ephemera

Yiddish Ephemera Memories

When I was a little kid my mom often would discipline me using phrases sprinkled with Yiddish. Her favorite was "Oy gavalt, such a shmatta". This bon mot was used to describe my poor choice of attire, like, for instance, when I tried to wear a White Sox cap to my uncle's wedding. With those words, she would send me scurrying back upstairs to change into something more appropriate like a Bull's jersey. When someone did something stupid on the highway, instead of swearing in sign language like all good Chicagoans, my mom would ask rhetorically, "Is he mishuggina?" The reason I'm bringing this up is that recently I've found myself using some of the same refrains around my house. Am I becoming an alter cocker? When I mentioned to my mother that she'd filled my noggin with all of this Yiddish jargon, she told me to stop cvetching, fershtinkiner ; Anglo-Saxon translation: "quit bitchin', butthead."

English sounds much more lovable in Yiddish.

Doing The Hustle at Nelson Elementary

Back in 1973, at about the same time as this issue of Sets In Order hit the newsstand, my elementary school found it necessary to take time from our studies to teach us the fine art of square dancing. Later, they taught us how to do The Hustle. I still can't get that Van McCoy song out of my head. Surely, these dancing lessons must have been planned strictly for the amusement of the teaching staff. While I still haven't found a practical application for being able to do the hustle, I do fondly recall promenading some of my prettier classmates around the gymnasium at Nelson Elementary School.

But back to today's very interesting ephemera example. The cover of Sets In Order, the official magazine of the American Square Dance Society, doesn't do justice to its wonderful content. The issue contains many interesting and thoughtful articles on the art and science of Square Dancing, and the ads for Callers and Square Dance equipment make this an exciting read from start to finish.

Swing your partners, boys.

eBay Miracle - The Jazzman's Mute

Recently, I wrote a post about eBay eMiracles. This is the story of my eBay eMiracle:

When my great uncle, Willie Berg, the founder of Humes & Berg (H&B), died in the 1996, I went in search of one of his original H&B Stone Lined mutes. There are thousands of used H&B mutes on the market, but I wanted one made before they were mass produced at Willie's factory in Indiana. I wanted one made by Willie's own hands. Of the thousands of H&B mutes made since the day when the legendary musician Glen Miller asked my great uncle to come up with a device that would change the tonal quality of horn instruments, perhaps only a handful remain that were hand-made by Willie and his wife, Faye, in their cramped Chicago apartment.

When I saw a beat-up old mute being offered in an auction on eBay, I contacted the seller and asked if, by chance, the H&B mute label said Chicago, Ill. After a decade-long search, my prayers were finally answered! When I called my 90-year-old great aunt to tell her what I'd found, she asked me if the red line painted across the top of the mute was crooked. When I told her it was, she replied, "I painted the mutes by hand in those days, and I could never get the lines straight." Bless her heart.

The Ephemeral Sound of an Old Typewriter

While browsing for reading material in Asheville's ancient Pack Library, I heard a sound that stopped me in my tracks--the smacking of an IBM Typewriter. Could it really be? I spent several minutes mesmerized. Like watching someone ride a horse down Main Street. The typist brought back a flood of memories--my first job, college term papers, and the smell of correction fluid.

I forgot how great an old typewriter sounds. A vintage Big Blue doesn't make the small, effeminate click-clack of today's computer keyboard. Oh no! It makes a SMACK, SMACK, SMACK noise that seems more closely akin to a machine gun than a dainty keyboard.

It brought back memories of the dastardly typewriter of my youth.

Special Series on the Roots of Herbalism

Organic gardening and herbalism are interests of mine. I've enjoyed gardener for some time, while herbalism is a more recent curiousity. Throughout the coming summer, I plan to run a series (3 or 4 posts) on the roots of herbalism. In conjunction with The Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine, this special series will combine books, ephemera, and my real-world experiences as I delve more deeply into the world of herbalism. Occasionally, I will also feature images (taken during class sessions held at the school) on A Year In Asheville, my photoblog, which chronicles my first year as a resident of Asheville, North Carolina.

In the interest of full disclosure and transparency, I've agreed to blog about my experience at the school in exchange for attending a few classes. The Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine offers classes in the tradition of Roots of Herbalism. Classes are held partly at the Chestnut School Center and Gardens near Asheville, NC, where Juliet Blankespoor and her partner, Tom, organically grow vegetables, fruit, native plants, and more than 75 species of medicinal herbs. If you'd like to learn more about the school, visit to their website for more detials.

While this series pushes the boundaries of my blog's theme, it's my hope to show how vintage ephemera--combined with practical experience--can be useful in appreciating a topic like herbalism and even help to illuminate it. Which, after all, is in keeping with the experimental and exploratory nature of this blog. In any case, as loyal readers will recall, I've featured several flora-themed posts in the past, including these gems: Bromeliads & Ed McMahon, Charlotte Camellia Show Program, and Mayflower Magazine.

To get the things rolling, here are a few of the books I plan to read this this summer on herbalism and organic gardening:

Medical Herbalism: The Science Principles and Practices Of Herbal Medicine

Guide to Flowering Plant Families

Botany for Gardeners

The Herbal Medicine Maker's Handbook: A Home Manual

The Book of Forest and Thicket: Trees, Shrubs, and Wildflowers of Eastern North America

By the way, if you're a collector that specializes in gardening ephemera, seeds catalogs, wildflower prints, or similarly themed collections, I'd like to feature ephemera from your collection as part of this series. If you're interested in sharing items from your colletion, please leave a comment or send me an email.

