Residential Neighborhoods North of Government Street

A February Day and a Tall Tree and Cleared Spaces (DSC_1290)

I. The Enclave between Government St and North Blvd, between 19th Street and Eugene.

The word 'enclave' is used, because here it was four-lane surface thoroughfares running parallel to the minor railway, the Louisiana & Arkansas, not heavily used today (but watch for its signals and, if you're sleepless, listen for the night-train whistle at about 2:00 am), North Blvd. changing from a parkway to a plain throughway (and to be distinguished from North Street, to be grouped rather with Spanish Town Road), several important cemeteries and two old and important schools, Dufrocq Elementary and Baton Rouge High School, one of two Magnet High Schools.  Major churches are farther downtown, most of the First churches west of the freeway, Interstate I-110.  The 'enclave' I studied first also is characterized by recent and ongoing renovation, as are its two old schools, and by its alignment to Roseland Terrace and Drehr Place, the two first tracts (19th Street was the city limit then) of the Garden District, some of whose contractors very evidently also worked in the 1920s for owners of lots north as well as south of Government Street.  There were no utilities alleys, however, which are characteristic of whole tracts which a major realtor like Zadok laid out and installed in advance, and there may have been some other conveniences lacking that I don't know of (City Park was being developed, the new LSU campus, too, and the late, great mid-city department store, Goudchaux (later Maison Blanche), like other features related to Main Street, was begun only in the 1930s.

The new images on which today's Post is based are stored in: 
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102498681030579488308/albums/5983162009021212385

I became interested in these characteristics only after I had seen Louisiana Public Broadcasting's  documentary for the 1950s successful and non-violent bus boycott in the early 1950s.  They say that it did not eventuate like the infamous events a decade later in Alabama and Mississippi, for example, because of the large, rooted middle class of African Americans here and the strong leadership of the Rev. T. J. Jemison, of Mt  Zion First Baptist Church, who died only recently.  I wondered which church that is, since Scotlandville, plainly, is mostly later, and in fact First Baptist is just a block south of First Methodist, which most of us know because it's the one we see on crossing under I-110.  But more of the First churches in another Post.  Here just what documentaries don't tell you, where the "power churches" (of whichever denomination) are (again, Taylor Branch taught me that importance in Atlanta), and where it was that people were waiting for buses (compare the populations of 1950 and 2000!).  I came here in 1981, and I knew from Oakland, CA, not to generalize about ethnic and social groups in a city of a quarter million.  My mother was working, c. 1950, for Stanley Home Products (cf. Tupper Ware), and we went (I assisted her) in homes where we were invited, so that we gained a network of Likes (yes, as in Facebook, et al.) all over neighborhoods (barring VanAstorBilt) from S. F. Bay some 30 miles over the hills as far as Livermore, in all the variety that implies.

