Cook's Paint Almanac - 1950

Color style fascinates me. There are people who can look ahead and see what colors will be fashionable and there are other people who are determining what colors are 'hot' each season. It is as much a science as an art. Part of the reason that I love vintage fabrics is that they do not change from in style to out of style. They remain vintage style!

This is a booklet about color, that floated to the surface, some time ago.

It is an advertising piece printed by the Cook's Paints (for farm and home). It is a calendar/almanac that begins in April 1950 and ends in March, 1951.


According to the almanac, April is the beginning of the "Spring Decorating Period". It is the month for "brightening up your rooms to match the wake-up spirit of spring". Some of the special days in April of that year are 'Pan-American Day' ( the 14th) and 'Southern Memorial Day' (the 26th).

The almanac suggests 'dramatic colors for the walls, pastel tints for ceilings and sparkling enamel for woodwork'. I love dramatic colors for walls. When we moved to the desert, the house we left had dramatic colors. The realtor chosen by the relocation company to tell us what our house was worth, said that the colors of the carpets and walls reduced the value of the house by many thousands of dollars. We disagreed...

I have been looking through some quilting books that I picked up at various auctions/estate sales/thrift stores, etc. The illustrations in the books from the 80's and 90's have examples of the projects made up in colors that look very dated. I remember when they were 'current', though, and that makes me hesitate to buy the newest fabrics that are in the quilt stores.

I guess that is why it is easier for me to stick with the vintage reproductions or the fabric lines that have a 'vintage feel'.

I wonder how old something has to be before we call it vintage, rather than just outdated!

Club Doings

Yesterday, I received an email from a woman who was trying to research a photo of ladies around a dining table, marked "Just-a-Mere Club, Arkansas City, KS 3-31-1930-something". She had come across this post that was spurred by an article in the New Yorker Magazine.

The email got me thinking, again, about the ladies clubs in the last century, and these books:

I found these in the family flotsam and jetsam.

They are the Secretary's books from the D.M.C. Club of Greensburg, Kansas. Another one of the many 'ladies clubs' of that era.

They are the official minutes of the meetings, beginning with December 29, 1921 (not the beginning of the club, just the first entry in the oldest book) and ending with December 8, 1950. Not the end of the club, either. Just the last entry in these books.

My Great Aunt Ruth was a member of the club (beginning 12/19/1945, according to the minutes). No idea how they ended up in our family archives, because I don't see in the records where Aunt Ruth was ever the club secretary.

Mostly, the secretary was Myrtle Linegar...

...pictured here on a Christmas card with her twin sister. (Can't tell you which is Myrtle and which is her sister...)

The pages in one book are very fragile (1925 through 1929) and some of the entries are very brief. Often with just the day and date of the meeting, the Hostess name and roll call topic, (current events was a popular one, as well as gardening tips. One was Irish jokes...) and a mention of the activity of the day. Often it was, "An enjoyable afternoon was spent with fancy work and conversation". It seems that taking pictures was another popular activity during the 1920's, sometimes described as 'kodaking'.

During the war years of the '40's, making items for hospitalized soldiers was a focus, but mostly the activities were social. And always food. From 'delightful luncheons' to cook-outs of 'weenie sandwiches', there was always food!

Often, meetings would be cancelled during the 'busy times of harvest' in June and July, or due to 'bad roads' in the winter.

The club membership was about 8 or 10 in the '20's and rose to almost 30 in 1950. I think it kept growing, because I remember going to holiday meetings when I was a child in the early '60's that were held at the VFW hall due to the size of the group.

My original thought was to transcribe the minutes. I got through 1922, but some of the pencil writing is very tiring to decipher, so I stopped transcribing and just read. Many of the member names are familiar to me as friends of Aunt Ruth, although some of the secretaries referred to members by first name, and others used a more formal "Mrs. R.A. Linegar" which is harder for me to keep sorted out. Some even used 'Mesdames Linegar and Gregory'.

I am going to try again this weekend. My eyes just work better during the day with natural light. Some of the pages seem like they could crumble to dust at any minute, so I don't want to wait too long.

Maybe I will check into voice recognition software. Then I could read the minutes aloud and then just edit.

I am sure Myrtle would have appreciated that kind of technology!

