Only the Olds will remember the chart above the blackboard in every fourth-grade classroom across the nation. It was the alphabet, both capitals and lower-case letters, in cursive.
It was bad enough having to learn how to print; now that we were big kids, we had to learn to write. Our efforts were meant to look just the letters on the chart, but most of us couldn’t manage it.
Sometimes, to spur us on to plu-perfect penmanship, an Old would give us a Woolworth’s pen and pencil set for our birthday or some other milestone event.
About the time I was learning cursive, there was a period when I wanted to become an archeologist like Howard Carter. He discovered King Tut’s tomb after years of digging through parts of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
It looked exciting, challenging and fun. So read an article in the Reader’s Digest about some place in eastern Canada where a vast buried treasure was waiting to be found. Apparently I wasn’t the only one interested, because the Lagina Brothers got there first.
That same excitement returned 20 years ago when Pat and I ran into the niece of Hiram Bingham, the fellow who discovered Machu Pichu in Peru and parlayed that into a tenured position at Yale, then election to the U.S. Senate. A friend loaned us a 1911 National Geographic magazine where he wrote about his adventures.
There are still television programs about archeologists and the work they do around the world. What they show is far from the reality of the work. A lot of it is boring and done in miserable places renowned for scorpions, deadly snakes and malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
My sister’s frequent news-laden emails and telephone calls have made that side of archeology very clear.
A half-century ago my hometown historical society bought the old Stoppel homestead. It came with a stone barn, stone house in poor repair, manmade caves used for storing crops plus farm fields. Attached to the home was a stone smoke house and one of the few stone outhouses in the upper Midwest. No one was going to tip that one over.
When the organization finally started restoration, they began with the outhouse. With small shovels, trowels, whiskbrooms and dustpans they worked their way to the bedrock quite a few feet down.
It seems that outhouses are a known repository for all sorts of things that might help historians understand the people who lived there. The project’s archeologist and his interns hoped to make discoveries, research them and add them to a museum display. They would have the goods to help interpret life on the farm for a century and a quarter, starting in the 1850s.
Archeology might seem like fascinating, even glamorous work. In very practical terms, however, the crew was slowly digging through 125 years of, to be polite, “fertilizer.” By then, it was mostly dry and certainly well composted, but still …
The interns went to school, perhaps graduate school and will be paying off their student loans from low-paying jobs for decades to come. All that to dig through … fertilizer.
Apparently they did have exciting moments, such as the day they found several old glass beer bottles from the Schuster Brewery in town. Another day their work rewarded them with a few pieces of broken stoneware from the Red Wing pottery factory. A belt buckle, a few buttons and coins rounded out their excitement. Oh, and some clay pipe bits and pieces. But no gold, silver or other valuable commodities.
Their finds were hardly the makings for so much as the ubiquitous fifth-grade first-day-back-to-school theme on “How I Spent my Summer.” In cursive, of course.
Only the rarest of archeologists are able to go off to faraway places with strange-sounding names to discover museum-quality stuff that might help rewrite history. Most university students with a degree in the subject scramble to get a job with a firm of civil engineers or construction crews to do site work before building starts.
Before erecting a new building, bridge or much of anything else, care has to be taken to make sure important icons of the past are not lost forever.
That is what happened with Richard III of England. After he was killed in battle in 1485, his body was unceremoniously dumped into an unmarked grave and, a couple centuries later, paved over to make a parking lot. A couple of years ago they found him again and, with great ceremony, buried in him a more fitting spot.
Today, careful archeological work is required to make sure that no sacred artifacts, especially remains of the indigenous people, are disturbed or mistreated. Anything found in their digs adds one more piece of information about those who came before us. That matters for all of us. So is treating the relic with respect.
As the movies’ Indiana Jones pointed out to his students, most archeological work happens in libraries and research centers, not out in the field. That is where we come in, especially if you are one of the Olds who had to learn cursive writing back in school and can still read it.
Your local historical society, museum, maybe the library needs you. Ox-Bow School of the Arts needs you to go through boxes of documents, memoirs and diaries dating back to 1910, most of them hand-written.
Or go big! Uncle Sam’s National Archives needs you. Strewn throughout their libraries and warehouses are long lines of shelves laden with countless boxes of documents collected over the centuries. Some of it is sitting in the same place they put it years ago.
Most of the papers are handwritten in cursive. If you can read them, the National Archives needs you. The good news is much of this work can be done online.
To get started, go to www.archives.gov, open the website’s Citizen Archivist Dashboard and explore it until you arrive at the National Archives Catalogue. After that, pick an area of interest.
For example, would you like to work your way through some of the Revolutionary War Pension File Transcripts? That might seem about as exciting as slowly digging through my ancestors’ stone outhouse until you realize some of the soldiers who earned those pensions used their money to move west to buy land to start their farms. In short, you are working on the history of the Westward Movement of our country.
That is just one of many areas where you could put your cursive skills to good use. And while you are at it, have a smug smile that we Olds are doing something most youngsters can’t.
Not only can we read and write in cursive, we know how to use a rotary phone or change television channels without relying on a remote!
