50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Baseball

 My husband and I, on a whim, watched the greater part of a baseball game today.  It was the Baltimore Orioles at the New York Yankees.  As a lifelong Dodgers fan dating from their time in Brooklyn (yes, I'm that old), I don't like the Yankees, so I had to cheer on the Orioles.  It was a futile endeavor, I fear, as the score when we left the game was 9-0 Yankees.  Sigh.

Yes, I've been fond of baseball since my childhood in the 1950s.  I was a tomboy; the usual girlish pursuits did not attract me.  I collected baseball cards.  I played "flyers & grounders" with a neighbor boy.  I watched baseball games on TV with my grandma, and I was thrilled when my mother kept me out of school one day and took me to the baseball stadium in our home town of Jacksonville, Florida, where we watched the then-Brooklyn Dodgers play an exhibition game.  I almost caught a fouled baseball, but I was carrying soft drinks back to our seats, and didn't want to drop them.  

And just in the early years of this century, the Dodgers played again at our local stadium, and I got Tommy LaSorda's autograph! That was a big thing for me.

My one regret in my affection for baseball has been that my eyes are not aligned due to a childhood operation to correct severe cross-eye.  I have no depth perception within three feet.  I can't hit a baseball worth beans.

 

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Charles Reed's Timeline

 Charles Reed (1840-1920) was my great-great grandfather on my mother's side.  He was born in Gallia County, Ohio, 28 August 1840.[1]  He died 26 January 1920 in Portland, Jay County, Indiana.[2]  In the year in which he was born, "horsepower" meant the ability of a horse to pull the family buggy.  In the year in which he died, "horsepower" was the power rating of the automobiles coming off Henry Ford's production line.  Charles Reed had served in the Civil War, Company F, 140th Indiana Infantry.[3]  When he died, the world had not long before engaged in a terrible war "to end all wars," which, of course, it did not.  

And when he died, importing, manufacturing, or drinking alcoholic beverages was illegal.

In the year in which he was born, Victoria, Queen of England, married Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Germany.  James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder was a nationwide best-seller.  Born in 1840: Emile Zola, Claude Monet, Thomas Nast, Pierre Auguste Renoir, August Rodin, Peter Ilich Tchiakovsky, and Father Damien, the "leper priest" of Hawaii.[4]

 In the year before Charles Reed died in January of 1920, Theodore Roosevelt died.  Woodrow Wilson presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations.  There was racial strife in Chicago, and the American Steel strike began, ending in January of 1920.  The International Labor Conference endorsed the eight-hour workday.  Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio was published, as was Hugh Lofting's first Dr. Doolittle book, H. L. Mencken's The American Language. and Robert H. Goddard's A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, a seminal work at the beginning of the age of rocketry.[5]  

 All of this information, and the citations below, are in an extensive timeline I did in 2003 on Charles Reed.  It spans 88 pages, with endnotes.  I had read an article extolling the virtues of timelines as a way of placing our ancestors in context.  I used Bernard Grun's The Timetables of History, which is arranged in chronological order, and lists events of political, historical, scientific, and social importance.  I also used various censuses, Charles Reed's Civil War pension file, and other references, to create the timeline.

Not only did I enter the events of national and world importance, I also entered the family events, such as births and deaths of the descendants of Charles Reed and of members of collateral families, mainly the spouses and children of his descendants. 

I am a convinced advocate of timelines. 

[1]  John Robinson Reed (son of Charles Reed), et. al., "Births and Deaths in the Reed Family to April 1st, 1913."  List of the birth and death dates of Charles and Clarissa Reed and their children with additional death dates entered by persons unknown, no date.  Copy of typescript, initialed "J.R.R." (presumably John Robinson Reed).

[2] Charles Reed, Civil War Pension Application File, SO 816,345; SC 697,707: Records of the Veteran's Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bernard Grun, The Timetables of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).  The book is arranged by year; I have not given page numbers because the arrangement by year makes it easy to find the items cited.

 [5] Ibid.

 

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Pi Day and Beyond

Years ago, our older daughter Marti was the receptionist/secretary of the Math and Statistics Department at the University of North Florida (UNF).  Mathy types celebrate their own holiday -- well, it's a working holiday -- on 14 March of each year.  Pi Day, so named because 3.14 are the first three digits of Pi.

So, of course, on Pi Day, what to the mathy types eat?  Pie.

Marti and I made pies for Pi Day and took them in to the department.  I was a student at UNF at the time.

 And to be true to the concept of Pi, I made my pies in a square pan.  With the formula on top, in crust.

Like this cherry pie I made one year:

Marti and I had great fun making these pies, and everyone in the department enjoyed them.  And we still enjoy remembering them.

Marti, being an employee of the university, had the perk of a free class each term.  Being deaf in one ear, she chose American Sign Language (ASL).  When she and her sister were young, they asked for and received a book on ASL.  Little did we parents suspect that we were giving our daughters access to a language which we didn't "speak."  I'm sure that led to all sorts of shenanigans, but they survived all.  So ASL was not new to Marti.

After taking the classes in ASL, Marti enrolled in a "bridge program" offered by Florida State University, my first alma mater.  This program was designed to bring students who had no background in sciences up to speed to then enroll in doctorate programs in audiology, in an effort to make up a shortfall of audiologists.  No surprise to me, considering how loud young people have been playing their music since the 1960s.  Anyway, she then was accepted at the University of Florida's doctoral program in audiology, and now she is a doctor.  She's not the first doctor in the family -- that occurred back in the late 1800s.  She is, however, the first female doctor in the family.  She works with veterans, individuals with whom she feels right at home, since her father and I are both veterans.  She loves the work.

 Our daughter, the doctor!

