Old News

[dgriffin]

Keep on clicking until it's readable. It will be a strain, but I can't sit here all day and retype stuff !

[dgriffin]

Well, Edgar made it back for his sister's wedding in 1920. Couldn't find any references in the paper beyond that. Let's hope he lived a happy life.


www.windsweptpress.com/images/edgar sister.jpg[/img]

[dgriffin]

Something I'd always wondered about, since I lived on Brinckerhoff Ave. in the 1950's. And the info re Elizabeth St. was a bonus. Happy her name wasn't Driselda.




Also see Post # 32 on Oct 18, 2009 on page 3 of this thread, Old News, re the Brinckerhoff Farm.

[fiona]

Thanks, Dave. For some great postcards of old Whitesborough (Main Street) go to www.epodunk.com

[fiona]

Here we have the streets going East: Steuben ( Baron Von Steuben), West (?), Miller (Miller family) Howard (another son?) Seymour ( self explanatory: Seymour family), Neilson (A cousin to the Millers) Dudley ( cousins from Albany NY), Brinkerhoff, (The Brinkerhoff farm), Taylor ( ?) , Conkling ( Roscoe & Julia), Mary, Blandina, Catherine, Elizabeth, Morris ( Morris Miller, father of Rutger B.), Bleeker (The Albany family), Rutger (Rutger B. Miller). Any mistakes? Please feel free to add corrections. How about these apples: South ( South of downtown) and up in the Hill: Hobart, Noyes, Oswego, Wayverly, Watson, Sherman, Springate, Newell and across the road: Jewett, OK! so my mind just went blank! But I think wev'e got a good start here for a new thread: Old Streets or should we call it, old potholes?

[stoney]

Before Lenox Ave. was Lenox Ave. it was called Higgins St.

Just thought I'd throw that little tidbit in.

[Clipper]

That must have been back when Bobbbiez and Dave were youngsters wandering the streets of the city, haha.

[bobbbiez]

Not quite, pain-in-my-dupa.

Lived on the street in the late 40's & 50's and it was Lenox Ave then and was even paved. Not like the dirt roads to the one-room school you attended. ;D

[Clipper]

It was a two room school and the road WAS paved. It was route 12 through Barneveld before the new four lane bypassed it. Our favorite childhood thing in summer was to stand on the corner and wave and salute at the army trucks on their way to Drum for training. It was a real treat if they saluted back or blew the airhorn.

I actually missed the one room school by one year. If we didn't move to Barneveld, I would have started school in Trenton Falls at the little one room school house with Mrs Hill for a teacher. She lived right across the road from the little school.

[fiona]

Clip: I attended the new Miller School, which is now Martin Luther King. Then I went to Kernan and then to UFA. While at school I was a holy terror. At Miller school they had a writing program called The Palmer Method and the instructor's name was Miss McCalmont. We used an inkwell and a nib up until 5th grade. Everyone had to write that way, unless you went to a Catholic School, which I did for a few years. I only wanted to be one thing - do one thing in life - get this! be a famous jazz singer! However, I couldn't sing, so I guess that wasn't a reasonable goal. Sometimes I wake up late at night and I see Miss McCalmont. She was always telling me to 'wash my neck"! Well, what did she want? I was just a street urchin from East Utica and then Cornhill.

[Clipper]

Mrs. McAlmont was also my writing teacher when we did Palmer Method at Seymour in the 7th grade. Would you believe that she was also my mother's writing teacher many years before that.

We transitioned from the straight stick pens and ink wells to black ballpoint pens with 3 gold stripes around the barrel. Not long ago I found a pencil box that my mom had put away when I was a kid. It had the stick pens and nibs. I also still have a scripto fountain pen that takes the cartridges. I doubt that you can buy the cartridges any more.

People have always remarked how nice my handwriting was over the years, and I have to attribute it to Palmer Method and the infamous ovals and up and downs. I always thought with my perfect ovals, I would get a job drawing slinkies, or possibly become an illustrator for a company that manufactured screen door springs.

I always liked to write, and essays were my favorites. One of the greatest gifts I ever received from my grandmother Naegele was a papermate pen with a piggy back refill. It was the smoothest writing pen on the market in those days and I treasured it.

It is sad that kids now don't have to write as much, and much of their homework is typed into a computer and printed out. Good penmanship is becoming a lost art.

[stoney]

Feb 3, 2010 18:02:21 GMT -5 Clipper said:

It was a two room school and the road WAS paved. It was route 12 through Barneveld before the new four lane bypassed it. Our favorite childhood thing in summer was to stand on the corner and wave and salute at the army trucks on their way to Drum for training. It was a real treat if they saluted back or blew the airhorn.

I actually missed the one room school by one year. If we didn't move to Barneveld, I would have started school in Trenton Falls at the little one room school house with Mrs Hill for a teacher. She lived right across the road from the little school.

