Centuries aside, people are people

A modern photo from a movie set?
 Hardly. It's from the 1920s.

The past few weeks have been hectic. I'm in need of a battery recharge. So excuse my excuse of a post here.

Take a close look at the photo that's with this blog post. At first glance, it seems to be from a modern costume drama or the set of a period movie or TV show. It appears to have been taken recently. 

But no. It's actually a screengrab from a short video that's about 100 years old. The women in the picture were relaxing on the beach during a sunny day in Palm Beach in the 1920s. 

Then, as now, Palm Beach was the playground of the 1 percenters. The two visitors pictured here had plenty of leisure time and enough money to carefully craft fashion-casual attire. Resort wear, it used to be called.

The original black-and-white video has been restored to a remarkable level. Most significant, to me, is how the bright color and sharp quality of the restored film erases time. You could imagine having seen these people yesterday, at the beach or on the street or at the grocery store. The intervening years disappear. 

One hundred years, one thousand years, people are people. Filled with dreams, dealing with life, snatching fun, doing the day-to-day, just as we all do today. 

External cultural and social trappings evolve and change with time. But the essence that makes us human connects people from one epoch to another. When a restored video brings that idea closer to home, it's a win for all mankind.

Here's the video link in case the one attached to the photo doesn't work: https://youtu.be/jCWJYZM9yeU

Past, future merge in AI audiobook

Listen to the AI narrator Mary
in the free sample.

I write about the past in this blog and in my fiction. But I just took a dive into the AI future. My novella, Trust in Love, a story that takes place in 1891-1892, is now available as an audiobook narrated by artificial intelligence.

It seems weird to even write that.

"Mary," the narrator of the book on Google Play, has a pleasant voice. Her diction is good. Better than I expected. She falls short at times on inflection and emotion. And I had to insert a few transitions into the text because Mary couldn't handle a scene break. 

Those are minor points. I'm happy the book is available in audio. It bugged me that my third novel, Growing A Family in Persimmon Hollow, and my novella lacked that option. Especially because the publisher of my first two novels released audio CD versions. I'm the indie publisher of the third novel and novella, and my budget didn't include money for audio. 

Transforming a written work into audio using traditional techniques is very expensive. Narration and production costs are high. AI audiobooks are still new and Google is letting authors try it out. Apple is launching AI audiobooks, too.

I've submitted my novel and novella into the Apple queue. If accepted, Apple will handle production. Google puts the business into the author's hands. It quickly created my AI file and gave it to me for review. I listened to every word of the novella before publishing the audio version. Google then reviewed the finished product.

I'm well aware that AI narration will get better and better and become stiff competition for voice artists. Just as I'm aware that AI writing will get better and better and become stiff competition for authors. 

Will AI get good enough to mimic the emotions a good storyteller needs? Time will tell. For now, I'll take a backward look at what was trending in literature in 1891 and 1892, when AI was the stuff of science fiction. These factoids are courtesy of Wikipedia:

• Strand Magazine is first published in 1891.
• Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Herman Melville, Jules Verne and Oscar Wilde all release new fiction in 1891. Many others do, too, but these are the authors whose names I recognize.
• Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Miller are born in 1891.
• The first collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories from Strand Magazine is published in 1892.
• W.B. Yeats is one of the founders of the Irish Literary Society in 1892.
• Pearl S. Buck, J.R.R. Tolkien and Edna St. Vincent Millay are born in 1892.
• Walt Whitman dies in 1892.

It'd be too dramatic of me to say fiction writing and narration are on their deathbeds. But I suspect living arrangements might be up for negotiation in the not-too-distant future.

Lue Gim Gong deserved better

Screengrab from a 1922
issue of the Manatee River
Journal in Bradenton, FL

It's a joy to uncover instances when pioneers in Florida helped others make it through day-to-day life. And sad to find times when they don't. Today's post encompasses both.

