Drizzle ~ and other Thursday thoughts

1.  The weather app said it was drizzling at my location.  When I opened my blinds, I saw the little white "raindrops" floating upwards outside my window.  Back in olden days, we called them snowflakes and "drizzling" meant raindrops.  The photo is from last year, and we may yet see at least that much "drizzle" again this winter.  LOL.

2.  I think this joke is funny, even if I'm not as crazy about chocolate as some folks.

3.  Thursday comes from the name Thor, so this seems to be a fitting "thought" for today's Thursday Thoughts.  Did you see what happened on New Year’s Eve in Scarborough, a town in North Yorkshire, England?  A lost walrus (nicknamed Thor) was found resting in the harbor, so the town council decided to cancel their fireworks program for the welfare of that walrus.  A spokesperson from the Council said:

"We have taken the decision to cancel tonight’s New Year’s Eve fireworks display on the advice of British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR), because of the arrival of the walrus 'Thor' in the harbour.  There are concerns that the display could cause distress to the mammal."  Councillor Steve Siddons, leader of the council, said:  "We are really disappointed that we've had to cancel the fireworks, but the welfare of the walrus has to take precedence."

Scarborough, a city of about 108,000 citizens had been planning the fireworks event for about six months.  They'd already purchased the fireworks out of the annual budget, and then canceled the whole thing to protect that walrus.  I am so impressed.  (* Thanks to Jan for sharing this remarkable news and the link to the information about it.)

4.  Micah 6:8 is the source of that middle part:  "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"  It's my favorite Bible verse.

5.  I have coins in an old film container like this and in old pill bottles so ancient any child could open them easily.  I have no idea whether or not a collector would find any of my coins of value, but it's not likely.  My coins are old because I collected them decades ago.

6.  Did you know Harvard offers free courses?  Here's one on Ethics that I wrote about several years ago:  JUSTICE by Michael Sandel.

7.  Speaking of "collecting" (#5), I'm still collecting my thoughts.  What's been on your mind this week?

Little Women in my Thursday Thoughts

1.  Do you remember the story of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott?  That novel follows the lives of the four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — and details their passage from childhood to womanhood.  Those four girls called their mother Marmee.

2.  Now there are four books about the four daughters.  I told you about those books in a recent Sunday Salon post.

3.  I phoned an old friend recently, and we talked about our 6th grade production of Little Women, which was 2 hours long.  I played the part of Marmee, and Shirley was Meg.  That was 70 years ago, when we were just 12 years old.  I told you that HERE.  You can read more about the novel in Wikipedia.

 

4.  You probably wonder what made me think of Little Women after all these years.  Surprise!  It's the Friday Afternoon Matinee Movie scheduled to be shown on the big screen in our Theater Room here on December 23rd.  That's tomorrow, and I'll be there.

5.  Here's a promo for the 2019 version we'll see.  Do you recognize any of the actors?

6.  I found this advice in a short article:  Decluttering should happen every time you go from room to room.  Take something with you to put in its correct place as you go. 

7.  Colleen quoted Aaron Freeman about "dying" in her recent Thirteen Thursday (#7):  "...your energy’s still around.  According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly."  I like the idea of being here, but less orderly.

8.  "Common foods that may trigger your nose to run when you eat include ... red peppers."  There's a name for this condition:  gustatory rhinitis.  And I have it, apparently.

9.  I guess I'll quit eating in the Café and getting the weekly meals, since peppers show up in a lot of their foods.  Or maybe I'll just order fresh fruits and yogurts and scrambled eggs when I eat there.

10.  The best part of Christmas is hearing from my friends and family who live far away.

11.  One of my neighbors has Covid.  When I delivered a small package that had arrived for her, I slid it under her door, not wanting to face her.  Another neighbor was spraying inside her car Monday, after having driven the sick person to the doctor for confirmation.

12.  Today is my maternal grandmother's birthday.  Inez Geneva Underwood Reynolds (1880-1943) was born 142 years ago on this day.  She's the second person from the left on the front row, and that tall girl on the front row is my mother.  This photo of Mom's family was taken about 1928.

