Monthly Archives: November 2013

Christmastime Comes Round Again: The Curtiss Miniatures Show

As the holidays appear at our door, once again it’s time for the Curtiss Museum Miniatures and Dollhouse Exhibition. This has been a regional favorite and a seasonal tradition for twenty years or so. For six years right in the middle I was responsible for it. So I was very pleased to see that this exhibition is the best in recent years.
First of all, you step into the exhibit right as you come through the door; the lobby is jam-packed. I was delighted to see a large somewhat whimsical model of the late lamented Keuka Maid. Also in the lobby — a 35-foot layout of a sawmill operation, circled by an LGB-scale model train. Now, here’s the thing — it all works. The train tools around, the overhead drive shafts spin, the belts power the machinery. You’ve really got to start at one end and work your way slowly down to the other in order to get the full impact.
Once you GET to the other end, you’ll enjoy the charming layout (enlarged this year) put together by Jim Sladish of Ithaca. Two lines of trains chug around and through a little Christmas village. Both of these are long-time favorites in the show — ask the folks at the desk if they can be turned on.
Other old friends include the small-scale coffee-table layouts, laden with crystals, by Will Parker. But all that’s just the trains and similar items. The bulk of the items on exhibit are dollhouses or room boxes.
Having said that, don’t get the wrong impression. Some of them are commercial products, or home-built toys made for little kids to play with. These include a 19th-century Bliss house with lithographed wallpaper, a tiny three bears house, and several large solid home-built dollhouses. There’s also a Depression-era store and a World War II-era commercially-sold house, both made of materials reflecting the shortages of their times.
Much of what’s on view, though, was never meant to be played with. It was created by adults for adults… for exhibit, for the challenge, or for the sheer joy of it.
Just for instance, there’s a room box of a motorcycle shop. A large spooky Halloween house. A colonial kitchen. A library, its selves lined with individual miniature books. High-quality, meticulously-detailed miniature soldiers. Two pasteboard cathedrals. A tank and a ship, each built from toothpicks. Two or three old-time barns and barnyards. A set of model cars from movies and TV shows — see if you can identify them.
As the working layouts anchor one end of the exhibit, the other end is anchored by several large cases of antique toys (try to find Charlie McCarthy and Donald Duck), and by the museum’s Evalena Stickler collection of antique dolls.
It seems to me that enjoying the holidays means enjoying the familiar and traditional, while also discovering and delighting in the new. Strolling through an exhibit like this is a case in point. Some of the visitors have been coming here literally all their lives, and some of the perennial exhibits have become part of their Christmas, part of Thanksgiving. But a few steps on, or in the next case — there’s always something excitingly new.
For some years now I’ve been exhibiting a small (and rickety) toy store, one of my father’s rare pleasant mementoes of a very difficult childhood during the Depression. He probably got it in December (Christmas and his birthday are eight days apart), probably around 1930. He played with it. My sister and I played with it. My two sons played with it. My father passed away in April, at the age of 87, taking memories of Depression and war with him. And Christmas comes around yet again. And here we are.