Discrimination against people of Asian descent, again on the rise, marred Florida's frontier days. A visible case is that of Lue Gim Gong, a gifted and lauded horticulturist about whom I've written before.

We know basic facts about Lue's life (see this post from 2014). One of these facts is that he died in poverty in 1925. He was a brilliant horticulturist but a naive businessman. People took advantage of his generous heart and soul.

Lue's major contribution to the citrus industry -- the Lue Gim Gong orange -- was hailed as revolutionary upon introduction in the early 1900s. It earned a federal agricultural award. Then drifted into obscurity. Some industry leaders decided it was simply a strain of the better known Valencia orange. 

I'm no botanist, but after learning how sad and lonely Lue's final years were, I can't help but wonder if those citrus leaders deliberately pushed him and his discovery into the footnotes. Jealousy? I found a 1912 newspaper account proclaiming the orange's greatness - and explaining why. And I found other articles mentioning Lue's other botanical achievements.

Bigoted competitors wouldn't want a Chinese immigrant stealing any of Florida's citrus glory. Florida in the 1920s wasn't known for its tolerance, as black, Catholic and Jewish people can attest.

Thankfully, the state's agriculture industry included people who stood by Lue. Some neighbors in DeLand and the surrounding area likewise supported him. One man who'd grown up in DeLand spoke loudly and eloquently on a statewide platform about Lue's mistreatment. 

The words of those who supported Lue are what I wish to share here. In most cases, I don't have individual names. The information was printed and reprinted in various newspapers.

Lue died in 1925, but he needed help years earlier. The Miami Herald on January 31, 1917 carried a reprint from "The Lancer in Florida Grower," an industry publication. The headline stated, "Hard Luck for Lue Gim Gong."  Lue is described as "a poor, inoffensive, loveable, Christian Chinaman who lives a lonely life on a little citrus grove, his only company being a pet horse and a rooster." 

It says Lue's name was known throughout Florida, and that prominent fruit growers from throughout the state had visited him and "learned to admire his honest and earnest character." 

The article says Lue had only left his farm once in the past seven years, meaning since 1910, "not even visiting his nearby city of DeLand."

Perhaps DeLand wasn't always welcoming to Lue, especially after the woman who adopted him died and left him her land and house in the early 1900s. His grave in DeLand's Oakdale Cemetery was left unmarked until a New York historian place a bronze marker on it five years after Lue's death. Yet the Orange County Regional History Center's webpage about Lue says prominent citizens served as pallbearers. So who knows. I do know Lue's grave didn't have a headstone until 1999. 

The 1917 Miami Herald article continues by stating Lue was often defrauded and ripped off, to use today's terms, and couldn't pay his bills. The writer calls on readers to support a fund drive ($1 apiece) to raise money for Lue. And to "make him realize there is something more than mere words in the Christianity he has adopted..."

Did it help? Hard to say. Maybe for a while. But it wasn't enough. Five years later, on December 8, 1922, the Manatee River Journal-Bradenton Herald headlined an article with this: "Chinese 'Burbank' of Florida Going Broke." (Burbank was a noted horticulturist of the times.) 

The article reports that the aged - he was 63 - and internationally known Lue was dependent on the generosity of friends. It describes him as "feeble and broken," with a heavy mortgage on his property and in danger of foreclosure.

It also notes that Lue had only visited downtown DeLand four times over the past 16 years. That's four times between 1906 and 1922. 

By the end of the month, The Florida Grower was fundraising again for Lue. A Florida Grower article was reprinted in the December 28, 1922, Manatee River Journal. It urges readers to pledge $100 each to help Lue meet a payment deadline and secure a new mortgage on his property. A large amount was coming due - $5,700 on January 1, 1923. That's the equivalent of about $95,000 in 2022.

I don't know the end of the story. Haven't yet found more vintage newspaper coverage. But I did find an article about one man who supported the fund drive, contributed $100 and pledged to give more if needed. That person was Bishop Frederick Leete of the Episcopal diocese of Florida.

