Helen Korngold Diary: September 29 through October 5, 1919

Helen Korngold, Dec. 1919, New York City

Continuing Helen Korngold's 1919 diary...
After several boring weeks at home, Helen gets a teaching position substituting at Maplewood High. She likes it much better than Wellston.


September
Monday 29
Washing. I didn’t help.

Tuesday 30
Finished up ironing.

October
Wednesday 1
Substituting at Maplewood High. I’m crazy about it. Can’t see why I didn’t take that job in the beginning. I was a big fool.

Tuesday 2
I certainly like Maple

Friday 3
Mr. Richmond & Gooch are dears

Saturday 4
Such nice children, too. Yom Kippur

Sunday 5
The school was beautiful.

NOTES:

Friday 3

A Wilbur I. Gooch appears on the 1920 St. Louis Federal Census working as a high school teacher. He was born in Minnesota in 1885 and was married to Nellie, age 22.

In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper of October 5, 1919, the licensing of auto drivers is discussed.

"A recommendation that every employed person driving an automobile should be compelled, by State law, to pass an examination and take out a license, is one of the remedies proposed for automobile accidents in the report of the June grand jury, submitted yesterday to Judge Klene. It was pointed out that in 1918 there were 420 persons killed in accidents and that the number in 1917 was 510. Many Of the deaths were due to automobile accidents, besides numerous persons crippled or injured. The estimate was made that damage from automobile and vehicle accidents alone amounts to 1525,000 a year."

Sales on fall fashions:



And a shipment of antique and modern Chinese embroidery arrived:

A SALE OF Chinese Embroidery Work
We have received a shipment of wonderful antique and modern hand-embroidery work from China and are placing it on sale tomorrow. Owing to lack of space in the Oriental Bazaar, this merchandise will be displayed on Squares on the Main Floor, as well as in the Sixth Floor Oriental Bazaar.
Mandarin Coats, besides being worn as negligees, may be cut and made into scarfs, runners and lamp shades. The colors and embroidery are beautiful. Prices are $10 and $15 Mandarin Skirts, beautifully embroidered on background of orange, red, blue, yellow, black and green. At $3, $5, and $15 each.
Even for children there are Mandarin Coat Suits, all-over embroidered, at $5 and $7.50
A special group of Obies, used as sashes to adorn the flowing gowns of Japanese women. Exquisitely woven in brocades, suitable for fancy bags, $5 and $10 apiece.
Sleeve bands that may be used for scarfs and other decorative uses. They are here in the greatest abundance of designs and colors, at $1.oo, $1.50 and $2 per pair. Skeleton Doilies by the hundreds. Little hand embroideries, so arranged as to be ready to be appliqued on doilies, table runners, lamp shades, etc. Your choice, 15c, 25c, 50c and $1 each.
 Mandarin Squares for fancy work, circle and oblong shape, $1.98 and $2.98
On sale on Squares 15, 16 and 17 on Main Floor, and in the Oriental Bazaar on Sixth Floor.

State-of-the-art home equipment promised to "eliminate the drudgery of hard work."

Outfit three rooms at $139.50 or $2.50 a week! $2.50 adjusted for inflation would be $37.07 today. What a bargain!


I love this Black Jack gum ad. My dad bought it and other Adams gums in the 1950s. You can find Black Jack today at specialty stores. I saw it in JoAnne Fabrics!

And I loved these brownies or elves making candy.

What an adorable ad of children's toys!


A whole page of movie, theater, and vaudeville-

Blowout Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russian, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth by Rachel Maddow

I thought I should read Blowout by Rachel Maddow. Should being the giveaway word to my motivation. Instead of a dose of medicine that's good for me but hard to swallow, it was a terrifying funhouse ride that totally engaged my attention! Maddow weaves together a narrative of how we 'got to here' that illumines the present.

Maddow lays out the oil industry's history from Standard Oil to fracking to Putin's dream of Russia becoming the world's fuel provider to trolls on Facebook disseminating discord.

The oil industry has always been too big and wealthy and powerful to control, starting with John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil which drove out or took over the competition. The values have not changed; anything goes in the pursuit of increased production and mindboggling wealth. And power. Don't forget the obscene power.

