Anna Ireland

This is a five year diary started by a girl named Anna Ireland in 1936.  I found it tucked deep into a shelf full of forgotten, bad fiction in an antique store in the mid 90s.  As with many of my thrift & antique store purchases of that time, I bought it to protect it.



Anna wrote in impossibly tiny script in order to save enough room for her future entries.  The lines are challenging, but mostly legible, and the pages are in decent condition.  The book must've been tucked somewhere safe and dark for a lot of years.



She wrote every day from January to mid March of 1936.  After that, only major events were recorded.  The back of the book contains the addresses and birth dates of her friends and family.



For as few entries as there are, it's a dramatic book.  The first few weeks of entries consist of bland updates about her home life interspersed with many pained lines about someone named Jack, who doesn't pay her as much attention as she'd like.  She wishes she didn't like him as much as she does.

Wednesday, Jan. 1, 1936.  First entry.
Well here I am. Last night was our first New Year's Eve and it wasn't so good. We were up until 10 in the morning. I was terrible disappointed because Jack didn't come after me or call.  I do like him so much, we didn't get up until late & mama slept with me. Tonight the place was dead, hardly anyone there.  See you tomorrow.

Inferred from the entries, Anna works with some kind of theater group and gives music or dance lessons to children.  Jack works in a drugstore where Anna hangs out.

Sunday, Jan. 26, 1936
Well I didn't sleep all night as my back & sides pained so but I got up at 11 and waited for Jack. He came at 12:10, his car was frozen so he had to go on the streetcar. Still we went & oh I was so glad. My back hurt so all through mass I could hardly sit there but as Jack was there, nothing could keep me from staying. We came home & had coffee, he went as soon as the folks got up. Well he was at the cafe tonight and made me wrap something around me. He was drinking quite a bit. John the barber was there also so he drove us home and I made them stop in & have some coffee, then they talked to papa a long time. They just left, I hope I see Jack soon again, I will miss him.

Business as usual for the next month.  Anna begins each entry with "Well," and complains of sickness and pains a lot. Endometriosis?  Whatever it is, she tries to conceal from Jack how often she is ill, and lies to him when he asks her if she's feeling badly one day, then feels "rotten" for lying.  A mention of how much she misses & would like to see Jack goes at the end of each entry.  Eventually I may transcribe them all, but that tiny script, man.  It's tiny.

Saturday, Feb. 22, 1936
Well I got up at 6 & wasn't tired & oh the trip was terrible. The fog, I have never seen anything like it. It was terrible, there was so many accidents. I wanted to turn back but we went on.  We got home O.K. I sure am tired. I went right out to the place as the 15 cent charge went on and we packed them in. The show lasted one hour and everybody said it was great. Jack came up & I am worried about him as he was sick. I hope & pray he will be all right. I am going over to his home tomorrow. Oh dear god have his folks like me, it means so much. I am afraid to go in a way, I guess I am a coward but I am afraid they won't & I couldn't stand that as I love him so.

There are no entries after mid March, until this:

Aug. 16, 1936
I was married today. Jack and I are so happy. I pray to god to keep us always that way.  "I love him so."

Then she only updates on their anniversary date.



Aug. 16, 1937
Today is our first year of marriage and I am happier than ever. We are at Bald Eagle Lake. We still haven't had our first fight.

Aug. 16, 1938
Today is our second year and I love him more only he is very sick, his heart is very bad. I pray to god he will get well. We are in the trailer at New Baltimore.

Aug. 16, 1939
Today is our third year, somewhat better than last. Jack is working at Kinsels & a little better. We lost our darlings last year. I hope god will give them back to us before many years.

The only other entry after 1936 that isn't a wedding update refers to the loss of the children.

June 12, 1937
I lost my darlings. I had twin girls. Why, oh why. What did I ever do to have a thing like that happen. I lay awake and try and think but can't. Oh please god take them and keep them for me & please, please god have Jack love me.



Such private pain and feelings that I hesitate to even record that here.  Still, real life.

When I first read through this, I was desperate to know what had become of Anna.  It was considerably more difficult to research people (from home) back then, and since she had lived in Detroit, it seemed impossible.  Since then, I have become skilled at getting all up in dead peoples' business, and have finally gotten around to finding out some more about her.

My findings are still pretty sparse.  Fortunately, you can find just about anyone in the census data, so I see her in 1920, 1930 and 1940.  There are several Anna Irelands out there of the same age, but our Anna had immediate family members with unusual names which make it easy to pick her out.

