Thanksgiving Leftovers

Though everyone is speaking on a different subject, one thing they all have in common is a passion for this work. Ian Nagaski is a music reach searcher whose label, Canary Records does mostly reissues of music and languages other than English. The collection to What's Strange Place the Music of the Ottoman American Diaspora introduced me to his work and became the basis for our season one episode entitled Diaspora with the Music. Ian has collected amazing stories of performers that

otherwise may have been forgotten. Here's a little bit of his story. I was a person who dug through records and went looking for old music ever since I was a kid. Uh sometime in my late teens, I started buying RPM discs um just thinking there would be something maybe interesting on them, because I'd heard reissue records of old country and blues and jazz and that kind of stuff while I was growing up, and when looked and you know, started digging into flea markets and things, going like, well,

why you know what? What is this stuff? Is there anything good on here that maybe I don't know about that I hadn't run into before. So I wound up intentionally buying anything that wasn't in English, And it turned out, yeah, there there were some good music I'd never heard of

before and that nobody I knew knew anything about. And I just started kind of gathering these things up real cheap, ten cents apiece, dollar apiece, and over the years I would play them for friends, and then eventually I wound up with a lot of them, and I kept asking questions of people, do you know what this is? Is there a story here? And I started gathering stories that related to the records that I already owned, and then I started finding out bigger stories about how different ones

of the records connected with one another. About two thousand seven, I put out a C D it was kind of a best of my record collection for a label called Dust Digital. That record is called Black Mirror Reflections and Global Musics, And for that record, I wound up including in the liner notes the back stories to every record that was on there, you know, as much information as

I could find out. In the process of learning those stories and writing those notes, I kind of developed some skills in research and have been sort of developing that ever since. So a little bit more than a decade now, I've been doing reissue records of old stuff and languages that I don't speak with. Some of the variety of stuff that you're finding, I guess in that early period, I remember the first three records I ever bought at

a flea market in Newcastle, Delaware. I got a Carter family record on Montgomery Ward Records called the Cowboys Lonesome Song to His Heard. I knew who the Carter family were, and I thought that was a good title, So for ten cents I was good on that one. I got a record that was in Japanese that turned out to have been recorded in Hawaii. UM one side was called the Song of Are Young, which was a song about

a a sad pilgrimage in Korea. Uh, it was structured as a twelve bar blues and it was in three or four time, so it's a twelve bar blues waltz in Japanese recorded in Hawaii. I thought, well, that's interesting. And then the other record was a record by um. They were then called the Bagelman's Sisters. They were later renamed the Berry Sisters, and they were basically the Yiddish language Andrews Sisters during the and uh, yeah, they were

pretty good. And the guy who sold me the records was this um, big, very very stoned guy who looked at these records and looked at me. I was nineteen years old or eighteen years old, and he just goes, Bagelman Sisters, are you going to listen to that? I think I will. And I bought a little turntable, a little like classroom turntable that same day for maybe like ten bucks at the flea market. We're great, and so yeah, I just started picking stuff up whatever it was. You know,

next thing, you know, some buddy's yard sale. They've got a box of old records in Russian and you know how much were the box? And they go five bucks and you go all right, let's figure out some Russian records. So one thing would lead to another. So what yard sales, estate sales, thrift stores? I feel I feel like you've told me you've literally pulled records like out of the trash before. Sure, lots of times, yeah, um, a lot of basements, a lot of addicts, um, you know, putting

ads in. You know, hey, if you have any older records, I'd like to come look at them. And you know, next thing, you know somebody's polka collection, but you know, old stuff, and go okay, well, you know how much for everything? When I started looking into one particular story, I kind of put out an ap B to everybody I knew who was a record head. By that time, I owned a record store myself, so I knew a

lot of record people. And one buddy of mine, Angela Sawyer in Boston, wrote to me and she goes, yeah, yeah, I've got a bunch of stuff in like Turkish. I guess it's been sitting, uh under my TV stand for about ten years. Spent maybe a dozen records. And I said, well, that sounds like maybe something I would want or need, And she sent me these records. They were all made by Armenians and Greeks, uh, and we're big sellers in the Boston area where there were a lot of folks

from that community. And I asked her, you know where did where did you get these? And she said that in college she had a roommate who would pick up any records she saw on the side of the whee, the side of the road that had been left out for the trash to take. Um, just knowing that Angela liked old records, and because she she didn't have any particular discrimination herself this college roommate, but was just a sweet person. Almost everything she brought her was, you know,

