For things to do and places to go try VISIT NEW JERSEY

Visit South Jersey

Since I have not been very up to date on places to go and things to do, mostly since I haven't been getting out and about much lately, I thought the least I could do would be to recommend that you sign up to get Visit New Jersey in your e-mail. They often have very interesting ideas: In this latest e-mail the ones that were interesting to me were the Rancocas Craft Market on the 27th all day. Many of the Visit New Jersey posts have to do with things at Winery locations and perhaps they support this web resource, since I don't drink at all, and have no interest in wine or winery events, I generally find about 3 or more events in their list of a dozen that are interesting to me, so it is well worth giving it a try.

Also, although I won't be volunteering there for this even, the Candlelight Tours of the James and Ann Whitall House will take place on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of December as happens each year. I haven't attended in some years and things have changed a great deal there since I left, so I can't give any more information but you can look it up. I would have volunteered but I can't drive in the dark any more due to vision impairment.

Happy Trails into Winter!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Composting/Cremation/Burials

Okaym at some point I may have to re-name my blog "Things to Think About" as well as places to go, but today I was reading the Harpers October issue (see To Be a Field of Poppies, pg. 36) and there was an interesting article on RECOMPOSE, a company created to compost human remains, rapidly and safely. Since I am 76 years old, I have given some thought to what I would like done with my remains. Needless to say, the first time many of us give any thought to this is when our parents die. Both of my parents were cremated in West Virginia and their ashes scattered in a memorial garden beneath a tree on the front hill. I always thought that was what I would do also, but in this article, several important points are made about the environmental impact of different forms of dealing with human remains after death. We all know New Jersey is a crowded place and as bad as it is to see farmland continually converted into housing developments, it seems even more wasteful to convert it to cemeteries. You must have seen the huge, almost endless vistas of cemeteries on the road to New York from New Jersey. It is shocking to those of us down here in the south of Jersey who are more used to the small, quaint burial places behind the local churches. Recently, I blogged about the disappearing cemeteries, those abandoned as the churches close and the people move on. The stones fall over, the mowers stop mowing and the saplings and weeds take over, joined by dumping of trash.

What I didn't know was that cremation puts a lot of pollution into the air and now that nearly half of hte people who die these days are cremated that is something to consider. In the article, which details the process and issues, they mention that it takes only 30 days to compost efficiently. Natural burials take about two years for a body to decompose, and as we who watch archaeology programs are well aware, bones ccan go on for a long long long time! I checked to see if composting was available in New Jersey yet and it is not but there were posts from funeral homes that said they would do it when it becomes legal. Apparently it is not that economical financially however. They said the average ordinary funeral burial arrangement costs about $7,000 to 10,000 and a Recompose costs at rpresent about $5,000 in Washington State where it is now legal. Cremation costs about $1000, so at this point, I will stick with cremation but if it becomes legal in New Jersey to compost human remains and the price goes down, when my time comes, that would be my choice! Hopefully it is a long way off!

Speaking of cemeteries, however, I must add that my favorites are Harleigh, resting place of Walt Whitman and a lovely place to visit for a walk or a drive, and Eglington in Mickleton. I haven't visited very many and it isn't a bad idea. I have seen numerous small churchyard cemeteries such as those behind the Friends' Meeting Houses in Haddonfield and Salem and Greeenwich.

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

My Thanksgiving cookery - The Three Sisters 11/25/21

Two of the three recipe's I am going to type here were given to me by friends. It goes without saying that if you can make these dishes with fresh foods, like fresh potatoes or carrots, you SHOULD! But I am giving you these because they can be made from canned goods. And while I am on that subject let me say a THANK YOU for canned goods! So many things about our modern world are worh hoting and being grateful for and canned goods is certaily one. A diversion - a family memory: When I was in my teens, my family had moved from the red brick canyons of South Philadelphia. In our New Jersey development, we had a big backyard beside a farm field where the farmer still grew corn. My parents had just been through World War II and their families had survived thanks to the Victory Gardens grown in the patches of field still remaining where the sports arenas and airport was finally built. So, my parents got rieght to work making a big garden. My father grew cucumbers, corn, carrots, potatoes, beans, squash, and of course, New Jersey's most famous fruit the TOMATO! They were so successful that they took up preserving. They bought cases of BALL jars and rubber washers and studied the safe procedures for pickling and preeerving. My father built a food pantry beneath the staircase to the second floor and after steaming days of late summer harvest, the shelves were filled with jewel colored jars of spiced tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, and preserved everything else.

I can still remember my poor mother, in the evening in the summer heat, in her apron, standing over the boiling pots of jars being sterilized. She spent a lot of time standing over boiling pots, my mother. I remember her boiling the glass baby bottles she used for my brothers and sisters, born in the new development of New Jersey. Those were the days of diapers which had to be rinsed, washhed, hung out to dry, and no air conditioning in the houses yet. She stood over those steaming racks of boiled jars, and over the huge pots of boiled vegetables night after night. I am not sure when they stopped, but I can understand why - it was just too much work and you could buy it all and we had plenty of money and the stores had plenty of products. The days of scarcity were over.