The family name of Leete was one of the oldest and best known in DeLand at the time. Its members contributed to the city's founding. Bishop Leete grew up in DeLand and had known Lue. He also knew Lue had faced discrimination.

The DeLand Sun on January 5, 1923, carried a reprint from the Tampa Times in which Leete is quoted. Leete lauded the Florida Grower fundraising effort, urged others to contribute and lamented that Lue had reached such a low point. His next statement is poignant:

"I do not need to tell you that Lue has not been altogether well treated by the Philistines.* He is also a little too good for this wicked world."

Leete closed with what could be taken as an admonition to DeLand: "The home of my boyhood is too splendid a city to allow any serious calamity to happen to this remarkable man."

Some people in DeLand rose to the occasion. Others didn't. Today, DeLand embraces Lue and pays him the tribute he deserves. 

Rest in Peace, Lue. Your contributions are not forgotten.

Digging up veggie varieties of past

Early settlers knew the value of kitchen
gardens, as this photo from Florida's state
archives shows.

A head of iceberg lettuce costs $2.79 to $4 or more right now. Yikes. Time to grow my own like the pioneers did.

Fall and winter in Florida are prime growing seasons for many vegetables, including lettuce. Head lettuce can be tricky in home gardens, but leafy kinds grow really well. 

Large kitchen gardens were common sights in early Florida homesteads. I used to have a fair-sized vegetable garden, about 8 feet by 10 feet. Now I have container gardens because arthritis dictates my moves.

You can do a lot with containers. My husband's Earth box of scallions is looking good. Some of my buttercrunch and romaine lettuces, grown from transplants, have already shown up on the dinner table. Seedlings of leaf and romaine lettuces, radishes and carrots have sprouted and are ready for transplanting. Sounds like a haul, but it isn't and doesn't require a lot of space or time.

Still, I can run to the supermarket if I have a crop failure. Vegetable gardening wasn't a hobby for pioneer Floridians. Healthful survival often depended on what could be procured by a settler's own hand. Of course stores stocked and sold food. Many settlers relied on stores only for staples they couldn't produce themselves, such as flour, coffee and tea. 

I've always wondered what varieties of vegetables Floridians grew in the 1800s and early 1900s. Among the many things lost to the past are numerous distinctive vegetable varieties. Some modern companies and organizations specialize in heirloom seed stocks, thankfully. But many regional varieties are long gone.

Bermuda onions are
an old favorite. This
drawing is from the
1885 garden book.

That's sad, because regional varieties are known for having adapted to their locations over generations of growth. These sturdy plants didn't require coddling and they produced good yields. 

Over the years, I've grown some old-timey varieties with varying degrees of success. It's always fun to experiment with them. I like searching out old garden guides to see what types of vegetables were recommended for Florida. One gold-mine book was published in 1885. Gardening in Florida, A Treatise on the Vegetables and Tropical Products of Florida, was written by J.N Whitner, A.M. He was a professor of agriculture at Florida Agricultural College in Lake City in north Florida. 

Professor Whitner gave cultivation instructions for numerous vegetables and suggested certain varieties of each. Here are his choices for Florida gardeners in 1885:

