An example of time and distance

These are photographs I recently posted on the Holscher's Hub site. Well, not really recently, but relatively recently.

Just the other day, here, I posted an article about the Revolution In Rural Transportation.  It can be easy to over do a thesis, and hopefully I haven't there, but that topic explored how parts of the Wyoming high country, or even just the back country, was inaccessible for much of the year.  Elsewhere here I've explored just how long it used to take to go from one area to another.

Here's a practical example from this Fall.  These are photos that were taking trailing out of the Big Horns.  Granted, this is pushing cattle.  If a person was just riding, they'd make better time.  Still, it's illustrative as to how distance used to be covered more slowly. And, and perhaps more significantly, it's an example of how distances once seemed so much more vast.  I can, at least in nice weather, easily drive up to this location and back home in much less than a day.  And some of these distances, which take a long time to cover pushing cattle, take under an hour on the road, by truck.

Day one, gathering and start of the trail.

 The Camp.

 Self portrait, day two.

 Lonely bull.

The slope, day three.

Writing What You Know

This is probably the third time in recent weeks that I've commented on something written by Tribune columnist Mary Billitier.  It's probably really unfair on my part, partially because her columns have been much less maudlin recently and she deserves credit for that.  It's also probably unfair as I tend to pick on the entire Casper Star Tribune every time I do that, and by recent observation their columnists aren't as bad as I have tended to portray them really. 

Here I'll give Billitier a little credit while, at the same time, criticize the publishing (and film) industry.  In today's Billitier CST article, Billitier notes that she submitted (resubmitted?) an old novel she had written to her publisher. She, as she recently related, is in her 40s, but the novel was written when she was in her early 30s, and features people in their 20s.

Now, I'm not privy to the rejection letter she received, but apparently her publisher gave the novel to some 20 year old employees who did not find it really credible, and therefore they gave her a re-write assignment, which I'll address in a moment.  But first I'd note that the entire idea that a person must be a certain age in order to portray it is bull. Rather, a person must be observant as to that age in order to portray it. As even Billitier noted, J. K. Rawlings hugely successful series of books was written to a youngish audience which she was far removed from. But, to give another more significant example, consider that Tolstoy was in his 20s when he started writing War and Peace, the greatest novel ever written.  The books starts out with observations of 20 year olds and teenagers, more particularly early teenage girls.  Tolstoy was never a teenage girl.  And the book goes through decades to where the characters are in their late middle age when it wraps up, with some elderly characters portrayed all along. It's often been noted how dead on he was in portraying people in context, and it sure wasn't because he was the ages of the people he was writing about at the time.  So here I think Billitier wasn't off the mark in feeling a bit wounded, even though she took the criticism to heart.  Here, for once, I don't think she should ahve.

Be that as it may, the next part of the column really bugs me.  Her publisher indicated that it wanted the re-write to feature a 40 year old woman who has to go back and patch up a rift in her ranch family.

What? 

If Billitier can't be expected to write accurately about the insights of 20s somethings, while would some dim bulb publisher seriously expect her to be able to write bumpkis about anything to do with a ranch family? Billitier is a Californian, not a Wyomingite, and the mere fact of her being transplanted here would no more guarantee that she has an insight into ranching than noting that my wife has a houseplant would make me an expert on horticulture.  I'm not criticizing Billitier at all on this, and to her credit, once again, she didn't indicate that she did know anything about this topic, and rather that she felt a bit humbled by the whole experience.  All the more so as she's apparently teaching a class on novel writing right now.

What this shows is how amazingly ignorant publishers are, at least as to certain formulas.  I noted on my Today In Wyoming's History blog recently that it seemed to be the case that there are a fair number of local authors who we could hope would do better, although some are, while we have always had some people who write about the West, or Wyoming, whose closeness to it we might question. This is not to say that a person must have grown up here, or even live her, to write about here. But why on earth would a publisher assume that mere residence here would mean that a writer would know anything about ranching?  It's absurd.  Most Wyomingites, of course, aren't ranchers at that, and in order to know anything about ranching, you pretty much have to ranch or really deeply immerse yourself in it.  I frankly think you'd have to do it. That makes me also suspect, fwiw, that this is equally true about any novel involving farming, livestock, riding horses, or the military.  If you haven't experienced that to some degree, you aren't going to get it quite right, I suspect.  Having said that, there are quite a few novels on these topics that are excellent, and I don't know if the writers had experienced those things or not.  I do know that merely living in an area does not make a person an expert on that areas culture or occupations.  I once spent a month in South Korea, for example, but that doesn't make me an expert on Gangnam Style.

This does explain why nearly every recent televised portray of Wyoming I've seen, however, is ubersappy.  Hollywood appears to seriously believe that Wyoming looks like the area just outside of Los Angeles, and that every single Wyomingite is a small rancher.  It also seems to believe that it is actually possible for a person to just go buy a ranch.   Hardly a reality.  And Hollywood also seems to really like the ranch girl goes home to patch up big crisis genera, of which there are a whole host of recent examples.