DSCF0632

No End, No Inocence; J.F.K. After Half a Century

Leave a reply

Many Americans, maybe especially those of us in the Baby Boom, describe the Kennedy assassination as an end of innocence. It was a lot of things, but it wasn’t that.
Looking at what came afterward… riots repeatedly tearing our cities apart, Vietnam, assassination after assassination… the time of JFK takes on a glow. Bracketed by the frumpiness of Ike and the vulgarity of LBJ, Kennedy’s glamor does indeed seem like “one brief shining moment.” Surely HE would have kept us out of Vietnam. Under HIM, Civil Rights would have moved forward, and the nation remained in peace at home and abroad.
But the idyll for which we’re so nostalgic was not so much the product of innocence as it was the product of ignorance… or even the product of ignoring. We forget that he was elected partly because of his saber-rattling, get-tough attitude. We’ll close the missile gap. We’re hardened by war. We’ll bear any burden, fight any foe.
We also forget that just about his last major act just before his own assassination was to connive with Vietnamese generals for the overthrow (which led to the murder) of President Diem, in hopes of getting a more vigorous war against the Communists.
We also forget that his legislative accomplishments were so-so, especially in the realm of Civil Rights. It was sloppy, appalling Johnson who hammered through the great Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 – and probably nobody BUT Johnson could have done it. When he stood before Congress on national television and announced, “We SHALL overcome,” it struck like a lightning bolt in a nation where millions “knew” that Civil Rights was a Communist plot commanded from Moscow, weakening America for the takeover.
It was not that we were losing our innocence. It was instead that we were not permitted to go on pretending. Millions of our people lived in the direst poverty. Millions more lived in moment-by-moment danger of death under a system as arbitrary and as violent as that of our Communist enemies. We repeatedly hear the conclusion of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. We rarely hear the earlier paragraphs, where he praises the rising spirit of militancy, and prophecizes that America will never know rest or tranquility until it deals with its crimes.
People often mourn for what we’ve lost, but when we take off the rose-colored glasses we can see that we a far better country now than we were in 1963.
We in the Baby Boom connected with Kennedy in a special way. He was energetic, dynamic… a dad like our dads, with kids like our little brothers and sisters. This was a tragedy we could understand, and could fear ourselves.
The storm that dropped a few inches of snow on Washington dropped many more in the northeast, so many of us were home from school on inaugural day. The TV brought us his short, inspiring, easy-to-understand address. And most of us were in school when we got the word that he’d been shot, if not yet the word that he’d died. It was the first great television news story, and most of were glued to the set.
So in many ways he seemed like “our” President, and we felt the loss deeply, as did most of the rest of the nation and even much of the world. His murder was a crime and a tragedy, and we owe him a lot – but he wasn’t magic, and our country wasn’t a paradise. On that day in Dallas furious right-wingers were plastering up “wanted for treason” posters with his photos like mug shots. In that season millions were kept from the polls by violence because they were black, or because they were Mexican-American. Native people and Jewish people were the butts of jokes. Many Americans insisted that Catholics (like Kennedy) could never be loyal citizens, never be fit for democracy, never be trusted with public office. Women couldn’t get loans. Segregation was still the law of much of the land. Lynching was so frequent that it scandalized the entire world, and over the years hundreds of anti-lynching laws were introduced. Congress rejected every one.
I liked my life in 1963. The midst of the Baby Boom, in a lot of ways, was a great time to be a kid. Life in many ways was wonderful, at least for a northeastern white boy whose father was a mechanical engineer. But even then I knew that millions of kids didn’t live the life that I lived. Even then I knew that looking at America honestly is the very first thing that you can do for your country.

