Photo From Zoom

Poem Stanza

The sewing machine

and the stereo

eventually went to the Goodwill

it goes on the floor by the seat

in a car back.

Quick question!!!

Hi,

Sorry to bother you, do you order from Amazon?

Thanks. Truly,  Laura Jensen

docs

A Short Entry

For about four months I have not been able to sign in to my blog Spice Drawer Mouse because the computer room at the building has been closed and blogger did not recognize the laptop.  Now it is August.  

Janet Forza Northern State Hospital Newsletter Article, May 10, 1940

“Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life”   In two past blog entries I explain how I knew my father was in the army and that he had been the pharmacist at Northern State Hospital.  In Northern State Hospital’s newsletter, columnist Janet Forza includes a shared moment with the “postal representative” in a piece published May 1940.  A swarm of bees has arrived at the front lawn.

It was psychiatric hospital.  Some of the patients were drug addicts.  The United State Post Office truck unloaded where the pharmacist sorted the mail.   The hospital relied on the pharmacist to watch for  possible contraband and to analyze any unknown substance at the pharmacy laboratory.   The pharmacist received packages that supplied orders for drugs and necessities.  The pharmacist photographed patients when they entered.  He developed some photographs.

The postal representative rushed out with camera in hand and by sheer brute force wedged his way into the midst of the melee and snapped one-two pictures – then – was seen no more.   The column by Janet Forza is titled, “Behold, the Conquering Hero Comes” and is about nature and man.  The column is an extended metaphor which references ideas in people’s thoughts and conversations in May, 1940, the ideas included war and even concentration camps.  Below the whole column appears a comment of praise:  “The Men’s O.T. has done a classy job of binding Goethe’s Works for Library.” – the comment of praise for Occupational Therapy is filler, yet newsworthy.  From time to time in the newsletter occurs a comment appears about columns by Janet Forza.  People liked her columns.  I can include the 1940 article in full. 

It was at Tacoma Public Library that I awaited, with others, the 1940 United States Census in 2012.  I found Theodore Jensen listed as pharmacist.  I had glimpsed the 1930 census of Northern State Hospital to determine that among employees at the hospital were names of English Descent, among patients were a larger representation of names that were non-English. 

Recently, when Tacoma Public Library had logged me in to Ancestry, I found a physician listed at Northern State Hospital listed as private or unknown at a family tree.  The assignment of privacy or unknown requires a respectful distance, although I have no way of knowing about the physician’s distant family member who created their tree.  The tree includes a beautiful professional photo, others with the wife of the physician as a young girl.  The private or unknown designation can be about stigma, about the wide category of difficulty associated with the institutions. 

Janet Forza’s first home address exists along a maze of old two-story row houses, where at places there are churches or public buildings, on Google Earth Street views.  She was born Janet Allsopp, and is 2 years old, in Derby, in a United Kingdom 1920 Census.  Derby, it seems, is close to the middle of England.  Her mother, a widow in the United States, married Joseph Forza, who was born in Austria.  Janet Forza is in the 1940 United States Census as 22 years old and working at Northern State Hospital as a stenographer.  At Ancestry at Tacoma Public Library, I find Janet Forza is included in family trees.  Janet Forza is buried in a Sedro-Wooley Cemetery, on Find a Grave, not the hospital cemetery.

Regarding the appearance of Theodore Jensen, there to photograph this event so momentarily:  I can also include one photograph of hospital days saved among his other photographs. it is a photograph of a work crew I think putting down tar on the road at the hospital, this is work therapy, another occurrence during a hospital day.  It is unusual for there to be among my father’s photographs a Northern State Hospital Photograph.  Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life. 

