On appearances.

I posted this photo in on September 3, 1921.

Earnest Hemingway and Elizabeth Hadley Richardson married in Bay Township, Wisconsin.  They'd divorce in 1927 after she learned of Hemingway's affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who had been a friend of hers.

Hemingway looks so young, right? 

He was about 22, and she was about 30, making her slightly older than the norm for a woman to marry at the time.  At least in this photograph, they both appear younger than they really were, or so it seems to me.

To the right, as we view it, in the phone are Hemingway's parents.  His mother was. . . 49.

49.

And that says something about appearance and aging.  Would you have guessed that?

In marriage, Elizabeth started to show her age pretty quickly.  In the photo below, with their son Jack, she's about 35.

Quite a contrast from just five years earlier.

Of course, maybe it was hanging out with Hemingway that did that to a person.  Here he is, in 1927, with his second wife.

Pauline would have been 32 years old at the time.

Martha Gelhorn, Hemingway spouse number 3 and former lover of Gen. James Gavin, was 33 when this photograph was taken.

To complete this, Mary Welsh, Hemingway's last, and longest lasting, spouse was about the same age, and in the same profession, as Gelhorn.  I'm unsure of the date of this photograph, but it was taken during World War Two.  Hemingway was Welsh's third husband, FWIW, so they both were experienced with multiple marriages when they married each other.

The following photograph is of a different celebrity couple, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.  You'll see it again next month.

The photo was taken in 1939.  Lombard was 31.  Gable was 38.   The woman on the left is Elizabeth Peters, her mother.  She would have been about 63.  

I suppose all of these folks look their age.  Lombard, born Jane Alice Peters, was from a wealthy family, and maybe that explains everyone looking so well-preserved.

On December 8, we posted an item on that day.  It included a lot of photographs.

They included these street scenes from San Francisco.

These are just people out on the street, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. That night, San Franciscans would believe that their city was raided, a jittery reaction to the arrival of war with Japan.

But note how extremely well dressed everyone is dressed.

San Francisco, I'd note, is cold in the winter, and in the summer.  But these folks aren't dressed heavy at all, in all cases. It must have been a warm day. They're all just dressed really nicely.

Same in Hawaii.

If you see movies depicting Hawaii in 1941, made now, or even in the 50s, you're going to see short sleeves and Hawaiian shirts.  This guy is wearing a double-breasted suit with a vest.

The guy behind him, however, is dressed down. He must be a dockworker of some sort.  He seems to be wearing Levis, by the way, which you can tell due to the pocket rivets.  And his belt is a Navy or Army officer's uniform belt.

Back to San Francisco.  These guys are joining the Marine Corps.

Two of them are wearing pinstriped suits.  The third is dressed down as he has omitted his tie.  And at least one of them is wearing an extremely nice fedora.

I'll bet nobody has gone into a Marine Corps recruiting station wearing a pin striped suit and a fedora since World War Two.

And here are some guys joining the Navy.

Again, pretty well dressed.

Speaking of the Navy, a USO dance still happened that night, the imagined air raid on San Francisco notwithstanding.

Here, the striking thing isn't the men, it's the women.

As odd as it seems to say, they're notable as, once again, they're fairly well-dressed and, as odd as it is to say, they're not tattooed.

I'm not sure what all of this says, but it says something.

Yeoman's Laws of History

Everyone is used to the concept that science and nature is governed by certain natural laws. For instance, Sir Isaac Newton discerned Newton's Laws of Motion.  Darwin gave discerned Natural Selection, and so on.

Well, it seems to me that history is governed by certain laws as well.  After long study of the topic, it seems that there are certain constants that repeat themselves again and again, and not just in the "history repeats itself" sense.  No, certain constants reoccur that are well worth noting. As the author, I'm claiming credit for their discovery, and setting them out here.  In future posts, I'll elaborate further on them.

Yeoman's First Law of History.  Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect.

It doesn't matter what the topic is, but the first occurrence of anything is always further back in time than originally thought.  This is why certain distant dates are continually pushed back, and will continue to be. So, take whatever you like, say the first use of the horse, or the first appearance of humans in North America, and you'll find the "first" date gets more and more distant in time.  Things that were thought to happen, say, 5,000 years ago, turn out to have happened 50,000 years ago, or 500,000 years ago, as we gain better data.

Yeoman's Second Law of History.  Everything last occurred more recently than you suppose.

Here too, it doesn't matter what the topic is, it happened much more recently than you think it did.  Almost everything and every behavior is really durable, if it had any purpose in the first place.

For example, last bayonet charge?  Are you thinking World War One?  Nope, the British did one in Iraq.  Small unit, but none the less they did it.  And in the Second Gulf War.  Last cavalry charge?  Civil War?  No again, they've happened as recently as the current war in Afghanistan.  Last use of horse mounted troops?  Well. . . we aren't there.  It's still going on.  We're never as far from what we think is the distant past as we imagine.

Yoeman's Third Law of History.  Culture is plastic, but sticky.

Eh?  What could that mean. Well, just this.  Cultures mold themselves over time, to fit certain circumstances and developments, but they really persevere in ways that we can hardly appreciate.

We like to believe, in the West, that all cultures are the same, but that is very far from true. And we also like to believe that they "modernize," by which we mean that they "westernize."  They can, but their basic roots do not go away, and they don't even really change without the application of pressure and heat.  Cultures, in that sense, are like metamorphic rocks.  It takes a lot of time, heat, and intense pressure to change them, and even then, you can tell what they started off as.

Examples?  Well, when I was a student in school it was often claimed by our teachers that citizens of the USSR liked their government, having known nothing else, and that everything of the old Russian culture was dead.  Man, that couldn't have been further from the truth. When the lid came off the USSR in 1990, all sorts of old cultural attributes of the various old peoples of the Russian Empire came roaring back. Cossacks remembered that they were Cossacks.  Lithuanians remembered they were Lithuanian. The Russian Orthodox Church experienced a spectacular revival.  Even protests in Russia remain uniquely, and strangely, old Russian.  Nothing had actually gone away.