Well, I don't wish Billitier ill on this.  I actually sympathize with her.  She is probably legitimately an expert on a topic that's far more common than her publishers want her to write on, given her domestic travails,and it's too bad they want her to write a Horse Opera when she would have no apparent background, that I can see, to write it.

Some Recent Columns of Note:

This isn't a general editorial page, of course, but there's been some recent columns running in our local newspaper that have brought up some interesting points somewhat worth looking at.

For instance, there's Cal Thomas' Sex and the city (of Washington).

This ran in our local paper on Saturday, November 24, and it raises some interesting questions about double standards and changing standards in the context of the Petreaus resignation.  I mentioned some of these exact same items here myself a bit earlier in my The Novelty of the Normal, and the Banalty of the Unusual... a writing dilemma, post, those being that there's a real double standard in what used to apply and what currently doesn't apply to most people, and is even lampooned in the popular media, but which is supposed to apply to high governmental officials.  It's a real oddity, and Thomas does a nice job summing it up.

Speaking of Petreaus, Froma Harrop mentions something that is apparent to any student of American history, on her blog, that being that our current crop of military men sure wear a lot of fruit salad.  She's unfair in her criticism of Patton, however, who normally didn't wear all of his decorations and who actually, contrary to widespread assumption, stuck pretty strictly to uniform regulations, all in all.

 

General Patton.  His modified B-3 aviators' jacket would have actually fit within the uniform standards of the time for a high ranking officer.

 

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who actually oddly departed from the official uniform in the form of pleated trousers and the "egg salad" on this hat, which, however, may have been appropriate for his other rank of Field Marshall of the Philippine Army.

Speaking of Harrop, an interesting article hers is to be found in her recent article The Curious Item of Mitt's Gift List.  I like Harrop's observation's as a rule, and find that she doesn't really fit into the conservative or liberal camp, even though she protests that she's a liberal from time to time. But I think she's way off the mark here.  Her thesis is that statistics demonstrating that there's a flurry of new entrepreneurial endeavors by people when they hit age 65 supports an assumption that extending the ability to list children on parent's health care up to age 25 will result in the same.  The reason, she claims, is that people in their 40s and 50s are working for health insurance benefits.

No doubt, in some cases they are, but I've known people much younger than that who did the same. And is that so much the reason that people take one job or another that they continue to work at any one particular job?  I doubt it.  That is, I doubt that this will mean that people will suddenly be freed up to start new businesses because they no longer have to be concerned about their 20 something kid's health care.  Its the sort of simplistic view of the economy and everything in it that leads people to so many simple, erroneous, assumptions about it, and in turn leads to unreasonable political expectations.

George F. Will's article from just before Thanksgiving was one of his recent bests, although I don't like the irreverent title.  The article does a good job of pointing out some recent absurdities with some pretty acid wit, sweetened by an accurate concluding observation.

Handwriting

Last week, I posted an entry about Pens and Pencils. That naturally leads to this topic; handwriting.  And, by handwriting, I mean cursive hand writing.

 Sergeant George Camblair writing letter home from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during World War Two.

When I was a kid a great deal of time was spent learning "cursive writing" via the Palmer Method.  The Palmer Method, the way we were taught it, featured writing books in which the student practiced writing the loopy flowing lines of English script.  Up on the borders of the classrooms, where the walls joined the ceilings, many class rooms had examples of Palmer Method script up near the ceiling, running along the entire border of the wall/ceiling junction.  Pre-printed Palmer Method wall paper supplied the example.  Teachers, for their part, had a means by which they could put the same lines we found in our work books up on the black (or green) boards to help provide examples to us on who to write it.

That would have been in the 1970s.  I'm not sure what grade were first introduced to cursive script, but we were practicing it, if my recollection is correct, by 3d or 4th Grade.  For many of us, once we learned it, it stuck, and we still write with it.  In that fashion, we were like our parents.

Both of my parents had beautiful examples of handwriting, with my father's being particularly nice and legible.  While he could type (and my mother normally typed, even if she was writing short items) when he wrote letters or notes, he normally wrote them in script.  His script was amazingly legible, with there never being any guess as to what he was writing.

 This is not to say, of course, that everyone's script, back in that era, was equally legible.  In fact, quite the opposite is the true.  I've seen many examples of handwriting from the 1950s and earlier that was nearly completely illegible.  Perhaps the most surprising thing of all, regarding legibility, is that some official documents, almost certainly written by scriveners, are darned near illegible.

