The Cape Cod Mystery (1931) continued

The heat-wave had appeared in Wednesday's paper, and our guests arrived Friday on the early morning train.

Regular passenger rail service through Cape Cod ended in June 1959. In 1978, the tracks east of South Dennis were abandoned and replaced with the Cape Cod Rail Trail. Another bike path, the Shining Sea Bikeway, was built over abandoned tracks between Woods Hole and Falmouth in 1975; despite vehement pro-passenger rail groups, the tracks were dismantled further north between Falmouth and North Falmouth (6.3 miles (10.1 km)) in April 2008 after Commonwealth representative and lawyer Eric Turkington signed legislation to convert the controversial line into a rail trail.

Active freight service remains in the Upper Cape area in Sandwich and in Bourne, largely due to a trash transfer station located at Massachusetts Military Reservation along the Bourne-Falmouth rail line. In 1986, Amtrak operated a seasonal service in the summer from New York City to Hyannis called the Cape Codder. From 1988, Amtrak and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation increased service to a daily frequency.Since its demise in 1996, there have been periodic discussions about reinstating passenger rail service from Boston to reduce car traffic to and from the Cape, with officials in Bourne seeking to re-extend MBTA Commuter Rail service from Middleboro to Buzzards Bay, despite a reluctant Beacon Hill legislature.

Cape Cod Central Railroad operates passenger train service on Cape Cod. The service is primarily tourist oriented and includes a dinner train. The scenic route between Downtown Hyannis and the Cape Cod Canal is about 2½ hours round trip. Massachusetts Coastal Railroad is also planning to return passenger railroad services eventually to the Bourne-Falmouth rail line in the future. An August 5, 2009 article on the New England Cable News channel, entitled South Coast rail project a priority for Mass. lawmakers, mentions a $1.4-billion railroad reconstruction plan by Governor Deval Patrick, and could mean rebuilding of old rail lines on the Cape. On November 21, 2009, the town of North Falmouth saw its first passenger train in 12 years, a set of dinner train cars from Cape Cod Central. And a trip from the Mass Bay Railroad Enthusiasts on May 15, 2010 revealed a second trip along the Falmouth line.

From my steamer chair on the porch I could just see the girls on the outer raft.

A steamer chair, so named because it was the type of chair used on passenger liners powered via steam (when steam power came into use and increased the speed of the translatlantic crossing, luxury cruising really took off) with a raised back, a long seat, and a raised area on which to rest one's legs.

Any highly trafficked tourist swimming area would have two rafts, an inner one in the shallow water, and an outer one, as far out as was considered safe. The rafts were anchored to the ocean bottom.

Despite the crowd, holday-size on a common week-day morning, Emma's large black-stockinged legs were exceedingly visible as they protruded from beneath the broad green stripes of my favorite beach umbrella.

In the 1930s, swimmwear conventions were loosening a bit. Prior to that time, men wore suis that covered their chests, and women wore suits that had backs as well as fronts, long skirts, and stockings so as not to show their bare legs.

By 1931, these restrictions were lifting a bit, but Emma was of the generation - and the heft - that would cover herself up well.

Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, by Andrew Coe

A fascinating look back at the history of the Chinese in America, and ideal for anyone planning on writing books about the time periods covered here.


Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, by Andrew Coe
Oxford University Press,2009
251 pages, plus Notes, Bibliography and Index. Several b&w photos scattered throughout the text.

Description
In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States-by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time.

It's a tale moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial movement when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine-and, for better or worse, chop suey.

Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why Jewish Americans fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai.

The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt them to our own deeply rooted culinary preferences.

Andrw Coe's Chop Suey is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what constitutes American cuisine.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of illustrations
1. Stags' Pizzles and Birds' Nests
2. Putrified Garlic on a Much-used Blanket
3. Coarse Rice and Water
4. Chinese Gardens on Gold Mountain
5. A Toothsome Stew
6. American Chop Suey
7. Devouring the Duck
Photo Credits
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Golf Terms

I'm working on a website that will host vocabularies of all different kinds of subjects, from sports such as golf, to the sciences.