• Asparagus - Colossal, Defiance
• Bush Beans - Early Mohawk, Golden Wax, Black Wax, Red and White Valentine, Long Yellow Six weeks
• Pole Beans - Giant Wax, Dreer's Improved Lima
• Beet - for the table: Egyptian Turnip, Early Blood Turnip, Early Yellow Turnip, Pine Apple; for feeding stock: Mangel Wurzel, Long Red, Long Yellow Mangel Wurzel
• Borecole (known today as Kale) - Dwarf German Greens, Green Curled Scotch, Purple Borecole
• Broccoli - White Cape, Purple Cape, Early Walcheren
• Cabbage - Early Jersey Wakefield, Early Winningstadt, Fottler's Improved Early Brunswick, Early Giant Bleichfield, Flat Dutch, Henderson's Early Summer, Improved American Savoy
• Carrots - Half Long Red, Danvers, Long Orange Improved
• Cauliflower - Early Snowball, Extra Early Paris, Extra Early Dwarf Erfurt
• Celery - Incomparable Dwarf White, Incomparable Dwarf Crimson, Boston Market, Golden Heart, White Plumed
• Corn - Egyptian Sweet, Sewell's Evergreen, Mammoth Sugar, Tuscarora
• Cucumber - Improved White Spine, Green Prolific, Long Green
• Eggplant - New York Improved, Black Pekin, Scarlet Fruited, White Fruited
• Lettuce - Green Fringed, Black Seeded Simpson, All the Year Round
• Okra - Giant, Dwarf
• Onion - Giant Rocca, New Queen, New Neapolitan Marzajola, Bermuda (the Bermuda was so popular it had its own separate write-up)
• Parsnip - Hollow Crown
• Parsley - Carter's Fern Leaved, Fine Triple Curled, Myatt's Garnishing
• Pea (green pea not field pea) - Ferry's First and Best, Bliss' American Wonder, McLean's Little Gem, Carter's Little Wonder, Prize-Taker Green Marrow, Fill Basket, Veitch's Perfection, Champion of England, Early Dwarf Wrinkled
• Radish - Long Scarlet Short Top, Scarlet Turnip, White Tipped Scarlet Turnip, Yellow Summer Turnip
• Spinach - Improved Round Leaved
• Squash - Yellow and White Bush Scalloped Squash, Boston Marrow, Hubbard
• Tomato - Acme, Hathaway's Excelsior, Golden Trophy
• Turnip - Early White Dutch, Early Red Top Dutch, White Globe

Some of those names are mouthfuls. I was surprised at the number of pea selections and mystified by the minimal tomato choices. Tomatoes usually take up pages in modern vegetable seed catalogs. I was happy to see Black Seeded Simpson among the lettuce options. That variety is part of my current crop of lettuce seedlings because it's a proven winner. It's neat that it's been grown in the state for over 125 years.

I recognized the Danvers carrot and Snowball cauliflower because the varieties are still around and I've grown them in the past. I once tried Sewell's Evergreen corn as an experiment. It wasn't very sweet at all. Most of the other heirloom variety names are mysteries to me.

I may envy these past gardeners the seed choices lost to us today. But other aspects of gardening in Florida are best left in the past. The book's section on fertilizers offers specifics on how to dissolve bones to create bone meal for working into the soil. It was a days-long process. Just reading about it made me tired. And glad a bag of balanced organic fertilizer is sitting on the garden shelf in my garage. 

Tracing birth of Key Lime Pie

Key Lime Pie photo by Marc Averette
from Wikimedia Commons

Key Lime Pie is pretty much the Florida dessert. Of course it's fitting that the pie's provenance traces to Key West. I mean, where else? Of a less flippant note is the story behind its creation.

Legend says a woman named Aunt Sally created the now-famous pie recipe in the late 1800s in what is today the historic Amsterdam-Curry Mansion Inn. Older versions of the story suggest that Sally was a cook who worked for the Curry family that owned the property at the time.

When I first heard the story, I wondered if Aunt Sally was a woman of color. Kitchen jobs in that place and time were almost always filled by women of color. They didn't have many employment options from which to choose. Unless they ran their own business, they were usually pushed into cook, maid, nanny and other domestic jobs.

Also, in the post-Civil War South, mature woman of color were often called Aunt or Auntie. I thought it sad no one knew the full name of the woman who created such an amazing pie. It seemed insulting to just credit it to Aunt Sally.

But we do know Aunt Sally's full name, or at least we think we do. She wasn't an employee. She was a member of the Curry family.

She dreamed up the delicious dessert in the Caroline Street home built in the 1860s by patriarch William Curry. The structure predates the current Amsterdam-Curry Mansion Inn on the same site. The current mansion was built in 1901 by William's son Milton, according to the inn's website.