*******

Wherever possible, Baton Rouge retained its street names and address numbers, so the enclave I was in on Friday is numbered from 100 to 499, N-S, and from 2200 to 2399 W-E.  One is grateful, because, what with cemeteries and railroads and, later, with intervening non-grid freeways, they are useful.
I admitted that three decades ago, when I first saw the Garden District, there were some houses up for sale that weren't selling; they not only hadn't been mowed and trimmed and painted but they had some of those spray dipinti that are so alarming when you're house-hunting.  There are none today.  Commercial contractors (and occasionally do-it-yourself improvers) have bought those that needed help, and they have been selling for as much as five times their price in the 1980s.  I was right to assess the GD as too good to perish.  What about across the street?  Zoning permitted lawyers and dentists and insurance agents and the like to buy up bungalows which rush-hour traffic on Government Street deterred young families from buying.  And obviously there are still some zoning restrictions.  Evidently, though, if you want a house as good as in the Garden District, it can be had less expensively, and you won't have hip-flasks thrown in the gutters or dipinti sprayed wherever a dog could reach or broken-down window air conditioners, either.  Even better, when a six- or eight-room house has been maintained only on the make-it-do principle (the English used to mock our "do-it-yourself" cult in such terms), you won't have the expense and trouble of undoing bad "improvements" from the 1950s or 1960s.  In my post for January 16, above, "What Evergreen Drive Tells Us", you can see how rewarding the results can be.
Similar rewards can be seen on the next street to the west, Delphine, but there, once a block away from Government Street, there will also have been numerous lots for houses one room wide and three or four rooms long : "single shot guns".  There are some in Beauregard Town, and I know of one in Roseland Terrace in the Garden District (in downright poor parts of town they are the rule, as the four-room cube of brick with stucco is in California—neither is to be confused with rural shacks).  Now, in the greater part of two blocks on Delpine Street, they come in rows, for a good reason: the lots on the city plat are measured for them and have been sold and owned as such.  There are other good reasons, too.  Though they usually (like all brick-pillar houses) need to be leveled and given new joists, they are really well built; some may have been so neglected, of course, that they have to be wholly rebuilt.  We have such things as dry rot and powder post beetles hereabouts.  Houses need to be lived in, and past a certain point you can't even rent them (which of course is itself a kiss of death for a century-old wooden house).  But somehow, and I congratulate the couples and singles who have realized it, a "single shot gun" in good  condition is easier to care for, more pleasant to live in, and MUCH closer to your place of employment (and no freeway driving) and far more neighborly, than some suburban ranch on a slab, badly built to begin with, with no trees or persons that share your culture.  And so Delphine should get a medal for urban renewal.  I photographed one house, a shot-gun duplex (two front doors) that is raised in order to be leveled and have the joists replaced.
Finally, the first thing I noticed, when I left that first block of Evergreen, in the enclaves north of Government Street is openness: not just the bareness of the deciduous trees or the use of several house lots for law offices' parking.  Often you have one or more lots empty, but even more often (and unlike what hurricanes may have done) a whole corner once with three houses today is perfectly flat, flattened I think.  In these 1920s blocks the corners or other grouped lots, on flood-free, on-the-bluff land, the last choice land—not requiring flood insurance, where within a mile or two to the south or southeast you are on alluvium, riddled with minor tributary streams that flood at least a little every year, empty lots on every side demand an explanation, despite the effect of the N-S thoroughfares and the Louisiana & Arkansas railway tracks, this should be the most fully built up neighborhood in the city.  Empty corner lots that are meant to take the large houses?  I haven't found an explanation in histories of Baton Rouge, but deliberately I want to see if I, an outsider till recently, can read the evidence truly.  The model of Oakland, CA, where most of the 19c large, proud houses (costly to maintain) got chopped up into the smallest possible apartments, got hopelessly abused by tenants who couldn't afford to take care of them (and who had no means to borrow money), would help explain what may have happened north of Government, except that Baton Rouge was younger and smaller and more modest (this wasn't Lake Providence), and, as PBS observed, had a large middle-class native born African-American community—the circumstance in which "community" is a reality.  What even I can see (and have read about) is that black community itself was sorely tested by not only white flight but by the choice of Scotlandville at the same time, after WW II, as the place to take flight to.
But this enclave next to my own is not grand, not so impossible to afford fixing.  Folks tell me that it is "black", but even today it is more salt-and-pepper, like much of New Orleans.  Anyway, color is not the reason why, evidently in the 1960s and 1970s, there was much too much trashing of these old wooden houses and much too much of "flight" on everyone's part.  What was hopeless and could destroy quiet and decent society within it has been torn out; what can be restored by new joists and new roofs and porches will richly reward the effort (who wants to live in a house with a splattered-on ceiling that falls all over your heads and books and furniture when the hot-water heater in the attic leaks and ruins everything?  Who wants floors with no spring, with astroturf carpets or linoleum tile underfoot?
I hope that the improving financial picture continues to brighten, so that north of Government Street can fulfill its mission.
Bear in mind, this is just an archaeologist's reading of about 20 square blocks, but far more interesting than I'd have thought.

