CLOSE UP Video Interviews

Doktor Water men clean muck out of old well in Bohemia

The well cleaners came, a lead man and his assistant, in a van decorated with a “Doktor Voda” (Dr Water) design. They pushed aside the heavy concrete cover then measured the depth - it looked like 9 m but was actually 7.6 m. They pumped out all the water in the well to the field out back. The outflow alternated between muddy and clear and this went on for about 15 minutes. They say the water will not fill back up into the well immediately, so it’s possible to work down there.  The assistant outfitted himself in heavy duty full body wetsuit thing.  They set up a steel tripod. At the apex of the tripod was a downward facing hook, and from there, the well cleaner was suspended in his harness on the hook and lowered down by steel cable winch.  His tools were lowered down after him. Initially, the head guy power washed what he could reach. After the assistant got down there, the steel cable was raised and a bucket with a scraper and a cup were attached to the hook and lowered down.  The well worker sent up three buckets of thick mud. The well was about 3 foot wide so in order to do that the assistant had to crouch down without hitting his head and do a lot of scooping.

Granddaughter continues tradition at Czech Bead Factory

Zuzana Slámová’s grandparents founded the G & B Beads factory that she runs today in the Czech town of Jablonec nad Nisou which has a tradition of glass bead making. There are actually two sites; the first is where they fabricate the beads, a little distance away. In the facility we visited they finish off the beads. It also boasts an art museum on an upper floor and on the first floor a retail store and a little museum with historical machinery.

Slámová ’took us through the building. In one room there were a couple dozen big tumblers that get filled with sand and water and spun to finish the beads. Workers had already left for the day. But not all the barrels are still in use. Production is only one fifth as much as it was at peak due to increasing competition from China. Most of the business is wholesale for export to 34 countries with the biggest demand from Japan, the U.S. and European Union.

Active production was in progress in another room. A couple workers there repeatedly inserted a string of beads into a machine; they applied a lever to bring the beads in contact with a large grinding wheel to create the facets.

Slámová showed us beads designed by her grandmother and of course, we had to buy several strands of the “babička” design. We also bought decades old original "dice" beads designed by babička. New designs come out every year. (Thank you Zuzana!)

See photo album here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBydVE

Building a cob house

Cara Graver built a cob house. An artist who has worked in many materials, she had attended a six week workshop in Oregon on natural building and came back to build what is now “The Cob Studio.” A cob house is built out of clay, sand, straw, and water. Graver says cob building has been done on almost every continent, and in every age. “Cob” comes from the old English word for loaf. About her house: Most of the clay she got from a neighbor who was building a house. There was a big hole with a pile of dirt beside it and that dirt was full of clay. More clay she retrieved by the roadside where there was exposed land. Graver led a nine day workshop with 25 participants to build the cob house. Your correspondent asked her to demonstrate the process: First you put clay and sand on a tarp and add water. You stamp and mix it with your feet . Next with your arm full of straw, grab a chunk of the clay mixture, combine it all together and shape it into a ball. Once you’ve formed the ball you shout “Cob toss” and toss it down the line of people to the person at the wall. That person puts it into place and tamps it down with their fingers. The wall is just built up from there! (Gravers was interviewed at the High Point Cafe craft market at the Allen Lane train station in Mount Airy, Philadelphia,  in 2023.)

Watch video interview here

Chestnut Hill Local disposes of bound print volumes

The Chestnut Hill Local has been published since 1958 and for decades, until about 2018, copies were bound into annual then semi annual-volumes. The Local kept a set and two other sets were maintained by the Chestnut Hill Library and the Chestnut Hill Conservancy according to Leisha Shaffer, Real Estate and Classifieds Manager. When the library experienced flood damage some years back, salvaged volumes were brought to the Local’s offices. Now it’s time to make more space.  Shaffer thought members of the community might want to retain some of these volumes as keepsakes - a little bit of history for a year that was of special note such as the year they graduated high school or got married or such. So she's been running an ad - in the classifieds, of course! The Local is now offering these history-packed editions to the public and asking for a $20 contribution for each.

Editions of the newspaper from recent years have been preserved in digital form and the Local had looked into digitizing all back issues but cost considerations and the pandemic intervened, according to Shaffer.

Your correspondent was unable to ascertain whether the Conservancy has a complete print set or what years it may make available in digitized format.

Watch video interview of news weekly's Classified Manager about disposing of old bound print volumes of the Local here.

Come volunteer! Northwest Philadelphia

Summit Presbyterian Church in Northwest Philadelphia partnered with the East and West Mount Airy Neighbor Associations to host a “volunteer connect” event on Saturday, January 6, 2024. The format was like a job fair. Representatives from a couple dozen organizations in the community were circled about the room to discuss with potential volunteers ways they can get involved. In the accompanying video, representatives from the following organizations answer your correspondent’s question “What kind of help are you looking for?”

