The Night Will Soon Be Ending

Story behind an Advent hymn

Early winter sunset in Christian County, KY

When we lived in Germany, I experienced the shortest winter days and longest winter nights I've ever seen! In Berlin, the sun set before 4:00 p.m. in December and January and didn't rise until 8:00 a.m. Winter was a very dark time there. (Berlin lies about 7° farther north than Montreal, Canada, believe it or not.)

"The Night Will Soon be Ending,"  a German Advent hymn, was penned in 1938 by novelist and poet Jochen Klepper (1903-1942). Klepper's knowledge of long winter nights and his personal experience with the Nazi regime were surely on his mind as he wrote this poem about darkness, light, hope, and promise.  Here is the first verse (as translated by Herman G. Stuempfle, Jr.)

The night will soon be ending; the dawn cannot be far.
Let songs of praise ascending now greet the morning Star!
All you whom darkness frightens with guilt or grief or pain
God's radiant Star now brightens and bids you sing again.

In the new LCMS hymnal, "The Night Will Soon Be Ending" is set to the Welsh tune "Llangloffan." But in Germany, the hymn has been sung since 1939 to a melody composed for it by Johannes Petzold.

The story of  Klepper's life is tragic. Jochen Klepper was married to a Jewish lady named Hannah ("Hanni".) Hanni had two daughters, Brigitte and Reni, by a previous marriage. The Kleppers sent the older daughter Brigitte to England in 1938, the same year that Klepper wrote "The Night Will Soon Be Ending." They could not bear to send little Reni too, so she stayed with them in Germany. Later, they tried to get an exit visa for Reni, but they were denied repeatedly. They also faced a mandatory divorce because it was illegal for a Jew to be married to a German.

German stamp honoring Jochen Klepper

In December 1942, Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of Jewish deportation, personally rejected their request to leave Germany. Certain that death awaited them in concentration camps  Klepper, Hani, and Reni committed suicide. Klepper wrote a final entry in his diary minutes before they died: "Tonight we die together. Over us stands in the last moments the image of the blessed Christ who surrounds us. With this view we end our lives.”

Klepper's diary was used as evidence in the trial of Adolph Eichmann.* A collection of excerpts from the Klepper diary, In the Shadow of His Wings, was published in 1956. I could not find a copy at any of my usual internet booksellers.

Several short histories of Klepper's life are available online. One article explores the role of German Mennonites in World War II as related to some events in Jochen Klepper's life. Another article on a Lutheran website discusses Klepper's theology and spiritual life in addition to the story of his life.
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*I clearly remember news reports and adult talk about the Eichmann trial during my childhood, though I did not grasp the full significance of it at the time.

A Mine Camp Childhood

Memories shared

Today, I asked one of my elderly customers if she had lived in Christian County (KY) all her life. My question was the only invitation she needed to tell me about her childhood.

Her family lived near Crofton (KY) when she was a little child. Her father was a coal miner. He walked six miles every morning from their home to a mine in the Mannington area. He worked all day in the mine, and then he walked another six miles back home each night.

Later on, they lived in a coal camp (in Hopkins County, KY, if I understood correctly). All the houses in the camp were owned by the mine. Everyone in the little town knew each other. It was almost like a big family. The kids all went to school together and played together, as children do.

The coal was pulled out of the mine in cars pulled by little mules. Her father was paid in scrip, instead of money, and the company store in their little coal camp was the only place where they could buy anything.

One time, there were problems related to the labor union. If I understood the lady's story correctly, labor organizers were trying to get the men to join the union. At any rate, all the men who were union members and their families were evicted from the company houses. Her family spent a winter in a tent provided by the union. They had a wood stove in their tent, but when the wind blew wrong, the tent filled up with smoke. Nonetheless, they made it through that winter.

"I have good memories of the coal camp," she told me. I wished I could have heard more of her stories, but unfortunately, I'm not paid to interview the customers. I told her I had enjoyed talking to her, and she should write down some of her memories. Her grandchildren would enjoy reading them someday.

I think these stories are probably from the 1930s. I know this lady's daughter, and she's a little younger than me. My mother was born in the 1920s, so this lady was probably born in the 1930s.

Old Gymnasium in Pembroke, Kentucky

The Physical and Industrial Arts Building in Pembroke (KY) stands along Highway 41, right next to the Minit Mart on the west side of town. The inscription across the top of the building reads, "19-  Physical & Industrial Arts Building -39". I think I've taken a better picture, but I can't find it, so this one will have to do.

I've been curious about the building for a while. When I passed through Pembroke yesterday, I decided to stop and take a closer look. At the right side of the double doors, I found two plaques (pictured at left). They answered my question of whether the building was a government-funded project of the Depression. It was indeed a project of the Public Works Administration.

In the Kentucky New Era archives (viewed via Google news search), I found a little more information about the building's history. On October 14, 1938, the Pembroke superintendent of schools, Mr. L. W. Allen, said he was nearly ready for bids on the construction.  A loan and a grant, $35,000 in total, had been approved by the Federal government, and the old, frame gymnasium had already been torn down to make room for the new one.

The new facility was to contain a manual training (shop) classroom and a home economics classroom. Shop and home economics classes had not previously been offered at Pembroke. However, the biggest room in the structure would be the new gymnasium.

Pembroke's new gym will have a basketball floor measuring 48 by 80 feet, which will probably be the second largest playing space in the county. Hopkinsville has the largest playing floor but county teams have maintained for years the Tigers' gym was entirely too large. The old Pembroke gym, although the scene of several important tournaments, was too small for real offensive play and had only a limited seating capacity and no out-of-bounds arrangements.