What I found:

She was born in 1913.  Happy centennial.  This makes her a little older than I had originally assumed.  She is 23 or 24 at the start of the diary.  Her middle initial is H.  Probably Helen.  Not a lot of H names out there.

She was born in New York.  If I knew what county, I could possibly find her birth certificate.  Both of her parents were born in Ireland so I wonder if they got their last name at Ellis Island, in which case, wth?  I know people were sometimes re-named after their point of origin, but considering the amount of people coming from Ireland at the turn of the century, it seems a little strange.

In 1930, her father identifies his occupation as a stage producer, which also helps to confirm that I have the right Anna.  The real confirmation was thanks to her address book, which lists the names of her family and boarders who appear in the census record with her.  Exciting!  Unfortunately, this is where the Anna info ends.

Again thanks to the address book, we have Jack's full name: John Connelly.  I found him in the 1930 and 1940 censuses, too.  He was 13 years older than Anna, and had emigrated from Scotland in 1929.  He had also been married before, but we don't know what happened with that, only that the prior marriage was in 1924.  In 1940, he is shown living in Detroit with Anna.  His occupation is druggist, and the census indicates that he has a college education.  No children.  Anna is listed as a housewife.

There are ship passage records for several John Connellys, so we don't know which is him, but it's not that important.  It seems like his family followed him here as the 1930 census shows a single woman named Helen Connelly living in John's rooming house, but she can't be his wife as he is listed as married.  Anna refers to his folks in the diary, so they must have come after that.  Yes, I do enjoy the speculative moments in historical research, thanks for asking.  More of that: did Jack go through the trouble of getting divorced, or did he just leave the ex in Scotland?  Did Anna know about her?  Other children?



I see a number of death records for women named Anna Connelly, and it is impossible to know which, if any, is her.  There is one Anna H. Connelly buried in Ohio that may very well be her.  Same birth year.  How to know, though?  Same for Jack.  On ancestry.com, you can look through digital family trees created by others, and I noticed that Anna is featured in only one tree, with a very bare entry.  It's for this reason that I don't think they had any more children as one would assume they would be appearing in more trees if they had.  For someone who lived semi-recently and came from a large family, it is strange that she is not in more.  One option is to research her siblings and see where that takes me.  It might give me access to living relatives of hers, which could solve all of my questions.

And anyway, how the hell did her diary end up in an antique store in Arizona?



To be continued, possibly.

Fun facts: You can find census data for free instead of paying for it on ancestry.com here: familysearch.org.  Only difference is you can't see images of the handwritten pages, which are helpful to view given the frequent (frequent) errors made in their transcription.

County and state archives have tons of information that ancestry.com does not have.  Only some of them have put portions of their records online, unfortch.  Also, they want you to pay them to even look and see if they have your record.  & don't rule out the county recorder.  There's all kinds of historic data in there, providing they put it online.  Oddly, Maricopa county was really good about this.  Wayne county not so much.

Findagrave.com.  Actually useful.

Fun observations:  Maybe I'm missing something here, but I think 70 years is a little long to wait to release census data.  What exactly are we protecting that people alive in 1950 wouldn't want anyone to know?  Who lives in the same place they did in 1950!  What other info does the census reveal that is so personal?  Annoying.  Not to get all ~NSA~ up in here, but cmon.

hashtag amateur genealogist.

On the road to West Egg

I don't feel like writing anything, but I will say YES, THAT to someone else being self-righteously and long-windedly indignant about the further wrecking of all of our nice things.  I mean, I haven't seen the movie and I don't necessarily gaf, but I will safely assume that it's going to piss off FSF fans. 

"Why can't they make one movie that is just pitch-perfectly what-it-was?"  Challah, my sister.  You're gonna have a hard time in this life, btw.

I don't understand what seems to be the typical takeaway from The Great Gatsby.  Are people just looking at the cover of the book and drawing their own conclusions?  Why does everyone think this is a novel about how fabulous and mysterious a rich guy is?  To me, the central theme is about wanting something desperately and never getting it, and the strange manifestations that creates in behavior. Gatsby is not the ultimate coolguy, he is a wraith in a big empty house, rattling his chains to no one.  F. Scott couched all of that inside of long automobiles and fountains of champagne as a device.  It's not the point. 

After I wrote that, I watched a video of Bill Nack reciting the last couple of paragraphs from the book, which told me two things, the first of which is that I might have a skewed-ass view of this book myself.  Is it actually about hope and the beauty of sentiment?  Have I completely grouched this thing up?  Maybe.  I'll read it again soon and decide. 

