Category: About Me

The World According to Me– Part 3 of “Who am I?”(originally posted 3-21-15)

About Me, Sometimes re-runs, This and That, When I was a kid, Writing and Blogging

{Having outlined important features of my life at Age 6, and again at Age 11… through early childhood,  into World War II and out by age 11, what follows here is a rather well-edited version  of the highlights of my life during the decade of 1945-1955.}

[THE END OF WWII ]

On the last day of World War II, when the armistice was signed with the Japanese, the official word report for that the war was indeed over, came from 11-year-old-Me…at least for my elderly neighbor, Mr. Myers.  I proudly delivered the news report, standing in the front yard.  He was the only person that I actually discussed the war’s end with, as my parents were not into talking of important world issues with kids.

Next followed several years of childhood and Junior High.  This half dozen years or so was a very difficult time in my life, in which my school life was marked by depression and questionable educational progress.  The less said about that era the better.

[THE LIBRARY BOOKMOBILE]

One of my favorite good memories was of the library Bookmobile.   There was not a branch of the regional public library in our town, but the Bookmobile did come around once a week.   It parked in an area at the center of town, behind or adjacent to a new car dealership.  During the war car sales had slowed to a stop, and it was a couple of years before new vehicles began to appear–once the resources and manpower needed to produce new cars became available as the soldiers returned from the war front and went to work in the factories again.

Anyway, the Bookmobile was a highlight of my young life.  The vehicle was an old bus that had been made over into a make-shift library, with shelves built into the sides and some portable shelves that were moved out into the  parking lot when the weather permitted.   Even today I can recall choosing books from the shelves, with guidance from the librarian, who was kind and liked to read.   She knew about books and the types of books children liked to read, and supervised the avoidance of inappropriate materials.

I seem to recall sitting on the steps at the entrance to the Bookmobile, but that memory may be an embellishment of my active imagination.  At any rate I sat there and read for hours, and always went home carrying an armload of books that the library lady had approved and recommended.  My library card was one of my favorite possessions, and my goal was to read every book in the Bookmobile.  I modified that goal shortly to include reading all of the books on certain shelves stocked with age-appropriate materials.

When the Bookmobile was not there, I had another hang-out where I could go and spend afternoons–high in a cherry tree in the field at the back of our half-acre lot.  That tree was a refuge and a joy for me, as I was the only person in the world who knew about that particular tree.

But I want to get on with it, and so I’ll skip to junior and early high school.

[THE COLD WAR]

Although The War was over, the Cold War had begun.  This time the enemy was the Russians, or more specifically the dreaded Communists of the Soviet Union, and Red China.   We kids and teenagers were still very well aware that we were within the easy sights of instant annihilation, and soon there was another war demanding our allegiance–this one in Korea.    My primary remembrance was the Korean War (er…”conflict,” it was never a declared war) was that a lot of our schoolmate boys joined the service as soon as they could, and one of my best friends…a mild-mannered red-haired guy who went off and never came back–died when  the army tank he was riding in over in Korea  hit a land-mine and exploded.    The military draft was in effect, and many of the boys in our school joined up with one of the branches of the service.   It was permitted for them to quit school at age 16 as long as they went into the military.  My brother joined the U.S.Navy at age 17.   My boyfriend, who would later become my husband later, quit school and  joined the army, but was sent to Germany instead of Korea.

MARRIAGE OR CAREER?

The first half of the 1950s saw us growing up, and the girls all got jobs in offices or shops, although a few did manage to go off to college to   There really were not any other viable choices for girls: nurse, teacher, secretary.   Oh, there was also the opportunity to join one of the Womens’ Services: the WACs, WAVEs, SPARS…with the Army, Navy, Coast Guard.

I wonder now why I never thought of joining up myself.  It would have been a great job and something that I would jump at the chance––NOW–-to do.  Well, I could have gone to nursing school I guess, but my nonexistent math skills and absolute disinterest in school in general would have made that option unlikely.

