The Best Thanksgiving Ever: Marcus French Goes to the Movies in 1925

We are rerunning this 2015 post  about a boy’s Thanksgiving day in 1925 as a reminder that perfect Thanksgivings depends upon your expectations.   And Marcus French’s idea of the holiday didn’t have much to do with Norman Rockwell’s!

football turkey

The connection between football and Thanksgiving seems to go way back…

On November 28,1926, Marcus sent his big sister Eleanor a report on Thanksgiving back home. He thought it was “The best Thanksgiving I ever had” even though “I didn’t get enough turkey.” It wasn’t having the dressing, sides, or pies in the cement house that made the holiday so special that year. The real reason?

“I WENT TO THE MOVIES 2 on THANKSGIVING.”

(The “2” is short for “twice.”)

mfrenchpage[1]

After the holiday feast the family went to the Strand Theater to see “Rin Tin Tin: The Hero of the Big Snows,” which Marcus said was “dandy.” He’d seen at least one other film starring the German shepherd war hero and star of the silver screen.

hero of the big snowsAfter this stirring yarn, in which Rinty saves a child from a vicious black wolf, it was time for something completely different, the “funny picture.” Marcus doesn’t give the title but does mention that it starred Harold Lloyd. According to Marcus, “the goofiest picture I ever saw.” mfrenchpage[2]Maybe the “funny picture” Marcus saw was the full-length silent, “For Heaven’s Sake,” the only movie Lloyd released that year. This chase sequence is pretty goofy, by all objective standards. harold lloyd heavensThe family went to supper before heading off to the Rialto (the theater’s façade still exists in New Amsterdam) to take in a vaudeville show and another unidentified “goofy picture.” Marcus had more important things to share with Eleanor than details about his third picture show of the day, like his preliminary Christmas list.mfrenchpage[3]He promised to send his big sister an updated and expanded list soon instead of asking what SHE might like from Santa. I was able to find pictures of some of the things Marcus coveted. Here’s an advertisement for the major manufacturer of bicycle cyclometers:

vreeder odometer

The manufacturer’s jingle for this product line was “It’s nice to know how far you go.”

And this might be pretty close to the basketball and the cover on the list:vintage-basketball-carrierAfter some perfunctory chat about the weather, Marcus closed with the Pathe News, this time a seasonal story in two frames, written and illustrated by himself: mfrenchpage[4]Is this graphic depiction of a turkey’s slaughter and consumption a sign that Marcus was a budding sociopath? Probably not. These contemporary Thanksgiving greeting cards send the message that Americans were a whole lot more matter of fact and a whole lot less squeamish than we are when it comes to meat-eating…

Marcus also wrote about his adventures trick-or-treating and his battles with the algebra teacher. Just as amusing is The Flapper’s Magazette by Miss Vivie Wivie…

boy ax turkeyturkey boy knifeSo enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend, whether you are finishing off leftovers from the bird or that tasty vegan mushroom gravy…

Holiday greetings from Team Cotsen

Andrea, Dana, Ellen, Ian, Jeff, Marissa, Minjie, Miranda, and Miriam

archimboldo thanksgiving

Made by a Child: The Scientifick Amusement (1752), a Vade Mecum Manuscript

Title page. The Scientifick Amusement or the Useful Companion. England, 1752. (Cotsen 34075)

About twenty years ago Cotsen purchased this little manuscript bound in blue sugar paper boards from John Lawson, an English antiquarian bookseller and great collector in the history of education.  The neatly lettered title page dated 1752 credits sixteen-year-old Robert Brightwell junior as the manuscript’s “author.”  It might have been possible to identify him had he noted the name of the town or house where he was living at the time.  Another clue, the line ” Mrs. Allen My Dear Madame D,” is too cryptic to lead anywhere and seems to be in a second hand.

He must have been a  rather serious lad to have compiled and illustrated a “Useful Companion, containing Short & Necessary Instructions for Youth.” The section on astronomy is one of the longer ones in the first part.  In this opening, Robert carefully wrote out tables of the diameters of the planets and of their distance in millions of miles from the sun.

He also drew a diagram of the solar system as far out as Saturn with its rings and five moons (Uranus would not be discovered until 1781).  In the lower left-hand corner, he attempted a picture of an armillary or artificial sphere, which the Encyclopedia Britannica on-line defines as “an early astronomical device for representing the great circles of the heavens, including in the most elaborate instruments the horizon, meridian, Equator, tropics, polar circles, and an ecliptic hoop.”   A pudgy cherub holds up one hand and looks away from the fearsomely complicated machine.This more detailed representation from a plate in a 1748 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine, shows that Robert didn’t try to identify the concentric metal bands. Trying to squeeze the information into such small spaces probably seemed rather daunting.Robert seems to have been capable of finer work when motivated.  The section on geography was illustrated with tiny hand-colored maps of the continents, where he went to the trouble of designating longitude and latitude and drawing in rivers, seas, countries, and major cities.  He did run into some trouble in the map of Asia rendering the horn of Africa and New Holland (aka Australia) to scale.Neat  rows of shaded diagrams decorate the margins of the section on geometry.  They are placed opposite the corresponding definitions of solid figures–cube, cylinder, cone, pyramid, sphere, prism, scaleneous cone, etc.It seemed likely that Master Robert was transcribing passages from printed books into his manuscript,  I searched distinctive phrases at random in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online.  The phrase “Scientifick Amusement” turned up once, in an Irish volume of periodical essays published in 1758, but no match: “There are some concerns of greater importance to a human being than the most luminous conception of the full force of the thirteen cards in the scientific amusement of whist…”  The phrase “Platonic body” in the definition of a tetrahedron returned ten results, none passages remotely similar to Robert’s text.  The prose In the history of England was too bland to offer good bits for searching as in this thoroughly uninspiring account of the reign of Richard III.So why might Richard have compiled this manuscript?  It’s possible that he was transcribing a text he  wanted to own, but could not afford to buy.  Perhaps he was copying material for presentation to someone else.  A third possibility is that Robert was consulting several texts and composing an abstract his own words, like the mad narrator of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub.   Or perhaps he was in the same spot as the hero of Jeffrey Taylor’s Harry’s Holiday (1818), who needed something to do during the summer break and hit upon the idea of making a copy of Joseph Priestley’s enormous New Chart of History .  At least Robert’s project was manageable in comparison!