Source: "Pembroke to Ask Bids on Project" by staff, Kentucky New Era, October 14, 1938.

The first basketball game in the new gym was scheduled for Friday, October 27, 1939. Pembroke's first and second teams played against Guthrie's first and second teams. Pat McCuiston was the coach of the Pembroke team. I did not find any information on who won the game.

A Halloween carnival was also held that night. The community was invited to come to the new facility and support their school. It was surely an exciting night for the students.

The new building was adjacent to the existing school. In September of 1940, the school building burned, but firefighters managed to save the gym. A newspaper story stated that a new building would be built so close to the gym that they would almost appear to be a single building. I am not sure whether that came to pass. There is an old, brick Pembroke School building located several blocks east of the Physical and Industrial Arts Building. The two buildings are very similar in architecture. That must surely be the new school that was built. Do you know this part of the story?

Pembroke High School was closed at the end of the 1957-1958 school year. Students from Pembroke High  and other rural high schools of the county enrolled in a new school, the newly-formed Christian County High School, in September of 1959.

Floods of Downtown Hopkinsville

High waters on the North Fork

These concrete lily pads provide a dry passage across Little River's North Fork. They are located just below the library in Hopkinsville, KY, near the intersection of Ninth and Bethel streets.

When my kids were little, they loved to leap from one circle to the next at this river crossing. I think one of them fell in the river once, but I don't remember if it was Keely or Isaac. Or maybe I just remember that I thought they were going to fall in. I'm really not sure.

Fortunately, the North Fork isn't very deep here, except when rainfall has been heavy. When the stream is high, the stepping stones and the walk approaches are covered by flood waters. Sections of the river walk may be inundated as well.

Before the watershed lakes were built on tributaries north of Hopkinsville, the North Fork (sometimes called the West Fork) came out of its banks whenever heavy rains fell.  When flood waters filled downtown Hopkinsville, water sometimes stood on Ninth Street as far east as the area of the old post office (the current Pennyrile Area Museum.)

In the big downtown flood of 1957, five feet of water stood at the intersection of Ninth and Main.Troops from Fort Campbell and National Guardsmen helped get people out of low-lying areas. Christian County suffered so much flood damage that President Eisenhower declared it a disaster area.

In a column about major Hopkinsville floods  ("Watching the Parade", Kentucky New Era, January 23, 1984), Joe Dorris wrote that the January 1937 flood was the worst one of the 20th century. Over 20 inches of rain fell in Christian County that month, creating recurrent flood conditions in Hopkinsville. Schools were closed and a typhoid epidemic was feared. 

High waters were not limited to Hopkinsville. Heavy rainfall across several states caused widespread flooding in the greater Ohio River valley and on down the Mississippi River.  Hopkinsville provided emergency shelter to flood victims from other cities, including Paducah and Louisville, and sent emergency supplies to the hard-hit towns of  Eddyville and Glasgow. I am impressed that Hopkinsville's citizens assisted other communities, even while coping with their own disaster.

Photos of the 1937 flooding in Louisville, KY can be seen at the website of the National Weather Service at Louisville.

WPA and PWA projects in Hopkinsville, KY

How some Depression-era projects were funded

Recently, I read some grumbling on the Hoptown Hall about a couple of grants that supposedly are approved for Hopkinsville. Some citizens are unhappy about the amount of local matching money that will be required to construct a foot bridge over Little River and a public restroom along our future rails-to-trails project.

These are Federal "stimulus" grants (I think, could be wrong), so I wondered how the 50/50 ratio of Federal to local funding compared to the Depression-era projects of the W.P.A., P.W.A., etc. that were completed around Hopkinsville.

In the Google News Archives, I found a Kentucky New Era article from January 1, 1937. It lists many public projects underway and in planning. The article states that the mayor intended the improvement of Seventh Street "from city limit to city limit" (U.S. Route 68) to be financed entirely with federal funds.  Other projects mentioned in the article include:

→ Sewer system and disposal plant improvements
Total cost: $405,000 / Federal funding: $182,454

→ High school auditorium with seating capacity of 900; Virginia Street School auditorium and four classrooms
Total cost: $55,000 / Federal funding: 45%

→ New bridge on North Main; street improvements on North Main; street improvements on South Main from 1st to 9th Street (downtown area)
Total cost: $79,000 / Federal and state funding: $70,900

→ War Memorial Drive built in Riverside Cemetery
Total cost: $2000 / Federal funding: $1800

→ Ninth Street Bridge
Total cost: $26,000 / Federal funding: $22,000

The article also listed some WPA projects that were approved, though not yet begun. No breakdown is given of the origin of the funds, but it's interesting (as a resident of the area) to see what the projects were.

Completion of Walnut Street from the bridge to the Twenty-first Street intersection; and Tenth Street from Walnut to Campbell; Virginia Street from Sixth Street to Twenty-fourth Street; Main Street from Ninth to Alumni Avenue; Canton Street from Fifteenth Street to city Limits; Jessup Avenue from Seventh Street to city limits; Fourteenth Street from Main to Walnut; construction of a stone building at Ninth and Belmont Streets as a permanent home for the Red Cross with the total cost $3450; painting, roofing and general repair work on the Public Library, total cost of $2886; on Fire Station, total cost $1809; on jail-workhouse, total cost $921. (Source: "Many Have Work on City Projects", Kentucky New Era, January 1, 1937)

Some of Hopkinsville's residents contributed directly to street work as well as contributing through taxes. In March 1938, the Kentucky New Era reported that residents of Virginia Street would pay 87¢ per foot for the curbing and guttering along their property fronts, as part of the street improvement project. The total cost to the city for the paving was expected to be $12,000-$15,000.

