For a Good Time, Try the Morgue

In this 1937 photo about hard times at Christmas, editors clearly didn't think the happy kid on the right fit in. The lines drawn on the photo show that he was cropped and retouched out of the picture, and that the two kids in the middle were the ones to focus on.

There’s nothing like a good morgue.

Oh, I don’t mean the kind where it’s cold and clammy and toes have tags on them. It’s a dated newspaper term for what is now politely called “the library,” but a good morgue is as much of an adventure as the one in “Night Shift” was.

Long before there was the Internet to give us random things to stumble upon, there were newspaper morgues. Looking for some routine background on a prominent woman you are interviewing? You just might find some clippings from the 1960s that report the death of her first husband, written in the euphemistic manner of the time but leaving little doubt it was quite the scandal. Looking for a generic Christmas photo? You just might find a shot of grubby-looking kids from decades ago, made to look as pathetic as possible by the sensationalistic photographer who took the photo.

Looking for a copy of a photograph shot by your dad, a freelancer for the local daily? You just might find your parents’ 1957 engagement announcement.

Nowadays, this is all digital. A couple clicks of the computer can land you a photograph or story that’s been published since about 1990. Other archival services can give bring newspapers from as far back as the 19^th century to your computer (or perhaps later in older parts of the world), although you pretty much have to know what you are looking for.

But a good, thorough newspaper morgue might just include most of the photographs that had been published in the paper for almost a century. Many are in the shiny black and white that was the hallmark of news photos for many decades. A good morgue might include envelope after envelope of clippings that were saved according to topic and neatly filed away. There also might be celebrity files, movie files, TV show files, school files, church files.

A 1951 photo about hypnotism.

Newspapers varied on what they kept and, sometimes, how they kept it. One newspaper I worked at kept everything, even promotional and news photos that never ran in the paper. Legend has it when Lee Harvey Oswald was named as the suspect in JFK’s murder, the paper was one of the few to publish his mugshot because someone had saved one that had come across the wire service when Oswald had been arrested in New Orleans the previous August.

The random things that were in the files of that newspaper were matched only by the random method in which they were organized. If you wanted to find the file for Cher, you had to look under “A.” You know, for “Allman, Cher,” because she had been married to Gregg Allman for all of three years. If you needed a photo of Julius Erving, you had to look in the “J” file. You know, for “J, Dr.”

Tom Jones lives in the old files, dancing with Lulu.

The need for space and, let’s face it, shrinking staffs have seriously impacted what many papers do in this realm these days. Sometime in the 1980s, the paper I now work for transferred most of its images to the Wisconsin Historical Society but also threw away tons of negatives. One day about five years ago I asked a grizzled veteran photographer where I might find images or negatives from the Milwaukee Brewers’ 1982 World Series. He started to tell me what happened, then walked away in tears.

Yet there is still some superb randomness in what is left in our files at the paper. While the files of old stuff at other papers were amusing on their own, it occurred to me that because this is where I grew up, my family might be among the old stuff in my own newsroom.

My father was a freelance photographer in the 1960s for The Capital Times, the paper I came to Wisconsin to work for. I looked through the files to see if maybe I could find a photo or two shot by him, or at least a clipping of an article for which he had done the photography.

Engagement photo.

There were no traces of the photos he had shot, but I found a goldmine nonetheless. Even large daily newspapers used to print much more social, family and military news than they do now, and because of this I found a few surprises.

A decade before my father shot photos for the Madison newspaper, his picture was in it as prom king of his high school. His first photo credit in the paper was likely the one of my mother, which ran with their engagement announcement in 1957.

There were other clippings – of my dad and uncles going to and thankfully returning from war. There was a photo of an uncle on trip to Scotland, wearing a kilt even though we aren’t Scottish. Other clippings told sadder stories of my family, such as one about my cousin who was missing in action in Vietnam and the memorial service held for him nine years later.

One topic can lead to another until you realize you could get lost for days in a place like this. And at least with this kind of morgue, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Once there was an engagement, clearly, the paper had to update its files.

