Furniture and Van Scivers

When I bought my house, 35 years ago, as I was an older young adult, 40, to be exact, I had some ideas about furnishing.  I had lived in many apartments by that time, both in New Jersey and in Philadelphia, and I moved into my little bungalow with the intention of staying.  I used to quip "The next box out of this house will have me in it.  

At the time, i didn't have a car but kind friends would drive me to various 2nd hand furniture stores (before they were called 'vintage') and in particular, we went to Wacker's Trading Post in Glassboro on Delsea Drive, and to Bill's Second Hand Furniture in Mount Holly.  Later I will check and see if Bill's is still there, but I am sure Wacker's still exists.

My little bungalow was built in the 1940's and, particularly after a renovation, was devoid of closets.  It had one closet in the bedroom which became a staircase to the attic when the attic became a bedroom.  Then there was only one closet, a small hall closet for coats.  So it was imperative that I find furniture that could be used as closet space and cabinet space.  

At Bill's I found a handsome chiffarobe with a chest of drawers on one side.  It was a very dark wood, stained perhaps mahogany.  It spoke to me of detectives and hotel rooms and traveling men and rooming houses.  It had real personality and it was only $50!  

Then at a 2nd hand store on Broadway in Gloucester City (now defunct) I bought a beautiful complete bedroom set of Vintage 1930's WATERFALL Art Deco bedroom furniture:  a bureau, a chiffarobe, a bed-table, and much later, not part of the set, a cedar chest, same style.  The bedroom set was $600 total including delivery!  What a bargain!  And so BEAUTIFUL.  The bureau and chiffarobe had a mosaic of veneers arranged in a parquetry pattern.  The mirrors were framed by a golden glass etched with vines and flowers.  This was HEAVY furniture, substantial and with longevity.  All the history this furniture had seen.

Over the holiday, I saw a documentary about how every half hour a toddler is killed by Ikea furniture, the drawer open on the chest of drawers makes it unstable and liable to topple over onto little ones and kill them.  Get the old furniture, leave the Ikea in the warehouse.  Also Ikea has been illegally logging protected forests in Europe.  Another reason to buy vintage!

Wikipedia:

Distinguishing features

The style was distinguished by numerous features. It was named "Waterfall" due to its distinctive rounded drops at the edges of all horizontal surfaces, intended to mimic a flowing waterfall. Pieces in this style were usually finished with a blond veneer, though a small percentage were finished in a darker walnut finish. Drawer faces on more expensive Waterfall furniture often featured unusual designs such as decorative crossbanding and bookmatched panels. Handles were typically of orange Bakelite and brass, and some vanities had illuminated spheres or frosted panels. Pieces in this style were sometimes paired with oversized round mirrors with etched trim. The furniture was made with plywood, which would be molded during manufacturing.Higher-quality pieces would feature the Waterfall curve in molded plywood where the plywood softened edges of side corners. Mass-produced Waterfall furniture often simply featured a quarter-round edge.

Waterfall furniture contrasted from boxy walnut or mahogany pieces of the 1920s due to Waterfall's curved lines and its use of imported woods, including blond-colored Carpathian elm and golden padouk.

History

The Waterfall style became popular in America after creating a stir at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931. A company in Grand Rapids, Michigan was among the first to produce furniture in the style in the United States; their efforts were successful enough to inspire other furniture factories to produce Waterfall furniture, much of which was mass-produced and of poor quality.

__________________________________________________ Next, I bought a dining room set, but I can no longer remember where it came from, maybe the same Gloucester store.  It wasn't in good shape, but it was the perfect scale for my tiny kitchen and the table had an extension in it.  Very soon after I bought the set, also for $50, the chairs began to fall apart, no matter how many times I wood glued the supports.  It was a problem with the wood, it became dry, unstable and broke easily.  However, my parents were moving and in the attic of their historic house, were three ladder back chairs that needed a home - PERFECT! Though not the right period, the wood color matched and I have always loved ladder back chairs.  These were not in great shape either - except it was only the seats, not the legs, so I simply used the little electric saw my father had given me and made wooden panels to put on the seats, covered with cloth and seat cushions.  

The dining room set was signed on the bottom, 1947 Van Scovers, and I could clearly remember seeing that furniture store on the waterfront in Camden, when we went to church on Front Street in Philadelphia when I was a child.  Since I had been born in 1945, it seemed fated.  Wikipedia has a nice essay on the history of VanScivers.  Don't you miss those old landmarks?  At least I have the dining room set made there, and made American!

