There are several bundles of checks, check stubs, and bank statements with cancelled checks among Esther’s letters. There was also a tiny bank book. It looks like the account was opened in 1919 and was used until 1923, which would have spanned the years Esther was in school at Indiana University.
I really need to get back to working on Esther’s letters, if for no other reason than that I haven’t read ahead, and I’m starting to get curious about what happens next. But, for now, here’s a scan from one of her three gradebooks. I do know that she taught high school and middle school for a few years between finishing college and getting married. Somewhere in the boxes of stuff, there are also her teaching certificates (complete with grades on her exams), check stubs and bank statements, and various other official stuff. It’s going to take me years to get through it all.
To give an idea of the quantity of information I need to process, it came in a 20 x 12 x 12 inch crate, and it was packed solid and filled to the top. That’s a whole lotta letters, and I’m maybe 1/3 through them, not including the non-letter ephemera.
Esther Munro (left) and Edith Kilbury (right), photo courtesy of Cheryl Ford
Cheryl found the photo in an old book, and went Googling for the names on it. She found my website and e-mailed me a scan of the photo. It’s of Esther and her aunt Edith, taken in Piper City, Illinois.
I spent some time last night scanning old letters and transcribing a few more new ones. In this installment, we have a family weigh-in and hatching baby chicks, courtesy of Ruth, and preparations for younger brother Clark to drive down to Bloomington in the family’s Ford to pick up Esther at the end of the school year. Also, more allusions to the rift between the Munro and Glendening families, in the form of Mamma telling Clark to tell Esther not to offer the Glendening girls a ride back to Geneva. Curiouser and curiouser!
I’ve scanned a few more letters that had already been transcribed, and transcribed and scanned a few new ones. There’s one from her father. His letters are short and sweet and sporadic, but they always make me smile. I picture him as a frugal sort, because he always tears away the unused portion of the page. All his letters have a ragged bottom edge. Now that the younger kids are out of school, the letters from Esther’s sister Ruth have picked up in frequency. She was a bright, bubbly girl. I think her letters must give a realistic glimpse into what the Munro household was like.
The whole uploading process has been maddening, though, and has taken me most of the afternoon. My internet connection is topping out at a blazing 7 Kbs/sec, and dipping down below 2 Kbs/sec at times. I’m really fed up with the lack of connectivity in the hinterlands. It seems to me that giving rural folks reasonable access to Teh Internets–and by reasonable, I don’t mean anything extravagant–would be something the powers that be might want to work on, but apparently it has not been, and I suspect will not be, any sort of a priority. It’s difficult enough to make AT&T/SBC provide minimal quality for standard phone service. They can’t be arsed to do anything above and beyond that.
Other than that, it’s been nice and quiet this weekend. I managed to finish mowing the, ahem, “yard,” which was some sort of Herculean task. Between one thing and another, I hadn’t mowed in nearly a month, so the grass was thigh-high in some spots. I had to pop a wheelie with the mower for the first pass, then take a couple more passes. And that was on the highest setting. It looks just awful, too, like someone cut it with a butter knife, or maybe a pair of those blunt lefty scissors from kindergarten. Later in the week, I’ll have to go over it again, on a lower setting, to even it up. I’m sure it’s annoying the crap out of my neighbors. Heh. On second thought, maybe I’ll leave it looking scraggly.
I’ve added eight new letters to Esther.
Even though it’s been warm out today, I decided to turn on the oven and make roasted vegetables for supper. They smell really good, especially the onions. I put them on the bottom, so they should get nice and caramelized. Mmmm, Caramelite Nunions.
And now for a wee rant about Netflix. I’ve been a member for, oh, three years or so now. I’ve always been pretty happy with their service. The turn-around has been speedy and there have been relatively few bad discs or mailing mistakes. Over the past couple of months, though, the quality of service has nose-dived. About half the discs I’ve gotten have been scratched, a few were broken or scratched so badly I had to return them for replacements. The turn-around time has increased, too. The kicker, though, is that twice now, they have decided to send me random discs from way down on my queue. Today, I got two notices that they were mailing discs that had been at #26 and 27. Now, that wouldn’t have been a huge deal, except that I’m watching a series and I’d kinda like to see it in chronological order. I can’t figure out why they changed my queue order, because discs #1-25 were showing as available now. There should have been no wait, and therefore no reason to monkey with the natural order of things. It seems to me, if they are going to pick random discs, that there’s not much point in having an ordered queue.
But, the icing on the cake is that there appears to be no way to complain about this new queue reordering habit they’ve developed. I looked at the “report a problem” page, and while there is an option for “received wrong disc,” that doesn’t really apply. It’s not the wrong disc, exactly; it’s just out of order. So, I went to their “suggestions” form and sent them a piece of my mind (cuz I’ve got so much to spare, dontchaknow?). Not that that’ll do any good, because there’s a big, fat warning that complaints about account-specific problems will not be entertained via that avenue.
I think, when I move, I’m going to ditch Netflix and get basic cable. Which is sad, because for three years I’ve been a very happy Netflix customer.
I’ve had a lazy day today. It stormed last night and has been raining on and off all day long. Days like this make me sleepy and amotivated, so I ended up taking three–three!–naps. I’m blaming it on Pandora. Cats have a magical power whereby they climb into your lap and suck the wakefulness right out of you. They are a sleep hazard.
I did manage to transcribe and scan a few more Letters to Esther this evening. I figured, if I was going to sit on my ass, I may as well try to accomplish something at the same time. I’m glad I did, because a couple of letters from Esther’s mother and brother contained clues to the break-up with Richard. After an enigmatic exchange, the letters from Richard abruptly ended, and, as far as I can tell, do not resume. After years of correspondence and apparent affection on the parts of both of them, it seemed sad that they should part on bad terms. Sadder still–for me–was realizing that I might not ever know what happened.
Well, it seems as if Richard wanted his cake and to eat it, too. He was happy to flirt with Esther, so he obviously felt some affection for her, but he was unwilling to admit to it, insisting that he had no special feelings for her and that she should have none for him, either. Hmmm.
It will be interesting to see what happens next. Esther will soon be returning home for the summer, so the letters will slow down considerably. In the fall, her brother Clark will begin attending Purdue University, and there is a large amount of correspondence from him. He’s a smart, funny kid, so I’m looking forward to getting to know him better.
I spent some time this afternoon transcribing and scanning a few more letters. Things have gotten a little testy between Esther and Richard. I really wish there were rough drafts of her replies included in these letters, because I’d love to know what she wrote to him. The letters from Richard stopped soon after, and it would be nice to know why. It’s getting toward the end of the school year for both of them, so I expect that whatever came between them was resolved over the summer break, and that we will never know what happened.
I spent the afternoon transcribing and scanning a new batch of letters from late March 1920.
The letters from March 28 and March 29 include descriptions from Esther’s mother, father, and sister of the first Palm Sunday tornado outbreak, which fascinated me. Storms, especially tornadoes, are terrifying. I did some Googling, and 39 people died in Indiana during that particular outbreak. More than 150 people were killed by tornadoes in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia.
I’ve transcribed and scanned a few more letters.
There was an outbreak of diphtheria in the spring of 1920, and the March 14 letter from Esther’s mother shows her concern for her children’s well being as well as sadness at the death of a local child from the disease. That, and her description of how much Ruth misses her big sister are awfully sweet.
red paper boat 