Sepia Saturday: Private Life, Family Life

(Our contribution to Sepia Saturday. Check the others here.)

This week I finished Jane Smiley's great new novel Private Life. Besides being a compellingly written story, I was struck by how the life of its central character Margaret Mayfield could have been any number of my female ancestors. Moving from Missouri to California, she suppresses her own aspirations and dreams in order to be a dutiful wife.
In a recent interview, Smiley mentioned that the story was inspired in part by a distant relative she knew little about and ended up inventing her fictional character from that base. I've said more than once that some of the most fascinating family photos are of those I never met and knew little about.

Born in 1874, Lulie Ann Fleming was the youngest of the nine sisters of my great-grandmother Eva Bell whom I chronicled in this post.
Like Margaret Mayfield, she married at 27 in 1901. In that era, I am sure that her family worried that she was on the road to be an old maid. Seen here with her husband Charlie on their wedding day, I can imagine the guests whispering "I was beginning to wonder if it would ever happen," as she walked down the aisles. I am always drawn to the hankie delicately placed in her lap.Although they lived in Kansas, not Missouri, Charlie and Lulie left for California sometime during World War I. I am sure that this was devastating to my great-grandmother since she had no other family there, all the other siblings still in Quebec. This shot is of Charlie on the Kansas farm sometime before their departure to California.
Taken in 1911, this shot shows four of their six children, including the youngest, Bessie, and Lulie's parents Spencer and Elizabeth visiting from Montreal. One son died as an infant, and another was on its way.

This final shot is from 1948 at Knott's Berry farm with Bessie and Lulie. Notice that nearly five decades after her wedding, she still had a hankie in her lap. Having been born in the days of horse drawn wagons as the main means of transport and much of the American west still a frontier, Lulie must have found it bemusing to pose for this re-enactment of it.

Looking at the photos of Lulie, I see so many familiar aspects of her face that remind me of the women in my family -- especially the position of the nose above the mouth. Seeing just that portion of her face, I could think it was my mother, sister, niece, aunt, grandmother and other women in the family. I can even see a bit of it in my own face.

I have never met any of Lulie's offspring, those surviving likely being fourth, fifth or sixth cousins. But I am curious where they are in California, if our paths may have crossed without us knowing it. I know that having these photos of Lulie was a great comfort to my great-grandmother who felt so alone in Kansas, and it is intriguing to look back at them and try to guess the fuller story.

Sepia Saturday: The Merging of Fact and Fiction

(Our latest participation in Sepia Saturdays.
Be sure to check the link to other great posts.)

How much of our family history is fact, legend or pure fiction? I've learned that mine is a pretty wild mix of all of that, and some of the "narrators" of our family's journey have been of varying reliability. Yet, I know that there is some truth embedded in some of the most outlandish tales.

The above photo is of my maternal great grandmother Eva Bell Cheuvront Coddington Cain and her son Claude, taken around 1891 with her son Claude. Here are the facts that I do know about them. She was born ion Montreal in 1867, the eldest of five children. In 1886 she married a man named Frank Coddington and moved with him to Mankato, Kansas.
This is the only photo I know of them as a couple. Their son Claude was born in 1889. They divorced shortly afterward, one of the first in the young state's history. Why they divorced has always been murky, but my grandmother always described Frank as a man with a reputation of being "dangerously handsome and downright dangerous when he was angry, especially when he was drinking".
Being a divorced, single mother with a strong French accent, no alimony and hundreds of miles from home must have been a daunting prospect. But Eva took solace in her "little prince", books of Plato and Baudelaire and memories of home.
In 1900, she remarried a man many years her senior, Maurice Cain, who had also arrived on the US prairie from Quebec. Together they built a new life that included my grandmother and three other children.