Janet Forza, Hospital Stenographer, at Northern State

Janet Forza, Hospital Stenographer, at Northern State

Public Discussion of the Holocaust
Over many years public discussion of the Holocaust referenced medicine.  My father, who worked as a pharmacist, put on his tie mornings at a mirror in our living room, wore a suit and his raincoat to catch a bus to the drugstore. 
The references compared medical institutions to concentratioin camps.  This is a quote from Life Magazine in 1946: “Through public neglect and legislative penny-pinching, state after state has allowed its institutions for the care and cure of the mentally sick to degenerate into little more than concentration camps on the Belsen pattern”. – Bedlam: 1946 by Albert Q. Maisel

Albert Deutsch referred to World War Two when he published an expose of mental hospitals called The Shame of the States in 1948: “… these (hospitals) were for the most part too understaffed to be very effective even before the military recruitment of medical personnel during World War II crippled clinic staff. "

Albert Deutsch quotes a novelist, Ellen Philtine, in The Shame of the States: “Rank in a state hospital is more rigid and counts for more, perhaps, even than in the Army.  The hierarchy starts with the superintendent or director and ranges all the way down to attendants, with only patients lower.”

In about 1961, my mother and father watched our tv set in the living room from the chairs at the dining room table.  I was not an only child.  They supervised as we saw a documentary about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.  A moderator interviewed people, maybe there was a coffee table, they were in chairs.  During the discussion they told about horrors and perversities.  Nazis made lampshades out of human skin.  (This strange fact is supported and documented.) 

From the dining room chair my father can have remembered that he worked at Northern State Hospital in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland.  He worked for Northern State Hospital for eight years or so.  He stopped in the spring of 1941.  He must have remembered the wards for patients and the farm buildings, farmlands, the occupational therapy.  He must have remembered the people who worked there.

News

In the 1930s and 40s, to inform about the nearby Insane Asylum, reporters at The Courier-Times, the Newspaper for Sedro-Wooley, Skagit County, at times surveyed acres of wards, administrative buildings, barns and farm areas to publish a Hospital Edition.  Some Northern State Hospital staff members contributed short pieces, Theodore Jensen, the Northern State Pharmacist, wrote the short description about the pharmacy, a central feature at the hospital where he filled prescriptions for all the doctors. 

In the December weather of 2019, last year, I took the bus to the Washington State Archives in Olympia, where copies of Northern State Hospital newsletters revealed a voice to me that was new.  Staff or patients could submit articles to a newsletter published on a printing press at the hospital as therapy. For one an administrative office stenographer named Janet Forza, an article meant a gossip column.

Janet Forza interrupts, probes, and scrutinizes, to create a satiric impression of the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and others from the daily papers.  The supt. Of nurses: “She didn’t point a finger at me and ask my name, but saluted me by name the third day she was here…they say that you have to be very good or very bad to be talked about…” (From the Janet Forza Column, I Know My People). 

A stenographer writing in the Northern State Hospital News: Published by the Male Occupational Therapy Department, Janet Forza shows a true aspect of an institution that recognizes superiority:  the upper hierarchy  of the remote institution, residence and farm, assumes the gloss of stardom. 

I reflect that Janet Forza may have had the privileged information that her “blue-eyed Viking”, Theodore Jensen, would enter the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  In following issues, he has left for Alaska.  And Janet Forza has left a deft impression that social innuendo has caused this.  In 1942 his name appears in lists of Northern State Hospital People in the United States Army, many physicians are officers, Theodore Jensen has an address at Fort Lewis. 

 

Interview

February 28, 1941, Janet Forza demands an interview from the unwilling pharmacist.  She declares his cynicism is a surface matter, he does many unselfish and gentlemanly things that she perceives though they are to go unnoticed.  Her Column, I Know My People, shares the page with lists of physicians newly part of the Army Reserves.

She writes, “I know you’re a busy man, but I’ve been waiting four years to psychoanalyze you, so here goes.  Be careful there.  Someday you’ll have high blood pressure, turning that bright pink…”

Is there a drift that marital status might tincture his draft deferment status?  “Don’t say I didn’t offer,” the Columnist points out, a parting comment.  She has created a portrait of the pharmacist at work.

Another Interview
In a story my father tells, “About 1940…I thought I’d better get some kind of proof that I was a native-born American citizen.”   Danish Settlers sold his family a log cabin, they wanted to retire and move into town.  When my father was born in the log cabin in 1902, there was never a birth certificate.  His family built another house near the cabin.
 
His friends from school told him “…maybe Mrs. Carpenter could tell him something.”  Her daughter was married and lived in Sedro-Wooley.  Back in Sedro-Wooley once again, at the house she said, “Yes, I remember you…I was the first person to see you.  I helped your mother when you were born.”

