manners regarding how you may or may not bluff.)

During their peak bridge-playing years of the mid 1970s, there was, of course, much going on in the lives of these four adults. The husbands changed jobs. There were moves to other states. My sister Adriane joined our family. Susie and George welcomed son Chip into their family.

As the oldest of the three kids, I probably have the most memories of the bridge sessions. I remember lots of laughter, occasional outbursts, lots of cigarette smoking and, strangely, Doo Dads snack mix. It was the only time I remember that food being available; I guess it was the official snack of Bridge Night™. These days, I like Chex Mix just fine, but I wish they still made Doo Dads.²

Sometimes the group played at our house. Sometimes we took short vacations to Susie's and George's house. While the adults smoked and played bridge, we three young brats would try not to get into too much trouble, playing with Star Wars figures and Matchbox cars and View-Master and Six Million Dollar Man action figures before pretending to go to bed when the hour got late. I'm sure the adults had to discipline us for not playing nicely more often than they would have liked.

There are other memories of the seven of us doing things together, including hanging out at the Jersey Shore and another time at an amusement park that I believe was probably Knoebels. There are beach pictures in one of my shoeboxes, but nothing from the bridge-playing sessions that were such a big part of their friendship. I guess there was just no one to take the photo; those are the kind of moments that we memorialize with a thousand smartphone pictures these days, but that no one thought to take a snapshot or Polaroid of back then.

In 1986, Mom and Dad got divorced and that was, of course, the end of the bridge sessions. For those two documented sessions in 1992, my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham, took Dad's spot. Mom then continued to play bridge with Helen and Helen's friends throughout the 1990s in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

And the finally tally? After nearly 20 years of bridge sessions, it ended up like this, according to these three sheets:

1. Susie: 354,780 points
2. Iggy: 318,380 points
3. George: 291,260 points
4. Alan/Helen: 264,880 points

That's assuming there were no math errors along the way. I have the official documents, but I don't think I'm going to go back and check the work.

Related posts

• Photo of a man who looks far too serious about his bridge
• Curious book cover: "Bridge Babies"
• Buzza Company auction bridge pads

Footnotes
1. The next morning (December 26), former President Harry S. Truman died, but that's just a piece of trivia that's not relevant to this tale.
2. Leigh Ann shared this recipe for homemade Doo Dads on her website, My Diary of Us, in 2013. I haven't tried it.

A pair of Mom's childhood pets

Here are a couple of snapshots from the early 1960s of two of Mom's pets. Susie was the dog, and Blackie was the cat. I'm guessing this is their house in Rose Valley, but I'm not 100% sure. Blackie appears to have been a moderately large cat. I think he/she is also featured in this photograph from the late 1960s.

Researchers of the future should have no trouble finding photos of my cats — Buddy, Cyrano, Scoop, Maya, Salem, Huggles, Mr. Bill, Mitts, Floyd, Mr. Angelino, Monkey and Titan. It seems like those guys take up about half the snapshots in my unorganized shoebox these days. They also represent 13.2% of Facebook's database.

Book cover: "Haunted Britain"

Mom loved "true-story" ghost books. She was in her early 20s in the early 1970s and had a fair collection of the likes of Hans Holzer and Susy Smith paperbacks. She was also fascinated with the United Kingdom, perhaps the ghostiest place of all, and had several books related to the ghosts and folklore of its various haunted grounds. She held onto these books long enough for me to discover — and become equally fascinated by — them in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One that I especially loved, partly for the spooky photos, was this volume. So I tracked down my own copy earlier this decade.

• Title: Haunted Britain
• Author: Antony D. Hippisley Coxe
• Is that the most British name ever on Papergreat? Probably
• What else did he write? Performance and Politics in Popular Drama; Classical And Circus High School; A Book About Smuggling in the West Country, 1700-1850; and — I kid you not — The Great Book of Sausages.¹
• Photographer: Robert Estall
• House editor: Penelope Miller
• Designer: George Sharp
• Cartographer: John R. Flower
• Indexer: Gerry Miller
• Publisher: Pan Books Ltd.
• Publication year: 1975 (Book was originally published in 1973 by Hutchinson & Co. I believe that's a hardcover.)
• Original prices: £1.50 in the United Kingdom, $4.30 in Australia, $4.10 in New Zealand, $5.95 in Canada. (£1.50 in 1975 is the equivalent to about £14.88 today, which is equivalent to about $18.92.)
• Pages: 201 (plus numerous maps after the final numbered page)
• Format: Paperback
• Front cover blurb: "A guide to the supernatural in England, Scotland and Wales"
• Back cover blurb: "A unique collection of the uncanny and astonishing phenomena that may be found in haunted Britain."
• Title page blurb: "A guide to the supernatural sites frequented by ghosts, witches, poltergeists and other mysterious beings"
• Dedication: For Araminta remembering the occasional alarums and many excursions we have shared
• First sentence of preface: This is a guidebook to places about which people hold some strange belief.
• First sentence of book proper: The Duchy is as packed full of beliefs as a can is of Cornish pilchards.
• What's a pilchard: "A small, edible, commercially valuable marine fish of the herring family."
• So, a sardine? Basically.
• Last sentence: The Colstoun Pear is supposed to keep the family lands intact and is still in the Broun-Lindsay family who alone can lay eyes on it.
• Random sentence from the middle: Prehistoric ghosts are rare, but many people, including a highly respected archaeologist, have seen the Bronze Age horseman who haunts these parts.
• Goodreads rating: 4.10 stars (out of 5.0)
• Goodreads review: In 2016, Jonathan Farley called the book "an entertaining gazetteer of ghosts around Britain."
• Amazon rating: 5.0 stars (out of 5.0)
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2014, Courtney wrote: "Instead of elaborating on the stories or offering theories about the supernatural, the book offers concise, matter-of-fact little snippets; it's arranged as the usual travel guide, region by region, with suggestions for day drives. ... Whether you're planning a trip to England in your daydreams or for real, you'll love browsing this book."

