Hershey Chocolate and Other Delights

When I read the biography of Thomas Lipton before giving the book to my sailing son for Christmas, I knew I wanted to read more of Michael D'Antonio's work. I also knew when I started reading Hershey, the biography of Milton S. Hershey, I'd better have a supply of chocolate on hand!* One of the things I like most about reading is how much I learn about something new. Reading Hershey was not only enlightening about the Chocolate King and his Utopian world, I also learned more about capitalism in general as well as what was going on in the world a hundred years ago. Hershey was not the first to perfect the manufacture of low cost chocolate in America, he was better at mass production, keeping the cost lower, and at marketing. I found it interesting to learn that Hershey's milk chocolate has always had a distinctive flavor - due to the fermentation of milk fat, it carries a single, faintly sour note. It was something European milk chocolate devotees would notice, but not the newly addicted American chocolate lovers. It was the distinctive flavor which Americans came to prefer over other chocolates.

When I was a lunch-bucket- packing grade schooler, a Hershey's Almond Bar was a welcome treat. For some unknown reason, it became a fad in the winter months to place our candy bars on top of the oil burning stove for a few minutes to melt the chocolate. Then we would dip it up with our fingers in order to eat it. I won't say our family was poor, but instead of a 5-cent Hershey bar in our lunch, we more often found the 3-cent Klein's Lunch Bar. (I actually came to prefer the peanuts in Klein's over the almonds in Hershey's.) Klein's was another Pennsylvania chocolate maker. William Klein once worked for M.S. Hershey before starting his own company. Even though they were competitors, they "always got along well and did business as friends."

One more little tidbit, I learned was something called fletcherizing. Named for Horace Fletcher, a Victorian era health food faddist, it was the belief that chewing food thirty-two times before swallowing would make people more healthy. His claim, "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate" earned him the nickname, "The Great Masticator". See what interesting things one can learn?

Three more recent reads included two new authors - Kate Morton and Donis Casey. Casey's Crying Blood was an interesting mystery and a look at farm life a hundred years ago in Oklahoma Indian Territory. It was a quick read which gave a glimpse of the cultural changes at that time. This book was a reminder of our visit to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee a few years ago during a stay in that area.

Morton's The House At Riverton was a more interesting mystery set in England during the time between the two World Wars. It, too, details the cultural changes of the time through the eyes of a young girl who goes "into service" at the big house before WWI. The story is told in flashbacks when the young girl is ninety-eight years old.

Cecelia Ahern has become a favourite author of mine so I was delighted to find her most recent novel The Book of Tomorrow on the shelf at the library. "What if we knew what tomorrow would bring? Would we fix it? Could we?" Tamara Goodwin has lived a life of luxury her first sixteen years. But her materialistic world comes crashing down when her father commits suicide and her mother is forced to sell everything in order to cover their debts.

Tamara and her mother move in with their peculiar relatives in a remote countryside village. There are several entwining mysteries here - not the least of which concerns Tamara's real age and parentage. Breaking the lock of a leather-bound book to discover a diary written in her own handwriting is a shock. But when the entry is dated the following day, and then the next day unfolds just as recorded, Tamara learns it is sometimes better not to interfere with fate.

* More than chocolate, reading this book made me crave caramels. (Hershey's first business was a caramel manufacturing company.) A bag of Werther's chewy caramels and one of Riesen chocolate caramels were devoured during the reading.

On To Another Mystery

Now that I have determined the location of the spring near Afton, I'm ready to move on to the mysteries of this painting. Mystery #1: Who painted the picture and when? To me it looks 19th Century. It appears to be a woman and small boy walking on a path through the woods. It looks like she has a bundle of firewood on her back. I have googled every way I can think of to find this painting. It is not "The Wood Gatherers" by Thomas Gainsborough, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Vincent Van Gogh, Henry A. Duessel, Claude Monet, George Arnald, Louis Apol, Frederik Marinus Kruseman nor any of the other artists who have paintings entitled "The Wood Gatherers". Nor is it a painting of "The Path Through (The or A) Forest" by Pierre Auguste Renoir or Joseph Augustus Knip. It is also not "Path Through the Woods" by Paul Cezanne, Camille Jacob Pissarro, Ivan Shishkin or Barend Cornelis Koekkoek. And while I have enjoyed looking through all these possible paintings - even learning of some new-to-me painters - I am no closer to finding this painting.

