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Imagine the year is 1935, and your father has come home with something odd he found at the store. It’s a board game you’ve never seen before, something new from a company called Parker Brothers called Monopoly. The game is interesting, albeit a bit complicated, but you and your family find it fun and it
Continue reading “Monopoly: From the Landlord’s game to the Great Depression to the Modern Age”
In 1900, Britt, Iowa, became the the first city in the state to host a national convention. The city council of Britt sought to catch the attention of the press, and therefore tourists, and with the enactment of the National Hobo Convention the council accomplished its goal.
One of the earliest stories my mother shared was from when she got into her mother’s makeup as a child. The story goes that my mother snuck into my Nana’s makeup bag in the bathroom and pulled out all her red lipsticks. Nana only wore red lipstick. Apparently while my mom examined all the pretty
Continue reading “Lipstick: Alternative Bathroom Decorating”
Dice clatter in succession over one, two, three tabletops, bouncing in spite of their edges and angles. Coasters are shifted, glasses are raised, and fruity fluids flow until their bit of bite raises volume and eyebrows simultaneously.
“Raymond it is three in the morning! What are those incessant clicks and bells you`re making?” This is what my great grandfather heard most early mornings while he still lived at home with his family. Whenever he felt the creative urge to write, he always did—even if the noise of his typewriter was “incessant.”
In 1926, when 16-year-old Guy Oscar Blackburn crept out of Alabama City, Alabama, and joined the Christy Bros. travelling circus, his foremost thought was probably just to get out—to get away from small towns and small minds. Likely, he didn’t give much thought to what he might actually do with a travelling circus, but over the course of his subsequent 23-year circus career, he soared. Continue reading “Soaring with the Circus: Depression-era Aerial Acts”
My great-grandfather, Emmett William Rossiter, was born January 15, 1888, in Bancroft, Nebraska. In 1932 he lived in Walthill, Nebraska, with his wife June and his eight children: Claude, Constance, Vincent, Mary, Constance, June, Joan, and Anne. He was a bank cashier and still employed at this time at Bank of Winnebago. Continue reading “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone”
My step grandfather, William Kyle Thurmond Junior, was not unfamiliar with the feeling of want during his childhood, but he and his father managed to find a beneficial escape from the trying times of the Great Depression through the sport of outdoor fishing. Born right at the cusp of America’s greatest financial Continue reading “Leisure in The Great Depression: Fishing”
Mandy [Millie] Brown, my maternal great-grandmother, was a homemaker who worked hard everyday to provide for her family. Although she didn’t often contribute to working outside of the house doing farm labor with her husband, she was the queen of her kitchen and loved making pies. Born in 1884, she married her first husband, Sydney Bruce, at the age of 27 on January 6th, 1911; he was a farmer in Montgomery County, Alabama . Continue reading “Grandma’s Pies”
When my mother was a little girl, she vividly remembers the days when her Poppy let her join him at work in his attic-style cartography studio in Charleston, South Carolina. Poppy, known to the rest of the city as Joseph Needle, was a Civil Engineer and my great-grandfather. As listed on the Charleston government website under the “City Engineering Records from 1867-1979,” Joseph’s work entailed “providing essential public services to a growing populace” (charleston-sc.gov). Continue reading “The Infamous Map”