June 24, 1914 (again): A place in time.

Last time around, I wrote about finding my grandmother’s birth listed in a New England annual report — specifically that of Keene, New Hampshire, in 1914.

This time, we go back to the report for a closer read, to see what it tells us about the place where she was born. What was her corner of the world like at the moment she entered it?

We find Keene in 1914 as a city of about 10,000 people (it’s about 23,500 today).

It’s a city on the move, at least by its own modest standards, with population increasing almost 10 percent between 1900 and 1910. It has a fairly healthy manufacturing sector; maybe the growth reflects an increasing willingness among the area’s people to swap farming for well-paying jobs in a factory.

One of the city’s major employers is making threatening sounds. The Boston and Maine Railroad is hinting at what the report calls “a very considerable reduction in the working force” at its Keene repair shops. (Layoff anxiety is eternal.)

Among the city’s other companies are the Monadnock Shoe Co., Keene Mica Products Co., Ashuelot National Bank, the Sentinel newspaper and its affiliated printing company, the Burdett Chair Co., the Keene Glue Co., and the marvelously named Impervious Package Co.

There is no business specifically identifying itself as a brewery. Perhaps Keene does not have a large enough German population to support one. Or maybe the mood in town is starting to favor prohibition, which is only about five years away from becoming national law.

Keene is not a dry city, though. It has a liquor agent, Ervin M. Bullard, who reports purchasing and selling everything from New England rum to porter to California brandy to something called “cherry rum.” And H.O. Wardwell, clerk of the Board of Police Commissioners, reports 152 arrests for drunkenness and nine for violating liquor laws in the first three quarters of the year.

Wardwell also reports one arrest for operating an auto under the influence of liquor, and five for auto speeding. Clearly, the automobile is not a major transportation option in 1914 Keene. (Progress is coming: The fire department’s portion of the report recommends the purchase of an automotive fire truck.)

Keene might not be a dry city, in the alcoholic sense, but it sure is dusty. Of the 103 miles of roads in town, only about nine-and-a-half are paved. Each home or business abutting an unpaved road is charged $2 in taxes to pay for water sprinkling to hold down the dust.

Keene Gas and Electric has 522 incandescent streetlights installed in the city, the locations of which are noted in detail in the report. One is located opposite the city’s hospital, Elliot City Hospital, then at 305 Main St. Perhaps it lit Maud Wamboldt’s way there as she prepared to give birth (if indeed she gave birth there, and not in a private home).

Also, while water and sewer lines are still being laid, quite a few are already in place, and the report goes into detail about when each one was installed. One wonders how many of them, patched and repaired over the years, are still in service.

Exactly 1,969 students aged 5 to 16 are in the city’s public schools — 1,063 girls and 906 boys. I cannot remember how long my grandma lived in Keene, but I am not sure it was even long enough to ever make it into that statistic.

The report includes each of the resolutions passed by City Council during the year, and they make for an interesting combination of the important and the mundane:

• “Sliding” (presumably sledding) is permitted from 4 to 9 p.m. on a section of upper Water Street.
• No one can rent a room to use for dancing without obtaining the permission of the mayor (one Herbert Fay in 1914) and the city aldermen. A dance permit costs $2 per year.
• The Lynn Wood Heel Co. is exempt from taxes for 10 years as a reward for moving its operations and machinery to town, with 150 jobs expected to be created.
• An extensive set of driving and traffic laws, covering both autos and horse-drawn carriages, is passed six days before my grandmother’s birth. (There is no indication that these laws supersede anything already on the books.) Fines are anywhere from $1 to $10 per offense.
• Nine hundred dollars is set aside for the construction of a concrete bridge over Beaver Brook on Church Street.

The state of New Hampshire has levied a bounty on hedgehogs, and the annual report lists a good 30 names of local men who have taken advantage of it. The most industrious, Ralph Manley, collects $1.60 for his work.