The online history says Milton demolished everything except the cookhouse in 1901. Today, the only parts of that once-saved structure to remain "are the brick chimney and tiled hearth that once contained the wood-burning stove." One can imagine Aunt Sally standing on that spot and perfecting her pie recipe.

So who was she? The best theory is that she was Sarah Jane Lowe Curry, wife of one of William Curry's other sons, Charles. 

A 2019 article in the Keys Weekly by David Sloan dug into the background. David unearthed census records and more in his quest to find a cook named Sally in late 19th and early 20th century Key West. He came up empty. 

His father, a genealogist, picked up the trail and found Sarah Jane. She and her husband lived next door to the William Curry/Milton Curry house. Sarah Jane was white and is believed to have been Bahamian. She was affectionately known as Aunt Sally by the numerous Curry nieces and nephews. It was a large extended family. 

I lean toward this story rather than the one put forth in 2018 by an author who claimed Key Westians did little but improve a Borden company recipe for a condensed-milk citrus pie. David Sloan is the author of the Key West Key Lime Cookbook. He ought to know.

So there you have it. An unproven but plausible story about the birth of Key Lime Pie. Now you need a recipe to go with it. I have an old -- 30 years? more? - recipe sheet from what was then known as The Curry Mansion Inn. The paper is old enough to contain the early version of the legend. The recipe, however, remains timeless. 

INGREDIENTS

4 eggs, separated

1/2 cup key lime juice

14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk

1/3 cup sugar

Graham cracker crust in 8-inch pie pan

Beat egg yolks until light and thick. Blend in lime juice, then milk, stirring until mixture thickens. Pour mixture into pie shell. Beat egg whites with cream of tartar until stiff. Gradually beat in sugar, beating until glossy peaks form. Spread egg whites over surface of pie to edge of crust. Bake at 350 degrees F. until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Chill before serving.

I know, meringue. It's a lot of work. That's the traditional recipe, though. If you don't like that version, there are lots of other ones floating around online. Just be sure to always, always, always make Key Lime Pie with the juice of the small, round, greenish-yellow key limes, never ever with those bright green limes usually seen in supermarkets. If you're going through the trouble to make the pie, you want the real thing.

Cheap fabric and oversized sleeves

The seamstress heroine of my 2nd novel
was too fashionable to fall for this trend

I spent so much time paging through an online 1896 Sears Roebuck catalog that I gathered enough for two blog posts.

Last month, we looked at the catalog's grocery section. Today I'm focused on the fabric department.

Both posts connect to how the characters in my Persimmon Hollow novels would have been familiar with Sears catalogs. I've just reprinted Books 1 and 2 with a new publisher and new covers that fit the theme of Book 3's cover. 

The novels are set in the late 1800s. Fast fashion as we know it today didn't exist in 1896 pioneer Florida. Yes, a person could buy ready-to-wear clothing in stores and from catalogs. But each item was purchased with an eye toward longevity. Most women and probably a lot of men knew how to sew and make garments. They spent quite a bit of time doing so. Far more than today. 

The heroine of my second novel is a seamstress named Josefa. She perfects her craft through an apprenticeship with the town dressmaker. Any author will tell you their characters seem like real people to them. I'm no exception. I can imagine Josefa poring over the fabric selections of the Sears catalog.

The section wasn't named "Fabric." No, it was the Dress Goods Department. It started on page 136, right after a page selling cheese box machines and creamery butter tubs.

Dress Goods depicted “all the newest and choicest products of foreign and domestic looms for the fall and winter season of 1897.” That wasn't all. There also was material touted as year-round fabric and a promise that “all the popular new up-to-date fancy brocades, Jacquards, two toned effects” were always in stock in great variety.

The prices almost made me swoon. A two-color diamond pattern brocade sold for 11 cents a yard. A wool serge was 25 cents yard and scotch wool plaid 29 cents.