In April 1938, local officials announced that the Virginia Street project had exhausted current city funds for street-building. Main Street residents would pay considerably more for their curbing and guttering than the Virginia Street residents had paid -- if the project ever came to be.

The citizens of Hopkinsville in 1937 couldn't rant on an internet forum, but I'll bet the street-building projects were discussed thoroughly in every public forum of their day.

__________

At right: South Main Street in Hopkinsville, today. Looking north toward the intersection of 9th and Main.

Van Buren, Missouri

An interesting Ozark village

I dawdled a little on my way home from Kansas, a few weeks ago. My ten-minute stop at a gas station along the highway turned into a two-hour visit to downtown Van Buren, Missouri.

Let me explain. I've been traveling through southern Missouri for 19 years now, on my way to and from family gatherings. Highway 60 was (and is) the most direct route from Cairo, Illinois, to Springfield, Missouri. When I started driving Highway 60, it had some very narrow, crooked passages through the ridges and valleys of the Ozarks.

Highway 60 to Van Buren

The very worst part of the road was the 25 miles just before Van Buren, Missouri, and the 25 miles just on the other side of Van Buren. Woe to the trucks that were forced to travel that twisting snake of a road. Woe to the cars that were trapped behind the trucks. Woe to the children trapped in the back seats -- especially those who suffered from car-sickness -- and woe to their parents.

Because I remember the old road vividly, I appreciate the new 4-lane road that leads into Van Buren from the east. The road through the most mountainous area west of Van Buren is now 3-lane, and it will soon be 4-lane, too. The taxpayers of Missouri (and I suppose, the entire nation, through Federal highway grants) should be proud of this highway. I'm sure it's been an engineering challenge to build it.

Until the roads were blacktopped and tourists began driving through the Ozarks, most people around Van Buren made a living, one way or another, from the Ozark hills and trees. Country folks grew and made most of what they needed. Van Buren's handful of stores supplied the rest of what people had to have. A trip to Poplar Bluff or Springfield would have been a rare adventure in a big city.

I saw, sensed, and imagined things like this, during my many trips on the treacherous old road to Van Buren. The big new road doesn't inspire nearly as many thoughts of this sort.

A river town

The Current River runs briskly along the west edge of Van Buren, and you can walk right up to the water on either shore. Small watercraft -- flatboats, canoes, and rafts --were once important modes of transportation through the area. The river crossing at Van Buren was valuable property during the Civil War. Several skirmishes occurred in this area between Union and Confederate/guerilla forces. Today, the river is popular again for rafting and canoeing.

Tree covered ridges dominate the skyline at Van Buren. If there are any grain elevators or smokestacks in the little town, I've never noticed them.

The Carter County courthouse, a WPA project and Missouri's only cobblestone courthouse, sits in the center of a well-shaded town square. It is the tallest building in downtown Van Buren and probably the entire town.

The historic marker on the courthouse lawn tells how Carter County's primeval forests were clear-cut around 1900, bringing two decades of boom to the area before the last trees were cut and the sawmills closed. I think that Van Buren is still struggling to overcome that setback. Tourism has helped.

The commercial buildings around the square are modest structures, and the houses along the highway are modest, too. It appears to me that Van Buren has never enjoyed much excess of wealth.

Visits to Van Buren

I've stopped in Van Buren many times and wandered around for a few minutes. My kids will read this and remember photographs of themselves in Van Buren. Sometimes we stopped and walked around the courthouse square, when we were traveling to or from Aunt Charlotte's house.

When I passed through Van Buren most recently, I stopped at the new station along the big new highway for gas and a brief stretch. I intended to get back in the driver's seat and hurry down the road, but nostalgia called me. I decided to drive down to the river and find an interesting rock to take home. It would only take a few minutes, I told myself.

Near the river, on the street that used to be the highway through town, I saw a little sign that said "Hidden Log House Museum". After I had found my rock at the riverside, I decided to see what the museum looked like from the outside. Then I got out of my car to take its picture, and while I was doing that, the lady who owns the museum came outside to talk to me.

I had to go inside. It would have been rude to drive away, and the admission was only $2. Besides, I was curious. It turned out that the little museum was well worth the visit. I've never been disappointed by a stop in Van Buren.

1930s Farm Security Administration Project at Hopkinsville, KY

Farmers of submarginal land relocated

In the high hills and deep ravines just south of Dawson Springs, KY, 14,648 rough and rocky acres are held by the Pennyrile State Forest and Pennyrile Forest State Resort Park.

These public lands -- and in eastern Kentucky, properties that became the Kentucky Ridge State Forest -- were leased in 1930 under the Land Use and Resettlement Program. Official websites for both forests state that leases were "sustained until 1954 when the property was deeded by the U.S. government to the Commonwealth."

I was a little surprised that the program that created these forests was under the Hoover Administration rather than the New Deal. However, I read a bit of relevant history -- Congress began trying to reduce farming of submarginal land in 1929. The Agricultural Marketing Act of that year provided for study of the problem, and perhaps this program was an outgrowth of that legislation. I have found no other reference to the "Land Use and Resettlement Program" on the internet.