Sixteen Stars: Making a War Memorial

Some years ago Chris Brown, who was then superintendent of schools in Hammondsport, commissioned me to develop an athletics hall of fame and a lifetime achievements hall of fame to honor alumni. I agreed to do so, but added, “Chris, you also need a gold star memorial.” He instantly agreed.
During the two World Wars, families with someone in the service could display a blue star; families who had lost someone displayed a gold, or at least had the right to. Chris and I decided on the spot that we needed to honor former students (whether graduates or not) who had given their lives in the line of duty.
It then became my job to figure out who they were, for there was no central listing. I had read through the entire run of the Hammondsport Herald for the World War I years, and hadn’t seen any mention of war dead from the immediate Hammondsport area. (We agreed we’d recognize anyone who had attended any school in what’s now the Hammondsport Central School District.) As director of the Curtiss Museum I had also read enough papers to be pretty confident that the town had lost no dead in the Spanish-American War of 1898.
A Steuben County company went to California for the Mexican War, but saw no action. Some three dozen from Urbana alone died in the Civil War, but we had no hope at all of ascertaining their schooling.
So that left us with World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and later. And there we KNEW we’d find names. Checking with some folks who’d been around the school system for some time… people like Jim Conklin, Dick McCandless, and Milt von Hagn… we were pretty sure about the good news that there had been no deaths in Vietnam or later.
The Legion didn’t have much information on historic stuff.  But for World War II I checked with Joe Meade, himself a naval veteran of that war, and Richard “Patche” Brady, who’d still been in school during those years. I also studied the monument on Pulteney Square in the village. I read through the internal magazine published by Mercury Aircraft, and I went through yearbooks.
This became a grim task, looking again and again at pictures of boys like Reggie Wood – boys who were never going to be more than boys. They’re mugging at the camera, or gathering with their clubs and teams, or trying to look serious and grown-up. They don’t know what I know, thank God. They don’t know what horror lies ahead of them.
Finally the list emerged – 13 Hammondsport School dead in the Second World War. Considering that the school was probably only graduating about 40 people a year – meaning maybe 20 boys – and that these soldiers were mostly of an age, that’s a horrendous loss for a small community.
If anything it gets worse when you study the timing of their deaths. Corporal Reuben Shettler was the first, passing away in a Japanese prison camp in June of 1942. Corporal Charles Stone was killed in the invasion of Sicily 15 months later.
Up to this time US deaths had been mostly aviators or naval personnel, or men fallen in battles that were constrained by geography – the Philippines, North Africa, Pacific islands, Sicily, Italy. But after June of 1944 in addition to Italy we would be in major battles across the plains of northern Europe, in the Philippines, at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. We were hammering now on the inner defensive walls of our enemies.
Suddenly it seemed as though the hemorrhage was uncontrollable. Two deaths on June 14; one on June 28; another September 18 (in Italy); December 4; December 28; February 22; February 24; April 7; April 26; May 11 (in the Pacific). With the exception of Reuben Shettler’s death in a prison camp, and Reggie Wood’s being lost in an accidental plane crash, all the deaths were from battle causes. And excepting Shettler and Charles Stone, they all came within eleven months.
Imagine how that hammered the community. When we had an unveiling for the finished memorial, a woman told me about the father she had never met. Knowing he was due to be sent home, her mother had been thrilled to see a car pull in, with a man in uniform inside. She rushed outside excitedly, only to be brought up short at the sight of an officer getting out of the car. Then she knew he would never come home at all.
That was 13 for World War II. Patche Brady is a veteran of the Korean War era, and he helped us identify two more from that conflict – Captain Raymond J. Bennett and PFC Paul H. Stone.
Patche also told us about Stephen Carrassas, who was in the band playing the national anthem when he was blown off the USS Honolulu by attacking Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor. Later the USS Helena went down under him, leaving him bobbing in the water by night in the crossfire of a major sea battle. He survived the war by three years, passing away in 1948, but Patche testified to how deeply he had suffered from his horrifying experiences. Judging that he too was a casualty of the war, we added him as well.
So today, at the front entrance and outside the administration office of a school they never saw, are 16 plaques for former students. Each bears the student’s name and his photograph… in every case but one, in uniform. Each has his unit, a brief note of the place and circumstances of his death. Each has a gold star. Just about every student, every staff member, every visitor passes their memorial every day.
In one of his books the military historian John Keegan quotes the old song about how old soldiers never die, they just fade away. But armies, he points out, are not made up of OLD soldiers. They’re made of YOUNG soldiers, and they die in their millions. Keegan observes that we’ve spent over 10,000 years perfecting war, and challenges us to spend the next 10,000 finding better ways to solve our problems. We’re glad to say that that wall by the office honors and preserves the memories of these boys. We’re sad to say that the wall has space for more.

