Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The Wednesday Post


Greetings from the Early 20th Century
Going through the Bruners' mail.

Either because my father was the only child of two parents who both had unconventional family structures, or because I live in a society so corrupted by individualism that we have all but forgotten the meaning of Family, I am extremely fuzzy on the details of my family tree on Dad5000's side.  Also, on its broad outline.  But I know that there are Bruners in the mix, either as bona fide relations or as the kind of technically-not-related relatives that some families adopt when they are running low on the real thing.

Daniel Bruner, who may or may not have been my great or second or third something, lived at 297 E. 36th Street here in the City of Roses.  That address looks perfectly plausible unless you are actually from around here, in which case it is all wrong.  We have quadrants, so only Burnside Street gets to be "E.", and the numbered streets aren't Streets, but Avenues.  Well.  The letter is from 1923, and so predates the insanely complicated WPA street renumbering project that left us with a city in which you can actually find places, and where old curbstones often sport names that are mischievously inconsistent with what the green signs say.


Now Roland Bruner was, I think, Roland of "Roland and Gladys," and it seems right to call Gladys "Aunt Gladys." So perhaps Roland was in some sense an uncle?  He was a nice elderly man who once, when I was in sixth grade or thereabouts, saw me with a tape recorder and asked if I was listening to "the latest jazz."  The question stumped me utterly at the time.  It's a shame that, now that I could field the question pretty well, it is decades too late.

Apparently, in 1904 [Uncle?] Roland, so young that he had to put up with the title of "Master," could be reached at a shoe store in Salem.  And the shoe store was too cool to need an address.


At least 430 S. 24th, City, is an address, but isn't an address that works for Salem anymore.  Maybe they had a big street renumbering too.


Did you have to pay two cents for intercity mail but only one for in-city mail?  Hubbard is 25 miles north, about halfway between Portland and the capital.  I'm half-tempted to circle the P.O. Box return address with a sharpie and write "return to sender" on the envelope, just to mess with whomever has P.O. Box 54 these days.


4 comments:

The Calico Cat said...

unconventional family structures - intrigued to say the least!

Love all of the old addresses & addressing systems.

Can you grab us a photo of one of those curbstones that doesn't match the green street sign?

I knew an elderly couple who shared their courting story with me. He would write her a letter in the morning asking for a date, she would reply the same day & the date would occur in the evening. So the mail was collected, sorted, & delivered many times a day back in the day.

Michael5000 said...

Probably if the unconventional family structures were actually interesting, I'd remember the details.

Getting a picture of a street name set in the curb, easy. Getting a picture of the current street sign, easy. Getting a picture of two juxtaposed and both clearly visible -- just about impossible. You have to point the camera down for one and up for the other.

I'm very fond of references in old books to "the morning post" and "the afternoon post." Multiple deliveries seems so civilized.

The Calico Cat said...

Getting a picture of a street name set in the curb, easy. Getting a picture of the current street sign, easy. Getting a picture of two juxtaposed and both clearly visible -- just about impossible. You have to point the camera down for one and up for the other.

Photoshop to join to photos?

sister jen said...

Hmmm...it's odd how little of this you know (other than where the letters were going). Daniel Bruner was your father's mother's father (so your great-grandfather); Roland--Uncle Bud, not Uncle Roland--was your father's mother's brother (so your great uncle). Gladys was indeed his wife (your great aunt).

I can't stop laughing over the "latest jazz" comment. Uncle Bud once gave me a copy of Bennett Cerf's Vest Pocket Book of Jokes, which in retrospect seem odd, as I was 10, but which nonetheless was funny. I remember it had chapters of ethnic jokes. Booooo. Uncle Bud had those awesome black horn-rimmed glasses....