mouldy copies of Barber's drysand records. Um, you know, just the kind of stuff you would find in goodwill. And then every once in a while there'd be something that was unusual, and um, Angela would dutifully like tuck that away because she's like an obsessive record nerd. And so for ten years, these records in Turkish just sort of sat under her and her TV stand And I said, you know, how much do you want for him? And she's like, no, no, no, no, no no, no, it's

it's it's not like that these are for you. Obviously, I've been holding onto them for all these years, not knowing it was you they were going to. But that's who gets them. And so a lot of records have come to me like that. A lot of people have seeing that I was interested and cared when no one else was. And that's really how I wound up with a lot of them. When did um records that were

immigrants from the Ottoman Empire start factoring into that collection? Um, let me think the first two records that I ever bought in Turkish actually bought both of them in uh in Boston at a record store that happened to sell seventy eight and happened to sell seventy eight in languages other than English sometimes um. One was a record made about nineteen sixteen by a violinist named Naimed carra Cond. The other was a record made about six by a

nudist and singer named Achilles poulos Um. They were both fifty cents plus tax at a record store called Stereo Jack's. So those were things that I just had kind of lying around as well, this is neat and cool. I didn't know what they were. I didn't know what they meant. And years later, when I stumbled across a box, a couple of boxes of records in Greek, I noticed that the recording dates and record label catalog numbers were roughly

about the same. You know, they must have been made about the same time, the same place, the same studios. I figured out New York City, and I go like, wait, did these people know each other? Was this part of a scene? Was there a community here that maybe was happening that I haven't heard about? And started asking around and looking for stuff that had been written and couldn't find much of anything. But with enough asking around and enough reading, I figured out that yeah, that's exactly what

had happened there. There was, in fact a community of immigrants from the Near East, and these records were made by people who, if they didn't know each other directly, certainly new people in common and lived in the same world and had very similar experiences being immigrants the United States at the same time. H. David Weinstein is a media historian and author who serves as a Senior program

director for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Without his book The Forgotten Network, Dumont and the Birth of American Television and his years of dogged research tracking down old kinescopes of long lost broadcasts. Our Dumont episode would have never been possible. The Dumont television network was once a household name, but in six decades off the air, it has fallen into deep obscurity. I asked David what it was about this dusty corner of history that's so captivated him?

Say hello or something, so we get a little Mike check for you. Hi. Ex, Dumont is the greatest network ever. Did all kinds of amazing, amazing things. It invented sound, it invented video, it invented audience, did everything. It's ironic that the Dumont name is like the punchline of jokes about antiquity, right, being that they invented so many features that are just like, oh, they were the first ones

to do that. Everybody does that now. Yeah. Certainly with network broadcasting after the war, UH, Dumont and NBC were the first ones to even think of a television network, the idea of broadcasting the same program in multiple cities, and Dumont did it in New York and Washington and was very much um focused on building that national network. Uh. They were among the first to do any kind of television programming. They are especially creative during World War Two

and preparing for the post war explosion in commercial television. UH. They were also innovative in their daytime schedule. They're innovative in some of their business models. For example, rather than a single sponsor or paying for and controlling the whole program, which was the radio model that went into television, Dumont chopped up its program into multiple sponsors, each of which would have a short segment, which is really the forerunner of television advertising as we knew it for much of

the network era. UH. Dumont also had tons of just creative programs, many of which we've talked about. Shows like The Playing Kloseman, Cavalcades, Stars, even Captain Video I think really belongs in that category. So I mean this may sound weird. I wrote the book between and two thousand four. I was I was younger then, and I was really into punk rock and indie rock and UM. I also Dumont as a punk rock television network, even though I didn't write this. A television itself was very punk rock.

And what I mean by that it was Dumont was young, creative, They were an underdog. They're an outsider in the industry, underfunded budget, so they were really creative. It was almost amateurish at times, but in that amateurism you found a

lot of really cool, interesting stuff. There was a sort of independence among the people who worked there, and there was certainly a community from what I've learned in talking to people at the network, but there was also a sense set in watching the shows you were almost part of this sort of weird little community of people who

were into the same things that you were. Whether it was Captain Video and then there was some merchandise related to that, or whether it was some of the other programs that even now sort of have a cult following among TV collectors, among you know, people into all time television. It had this sort of many of the Dumont programs had this sort of weird niche following that continues to this day. Done it's not rolling night tonight, what do

you dressed up? Well? Wow, all my friends are here, I see Andy, Mary cal were from my lame like the Garden, Oh my friends ahead and no Minimum again a good time. I think it really did come out of not just punk but just in general sort of liking to mind the history of pop culture for things that have been forgotten and don't deserve to be whether old music, old movies. I've never been the kind of person who just sort of flips on the commercial radio