Some yeqrs back, Dr. Mehmet Oz was featured in a cover story about the safety of canned goods on the cover of a popular news magazine, Maybe Time, maybe Newsweek. Anyhow, he maintained that although canned goods were not as nutritious as fresh or frozen, they were certainly safe. That was good news becaue I think there had been a scare about the storage of food in metal cans. Apparently the metal in modern canned goods is safe. Anyhow the following recepice's are all from canned goods which mean you can buy these cans aghead of time, store them in a cupboaard and in snow, or bad weather, or anytime you don't want to go shopping, you can make these soups with canned goods!

From Pam Enticknap, a a former college and art friend who was from New England and made this oup with fresh ingredients but it can be made with canned: 1 can of potatoes whole or sliced 1 can of creamed corn 1 can of whole sweet golden corn That's it! Put them in a pot with a few tablespoons of Earth's Promise olive oil based butter substitute, then do a little mashing with a masher or an immersion blender and you have a sweet creamy soup on a cold day! At present, we have a salmonella scare on onions from Mexico so this is a safe alternative to the fresh onions version.

From Ann Horton, a former poetry friend 1 can red beans 1 can black beans 1 can white beans 1 can of corn 1 can of spiced diced tomatoes 1 jar of Slasa Again, just open them, put them in a po and cook! I put a tablespoon of chili in too and I serve it over brown rice (which you can buy frozen and microwave) and with lime flavored tortilla chips. Needless to say, you can make all that fresh with a pressure cooker and I have done it, but the canned goods make it a half hour prep experience!

Finally, my own discovery. In the 'foreign foods aisle of my ShopRite (where they have Chinese foods and Goya products) you can find canned lentils. 2 cans of lentils 1 can of cut carrots Again, I repeat, you can cook your own lentils and peel and cook your own carrots and I am certain it would be more delicious, but this is from storage on a day you are out of fresh produce and don't want to go to the store. When I make these things I like to think of the places in the world they come from and how old thee grains adn beans are in our history. The Three Sisters are the foods the Indigenous people used as their basic diet and which they offered to the first pilgrims to save them through the winter when they arrived: Beans, Corn, and Squash.

So pick up the canned goods on some can can sale day and put them in the cupboard and when winter and snow trap you indoors - you are all set to cook and enjoy and be warm! Happy Thanksgiving. Again, please do't bother with the comments on this web site p it is entirely polluted by robot scam stuff, if you want to reach me, use my e-mail wrightj45@yahoo.com Happy Trails! Jo Ann, by the way I enjoyed New Jersey cider with my meal!

The War of the World Views - Mankind, Civilization, Sapiens and the Dawn of Everything

Teleological - the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than ofy the cause by which they arise

Throughout my long life, I have been a big fan of the epic - the epic historical narrative, the epic explanation of the way things are, the epic on the small scale and the large scale. One of the first experiences I had with the epic description of human history was probably Will and Ariel Durant's Civilization. Along with reading such books, most fondly The People's History of the United States by one of my life heroes, Howard Zinn, there werre the popular epic historical drama of the cinemascope era, Lawrence of Arabia and Gone With the Wind. Theee were all fabulous introductions to the ideea of different viewpoints. Needless to say, I had my collection of Women's History of the United States, and Women's History (of a number of things - most of the ones we had been traditional left out of).

I am still a big fan of the tv weries old and new and just began to watch again Civilization, narrated by Sir Kenneth Clark and first appearing in 1969. Some of the big views were through the lense of architecture and art, which was my later road into the big history. My second degree is a B.A. in Fine Arts and one of the most difficult, or challenging courses I ever took was History of Art, a full year, two semester course that relied heavily on memorizing, which is something I am not good at! Nevertheless, I loved it and took legal size pads of notes redeced them to index cards, studied and studied and got good grades. We viewed the history of humankind via statues like the Venus of Willendorf and temples like Stonehenge then, of course up through the tried and true Crete, Minoan and Greek, Roman and Midieval periods, through the modern and post modern via paintings and finally film and photography. Sir Kenneth Clark took a similar journey via temples and churches and Roman roads and Aquaducts. The television series I jsut finished watched was a quick and action movie style look at the rie of humanity via mainly wars of conquest and defense. I read some commentary on the International Movie Database and it was mostly critical. My opinion is that all of these journeys are like road trips. If you take the bus, you see one landscape, if you take the train another, and by plane or boat something else entirely, then there is by foot! However that said, my main criticism is as always that Mankind was about MENKind. You'd have to wonder where all the people came from since women weere rarely pictured let alone mentioned, although, as usual, a warrior queen or two were thrown in as a sop to the complainers. ,p/> What is interesting to me in the extreme is when historians take on the whole package of how something is organized and presented which is, of course, what Howrd Zinn did and what an eye opener that was! Instead of focus on Kings and Conquerors like the perrennial favorites Ghengis Khan and Alexander the Great, Zinn took a look at history from the ground up, through the lives of the little people and forever changed my interests in history. While I am on that subject, I have to interject that the view of history from the peope who lived it has always been my most passionate interest and I love the study of first-person sources such as journals and memoir. That said, however, so much of our HUMAN history occurred before any individuals could write about it, the story must be told via the ghostly bones of early cities and the few notable objects of material culture that must then be interpreted. So, take for example the Venus of Willendorf, the small stone idol, found in the thousands over stone age Europe can be a remnant of a Goddess worshipping period, cult, or the symbol of some other kind of worship like fertility. We don't know, we can only buess using our own bias and experience. Here I must bring in Maria Gimbutas. The book of hers that I read was The Civilization of the Goddess. She was a noted archaeologist and anthropolist.