A scrivener  is an occupation that has ceased to exist; the occupation being the victim of technology. The technology, in this case, was the typewriter.  The typewriter was invented in the 1860s and had a very rapid spread.  It wiped out scriveners as an occupation and rendered the word itself so obscure that generations of high school students have had to have the term explained them when assigned to read Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. Now, the term seems to show up solely in court decisions when a court wants to use a fancy word for "drafter".  So, instead of a person being the "drafter of a contract," they are the "scrivener."  Oddly, this is actually an incorrect use of the term, as a scrivener is not the drafter.

Typewriters belonging to RKO being turned over to the U.S. Government during World War Two to help ease the critical shortage of typewriters.

A person would be inclined to think that scriveners must have had beautiful handwriting, but it simply isn't the case.  I've read more than one official document that was set out in perfectly awful handwriting.  Some U.S. land patents, for example, are darned near impossible to read.  The scriveners, who perhaps were actually occupants of other occupations, had hideous handwriting.  Indeed, at least by my observations, early land patents are difficult to read, due to the handwriting, more often than not. And bad handwriting shows up in lots of other official documentation as well.

British soldiers in North Africa writing home.  Note the fountain pen.

Still, I miss cursive writing and really feel it should still be taught.  At some point schools just stopped teaching it.  I'm not sure why, but now at least one or two entire generations of Americans can barely write in cursive, if they can at all.  My son, for example, started off writing with it and was affirmatively stopped from doing it as school, meaning that instead he was taught to print everything.  Printing is slow, and frankly a person with bad cursive hand writing will usually have equally bad printing, so nothing is achieved by the omission.  And cursive is much more rapid to write.

On that latter point, that may perhaps explain the demise of cursive writing.  Just as the typewriter eliminated the scrivener, the computer may have eliminated cursive writing.  Now, younger people take some sort of a computer,. whether it be a true computer, or a miniature computer such as smart phones have, and are, with them everywhere.  Most younger people are capable of keyboarding extraordinary rapidly, and the modern thought is, no doubt, that they learn to write rapidly that way.

But, even in this day and age, there are times when  you need to take notes, or write.  Cursive writing was quickly, and somehow more charming, for that.  I miss it.

Communications Curfew

Interesting article by Jean Singleterry about employer's efforts to get employees to quit checking their electronic devices, for work purposes, after hours:  Personal Finance

There's simply no denying the massive intrusion that cell phones, and in particular smart phones, have made into many professions' personal time.  It's really interesting to consider the evolution of this over time.

A century ago, 1912, most people in my office profession had no direct contact with their work outside of their office, unless they were on a work related mission. By the same token, however, and often missed in all of this, doing some work at home on an emergency basis was pretty common.  I think perhaps modern technology, starting with the telephone, has greatly reduced that.  By this sort of at home work what I mean is, for example, it wasn't wholly uncommon for somebody to show up at a lawyers house off hours if there was some sort of an emergency that seemed to require it. This was even more common, much more common, in the case of the medical professions, where after hour contacts were part of the expectation of the profession.  This carried on well after the introduction of the telephone for doctors and dentists, and probably actually dramatically increased.

Offices at home were often quite common for various types of professionals.  When an office is at home, work at home is going to occur.  Quite a few lawyers kept offices in their homes.  Some still do, but at that time it was quite common.  This was also quite common for doctors, who often had their offices in their houses.  But even other professions did that.  A really nice re-worked house here in town, for example, that is now a near downtown law office was once the home, and office, of a cattle buyer here named Murphy.  The house has a fairly large front room that was probably Murphy's office at that time.

All of this is not to say, however, that the cell phone hasn't changed things for many professionals, and simply average people.  Quite a few people now use texting to contact employees and professionals. As the cell phone keeps no real hours, texts can be sent any time and, of course, received any time.  The fact that most homes now contain a computer also means that many people whose work is computer based, or which features email, can pretty much return to work at any hour. As part of this, even if they do not have to be working, the blending of work and home in this fashion, or rather work hours and off hours, creates a discipline problem for quite a few people, as it's hard not to check a work related message and respond.

Of course, a missed aspect of this is that now that work follows people around in the form of the smat phone and the computer, private and home life comes into the work place in that fashion as well.  For much of the 20th Century this was only true for most people when they received a private phone call at work.  Even as recently as 10 years ago or so, quite a few employers did not approve of very many personal calls at work.  Employees who took quite a few personal calls would hear about it from their employers.  After cell phones started to become common that began to break down.  Now, with text messages and email, it's nearly completely broken down and a fair number of people have bits and pieces of their private lives occur at work every day.  It'd be my expectation that, for those just entering the work place, the concept of leaving home life at home completely would be so foreign that it just won't occur.

Which brings  up an odd fact that, in some ways, the cell phone actually doesn't create a new environment, as so often imagined, so much as it brings back a really ancient one.  If we go far enough back, there really was no distinction between work and home life at all, and many people were in constant contact with the immediate members of their family and tiny village.  We seem to be doing that with cell phones once again.