Part two of the mystery - Who did this picture belong to and where did it come from? It is a print of a painting - not an oil painting - which is about 16" x 20". The first time I saw it was after Mom died and my brothers and I found it in the closet in her bedroom. Neither of them had any memory of ever seeing it before, either. I immediately fell in love with it and asked if it was okay with them if I took it. (It was.)

It is possible it was something Grandma Ridnour had which Mom ended up with after Grandma died. The frame looks like something from the 1920's-30's and is in good shape. It is also possible the picture was in some of the 'treasures' Dad used to bring home from auctions.

There are numerous "brush strokes" in the bottom corners of the picture which almost could be an artist's signature, but which are just not quite legible as such.

I'm going to keep working on this mystery - perhaps one of the cousins remembers seeing it at Grandma Ridnour's? Eventually, I will take the back off to see if there is any writing underneath - but not yet. It can remain a mystery a little longer. Meanwhile I am going to google painting of "Old Woman and Child Walking Through Woods in Springtime". I'll let you know if I get a match.

In Search of a Spring

When I saw this picture hanging in the hallway of the local Windrow Restaurant in the autumn of 2009, I was captivated. This 'picture of a picture' shows a group of people standing near what almost looks like a grotto. Printing in the corner, however, identifies this as "Natural Spring Near Afton".
Springs have always held a fascination for me. That may be a result of visiting the spring on the Gray farm in Illinois when I was four years old. Or it may be from all the reading about pioneers I did when I was younger - how they would camp near a spring or look for a homestead with a spring nearby in order to have a source of water.
For a year and a half I have been trying to discover exactly where the spring near Afton (which is the former county seat of Union County - about ten miles east of Creston) is located. I want to see if there is anything remaining of the above structure. I've asked at the library, I've asked people from Afton, I've asked and asked. Finally Thursday I asked the owner of the Windrow about the picture and if he knew where the spring was located. He did. He gave me directions.
Then yesterday, I did a more diligent search on the library's Union County history shelves and discovered a slim booklet of "Small Towns of Union County". It included Afton and it included the above picture. The spring was/is? located three miles east of Afton at what was once known as Afton Junction. It is where the north-south and east-west trains once crossed. Not only was there a spring, there was also a swimming hole and picnic grounds. In addition to the two railroad depots there was a general store and possibly some other businesses. (I've heard there was a hotel.) So now I'm waiting for some warmer weather and an exploratory drive in the country.

I'm always on the lookout for springs when we travel. This photo was taken at Hooper Springs Park in Soda Springs, Idaho. Free soda water is available here. Yes, I filled an empty water bottle. No, I didn't care for the taste - it's not like the club soda we buy at the grocery. Soda water from this spring was marketed nationally in the late 1800's and into the 1900's. Soda Springs also has a geyser which erupts every hour. The area was a rest stop on the Oregon Trail (The Oasis of Soda Springs.)

Boone's Lick in Howard County Missouri was the site of one of that state's first and most important industries - salt. Here I am looking at one of the salt springs at Boone's Lick State Historical Site north of Boonville. Yes, I did dip my hand in and taste the salty water. (Bud's comment was, "Eww-ww, I can't believe you did that!") Daniel Boone's sons opened a salt business, shipping the crystallized product by keel boat to St. Louis.

One of my favourite camp sites back when we were still tent camping, was this one in Jo Daviess County in northeast Illinois. We had been at a wedding in Dubuque. I always wanted to see Galena, so after touring around there, we began looking for a place to camp. Wooded Wonderland was one of those serendipitous finds. Who wouldn't want to camp where you had to drive on Devil's Ladder Road to reach the campgrounds?

