Lost & Found . . . in Elk Rapids, MI

This young lady is quite sad looking despite some
fabulous accessories – a flowery pin or belt at the hip and a
ribbon-handled white purse.  The photo was taken at
a studio on Monroe St. in Detroit, MI.

This picture really got me. If there had been super models in the
nineteenth century, she would’ve been one of them. Love her hair,
her dress and her name . . . Unadill Simpson, written in pencil on the
back of the photo. Notice the locket pinned to her dress.
Simply beautiful. I hope she had a terrific life.

I adore this photo of a mother and her son. It’s quite
telling of their love for each other as he nestles his cheek
against her forehead and smiles like a little cherub; his hands
lovingly placed on her shoulder. The proud and happy mom.
On the back of the photo they are identified as Kate Miller and son, Lynn.
A heart-warming and sentimental photo for just fifty cents.

In an earlier post about Lost Souls from Paw Paw, MI, I mentioned
that old old photos of kids and babies fascinate me because its as
though their stare from the photo goes right through me. Case in point
with this daguerreotype I bought for just one dollar and fifty cents at an
Elk Rapids, MI, antique store.

This photo is one of my favorites. A woman in a white dress in a flower garden.
No stuffy studios with props and dramatic or strange backdrops (like one photo I saw of a young couple standing in front of a paper waterfall). The back of this photo shows that it was sent as a postcard and mailed to a woman in Charles City, Iowa, on July 10, 1912. Written on a Friday morning, the postcard reads:

“We arrived home Wednesday afternoon, had a very good time. E.G. said Louis was better and was going to work again. My room is finished and it looks fine, bought a new art X [square?] for it too. I have the ironing to do to day [sic] as Cora is making my pink dress. We expect to go to Clarksville, last of next week I think.  X [perhaps Pa?] drove up to the farm yesterday. Lovingly, sister Clara.”

I saved one of the best photos for last. Look at this kid. Can you believe what he’s wearing and how he looks? This kid is dressed to impress. The lace collar, the coat, the sash, the sleeves, and that HAT! He  looks like baby Napoleon standing stoically holding a toy choo-choo train. This is undoubtedly one of the most fabulous old photos I’ve ever seen. The back of the photo indicates the boy’s age – two and a half. He may have been English royalty or, at the very least, was a member of a very wealthy British family. The photo was taken at the studio of W.S. Stuart, in Richmond, Surrey. Under an image of a crown, it states:

“By Royal Warrants of Appointment
to
Her Majesty the Queen
H.M. the King of Spain
H.M. the King of Portugal
H.M. the King of Hellenes”

Does anyone know or think they know who this little boy may have been?

Lysander Woodward's Legacy

This weekend will mark the 17th annual Woodward Dream Cruise and feature classic cars and cruising -- 1950s style -- along Woodward Avenue, one of metro Detroit's most famous roads. In honor of the big weekend in Southeastern Michigan, I wrote an article for Rochester Patch about the town's own Woodward legacy that began with Lysander Woodward (no relation that I know of to Woodward Avenue's namesake, Judge Augustus Brevoort Woodward).

Rochester's Woodward Was a Farmer Who Brought Railroad to Town

Because a (Younger or Older) Girl Can Do It

Earlier this week, swimmer Diana Nyad attempted to be the first to swim from the coast of Cuba to Key West without a shark cage. At age 61, Nyad told reporters that she wanted to show it’s never too late to realize your dreams.

Though Nyad, who’s as fit and trim as someone half her age, had to cease swimming 29 miles into the 103-mile trek due to asthma, shoulder pain and water conditions, she remained upbeat when she told CNN that “I’m not sad. It was absolutely the right call.”

Another famous American female swimmer, Gertrude Ederle

Reading about Nyad’s attempted record-making swim reminded me of another female swimmer from long ago – New York native Gertrude Ederle, who, at age twenty, became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. Why? To show the world that a girl could do it, she once said.

According to an Associated Press article written at the time of Ederle’s death in Dec. 2003, only five men had made the same swim successfully and Ederle beat the best recorded time by more than two hours.

As a college student, I wrote a paper about Ederle and was transfixed by what I read about her. Unlike today, when you can simply “Google” Ederle’s name and come up with pages of information online, during my college days I had to look at microfilmed newspapers of the time, read book and chapter entries about Ederle and really dig for the information. The Internet is certainly a wonderful and useful tool for researchers, but there’s something about reading an original newspaper article that gives a true sense of the time period. In this case, I remember really grasping the thrill Ederle’s swim had given people around the world – the newspaper accounts were detailed and full of suspense as if the reporter writing it was on the edge of his seat waiting to find out how this story was going to end.

This was the time, after all, when daredevils, thrill-seekers and risk-takers were all the rage. Records were being made and broken throughout the 1920s. But as the Associated Press article stated, few of those daredevils were as celebrated as Ederle. She became a world-wide sensation.