This is true of all cultures. Even here in the US.  The old Puritans may be gone, but much of their views towards our natures and work very much remain.  Even when cultures take big vacations from themselves, they tend to find their way back over time, at that, and will surprisingly reemerge when thought long gone.

Yeoman's Fourth Law of History.  War changes everything

This is something that somehow is repeatedly forgotten by those who advocate wars.  I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it should be remembered that wars change absolutely everything, about everything.  No nation goes into a war and comes back out the same nation.  People's views about various things change radically due to war, entire economies are dramatically changed, and of course the people who fight the war are permanently changed.

We've discussed this here from time to time in regards to specific topics, but this law is so overarching that the impact of it can hardly be exaggerated.  Every time a nation enters a war, it proposes, in essence, to permanently alter everything about itself.

Yeoman's Fifth Law of History.  When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.

When nations start a war, they have a "war aim."  But that aim rarely determines when a war ends.  Wars are over when the party that is attacked decides that the war is over.

The Germans, during World War Two, thought that the war in the West was over when they knocked France out of the war, but the British did not believe that, so it did not end. In the East, the Germans thought advancing to the Volga meant victory over the USSR.  The Soviets, however, had no such concept so the war went on.  Conversely, the Imperial Russians in World War One gave up long before they were really defeated.  They just gave up.  Wars end when the party that was attacked decides that they are over.

Yeoman's Sixth Law of History.  There was no age of innocence.

A persistent idea about any one violent era in history is that the era that preceded it was "an age of innocence", or that the violent historical event ended a country's "innocence."  Even really first rate historians will claim, in various works, that an era immediately before what they're writing about "ended the country's innocence.".

Well, while these events, particularly if they are wars, and that's usually what is being addressed in this context, may change everything (see Holscher's Fourth Law of History), the era before them is never an "age of innocence," as there never was such an age.  That's a nostalgic concept that does not fit reality.

For example, over time, I've read of World War Two, World War One, and the Civil War ending "America's innocence.".  Bunk.  None of those horrific events, and they were horrific, ended an age of innocence. They may have been titanic disasters, and horrors of the first rate, but they did not end ages of innocence.  By the time of the American Civil War the country had been through the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and any number of horrific Indian Wars that made those that came after the Civil War look comparatively blood free.  And this doesn't even address the violence of slavery and sectarian strife that came before the Civil War.  And even if a person imagines that the country slipped into an age of innocence after the Civil War they'd be sadly mistaken. Prior to World War one came the economic panic of the 1890s, the Indians Wars (including such events as Little Big Horn and the Wounded Knee), the Spanish American War and the Philippine Insurrection.  Prior to World War Two, of course, we World War One and the Great Depression.

And the same is true for any other country a person could pick out.  The British, for example, had the Anglo Irish War before World War Two, the Boer War before World War One, and so on.

None of this is meant to be commentary on the big events mentioned. Rather, the frequent claims that a person reads some event unique exposed a country, for the first time, the the horrors the world has to offer, is simply wrong.

Posted December 28, 2012.

Yeoman's Seventh Law of History.  No accurate history can be written until 60 years have passed since the event.

A really thorough history of  an event cannot be written close in time to the event.  Indeed, several decades must pass from the event's occurrence before an accurate history can be written.

That may sound shocking (although at least historian Ladislas Farago noted this in the introduction to his early biography of George S. Patton; Patton:  Ordeal and  Triumph) but its true.  Close in time to an event, authors tend to be too much men of their own times with their views colored by the context of those times. Such influences tend to remain at least as long as twenty years after an event occurs.  Direct participants in an event have a stake in what occurred, which also tend to inform and color their views.

Beyond that, however, and very significantly, authors who write close in time to an event, including those who participated in it, tend to simply accept certain conditions as the norm, and therefore diminish their importance int their writings or omit them entirely.  Conversely, they tend to emphasize things that were new or novel, for the same reasons.  Given that, early written records tend to overplay the new and omit the routine, so that later readers assume the new was the normal and they don't even consider the routine.

Take for example the often written about story of the German army during World War Two.  Only more informed historians realize that most of the German army was no more mechanized during World War Two than it was during World War One.  Fewer yet realize that a fair number of German soldiers remained horse mounted during World War Two for one reason or another.  Period writers had little reason to emphasize this, however, as it really wasn't novel at all at the time, and not very dramatic either, and reflected similar conditions in many armies.

This doesn't mean that early works and first hand recollections aren't valuable.  Rather, it means that a person cannot base his final view on those early works, however.  It also provides the answer as to why later historical works on a frequently addressed topic are not only valuable, but necessary.  Rick Atkinson's and Max Hasting's recent works on World War Two, for example, really place the conflict in context in all sorts of ways for the very first time.  The plethora of new books on the First World War that were at first regarded as revisionist are in fact corrective, and likewise the war is coming into accurate focus for the first time.

Date added:  June 11, 2014.

Yeoman's Eighth Law of History:  Myths, unless purely fanciful, almost always have a basis in reality.

In cultures that write things down, the concept that myths, which were primarily related by word of mouth, have any basis in reality seems to come as a shock. But they normally do.

It is the spoken word that is the default means of transmitting information, including history, in human beings.  The written word is a learned behavior, indeed one that must not only be learned but nurtured in order to take root.   Even now, a lot of people will take and retain information better orally than in a written form.

But oral transmission is always subject to decay with the teller, and the tricks the mind uses to retain the story warp it a bit by default. But that doesn't mean that the stories were never true in any fashion.

All the time we find that historians and archeologist are surprised to learn that something thought to be a myth has some basis in reality.  Probably most do. Troy turns out to have been a real city (and the war was probably over the teenage wife of a teenage king, I'll bet), the Navajo and Apache turn out to be from the far north originally and so their memories of their being great white bears and great white birds are spot on.  Myths, even very old ones, if carefully discerned usually have some basis in fact.

Date added:  April 1, 2015

Yeoman's Ninth Law of History:  You don't know the "right" side of history, until its history.