Here's a few entries for golf:

Address the way you position your body in relation to the club and the ball.

Alignment the position in which you set your body to control the direction of the ball.

Away The person who is “away” is farthest from the target and will be first to play the next shot.

Balata A soft material for golf ball covering that helps lower handicapped players in an effort to get the ball to stop rolling quicker

Best ball A tournament where a determined number of of the best score of the team on each hole counts as the score for the team.

Birdie Scoring one shot less than par on an individual hole.

Bite When the ball starts rolling quickly.

Blading Hitting high on the ball, causing it to go low and run rather than getting into the air. Also called hitting the ball thin, skulling, or topping the ball.

Bogey one stroke more than par on an individual hole

Break The curving of the ball on the putting surface caused by undulations

Bunker A sand- or grass-filled indentation in the ground.

Bibliography
The Women’s Guide to Golf: A Handbook for Beginners, by Kellie Stenzel Garvin, Thomas Dunne Books, 2000

The Cape Cod Mystery (1931) continued

"That means we'd keep drawing those two until Kingdom Come."
"Kingdom Come" is a phrase from The Lord's Prayer.

The Lord's Prayer (also called the Pater Noster or Our Father) is a central prayer in Christianity. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke which records Jesus being approached by "one of his disciples" with a request to teach them "to pray as John taught his disciples." The prayer concludes with "deliver us from evil" in Matthew, and with "lead us not into temptation" in Luke. The liturgical form is Matthean. Some Christians, particularly Protestants, conclude the prayer with a doxology, an addendum appearing in some manuscripts of Matthew.

Our Father, which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done,
in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
[For thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.]
Amen.

"At college she claimed that no one really liked her till they found out it was naturally blonde and a stranger to peroxide."
Peroxides have a bleaching effect on organic substances and therefore are added to some detergents and hair colorants.

"Don't say "No one-they."
Prudence is attempting to correct her niece's grammar, but there's nothing wrong with it.

"She'll probaby bring some fresh catnip from her garden for Ginger."
Nepeta cataria (also known as catnip, catswort, or catmint) is a plant in the Lamiaceae family. The common names can also be used to refer to the Nepeta genus as a whole. Nepeta cataria is mostly used as a recreational substance for pet cats' enjoyment. Roughly 50% of cats will be affected by the plant, whether it is growing in the wild or harvested and dried. The common behaviors that are observed are: rubbing on the plant, rolling on the ground, drooling, sleepiness, anxiety, or consuming much of the plant. The plant terpenoid nepetalactone is the main chemical constituent of the essential oil of Nepeta cataria and acts as a feline attractant. This chemical enters the feline's nose, and produces effects on the cat.

"She'll play Russian Banque wih you."
Russian Bank is a card game for two players from the solitaire family. It is also known as crapette or crapot in Brazil and Portugal. It is played with two decks of 52 standard playing cards. It is much like the game of double solitaire. The goal of Russian Bank, like many card games, is to get rid of your forty-eight cards before your opponent can rid themselves of theirs. At the same time, it is required to build "piles" of suits, Ace through King, in the center of the board. If a rule regarding the placement of piles is broken, the opponent may call "Stop!" to end one's turn.

Booklist: Cowboy Lingo, by Ramon F. Adams

Cowboy Lingo: A Dictionary of the Slack-Jaw Words and Whangdoodle Ways of the American West, by Ramon F. Adams
236 pages, plus index
Library: 427.09 ADA

Description
The Classic Guide to the WAys and Words of Cowboy Life

The cowboy, that enigmatic, larger-than-life icon of American culture, has long been considered a figure of fast hands and steel nerves but few words. Accrding to Ramon Adams, though, cowboys, once among themselves, enjoyed a vivid, coarse, often boisterous repartee. You might say that around a campfire under the open sky, they could make more noise than "a jackass in a tin barn."

