Around the world in living color

We’ve had plans to share the Charles W. Cushman collection with you for some time, but we kept putting it off somehow.

Lately, though, we’ve seen photographs from the collection featured on a number of other websites, so we figured we’d better act now, before the entire Cladrite community has encountered Cushman’s work elsewhere.

Cushman was an amateur photographer and devoted traveler who resided in Indiana. Late in life, he bequeathed his collection of nearly 14,000 photographic slides to his alma mater, the University of Indiana. And bless their hearts, the good folks at IU have made a substantial portion of the collection—literally thousands of photographs—viewable online (prints can be purchased at reasonable rates, too, which we think is dandy—we’re proud owners of an 8×10 print of the Chinatown shot seen below).

The photographs in the collection were shot from 1938 to 1969, which would make them intriguing to us in any case, but the fact that they’re in color renders them true treasures.

We’re sharing with you some of our favorites from among Cushman’s color images of New York City in the 1940s, but don’t be satisfied by this small offering. Cushman traveled the world, and there are many more of Cushman’s images to be savored at the IU website and on Flickr.

The Cladrite Interview: Lesley M. M. Blume

We’re going to take it easy until Monday (as should you—happy Thanksgiving, everyone!), but we’re pleased to open this holiday weekend with the first installment in a new recurring feature, The Cladrite Interview.

And we’re doubly pleased that the subject of our inaugural interview is the charming and talented Lesley M. M. Blume, author of Let’s Bring Back: An Encyclopedia of Forgotten-Yet-Delightful, Chic, Useful, Curious, and Otherwise Commendable Things from Times Gone By, a delightful collection of words, practices, attitudes, and traditions from recent decades that Blume feels (and we generally agree) should never have been allowed to fall by the wayside or out of the mainstream.

Inspired by her column of the same name at the Huffington Post, Let’s Bring Back is a breezy trip back in time that proves refreshing indeed for those of us drawn to the past, who wouldn’t necessarily change places with our parents’ (and grandparents’) generation, but do have an appreciation for the lives they led.

The book also features contributions from such notables as designer Kate Spade; filmmakers James L. Brooks and Nora Ephron; media icons Arianna Huffington and Ted Koppel; interior decorator Jonathan Adler, chef Daniel Boulud and others.

And found in the pages of Ms. Blume’s delightful volume are, we’re pleased to say, our own pet bring-backs: the use of the word “pictures” to refer to movies, and telephone exchanges, whose evocative qualities are sorely missing in today’s telephone listings (mind you, we didn’t contribute to the book; Ms. Blume came up with those on her own—we were just glad to learn she agrees with us).

We asked Ms. Blume about her relationship with the past, whether she feels life was necessarily better then than now, and how her appreciation for relics of days gone by impact her life today.

What initially sparked your interest in life as it was once lived?

I’ve always been a history-oriented person. When I was a kid, other little girls dressed as Cinderella and Snow White for Halloween; I always wanted to be Cleopatra or Queen Elizabeth. Let’s Bring Back is just a natural extension of my personal life. I wear a lot of vintage clothing and hats, collect vintage books, listen to music on records players, and prefer dinner parties to status updates.

Do you consider yourself to be a nostalgic person, in the sense that, as Merriam Webster puts it, you yearn “for a return to or of some past period”?

I don’t yearn for a return to the past. I am very happy being a 21st century woman with a full range of opportunities available to me. Even my icon, Diana Vreeland, another incurable nostalgist, had to admit to the advantages of living in the era of penicillin. But I do wish to preserve certain rituals and adornments as we move into a digital age. Let’s Bring Back is about cherry-picking the best the past has to offer, and bringing those elements into the future with us.

Would you, if given the opportunity, opt to live in another decade, another era, and if so, which one?

The 1940s, when the world emerged from despair into hope again. It also marked the beginning of modernity as we recognize it today. It must have been a fascinating point of transition to experience.

Merriam-Webster’s primary definition for “nostalgia” is “the state of being homesick.” Does the past feel like home to you?

In some ways, yes. But in others, not at all. If any of us woke up in another decade, we’d feel like aliens. I don’t think we really realize the extent to which we’re creatures of our own times.

Are you more strongly drawn to a past you experienced, or those decades that preceded your birth?

I’m more interested in what came before me. Aesthetically speaking, I don’t really give a hoot about the ‘80s or ’90s, although Mad Men rekindled my interest in my early childhood in the 1970s. So many of the design elements in the show’s sets and costuming—not to mention social rituals—were still very much a part of the landscape when I was a kid. So that show seriously resonated with me.

Do you live what you consider to be a vintage lifestyle? How does this manifest itself?

A vintage lifestyle is one that honors the integrity of objects and pastimes from bygone eras, instead of casting them aside for the sake of pursuing novelty. This can arise from creating a physical world of vintage objects around you, or simply have a vintage mindset. So much of vintage lifestyle is about attitude and one’s manner. So, yes, I very much live a vintage lifestyle.

If you could pick one example from your book to, with a snap of your fingers, immediately bring back into use, which would it be?

Discreet voices. I hate hearing people’s one-sided cell-phone conversations.
Read more

The Karen Files, pt. 4

Another in an ongoing series of posts celebrating the life of our mother:

Most folks, curmudgeons and misanthropes aside, like kids. Many people, as we do, love kids and consider interacting with them one of life’s great pleasures.

Hi-res image

But Karen loved kids more than anyone we—or you, mostly likely—ever knew. She devoted much of her adult life to their betterment and wellbeing—and not just her own kids or her friends’. She spent years working, on primarily a volunteer basis, for the preservation and improvement of public schools. She was founder and chair of the Oklahoma Coalition for Public Education, an organization whose primary goal was the preservation and improvement of public schools, and served as Executive Director of the Oklahoma Network for Excellence. She served two terms as the president of the Oklahoma State PTA, was president of the National PTA’s State President’s Council, and served as Regional Vice President of the National PTA.

And that’s the just the tip of the iceberg, believe it or not. There were dozens more affiliations and commitments she willingly undertook, and all of it was done purely out of her love for children and her belief in education.

But we’ll remember most fondly her individual interactions with the kids she met in the course of her day. Wherever she encountered a child—in a restaurant, at church, at the mall, you name it—she was likely to pause and to coo at the baby, to have a brief conversation with the toddler. It’s a trait we share with her (to the occasional exasperation, we suspect, of Ms. Cladrite), but she almost never missed an opportunity to brighten a child’s day (and to have that child do the same for her, of course). And the kids knew immediately they’d found a friend in Karen. They always responded warmly to her overtures.

So it was a special treat to come across this week’s entry in the Karen Files. As we mentioned in a previous installment, we’d somehow made it to adulthood (well into adulthood) without seeing any photos of Karen as a child or even a teenager. She kept insisting she had boxes and boxes of photographs (and she wasn’t kidding) and swearing she would one day pull them all down from the attic and get the photos organized, but that was one of the few things this go-getter didn’t get done.

This photo of Karen tenderly cradling an infant (the offspring of dear friends of Karen’s parents), is one of our favorites among those we uncovered in the days following her passing. We miss her dearly, of course, but photos like this one, taken in 1947 when she was 14, allow us to feel she’s still with us (we know, we know—we’re sentimental saps).

And we’re happy to share it with you, the Cladrite Clan, today.

A colorful past, pt. 2

Earlier this week, we pointed you toward some amazing color footage of London from the 1920s.

Today, we follow that up by tipping you off to the website How to Be a Retronaut, which is currently featuring four gorgeous color photos of London, taken around 1949. They’re remarkable pictures, and we’re grateful to H2BAR for sharing them with the world.