Pundits and advocates are fond of saying that this or that is on the "right" side of history, by which they mean the side of any one issue that they feel, based on the feelings of the day, will surely prevail.  The trouble is, those feelings are just that.  You don't really know what will prevail, until Holscher's Seventh Law of History has had its day.

History is full of movements and issues that were on the "right" side of history, which turned  out not to be at all.  Prohibition was a hugely popular movement which newspapers everywhere supported while condemning its opponents as naive rubes but which, when it became the (at first) hugely popular law of the land in the United States, and elsewhere, lasted less than fifteen years.  During the 1920s and 1930s fascism was widely commented upon as being a movement which was so valid that it would replace democratic institutions everywhere and which should be supported where it had taken root, even in democratic countries.  Communism was lauded in the liberal left as the next step in liberal and progressive thought and widely held as an inevitable next step in history, a view which its own foundational documents held to be a scientific inevitability.  Even staunch anti-communists such as Whitaker Chambers publicly stated that it would win and even as late as the 1980s I myself had to read a book in college arguing that the entire world should be placed under a Communist government in order to avoid a surely inevitable nuclear war.

There are many other such examples.  The fact of the matter is however that many movement, trends, and instabilities don't survive the bright sun of reality which burns them away.  We don't really know what will survive that sun's glare until it does, by which time many of us who worried, endured or supported them will have passed onto history ourselves.

Date added:  January 4, 2019.

Meeting the Mental Image: The RG Barn

The RG Barn

The reason I'm posting this here is that not only is this ranch yard exceptionally attractive, it's about the only Wyoming ranch yard I've ever seen that actually meets the Hollywood mental image of a ranch yard.

 

The barn, with the founding date of the ranch under the brand, is the text book version of a barn. The ranch house, which I negligently failed to photograph, is a huge old-fashioned ranch house.  An attractive late 19th Century house, it's a perfect cube in shape (two stories) with a covered porch that goes all the way around the house.  Very nice.  

Even the cows looked perfectly content.

I'm only noting this as the mental impression was so significant, that it really stands out.  I'm not criticizing other Wyoming ranches by any means, but this ranch that borders the town of Burlington (this yard literally is on a Burlington street) is really unique in this fashion.

Lex Anteinternet: Shaving

I posted this item this last April:

Lex Anteinternet: Shaving:
West Point Cadet shaving with a straight razor in the field. The
first thing I do every weekday, or at least every weekday that I work

Bleh. . . I have to admit that recently shaving has been one of those daily tasks I'd gladly give up.  I actually will skip it at least one day of the weekend, Saturday, and frequently I'll skip it on Sunday too.  If I have a few days off, which I hardly ever do, I'll generally skip it then as well.  I just don't like doing it first thing in the morning, and if I were retired, which I'm nowhere near being, and for which there's a fair chance I'll never be, I might just grow a short beard.  This is particularly in mind this morning as I shaved on both days of the weekend, which I rarely do.

Having said this, I'm increasingly surprised by the number of men who find it acceptable to pack a couple of days stubble during the workweek.  It's really common.  I was at a deposition the other day in which, for instances, one of the lawyers had on a suit and tie and about two days of beard growth.

An odd thing about that is how thin a lot of those beards are too.  They're scraggly, in many instances.  For a guy like me, with a really heavy beard, it's weird to see guys skipping a couple of days shaving to grow such thin beards, when if I did that, I'd look like a bear in short order.  Looking back on photos of the hairy 19th Century, it makes me wonder where those guys were then, as it seems like everyone in that era could either grown a titanic beard or mustache.

At any rate, it's probably a sign of my age, but either grow a beard or don't. The scraggly two or three days of thin beard growth look just doesn't work.

Standards of Dress

Over the weekend, I drove down to Ft. Collins to purchase a couple of suits. "Business Suits" that is.

While I work as a lawyer, I really don't like buying formal wear at all. I'm not sure why, but it may be the peasant in me. I rarely wear suits, and never wear them except in court. A lot of times in court I'll wear a sports coat and tie, although I should probably wear suits more often. While sports coat and tie are very common here, even combined with black jeans and nice cowboy boots, as I will sometimes do, I actually was privy to a female lawyer, who moved in here from elsewhere, complaining about that recently, so perhaps I should forgo that for the most part and try to look a little more "lawyer like".

Anyhow, what a remarkable change in dress standards we have witnessed in the past half century. Up until at least the 1950s, men who worked in town wore suit and tie darned near every day, unless they have a fairly physical job. And they wore suit and tie quite a bit outside of work as well. Photographs as late as the 50s show, for example, men wearing suits just to board aircraft.

This started to change in the 60s, I suppose as a part of that turbulent era, as young males adopted jeans and t-shirts in a conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious, effort to emulate the "working man", whether they were working men or not. And as the boomers of that era aged, the old clothing standards never really revived. Now it is common really to view sports coats and ties as being fairly dressed up, when they used to be regarded as fairly dressed down.

Taking this back a bit further, I recently watched one of the special features of the DVD version on the new Coen Brothers "True Grit" film. For those who have not seen the film, I highly recommend it. Anyhow, the portion of the special features addressing dress was quite interesting, with the clothing designer noting that for town dress, even though the majority of people in town would have been farmers, she would have expected them to be relatively formally dressed. That's probably fully correct.

As long time readers of this blog, i.e, me, as I'm probably the only reader, this blog is part of an effort, really, to look into the 1910 to 1920 time frame, but with a lot of interest in earlier in later eras. I'd expect the 1910 to 1920 era to have about the same sartorial standards as the earlier era depicted in True Grit, and which continued on for quite some time later. That is, even in that heavily agricultural era, in most of the US, town dress was fairly formal. Rural working dress would not have been of course, but people in town would not normally have been dressed down no matter what their station in life may have been.

Epilogue

Court.

I've recently had a couple of experiences that reminded me of this old post.

One of these was that I was in Court the other day, when a docket call was going on.  A docket call is when parties with various types of cases, usually criminal cases, appear before the court briefly.