Popular Biography

After 65 years I still remembered Gene Fowler's biog of John Barrymore.

Public Library reading through a lifetime

A single PBS broadcast can provoke a flood of memories.  In this case, it was the film version of Christopher Plummer's one-man (or two) last year of John Barrymore's life.  Adolescents consume journalistic biographies avidly, to broaden one's views, to test one's feelings, as a source book of Life.  I can date my readings fairly accurately by remembering which library I borrowed them from: Alameda, San Pablo, a branch library somewhere in East Oakland, the wonderful Berkeley Public Library, which  was my library of choice once I discovered that the 51 bus and the A and F electric trains (replaced by buses similarly named) connected everything I wanted.  But, let's face it, I'd have found the same sort of reading wherever I was.  Besides, with the rise of cable TV, canned biographies were abundant; now, only the best of their kind survive, on PBS as American Masters / Experience or, imported, from the UK.
Children of each cohort have their own favorites.  It is no wonder that I honestly remembered how seriously I took not only the British princesses but Shirley Temple.  My second blog post, of February 9, 2009, with the Label 'Shirley Temple Movies', commented on that fact.  There was more than paper dolls, though, that led me to the Barrymores.  Somehow vaudeville had led me to Sigmund Spaeth and him to famous theatrical families of the time; the Dewey Decimal System brought the Drew and Barrymore families into proximity, a current film (which I found hard to understand), None But the Lonely Heart, featured Ethel, we had Lionel telling the story of A Christmas Carol (well, too, as I recall, on 6 sides of 10" shellac 78rpm), and lots of stuff in the weekly magazines on John (who was dead only two years).  Eventually, these led me to Gene Fowler's popular biography (see above: the gossip column dignified as Hollywood history in hard cover).  The Wiki's list will give his range; his own mentions of himself in his"Good Night, Sweet Prince" will hint at his own proximity to the Barrymore life style.  A number of copies are available even today, though most will have been sold off.  By the time I was out of high school, in 1952, I was no longer enchanted with the Barrymores as theatrical artists, but the idea of sinful Hollywood during The War (ours, WW II) had led me to The Dream Life of Balso Snell (much, much worse than Miss Loneleyhearts) but as good an adolescent trip as can be found anywhere: incompetently extremely ambitious.  Something far better kept being mentioned by critics, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One.  And within a couple of years I had a friend who was a librarian eager to send me de-accessioned copies ("ex-library", if you don't mind marginalia that today can be matched in the comments of Twitter, et al., meaning indestructibly well bound) of memoirs written "with" a writer or alone with a tape recorder and a typist, or independent biographies, written without the object's having the right to object).  None of these are candidates to become a classic Life of any kind.
I don't mean those in the EB 11th edition, the most famous being Swinburne's sv Mary Queen of Scots, that have a remarkable point of view.  Swinburne's, which is only 6 two-colum quarto pages (which will come to about 48 octavo pages of Penguin Classics. and even so much longer than any modern encyclopedia editor will tolerate).  Of course, Mary Queen of Scots has always attracted those in some measure prone to identify with her, at least imaginatively or operatically.  Indeed, I have read only half of one of them, lent to me by a neighbor herself at that time an octogenarian herself, so I was not surprised when she lent me her copy of Victoria Regina, the favorite role of Helen Hayes, a play by Laurence Houseman no longer as highly regarded as it was in 1934.  In the present generation, biographies of Princess Diana probably fill the bill (though I don't know what may exist for more recent celebrities).
Also, for whatever reason, I don't quite know why even today, and even in the most liberal and literary Press, Shirley Temple stands apart.  Or why, even in the conservative Press, most are just as fond of Pete Seeger as I have been.  But why have they forgotten the Tale of Abi Yoyo?
Who has more to contribute?  Did anyone else for a while feel that Edna St. Vincent Millay was a major poet?  Who took her place in the 1960s?
And remember that Drew Barrymore, however talented, is not very closely related to John.
And, again, the Canadian film with which I began this Post is really excellent.
P.S. I had intended to say something about Waugh's The Loved One but neglected to do so.  Anyway, it wasn't a Public Library self-indulgence but a choice of a different kind.  So I'll just say that it is hilarious to read, even when it turns gruesome, so enjoy it.  In Evelyn Waugh (who had problems of his own, of course) reacting to Forest Lawn brought out the best and worst in him.

