More on "Wartime"

     JFZ, aka Johnny Electronics, writes as follows:

     "Julie,

I believe this is May Street. Dad and I tore out the archway perhaps in the early sixties. The door to his right is the hallway to the front door on the porch. But that hallway also served as his darkroom. Remember?"

     Bingo! John, that solves the mystery of my puzzlement about that archway.  May Street was familiar, but the archway I never saw when I was old enough to retain memory of it.  Have you read much Agatha Christie?  There's a short story in which the heroine, visiting a house for the first time, as she thinks, absently gets up and starts to walk into a wall.  At the end of the tale - once they've found the body buried in the garden - she figures out that she visited the house as a child, when French doors were in that wall.  This is a kind of converse of that story!

     That was heedless, tearing out that archway.  Not only was it the product of good American craftsmanship, it is a classic design element.  You can see those lines in the Parthenon.  Look, if you concentrate on the outline of the entire arch, you can reverse the image in your mind.  When you do that, you see the outlines of one half of each of two columns, one on the left and one on the right.  It was all done on purpose, to make pleasing masses and pleasing spaces between the masses.  There are galleries of these all around the porches of classical temples.

    You can enlarge this image quite easily if you are viewing it with Safari or Mail on a Mac.  Click on it.  Specifically, left-click once.

     And that ain't all.  Look at two the lines of sight - perspective lines -  that emanate from the top and the bottom, respectively, of the case clock.  Follow them as they converge to their focal - or vanishing - point.  They converge on John Zdrojewski.   

     He's stoically bearing up under the prick of Time's arrow.

JFZ continues:  "You have a great picture here. It makes me very nostalgic for the way America used to be, quite united in both peace and war."

     "By the way, Casey did not attend Orchard Lake. And during WWII he may have been in his early years at St. John Kanty in Erie. But, he did spend his freshman year at Kenzington High."

     Thanks, John.  I wonder what year Casey was at Kensington High.  My Mom, Clara Matynka Zdrojewska -  let's now dub her CAMZ for this blog - graduated Kensington in 1947.  Let's see, would that have been about ten years after Uncle Casey's freshman year there?  Wish we had more dates.  I have a CAMZ Ken yearbook and some prom stories.  So keep reading. 

     

Paul Zadner has written thus:

     "This is May Street. All the photos are taken in front of that window and he had a dark room for photos to the door on the right. I also remember the radiator but not the archway but those arches were very common, because I remember wall papering them."

     Thanks, Paul.  Indeed that front window appeared in the very first post on this blog.  (That's a link:  Go for it!)

     The door on the right I recall as the way to the front entrance of the house.  It led to the front porch on the one hand, and on the other hand it ought to have led to the front stairs to the upstairs apartment. Did the darkroom equipment obscure those stairs?  Not so good for fire escape!

     I do not recall the darkroom at all. Maybe I was too short, or maybe I was kept away from it for fear that proximity to lab equipment would shrivel my ovaries; who knows.

     Description of the darkroom - where did that enlarger come from that Marty had in Marilla? - would be wonderful.  Stump up, John, Paul, Marty!  Skip over to blog website, then click on the "Comments" link at the bottom of this post, and run wild.

Little Joodgie