When a person appears before the court, they probably ought to try to look sharp.  It makes some sort of impression on everyone, I'm quite sure. But sartorial standards  have fallen so low that it seems many people don't know that, and a few of those people are the lawyers, amazingly enough.

While I was there I noted that a large number of people appearing before the court were in t-shirts.  I suppose that was everyday attire, and that's what they had.  Nonetheless, it doesn't leave the best impression.  It particularly does not of the t-shirts have a vaguely legal theme.  One person had on t-shirt that had the words "Southern Justice" on it, with the scale of justice tipped to one side.  Granted, we aren't in the south, but if you are making an appearance in a criminal case, that's a bad idea.  Another person had one that said something about "Pirate's *****."  It was probably whimsical or even a little risque, but still, pirates were thieves and you probably don't want the court to associate you with them.

At one time, except for the extremely poor, shirt and tie would have been expected for men.  A person might even have risked being dressed down for failing to wear that, save for cases of poverty.  Following that old rule here remains a good idea.

Epilogue II

Traveling 

Another experience that caused me to ponder this a bit recently is that I've been doing a fair amount of traveling, which means that I've been getting a fair amount of airport and airplane time.

If you glance through photos from the 1950s or early 60s, when air travel really took off, of people traveling in airplanes, its a bit of a shock to see how dressed up everyone was.  Men, for example, routinely were in suit and tie.  Servicemen were in their dress uniforms.  Hardly anyone is really dressed down.

Now, just the opposite is true.  I cannot ever personally remember a time when people were not fairly informally dressed in the airport or on airplanes.  Indeed, if I see a man with a tie on, I know he's come right from, or going right to, a meeting.  Indeed, pretty much only business travelers routinely dress in a "dressed up" fashion, with "business casual" being the norm for them.

Recently, however, the level of dress has been amazingly varied.  Some people opt to travel in clothes designed for the gym, I guess, and are really dressed down.  I've travelled plenty of times in airplanes in my jeans, and thought I was comfortably dressed, but I can't imagine wearing trousers designed for the gym on an airplane.  I'd feel self conscious and uncomfortable.

But not as self conscious as I would feel at a store in my pj's, but that's antihero odd trend, mostly exhibited by women.  I'm starting to see a few women in stores wearing their pj's and slippers.  I appreciate people are pressed for time, but nobody is ever that pressed for time.  It looks sloppy and most people don't really want to be seeing non family members in their pj's, particularly in public.  I guess it says something about how informal our era has become that people shopping in their pajamas isn't wholly unusual.  Or just seeing somebody out in public in their pajamas isn't wholly unusual.

Epilogue III

The Clothing of Youth.

Recently I've also had an odd experience that causes me to recall this thread.

I pass a local high school everyday, and in the course of doing that, I notice some rather interesting clothing styles.

Teenagers in that age range have always given us some interesting clothing trends, to be followed by, or sometimes lead by, people in their early 20s.  For example, people in their 20s gave us all the interesting clothing associated with the Jazz Age, including shorter skirts and raccoon coats.  In the 1950s this age range gave us Levis and t-shirts for people who weren't really working in labor, although most clothing was still pretty conservative.  Photos from the 1930s and 1940s show this age range dressed like adults, which in the years of World War Two and the Great Depression, they were.  The 60s, of course, brought in all sorts of stuff, and when I was in high school we pretty much all wore t-shirts to school.

The oddest high school age trend I've noticed are girls who have adopted the "Furry Lifestyle", going to high school dressed as cats or wolves. That's just weird in my opinion, but some do it every day, even wearing tails.  Very odd.

But that's now what inspired me to write.  Every day when I go by the high school I see one kid who is wearing a suit and tie. Every day.  And he looks perfectly natural in it.  Indeed, I've seen him so often that way, I'd now be shocked if he wasn't dress that way.  Interesting to see that in somebody so young.

Epilogue IV

Manly Dressing.

Somewhat off topic, but a podcast episode on men's dress on the Art of Manliness. 

Epilogue V.

Clothing at Church.

Okay, now for one that's again observational, but a bit counterintuitive.

You can fairly easily find, on the net, various gentle reminders by at least Catholic clerics, and probably others, that when people arrive at Churches on Sunday, they perhaps ought to dress up a beyond their usual standards, which as noted is, in the US, a pretty low standard. But you won't find those here locally.  Indeed, looking back to when I was a kid, I can't recall the standards of dress for Sunday Mass being particularly high.  And my recollection is pretty good.

I'm not saying that there was never a year when those attending Mass on Sunday didn't dress up. There may have been, but I can't recall it, and my memory stretches back on that at least to the late 1960s.  People have, in the time I can recall, always worn their regular clothing. So here's a local phenomenon, at least, that counters the trend noted here to an extent. Whey would that be?

I'm not entirely certainly, but I suspect that reflects something about the conditions of the rural West and perhaps something about the demographic I'm recalling.  In an area where a lot of people had very rural jobs, or heavy labor jobs, their clothing may have been their clothing, and that was the way it was. So they wore what they wore.

This isn't to say they wore dirty clothing or anything of the type.  That would not be true.  But, for example, people from ranches wore blue jeans and boots, and a clean shirt.  Men of any walk of life only rarely wore a tie.  School age kids wore what they wore to school, if they went to public school, where there were not uniforms.

Having said thsi, I suspect that if a person went back further than the 1950s, they'd find a  different situation at work.

Now, having made this observation, I will add a couple.  One thing that I now see at Mass that I never saw when younger was young men wearing shorts.  We didn't have any shorts, and that may be the reason why, but I do wonder if our parents would have approved of that.