Keene has a college — then called Keene Normal School — but it’s only five years old in 1914 and doesn’t appear in the city’s annual report, except for a few brief mentions related to expenses.

Also mostly absent is World War I, freshly begun and not yet directly involving the U.S. There’s a reference to it in the library department’s report, of all places, but not much else. Keene, and the rest of the country, was still willing and able to stick to its own knitting in 1914.

Finally, William and Maude Wambolt and their two young daughters do not appear in the report, except for the Vital Statistics section mentioned in my previous post.

They didn’t owe any taxes; they didn’t serve on any city boards; they didn’t do anything else of note.

They just had a daughter, without whom you might have spent the last 10 minutes doing something more productive.

William Wambolt.

Maude (LaBatt) Wambolt.

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June 24, 1914: Reported.

Twenty years ago, I learned to love the New England-style annual town report.

(It might be that towns in other parts of the country also issue these reports. But I came to know them in the context of New England small-town democracy, and they live there in my mind to this day.)

An annual town report is a snapshot of ongoing operations — the municipal equivalent of a public company’s annual report. It lists all the town’s relevant financial info at numbing length, as well as other operating data and the results of Town Meeting votes.

Department reports provide splashes of narrative amid all the numbers. The police chief might decry an increase in breaking and entering, while the Parks Commission might plump for money for a new dock at the town pond.

A typical annual report cover. This report is recent, but comes from one of the towns I used to cover back in the day. The full report can be seen here.

These reports were a staple at the chain of Boston-area weekly newspapers where I worked in 1996.

A year or two earlier, a reporter with a freshly issued annual report had had a genius idea. He’d written a snapshot-of-local-life cover story, based entirely on interesting info culled from the report — five births; six deaths; three marriages; 13 underage drinking arrests; 22 miles of town-owned road resurfaced; $4,020 in library overdue fines collected; and like that.

Combined with creative graphics, “Sherborn By The Numbers” or “Natick By The Numbers” made for addictive reading. (Basically, they were Internet listicles before such a thing existed.)

The only people who disliked these stories were town employees, who hated seeing their salaries in print. The supervisor of the local sewage plant once got salty with me after I included his salary; listed the amount of waste his plant processed that year; and did the math to find out what he got paid per gallon.

But, town employees’ salaries are public info. They’re in every town’s annual report. And the reports were available free to residents — in some places, every household got a copy in the mail. So we weren’t telling anybody anything they couldn’t have looked up themselves.

These by-the-numbers stories were so popular, and so easy, that every paper in the chain took to running them at annual report time.

Perhaps they still do.

# # # # #

Twenty years later, I’ll still thumb through a town report whenever I find one. They’re like postcards from a place and time. You can see moments of real people’s lives if you squint at the numbers the right way.

I’ve been lost to the outside world lately, since I discovered that the University of New Hampshire Library has almost 15,800 annual reports from New Hampshire towns and cities available online.

Even though I’ve never lived in the Granite State, I’ve dived into the struggles and triumphs of its communities, from the Holderness Floods of 1973 to Derry’s celebration of hometown hero Alan Shepard a dozen years before. A few paragraphs after praising Shepard, the Derry report adds: “We hope to have our main street paved in 1962.”

(Charlie Baker, if you’re reading: You need to put some resources into closing the online annual-report gap. New Hampshire is housing you. Are you going to stand for that?)

I became doubly interested in UNH’s online treasure trove when I realized that I might find my paternal grandmother there.

She was born in Keene, in the southwest part of the state. And most town or city reports include what’s called Vital Statistics — a list of births, marriages and deaths recorded over the course of the year.

A few minutes with UNH’s marvelous archive and there she was, swaddled and screaming:

You have to squint a little bit, but she’s the second line from the bottom — “Corrine,” born female and living on June 24, 1914, the second child of 30-year-old teamster Wm. L. Wamboldt and 33-year-old Maud LaBatt.