Mail. . .. and Junk Mail

Mail is one of those classic and perennial subjects of conversation.  Like the weather, everyone has an opinion on the mail.  Usually the opinion is the same one that has seemingly always existed. . . that the mail is slow and everything in it is bad.  By and large, that's a pretty unfounded opinion but it doesn't seem to vary much over time.

A classic example of this is something once overheard by my son in the barber shop.  A couple of older gentlemen were in the barbershop waiting their turns and discussing the mail.  One complained that the German postal service could move a letter clear across Germany in a day and there was no reason that the US Postal Service should not be able to do something similar.

Well, the Post Office does do something similar to that every day.  Germany's geography consists of 137,847 square miles.  Wyoming's geography consists of 97,814 square miles.  Mailing a letter from one place in Wyoming to another, overnight, is not hard to do, and that's about the same mileage a typical German letter would put in.  This was probably all the more case in the complainers case as his time in Germany likely came before German reunification when the square mileage of the BDU was less than that of Wyoming.  The Unites States, as a whole, consists of 3,794,083 square miles, and obviously moving a letter from one place in the US overnight may be a much more difficult matter.

In other words, people, in part, like to complain about the mail.

Which is not to say that the mail hasn't changed over the years.  One thing I was recently surprised to learn is that in at least the UK twice daily mail delivery was the norm in the early part of the 20th Century and it was common to mail a card in the morning and have it delivered in the afternoon, an impressive feat.  This is the reason that there are so many photo cards from the early 20th Century.  Average people, and businesses, used them for short messages.  Sort of like having a fancy email signature, using a photo card was a little spiffier way of sending a message.  Photo cards were extremely common, and existed on all topics, including news, travel, and politics.  Even radical organizations had photo cards, designed not only to serve as messages for their adherents, but basically as advertisements for their causes.Of course, then as now, people also collected them to.  But probably the chance to get a photo card, which many of these were, added a bit of happy anticipation to receiving mail.

As twice daily mail delivery might infer, mail delivery was an extremely important governmental function at one time (and really still is).  Delivering the mail is one of the duties of the United States government that's specifically referenced in the U.S. Constitution, putting it up there with providing for the nation's defense.  Indeed, its one of the task that the US took on right from the onset.

Early postal delivery was a daunting tasks.  Now forgotten the Post Office was in effect one of the nations' early "mounted services", in that much mail was delivered by mounted men.  This was so much the case that it is claimed that the etymology of the equestrian term "posting" comes from postal riders.  Posting is the practice of "rising to the trot", as opposed to "sitting the trot" in which a rider rises to the beat of the trot, a practice which generally makes the trot easier for the rider to do and which also provides some relief for the horse.  Whether posting actually comes from postal riders is not undisputed, but it at least there's some basis to make that assertion.

Seal of the former United States Post Office Department, the predecessor to the United States Postal Service.

Moving the mail was so important to the country that being Post Master General was a cabinet level position in the US Government from 1872 to 1971, when the Department was converted into the Postal Service. Few people probably recall that change now, but it was a real one.  I'm actually pretty surprised to learn that the elevation to a full cabinet position came in 1872, however, as that would seem rather late.  Still, having said that, I suppose that delivering the mail in the vast West at that time must have been a chore of epic proportions.  It's a forgotten one too.  For example, an historical oddity is that one of the government installations near Independence Rock, during its 19th Century hay-day, was a post office.  People remember the forts and what not, but they don't remember the post office.

I suppose the importance of mail started to diminish slightly with the telegraph, and then the telephone, but not much really.  It's the Internet and Email that's really cut into the importance of the mail.  Not that mail isn't important, but it's declining in importance nearly every day.  Offices still send out vast quantities of mail, however, and the law in particular relies on the mail as many types of legal instruments and documents must be "served" by mail.  A ritual in any law office is the daily sorting, stamping, and delivering of the days' mail, followed by the daily mailing out of pleadings and notices. The law, however, is generally a slow adapter of new technologies.  Electronic communications are making their inroads here too now, and now Federal Courts use electronic filing, as system by which all pleadings in actions are filed electronically.  The Federal Pacer system also sends out the notice of filings as well, which replaces the requirement that lawyers mail out pleadings.  So far only the Wyoming Supreme Court has done something similar, with other Wyoming state courts retaining the mailing and hard copy requirements.  It's only a matter of time, however, before all state courts in the US use some variant of electronic filing.  I'd be very surprised if I was still filing hard copies of pleadings, and mailing the service copies, a decade from now.\

Of course, part of what everyone has received in the mail for many years is "junk".  "Junk mail" is the term loosely used for advertisements.  It should be regarded as pretty loose of term, however, as a lot of people are looking forward to some of that junk.  Catalogs and advertisements may be unwelcome to some, but many look forward to those very things, and cringe at the other major thing that the Postal Carrier delivers, that being bills.

