Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

Recently, a package arrived at my door from Parsley of Seasons of My Mind. She is the talented cross-stitching, unmatched award winning 4-H leader, multi-dog owner with a huge heart of gold. She was the one that sent me all the neat Oklahoma goodies a while back when I won her postcard giveaway (details here).

Before I go on - I want to wish Parsley a speedy recovery from a recent bit of upset and trouble. If you thoughtful readers would, please visit her blog and give her a 'I hope you feel your bestest soonest' as she continues to struggle. Go back a couple post if you need to, to find a place to comment. I would be most grateful and appreciative.


Inside the surprise package, was an 8-CD set containing Joshua Ferris' second novel, The Unnamed.

Joshua Ferris constructs his new novel, "The Unnamed," around one of Emily Dickinson's most devastating poems, "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes"

AFTER great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

Emily Dickinson (1862)
My understanding of this poem is this: Emily Dickinson was tracing the numbness experienced after some terrible blow. Numbness one way we protect ourselves against the onrush of pain and against being overwhelmed by suffering.

Novelist Ferris drops realism to ask but what if we did live without distractions? Not just the petty ones, such as e-mail, but all the carrots: a promotion, a successful resolution to that all-important lawsuit, a vacation in the British Virgin Islands?

Ferris examines this question by giving his protagonist, Tim, an undiagnosed condition that periodically returns that wrenches him out of the rat race. "A happily married father of one with a partnership at a fancy Manhattan law firm, Tim can't stop walking. He might be at his desk at Troyer, Barr and Atkins, LLP or in bed with his wife, Jane, when suddenly he's seized with an irresistible compulsion to walk.

If he's lucky, he'll have on hiking boots and a provision-filled backpack. But if he's hatless in winter, his disease is no less cruel. It forces him to slog for miles along city streets and highways or through the woods, until he collapses into a deep sleep." (quoted/paraphrased from here)

I came away thinking, "Despite all the progress human society has made, there's still something shameful about having a mental illness, some lingering, unfair impression that the 'afflicted ones' need to just try harder to be normal."

The novel is beautifully narrated, and contains some exceptional bits of music. As a compulsive walker prone to bouts of depression and OCD weirdness, I can relate to the Tim in a small way - As an admirer of good writing, I admire this novel.

Thank you Parsley! This was quite a surprise, an awesome giveaway! and a thought-provoking piece of work indeed.

Found on eBay

First, I want to thank everyone that commented on the previous entry. Your suggestions and support are very important to me. Thank you Junyah, for the links and information on how to follow up with the Veterans Administration. I will be following up on the matter of the missing gravestones - time will tell what results I have.

While searching the Internet for old pictures of seashore, I found this postcard listed on eBay. Imagine my suprise when I saw the name of the publisher. I might not of even noticed or recognised it, except that I had just oh-so-recently learned who the man was...




Boardwalk
Location: Wildwood, N.J.
Maker: Geo. E. Mousley, Phila, Pa. Made in USA
Postmarked: Yes
Stamp: Yes
Year: 1910
Size: 3 1/2" x 5 1/2"
George Edward Mousley was a "cousin" of mine. He was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1862 and died in 1940 and is buried in Camden, NJ.

George's father came to the United States around 1845 with his father Joseph and brother Charles. The elder George is the one that went on the fishing trips with my g-g-g-father Charles that I wrote about (here).

George's father, George owned a stationary business in the heart of the Philadelphia business district. Young George however decided to branch out and start his own business so, at the age of 21, he opened up an importer, wholesaler, and retail shop selling stationary, toys, and fireworks on Germantown Avenue in what is now the "Northern Liberties" section of town (just north of center city).

His lasting claim to fame was his postcards and toys. Geo. E. Mousley, Inc. was the first to sell prepackaged Christmas Stockings filled with toys. Business was very good, and George opened a manufacturing plant in Camden, NJ and moved across the Delaware River.


1950 Vintage Toy Pony Made by Geo. E. Mousley
When George died, the business was sold to a firm from New York, and it later moved to West Warwick, Rhode Island.


Many items, such as the Lassie "Trick Trainer" toy shown above, and "Pitch to Mickey Mantle" were made by George E. Mousley, Inc. (later known as G. E. M.)

The Lassie Trick Trainer toy was actually a set of items that a young boy or girl could use to train their dog. Lassie was first introduced in a best selling novel in 1938. She then appeared on the silver screen, went on to radio productions and finally moved on to that newfangled gadget called the television. In 1954, the Campbell’s Soup Company also of Camden, NJ, sponsored "The Lassie Show". Campbell’s was commercially involved with The Howdy Doody Show and the Mickey Mouse Club, but found a real winner with Lassie. Ultimately 35 million viewers sat before the television set on Sunday evenings watching the adventures of Lassie and having warm thoughts about Campbell’s soups and wonder if their own dogs could be trained to be just like Lassie.

