I possess a bottle with some brown liquid inside. The metal cap over the mouth of the bottle could be easily popped off, and the brown liquid inside could be tasted to determine if it had spoiled over the years. You see, I purchased the bottle at some time around the year 1990, so it is twenty-some years old. Put two and two together, and you discover that the brown liquid inside the bottle is probably as old as the bottle itself. The bottle contains a type of soft drink, soda or pop (depending on where you live) that was popular in the 1950s and 60s. One little corner grocery store in the town of Hollidaysburg continued to carry it, along with many other outdated brands, into the 70s, 80s and 90s.
I could amaze all you readers by stating the exact circumstances of my purchasing the bottle, providing all of the details, beginning with the faint squeaking of the door as I entered the shop, but I don't actually remember anything at all about the visit. One detail that I can surmise is that I probably purchased more than just the one bottle at the time because I probably wanted to drink some of the brown liquid ~ I really doubt that I would have spent any money on a single bottle with the brown liquid inside just to take it home to sit on a shelf - for twenty-some years!
The bottle that I possess contains a brand of soft drink that was called Moxie.
The word moxie is an American slang word. You won't find it as an entry in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, although it is included in the standard OED. The definition provides two options: 1. An American soft drink; 2. Courage, guts, nerve, energy, pep. The second option of the word provided in the OED certainly gives an impression of the word, moxie, but it really doesn't focus on the unique aspect of the word. The word moxie would not be easily substituted for any of the words "courage, guts, nerve, energy and pep" by themselves. It possibly might work as a substitute for any combination of two or more of those words, though.
Moxie was not just a single action, such as 'courage' or 'pep'. It encompassed a variety of feelings and emotions that gave you 'courage'. It expressed the reason you had the 'guts' to face some oppressive situation. Roget's Thesaurus defines the word, moxie, as "the quality of mind enabling one to face danger or hardship resolutely", and then lists twenty-seven synonyms.
The soft drink that was sold under the brand name Moxie, was developed from a 'tonic' that was invented in 1876 by a resident of Maine, Dr. Augustin Thompson. The native Indian tribes, who inhabited the region that the English settlers called Maine, knew of and used parts of the moxieberry plant for medicinal purposes for many years prior to Dr. Thompson's concoction. Whether the Indians knew of any beneficial effects of the moxieberry plant is unknown at this time. Dr. Thompson might have known of the native peoples' use of the plant, but he claimed that the concoction that he marketed to "cure brain and nervous exhaustion, loss of manhood, imbecility and helplessness..." had been discovered by a man named Moxie at some undisclosed location near or south of the Equator. In the 1920s, with the widespread development of carbonated beverages, as a result of the Prohibition movement in America, a company in Boston, Massachusetts began to bottle and sell the soft drink, Moxie, its flavor being derived primarily from the gentian root. The invigorating effects proclaimed by Dr. Thompson for his original tonic became the basis of the marketing campaign for the new soft drink. And so, it was suggested, if you drank Moxie, you would be endowed with the invigorating effects of a tonic, and therefore filled with a resoluteness and strength of being to conquer anything: in other words, you had a lot of moxie.
A tiny spinning wheel that sits on a blanket chest in my entryway is certainly no child's toy. The wheel measures only ten inches in diameter. The height of the entire piece to the highest point, which is the tip of the distaff, measures a mere three and one-half feet. It is definitely a small piece. But, like I said, this is no child's toy, despite the fact that everyone who sees it thinks it is.
The diminutive spinning wheel shown in these photos would be called a castle wheel, so named for the number of 'spires' that rise upward. Castle wheels could be much larger than this though; that name referred more to the structure than to the size. The aspect of the size is what gives this spinning wheel the more common name of bride's wheel.
In the early 1800s, which is the probable date of this bride's wheel, and earlier, when a man and woman married, the woman left her family and moved to a new home, which was the choosing of the man.
Oftentimes, the young couple did not have a tract of land in the immediate vicinity of their families, and needed to travel a distance to start their home. The family might have only a single wagon on which to haul all of their possessions. The bride's wheel was created as a small, easily carried spinning wheel.
Because of its small size, the bride's wheel is often mistaken for a child's toy. But it is fully functional.
The young bride would use this type of wheel until the family could afford to purchase a larger, 'full size" flax wheel.
In the images, notice the small white balls on the ends of various turned parts of this wheel. The white balls are actual ivory. Also notice, in the images of the wheel, there are turned half-spokes of ivory between the wheel's black painted wooden spokes.
My grandfather, Eldon Smith ~ whom we called: Pap ~ made a living by moonshining. I believe I mentioned that in a previous post. What I didn't mention before, though, was that each year Pap raised one or two pigs to feed the family through the winter. At one time he also kept a cow or two for the same purpose, but I mostly remember the pigs. The trouble with Pap raising pigs was that when the time for butchering came around, Pap couldn't bring himself to kill the pigs, so that task fell to my dad, Bernard ~ whom we called: Pappy.