Well, Happy New Year Everyone!!!  Happy Trails To You!
wrightj45@yahoo.com

Baba Ram Dass died on December 22, 2019

Baba Ram Dass's book BE HERE NOW, had and still has a powerful influence on my daily life.  I have bought that book more times than any other book in my lifetime.  I bought it two or three times in the 70's and at least four times since 2000.  Sometimes I bought it because I couldn't find it, but mostly I bought it to give to my friends because it was so helpful to me.  The title says it all.
Baba Ram Dass not only gives you permission to be in the present moment, he gives you and injunction to.

My Protestant conscience taught me throughout my life to be my brother's keeper, to feel responsible for all the harm and misery in the world.  It weighed me down.  From my earliest days, I have been painfully aware of the suffering of other beings both near and far.  I can remember so many instances of real trauma and long lasting mental misery caused by things that were hardly noticed by others.  "How could they not care?" I wondered.

For two small examples:  One Easter my family was all dressed and ready to go to our local and family church, Gloria Dei, 'Old Swedes' Church, on Front Street in Philadelphia.  Outside on the street, ready to get into the car, I saw a cat in the gutter and picked it up.  "Put down that filthy thing?" MY mother cried out in horror.  "It's dead!"  

In explanation, my father said, "They climb onto the wheels to be near the warmth of the engine, then they fall asleep and the car cools down and they freeze."

It may have been my first experience of death.  And, I must add, my closest soul mates at that time (and possibly to this day) were cats and dogs, particularly cats with whom I have always had a deep and special bond.  That this memory remains after seven decades, speaks to the power of the moment.

The second incident was much later, when I was in my teens. I had just read the story of Pompei and the imagery was vivid and fresh in my mind.  I came out the front door of our house in the suburbs and my mother was pouring a pot of boiling water over the ants, a colony that had developed between white concrete sidewalk blocks.    I was horrified, connecting the ants, washed away by the boiling water with the people carried off by the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius.  I could almost hear them screaming.  

To me these creatures are as real as people and incidents of their powerless suffering and death haunt me.  They rise up in my mind and I suffer - sorrow, heartache, and it drags me down into worldwide despair for everything, children separated from parents at the border to Mexico, animals in labs, homeless cats in winter, creatures poisoned by pollution, whales caught in nets, and on and on.  I could be weighed down to depression and death by it all.

BUT Baba Ram Dass, supported, in my case, by many many other texts on Zen Buddhism, gives me permission to be here, in my present moment, right now, and gets me released from the jail of images from the Holocaust, and mail solicitation for animal rescue groups.  I am not there, I am not able to intervene, I am here and this is now, not the past, not the future.  It is such a remarkable relief for someone with an overburdened sense of responsibility and  empathy.  

It doesn't release me from a responsibility for right action, it simply relieves me from fruitless suffering over what I cannot affect, the past, or things beyond my realm.  

I have read many other Buddhist philosophers such as Jack Kornfeld, and Pema Chodrin ( second only to Baba Ram Dass in influence in my life) and subscribed over the years to Shambala Press, but Baba Ram Dass was the first to show me the way.
It is true that he was also supported by my experiments with LSD, and his guidance no doubt, directed the effect of the LSD.

I am glad Baba Ram Dass had the chance to live such a good long life, to age 88, and I am eternally grateful to him for helping me to live a better life.  May he rest in peace.

Another thought about THE BRITISH ARE COMING, Rich Atkinson

Sometimes a book is such as pervasive experience that long after you have finished it, it is still happening in your life. 

This morning I was reading a book review of Frank Dikotter's new book: HOW TO BE A DICTATOR - THE CULT OF PERSONALITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.  Those of us who lived through a good part of the twentieth century had the opportunity to observe several world infamous dictator's most notably Adolf Hitler, his sidekick Benito Mussolini, Emperor Hirohito, and our own pre-Revolution King George of Britain.  

One of the remarkable aspects to the personality of our George Washington, as portrayed in THE BRITISH ARE COMING, was his ability and tendency to share decision making and power.  He could have been king but he deferred to a democracy.  In most if not all of the decisions he made during the war, he gathered his generals and not only asked their opinions, but listened to them and adjusted his own ideas to fit any superior idea that came of the discourse.  