What Evergreen Drive tells us

Now turn the corner North to Evergreen Drive

I promised not to study any more bungalows.  These are not new kinds, though no two are quite alike, especially after nearly a century, but they are not part of Zadok Realty's planned tracts, beginning with Roseland Terrace, yet they are very much related to those on the south side of Government Street (and some also to the northern half of Beauregard Town).

When I saw what we have here I took a few pictures, but I don't need to discuss them in detail, beyond observing that some are more faithful to their origins (if only because they have been restored more recently: they are well informed).

How shall I put it?  I came to Louisiana unaware of and blind to racial distinctions of any kind (from Berkeley, CA).  Only in the last five years and thanks to my looking more closely at 1920s bungalows, after my colleagues had told me that I must not look at houses in some blocks (else I'd own a house of my own in these blocks, just west of the main High School) did I form the habits usual here.  Now, thanks to one of the nation's best mayors and many other fine citizens,  and to living and going where I please (provided it isn't a flood-prone "bottom") can I be interested in the integrated development of the town.  Also, I don't know, I cannot tell, what 'community' now enjoys the Magnet High School as its own.

I should point out, what I haven't studied yet, that the slash of the Interstate Freeway, N-S, I-110, may have been really divisive.  And Evergreen Drive is one of several streets that run uninterrupted from Government Street to North Blvd, by which you can go directly west, all the way to the Old Capitol and the River.  I first saw this continuity in several of the bungalows preserved on S. 19th St., just north of the new Dufrocq Elementary (as previously the old one of 1906, abandoned to dilapidation).  Now, I think, the reversal of dilapidation is replacing the race to Ranch-style NASCAR-land (probably an unjust designation).

In any case, easy-going Louisiana is a pleasure to those who love the America of their parents, parents who bought their first homes in the 1920s.

The photos taken yesterday specially for this essay: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102498681030579488308/albums/5969242511079001185

Evergreen starting from Government, opposite Drehr Place, and running north to North Blvd.

Evergreen between Louisiana and Spain, south towards the big garage of the house with the façade heading the previous Post, showing its biggest palm, the rear of its square façade, and its two chimneys

428 Evergreen, the first house north of the garage and yard of the big fancy house.  It rained and froze starting the next day, but yesterday I came back (better light and no pickup truck are demanded).  this is very like the Sanders house less than two blocks away in the Drehr Place part of Wisteria Street.

428 Evergreen: the "camel back" provides upstairs bedrooms, and I'm not sure which gables are primary (by now any good contractor could have looked around, and the 'chinese' gable may be elective, the front door an up-market choice), but the vocabulary and syntax, especially the short pillars and brick posts, are exactly right.

Here on the corner of Evergreen and Spain, we have a fine choice of pillars, quite urban, and that blue paint that has been used a lot all over the Beauregards and Garden District.  Nice to see that this is a family house whose child got a car for Christmas!

Here, and still in that early 1920s (I think) vocabulary with square 'Chinese' brackets and  dagger-pointed pi pendants on the pillars, we can compare again the Sanders house in Drehr Place and all those already compared with it in earlier Posts.  The open gate for access to the garage, framed by brick posts topped with cast pineapples, however, belong to the house next to it, currently being worked on, hence the open picket fence for supplies.

And here is a detail of it, definitely going to be Craftsman and possibly such to begin with.   Again, this is highly correct in its approach.  Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, when houses of the 20s were "improved" they were a disgrace, everywhere, not only in Louisiana (though in our 1920s neighborhoods, and not only in the kitchens, we have our own mockeries).  I had to photograph in the shade, but see the general view in the Album.