Recently I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari but I was not as impressed as many of the reviewers whose essays I read. I liked him better in interviews, most recently in a Sunday New York Times Magazine interview I think I mentioned in another blog entry. He is challenged by Graeber and Wengrow in a very well written and gripping essay in the November 6, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, by Gedeon Lewis-Kraus, pg. 62. Their new book takes a far more free-form appreach and apparently, takes a view of the power of happenstance rather than design. I recommend you read the esay, it is far more than I could summarize in this blog entry. It is well worth the read. And even though it is so fueled by testosterone fantasy, I recommend Mankind, the Story of Us which I saw on amazon prime, if for no other reason than it gives another side dish to go with the Thanksgiving meal - the history of human beings!

By the way and totally off topic, I will be having Thanksgiving with my sister and brother a couple of days after the traditional Thursday, because my sister is the cook and she has to work. For my own personal at-home Thanksviing, I have a nice pot of sweetpotato/carrot soup, and for the day after, a nice pot of corn chowder. Obviously I am a vegetarian, but at my sister's dinner, I will enjoy the sides as they eat the turkey. Hope you have a lot to be thankful about and that you have the awareness of all the things you have to be thankful for! Happy Trails! Jo Ann

An Amazing Bit of WWII History

From the Smithsonian November 2021 issue, this story:

Surely if you have known any children in the last 30 or 50 years, you have probably read the Children's Literary Classic - CURIOUS GEORGE. The authors and illustrators, H. A. and Margaret Rey were once trapped in southern France as the Nazi army marched and bombed its way over France. They were helped by a miraculously brave and generous hearted Portuguese diplomat named Aristides Sousa Mendez. He had been forbidden by his superiors to issue visas to the thousands of refugees piling up along the border to Spain, hoping to ecape the onslaught of the Nazi occupation. He defied his orders and set up a veritable assemply line to stamp passports and issue visas to thousands of people from all walks of life. They were making their way through Spain to Portugal and from their to any place they could get to, South America, the U.S. It was a life and death situation.

If you never read Curious George, perhaps you might have seen the classic Humphrey Bogart nd Ingrid Bergman movie, Casablanca. That movie as about those same refugees after they have escaped as far as Morocco and are trying to get away to any place safe. The young woman who begs for help from the Vichy consul and then gets help from Rick (Humphrey Bogart) wa an actress who actually got her visa from Sousa Mendez and escaped via that route to the U.S.

A descendent of one of the thousands saved by Mendez, Olivia Mattis, set up a foundation to honor his memory and preserve his legacy. Among the many professors, physician, scientists, teachers, musicians and writers along with the thousands of ordinary people trying to flee with their families, were such luminaries as Salvador Dali, the famous Surealist painter, and his wife, Gala. Sousa Mendez continued to make visas and stamp passports even after the town where he had been stationed had been bombed. Eventually, his superior in Portugal ordered that none of his signed passports should be honored at the Portuguese border. Sousa Mendex was stiffly reprimanded, punished with financial disaster, and denied his pension. One of Sousa Mendez son's actually joined the U.S. army and was part of the force that landed at Normandy. Sousa Mendes died in poverty from stroke but his memory and his nobility will be remembered by the descendants of the thousands he saved.

Happy Trails, Jo Ann

HISTORY: America - Our Defining Hours

If you have HULU, a streaming service, or if you have a subscription to the History Channel, I urge you to watch AMERICA: Our Definihg Hours. What a great series. It is in three parts and begins with the Revolution. I never watch tv during the day - never have. But today, I was so excited by this series which I began to watch lat night, that in place of my afternoon reading time, I decided to tune it again for part 3 which covers the first half of the twentieth Century.

As a devoted follower and reader and learner in HISTORY, I am well aware of the mythical plot pattern where all is almost lost and the hero emerges from the people to lead them to safety and they survive. One of my favorite all time foreign films was PATHFINDER and Icelandic saga. It follows the same theme. I couldn't help but produce a tear for the heroes of our own most dangerous times: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. To think of the nobility of purpose the daring, the selfless devotion, the wide ranging intellectual accompishment and the huility of being able to get the necessary help from others which made it possible for these heroes to bring us back from the depths.