A word about Girls of the era:  it was common to be planning one’s wedding at the same time as graduation.  A few girls got –OMG, pregnant– which completely destroyed any educational aspirations.  Even high school was out of the question.   Most of us who did NOT get into “trouble” and graduated high school were sent off to work in offices.  At least I did have secretarial skills which landed me a job and provided a respectable occupation.  Typing and Shorthand were the skills to have.  I did not qualify as a stenographer (who was proficient in secretarial skills–especially Gregg Shorthand, which was a mark of distinction.)  I was classified as a “clerk-typist,” which was higher rank than “file clerk,” but not as high as “secretary” or “stenographer.”

[OVERSEAS AS AN ARMY WIFE]

In 1954 I got engaged, got married in August, and on Christmas Day 1955 landed in Bremerhaven, Germany to meet a train which transported me to Frankfurt, and Giessen, and a U. S. Army base  in a small town called Butzbach.     I was 21 years old when I went to Germany on a troop ship which had been partially converted to transport officers and dependents.

That was an experience…at 21 I had no clue.  Spoke only a little bit of German, and had never been farther away from home than about ten miles.   The trip across the Atlantic Ocean was wonderful…I spent every waking moment on deck soaking in the atmosphere of the sea air and the turquoise water churning at the bow of the ship.  I absolutely loved that journey, and while my fellow dependent wives languished in their small cabins or crowded “theaters” aboard ship, I stayed on deck as much as possible.  My tiny cabin was shared with two other women, and two two-year-olds in cribs.  Yikes!

My German never did get beyond some rudimentary grammar and basic Berlitz self-study.  We lived in a German apartment for one week, maybe two, then moved into U.S.Army quarters into a brand new apartment building in Butzbach, near Giessen.   Most of the people I came in contact with were Americans, except in the commissary (grocery store) and shop-keepers, most of whom spoke English.   My two closest friends were American wives from US southern states, one of whom was still quite incensed at General Sherman’s March to the Sea after the U.S. Civil War… not the best company for a Yankee gal like me.

We played a lot of Scrabble, Canasta, and Pinochle…especially when the troops/husbands were out on maneuvers and we wives were left to entertain ourselves.

I often remember with some regret that my year and a half in Germany was pretty much squandered, in that my interaction with the Germans pretty much involved buying things… haben sie haferflocken? (Do you have oatmeal?)  And ordering and paying for things like bread, rolls (still warm, hung in plastic bags on our doorknobs,) and beer.  (Yummy beer, in green bottles with the bale stoppers…delivered by the case to our apartment door.)

That was also my introduction to hostility…as the locals were not crazy about Americans in general, and snotty young-girl-wife Americans who showed up to re-claim their soldier-husbands in general.  When we got to the area  there were still burned out buildings and huge piles of rubble everywhere in the cities, children that did not want anything to do with us, old lady widows dressed in black…riding bicycles…who hated our guts.     The town near us was especially bombed-out, as according to local lore, some American fliers were killed by farmers armed with pitch-forks as they parachuted from their shot-down planes.  The story was that the allied planes on return flights from Frankfurt back to London routinely “saved a bomb for [the town].”    Very logical, and the town was really in shambles.

In March of 1957 my husband and I returned to the States, via the MATS, Military Air Transportation Service, because I was pregnant.  I was disappointed because I was really looking forward to returning to the States by ship.  The plane ride (I think my second flight ever) was long and boring–and we didn’t even have a window to look at the Atlantic Ocean.     We retrieved our car from the port in New Jersey, then drove home to Ohio, enroute to new military orders shipping us to Fort Hood, Texas.

Thus began the next phase of My Life…

coming up soon…GRADMAMA2011

Me and The War, reblog, Part 2 of Who am I to have an About Page?

About Me, Sometimes, Sometimes re-runs, When I was a kid, Writing and Blogging

[This post was the second installment of the life history of… well, Me. The first time it appeared was in 2015. For my VCBs: Very Cool Bloggers, this post will be a re-run, please bear with me if you’ve read it before, and please enjoy it if its new.]


In the first installment of this feature, Who Am I to have an About Page? https://mumbletymuse.com/so-who-am-I-to-have-an-About-Page-?/   I started out as a newcomer to the world on a Friday the 13th, and by the end of Part One I had been to California and back, eaten part of a persimmon and part of a gourd, and had finished Kindergarten.  Which pretty much sets the stage for the second part of my life story.