November, 1901: A Busy Month for Socialites

Glenn and Lena Curtiss, along with their infant son Carlton, spent Thanksgiving Day in 1901 visiting friends in Rochester. It they had stayed at home in Hammondsport, they could have attended Union Services at 10:30 that day in the Methodist Episcopal Church on Lake Street, where Glenn’s grandfather had once been pastor. At the Presbyterian Church they could have attended a Thanksgiving Fair, with “Chinese curios, Angora cats, cut flowers, potted palms, …other things too numerous to mention, and a fine supper to finish off with.”
If Lena had chosen to make her own Thanksgiving feast, she could have gone to C. G. Kay for “Thanksgiving Eatables.” Cape Cod cranberries were 10 cents a quart. A package of sage leaf cost a nickel. She could have gotten three pounds of raisins for a quarter, or half a pound of chocolate candy.
The Curtisses could have enjoyed many other social events that long-ago November day, if they were in fact so inclined, although Carlton’s poor health doubtless slowed them down; this was the only Thanksgiving he would ever see.
They could have joined one of Mrs. Benedict’s dancing classes in the newly opened Opera House Block. (Do you think Glenn would have liked that?) They could have watched Bath-Haverling clobber the Hammondsport home team 16-0 in football. On November 7, from 3:00 to 6:00 and again from 7:30 to 10:00, they could have attended a chrysanthemum show and sale at the home of Mrs. W. Brown. Fifteen cents would have gotten them admission, coffee, and wafers.
Glenn didn’t become a Mason until 1914, but the Lodge was moving into its new rooms in the Opera House. Citizens’ Hose Company had ladies’ night on the 25th. The Epworth League literary society met at the home of Miss Florence Voorhees to discuss the life and work of Edward Eggleston. A “jolly party” went on at Germania Wine Cellars, but those were all people from Rochester. The Curtisses could also have slipped over to the Casino Opera House in Bath for a delightful love romance, “When We Were Twenty-One,” presented by “a strong and popular company.”
Lena would not have been eligible for a mysterious group formed one Friday evening in November of 1901 at the home of Miss Adda Shull. All members of the “M.M.M.” were “bachelor girls,” but they refused to reveal what the initials meant. Hammondsport Herald editor Lew Brown archly conjectured that they might stand for “Merry Marriageable Maidens,” “Merciless Man-Hating Maidens,” or any number of other possibilities. He also twitted them in verse. Members would say only that their goal was to discourage matrimony, improve their proficiency at Pedro (a form of the card game pitch, which seems to have been wildly popular around Hammondsport in 1901), and encourage the production of “palatable culinary products.”
While Lew Brown would have his fun with the M.M.M.’s over the next several months, he was conscientious in reporting women’s issues. In fact, if the paper’s columns reflected his views, he supported woman suffrage and the increase of women’s rights. On November 13 he published lengthy extracts from an essay by Ava Stoddard of M.I.T. analyzing why women’s pay was less than that of men. Miss Stoddard stated the reason was political – established workers feared competition from women, and women were not in a position to force improvements. “Give women the ballot,” she urged, “and… ‘Equal pay for equal work’ will be realized.” She would probably be horrified to see how little that is true more than a century later.
Of course, Hammondsport also had some more prosaic interests back then. Sheep worrying was still a problem. J. S. Hubbs added an iron fence to his home on Sheathar Street. Miss Grace Ellis was working at Smellie’s Pharmacy, as the telephone and telegraph operator. Trappers and hunters were busy taking muskrat. Concrete or limestone sidewalks were being installed, along with a crosswalk at Lake and Wheeler. Lown’s in Penn Yan held its winter millinery opening on the 14th and 15th.
Out in the big wide world, variolid (a mild form of smallpox) had broken out in Corning. The Soldiers’ Home in Bath had 1706 inmates. The New York Central Railroad settled a strike by agreeing to a 10-hour day (down from 12), plus overtime. The Boers beat the British badly in a South African battle. A coastal storm devastated sections of Long Island and New Jersey.
The Treasury Secretary ordered a buy-back of US bonds; our government had so much money, the surplus was starting to drain the economy. The Board of Naval Construction was doing all it could to solve the problem, proposing 40 new ships in addition to the two battle ships and two armored cruisers already on the ways. And the Navy’s first submarine boat, Fulton, submerged for over 15 hours in New York on the 25th.
Just in case you were wondering, the weekly Hammondsport Herald ran its first Christmas ads on November 27, the day before Thanksgiving.