Costs of Living

In 1925, JBT and her children arrived in Seattle via a California steamship. My infant grandmother had contracted mumps, and once she was out of quarantine they timed the trip to beat the second onslaught. Making their way to Everett, they were met by family members who had rented out an apartment near the family home, because WFT's father had never had mumps and my grandmother--and by association the rest of her travelling party--was contagious.

In 1925, not only were they able to rent out the apartment, but they were able to partially furnish it with the necessities of living until JBT could supply more furniture. This brings to light the stark differences in costs of living that has occurred over the last century.

Having just seen The Great Gatsby, the idea of the "Roaring Twenties" as a grandeur vision of wealth and everyday luxury is salient. So it's possible that there was simply enough extra money* to put someone else up for a summer in their own apartment. Let's take a look at some numbers:

The estimated annual wage was around $1,400.** A house cost the rough equivalent of 1 year's pay, but it could be less; a car took a quarter-year's salary. Tuition at UPenn was $300--less than the cost of the average car. In today's money, that would be about $4,000.

Contrast that to today, where the average salary is around $43,000. A house, at $275,000, is more than six years' pay. The price of cars hasn't inflated too much, at just 3/4 of a year's pay on average. Tuition at UPenn is $46,000, or more than an average year's pay. No wonder we're all in debt.

Today, the idea of renting out an apartment for your daughter-in-law and her contagious offspring for a few months would mean a grand gesture--the family would either have to be well-off, or really like that daughter-in-law. It would mean a cost of at least $2,000 in rent, plus at least $100-200 to furnish it with the necessities. Granted, the family who put JBT and her children up for the summer were retired, and perhaps a retired couple today would be better able to give that grand of a gesture.

Our society now finds itself in extraordinary amounts of debt. We are reminded of that every day, and when not being reminded of personal debt, we're being reminded that 1% of the country holds a really-really-high percentage of the nation's wealth, and even the middle class only holds a tiny portion of wealth. Today's inequalities in wealth distribution resemble that of the pre-crash era, but none of us are having nearly as much fun as they did.

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* "extra money" is a term used by my mother throughout my childhood to gently tell me she couldn't buy something; e.g. When I have extra money, you can have that Britney Spears CD.

** according to Paul F. Brissenden's
Earnings of Factory Workers, 1899 to 1927, Volume 10 (p.350)

An Exercise in Recreation

Christmas night in California: far from the white vista envisioned by Bing Crosby–a toasty 50 degrees in contrast to those cousins in the midwest. In Palo Alto, a young couple and their colleague gather in a living room. Julia returns from the kitchen with a plate, the smell of roasting turkey wafting in behind her. Mr. Atkinson sniffs deeply, inhaling the mouth-watering feast and longing for his knife and fork.

Julia Bell serves the coffee to her guests. The mixture of eggshell and grounds has been steeping since six yesterday evening. Her husband pauses before his first sip to enjoy its sweet scent. Like the rest of the feast on the table that night, she owes its success to the cookbook she received ten years ago, before she left her Texas kin for Stanford. Her mother left recipes inside, like hidden treasures strategically placed to combat bouts of homesickness.

Will Jr. opens his bleary eyes after a nap in his father's arms. He blinks at his parents' guest, who smiles at him and says, "Good evening." Will Jr. blinks, subconsciously making note of the singsong nature of the man's voice; the prosody, mimicking that of the Shakespearean plays he will read a decade or so down the road, helps his practicing babbles evolve into speech. He is six months old.

Will Jr. sits next to his wife, hands shaking as he cuts the Christmas roast delivered to him by a Sri Lankan woman. His baby brother sits at the other end of the table, simultaneously congratulating his brother's grand-daughter on her Harvard acceptance and telling her university is a waste of time and money. He recommends the public library as an alternative. Will Jr. struggles to unite fork and mouth; his degenerative disease making its presence painfully known. He is ninety-two years old.

The family of Will Jr. sits atop a mountain meadow in the Northwest Cascades. His namesake points out the mountain peak his father climbed before any other man, and another one he named. The future Harvard graduate listens, holding the urn containing her grandfather's ashes with care. They enjoy a meal in the springtime flowers, reminiscing about their patriarch before scattering the ashes of the man who loved mountains.

In 1915, Will Jr. giggles and points at the lighted candles adorning the table.

A Different World, Almost

... a small group of intellectually inclined gathered in one or another of their rooms in the Hall for argument and discussion of the deep questions that were disturbing the minds of the day, perhaps the most disturbing being Darwin and his theory of Evolution. This sort of debate was not considered the safest sport in the world at that time and some say they were labeled “agnostics.” A poem, called All Hail Millenuim in the same Tyee, suggests as do a picture of the Prexy with his big stick, and the “Press Club” and “Suppress Club” that even in those “good-old-days” the students harbored thoughts of protest. Just yesterday, November 20, 1968, news was carried over radio, and T.V. that the Supreme Court had handed down a decision that the State of Arkansas can not legally forbid the teaching of Evolution in its school children.

 It's crazy to think that just over 50 years ago, this theory of Darwin's was considered so controversial that it was an issue taken to the Supreme Court; that something that is essentially the basis of my university degree was once illegal to teach to children.

But it's really not so different from now, where the Supreme Court is looking at the for-now controversial issue of LGBT marriage rights.

Earlier in this account JBT talked about her husband, WFT's confirmation around the age of eighteen. His mother was offended when the church leadership suggested he was too inquisitive and that she should somehow put a stop to it. Maybe that sort of attitude about the Church is hereditary–JBT's daughter would later take my mom and her siblings out of church after an Easter service upset the children too much to enjoy the holiday. My mom thinks our family was only part of a church because it was socially unacceptable, until recently, not to be; our family has always been more on the side of science, when the two doctrines clash. JBT didn't say in this account, but I know that WFT's side in these Darwin debates was pro-evolutionary theory.

I enjoy the way JBT labels agnostic with quotation marks.

Foreword

My great-grandmother researched her husband's family history and compiled it all into an informative, yet personable, collection of family stories. These were typewritten by her and distributed to her children and grandchildren. My mom now has a few of these binders, some remaining in pristine condition as they went largely untouched and unappreciated. Finishing this project just years before her death in 1976, she would never see this work published beyond the few copies she made herself.

The first 57 pages of her 290-page collection deals with the distant and not-so-distant history of my  family, from the Dutchman who got his head blown off by a canon, to the English cousins whose correspondence ends shortly after the start of WWII: an eerie cliffhanger never resolved.

The children to whom my great-grandmother wrote these stories are now themselves almost gone: my grandmother and her brother, leaving her sister and another brother left. In the foreword to Part II of our history, she addresses each of her children--specifically, to her son who succumbed to Parkinson's disease five years ago.

In this letter, she speaks about memory; of the people who are already gone, and chillingly, she says, "Who will even be living a few years from now who will remember us or them?"

I'm converting stories, written by a woman who died before I was even an idea, into a technology she never lived to see; through her stories, I've developed the closest connection to extended family I've ever known. I've found myself starting to add comments into the word document. When she described her favourite picture of her husband, I asked her if that picture still exists. The "talk to the author" direction, of my high school history class' document analyses, is becoming a very literal practice.

I've decided to start this blog as a place to record and develop my reactions to these stories. Her vignettes are primary documents of historical events never available in high school textbooks. The reprinted letters from English cousins who decry Hitler, and refuse to seek refuge from the threat of war, give me incredible insight into the collective personality that is my family: "I am not going to run away from The Fuerer -- we haven’t the slightest intention of being beaten by any Nazis."