The one where Cookie crosses over the 2,400 mark

 

Who are these men?  They need decorating help.

 

This is the one where Cookie toots his own horn.

As of yesterday, I have validated and then uploaded 2,400 images of copyright-free photographs of people - long dead, of course - to Find A Grave.  And these images are not of famous people.  Nor are they pictures of grave markers - that is a different count.  These are electronic images scanned from the originals. 

It is all about putting a face with the name on the memorial.

Cookie sees himself as a history connector - one who connects people to history - and to that end, I have always felt that if a picture is worth a thousand words, well then, it makes it far more likely that someone will be able to see that a memorial on that site isn't just a name and grave location, but the face of the person behind that name. 

One could just snap up pictures found in yard sales and just assign the picture of Anna Smith of Toledo, Ohio, to the memorial for Anna Smith buried in Toledo.  But that would be a recipe for chaos. I mean, per Find A Grave, there are 29 people named Anna Smith buried in Toledo who have memorials, so how do you know you have the right face on the right memorial?  And in Lucas County? That adds in another 14.  Ann Smith, then things snowball. 

Well, you only know if you study the image, note the name of the person, their possible age, and the era in which the picture was taken.  Those huge mutton sleeves on the comely Anna Smith in the image give you an idea that she was perhaps, 16-25 at the height of the fad in the 1890s.

Then you hunt for Anna Smith on FamilySearch, Ancestry, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage, and you pour over newspapers looking for obituaries, and marriage announcements.  You look at birth records, you look at death records, you search until you have proven that the picture of the Anna Smith you have is the person on the site. 

And what if Anna married or remarried?  Stayed local or moved away?  I guess what I am getting at is that each picture can take an hour, or weeks, months even.  Then there is the pile of images that my forty-five years of experience searching for people means nothing.  These are the people for which there is no positive way to identify them.  Those make me the saddest. 

But when I make that connection, I scan the image, encode the metadata, and if need be restore it in Photoshop.  After all, everyone likes to look their best.  

Then the upload. 

Another one done.

Next?

Onto 2,401.

Of course hunting for the images is a duty in itself.  Flea markets, book and paper shows, etc., and so on.  I also try and rehome these images. I have only had one person tell me to throw out an image: "I have plenty of pictures of him, throw it out," said the person's granddaughter. 

That one got mailed to the local historical society as a gift.  Maybe one day her grandchildren will be looking for the image as well. 

I don't care if people download the images.  If it makes a connection for them, fine.  Isn't that what helping people make connections is really about?

Needless to say that I have plenty of time to work on these.  My goal is 3,000.  But when I get to that, the foot gets punted down the field to 3,500, maybe 4,000. 

I really believe that we owe people something to help them find a link to their past if they search for it. Ignoring history just makes it that much harder to unearth further down the line. 

I want to be the person who in a small way helps them make it there. 

The Phlebotomist is Having A Day

 

Cookie had a mad dash to the doctor today. 

I was scheduled for blood tests today in advance of a follow-up with the surgeon when one of these God Damn messages from their automated system comes in and told me that I need to check in for my appointment. 

But the bloodletting was scheduled for 10:30.  Now it's 9:30?  Well you can't call the doctor without getting trapped in the Hellish phone tree, and not wanting to miss my window, I decide to make a run for it.

So I grab a jacket, push the Prius to its limits, and make it to the medical building ten minutes late, so I am technically on time in Baltimore metrics. (You can be up to a half hour late here, they don't care.)

I sign in and get called up only to be told that my appointment is at 10:30, which I thought.  

So Cookie shows them the message, they look it up, and Receptionist tells me that "that's for next week."

"But shouldn't it give me a date for the appointment check-in?"

"One would think.  You should have called," says Receptionist.

"Your phone tree isn't easy to work through," said I.

Receptionist says, and I quote: "Yeah, we hear that a lot." and then, crickets.

I mean it's not her job to fix it, but a Comcast representative will tell you the same thing about their phone tree, which is closer to the black hole of Calcutta than anything service related. Yet these systems never get fixed.

Anyway, I get to the Vampires Den, and I think were doing one tube. I get Hotty McHotty, the male phlebotomist, and he asks how I am doing.  

"I am having a day," I reply. 

"You and me both."

Now Miss Thing is built well, looks damn good in scrubs, has a dimple in his chin, and is totally desire-worthy, but he is a prima donna.  I have seen him at the home of one of the neighborhood power couples. 

"I'm sorry."

"I'll live.  The world keeps going." Then he says under his breath "Keep it together, Minnelli."

Reader, it took every ounce of strength not to laugh.

Then a woman I have never seen comes by and tells Hotty to take a break and she'll stick me. Sotto voce she tells me "He's having a day."

Out comes my arm, looking for veins, pat, pat, pat, and she finds one she likes, then she remembers "I need to get the tubes."

Tubes?

I thought this was just a follow-up PSAT.  WRONG.  They haul out a whole battery of tubes. 

She sticks me, and I don't feel a thing.  This woman is good. And better her than Hotty, because you don't want Miss Thing jabbing you if his mind is someplace else, like looking at his husband's messages on that man's phone. 

So it was four vials, and she admonishes me for not drinking enough water before coming over, and then she hands me a cookie. 

"Usually we only give these out when we draw a lot of blood." I didn't fuss or freak out, so it was my reward for being a compliant patient.

Then she says, "He's a little off, but he'll be better in a moment. I'd appreciate you not mentioning that to the doctor when you see him."