The oil industry has always looked for better ways to get to the oil, using nuclear bombs and ocean drilling and fracking. Sure, messes happen. The best clean up tool they have developed is a big stick of paper towels.

Fracking was going to save the day! Years worth of 'clean' gas. So what if Oklahoma suffered 900 earthquakes in 2017?

I didn't know how Putin had gambled everything on the fossil fuel industry bringing Russia money and power across the globe. But they needed the technology to make it happen. And Rex Tillerson and Exxon/Mobile were planning to help him. Those pesky sanctions got in their way.

Business and capitalism is amoral; politics and justice and fairness are irrelevant. The prime directive is making money. You lobby for the best tax deals, pay workers the lowest wages possible, make deals with the Devil--if you are killing people, or the entire planet, cover it up and carry on making the big bucks.

The damage fossil fuels are doing to the planet is happening NOW, has been happening for a long time before we wised up to it. It isn't just when we take a jet or when we eat a half-pound burger or drive the kids to school. Getting that gas out of the ground it escapes. Lots of it. From the get-go, fossil fuels damage our world.

Maddow writes, Coal is done, and so is gas and oil but they don't know it yet.

Oh, the last desperate gasps of the old world struggling to hold on.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"...the oil and gas industry is essentially a big casino that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit. That equation invites gangsterism, extortion, thuggery, and the sorts of folks who enjoy these hobbies. Its practitioners have been lumbering across the globe of late, causing mindless damage and laying the groundwork for the global catastrophe that is the climate crisis but also reordering short-term geopolitics in a strong-but-dumb survival contest that renders everything we think of as politics as just theater. It's worth understanding why. And why now."~from Blowout by Rachel Maddow

from the publisher:

Rachel Maddow’s Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe—from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea—exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West’s most important alliances. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, but ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson emerge as two of the past century’s most consequential corporate villains.

The oil-and-gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.”

This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest industry on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

Blowout
Rachel Maddow
Crown
Published Oct 01, 2019
Hardcover $30.00
ISBN 9780525575474

Threads of Life by Claire Hunter

"Sewing has a visual language. It has a voice. It has been used by people to communicate something of themselves--their history, beliefs, prayers and protests."~ from Threads of Life by Claire Hunter

Twenty-eight years ago I made my first quilt and it changed my life. As I honed my skills I was inspired by historic and traditional quilts but also by art quilts.

Early on I dreamed of being able to make quilts that represented my values, interests, and views. I eagerly learned new skills, from hand embroidery and hand quilting to surface design, machine thread work, and fusible applique. I have been making a series of quilts on authors I love. I have created a Pride and Prejudice storybook quilt, an Apollo 11 quilt, and embroidered quilts of the First Ladies, Green Heros, and women abolitionists and Civil Rights leaders.

With my quilt I Will Life My Voice Like A Trumpet,
2013 AQS Grand Rapids quilt show

I was excited to be given an egalley of Claire Hunter's book Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle. 

Hunter identifies themes in needlecraft including power, frailty, captivity, identity, connection, protest, loss, community, and voice. She shares a breathtaking number of stories that span history and from across the world.

Hunter begins with the history of the Bayeux Tapestry, a panel of wool embroidery showing scenes from the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Its history illustrates the ups and downs in cultural attitudes toward needlework.

detail from Bayeux Tapestry 

It was forgotten, nearly upcycled, and used for a carnival float backdrop. Napoleon put it in a museum until it fell out of fashion and was again relegated to storage here and there. Himmler got a hold of it during WWII and publicized the artifact and saved it from destruction. Then the French Resistance took possession of the Louvre and the tapestry.

900 years later, the tapestry attracts thousands of viewers every year, a worldwide cultural icon, and inspired The Games of Thrones Tapestry.

Yet, we don't know who designed the tapestry or embroidered it, the challenges and tragedies they faced. They remain anonymous.

I was familiar with the Changi prison camp quilts created during WWII by women POWs in Japanese camps. Hunter explains how the women created images with personal and political meaning to tell loved ones they survived.

quilt made in the Changi Prison Camp

I have seen Mola reverse applique but did not know it was an invention of necessity. Spanish colonists in Panama and Columbia insisted the indigenous women cover their chests. Traditionally, the women sported tattoos with spiritual symbols which they transferred to fabric. In many cultures, cloth has a spiritual element.