But wait, there's more

As a kid, I loved the visual aspects of this book. It had a system of symbols to describe each site. And the photograpy — some original and some from archives — was creepy and unsettling. Here are some peeks...

Hey, it's the ghost of Raynham Hall!

Mom and I loved this one. The caption states: "Spot the ghosts in this photograph taken by a former employee at Downe Court Manor. According to the owner, eleven phantoms are visible: Charles Darwin, a blackamoor in a three-cornered hat, a Cavalier, a Miss Smith, half a dozen faces, and a girl with a long plait.

Sausage footnote
1. The Great Book of Sausages does not have great reviews. Here are some from Amazon:

• Under-cooked Book
• What's not in this book? Any useful information on making or cooking sausages.
• This was by far the biggest waste of my time and money that I have ever ordered for myself. This isn't the great book of anything.
• The not-so-great sausage book

One-of-a-kind family photograph

This group photograph was taken during my parents' wedding day on June 14, 1969. They were married at Trinity Episcopal Church in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and the reception was held at nearby Rolling Green Golf Club. So one of those two places was the likely setting for this shot.

As the person who inherited the bulk of the family photographs — and, dear heavens, it's a lot of photos — I believe I'm in the best position to say that this is the only shot that contains all eight of these people in the same photograph. So it's a pretty neat piece of my family history. My father and my uncle are the only two people in this photograph who are still alive.

From left:

• Howard Horsey Adams (1892-1985), a great-grandparent of mine on Mom's side. I called him Pop-Pop. Read a bit about him here.
• Greta Miriam Chandler Adams (1894-1988), Howard's wife. I called her Mimi. Her collection of ephemera from world travels has contributed greatly to many Papergreat posts.
• Charles Ingham, Mom's brother, who now lives in Texas. Great sense of humor.
• Helen Chandler Adams Ingham (1919-2003), Mom's mother. Daughter of Howard and Greta. I called her Beembom. Her life and travels have also contributed greatly to this blog.
• Mary Margaret Ingham Otto (1948-2017), my mother. Read through the Mom's Life label to learn all about her.
• John Alan Otto (born 1947), my father. Now lives in Florida with his wife of 23 years, Sally. More pics of Dad here.
• Olive Virginia Hartford Otto (1914-2006), Dad's mother. I called her Bambi.
• John Alexander Otto (1911-1991), Dad's father. I called him Pappy. He was a World War II veteran and once bowled a 300 game.

Happy 71st birthday, Mom

Mom would have turned 71 years old today. I've written a lot about her life in the past two years here under the Mom's Life label. Today, I just wanted to share some cool pictures of her. These exist as 8x10 photographs, probably circa 1967 or 1968. There's no date or further information on the back of the prints. Perhaps she was helping a fellow Lycoming College student by serving as a model for a photography class; the interplay of light and shadow seems to be some of the focus. Whatever the case, I think they're pretty neat.

Montoursville 2018: Our third house

OK, it's time to get this series polished off. I'm at peace with (and actually a bit comforted by) the idea that I could not possibly fit all of my memories and stories about our house on Montoursville's Willow Street into one post. So I won't even try.

We lived at 912 Willow Street from late 1980 until the summer of 1983, so I was ages 10, 11 and 12 during that time — very robust years for childhood memories, much more so than when I was single digits in the hazy, trippy 1970s.

Quick recap

• First family house in Montoursville was on Mulberry Street (early 1970s).
• Second family house in Montoursville was on Spruce Street (mid 1970s until summer of 1978).
• Then we moved away and lived in Clayton, New Jersey, from summer 1978 until late 1980.
• Third family house in Montoursville was on Willow Street (late 1980 until summer 1983).
• Then we moved to Florida.