The first line in the review of the Dikotter book is:  "Dictatorship, has in one sense been the default condition of humanity."  He goes on to describe it in view of hereditary monarchy, chiefdom, patriarch, and all the many forms it has taken.  In view of this observation, which I think any knowledge of history would have to reveal, it is remarkable, almost miraculous, that George Washington did not give in to the personal ambition that brought him to the head of the army and could have made him the king of the new republic of America.  

I am not going to order this book because I am knee deep in books I have ordered this month and I have to read some of them before I order any more, but I may keep this essay.  If you want to read it, it is page 84 in The New Yorker, December 23, 2019.  There may be a copy at the local library or on-line.  Actually, I my bring it to the Whitall History Club in January as a conversation piece!  If you want to borrow my copy, you could meet me there.  James and Ann Whitall House, Red Bank Battlefield, National Park, NJ.  We meet at 11:00 on January 10, a Friday.  I can't tell you what a treat it is to be able to talk history with other interested people.  Few of my friendship group share this interest and the ones who do, are specific to other historical subject areas such as the Pinelands.

Happy Trails and MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com

Reading and Writing and the Revolution

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I will be returning to volunteer at the James and Ann Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield, National Park, NJ this spring after a few years hiatus.

One of the innovations initiated during my first run as a volunteer there, was the History Reading Club which meets once a month on a Friday.  Among other things, we read Job Whitall's diary in that club.  Mostly, in the old days, we each read on our own and reported back to the group any books we found useful and informative.  As time went by, during my time off, the format changed to where the club members read the same book and then discuss it.  

Their latest book is From Slaves to Soldiers, by Geakes.  I just bought it from amazon.  A book I will be bringing with me to share and discuss (if that is permitted) is The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson, volume 1 in a proposed 3 volume set.  It was marvelously written and very detailed.  I think one of the things that struck me was the immense, almost unfathomable amount of livestock and provisions needed to supply the armies both British and American.  In the book Atkins wrote of such numbers as 65,000 head of cattle gathered at an Irish port of departure.  literally hundreds of thousands of animals, pigs, cattle and horses were slaughtered annually, amounting, if anyone did the calculations, to the millions, over the course of the war.  The search for provisions literally dictated the course of the war as much as any other strategy or battle.

The other book I am going to bring to talk about is 266 Days, the account of the days the British occupied Philadelphia, told in the words of the inhabitants through diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts.  I am always interested in the on the scene, ordinary people, of any historical event, so this book was very interesting to me.  

It is December, and the ten crucial days of the Revolution in New Jersey would have played out during this month up in Trenton and Princeton.  When I walk the dog in the cold and feel the sting of the cold on my face, (as I am lucky enough to have a hooded puffy coat, a pair of quilted boots, heavy fleece lined mittens, and a neck scarf) I often reflect on the suffering of the stoic and stalwart soldiers who endured the biting sharp fanged cold of winter with none of these luxuries, all to bring us the independent constitutional republic in which we live today.

The history of our nation is a subject you can study for your entire life and there are an infinite number of routes of interest to follow in this study!

Merry Christmas everyone!  Happy Trails whether in the woods or in your mind!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com

First Day Hike at Batsto - Start the New Year Right!

First Day Hike at Batsto Village

Wednesday, January 1, 2020 at 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Batsto Village is one of many locations in the New Jersey State Park Service hosting a First Day Hike on New Year’s Day as part of America’s State Parks First Day Hikes program. Led by a knowledgeable and entertaining guide, this urban hike will bring you to key Revolutionary sites in the community where New Jersey began!

Start your new year with a family history walk through Batsto Village.

Hike Info

Easy ~ 1.5 miles

Families welcome (Village tracks may not be comfortable for strollers). Service animals only.

Meeting Location: Batsto Visitor Center, Wharton State Forest

31 Batsto Rd, Hammonton, NJ 08037

Registration & Cancellation

Pre-registration is REQUIRED. To register and/or for more information: alicia.bjornson@dep.nj.gov or call (609)561-0024. Include your name, number of people in your party, a cell phone number and email address. Cancelled if icy conditions. To check, call (856)275-6975.

These free First Day Hikes offer a great incentive to get outside, exercise, experience history, enjoy nature, and celebrate the New Year with friends and family in one of your state parks. Wear sturdy footgear and bring water and snacks. Check the weather before you leave the house and wear weather-appropriate clothing. Layers are best for exercising in colder temperatures.

Love Those Trains!! House Tours - a review!