Mola Blouse, c. 1990, from the International Quilt Museum

Hunter also touches on Harriet Power's Bible Quilt, Gees Bend quilters, the Glasgow School of Art Department of Needlework, and Suffragists banners.

There was much that was new to me. How  Ukrainian embroidery was forbidden under Soviet rule as they systematically dismantled cultural traditions. Or how the Nazis used Jewish slave labor to sew German uniforms and luxury clothing.

Hunter tells stories from history and also how needle and thread are employed today as therapy and as community engagement and to voice political and feminist statements. She tells the memorable story of guiding male prisoners in the making of curtains for a common room and how she worked with groups, Austrian Aboriginies and Gaelic women, to make banners addressing displacement and community disruption.

We also read about the history of sewing, the impact of industrialization and the rise of factory production, the home sewing machine, the shift from skilled craft to homemade decorative arts.

Art quilters and textile artists like Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago are discussed.

Social awareness needlework included the quite well known Aids Quilt but also the little known banner The Ribbon, created to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Justine Merritt organized the sewing of peace panels to be stitched together. 25,000 panels were made. 20,000 people collected on August 4, 1985, to wrap the 15-mile long Ribbon around the Pentagon, the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the Lincoln Memorial, and to the Capital and back to the Pentagon. The media and President Reagen ignored it.

Threads of Life may seem an unusual book, a niche book, but I do think it has a wide appeal that will interest many readers.

I was given access to a free egalley through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle
by Clare Hunter
ABRAMS
Pub Date 01 Oct 2019
ISBN 9781419739538
PRICE $26.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A globe-spanning history of sewing, embroidery, and the people who have used a needle and thread to make their voices heard 

In 1970s Argentina, mothers marched in headscarves embroidered with the names of their “disappeared” children. In Tudor, England, when Mary, Queen of Scots, was under house arrest, her needlework carried her messages to the outside world. From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. 

Threads of Life is a chronicle of identity, protest, memory, power, and politics told through the stories of needlework. Clare Hunter, master of the craft, threads her own narrative as she takes us over centuries and across continents—from medieval France to contemporary Mexico and the United States, and from a POW camp in Singapore to a family attic in Scotland—to celebrate the age-old, universal, and underexplored beauty and power of sewing. Threads of Life is an evocative and moving book about the need we have to tell our story. 

Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris

"What you are doing, Cilka, is the only form of resistance you have--staying alive." ~from Cilka's Journey

In 1974 when I was twenty-two I met a woman who had come from Russia after World War II. I was new in town and not even half her age. In the morning when she saw my husband had left for work she would run across the street to my door. She asked why I did not have children yet, whispering that I should ask my husband--he'll know what to do. And she puzzled over my husband's job as an assistant pastor, asking "why two priests?"

One day, in broken English, Nadya told me that when she was a teenager she volunteered to go to a German work farm in her father's stead. She told me she never could have children and thought that she had been sterilized at that camp. When the war ended she was given the choice of three places to go and she chose New Jersey in America. On the ship, she met a man who had also been in a camp and had no family left and they married. She could not read English or drive. I am now surprised she even told me this much of her story.

I was ignorant of the details of modern history at that time. I knew about Nazi Germany and the concentration camps from books I had read such as Anne Frank's Diary. Still, I had little appreciation of the horror Nadya had endured. I later realized that Nadya was perhaps was Polish or from another country taken over by the Nazis and not Russian. That the work farm was a prison camp. That she had no family or home to return to after the war.

We are surrounded by people with stories that they keep to themselves for many reasons. Sometimes because the stories are too painful to speak. Perhaps they don't have the words to express their experience. Sometimes people fear that their past will bring judgment from those who weren't there.

When Heather Morris talked with Lale Sokolov, listening to his story that would become her best-selling novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, he told her that Cilka Klein saved his life. Morris knew she had to learn about Cilka and write her story. How did this teenager survive years in prison camps? Not only survive but have the strength to help others survive?

The people Morris interviewed gave conflicting stories about Cilka's character. She was a collaborator. She slept with the Nazis for favors. She helped them, saved them, sacrificed for others. Which was the real Cilka?