I've always wondered where the farmers were relocated when they were moved out of the Pennyrile Forest area, and tonight I came across part of the answer in a guide to Kentucky by WPA writers:

Hopkinsville is the headquarters of the Farm Security Adminstration's Christian-Trigg Farms, a project covering more than 8,000 acres in Christian, Trigg, and Todd Counties. It was designed to provide small farms -- they average 67 acres -- for a selected group of tenants and sharecroppers in these counties as well as families removed from near-by areas that were submarginal for farming. Each unit includes a house, barn, smokehouse, and poultry house.

Forty-eight of the 103 farms planned were occupied in October 1938 and the homesteaders, advised by Federal agents, had worked out a diversified crop plan by which the families raise the major portion of their food and the feed for their stock (chickens, hogs, and milk cows), plant legumes to enrich the soil, and produce tobacco and cotton for cash crops.

Quoted from The WPA Guide to Kentucky. Originally compiled and written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Admninistration for the State of Kentucky and published in 1939 as Kentucky: A Guide to the Bluegrass State. The entire entry for Hopkinsville is quite interesting if you know the area.

The description of the diversified crop plan being taught to the relocated farmers reminds me of the small farms owned nowadays by Mennonites and Amish in Christian County. Most would be about the same size -- less than 100 acres. Like the relocated farmers of the 1930s, they raise their own food and their livestock's food, practice crop rotation, and raise cash crops such as vegetables, corn, grains, etc.

Tobacco is still widely grown in Christian County, but I have not seen or heard of cotton grown here.

Related posts:
Pennyrile State Forest
January Scenes from Christian County, Kentucky

"Puzzle Pages" Workbooks Remembered

Reading seatwork series illustrated by Ethel Hays

In our one-room school, our teachers taught several classes for every subject. The number of classes depended on the grade levels of the current students. Sometimes there were half a dozen grades or more for ten or twelve students.

Usually, the teacher called the classes in order from youngest to oldest. "First grade Reading," she might announce, and the first grader/s went to the bench beside the teacher's desk with appropriate books and papers. After a few minutes of oral reading, the teacher assigned some seatwork and called the next class.

In the primary grades, we always had a page or two to do in the reading workbook, a few pages of practice reading from the textbook, a page in the phonics workbook, and the next page of Puzzle Pages.

Read and write, cut and paste

Puzzle Pages was a reading seatwork series. Besides the part of every page that had to be read, the work usually required some writing and some cut-and-pasted words or pictures from the back of the book. This kept our hands busy with pencils, round-tipped scissors, and globs of white paste. We were also expected to color all the pictures on the pages.

The cover of this Puzzle Pages workbook is exactly like the ones I remember. Just look how busy those children are. And so were we! My husband remembers this workbook, also.

One day, the children in the Puzzle Pages story went to the circus, so we had pictures of circus animals to cut and paste. When the teacher checked my page, she marked the elephant wrong, even though I had pasted it in the right place. She said it was colored wrong. Not having gray in my box of 16 crayons, I had made the elephant purple. Maybe she would have preferred light black.

Ethel Hays, artist and illustrator

ThePuzzle Pages workbooks were published by McCormick-Mathers of Wichita, Kansas -- a publishing company which appears to have gone out of business. Internet searches for "McCormick-Mathers" yield used books from the 1930s through the 1980s, but no website for the company.

The illustrator of all the various Puzzle Pages editions and revised editions was Ethel Hays. Her other work included a comic strip, Flapper Fanny, during the 1920s and magazine illustrations and comic strips during the 1930s. During the 1940s, she illustrated a number of well-knownl children's books, including The Little Red Hen (1942),  Little Black Sambo (1942), The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1942), The Town and The Country Mouse (1942), and others. She also illustrated the popular Raggedy Ann books of the same era.

Before Cars, The Importance of Hay

Horse power requires fuel.

A century ago, thousands of tons of prairie hay were sold out of wild meadows each year. Railroads carried the hay to distant markets.

Hay was an important income source for homesteaders who were trying to get ahead. A 1908 New York Times article (pdf) states that hay was the second most important cash crop of Nebraska.

The 1919 Encyclopedia Americana reported that Nebraska was the biggest producer of prairie hay in the nation (2,544,000 tons in 1917). It also notes that the largest hay-shipping station in the world was located at Newport, Nebraska.

The following short description of the best of Nebraska's fine hay prairies was written in the late 1930, after the hay-shipping market had begun to decline:

West of O'Neill, the highway [Highway 20] passes through the great hay-producing country, which extends as far as Valentine in an almost unbroken stretch of prairie, dotted in the fall with large haystacks.

Source: Nebraska, a Guide to the Cornhusker State (page 310), by The Federal Writers Project, Nebraska. Published in 1939 by US History Publishers.

And where did the railroads carry all this hay? Some of it went to the horses of the U.S. Army, but much of it went to cities, to feed the millions of horses that labored in the streets.

If one assumes an urban horse population of approximately 3 million in 1900, then 7,200,000 tons of hay and 4,200,000 tons of oats were consumed by city horses per year. To grow this amount of fodder may have required as many as 15,000,000 acres.

Source: The Making of Urban America (page 120) by Raymond Mohl. Published by Rowman & Littlefield in 1997.

The production of hay for the urban horses was an important part of the economy. In the early 1930s, the Horse Association of America (HAA) issued several statements that blamed the depression in the agricultural sector on the automobile. They claimed that the ag depression would never have happened if automobiles, etc., had not largely replaced horses in city streets, and they provided a set of figures to prove it.

The authors of The Horse in the City think that the HAA may have underestimated the amount of hay needed, had horses and mules still been powering all city vehicles in 1930. However,

[t]here can be little dispute that the amount of land needed to feed urban horses and mules was vast. In short, horses had to eat in order to produce energy, and the food they consumed absorbed the output of large amounts of agricultural land, required massive capital and labor inputs for production and transportation, and necessitated an extensive regional and urban distribution system.

