Category: Letters to Esther

Letters to Esther

New Letters to Esther

Shelly

The letters from Warren and Lloyd, Esther’s little brothers, cracked me up. Warren’s letter is very obviously from a little kid, and Lloyd’s closing could not be more underwhelming. I literally laughed out loud when I read it.

October 23, 1921 from Bertha Hiatt
October 23, 1921 from Mamma
October 23, 1921 from Lloyd
October 30, 1921 from Mamma
November 1, 1921 from Warren
November 2, 1921 from Mamma
November 3, 1921 from Clark

Letters to Esther

And More Letters to Esther

Shelly

I did a few more letters this afternoon. The one from Josephine cracked me up. She spent the whole letter complaining that she was too busy to be messing around with letter writing. Etiquette fail! The one from Fred Reffe is kind of interesting, too. I guess Esther told him it was okay to write to her. He’s kind of a pompous ass, though, and I’d be a little concerned if I didn’t already know that it doesn’t really go anywhere.

October 19, 1921 from Clark
October 21, 1921 from Mamma
October 23, 1921 from Josephine Martin
October 23, 1921 from Fred A. Reffe

Just to show why it takes so long to transcribe some of the letters, here’s a page from the most recent one from Esther’s mother. It was written in pencil–now faded–on what looks like paper from a school exercise book. The paper is pulpy and has darkened so much that it’s almost the same shade as the pencil. When the foreground and background values are so similar, it’s almost impossible to Photoshop it into submission.

Mostly, though, I just wanted to share the little drawing. I think it’s pretty wonderful how much the family relies on the older kids’ input on stuff like their on-going home renovation.

1921-10-21p1

Ladybusiness, Letters to Esther

New Letters to Esther

Shelly

I did a ton of scanning and transcribing today. The one from Luella is quite long, and once again, she manages to work some prime patriarchy blaming into it. The later letters from Esther’s mother are full of concern, because Esther is apparently suffering from appendicitis. And, a new potential suitor! Mr. Reffe writes to Esther, to ask if he may correspond with her, and in doing so, mentions Esther’s old beau Richard. It’ll be interesting to see if that goes anywhere.

September 22, 1921 from Ruth, Mamma, and Warren
September 23, 1921 from Mamma
September 24, 1921 from Clark
September 26, 1921 from Clark
October 2, 1921 from Mamma
October 2, 1921 from Fred A. Reffe
October 3, 1921 from Clark
October 5, 1921 from Mamma
October 5, 1921 from Mamma
October 7, 1921 from Mamma
October 9, 1921 from Mamma
October 12, 1921 from Luella Glendening
October 14, 1921 from Clark
October 16, 1921 from Mamma

Crankypantsing, Letters to Esther, Meta

New Letters to Esther

Shelly

Three new letters. It’s been awhile since I’ve done any new letters, but I had to wait until I got a new scanner. Which I have. And which is zippy and super neato-nifty! It may, in fact, be too much scanner for me.

September 22, 1921 from Bertha
September 22, 1921 from Luella Glendening
September 24, 1921 from Mrs. Craig to Miss Hiatt

The letter from Luella is long, but there is an interesting (to me, anyway) bit toward the end about evangelical preachers and how they seem to always target women. A nice little bit of patriarchy blaming.

Also! And this is way more exciting to me than new scanners. I had to upgrade the Esther blog, onna counta some of the files were corrupted (or it was hacked?). So, I took a deep breath, bit the bullet, and upgraded. It did not take the five minutes promised by the good, delusional folks at WordPress, but at about 20 minutes, the ordeal was not so much of an ordeal. In fact, it was downright easy, with no broken databases! This means that I may (may!) soon feel up to the challenge of upgrading this blog. Not today, though. I have a headache and that might actually cause my brain to implodiate.

ETA 13 Jul 2009:

Well scratch that! It seems like the Esther blog has mysteriously gone dead (“Error establishing a database connection”). I looked at the database, and it has the same error that this one did (duplicate key in the comments_approved table). I don’t know enough about MySQL databases or about interpreting error logs to know whether or not that’s the problem, and right now, it’s not a priority, so I’m not going to waste a lot of time messing with it. But, what I am is worried about that the fact that it was working fine after upgrading, and then it became corrupted. Does this mean that, if I do succeed in upgrading the main blog, that it will then become corrupted, too? What a pain in the ass!

ETA 18 Jul 2009:

I went ahead and ditched the Esther blog, and just pointed all the “What’s New” links to the Esther category here. I don’t know why on earth I didn’t think of that in the first place!