And another is that t-shirts have changed over the years, which is interesting. I've written on this before, but t-shirts seem to have their own trend line at Church, at least by my narrow personal observation.  When I was young, we would wear t-shirts to Mass, including the period of time during which I was a university student.  In the 1990s I was seeing a lot of t-shirts, including quite a few of the type with highly rude slogans on them, which really weren't appropriate for Mass, if appropriate for anywhere.  Now, however, that's increasingly uncommon.  T-shirts aren't disappearing, as noted earlier, but young people at Mass do not wear them as much as they used to.  Indeed, I'm seeing a lot of nicer athletic shirts of one kind or another now. T-shirts that do show up, in season, are generally pretty appropriate for general wear.  And very recently I've seen some young people who wear t-shirts that specifically have a religious message, indicating that these shirts were chosen intentionally for the message, making them oddly appropriate as an informal piece of apparel for this setting.

Indeed, in spite of my earlier comments on t-shirts, I somewhat wonder if this all indicates a trend line away from t-shirts.  They're not going to disappear, but they do seem to dominate less of the clothing worn by people than they did only a decade ago.

Epilogue VI.

Clothing at Church.

But then, on the other hand. . . . 

Sometimes, after you write something, you find a reason that you have to reconsider or modify your prior stated item.  And this weekend I happened to observe something that causes me to do that.  It's a minor item, and I've already noted it on the post on hats and caps.  The item is women's head coverings at church, or more specifically the Catholic Mass.

Women at Mass, 1940s.

It was once a rule that women attending Mass, in some localities, had to have their heads covered.  I don't recall this rule personally, and indeed my personal recollection is quite the opposite.  But I was aware that hit had been a rule.  I'd just forgotten it.

In fact, it was further a rule that Catholic Priests, for much of the 20th Century, had to wear a hat while outdoors. Typically that was the typical men's business wear type hats of the time.  I.e., we'd expect a Fedora or a hat of that type. As I understand it, and I may not understand it well, this rule had to do with expressing respect.

This is all largely a thing of the past, which shows our changing views on this topic, but I recalled it as I happened to see two separate families at Mass in which the woman or girls were wearing lace head coverings.  It was practically startling in light of the fact that it is so rare.  Indeed, all of these girls and women were dressed very conservatively.  That shouldn't be read to mean something like Amish, which would be completely false, but simply nicely conservatively dressed.  Indeed, the conservative dress was really working for them, which points out the irony of conservative dress in loose clothing standards times being attention getting, irrespective of its intent.

I was aware that some people have continued on this old practice voluntarily, which isn't to say that I'm making a pitch for the rule to be returned.  Not at all.  I'm merely noting it.  And, by the same token I should note that certain religions have an actual rule requiring daily conservative dress, with strict Orthodox Jews being the most notable.  It's interesting that in their case, this does indeed make their appearance more distinct than in former eras, when many people were somewhat similarly dressed on a daily basis.

Epilogue VII

Men dressing their age

Just before this update, I posted Pope's "An Essay on Criticism", which is the source of the quote "fools rush in where Angels fear to tread".   I note that, as what I'm about to say is probably foolish.

I was at an event recently which had young people at it.  It was on a really nice day, the first really nice sunny day we'd had for awhile.  It was an outdoor sporting event, but one of those individual sports of skill, as opposed to a team sport.  And its a sport that probably sees a lot more participation from adults than it does from children, but most of the people who engage in it learned the sport as children, as its generally outdoorsy, usually people dress somewhat in that fashion while engaging in it, assuming that they don't have clothing specially made for it, which some do.

Anyhow, while at this a father and son set showed up, which is a gratifying thing to see, but they were both dressed, well. . . sort of like toddlers.

That may sound like a peculiar description, and in part that's because of my age.  Allow me to define it further.  Both father and son (son probably about 10 or 11, father probably 30 something) were wearing baseball caps with the brims completely flat, in the style currently popular with teens.  Both had their hats a bit off kilter directionally as well, which is common with aficionados of that cap genre.  Both were wearing floppy shorts, and both we wearing the brightly colored jersey of some athletic team.  It presented, shall we say, an extremely youthful appearance.

It was also clothing that was generally inappropriate for the activity, although you could get by.  But the odd thing is that it made father and son look like twins separated by a vast gulf of time.

Now, part of my reaction to this is no doubt as this clothing style simply didn't exist when I was young.  Wearing team jerseys was common, and I don't have an objection to it, but the shorts and off kilter cap look would have gotten us beat up when I was a teen, and there's no way that we would have affected that style.  I think it odd looking when I see teens wearing it now, but then teens have always tended, to a certain degree, to angle for odd clothing, although I can't really think of that being the case when I was a teen (maybe we wore badger robes rather than bear robes. . . its' been a long time ago).

Anyhow, while its not apparent to us, Americans have a reputation as being the sloppiest dressed people on the planet, and while its up to people to dress how they want to dress, stuff like this sort of contributes to that.  And at some age, you just can't get by dressing like a youngster anymore.

In the theme of this blog, I flat out do not think this occurred with men at all up until fairly recently.  Men always dressed like adults.  If you heard criticism of a man dressing under his age, it was for trying to affect one of the adult style of the era. So, for example, if you had a guy in his 50s wearing chains and keeping his shirt unbuttoned, in the 1970s, he'd get a verbal busing behind his back, no doubt.  A guy that age probably couldn't have gotten away dressing in a Zoot Suit in the 40s, for that matter. But to dress as "youthful" as we see some adults dress now would not only spark some degree of ridicule, but you'd really have people talking about you in a former era, if you were a man.  With women this seems to be markedly less of a trend now, and women still have the age old social control of getting criticism from their fellows if they dress too much like a teen, when they're not.  So we don't really find the phenomenon of women dressing way down in age to be common.

Epilogue VIII

It turns out that essays of this type are more common than I'd thought, or that I would have guessed.  A website I stumbled on has an entire series of them, basically cast in the vein of assistance.

An essay related to this topic, Four Reasons To Learn Style Rules.

And, Style, Not Sin, Part 1

Style, Not Sin, Part 2..

An essay on shoes from the same source; Style Starts With Shoes.

What probably is not obvious to folks is that in spite of what we'd think, even in the US which has next to no clothing rules left, people still judge each other by appearances.  People don't think that this is the case, but it tends to be to a surprising degree.