station and that's it. I like to figure out where things came from, the origins and sort of cool stuff that has maybe been overlooked, and Dumont certainly fit that bill. And as I learned more, I sort of became seduced by some of the programs. In some cases, it is because so much of it was live, an ephemeral and even the hunt to find them and and find seeing things that I felt people hadn't seen in years in the live programs that was worth seeing. It was really cool,

that was really inventive. That helps understand how television became so popular. Um when I was doing the research, there was still a sense of television had a golden age, and they were sort of dramas that were on the other networks and stuff like Marty, stuff that had you know, survived that was pretty easy to find, or stuff like Milton Burrower and Sullivan. And I wanted to take a little bit deeper and see what else was going on and I get excited when I find cool, different stuff

that helps me connect the past in the present. Sarah Wasserman is a professor of English and Culture material Studies at the University of Delaware. She has a book coming out in called The Death of Things that looks at ephemera in twentieth century American fiction. I asked her how

she ended up as the FEMA teacher. Part of it is just that you start doing one thing and it has all kinds of offshoots and rabbit holes, and if you're curious and maybe a little nutty like I am, you tend to tend to follow them instead of staying

on one focus. But it really started, you know, I did a PhD in literature in an English department, and I was reading all of these novels, all these American novels, primarily, and I was thinking a lot about why there was so much stuff in these novels, and then in particular, why there's so much disappearing stuff, you know, why our novelists writing about pop up buildings and paper that disappears and stand collections that go missing and things like that.

So it started from being someone who liked to read and and studying literature in a scholarly way. But I wanted to understand why there were these objects and in books, in fiction, and um that sort of led me to doing this material culture stuff. I'm not someone who goes primarily to a museum and looks at, you know, American pewter or a line of teapots. I'm thinking about why

authors are writing about those objects. But in trying to do that, obviously I've I've learned to kind of go to the archives, go to collections, look at things that authors might be writing about, and and try to make sense of it. That way working is hardly ever glamorous. When I was in grad school, I did this dissertation writing boot camp over a break where they like lock

you in a room and you have to write. And the way they started as we all sat around a table and everyone had to go around and say what they were working on. And this is at Princeton, brilliant people, and everyone's going around and saying what they work on, this project on the Revolutionary War whatever. And the woman next to me said, I'm writing. I'll see if I

can remember. I'm writing a dissertation. It's a comparative literature dissertation that looks at Chinese, French and German literature and it's about the concept of everything. So when did writers start thinking about the totality of the world. And I had to go after her and just said, yeah, I'm Sarah. I'm writing a dissertation about trash um. So you know, it's important to be to be humble. So I think that these objects do teach us a lot and and

make a lot of meaning. But I think part of what you're saying in your pitch is that they can be overlooked and they can be seen as as minor, and so they don't enter the history books as much. We need these other formats to explore them. Sarah's interview forms the basis of our episode. If what one of the topics we mentioned is the nine New York World's Fair and the Souvenir Craze that a company that ephemeral event, which gave me the opportunity to inquire about Sarah's own

color action. After you came out of Futurama, which was General Motors Vision and sort of model city of the future, you would get a little button that says I have seen the future. That'd be a great button have Do you have one? I don't have one. I don't have one. I have a bunch of ahema. You know, when you start to work on a phemera, people come and give you a phemera as presidents. So I do have quite a lot from the Nine Worlds for but I don't

have one of those pins. They are actually pretty desirable collectors items because not not many of them are left, right, Please give me just a little audio tour of like some of them that you have. Gosh, so I have a lot of I don't know how to describe these. They're not really a genre that's around anymore. So from the fair, I have a lot of souvenir booklets. So they're really interesting because I mean it's fair. So they're mostly drawn, as you know, they're not photographic records, and

they take all different forms. So they're like fans with the photo of the Paris here and the trial on where the two iconic buildings, and they get sort of put on everything. Um. And there's a lot of you know, little drawn books that tell you about the different exhibits and their fans. I think I have a kazoo um a sewing kit from the fair that someone gave me, and then going forward to some of the other ephemera that I that I talked about that I've managed to

sort of get from my own nerdy collection. I have a bunch of stamps. So um, I think I have all the stamps that Philip Roth writes about in his novel The Plot against America. Um, how many stamps is that? Fifteen? They're so, I want to say, and they're They're pretty unusual,