Theodore Jensen brought back a notary public with affidavit certificates.  And Mrs. Carpenter signed the birth affidavit.

Questions
Why did Theodore Jensen join the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers?  Did a recruiter suggest he enter the service before he was drafted so that his identity papers could be screened?  Did his status as a pharmacist exclude him from the Reserve Officers Medical group?  Did he actually step away from his comfort zone at a secluded Sedro-Wooley State Hospital because of emotional complications involving a Gossip Columnist?  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he had a job at a pharmacy near South Seattle, in Renton, his most recent job experience the Army Corps of Engineers.

(I have visited Washington State Archives in Olympia, Washington for quotes from Northern State Hospital News.)

Privileged Information - To Read at Poetry Reading This evening

Privileged Information   (photo - from family first aid kit) - Happy Valentine's Day

I always knew my father was in the army.  I knew because my father would tell stories about his life.  
The story of the MP was just one example, this was the story about the M.P.: 

I was so worried about my stomach the rest of the way over that all I ate was some canned milk and a few of those little oyster crackers.  I didn't eat anything of any substance so when we got over to Liverpool I was pretty weak.  I did manage to carry my seventy-pound pack and my duffle bag which probably weighed another sixty-five pounds up out of the ship from C-Deck to B-Deck to A-Deck and over the gang plank down to the dock.

And there I thought I'd take a bit of a rest.  So I sat down and leaned up against a little building there for a few minutes and one of the MP's on the dock came over and said, “What's the idea?  What are you goofing off for, why are you falling out?”

Why I told him what had happened.

So he sez, “Well, wait a minute.”

When I got my breath he took ahold of one end of my duffle bag and I got the other and we  hauled it over to what they call a goods wagon, that's sort of a freight box or freight car on the English railway.  That's where all the rest of them were putting theirs.  That's the last I saw of that till we got to Everley Manor.  But if anybody complains about MP's to me, I always tell em, how, one of em was a friend of mine.

The story about the M.P. was that kind of story:  there are kinds of stories, one kind was a testimony faithfully remembered, “…if anybody complains about MPs to me, I always tell em, how, one of em was a friend of mine.”

There is the story, a kind of story,  about when a person was born. It was a nine-day stay at Tacoma General Hospital.  The doctor told her not to try to have more children.  It would probably kill her, the doctor said. When the Runeberg met at the Valhalla Hall he went over to announce that I was there, that I was a girl.  He must have been at the hospital a lot of the time.

They would tell me, the nurse when I was born was a black woman.  A Negro woman.

From next door above the house, as soon as we were at home, my mother’s family probably walked next door to visit from having Thanksgiving dinner.  We took a taxi to the hospital, my father probably said.   He would tell a story about Lake Whatcom, where he was born in a log cabin, or a story about working his way through pharmacy school, or about the army.  

My mother would say she did not tell a lot of stories the way my father did.  She could chime in, like a tapped tone on a xylophone, that my father told the taxi driver all the way to look out for chuck holes on the road.

He would not talk about patients or about the medical procedures.  Those were restricted information.  He told only one or two stories about working at Northern State Hospital.  Again, he would not talk about the psychiatric patients or about the medical procedures.  These were restricted information.  But he would tell one or two stories about Northern State Hospital.  This was how I always knew my father was in the army.  And how I always knew my father had worked at Northern State Hospital.

At the United States Archives 1998

Andrea Baago

One morning in July 1998 I spent time trying to find a yellow slicker that vanished.  One moment it was just not there, I took a couple of busses back and searched at stops.  I got to the United States Archives only by the afternoon, did only two hours of research on the microfilms.  The next morning I took the Seattle Express bus back and did four hours in the morning.  I did more again in the afternoon.  The microfilm machines would make a copy for the researchers.

Both scenes I easily recall.  Later in the diary I have taped in the ticket, 27^th row, for the Bob Dylan concert at the Western Washington Fair.

The microfilm was referenced through the set of research books, German Passenger Ships Arrivals Lists which were at the Tacoma Public Library.  My grandparents came from Prussian Occupied Denmark, on my father’s side.  I had gotten the slicker when I was going to go to Scandinavia, in 1990.  My grandmother’s name was Andrea Baago.  I will include her name from the Steerage Passengers Listings.