Its interesting to note that junk mail is an unwelcome aspect of mail that Email not only managed to catch up with, but to really surpass the old written mail with.  On most days I get a few advertisements in my home mail, and I get a few every couple of days in my work mail, although quite frequently the work advertisement mail is relevant to what I'm doing and isn't really all junk by any means.  But my Email, particularly my work email, is amazingly full of junk mail.  And junk mail, as any Emailer knows, is derisively known as Spam, a name that the makers of the canned meat by that name are probably less than thrilled with.

The real Spam.

Spam, the electronic kind, is really irritating.  It's at least as irritating as junk mail ever was, and arguably its much more irritating.  Spammers bombard my work email with junk every day, and with repeated emails using the same bogus email addresses.  As a result, I've reset my Spam Filter on my email from Stun to Kill, and now most of it gets weeded out, thank goodness.  I hope for a day when Spam Filters will be so efficient that Spam will die off, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.  Indeed, I'd like the Spam filters to hunt the perpetrators down, leap out of their computer screens, and hurl cans of Spam at them.

Most irritating of all the Spam, and the one that seems to come into my work email the most frequently, are those that purport to somehow be business related, or which closely mimic real email that a person might receive. For example, I get fake Amazon spam fairly often.  I know when I've ordered something from Amazon, so I don't click on them, but it's irritating.  Likewise, for awhile I got piles of them purporting to be from the IRS, even though I know very well that the IRS does not send out official information by email.  Others mimic banks, or other business institutions.

Oddly, some of these purport to be from people at these institutions, which are the most bizarre of them all. Probably a very high percentage of these Spam emails originate overseas, and they contain either malicious viruses or some sort of nasty tracking program of some sort.  They're dangerous. But they're sort of amusing at the same time, as apparently the Spammers in Russia or Nigeria, or wherever, think the average American has a very unusual name.  Just the other day, for example, I got one that purported to be from ArmandRosenberg, or soemthing like that.  Armand?  Unusual names like that are common for these.  There will be things like SpankadorVonLudwig, or ZiangchwoSpencer.  Apparently Spammers spend a lot of time watching American television in which names are, indeed, sometimes odd.

Anyhow, it's extremely frustrating.  I almost miss the day when junk mail was limited to catalogs and mailings that I could just toss, rather than electronic Spam I have to filter out in vast quantities, some of which probably contain viruses and all of which I wish to avoid.  Even bloggers, such as we, have to worry about the occasional spam attempt as a comment to this and our other sites.  We love it when we get comments, but every few months there's one where some poster claims to love the site and wants to direct to his own time share in the Caribbean, or something, site. 

It was refreshing, therefore, when some I twice received mail from a local car franchise a couple of weeks ago that had hit upon the idea of sending out envelopes with no return address, and their add, with a sticky note attached addressed to a household member's first name.  It looked oddly personal, even though it was apparent it was not. Still, it came by mail, and it didn't contain a virus.

Closed

This blog attempts to track changes, amongst its other topics, occurring over the past century or so.  It strays from that fairly frequently, but here's a clear change that's worth sadly noting.  The end of actual days of rest.

This is an observation I've made elsewhere here from time to time, but it's really on my mind today as for the first time in my life, some major retain stores are open, today. Thanksgiving Day.  It's reprehensible, in my view.  Frankly, I'm not really all that thrilled about "Black Friday", the biggest shopping day of the year. This is a phenomenon that only developed within the past couple of decades in and of itself.  It really brings into sharp focus the extent to which the US has gone from a production economy to a consumption economy.  So does the end of the day of rest.

Wyoming has never had Blue Laws, or at least if it did, I'm unaware of them.  Blue Laws, for those unfamiliar with them (which is undoubtedly an increasing number of Americans) are laws that mandate that stores be closed on  Sunday.  Blue Laws tend to be strongly associated with religion, but that association may in fact be inaccurate.  What causes that belief is that Sunday is the Lord's Day in almost all of the Christian denominations, with the Biblical injunction against working on the Sabbath being regarded as having been transferred from Saturday to Sunday.  This isn't a theology tutorial, so I won't get into the the theology behind that, but all Christian denominations have the concept of The Lord's Day, with all Judeo Christian religions believing that there should be a day of rest.  Hence, the widely held belief that Blue Laws are merely a civil law to enforce a Christian belief.

Christ observed that the Sabbath was made for man; not that man was made for the Sabbath, and that really reflects the general concept behind Blue Laws.  As the nation industrialized it was observed that many employers would not give a day off of any kind, if they could avoid it.  Generally, social pressures meant that most employers had to give Sundays off, but that was it.  Ten hour long days, six days a week, were the rule.  And the labor was very grueling.   Blue laws meant that there was at least one day off for everyone, which not only meant that the Biblical injunction was observed, but that people had a de facto chance to rest, if only for a day.  The labor movement, through long arduous efforts, eventually secured a second day, Saturday, and the weekend was born. This didn't come about because employers were eager to make the work week five days long, but because workmen struggled for a second day off.  Its' a necessary day as well, as at a certain point people become unproductive and even dangerous by overwork.  Some time off is necessary.

