Anna in 1967.  This is just what I thought she looked like.  How amazing.

DEVELOPMENT!

Oooh, who got an email from another amateur genealogist today?  This guy.

It's so exciting to get data or evidence in a concentration to which so much is lost with a simple death.  People don't record things about their lives, especially excessively pragmatic people.  How the hell am I supposed to be a spy detective archivist when there's no material?  That's why this is exciting.

-----------------------------

Subject: RE: Anna Helen Connelly Davis Hi Brittany,  Sorry I have not back to you sooner. I just reaad the message today. Anna Ireland is my husband aunt who married John Connelly and then married again after the death of John. I know she lived in Arizona and we did visit her back in the late 60's. She had a daughter Colleen who married a doctor. We have no idea where she is living now. I will have to check my files and see what I have enter in the records about her. I will try to update them for you.  you can contact me through my e-mail.  What are the dates in the diary? I wonder why her diary was in an antique store?  Wow, you may some information in the diary that I could use.  I hope this will help for now.  Kay Connelly ----------------------------- So!  She lived in Arizona in the late 60s.  A record without a source on Ancestry says she died in 1966, and I can't find anything reliable in the Social Security Death Index.  None of those entries seem to fit her, so I can't reasonably say when she died at all. That explains how the diary got here.  She schlepped it with her over 30 years, through various marriages and moves, so it must have retained some meaning for her.  I assume that she died in Arizona, and her personal effects were boxed up and donated, diary included. I asked for a picture and for her to try to find a way to contact the daughter.  All right!  I wish someone would find some artifact belonging to one of my ancestors and send it along with some research.  Damn!

STANWYCK

The gay classic Hollywood columnist blogosphere told me it's Stanwyck's birthday today.

She is my favorite female actor of all time.  She is always interesting, always impressive, always good.  In her early movies, she stands out like a beacon amid a bunch of cardboardy jokers.  I had to buy the second TCM collection of pre-code movies because Baby Face was on it.  Baby Face was one of her earlier films about a young girl who learns to use her charm and sexuality to get what she wants in 1930s corporate America.  The decision to do so arose from coachings by a grouchy old man who reads lines to her from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.  Amusing.



With John Wayne in Baby Face.  In 1930, he was just another nobody dude in eyeshadow.



She's unique for this era with her strange little lisp and the believable street savvy that bleeds into every role.  Usually for this time, girls from the other side of the tracks get some attention, but they never win.  And even when Stanwyck doesn't win, she's still somehow the authority.  When she makes some sarcastic crack, you know she has somehow lived that moment before.  And she probably did.  Orphaned at a young age, Barbara, or Ruby as she was called then, was a Brooklyn street urchin who worked her way from shitty menial jobs into a graveyard shift as a chorus girl.  At this point, she believed she had arrived.  All she wanted, she said, was to be able to eat and wear a nice coat.



Shortly thereafter, she caught the eye of some casting agents in the late 1920s, and acted in a bunch of slightly crappy/slightly awesome pre-code movies like Baby Face before killing it in Stella Dallas.  She acted for decades afterward, well into her middle age, which few of her contemporaries managed or were willing to do.  Tabloid notes: she hooked up with Robert Wagner when he was 22 and she was 45.  bang!  She was also a particular fan of Ayn Rand, which I assume is partly resultant of her hardscrabble early life and successful end.  People who have that experience so often come to think that life is a one way rodent maze, and they figured it out.  Formulaic, as though it's foolproof to simply "work hard," and those who have not made it have simply not tried.  Foolish, but we let it slide.  For her.  No one else.

I like that her self-confidence is palpable and natural.  It's there in every character.  She always seems to be in her own environment.  This is somewhat uncommon, but the common characteristic of this quality is that it draws attention like a magnet.

 

Oh tile.

I love vintage tile.  I feel like I'm in the wrong trade these days.  Social service nonprofits are nice and all, but wouldn't I be happier doing historic home renovations?  Probably like 70%.

Anyway.  This site warms my frigid heart, and I am so amused and pleased that it exists:  http://savethepinkbathrooms.com

Summarized, this is a site that says (in a nice-person way), hey fuckers, totally stop demoing your historic bathrooms, and consider growing some taste!  Then it surmises that Mamie Eisenhower started the trend that resulted in a zillion post-war bathrooms being tiled in pink.  All tile colors are delightful (almost), but pink seems to be more likely to be torn out than others.