The Mystery Field of the Invisible Farmer

A motel and farm field, circa 1950.

All these years later, the motel is still there -- and so is the farm field.

On any farm field, the signs of life come gradually. Tilled soil one week, pokes of green a little bit later, soon a full crop swaying in the wind and then the hustle and bustle of harvest.

Yet there’s one farm field where the signs of life have always intrigued me. Because beyond the work of Mother Nature, I have never seen a human being working this field.

That wouldn’t be so uncommon in a field out in the country, you might not catch a farmer on his or her tractor or combine every time you drive by. But this field is in the midst of the town where I grew up, more or less across the street from where our house once stood. Yet I’ve never seen anyone working that field in nearly 50 years.

The crops come up. Someone plants them. Someone harvests them. I say it’s the work of the Invisible Farmer, others suggest perhaps it’s the Vampire Farmer because there is a cemetery right next to the field.

In this day and age, it would be easy enough to find out. A quick Internet check of the tax rolls would provide the name of the property owner. Then again, this is a small town; I probably could walk to the hotel across the street and ask the owner if he knows.

He probably does -- he might even own it himself -- but I like the mystery of the place.

After harvest at the mystery field.

The field is about the size of a football field, if that. Small fields like this aren’t uncommon in my neck of the woods. This is hilly terrain in southwestern Wisconsin; some farmers find patches where they can and plant a crop. It’s a far cry from corn as far as the eye can see when you drive along places such as Interstate 80 through Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois or Indiana.

It’s not the size of the field that intrigues; it’s the location. The field has been there for decades, maybe even a century, and likely was once on the edge of town. The village has grown up around it. The field’s border to the west is the cemetery; its border to the east is a bike trail that was once the railroad tracks. Right on the other side of the trail, however, is a strip mall with a big grocery store and beyond continues more development that includes franchise restaurants and stores. The town grows; the field remains.

Over the years, there were always rumblings of what might happen to the field. When I was a kid, there was a rumor that a McDonald’s was going to go there. When you’re a kid, it’s exciting news that a McDonald’s is coming to your town, much less across the street from your house. Now, as an adult, I really don’t care that we have a McDonald’s at all and I’m grateful it’s not in that field.

The mystery field butts right up to a subdivision.

I’m not sure how long that field will hold on; no doubt the Invisible Farmer is battling the inevitable pressures of development. What you can’t see about the field as you drive by is that it goes up over a hill, back down and right up against a subdivision. It’s the fate of many fields in the Midwest, and if you’ve never seen a farmer cry, watch an elderly farmer talk about the development near his field in the marvelous documentary, “The Real Dirt on Farmer John.”

So much change has come in my lifetime to my old neighborhood, which once had more homes than businesses. An empty lot sits where my house was, as various developments are planned and then fall through; a crazy busy convenience store replaced what used to be the home of a guy named Wild Bill. Other homes were replaced by fast-food restaurants and the cemetery that once was an acreage of strangers is now dotted with people I once knew.

But the field survives. And like the mystery of the Invisible Farmer who works this field, the fate of it remains to be seen.



In this 1908 postcard, the cemetery and the field are the town's eastern border (left center).



Face It: We Are Who We Are

 

Seriously, these are high school students? They were, in 1935.

I looked at the photo and saw the faces. They were all faces of people I know, or knew once upon a time. And in those faces I saw women who are a few years older than me, not that much but certainly a difference that will never change.

And it was a picture of a bunch of fourth-graders.

I’ve always been intrigued by the way time and vision play interesting tricks on your brain. The way the years can melt off the face of someone you haven’t seen in decades or can add years to make a group picture of Girl Scouts look like the 50-something women they are now.

It doesn’t always just happen with people you know. Time and fashion have a way of making people from the past look surprisingly old to younger generations. Maybe it’s the cat-eye or granny glasses, the suit jackets or the old-fashioned hairstyles – looking at an old yearbook is akin to looking at a book filled with grandparents, even if these people are only 16 years old.