We were told to camp at any of the sites we wanted. This glade looked inviting. Once the tent was set up, I began exploring. I was elated to find we had camped next to a spring. At first I thought it was just a small pond - the edge of which is barely visible in the bottom of this picture, then I realized the 'pond' was being fed by a small spring.

The campgrounds were primitive. There was an old sawmill and remnants of some kind of mining or caves. Rusty old machinery, cars and trucks littered the area. It was a perfect place to camp and explore.

McMurtry Spring south of Cassville, Missouri on the Missouri-Arkansas border is another spring which has interested me since I first saw it in the mid 1970's. The kids and I were returning from a vacation on Beaver Lake near Rogers, Arkansas when my attention was drawn to a limestone barn and house near the intersection of highways 37 and 62 just south of the little town of Seligman, Missouri. My head was still turned, looking at those dream inducing structures (as in I could imagine living there), when I saw this pool. It was not signed, then, but on a trip Bud and I took twenty years later, a sign had been posted saying this was a stop on the Trail of Tears.

A spring is any natural situation where water flows to the surface from underground. A seep is a moist or wet place where groundwater reaches the earth's surface. We didn't have a spring on our farm. However, there was a seep on the side hill southeast of the barn. Before the field was tiled, there were a couple willow trees growing there. I always wondered if we dug it out some if the water would flow. Would we have a spring? Could we have a spring? It was one of my childhood fantasies - another reason I still go in search of springs in my old age?

The Play Purse

Growing up pre-television era meant we had to come up with our own entertainment. We played house, dress-up, office, tea party, cowboys and Indians, camping and with our dolls.
We had old clothes, hats and shoes for dress up. I also had an old white clutch purse of Mom's. In addition to play money and an almost used up compact and lipstick, I kept a ring in it which was too big to wear on any of my fingers.
Picking up after myself was not one of my good habits. I would leave my play purse laying around wherever I put it down. Mom threatened several times that if I didn't take care of it she was going to burn it.
One day I was looking for my purse and asked Mom if she had seen it. She said she had, that she had gotten tired of picking it up and had thrown it in the burning barrel. I asked her if she had taken my ring out of it, but she hadn't. I ran out to the barrel and found the remnants of the purse. Luckily, I found my ring.

This wasn't one of those ten cent rings from the five and dime. This was a ring my grandmother Bessie Lynam had given me. She said it was a friendship ring which had belonged to her grandmother, my Great-great Grandma Aggie.
It is hard to tell in the picture above, but the ring is encircled with twined hearts and some little flowers which look to me like lily of the valley. The band is 1/4" wide and I would guess a size 6. It doesn't have any markings, but looks like gold. After it was burned, it tarnished very easily so maybe it was gold plated?

Agnes Georgina Hull Richardson was born October 18, 1850 and died March 25, 1943 - sixty-eight years ago today. She was 92 1/2 years old.
This picture of Grandma Aggie with Dad (Louis), Grandma Bessie and baby Ron was taken October 11, 1940 - a week before her 90th birthday. It is unusual to have a five generation picture because so often the great-great grandparents are already dead. In this instance, it is the fourth generation missing because Flora, Bessie's mother and Aggie's daughter, died comparatively young (61).
I remember growing up hearing about how close Grandma Bessie was to her Grandma Agnes because her own mother (Flora) had died young. I know at that time I thought this meant really young and that Agnes had raised Bessie.


I don't know why Grandma Bessie gave me this ring instead of giving it to her daughter or a niece. Was it because I was the oldest granddaughter? She was the oldest granddaughter and the ring was given to her by her grandmother, so maybe Grandma Bessie was doing the same thing?

This ring is one of those family treasures I want to pass on. Should I carry on the tradition and give it to my oldest granddaughter? Or will I give it to my daughter because Lily of the Valley is her birth month flower? I just want the recipient to know the story of who it belonged to - and treasure it enough to keep it out of another trash fire.

Books and Baking

The raking part of Tuesday's post, Reading and Raking, didn't work out too well, so today, we'll try Books and baking. Happily I report there was no problem with my shoulder in stirring up a batch of cookies - I didn't even burn my fingers as I usually do when taking something out of the oven.

