Roberta McKern
When rain and fog settle in they remind us of winter’s tedium and someone asks, “How’s it going?” we may reply, “Same old, same old.” Then it is time to look forward to a visit to the East Linn Museum, even though it will be closed until February but we have time to whet our expectations. If anything, a visit to the Museum will remind us we do not really live in the “same old, same old.” Time is against it.
By definition the Museum tells of the past, one perhaps as disjointed as human memory. After all, artifacts and information come to the Museum piecemeal. However, many articles on view stimulate our memories and some displays illustrate a history of change.
For example, in the front annex collections of telephones and cameras are together. Hand cranked battery operated telephones and others hang on the wall and stand on a cabinet filled with cameras. Both the telephones are lined up from earlier to later with cut off dates around the 1970’s when the Museum was founded, although some more recent styles have slipped in, like a yellow touch tone phone. The telephones go from the earlier ones hanging on the wall, hand cranked with bells, a dangling receiver and a wooden cabinet in which batteries were concealed, through tall candlestick ones to dial and the Princess touch tone. The earliest ones were party lines and relied on operators to place calls with a number of rings identifying who was being called. Those early ones came from the days of “Hello, Central. Give me Dr. Jazz” and “rubbering” as people listened in on the party line. Numbers were few digits. Five might place a call to the local store. On the wall close by hangs a framed stock certificate for the first telephone service in the immediate vicinity linking Sweet Home, Foster and Cascadia. Jake Menear paid $50.00 for it and the company was financed at $5,000.00. Jake Menear bought his stock in 1907.
The cameras include the box style, ones using glass plates and on to those with flash attachments. The telephones, however, prove more attractive to visitors snapping photos with their smart phones.
Although the Museum lacks a running stream and flat rocks on which to wash the laundry, as for telephones and cameras and not far from them, there is a technological display for laundry day. It starts with a zinc tub and a wash board and runs through a variety of hand cranked wooden units, sometimes with wringers, to early electric washers. An unusual one features a copper coated tub with an amazing three unit agitator which, despite its seemingly high tech appearance, is still cranked. As children, some of us who are older remember when we were urged to avoid wringers on electric washing machines lest we get our fingers caught between the rollers with the arm being pulled in up to the elbow. There was always a kid’s name handy to remind us of the danger and discourage us from being future bad examples.
Wash day may have seemed like the same old same old to the person doing the chore, but from the days of wash table and wash boards to those of electrified washers spanning the first half of the 20th century change definitely took place.
As we amble around the Museum we can easily find contrasting signs of flying time’s passage too. A case in the main room holds two pattern books for example. One depicts the puffed sleeved, wasp waisted, look of the late 1890’s. The other goes to the era of “Oh, you kid” and the Charleston, the 1920’s where the former centered on emphasizing the bosom and hips with occasional flings at “Lo, and behold” necklines. The latter featured a flat chested, narrow hipped boyish or waif look. Hair went from long for the pompadour to bobbed. What had happened? Well, horse and buggy days were quickly fading in favor of trucks and automobiles and “The Great War” (later called World War I when out-done by World War II) intervened. War pushes technology forward with its killing, maiming and disruption. First, there is the need to violently suppress the enemy, especially if his violence started the whole thing. The need to clean up follows and there is change. Sometimes a step forward and sometimes a step back.
In the Museum’s military room we can move from a World War I bugle and a Yankee tin hat to late volunteer Bill Bell’s photo of the Enola Gay, a B-29 airplane. It paused in its journey on a South Pacific island where the soldiers with the camera made our snap shot. The Enola Gay, of course, was famously on it way to Hiroshima, Japan, where the atomic bomb accelerated the end of World War II. It was one of the first times someone tried to blow up the world and no one knew for certain what would happen but how the world would go on was considerably altered. A new shade of fear expanded.
The”same old, same old” didn’t quite apply, but as we know, the phrase is generally used as a pleasantry in the range of “fair to middling.” As a reply it is less positive than “fine” when asked “How are you?” because we realize a thirty minute health report is not wanted.
Never the less, “the same old, same old” ways seem to apply to the Museum’s often unchanging displays and their frozen histories, but this is also an illusion. When the Museum was founded the plan was to focus on the pioneer history through donations from local descendants but later years more recent local histories and artifacts have crept in and, for instance, we can compare a 1930’s to 1940’s Zenith radio with a 1950’s television or an early 1st reader including repetitions of the words from one of Aesop’s fables with a Little Book tale of Dick Tracey who wears a wrist watch featuring a radio connecting him with headquarters. Now such radios connect parents with their children.
A Museum visit also shows us how our area has gone through different economic phases. Farming was the first one followed by stock raising and running cattle and horses on the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Toll road over the Santiam Pass to the bunch grass of the Deschutes River. Quartzville, with its gold mining was another phase while the timber industry grew predominant. Cattle drives no longer take place on Highway 20 which succeeded the toll road and gold searching around Quartzville is sporadic, but farming and logging continue, the latter to a lesser degree from the time Sweet Home was called “Timber Town” in the mid 1900’s.
Each of these phases is represented at the Museum allowing us to see in particular how logging has been changing. We go from spring boards and crosscut saws ten feet long called “misery whips” and yokes used on oxen dragging logs from the woods to gasoline powered chain saws. The power saws hang above a mortuary table near a red stain, (actually spilled paint). When it is to be imagined to be blood, visitors can pause, use a smart phone and photograph each other lying on the stain.
So, if we want to play at refuting the phrase “Same old, same old” the East Linn Museum is a place to visit armed with knowledge of the present to compare with the past. Therefore, a trip to the East Linn Museum has the ability to stimulate the mind and to relieve us from boredom and winter’s tediums, starting when the Museum reopens in February 2024 at 11:30 am until 4:00 pm on the first Thursday of the month.
In the meanwhile, Auld Lang Syne time has come. Happy New Year.