Some of you may have seen me last week daftly call a banana limp from freezing a 'bamboo' instead!  Well, here's a very fine stand of ornamental banana, and like all the others that suffer when we have a hard freeze this one will survive, too.

Now I have to wonder: can I learn enough to share about the whole of the neighborhoods from before WW II (which caused a great hiatus in domestic housing)?  It bothers me that people talk about 'the working class', both blue- collar and white-collar, which is to say most of us, including about the same proportion of African-Americans (just read Taylor Branch's "Parting the Waters", the first volume of his biography of Martin Luther King, inter alia, and of the California Hispanics and Asians that I went to Oakland High School with) as if we had been either wealthy families at their Newport summer homes or else the subjects of the justly famous FSA photos.  What I like about Baton Rouge is that, for the most part, it is neither.  Just like San Luis Obispo, where I was born.

Government at Evergreen St., Season's Greetings

Government Street Decked at Christmas 

At 2337 Government Street.  This is so much grander than the bungalows around it.

This cannot be, I think, nearly as old as the façades in New Orleans that it emulates, but decked out for Christmas and attended by its huge palms it becomes glorious.  Behind the façade is a large capacious house of, I guess, about a century ago.  I don't know who owns it (the realtors' pages on line don't say more than that it is a single family dwelling), but they take good care of the garden as well as the house,  and it deserves being the vehicle of Season's Greetings to all here of every faith.  In fact, Government Street, once the main E-W street, is well suited to represent us all, having something of everything in Baton Rouge.

Wedding Portraits & Photographic Science

Naples, MNA.  Pompeii.  Man and wife, from a wall of their house.  The date is Julio-Claudian by her hairstyle.  She, again, as a poetess, he as (what else?) an orator (the idea is, someone educated to serve in public life of the town).  This famous portrait is in a style that might be called a colored drawing rather than a painting, a style which you might compare with the "dry", hard-edged sculptural styles as distinct from the plastic, coloristic styles.

Probably at their wedding 23 December 1920: Cliff and Inez Lawrence Lehman, Audine Lawrence, and (probably) Gilbert Lehman, Cliff's elder brother.

F.L.Lawrence & Mary Ferguson, Wedding Portrait, early 1890s

What Constitutes the "Traditional Wedding Portrait"

The major distinction is whether the families have one made, or not.  The probabilites of preservation from antiquity make their scarcity understandable, and funerary images are vastly more numerous.  We must remember, too, that the garments for brides differ with the ceremonies and symbolism of cultures.  For example, we know from the funerary statue of Phrasikleia (Boardman, Archaic, p. 73, pl. 108a) whose inscription tells us that she will remain a maid rather than a bride and who is dressed in red with a bridal crown, that the red bridal gown, attested to in Lain literature, is far older, since Prasikleia died in the middle of the 6th century BC.  White, I fancy, was associated with death, instead.  Besides, like the other kore statues elaborately dressed, carved in marble by named sculptors like Aristion of Paros, such statues were for the wealthy.

Usually marriage portraits are pretentious in some way or another, and that feeling is expressed in formality.  Piero della Francesca's of the noble Gonzagas are pure profile busts, which recall medallions  and cameos.  Man and Wife paper silhouettes also recall cameos.  Gilt glass, from the Late Empire, is as likely to be frontal.  Also frontal are the Late Republican and Early Empire funerary portraits.  What we don't get, even in the Renaissance, is the equivalent to the bride feeding her husband a piece of the wedding cake. 

A search to locate family wedding pictures, without locating the photographs that the younger generation expected to find, led me to think and to conclude tentatively that the first three quarters of the last, the 20th, century were the height of the Brides' Magazine "traditional" wedding.  What I'm going to suggest is tentative, because (still in its days of early scholarship) the internet seems not to address the subject properly.  What you do find is entrepreneurship: the availability of newly made, modern but jewel-like daguerreotypes, which may well promise that the marriage is consecrated also by uniqueness, by the precious copper and silver (forget the poisonous mercury vapor), by the hint of old-fashioned fidelity (not that such was always the case: indeed, my paternal grandparents, above, separated after their six children grew up). 

