Letter from Susana

This is a place about conversation. You and I are never likely to meet. I’m very reclusive in my old age, am happily married, and represent no Internet chat risk. But we have lives that have run along some interesting parallel lines. Your latest response at my Facebook page so many bells with my own experience I feel compelled to share them as comments and hyperlinks in the context of your own text. First of all, known already before your latest, we have dogs in common, an irreverent sense of humor, and a political bias toward skeptical sanity.

I’m 72 and have been writing since I was 15 years old, sooner than that if you count my typed mission reports after each episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. when I was 11. Here is the stamper I used to secure my signature on those reports.

Here is the armament I wore under a sportcoat when I was on duty in those days.

I own no guns anymore.

Ice broken? Now for your communiqué. Here’s a straight reproduction of what you wrote, augmented with hyperlinks to corresponding experience of my own, plus explanatory interruptions set off by square brackets. Thinking you might be as amazed by the parallels as I was.

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This is a very accurate description of what was, what is becoming, and why it's becoming whatever it's going to be. Your impressions are so much like mine that this piece could have been written by me (If I had the discipline to write it, which I don't). Very nicely done.

I know some libraries collect oral histories, but a collection of pieces like this, "social histories" that record the conditions of the time, how people lived, and what their concerns were, would be a really valuable addition. Information like this is rarely recorded, leaving us mostly with questions about how our lives came to be. [A huge percentage of my writing output over the years has been exactly this. These are both written and oral (at Youtube and elsewhere), and they cover the waterfront in terms of topics and life experiences.]

My Masters Degree was in Information Science, and I was planning to become an academic librarian, when I decided that I preferred to remain in telecom (AT&T, Bellcore/Telcordia, Siemens, my own small company, for a few years). I started an MBA at NYU, but didn't finish. [I studied Information Theory and did training on it during my management consulting years for General Motors and Whirlpool Corporation. I too dropped out of an MBA program, at Cornell, (afraid I was about to become an CPA) and my first real job after that was in information technology at McGraw-Hill’s Datapro Research Corporation.] 

For 12 years , my second job was being the DAR curator of Buccleuch Mansion, a 1734 colonial mansion outside New Brunswick. I knew all the dates, who lived there, when, that the mansion was occupied by Hessian soldiers during the Revolution, and I could explain the architecture and furniture styles of the period. I regularly relayed this information on tours. But I often wandered the halls, wondering what life was like for the inhabitants, and what their daily concerns were. I honestly wished the walls could talk. Our historic interpretations of people's lives and concerns consist mostly of assumption and speculation.

The real star of the reenactment event was a modern day historical figure in Salem named Stony Harris, founder of the still thriving Cowtown Rodeo. He used to boast of attending cattle conventions in Texas and dismaying the Lone Star ranchers with the documented proof that the Harris brand was older than any in Texas. Larger than life and my privilege romance known and worked with him.]

My understanding of the social history of my own family is also vague. My mother was an enigma. She was a quiet Lutheran lady, but despite being a DAR - someone you'd assume had an interest in history - she relayed very little of her own. All I know about her is that she once fell in the family's henhouse and broke her nose, and she later dated a guy who flew his plane drunk, which, as the daughter of a staunch WCTU member, she didn't like, and so she moved to NJ. [Told you my aunt became a Colonial Dame after putting in the necessary hours on genealogy. My Grandfather Laird, in contrast, didn’t even know his own grandfather’s Christian name. All we had to go on was family legend that the Lairds came to NJ and Virginia after it became necessary to flee from the Brits after the fall of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Social status didn’t seem high on the priority list.]

That's pretty much it. My mother's family lived in rural Pennsylvania, and her father owned the local General Store with his 3 brothers. This turned out to be a blessing, because my grandfather returned from WWI with a chronic disability from having been mustard-gassed, and he had the support of his brothers. She told me so little about the things you'd think were important that I often find myself wondering about what their lives were like during the Depression. Did it help to own the General Store? And although Pearl Harbor was bombed on my mother's sweet 16th birthday, she never told me whether they went forward with the party. I asked some of these questions while mom was alive, but her answers were brief. She didn't like talking about the past. [Old home week. Both my Laird grandparents were born in Pennsylvania Dutch country (“Throw your mother out the window a kiss…”) and my granddad ultimately grew up in Germantown, Philadelphia. And general stories! I’ve been fascinated by them enough to make part of my own oral history:

This is one of three such recordings by the way.]

