Lost Korea As Cool As A Lost Van Gogh

I told the lovely Dr. Carla Trentelman that one of the biggest discoveries I'm making while digging through Union Station's archives is how easy it is for stuff to get lost even in a museum.

"I really understand how a long lost work by Van Gogh or Michelangelo or Titian can turn up sitting on a museum shelf," I told her. "It's right there all the time but nobody knows it."

We've all seen the "Raiders of the Lost Arc" film where the Arc of the Covenant gets buried in an anonymous government warehouse. On a smaller scale, that is what is happening in every museum in the world. At least, every museum that doesn't have a world-class anal retentive indexing system installed. Stuff gets misfiled, or not indexed in sufficient detail. People die or retire and new filing systems are put into place that skip stuff. Nobody has time to really look, closely, at everything on every shelf.

Union Station's archive is pretty small -- rows of shelves jammed into a room the size of a small living room. One guy, Lee Witten, has done his best to organize and catalog things, but he's a volunteer like everyone else here and hasn't got time for the sort of detail that would reveal that lost VanGogh, so to speak.

I mean, he'd spot a real VanGogh, obviously, especially if it were among the thousands of feet of super-8 movie film of trains he's spent the last several months going through, but a propaganda leaflet from the Korean War?

He didn't know it was here.

I'm trying to learn the collection here. Lee's indexing is vast, with thousand of entries in our database, but that would rot my brain to go through one by one.

So I'm just pulling boxes off the shelf at random to see what's there.

Last week it was a collection of old valentines from Ruth Myers Schrider. I mentioned in that blog (click) that there was also some stuff from Korea, and this week I looked at that.

Tom Myers was Ruth's brother perhaps?  He spent some time as a civilian working for the American military occupation force in Korea beginning in 1947. Korea was divided between north and south after WWII ended, the US, Japan and others countries still had armed forces there while the politics of deciding how the country would be governed got sorted out. That sorting led to the Korean War.

What a trove of stuff Myers left.

In a way it's cool because it's so ordinary: There are books of a "Getting to Know Korea" nature given to soldiers serving there so they would know how to behave in a strange culture.

"Koreans will not bear any assumption of superiority on the art of any men on grounds of race, creed or color," one book says. "They themselves are without any of these prejudices on any of these counts."

Avoid the women, it says. "The limitations imposed by the length of duty tour in Korea precludes most Americans becoming sufficient familiar with the social customs" to avoid committing a major breach of etiquette.

In fact, "sexual relations, regardless of how inspired, other than through the lowest form of prostitutes, is deemed by Koreans to be classed as an act of rape," and will get both man and woman in serious trouble.

There's fun items of every day life: A bar list from the Dai Iti Hotel in Tokyo which served drinks for 20 cents or so, collections of post cards showing typical Korean life and culture, a menu from the American-run hotel of some sort for Thanksgiving showing a typical turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

Interesting, the menu claims it is the "famous Cho-Kwang Hotel on Skidrow Alley" in Seoul.

Skidrow Alley? One smells one's chain being jerked, especially since the "hotel" staff are all US military personnel.

Lots of pictures, of course. Some scraps of Korean money. The bar list has some sort of crude map drawn on it.

All very mundane, but that's the point. Mundane items of daily life are precisely what don't, normally, get saved over the ages. These show slices of life of a Korean before a terrible war tore through that peninsula in the early 1950s.

Historical and darn cute Valentines

With Valentine's Day only weeks away, I thought it would be fun to peek into one of the more interesting collections I've found in Union Station's archive: The Ruth Myers Valentines.

I'm still trying to figure out more who Ruth is, or was.  She was Ruth Myers Shrider, who married D.O. Schrider and died in 1942, according to the note on the box. Her husband died in 1955, and I'm guessing the family donated all the old stuff just so they didn't have the pain of throwing it away.

In addition to old Valentines there are pictures and documents from T. E. Myers time in Korea during the Korean War, some railroad documents and pictures, and lots of other stuff. To be honest, I'm  just beginning to dig through the boxes.

This first one contains a lot of Valentines that Ruth apparently collected in the 1930s, although some seem addressed to her brothers or other siblings. Whatever.

What's really cool is just looking at the old designs -- the 30s styles of clothing, the way children are portrayed, the die-cut lace and movable elements of the cards. And, yes, the occasional politically incorrect one.

You can imagine going into the 5 and dime
and picking them out for a penny a piece, or whatever. Or perhaps one of those boxes of 30 that included one for the teacher.

Anyway, that's it -- spiffy old Valentines. I told Lee Witten, the archivist here, that we could probably get a fortune for these things on eBay, but obviously that won't be happening. They're history, they're culture, and they're here for as long as the walls stand.

Fun Railroad Stuff That Just Shows Up

Came into the Union Station archive this morning to find Chief Archivist Lee Witten almost drooling over a pile of old books, photos and railroad gear that he was lovingly sorting out on the table.

All of it was donated to the archives by Donna Forbes, Midvale, whose dad started as a telegrapher for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1942 and worked as a dispatcher and rules examiner until he retired in 1983.

He was a saver, even preserving the original flimsies for telegraph orders on his first day at work. His notebooks are filled with carefully handwritten notes on promotions and tests of guys working to be promoted to conductor, train orders and all sorts of other stuff.

There's a couple of telegraph keys and a practice key, complete with tapes of signals to be translated so he could build his speed or keep his skills honed. There's a nice pile of pictures of old steam engines.

Mr. Forbes worked in Las Vegas and then Salt Lake City. I'm guessing he died since then -- I will be talking to his daughter to get his full history -- and all his stuff is the sort of thing that gets tossed out by children or grandchildren unless they think, as Ms. Forbes did, that they should be preserved.

So she brought them to us and they will be saved, with extreme care and gratitude.