The grail, of course, is finding a bathroom with matching tub, sink, toilet and tile.  These are usually American Standard fixtures, and they are so beautiful.  How could anyone dislike that?  How could you possibly remove that to replace it with a plastic Home Depot vanity in "sand," and some other ugly shit?

My bathroom counter features some well-worn 1950 pink & black tile, but the shower tiles have been replaced with modern white tiles.  blerg.

Isn't it perfect?  Isn't it hilarious that I'm going to paint the vanity base pink?  Trust me, it's gonna work.

Green with pink.  Perfect.  PERFECT.  I don't think that pink is an original color (or size) but whatever, THE SINK!

Fancy.

Green on green, nice.

Hex tiles on the counter.

And hex on the floor, my favorite.

So anyway.  All good houses still have their own tile.  Failing that, you can buy new old tile and put it back in if it didn't survive the decades.  People who tear this tile out are my enemies.  I don't care if it's cracked, pitted, and faded, you deal with it.  Or you replace individual tiles.  Last year, my grandmother let a tenant tear out the original 1954 tiles in the kitchen of her rental, and I almost slapped an old woman.  He replaced it with some 12" ceramic floor tiles.  I don't even have the words.

Corner sink!

Edited to add: Seriously, I never see these sinks with the spindly metal legs, like ever.  They must have been disasters in practice.  

OH LORD.

Photos by Flickr user Howzey!

This can't be real.  It's too perfect. STAGED I SAY.  I just love that exposed wood lath when plaster falls away.

I can't live anymore.

PERFECT

Curtains!

It's all so Grey Gardens, 10 Years Later.

This reminded me of a hideous old house I visited when I was still apparently confused enough to consider purchasing a house in Phoenix.  (I'm moving in 10 mos or a year or something. Bye-)  I visited it twice just because I loved seeing it, even though it was much too destroyed to consider.  It wasn't worth it like all the structures above.  It was just a little early 50s ranch that had been time capsuled and then abandoned.  I decided to look in my other old blog to see what I had written about it.  Also, I guess sometimes capitalizing takes too much time?

"though the absurdly high price paired with the extreme state of dereliction instantly ruled it out as a prospect, i forwarded the link to my realtor anyway.  it is in a very picturesque state of decay and i wanted to see the inside. 

it is entirely salmon, everything is the same color.  the brick, the porch, the doors, the windows, the carport.  when we entered, i saw that the drapes were curiously still intact.  heavy, fancy silk sitting room drapes, full of forty years of sun, looking like they'd crumble if touched.  the drapes, walls, floors and ceiling were all coated in thick cobwebs.  i've never seen them so...hangy, so thick.  i walked around to the kitchen and was almost afraid to walk in.  the cobwebs were much worse in there.  what used to be a vent above the stove in the ceiling was now just a roughened, black hole.  the wallpaper was 1950s, floral, teals and greens, distended and puffy.  the requisite precious blue and yellow tiled counters.  intimidated by the narrow hallway from the kitchen, i went back through the living room to the bedrooms.  i felt like anything could jump out at or fall on me.

the first one indicated some severe settling of the house, or genuine movement of the earth underneath.  you could see daylight through the cracks torn in the bricks.  the old paint was peeling and falling down in long, wide  sheaths. the next bedroom featured a 6" hole in the pink ceiling, the edges corroded and softened by rushing water.  i'm sure plenty of friday's rain freshened that room.  the bathroom was cramped, with gaudy 1950s sconces placed on each side of the large, dusty mirror.  more of the tile countertops i miss.  pretty, narrow old doors with dented, dusky bronze knobs. 

the realtor, of course, was having fits, bitching and complaining the whole time about having to go inside.  ah, i hate him."

I'm sure it's still empty.  A wreck in bad neighborhood like that can't possibly seem worth renovation to anyone here.  Can't quite remember where it was.  I wish I had taken photos!