In the Pitch to Mickey game, kids would try to improve their hand-eye coordination skills by trying to throw a ball into one of the four circles on the Mickey Mantle game board. Three of the four holes were outs and one of the holes scored a home rum. The playing board featured a nice photo of Mickey batting left-handed with an airbrushed Yankee pinstriped uniform. This game dates back to the early 1960s.

George had an uncle whose family ran several hotels in Wildwood, NJ named the Rosemont, the New Rosemont, and the Delwyn. I'm still checking, but I believe one of those hotels is shown in the postcard I found on eBay.

I think there will be some more interesting (to me at least) stories of the relatives. I know there was one that successfully raced wooden boats on the Saint Lawrence River and lived in Miami... I might investigate his story next.

My Great Great Uncle Russell

Recently I took a trip to the Hillside Cemetery to visit the "family plot" there. I've never been there before - as I've only recently learned that it existed. According to the lady that answered the phone call made before the visit, there were at least eight, possibly nine or more of my ancestors buried there, including my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather.

When growing up, I didn't see many relatives as my dad was an only child and my mother was born years after her older siblings. The very few aunts, uncles, and cousins that I had, where mostly miles away in California and Massachusetts and out of reach a day or weekend trip.

My grandfather has never spoken much about his parents or grandparents - there was what I'll call the "Great Family Argument of 1930" - an argument that led my grandfather having bitter feelings towards his parents and his parents siblings. This bitterness led to me and my brothers not knowing any of the relatives from my grandfather's side of the family - relatives that actually lived in the neighborhood.

Forgive me for babbling, I'm still trying to mentally digest this.


My great-great-uncle Russell died a few short weeks before I was born. I never knew the man.


I never met his childless, widowed wife, Mary Frances Rhoades either, despite the fact she lived nearby for many years. When I saw saw her grave marker - I saw the veteran flags and no other marker nearby. Puzzled, I figured out from the paperwork the cemetery gave me, that the flags were for her husband Russell - who has no visible gravestone. My great-grandparents and great-great-parents were also missing gravestones. A little troubled by this - I sought to learn why the stones were missing and what I could do about it. Russell, being a wounded, honorably discharged, war veteran, is qualified for a "free" gravestone from the US Government. Where is it and what happened to it?

I felt an inexplicable need to know more about the man - and I'm actually pretty ignorant when it comes to WWI. While searching for information on how the veteran's gravestone business is done, I found his application for a WWI service medal and also learned he had a "Certificate of Wound". From this, I gleaned he served in Machine Gun Company 315 of the 79th Infantry.

The Certificate of Wound was given in WWI - it predates the Purple Heart which was first given in the 1930's. A veteran with such a certificate could send it in and get a Purple Heart later on in the 1940s. Whether my g-g-uncle did this or not, I do not know - there seems to be no on-line listing of Purple Heart recipients (which must number in the hundreds of thousands, if not more).


Anyway, what little I knew of WWI was that the Meuse-Argonne offensive was the last major battle in the war, and that it was fought largely by the Americans - their first and only major combat battle in the war - the defeated Germans signing the Armistice shortly afterward. In just four short months, over 1.25 million Americans saw combat and 10% of them were casualties. 120,000 men were killed or wounded.

My g-g-uncle Russell, a member of the 79th Infantry was involved in this horrible battle.

I looked up Adolph Hitler involvement in WWI as I knew he served in it and had been wounded twice - the last time being blinded by mustard gas in Belgium - so he didn't see any American soldiers or my g-g-uncle Russell.


As horrible as the American losses were in WWI, the British, French, and German losses were far, far worse. War is a brutal way of solving differences. A family squabble can be as brutal to those involved or effected by the fall-out.

I am left mostly wondering two things -

1) Do I have enough energy to tackle the bureaucratic paper form-filling mess that getting a gravestone for Russell will entail?

2) Was my g-g-aunt Mary Frances lonely in her final years, wondering why her nephews never called?

Why I Support Public TV

As many of you know, I'm a staunch supporter of Public Television. It's not just the British Comedies, Masterpiece Theater, Scientific explorations such as Nova, Nature shows, and the hours of cooking shows - its the thought-provoking broadcasts that make you think like nothing commercial television ever does.

Recently, Photojournalist Rita of Soul Comfort's Corner brought to my attention a new series I had missed, called "Independent Lens", an Emmy award-winning independent film series featuring documentaries and dramas -- a film festival in your living room. It is dedicated to an eclectic group of film makers exploring some fringe areas of the human condition. Or not-so-human condition.







Somehow, I think I've missed my calling - I should have been an Independent Film Maker - somehow though, I think my attempts to film orange cones fondly known as OCHAs such as this attempt (here) would have required me to err.. ah lets say, expose myself to a genre of music described as "porno music" when I laid in the sound track.

I don't think that would be PBS material...