Here in one volume is the complete guide to cowboy-speak, including sections on cowboy's duties, his riding equipment, the roundup, roping, branding, even square dancing.

Cowboy Lingo includes terms you'll recognize because they've filtered into everyday language- "blue lightning," "star gazin", "the whole shebang" plus countless others that, sadly, are seldom heard in current speech: lonely as a preacher on pay night, "restless as a hen on a hot griddle," "crooked as a snake in a cactus patch."

As entertaining as it is authoritative, Cowboy Lingo captures the living speech of the Great Plains and serves as a window into the soul of the American West.

Ramon F. Adams (1889-1976) was an American cowboy, a musician, a folklorist, and the author of numerous books on western Americana.

Table of Contents
Foreword by Elmer Kelton
Introduction
1. The Cowboy and his lingo
2. The Ranch
3. The Cowboy and his Duties
4. His Costume and Furnishings
5. His Riding Equipment
6. Ropes and Roping
7. Cattle
8. Horses
9. Riding
10. The round-up
11. Brands and Ear-marks
12. The trail
13. The Commissary
14. Rustkers and Outlaws
15. Guns
16. Nicknames
17. The Cowboy Dance
18. Miscellaneous Expressions
19. Figures of Speech
20. More Figures of Speech
Index

The Cape Cod Mystery (1931) part 3

The bathroom was appallingly palatial. There was an electric light system and an electric pump.

Most rural homes in the USA in the early 1930s lit their homes with kerosene lanterns. And they used a hand-pump to pump water from a well, as opposed to an electric pump, which was a luxury.

"...these [telegrams] are both from Boston, if the Western Union isn't being funny."

In 1851, the New York & Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company was organized in Rochester by Hiram Sibley and others, with the goal of creating one great system with unified and efficient operations. Meanwhile, Ezra Cornell had bought back one of his bankrupt companies and renamed it the New York & Western Union Telegraph Company. Originally fierce competitors, by 1855 both groups were finally convinced that consolidation was their only alternative for progress. The merged company was named The Western Union Telegraph Company at Cornell's insistence and Western Union was born.

Western Union bought out smaller companies rapidly, and by 1860 its lines reached from the East Coast to the Mississippi River, and from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River. In 1861 it opened the first transcontinental telegraph. The company enjoyed phenomenal growth during the next few years. Its capitalization rose from $385,700 in 1858 to $41 million in 1876. However it was top heavy with stock issues, and faced growing competition from several firms, especially the Atlantic and Pacific (itself taken over by Jay Gould in 1874). In 1881 Gould took control of Western Union.

Western Union briefly operated local telephone systems, but lost a court battle with Bell Telephone in 1879 and left the field.

By 1900 Western Union operate a million miles of telegraph lines and two international cables.

The telegraph was dominated by Western Union, an industrialized monopoly. They were the first communications empire and the beginning of what was to come for the future of American-style communications as it is known today.

1914 Western Union offered the first charge card for consumers; in 1923 it introduced teletypewriters to join its branches. Singing telegrams followed in 1933, intercity fax in 1935, and commercial intercity microwave communications in 1943. In 1958 it began offering Telex to customers. Western Union introduced the 'Candygram' in the 1960s, a box of chocolates accompanying a telegram featured in a commercial with the rotund Don Wilson. In 1964, Western Union initiated a transcontinental microwave system to replace land lines.

Western Union became the first American telecommunications corporation to maintain its own fleet of geosynchronous communication satellites, starting in 1974. The fleet of satellites, called Westar, carried communications within the Western Union company for telegram and mailgram message data to Western Union bureaus nationwide. It also handled traffic for its Telex and TWX (Telex II) services. The Westar satellites' transponders were also leased by other companies for relaying video, voice, data, and facsimile (fax) transmissions.

"If the mercury is soaring theway the papers say, that settlement of hers on the East Side of Old Manhattan must be pretty uncomfortable."