Then one year Clipper's class got paper & fountain pens; life was good. Once Clipper was a bad boy & had to sit in the corner with a dunce cap on. All the kids shot spit wads at his plumber's crack, but he got back at them during recess using instruments of semi-mass destruction. He was hauled off to 'juvy' where he met 'Bubba'.

[bobbbiez]

Feb 3, 2010 20:01:18 GMT -5 Clipper said:

Mrs. McAlmont was also my writing teacher when we did Palmer Method at Seymour in the 7th grade. Would you believe that she was also my mother's writing teacher many years before that.

We transitioned from the straight stick pens and ink wells to black ballpoint pens with 3 gold stripes around the barrel. Not long ago I found a pencil box that my mom had put away when I was a kid. It had the stick pens and nibs. I also still have a scripto fountain pen that takes the cartridges. I doubt that you can buy the cartridges any more.

People have always remarked how nice my handwriting was over the years, and I have to attribute it to Palmer Method and the infamous ovals and up and downs. I always thought with my perfect ovals, I would get a job drawing slinkies, or possibly become an illustrator for a company that manufactured screen door springs.

I always liked to write, and essays were my favorites. One of the greatest gifts I ever received from my grandmother Naegele was a papermate pen with a piggy back refill. It was the smoothest writing pen on the market in those days and I treasured it.

It is sad that kids now don't have to write as much, and much of their homework is typed into a computer and printed out. Good penmanship is becoming a lost art.

I too have to contribute my excellent hand writing and learning the art of calligraphy to the Palmer Method and Miss McCalmont. I actually loved her class and all the forms of practice. Think it was the only class I did excel in. ;D

Didn't she use to wear her hair real long and tied back in a bun? I remember her being tall, slender and wore glasses. Very attractive woman if I remember correctly. I do remember, I liked her a lot.

[dgriffin]

The thing about nib pens and inkwells was they were a cheap way to arm a child with the tools he needed to become part of educated society, a real boon to the generation that exceeded their parents standard of living and allowed them to participate in the world of ideas. Reading and writing was one way in which old lines of class distinction might be blurred a bit and allow mobility in society. Such mixing was considered a key to democracy. Many of us on this forum, a place where we exchange ideas and often learn something new, had grandparents or great grandparents who barely read and never were able to write a simple letter.

A few years ago I began to play with nib pens again, my first acquaintance going back to Blessed Sacrament School in 1949. The neatest pen I found is made of glass. It is a single piece, from the comfortably round shaft to the writing tip, a finely rounded point. Above the point but below where your finger tip guides the pen, is a sort of carved swirl that holds ink on the pen and supplies it with much more than did the slit in the old steel nibs. In a test, I was able to write a full line and a half from a dipped steel nib. The Glass pen with the swirl will write 3 and a half lines, quite an increase in ink capacity. I imagine we could have a calligrapher somewhere here on the forum who can tell us more about pens.

I guess my fine motor skills suffered even at a young age, because I could never make all those Palmer circles and vertical lines come out looking as well as Mary Immaculata O'Toole, who sat next to me in second grade. MaryMac did everything right, I remember, and was always first in the class all the way through our school years. She was the first to win the city-wide spelling contest, the first to sell four hundred boxes of girl scout cookies and the first girl in seventh grade to qualify for a bra. Mrs. Dave tells me at that age such an honor was akin to being elected an amazon princess of the jungle with expectations of respect and obeisance from any other girl who still could still see her toes.

By the way, I wonder what Blandina Dudley Miller would have thought of having her family named school renamed after a southern black politician. Maybe she would have shrugged and gone on line to download rap music from Barnes and Noble.

[fiona]

Yes. I remember what she looked like. I later heard - and this is sad - that she lived along time in the Roosevelt Apts - and had a drinking problem. I have been in this neighborhood since 1975, off and on and there used to be a lot of gossip between a group that called itself "the lifers". Mostly consisting of some very old women - at least I though they were old- who met for coffee each morning in the Olbiston Lobby. They had a bench and chairs there and these women would come down on the elevator in their dressing gowns every morning about 8 AM. The last one of the group died last year in her apt on the first floor. She was over 100 years old. True or not, about the drinking, I don't know. I believe she died at the Saint Joseph nursing home around 1995. There were other notables also - a sub teacher called Mr. Coupe. He looked like he stepped right out of Charles Dickens. He was short and small with jet black hair and a little moustach. He wore a black suit that had seen better days and a string bowtie. We used to call him Coup de poop! Then there was another sub, he may have been Chinese- he was oriental - we called him Tokyo Joe. Does anyone remember Mrs George, the principal at Mary St. and then at Miller? She was tall with red hair and wicked buck teeth. Then there was Mrs or Miss Crow at Kemble. It didn't help that she was tall, thin and wore severe black widow's weeds. Her mission in life was to teach me to make an apron! I could knit , though, and I made a cover for a beer bottle, and called it a beer cozy. My mother didn't think it was funny, but Grandfar really like it.