Dangerous conditions

Press photo of Gertrude Ederle.

Like Nyad, Ederle had to prepare for and endure dangerous and changing water conditions – stormy seas, sharks, jelly fish, strong currents, etc.

Dressed in a two-piece bathing suit she designed herself, Ederle was greased head-to-toe, put on her goggles and began her history-making swim. As she swam, she did encounter stormy seas and rough conditions. Nearby boats carried friends, relatives, reporters and photographers, as well as a phonograph, that, noted the Associated Press article, played “lively tunes to buoy her spirit.”

After fourteen and a half hours, Ederle reached the coast of England. Storms caused her to swim extra miles, swimming a total of thirty-five miles to cross the twenty-one mile channel.

According to the Associated Press article from 2003, two years earlier on the 75th anniversary of her record-breaking achievement, Ederle gave an interview in which she remembered her trainer telling her to give up during the swim’s worst moments.

“’"I'd just look at him and say, `What for?' " Ederle recalled.’”

Upon her return to the United States, Ederle was given a ticker-tape parade through the streets of New York City, met President Calvin Coolidge, became a vaudeville star, made a movie, had a dance step and song named for her, and went on to set twenty-nine U.S. and world swimming records and to win a gold medal and two bronze medals in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.

Similar dreams, different endings

Ticker tape parade for Ederle in NYC.

In addition to being female swimmers setting out to break records and become the “first” to achieve their dream, Nyad and Ederle also share the time of year in which they swam. Nyad began her swim this year on Aug. 9 from Cuba, while Ederle plunged into the English Channel from France on Aug. 6 – eighty-five years later.

Nyad set out to to show that youth is a state-of-mind and that older people can still live their dreams in an age that seems obsessed with being young. Ederle hoped to prove a girl could swim the English Channel during a time when women were considered the "weaker sex." Despite differences in the result of each woman's amazing swim, both proved that dreams can and should be lived.

P.S. I’ve included the links to two YouTube videos about Ederle’s accomplishment.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7-rE-DflDA
www.youtube.com/watch?v=84fYnCEVfJI

Ederle swimming: This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ggbain.37118. This is a press photograph from the George Grantham Bain collection, which was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1948. According to the library, there are no known restrictions on the use of these photos.

Ederle Parade: Ticker tape parade GE: This photograph is a work for hire created prior to 1968 by a staff photographer at New York World-Telegram & Sun. It is part of a collection donated to the Library of Congress. Per the deed of gift, New York World-Telegram & Sun dedicated to the public all rights it held for the photographs in this collection upon its donation to the Library. Thus, there are no known restrictions on the usage of this photograph.

Lost Souls . . . $1 apiece.

This photo is very similar to two others I posted with an article I wrote for Oakland Township Patch. The photos in the article were identified as Ray Time Girls from Goodison, MI. I guessed that they were a theatrical troupe of some kind by the way they posed and mugged for the camera -- a somewhat unusual type of photo for the time (estimated to be early 1900s during the Gibson Girl era). This photo is nearly identical to one of the photos in the article. I love it. No amount of high neck collars, cinched waists and upswept hair can stop them from having a grand time.

This is a great photo, too. I'm assuming this is a high school graduation photo.

The hat is phenomenal! I wonder what the flowers are in her bouquet?

Lost & Found in Paw Paw

In my earlier posts, as well as in a couple of recent articles for Oakland Township Patch, I mentioned how heartbreaking it is to find old photos piled in a basket on the counter of an antique store. Well, I stumbled upon that very thing this week at an antique store called Found Things in downtown Paw Paw, Michigan.

I flipped through a few in one basket. Lots of wedding pictures, a well-dressed older lady with quite a hat on her head, and a couple of images showing a young woman posing in a garden and wearing an extravagant and unusual outfit. A graduation perhaps?

There was a photo of a sailor looking forlorn and scared, three images of a woman with the tiniest of waists (cinched tight no doubt) with a Gibson girl hairdo and so much jewelry it would make a collector swoon, and a couple of photos of men with macho mustaches and hair slicked back with the latest in hair pomade.

The photos of kids, however, always throw me. Elegantly dressed babies with stares that seem to go right through me, frowning little girls with huge bows in their hair, and little boys in knickers who seem to want to be anywhere else but in a stuffy photography studio.

How do these get here? Like diaries and journals, photos are taken for a reason -- to remember. These memories for sale often tell their own stories -- like the one I saw taken in 1940 of a guy leaning against a car. The inscription on the back mentioned that it was "our new car" and "isn't she a dilly?"

A couple of other customers commented on how sad it was to see these old photos -- lost souls, one lady called them. She mentioned to her friend that the photos should be posted to a web site called "Dead Fred." Have you visited this site? It's a free searchable family history online photo archive. Type in a surname or state (you can even search by year and photographer name) and see what pops up. You might find a long lost relative.

I included a photo (blurry cell phone photo) of the "lost souls" in a basket. More to come!

Tiffany