In Pursuit Of A Tidbit Of History

It must be noted that both Arthur and I spent some time as newspaper reporters in the 1970s when our dream to carry on my family's legacy in the local newspaper world burned bright. Newspaper reporting in a small town meant you were first and foremost charged with providing accurate information. After all, you were the eyes and ears of the community.

All these years later, in our pursuits that involve writing and music and the intersection of the two, we still hearken back to those lessons learned when we were young and hopeful. And it was our interest in truthful and careful reporting that took me to the Potter County Historical Society last month. I was in search of documentation of a snippet of information Arthur had remembered from a long-ago newspaper piece about New Century Club.

New Century Club was a women's club that began some time early in the twentieth century - and celebrated a milestone anniversary during our time at The Potter Enterprise. It was that celebration and the retrospective of the club printed in the paper that needed to be found.

The volunteers at the Historical Society are always anxious to help solve mysteries involving the community and its people and these women went to work to help me on my quest to find a truly obscure piece of information. Diane Caudell checked sources online and provided the year of the club's establishment, a framework that send Linda Goodnoe Russell upstairs to pore over old newspapers.  

Julia Kolat recalled that there were records of New Century Club stored on the third floor of that fine old brick building. And she took me up the sweeping staircase to the second floor and then up the narrow steps into the attic space. Stacked on the floor, carefully boxed and labeled, records of the Club that served the community for more than 100 years are stored.

And thus began my introduction to Belle Haskell Lewis.

These are her words, taken from a multi-paged document tucked in the front of an over-stuffed scrapbook of clippings. Typed on a typewriter, double spaced with wide margins at the top and bottom, it is a history written in 1935 - a 30th anniversary retrospective.

I was asked to write a history of the New Century Club but many of the records I find missing and most of those available are mere outlines of programs, lacking all the life and color that characterized our activities...

To look back over the road we have travelled is interesting and enlightening. We see a procession of years steadily moving forward. In some of these years things apparently were static. Old customs and traditions held fast and were meticulously observed.

Then as the years passed a more extensive outlook was gained and closer contacts were made with the world's great movements. There were years that were exciting, exhilarating, heartbreaking.

Our country was emerging from its seclusion, and with high purpose had entered a war, to maintain a principle which we thought had been established to be a beacon light to the world. 

The years that followed the World War brought a larger, fuller life for women, a freedom that in 1905 was talked of with bated breath, lest we be thought unwomanly.

Thereafter followed years of reaction, with changes so radical that they seemed to threaten, to undermine, what to us had seemed to be the fundamentals of society. Years of doubt, of confusion in the fog of which we are still wandering.

While we have been moving forward, keeping pace as best we can with the changing world, accepting innovations, following the trend of modern thought. Ever advancing, we have been carried into realms scarcely dreamed of before.

Yet when we looked backward we find that we have left behind us many things that were infinitely precious. We have lost old friends, old ideals wherein we found safety and comfort and security.

Dreams that we once entertained have been dissipated; illusions that we once hugged to our hearts as being things of utmost importance have vanished, lost in the clear light of science.

Old friends: How the essence, the flavor of their kindly spirits permeates all the years since they left us. Many of them we will see no more. We recall how they looked, what they said, even what they wore!

Recollections of them, and of others, come to us over and over, like some haunting phrase of music, a bit of melody wrought out of our association with them in the New Century Club.

... What of the New Century Club of the future? We find ourselves in the midst of a giant upheaval. What the world will be like, how many of our institutions will survive, no one knows.

There must be no limit to our horizon, it must extend beyond tihs world even into eternity. We cannot escape the past, it determines the future. We can never say, "It is finished."

I was enthralled by the discovery of this woman's writing and by the history of New Century Club but lest I forget – that obscure piece of information that was the purpose of my visit to PCHS was found by Linda in the newspaper from 1980. And Arthur's memory was accurate and what he's concocting from that piece of Potter County History - and others - is his story to tell.

And as for me, I'm now on a quest to learn more about Belle Haskell Lewis (1864-1955) and share in this New(ish) Century, her observations about the last New Century.

For now, her poem, published in her 1955 obituary in The Potter Enterprise.