13.  The snow in this Christmas card I got from my daughter Barbara in 2020 looks delightful, but the wind and snow predicted across the middle of the United States may not be what we want for the holidays.  Especially for travelers.  Temps are predicted to be below 0°F in St. Louis today and tomorrow.  On the other hand, there’s SNOW place like home for the holidays.

 

Joyful thoughts for Thursday

1.  Look what I got in the mail:  A package from my daughter that was wrapped in JOY.

2.  Time for a confession.  Everyone knows that old age is our "second childhood," and everyone also knows that you can't trust children around Christmas gifts.

3.  When I realized my daughter didn't actually say it was for Christmas, even though she used Christmas wrapping paper, I went ahead and opened the gift.

4.  And what was inside?  More JOY, which is now hung on the wall where I will see it every day.

5.  When I texted her to thank her, she wrote back that she wanted me to have a bit of Christmas.

6.  I told her I'll hang JOY on my cart, when I go to the Circle@Crown Café to eat.

7.  Oh, by the way, Clawdia wanted to play with that tassel on the bottom.  Nope, nope, nope!  This one's not for you, Clawdia.

8.  Let's make more connections to the word JOY, some of which I have shared before.  It's my favorite word, for one thing.

9.  Why?  Partly because I've spent a lot of time with this word; to wit:  I presented a paper on "Joy or Despair?" at the Southeastern Undergraduate Philosophy Conference held at Emory University back in the early 1970s.  I asked why existentialists seemed to focus on despair (Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus come to mind).  If, as they say, we find our own meaning in life, why not choose joy?

10.  One of my favorite phrases from the Bible is "make a joyful noise," so when I started a church newsletter, I named it Joyful Noiseletter.

11.  I was so "into" the meaning of joy during my undergraduate years that my best friend addressed my mail to "Bonnie Joy Jacobs."

12.  When my bank got its first teller machine, telling us to choose four letters or numbers to access it, I considered using B-J-O-Y.  My young daughter Barbara said, "But Mom, anybody could figure out that's what you would pick." 

13.  At the top of my blog about words, I have these words:  "Joyful Noiseletter — an exuberant newsletter to myself about joyful things, like words, which I enjoy."

Hands full of love ~ for Throwback Thursday

Here's an old photo of me with my great-granddaughter Raegan.  I was leaving my daughter's house to drive home to St. Louis in 2014, and I made the sign for "love."  Raegan did it, too, and then she wanted us to make the sign with both hands and touch our extended fingers.  This stamp shows the "I love you" sign a bit more clearly.

Mocktails in the Café

A bunch of us laughed and talked over root beer floats and ice cream sundaes served by the Crown Center staff in the Café a few weeks ago.  There's even a professional pianist playing in the background.  You won't find me in the photos because I was the one behind the camera.  We have lots of fun events here.

Signal Mountain Road

Signal Mountain Road is the Highway up and across Signal Mountain near Chattanooga Tennessee. The road is wider now, and those trees on the left are long gone.  When my dad's younger brother Jeff was little, he noticed that "big rock" above the road and said it would "hurt his little toes if it fell."  Click here for an older photo of the road.

Throwback Thursday ~ a day for remembering

Here are Bonnie, Lauree, and Donna in 2019, when Lauree made a presentation at the Crown Center.  Why am I featuring this today?  It's for Lauree and all our friends who knew Donna and Lauree's mother, Tiny.  Donna and Tiny both died in July 2021, and today is Lauree's birthday.  Happy, happy birthday, Lauree!

Lauree also took this photo of me that I use for my profile picture; it's on the sidebar to the right.  We had gone out to eat together with her mother, and I handed her my cell-phone camera.  Thanks, Lauree.

I hope your birthday is wonderful!

Actually, I hope your whole YEAR is great!

Matchbooks from Chattanooga

How many of these places still exist, and how many have changed in some way?

The Hotel Patten building still exists, but it became apartments for the elderly.  Chattanoogans, let's update this list.  One down, fourteen to go.