The U.S. Archives are a part of the Northwest.  I hope they remain there, although the government may move them, I find this difficult.

New Year's Day 2020

Happy New Year 2020

The Copy of Little Women That Belonged to My Mother

The copy of Little Women that belonged to my mother will be one hundred next year.  The book along with the other Alcott books, Little Men, An Old Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Jack and Jill, Jo's Boys, were the Alcott books I read.  It was nice to see the movie on Christmas Day. 








That Louisa May Alcott as Jo March was married to the professor as a believable ending to her story is presented in the movie with emotional intelligence.  I photographed the copy of the book to show and the poem in the prelude encourages me to go ahead and share these photos at the holiday time.

Preface

          “Go then, my little Book, and show to all

          That entertain, and bid thee welcome shall,

          What thou dost keep close shut up in thy breast;

          And wish what thou dost show them may be blest

          To them for good, may make them choose to be

          Pilgrims better, by far, than thee or me.

          Tell them of Mercy; she is one

          Who early hath her pilgrimage begun.

          Yea, let young damsels learn of her to prize

          The world which is to come, and so be wise;

          For little tripping maids may follow God

          Along the ways which saintly feet have trod.”

          Adapted from JOHN BUNYAN.

Christmas Greetings From Gord Barbershop 1936

At Facebook at Historic Tacoma December 17. 2019:
Across 21st Street from the Three Bridges Building (posted about recently) is another bit of Tacoma's architectural legacy and an architectural cousin to The Spar Tavern building in Old Town, the RealArt Theater in South Tacoma and the much-discussed Holy Rosary Church. Built in 1914, it too was designed by the architects Charles Lundberg & C. Frank Mahon. Originally a drug store and barbershop, it now houses Coates Chiropractic and other businesses. It still has a barbershop!


My comment in Historic Tacoma's Comments section included a photo of Tide Literary Magazine from the College of Puget Sound, an advertising section that included Gord Barbershop.  My uncle was a barber at Gord Barbershop. 

Another commenter could see The Spar in Old Town in this building.  Another of the issues with the Gord Barbershop advertisement featured a manger scene on the cover, at the holiday season now, it is to share.

barbershop building

Twenty Years Ago Today

On Facebook a Facebook Friend wants to know what people were doing twenty years ago today.  Since 1987, twelve years, I had been on the third floor of a brick apartment building.  I wrote a first diary entry in a new blank book that begins November 30, 1999.  The entry was a very first entry in a new blank book diary. 

Tuesday  November 30, 1999

Oh, I am weary of skipping my mind through the arbitrary days events to guess how to start off some entry again – all of it feels like I can begin anywhere.

An old 5-year diary with almost no entries is about watching television programs at Grandma’s.  The whole just did not go too far.

In Seattle are marches against the World Trade Organization.

I am steaming sweet potato (diced) in my nice revereware steamer.  (Now this reminds me of some of the letters from Scandinavia.  How the news information is distracted – in the letter – with up to the minute household descriptions.)  I am making Sweet Potato Vinaigrette.  Somehow all the historical domestic recollections are so –

(I also noted down the day elsewhere, and that day I delivered newspapers for an hour and a quarter.  I spent just a quarter of an hour writing the diary entry.  And I worked from two to four at the hourly library worker job I had found at the University of Washington Tacoma Branch. Both jobs started about six months before, I delived newspapers for five and nearly one-half years.)

The Record Album: Entertainment Drought 1964 and "State Fair" (from July 2019 Spice Drawer Mouse)

The Record Album:  Entertainment Drought 1964 And “State Fair”:

          A 1995 Review, Love is in the air (mail)

by Michael J. Vaughn, from the Internet

          The Anxiety of Influence   by Harold Bloom

A Review

A review of two musicals “she loves me”

And “Most Happy Fella”

Refers to “The entertainment drought

That followed the Kennedy Assassination”.

Influence

In the United States that mourned

It is the swerve of Influence described by

Harold Bloom.    Along a neural pathway

A specific work of art.