This magic is what people miss when they skip their class reunions. Even if you don’t like the people, it’s an almost supernatural phenomenon to look at a room full of strangers and within a few moments see the faces of people you have known your entire life. Bit by bit your brain puts together the pieces, making you realize if that is Joe then that must be his buddy Jim but how could it be Jim because it looks nothing like him? And then, little by little, it looks just like him.

At our 25th class reunion, I had a good friend of mine tell me that everyone said she looks exactly the same.

“I’m not sure how to feel about that,” she said.

“Feel good about it,” I said. “They see you, and that’s a nice thing.”

I don’t really have that conundrum. Some people were born with the face they keep their entire life; I am not one of those people. At that same class reunion, I was chatting with a group of friends until one of them looked at me and said, “Do I know you?” Friends I've made since high school never believe it’s me if they see my high school graduation picture.

I have an old photograph of my sisters and me when we were about ages 2, 3, 4 and 5. It was on the wall at my parents’ house and I have had a copy of it on my wall for years. In the decades that the photo has been on my wall, no one – not one person – who knows me but not my sisters has ever been able to pick me out of the photo. My sisters have characteristics in the photo that they keep to this day. Me, not so much.

It hasn’t helped, either, that throughout my life my hair color has just had a mind of its own. I have a fourth-grade photo of me, as blonde as can be. In photos from fifth and sixth grade, I’m practically brunette.

It swung back enough that when I returned for my sophomore year of college, a friend of mine didn’t recognize me after I cut my hair over the summer. “My friend Jane has long blonde hair,” he said. “You have short dark hair. What happened to my friend Jane?”

By moving back to my hometown, however, my anonymity has been somewhat shed. I may have a face that changes with the seasons, but there is one constant to it – it is the face of my mother.

This was never more apparent when I stopped by a local dress shop just before closing time and happened to find the perfect outfit for an upcoming event. I had just been out for a walk and didn’t have a checkbook or credit card on me and I asked the shop owner if she could hold it for me until the next day.

“Sure,” she said, pulling out a piece of paper to write down my name. “Which one are you?”

Not “what is your name” or “where do you live.” No, she knew I was one of the pack of girls who used to sit by her family at church. “Of course I know who you are,” she said. “You look just like your mother.”

There are worse things to hear in life, that’s for sure. If it’s not me that people see, but instead see my mother, that is something I can face just fine.

Girl Scouts, circa 1970.

The Green, Green Grass of Home

This way to home.

The statement was as innocuous as you could imagine, but it was still a kind gesture coming from an airport customs agent.

“Welcome home,” the agent said.

The greeting didn’t come at O’Hare or Newark or Dulles or any U.S. international airport through which I have cleared customs over the years. The welcome home came from a customs agent in Dublin, Ireland.

Indeed, I was home. My name kind of gives it away, but not entirely. Years later, I still smile to think of the warm, almost personal, welcome I got returning to the homeland.

Strangely, it’s not my only “homeland.” Like most Americans, I’m not one thing, I’m a mutt. I’m probably more German than Irish, and even a bit more Norwegian than Irish. Yet it’s not just St. Patrick’s Day that makes me and my family celebrate our Irish-ness.

Still, I’m not sure what it is.

Maybe it’s the name, which isn’t even officially our name. A great-great grandfather was born in Galway a Byrnes and was buried in Wisconsin a Burns. Over the years, people have told me when they see the Scottish/English spelling of my name that I am not Irish.

“Well, maybe my ancestors were actually English and Protestant but they claimed to be Irish Catholic to make their lives easier here in the 19^th century,” I respond. That usually shuts people up, if they have the slightest notion of human history.

My family is fortunate. We remain in the place our immigrant ancestors came to more than a century ago from Ireland, Germany and Norway.

Yet we cling to the Irish.