Photos of Chattanooga streetcars

Here's a streetcar on Market Street between 6th and 7th Streets in the 1940s in downtown Chattanooga.  When I was a very little girl, I rode those streetcars and buses (there's a bus behind the streetcar, followed by another streetcar, I think).  That first step up onto the streetcar was a real doozy for a child like me, kind of like an adult stepping up onto a table!  It helped that an adult was always with me to pull me up by one arm as I took that step.  Look at the woman in the street beside the streetcar for a comparison.  I think you can click to enlarge the photos.

This streetcar is on Georgia Avenue, near the courthouse.

I think that's the Electric Power Board building on the left, with J. C. Penney's in the middle behind the streetcar.  Oh, wait!  Now I see the Penney's sign on the corner of the white building.

Hmm, this could be Broad Street, a block over from Market Street.  It does seem to be wider.  But where?  I'm not sure if we're facing north or south.  Or maybe it's Market Street with no cars parked on either side.

Here are the 1913 Chattanooga streetcar routes.  Downtown is south of the Tennessee River.  The route at top left goes up Signal Mountain and the one at bottom left goes to Lookout Mountain, with the Incline Railway being the straight line up the side of the mountain.  Rossville is just south of where the route crosses over into Georgia on the right, with Chickamauga National Park (the battlefield) at bottom right, south of Fort Oglethorpe.  I see Dodds Avenue intersecting just above the state line, with Main Street (and East Main Street) passing near National Cemetery and meeting Dodds Avenue.

I have no idea where this is.  I wonder if the building with a flag is a school.

Throwback Thursday ~ a train trip

Here's a train ad from 1947.  I took my first train ride from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Florida with my Aunt Bonnie in 1947, when I was 7 years old.

My book blogger friend Nancy posted several train ads from the 1940's on Facebook, and I noticed this one was actually from the year of that trip.

My aunt got permission to take me out of school (second grade) for a week or two to take me along with her.  I remember the rocking of the train nauseated me, like I was seasick.  Then the sand whipped my little bare legs when we walked on the beach because we got there near the tail-end of a hurricane.

All in all, I was not very impressed with Florida!  Bonnie was my mother's sister, and my dad's sister Lillian and her family moved from Louisville, Kentucky, to southern Florida a few years later.  So I did visit Florida several times as I was growing up, but our family trips were always by car.

Throwback Thursday

Here's a view from a streetcar on the side of Signal Mountain taken June 20, 1914.  The Tennessee River can be seen (barely) off in the distance on the right.

Throwback Thursday or #TBT is an internet trend used among social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.  (And by bloggers like me, occasionally.  Hmm, I see this is only the fifth time I've done a #TBT here on my blog.  Click the label below to see them all.)

Wikipedia informed me:  "On a Thursday, users post a nostalgia-inducing picture, usually from a different era of their life."  No, I didn't experience the streetcar myself (I'm not THAT old), but I lived on Signal Mountain from 1965 to 1984 and knew about this streetcar line that was no longer there.

Remembering my childhood

I remember Miss Griffin's Footlong Hot Dog stand when it looked like this and stood on a tiny triangle between streets.  It was directly across from my Dad's grocery store on the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue in Chattanooga.  We lived in the back of our store . . . my mom and dad, his parents, and me.  My parents are now buried in National Cemetery, just beyond the trees on the right, behind the men on the corner in this photo.

The W Road

Somebody posted a video on Facebook about driving up the back side of Signal Mountain.  It made me wonder if there's also a YouTube video of what it's like to come up (or down) the W Road on the Chattanooga side of Signal Mountain, and I found several.  In this short video the driver goes up through the W turns and back down.  When my children were learning to drive, they had to navigate that road in a car with a stick shift.  They are all excellent drivers.  (The photo was taken in 1914.)

Vintage phones

Who can remember their childhood home phone number, but struggle to remember the password they created yesterday?  A Facebook friend posted that, and I shared it with my friends.  That made me remember the first phone number I memorized, which was 2-9060, back in the olden days before prefixes, back in the early 1940s.