The Willow Street house is in the northeast corner of town, where the elevation begins to rise. It's located at the triangular corner of Willow Street and Fairview Drive, as you can see from this map I used in an earlier post about C.E. McCall Middle School. The backyard, where the driveway is located, is very sloped, making for unpleasant shoveling times in the winter (to which Dad and his back surgery can definitely attest). When we moved in, there was a huge willow tree in the far corner of the backyard, but it was cut down during our time there. We also had a burn barrel for paper trash in the backyard, because it was a much different time then — long before there was much momentum for the notions of recycling or air quality.

Even with the slope, the backyard was a great place for running around with the hose or sprinkler. There were all sorts of nooks and crannies to play with Star Wars figures or Matchbox cars. I remember coming across a walking stick insect once in the bushes. The tree in the corner of the front yard was just starting to be strong enough for a young boy to climb; it's huge and middle-aged now. Best of all, I remember laying in the backyard during dark summer nights to gaze at sky and watch for shooting stars. We were spoiled by those night skies, so relatively unpolluted by man-made light.

To the side of the house, along Fairview Drive, there is a concrete-slab covered porch. We spent much time out there throughout the year — relaxing, conversing with friends and neighbors, bug-hunting or listening to John Williams soundtrack albums on the record player we would haul out there and plug in.

Here are some then-and-now photos of the Willow Street house's exterior...

Front

Side porch

Backyard

Some thoughts after looking at those photos:

• I'm glad it wasn't until our next house, in flat Florida, that I began taking on lawnmowing duties.
• That's not our station wagon in the early 1980s photo of the driveway.
• I love the front-yard landscaping now.
• I have no recollection of the huge tree that now dominates the backyard, not even as a sapling (though my memory might be faulty on that count). The tree is also located almost exactly where we used to lay on the ground for stargazing.
• Fences kind of suck, from an aesthetic standpoint, though I do understand you need them if you have a dog (or small children), so close to the road.

* * *
The first floor of the Willow Street house, when we lived there, contained a formal living room as you came in the front door, followed by a small dining room. From the dining room, there were three bedrooms (sharing just one bathroom) to the right and the kitchen to the left. (I wrote about the kitchen during a "Snapshot & Memories" post in January, so I won't touch on it much today.)

The finished basement was where we spent much of our time. There was a TV room, a rec area that served as both a bar and an area for playing board games or cards, a laundry room, and a large play area just inside the garage door where Adriane and I played with blocks or other toys and then cleared them all away during the holidays so that the live Christmas tree could go up. The basement was fairly dark and it could get damp, too. Probably the biggest Traumatic House Event during our time there involved a damaged drainpipe at the bottom of the sloped driveway; it forced water into much of the basement.

The coolest part of the house was the fully finished attic. The staircase was located off the dining room. The main part of the attic was a long hallway, wide enough to allow storage (books, boxes, etc.) on both sides and still have plenty of room to navigate. Flanking the hallway, on both sides, were storage passages that went the length of the attic. Adriane and I called them the cubby holes, and we played in them all the time. Both cubby holes had terminus points in the small guest bedroom located at the far end of the attic. (That's me in the attic bedroom in the photograph at the top of this post.) The guest bedroom was also a great place to play with friends or to seek out some solitude for reading. The Willow Street attic was great.

In retrospect, the worst part about the house is that it had just one full bathroom on the first floor and a toilet closet in the basement. For a four-bedroom house, it was definitely lacking in that respect. And the kitchen was fairly small. I wonder if it's been retrofitted over the decades. (Hmmm, it appears the answer is no.)

* * *
Ephemera & memories & being a kid

As I said, I won't even attempt to share all of my memories of my time at this house. To keep things simpler, and far more appropriate for the nature of this blog, I'll limit it to some memories related to books and ephemera. Many of this is also tied in with sports, which I was very enthusiastic about at the time. Here we go...

