The Last Newspaper. Blogger Gary Goldhammer’s take on the demise of the newspaper. Did the transition from stories to content hasten the decline?
A Day in the Internet. Lots of fun facts about what happens in 24 hours in cyberspace.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Winter got you down? If you live in a four-seasons part of the United States, your answer may very well be yes.
Here in Central Iowa, we’re not even through January and we’ve already received more snow than we would normally expect in a full winter season. And that’s on top of bone-numbing cold, ice storms and a persistent fog on those rare occasions when the temperature creeps above freezing. The sun has been pretty much a no-show except on the coldest of days.
One way to ward off the cabin fever that ultimately engulfs those who are housebound for extended periods of time is to start a family history project or work on your existing one. Here are a few things you can do besides watching TV or tripping through cyberspace:
Organize your e-mails. That means working your way through your inbox, tossing those messages that you no longer need and responding to those that call for a reply. Save only those messages that are absolutely necessary and put them in a folder that you will check. Be ruthless.
Manage your computer files. Take the same approach with your electronic filing system. You most likely have items there that have outlived their usefulness or weren’t that important in the first place. If you haven’t used something in the past year, it’s a good candidate for the trash bin.
Sort your stuff. From file cabinets to photos, it’s time to whittle down to just what you need. If you have family photos that you don’t really need, consider sharing with other family members.
Back up your data. What! You haven’t done this yet? Better get with it.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
If you’re not familiar with the term yet, you’d better gear up. It will be in the news all week as it’s reported to be the centerpiece of President Obama’s State of the Union address on Wednesday.
Simply put, the term refers to anyone who is caring for their elderly parents and their own children at the same time. While some demographers question the validity of the term itself, it is commonly believed that more people are suffering from this familial burden than at any other time in history.
There are plenty of factors that support this belief – elders living longer, couples delaying having children, the erosion of middle-class buying power – but the truth is that so-called “sandwich generations” have been around for virtually all of recorded history.
Three- (or four-) generation households were common just a generation or two ago. Children of those extended families gained valuable knowledge on dealing with elders as they went through the aging process under the same roof.
There is nothing unique about the concept of a sandwich generation, though it may be true that the pressures of modern American life have raised the anxiety level to unprecedented heights. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Dr. Edward T. Creagan of the Mayo Clinic gives some advice on how to deal with the stress of the situation. Read the comments, too, to see how others are coping. If financial matters are causing the stress, consider these tips from Laura Rossman.
Writing prompt for the day: Write about how your ancestors have dealt with the sandwich generation phenomenon.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
In my family, I’m something of a rarity – I get my hair cut at a barber shop.
As I recall, neither of my sons have set foot in an honest-to-goodness barber shop. I’ve tried from time to time over the years to lure them into my barber’s shop, but they have a preference for those hair salons that have popped up the past few decades. Such a shame.
When I was a kid, most of my haircuts took place in our basement with one of my parents wielding the clippers. This was a far cry from the comfy big leather chairs that my father undoubtedly enjoyed for himself. I realized what I was missing when I started to pay for my own haircuts, at just about the time I started college.
Since I was on a budget, I opted for a barber school in downtown Omaha. The price was right and they wouldn’t let you out of the place until your hair was inspected by the head instructor, a tight-lipped, straight-backed young man with sculpted hair who preferred nodding and pointing to actual conversation and smelled of Sen-Sen.
I eventually graduated to a two-chair shop in my neighborhood, where they actually trimmed nose and ear hair and eyebrows. They even applied a hot lather with a soft badger shaving brush and used a straight razor to block the back and trim your sideburns. It was heaven.
It’s no wonder that the shops were full on Saturdays with older men who appreciated the personalized service and lively banter among friends while dropping in for a "high and tight" or "three-finger fade." The smells of talc and bay rum mingled with Jeri’s Hair Tonic and Pinaud and Clubman toiletries to create an intoxicating atmosphere.
For a time in the 1970s I briefly strayed to a hair stylist. It was a two-seat shop that required at least a few hours notice. Despite the higher prices and shelves lined with fancy shampoos, conditioners and pomade, it was still basically a barber shop with an appointment book.
When I moved to Des Moines nearly 30 years ago, I found a simple barber shop, one with a candy cane pole beside the front door. It’s now a two-generation family shop boasting pictures of dad giving junior his first haircut and junior trimming up pop in his first professional gig.