My Tapestry

The tapestry of my life I know

Has been wrought without design;

Seemingly colorless, somber and grey,

Faulty of texture and line.

The world will carelessly toss it aside

When the fabric is complete;

For this is the fate that commonplace lives

In the end must always meet.

I wove each day the threads that came

To my patiently waiting hands,

And I tried to mingle the beauty of the earth

With the dull monotonous strands;

A bit of blue of the heavens above

And the gold of the setting sun.

You will find them there with a thread of love

When the tapestry is done.

Dear Medicare enrollee

The letter came in the mail on Friday. A letter from the United States Government. A letter signed in that familiar yet unrecognizable sharpie signature at the bottom.

I was immediately struck by the number of capital letters in this letter filled with the overwrought and overused rhetoric of DJT. The AI-assisted marketing team affixed capital letters on phrases that have no business being capitalized while in the greeting, it's Medicare enrollee.

I'm wondering why the incessant use of capital letters in a way that would make Mrs. Olin frown and put her head down on her desk.

It's all part of the relentless assault these days on the conventions of how we express ourselves through language. One observer wrote "He uses language to prevent us from holding him accountable for his words and actions in what scholars call 'language intensity'."

She continues "Trump is the outrage president. He doesn't seek to be presidential."

And so we can assume the capitalization of words not needing to be capitalized signals the importance he attaches to those words.  And these particular words tell me that he's sending me a One-Time Payment, putting healthcare dollars back where they belong - in the hands of the American People.

I could more easily excuse the body of the letter if it weren't for the last paragraph.

May God bless you .... 

This from a thrice-wed male who has bragged of his penchant for assaulting women, a man whose association with Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is well documented. This from a man convicted of sexual abuse. This from a man who has never once even hinted that he has repented for anything. This despicable human who has brilliantly manipulated God-fearing individuals to do his bidding.

Signing off in all capitals - shouting at us once again that he is president of the united states of america.

Afghan

It was a work for Art – this afghan that hung across the back of the avocado green couch in Thelma's living room. You know the kind with the zig zags in sometimes - mostly - garish colors, this one in brown and orange and yellow in those too-synthetic hues. Crocheted in scratchy synthetic yarn that become more scratchy with time.

Ugly, just plain ugly.

"But Jane, my grandmother made it."

"It's still hideous," I said. 

But still it was kept, even plucked from the dumpster after our daughter discarded it along with the worn out pillows and threadbare sheets and old newspapers and even older magazines and the broken chairs that would be perfectly good if just repaired with a little glue and a clamp.

But he rescued the afghan and stuffed it behind the seats in his truck where I wouldn't see it – that's not until the day I was cleaning out the truck. The afghan purportedly so preciously had absorbed half a can of motor oil, miscellaneous discarded foodstuffs and perhaps even some deer blood.

I pulled it out and hung it on the clothesline. It disappeared again sometime later that day and he swears it's been eliminated but I fully expect to find it in the of a cupboard in the workshop.

I put together the words you read above on February 27, 2026 during a ten-minute writing practice session with the prompt "Afghan."

We're buried in such stuff here on the farm - not just our stuff, thought there's plenty of that! But we're living in a place where five generations of family - thrifty farmers for the most part - have lived. And if you know thrifty anybodies, you'll know that throwing 'perfectly good' things away is a challenge. You might need it some day.

Add those 'perfectly good' things that might need just a little tweak to restore them to the 'perfectly good' status, and you've described much of what has been squirreled away. And then, of course, the sentimental things - worn out baby shoes, old high school and college yearbooks from parents, grandparents and offspring, funeral calling books from family members who have been in the cemetery since early in the last century.

But we're determined at the end of yet another summer to made a substantial dent in the purging process.

But guess what showed up again draped across the futon on the upstairs back porch to surprise me?

But this time, in the interest of truly making the substantial dent, here's the rest of the story.

Maybe that's the end of that afghan story - but here's the last part of my "Afghan" writing practice from February.

My grandmother made me an afghan when we were married. It too is rather garish but soft with cotton yarn. Black borders with colorful knitted blocks. It's hidden away upstairs in a trunk in the attic and he doesn't know it's there.