As far as I know, the two R’s in her first name are a typo. In my acquaintance with her, she was always Corine. Her mother’s hometown is also listed incorrectly: Maud LaBatt came from North Easton, N.Y., not “No. Eastern.”

(Regular readers have met and recently said goodbye to Corine’s older sibling, who was born two years earlier in Vermont. William and Maud had no other children before William’s death in 1920. Or after it, for that matter.)

Reading the list of births — nothing else in the report, just the births — is enough to paint a picture of Keene as a place torn between 20th-century cityhood and the roots of its rural surroundings. (Remember what I said about seeing real people’s lives if you squint the right way?)

For instance, there are 26 living births listed on “Corrine’s” page and only one stillbirth. The ratio is similar on other pages, and some list no stillbirths at all.

I’m no expert on public health, and just because all these children were born alive doesn’t guarantee they lived long.

But on the whole, it’s a better report than I would have expected from a small city in a rural region 100 years ago. It suggests that prenatal care was available in the area, and was making a difference.

On the other hand, there are birth reports from as far back as 1869 wedged in among the 1914 new arrivals. You can see 1894 and 1898 listed on “Corrine’s” page. The notion of promptly reporting a child’s birth, something we take for granted today, was clearly not yet standard.

I don’t know the full story, but I’m guessing these people were born on farms or in rural homes outlying Keene — maybe even without a doctor present — and no one bothered to file the notifications until years later, when they needed a birth record to accomplish some goal or other.

I’ve prattled on a while at this point, but there’s a lot more to discuss in the Keene annual report.

I think I’ll do a little more squinting for my next post, and see what more I can deduce about the time and place in which my grandma was born.

(For those who can’t bear the suspense, the 1914 Keene annual report can be downloaded here.)

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July 31, 1975: Still life with ocean.

I mentioned last week I’d probably divert from the calendar entries for a few, and write a couple posts based primarily on my grandpa’s photos. Indeed.

Two years ago around this time, I wrote a post about a gorgeous, timeless heat-of-summer photo my grandpa captured.

Most likely, it was taken July 31, 1975, during a visit to Cove Island Park, a public park in Stamford overlooking Long Island Sound.

The picture I wrote about isn’t the only great photo my grandfather took on that trip. Y’all wanna click on this and look at it full-size for a minute:

(Yes, there is a honkin’ big hair-thing in the photo, probably an artifact of the scanning process. I look at it from a Zen perspective: All things manmade must have a fault somewhere, or else they wouldn’t be manmade. Look past it, out toward the eternal sea.)

I am guessing the woman in the picture — laboriously dressed to block the sun, even on a 90-degree day — is my grandmother. She would have dressed like that to go to the beach.

And, since the original calendar entry mentions “lunch at Cove Island,” it’s possible that the bag or basket in her hand has a couple sammiches in it. It’s not a large bag, but my grandparents were not gluttonous.

I’m not hung up on literal reproduction of the day’s events, though. What I like is the story between the lines.

Check out the woman in long sleeves and pants, separated by both height and distance from the faraway figures on the beach.

She is so close to freedom and relaxation and pleasure, she can practically reach out and touch it. And yet, it is not hers to have.

Her clothing and posture suggest a certain fundamental ambivalence about it. She has deliberately brought herself to the place of sun- and sea-worship, but has come prepared to deny herself any participation.

Down on the beach, practically at the photo’s center, is a young family — what looks like two parents and a small child — suggesting fertility, vigor and action. Up on the viewing deck is a single person, suggesting stillness, confinement and loneliness. Is youth a release? The image suggests so.

Both a fence and a road separate the woman from the beach. In the endless dichotomy between civilization and nature, man and wilderness, she is staying firmly planted in the known, sanitized, well-defined world of settled life.

There is no visible threat to keep the woman on the deck away from the beach. No riptides; no thunderclouds; no crush of towel-to-towel, shoulder-to-shoulder bathers.

She just chooses not to go, even though the grass beckons with a wonderful deep green, and the sky presents a tapestry of deep blue dotted with cumulus white.