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St. Patrick's Day Danny Boy Ban

Recently, I read that one New York pub has banned the playing of Danny Boy. The bar's owner claims it's too depressing for St. Patrick's Day. Really? I find it to be soothing, not depressing. In fact, I rather like it.

Besides, St. Patrick's Day has always had a tinge of melancholy associated with it, at least for me. Back in Chicago, they'd dye the river green. It was the only thing green--the dregs of winter kept the landscape brown and the trees bare. The beer flowed, but there was a hint of sadness in the air. The wearing of the green only served to reminded us of spring weather that would never come.

Anyway, the Danny Boy ban made me think of all the other so-called 'sad songs' that I like. The Guardian took the trouble of publishing a list of the all-time most depressing songs, but I didn't find much agreement with their list. I'm not going to create an 'all-time' list to challenge them, but here are a few of my favorite sad songs for your consideration:

Cold, Cold Ground (Tom Waits)

Buckets of Rain (Bob Dylan)

Mill Towns (Del McCoury)

Stolen Car (Bruce Springsteen)

Summer Wind (Frank Sinatra)

A Summer Song (Chad & Jeremy)

The Grand Tour (George Jones)

Whistle Down the Wind (Tom Waits)

What are your favorite depressing tunes?

More Drugs in Elvis or Drinking Water?

When Elvis passed, bless his heart, he had a lot of pharmacuticals in his system. According to some sources, at the time of his death, the King had traces of 14 drugs in his body, including codeine, morphine, and demerol. This week we learned that our nation's drinking water contains 58 drugs, including infection fighters, estrogen, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, and anti-anxiety medication.

So, it's clear: our drinking water has more drugs in it than Elvis.

Fallout Shelter Sign - A Lesson Learned

This fallout shelter sign is authentic, unused, old-stock Cold War ephemera printed by the Department of Defense.

As I was growing up in the midst of the Cold War, I remember seeing these signs all over town.

A fallout shelter sign was plastered to the wall of my elementary school; although, for the life of me, I had no idea where the actual shelter was located, or if it even existed. Even as a nine-year-old boy, I had the good sense to realize that the logistics of the school's fallout shelter were deeply flawed: How would more than 1,000 students and teachers fit in a shelter--a fraction of the size of the school--when the entire building barely held us? Further, I had grave doubts that the shelter was stocked with enough food and water for us to survive a nuclear winter.

The shelters, especially the one at Nelson Elementary School in Niles, Illinois, didn't make a lick of sense, and the Cold War "duck and cover" drills we routinely performed were even more ridiculous.

The Cold War was a potential powder-keg of mutually destructive stupidity that even a suburban schoolboy could tell it was moronic. Let's hope these signs don't make comeback.

Old Menus - Fond Memories of Degustation

[Warning: This post contains graphic content.]

In a previous post, I talked about my experiences with the dorm food at ISU. But I've never related a particularly gory story regarding an unfortunate incident involving a dorm food menu, similar, in many respects, to this vintage Santa Fe Super Chief.

One day, ISU's dorm food supplier thought it prudent to add the caloric content next to each menu item on the bill of fare. This move inspired two of my dorm mates to enter into a grizzly food challenge: They would battle to see who could consume the most total calories in one sitting. By eating large portions of mashed potatoes and cream pie, it didn't take long for the winner's total to surpass 14,000 calories. Suffice to say, it's impossible to hold down this much savory goodness. The winner dashed upstairs to unload his winning cargo in one of the six sinks we all shared on the 15th floor of ISU's Manchester Hall. The janitor, bless his heart, refused to clean up the mess. (Nor would anyone else for that matter.)

This left one of the sinks hopelessly clogged and in deplorable condition.

As luck would have it, I found myself over the ill-fated sink one morning, a few weeks later, trying to brush my teeth. And, clumsy me, I dropped my toothbrush right into what was by then a gruesome scene. Thinking quickly, I grabbed the toothbrush and rushed back to my room to boil water for the sterilization of my dirty instrument. After a few minutes in a rolling boil, I removed the sterilized toothbrush and resumed brushing. In my haste, it didn't occur to me--until too late--that the hot water had caused the plastic surrounding the bristles to expand. I quickly found myself with a mouth full of very disgusting toothbrush bristles--whilst standing over a sink filled with weeks-old sick.

It was a low point.

Pinetop Perkins - Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen

Through dumb luck and quirky circumstances, I found myself virtually alone with the 94-year-old Pinetop Perkins, the last of the great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen, at the soundcheck of his recent Asheville appearance. Besides myself (and my wife), only the band members, sound guy, and the club owners were inside the venue at the time. It was one of those rare moments that send chills down your spine—an eerie sense that this really can’t be happening but it is. [Click over to my Asheville blog to see an image from the show.]

For most of the soundcheck Pinetop sat quietly in the seats near us, dressed up and clutching a cane, as he watched the band tune up. After a few minutes, Pinetop slowly walked the few feet to the stage, frail at 94, and was helped to his piano, where he graciously played his classic Down in Mississippi.

Even though frail, his voice was excellent, and his impossibly long fingers still smoothly moved across the keys. I’d forgotten what a truly great Chicago blues band could sound like. There is a huge difference between this level and lesser talents.

The highlights of the show were hearing him sing his theme song, They Call Me Pinetop Perkins, and a show-stopping version of Got My Mojo Workin'.

At 94, Pinetop's voice and piano work are still amazingly strong. Even so, it was like watching history, and knowing, certainly, that there would never be another opportunity to see a pre-war Delta Blues Master perform live again, which made the evening a little bittersweet for this life-long fan of the Blues.