As my brother, Leon, and I grew up, we participated in the raising of the pigs along with the butchering. Well, I shouldn't really say that we "participated" in the pig butchering because Leon would only have been seven or eight years old when our family butchered its last pig, and I would only have been six or seven years old. So pig butchering day was more of a "run around and see what we could get into" type of day for me and Leon.
Did I mention that Pap couldn't bring himself to kill the pigs to be butchered? That was because he made the same mistake every time he got two pigs in the spring: he'd name them. And once the pigs were named, they were his friends, not potential breakfasts and suppers in December. So through the year, as Sally and Tom (or Benny and Jane, or Smokey and Gertie, or whatever) grew up, Pap would fatten his pigs with slop and cornmeal, watching them grow fatter and fatter until that day in mid-October when strips and chunks would be cut off to be renamed bacon and loin chops, and intestines would be washed thoroughly to become the casings for the ground-up sausage.
In his later years, Pap kept his pigs in a pigpen (a twelve by twelve foot building) that stood on my dad's property. Pap had sold the portion of his property on which his own barn stood a few years earlier, and so the pigs became my parents' responsibility. I don't know if my parents considered the pigs to be theirs (because they were kept on their property, they might have), but Leon and I knew that the pigs were Pap's ~ until butchering day, that is. So me and Leon were helping Pap with his pigs when we carried the buckets of slop to them, pouring the mixture of milk and left-over food scraps into the trough, overtop the two or three scoops of corn meal that would first be spread out evenly in the trough bottom.
We loved helping take care of the pigs, and I was just big enough. If I stood on the trough edge, resting my belly on the top of the trough wall, and by stretching as far as I could, I could pat the pigs on their scratchy hairy backs. Me and Leon did that while the pigs were eating ~ they wouldn't stand still for you to touch them otherwise.
So what about that thing shown at the top of this post? It was called a pig scraper (or a hog scraper by some people). The purpose of the pig scraper was to scrape all the hair off the pig when it was being butchered. That concept ~ to scrape the hair off when the pigs were being butchered ~ was kinda lost on six and seven year old Larry and Leon. We thought that the pigs liked having their backs scratched ~ while they were living. I knew that I felt real good when my back itched and mom would scratch it for me.
So we assumed that the pigs probably felt real good too when Leon and I scratched their backs for them. And what better way to give the pigs a good scratching than to use the pig scraper. The only thing was that Leon and I didn't realize that it probably hurt the poor beasts. Every time I see a pig scraper I can't help but be transported back to the 1960s, and in my mind I can almost smell the slop and cornmeal. And each time I experience that kind of vivid memory I feel sorry for those humble pigs who grunted and snorted while two little boys scraped a few hairs off their backs.
When the first Europeans began to move into the North American wilderness in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, they had to construct houses in which to live. That was easy enough for me to say, but as the old saying goes: "It's easier said than done."
The fact of the matter was that it took quite some time and energy to cut down the number of trees needed to build even a modest-sized structure. If the immigrant family was from Western or Southern Europe (which included Britain, Spain, France and the Netherlands), they probably intended to build a wood-frame structure. If the immigrant family came from Northern Europe, they would no doubt have intended to build a log cabin structure. Either method of building would take a little time to accomplish, especially if it was to be performed by the family's father and maybe a son or two.
So what was a family to do in the meantime for shelter? The most common solution to this dilemma was a structure known as a half-faced camp. The half-faced camp consisted of three walls and a roof made of light saplings spaced somewhat close together and interwoven with brush and smaller twigs. The fourth, open, side of the structure was higher than the rear so that the roof sloped from front to back and directed any rainwater away from, rather than into, the interior space. Outside of the structure, but close to that open side, would be kindled the fire for cooking and heating. The half-faced camp would be used as the family's home while the house was being built. The illustration above is of a form of half-faced camp published in 1859 in The Prairie Traveler, by Randolph B. Marcy. Instead of saplings, brush and twigs, the structure consists of a piece of fabric stretched to the ground from supporting branches.
In the North American Colonies, especially in the ones settled by English colonists, the English language bulged with words and phrases that developed and grew from the environment. Such words and phrases have become known as homespun words and phrases. The temporary structure that the immigrants constructed, the half-faced camp, gave birth to one of those homespun phrases (or rather, hyphenated words): half-assed.
Dictionaries give the meaning of the hyphenated word half-assed as something that is done only partly, or done without much effort, resulting in a product that is deficient in some way.
I'm sure that nine out of ten people that use this word to describe something in their life that is rough, or otherwise misses the mark in terms of preferred quality, do not have any idea that the word they have used was derived from a shelter against the weather.
