These Happy Golden Years

In a letter dated Feb 26, 1967,Eugenia Garson, the force behind the Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook,  wrote Rose that she had the hardest time finding the music to These Happy Golden Years. She struck out at the Library of Congress and many other music libraries. Finally she found by chance in a small private collection in New York. It had originally been published in East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1879. Let’s all thank Mrs. Garson and her daughter for not giving up and listen to this great song that gave us a great title. Find it on “Laura Ingalls Wilder Speaks” available from most of the gift shops.

Quote: “What’s popular…”

The November 1. 2008 issue of Library Journal features a review of a new search engine called Hakia. It weights according to content and context rather than popularity and relevancy (as does Google).  Instead it considers peer-reviewed information, commercial bias, currency of content, and source authenticity and has a section called credible sites that are identified by real librarians. So far those are limited to the environment and health, but plans are in the works to expand them to other areas.

COO Melek Paulatkonak of Hakia gave this great quote “What’s popular may not be credible, and what’s credible may not be popular.” A true quote and one well worth thinking about. (p. 22)

Farmer Boy Economics

Once again a reporter is citing Laura’s brilliant description of the labor theory of value, meaning that money or a good is worth the amount of labor it took to produce it. Father Wilder is used as the character to explain the lesson when he gives Almanzo a 50 cent piece, but convinces him to invest his money in a pig rather than spend it on lemonade.

http://tinyurl.com/cjvr27

The theory was developed by British economist David Ricardo who based his economic work on Adam Smith’s pioneering work The Wealth of Nations. In simplified form, it holds that a clock that costs $100 has ten times the labor in it as a $10 pair of shoes or that all that the value in something comes from labor which leads to very interesting conclusions about wages and inflation, but you can look those up for yourself. By the way, the theory has now fallen out of favor in modern ecomonics and been replaced by the marginal theory of value which says that both supply and demand influence value. In the classic example my economic professor gave me, once you have 10 pairs of identical orange tennis shoes, will the 11th pair have as much value to you as the first pair did?

Walnut Grove Depot

You never know what you’ll come across when you are searching the web. When I was looking for something else entirely I found this page of old (circa 1920s) family photos of Revere, MN. Not only is that just down the road from Walnut Grove, but that’s also where the depot that now is part of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum came from in the early 1980s. It was a hard trip, it even fell off into the ditch once along the way, but it finally made it and has put in years of faithful service. So I just had to check out the photos and low and behold, there was the depot in its original location. You can see it the best in the photo on the right in the second row. Take time to stay and look at a typical Midwestern small town from that time (note the wooden grain elevator like those in an earlier post).

http://tinyurl.com/d684bo

It makes me think, go ahead and follow the rules of good photography and get close up photos of people by all means, but don’t forget to take some really wide shots, too. It’s been my experience that even family members in years to come will be just interested in that. (Oh, look it’s Aunt Jean’s kitchen! That’s before we took the playhouse down. Remember sitting under that old tree before the ice storm?) So make sure you are taking some of those for the future too.

Churning Garth Williams

This last read through of Farmer Boy has convinced that Garth Williams has led me astray. I always liked the barrel churn Williams pictured in Chapter 17 “Summer-Time” (page 198 in the yellow back paperbacks). I always wondered why Almanzo didn’t get on and ride it like a rocking horse. I always wanted to see one like it. I haven’t yet, but I suppose there was on Williams based his drawing on as I can recognize most of the equipment in the drawing behind Almanzo.

I have seen lots of barrel churns. They just looked nothing like the rocking horse model. Well, this time I read through a line jumped out at me, “Almanzo turned the handle, and the churn rocked.” There is nothing to turn on the one in Garth Williams drawing, but a normal barrel churn turns the barrel by turning the handle. Loaded with cream it’s constantly off balance and does rock, though not on rockers.

Dasher and Barrel Churns

I’m including a photo of a normal barrel churn which I’m now 95 percent sure that it is like the one Mother Wilder used. The churn on the left is a dasher churn, like the Ingalls Family used in Little House in the Big Woods. The metal ones on the far side are new to me, but I would guess they might be from a commercial dairy to go with the other photos in the chapter.

Melissa Wiley

A recent find in the Lexis-Nexis database is an article in the Boston Globe from May 26, 1999.  It spells out what happened on “Little House By Boston Bay Appreciation Day” on Boston Commons.

It also has an interesting description of Melissa Wiley. “In a gingham dress and sunbonnet, with braids hanging down her back, she began each morning hauling pails of water a half mile down a dusty path from the museum office to the little sod house where she gave talks for school groups. She churned butter, gathered buffalo chips for the fire and baked bread in an iron cookstove.”