Also note, while we’re at it, the rich marine blue color of the observation deck. It’s sorta like a copy of the ocean … a flat, tamed version of the sea in which even the likes of my grandma can feel comfortable parking her feet.

I am sure my grandparents eventually made their way down to the beach, got comfortable after a fashion, and enjoyed their lunch.

But in this single fall of the shutter are more complicated possibilities.

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May 6, 1969: Driven.

Last week, I told you about one of the loves of my grandfather’s life circa 1969 — his brand-new, eagerly anticipated Ford Fairlane 500.

This week, we follow him as he grits his teeth, swallows hard, and thinks about handing the keys over to the other love of his life — my grandmother.

May 6, 1969. (With special bonus content: May 5 and 7.)

I’ve been writing this blog for a good 20 months now … and my total failure to define, describe or otherwise flesh out my grandmother in this space has been an ongoing source of frustration for me.

Corine Mae Blumenau, nee Wambolt, was kindly, good-humored, a skilled baker, deaf as a stone post, and prone to occasional periods of depression.

As a child, I witnessed all of these qualities but the last; and all except the deafness have manifested themselves in me as an adult. (Classifying myself as “kindly” may be giving myself the benefit of the doubt, I suppose.)

Genealogy was her chosen habit. And it is her family’s lineage that connects a 21st-century salaryman to the earliest days of colonial America, through distant ancestors like William Keeney (born 1601, Leicestershire, England; died 1675, New London, Conn.) and Levi Beebe (born 1743, East Haddam, Conn.; died 1817, Richmond, Mass.; served as a corporal in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.)

Corine Blumenau and her adorable grandchildren. Stamford, Connecticut, 1975.

My grandma worked until she got married. It was a point of pride to my grandfather that he make enough money to support them, and they dated for several years until he felt comfortable that he could do so.

I am not entirely sure he did her a solid. I think my grandma’s worldview in her homemaker years was somewhat limited, and she would have benefited from engaging a little more with the larger world.

She was the only one of my grandparents who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in her final years; and while social interaction and intellectual challenge have not been scientifically proven to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, more of both might have helped her.

(In fairness, millions of other women of her generation chose the same path — homemaking, not Alzheimer’s. I have no evidence to indicate she was anything but agreeable with her switch from working woman to homemaker.)

As far as I know, my grandma never had a driver’s license. I know I never saw her drive, and I do not think she was ever legally able to.

This suited her personality — though I find it difficult to find the exact words to describe why.

Was she ditzy or airheaded? No. But, I could easily imagine her rear-ending somebody because she’d seen a good price for ground beef advertised in a store window, and had started thinking about how she might put it to use.

Was she nervous? Not in a chronic fingernail-biting sense. But, I can easily imagine her going 10 mph under the speed limit — on a street marked for 30 — just to be totally sure she didn’t hit anything.

My aunt and grandma, passengers, 1959.

While my grandma might not have been cut out for driving, she did make some attempts to learn.

My grandfather’s calendar headers for October 1968 and March 1969 both feature notations about my grandma taking, or signing up for, driving lessons.

And the calendar entry that started us off, 500 words or so ago, indicates she went so far as to get behind the wheel and give it her best.

October 1968.

I don’t know at what point the Corine Blumenau Driving Experiment failed. I’m not sure if she ever took a driver’s test, or whether the whole idea was abandoned after a few lessons.

I don’t think the topic was ever raised after 1969, though — or if it was, I don’t remember it ever showing up on the calendar.

My grandfather remained the sole operator of the family celery wagon for the remainder of his life, and they managed to get by with that. My grandma retained firm control over the cooking and cleaning, with help from my great-grandmother.

And that, in the Blumenau household, was the way of things.

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Nov. 12, 2011: Next stop, Carversville.

This is another post having nothing to do with my grandfather and his calendars. It has nothing to do with my family at all, really. It’s just another of my weird semi-historical jags. If you’re on the train for the calendar entries, the next one will be along on Monday.

