bureau services free to all desiring to become citizens
It was a different time.
Today we have ICE, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In 1926 there was the Bureau of Naturalization.
The Ford Motor Company set the American Citizenship Bureau of Highland Park to work with Bureau of Naturalization.
This item ran in the Ford News, the weekly Newspaper for the Ford Motor Company, October 1, 1926.
Headlined, Give Instruction in Citizenship. the item stated:
Classes in American citizenship for men who are not American citizens and wish to become naturalized were begun September 20 under the auspices of the American Citizenship Bureau of Highland Park.
The bureau furnishes its services free to all desiring to become American citizens, cooperating with the naturalization courts and the office of the District Director of Naturalization.
Besides the knowledge necessary to naturalization, the prospective citizen may learn reading, writing, and other subjects through free classes taught under the direction of the Highland Park Board of Education.
Full information is available at the offices of the American Citizenship Bureau, Highland Park City Hall, 20 Gerald Avenue.
This book is in the Smithsonian Institution where it has the legend, “Though a key requirement of citizenship is learning English, many guides are still available in the native languages of new immigrants. The Foreign Language Information Service provided translations of these guides in thirteen European languages.”
Different times.
This must be one of the display targeted for removal.
time to rid ourselves notion leisure for workmen a class privilege
Based on the article, The weekend is 100 years old – but have ‘skiveday Fridays’ and hybrid working ruined it for everyone? by Jess Cartner-Morley.
Ms. Cartner-Morley writes, “In 1926, Henry Ford gave his employees both Saturdays and Sundays off – and the two-day chunk of time to party, pray or simply do nothing was born. Now it’s changed beyond recognition.”
“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,” Ford wrote in his company’s Ford News in October 1926. Ford’s innovation was in part a response to his earlier invention: the assembly line, which had increased productivity but exhausted workers, with absenteeism up to 10% in factories; in his article he did not disguise that there was self-interest involved. “People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles,” he continued. The new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. Meanwhile, his factories maintained a steady level of productivity despite the reduced hours. In 1938, faced with rising unemployment levels in the Great Depression, the five-day week was officially adopted across the US.
And it got me to thinking about the term Weekend … or Week End as it floated around in my brain.
I came up with a scene from the show Downton Abby where new heir to the title said he might be able to come out from the city to Downton … for the Week End.
Ms. Cartner-Morley remembered the same scene and commented, “The late, great Maggie Smith had, as she so often did, the best line. “What is a weekend?” she asked, in Downton Abbey, with the entitled bewilderment of a dowager countess for whom income is spoonfed in silver from birth, not doled out in a brown envelope on a Friday night.”
The problem is that scene in the TV show took place in the first season, the year the Titanic sank, 1912.
don’t dare start thinking in the morning … if I thought thoughts would bust my head
Blues at Dawn
I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head – So I don’t dare start thinking in the morning.
I don’t dare remember in the morning Don’t dare remember in the morning. If I recall the day before, I wouldn’t get up no more – So I don’t dare remember in the morning.
As published in The Collected poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994).
I don’t dare start thinking in the morning.
I don’t dare remember in the morning
If I thought thoughts in bed, them thoughts would bust my head.
If I recall the day before, I wouldn’t get up no more.
Just get me a cup of coffee and go away for about 20 minutes.
moment you’re suspended knowing nothing and no one … not even yourself
There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you,
and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place,
and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.
From The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Harper Perennial: New York, 2021).
Time marches on.
As Willie Wonka said, “Oh, you can’t get out backwards. You’ve gotta go forwards to go back. Better press on.”
But there are those moments.
There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place.
Maybe these are life changing moments when one part of your life is at an end and a new life starts tomorrow.
Sometimes you see it coming.
Sometimes you see it was coming when you look back, and you say should have seen that one coming.
Sometimes you might not even know it happened until years later and you say, you know what …
I have long been fascinated by these isolated moments in your life when you are in that moment, suspended, knowing nothing.