I read both Anne Perry's ninth and tenth William Monk mysteries, A Breach of Promise and The Twisted Root this week. Promise details the importance of a young woman's beauty and reputation in Victorian times. When successful architect Killian Melville hires Sir Oliver Rathbone to defend him when he is sued for breach of promise to marry Zillah Lambert, the daughter of Melville's patron, Barton Lambert, he refuses to tell the barrister of his reason(s). He insists that he never proposed marriage to the young lady - that her mother was so anxious to have her daughter married that she misconstrued Killian's friendship with Zillah.
The trial is all but over - all that remains is the settling of damage amounts - when the talented young architect is found dead. It appears to be a case of suicide until an autopsy confirms it was murder.
As usual, it takes Monk and Rathbone working together to solve this crime. Hester Latterly helps some, but does not play as large a role as usual. I was able to guess the reason for Melville's refusal to disclose why he would not marry Zillah and figure out how he was killed. But there were other aspects of the story I did not see coming - including Monk proposing marriage to Hester at the end of the book. (I have assumed since the beginning of this series that would happen eventually.)

I liked The Twisted Root a little more than Promise though I am now seeing that all these novels follow the same pattern. Monk is hired to find a missing woman. The coachman who drove her away from her fiance's home is found murdered. She is found and charged with the murder; Rathbone is hired to defend her. There is another murder and several red herrings.
I still enjoy the writing and the Victorian settings; maybe I should just spread them out a bit more and not read two in a row.

Barbara Vine's, The Blood Doctor, was the third book I read this week. It was really hard to get into - not the psychological thriller I have come to expect from Vine/Rendell. The book deals with a Victorian doctor obsessed with the hemophilia in the royal family. It goes into more detail than I care to know about the House of Lords, of which the Doctor is a Life Peer, as well as the topic of hemophiliacs.


Today I made a batch of Mom's Poor Man's Cookies. These cookies were the ones she always kept on hand before the Dishpan Cookies became her favourites.
I was searching through the online Adams County Free Press archives last week when I ran across her recipe. It had been published in the paper back when they used to use contributed recipes.

Poor Man's Cookies:

A 2 Cups Rolled Oats
1 Cup Flour
1 Cup Brown Sugar, Packed
1/2 Cup White Sugar

B 1 tsp Baking Soda
1/4 Cup Hot Water

C 1/2 Cup Shortening, Melted and Cooled
1 tsp Vanilla

Combine A in a bowl. Combine B and stir into A then stir in C. Mix well then roll into walnut sized balls. Place on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees about 10 minutes until golden brown. Let stand 2 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool. Makes about 3 1/2 dozen.

My cookies do not taste as good as I remember Mom's tasting. Nor are they as good as the Dishpan Cookies.

I'm thinking I should look for some different authors at the library tomorrow - maybe even bake brownies instead of cookies next time I feel like stirring something up.

"Mom! Mom! It's a Tornado!"

When the tornado sirens first blew last evening, I didn't think the clouds looked that bad. Then we heard there was a tornado on the ground six miles southwest of Creston. I was looking out the window overlooking the pond when I saw a likely looking cloud. In the time it took me to go out on the deck to take pictures, the funnel was already formed and dropping.
This first picture was taken zoomed in.





This was taken on normal setting a couple seconds later so you can see the tornado in relation to our pond.

My dad was a dedicated cloud watcher. By watching threatening weather with him, I learned at a very young age what to look for in the clouds. And I've been a cloud watcher myself ever since. Of course now we have Doppler and super Doppler to warn of potential bad weather. There's nothing like storm spotting with one's own eyes, however.