Part Two:        ME AND THE WAR

That would be the Second World War, WWII, The Big One– the catalyst for the rise to world dominance of the United States.  I was eleven when the war ended in 1945, and I must say that I was one patriotic little girl.  I was so proud of the accomplishments of my country, in which we had emerged mostly safe and sound (those of us who had not been killed during the war years, of course) and had the distinction of being THE leader of the Free World.

But let me skip the rhetoric and get on with MY part of the War, which began in 1941…along with the arrival of my baby sister when I was eight and a half years old; my brother was six.  It was just us three until near the end of the war in 1945, when another sister joined our merry band.

One thing I recall about grade school is that there was a Congresswoman who regularly was permitted to leave fliers advertising her prowess in the U.S. Congress on our school desks.  She would come in and talk to us about how important it was for our parents to vote for her. Despite having been told, on my very first day of first grade,  by the teacher to “go home and never come back again,” as I explained to my parents when they picked me up walking home from school about an hour after classes began,  I did indeed continue with my education.  I remember well the adventures of Dick and Jane, Baby, and Spot, the stars of our first level readers.

The main thing going on everywhere was THE WAR.   We went to the movie theaters, and were treated to black and white newsreels showing bombs dropping from airplanes, Hitler’s marching troops in huge showy choreographed formations, and in-coming shipments of USA- flag-covered coffins.  We recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and read The Weekly Reader, a newspaper produced especially for school children at various levels. My grandfather taught me about television.  He had a floor-model radio, which had a large window area for tuning various stations on the radio, and he said that some day, after the war, we would be able to look at windows like that and see actual movies and real people talking and singing and the like.   I was properly impressed…this was undoubtedly the source of my great love of electronic stuff.

Then the newspapers, The Cleveland Press, The News, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer told us every day how many soldiers had been killed in battle, and kept us well informed about the terrible evil enemies of the United States on all areas of the world.   Toward the end of the war there was news about Hitler’s atrocities, and the Japanese cities evaporated by TWO atomic bombs.  The pictures were everywhere in magazines and newspapers. The newsreels at the movies were relentless in presenting the horrors of war, and these were incomprehensible to American kids, who had thankfully never had bombs dropped on them.

Movies themselves, presented on monster screens in huge movie theaters that always reminded me of palaces (not that I had ever been in a palace) also presented the great block-buster films of the 40s…complete with horror stories about the war. So this brings Me to the end of the Great War, and the beginning of the phenomenon known as THE COLD WAR.

The newspapers treated us to daily headlines screaming of annihilation and pending doom.  A particularly horrible series presented by the newspapers contained in part a huge bulls-eye, with segments indicating the extent of the death shadow that marked Cleveland…with its four NIKE missile sites forming at once a horrible defense capability of retaliation.  The center of the bulls-eye, of course, meant instant end to everything…out in the suburbs the threat lessened sequentially until by a distance of thirty miles out some percentage of life might survive.

BUT that survival would depend on bomb shelters, which might delay death by radiation by a couple of weeks. As children we were conversationally proficient about hydrogen bombs, pros and cons of including guns among bomb shelter supplies, and just how bad radiation poisoning was. So that was pretty much what one little girl knew about THE WAR… The next era of MY ABOUT PAGE    will be coming up soon:  THE 1950s

please stay tuned…

Books of Childhood

About Me, Books and Reading, This and That, Writing and Blogging

In a previous poem I wrote about a gift I received for Christmas, which my mother had concealed in an Oxydol Soap box…a book which our teacher had read out loud to the class.  That book, is called Snow Treasure, by author Marie McSwigan, was first published in 1942.

At age eight or nine I was very impressed with this book about Norwegian children who smuggled their town’s gold down mountain, past occupying German troops,  to a fiord, where an uncle waited with his ship to whisk the treasure away to safety.    The story is said to really have happened.

About 70 years later I obtained a copy of the book that had been discarded by a public library, and available at a book sale.    Marveling at my luck, I quickly paid the pittance asked and left with this great treasure of my own.