 

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Hallowe'en 1982

[Alert:  this post has one mildly naughty word in it.] 

It was the season for trick-or-treating in the neighborhood where we lived when our daughters were in middle school.  This photo was taken 1982 at the home of my older daughter's best friend Kim.  In the photo are Marti, our older daughter; me; and our younger daughter, Elizabeth.

I have to say I'm still impressed that I actually made those uniforms.  If you don't recognize the uniforms, they are my best job of the Starfleet uniforms from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.  I don't sew, as a rule.  I am not good at it and it's not really something I enjoy.  But even if I do say so myself, I did a doggone good job with them.

 

Marti is Captain Kirk, though with a much fuller head of hair.  She's reading A Tale of Two Cities, the book Spock gives to Kirk as a birthday present in the movie.  Elizabeth is Lieutenant Saavik, Spock's full-Vulcan protege.  I guess having made the uniforms makes me the Starfleet tailor.

Our family had a lot of fun with Star Trek.  We watched the original series in syndication, and we watched the later series offerings, as well.  We went to all the movies.  We went to conventions and sometimes worked on convention staff.  And we played games based on Star Trek.  It has been a part of the glue that kept this family together all these years.

One game we played was a card game, in which, in our explorations, we got into a combat situation, a part of the game that the rules called The Last-Ditch Battle.  Whoever had the most cards won the game.  I was running the game, with Marti and Elizabeth, by that time, both in high school, playing with me.  We went through all the levels and got to that last end-game part, and I announced it:  "Now it's time for the last-bitch dattle."

I don't think we stopped laughing for ten minutes.   

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Story Time

 Jennifer Jones, whom I follow on Substack, has issued a challenge:  Can we make an entry to our genealogy blogs every day for 50 days?  I'm already over-extended, but that's me.  But I can't resist.

I need a goad to get myself to the keyboard and get some stuff done.  So here we go . . . 

 Story time:

My mother was an intra-family adoption.  Her father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, was killed in a railroad accident when Mom was not quite a year old.  According to her sister, my Aunt Margaret, the Reed family "ganged up" on my widowed grandmother and took her two daughters away from her and had two brothers and their wives adopt them.  Mom's brother, the oldest of the three, was 16, and was left with his mother.

My mother was adopted by her uncle, Perry Wilmer Reed, and his wife, Mary LeSourd.  Perry, after a career in railroads working with the rules, rates, and regulations as a general freight agent, became the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Pensacola, Florida, in the late 1920s.  And here's a story, as told to me by Mary Reed when I was a teenager in the 1960s:

Mary LeSourd Reed, as the wife of the head of the Chamber of Commerce, had to maintain a certain lifestyle and appearance, as a member of the Pensacola upper crust.  And part of that appearance, among "decent" women in the 1920s, was long hair.  Hers was down to below her waist.  All that heavy hair caused Mary to have awful headaches, as it must have done to most, if not all, the high-society ladies of Pensacola.  Well, Mary was not one to put up with that which she need not endure.  Aware of the fashion trends of the "Roaring Twenties," she went to the beauty salon and had her hair "bobbed," as they called it in those days -- she got it cut.  Short.  

She went to Perry's office to get his opinion of her new "do."  She marched into his office and asked him how he liked the new look.  Perry's secretary was standing nearby.  "Well, Mary," Perry said, "It looks all right."

Mary stormed out of Perry's office, leaving him totally befuddled as to what his offense may have been.  His secretary let him know, as Perry probably told Mary later:  "Mr. Reed," she said, as if admonishing a recalcitrant student on the fine points of proper behavior.  "You never tell a woman that she looks 'all right.'"

That's not the end of the story.

The next day, the other elite women of Pensacola went to the beauty salon -- and what a banner day it must have been for that establishment's bottom line!  They all had their hair bobbed.  If Mary Reed wasn't going to put up with those horrible headaches any more, neither were they!

 

True Confessions: Cranberry Wine

 It's 1976 or thereabouts.  I'm a fairly new Yeoman Third Class in the Coast Guard Reserve.  It's a Saturday of my drill weekend.  I come home, tired from a busy day and a long commute.  I open the refrigerator to see what I might cobble together for dinner.  The fridge is pretty bare, and there's an empty bottle on one of the shelves.

"If you're going to drink the last of the wine," I say to my husband, "don't put the empty bottle back in the fridge."  There was about 1/3 of the bottle left, my husband and I having enjoyed the other 2/3 over the course of a couple weeks.

He denies having had any of the wine, a sparkling cranberry wine made by a friend of my father-in-law, Marshall.  Marshall had gotten a few bottles from his friend, and had given us one.

Just then, our four-year-old daughter Elizabeth comes toddling down the hall from the bedroom she shares with her sister, who is six.  She's happy.  Too happy.  REALLY happy.  We look at each other, then back at our daughter.  That explains the missing 1/3.

She's been into the sparkling cranberry wine, and put the empty bottle back into the fridge.  Keys and I laugh, but I also remind him to keep a better eye on the kids when I'm not home.

When the girls are teenagers, we're swapping family stories, and we tell them about Elizabeth's adventure with the cranberry wine.  We all have a good laugh.

48 years later --

Elizabeth has, about a year before, been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.  She's achieved remission, and her sister Marti has been her morale officer, coming Saturdays to visit, bring lunch, and play video games or watch silly TV shows with her.  Then Elizabeth is feeling up to short road trips and shopping.  So one day they go to a small town where Marti has heard there's a winery, not too far south of where we live.

When they return, they have a gift for us, that astonishes and amuses us no end . . . 

. . . in repayment of a debt of long standing that Elizabeth owes us . . . 

. . . a bottle of cranberry wine!