Source: The Horse in the City (p. 129) by Clay McShane and Joel Arthur Tarr. Published by JHU Press in 2007

The importance of hay in the economy helps to explain why the New York Times archives from the era of horses contain many reports of prairie fires. An example is the article, A Disastrous Prairie Fire (pdf), which burned a portion of the hay crop in the Newport, Nebraska area.

Besides the interest that the public always has in disasters, such fires were matters of concern to business people. Just as we watch the price of gasoline today, people watched the price of hay then.

Audubon State Park

Camping at Henderson, KY

Another pleasant outing in the faithful Coleman tent

John James Audubon, noted American ornithologist, lived at Henderson, KY, from 1810-1819. Today, the Audubon State Park preserves some of the old-growth forest where Audubon roamed along the Ohio River, observing the birds and collecting specimens to paint.

Isaac and I camped two nights at Audubon State Park, while we were sightseeing at Henderson, KY, and Evansville, IN, last week. Isaac had just three days free from both work and school. Dennis was still obligated at his job for part of that time, so Isaac and I went by ourselves.

The Audubon State Park campground is near the Ohio River, just off Highway 41 at Henderson. In fact, the traffic on the busy highway is clearly heard at the campground. Nonetheless, it's a beautiful site with tall trees and many squirrels. We were the only tent-campers there, and there were only about half a dozen RVs.

Isaac really likes camping, and Boy Scouts deserves the credit for it. I'm glad that he has a wholesome hobby that he can pursue all his life. When I camp with him, we don't rough it too much. We get a site with electricity so we can hang the "trouble light" in the tent for reading after dark.

This time, I also brought along a tiny television set, so I could see the McCain vs. Obama debate. To my surprise, half a dozen stations came in clearly with the small antenna. I watched most of the debate while reclining on my air mattress in the tent. Near the end, rain began falling, so it seemed prudent to unplug the extension cord and listen to my little radio instead.

Our campsite was under several black walnut trees. We set up the tent at the edge of the walnut area, but we still had to clear a spot by kicking dozens of black walnuts out of the way.

Whenever the squirrels ran through the treetops, the walnuts rained down. We weren't hit by any of them, but one did fall on my car's hood so hard that it made a little chip in the paint. Oh, well. That's a hazard of parking near walnut trees this time of the year.

The museum in the park has some of the Audubon sketch books, original paintings, and early prints. It's quite interesting. I didn't take any photos because there's a sign at the museum entrance that says, "No Cameras."

One interesting thing I learned at the museum was that Audubon set very high standards for himself. He went through his work every year on his birthday and destroyed everything that was not up to his current level of painting skill.

Like every other Kentucky state park I've visited, much of the infrastructure at Audubon State Park was put in place by CCC and WPA workers. The museum (photo below) was built in 1938 as a WPA project.

Next time we camp at Audubon, I want to hike some of the trails to see more of the forest. This park deserves more time than we were able to give it on this trip.

Radio Days

A revolutionary invention

Imagine America at the end of World War I. Brief notices of important events were still sent by telegraph, the fastest communication that existed.

People read newspapers and magazines to learn details about happenings in the world beyond their hometowns. In small towns, the news was often out-of-date before the publications arrived. For that matter, much of the news was old even when it was written.

A decade later, a surge of interest, development, and investment in commercial radio had transformed the nation.

Election results were broadcast by radio for the first time ever in 1920 (by KDKA in Pittsburg.) Owners of radio sets heard the news first. They didn't have to wait for printing presses to grind out an extra and newsboys to run it through the streets.

With that broadcast, radio gained a new measure of respectability. Its potential was examined and found promising; it was recognized as more than a curious hobby.

By 1927, radio frequencies were so crowded that Congress set up a regulatory agency, the Federal Radio Commission, to issue broadcast licenses.

The 1930 census inquired whether the household owned a radio set. Many people did. The wealthy purchased a commercial model, and the poor built their own crystal sets or vacuum tube radios using the plans published in hobby magazines.

Americans tuned in regularly for the news, farm reports, and weather reports, and for other favorite programs -- music, drama, quiz shows, humor, and more. The radio often became the family gathering place, assuming a role that the piano or the phonograph had previously enjoyed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt used radio to bring his "Fireside Chats" into American living rooms, starting in 1933. He employed the cutting edge of technology to speak directly to the people in an unprecedented way.

From that era, here are two interesting quotes:

I live in a strictly rural community, and people here speak of “The Radio” in the large sense, with an over-meaning. When they say “The Radio” they don’t mean a cabinet, an electrical phenomenon, or a man in a studio, they refer to a pervading and somewhat godlike presence which has come into their lives and homes.

—E. B. White, 1933

God Hears Prayer

If radio's slim fingers can pluck a melody
From night -- and toss it over a continent or sea;
If the petalled white notes of a violin
Are blown across the mountains or the city's din;
If songs, like crimson roses, are culled from thin blue air --
Why should mortals wonder if God hears prayer?

-Ethel Romig Fuller (from the 1937 anthology, 1000 Quotable Poems)

Related post: I Grew Up in Radio Land

Courthouse and Old Jail in Bowling Green, KY

Historic buildings in Warren County, Kentucky

Isaac and I were in Bowling Green, KY, a few weeks ago, hunting down the old Warren County jail building. Cleverly, I forgot to bring the street address with me. I'm not at all familiar with Bowling Green's geography, either. After driving around downtown for a while, we finally spotted the public library. There, it was a quick job to get the jail's address from a book about Bowling Green's historic buildings.

