Did Iva Mae {heart} George?

As I sat in my neighbor Celia's kitchen the other day, she pushed a tiny white box toward me across the table. She said the box had been sitting inside her desk junk drawer for many years. Inside the box was this very old pocketwatch.




She explained that the watch had been gifted to her by a woman she worked with years ago. The woman told Celia that the watch had belonged to her adoptive mother who died at age 106 about ten years ago. The woman who adopted her had never married but during her long life in the Waterbury VT area had been known as a "real looker" (Celia's description) and had many "boyfriends" in her life about whom she had always remained very secretive.

I took the pocketwatch home to study it under a good light and to open the caseback to see what was inside. The dial says Hamilton which was an old, venerable Lancaster PA company which produced highly desirable watches from 1892-1969, the most collectible being it's "railroad" watches. (Envision an old black & white film where the railroad conductor pulls out his pocket watch to check his train's departure time.) The back of the watch has an Art Deco style three-initial monogram which I could not exactly decipher.



So I popped open the caseback of the pocketwatch and found an very intriquing hand-engraved inscription:




It is so reflective that it was hard to photograph but the inscription says:

I.M.D. to G.L.D.

Geo. L. Dwyer
Waterbury VT
1929

Aw, how romantic, right? Given that the last initials in the inscription's "to-from" are "D", I assumed the pocketwatch had been a gift from a Mrs. Dwyer to her husband, George Dwyer. The couple would have been a wealthy one because the price of the watch in 1929 would have been around $125. But I now knew the initials on the back of the case were "GDL".

I opened the dust cover to examine the watch's movement. First know that I adore "mechanical" watches, which describes the way watches were originally crafted. Mechanical means you wind the spring inside the watch by hand every day to keep it running. You have to have a major love affair with a watch to find the daily winding ritual a joy and not a burden. Anyway, look at the beautiful mechanical movement inside the pocketwatch:



Make sure you click on the photo to see the amazing detail. The spring that winds it is loose and not winding so the watch is not running. You can see the winding spring at the edge of the movement in between the 11 and 12 o'clock position in the photo. It is a 23-jewel mechanical movement. But oddly, there is no movement number etched into it at the usual spot (around the 3 o'clock position in the photo). That missing info is thwarting my attempts to value the watch. I cannot find another Hamilton pocketwatch online that has no movement number on it.

So, back to the story....I relayed the inscription text to Celia. She didn't know that the watch caseback opened, much less that it had been inscribed. Interestingly, she told me that the original owner of the watch had been a Miss Iva Mae Dexter, and not a Mrs. George L. Dwyer. Hmmmm. So why would Miss Iva Mae Dexter have given an elegant and expensive 18K gold pocket watch to Mr. Dwyer in 1929?

Who were these people? A bit more research revealed George's name listed on page 746 of the membership list of the American Dairy Science Association dated July 15, 1934. Address was Waterbury VT. So I believe I've found the pocketwatch's George L. Dwyer and he was a dairy farmer.

So guess what Iva Mae did for a living? She was a dairy inspector. How interesting. Celia was told that Iva Mae's dairy lab had been known as the cleanest in the country. On her 104th birthday, Iva Mae fulfilled one of her lifetime dreams when she rode a San Francisco cable car. I found by digging that CNN had reported on Iva Mae's adventure in a televised piece on April 21, 1996.

My research is continuing but raises lots of questions so far. What was the precise relationship between Iva Mae and George? What event prompted her to gift such an extravagant and personalized gift to George, who I believe was a married man. If the pocketwatch had been a gift to George, why then did it end up in Iva Mae's belongings at her death? And why has the pocketwatch landed at my doorstep now?

Knitting Idol

Have an American Idol fan in the house? The ever incomprehensible but totally adorable Paula Abdul is selling a knitted fashion accessory she calls her My Forever Favorite Button Sweater Wrap.







58"/147cm X 15"/38cm with 3 buttonholes and 2"/5cm mother of pearl buttons. 50%cotton/50% acrylic. She offers it in black, brown, blue, purple, red and white. Handknitters could knock this off in a day. Machine knitters...what, like an hour?

I love shrugs. Are they coming back? Or is Paula 5 years behind the times?

color

Woke up at 3:15AM this morning not to return to sleep so flipped the channels and watched an interview with a jewelry designer from Budapest whose specialty is pearls. Not your grandmother's pearls but modern pearls of all shapes, sizes and colors from which she creates her designs.



She was asked what her design inspiration is and she said without thinking, "yarn". What?! She said she goes into yarn shops and buys interesting balls of yarn (it actually sounded like "bowls" but I'm sure it's balls) and unwinds them at home to see what colors and textures have been blended together. Then she translates the yarn into her pearl jewelry.

I thought that was so interesting. Generally knitters look for color inspiration out in nature, in art galleries and from other esoteric sources.

