Memories are made of this ... and this ... and this

Chattanooga telephone directory, September 1944

A woman named Cathy posted this picture in the "You Know You're From Chattanooga If..." group on Facebook, saying, "This piece of history is talking to me!  It’s been through some rough times.  Hopefully I can preserve it."  And she was willing to look up names for those of us who were curious.

I didn't know if our phone number in 1944 was in the name of William E. Setliffe, Jr. or Bonnie Reynolds, since we moved into my maternal grandmother's house with my Aunt Bonnie in 1943.  I memorized my address and phone number as a child:  3208 5th Avenue, and 2-9060.  I thought my paternal grandfather — William E. Setliffe, Sr. — might also be in that book, even though he died during that year.  Cathy reported, "There's two listings for William E. Setliffe Jr."

• W E Setliffe Jr (r) 822 E Main....6-8990
• Mrs. W E Setliffe Jr (r) 3208 5th Av....2-9060

She added, "I don't see your grandfather listed."  I didn't remember off-hand which month my grandfather died (I was only 4, after all).  It was probably earlier in 1944.

My dad's listing at 822 Main Street would be the grocery store he owned at the SW corner of Main Street and Central Avenue, directly across the street from Miss Griffins Foot-Long Hot Dogs.  Her little stand used to be right at the corner in a little triangle until the streets were widened.  Her place is still at that corner, but now it's bigger.  I asked if Gladys Setliffe was listed, but Cathy didn't find my dad's mother listed.  I remember that she lived on Cameron Hill after his father died.  When she remarried and moved to Florida a few years later, I was in the third grade.  That would have been the spring of 1949.

Mom, me, and Dad holding my brother Bill, in the house on 5th Avenue about 1944

Family memories

Then I started thinking about the (r) Cathy had mentioned.  I presume that means "residence," and both listings have that (r) designation.  When I was very young, we lived behind the grocery store.  Then we moved about a block up Main Street (toward the Ridge) before moving in with my Aunt Bonnie after my maternal grandmother died.  Maybe the grocery store had no phone, or maybe my dad had one in the back where we used to live.  After all, who would have had time to answer the phone all day, when he was running the store by himself?  He was also the meatcutter, chopping and weighing and wrapping meat.  Phones were not as ubiquitous in the 1940s as they are now.

Word of the Day

u·biq·ui·tous / yo͞oˈbikwədəs / adjective = present, appearing, or found everywhere.  Ubiquity is generally used to describe something "existing or being everywhere at the same time, constantly encountered, widespread, common."  Ubiquitous can also be used as a synonym for words like worldwide, universal, global, pervasive, all over the place.  Example:  "Phones were not as ubiquitous in the 1940s as they are now."

Blast from the Past

Imagine the smile on my face and the uplift this message on Facebook gave me last week.

"Hey, Bonnie — I feel badly that we've lost touch over the years.  I think the last time I saw you was at a Bible study when you were leading Forrest Avenue United Methodist here in Chattanooga, but I still remember you fondly from Baylor days when you worked in the library.  You were so encouraging to me in so many ways.  In fact, I used to call you my 'guru,' and you'd sign your notes 'bjguru.'  I'm back in Chattanooga now, although over the past decade or so I worked some here and some outside of Philadelphia.  I just happened to think of you the other day and wondered how you were doing, then thought I'd check Facebook and see if I could find you.  Looks as if you're in Missouri now: what led you there?  Hope you and your family are safe and well and that you're happy and enjoying life.  You were always a great influence on me, and I'm grateful."

Keith was in high school when I met him in 1974 at Baylor School in Chattanooga.  I was working in the school library, shelving books much as I do now at the Crown Center for Senior Living.  That's how I paid my way through college for my first degree.  I remember Keith bringing the children's choir from First Christian Church to sing at Forrest Avenue United Methodist, maybe in the late 1980s.  A group of six-year-olds.  More memories.  Keith and I are now Facebook friends.

Thursday Thoughts

"I wanted to explore the journey of those young women who lost the men they might have married.  They were an extraordinary generation who had to redesign — if you will — the notion of what it meant to be a woman on her own — a spinster."

Those men were lost in the Great War of 1914-1918 in Europe.  This quote is from page 4 of a "conversation" with the author at the back of Jacqueline Winspear's 2004 novel Birds of a Feather.