Maybe it’s the religion. We grew up Catholic and that was the core of who we were, too. But we’re also Catholic on the German side, although my mom moved away from her family and they are about two hours away. The Norwegians? Let’s just say those are the Lutherans who are buried in that other cemetery in the town of my paternal relatives' birth.

Maybe it’s the stories. We tell them with great abandon. A few years ago, I was at a conference and gave some remarks. Afterwards, an African woman I had met there said to me, “You’re Irish, aren’t you?” I said yes, but it was nothing recent, that my family had been here about 150 years.

“No matter,” she said. “Your people. They can tell stories.”

Strangely, we don’t know our own story. I often thought it odd that in a family of storytellers, in a family that had been here for so long, we only have stories that go back to about the 1920s.

But I found my answer on a visit about 15 years ago to the cemetery outside Hollandale, Wis., where generations of my father’s family are buried. I visited the graves of relatives I knew, and checked out graves I had probably been shown as a kid belonging to relatives I never knew.

The latter graves all had something in common: 1918. The influenza epidemic took out a generation of my family, leaving my grandpa orphaned at a young age and the rest of us with not one story about the generations that came before.

On my same trip to Ireland, I spun that sad tale to an Irishman I had just met. He listened, looked at me and said, “So do you get the shots every year then?”

Maybe it’s the humor. In the blackest of times my family has been able to laugh. We’re the kind of people who have fun at funerals because yes, it’s a drag somebody died but oh, we love each other’s company.

Before I knew my family was from Galway, I got lost there. If you’ve ever been to Galway City, you’d realize that’s not a difficult thing to do. But I like to think now that it was a cosmic event, as if fate were making me spend more time in a place that we were just trying to drive through on our way to somewhere else.

My family isn’t the type to pass through a place. We left various countries and have tended to stay put in the places where we settled so many generations ago. Now I want to go to Galway again and instead of cursing the unspecifically marked intersections and roundabouts to nowhere, I want to just stop a moment and take it all in.

Because I’d be home. And maybe I’d even be welcome.  

The Right Stuff, and So Much of It

It's a delightful surprise to find things like this, but what to do with it?

Boxes are only piled one or two high, so it can’t be that bad. Then again, there are a lot of two-box piles sitting around my basement these days. 

It’s a thin line between history and hoarding. While I know very well where I sit on that line, it’s a challenge to make sure it goes in the right direction. 

About a year and a half ago, my mom died. She was worried about all the pictures in her basement and we had gone through some things together. But in the final weeks of her life she fretted about those pictures in a way I thought was kind of odd. 

And then, after she was gone, I opened the boxes. 

My family has a lot of pictures and I knew that. My father was a photographer, so we have more family photos than most families from that era have. In the 1960s and 1970s, cameras weren’t the common household item they are today and parents weren’t as interested in recording every moment of their children’s lives.

A kindergarten field trip to see Santa.

But my dad was there with his camera. Not just for the professional reasons such as weddings and babies and graduations. He was there with his camera when our Girl Scout troop marched in parades, when my kindergarten class visited Santa at the bank, when my little brothers helped make curds at the cheese factory of a friend of his, when we rode horses at my uncle’s farm and for every birthday party one could imagine.

That’s what I knew was in the boxes. What I found wasn’t just the family photos, but essentially a complete archive of my family’s history. It took my breath away.

There were scrapbooks my mom put together when she was in grade and high school, complete with programs from school plays or basketball games. There were two framed religious plaques honoring her First Communion. There was a copy of a children's Christmas book from her big brother, with the words, “To Betty Jane: From Eugene” written inside. 

Hollandale High School rah rah rah!

There were my father’s high school letters won in a variety of sports for a school that does not exist anymore. There were mementoes of Army days and even a few letters between my parents, something about picking out a couch just weeks before they were married.

Moving on through their lives turned up seemingly every handmade card we kids – all six of us – made for them. Little bunnies with cotton balls for tails that say, “Happy Easter To Mommy and Daddy.” Tulips created with crayons that signify a Happy Mother’s Day, with or without a proper apostrophe.

Cotton tail still in place.

