Berlin

Today I'm doing a "how to use the library" session for a group of students who are learning about the history of Berlin.  Since it happens to be nearly exactly 30 years since I was in that great metropolis, I dug out some of the photographs from that trip to remind myself of my visit.  It was a long weekend visit during a longer exchange visit I made to Germany that summer.  My host family had aunt/cousins in West Berlin, so off we went.

I can only imagine how different it is today, and I look forward to seeing it again at some point.  These are a few of the shots that I thought would be most representative of showing what Berlin was like in 1983 from a young man's point of view.

Mostly I remember a vague feeling of being scared.  We drove to the city through East Germany, and the border crossings were tense- for me at least.

Yours truly, taking a photo of the Berlin Wall and Brandenburg Gate, from the western side.  The Reichstag is directly behind me.

And for a meta-moment, here is the photo I was taking when the one above was taken by my host mother.

Another memory of that day- and the importance of paying attention in history class- my host Aunt spent a good hour quizzing me on the history of the American Civil War.  Which I had to explain.  In German.

The Brandenburg Gate from the East Berlin side, Unter den Linden.  Me looking nervous.

At the bus stop, my host brother and me, yet again sporting a CWRU sweatshirt.

Campus Legacy

No, that's not Sam.  That's the humble author with his grandfather, William Searl Hoffman, in 1969.

A week or so ago, I was looking through a collection of books I have at home.  I call this particular section of the library the Hoffman Memorial Collection- books that belonged to my mother and her parents and are inscribed with their names.  Most of Mom's are from her college years.  There are several that belonged to my grandfather, and one- his copy of Don Quixote- has in pencil, below his name, "Carnegie Technical Inst".  I had a vague memory that he'd gone there for schooling.  Part of what now is Carnegie Mellon University, it was a trade school and was where he went after graduating from West Tech High School in Cleveland to learn to be a printer.

I did some Googling to see if I could find anything about his time at Carnegie Tech.  Nothing came up, but I *did* find his name in a document housed at CWRU's own digital repository, Digital Case.  Not once but three times does his name appear in commencement bulletins for Western Reserve University: in 1932 when he was awarded a certificate for teaching industrial arts, in 1936 when he earned a B.S. in education and again in 1942 when he earned a M.A. in Education- all of these while he was employed as a teacher in the Cleveland Public School system as an instructor of printing.  And all of them occurred after he became a family man.

Why his education at WRU wasn't celebrated family lore is beyond me.  My sister Jane has a memory of Grandpa's graduate degree, but nothing beyond the fact of it.

I'd always dated my family's connection with CWRU (and all of its past incarnations) with my mother's graduate education in Library Science in 1957-58.  Dad came to campus almost exactly a decade later and completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics in 1970.  A decade and a half after that, I arrived as an undergraduate on campus earning my B.A. in English in 1988 and M.A. in English in 1993.  But it turns out our connection goes back a further 25 years with my grandfather's education.  So not a bad set of sheepskins for one family from one university.

I just wish Grandpa had stayed with us longer:  he died at the age of 62, in 1971.

Surprises from the stacks

We've been working on an inventory project at work, identifying books that were not added to our catalog when we transitioned from cards-in-drawers to records-in-computers about 30 years ago.  We've come across some real gems, and here are just two that struck a chord with the woodworker in me.

Both are academic, but completely fascinating to anyone who has an interest in period work.  Here are two illustrations from the books- on the left are two photographs of bodgers (the term for chairmakers), one installing legs to a seat, the other bending what will become the back of a Windsor chair.  On the right is a reproduction of an image of an early gang saw mill.

From The Early Sawmills of New Jersey:

Sawmills, unlike gristmills, were not places of romantic interest.  Although the early sawmills were run by wooden machinery, the water wheel vibrated the building, there was no odor of ground meal, no millstones to rumble, no dusty miller drawing in fat bags of grist, and no miller's daughter to enhance the surroundings.  Instead of gently descending mealy showers, the air was full of sawdust, bad language of the men struggling with logs, and the noise and screeching of the saw.  Sawmills were places for work and not for idle gossip or the exchange of neighborhood happenings.

Birthday weekend with Jane

We had a wonderful weekend visit with big sister/aunt Jane this weekend.  She recently had a big birthday and decided to come for a Cleveland visit as part of the celebration.  Fine by us!  We talked about past birthday trip celebrations, so it must be a sort of a tradition, right?

Friday Sam and I took Aunt Jane to the special Rembrandt exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.  In the evening the nieces and nephew took her out to dinner.

Pizza at Deweys!

And a birthday celebration wouldn't be complete without some cake and singing.

Today we continued the celebration with a trip to the new Cleveland Aquarium.  Our campus parents group had arranged the visit, so it was perfect that Jane was in town to join us.  We enjoyed seeing all of the fish, especially the tank of lobsters which one views from below (where's the butter?) and the walk-through hallway in which sharks and rays swim around and above.  Cool!  Another fine meal out for lunch rounded out the weekend.  Thanks for coming, Jane!

A New Blog

I just want to let you know that I'm adding another blog to the stable of outlets for me to spew verbiage. It's called Notes from the KSL Stacks, and it's a place for me to post mostly work-related information. Most of the posts will be the kind of thing I've shared via my personal facebook page for quite some time. That's fun and all, but facebook doesn't keep track of those posts for me, so if I vaguely remember sharing something about etymology at some time in the past, it's hard to find the link. When I do so through a blog, I can tag the posts as well as search through them. Geeky, no?

So I'll use the new blog in a couple of ways:

• highlight new books we've added to the library collection. I'll do this at the rate of a title or two each week. It's a way to pull out a few out of the scores of books that we purchase. Criteria are strict here: I'll highlight something that seems cool or interesting to me. Or possibly something that I think is of particular interest to my readers. (of whom I have very few right now, hence this advert.) These are likely be of general interest to non-specialists as well.
• point out interesting tidbits from around the web relating to scholarship in the humanities, publishing, literary topics, library goodies, or anything else of interest.
• who knows what else.

So feel free to pop on over to the new blog. You can subscribe via email (as many of you do to the posts here on Commonplace), and/or follow it via facebook (click on "Like" and the posts will show up in your facebook feed), or if you are a geek like me, you can follow via RSS.

Go Tigers!

Princeton Football might have lost to Harvard today, but field hockey beat the Crimson!

And Tiger fans are pretty darned cute.

Sam is going to hedge his bets and root for the mighty Spartans as well. (And yes, those are his pearly whites in the grin below!)

Weekend waiting

Sunday, May 16th was graduation at CWRU, an event that Kim enjoys being a part of. This year was particularly special for her, as her first two graduate students were getting their PhDs. Personally, I think she just likes the opportunity to wear her subtle academic regalia.

We thought perhaps the robes would hide her baby bump (baby bulge? baby BOOM?) but it didn't take too much encouragement to put that argument to rest.

Profile!

How did the rest of us spend the afternoon? Hoops!