 

childhood memories of war

About Me, History, This and That, Writing and Blogging

Perhaps the most vivid memories of nursery tales were not of bunnies or bantering fairies…but of War and its aftermath.     We here in the United States did not suffer the horrors that children in other countries did, the bombings and air raids and worse.   But such accounts were very much vicariously present.    And directly following the Hot War followed the Cold War, with its insidious psychological terror.

I was eleven when World War II ended in 1945.    What I write here are my impressions as a child.

Here in the Cleveland, Ohio area we had three major daily newspapers in Cleveland,
in the 1940s-1950s.    Subtlety was not a virtue to our dueling newspapers, bent on gathering new and worse  predictions and statistics to entertain and scare the heck out of the readership.     Everyone read the papers…there was no television in the vast majority  of our homes, and except for newsreel productions in the movie theaters,  the newspapers were the major source for information about the “doomsday bullseye” which so impressed us as kids!   We lay on the floor with the front page of the paper spread out before us,   especially the issues with the giant bulleye dominating the front page…we traced the maps and figured out the implications for us personally…we lived  roughly 30 miles from the epicenter, which was presumeably down-town Cleveland.      In those days the  Cleveland area was a major producer of steel and—I was very proud to say—the twelfth largest city in the United States.

…tales of missile silos that later became parks
where ducks paddled in glistening ponds
surrounded by Lilies and Begonias
casting their colors in pinwheel flashes

This  was all a  grim and grotesque point of pride for me (for many of us kids) in the knowledge of having—within our own perimeter—huge metal monsters capable of unspeakable destruction.   This perverse, but prevailing situation had the effect of providing bragging points in discussing the relative extent of our living areas from the Bullseye Center at the heart of the city.   The really spooky thing is that my peers and I understood (mostly) the implications.  We discussed it in school, and excitedly and conspiratorially mapped our own possible destruction and theoretical  survival rather matter-of-factly, if not with particular sophistication.

The encouraging news—such as it was— lay in the conjecture that relative safety
existed outside of a radius of thirty miles… outside of the “immediate blast” area.
After that was a series of concentric rings, inside of which various stages of non-annihilation “might” exist.   This included various degrees of exposure to radiation,
and theoretical projected life-expectancy.

But comfort came in the form of experts’ advice on preparing our underground shelters and keeping them stocked with water and food… supplies sufficient for about two years.    Then came the horror of realization of implications that under the category of “supplies” would have to come stores of ammunition to arm the guns that would be necessary to guard our family stores  against neighbors and friends—and planning for continued survival AFTER the theoretical “all-clear” sirens sounded and we could come out of our shelters and return to — What?

Even us children understood that if the GOOD news was that survival from an atomic blast would (or might) be possible—this was also the BAD news.

 

 

 

 

From Doorstep fiction writing— to unfinished dissertation (Re-posted)

About Me, Books and Reading, Commentary, Fiction, History, re-blogged posts, Sometimes re-runs, This and That, Writing and Blogging

When one of my daughters was about ten, her school bus came later than those of the other kids, so she and I had half an hour or so one-on-one time.  I loved to make up stories, and some of my best (maybe) ideas came at that time.   This means fiction…since I was a working newspaper reporter and writer at the time I was writing other types of material —news stories, police reports, obits, motor vehicle crashes, city meeting coverage— when I wasn’t making up far-out stories.

The story I am referring to was about a tiny slug that landed on a patch of grass, and was saved from trampling by a group of scuffling boys by a young girl named Fonzie McElroy.   Turned out the Slug was no other than Prince Rehebal, of some distant planet that was left behind on an exploratory visit to Earth.   To fast-forward the plot, the young Prince was rescued by returning space crew…and Fonzie was richly rewarded, although no one but she ever believed the tale was true.

I know…sounds vaguely like “ET,” which had not hit the movie theaters yet, and I did not hear about for at least a decade.  Yes, I did type up (on newspaper print paper) and I still have the original.

Another of my languishing plots was a Civil War theme, set on a Confederate prisoner-of-war island, a sutler’s daughter who fell for a Rebel army officer, and so the historical novel was set to go.   A sutler was a farmer or merchant who set up sales of produce like onions and potatoes in periodic markets held by prison officials for the imprisoned soldiers.