They aren't the only heroes, needless to say, all the brave and selfless heroes on other strata of accomplishemnt who led the people from despair to victory ar the sacrifice of their own lives are also always present in my heart and mind, Clara Barton, Margaret Sanger, Alice Paul, Harriet Tubbman, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavesz, Dolores Huerta, Joe Hill and so many many others up and down the social scale.

But my point is, if you haven't seen this, please watch it and if you have seen it, it may be worthwhile to watch it again! I have revisited many programs and leanrned a great deal the second time around, for example, with TURN!, the Revlutionary spy series. The first time I watched it, on my tv, I could barely make it out in the murky color of it, and I had a lot of trouble with my hearing, but when I watched it again, through a treaming service (I think it was amazon) I could really see it and hear it and enjoy it.

It appears I spoke too soon, or perhaps I spoke before I could make an informed critique because I have just gotten to the near end of the series and they sckip right from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement to the 911 bombing and once again the Women's Movement is entirely ignored. It happned and it affected half the entire population of the United States!!! Half the people in this coutry couldn't vote until 1919. Half of us paid taxes without representation until 1919, and half the population of this country suffered discrimination in every walk of life until the Women's Movement and yet both the Suffrage movement and the Women's Civil Rights Movement of the 1970's are ignored by this series. Our Civil Rights matter too, and our gatherings of 200,000 are as important as the gathering of any other civil rights groups, or labor groups. I am so disappointed at this omission. It ruined this series for me.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Freeman Dyson, Carl Woese, Yuval Noah Harari

Some years ago, in a New York Review of Books article on Freeman Dyson, I ran across a quote from Carl Woese, great and renowned biologist that had such an impact on my that I have copied it into every diary I have written since then. The Review was of OUR BIOTECH FUTURE, 2007. Freeman Dyson quotes Woese:

"Imagine a child playing in ae woodland strem, po9oking a stick into an eddy in a flowing current, thereby disrupting it, But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disrupts it again, and again it reforms.....There you have it, organisms are resilent patterns in a turbulent flow, patterns in an energy flow. It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems we must come to see them not as machines but as stable, complex, dynamic organization."

Harari, in an interview in Sunday New York Times, 11/14/21 says, "I explored the way in which the information revolution disintegrates the human individual which is the foundation of humanism, and liberalism......it is no longer that a human being is this magical self which is autonomous and has free will and makes decisions about the world. No, a human being like all other organisms, is an information processing system that is in continuous flow. It has no fixed assets."

What brought both of these essays to mind was an essay I was reading about the journals of Claude Fredericks, a professor of classics at Bennington College. He wasn't faouus in his on his own, but was a friend of many famous authors such as May Sarton, and Anais Nin, and poet James Merrill. He kept journals from the age of 8 until his death and the Getty has purchased and archived his journals. This was interesting to me as I have kept journals for 50 years and have been a fan of the new literary art form known as "Autofiction" which was made famous by the author Karl oOve Knaussgaard through his 4 to 6 volume work called My Struggle (of which I have read 3 or 4 volumes).

All of this coincided with an essay on not getting rid of our stuff which I wrote about yesterday. My home is, in a way, an encapsulated history of one organism, kind of like the fossil remains of a T-Rex in the desert of the West, or of a saber tooth cat in a tar pit in California. There are my journals, and my paintings, and my accumulated bits of flotsam and jetsom, rocks, fossils, photographs, postcards, books by the thousands.

All these bits of material Culture, describe the life of an organism, a free floating bit of humanity in the continuous dynamic stream of history that is time made manifest. I wanted to share these thoughts with you because they have been so compelling to me over the years. I hope you are insired to look up the original sources and read them for yourself!

Happy Trails - like leaves floating on the ripples in a pod

The Last Word: Why I'm not throwing out my stuff, Sandy Hingston in The Week

Ages ago, before the Pandemic, there was a fad for what was called "Swedish Death Cleaning" by which we were (we old people that is) supposed to clear out our crap before we died and spare the inheritors having to do it. Right from the start I hated that idea for many reasons. First of all, I was insulted at the idea that I should erase all evidence of my life beore I even died! Secondly, didn't clearing out our parents' things after they were gone give us a chance to grieve and remember and cry and hold onto a memory of happy times! It is true that I didn't take much, mostly photographs, which is also what I inherited from my Grandmother, photos of her parents from the late 1800's.

Also, as a volunteer for half a dozen historic sites and organizations, Historical Societyies, since my retiremtne, I am very conscious of what the objects of the past tell us about times that are gone, and people who were here before we were. I used to be a suitcase history volunteer for a Historical Society and I took a chest of objects to grade schools to talk to children about Colonial history. The wonder on their faces when they handled the tools and tried to figure out what they were used for, or when they tried on the spectacles, or dressed up in reproduction cclothes. We lament that our children don't know about or care about histoty and then talk about discarding it as though those very objects are not the things that make history come alive!