Armed with the address, we found the jail easily enough. We hadn't seen it because it stands just a few feet from the back door of the Warren County courthouse, hidden by trees and partially obscured by another building. Between the tree trunks at left of the courthouse in the photo above, you can barely glimpse the gold and gray of the old jail's wall.

The back side of the old jail is plainly visible from another street, but it's not nearly as spectacular as the front side of the building. I'm sure that we drove by it, but having seen photos of the front side only, I didn't recognize it.

The jail was built in 1939 as a WPA project. The building is still used for Drug Taskforce offices and for the courthouse archives. It is an interesting structure because its architecture is Streamline Moderne.  To see a much better photo of it than I managed to take, visit the images at the Kentucky Digital Library.

The courthouse was built immediately after the Civil War. The city of Bowling Green was in a sorry state of repair after being occupied for a total of four years by Confederate and, later, Union forces. The splendid new courthouse was a symbol of hope for the war-weary residents.

Stuffed Animals and Happy Childhoods

Wants, needs, and deprivations

A few days ago, I was in line at a store behind a lady and her granddaughter. The little girl had a stuffed animal, and she was whining and wheedling for the grandmother to buy it.

The pleading reached an emotional crescendo as Grandmother unloaded her purchases at the cash register. At the very end of the transaction, she bought the stuffed animal and handed it to her granddaughter. The little girl's tears vanished, a smile appeared, and (thank goodness!) a sudden quiet fell upon our little corner of the store.

The woman turned to me and explained that she never had a stuffed animal when she was a child. She wouldn't have dared to ask for one. That's why she buys stuffed animals for her granddaughter, she said. She has sixty stuffed animals in her home; some are for her grandchildren, but some are just for herself.

I don't remember a stuffed animal that belonged exclusively to me when I was little. My sister had a teddy bear, and I think there was a stuffed horse in the toy box that my mom had made. It didn't bother me not to have a personal stuffed animal. I had various dolls, and they were enough.

My children had dozens of stuffed animals that they had received as gifts from friends and relatives. I wonder if the popularity of stuffed animals as a gift suggests a repressed yearning amongst adults. Or do adults like to give stuffed animals so they can feel virtuous about giving a toy without batteries? Then again, maybe adults like stuffed animals simply because we have a biological predisposition to respond to big-eyed, soft, baby-sized critters.

It is sad to think of children who don't have many toys. My parents grew up during the Depression, and like many people their age, they didn't have many frivolities in their lives when they were children. My mother had one beloved dolly. My dad remembered blocks of wood to play with instead of toys, and an orange as his only Christmas gift. And there were other, much more serious lacks and losses and stresses and sorrows in their little lives.

When my parents married, they decided they would create a happy home together. As I look back at the childhood they gave me, it's hard for me to feel deprived about much of anything. (Well, I should admit that I felt deprived when I was a child because we didn't have a television. However, I've come to think of that as an advantage.)
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Millions of children are truly deprived. Many lack the most basic necessities of life. Your generosity can make a big difference in their lives. Please consider a donation to a reputable charity that helps children.

Stone Church in Auburn, KY

Pearce Memorial United Methodist Church

I was so busy photographing this interesting stone church in the little town of Auburn, KY, that I forgot to read the name on its sign! The letters are almost too faded to read in my photograph, but I verified its name on the internet. This is the Pearce Memorial United Methodist Church.

After I had the name, I found a church history that was written in 1974 by Nancy R. Wright. It says that the church was named for John Pearce, a lifelong member of the congregation, whose last will and testament designated $20,000 for the construction of the building.

Dedicated on March 26, 1939, this structure replaced an 1882 building and became the third meeting house of the congregation. A stone parsonage (barely visible at left in the photo below) was built behind the church in 1950-1951.

According to Wright's history, this is Bedford stone (a type of limestone) from the Halls Knob Quarry near Auburn. Her history also includes a description of the interior of the building.

The architect of the church was Mr. A. B. Gardner of Nashville. I have not located any additional information about him. I can only say that Mr. A.B. Gardner was not affiliated with the Nashville architectural firm, Dougherty and Gardner, which operated throughout the 1920s. (That was Thomas W. Gardner.) It seems that this fanciful little stone church in Auburn may have been Mr. A. B. Gardner's greatest work.

(The walls of the church don't really slant in.

The distortion was caused by the wide-angle lens.)

Horse Drawn Hay Sweep-Rake

Making hay with horses

In the hayfield, the hay sweep (or sweep-rake) moved hay. The driver lowered the sweep's teeth (the long wooden tines) to ground level and took the sweep down a windrow of raked hay. As the sweep moved forward, the hay piled onto the buck (the platform of wooden teeth.)

When the buck was full of hay, the load was taken to the haystack. A good man on the sweep planned his route so he was close to the haystack when the buck was full and heavy.

Mowing machines and dump rake were pulled from the front. However, horses could not walk in front of the sweep-rake -- they would have been wallowing through the hay windrows that the sweep was supposed to gather. This problem was solved by having the horses pull the sweep from the sides.

In the image below, the load of hay has been deposited on the haystacker buck (another platform of wooden tines.) The sweep driver has backed the horses away from the load. Now he is approaching the hay again to push it farther onto the stacker buck. The driver is physically lifting the sweep teeth. Men and horses worked hard in the hayfield.