Then there is the loose plot of a murder mystery set in a small town, peopled by town municipal workers like council members, police, and of course a newspaper reporter that solves the whole crime.   My heroine is still (after about 30 years real time) sitting at the railroad tracks waiting for a train to pass, the murderer holding a gun to the reporter’s side–while the police chief waits on the other side of the train tracks.

In my Science Fiction story the location is a planet which is ruled by women.  All of the men are sent out on space ships doing various jobs, and serving out their time until they and their wives can reunite and move to a utopian planet where they live out their years in happy wedded bliss.

The probability of any of those works ever seeing the light of day is remote.  My more recent interests are in writing  Historical topics in which I have an interest…such as the British Abolition of the Slave Trade; Liberation Theology in Latin America; and various other essay contributions.

Oh, and my current…and possibly only novel is one that I worked on as a National  Novel Writing Month (not the correct name, but the popular writers’ competition in which the goal was to write a 60,000 word novel in one month…which was accomplished mostly stream-of-consciousness-style with no correcting spelling or style or anything else…just pounding away for 30 days.   That NaNoWriMo exercise is THE most useful and inspiring writing experience I have undertaken.   I have elaborated on the plot and the work to a great extent.   It is part Historical and part Time-Travel.

The topic of my novel was based on my doctoral dissertation (which I did not  bring to completion within allotted time.)    Obviously no one except my advisor professor has ever read the Final Draft, which I wish now with all my heart that I had completed.    Various readers such as my kids and best friends…captives, if you will…SAY they read the copies that I gave them ten years ago, but their eyes glaze over as they say it.     It’s about History of 500 years of the Catholic Church in Mexico, or something like that.   It’s a LOT more interesting than you all think!

What got in the way of my writing was … well… writing.    I often whine that  “I wish I had been a Writer.”   I spent years writing for newspapers, term papers, writing minutes as secretary of city boards and commissions, in college writing assignments and serious papers.  E-mailing (the way I have always done it) is sort of like writing as I wrote  to my friends and other people.

Blogging  is writing of course…and I love it because it is a combination of all the different kinds of writing I have ever done:   Fiction, poems, rants, news stories, satire, responding to prompts about all kinds of things…and writing about writing.   Photographing isn’t writing of course, but in a way it can be in that photos tell stories in and of themselves, or they serve as props for accompanying prose.

 

 

Stats Analysis (No Yawning)

About Me, Sometimes, This and That, Writing and Blogging

My blog’s best day ever was November 6, 2015…. 99 VIEWS.

Guess what the topic was!    World peace?  No.  War? Nope.  Donald Trump? nah….   it was COOKIES.   The title was “Tea and Gingersnaps Anyone?”   I had so many followers over that day that I ran out of cups.  Really.

Here is a sort of half-baked analysis of the Statistical Information provided by WordPress to give bloggers an idea of their progress in publishing and showing off.   I does take some study to understand all of the charts and lists, but doing so is well worth the while.

For the first eleven days of this month, December 2015, Sometimes, has had 447 views, 159 visitors, 240 Likes, and 202 Comments.

The total number of followers…as of right now…is 373.  Most of them (17%) visit on Wednesday at 11:00 AM (10%).  (I’m not sure of the time zone, but I think it’s local time of the visitors.)

The total number of posts on Sometimes EVER  is 186–with a total of 6,859 views by 2,200 visitors.

I admit that I am confused about the ratio of views per visitor.   For instance, TODAY (December 11) here’s the tally:

447 Views
159 Visitors
240 Likes
202 comments

This begs some questions:  The site was looked at 447 times (I believe that includes my own views and reviews of it.)  SO, if 159 visitors looked at the site, how come 240 Liked it?   Did they like it so much some of them read it and pushed the LIKE button twice?

The best month so far for 2015 was…………   OCTOBER!!!

37 New Posts published in October
31,317 Views
375 Visitors
(3.51)  Views Per Visitor

47 Nations of the World sent delegates to My Blog 🙂

This analysis was fun to do.   I didn’t do any math, just trusted in the Stats as presented by WordPress.