You're really lucky your family lived locally. Did they discuss the Depression and WWII with you, in any level of detail? [Yes. Fortunate in that regard. My Laird grandparents lived next door to the President of one of the town’s two banks, the one that did not foreclose on any mortgages during the Depression. The other one made a fortune selling foreclosed properties after the war when prices recovered. We did not bank with him. My grandparents did their own part. They’d had a cook and a regular gardener when my dad was a kid, but they hired all kinds of domestic help in the Depression, and the gardener actually moved into the basement to put a roof over his head. There was gas rationing, but their one luxury in those years was a place about five miles out of town called Woodmere. So they made that trip several times a week in a wicker pony cart drawn by Babe, and they sat on the dock in the sun trying not to think about my adad in combat overseas. Woodmere became part of my life too, where I ironically got to spend some idyllic time with my Grandpa Miesse:

My parents remembered the Depression keenly. They were the lucky ones in many respects, butt they witnessed the privations around them while their own families tightened their belts, didn’t cheat on their ration books, and learned the disciplines of hard work and family duty in a time of nationwide deprivation. As kids, my sister and I got to absorb the wonderful music of those years because they had an extensive collection of phonograph records, including the big bands they had actually seen in person and the great musicians, white and black, that made up the soundtrack of those and the subsequent yewrs for them. I still have that record collection (extending all the way back to the era of ,78s), just ten feet behind where I’m sitting now, and I can hear it all in my head without playing the albums anymore. I have this now rare album of Sinatra’s first solo LP:

I got lucky when I was living in Ohio. Very late in his career, Sinatra performed in an open air theater in Cincinnati. I dragged a reluctant wife along to see him, not expecting anything but a shadow playing out the string. Bucket list checkbox I was thinking. Boy was I wrong. The moment he opened his mouth I knew. He was still Sinatra, Chairman of the Board, the voice we had listened to twice a week on WWDB FM in Philadelphia. That engrained in me. He’s an outstanding memory of mine, and I still play his music when certain moods strike.]

I'd love to hear any fighter pilot stories you may have. Where was he based? Were they able to go home after a certain number of missions? My mother's older brother was the co-pilot of a B-29 heavy bomber on the Japanese front. He's still at the bottom of the Pacific. I have his training log book and some old letters, but most of his short life remains a mystery to me. I always assumed his loss was why my mother wouldn't discuss the past. [A piercing moment with my mother, late in life after I had taken over the family home so they could live on one floor in a smaller house. She still dropped by alone to pick up small items she had left behind. Making conversation, I told her about a documentary I’d seen of Iwo Jima vets persuaded to attend a reunion on the island that involved meeting Japanese Iwo vets. It was a PR disaster. The U.S. Marines could not forgive and forget. They could not shake hands with the men who had killed so many of their friends. I thought my mother would understand. I was unprepared for her reaction. She dissolved completely. Through her tears she told me what I doubt she had told anyone since it happened. She was secretly engaged to a man who had died on Iwo, and her heart was still broken 50 years later. I’m thinking not even my adad knew about this. The costs and losses of war are never filed into a state of — what’s the word they use now?…— closure. I comforted her as best as I could and only let her drive home when she had settled herself. We never spoke of it again.]

I've always found social histories to be far more interesting than dates, the order of battles, and who won what, when. I want to know about the people.

BTW, my father was Chief Chemist at Nixon-Baldwin, a plastics plant in Edison. It was formerly Nixon Nitration, and they made the switch from using nitrates for making explosives to nitrates for making plastics. It was later aquired by Tenneco. What company did your father work for? [Wow. Another bell rung. My Grandfather Laird was a chemist for the DuPont Company and nearly lost his life at the Chambers Works. My dad also worked for DuPont as an engineering manager in the development group that automated chemical processing plants. After his retirement he was nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Chemical Engineers. Not bad at all for a traumatized combat pilot who dropped out of the chemical engineering program at Cornell with one semester left for his degree. But he came back from the war better than the veterans I’m hearing about now.]

My brother has a chemical engineering degree from Columbia, but after finding that he didn't like the work, he quit. We grew up with a chemical lab in our basement. Stuff was always blowing up, hahaha. [My sister is the member of our immediate family who finally did what my Dad and I couldn’t do: get a degree from Cornell University. Two in fact. A Masters and PhD. In Education. She went on to teach at the University of Maine and the University of Oklahoma, where she earned tenure and became an Associate Professor. We do not get along and haven’t had any contact with one another in years. I could explain my side of it, but only if you have any interest, which I have almost ceased to have anymore myself.]

Anyway, thanks for recording our history in the way you did. Would you be willing to participate if I got the library to start a collection of social histories? [I don’t know what that involves, but if there’s material I haven’t already documented in some other way, I’d be happy to contribute what I can.]

BTW, I remember Lucky Strikes, although my adulterated tobacco of choice was always Newports. I remember when they were 75 cents a pack. And also, my father would not have pardoned me either. Not a freaking shot. [I still smoke. The other writer’s complaint. My last vice. Winston’s.]

Lastly, what is your best guess about where we're headed? I haven't yet read your more recent pieces. [I do an end of year piece annually at Instapunk Returns, as I also did for years at my previous blog, Instapunk Rules. The latest one has only been read to my certain knowledge by my wife. It’s over 12,000 words. Don’t feel bad if you can’t get through it. It’s as much documentation of ideas I wanted to make sure I’ve thought through by writing them down as it is a post for general consumption. I believe I did that, and my feelings aren’t hurt by negative reactions. The title is Year-End Thoughts for 2025 — The Big Picture Stuff.]

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P.S. Just for fun. One dog nut to another…[ignore the unsafe warnings. The vendor has screwed up the site admin. Blow through the warnings and click on seeing the website.)

The Dogs of the Rings