Out of the camera's range, the stacker team waits. The horses are harnessed to the pulleys that take the stacker buck to the top of the triangular frame and throw the hay onto the haystack. The man who is standing by the stacker buck is probably the driver of the stacker team. This was a fairly easy job, perhaps one that a grandfather might be assigned to do.

By the time I was a child, the hay sweep was a tractor, with its transmission reversed and its seat turned around. Its big wheels were in front and its small wheels were in back. The sweep buck was mounted in front of the big wheels, and it was raised and lowered with hydraulic power. It could carry much larger loads of hay than a horse-powered sweep, and it went much faster.

A tractor pulled the load of hay to the top of the haystack. However, the tractor driver was still said to be "driving the stacker team." Maybe "stacker team" was easier to say than "stacker tractor."

Photographs in this post were taken between 1935 and 1945 by John Vachon (top-left image) and Russell Lee (the other three images) for the Farm Security Agency.

Related posts:
The Hayfield
Horse-drawn Hay Rake
Winter Memories

More images
Solomon Butcher's Nebraska images of hay equipment (stacking)

Arthur Rothstein Comments on a Famous Photo

The photographer explains his art.

UPDATE: I've redone the Library of Congress links in this post, and I hope they'll work now. If they don't, please let me know.

FSA photo by Arthur Rothstein

Cimarron County, Oklahoma, April 1936.

Arthur Rothstein worked as a photographer during the Great Depression for the Resettlement Agency, later known as the Farm Security Agency (FSA).  One of Rothstein's most famous FSA photographs appears above. (Click the image for a larger view.)

Rothstein commented on the photograph in a 1964 interview at the Smithsonian:

You may remember the stories in those days about the black blizzards that swept across the plains and even darkened the sky in New York City...

Well, it was a dramatic catastrophe in American agriculture. Strangely enough, it was a very difficult thing to show in pictures, but I lived in the Dust Bowl for several months and went out every day and took pictures.

In the process, one day, wandering around through Cimarron County in Oklahoma, which is in the panhandle of Oklahoma, I photographed this farm and the people who lived on the farm. The farmer and his two children, two little boys, were walking past a shed on their property and I took this photograph with the dust swirling all around them.

I had no idea at the time that it was going to become a famous photograph, but it looked like a good picture to me and I took it. And I took a number of other pictures on the same property. And then I went on to some other farms and took those pictures. This particular picture turned out to be the picture that was quite famous.

It was a picture that had a very simple kind of composition, but there was something about the swirling dust and the shed behind the farmer. What it did was the kind of thing Roy [Stryker, his FSA supervisor] always talked about-it showed an individual in relation to his environment.

Of course this is the sort of thing that painters from time immemorial have been trying to do-to show man in relation to his environment. You know the old axiom that " Art is the expression of man," so here, if this has any art, it's because it's an expression of man.

Source: Arthur Rothstein Oral History

In the same document, Rothstein also explains a controversial photo of a skull lying on the sunbaked soil of the South Dakota badlands.

One of my favorite Rothstein FSA photos is "Car on the plain", taken in October 1939 in Washington County, Colorado.

A short biography of Rothstein
Links to online archives of Rothstein images

The Body as an Industrial Palace

Man's internal machinery

Several years ago, I came across an interesting old illustration on the National Institute of Health (NIH) website. It shows the human body as a factory -- literally, as an "industrial palace." I saved the image because I liked it, and then I quickly forgot about it.

Tonight, I came across the "Industrial Palace" again, and looked at it a little differently, due to my recent (small) study of the modernistic architecture of the early and middle 20th century.

Here are the details of this piece of art, according to the NIH:

Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace)by Fritz Kahn (1888-1968)Stuttgart, 1926. Chromolithograph. National Library of Medicine.Kahn’s modernist visualization of the digestive and respiratory system as "industrial palace," really a chemical plant, was conceived in a period when the German chemical industry was the world’s most advanced.

Source: Dreaming the Industrial Body

It seems that, in the 1920s and 1930s, people were extremely excited about machines. It was the Machine Age. The assembly line had been invented, enabling many people to own personal machines -- automobiles. High speed travel was possible via big ocean liners and streamlined trains. Electricity, produced by generators and turbines, was transforming everyday life. Mechanized factories were churning out many new, inexpensive consumer goods. Machines even made it possible for people to fly.

I've been reading that modernists thought of schools as machines for learning, houses as machines for living, and hospitals as machines for healing. Designed for speed and efficiency, the architecture sometimes seemed cold. Unnecessary frills were stripped away, and the design was streamlined just as a train or an airplane might have been. This was modern!

Given all that, it's not too surprising to see the human body portrayed as a factory, in a drawing from 1926. Fritz Kahn, a doctor, was just creating a bit of modernistic medical art.

Life in the Country before Electricity

Rural Kentucky in the 1930s and 1940s

With Christmas just around the corner, my days at work have been very busy with one customer after another. I've been working full-time, and honestly, it's been exhausting.

All of this makes me remember my one-time job at the little country store with fondness. I did spend a lot of hours there, but it was a relatively stress-free job less than a mile from my house. I made sandwiches, cleaned the store, and ran the cash register. Another of my jobs was visiting with the customers while they sat down to enjoy a snack.

Here's something I wrote back in my country-store days, about some of the reminiscences I heard from the old fellows who gathered there every day.

I take a lot of trips down memory lane at the little country store when the old-timers sit around with their "co-colas" and reminisce. The other day they were remembering straw ticks in their beds. By the end of the winter, they had worn a little nest in the straw where they could snuggle down completely warm under a pile of quilts even though snow might blow through the cracks in the log walls.