Chestnut Hill Meals on Wheels
East Mt. Airy Neighbors
Food Moxie
Friends of the Wissahickon
Germantown Avenue Crisis Ministry
C.W.Henry School PTA
Hosts for Hospitals
Mt. Airy Tree Tenders/Germantown Tree Tenders
Northwest Mutual Aid Collective
Pathways to Housing
Stenton Manor
Unitarian Society of Germantown
Urban Resources Development Corp.
Welcoming Homes
Wesley Enhanced Living at Stapeley
Woodmere Art Museum
Wyck House and Garden
Yes! And...Collaborative Arts
Quintessence Theatre

Regrettably, your correspondent didn’t get a chance to speak with Whosoever Gospel Mission or Cliveden

View more photos of the volunteer event here.

View video snapshots about the organizations in the Volunteers playlist.

Sojourn in Denmark brings surprises and delights

Your correspondent and his spouse spent a wonderful two weeks in Denmark in May, most of it on a "workaway" vacation with a lovely family in the countryside near Gjøl, a small town on the northern coast of the Limfjord on the peninsula of northern Jutland. We have had a longstanding interest in visiting Scandinavia but confess that  two years of being hooked on the Danish television political drama "Borgen" piqued our particular interest in Denmark. It was no surprise that your correspondent didn't accidentally run into Sidse Babett Knudsen who played Denmark's first female prime minister Birgitte Nyborg nor Pilou Asbæk  who played Kasper Juul, a spin doctor, in the seriews. After all, your correspondent was  painting a 200 year old stone barn across the water and quite a ways from  Borgen (the Castle) as the Christiansborg Palace, the seat of the Danish Government in Copenhagen, Zeeland, is known, not that the actors who likely now have international reach would be hanging out at Borgen anyway! Politics came up  in this interview with a  Vigo  (a play on "we go"?) rideshare driver from Romania who was sympathetic with the truck drivers who were on strike and staging blockades (but not along our route to the airport for our flight back home) in a protest against government policy. But it is culture, history and nature that figure prominently into your correspondent's documentation of this beautiful, dynamic land of 6 million people, three quarters the population of New York City.  We are grateful to all our hosts, everyone who helped us find our way and all the people of Denmark. See some documentation below.

VIDEOS HERE

PHOTOS HERE

 

INSTAGRAM REELS HERE

How Bermudians speak English

On a six day visit to Bermuda, your correspondent became intrigued by the variety of accents.

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On a ferry ride, a very zippy jet-powered ferry from Hamilton to the Royal Navy Dockyard, an elder ferry worker referred to his proper yet distinctive accent as “British Bermudian.” He distinguished it from the Queen's English and from a West Indian accent. Tongue-in-cheek, he attributed British Bermudian to the temperate sea breezes on the island, warmer than England and cooler than the West Indies.

Jean-Marie runs a “garden inn’ in Southampton and although our timing didn’t work out to stay there, we visited! She has a lilting accent from (warmer) Antigua. She married and settled with a Bermudian and settled here, but goes back to Antigua every year. A garden tour included the greenhouses full of smal,l green poinsettias which she imports as slips , feeds and grows, prunes back in September. In the following months she draws the curtains  to provide just the right amount of night darkness so that they turn brilliant red at Christmas. Unfortunately, two back-to-back hurricanes caused her to twice enlist neighbors and draft her sons to haul the plants into the house and back to the greenhouse; the salt mist blowing in the one semi-open side of the greenhouse could have “burned” the leaves brown and gotten into the potting soil.

At a lovely Airbnb, across the road where we stayed, the innkeeper’s partner, Danny, exhibited a British Bermudian accent, also. His heritage is very varied-including Scottish and Indian from India. Ironically, some of his family were originally settled in a more northern area of the island populated by Native Americans (American Indians) a legacy of the confusion attributed to Christopher Columbus in the 15th century who thought he had reached the east Indies. He recounted that the 300 year-old house was once a horse stable for an inn and brothel that had stood across the street; evidently it was popular with sailors on the then sparsely populated island!

Your correspondent also came upon other English accents- someone who spoke with a rather posh accent and yet another with more working class. Perhaps most surprising was the “Bermudian” accent that was American! Robert’s English family, whose genealogy he has been documenting (3000 individuals so far), has been on the island for a few hundred years. A grandmother may have spoken with an English accent, he recalls, but recent generations like his have been sent to boarding school beginning at age twelve following through with university in the States.

Karl Marx returns from the dead

Actor and activist Robert Weick stars in the one man show “Marx in Soho,” based on the fantastical conceit that Karl Marx bargains with the authorities in the afterlife to come back to America to explain his ideas, call for peace and justice and clear his name . Your correspondent had a chance to speak with Weick during a rehearsal of David Auburn’s Proof” in which he portrayed a brilliant but mentally off-balance math professor. The play was written by noted social historian Howard Zinn who, as Weick encapsulates, writes about history through the eyes of ordinary people, slaves, Native Americans and other oppressed peoples who come together, take to the streets and work to effect social change. Weick became friends in 2005 with Zinn, who died in 2010, through collaboration on a national tour of the play and undertook another extensive tour of “Marx” in the U.S. and UK in 2018 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth. For more information and booking inquiries visit marxinsoho.org Watch video interview here

