Introduction

Introduction

While I was born in 1951, sometimes I feel like I was born in 1914. My father told me so many stories about growing up in Philadelphia, and occasionally even about his family, that I feel some sense of at least one person's life in those years before I was born. While my mother, of course, wanted a child, I'm not sure that my father did. I think there was a part of it all that scared him, so they waited quite a while to have me. I hope I was "a relief" to my father, and I think I worked hard to be a good son. Looking back, especially at those few older pictures I have of my father, I think the very best part of his life was the first half - back when things were simple, he had good friends, and the burdens of adulthood were not yet upon him. Looking back, I feel like the best part of my life was the first half, largely due to my parents. It was a time when life was simple, controllable, and when I was actually organized! I'm sure my father found many good things in his entire life, as do I, but I believe we had this in common - that there is nothing better than growing up in Philadelphia. So, do not find the title of my new blog in any way depressing, my friends, its just a perspective that I've found interesting to investigate.

I'll start by writing about my family. I realize we are nothing special, but as we've learned from millions of pages of memoirs written and published, there can be much to be learned from those who came before us.

As I get past some family stories, this blog may be of interest to anyone who grew up in the Delaware Valley/Philadelphia/Delaware County in the 1950's and 60's, or to anyone married/partnered to one (if you are, there is much you need to understand before the two of you can communicate!).

Please check out my book, Saturday Night at Sarah Joy's. All proceeds go to the Hurricane Sandy NJ Relief Fund. Information is available at: saturdaynightatsarahjoys.blogspot.com.

Thank you!

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Photomining at Dan's


I was very fortunate to live on a street that had a corner store.  It was officially called McCloskey's, but everyone called it Dan's.  Dan had a permanent grouchy look on his face, whenever a kid came in.  We'd usually be there to bring a soda bottle back (and get two cents) so we could buy some penny candy, but I would often be there to get milk or cigarettes for a neighbor lady.  I don't think he made a lot selling me penny candy, but it was a very interesting little store.  For a building about the size of a row house it seemed to have just about everything.  Of course, the oven cleaner sat on the shelf next to the candy, but they used every inch of space. What I remember most is the density of the store. Dan's was a functional, practical use of space.  Dan had no interest in flash or packaging, only function.  And to serve as a corner store for us, he stocked as much as he could in the space he had.

Confession time.  When I was in high school on the yearbook staff they had in their files a "professional photo" of Dan's.  Probably they had an ad in the back of a yearbook one year.  I loved the photo, and it was unlikely that it would ever be used again, so somehow (the past is so fuzzy to me now) I ended up with it.  I used to occasionally look at it with my mother's magnifying glass, to remind me of the place.  Then technology came along, and eventually I had the capability for digitally scanning the image.  Scanning, then taking time to zoom in on parts of a picture, sometimes sharpening or otherwise modifying, can be great fun.  This picture is a perfect example, because it is jam-packed with details and memories.  I call the process photomining.  There are lots of pictures you could do this with - perhaps scan an old family photo and zoom in to get a good picture of the broach that your Aunt always used to wear, or to see if Grandma and Grandpa really were holding hands in that crowd. 

Personally, I use iPhoto for my photomining, and I can show you some examples of how this really takes me back, right back into the store that I had been in so many times as a kid.

(keep in mind that this was a professional photograph, so I had good resolution to begin with, which certainly helps when you are creating a digital image from an old photo for exploring)

So here it is - welcome to Dan's.  Time to start looking around.

This part of the picture shows the boxes of candy on Dan's left, and the shelf below, which held cleaning products such as Lifebuoy soap and spray starch.  You could get paper sheets of candy buttons, licorice rope twists, twizzlers, and small boxes of salt-covered pumpkin seeds. 


The ice cream sign lists more than 25 different kinds of ice cream - they were all behind the counter in a freezer. 


Below the ice cream flavors, the shelves are packed with cigars such as Dutch Masters and Phillies Blunts, Tips, and Cheeroots.  There are 39 cent pens, and candy bars below the smokes, and candy bars - Mounds, Almond Joys, Good & Plenties, Fifth Avenue bars and Baby Ruth's! I'd forgotten what some of the old packaging looked like!


Dan kept a close eye on the cigarettes.  It wasn't until I started photomining that I realized he sold Mrs. Paul's fish sticks!  I wish we'd known.


The ability to work with a digital version of an old photograph can really open up some opportunities.  The more complicated the better!

© 2012 John Allison
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The Collector

As a kid, I collected things.  Of course, Philadelphia was the best possible place to be a kid collector.  Lots of kids across the country collected coins "back then", but we had The Mint - the ultimate coin shopping store. My Uncle Charlie turned me on to coin collecting when he gave me some partially filled "books" of pennies.  He had one book with spots for all of the indian head pennies in it, and the flying eagle pennies that were used a few years before the indian heads came out.  It was probably half full.  What a great start to collecting!  My Uncle Herb introduced me to proof sets, which I would order, and still do, from the mint every year. 

Lots of kids collected stamps.  We probably all started by just being excited to get as many stamps as we could.  My Aunt Helen would always send me an envelope of stamps she'd pulled off of a summer's worth of postcards that she'd gotten from friends who were traveling around the world.  I think most of my friends decided to focus on US stamps, since the entire world made too many to keep track of.  I also collected stamps from the UN - again a place that was just a train ride away - where we would occasionally go stamp shopping.  I thought one of the best Philly perks for young stamp collectors was the Philatelic counter at Wanamakers.  You could buy nice albums there, get new pages every year, and the guy behind the counter actually talked to kids.   (For the record, stamps are things that you would lick and put onto a letter.  The US doesn't make stamps any more as far as I'm concerned.)