Veteran's Day Eve

Since tomorrow is Veteran's Day, (and Dearest Sister's turn to post, in our tag team blogging adventure) I thought I would share a bit of ephemera from the family flotsam and jetsam.

This photo is a post card that was in a stack of vintage cards that came from my Aunt Ruth's house. Most of them are correspondence addressed to her from friends, (sent with a penny stamp).

On the back of this one, it just says, "From Henry Newton Chase To Miss Ruth Kruse".

I did not recall seeing his name in her diary of 1916, so I was thinking of ways that I could research who he might be, but then I remembered the magic of Google! Crossing my fingers, I entered his name and this entry was in the first two or three that popped up. Galena, KS is a couple of hundred miles from Greensburg, but it certainly seems likely that it could be a match.

CHASE, HENRY NEWTON, seaman, second class, United States Navy.
Enlisted: St. Louis, Mo., June 5, 1917.
Died: U. S. S. Mercy, October 9, 1918.
Cause: Influenza.
Next of kin: Father, Elmer Chase, 115 Short Street, Galena, Kans.

He apparently enlisted soon after the US entered the war and died from the flu a month before the armistice was signed.

Aunt Ruth kept his photo for a long time. Maybe he was just an acquaintance, or maybe a special acquaintance. Of course, it is too late to ask her.

On Veteran's Day, this year, we remember him and the many thousands of other young men and women who have served their country.

Those that came home, and those that didn't.

Resources untapped

When I was born, my Grandpa (my mom's dad) was 60 years old. He was still farming to a certain extent while I was in elementary school. Mostly, I remember that he always had soft peppermint candies in his pocket. I do not recall ever spending "quality time" with my grandpa. He was not in great health and was no longer living alone by the time I was in 5th or 6th grade.

This photo (from the family flotsam and jetsam) obviously was taken outside Kiowa County, but I was never aware that my Grandpa ever traveled!

The occasion for his travel is a mystery to me!

My mom and dad moved frequently before I was born, and after, until my dad passed away when I was almost two. Daddy's work as a welder took us from Texas to Canada building pipelines. I think Wisest Sister attended something like 23 high schools before she graduated from GHS. (That might be an exaggeration, but it was a lot!)

I don't think we ever lived in Arkansas, though, so Grandpa wasn't visiting us when this photo was taken. (Plus, it is not a slide, so my mom didn't "snap" it!)

It may remain a mystery unless someone else has the answer. Of course the folks who would surely know, my Grandpa and my Mom are no longer with us. In my family, we are pretty good about identifying the folks in photos on the back. We have some "unknowns", but not many. We are not as good about identifying the occasion.

When The Boy Cousin was visiting a couple of weeks ago, we talked about Aunt Ruth's diary and some of the surprises in it. One surprise was that Aunt Ruth apparently didn't graduate from High School. TBC thought that he had seen her in the Gallery of Graduates before the tornado. I always assumed she had graduated, because I have a photo that was always attributed to be her graduation photo. Dear Aunt confirmed to him, though, that Aunt Ruth left school before she finished.

She also added that Grandpa, Aunt Ruth's brother always was envious of Aunt Ruth because she got to go to school as long as she did, since he didn't get to go to high school, at all!

He always seemed kind of "prickly" to me when I was little, but I wished that I had the opportunity to know my Grandpa better. I guess learning through sharing our collective memories with my sibs and cousins is next best...

One of the things on my wish list....

...is a machine to convert slides to digital pictures. Precious Ms A has told me that they exist and I mean to investigate and gain access to one.

When Dearest Sister was here over the Eating Holiday, she helped me go through a box or two of Flotsam and Jetsam . This evening, I set up the projector and investigated several carousels of Kodachrome slides that we intended to review, but ran out of holiday before we got to them. As we suspected, most of the slides were photos of iris that were taken by my mother.

Not all, though!

Some were family photos that I think I may have seen before, but perhaps not more than once. Not enough to settle them into my memory.

Mother always took slide photos. She felt they were superior quality. True, but since she did not own a slide projector until the 1980's, for many years we could only look at them by holding them up to the light.

When I saw them, I really wished someone were here to enjoy them with me! They made me smile and some made me laugh out loud!