Bordentown Holiday Train Show

December 13 - 15 | 4 PM - 8 PM
Old City Hall, Downtown Bordentown

The Old City Hall Restoration Committee presents the Holiday Train Display! Visit every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from Thanksgiving weekend through December to see this exciting show! There will be various photos, calendars, and memorabilia along with over 200 train pieces displayed for everyone's enjoyment. Admission is free. 

I have been to the train show many times and ALWAYS loved it because I love those trains!  Waiting for the year I can put mine up again - may take awhile, my cats are young!

House Tours at Christmas
I have gone on several over the years, Woodstown, and Haddonfield most recently.  Did not like the Haddonfield one very much - not interested in trees done by hired designers or all white houses, or places where you have to put plastic bags on your shoes as though visiting a crime scene.  Woods town was homier, but I still felt like an intruder, so maybe house tours just aren't for me.  Anyhow Collingswood is having a trolley tour which sounds like fun and here is Mt. Holly:

Mount Holly Holiday House Tour

Saturday, December 14 | 3 PM - 8 PM
Main Street, Mount Holly

Get into the Christmas spirit with the Mount Holly Holiday House Tour! The house tour is a fun and festive way to celebrate the holiday season. This year the tour will feature ten historic homes decorated in various styles of Christmas, plus some extra cheer from the The Woolman Memorial and Shinn Log Cabin! Proceeds benefit Main Street Mount Holly. 

(You know I love a log cabin as much as a model train platform, so I may try this one!

Merry Christmas!

Jo Ann

stocking stuffers

A friend and I had the pleasure of attending the CandleLight tour of the James and Ann Whitall House on Sunday.  They had a whole new approach this year and all new volunteers from the time when I was a docent there, so it was all new to me!

They also had a Christmas Shop in a tent outside with many charming and ALL handmade items.  I bought a little quilted tree with button ornaments to send my daughter and some handmade chocolates.  

If you are looking for something special you may find it here:

Holiday Market 2019

VISIT THE ANNUAL EILANDARTS HOLIDAY MARKET 2019. 
 

Friday December 13th, 5-9pm
and
Saturday December 14th, 10-5pm, 2019

Eiland Arts is in the old Merchantville Train Depot right off Center Street in Merchantville, NJ

Presentation on "Yahoos and Musrats: South Jersey and the Civil War"

Greetings--

The Genealogical Society of Salem County will host a program entitled “Yahoos and Muskrats: South Jersey and the Civil War” presented by The Delaware River Blues on Tuesday, December 10, 2019 at 7:00 pm at Friends Village in Woodstown, NJ. This program will be held in the residential dining room instead of the usual auditorium.
Reenactors from the Delaware River Blues will present the many contributions and experiences of the local population to the preservation of the Union in 1861-1865. Regiments covered will include the 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th NJ regiments. For more information, please visit www.delawareriverblues.org
This program is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit www.gsscnj.org, email genealogicalsocietysalemcounty@gmail.com, or call 609-670-0407.

Coal in your stocking

Coal, strangely enough, has returned as a subject in my life at the same time as it has returned as a subject in the political world.

Some of my earliest memories of coal are the coal delivery truck coming to our brick row house in South Philadelphia.  I would rush down to the basement to watch the chute come in the coal delivery window into or coal bin, which was actually a small closet like room, dark and dirty with old coal dust.  The coal came rattling down the chute in a torrent of black glittering gems.  I suppose my father shoveled the coal into our heater, but that part I don't remember at all.

The coal going into a furnace that I remember was at my grandmother's house in Ocean City.  She had a small black, pot bellied stove in her kitchen, and she would allow me to go to the coal bin and bring up a scuttle full of coal and then she would open the door to the blazing belly and I could use the little shovel to throw the coal in.

Also from my Philadelphia childhood, I remember the coal cars rattling down the railroad tracks on the waterfront where we went to church at Gloria Dei Old Swedes church.  I also remember the lowing of the cattle penned there I suppose for the slaughter house. So sad and mournful.  And I remember the hobos with their barrels full of fire, warming their hands.  Such sad sights for a young child, but that was city life in the first half of the twentieth century.

My father told me when he was growing up, near to the place where we lived in my childhood, he went to the railroad with his mother and brothers to pick up the coal that fell off the coal cars, to bring it home to heat their house.  After his father died, suddenly, on a return from a Merchant Marine voyage, my father and his widowed mother and his brothers were exceedingly poor.  It was the depression.  

