Monday, June 27, 2011

Ephemera Find

All right, Typosphereans and ephemera lovers. Have I got a treat for you.

A humorous poem, hand-typed at some point in the first half of the last century, fresh from a storage box that has sat in an attic for longer than most of us have been alive.


The Wife and I have been learning a lot about my family history as we've been cleaning out some spaces. I suspect my grandmother might have typed this during her education at Lasell Junior College. I doubt she was the author. More likely she was just practicing a bit of copy, or she read it in a book or newspaper somewhere and found it humorous enough to reproduce and save. That woman saved everything. But she wouldn't let us look at anything until, well, until she couldn't stop us any more.

We've got lots and lots of other documents and pictures: civil war letters from the family that adopted my great grandmother, letters to great-uncle with special needs who died in a school fire as a teen, newspaper articles about old family businesses. The Civil War stuff deserves a blog all its own, though it would take a herculean effort to scan and transcribe all those old letters. (1860s handwriting is so pretty but so hard to read.)

Anyway, this brief bit with its bellyaching about progress seemed an extra-special fit for you typewriter lovers, so...there you go.

3 comments:

  1. There's some progress, you're posting fairly often again! :D

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  2. Love that poem. As a kid in the 1950s there were a few old timers who would swim across Narragansett Bay before using a power boat. And I don't think they approved of electric lights or central heating.

    Enjoy those Civil War letters. Wish we had documents like that in my family.

    Jeff The Bear

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  3. Ted --

    Nice of you to notice, ha ha! I had a bit of free time over the weekend which worked to my favor. Got a rather punishing schedule this week but we'll see if I can't scan and share something.

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