It would be fun to do a giant chart for my wall (IF I had any available wall space in my office/book room.)    It’s fun to look over the Stats and see who commented, what posts were the most popular, what older posts emerge from my Archives.   I do have the “You May Also Like” button activated to refer readers to other posts I have made.

…wasn’t this fun?

My (Mostly) English Heritage… Part One

About Me, History, This and That

Reading about differences and similarities between folks here in the US and in the UK, inspiration has been beckoning me to write about the subject in my own blog.

Actually many Americans began as British, back in the days of pre-American Revolution.  It was in fact a British colonial government, which was over-thrown more or less by rebellious subjects who wished to control their own affairs.  This was a lot easier since the British military was engaged in more pressing issues, such as keeping the French at bay and making sure the Spanish didn’t get all the goodies from the Americas.

But this isn’t a History lesson, although at times I admit that I am prone to lecture on various and sundry topics, not all of them necessarily pertinent to the current subject.   So I have no intention of going back over the common knowledge and think-we-know facts, and write about something that is pertinent…at least to me.

Background

I am at least three-fourths English, based on family origin.  My children, however, are three-fourths German counting the fourth they get from me, and the rest from their father, whose grandparents were all born in Germany.

There is one questionable thing about these facts, in that my maternal grandfather was born in Australia, of German-ancestry.  Hmmm…come to think of it, if I said he was an Australian-American, is that accurate?  Also, as Australia is part of the UK, does that count as German or British?    I usually say German,, which is how I arrive at being able to claim the one-quarter German.

An aunt of mine, Grandpa’s daughter in fact, did an in-depth research study into the Australia connection.   That history goes back pretty far, as we have considerable amount of information about the men in that family back at least to Grandpa’s grandfather.

The way that grandfather became an American is after he had run away from home in Australia at age 16, and worked on fishing boats for several years .   Then he met and married my grandmother in New York.

Anyway.  One of my distant relatives on that grandmother’s side did a quite extensive geneological research.  That branch of the family in fact has held annual family reunions here in Ohio for at least 140 years.  They are two-thirds of my English ancestry.  The geneology report lists the names of dozens of people –related to me–that came to the United States from England  prior to the American Revolution.   In fact, I have been told by a cousin that the family researchers have gone so far back that they found a Viking!

Actually I don’t think that is particularly uncanny, finding a Viking in the family tree of anyone that hails from the British Isles.  “They” tell me that this is where the blonde hair and blue eyes comes from.   hmmm…

Many of these ancestors are buried along the train track between Boston and the northern end of the line.  This came to light when I was visiting my son and daughter-in-law who were living in Massachusetts at the time…as we rode on the train the conductor called out the names of the stops, and many of them were surnames of my ancestors.   Many more from that clan traveled westward at least as far as Ohio, which is where the family is located now.

Since I have gotten SO far afield with my story, and in view of the fact that I only have chatted here about my mother’s side of the family– and I need to wind the tale down for this Part One only.

stay tuned for Part Two of the saga, in which I will continue with my Dad’s side of the family.

On Writing Poetry… with a nod to Miss Edwards (re-posted from 2015.)

About Me, Commentary, Poetry, re-blogged posts, Sometimes re-runs, This and That, Writing and Blogging

I have always been a writer.  At age twelve, more or less, I wrote a novel.  Although I don’t recall any details of the plot, or characterization,  I do remember a name…Joyce Reena Phane.   That was to be my pen name, I believe.  To me that name was beautiful, and the very essence of sophistication.   I was quite proud of my novel, such as it was, and when my aunt asked to read it I was delighted.   Aunt Jada was a writer herself, and was working on a novel dealing with a group of Kent State students during the Vietnam War.  She loved my novel, and was impressed enough to talk with her sister, my mother, about it.

That was the end of that.    My mother was a very practical and down-to-earth woman, whose no-nonsense beliefs had no room for frivolous or non-productive pursuits.   As far as she was concerned no one made a living from writing books, especially if they had no college education–and the prospect of ME going to college was out of the question.   Besides, my writing was childish, the plot far-fetched and the characters unrealistic…and the pen name I had chosen so carefully was silly and unlike a name any real person would have.  The early….and only…draft of that novel consisted of several notebook paper pages, which no longer exist.