So, I put on my thinking cap and used the technology and magic at my disposal to convert Kodachrome to digital!

DS and I have a history of laughter! On one adventure with our girls and one or two of their friends, we heard the impertinent miss, Dearest V, say to her companion, "Don't worry if my mom and Aunt Jan just start laughing at nothing. Sometimes they do that." Which of course made us start laughing!

As I said, it goes waaaaay back -


Even when we were in peril from un-anchored swing sets!

Our siblings did not always see the humor to the degree that we enjoyed...

Sometimes the picture taking ordeal took its toll on our jocularity, too though...

Or maybe the sugar rush from Easter Candy Before Sunday School had subsided...

Anyway, I really wanted to share these slides, so I used the magic of mythology -well, my Olympus camera (Roman? or Greek? I can never remember..)

I took digital photos of the images projected on the wall! Not the quality that mother aspired to by using slide film, but it works in a pinch!

Flotsam and Jetsam

Over the years, I have become the Keeper of some of the flotsam and jetsam of our family that has floated down through the years. I became the keeper mostly because I lived in the same house for 16 years and it had lots of storage space. And I lived close to my mother who was the original Keeper.

Mostly it consists of boxes of things that were stored for years, perhaps by the original owner; photographs, cancelled checks, school books, various deeds and agricultural loan documents, miscellaneous receipts, newspaper articles etc.

Periodically, I go through a box here and there and decide who in the family might appreciate having something (or more likely, who can I talk into taking something away!) Whenever the sibs or nieces come to visit, I often have a little packet of photos and documents that are particularly relevant to their branch of the tree to send home with them.

Once in a while, I find something that I have never noticed or realized I had.

This is the wedding photo of my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Don. She is my mother's aunt, my grandfather's youngest sister. She was born in 1897 and she was married to Uncle Don in 1927.

A few weeks ago, I found this:

It is a tablet that probably was meant to serve as a note pad. An early pre-courser to the spiral pocket notebook. I probably saw this notebook and assumed that it had columns of cattle feed costs and notations of how many acres were in pasture at some point in time.

Imagine my surprise -

Aunt Ruth used it as a diary in 1916!

Many entries are pretty typical of most 19 year old girls - boys, parties and her friends that were married and having babies. She wrote intermittently, always apologising for "neglecting you". In the first entry, she mentions George Fuller. In the last entry, eight months later, he is not to be heard from.

The last entry:

August 8. 1916. Tuesday

"It sure has been a long time since I have written to you but I have sure been busy. I have been happy, tho. Chas came up last Sunday and we went to HIS HOME and his Aunt & Uncle and Cousins were there and Earl & Anna and Frank & Sarah and we had ice cream and cake and Anna & Chas & Lawrence played and Ruth & Irene sang and I got weighed. I weigh 133 lbs. And in the evening we went home with Anna & Earl and spent the evening with them. Coming home Chas told me a lot of things about his life but I care for him more every time I am with him."

"He made a date for tomorrow night. I wish it was tonight but I believe it is going to rain."

"Mabel & Norris was married July. 28 at Dodge City. I guess they are happy.
Well Anna & Mabel are both married - it is my turn next"

The last entry made me a little sad when I read it. It would be 10 years before Aunt Ruth was married and not until after her father died. Before that time, her lot was to help run her parents house on the farm and care for her grandmother. Because she "stayed home" Aunt Ruth inherited the house, a rural Victorian mansion really, built at the turn of the century which became terribly run-down in later years.

During my visit with Dear Aunt last month, I asked her about the timing of the marriage and if it was significant that Great Grandfather had passed away before Aunt Ruth married. She didn't remember exactly, but she said "some people were jealous of Aunt Ruth because she was 'given everything', but really, do you think she chose that life? Her place was to stay home and take care of her grandmother. I don't suppose there was any question of whether she would marry!" Dear Aunt said that her dad (my grandfather) always said that Aunt Ruth married Uncle Don because he was the only one who would put up with her responsibilities.

After they were married, Uncle Don moved into his in-laws' home and Aunt Ruth continued as the dutiful daughter. A couple of times Uncle Don's father tried to set him up in a farming operation, but it never lasted very long. After all, Aunt Ruth was needed at home.