Cilka was only sixteen in 1942 when the Nazis rounded up Slovakian Jews and she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was young and beautiful and soon slated to become a sex slave.

At the end of WWII, Russia rounded up people they feared had collaborated or spied for the Nazis and sent them to Siberia. Cilka had 'slept with the enemy' and knew several languages. Deemed an enemy of the state, she was sent to a prisoner camp near the Arctic Circle where mistreated prisoners mined coal by hand.

In Cilka's Journey, Morris recreates life in the Gulag interspersed with flashbacks revealing Celia's life before and during WWII. The book is filled with memorable characters, women who have lost everything and yet strive for a sense of order, community, and even beauty. They bond over the hope represented by a baby and forgive each other's frailties.

"History never gives up its secrets easily," Morris writes, but Cilka's story needed to be told. It is the story of a girl cast into the unimaginable, not once but twice in her young life. And it is the story of courage, the pragmatism needed to survive, the shame of survivor's guilt, and the empathy that spurs personal sacrifices to help another.

Lale never forgot Cilka. Thanks to Morris, neither will we.

I received an ARC through Bookish First in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Cilka's Journey
by Heather Morris
St. Martin's Press
$27.99 hardcover
Publication Date: Oct 01 2019
ISBN: 9781250265708

Humble and Human: Impressionist Era Treasures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Arts, an Exhibition in Honor of Ralph C. Wilson, Jr.

At almost the last minute we finally made it to the Detroit Institute of Art to see the Impressionist exhibit Humble and Human which runs through October 13, 2019.

I loved seeing how art and individual artists developed over time.

 Alfred Sisley, Village Street in Marlotte, 1866

Clearing in the Woods, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Woman Sewing, Berthe Morisot, abt. 1879

Violinist and Young Woman, Edgar Degas, abt. 1871

Cafe Scene in Paris, Henri Gervix, 1877

Political Woman, James Tissot, 1881-5

 Tissot was a master at replicating fashion!

After several paintings of the rich and powerful came portraits of ordinary and plain folk.

Woman With a Bandage, Edgar Degas, 1872-73

Jockeys on Horseback Before Distant Hills, Edgar Degas, 1884

View of the Crotoy from Upstream, Georges Seurat, 1889

 Note how Seurat continued his pointillism onto the frame.

Study for "Le Chahut", Georges Seurat, 1889

Morning in Provence, Paul Cezanne, 1900-6

Mont-Sainte-Victorie, Paul Cezanne, 1904-6

Study for "Le Pont de L'Europe," Gustave Caillebotte, 1876

Many of these paintings are in the permanent collection of the DIA. Including these wonderful Van Goghs.

The Old Mill, Van Gogh,

Spirit of the Dead Walking, Paul Gauguin, 1892

The Yellow Christ, Paul Gauguin

We then had to visit our favorite gallery of American paintings.

They remind us that empires fall but nature is eternal.

Syria by the Sea, Frederic Edwin Church, 1873

 And of the magnificent and awesome beauty of nature.

Indian Summer, Jasper Francis Cropsey, 1866

 And I will end by sharing my favorite Frederick Edwin Church painting, Cotopaxi.

from the DIA website:

In Humble and Human: Impressionist Era Treasures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Arts, an Exhibition in Honor of Ralph C. Wilson, Jr., a selection of more than forty Impressionist and post-Impressionist treasures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Arts traces the arc of a period that elevated the irreducible beauty of the everyday to the status of fine art.

A testament to the power of collaboration among artists, museums, and cities, the exhibition explores the pioneering work of leading Impressionist and post–Impressionist artists, including Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot. It also celebrates the life and vision of Ralph C. Wilson, Jr., who saw in the art of these late nineteenth-century avant-gardists, especially that of Claude Monet, evocations of values and ideas that were close to his own heart, capturing the ephemerality of the everyday experience while dignifying hard work, simple pleasures, and ordinary people.

On the hundredth anniversary of Mr. Wilson’s birth, both institutions are proud to celebrate these extraordinary works and Mr. Wilson’s legacy as a philanthropist, business leader, and advocate for the citizens of Detroit and Buffalo.