most of them. So, for reasons that I won't necessarily go into the main character also called Philip Um collect stamps and he he's interested and obviously the ones that are more valuable, which tend to be like things with erata. So you know, the plane in the middle is printed upside down because when they put the stamps through the through the printing machine the second time they had a positioned the wrong way. Things like that. So I have

some stamps. Um. I have an interesting I write about Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle, which some of your listeners will know not as a novel but as a TV show. And in the novel there's this thing UM called cards of War from during the Second World War, which are They're they're like playing cards, I guess, and on one side they depict a really gruesome illustrated scene from a war and on the reverse side there you know, there's details about what this battle

was or what this military maneuver was. Um. So they really range from you know, the lovely little kazoo to the grim war cards. Where you did you collect ephemera before you became Uh, that's a good question, So my answer would be no. But upon thinking about it, I'm not a collector. I'm a pretty minimalist person. Um. I don't need to Marie condo my house because I've already

tidied as I go. We could talk about my reconduct too, But I think about my childhood and and I think many adults who don't collect in their adult life were collectors as children, and I certainly was. I had a sticker album. I had things that were maybe less ephemeral, like a collection of troll dolls, um, a collection of Bonnie Bell lips mackers. I like things that you could organize by color. Um. So now I don't. I don't collect things like that. I do, though, have a small

collection of strange fortunes from fortune Cookies. So fortunes with typos or very odd phrasing in them. Um. But other than that, no, I was not. I was not into ephemera before I started this research. Do you have a favorite strange fortune? Oh? My favorite one is probably this one, which just says you are always on our minds. Wow, I like I like that. It's yeah, it's collective. Someone's you know, multiple people who made that cookie are thinking of me. I don't know. Maybe would have rather not

gotten that message. One more thing. When we recorded the interview earlier this year, it seemed like everyone was cleaning their homes because of a new show on Netflix. I'm really interested in the fact that Marie Condo is this juggernaut right now. And it's not like in the early aughts we had Hoarders, the TV show Hoarders, right, and it was super pathological. It was like, look at this person and all the things they haven't thrown away and the cat that died and they didn't even notice because

they have too much stuff. And Marie Condo was not that right. Marie Condo is the show that's done with love and care, um, and it's a really non pathologizing show about people letting go of their stuff. So I wonder, as I'm finishing this book, and it's something I've been working on for a long time, too long, really, um, if there is a shift, if the tide is turning, and it might be linked to some of the things that you mentioned earlier about digital technology and people getting

more used to living among less stuff. But I just think it's a really the time is ripe for for this question, for the show, for for these considerations of disappearing objects, And I think that the Marie Condo is a sort of symptom of that. Elizabeth Cobbs is a historian with more qualifications than I could hope to list.

Stopping through Atlanta on tour for her newest book, The Tubman Command, she joined me in studio to talk about her work The Hello Worlds America's First Women's Soldiers, which tells the stories of brave souls who enlisted as telephone operators for the U. S. Army Signal Corps during World War One. Our conversation became the episode Switchboard. We actually had finished the interview when we're standing outside the booth.

When we got to talking about ephemera specifically, Elizabeth asked if we could jump back into recording, and that's where the following piece of tape comes from. The way she talks about a historian's job of reaching into the past is for me what this whole endeavor is all about. One of the things we do as historians is we look at ephemera, which we consider to be the tangible material objects that surround documents. So one of the ephemera that the Hello Girls had, which to me, was so

indicative of their sense of humor. I was at Mark Howe's home and looking at the things he had collected of the Hello Girls, and I found He said, look at these tiny binoculars. Now, these tiny binoculars look like the size of a penny, like like a little tiny charm embracelet, kind of charm that you might wear in a bracelet. So I said, oh, those are cute. Aren't those cute? And I put them back down. He said, no, no, really,

look at them, look through them. So I lived at these tiny souvenir binoculars that one of the Hello Girls had brought back and showed her friends, and I could see this little glimmer of light and I said, oh, yes, why could see light comes through them? He said, no, I really look through them. So I looked through them, and on one side of the binoculars there's a naked lady holding up a mirror and looking saucily at the

at the viewer. And the other side of the binocular there's two naked ladies who are standing in a mirror. And there was its French pornography. And so these Hello girls had this just wild sense of humor, you know that that they brought back all kinds of souvenirs, letter openers and you know, books and and such things, and even yes, even a little French pornography. For the heck of it. They were I'm telling you, the optics on

this thing were amazing. And that's now, by the way, all at the World War One Museum in Kansas City. All of these things that that are indicative of the women's experience, you know, from their uniforms, to their trench helmets, to their gas masks, to their mess kits, to their crazy little French pornography, which they found apparently very musing, at least one of them did. When you when you went out and found these diaries, specifically, what I'm thinking,