Epilogue IX

Regarding the courtroom item noted above, I'm not the only lawyer to have noted this, the Bow Tie Lawyer has commented on it recently as well. 

Modern Technology and the Public Building

Recently, on our blog about courthouses, I posted an item on the Townsend Justice Center, which is the courthouse for Natrona County Wyoming.  In that photo I posted a picture of a circuit court courtroom.

I should note that the circuit court is much, much, smaller than the district court courtrooms in the same courthouse.  As I'm set to be a little critical of those courtrooms, I want to make that plain.  The district court courtrooms are much larger.

Anyhow, one of the recent features of public buildings has been the incorporation of a lot of new technology into them.  I'm not wholly opposed to this, and regard it as inevitable, but one thing that I think people really need to keep in mind about this is that certain types of public buildings reflect design lessons learned over centuries, to address their specific functions, and incorporation of technology that's only a couple of decades old, or maybe even less than that, isn't necessarily going to improve their function or even really work very well.

 

 The Niobrara County Courthouse in Lusk Wyoming.  This old courthouse has one large courtroom, typical of older courthouses.  While heating and air conditioning were lacking in effectiveness the last time I was in the courthouse, the big courtroom does nicely accommodate projected voices.  The thread on this blog from 2009 featuring this courthouse remains a freakishly popular one here.

To start with, I'll note audio systems. This is a routine feature of almost any modern building where a person is expected to give an address of any kind, but by the same token almost any building built prior to the mid 20th Century lacked one.  If a building was expected to have public speakers, such as a church or a courtroom, it was built accordingly, and that worked just fine.

Churches are a particularly good example of this, as some churches, including very old churches, are huge.  The person at the ambo had to be able to address the person in the back as effectively as the front, and without yelling. While some no doubt had problems doing that, most didn't, and that's simply because people in that role learned how to project their voices, and were aided in that by the architecture of the building's interior.

 

 Interior of the Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe in Dallas Texas.  Built in 1902, this church has classic architecture which wold have allowed voices to carry to the back of the church quite easily.

Courtrooms worked the same way, although the lawyer and court didn't really have to address the entire audience in the gallery, except during voir dire, but just the jury.  Still, they had to do that, and learned how to speak effectively in order to do so.

All of this is still true, but now audio systems have been incorporated to achieve that. The problem is that they aren't really always needed, and when incorporated into older buildings you get weird results on occasion, such as cutting in and out, voices that are way too loud, or distortion. Still, people have become so used to the systems they never simply dispense with them, but endure the glitches and press on.

Audio is one thing, but a bigger thing is becoming the incorporation of computer and visual systems.  People can be absolutely fascinated with them.  So we now see buildings with all sort of projectors, monitors, and the like.

One of the most distracting examples of this I've seen was in a church in Ft. Collins, Colorado, in which some sort of projector was used to flash poorly drawn images apparently depicting the gospels being read as part of the readings for that Sunday.  It was distracting, and not really well done. The building itself was fairly poorly constructed for public address at that.

But its in courtrooms where this has become really pronounced, and not really to uniformly good results.

The courtrooms of Wyoming's Seventh Judicial District are a good example.  From some point in the 1930s, up until relatively recently, district courts used a Depression Era courthouse. That building featured a very large single courtroom, if a very tiny axillary courtroom is not considered.  Over time, however, the existing makeup of the court became simply too small, as with three district court judges, and one courtroom, something was clearly needed.  The original purpose was to remodel the beautiful 1930s vintage courthouse, but a bond measure to do that was defeated. So in the end the State ended up funding the remodeling of the old Townsend Hotel across the street from the old courthouse.

 

 The Depression Era Natrona County Courthouse, now no longer used for court purposes.

The Townsend Hotel had been unoccupied for a couple of decades at the time, and something really needed to be done. The remodel is really something, and the entire facility is very impressive inside, even if the outside looks a lot like a 1920s vintage hotel.  But the courtrooms in it drive me nuts.

The Townsend Justice Center, the remodeled Townsend Hotel.

The courtrooms themselves are beautiful really. Not as pretty as the old big courtroom in the old courthouse, but still, they're really nice.  Nobody could rationally complain about their appearance.  But up in front of the bar, they're uncomfortable.

The problem is that they've been wired to the nth degree for every sort of electronic device going.  Each juror has their own television monitor, a huge television monitor hangs from the ceiling.  All the counsel tables are wired so that counsel can plug his computer in and run the monitors.

That all sounds great, but what that means is that tables are fixed in place.  And not only are they fixed in place, they're small.  In contrast, counsel tables in older courtrooms are capable of being moved, and are also gigantic as a rule.

That may sound minor, but its not.  In a typical multi day trial, its impossible in some modern courtrooms to effectively seat more than one attorney, or an attorney and a paralegal, and the client.  No small matter. And in any multi day trial, no matter how high tech the lawyers may be, there are boxes and boxes of material that must go somewhere, and hard paper exhibits.  Without the ability to move tables, join tables, and rearrange, the ability to actually operate in the courtroom is impaired.

Circuit (not District) courtroom in the Seventh Judicial District.

It is the case, undoubtedly, that the ability to present a case electronically can really enhance a presentation, but it can distract also.  In almost every instance of extensive courtroom technology being used for a presentation that I've seen, somebody screwed it up.  I've seen family photos presented for evidence, and a lawyer sort through photos that included some that were somewhat questionable in nature (good thing to keep off your legal computer, I'd think), and a person have to go back and forth and back and forth.  And I've also found that a fair number of attorneys who are really comfortable with electronics are no longer comfortable with the court's electronics, so they pack in their own, adding to the enormous assortment of stuff in the courtroom.

None of this is to suggest that this should all be ripped out of the courtroom, and even if I argued for that, it wouldn't happen anyhow.  But, rather, a person needs to be careful.  Electronics aren't the end all and be all of presentation, and to some degree their diminishing the ability to effectively present in some circumstances, while greatly enhancing it in others.  It's one more tool.  But when things are built to accept the new tools, perhaps the reason for the old construction should be carefully recalled at the same time.