The second thing is that F. Scott's prose is deeper and more perfect than I had admitted before.  It's beautiful and affecting.  The first time I read the book, I got so tired of noting line after winning line that I stopped reflecting on the artistry because it was preventing me from getting into the story.  WE KNOW. YOU'RE GOOD. NOW STOP INTERRUPTING.  Hearing the words said aloud is a whole other level, of course.  Ted Hughes said it was a necessity to read poetry aloud, but in this case, maybe prose too. 


Kate Beaton addresses the Fitzgerald marriage on Hark a Vagrant.

F. Scott's editor's first impression of the book: "a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality."

Hemingway to FSF after reading Tender is the Night: "You can write twice as well now as you ever could. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is."

And again, FSF to his young daughter, Scottie: "I am glad you are happy — but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed pages, they never really happen to you in life."

Esther Walker

Vaudeville comedienne, philanthropist, sass-mouth.

1:59

Betty? This is Bette.

BD to Elizabeth Montgomery after a spat at Bette's house:

"Betty? When they do the story of my life, you should play me.  And I'm not sure that's a compliment!"

Listen here.  2:20.  It's all very adorable.


I suppose I should note that it could be confusing of me to refer to Bette Davis as BD for short, because her traitor daughter, Barbara Davis, was and still is known to the world as B.D.  It may look lazy to my other middle aged gay Hollywood columnists, but I do like to use initials and B.D. doesn't even count, right?  She wrote a shit book about her mother and ran off to join a Christian cult where she apparently remains.  These seem like poor choices to me.  Now she and her children have nothing to show for their famous lineage but bad attitudes and googly eyes.  Bette cut B.D. entirely out of her will and ended up giving half of her estate to the personal assistant who became a friend and confidant in her last years.

It seems that B.D.'s book was universally rejected as opportunistic and discreditingly fictional slander at the time, particularly by people who had known she and her mother through the years in question.  Perhaps she was seeking to ride the coattails of Christina Crawford and her seemingly more legit "Mommy Dearest," about her childhood with scaryass Joan Crawford.  Even Mommy Dearest is considered to be partly fictional, but who knows what happened behind those hedges.  Like I may have mentioned before, JC seems like she could have been the teacher in Sideways Stories from Wayside School, and that's not a compliment either. 

Pre-Code

I've been watching one of TCM's "Forbidden Hollywood" collections, which showcases movies made in the 30s before the Hays Code really became active and movies were forced to become coy and generic for the good of the viewers.  I always have to put my hand in the air when someone refers to the sweet, good old days when men were men and women were babies and no one cursed or took their clothes off, as my grandmother would say.  I don't think so.  Shit was raw when your grandparents were running it.  You just don't know because they didn't tell you.  Ask Ruth Chatterton. 

These early movies were mostly free of censorship and contain all kinds of things like near-nudity, violence, portrayals of women that violated the conservative norm (running businesses! doing drugs! sex with non-husbands!), and difficult topics like rape, abortion, incest, abuse, addiction.

Unfortunately, the drawback to many of these earlier films is they are terrible.  They have weird, pointless plots, bad acting, continuity issues, and, worst of all for me, stupid and convenient endings.  Still, I love them best.  I watch them over and over because there are so many small details and I love absorbing all of the sets, street scenes, clothes, slang.  They seem like much truer reflections of life than glossier, more edited films. 

Since the code was enforced from the mid 1930s to the late 1960s, I would guess most people probably haven't seen films made before it.  My first exposure to pre-code movies was FEMALE (all caps for emphasis, as in, not a lady but a-), which is a story about the fall of a corporate titan who learns the same lesson that all women learn in these films: being independent will ruin your entire life.  Societal constraints for women are for their own good!  Examples:

The Divorcee (1930): A wife learns that her beloved husband has cheated on her with someone named Janice, for god's sake.  She gets very drunk and sleeps with his best friend as payback.  He divorces her and she's never happy again.  Until he takes her back.

A Free Soul (1931): A girl is raised by her libertine father whose lack of conservative parenting lands her in the bed of a mobster who looks a lot like Clark Gable.  Clark tries to ruin her life and Leslie Howard rescues her and brings her back to the prim world she should have occupied all along.

Three on a Match (1932): A bored and fickle housewife leaves her goodguy husband for some scumbag she meets on a cruise.  She gets addicted to heroin and the boyfriend abducts her child from the ex-husband to ransom him for money to pay off his debt to the mob. A very young and vicious looking Humphrey Bogart is one of the bad guys who decides to just kill the child, which the mother prevents by jumping out of a window with a note to the police about the kid's whereabouts written on her dress. 

Starting to get the idea?  I think it's safer in the house, babe.