The weekend off also came at a time when the Federal government, like other national governments, saw fit to provide for a few extra holiday days off during the year.  These days have never been very large in number in the United States.  Other nations tend to have many more.  These Federal holidays are largely observed simply by giving Federal employees the day off, and by closing all Federal services on those days.  But, up until a few decades ago, most civil employers followed suit.

That really leads to the current conversation, as even where Blue laws did not exist, it was the rule up well into the 1960s and even early 1970s that employers did not require employees to work on Sunday, and things were closed on Sunday.  Religious people and non religious people observed the custom. This custom extended to Federal holidays.  I well remember, as a young child, that my father would make sure to buy gasoline early if the 4th of July fell on a Monday or Friday, for example, as it would be impossible to buy it anywhere all weekend long.  No gasoline stations were open.  None. Not even the truck stop out on the highway.  It wasn't the law, it was the social custom, and it was observed.

Some businesses were open on Saturdays, but they were certain types of retail outlets, and they tended to open later than normal. Automobile dealerships were open on Saturdays, but they may have kept shorter hours.  Department stores and certain other stores were as well.  This allowed people who worked all weekend long to shop on Saturday, which was also a long held custom.

About the only stores of any kind which were open on holidays were grocery stores.  My father always found this to be a bit appalling, and my wife still does.  Even major holidays saw some big grocery stores open.

Now, all this is passing rapidly away, and soon it'll be the case that all people, in all occupations, will be working seven days a week.  In the name of convenience and service, we're giving up the ability to have any free time off at all.

This has been a slow process, but the dam has really broken on it in recent years.  It started with some types of retain outlets, which probably reflects the evolution of the United States from a production economy to a consumer economy.  When most people were producers of some sort; industrial, agricultural, etc., or when most people serviced material items if they didn't work in these industries, it was naturally the case that the economic engines wouldn't see it as necessary to stay open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Washing machine manufacturers, for example, can shut down for the weekend and not be hurt economically. Washing machine repairmen don't need to fix things on Sunday. They can still do it on Monday.  But, retail outlets make no money at all if they're not open.  So, we saw the big "department" stores (a name that now no longer really used ) move towards seven days a week, a move that happened a long time ago.  This was followed by outfits like WalMart that simply never close.  Ever.  Small convenience stores followed suit, which at first made them a novelty, but which now really is not.

A person could state, of course, so what?  That's more convenient for me, right?

Well, probably not really.  Many more Americans are employees in that sector of the economy than in prior eras, which means that many more people now work any day of the week, and any hour of the day.  Now this is has advanced into the Thanksgiving Holiday. With that being the case, Christmas will not be far behind.  When a huge section of the economy begins to base their hours in this fashion, soon everything does.  At some point it will be probable that only schools and governmental offices will be closed on the traditional weekend.  This isn't a good development at all.

In much of the country Blue Laws never did exist, but the weekend did.  This was only because people felt it should.  That's probably the only way a real observance of holidays will return.  But that will require the shopper to realize that having the convenience, in 2012, of shopping on Thanksgiving is likely to mean that, in 2014, they'll be working on Thanksgiving, no matter what they do.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

The image above, with the caption "Jack Was Here", appears on the power box of My Brother's Bar in Denver.  The image is of Jack Kerouac, the famous Beat Generation poet who died due the effects of cirrhosis at age 47 in 1969.

Or is he famous?

When I took this photo on my phone, I texted the image to my wife and son.  My son replied "Jack who?"  It's not an unreasonable question.  He's well read, but he'd never heard of Jack Kerouac.  I have, but quite frankly, I've never read him.  Not one word, including the famous "On The Road.".  And I have low interest in doing so. Perhaps that's because I have read snippets of Beat Generation poet Alan Ginsberg, and have no appreciate for the material of his I have read.  Perhaps, of course, that's unfair and Kerouac and Ginsberg should not be compared.  I don't know.

Perhaps also it's because the Beat Generation seemed to be a comma between the 1930s and 1940s and the 1960s, leaving their moment very brief and seemingly irrelevant. But I think that may mean more than it seemingly says. Perhaps some personages are truly only relevant to their times, and irrelevant to all others.  Or, if not irrelevant, not more relevant, or much more relevant, than everyone else.  In other words, maybe Kerouac doesn't pass the test of time very well.

Indeed, I did know that Kerouac had lived in Denver for a time and that he'd left an unpaid bar tab at My Brother's Bar, which he frequented in that period.  But I was only aware of that last minor item because I'd heard it on a television show about hamburger joints.  Apparently My Brother's Bar, located just next to REI in Denver, is a major famous grill.  I didn't know that.