The Golden Age of Hotels

January 26, 2011

These photographs depict what had been the Townsend Hotel, and what is now the Natrona County Townsend Justice Center. This building depicts an evolution in transportation, and in the downtown landscape of cities, which incidentally has a direct legal connection.

This building was originally built in the 1920s as a nice hotel. It served in that capacity up in to the 1960s. It was well suited to do so, being only two blocks from the train depot. What it lacked, however, was parking.

Starting in the 1960s, after the massive nationwide improvement in highways, and the corresponding decline in rail transportation, this building became a bit of a flop house. It finally closed in the late 1970s, after its restaurant closed down (the restaurant had not declined like the hotel itself).

In the last decade it was rebuilt as a courthouse.

This says a lot about downtowns as they once were, and are today. Built in the golden age of hotels, this hotel was in a neighborhood of similiar hotels, all of which offered lodging and dining. They didn't offer parking. They couldn't survive the motorization of the country. They depended upon rail transportation for their business. They made, however, for a busy downtown.

Postscript

May 29, 2014

I was reminded of  this old post as one of the oldest buildings in Casper is undergoing renovations, and I took a few photographs of it this past week when those renovations revealed   a "ghost sign" that was painted on it when the building was a hotel.  I posted those photos on our Painted Brick's blog.

The former County Annex, being rebuilt as the Hotel Virginia.

The building is sort of returning to its original use as apartments, under one of its apparent former names, the Hotel Virginia. This building is older than the old Townsend Building depicted above in this thread, and its one of the oldest surviving brick buildings in Casper.  

What's interesting about this, other than the age of the building, is that this building is one block over from the Townsend.  And its on the same block as what was the Gladstone (now an office building).  It would have been catercorner from the Henning. So Casper had four brick hotels, three of which were quite substantial, withing a block of each other.

In thinking on it, if a person goes just a couple of blocks out, this trend continues.  The street depicted in this photograph is 1st Street, which was also the east/west highway at that time.  A couple of blocks away were a couple of motels, true Motor Hotels, of early vintage, one of which had a swimming pool.

Today all the major current hotels in Casper are along the interstate highway. Casper has an assortment of modern hotels and business hotels, but what's interesting about that is how the hotels had migrated by the 1960s to the interstate.  The downtown hotels were dying by that time, and by the 1980s none of the original downtown brick hotels that were located in the heart of the downtown era were still hotels. This is, of course, a very typical story, demonstrating the evolution from rail travel, to car travel, to those cars being on a state highway at first, and an interstate highway later.

Mustang ROTC program turns 100

Mustang ROTC program turns 100

I posted this item yesterday, but did not comment on it.  In thinking on it, I should have.

As the article notes, NCHS's JrROTC program is a century old.  Indeed, I've heard, and believe it to be correct, that it's the oldest JrROTC program in the United States.  Pretty remarkable, really.

As such, it's an institution that's marked the passage of time, and tells us something about the times.  Therefore, it fits into the subject area of this blog ideally, and is worth a closer look.

I graduated from this high school, but was not in JrROTC.  My wife (also not in ROTC) graduated from there as well. . . as well as both of my inlaws, a lot of my cousins, and my father and his siblings.  Our connection with NCHS goes way back, but not all the way back to 1914.

JrROTC was incorporated in the curriculum of the school in 1914 as a mandatory class, on the nation's run up to World War One.  The high school is a land grant school.  We tend to think of land grant schools being colleges and universities, but that category included some high schools as well, and NCHS is one.  As such, back in 1914, the US could require NCHS to have a class on military preparedness, which it did.  The University of Wyoming introduced one about the same time.

This applied only to boys, of course, in an era when solders were in fact almost all male.  It was a very gender differentiated world in those days.  And it was a pretty serious course at that.  The young men were issued uniforms and taught basic solder skills. Drill and Ceremony, some marksmanship, and the like.  They didn't come out of it soldiers, but it took the edge off military ignorance in an era when most Americans hadn't had a family member in the service since the Civil War.   The Army was attempting to speed up training a bit, and it probably accomplished that.

After the Great War, the school kept the program, and kept it mandatory.  It was mandatory all the way up until the mid 1970s when, in the wake of the Vietnam War, the school board made it an elective.  By that time, the district had a second high school which didn't have an ROTC program at all.

In that intervening period, a lot had changed.  During the 1930s the program, I'm told, was one that parents appreciated as the school issued a set of uniforms in an era when money was really tight, and the extra clothing appreciated.  For a time the school even departed from the actual official Army uniform of the era and issued its own, very fancy, blue uniform, although this passed as the nation began to prepare for World War Two.  Keep in mind that money was so tight in this era that the 115th Cavalry Regiment of the Wyoming National Guard was effectively recruiting right in the schools, through a music teacher, and the kids and their parents were glad to join for the extra income.  Not all those recruits were of legal service age either.

It was probably World War Two that really started the changes in JrROTC.  The program was strong during the war, of course, but post war it actually saw some returning servicemen assigned back into it, as they went to complete an interrupted high school career. Suffice it to say, they were a disaster as ROTC cadets.  And the post war world saw a big military with a big training program, and a lot of men in the general population who had military service.  In short, JrROTC was no longer really needed anywhere in the same way that it had been in 1914.  I've actually heard of a story once where an NCHS graduate, who had of course been in JrROTC (he was male) found himself in a formation during basic training in which the DI asked if anyone had been an ROTC cadet. Indicating that he had, he found himself singled out by the DI, who instructed the other trainees to ignore whatever he did.

Juniors in NCHS, in 1946.  Note how many are wearing their JrROTC uniforms for their class picture.

Still, with a big military commitment existing during the early Cold War the district kept the program, and a person can find interesting recollections regarding it.  One really dedicated sports shooter I know noted that it was in JrROTC, which had a rifle team with actual .22 rifles as late as the late 1970s, early 1980s when I was in high school, where he was introduced to the sport.  Another individual I know recalled, in a less nifty recollection, that in the 60s when he was in NCHS they were still issued the old World War Two service uniform, which had wool pants and a wool jacket, and they never took them home for cleaning.