There is a difference between hoarding and clutter and conserving family heirlooms. Old cardboard boxes, plastic milk jugs, clothes many sizes too small, these things should be put into the recycling stream, not packed away in corners and sheds, back rooms and attics - oh, but while we are on the subject of attics - When I was a college student working on a degree in Art, a sculpture teacher once caused us students to ponder the upcoming new world of houses without atticd. It immediately called up to me a memory turned over in my mind many times in my lifetime, of a place in my early childhood called Scott Storage. In Ocean City, on Asbury Avenue, near 6th Street, there was a huge (to my under ten year old eyes) warehouse with a dark, murky cavernous interior chock filled with giant and ornate pieces of mahogany Victorian furniture, plus pianos and most interesting of all, figureheads from ships, steering wheels from the helms, and small wooden boats once used with bigger sailing vessels were also stored there. Standing guard at the entrance with the old man on the chair, smoking his pipe, was a cigar store Indian. My family didn't have an attic, because we lived in a brick row home in South Philadelphia, but Scott Storage was enough of an example to get me pondering the question of what if there was no place to save the material culture of the past?

Mark my words, as soon as the young minimalist millenials reach the later stages of middle age, they are going to long to see those America Girl Doll trunks, those Polly Pockets, those Teddy Ruxpins and they will wish they could visit just one more time with the beloved books of their childhood such as Caps for Sale, or John Burningham's The Cupboard. My hoouse is my own little Old Curiosity Shop, and it will remain somewhat dusty and cluttered with the accumulated treasures of my 76 years until I die and no longer care about these things. My daughter can earn back all I did for her by going through these things and remembering me, and she can cry and grieve, and as she lets go of each item, she can send some of her sorrow awaay with it, the way you can tell your worry to a Guatemalan Wworry doll and toss it into a field.

Happy Trails, through the woods or through the dust - Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com s

The Doll Houses of Ocean City

My cousin sent a few articles to me about the Doll HOuses of Wovern Place in Ocean City and I am about to returnn them to her so I thought I would post about them. I think I may have done a post about them before, but I can't remember. My cousin Patty, by the way, lives in the Villas, near Cape May, another interesting seashore location! Once when we were visiting a seashore historical society, we came across an old advertisement for the houses where she now lives. It was a charming holiday advertisement with the holly corner decorations and the houses were so ridiculously inexpensive that we had to gasp! Patty's mother bought the house in the Villas decades ago and when she died, she left the house to her only child, Patty. When Patty's husband died, Patty used some of her inheritance to renovate the Villas house, modernized the electrical and plumbing, the roof and so on, then she packed up and moved from her family home in Norristown, Pa. where she and her husband had raised three sons, to the Villas to start a new life.

Patty and I were both very closely connected to our Grandmother Mabel who had, herself, moved to the seashore after her husband, my grandfather, died. Grandmom moved into a house owned by her sister and took care of their mother, my great=grandmother after a catastrophic stroke left her paralyzed. She took care of her for 15 years! During all the years of my childhood, my father, mother, and the brother closest to my age, went to Ocean City visit with my Grandmother almost every weekend. We played on the beach and walked on the 'boards' which is what locals always called the boarwalk. My grandmother worked in summer on the boardwalk at an amusement arcade, in a ticket booth. In winter, she worked in Stainton's Department Store. She worked all the way into her 80's, until she had a heart attack. My grandmother lived with her brother, my Uncle Yock, most of their adult lives after her mother passed away. So, we spent a lot of time in Ocen City and had a lot of favorite and intimately familiar places. My all time favorite was the big Warehouse two doors down from my grandmother's place - Scott' Storage. They had a lot of maritime salvage including ship's prow heads sculpture, a cigar store Indian, and a great deal of enormous Victorian furniture, most likely the orphaned furnishings of previoos seashore residents who were replaced by modern people who wanted lighter, summery furniture rather than the heavy dark wood furniture of the past.

Though I explored vigorously growing up, wherever I was, in the city of my birth, Philadelphia, or in Ocean City, I never came upon the Doll Houses of Wovern Place, even though they were aparently not far from the last house my grandmother had before she died, which was at 11th and Bay Avenue. According to the article sent by my cousin, the deeds on the houses go back to 1871. The houses are located in an area around 13th and 15th Streets and Bay Avenue. My grandmother's house was just a house up from the fishing pier over the Bay, another favorite spot of mine. Just thinking about it now, I can smell the briny bay. My cousin's directions are to take Bay going north from 34th Street, turn left on 15th to Wovern Place then turn right on Wovern She said the houses are only on opne side.

If, like me, you enjoy the seashore off season and in winter, you may like to make the Doll Houses a 'go to- goal or your next drive to the shore. Now that I have a new car, I just might give it a 'go' myself!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

This just received via e-mail. Camden City Park at Cooper River!

Modern waterfront park to open in Camden at former city dump site

By Noah Zucker

phillyvoice.com

Fifty years after Camden decommissioned its city dump on the Cooper River, officials and residents of the Cramer Hill neighborhood have reclaimed the space with a modern waterfront park. Work on the $48 million, 62-acre park, which features a fishing pond, kayak launch and 8 miles of multi-use paths...