There’s always a pot of coffee brewing with complimentary doughnuts or cookies in plain view. Most of the customers know each other and conversation flows freely. The reading material is more current and topical than your typical doctor’s office and the TV is fed by satellite, including all day games of the locally popular Chicago Cubs.
Who could ask for anything more?
Writing prompt for the day: Are there any hair-cutting stories in your family history?
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting recently:
Ordinary Men, Extraordinary History. They made beds and cleaned toilets. They shined shoes, dusted jackets, cooked meals and washed dishes. Yet the Pullman porters created history in the face of adversity and racial prejudice. Great video and links from the folks at AARP.
Green Is the Way to Go. That’s the tagline for Creative Coffins which claims it can “provide a green solution for a distinctive funeral.” Check it out.
Venues Collect and Share Stories for Myriad Purposes. Got a family history story you want to share or would you just like to read someone else’s story? This list of online sites by Kathy Hansen may be just the ticket for you.
The World’s Greatest LP Album Covers. If you miss vinyl records, you probably miss their great artwork, too. Thanks to this site by Matt & Tony, you can relive those glorious days when an album’s design often overshadowed the music inside.
21 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade. Do you still have a landline telephone? Compact discs? If so, you may be surprised to know that you’re living in the past. This list shows how quickly innovation can be transformed into yesterday’s news. Remember the Walkman?
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
One of the great joys in researching a family history is the unexpected find. Usually this comes in the form of a photo album, scrapbook, journal or box of documents that we stumble upon, something that adds depth and breadth to our work.
Imagine, then, the joy at Haas Library at Western Connecticut State University. Brian Stevens, the university's special collections librarian and archivist. Stevens recently retrieved 67 boxes of books about Connecticut from the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Historical Society.
The Brooklyn Society, which was founded in the 1860s, has begun weeding its collection to focus on Brooklyn, Long Island, and other parts of New York.
"It's nice to have,'' Stevens told Eileen FitzGerald of the Danbury News Times. "All of this Connecticut material previously was invisible in Brooklyn, and now it is in a local collection in Connecticut, where it can be used."
Once the material is catalogued, it will doubtless be a great resource for the people of Danbury and Connecticut. But I have great empathy for those who did research in Connecticut while such a valuable cache of information sat in a library in another state.
This is one of the frustrating parts of researching family history – you never really know where you’ll find information that can push your project to another level. This is true in families as well as institutions. Do you really know where your own family information is? You might be surprised.
Writing prompt for the day: Survey your own family members to try to determine what family information they have and will share with you.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting recently:
Volcanoes, 9-11, and Personal History. This post by fellow personal historian Dawn Thurston is a good reminder that personal history does not occur in a vacuum. All the pieces fit in a more relevant manner when family history is presented in a broader historical context.
210-year-old Irish immigrant's grave uncovered in New York park. For 210 years the body of 28-year-old County Kildare native James Jackson, a young Irish immigrant, has lain undisturbed in the center of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. But as park workers dug below Washington Square they revealed his gravestone, a three foot sandstone tablet buried so long ago that it’s a wonder the writing on his headstone is still so clear. Thanks to Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak for pointing me to this fascinating story.
New 'Antiquity' fragrances based on DNA of dead celebs. A Beverly Hills company is formulating a line of "Antiquity" fragrances based on the DNA of dead celebrities including Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson - even Richard Nixon. Weird, huh?
Days With My Father. An absolutely mesmerizing photo tribute to his father by Philip Toledano.
United Breaks Guitars. I find air travel to be an increasingly frustrating, unnatural and unsatisfying mode of transportation. Therefore, I’m pleased to share this video by Dave Carroll that has something of a happy ending. Here’s the story behind the video.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Funerals are such bittersweet events. The bitter, of course, comes from the loss of a loved one, dear friend or even the most casual of acquaintances. The loss is tempered, though, by the celebration of the life of the departed.
My family went through the experience this week as we honored the matriarch of my wife’s family – her mother, Rose Hayes. While we’ll all miss Rose greatly, we were also reminded of how much joy she brought to others in her 90 years.
Stories about Rose and her family flowed freely as relatives and friends gathered from across the country to say goodbye. Besides the stories familiar to so many of us, many others had been long forgotten or seldom told in recent years. The sharing of so much family history was a powerful tribute to a strong lady.
Our family was, perhaps, better prepared than most in that we had prodded Rose for much of her family history in recent years. Still, it was sadly obvious that we had lost more than her generous heart and radiant smile.