I did continue my creative writing, with encouragement from my seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Wilkinson.

I have some early poetry written in a brown notebook, one of those old dime-store notebooks  that were cheap and plentiful.  In addition to my own works of poetry, I have in those pages the complete Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven, copied in my neat and even cursive handwriting.   Also much of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s masterpiece which had also been immortalized as our high school play.  I was so enamored of that classic that I saw fit to enter much of the original play into my notebook.  There is also some poetry that I can still recite in part this many decades later…I was quite proud of my poems which also immortalized some of my early loves in my handwriting.   I used a fountain pen with real ink, and when I made an error I ripped out the notebook page entirely and started over.  I still think that the handwriting on those pages are perhaps the most endearing aspect of the whole brown notebook.  I wish I still loved my handwriting as well as I did then.

As for Shakespeare, my exposure to his works were in my Junior or Senior year of high school, when the truly marvelous reading by our English Literature teacher–who was also the school principal–sends shivers up my spine to this day.  I always stayed on Miss Edwards’ good side.  She was a small woman in stature, tough as any marine sergeant, and did not need any police personnel to maintain order over her classes–or her school.  One of the things I liked about Miss Edwards is that she liked my writing…she is definitely one of my mentors who had a positive effect on my life.

Ah well– I will never make it as a poet, but as long as I like my poetry and other bloggers occasionally say something nice about it as well–it is worth the oft-times lame verse that escapes my fountain pen….er, keyboard.

Photographer or Pitcha-taker?

About Me

Once, decades ago, the Chief Photographer at the newspaper where I worked  asked me a question that has remained in my thought-processor to emerge every once in awhile:

“Do you want to be a Photographer?  Or just a Pitcha-taker.?”

At the time I had only recently began providing photos to accompany my news stories.  I had a Yashika-Mat camera, which I had bought for the purpose.  It cost $85, which was a considerable amount of money for me, but in retrospect it was a good investment, because during the years I used it,  the Yashika paid for itself many times over.   I was supporting five children with my earnings as a reporter  for the newspaper, and for two years in 1970-1972 my meager pay was most of the time my sole source of income.

At that time I had no formal education beyond high school, although fortunately I had some ability to write cohesive articles and took to news reporting like an Owl to being a bookstore mascot.  For 18 years my career as a Journalist survived without higher education.  I’m a quick learner, more or less, and passed my trial-by-fire–a tax levy meeting by our local Save Our Schools (SOS) committee and the school board.    This was a momentous occasion in shaping the rest of my life beyond then.  That meeting coverage, and a feature story anout  a meeting at the State Prison Farm, directly led to my position as a reporter.

In October of 1972 (he 28th, forty-three years ago today, in fact) I got remarried.    I continued with the newspaper part-time, until my decision to enter community college…to see If I could cope with all that entailed.   But that’s another story…

Back in the day of film cameras…which was really not so long ago…my work film was developed and printed by the newspaper photo lab, and I did not do much private family/kids/travel work on company time.    Most of those photo shoots featured my late husband’s photos taken with his Konicas and/or others of his cameras…he had been into photography since he was in France during World War II, and did his own developing and printing back then.  (Before my time.)  Then when we began traveling extensively, we bought roll film and sent it away to be developed and printed.  It would take a few days or a week to return.

My skills at photography never really excelled, for a couple of reasons.  One is that I did not take the time required to learn technical details of appropriate exposure techniques.  The cost involved with print film was also high, so I did not experiment with the camera like I do now in the advent of digital photography.  So that meant that the best photos we had…and the greatest number…were Bob’s.  We did some Sunday spreads featuring his photography, and my writing.

Photographer or Pitcha-taker?     The difference being that a photographer will take the time and effort to acquire as much knowledge and practical skills as possible, and apply it to his or her work.  The Photographer works toward capturing the nuances and minute details of the subject, and fuss about color saturation and light conditions, etc., in order to produce work that is as esthetically pleasing as possible.