 The interior of My Brother's Bar in Denver.

It is a neat old bar.  I frankly would have been a little spooked to have ventured into that area of Denver a decade or two ago, but not so much now. As noted, it's right next to REI, and just down the street from the Denver Aquarium, which is pretty neat.  It's a really old establishment.  It's apparently so well known that they've never put a sign up.  You just have to know its there.

According to the Food Channel, it's famous for the Johnny Burger, which was created there and named after a bar tender who thought it up.  That's what I had.  They are very good.

Anyhow, I guess that may, or may not, be a comment on fame.  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi were the words, we are told, that a slave spoke to those who were granted a Triumph.  All glory is fleeting.  And not only fleeting.  Over time, it seems, some locations are not remembered for who were there, but for the really fine hamburgers they serve.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Twinkies maker Hostess plans to go out of business: Thomson Reuters Business News - MSN Money

As we've learned from recent news:   Twinkies maker Hostess plans to go out of business: Thomson Reuters Business News - MSN Money

Who would have even thought it possible, which I guess says something about the temporary nature of even major brands.  No Hostess?  What about Twinkies, Ding Dongs, etc?

Well, my prediction is that a lot of these foods will not really disappear.  They have too broad of a following.  Indeed, I'm quite surprised to learn that Hostess is in trouble, I would have never have guess that. The fact that it is says something about the state of the American economy and production.  Whatever that is probably isn't a good thing either. Be that as it may, while I myself haven't had a twinkie in years, my prediction is that the snack products party of the company will be bought up by somebody who will keep on making them.

While I've been sort of violating this rule recently, this blog isn't really supposed to be a series of running comments on the state of the U.S. today, but in the past, related to today.  So I'll forgo commenting too much on what this odd development might mean. But it is interesting to note how big name brands of the past can evaporate and disappear.  What we think of as being a really stable product line might not be.

One area that this has been proven to be true of is beer.  Lots of beer is still brewed in the country, of course, but the labels have changed somewhat, and even where they haven't, the makeup of the brewers has.  When I was a kid, here, the beer brands you saw around were Coors, Budweiser, Olympia, Hamms and Pabst.  Coors was a regional brand at that time, apparently coveted  by those elsewhere.  As such, it was really a survivor from an earlier era, as the beer scene of the 1950s to 1970s was really quite different from what it had been prior to Prohibition.  Prior to the Volstead Act there'd been all kinds of regional breweries all over.  Casper had one such brewery, that being the Hilcreast Brewery.  It went under, I think, due to the Depression.  Outfits like Coors, Budweiser, Leininkugels, etc., held on somehow and started back up in 1932.  The entire industry begain contracting sometime after WWII and there started to be fewer and fewer brands over time.  Even where multiple lables still existed, they were somtimes owned by the same companies.

 Southern drinking establishment, early 1940s.  The beers being advertised are "Jax" and "Regal", neither of which I've heard of.  Hires Root Beer, still around, was apparently also behind the bar.

Reversing course in the 1980s, new small breweries came in, often with much better beer, and now there's all sorts of labels once again.  I don't know if Olympia even still exists.  Coors does of course, but Budweiser was bought by a huge Belgian entity, making what some have regarded as the very symbol of American beer a foreign owned outfit, at least for now.  American beer, for that matter, might better be defined by Sam Adams, a brewery that came on since the 1970s. Around here a regional brewery that has done wall has been New Belgian, which was just a small outfit when I first heard of it while living in Laramie in the early 1980s.  The beer brands have come and gone, quite clearly.

But so have the soda brands.  Coke and Pepsi remain the cola kings, of course, but at one time you'd also find Royal Crown around here.  Not anymore.  The other biggies, Mountain Dew, Doctor Pepper, Orange Crush, and 7 Up were around then as now.  But a collection of diet sodas, a new thing, also were that are sort of rare, if not absent, today.  Tab was one.  Fanta another.  I think that some of these may still exist, but you hardly ever see them.  If we go back further, however, there were a whole host of brands that were popular in some regions that might still exist, but which aren't as big of names as they once were.  Nehi we still see here occasionally, but not all that often.  Moxey, believe it or not, was a popular soda in the US back in the 1920s.

 Royal Crown getting lower and lesser mention on building, Natchez Miss, late 1930s.

Royal Crown and Coca Cola with some forgotten brands.

Another place there's been a massive amount of change over, in terms of brand names, has been in automobiles.  Even in the past few years a few well known General Motors lines of old disappeared.  The same is true for the Ford Motor Company.  Up until quite recently, I had a Mercury Cougar parked outside the house that I used for a daily driver.  Now, not only is the car gone, but Mercury is gone too.  Of course, Ford remains, but there are car manufacturers that have completely disappeared.  International Harvester, for example, still makes heavy equipment but it no longer makes light trucks and SUVs, like it once did.  Studebaker still exists as a company, but not as an automobile company.  Packard, Hudson, Willys, etc; all gone.