A KNITTING NEEDLE

Absolutely Fabulous was a staple of my tween years and I do partially blame it for the person I have become.  In a good way, of course.  It's something I can watch over and over, and I am always annoyed when people don't get references to it.  What's the best response to a friend having a pregnancy scare?   "Bring me...A KNITTING NEEDLE!"  Or not, maybe not the best response, but certainly the funniest.  Look, I'm not a life coach.  But I definitely should be.





Comedy Central was so much better, then.  I need to watch some Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Gentle people music

Fairy-tale Coincidence from InitialsBB on 8tracks Radio.

I guess I uploaded all these songs at the same time into 8tracks and forgot about them.  So now they're a mix, because a theme was observed.  Get out your notebooks and Sylvia Plath bookmarks!  It's time to write some moody journal entries!

But then I intentionally made another mix, or tried to until I was foiled by the ridiculous legal jive of record companies that won't allow me to upload more than 2 Glenn Miller songs into one playlist.  Really, dicks?  Laying the hammer down on all those people who want to pirate obscure swing jams that only dead people remember.  Got it.

So that mix is minus 5 other songs that I wanted because Glenn Miller had such an array of accompanying artists that no song is remotely the same, and they are all required.  FINE.  I'LL SETTLE FOR MEDIOCRITY I GUESS.

Almost completely divine from InitialsBB on 8tracks Radio.

It's still all right.  Muffled trombones and moody jazz music are comforting to me.  Highlights: Peggy Lee, young Sinatra.  I never was a Sinatra fan until I heard his very early recordings. Those are why he's great, not the loungey stuff he recorded in the 50s and 60s.  The later stuff isn't bad, but the early early stuff, when he's still that narrow-faced kid, is kind of amazing when you haven't heard it before.

I'm getting these out of the way so I can make the mix I really want: 12 different covers of the lullaby from Rosemary's Baby.  Oh, trust.  That is real.

Eminent Ladies of 1936

I noticed that today is the publication anniversary of Gone with the Wind.

Margaret Mitchell is an interesting person.  She's far more interesting than any of the characters in her book, who are often pretty two-dimensional.  Everyone picks a trait and spends the entire book defending it.  Also, most of the characters are either completely self-serving reptiles, or inhumanly altruistic, good people with no capacity to do harm (except when they marry your fucking BOYFRIEND, MELANIE WILKES!)  jk.  She had him first, since after all they were cousins.  Don't forget, this is a book about the south.  Sorry, the South.

Anyway.  One of the most obnoxious things MM did in her lifetime was make her husband pinky swear to burn all of her letters, papers and probably manuscripts upon her death, which he did.  Unfortunate, since she was mowed down before her years by a car in Atlanta in 1949.  She might've loosened up in her older years.

She should have written more, but I think she was too crippled by depression or bi-polarity or something to manage it.  It is interesting, because she had the natural compulsion to write, which resulted in thousands of typed pages littering her home for years in disorganized stacks and piles - the fetal Gone with the Wind.  She just had to get it out, but was afterward content to let it sit in obscurity save for the private audience of her husband.  She only considered publishing it due to the frantic encouragement of select friends who had been permitted to read it.  She seemed to have zero personal desire to do this and only did so out of weary acquiescence and a "what's the worst that can happen?" attitude.  For those who don't know what happened, it became a best seller and the biggest book in the world for a long time, translated in to a jillion languages.  She won a Pulitzer for it.  It was a really big deal.  And then the movie came out and was even bigger.

Maybe she only had one thing to say, or one story, and didn't want to tell it twice.  Her lifetime very interestingly bridged two American eras.  She was from a fancy Atlanta family whose tree was filled with Confederates and other casualties of the Civil War.  She grew up listening to war stories on the knees of old vets, and she and her cousins would dig cannonballs and other gun fodder out of the grassy fields for fun.  It was everywhere.  It was not ancient history, and it wasn't from the victor's perspective.  Maybe it was a story that needed to be told.  Northern perspectives seem to have the war at the periphery, won and done; for southerners, it was an all together more personal ordeal, probably because they had to live inside the wreckage.

I disagree when subsequent generations take credit for historic events or treat them as parts of their own condition or experience after the reverberations have ended.  Don't say "we".  It was they, not you, who did this thing.  Won that battle.  Overcame some odd.  When Americans look back at WWII and say, WE DID THAT, you really didn't.  People who are dead did that, and I'm willing to bet that whatever qualities got them through those experiences have long since leached out of your high-fructose blood.  It was a different time.  It's not transferable.