And that brought back memories of old telephone dials, showing letters as well as numbers.  All the early phones were black.  The earliest light-colored phone I remember having was hanging on the wall in the kitchen of the first house we bought after I was married.  My FB friend Tricia commented, "Yes.  It was the 80s before we had a push button phone.  And we had a party line when I was growing up!"  Ah, yes, we also had a party line phone when I was a child.

Word of the Day

A party line was a local telephone loop circuit that was shared by more than one subscriber.  There was no privacy on a party line; if you were conversing with a friend, anyone on your party line could pick up their telephone and listen in.

When, exactly, did you become an adult?

I was looking for something else on my blog when I came across an old post from January 20, 2012.  It made me laugh, so I'm sharing it again.  Hmm, I just noticed that Beth Kephart, the author, was the first to comment that day:

"Wow. what a story you have lived, Bonnie.  It seems to me there is the stuff of a book here!"

Throwback Thursday

Beth Kephart asked in her post today, "When, exactly, did you become an adult?"  Funny she should ask, I thought, as I dashed out the door before even reading beyond her title, which appears on the sidebar here, under "Blogs I read."  I had places to go and people to see, but now I'm home and have looked up what I wrote in 2006 about becoming an adult.  At the time, I was sixty-six years old, having been born in 1940.  (That's important to know when I mention 1960, okay?)  After reading this, you won't be surprised to hear that I still occasionally wonder what I want to be when I grow up.

Bits of Bonnie

When I started thinking about "becoming an adult," it seemed to me the first thing to consider was what makes a person an adult.  Once there were initiations to pass, as when a boy joined the men on a hunt and killed his first "food."   Once, a girl was considered an adult when she began to menstruate and could have children.  I had my first period when I was twelve; did that make me an adult?  I don't think so!

I married at eighteen; did that make me an adult? Apparently not. When we bought a house in early 1960, I was nineteen and my husband was twenty-five.  He could sign the papers, but I could not ... because I was a minor.  At that time the legal age was twenty-one, but that has fluctuated in my lifetime.  Anyway, I had to go before a judge to get my "minority" removed.  Then I could sign legal papers and be co-owner of our first house.

Did owning a house make me an adult?  Apparently not.  I couldn't vote in the 1960 election between Nixon and Kennedy ... or at least I assumed I couldn't vote ... because I was only twenty.  A few years ago it occurred to me that maybe I could have voted after all, since officially my minority had been removed earlier that same year and I was "legally" an adult.  But I didn't think of that until about 45 years too late.

When I was twenty, my twins were born; did that make me an adult?  When people asked me how I managed, I would tell them, "I didn't know what to do with ONE, and I got TWO."

My father died in a traffic accident when I was twenty-four, and my widowed mother was in shock; so my 21-year-old brother and I had to arrange the funeral.  Did that make me an adult?

Somehow, things keep happening and we keep going, doing whatever is necessary to cope.  Maybe I became an adult at the point I was able to put the pieces together sufficiently to be able to say with confidence that I now knew my own mind and could give a satisfactory answer to the meaning of my life.  If so (I wrote in late 2006), I became an adult only four or five years ago in my early sixties!  And THAT, dear heart, is why my email is "emerging.paradigm" ... because I am emerging into my new way of being.

Am I an adult now?  Maybe it depends on the day.  Some days I feel like I'm in my second childhood.

Okay, it's your turn to ask yourself, "When did YOU become an adult?"

Stories about my mom

For Christmas 2003, I gave each of my grandchildren a piece of history, a story about their ancestors.  Everyone got a different tale, which meant they would have to share their stories in order to get a fuller picture of the people from their past.  My three grandsons got stories about their great-grandfather William Elmer Setliffe, Jr., which I shared last week.  My four granddaughters got stories about their great-grandmother Mildred Inez Reynolds Setliffe.