Yet the frontal, "iconic", basically more primitive representation of an important human, seen solemnly, is unlikely to have been the principal reason, I think, for the 20th-century parlor presentation of the new man and wife; even in antiquity for the Pompeiian couple (and the house may have belonged to a baker) the primitive preference for the mug shot may be more important.  A child draws a front view before any other, and religions use eikones, icons, flat and frontal and remote, to differentiate exalted personages from ordinary, friendly, familiar images.  But by the 19th century, sophisticated, moving, modeled, active figures prevail in pictures.  Newly wed couples by painters like Vigee Le Brun and Gainsborough, and their paintings of their own children, are usually shown as very much alive.  Even early American anonymous itinerant painters generally prefer a three-quarter view (though these do not generally paint couples in the same frame).

I considered:

• In North America, as in Australia and South America, scattered and varied imigrants and professions wanted to define themselves.
• The highly portable daguerreotype technology spread like wildfire after Daguerre introduced it in 1839, and in cities they were often delicately tinted.  Elsewhere, everywhere, quarter-size plates were pedalled; that is why the Library of Congress and the US Archives as well as the Smithsonian Institution and libraries everywhere have so many.  Their variety is wonderful (and the detail is breathtaking—folks like detail).  Wedding portraits are only one kind of daguerreotype portrait, but they are among the most frontal.
• Collodion emulsion, whether processed on glass for the ambrotype or on tin for the tintype (and many family treasures are ambrotypes and tintypes), which are positive images, or on glass (replacing sensitized paper) for negatives to make prints, albumen on paper, rapidly replaced the daguerreotype in the 1850s.
• Gelatin silver whether on glass or celluloid for negatives and whether printed in gelatin silver or albumen on paper quickly replaced collodion from the 1880s onward.

(The foregoing is much abbreviated and does not describe what has no bearing on this Essay.  See some of the many basic books on the history of photography, such as Naomi Rosenblum's, or the very good Handbook from the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995; these are just the first two that come to mind, and the Getty collection is too wonderful to be typical.  For the typical, just Search the Wikipedia).

I gathered from every search and images site on line that while people did put on their best clothes to be married, just as we usually do to go to Reno (add a corsage, a little hat with a small veil or a shoulder-length veil), that in earlier photography:

• Only a wealthy garden wedding, providing sunlight (and I think of a somewhat bohemian couple) would have a portrait of the couple being married or just married, and it would be done with calotype (salt print) or daguerreotype.  No minister of any church would countenance the very long exposures, even if the subjects could hold the poses.  The newlyweds would have to go to a studio with a skylight and usually have their heads fixed (examples of the braces exist). 
• The traditional white wedding dress and dinner suit for the groom, i.e., formal wear, came in only gradually, and only in large towns and cities, and in England earlier than in the USA.  The idea of a wedding photo seems clearly to have been set by those who could afford the clothes AND to have afforded the man from the main-street studio unless access to a well known photographer also made the girl a debutante or qualified to be presented to at a coming-out ball.   Photography was too expensive a hobby until Kodak, et al., came along and then its output was not fit for the rotogravure.  Similarly, flash equipment of the 19th century (and even into the 20th) was grossly unsuitable for a chapel.  Emulsions as fast as ISO 80 were tops, and only expensive cameras had shutters as high as 1/100 sec.  The wedding pictures of my youth, printed in the papers and magazines, were taken at the receptions, and I was thinking that couples who had no receptions may have had no photographs (unless a member of the party or of the family was a member of the local camera club).
• Even as late as 1891 (I think it was), my paternal grandparents, above, had hardly formal clothes, were standing stiff in a photo studio with a paper backdrop.  Also, it is possible that the photo is a collodion negative and printed on albumen paper (in northern Arkansas, the technology might not be of the latest).
• The newspaper's society pages' photographs of weddings that I remember from the middle decades of the last century are conventional and commercial, except for the very finest ones, and even well-to-do people, if they were conventional in their ideas, might want to make sure they had the "right kind" of images, even when the best photographer in town was, as their friend, taking far superior ones free of charge.