Winspear's books are bringing back memories from my own life as I read about life between the First and Second World Wars.  This line makes me think of my Aunt Bonnie, whom I'm named for.  She was a "spinster," born in 1904, and thus at the exact age Winspear is talking about.  In 1930, when this book is set, she would have been 26 years old.  I remember hearing Mother telling someone that her sister had turned down a fellow who asked Bonnie to marry him, not knowing he'd be the last to propose to her.  The reason she rejected him?  He didn't have indoor plumbing.

I realized, on reading that line above, that she didn't have as many options as I did, or even my mother, who was 13 years younger than her sister.  The photo shows Mother's family:  father, mother, six brothers, and two sisters.  Their parents are on the left, my mother is the girl on the front row, and Bonnie is behind her.  Mother was 12 when her father died in an auto accident in 1930, so this photo has to be earlier than that, obviously.  Bonnie went on to work (and support herself) by working for Mark, the brother on the far right in this picture, who owned a coal company on Main Street near Ridgedale.  She ran the office and dispatched the trucks delivering coal to their customers.

By the way, they are standing in front of the house I wrote about yesterday, the house on Fifth Avenue where I lived from 1943 to 1949.

Two old books ~ on TWOsday

Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner ~ edited by Ellen E. Garrigues, 1895 and 1910

This is a slim little volume, with brown covers imprinted with slightly darker brown words.  That's why I photographed the title page instead of the cover.  I'll probably read the book before passing it on.  What fascinates me most is that it belonged to the aunt I was named for.  She wrote her name in the book three times:

Bonnie Reynolds      ― inside the front cover
Central High School

Bonnie Reynolds     ― inside the back cover

Bonnie Reynolds     ― one page in from the back
Sophomore
1921

She also annotated sections of the ballad and wrote a list of words in the back that her teacher must have been trying to teach them:

medifor ― [metaphor]
simile
Presonification ― [personification]
apostrophe

Oops on her spelling!  Since she's the one who taught me lots of big words, like "masticate" (to chew), I'd have fun teasing her if she hadn't died in 1979.  She also goofed when noting the meaning of a word.  "Apostrophe is addressing lifeless things or abstract things as though they were persons."  Nope, that would be personification.  Oh, well, it's fun to think my Auntie was once a girl in school.

1-3-17  Wendy corrected me (in the comments below):
The definition for apostrophe is correct.  It is a kind of personification in which the speaker addresses a concept or object.  An example:  "With how sad steps, o Moon, thou climbs't the sky."

I looked it up and found that Dictionary.com defines "apostrophe" as a digression in the form of an address to someone not present, or to a personified object or idea, as “O Death, where is thy sting?”  Ha!  I knew "apostrophe" sometimes meant a digression, but I didn't realize it was in the form of an address and I didn't connect it with personification.  So thanks to nearly-one-hundred-year-old notes from that teacher's class, Wendy's comment, and this explanation from an online dictionary, I've learned something!  Thanks, Wendy.

Adventures in Appreciation ~ by Luella B. Cook, Walter Loban, and Susanna Baxter, 1936, 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952

I rescued this book from a free bin outside a used bookstore many years ago, because it was one I'd used in high school myself.  Several names I remember are inscribed inside this 718-page anthology, so whoever used it was possibly in my class.  She also slipped a newspaper clipping of a boy in uniform (ROTC?) between the pages.  Since we didn't buy the books we used at our school, I can only surmise that, having stamped it repeatedly with the name of her club and having written all over it and checked each footnote she read, she was required by the school to pay for the damaged book ― and she kept it.

I recognize many of the stories, poems, articles, nonfiction, drama, and a complete novel (Silas Marner by George Eliot) included in this heavy tome (yes, I know that adjective is redundant).  Some of them stand out for me, and I may read them before donating the book to a book sale.

• "By the Waters of Babylon" (pp. 36-47) ― a post-apocalyptic short story by American writer Stephen Vincent Benét, first published July 31, 1937, in The Saturday Evening Post as "The Place of the Gods"
• "Outwitted" (p. 208) ― a poem (quatrain) by Edwin Markham

He drew a circle that shut me out ―
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

• "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" (p. 208) ― the music for this "Negro Spiritual" is on the facing page, and I'll probably run off a copy to play on the piano before I give away the book.

On this TWOsday, I share two old books I found while emptying a box to unclutter my home.