In the days when the menfolk would be out in the fields plowing, sowing,
tending or reaping their crops, when the housewife wanted to call them
in to dinner or supper, she had three ways of doing so. She could give a
strong, loud call to them, hoping they would hear. She could send a
young child out to tell them to come in. Or she could blow on one of
these things - a dinner horn.
This tool is made out of
tin. As the images show, it has a slight bit of detail in texture, but
it was not made to be pretty; it was made to be functional.
The tin dinner horn has a permanent reed, and there are no holes on which the user can play different notes. It has only a single sound ~ something like a duck's quack.
I got my first blacksnake whip from my maternal grandmother, Grammy Nofsker. I was six or seven years old at the time. I was both fascinated and repulsed by the whip. It seemed kind of scary, but being a young boy, I wanted to play with it. Grammy kept the whip in a drawer of a dresser that she had in her apartment, and every now and then she'd let me pick it up and hold it. I was a little hesitant each time I first looked at it, because it actually did look like a snake to me, and it took a bit of gumption for me to extend my hand toward it.
I was forbidden to swing the whip around through the air ~ I might hit something and break it ~ so I was satisfied with just holding the whip in my hands. And you ask ~ how on earth was that possible? I lived in the day and age when children respected their elders, and when we were told not to do something we listened. Period. No need for a 'time out', you simply listened and behaved. The few instances when dad took off his leather belt and gave me a sharp slap across the behind was remembered when I even contemplated misbehaving. So I would just hold the whip and imagine what it would be like to 'crack' it over the heads of a team of horses to make them trot ~ or better yet, gallop ~ a bit faster. I didn't have any video game or YouTube clip to show me how a blacksnake whip should be handled, but I had seen movies in which the hero used his whip to spur his horses to pull the carriage faster. I could easily imagine what it would be like to swing the whip gracefully through the air without actually having to do so ~ against my parents' or Grammy's orders ~ and breaking something valuable in the process.
So what was a blacksnake whip?
Numerous leather strips were braided together around a steel or iron rod to make the handle. The braiding of the leather strips was continued for a length of about two or three feet, and then they were attached together somehow so that a single strip only extended about another two feet. The single strip of leather was usually tied into a knot at the very end of the whip. The braiding of the many strips of leather gave a mottled coloring which, in addition to the shape, did indeed look like a snake. The texture of the braided leather strips resembled snake scales and the various shades of brown of the leather resembled the coloring moreso of a rattlesnake, copperhead or milksnake than a blacksnake.
A website I checked out recently noted that a blacksnake whip was one that did not have a piece of metal in the handle, and therefore could be completely coiled up, resembling a coiled snake ready to strike. The writer of that website apparently did not come from the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania, because the things that people around here always called blacksnake whips had metal rods in the handle.
The blacksnake whip was not the twenty-feet long whip like the one that Indiana Jones cracked in the movies of the same name. Blacksnake whips tended to be only between four and six feet in total length. They were used by a carriage driver to spur on his horse(s) by a slight swat rather than by a skin tearing rip.
The idea of the whip, when coiled up, resembling a coiled snake is an accurate description. That's why, when Grammy Nofsker would let me open up the dresser drawer, and my eyes would first catch sight of the whip, I would experience a momentary sense of fright.
The object at the top of this post is only two inches long, but despite its small size, it has nicely sculpted features. My paternal grandfather gave it to me when I was young, and so I have treasured it for at least fifty years.
What the picture above shows is a detail from a cigarette holder made from the material known as Meerschaum. Both, cigarette holders and pipes were carved from meerschaum.
Meerschaum is a substance composed of hydrous magnesium silicate; it is a mineral of the soapstone family. The substance has been known, down through the decades since the 1650s, variously as seafoam, sepiolite, White Goddess, and Venus of the Sea.
At one time it was thought that meerschaum consisted of petrified sea foam, hence the one name given to it because the word meerschaum is a German word meaning simply 'sea foam'. It was given that name because it was found to be floating on the Black Sea, pieces of it having been freed from the sea bottom to rise to the top because of its porosity.
Although it has been claimed that the name was assigned to the material as early as 1475, the first pipe to have been carved out of meerschaum is claimed to have been one made in the year 1652 by the French artist Louis Pierre Puget.
Another claim has been made by a Hungarian nobleman, Count Andrassy, who received a piece of meerschaum in the year 1723 from the sultan of Turkey, and who gave it to a cobbler at Pesth who carved pipes out of wood. What is known is that by the 1750s there was a great demand for the material and for pipes carved from it. Objects, such as pipes and cigarette holders made from meerschaum were expensive, and therefore a commodity purchased or commissioned by only the rich. Very often meerschaum pipes and cigarette holders were not purchased to be used for smoking, but rather simply for the sake of the artistic carving.
The meerschaum material was very well suited to being carved in fine detail. That made it possible for this tiny man to be so nicely carved.The fact that the mouthpiece is broken off never bothered me because I never intended to use it, anyways. I always considered it more of an artwork than a smoking tool.