Now, as everyone knows, having been told, in the 1960s (really, in the late 1960s) young people and Hollywood people and liberated people began to want to create their own rites and choose their own natural places (the beaches and state parks, for example), and novel wedding clothes (or even swimming nude if water enough were available)—or of course being married at a political demonstration, often with the most high-minded intentions.  Well, they did; I remember.  But also everyone knows that there was grass-roots backlash, and the vast majority of duly engaged and announced and church-married couples still had the same kinds of wedding portraits, too.  Some of you may remember "Auntie Mame" and Gloria and her parents; Gloria to be married had to do it all comme il faut.  Also, though, the children of teachers and grocers and factory-workers continued to think of and plan their weddings as their mothers had done.  Right now, in fact, families can and do choose just what they fancy.  At the head of this essay, I mentioned the entrepreneurs who offer real, genuine dauguerreotypes to make their marriages as Victorian as can be.

Most Americans I now realize adhere to the religion of their choice and go to church fairly regularly.  Even a Reniassance Fair is a good site for a wedding, but so is the church in one's neighborhood or the big one with acres of parking lot.  My parents' generation were married by the minister who in due course would christen me and my siblings.  I am thinking of the very people who live in the same kinds of downtown bungalows or suburban post-war houses that I am most familiar with.  Those who are most apt to take pictures are those who marry at a party Fair or at home, but they take their own images.  There are hardly any society pages for wedding pictures in the surviving daily paper.  

But I think there may be more to this: hardly any of my nieces and nephews had formal weddings, let alone commercial wedding pictures.  I have to ask, how many lower-middle income, or even professional (sons and daughters of doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers), have been having the sort of wedding that entails a catered reception, a commercial photographer, and the rest?

As for that Wedding Photograph, the one you set on your piano or your mantelpiece, is it not something that flowered along with the middle-class aspiration to the upper-class formal wedding and the debutante ball?  Isn't it the quinceañero, still done by Hispanic families, the other Catholic rites of passage, the bar mitzvah, especially where there are solid enough communities to support it, that survive?  And, in that case, wasn't it that touching American quest for identity that fostered the Bridal Industry?

Isn't that why we had a huge, commercial wedding picture industry, sustaining the commercial photo studio and producing a very limited and conventional kind of image?  Now there are no photo studios downtown or in the malls.  I think that we no longer have such an industry, but instead we take and post thousands of images of our own.  Some of them are wonderful, and we ought to take care to keep them.

As it is, I don't know whether the one I share here is or is not the only one in our family.  It may be.  Because I may be too late, practically everyone older than me (and that includes all our amateur photographers) is dead, and if thousands of prints turn up in Salvation Army stores, they are someone's family history.  But I never have seen formal white bride, formal groom pictures of ours.

Or have I?  I have added, above the photo of my Lawrence grandparents, one I recalled from the wedding of my father's eldest sister, Inez.  And they are family or friend shots.  And very Californian, evidently from an orange orchard.


P.S.  If you are really interested in the technology of photography, and if you can find the book, go to William Crawford, "The Keepers of Light", Morgan & Morgan, Woods Ferry, 1979.  The best source for doing everything from scratch remains the Eleventh Edition, 1910, of the Encyclopedia Britannica. s.v. Photography.  Though the Wikipedia used this, it used only a small fraction of it and left out most of the solid science.

Without Opinions

22 November 1963

Once again, as when I first tried to write here, in 2009, what I actually remember.

I came into the lobby of the Architecture and Allied Arts building, to teach a lecture course.  The lobby was full, and there were numerous transistor radios on.  I was promptly informed that the President had been shot.  The first radio announcements were being repeated over and over.