For Cali

My mom was a cook.  That, I believe, was her identity.  She loved to cook for her family and, when she needed to work outside the home, she worked in the cafeteria at Clifton Hills Elementary School on Rossville Boulevard [in Chattanooga, Tennessee].  By taking some classes, she became a cafeteria manager in the city school system.  Cooking was her life, and she loved food.  The one thing that probably stands out in the minds of her relatives and friends is Mom's white fruit cake.  I should probably put that in capital letters:  "White Fruit Cake."  She learned to make it from her mother Inez, my Grandma Reynolds.  Here's the recipe:

White Fruit Cake

1/2 to 1 lb. candied cherries (chopped fine)
1/2 lb. ground shelled pecans
3 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter (2 sticks)
1 cup sweet milk (or water)
1 tsp. flavoring (vanilla or almond extract)
5 egg whites, beaten
Fresh grated coconut
Milk of fresh coconut

Mix and bake in usual manner for white cake:  Cream butter and sugar together until thoroughly creamed.  Add dry ingredients, alternating with milk, into the sugar mixture, beginning and ending with dry ingredients.  Add cherries, pecans, and flavoring.  [To keep cherries from sinking to bottom of cake, first lightly flour the pieces with part of the flour.]  Gently fold in egg white.  After cake is cooled, pour milk of fresh coconut over both layers.  Ice with 7-Minute Frosting and cover with fresh grated coconut.  Add cherries on top to decorate it.  Good served with boiled egg custard that is thin and runny, made with 5 egg yolks, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk per egg, and nutmeg.

This looks sort of like white fruit cake.

In case you want to make this yourself, here's how we did it when I was a kid.  Mom always got a fresh coconut.  We kids would take it out to the sidewalk and pound away at it with a hammer, working hard to break the tough outer shell of the coconut.  Once that was off, we would drive an ice pick into a couple of the three "eyes" of the now-hairy-looking coconut. Then we'd carefully pour the coconut "milk" into a glass, complaining loudly when the coconut didn't produce much milk because that would affect the taste and moisture of the cake.  Then, tired, we'd go play and let Mother go about the real work of producing the cake as described above.  It really is best with the custard.  Everyone enjoyed the soft, moist "white fruit cake" better than the hard, dark ones with lots of tough fruit, even though the only fruit in Mom's cake were coconut and cherries.

The stories I gave to Brandy, Kenzie, and Cady will have to wait until I find them again.  After typing this last week, I put the spiral-bound booklet in a "safe place" until I had time to finish typing this blog post, and now I can't find that "safe place."  I spent nearly an hour this evening searching through papers, under piles of magazines, in the other room, anywhere I could imagine, and I simply cannot find those seven stories.  The booklet is here somewhere, so maybe next week I'll post "the rest of the stories."

Stories about my dad

For Christmas 2003, I gave each of my grandchildren a piece of history, a story about their ancestors.  Everyone got a different tale, which meant they would have to share their stories in order to get a fuller picture of the people from their past.  My three grandsons got stories about their great-grandfather William Elmer Setliffe, Jr.  My four granddaughters got stories about their great-grandmother Mildred Inez Reynolds Setliffe, which I'll share next Thursday.

For Kendall

My dad spent a lot of his growing-up years on Main Street [in Chattanooga, Tennessee].  That's where his father, my "pops," had his meat market.  Both my dad and his brother Jeff became meat cutters like their father, and each eventually had his own store or meat market.  Dad opened his grocery store at the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue, only a few blocks from where his father's meat market had been.  The meat counter had a glass front like those in a deli today.  I have a 1942 photo of the store showing Pops on the left (with center counters hiding the fact that he had had one leg amputated), Dad wearing his white apron and leaning an elbow on the back counter where he weighed meat on the big white scales, and two assistants in the back.

I remember living behind our store, and Dad's parents lived there with us.  One morning, Pops was shaving in the bathroom and one button of his long johns was unbuttoned.  I giggled and pointed and sing-songed:  "I see Popsy's hiney!"  My elders enjoyed that story for years.

I remember only a few "important" things about the store, since I was only two when I lived there.  By important things, I mean my job.  I got to arrange the apples in the front window.  My daddy let me stand on a stool and put the apples on the slanted board.  I can also tell you exactly where the cookie bins were ― in the center of the store.  Getting a cookie, either to sell or nibble, meant taking the silver top off the big glass container and reaching in for the cookie you wanted.  The jars were on a lower shelf, exactly at the eye level of a little girl like me.