What brought the idea of coal back into my current thinking, was reading a book 266 Days, an account of the 266 days of the British occupation of Philadelphia, city of my birth.  The narrative is built on the diaries, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and the letters from military men on both sides of the conflict.  The women's diaries talk a lot about marauders pulling down their fences and outbuildings to get the wood for fires for heat.  So, naturally, I was thinking of the times when people heated with wood instead of coal.

Wood fireplace fires are not effective which is why Benjamin Franklin, our historic genius, invented the Franklin stove.  A wood burning fireplace makes a LOT of heat close to the blaze, and leaves the air, a few feet away frigid.  I know this from my visits and volunteer work in historic houses and from the accounts in diaries that I have read.  

The greatest waste and destruction of the woods and forests of my current home, New Jersey, was to serve the iron smelting businesses and for charcoal making.  Vast swaths of our natural forests were destroyed as they are now being destroyed in the Amazon, which is heartbreaking to me.

Back to coal:  my next 'personal' experience with coal was when my parents retired to West Virginia.  Their next door neighbor, Mr. Rose, came often to visit and play cards.  He had a raspy voice and chronic cough because he suffered from 'black lung' disease which would kill him not long after my parents moved there.

Last night, I was watching THE CROWN, on Netflix, the series about the modern monarchy, Queen Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, in particular, and there was a brief and at the moment inexplicable scene switch to a rural school with a black mountain behind it.  Immediately I knew it was going to go back to the tragic coal mine disaster of Aberfan, Wales.  Although I didn't remember the details, I remembered the mine disaster and how the whole village had lost family members.  If you aren't familiar with the story, the disaster occurred in 1966, when a black mountain of coal waste became engorged from extraordinary rain fall.  The bloated mountain of soggy dust dislodged and became a thunderous avalanche that buried half the village and the entire school.  Only 22 of the 144 school children survived, one because her teacher threw her body over two of the closest children protecting them from suffocation.  

The scene in the show of the minors digging with their bare hands to free the children from their black ocean made me cry.  Every single family lost people, and half of the children of the village died.  

My first house had petroleum heat, a big tank in the yard and an ancient heater that stood by me for 30 winters and which had served since two years before I was born.  It was original to the house, built in 1947.  The liquid petrol would come in through a pipe, be spewed into the cabinet, set alight by a spark, and the heat generated would be air pumped through the registers, leaving a pale aura of black greasy dust around the registers.  

Eventually, about 3 years ago, I converted to gas, using a home equity loan.  It turned out to be a pretty expensive proposition once all the hidden costs were factored in:  the building permits, the substitution of a larger more expensive heater after the estimate had been found inadequate.  The total was a bit over 10,000, but the heater installation team assured me that I would get the cost back in a few years.  They were right.  Oil heat cost me $250 a month once the prices rose.  In the early days, $600 a year would keep the tank full and the heater going, but just half a dozen years later it rose to $1200 a year, and soon after, $100 a month, then $200 a month and up to $250 the last decade.  Also, my old tank had begun to leak through a rusted seam in the bottom and had to be removed and replaced.  Fortunately the tank removal guys dug up the dirt, replaced it with sand surrounded by stone, and the new tank held good until the gas heater replaced it all.

Recently in my town and surrounding areas, rooftops became covered with solar panels.  It was gratifying to see this transformation, though it could't work for me because of my trees.  The sun rarely to never sees my roof.

It is easy to take for granted the modern luxuries we enjoy, indoor plumbing (I have used an outhouse - again, in West Virginia, and they are horrible from the stench to the bees and spiders) electricity, heat, clean indoor water (I have also used a water pump, and have even fetched water from a mountain spring in a large 5 gallon plastic container - yes, always in West Virginia).  It is nice to turn on a faucet and have water, hot or cold!  Every day I appreciate the luxuries of my American bungalow in the 21st Century!  Often, I ponder on the marvels of living so long and seeing so many transitions in ordinary life.  I have lived from the end of the second World War, 1945, to 2019, soon to be 2020, from coal furnace to cable tv, from horse drawn huckster wagons down the alley to space travel.  AS the Grateful Dead have said, "What a Long Strange Trip it's Been!

The stockings are hung on the bannister to the attic at my house (no chimney) and when Christmas morning comes, there won't be any coal in them.  I wouldn't even know where to find coal these days!  Maybe in West Virginia.