RIP Brad-cicle

It's been a sad week in Genoa City WI, home of all people "young" and "restless". After 24 years steaming up the small screen, pool boy cum corporate executive Bradley ("Brad") Carlton died a hero.

Brad sacrificed his own life saving that of the idiot teenage son of Sharon, the love of his life. Sharon had only moments before kicked Brad to the snowy curb, sending him away from her warm and cozy cabin in the woods into a blizzard of unprecedented proportions in Wisconsin, unaware that her unsupervised, idiot teenage son (did I say that already?) was ice skating on a lake just down the road, having been punked by the kids at high school into believing the lake was the site of a "cool kids" party, nasty blizzard notwithstanding. So brave Brad, pool boy cum ex-Navy Seal, dove into action. Literally.

The idiot teenager had fallen through thin ice but is fine, having been pulled out of the frigid water by Brad who, while wearing his signature black leather jacket and a new bright red scarf (seen in the photo below), heard the idiot teen's cries for help from the roadside where Brad's new car had inexplicably died too. (Ah, the irony.)

Proving no good deed goes unpunished in WI, here is the sad result of Brad's bravery: an ignominious and gruesome death as an underwater frozen popcicle:



Oh Bradley, if only you had had the foresight to take off your shirt one last time for us.

Saturday

So here's my latest knitting project:



Nothing in the basket lately.

At long last, Sears Optical finally had it's 2/$99 glasses sale. I've been holding onto my new prescription for 6 months waiting for this sale. I got there at the last day of the sale but was happy to find a reasonably decent frame which I ordered in two colorways.



Before I moved to VT I thought I had to spend $400++ per pair of glasses. Duh. So, I finally have new frames that work with my salt & pepper hair (still working New Year's resolution '08). Went out on the limb with the deep purple & pink option but some days a girl just needs some color on her face. The other is black & tortoise. These are my first glasses with progressive lenses and this is just day one with them but I am using my old readers to type this up. I couldn't find the right spot on the new lenses for computer-distance sight.

Murphy had accupuncture yesterday and this is the result:



She sleeps so peacefully for the rest of the day and night, rising from her slumber only to eat. Today she will be filled with energy. This is her holistic vet who does the accupuncture, Dr. Konrad Kruesi.



There have been 3 assorted vehicles parking in Southern Boy's driveway for the last week. Must investigate.....

The long decade.

My father died unexpectedly ten years ago today.

He had no plans to die that Saturday morning. In fact, he and Jean were packing to travel here to Vermont for a week's vacation. He smoked a cigarette and by all accounts started feeling the well-published signs of a heart attack. He had no one to become alarmed for him. He was not alone yet was very alone. Jean was deep into her Parkinson's Disease and unable to help. My teenage brother paid little attention to my parents. He was the one who phoned me in a panic at 8:30AM to ask what to do because my father couldn't breathe. How long my father had been like that I won't ever know. I told him hang up and call 911. But Emergency Services could not revive him.

To honor his memory today, I had every old photo I had of my father, from child through young grandfather, transferred to DVD and I sent a copy to each of my siblings. (An unexpected benefit: I discovered that many of the old photos, while stored properly in acid free boxes, were deteriorating and fading with age.) Here are some of the photos:

My father's parents, Lucy and Antonio, on their wedding day. Don't know the date. He was fresh off the boat from Italy. I never knew him. They had no money at all and I always wondered how they managed to look so darn opulent.



This is the photo I used for the cover of the DVD's. It's my father at age 4 being led by hand along a city street by his mother. How fabulous is that huge clutch she is carrying? My father was always Grandma Lucy's favorite child, her golden boy.



Here's my father (on the right) with his best friend circa 1953.



How about those busy lace curtains? Just behind my father's head is a framed Air Force photo of him that I have never seen.

This is another photo of my father and his friend Micky (my father is sitting) and I love it because it contains one of the strongest childhood memories I have, the kind that flashes you back 50 years in a nanosecond. On the top of that white cabinet sits a ceramic pig which is a cookie jar. It's pink and I believe one of my sisters has it today. That pig was always filled with cookies at grandma's house.



Here's my father (right) at an Air Force base in Japan circa 1952. He was a bomber mechanic during the Korean War, having enlisted right after high school. He could fix anything.



While stationed in Europe with the Air Force, my father took a zillion photos, this little bit of craziness being one of them. I can just imagine the group of 18-year old boys away from home for the first time and laughing in disbelief at this statue.



Does anyone know what/where it is?


This photo of my father was published in his hometown newspaper in April 1953.



Jean and Phil married February 19, 1955 after meeting in the Air Force (she was enlisted too). She borrowed the dress from one of my father's relatives.



The sad result of 15 years of marriage:



Only kidding. It's Halloween fun circa 1970. Dad in the pearls; Jean in the beard.