Packard workers building Rolls Royce aircraft engines during World War Two.

These companies, it should be noted, were not minor concerns, as it sometimes seems to be claimed now.  Packard was a major engine producer during World War Two.  Studebaker 6x6 trucks were used principally by the Soviet Union, GM production being so vast that the US didn't need Studebaker 6x6s.  Thousands upon thousands Studebaker trucks were made and supplied to the USSR via lend lease as a result.  Willys, together with Ford, made thousands of Jeeps and Willys gets the credit, along with Bantam, for creating the Jeep.  The big three were all around, of course, at that time, but they had a lot of competition.

Airlines provide another example.  Pan American, TWA, etc., were common names in US air travel following World War Two.  Since then it seems airlines have come and gone constantly. When I was a kid, our airport was served by Western Airlines and Frontier Airlines. Western is still around, but it doesn't fly into here.  Frontier, to my surprise, is still around as well, but likewise doesn't fly here.  Now, United and Delta do, through a regional airline they contract with, Skywest.  

Even such things as clothing brands prove to be less durable than times would suggest.  When I was a kid, the jeans brand was Levis.  Wranglers and Lees were around too, but only real ranch people wore Wranglers.  I've always liked Lees, but I'm about the only one I know who does, so how they hand on I have no idea. And, of course, Carhartt existed, but it was worn only by working men.

Since then, zillions, seemingly, of Jeans companies have entered the market and Levis no longer is what it once was.  The choice is definitely broader than that presented by three companies, and "Levis" no longer defines jeans to such an extent that the product name is interchangeable with the clothing item.

What the point would be, in general, of all of this?  Well, I don't know that there really is one, other than that at least in product names, things really are less permanent than what may be familiar at any one time might suggest.

All photos on this thread from our Flickr site.

Pens and Pencils

I just learned the other day that ballpoint pens came about in the 1940s. Apparently, in the WWII time frame, they remained largely unreliable.

 Waterman fountain pen advertisement, claiming the pen to be the "the arm of peace" in French.

I don't know why that surprised me, but it did.  Pens, in the 40s, and the 50s, largely remained fountain pens.

Frankly, even the Bic ballpoint pens I used through most of junior high and high school were less than reliable. The ink dried up, or it separated in the plastic tube holding it.   Sometimes they leaked and the ink came out everywhere.  But they were easier to use than fountain pens.  With fountain pens I was always like Charlie Brown in the cartoons, with ink going absolutely everywhere, or at least all over my hands.

Which didn't keep me from trying to use them.  I did.  I've always liked fountain pens, and I always admired my dad's ability to use them.  When I was young he had some nice fountain pens at home that he used.  I have them know, but I don't use them.  In later years he switched to cheaper basically disposable fountain pens which took cartridges, rather than having to be filled up from an ink bottle, and I tried to use that kinds in school. But it just didn't work out for me.

More recently some company has developed a wholly disposable fountain pen, and sometimes we have those at work. They're really neat, and they generally don't blow up.  Still, on the other hand, modern roller ball ink pens, a nifty successor to the ballpoint pen, is such a nice pen, and so rarely blows up, that they really can't be beat, as a practical matter.  Still, fountain pens, even disposable ones, are pretty neat.

In the era this blog tried to focus on, fountains were it, in terms of pens.  Mass production of fountain pens, and relatively modern fountain pens, began in the late 19th Century.

But, given as the story of the pen for the first half of the 20 Century was the story of the fountain pen, that means a lot of writing was done with the pencil.

Portrait of Abraham Lincoln in which he is holding a pencil.

Pencils seem to have become semi extinct in some ways in modern times, although that's obviously an exaggeration.  I can hardly get my own kids to use a pencil, even for math homework, which drives me crazy.  By extension, however, I can recall my attempts to use a ballpoint pen for math homework as a source of irritation for my own father, so perhaps that's simply an example of history repeating itself.

Pencils, however, were the writing instrument for people on the go to a large extent prior to the ballpoint pen. When I was a geology student we largely used pencils in the field, not pens, and I'm sure that's true of every outdoor profession.  Army quartermasters, who were issued a pommel bag to go with their 1917 Packers saddle, found that the pommel saddlebag had loops for pencils so that the quartermaster could take notes.  Pens just weren't an option.

Something that was an option for some things, however, was the brush.  A lot of cartoons were ink and brush.  Bill Mauldin's famous cartoons from World War Two, for example, were done with ink and brush, not pen and ink.  Perhaps most modern cartoons are as well, I have no idea.

Anyhow,  the prime focus of this blog is to try to track changes in the 20th Century, and here's a subtle, but important one. Soldiers in the field, newspaper reporters, lawyers in court, prior to WWII, were packing around pencils, not pens.