"Me?" I say. "Not the doctor.  Besides, who am I going to tell?  "  

And I have not broken that promise. 

 

The car that wasn't there. At first...

 

I call this one "The car that wasn't there." It's a 1962 Dodge 800.  When Dodge rolled out its disastrous 1962 model line in the fall of 1961, the one thing missing was a big, BIG car. 

It's a whole corporate cloak-and-dagger thing.  Suffice it to say, the boys at Highland Park got pantsed by their former CEO William Newburgh. 

Things got out of hand when Newburgh overheard Ed Cole (GM) talking about their forthcoming small Chevy, and only hearing whispers, Newburg panicked.  Upon getting back to the HQ, he ordered that the full-size Dodge and Plymouth's proposed for 1961 be shrunken, and fast.  This threw the whole styling and engineering sections into total chaos. They had to shrink the length, and to get the proportions right, the width as well.

Things got completely out of hand when, in short order, Newburgh was shown the door in a conflict of interest scandal.  Chrysler ended up with a CEO named Lynn Townsend who was a bean counter, and accounts make lousy heads of car companies. 

THEN things went totally out of control when Chrysler found out that Chevy wasn't shrinking any vehicle, but it was coming out with the compact Chevy II.  By that time, and with Townsend not wanting to waste tooling dollars, it was impossible to stop the development of the small cars slated by Dodge and Plymouth. But reader, the body dies were literally cast, and there was no going back without a massive loss. 

In short, Newburgh had screwed Chrysler's pooch. 

So all Dodge dealers had in the fall of 1961 were intermediate shrunken-up Dodges to sell. And they were ugly.  Well, not ugly, but weird. Obtuse angles. Asymmetrical lines. Unexplained bludges.  Dealers complained and buyers ran to GM, Ford, and AMC.  Even Studebaker benefited from the stumble.   OK, they had the look that only a mother could love. 

Vice President of styling Virgil Exner, the man who just five model years before had been hailed a hero, was given his walking papers.  Never mind that Exner had warned the higher-ups that this would be a catastrophic disaster.  The dealers demanded retribution on someone, and Exner was axed. 

Quick thinking, in the late fall of 1961, Chrysler decided to make a new Dodge out of that year's Chrysler body.  From the cowl back, this is a Chrysler Newport. But, from the windshield forward, it's a 1961 Dodge front clip with a restamped hood.  

To make it look different, Chrysler's new head of styling, Elwood Engle* (a man as exciting as his name sounds) brought out a box of disused trim pieces from previous years and taped them to the body of a cobbled-together test mule.   Dodge's new symbol, the "Fratzog" ended up on the grille, faux vent fins from the previous year's Chrysler made it to the front fenders - you know making do with parts are in the warehouse. 

The irony? The 1962 Chrysler was a 1961 Dodge with a 1961 Chrysler front clip and redone rear quarter panels that did away with Dodge's funky reverse forward high fins. 

There was no time to fix the rear of this Dodge 880. If you were sitting behind a 1962 Chrysler or a 1962 Dodge 880, they looked exactly alike, save for the names Chrysler on one and Dodge on the other.  

To confuse this even more, let us ask "What of Chrysler's 1962 Chrysler wagon?" 

It didn't start out as a definned Dodge, and it couldn't use the Chrysler wagon body that had fins as big as a wedding cake, so it used the Chrysler front clip, mated to the 1961 Plymouth station wagon body.  And when the 1962 880s came along, they too used the Plymouth body.  One thing carried over from the previous two years was the hardtop senior station wagons - a body style both dropped by GM in 1958 and Ford's Mercury division at the end of the 1960 model year. 

What of the 1962 full-size Plymouth? Well, there wasn't one. 

Instead, Chrysler took its Newport and dropped the prices so low it stood in for a Plymouth.  This damaged Plymouth's ability to sell cars, because its shrunken "full-size cars" weren't beauty winners in their own right, either.   It also damaged Chrysler's reputation as a maker of better cars.

In 1963 Chrysler got its cars the "Clean, Crisp, Custom" look, and Dodge carried on with the Chrysler body that had been a Dodge body.  For 1963 they got rid of this gawd awful front end and got new round taillights. 

Dodge made do with the basic body through 1964, getting an almost modern look from the rear. 

In 1965, All was made right, sort of. All three brands got all-new vehicles.  But that is a post for another day. 

*Cookie is sure he was a lovely man, but the cars he created at Chrysler were hit or miss.  The 1965 Dodge was a yawner, as was the 1969 Plymouth.  And we won't even discuss the 1966-67 Plymouth Belvedere/Satellite or the concurrent Dodge Coronet.

No Manic Monday here.

 

Well, I guess it's time for an update of sorts, frankly, I cannot think of anything that is going on with mentioning. 

Verily, if I could, it would break this horrific case of ennui and boredom that envelopes me.  It's not depression, but seriously low energy, and a bad case of nothing new.

No manic Mondays here in Baja Towson.

As my recovery progresses from surgery I really can't set out on an escapade, or travel.  So there is nothing new there.  Genealogy is all caught up. TV is a vast wasteland.  And we're in that part of February that has some springlike days, but no consistent springlike weather. 

One good thing is that Husband had a summons to Boston, and has returned safely.  The best no-drama there is. 

I am planning on ordering archive materials from Gaylord on March 1st, but that isn't the stuff of entertainment, just another form of work. 

Got my allergy shots today, so yeah me.   Self-care, everyone's a winner!

See what I mean.  

I feel like Gooch - a giant sponge. 

Oh, well.  Tomorrow really is another day.