I told [my son] David, when he was promoted from bag boy to the meat section of Pruett's [grocery store] on Signal Mountain, that he was following in the footsteps of his ancestors.  I could remember seeing my dad with gauze around a thumb because he had chopped meat a bit too close to his own hand.  Once when I was at Pruett's, I saw David behind the counter with his thumb similarly wrapped ― and the bandage was soppy wet.  Until that moment, I had forgotten that Dad's bandage was also usually wet from handling the frozen food.  I was not too happy about that particular connection between my son and my father, but I guess it comes with the territory ― using meat cleavers and sharp knives.  Still, I couldn't resist telling David no one wanted part of his thumb in their meat.

When I began managing the Trenton bookstore in August [of 2003], I felt totally at home.  Recently, it occurred to me that the bookstore is about the size of Dad's meat market and I'm following the family tradition, retailing to customers who prefer small stores.  No wonder I love working there.

For Chase

My dad had two children and one more on the way in 1944, when World War II was in its next-to-last year.  Being a father had kept him out of the war until then, but in 1944 he was drafted.  He had to leave before Christmas, but Santa was good to us that year and came early so Daddy could enjoy Christmas with us before he left.  I was four years old as I stood on the sofa, waving goodbye to him through the window, and Billy would have been barely two.  Dad was wearing his Army uniform and waved as he walked up the sidewalk.  My little sister, Ann, was born the following March and was several months old before Daddy came home again.

The Army had a funny way of assigning jobs.  Because Dad owned a meat market and grocery store, someone must have thought "food" and decided my daddy should be a cook.  He didn't know how to cook, not at all.  So he wrote home to his wife, my Mama, and asked for her recipes.  Can you imagine taking a recipe to make something for a family of four and multiplying it to feed thousands of men?  That's what he did.  Apparently he did a pretty good job as a cook and came home still cooking "enough to feed an army."  He loved to make chili, but there was always enough to feed the whole neighborhood, literally!  So we would have a block party even before it was called that.  He would use a white coffee cup to ladle out the chili.

It's funny that I miss his chili and wish I could have some now, because I never wanted his chili when I was a child.  It burned my mouth and was too spicy for me.  I guess that's the way the soldiers preferred it, and I would probably like it now.  I wonder if I could find his recipe if I looked through old family papers.  Probably not, because Daddy mostly cooked by dumping in lots of meat and beans and spices and tasting until it was just the way he wanted it.

If he were still alive, I know he'd be sitting around telling you about all his exploits in Japan and in the Philippines.  He would tell you about sailing to the Philippines on the U.S.S. Enterprise, an aircraft carrier.  It was the biggest ship the Navy had at that time, so you could probably find a photo of that ship in a history book or an encyclopedia.  But I've saved you the time by printing out some information I found online for you.  He loved to tell stories, and he would illustrate the letters he sent home to us.  He drew not only things he saw, but cartoons about cows or anything he thought would make us laugh and enjoy his letters.

For Jamey

My dad was in the Army during World War II and was sent to Japan near the end of the war.  He was in the First Cavalry [division], which had a yellow patch with a black stripe slanted across it and the head of a horse in the upper part.  It looks like the one at the right side of this paragraph.  One of the funny stories he told was about the Japanese making replacement patches for the Army and making the "horses" with long ears.  They were making jackasses out of the First Cavalry!

My dad liked to tell stories and make people laugh, so I'm never quite sure whether a story was true or was "elaborated."  Even though Dad was a cook, he also drove big trucks and (according to him) led convoys of trucks because of his good sense of direction.  The soldiers, after all, couldn't read Japanese road signs.  When we children would ask him to tell us about the war, he said he had "captured two Japs."  Then he would tell the truth about that capture:

One night he was writing a letter to Mama (and us kids) and heard footsteps in the gravel outside his tent.  When he went silently to investigate, he found two Japs (what we called the Japanese people during the war).  The two were trying to steal food, and Daddy was the cook.  He grabbed both of them without having to fire a shot.  Only at the end of the story did Daddy admit the two he "captured" were children.  Although he didn't say so, I can only imagine my child-loving daddy fed those hungry kids before he turned them in.