The settlement movement was a reformist social movement, beginning in the 1880s and peaking around the 1920s in England and the US, with a goal of getting the rich and poor in society to live more closely together in an interdependent community. Its main object was the establishment of "settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of their low-income neighbors. In the US, by 1913 there were 413 settlements in 32 states.

"But does she cry for heat relief like so many politicians calling for drought relief?"

The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops or other techniques to prevent erosion. Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had displaced the natural deep-rooted grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.

During the drought of the 1930s, without natural anchors to keep the soil in place, it dried, turned to dust, and blew away eastward and southward in large dark clouds. At times the clouds blackened the sky reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds, which were in part created by the dry and bare soil conditions. These immense dust storms—given names such as "Black Blizzards" and "Black Rollers"—often reduced visibility to a few feet. The Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres, centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) migrated to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better during the Great Depression than those they had left. Owning no land, many became migrant workers who traveled from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages. Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Of Mice and Men, about such people.

The Cape Cod Mystery (1931) cont.

Narrator Prudence Whitsby is a respectable - and wealthy - spinster (a spinster being an unmarried woman) staying in a Cape Cod cottage. It's years after the crash of the stock market, and the Great Depression is in full force.

"For many summers we had cast covetous eyes on the cottage we now occupied. We would still be envying the Bentleys, who had rented it from time immemorial, if they had not taken it into their heads to see Europe under the guidance of Mr. Cook."

1. When did "time immemorial" become a phrase, and what does it mean precisely?

Time immemorial is a phrase meaning "time extending beyond the reach of memory, record, or tradition, indefinitely ancient," "ancient beyond memory or record". The phrase is one of the few cases in the English language where the adjective is a postmodifier—some other legal terms such as attorney general and court martial follow the pattern, largely due to the influence of Norman French.

The term has been formally defined for some purposes.

In English law and its derivatives, time immemorial means the same as time out of mind, "a time before legal history and beyond legal memory." In 1275, by the first Statute of Westminster, the time of memory was limited to the reign of Richard I (Richard the Lionheart), beginning 6 July 1189, the date of the King's accession. Since that date, proof of unbroken possession or use of any right made it unnecessary to establish the original grant under certain circumstances. In 1832, time immemorial was re-defined as "Time whereof the Memory of Man runneth not to the contrary." The plan of dating legal memory from a fixed time was abandoned; instead, it was held that rights which had been enjoyed for twenty years (or as against the Crown thirty years) should not be impeached merely by proving that they had not been enjoyed before (holding by adverse possession).

The Court of Chivalry is said to have defined the period before 1066 as time immemorial for the purposes of heraldry.

2. Who's Mr. Cook?

Thomas Cook (22 November 1808 – 18 July 1892) of Melbourne, Derbyshire, founded the travel agency that is now Thomas Cook Group.

Cook's idea to offer excursions came to him while waiting for the stagecoach on the London Road at Kibworth. With the opening of the extended Midland Counties Railway, he arranged to take a group of 570 temperance campaigners (he, and they, were against drinking, and public houses where the common folk went to drink) from Leicester Campbell Street station to a rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away.

On 5 July 1841, Thomas Cook arranged for the rail company to charge one shilling per person that included rail tickets and food for this train journey. Cook was paid a share of the fares actually charged to the passengers, as the railway tickets, being legal contracts between company and passenger, could not have been issued at his own price. This was the first privately chartered excursion train to be advertised to the general public; Cook himself acknowledging that there had been previous, unadvertised, private excursion trains.

During the following three summers he planned and conducted outings for temperance societies and Sunday-school children. In 1844 the Midland Counties Railway Company agreed to make a permanent arrangement with him provided he found the passengers. This success led him to start his own business running rail excursions for pleasure, taking a percentage of the railway tickets.