The most amazing find was a bag that contained every card my parents received when my oldest sister, their firstborn, arrived in 1959. It was a wonderful snapshot of a moment in time – who was alive then in our family, who was alive then in our town and who my parents’ friends were at the time.

It was a treasure trove and I breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t find that stuff celebrating my birth. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

It was an easy “first edit” to go through the stuff – if I didn’t know the person, I threw the photo away (sorry, Mom’s high school classmates.) Negatives could go because technology means we can always scan the prints. The first edit was done in my mom’s basement in the weeks after she died. It’s time to dive back in.

My left foot

This is where the hard choices will come, and I already unexpectedly face a conundrum. Just the other day I found something I missed the first time around: the stash of stuff that accompanied my entry into this world. There’s a beautiful birth certificate, complete with my footprints, and a birth announcement in my mother’s handwriting. Best of all is a little pink bootie that served as an invitation from the local bank to start a savings account. It’s still in the envelope addressed to my parents, postmarked two days after I was born.

We’re fortunate in my community that we have a strong historical society that is interested in collecting the everyday minutiae of life as well as things of obvious historical value. So while the historical society has my dad’s photo collection, I also gave them my mom’s library card. They’ll get the pink bootie, too. Eventually.

I have friends whose parents who were hoarders and had to take care of those households when their parents died. My mom had a lot of stuff but it doesn’t come close to qualifying as hoarding – even I could understand the significance of nearly every item she saved. 

I always wondered where I got my love for history; it didn’t seem to be a passion of any sort for either of my parents. Now I know.

My parents didn’t hoard, but they had a way of hoarding history. They saw the value in the story of our lives. That makes for way too many boxes in my basement and I still have no clue what we're going to do with most of this stuff, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A little bootie to help a little girl baby sock away some savings.

The little bootie was still in the envelope sent from a bank that no longer exists.

Considering the safety of this would-be baby toy, it's probably best it was left in the original envelope.

Be Like Mike? No Thanks

Basketball in ye olden tymes of yore, when the girls didn't even get uniforms.

Soaring through the air has always seemed like it would be really cool.

Having millions of dollars would be nice, too.

And to be the best in the world at something, that would be unimaginably amazing.

But you know, these days, I’m pretty happy to not Be Like Mike.

Last month, Sports Illustrated ran a heart-wrenching story of the man who was Michael Jordan’s high school basketball coach. Legend has it, this man cut Jordan from the team his sophomore year and provided the motivational spark that helped create a legendary player.

Turns out the legend was wrong.

Jordan never got cut; he simply didn’t get promoted to varsity that year. Seems ridiculous in retrospect, but the coach needed a tall player on varsity and MJ wasn’t there yet. In the years since, including during a painful Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Jordan has taken every chance to throw in a few digs at the coach who “cut” him and the player who did make the varsity.

How’s that for thanks to a man who, like so many coaches, gave of his time and talent to help young people? The sad part of the story is the troubled life that coach has led ever since, a fact that still didn’t keep Jordan from getting his digs in every once in a while.

That story didn’t just capture my attention for its content, it grabbed my attention because at the very same time it came out, my former teammates and I were planning an event to say thanks to our high school coach. We didn’t go on to be millionaires, we didn’t even go on to be very athletic but clearly we grew up to be people who can appreciate a good deed when one is turned.

And what a good deed coaching girls in the 1970s was.

Forty years ago this summer, Title IX passed, mandating that institutions that received federal funds must provide equal opportunities for males and females. Girls' sports went from intramural to varsity status in the states that weren't offering that already, which was most of them. Everything the boys had, the girls were supposed to have, too.

Well, sort of.

It was such a thrill to be able to play, I actually forgot a few key details of the era. For starters, in my freshman year we didn’t even have uniforms. We played in our old gymsuits, with pinnies on them with numbers. What I did remember was I was No. 11 because I have no artistic skills whatsoever and that was the easiest number to make with athletic tape.