Being a dozen years older than the new brood of children, Claude apparently always felt in an awkward role but was especially admired by the three women of the household, and I always heard stories of his amazing singing voice and love of poetry and art. Sadly, none of his work was ever passed down through the family. My grandmother spoke of his dreams of going to New York or even Europe, but he only got as far as Kansas City where he worked as a streetcar conductor until dying suddenly at the age of 29. It was an event that forever shattered Eva. When my mother looked at the photos of the beautiful, poised young Eva in Victorian finery, my mother said it was hard to recognize her as the grandmother she knew -- a hunchbacked woman with goitre, half her teeth missing and smoked a corn cob pipe. Years of hard farm work and dashed dreamed took their toll on her.
My grandmother and her sister would sometimes speak of Claude in hushed tones, his life as what they termed a "confirmed bachelor" and the night he drowned in the Missouri River. As a child, I always wondered why he would go swimming at night. Only towards the end of her life did my grandmother share that he jumped into the river but would then refuse to share more details. When I pressed for answers, she would either turn silent or my parents would tell me that I was being rude.

My instincts and imagination have filled in what I think might have been Claude's story. I don't know how much is fact and how much is fancy. I've long wondered why I he has held such a fascination for me. Other ancestors have had more heroic or dramatic histories. In fact, he is only my "grand half uncle" though I can see a shared bloodline when I gaze on his face in the above portrait of him in his uniform. There is a familiar mix of grace, arrogance, melancholy and longing for what is beyond the immediate horizon. Was he composing a sonnet in his head as the shutter snapped or dreaming of what was beyond the flat Kansas landscape, envisioning himself dancing somewhere in a salon in Paris?

What is most perplexing is that I think I may be the only living person who knows that Frank ever existed or possesses photos of him. Even my sister, who is dedicated to preserving family history, can't remember hearing stories about him. I've asked extended family members about him, and they don't even seem to know that our great-grandmother had a first marriage.
The video below is something I created a few years ago, my imagining of what Claude's story may have been. I know that I probably got several of the facts incorrect (he died in 1918 not 1912 as stated in the video and some of the names are changed), but I hope it honors the truth of his life. I want to believe that this lost soul is not forgotten and that the sweet young prince that brought solace to his mother more than a century ago left behind a wisp of poetry on the prairie, still floating in the cornfields of the sunflower state.

The Best Westboro Baptist Confrontation. Ever.

Hey, do you know where I can score some poppers?

Vanilla Pride - The Ultimate Rebellion.

In a matter of hours, San Francisco will host its most irrelevant, boring, outdated event – the Folsom Street Fair. While we now have a viable alternative opportunity during Pride Week thanks to the increasingly popular Gay Shame, unfortunately there is not a local Folsom Street Fair alternate. We desperately need one. That’s why tomorrow night I’m puttin’ on my Dockers and heading to Kansas City for the fifth annual Blandfest, the nation’s definitive vanilla-appreciation event. This year promises to top 2006’s landmark event in Dubuque when they dedicated the glorious Mullet Wing at the Hairdo Hall of Fame and the Alberto VO5s put on a kick ass concert.

This year the event will include a reunion of Hootie and the Blowfish, an Up With People retrospective and two simultaneous cinematic galas – the Tom Hanks Film Festival in Country Club Plaza and the Sandra Bullock Film Festival at Crown Center.

The Alberto V05s rock the house at Blandfest 2006

As a true renegade and rebel, Junk Thief would much rather be at this edgy event in Kansas City instead of the tedious gathering in SOMA. I mean, how many times do you need to see a 68-year-old guy show off his pierced scrotum while a group of onlookers gape with the dogged orthodoxy of a bevy of elderly Rotarians from Toledo going through their weekly rituals? What’s that, oh right, that 68-year-old guy with the pierced scrotum actually is a Rotarian from Toledo.

So indulge me to once more give my take on the Folsom Street Fair. In 1962 it would have been fiercely renegade and shocking. By 1970 it would have reached a stage of still being mildly edgy but bordering on mainstream assimilation. By 1989 it had attained near retro relevance of paying homage to a long lost age. By 2002 and the post dot-com bust, it had attained the hollow pathos of a group of mourners continuing to put on a funeral years after the corpse was permanently planted six feet under. In 2007 it is, in a word, pathetic.