Although Rose’s material world had shrunk greatly as she transitioned from a three-bedroom house to apartment to assisted living to nursing care over the past dozen years, she still left a sizable cache of personal drawings, writings and photographs.
While we are grateful for the family history bounty she has left us, I have a few suggestions regarding family photographs that you might find helpful:
Label them. At the very least, put a date on them and identify the people in the photo. Listing the location and event is also helpful.
Don’t bury the information. Rose did a great job of labeling most of her photos. But she then glued them into a photo album, making it very difficult to extract them with the information on the back readable.
Don’t use terms like mom and dad. Use their names instead. Relationships won’t be that clear to future generations.
One final suggestion: if you regard something as important, make certain your family knows about it. Many important family items end up in the trash simply because they are not recognized.
Writing prompt for the day: Do you have your family photos organized and clearly labeled?
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
It started with a dance, probably at Sokol Hall in South Omaha. It was probably a polka, but it may have been a waltz, fox trot or two-step.
Whatever the dance, “sparks flew and it was truly love at first sight.”
That’s the way Rose Mary Kastl Hayes remembered her first meeting with her eventual husband John Hayes nearly 70 years ago. But Rose’s family didn’t see her beloved Johnny quite the same way.
The Kastl clan, descendants of Czech immigrants, thought John, a born-in-Chicago son of a union strikebreaker, was a bit on the rowdy side. Nevertheless, after Rose and John, by then an Army private, were wed on March 15, 1944, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the family eventually came to accept the union.
Within a year, her first child, Samuel John, was born. A second child, Linda Mary, would follow three years later, setting her course for the most important role of her life – raising her family.
The youngest of seven children, Rose’s father was 49 years old when she was born. Her youngest sibling at the time was 13 and her only sister, Sophie, was 17. She adored her father, who included young Rose in the family’s Depression-era wine-making – from picking the grapes to corking the bottles. Much of Rose’s care as a young girl was assigned to Sophie.
A shy girl, Rose saw her mother as old-fashioned and too set in her Czech ways. Nevertheless, Rose learned to become an excellent cook from her mother and later attended class to better understand the Czech language. As a young student in Catholic schools, however, Rose admitted in later years that she felt inferior to her wealthier classmates.
That feeling of inferiority faded a bit after a teacher in her final year of high school remarked that it was too bad she wasn’t going to college because she was such a good writer. Drawings from her school years showed that Rose had artistic talent, too.
Rose worked at several jobs as a young woman, including clerking in a dime store and desk work for one of Omaha’s many insurance companies. But she gave it all up to be a full-time mother to Sam and Linda.
Besides taking an active role – including president of the PTA – at her children’s schools, Rose vowed that her kids would never have reason to feel inferior to any other children. As she and John traveled their nearly 51-year life journey together, Rose knew that despite persistent financial and health struggles, there was plenty of opportunity for young families.
She took her kids on streetcars and buses to attractions everywhere in Omaha, including parks, libraries, museums and art centers, all within her limited family budget. The family almost always found a way to enjoy a family vacation in the summer, too – from visiting Mount Rushmore to lengthier jaunts to visit friends in Florida.
She saved pennies in a small bank to make certain her kids received a good Catholic education, including high school at Omaha’s Bishop Ryan High School. She was exceptionally proud that Sam and Linda graduated from college, found work and married. They produced six grandkids – all college graduates – and two great-grandchildren.
Through the years, John remained the driving force in her life. John and Rose found time in their retirement years to visit Las Vegas 27 times before John died in 1995.
Health issues forced Rose from the home she and John shared for their entire married life, and she lived in a succession of apartments before liver failure sent her to Hospice House in Omaha just before Thanksgiving.
After John’s death, Rose admitted that losing family members and friends as she aged was difficult for her. Of death she said, “The older you get, the more you welcome it.”
At one particularly low point, she questioned why she had lived so long when she could no longer do things to help other people. Then, after thinking about that for a while, it came to her. She lit into a smile.
God kept her alive because so many people could see she needed help and they stopped to help her, she explained. Her purpose, then, was to make other people better because they took the time to be kind.
Rose died on Dec. 31. As the family gathers for final farewells this week, they can take comfort in knowing that Rose and her beloved Johnny are dancing together again.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand --Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Photo: In April 1943, John Hayes was a 31-year-old enlisted man in the United States Army. Rose Kastl was a 23-year-old from Omaha, the same hometown as John. A year before they married in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, they enjoyed some time together in San Antonio, Texas, where an unknown photographer snapped this photo of them holding hands while walking down a San Antonio street.