We played in grade-school gyms that sometimes weren’t even regulation size. We had to share locker rooms with the teams who just killed us, which, sadly, happened a lot.

Our coach was a typing and business teacher at the school who had no athletic background beyond the old intramural system, because it simply wasn’t offered to her. But she was instrumental in making sure we had the chance she didn’t have.

To this day, our coach apologizes for what she didn’t know about basketball.  To this day, we still don’t care. We got to play, and that’s what we cared about most of all.

So much of life is about celebrating the winners. Sometimes it’s necessary to celebrate those who were there. My teammates and I got that chance and it was amazing to revisit all this with the perspective of an adult. I had no idea one of my teammates had a stalker and I loved how my coach asked the question, “OK, how many of you drank during the season?” (The answer, from one teammate: “What did you think? I lived above a bar.”)

MJ can have his Hall of Fame career and the Hall of Fame chip on his shoulder. I’ll take those long bus rides and half-size gyms and wouldn’t change a thing.

Well, maybe I’d lose the gymsuit.

Eventually the uniforms arrived. Matching socks, not so much.

Malibu Barbie, Holiday Barbie ... Bald Barbie?

Barbie with Puppy Swim School

Wow. I can’t believe I’m going to come down on the side of Barbie.

I can’t believe I’m about to say that her ridiculously blonde hair, disproportionately stacked build and glittery outfits are all that they should be.

Because sometimes, they should be.

A campaign recently began to ask Mattel to create a bald Barbie in support of children with cancer. Mattel’s subsidiary, American Girl, has received similar requests.

A Facebook group dedicated to the cause has nearly 120,000 likes. Many on there tell heart-breaking stories of illnesses that have impacted their children and other family members. In an article written by the Associated Press, the page’s founders say a bald Barbie would help raise awareness for children with cancer.

Sorry, but "awareness" is a grown-up word, a grown-up notion. Do children need to be aware of cancer if it isn’t in their world? Do children in that situation want a doll that looks like them or do they want a doll that does what so many dolls do for girls – provide a fantasy world? 

I have no children, but I have had cancer. I was fortunate to not lose my hair and got more than few jolts of the real world when sitting in oncology waiting rooms with people and children who had.

As a kid, however, I had the kinds of things that make you realize you are not like other kids. I wore leg braces and, later, a back brace. Walk out the door with bolts on your shoes and metal around your neck and try to feel like the other kids.

Yet what I needed most back then -- and got -- wasn't some awareness campaign or a toy that looked like me. I had parents who somehow, miraculously, made me believe that as much as this stunk, it shouldn't have to affect who I was or who I wanted to be.

When I went to Girl Scout camp, I went to regular old camp. One year, we were visited by kids from a nearby camp for disabled children. There was a girl who visited who had the same back brace I did for the same reason I did. My parents sent me to Girl Scout camp, let me play basketball, climb trees, ride my bike and generally be a regular kid. This other girl's parents sent her to a camp for disabled kids. I wish I had been older and more mature to talk to her about it; the memory of that saddens me to this day. 

For a child with cancer, I  imagine her regular kid world would include her toys and her dolls, no matter how unreal they look. For little girls, Barbie is a fantasy world. She’s held up as ideal, a beautiful ideal, someone many little girls grow up wanting to be.

For a sick child, I would think that would be a wonderful escape. Feminists and cultural critics have long debated the wisdom of Barbie as a role model, but in this case let the child have her fantasy and spare her the teaching moment. I suspect even without a special Barbie, a little girl with cancer is gaining quite an awareness of what the real world has to offer.

Do children need this "awareness" in their toys? That’s what it comes down to. Barbie is not alone in this regard. The pink juggernaut of breast cancer has had things such as rubber duckies, Beanie Babies and even a pink Sponge Bob Square Pants toy.

In a perfect world, children would never have to be aware of these things. But in a world that’s far from perfect, letting a child believe her Barbie is perfect might be some of the best medicine of all.

The image promoted by those who want Mattel to create a Beautiful Bald Barbie.