In another story Daddy told us about hearing piano music coming from a Japanese house he was walking past.  He stopped and tried to tell the owner he wanted to listen.  The man, however, thought Dad wanted his daughter, who was playing the piano.  So he got very angry and ran Dad off, even though he simply wanted to listen to the music.  Back home in Chattanooga, as Daddy knew, I was learning to play the big upright piano in the living room.  All he wanted was to think about music and his family.  My dad was a family man who loved his children.  He was missing us when he heard the piano inside that house.

Why we left Oprah's book club

"The biggest obstacle we've had to deal with as a group was the reformatting of the Oprah book club website.  We ended up losing years of books discussions.  It was really disappointing."

Chris of Chrisbookarama wrote that for the Book Club Exchange on Booking Mama's blog back in December of 2009, and I found it.  Oprah was originally on AOL, where I was known as BoJacobs in her discussion groups (my profile picture was that animated orange cat GIF above).  We, too, ended up losing years of discussions.

Actually, we had more than one Oprah group.  Some us read and discussed at least two or three books every month, with groups reading different additional books besides Oprah's book club picks.  We lost years of several discussion threads.  One of my groups on Oprah called ourselves "Book Buddies," so that's what I called our new primary online book club.  Here's the very first post on Book Buddies, and you can read in the comments the excitement from people in our various Oprah groups, as well as some who were new to our group.  (I tend to invite everybody I know.)

Another of our Oprah groups discussed books set in countries "around the world," which became my Book Around the World blog.  Our Essencia Island became a private blog for the Book Buddies to party with each book's characters ― or as I said at the top of the blog, it was "a place for Book Buddies to relax and party."  This pleasant sunset scene is at the top of the blog.

Gerry also commented on the shock we all felt when Oprah just threw us away:

"I was truly shocked to see Oprah delete us all.  Oh well!  Time to move on.  Bonnie I love the blog."

Teddy agreed with our assessment:

"I'm glad you set this up. I am fed up with Oprah as well and have moved the Classics Club book discussions to Yahoo groups. I can't beleive Harpo deleted all of our book clubs without prior notice and there will be no way to retreive our old messages. Thats unaceptable in my books!"

We no longer trusted Oprah and moved our book groups to new places.  Book Buddies is my own online book club, where our discussions will live on until Blogger (now Google) decides to throw away what we wrote.  See the sidebar of Book Buddies for a list of books we discussed between 2007 and 2016 before interest died out.

Throwback Thursday ~ river and church

The Tennessee river was frozen over in Chattanooga on January 27, 1940, when Earl Dowlen took this picture.  He wrote the date on the back, saying also that it had snowed 8-1/2 inches.  That's the Walnut Street Bridge, the first non-military bridge in Chattanooga.  Finding this on "Chattanooga has History," a Facebook group, made me think of my own history.

This photo was taken three months before I was born at Erlanger Hospital, maybe a mile from the south end of the bridge.  At the north end of the bridge, on the left, you can see a building up the hill that stands out against the snow.  That's Forrest Avenue Methodist Church, later Forrest Avenue United Methodist Church.

When I was the pastor there, my office was in the addition, which had my office, classrooms, and a fellowship hall downstairs.  Below are two photos of the church I also found on "Chattanooga has History," a Facebook group.

This one was labeled "mid-20th century."  The Olgiati Bridge, built in 1959, is already there.  I don't see cars on the Walnut Street Bridge, but that doesn't mean it was already closed.  Here's the other photo of the church found on Facebook:

Both of these show the new addition on the left.

This photo shows when the river froze on January 12, 1918.  That's a hundred years ago.  I don't remember ever being told the river had frozen over.  And now I've found two photos of it frozen in Chattanooga.  Both of these occasions were before I was born.