GSSC - Tracking History Along the Delaware Bay in Photos" by Steve Barry

The Genealogical Society of Salem County will host a program entitled "Tracking History Along the Delaware Bay in Photos" by Steve Barry, editor of Railfan & Railroad magazine on Tuesday, November 9, 2021 at 7:00 pm. This meeting will be held in the Woodstown Friends Meeting House at 104 North Main Street in Woodstown. Photographer Steve Barry has family roots in far southwestern New Jersey in the marshlands that border the Delaware Bay. Over the past few years, he has taken his camera down to the region to explore some of the sights. Along the way he has photographed the historic, the mundane, and the offbeat — all a part of the fabric of life along the bay. He will share some of his favorite photographs of his explorations of this unique corner of New Jersey. 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.

--Bonny Beth Elwell VP of GSSC

Blogging, the Brain, The Sopranos, Hobbes, The Revolution

Yesterday, November 6th, I was reading Archaeology Magazine aboutht the mysterious Picts of Scotland. Like the Anglo Saxons and the Celts, they were a preliterate society and left no records of themselves for us so all we have to go on is the mentions of them by Romans in regard to battles on the frontier of Briton in the few hundred years around 300 ad. Recent excavations on a hilltop have revealed traces which point to a Pictish settlement of about 4000 residents with an enclosed fort at the top of the hill which the magazine aarticle authors describe as 'high status' because of the presence of Samian pottery, Roman amphora, possibly for wine, and metal worked objects. What stuck in my mind after reading the article was how often I have both read and heard on tv archaeology programs these descriptions of 'high status' dwellings, based on the pottery and other artifacts found there. The Picts were noted by the Romans for their ferocity in defending their lands from invasion and for the blue tatooing over their bodies which is the origin of the description name 'Picts' which stands for pictured or image covered people. The article went on to say that the people called 'Picts' were actually probably a loose network of Celtic and Gaul tribal people draawn together mainly to defend themselves from the Romans.

When you read and listen to books and programs about the times of the Anglo Saxons, the Celts, the Northern Barbariansm the vikings, what is striking is the clash of the lawless savagery of the cultures of conquest and pillage. These peoples as well as the Romans, were in the process of organizing themseles into lawful civilizations, by which I mean civilizations that do not exist by means of the invasion and pillage of their neighbors. As we know, the Vikings business was theft, enslavement, extortion and destruction. These basically evil and destructive ways of making a living are with us still in the form of the 'mob' the Cosa Nostra, the drug cartels, and all the other forms of organized crime including politial organized crime such as ISIS.

The philosopher, Hobbes, who "implied that natyure is red in tooth and claw unless we set up social institutions to curb and control it, in so far as human nature interferes with the smooth running of human society."

Re-watching the Sopranos, described by many tv critics as the greatest tv series of the golden age of tv series, brings to mind many thoughts and conjectures about Hobbes and that part of human nature which pumps itself up with the false idea that "might makes right." Many times in human history we have seen this play out, most recently in World War II where the Nazi Party initially was thriving via the notion of brute force as the greatest weapon for the conquest of neighboring lands and seizing the products of others' labor as well as their lives. They were defeated, so was Napoleon. It seems to me that civilzation is always moving towards greater organization based on cooperation and non-viloent resolution of conflict and the distribution of resources, but you cannot help but see this constact contest played out in the show the Sopranos.

The criminals in this show live entirely off the labor of others, through extortion, robbery and murder. They are a cancer on society. I think the character of Dr. Melfi, the psychologist that Tony Soprano sees from the beginning of the series, represents US, the viewers, who are mesmerized by this human contradiction, a human who looks like us in so many ways but appears to act devoid of the characteristics the rest of us take for granted, empathy, a sense of fair play. Like Dr. Melfi, we want to know what makes him tick, how this creature 'works' and as so often has happened in psychiatry and in culture, it gets blamed on his mother, who Dr. Melfi labels as 'anti-social' and 'borderine personality disordered.' However, that takes away all responsibility for all the decisions made by Tony Soprano the rest of his life. We all rise from and evolve from our family originas

The Sopranos have all the 'high status' objects of our modern culture, expensive car, expensive lavish house, swimming pool, jewelry and cash, and yet none of them are happy. In a previous post, I said that it was like watching the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire all over again because the Roman Empire, like the Nazi Empire rose on its brute strength and conquest, and declined and fell. Historians have picked over the corpse of the Roman Empire for the more than thousand years describing the causes of the decline. One of the indisputable causes as well as contributing factors, was the rise of Christianity. The value system that Christianity, at least in its early stages exemplified was the opposite of the "Might makes Right" value system. It made a moral right, a right based on love and cooperation, empathy and compassion, sharing and understanding and it superceded the irrational fluctuating emotional systems of pagan religions of greedy and temperamental gods.

These forces are again playing out in our own culture. Men scratch and claw blood money to buy the symbols of status current to the American Empire, expensive cars, huge expensive mansions, exotic label clothing and products (think designer bags and label suits and clothes such as Armani or Prada) while their greed becomes a cancer that eats at the fabric of their society.