I collected cards.  It seems like baseball cards were probably first to appear, followed by football cards.  Then there was a card explosion!  Too many to keep track of!  I have cards dating back to the 1950's that were probably worth something at one time, but that time has come and gone.  Good thing.  I remember having the Micky Mantle card, the Roger Marris card, all the greats of the time, and I also remember trading them all away (for Phillies cards, of course!  It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I'll share with you some of the bubble gum cards/trading cards that I used to collect and of course still have.  Again, there was no better place to collect than in Philadelphia.  Fleer, the company who made a number of sports and non-sports trading cards, was headquartered in Philadelphia, as was Bowman Gum, who made cards through 1956 before selling out to The Topps Company.  Topps did have a plant in Dureya, PA (near Scranton), with headquarters in Manhattan.  To give you some idea of why the Philadelphia area was a great place for a kid to grow up - when the Beatles became hot, Topps put out several sets of Beatles cards.  There were three black and white series (each containing about 60 cards), and a color series (64) cards, which all came out in 1964.  I remember this well because I went to visit a school mate, Alan, one day, and his mother, who apparently worked for Topps, gave me a complete set of color Beatles cards!  A complete set!  She just handed them to me like they weren't the coolest things in the entire world.  Life for a kid collector in Philadelphia was excellent!

Here are some cards representative of those in my collection:


Fronts and backs of some of my 1961 Topps Baseball Cards
I traded away everything except for Phillies Cards!

The top card is from the First Topps Beatles Series, card number 44.
The second is from the color series, card number 28.
The third is from a series devoted to James Bond movies.
The backs of the three cards shown above are shown here
Early Beatle Cards just had numbers on the back
Color Beatles cards had fun information
A football card from 1962
A "Space Card"
A card from the series on the Civil War

The backs of these cards
All the stats you'd want on a football team
Space facts - sorry, it was glued into a book!
Information on the backs of all of the civil war
cards were like little newspaper headlines
Spook Stories had photos from movies
and TV shows (with joke captions)
A set of cards was dedicate to one TV show,
the Outer Limits
There were even cards dedicated to
Gomer Pyle
mostly with scenes from the TV show
Gomer Pyle USMC


Card backs
Some had jokes
Some had information on the
front picture
Some had dialog to go with
the still
There was no shortage of great card series to collect, and this trend continues today.  However, it was a special time in the 60's when card manufacturers first ventured beyond sports cards.  And it happened right here in Philadelphia, of course.

© 2012 John Allison
Note Added:  I can't believe that I didn't comment on how collecting changed my life!  Let me do that here:

I was very, very lucky because early in life I learned to pay attention to the things around me and to try and integrate new facts into how I thought about how the world worked.  Honestly!


It all goes back to collecting stamps, probably.  Some stamps were just, to me, too cool, but to collect them, you need to look at them, read them, get them in your head, so you can explain which one you might want next.  You want to look at them.  Little works of art they were.

More and more it started happening.  "What is the name of the queen who sent Columbus on his exploration?"  a teacher asked.  Well a set of stamps from 1892, the Columbian Exposition stamps,  had a $1 stamp showing Queen Isabella "pledging her jewels" it said.   From stamps, I knew something!  It felt good, and it happened over and over.


My personal favorite of US stamps was the Project Mercury stamp - a space capsule over the earth - a 4 cent stamp printed in 1963.  When a question came up in science about space travel, I knew the date.  I knew the project name.  I had information.  Others didn't.  Suddenly it felt like I wasn't so dumb anymore.

I was interviewing to be an assistant professor at MSU and someone asked me if I understood what it meant to be at a land grant college.  I hadn't touched my stamps for years but I remembered a green 3 cent stamp from 1955 celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the first land grant colleges - Michigan State and Penn State.  I could make an intelligent comment.  I knew dates and places.  It was because of all the hours I spent with my collections, enjoying them.


Aunt and uncles (and sometimes their friends) occasionally would bring coins back for me from vacations overseas.  The coins from England were confusing but heavy and cool.  They started out with a system of shillings, soverigns, and guineas.  In 1971 they introduced the new pence (100 new pence = 1 pound).  I read about it all in a coin magazine (being a good little nerd), and I had some new and some old.

I actually had the opportunity to travel to England a few times.  When I was there, many new and old coins were in circulation, which really confused tourists.  I understood, so nobody in my group would buy anything without consulting with me.  I liked it.  

I've also been able to answer questions about where money was minted because I had spent so much time looking at US coins with mint marks  (no mark for Philadelphia, D for Denver, S for San Francisco (SF?) and CC for Carson City).


So I had a very special context in approaching college.  Some classes were more relevant than others, but I got used to listening,  retaining, trying to remember.  I took lots of notes, read through them at the end of the day, and knew stuff.  Preparing for tests wasn't so hard.  It felt good.  Knowing facts felt good, and I had many free opportunities to learn things through my collections.  I still haven't used any of the information in my brain that I learned from my Gomer Pyle USMC cards, but you just never know!  My time will come.


 © 2012 John Allison
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