Mind you, I have no problems with sex, kink, innovation, freedom, self-expression and individualism, none of which will be on display at this event. It's just a bunch of technology and rituals. If I want that I'll head over to Best Buy and blow the one cute member of the Geek Squad. Perhaps it comes down to what I consider to be the major differences between creativity and sexual innovation in California and the East and Europe. As with many things, California seems to be obsessed with technology and not content or concept. As anyone can tell from the sloppy design of this site and inept editing of Junk Thief TV, I’m much more a concept and content sort of guy. Sure we all need our share of technology, but it’s not what I want curled up next to me at night.

So that’s why I’ll avoid the lame rituals on Folsom Street this weekend and opt for the Big Vanilla in Kansas City. It’s a good reminder that vanilla is too often misnamed as a non-flavor while the foul, fecal stuff called chocolate is revered as something holy. In its pure form, vanilla is neither bland nor white. And while an excess of chocolate will give you zits, a big gut and a headache, too much pure vanilla will give you a glorious, giddy high. But, of course, Vanilla Pride should not be repeated. As with any true, renegade act, it should be committed once and allowed to sear itself into our memory. To repeat it would turn it into ultimately banality, something the Folsom Street Fair organizers should have realized 25 years ago. And don't even get me started on body "art"!

UPDATE: News flash from Omaha, home of the Alberto V05s. The reason the above photo of the 5s has only four men is because Ralph Burnside, their counter tenor, has left the group and will be running a spanking booth at Folsom Street Fair. Obviously, this was horrifying for the group, but they've persevered and reformed as a quartet named the Blandies.

Concentric Circles of Zasu

When I was in middle school, a girl who worked on art projects with me had an obsession with the actress Zasu Pitts. I had no idea who she was talking about but acted as if I did. No slouch, the girl asked me, "So what are your favorite movies of hers?" Not missing a beat, I responded, "Oh, you know, the German ones." She responded back, "Oh, indeed, Von Stroheim and Greed." That ended the conversation, but the words Greed and Zasu stuck with me for years, years before we had imdb.com and Wikipedia. There was just something about someone named Zasu that stuck with me, especially when paired with a moniker like Pitts.

Only in my college years, would I have my first opportunity to see Greed on a big screen, albeit in a very poorly preserved print. But her portrayal of Trina did not disappoint me in this rarely afforded opportunity to finally see that face and personality paired with such an odd name. The passing this week of Leona Helmsley harkened back to that image of Pitts' character Trina as well as the miserly Hetty Green whose bio I've referred to earlier here.

What is it about greed in men that is so repulsive but fascinating when embodied in a woman? Of course, Pitts would go on to play mainly comic, light characters, but her early career always fascinated me. Only recently did I discover that she was born and spent her earliest years in Parsons, Kansas, where I have several family members. How fitting that like Louise Brooks, Kansas with its flat, abstract landscape produced a disturbed and distrubing artist.

Stranger still while researching a piece on Zasu for my vlog that I came across this embodiment of the name Zasu in, of all places, Melbourne, Australia. Sometimes sweet, beautiful madness smiles down on a flat landscape and transports its bent poets into great places.

94 Years Ago -- 70 Feet and Falling

On July 4, 1912, my great uncle Claude Cheuvront Coddington jumped from a bridge on the edge of downtown Kansas City with another bachelor with whom he shared a rented room on Locust Avenue. Those are about the only proven facts I know of those facts or his 24 years on this earth. I think that I may be the only human being that knows he ever lived. I recently wrote a story called “70 Feet and Falling” in which I tied to go beyond the facts and try to find some of the truth in what happened that night. Though it’s likely that I will never know what happened that night, I read volumes into what I can see in these ancient photos of him during his brief career as a street car driver in Kansas City. My grandmother always said that she saw so much of him in my eyes, which was a confirmation of everything I assume today. She said that he was known for his lilting French-Canadian accent that sang out the bland names of the streetcar stops on the prairie. As she said, the morning after he jumped, life in Kansas City went on as normal but the music on the Interurban line died.

Check back here once I get around to editing "70 Feet and Falling" which I also hope to edit as a slide and music piece.

UPDATE: In January 2007, I made this video about these family members.