Another thing that shocked me about the pre-code films is seeing big stars playing some scandalous roles as younger women.  One day I was searching for photos of Claudette Colbert in her Cleopatra outfit, as you do, when I found this clip from The Sign of the Cross, another crazy early film.  I thought the Cleo dress was risque for her, but apparently not.  Here she is, playing an Arab princess and bouncing around topless in a milk bath.  Well, she is French.



I was also surprised to see Norma Shearer in similar roles, although they apparently couldn't get her to take her clothes off, and the extent of her sex scenes are outside shots of some drapes closing, or of her being in a man's house in the morning, which tells you all you need to know about her night.


Edit: OH MY GOD, Universal has gone through and had all the clips from The Sign of the Cross taken down!  Don't they have better things to do?  But I did find this, in case you didn't believe me earlier:

A few years later, she'd become America's considerably more modest sweetheart in "It Happened One Night"

Next Stop is the Grave

Well I did it.  I reached into my heart and/or soul and conducted out a 10 track playlist about flagrant gothery. 

I Was a Teenage Goth from InitialsBB on 8tracks Radio.

In my review, however, I realized two things: 1. This is obviously just an installment and 2. All of these artists are British except Dead Can Dance, who are Australian, and Christian Death.  Of course the British make better music in this realm.  They're just standing on a big pile of bones and angst over there.  There are American goth outfits, of course, they're just all later and suck. 

This list contains nothing but well known, well-loved hiteroos, including the excellent Bauhaus cover of Ziggy Stardust, which I actually like better than the original, although only kind of if you're going to get all heated about it.  I don't repeat any artists, which was obviously a hardship for me.  I also stay largely on track, genre-wise, which is actually totally impossible at all times and we start with punky goth, then move into more baroque eyelinery stuff and then into neo-folk with almost no attention paid to new romantic this time.  Deal with it?  Don't worry, next time there will be Marc Almond.

The smell of creosote is so everywhere lately that I barely noticed that I should be smelling orange blossoms right now. 



I'm always on the edge of desert now.  I veered from my path today to drive through my old north central neighborhood, sure it was a space where the white blossoms would take over for the little creosote poms.  It was.  Dueling spring scents.

I love the musty musky smell of orange blossoms, and the creeping smell of the creosote, which makes me think of rain and delicate green grass that looks like carpet on the mountains.

I volunteer at a tiny art gallery every once in a while.  Because my schedule is insane, I only ever make it there about once a month, but I keep it on my schedule because why not.  The gallery is on the first floor of City Hall, almost completely unknown to the public, which is fine by me, because I just sit and read for a couple of hours in almost completely uninterrupted silence.

I was interrupted this morning by a quiet, somewhat grizzled older guy in all black and a feathered hat who came in to ask me about prints of the pieces, all recent shots of architectural landmarks around Phoenix.  He pointed to the Valley National Bank on Camelback and 44th st, saying, "That's my building."  Maybe I've just had too many downtown kooks up in my face recently, because I just smiled and nodded to the guy, thinking, yeah buddy, it's my building too, we all like it.

I asked him for his contact information to follow up about the prints and watched as he printed his name in exacting block letters, then spent the next 10 seconds squinting blindly into space, my mind desperately trying to remember and fact check without the internet.  As soon as he started to leave, I concluded: he designed the Valley National Bank building, the "mushroom bank," in 1968.

IT IS HIS BUILDING.

I didn't call after him to tell him that I had finally figured out who he was, because really.  His demeanor was interesting, very quiet, almost awkward, although I usually find introverted, subdued people to be interesting. 

Anyway, he is cool.  About the building.

Julius H. "G." Marx

Groucho: Say, I wanna register a complaint. 
Captain: Why, what's the matter?
Groucho: Matter enough. You know who sneaked into my stateroom at 3:00 this morning?
Captain: Who did that?
Groucho: Nobody, and that's my complaint!

All of the Marx Brothers films have little spaces after each zinger, allowing time for the audience to laugh without missing the next one.

It's amusing that Groucho is always the lech in the movies, but that may be an exaggerated reflection of life.  Lines like,

Waitress: What can I do for you?
Groucho: I'll tell you later.

...would probably piss me off in a modern film, but the way he alternates being completely ridiculous with making sly dog side comments just amuses me instead.

Like a lot of things that feel like a given now, the humor of these movies seems like part of a universal cultural memory.  When I first started watching these films, I was surprised at how familiar the jokes and antics felt.  Did I watch them as a kid and forget?  Maybe.  What's more likely is they were copied, referred to and lampooned in a lot of old cartoons and came to me that way.