I believe this type of tornado is called a "rope" because of the way it twists and turns and "ropes out".
I have seen a lot of tornadoes in the distance and viewed a lot of tornado damage, but the closest I've ever been to one was June 7, 1984. Kari, Preston and I were at my Mom's farm. I was fixing supper. There were storm warnings out and Preston was in the front yard watching the clouds. Yes, I had passed my Dad's and my fascination on to him.
Suddenly he came running into the house: "Mom! Mom! It's a tornado and it's headed this way!" "Sure it is, I said." "No, really, he yelled, come look!" By the time I got out into the yard there was a cloud of debris racing northeast across the neighbor's pasture about a half mile away. I could see we were out of the path of the twister - unless it turned, of course. I sent Mom and the kids to the storm cellar while I got on the phone to call the sheriff to warn the town of Corning. I was told they were already aware. My cousin, Gary Mitchell, had already called it in.



In this photo, you can just make out some of the dust being churned up by last night's tornado. I don't think this one damaged any buildings. That was not the case in the 1984 tornado. A home a mile and half west of Mom's was completely destroyed. Luckily the mother and child home at the time made it into the basement just before the tornado struck.
A neighbor a mile east and two and a half miles north lost his barn. Interestingly enough, the barn built to replace it was damaged in another tornado three years ago.
To me, this rope tornado looked a lot less dangerous than some I've seen. The size can be deceiving, however, as some tornadoes get more intense as they narrow and tighten. (Size does not necessarily indicate strength. I'll remember that the next time I'm photographing a rope tornado - or indeed, any tornado.)




I only had time to take nine photos including this last one of the funnel back up in the clouds. It is the slightly darker line right at the bottom of the cloud in the middle of the picture.
Is the fact that we had our first severe weather on the second day of spring a presage of things to come? Will it not only be a dark and stormy night but a dark and stormy season as well? Will Preston again be saying, "Mom! Mom! It's a tornado!",?
Will Dorothy be calling, "Auntie Em! Auntie Em!"?

Reading and Raking

One of my all time favourite photos is this one of my youngest son, Preston, raking in the spring of '76. He loved being outside and helping mommy.
It is the time of year when the grown up Preston and his family came to the farm and helped with the spring raking and clean up. And while they may miss the annual ritual, I'm content with having a smaller bit of raking to do where we live now.
Ki and Dominique visited us last Friday. And while they did not come to rake, as they were leaving I discovered our neighbor on the north had cleaned my flower beds on that side of our house. She did not want me to be doing it with my recent shoulder surgery. And while I appreciated her thoughtfulness, it made me feel like I was sloughing off.
So Sunday afternoon, I went out and raked a bit on the south side of the house. I was taking it easy - the shoulder was working fine - when suddenly, pain. I quit immediately. By evening I was able to do my exercises, but the arm still hurt some. Luckily, when I went to therapy yesterday I learned I hadn't done anything major. Lesson learned; take it easy for awhile longer. Good thing I have still have some books from the library to read!


I was happy to find a new Rhys Bowen Molly Murphy mystery at the library. Even though In Dublin's Fair City came out in 2007, our library just got it in February of this year. That gives me hope that they may be getting some of the other older books in the series as they have the newer ones. Even reading them out of order does not lessen the pleasure of following Miss Molly as she makes her living as a private investigator in New York.
It is with some trepidation that Molly accepts an assignment to travel back to Ireland to try and find the long lost sister of a theatre impresario. Things start to go wrong when she is persuaded to change cabins with a famous actress and the actress's maid is found murdered.
Molly is able to convince investigators she had nothing to do with the murder, but once she is in Ireland, she becomes involved in the freedom movement and a dangerous mission of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
I put Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy mysteries in a similar category as M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin's, though they are set in different time periods and locales. They are quick reads with interesting female characters. The two Beaton novels I've read the past week are: There Goes The Bride and Busy Body.
Lady Killer by Lisa Scottoline was another book I finished reading last week. It was a paperback I had had on my bookshelf for some time - a garage sale purchase, no doubt. I may have read some Scottoline's before. She seems to be a prolific and admired author. However, I find her writing style a bit too 'cute' for me. Or maybe I just didn't care for the Italian mob and the South Philly locale she was writing about.
I'll stick with Anne Perry and Ruth Rendell mysteries for awhile - and definitely stick to reading rather than raking!