Silk was an uptown price, hovering at 98 cents a yard, while soft, fleecy flannel went for 6 and 3/4 cents a yard. If you wanted basic, unbleached cotton flannel, you could have it for 4 cents a yard. Gingham was slightly more expensive: 4 and 1/2 cents a yard. Percales were double that price, or 9 cents a yard.Don't ask me how they figured change when dealing with half- and quarter-cent pricing.

My astonishment grew as I reached the pages that advertised quilts. One seven-pound bed quilt measured 72x78 inches. It was made of twilled sateen, red lining and carded cotton fill and it featured something called "fancy quilting." The price was...are you ready...$1.50. I searched to discover the equivalent of that price in purchasing power today. The result: $52.91.

Seamstress Josefa would definitely have spent time perusing the quilts, household linens and ready-to-wear sections of the catalog. She would have looked for fashion trends, judged the latest styles and determined what would and wouldn't work in her frontier Florida environment of Persimmon Hollow.

One fashion at the peak of popularity at that time was the ridiculous bubble sleeve that puffed out four or five times the width of the wearer’s arm. I’d have skipped that trend had I lived back then. Just like I skipped the whole cold-shoulder blouse trend of recent years.

My seamstress heroine had better fashion sense than to wear those massive winglike sleeves. She had style and taste. Of that I'm sure. I know her pretty well. :) 

1896 Sears catalog Amazon of its day

Detail of a page from the 1896 Sears catalog

I stumbled across the 1896 Sears Roebuck catalog on—of all places—Ancestry.com. Of course I proceeded to spend too much time there. 

My main interest lies in how old catalogs depict items used in everyday life. Another reason is the time period. Paging through the catalog digitally reminded me that characters in my novels would have thumbed through the real thing. The 600-plus-page catalog was the Amazon of its day.

My novels are in my mind because I’ve just re-released the Kindle version of Books 1 and 2 in the Persimmon Hollow series. I got the rights back from the publisher, who no longer sells the books. Now I’m scrambling to get them reprinted with new covers. So far, the Kindle versions are available on Amazon. Paperback is coming soon, as well as versions for other ebook platforms.

The characters in my novels live in a late 19th century world. They would have received the Sears catalog in the mail. And even ordered groceries from it. The 1896 catalog included an entire grocery section, much to my surprise. 

It’s like the “everything old is new again” adage. People 125 years ago ordered groceries from home just like people do today. On paper, not online, true. And who knows how the shipments arrived in areas outside regular mail delivery back then. It’s fun to think about.

In addition to groceries and household items, the catalog featured a sizable pharmacy section. All kinds of tinctures, potions, lotions, oils and other ingredients were offered, enough to stock a  pharmaceutical factory. You could even buy laudanum (23 cents for a 2-oz. bottle). 

The pharmacy section’s offerings were a cross between a modern drugstore’s selections and the homeopathic remedies found at health food stores. Except it’s now illegal to purchase some of the ingredients that old catalog sold.

I noticed another indication of the same-but-different mantra. Customers in 1896 could order tea that came from Japan, China, Formosa and Ceylon. People living in the time of my novels would have recognized all four locations. Today, we’re most familiar with Japan and China. Formosa back then was a name associated with the island of Taiwan. Ceylon was the British colonial name of the now-independent country of Sri Lanka. 

Sears particularly touted its Golden Tips Ceylon and Ungalora Ceylon teas as the healthiest, best flavored and most economical of all teas. But customers could choose from among several types of teas. Prices ranged from 19 cents to 51 cents per pound, depending on grade and quantity.

There was no popping a cup of water in the microwave to heat up tea water in those days. If you want to brew tea the way they did in 1896, the catalog shared the following instructions:

“Make it at the table; heat the pot, then pour in water that has just come to a boil (not water that has been boiling for some time), put the tea on top of water, let stand from 2 to 7 minutes and pour into cups or other pot; do not let it stand on leaves as that destroys the delicate flavor so much desired.”

I think I’ll go make myself a cup of tea. With some help from the microwave.

Here are the new covers for my novels.