I raised my voice enough to tell my own students that I believed that the President would want us to learn rather than gossip, so please come into the lecture room (we were right at its door).  Most of them did come and fell quiet.  I did lecture and gave them to understand that they might share their notes with students (about 25 or so) who had left before the majority had come in.  It was my fourth quarter teaching (PhD June 1962, and I was 29 years old).

About an hour later, all afternoon courses were cancelled.  From my apartment window, which overlooked the Millrace and faced a couple of "Greek" houses, I watched the students canoeing.  I thought, they are very young.  And why not?  Later I thought, well, the students who lived in private rentals probably were not playing in the same way.

I did not have a TV or indeed a radio of my own.  The footage that we all have seen since then I only saw in Life or at the movies in March of Time or the like.  

I do not remember in what sense I was shocked, but I was very sad and kept mulling it over.  No one ever rebuked or praised my teaching when I did.  I still do not know why, for sure, I did so or whether it was right or wrong.

I keep hearing people today, now middle-aged, saying that they had been age 5, for example, and so remembered it.  That is how I remembered Pearl Harbor, when I was age 7.  Though an attempt had been made on Truman (it was in the newspaper), no assassination had been made since McKinley, and that was eight years before my father was born.  Despite holding an advanced degree, I really had no idea of politics.

A few commentators have touched on a happy era ending at that moment.  Yes, but we all knew about atomic threats and problematic trials, HUAC(!),  and Cuba.  Yes, the Lindbergh baby.  Yes, we were aware that Green Berets in Viet Nam did seem rather problematic.

I already, writing above about 1945, wrote about the death of the only president I knew of (and I didn't even know who his vice president was), and about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: even more than being appalled by the deaths of so many Japanese I realized that no one would ever be safe again: that is how the 11-year-old felt.  Jolted into awareness.  Those who were age 5 when President Kennedy was assassinated had known several presidents and the Korean War.  When I was teaching History of Photography I found that many of my students could not tell WW I from WW II.  For their cohort, November 1963 was their jolt.

The way that, without my own radio or TV, I came to remember the images of the Kennedy assassination and funeral in the oft-repeated photographs (indeed, up through Viet Nam I still got most of my news from Time, Life, et al.), for the post-war cohort President Kennedy was like the death of FDR.

As for our remembering being happy until being jolted: yes.  We were not paying much attention.  It was great not to have Bikini tests any more; it was, above all, not to have WW II.  It was super-great to have a first family who dressed tastefully, as well as anyone in Europe.

But now we put away and didn't listen to "The First Family" LP (or even "My Son the Folk Singer"); we had never enjoyed them to mock!  I remember feeling that the Kennedys must have enjoyed them, too (and I'm sure Abe Sherman's family and friends enjoyed the Jewish jokes in the "Folk Singer").  But I never enjoyed laughing out loud again in the same way.

There.  That's what I remember.  Pretty shallow, but not vicious?  

Kindle Literature

The Kindle, over my shoulder

You can guess the book, probably, but certainly the subject matter.
Nowadays I usually buy beautiful books in hard cover, hard copy, but when my old eyes have hundreds of pages to read, the Kindle is what makes it possible.

I wouldn't have you think that I'm just an esthete or just a someone studying houses.  I do read lots of books that I really OUGHT to read.  I always have read them, and some periodicals, if they seem to be worthwhile.  I'll even download a complete Shakespeare when I realize that I know absolutely nothing about Richard II, and Holinshed for good measure.

Economics, however, has next to no pictorial interest!  I don't count statistical charts as pictorial.

So this post occurred to me.  Politics is mind-boggling, but economics, whether in the first age of monetization or today, is fundamental and interesting. 

Besides, with a writer so good that the book is a leading contender for the National Book Award, I usually try to read the books.  So this one.

And I really am glad that the famous Bull is staying where he is; I like that statue.