Since you've been asking: news from the 'hood

Crazy amounts of snow and ice due today and tonight. Pushing 2 feet (that's .61 meters for you, Kiwi) expected. Schools closed today before they began in anticipation of the forthcoming hot mess. My heating oil tank alarmingly registered "empty" yesterday so I dumped in a jug of kerosene and called for an oil delivery today. Went through 200 gallons of heating oil in the month of January. Oh wait...it's still January. Walked Murphy and her friend Arthur at 6:30 AM so she won't stare at me with those "I'm house-bound and I'm stir-crazy" eyes later today in the thick of the storm.

So aside from weather, here's what's new in the neighborhood.

The ever-popular Southern Boy has a new girlfriend who often spends the night at his house (not being nosy but, like the cops say, her car's in plain view). He's single so no big deal....except that he's old enough to be her father. Why is there always an eagerly-available dopey 20-year old college girl for every commitment-phobic, middle-aged guy? I want to grab her and shake her by the shoulders and urge her to run. Instead, being a late-night dog walker, I am often subjected to long, icky, spit-swapping sessions in his driveway as he bids her farewell. (That's me, awkwardly averting my gaze while hiding in the dark across the street until they separate and she drives away, mentally weighing the this-is-cringe-inducing factor against the freezing-my-ass factor. Far be it from me to interrupt young love.)

Next door neighbor Kevin is finishing up his annual January/winter project with his wife--remodeling the interior of their house. Last winter, they refinished their hardwood floors and I am consumed with jealousy whenever I see those gleaming floors worthy of a championship bowling alley. This winter, the target was the remodel of the three upstairs bedrooms. Wallpaper was stripped, plaster walls spackled and painted. Carpeting replaced. Their bed swapped from a queen-sized water bed (the frequent subject of my friendly ridicule: hello, 1968 called and wants it's water bed back) to a conventional king-sized bed. I suggested they offer the water bed to Southern Boy, for whom every day is 1968 and "the summer of love".

Neighbor Cindy with all the assorted kids (natural, adopted, foster) is still struggling post-divorce from her cheating skunk of an ex. I use her youngest son to help me around the house, as with dog walking, snow shoveling, watching scary TV shows with me, etc. (He's the same age as Murphy: 11) But he hasn't been available when I've needed him in....well, forever. Cindy packs up the kids and pets into the minivan and goes on the road EVERY Friday, snow day and school holiday. She'd rather sleep on the floor with the kids at someone else's house than be in her own home. She confessed to me the other day that at home she's lonely for another adult to talk to. (Since most days, my conversations are either with a dog or a woman with dementia who refers to me as "the warden", I get what she means.) Cindy does get to speak with her lawyer a lot because her ex's live-in girlfriend likes to cause trouble. For example, a court proceeding was threatened at Christmas after Cindy refused to accept a pile of gifts from her ex's girlfriend. Yes, the girlfriend had a good ol' hissy fit when a bag of doggie gifts was returned to her unopened. As Cindy said, "I may have be forced to accept her gifts for my kids but I'll be damned if I'm taking gifts from her for my dog!" I counseled Cindy about the potential triple-pleasure of accepting ALL gifts from the skanky girlfriend: (1) eliminating all future legal-fee generating issues, (2)causing the girlfriend to spend lots of her own disposable income (she is in the phase of trying to "buy" the affection of Cindy's kids) and (3) spreading joy by immediately carting all those bags of unopened gifts (whether for kids or pets) down to the grateful Salvation Army store. I try to be a pragmatist.

New-to-me neighborhood scandal: Down the street are two adjacent businesses, both grandfathered into this residential neighborhood. The businesses are operated in the backyards of two otherwise stately homes sitting side-by-side. I was aware that business #1 is owned and operated by a divorced yet obviously cordial couple. She works the office and he's in the field. Business #2 is operated by a friendly guy who waves from the front porch when I walk by with Murphy at night. Here's the scandal about which I inexplicably had been unaware: a few years ago, the husband in business #1 hooked up with the wife in business #2 and broke up both marriages. Husband #1 now stays far away from husband #2, which is a bit awkward due to working next door to each other. Husband #1 and wife #2 now live together. We can only hope they are happpy. (a'hem)

In the karma-can-be-a-bitch column, I listened on the radio yesterday to an interview of the only candidate running against the incumbent in our mayoral election in March. (More on him later because Kevin & I are plotting to help him.) During the interview, a guy called in and asked indignantly what the candidate planned to do about (paraphrasing) a certain city department head who rides around in his city-owned truck all day long doing nothing, uses the truck for his personal business and who routinely steals road salt, sand and gravel from the city for his personal use. Ooops. A year ago, my friendly neighbor/city department head who drives a city truck all day dumped his wife for the mayor's young secretary the Monday following his Saturday night 50th-birthday party. Probably just a coincidence.