Sadly, the side of human nature that is greedy and lazy and craves excess has arisen in our society and instead of hunerstnding the subtle message of history implied in shows about the Vikings or the Sopranos, people revel in the brute violence of it, just taking and using and discarding in immediacy without thinking of consquences and without empathy. That is the destructive force which will kill our society and our planet unless the better side of our natures finds some expression that can, like an immune system, find, envelope and unarm this dangerous disease.

As I have said in previous posts, robot hackers have destroyed the comments function on this blog site so if you wish to discuss any posts, it is best to e-mail me and I can reply. wrightj45@yahoo.com

Such beautiful augumn weather, I hope you are able to get out and about in it! Happy Trails - Jo Ann

The book History Club is going to read for our January meeting is FOUNDING BROTHERS, by Joseph Ellis who won a Pulitzer Prize. I imagine we will find a mirror in the arguments and ideas they faced in creating this nation, to the one we face today in trying to maintain it.

Camden Shipyard and Maritime Museum - Not Open

It is really annoying to me when cultural sites post that they are OPEN when they are NOT. Today, I looked up the Camden Shipyard and Maritume Museum on the web and it said it was open on Thursdays from noon to 4:00 p.m. I called the listed number a half dozen times but it went straight to the mailbox which was not functioning. Since I live less than a half hour away, I decided to make the drive though I was warned off by my sister who passes through that area frequently on her way to and from her jobs working for catering companies. She said the address was near what they call "Five Points" and it is an infamous drug selling corner. She told me took around carefully before I got out of the car.

I drove there at about 1:30 and, indeed, there was someone loitering about who looked like he was waiting for a car to summon him for a transaction, so I drove around the corner, passing several despairing (possibly strung out) people on the sidewalk and the steps of adjacent buildings. The web site said you could park in a lot at the back, but I drove down a trash strewn alley and did not see a lot, so I went back out front and parked. I tried all three doors, two of them with ramps and one with high steps (hard on my knees). It seemed to me none of the buzzers were working. No one came to any door even when I tried knocking when the buzzers didn't seem to work. Finally, after tripping on some vines across one of the paved paths from a door, I gave up. Fortunately a police car was parked at the corner which was reassuring to me. I drove around the block past rows of abandoned houses, some boarded up, others with blck and gaping holes where windows and door had been.

Years ago, I went to college at Rutgers in Camden, and had many explorations there, so I wasn't surprised by the degradation the city has endured. But each time I go, there is a new tragedy. The last time I went, the library had been abandoned and destroyed. The library on Broadway had been so beautiful I had taken children from the summer programs I worked in at the time, to visit it. I remembered the block glass upper balconies and the marble busts of great writers in the niches between alcoves where people could read in peace and quiet. It was a graceful and beautiful old building allowed to rot and ruin.

Camden is like a sick and dying creture, set upon by scavengers. It is so sad, and sad for the people who still try to live there. The Camden Shipyard and Maritime Museum is in what was once an old and beautiful Episcopalian Church. I imagine inside you can still see the beauty of the stained glass windows. I am glad the church was at least put to a good and cultural purpose and not allowed to fall to ruin like the library, BUT that said, ALL ventures whether cultural or profitable, shops or museums, should post if they are open only by appointment. It is always wrong to post that you are open if you are probably not going to be open.

too tired to go into the whole volunteer situation now, but a lot of places that run on volunteer labor cannot be certain of their staff, so they should post by appointment only and at least make sure the telephone works!!

Jo Ann

Veering off from History to Current Culture - the Sopranos - a ReWatching

The DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE - AGAIN!!

Because I read so many magazines and newspapers, I couldn't help but be drawn into the current crze for re-watching the Sopranos which many media critics have crowned as "the best Tv series in the golden age of tv series." I started watching last night, my second time as I watched it when it was new in the 90's. Once again many themes emerged for me:

1. The immoral and destructive culture of GREED and Each Man for Himself that is at the heart of all crime. ,p/> 2. The capitalist delusion that happiness can be bought and that it comes from money and social prestige.

3. The disdain for others, whether different races or different sexes - the Tribal mentality that all others, outside the tribe of of no worth and also are enemies.

4. The psychopathic lack of consciousness of the value of life. This goes against almost all civilization.

5. The rise of brute force as a measure of success and hence the concept that brute force is at the center of masculinity. ,P/> An often isquoted phlospher whosse mane I will have to look up again said that "Nature is red in tooth and claw without the social contract." The social contract is law, civilization, a set of governing values that all agree to abide by for the good of all and which we see eroded over all the world at present where individual selfish desire and greed have pushed to power at the cost of the common good.

There is a lot to think about in this program and also I wanted to mention the common references to the Roman Empire as in, perhaps the second or third episode where Tony Soprano's says "We are the Romans." It is worth noting that the Roman Empire like the Viking culture was baed on slavery and b rute power to steal from others their land, the lives, and the product of their labor. At various times in our own history we have faced and rejected these negative values as in the second World War when we faced, fought and defeated the Nazi criminal expansion and theft of entire neighboring countries.