A Pitcha-taker, on the other hand, points the camera lens at the subject–and shoots.  The Pitcha-taker has albums which include coat sleeves, sun-glare, hands in front of faces, cut off heads, weird colors, and pictures of Aunt Bessie with her eyes closed or her mouth out-of-joint.  Over-exposed, under-exposed…all kinds of issues that ruin their photos.

Not to say that the Photographer, even professionals, don’t make mistakes…they just discard the “bad” shots, rather than showing them off to audiences and apologizing for their bad quality, as the pitcha-takers do:   “Ok, this should have been a really good photo, but this lady moved out of the frame too quickly…see her hat?  It was really a nice blue.  Sorry its blurry..”

Some True Facts and Confessions About Blogging

About Me, Blogging University, Writing and Blogging

Today I managed to spend the entire day blogging, with exceptions for hauling the son around and feeding the cats.   By “blogging” I mean visiting lots of other bloggers online, trying to get my photos to cooperate, and writing in my blog.

All my writing life I have felt guilty and self-indulgent when I spent time writing for pleasure.   Sure, I got paid for it in various venues, and wrote lots as a student, and even sneaked in some time writing short stories or novels that I never finished.  I still have four novels floating around aimlessly, with characters and everything.  That kind of writing has always been, to me, more of a treat…a sort of stolen pleasure, so to speak.

Not so much that the Writer’s Life is considered glamorous and exciting and adventurous.   When I was a girl I had aspirations to be, in no particular order: an Exotic Dancer, a Singer, a Nurse, Psychiatrist, Police Woman, and I should have added– Foreign Correspondent to that list.  The main reason I never got far with any of my ambitions was a deep-set idea that “people like us never went to college,”  Also, I trip over my own feet and even though I took dancing lessons once (torturing the poor instructor,) and gave up that idea.  Furthermore, I was always too fat, as well as being uncoordinated, to qualify as an exotic dancer…I would have tripped over my feathers.    A singer?  Well I admit that except for a very brief glimmer of hope at being the Star of the Christmas Pageant, the only audience my singing has ever attracted consists of Cats.

Being a nurse was sort of ruled out because of my aversion to blood.  In an emergency I stand around saying “oh my God!” and feeling sick.   Three of my daughters are nurses, but not me.   Psychiatrist was ruled out because of rule one about people like me not going to college, AND my zero-capacity for Math, and illiteracy in Science (proven by a C I got in Geology once…they tricked me on the rocks, so I didn’t do well on the final exam.)     The possibility of Police work never really came up.

I might have been a News Correspondent, in fact I was, on a medium-size newspaper covering the wilds of city council and school board meetings.   Those affairs can get pretty wild sometimes, I’ll admit.   My ideal, my role-model,  I might say, when it comes to Foreign Correspondents would be Christine Anapour, CNN’s all-over-the-world War Correspondent.   She always looks so darn cool in her flack jacket!

OK, I seem to have really gotten off-topic here!

Me, Posing as a Photographer
Me, Posing as a Photographer

My point?   Oh yes.   The reasons I love blogging are many-fold,    But most of all I appreciate and enjoy the opportunity to write about all of the things I have wanted to my whole life.   I enjoy having other bloggers and writers “follow” me, and am very thankful to have had interesting and write-worthy things happen in my life.   I follow the works of many other bloggers because their experiences and wants and rants are similar to my own, or offer nice change of pace distractions.   I love all of the blogs–even the ones that don’t have A Cat featured prominently on the first page.

I especially enjoy the classes WordPress offers frequently, the topics and prompts, wide-open field for subjects and for photography–and especially the other bloggers that I meet.   This may sound self-serving, and I suppose it is in a way…but I think that I offer as much to the others in my classes and in the Blogger Community, and the thing here is the interaction. (I know I already said that, but its SO hard to choose from among clauses and paragraphs. )

Every class I have taken has had a different, unique character.  Some are new bloggers just getting their feet wet, others are seasoned photographers (doesn’t that sound swash-buckling!) and writers who have their own reasons for doing what they do.  I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think it has to do with the sense and atmosphere of Community.  Mutual support is of course a major ingredient, and for me its the Armchair Travel of visiting exotic places now that I am no longer able to do the things I used to do.

So anyway…those are some true facts and confessions about Blogging.  🙂