My grandmother was a plain cook of the old school.

No flashy triple-decker birthday cakes or hand-iced petits fours for her. Dessert at 1107 Hope Street was more likely to be something homey and traditional — a plate of cookies baked from some venerable recipe, or my great-grandma’s plum cake, or perhaps a blueberry pie.

(Blueberry pie became my grandma’s go-to dessert after one visit where my brother mysteriously decided he couldn’t get enough of it. It was a short-lived affliction, but the pies kept coming.)

Have some cookies.

Dessert at my other grandma’s was a little fancier — banana splits with maple syrup, or a box of those Stop n’ Shop sandwich cookies with a little square hole in the top cookie where the peanut butter would poke through.

As a kid, I was more impressed with the store-bought stuff. As an adult and an experienced cook, I think I would be more receptive to the homemade desserts. Cookies are a vector for conversation, after all, and if they’re too good or too sweet, they overshadow the companionship. (A decent cup of tea goes a long way toward redeeming dry or bland cookies, too.)

I thought of my grandma and her predilection for original-gangsta desserts the other day while reading one of the better cookbooks in my collection — Evan Jones’ “American Food: The Gastronomic Story.”

The first half of the cookbook is a series of narrative chapters, explaining how food traditions evolved in different areas of the United States. The second half consists of regional recipes, ranging from the familiar (Thanksgiving turkey, U.S. Senate bean soup) to the exotic and unusual (West Coast abalone steak, Virginia chicken and oysters over cornbread.) I scored my copy at a deep discount on closeout, and have been grateful ever since.

One of the first recipes in Jones’ dessert section is something called Carversville Black Walnut Cake. It’s baked in a greased and floured loaf pan, so it looks more like a loaf of bread than a cake. And its only decoration is a light gilding of confectioners’ sugar.

The idea of a cake without frosting sounded like something that would have been right up my grandma’s alley. It exuded an air of thrift and simplicity that appealed to me. (Once, years ago, I made a Depression-era mock-apple pie just for fun. It was surprisingly tasty.)

When you stop to think about it, don’t most cakes nowadays seem to exist for the sole purpose of holding up big gloppy piles of icing? Not so Carversville Black Walnut Cake. It makes its own friends, needing neither buttercream nor ganache for support.

There was a local connection, as well. The village of Carversville, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is maybe an hour’s drive from where I live. By making a Carversville Black Walnut Cake, I would not only evoke the spirit of my grandmother, but might also gain a little bit of self-administered eastern Pennsylvania street cred.

There was nothing else to do, then.

Evan Jones' book, plus some of the raw ingredients for a Carversville Black Walnut Cake. (In the background: Genesee Cream Ale.)

Creaming everything together.

In goes the marquee ingredient. Black walnuts, incidentally, have a weird, high-sour, almost-turned taste. Would it mellow during baking? I hoped so.

The finished product with its dusting of sugar.

How was it? Excellent. Agreeably crunchy on the outside, and open and crumbly on the inside.

And the distinctive flavor of the black walnuts seemed to go down a notch with cooking — which is good, since the cake is liberally laced with nuts, and their flavor would have been overwhelming otherwise. (I am sure the recipe would be equally noble, and slightly cheaper, if baked with regular ol’ walnuts.)

This is a cake fit for any rainy-day kaffeeklatsch; any kitchen table laid with oilcloth; or any Sunday-afternoon gathering of the septuagenarian ladies of the church. An American classic, in other words.

Grandma would have approved.

Carversville Black Walnut Cake

1 stick butter, softened
1 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp orange juice
2 cups cake flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup black walnut bits
1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar (I used a few pinches)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream butter and sugar together. Add eggs, vanilla and juice and mix thoroughly.
Sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Stir this into the first mixture along with milk and nuts.
Spoon batter into a greased and floured loaf pan and bake for 1 hour 10 minutes.
Remove from oven and sprinkle top with confectioners’ sugar.

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