1903 Chestnut Hill stone building demolished for townhouse development

Damian Garcia , a member of the IUOE (International Union of Operating Engineers) Local 542, has been working in demolition for 20 some years and loves it. He may have single-handedly demolished the 1903 building at 30 West Highland Avenue in Chestnut Hill with a large powerful excavator, sometimes switching to a smaller bobcat bulldozer to move around piles of debris. (Of course he had a support team including laborer Melvin McClure who directed the action) According to an article in the April 28, 2021 Chestnut Hill Local, “The existing building was built in 1903 but does not qualify for historic preservation because of substantial changes made in the late 50s and early 60s. The plan is to tear down the original building and industrial garages, dig up the concrete drive and replace them with eight townhouses, 12 trees, a permeable-surface driveway, a 'pocket' park and a residential walkway with small lawns. The main issue for the neighbors, they said, is density. The proposal, they say, is too tall, too many houses.” The building had housed the EB O’Reilly HVAC business.

Over the course of about a week, Garcia brought down the structure and loaded most of the debris, which he had carefully separated into piles of wood, metal and stone into a dumpster truck. Garcia related that his company, Geppert Bros., Inc.,  had roots in Chestnut going back nearly 100 years when it was founded as Chestnut Hill Extraction. A short history of the related Geppert companies can be found bellow.

Before embarking on demolition Garcia studies the safety plan and determines the placement and orientation of the building’s trusses. Taking down a building is like solving a puzzle, he says and he takes it step by step. He often used an I-beam from the building as a poker securely held in the excavator’s grapple to brush the fragile stone wall, causing the pieces to crash down into dusty piles,“nibbling” away at it. He also used the large grapple to push over other sections of wall. For the second level wood flooring and the roof, he used the grapple’s large powerful jaws to take bites out of the structure. The main controls he uses are to raise and lower the boom, open and close the grapple’s jaws and to swing the boom left or right. After your correspondent complimented him on how delicately and skillfully he operated the excavator he demurred. “It’s not that hard but it is dangerous…the building could fall off on you, fall on somebody, hurt somebody. You just got to know what you’re doing.”

Interview of operating engineer and archival movies of the demolition process can be viewed by clicking here.

Still photos of the demolition can be found here.

Thanks to Alex Bartlett of the Chestnut Hill Conservancy for exploring the archives.

Anecdotes brighten tour of Rosebach rare book Museum and Library

Docent Charlie Karl gives a floor-by-floor history tour of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in downtown Philadelphia. Known for its collection of important manuscripts first additions, illustrated copies of literary works and artifacts the Rosenbach houses the personal collection of the rare book dealer Dr. A.S.W, Rosenbach. With his brother, Philip, he had a 50 year run as a dealer in books and manuscripts. "Renowned dealers in books, manuscripts, and fine art, the brothers played a central role in the development of private libraries that later became our nation’s most important public collections of rare books, such as the Folger and Huntington Libraries."  (from the Museum's website). Karl sprinkles narrative with anecdotes. For an exhibition to celebrate Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, first published as “The Whale,” lamps were lit with whale oil. At the very top of the multi-floor staircase, we encounter a miniature model version of the Rosenbach’s New York office. So much attention is paid to detail that six tiny books in the model are actually miniaturized books. Watch video tour here.

MORE PHOTOS HERE

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A portrait of the renowned actress Fanny Kemble painted by James Sully in 1833 is the departure point for docent Charlie Karl’s fact-filled and wry tour of the Rosenbach Museum and Library. Karl relates that Kemble, who came from a renowned British theatrical family traveled to the U.S. with her father in 1832 to do dramatic Shakespeare readings along the East Coast. During a stay in Philadelphia she met Pierce Butler and in 1834 they married. Britain had abolished slavery in 1833. The fact that her husband owned 700 slaves on a Georgia plantation and made trips there without the family was such a source of discomfort to Kemble that she insisted on going with her husband and children to visit. There she journaled and tried to improve the lot of the women slaves. The experience became the basis for her book “Journal of a residence on a Georgia plantation” not published until Kemble had divorced, returned to England and the civil war had ended. In her later years, Kemble, who saw herself more as an artist and writer, resumed dramatic readings, crisscrossing the ocean. Watch video of portrait and short life story of actress writer Fanny Kemble here.

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In a room of the Rosenbach Museum and Library dedicated to the literature of Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland the James Joyce manuscript of Ulysses sits in several boxes behind a glass covered bookcase. Guide Charlie Karl recites a ditty Joyce had written exhibiting his distain for Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, as a collector.

“Rosy Brook he bought a book
Though he didn’t know how to spell it
Such is the lure of literature
To the lad who can buy and sell it”
(According to the Rosenbach blog, a telegraph operator had apparently misspelled the title in a message)

Karl relates the backstory: At a manuscript auction, Rosenbach had purchased acclaimed Joseph Conrad manuscripts for a hefty sum but was able to acquire Joyce’s Ulysses manuscript from a collector, to whom Joyce had sold it, at a relative bargain. Subsequently, Joyce wanted the manuscript back but Rosenbach declined. Karl posits that Joyce didn’t really sufficiently appreciate Rosenbach as a bibliophile, who held literary works in such esteem that he mentored a generation of private collectors and enthusiasts dedicated to the preservation of these works. Watch video here.