Stockbridge - What to Drink - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Not everything a storyteller does is open to the public.  Aside from work in schools, private events occur.  So far much of my "High Times in the Dry Times" has been in preview performances.  The Brandon Township Public Library preview -- my first for this program -- was indeed open to the public.  What they posted on Facebook can be found at my most recent article about Prohibition.

Next week I head up north for the program I said would be in early October.  It recognizes volunteers (as does another later in the month), so it's not open to the public.  A booking of the program that is public on January 15 at Clarkston Independence District Library came up with a great idea and resource.  Why not serve some of the non-alcoholic drinks that replaced the forbidden drinks offered back then?

The recipes are found in a book called What to Drink: Non-Alcoholic Drinks and Cocktails Served During Prohibition by Bertha E.L. Stockbridge, which is a reprint of a 1920 book, What to Drink; The Blue Book of Beverages; Recipes and Directions for Making and Serving Non-Alcoholic Drinks for All Occasions.  Stockbridge also wrote a 1922 cookbook with a similarly long title, but no other information about her is easily found.

Usually my Keeping the Public in Public Domain segments are stories, but since this week and next promise to be hectic, I want to give an overview of her book this week and some recipes next week.  If there are specific recipes or a category that particularly interests you, please be sure to let me know as I need to choose for next week very soon, but could always do another later.   Emailing me at Lois-sez@Lois-sez.com is always possible or Facebook Friends may message me at https://www.facebook.com/lois.sez .

That second page where she refers to presentation is fun in the way it gives a look back at those times.

I also found it interesting that even back then she found "It is probably as economical to purchase the sweet cider as to use the time and the necessary apples as to make the cider."  With the many cider orchards right now, isn't that good to know?  For my readers in southeast Michigan, I recommend https://www.oaklandcountymoms.com/best-metro-detroit-cider-mills-25199/.  That link also has links to  hayrides and farmers markets.  When the author, Lisa LaGrou, was asked to rank the many cider mills, she said it depended on what you were seeking and then went on to give specific awards for specific attributes.

It's still hot enough for lemonade and Stockbridge gives a wide variety of flavored lemonades, but remember she warned that she might say more about presentation "imperatives"?   The chapter on "Fruitades" opens with

Once upon a time I had a box of lemons minus their zest (it's used to make soft drinks) so we had to work FAST!  I still remember how old-fashioned squeezing can get old (and painful in cuts!) quickly.  Let's hear it for the makers of RealLemon!!!

Of course in a program about High Times in Dry Times, mixed drinks were a HUGE part of why the Roaring 20s ROARED.  Prior to the 1920s cocktails were not the usual way to drink alcohol.

Talking back to Stockbridge, I hope the attractive looks of all of this is appetizing for you.  Actual recipes next week are not prohibited, thanks to Keeping the Public in Public Domain.
**************************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Crows & Scarecrows - 2 stories - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

This Saturday I'm "wine wenching" at the Michigan Renfest for two local theatre groups, so today's post is a bit early.  The festival has themed weekends to keep the public returning.  This weekend they are having a scarecrow competition.  I will definitely visit it for ideas.  You may remember a month ago I wrote and showed pictures of our excavation for a new septic system.  We are now trying to return it to being a lawn.  That means preparing the soil surface -- this area is loaded with rocks from the glaciers that rolled over it aeons ago -- then seeding and adding chopped straw bedding.

The call of a crow to others reminds me that a flock of them is called a Murder of Crows.  Yeah, that definitely makes sense.  Then there's the blue jay calling me a thief as I lay down that straw to hold in the moisture and maybe keep the birds away.

Right now I've got some bits of unseeded patches over the septic tank and on the hillside to return and do.  Otherwise it's all set except for our meadow down by the barn.

All of this made me search for stories about crows -- there's a LOT! and I even found one about a scarecrow.  First come crows and then come scarecrows, so that's the order I'll show the stories, then give a way to find even more stories online about crows.

Marieke Tacken on Unsplash

Back in 1919 the designation of the Arctic people was just lumped under the name of Eskimo.  This story is from Frances Jenkins Olcott's nature anthology, The Wonder Garden.  Today we would say more about the specific nation within either Alaska or Nunavut.

Natalia Y on Unsplash

Right after posting that I went out to hang up my laundry and heard from up the road so many crows cawing that it sounded like dogs barking.  Sure hope they don't feast on my seed.  That story was both an interesting pourquois tale (explaining how or why something became the way it is) and a cautionary tale.  I doubt it will change the behavior of children, but have you ever noticed how whenever someone is told to do or not do something in a story, it's guaranteed to have the opposite effect?

Viktor Dukov on Unsplash

This next story is by Angela M. Keyes in her book,Stories and Story-telling, also from 1911.  I found her book is online, but nothing about her online except the book says she was Head of the Department of English, Brooklyn Training School for Teachers and almost a quarter of the book is devoted to how to use stories with children.  I love her preface:

those "very short stories" often are only a paragraph long.  They come after the section on storytelling and some 32 stories.  While she may have omitted "favorites easily available in other collections", several now fit that availability.

Reading the story, I can see its roots in oral telling.  The repetition works better there than in print, but it's needed.  The magical elements she puts in the story seem right in today's tales where Harry Potter might summon Magic Darkness and Moving Wind, to say nothing of the scarecrow himself.

HLS 44 on Unsplash

I try to tell myself the birds won't eat all my grass seed, but then I think about how a bird has to eat his weight in food daily.  Guess I can handle one crow, but they never stay just one!