Another thing they all remember fondly is home-canned meat, fixed in a gravy. I've heard them say many times that their (rural) families never were hungry even during the Depression. Everyone had a big garden, pigs, and milk cows. They butchered the pigs in the winter and either smoked or canned the meat. They raised what they ate and ate what they raised!

The creamery sent a truck out once a week and people put their cream cans out on the road to be emptied by the driver. He left the cream money from the week before tucked under the handle on the lid. The ice truck also came once a week.

They went to bed early because kerosene for the lamps and batteries for the radios were expensive. On Saturday night, the young folks gathered at the store to socialize. They came in a car or on a mule if they had one, and if they didn't, they walked.

Electricity and paved roads changed everything!

An Evening at the Kentuckiana Digital Library

Historical documents, images, and more

A few minutes ago, I had to pull myself away from the Kentuckiana Digital Library (KDL) so I can write in my blog and go to bed!

The KDL is just one section of The Kentucky Virtual Library, an immense resource for research in and about Kentucky. I don't pretend to know everything that can be found in and through the Kentucky Virtual Library. I do know that you can search, get the name of a book and its library, and have your local library arrange an interlibrary-loan.

The KDL has a lot of old photographs, books, and newspapers online. For example, I found a little book from 1915 that gives a proud overview of Christian County, Kentucky (where I live.) The entire text of William Henry Perrin's histories of Christian and Trigg Counties is also available there.

I learned a bit about the WPA work done around here in the Depression from some of the images of Christian County. Besides building roads and bridges, they operated a stone quarry that provided the materials. The images also include views of the coal mines in the northern part of the county in the early years of the century, a few farming photos from that era, and a number of photos of the long-gone Bethel College in Hopkinsville.

Since we live on the east side of Christian County with the Jefferson Davis Monument in the greater circles of our neighborhood, I was interested in the 1929 images of the newly completed monument. The one that shows a vintage automobile approaching Fairview is my favorite.

The Todd County photos (next county to the east) raised a question in my mind that will now have to be answered. What has become of the Gray and Blue State Park that appears in over a dozen photographs?

A hotel, lodge, traveler's rest hall, and more are shown in the photos of the Gray and Blue State Park. The park was transferred in 1936 to the National Park Service according to one of the captions. The only modern-day evidence I can find of the park's existence is the address of a church: "2273 Blue and Gray Park Road." I'm planning a drive down that road to see what I can see.

If you appreciate old-time photographs, newspapers, books, etc., there are wonders to behold at this website. I hope you'll pay a visit.

Old Bridges at Land Between the Lakes, KY

Eggner's Ferry Bridge and Lawrence Memorial Bridge

The Eggner's Ferry Bridge on August 11, 2007

The Eggner's Ferry Bridge (pictured above) crosses the Tennessee River at Fenton, on the west side of Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes. The Lawrence Memorial Bridge crosses the Cumberland River at Canton, on the east side of Land Between the Lakes.

Both these long bridges were built in the early 1930s, before the rivers were dammed and the lakes were formed. Before Kentucky Lake was filled in 1944, Eggner's Ferry Bridge underwent modifications. According to explorekentuckylake.com, new pilings were built and the bridge was raised in 1943. The Lawrence Memorial Bridge underwent a similar procedure in preparation for the damming of the Cumberland River and the filling of Lake Barkley (which took place in the 1960s) .

Highway 68/80, the road on which these bridges lie, has become a major, well-traveled, east-west route through southern Kentucky. Most of the road is now 4-lane. Land Between the Lakes is a popular recreation spot for both tourists and residents, and many of these bridge-crossers are towing campers or boats behind them. All in all, a lot of traffic pours across these bridges every day.

The two bridges were declared functionally obsolete in their last inspection. They are scheduled to be replaced within the next decade, and that will be a good thing for the motorists who must cross them. The bridges are too narrow for modern traffic. It's not uncommon to hear of someone whose rear-view mirror was knocked off while crossing these bridges.

The new bridges will have 4-lanes with shoulders and an additional lane for foot and bicycle traffic. They will cost an unbelievable $80 to 100 million each. Highway 68/80 will also be made 4-lane through Land Between the Lakes. The project is still in its design phase. Construction won't start until 2008 or 2009, and it will take several years to complete.

School buses from Christian County are not allowed to cross the Lawrence Memorial or Eggner's Ferry bridges. When our high school teams play Murray (west of Land Between the Lakes), they travel about fifty miles farther so the buses can cross the rivers on I-24's wider, safer bridges.

Eggner's Ferry history

The Eggner's Ferry Bridge over the Tennessee River is named for the ferry that was there for many years before the bridge was built. The ferry was established by Milton Eggner, (who also ran a stagecoach business and had a mail-carrying contract) in the 1850s.

During the Civil War, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman mentioned Eggner's Ferry in a dispatch that warned of Union forces on the road to Murray. According to a listing of tavern licenses, in 1865, both Wm. Price and O. Walsdrop posted bonds and were licensed to operate a tavern at Eggner's Ferry. It is not clear if they operated the same tavern or different ones.

Eggner's Ferry is mentioned as an address in the 1924 obituary of Mr. Temolean ("Mollie" Leneave. An image of the Eggner Ferry when operated by John L. Jackson has been posted at Webshots by a Trigg county resident. Mr. Charles Hill Bradley, mentioned in a 1931 book of Calloway County biographies, owned an interest in the Eggner ferry and store. He may have been one of the last owners, because the bridge was built in 1932.


Read more:
"Bridge forum draws crowd", Murray Ledger

Updated 1/29/2012