• I remember finishing an English research paper about lions, complete with every fact I found on a separate index card (for the mandatory footnotes), while watching the Philadelphia 76ers win the NBA championship over the Los Angeles Lakers.
• I had a small metal box in which I put clippings and other ephemera related to the Philadelphia Phillies. I had boxscores and other tidbits that were cut from the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. I think I also made my own Phillies baseball cards, as a project.
• My favorite magazines were the Street and Smith's baseball yearbooks that were issued late each winter. I absolutely poured over the articles, team-by-team previews, rosters, statistics and schedules. I was also enamored of the Topps baseball sticker albums during this time.
• 
  When I played Major League Baseball on the Intellivision that was set up in the basement, I would sometimes write out actual lineups for the game, filled with my favorite contemporary players, and then keep the boxscore and subsequently track my players' statistics over several games. (It was good math practice!)
• I kept notes and statistics about the first season of the United States Football League. I loved that league!
• Dad would often go get The Philadelphia Inquirer and a box of doughnuts on Sunday mornings. I definitely read the comics, and probably Sports. I'm not sure what else I was reading in the newspaper at that point.
• Pivoting to something other than sports, I discovered the world of Dungeons & Dragons during this time (which should not be a surprise to regular readers of this blog), though I didn't really play in any groups or know anyone who did. I had the 1981 Basic Set and the other things that came with it in the box. I probably had an issue or two of Dragon magazine, and I was an avid reader of the Endless Quest series. Mostly, I liked to create maps and histories for fantasy worlds. I remember having a small, light-blue-covered notebook filled with maps and ideas, and what fun it would be to still have that to look through. I'm sure I'm the one who decided to get rid of it at some later point, but I can't fathom why. Dad would make photocopies of D&D character sheets for me, but I'm not sure what I used those for, since I didn't play the game. I just remember how cool and special it felt to have Dad bring home photocopies from work.
• 
  On my bedroom bookshelf, I had a couple dozen of those National Geographic hardcover "Young Explorers" books, courtesy of a gift subscription from Beembom (my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham). I also remember reading a lot of Garfield, Family Circus and The Three Investigators books during this time. Plus, of course, the discovery of Ruth Manning-Sanders at Konkle Memorial Library.
• We had The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, a huge hardcover volume, on the bookshelf in the formal living room. I would often pull it from the shelf and browse for hours. The book is on a bookshelf in my bedroom today.
• My record albums were an odd and definitely unhip mixture for someone my age. I had the aforementioned John Williams movie scores (Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark); Hooked on Classics; Star Trek tales on vinyl; Mickey Mouse Disco; a half-remembered record that had covers (not originals) of popular movie songs such as "Makin' It" from Meatballs; and another collection featuring covers of classic movie themes such as The Pink Panther and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Those are the ones I can remember (and admit to), anyway. I was not yet into buying pop music on any medium. (And it's crazy to think how much I grew, learned and changed from this kid in early 1983 to the college graduate who bought August and Everything After on cassette in the autumn of 1993.)
• Mom's college art books were in that bedroom in the attic, along with some of her other forgotten artistic endeavors. I wonder, in retrospect, if she just didn't care for them at that point. Or maybe they reminded her of things that could have been. She definitely wanted to keep them, but never seemed very interested in revisiting them. The bulk of her reading then consisted of Hans Holzer, Susy Smith, Stephen King, etc. This was still a few years, I believe, before she got back to adding historical fiction into her regular reading rotation.
• And I had a Christopher Reeve/Superman poster on my bedroom wall. Here's proof!

* * *Wrapping up, I envision three more Montoursville 2018 posts, all of which should come before Thanksgiving and none of which should require the time and effort of this one. We can see the finish line!

Book cover: "Welsh Ghosts"

• Title: Welsh Ghosts
• Title in Welsh: Ysbrydion Cymru
• Series: Viewing Wales Series
• Author: Jeanette Dixon
• Publisher: James Pike Ltd (Cornwall)
• Cover price: Unknown
• Publication date: 1975
• Pages: 32
• Format: Staplebound paperback
• Provenance: Mom's bookshelf
• First sentence: We live in a so-called Progressive Age.
• Last sentence: At least, if you are out one dusky evening and suddenly hear the faint clattering of a horse's hooves you may just spot a Ceffyl Dwr before it disappears into the sea and under the waves...
• Random sentence from middle #1: The ghosts are a legion, floating from almost every circumstance and century: pirates, witches, unmarried mothers, lovesick maidens, white, grey, black, green and even a blue lady, monks and nuns, together with a few more phenomena which cannot even be identified.
• Random sentence from middle #2: Most peculiar of all is a phantom cat which is quite wild and roams all over the woods playing havoc.
• Reviews: There are no ratings or reviews for this booklet on Amazon or Goodreads.
• Revised edition: The Wolfenhowle Press is selling a new edition of this book for £7.99. It describes it as: "First published over forty years ago, this new and totally updated edition has been completely rewritten and expanded. It included not only some of the more famous tales, but also some that are virtually unknown nowadays, first appearing in Victorian newspapers."
• Notes: This slim volume and another one from the series, Welsh Witchcraft (maybe I'll do that one for Mild Fear 2019), were on Mom's bookshelf, in the spooky section, for as long as I can remember. It's only 32 pages, so I should go ahead and read it straight through so I can put it up on Goodreads with some proper documentation. According to the back cover, other volumes in the James Pike's Viewing Wales Series from the 1970s include Ancient Industries and Handicrafts, Best Beaches, Birds, Legends & Folklore, Northern Footpaths, Railways, Smugglers and much more. Most of the volumes are fairly difficult to find these days.