Ah, the Tool Motel. Your first stop when you're visiting Tool, Montana.
For the last few months I've been sending Daughter some home-made magazines.
They're an offshoot of a weekly annoyance that began, years ago, when i started sending her David Lynch's "It's a Friday Once Again" video every Friday. One of those annoying Dad things that'll prrrrrobably less annoying in retrospect some day. That turned into a weekly letter via email, but now I print them off into little booklets and mail them.
This, I know, is absolutely archaic. I should be crafting funny TikToks with STITCHES that CLAP BACK or maybe do a version of the meme everyone was doing between 11:16 AM and 8:42 PM today, you know, that dance, but you're also chewing gum, and it's for Awareness? That.
But no, I miss magazines. The hope is she'll pause in a coffee shop on the way home and read it when it arrives. They contain QR codes that have links to videos and stories. There's always a section on her field, Advertising, with archival material. When we visited last I noticed she had a Newport ad taped on her bulletin board, and this amused me to no end: she, too, had grasped the unnerving nature of the 70s and 80s Newport ads.
She texted today that they'd arrived at the office, because I'd written TEXT UPON RECEIPT on the back. This was followed by a note from a co-worker about her first year at the agency, and how she'd been crushing it with all that energy and creativity.
Advertising! She ended up in ADVERTISING, friends. I still find this remarkable. Now if she'd just finish that latest novel.
Ordinary day in the new style, which is to say, another walk in limbo, unsure of what comes next. Took all I could muster to go to the gym; motivation has completely collapsed and I just want to eat french fries and ice cream. The lobby ceiling light that twitches has not been replaced. The building, by the way, was just sold for less than the asking price a few days ago, and today I noticed the name of the company that owned it had been scraped off the glass on all the doors. Spent some time mentally crafting a tweet - the name went off the glass so fast you'd think the owners had shown up to hand over the title to Mary Astor - but I couldn't make it work.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
Saw an ad for this familiar cake mix. I clipped it because ol’ Grandma is what, 55?
Women of that era entered Matron Mode quickly, at least in the ads. Here she remonstrates her vital, modern daughter for having time for fun.
Would Duncan Hines approve? Of course. But who was Duncan Hines? You probably know, but just in case: he was a restaurant reviewer who wrote guidebooks for travelers.
Hines worked as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printer, and he had eaten many meals on the road across the United States by 1935 when he was 55. At this time, there was no American interstate highway system and only a few chain restaurants, except in large populated areas. Therefore, travelers depended on local restaurants. Hines and his wife Florence began assembling a list for friends of several hundred good restaurants around the country.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hines wrote the newspaper food column Adventures in Good Eating at Home, which appeared in newspapers across the US three times a week on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. The column featured restaurant recipes adapted for home cooks that he had collected during his nationwide travels.
This newspaper article makes it sound as if his eatery-guide was a result of a carefree fellow, not a weary and hungry road warrior:
The name was so widely known that people took out ads to point out that they weren’t in the guide, but should be:
When we google her name, we find that she dissolved the partnership of the cafeteria in March of 1947. She was noted in a society piece about a dog show in 1947, and . . .
But there’s no obituary.
Googling around some more, I see that she had three kids - a son named Irby, and two daughters: Mary and Edmonia Orendorf. Wow. That was her grandmother’s name, it seems; she had married . . . Mexico Orendorf.
Anyway, here’s the space where the cafeteria was, according to the old ads. 207 Broad Street.
That's one way of making a second-story entrance.
It’s a sad block of old emporiums, long gone. Not to tread on the Main Street feature, but what the hell happened:
Computer, enhance . . .
Ah. Well, that’s interesting.
1945, two years before Mrs. Perrin’s coil-shuffling:
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So this block was their world. |
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The Y built another building, and it’s abandoned now.
It closed in 2002, “the victim of poor management, neglected and dangerous dilapidated.”
And here you stop poking around town, because it’s just depressing.
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Ten thousand souls. Wikipedia: "The land on which part of Cambridge stands was granted to Zaccheus Biggs and Zaccheus Beatty by the government in 1801." So it could've been named Doublezacch, or maybe Biggsenbeatty. Just as well.