Locally, after Kelly Walsh was built in the early 1960s, and the decision was made not to have a JrROTC program there, an odd situation was created in that students had no choice as to what school to attend as this was determined geographically.  Boys at NC were in JrROTC.  Across town at KW they were not.  Amazingly, the program lived on through the Vietnam War, which says a lot about how the war was viewed in this region.  But times caught up with the program, and in the mid 1970s the decision was made to make it an elective.  I can vaguely recall the school board making that decision, when I was in grade school.  In my mind the number of years between that decision and my own period in high school seems vast, but it really isn't.  I only missed mandatory JrROTC in high school by a few years.

As an elective, it's lived on.  When I was in high school it was carried as a physical education class.  The students who enrolled in it seemed to do so either as they definitely knew that they were going into the service, or in order to have a PE credit that avoided the rough and tumble nature of high school PE here at the time.  Indeed, for some of us who may have been mildly interested, or even definitely interested, in the program the thought that we'd be regarded as shirking PE was enough to keep us out of it. Some no doubt joined it so they could get on the rifle team, which was the only way to do that, and I recall pondering that myself, as I wanted to be on the rifle team. By that time, girls as well as boys were in JrROTC, and there were female shooters on the team.  In that distant era, the indoor range was actually inside the school.

It's kept on keeping and I think today its simply an elective for people who are seriously contemplating military service.  I don't believe its a PE elective, and the atmosphere of the times that existed in my high school years is gone on a a lot of things.  In some ways the odd atmosphere created by the Vietnam War on all things military really didn't creep into Wyoming until the late 1970s, and of course never did to the full extent that they did in other regions, but JrROTC suffered for awhile because of that.  I also think that over time the program has evolved, like a lot of such programs, into more of a leadership and service program than a truly fully martial one. As late as my period of service in the Army National Guard the JrROTC cadets trained for a week at Camp Guernsey, engaged in some sort of annual war game, and had actual rifles for drill team use, none of which I believe to be true any longer.  I can recall being detailed to retrieve the trucks that had been loaned to them by the Army  Reserve, and can also recall having M1 Garands in our Armory that belonged to JrROTC. 

Anyhow, it's interesting how an institution like this, which has survived for so long in the schools, but which is a bit unusual for most schools, marks and reflects the times.

Postscript.

NC's JrROTC program is in the news again this morning, although this time it's for the fine performance of their air rifle team, which won a significant competition for the tenth year in a role.

I note that here, however, as this also illustrates the changing times. The article notes that the rifle team itself dates back to 1914, at which time they used M1903 rifles.  That means they were shooting service rifle competition at the time.

California National Guard rifle team at Camp Perry, 1908.  They are equipped with brand new M1903 rifles.

That's pretty remarkable in some ways as the M1903 is a fully sized rifle, although chances are that the boys on the team had all already shot full sized rifles.  The competition was not of the type that air rifles do at all, but was along range match.  In short, they were shooting in a fully adult competition using rifles that were the Army standard at the time.

Camp Perry, Ohio, where the national championship for service rifle competition was held, and still is.

When my father went to NCHS, JrROTC was equipped with M1917 rifles.  The M1917 rifle was a rifle that the US Army purchased during World War One to supplement the supplies of M1903s, which were arsenal built by the Army itself.  M1917s were built by Winchester and Remington, which had started off making them as the P14, in a different cartridge, for the under supplied British (the "14" stands for the year 1914).  More M1917s existed by the end of World War One than M1903s, although only barely so, and they continued on in some numbers in US use thereafter.  During World War Two the M1903 was used in great numbers, even though the M1 Garand became the most common rifle in US use during the war.  The M1917 saw much less use, but did see some, equipping Chemical Mortar and Artillery units early on, and State Guard units throughout the war.  Apparently it was also supplied to JrROTC units.  My father could remember the serial number of the one he had in JrROTC his entire life.

British Home Guardsmen with P14 during World War Two.

U.S. Marine training during World War Two with M1903 rifle.  One in Seven of all U.S. infantrymen were equipped with the M1903 during the war, and the rifle was the standard rifle for some formations, such as the Military Police.

Just before I was in high school the JrROTC unit there actually had M14s, which is a surprising thought.  I believe that they had the firing pins removed, but that both shows the extent to which JrROTC units had access to real arms, and the depth to which the M14 had fallen as a service rifle.  The M1903 was officially replaced as a line rifle after World War Two, and it had become a specialist rifle during the war at that.  It soldiered on for years and years after the war, but an improved variant of it in the new official NATO cartridge was adopted in the late 1950s. That rifle, the M14, never managed to supplant the Garand and it never even made it into Guard and Reserve units as the standard rifle before the Vietnam War brought on the M16, which ended up replacing it before it had really fully replaced the M1 Garand.  A highly regarded marksmanship rifle, the M14 lived on for a time as a service rifle competition rifle, but it also ended up in a lot of Guard armories and secondary use in the Army when its fortunes fell.

Soldier early in World War Two training with a M1 Garand.

Still, that JrROTC units had M14s is surprising.  At some point in the mid 1970s, however, they were removed and sent back to the Army, which began to reconsider the rifle for certain uses.  The rifle ended up coming roaring back into service in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its accuracy and long range performance made them a better rifle for trained marksmen than the M16 which had originally replaced it.  

U.S. paratrooper in Vietnam, equipped with M14, during 1967's Operation Junction City.  Junction City, fwiw, is the town just outside of Ft. Riley, Kansas.

U.S. infantryman in Afghanistan with rebuilt updated variant of the M14.

When the M14s went, the M1s came back, and when I was in high school they had some M1s.   The drill team used M1903s, however.  About the only time I saw the M1s was when I was in the National Guard, as we had their M1s on some occasion.  They had the firing pins removed.

Well, now times have changed and the rifle team, which shot at a range inside the high school, no longer uses firearms but instead shoots air rifles.  A person can make of that what they want, but its quite a change over a century.