As an example, back in the day I played a lot church league softball.
Baptist Church league softball.
If you ever want your faith and testimony challenged play Baptist League softball.
I was challenged a lot and failed a lot.
BUT I DIGRESS.
Every so often I might get a hit and ended up on base and it occurred to me that while on base, time kind of stopped.
The was a finite time that I could be on base.
There was an infinite time that I could be on base.
While on base, my clock stopped.
I couldn’t (well maybe I could have) ask for time out to use the bathroom, answer the phone or respond to any number of calls on my attention.
I was on base.
I was safe.
I was safe on base.
And in softball as well as in baseball, there was no clock running.
No one could point to a clock and say I had been on base too long or that time was running out.
I was on base so long as I was safe.
OR until someone else on my team did something so I could score or get out and maybe the side would go out and I was no longer on base regardless of what I did or said.
It was a magic time.
The past that I’d been standing on fell away behind me, and the future I meant to land on was not yet in place.
Admittedly that ‘on base’ moment is a snapshot of moments where the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place.
Sometimes these moments of the time are an elevator ride.
Sometimes these moments stretch on and on where the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place.
And for a moment … of maybe a lot longer … you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.
Between barstools was the way some folks put it.
And that’s where I am right now.
The past that I have been standing on has fallen away behind me, and the future I mean or I hope to land on is not yet in place.
I am suspended.
Still know things I think but what to think that I should know when the future I might land is not yet in place.
I am reminded of the Steve McQueen role in the movie when he said:
It’s like that fella who fell off a ten-storey building.
What about him?
As he was falling, people on each floor heard him say “So far, so good.”
everywhere nowhere jactatively away like the falling tide
Adapted from the poem, Words in a Certain Appropriate Mode” by Hayden Carruth as published in Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991 (Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, Wash, 1992).
Aside from the many moods captured in the poem that match many of my current moods,
Nor not alone, where cognition seeps Jactatively away like the falling tide
If there were a tide, and what is left Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps Its undifferentiated unreality, all
It was that word there, Jactatively.
Was it made up?
Is it really a word?
Was gratified to find it is indeed a word.
And what a word!
According to the Online Merriam-Webster, Jactatively is an adverb derived from the rare word jactative (pertaining to boasting or the restless tossing of the body), meaning in a manner characterized by bragging, ostentatious false claims, or restless physical agitation.
In the 17th century, lawyers began tossing around the word jactitation, which can be traced back to the Latin verb jactare, meaning “to throw.” Originally, jactitation was used as a word for a false claim or assertion being publicly thrown about to the detriment of another person. Run-of-the-mill slander and false claims of being married to someone were two common types of jactitation brought to court. Before long, jactitation had jumped over to the medical profession, where it continues to serve as a word for restless, jerky, or twitchy body movements. In 1761, British writer Laurence Sterne threw jactitation into his novel Tristram Shandy as a substitute for discussion, but that meaning never caught on.
Restless physical agitation.
BOY HOWDY!
All I have to do is turn off the light and lay down yet my mind jactatively refuses to release me to sleep.
Here is the poem.
It is not music, though one has tried music. It is not nature, though one has tried The rose, the bluebird, and the bear. It is not death, though one has often died.
None of these things is there.
In the everywhere that is nowhere Neither the inside nor the outside Neither east nor west nor down nor up Where the loving smile vanishes, vanishes In the evanescence from a coffee cup Where the song crumbles in monotone Neither harmonious nor inharmonious Where one is neither alone Nor not alone, where cognition seeps Jactatively away like the falling tide If there were a tide, and what is left Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps Its undifferentiated unreality, all Being neither given nor bereft Where there is neither breath nor air The place without locality, the locality
With neither extension nor intention But there in the weightless fall Between all opposites to the ground That is not a ground, surrounding All unities, without grief, without care Without leaf or star or water or stone Without light, without sound anywhere, anywhere . . .