Everyone wants to do that and in some part I understand.  Nationalism or whatever.  And we do often exist in the climates created by our predecessors, so maybe sometimes it is more relevant than I imply.  But if you want to take credit for the highlights, then you have to agree to be culpable for the fuck ups too, no?  Americans wanting to feel responsible as a “race” for ending WWII, for example, are also going to have to be the ones who signed off on all the murder & brutality that didn’t happen for a good cause.  I would not recommend that trade.  

So not only because of the overt racism that is tied up in it, this Confederate pride thing that still occurs in the south is totally outrageous to me.  It's such an incredible joke to make a community tie out of.  Especially since it literally amounts to taking personal credit for going to war for a variety of idiot reasons and having an entire generation of people slaughtered and ruined because of it, then not even winning, and then having your home turned into a cesspool babylon that it still kind of is.  So let's fly the flag and remember the lynchpin of that downfall forever.

I mention that only because in Margaret Mitchell's day, it still kind of was "their" war.  Things that had happened fifty years ago still had measurable impacts on the daily lives of those still remaining and on later generations.  Wounds were fresh and personal.  Firsthand war experiences still walked the earth.  I don't think anyone but she could have written that book or anything like it, being at the forefront of that experience, and a sick and sensitive child to begin with, absorbing all those feelings and reflections.

Oh, and she was a super babe, too.

I've always liked the kind of creepy Ya Ya song from Lolita, but was amused to find another recording made by Sue Lyon at the time.


It's cute, but I'm more amused at her crappy, awkward teen voice.



Naturally, we disapprove of books and movies fetishizing kids, but I do like the 1962 movie.  Mainly for Peter Sellers, but also for neurotic, obnoxious Shelley Winters.  She's so annoying!  Although maybe that's just her thing.  Montgomery Clift couldn't kill her fast enough in A Place in the Sun, no?  Woops, spoilers.

Anna Ireland II: Child Installment

I found a bit more information about my diarist, but have otherwise hit a wall in my researching.  I have to put this stuff down before I forget it all and ancestry.com kicks me out.

Additional information has been Jack's middle name (Kyle), which assists in discerning him from the jillion other John Connellys who evidently flowed from Scotland in the day.  It appears that he died in 1954 of causes unknown.  Found the ex-wife, too.  A gal from Kentucky named Robbie who also worked in a drug store and was living in Detroit with Jack in 1930.  By 1935, she was divorced and living in Tennessee.

Anna seems to have remarried.  This is why I had such a hard time finding her originally - upon her death, she was known as Anna Helen Davis.  Death date on ancestry is "after 1966".  wth.

But here is the real information: they did have another child.  And by all appearances, she lives today.  Her name is, or was originally, Colleen Ireland Connelly.  Could you have a more Irish name, Colleen?  She was born in Orange, California in 1947, ten years after the deaths of Anna's first two children.  I have been unable to find any more information about her, even with that weird middle name.  I will find her eventually, though.  No one hides from the internet.  It is often difficult to find older people, though, as they strangely don't feel the need to make multiple social media profiles.  They are the only ones able to live under the radar, hidden away from modernity with their landline telephones, cassette tape answering machines and print tv guides.  Strange to think that their lifestyles will soon seem as quaint and unbelievable as the daily lives of people living before the Industrial Revolution.  You had to get your water out of the ground, drive a horse and communicate long distance by handwriting?  Sounds like some sci fi shit to me.  So anyway, Colleen is 65 years old and I will find her as long as I remember to look.  I'm kind of surprised that I haven't already, actually, but I suppose she's probably married and using some other name.  Cursed patriarchal name-trading!

Also, is it weird to contact people to ask for gossip about/pictures of their family members because I bought someone's diary at the Brass Armadillo 15 (jesus christ) years ago?  I know - it is.  But what am I supposed to do?  Also, the kid might want her mom's diary.  This could turn into a Hallmark Network movie about a woman's reconnection with her dead mother through a curiously and fortuitously found diary.  Or maybe they already did that on Lifetime.

In the meantime,

Party like it's 1933 from superheidi on 8tracks Radio.