On 4 August 1845 he arranged accommodation for a party to travel from Leicester to Liverpool. In 1846, he took 350 people from Leicester on a tour of Scotland, however his lack of commercial ability led him to bankruptcy. He persisted in hia business, however, and had success when he claimed that he arranged for over 165,000 people to attend the Great Exhibition in London. Four years later, he planned his first excursion abroad, when he took a group from Leicester to Calais to coincide with the Paris Exhibition.

The following year he started his 'grand circular tours' of Europe. During the 1860s he took parties to Switzerland, Italy, Egypt and United States. Cook established 'inclusive independent travel', whereby the traveller went independently but his agency charged for travel, food and accommodation for a fixed period over any chosen route. Such was his success that the Scottish railway companies withdrew their support between 1862 and 1863 to try the excursion business for themselves.

With John A Mason Cook, he formed a partnership and renamed the travel agency as Thomas Cook and Son. They acquired business premises on Fleet Street, London. By this time, Cook had stopped personal tours and became an agent for foreign or domestic travel. The office also contained a shop which sold essential travel accessories including guide books, luggage, telescopes and footwear. Thomas saw his venture as both religious and social service; his son provided the commercial expertise that allowed the company to expand. In accordance with his beliefs, he and his wife also ran a small temperance hotel above the office. Their business model was refined by the introduction of the 'hotel coupon' in 1866. Detachable coupons in a counterfoil book were issued to the traveller. These were valid for either a restaurant meal or an overnight hotel stay provided they were on Cook's list.

In 1865, the agency organised tours of the United States, picking up passengers from several departure points. John Mason Cook lead the excursion which included tours of several Civil War battlefields. A brief but bitter partnership was formed with an American businessman in 1871 called Cook, Son and Jenkins; however after an acrimonious split the agency reverted back to its original name. A round the world tour started in 1872, which for 200 guineas, included a steamship across the Atlantic, a stage coach across America, a paddle steamer to Japan, and an overland journey across China and India, lasting 222 days.

In 1874, Thomas Cook introduced 'circular notes', a product that later became better known by American Express's brand, 'traveller's cheques'.

Conflicts of interest between father and son were resolved when the son persuaded his father, Thomas Cook, to retire in 1879. He moved back to Leicestershire and lived quietly until his death.

The firm's growth was consolidated by John Mason Cook and his two sons, especially by its involvement with military transport and postal services for Britain and Egypt during the 1880s when Cook began organising tours to the Middle East. By 1888, the company had established offices around the world, including three in Australia and one in Auckland, New Zealand, and in 1890, the company sold over 3.25 million tickets John Mason Cook promoted, and even led, excursions to, for example, the Middle East where he was described as "the second-greatest man in Egypt". However, while arranging for the German Emperor Wilhelm II to visit Palestine in 1898, he contracted dysentery and died the following year.

His sons, Frank Henry, Thomas Albert and Ernest Edward, were not nearly as successful running the business. Despite opening a new headquarters in Berkeley Square, London in 1926, ownership of Thomas Cook and Son only remained with the family until 1928, when it was sold to the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.

During the 1930s, the travel agency consolidated especially from tours to Egypt and Palestine. Indeed the company was a principal employer in Egypt, involved in shipping, transport and touring operations. After the outbreak of World War II, the Paris headquarters of the Wagons-Lits company was seized by the occupying forces, and in turn the British assets were requisitioned by the Government. In 1941, the 100th anniversary of the company, Thomas Cook & Son Ltd. was sold to the four major railway companies with the aim of expanding it further.

The company was nationalised in 1948 as part of the British Transport Commission. In the early 1950s, the company began promoting 'foreign holidays' (particularly Italy, Spain and Switzerland) by showing information films at town halls throughout Britain. However they made a costly decision by not going into the new form of cheap holidays which combined the transport and accommodation arrangements into a single 'package'. The company went further into decline and were only rescued by a consortium of Trust House Forte, Midland Bank and the Automobile Association who bought the company from the British Government on 26 May 1972.

(The company has changed hands several times since then and is now owned by Lufthansa and Karstadt, out of Germany).