Similarly there are lots of stories about crows.  One easy way to find several online comes from the now archived Story-Lovers website which housed the results of storytellers talking on the email list, Storytell.  Storytell is now hosted by the National Storytelling Network and that link would let you subscribe.  I always list Story-Lovers in the fine print ending a Public Domain article, but this link takes you right to the Crow section of books, online stories, and some of the condensed Storytell discussion.  You will notice many stories say they are from India and the Panchatantra is divided into five books with the third being Crows and Owls as part of their war with each other.  Unfortunately there is a "frame" with one story leading into the next (I think this is handled better in the Arabian Nights), plus the Arthur W. Ryder translation from the Sanskrit is loaded with poetry.  I'd need to work like crazy to make it tellable for me, but I do love that the story about this nearly 3,000 year-old collection of fables supposedly was told to instruct a king's three sons who were "supreme blockheads."  

Marija Zaric on Unsplash

Some of the links on the old Story-Lovers page take time to respond and a few no longer can be found.  In searching the http://www.4to40.com site I didn't find on their folklore page an Indian tale of "A Matter of Crows", but instead found Ruskin Bond's story of "A Crow in the House" about a pet (or pest according to one view) crow who ruled a house and was named appropriately "Caesar."  I enjoyed the story and remembered traveling in a carpool with a woman who told about the pet crow she had while growing up.  It rode the handlebars of her bike and, like Caesar, talked.

I don't plan to make a pet out of any crows landing here, but I may decide to make a scarecrow.  It's an old art object, as our local renaissance festival will show.

Mel Poole on Unsplash

 *************************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Macmillan - Rainbow and the Autumn Leaves - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

The first trees turning to spectacular autumn colors had just begun here in Michigan, when summer temperatures decided to torture students stuck in school.  Those two trees on the road near my house are always earlier than all others, but I'm seeing the purple and golden wildflowers hiking with my dog, so I think it's time for this story even as it comes from further north in Canada where the season may come even a bit later. 

illustration from Canadian Fairy Tales by Marcia Lane Foster

 

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Today's story comes from Cyrus Macmillan's Canadian Fairy Tales, but that 1922 title is misleading as it's from his collection of what would now be called First Nations tales.  Some of those First Nations include the same people in Michigan's Anishinaabe, but while Professor Macmillan did a thorough job of traveling and recording tales from the Micmac in the east and then proceeded over the prairies to the pacific coast, unfortunately he didn't identify the nations telling the stories.   The animals in this story are woodland animals and could easily fit in our own mitten-shaped state where today's borders don't match the traditional movement of our North American native people.

Linking animals with the start of  autumn is not unique to Canada's First Nations tales and even the blood of bear is attributed to the color change in the tale "Why the oaks and sumachs redden" in Katherine B. Judson's Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes told by the Meskwaki (named the Fox in the book).  The story is very bloody and is not the version I would tell, but that link lets you choose as it, too, is in the Public Domain. 
*******************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

'Tis the Season. . . no, not Christmas yet!

Last week, the Labor Day weekend, I said "Here in Michigan public schools, by law are not to start until after Labor Day, although a district can request a waiver.  That waiver has been increasingly requested.  The intent was to help our state's recreation and travel industry."

Michiganders have now returned to school, BUT that recreation and travel industry hasn't closed up for the year.  Not at all. Go to the state's official travel and tourism site, Pure Michigan, to see what I mean.  The current theme is "Fall in Real Time" complete with the usual categories to get you doing something.  Somehow nothing seems to catch everything.  You may want something specifically  local like the events section of the Oakland County Moms site which has been around since 2005.  Right now for autumn it also lists hayrides, cider mills, farmers markets, and is already looking ahead to Halloween.  Similarly the online version of the MetroParent newspaper found in libraries has a weekend event section for the metro Detroit and Southeast Michigan area separate from its calendar.  They even already have an article on  Best Fall Michigan Color Tour Spots . . .(listing both area parks and free drives).  It all can be a bit overwhelming although online searches should be able to link you up with something to do.  Newspapers, both the major dailies and the local versions, also list events and activities.

Thompson School on Fisk Farm grounds

For organizations wanting to inform people it's also a bit overwhelming.  A perfect example is this weekend I'll be part of the Fisk Farm Festival.  It's held annually by the White Lake Historical Society every year on the weekend after Labor Day.  Their very site is part of  Historical Society of Michigan's site.  H.S.M. has its own calendar, but the Fisk Farm Festival wasn't on it.  In fact the MetroParent event section is the only one where I found it. 

Then I remembered the local newspapers.  For White Lake think "Spinal Column"!  Yes, it's an unusual name for a newspaper, but their Popular Categories lists 16 events including the festival.  It's listing for the festival shows a hodgepodge of activities, crafts and craft booths, various entertainment, food, raffles, rummage sale (including a library book sale), pie eating contest, arts and crafts sale, living historians, pet adoptions, building tours -- in other words it's no wonder the Historical Society has a hard time figuring how to spread the word. 

While North Oakland County Storytellers started there, they no longer hold meetings, but will continue telling stories -- storytellers are like "herding cats", they don't always stay organized.  Carolyn Graves and I each will have sessions at the festival, possibly in the Thompson School, also long-time White Lake Historical Society member and promoter, Ron Hinman plans to teach how ropes were made on the farm.  The three of us keep history and storytelling living. 

Maybe you want to find even more.  Thompson School is called a One-Room School, but there's now a meeting room and some modernization beyond the classroom. The label of One-room Schools has been used many times here and, of all the sites about such schools, the one with the most to offer is One-Room Schoolhouse Center.  Like most large sites, some links have become inactive (to find old sites prowl the Wayback Machine's  https://web.archive.org/), but there's still a lot to be found and enjoy.