Thought turns instead

To a continuum and immediacy

For that national emergency and shock.

Physically I turn off art

I would have experienced.

In State Fair 1962 the family

Reaches Dallas in the convertible.  And thought

Turns instead to the tragedy.

The Record Album

The entertainment drought

Rose from the audience.  State Fair 1962

Was set in Dallas.  On my album cover

From Andrews and Burnett,

Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall

Enormous sheepskin chaps

From Neiman Marcus – Big D,

Little A, double-L,  A,  Ess…

After, I almost never listened anymore.

The concert

While the tv stayed on with serious music

News and No commercials in 1963

She came back in the evening from

The Runeberg Lodge Choir fiftieth anniversary.

They presented their concert but cancelled

The Sunday Banquet and the people

From Canada started back.

From the backyard garage and steps

Through the back porch, into the kitchen.

She would have figured out On Friday

if we had wanted to go with her

that Saturday Evening.

The Record Album, Again

I almost never listened anymore. 

Orange cover - They have on their

Enormous Sheepskin chaps from Neiman Marcus.

On the internet:  a you tube video of What’s My Line

With Carol Burnett, February 1964.

As she shakes hands with the panel

And she hugs Buddy Hackett,

She continues to look so solemn.

I was confirmed in 1964

In school and In the front pew directly beneath

The national prayer for the bereaved

we continued into spring.   Confirmed, young

And influenced, we were bereaved.

Djupt I Havet

 From some translations I made from Swedish Folk Songs - Djupt I Havet.

Joy Harjo Read September 1994 for the Distinguished Poet Series

During earliest experiences with computers I still used my manual typewriter.  However at the Arts Commission I entered information for contributors’ bios, I tried for brevity, and entered other necessary material, captions for end-pages photos, during my 1994-1996 grant from the Lila Wallace – Reader’s Digest Foundation.   

Dorothy McCuistion and I co-edited and co-designed the compilation and each broadside distributed at the Distinguished Poet Series readings. Dorothy, our Tacoma Arts Commission representative for the reading series project, arranged for the compilation to be included at the United States Library of Congress.

McCuistion

One day I visited the Tacoma Arts Commission to assemble the Distinguished Poet Series broadside compilation. Dorothy McCuistion and I approached stacks of broadsides around a large table. The broadsides remained from those distributed free at the readings, we printed broadsides ahead for remaining readings so these too could be included in the limited edition compilation.

The city scheduled us in a room just off the city council chamber at the Municipal Building, where the table was large enough for our broadsides. We placed the broadsides in an order we felt might best set off the art or meaning of the poem. As we planned, we decided to use my idea that the broadsides should be placed on facing pages. The first poem in the compilation is Grace by Joy Harjo.

The other day I happened to meet Elaine Briden at the Tacoma Public Library. Elaine participated in the project as an opening reader for Duane Niatum.  The framed Broadsides also appeared in April, 1996, at the Handforth Gallery for National Poetry Month. We reminisced about the reading, twenty-five years ago, in 1994, by Joy Harjo.  And Joy Harjo, this September, gave her first reading as United States Poet Laureate.

Lines Regarding A Washington State Fair Exhibit

Lines at the Grange

Immediate is the shock

Of mask and white robe

Inside the old fairgrounds barn.

The shock fades, ambiguous:

Applique on the robe

A crusader red cross.

In the rodeo parade riders

Drape behind the saddle

A bright-colored cloth.

At a place in a journal

From 1995, I visited in summer

Daffodil Arabians at the arena.

On one page in the journal,

Across the street from

The poetry reading,

A helmeted knight

Holds the tour sign

For the Pythian Temple.

The mask and white robe

Continue to shock.  Others

Turn to one another to say things.

Did white robes come from

The linen closet?  Or from

Drama costuming? 

Or from:  maybe, we see, from:

The corn field.  Near grange exhibits

The Scare Crows are various and many.

A bright jester has

The purple ribbon.

On the Merry-Go-Round

One horse has face mail.

White robes and masks

Were a horrific perversion

Of a knighthood fascination. 

Armor at the 1905 Pythian Temple.

A corn field is not so far away

From a provincial seaport.

An early Crusader

Was Saint Francis of Assisi.