because there's lots of diary entries. I mean, what do you get to see the actual Well, yeah, this is the interesting thing because since there was no effort really to collect these women's experience, I had to go all over the place. I had read that there was this attorney, so I tracked him down in Seattle and flew to Seattle one day, and he had some boxes and we went through them, and in one of his boxes I found a diary. And on the diary it had a

phone number. So I first of all read this amazing diary that no one had ever seen before, and and then I called the phone number that was on it, and that went to somewhere in Saucelito, which is in California, in the Bay Area, and and that was a man who said, oh, yes, well I my aunt. My aunt was a Hello girl, and I have her records. So I went and looked at that group of records, and in that there was a memoir. In fact, that was

where I found Merle Eagan's memoir. And and then from all of that, and then I began to think, I've got to get Grace Banker. I've got to get the woman who led the first contingent was sort of my holy Grail and I have a friend who's absolute crackerjack investigator, and I said, can you find me a descent of Grace Banker? And she called me the next day and she says, I think they're in a nursing home in

New Hampshire. So that I'm on the trail of something in New Hampshire and I get on the phone and call this man, old man who calls me back and says, well, yes, my my mother in law was Grace Banker and she passed away a long time ago. And I said, do you have anything of hers? And he said, well, well, we have a diary. Now. I had seen references to a ten page diary excerpt that Grace Banker had once published, and I thought it might be the whole thing. So

I said, how many pages is it? And he said, well, it's a it's about ninety pages. And so then I knew I had a book. I knew I had a book because I had Grace Banker's diary, the diary of Bertha Hunt, who was a signal cooperator from Berkeley, California, and Merle Eagan's memoirs, and that combined with the Army personnel records in St. Louis and the army records in the United States Archives in Washington, d C. And then the newspaper records. You know, I was on the trail

of a real book. When you've got that diary and you're like, you're really literally like holding it right, and you're maybe the only person that's ever edit or at least read it in what seventy years or something. We're reading maybe a hundred years. I mean people, you know, Grace Banker came back and she put it in her trunk.

And I was talking with her granddaughter when I was first telling the family about my interest in their you know, their their mother or grandmother, and um, she said to me, Caroline Timby, she said, well, I have my grandmother's trunk, but I've never looked in it. So I said, oh, my gosh, you have FaceTime. I have an iPhone? Do you have an iPhone? So we're we're bringing each other's faces up where we're talking each other and looking at each other, and I say, well, let's can I see

the trunk too. So she walks me on my iPhone into her grandmother's store in the family storage and there's a green trunk, this green leather army trunk that stamped U S Signal Corps Grace Banker. And she lifts the lid and there's grandma's stack of letters, and there's grandma's trench helmet, and there's grandma's gas masks and mess kit and and uniform. And this trunk has not been opened and we don't know how many decades, and suddenly it's just all there. It's like this you know, magic trunk.

It's like a treasure chest as and and so the family is now donated most of it to the World War One Museum in Kansas City, but I think there are pieces of it they just you know, they just can't unclench their fists and let go off because it is you know, it says treasured memento. But there's something like holding that handwritten note that who knew, who knew of whould ever be read again? Maybe you know you're seeing it for the first time in a hundred years.

It's like a do you feel like a psychic link back? I do? I you know, it's okay, here's a weird thing. The historian to me, it's like the dead or present with us, you know they are We'll be dead too soon enough, and we'll leave our own ephemera. So I always feel like writing history is like reaching through this beaded curtain and and and holding someone's hand who's on the other side, you know, trying to bring them closer

so we can see them. Hope that doesn't sound too ghoulish, but to me, it just feels very intimate and personal. With every book I've written, you know, it's it's always I'm there to to meet them. I mean, there to meet Harriet Tubman, there to meet Alexander Hamilton. I've written a couple of novels on those and some other people as well, and and I always just you know, that's I feel my mission, and the mission of historian is get the dead to stand up and walk, you know,

tell the story. My sincerest gratitude to Elizabeth Cobbs, Sarah Wasserman, David Weinstein, Ian Nagaski, and all our other amazing guests this season for lending their credibility to our fledgling podcast. Finally, we wanted to say thanks to you for, instead of the infinite amount of other things you could be doing, choosing to listen without you. There's no show if you feel so inclined, drop us a line, let us a little review, hit us up on social media. We'd love

to hear from you. Learn more about everything you heard here at ephemeral dot Show. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.