Gender is a whole other topic for another time as I am getting ready to go to visit the Camden Shipyard and Maritime Museum for the first time this afternoon and before I go, I have a dog to walk!

Happy Trails whether on land, on water, or on thought waves!

Jo Ann

Being a Generalist and AGING

Just a couple of days ago, I picked up my latest painting from the Eiland Arts Gallery which is located in the old historic train station in Merchantville, New Jersey. I LOVE this place - it is a coffee shop and Art and Music venue run by a warm, friendly and talented woman named Nicole Eiland with the help of her partner Matt Eiland. The way I found out about this place was that I am a lifelong fan of trains and train stations and one summer I was driving along Atlantic Avenue seeking out the train Stations that I knew and taking photographs of them. They are a disappearing lot. Some of the lucky ones have been saved by local historical societies, like the one at Laurel Springs, others have been repurposed like the one in Audubon which is a dental office, but my favorite re-urposed one is Eiland Arts Center. I visited one in Berlin which still functions as a historic depot, and I believe the one in Haddon Heights is under the protection of a model railroad group because I visited it once, long before the pandemic and spoke to the men from the model railroad group.

I can trace my love of trains back to my father and our Christmas platform, and his love of trains. When we were children, my father took us on many historic railroad lines, steam trains, mine branches, and my father, an ironworker actually put a train into the Smithsonian! We visited the train that his company was hired to transport and place in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. They had to take out a wall to do it and put the wall back in place. My father had a heroic life. But it was the model train platform, that minitature world, that captured my heart and I can still remember the smell of the engine oil he used on the locamotive. Somehow the trains never captured my brothers the way they did me and sadly, gender politics being what they were, he gave them the trains and they sold them. I would have kept them all my life.

Anyhow, even bus stations are magical and evocative to me and my favorite was the old wooden bus station in Ocean City which I visited several times in the years when I didn't have a car. IIt is now endangered and surrounded by chain link fence) My grandmother lived in Ocean City and it was a town deeply rooted in my life, so even after she was gone, I visited it regularly. The air of the bus depot and the train depot was always filled with the essence of adventure, winter coats drying from snow, tobacco, newspapers, ladies cologne, and train and bus fumes. People were going and coming from far off places, all the excitement of it, the anticipation!

Well, anyhow my topic was generalists and aging. A few times I was criticized by a former friend for having too many interests, being too broad and generalist. I write and have independently published three novels, and I paint and show regularly in places like the Eiland Arts Center and the Atsion Summer Art Festival, and I read and I have been a historic site volunteer at half a dozen places over the years. I maintain, especially from the height of my advanced years, that being a generalist can save you as time goes by and the unexpected disabilities of age begin to mount and lay obstacles across your road. Most recently my old car (16 years old when I traded it in a couuple of weeks ago) and my failing eyesight hampered me in my travel adventures, but I placed my focus closer to home and Camden County is filled with interesting places to visit and places to spark your interest. Sadly, I missed the October History Month flyer in time to visit many of hte places and events that were listed, but there are still a few events coming up in November - the Gabreil Daveis Tavern in Glendora, and the James and Ann Whitall House in National Park where I have once again applied and been accepted to volunteer as a docent. I think I did a post on the Daveis Tavern events. You can look it up on the web too, I am sure.

wIf you "Put all your eggs into one basket" you may become a deep expert, but, if something happens to you and you can't perform that specialty any longer, you are up the creek. If you branch out and try your hand at many things, you can adapt to misfortune and generate new leaves! Zen Mind Beginner's Mind is a good book and possibly the passport I used to support my natural inclination to try lots of things. As for that reductive old expression "Jack of all trades - mast of none"! All I have to say is that you can be a satisfactory master at many things if you live long enough and variety is the spice of life.

Now that the Charles Dougherty senior center is going to be open again in my town, I have planned a new year meeting for January 3, 2022. Any intereeted people from neighboring towns are welcome. Our first topic will be Creative Jouraling and Scrapbooking and I will bring samples. We will also talk about Books we have been reading and do a book swap, so come join us and branch out! We will have guest speakers as we did before the pandemic. The Charles Doughterty Senior Center is at 507 Lambert, on the Railroad line that crosses Kings Highway in Mount Ephraim. I can hear that train whistle at night when I go to bed and early in the morning. Doesn't everyone love a train whistle?

We are all facing change and ADAPTABILITY is the key to successful navigation! Join us on Jan, 3 at 1:00. You can bring a bag lunch if you like. We mostly eat at home before we come, but we are seated at tables so you can bring a lunch and eat there, we are very casual! Bring some ideas as well. We want to hear about your interests!

By the Way, my most recent (and long time) reading passion has been Mystery Novels. Currently I am reading Jacquelin Winspeare's Maisie Dobb's novels, set in the inter-war years in England. Before that, I was reading the Three Pines stories set in Quebec. I began, as so many did, with Agatha Christie in my youth, and Arthur Conan Doyle, of course. So we will talk a little about mystery novels too! Join us for conersation and ideas and share your interests with us!

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com