Sandy Davenport

The Rosenblooms of Binghamton

While I was in California I met a man  (Paul) whose grandparents had lived briefly in Binghamton and he asked me if I'd go past their house and take a photo. Once I got home, Paul sent me a text with the details. He didn't have an exact address, but thought it was Oak St. Before I even hit the city directories at the library, I did a quick search through a privately-maintained database of upstate New York newspapers and found this story:

I showed this to Karen at work, and she lives on Sibley Rd., in Owego, named, apparently, after the brother of the 1938 Owego Police Chief. Paul was also appropriately tickled by this story and will be sharing it with all the relatives.

With an address in hand, I swung by Oak St and took a photo of the the house. It was only a half block off one of my regular walking routes. It looks like it is being renovated, because there is a big dumpster (skip) out back, and a work crew was arriving when I was taking the photo, so I had to snap it real casually. 

Just down from the high school and right across the road from my lawyer (who I haven't seen in a long time, but we should probably make an appointment to update our wills, since Ella is no longer 3 years old.

Then when I was in the library reading 1890s newspapers (omg, the saga of corruption over the awarding of asphalt contracts for city road paving to cronies of the council members!), I took a moment out to look at the 1937 and 1938 city directories.

City Directories were amazing. The 1930s ones cross listed people by name, including their address and occupation. Then they also listed every street address and who lived there. The 1890s ones I've also been looking through don't do the street lists, but they have people by name and occupation and I could read them for hours. In 1890 they also listed every teacher at every school and all the clubs (oh, I have a post coming about clubs, I believe), and all the churches and all the businesses and I went down some serious rabbit holes.

In 1937, before he married Rose and moved to Oak St, Irving Rosenbloom was living at 70 Henry St, otherwise known as the Henry Hotel (which no longer exists. There's an office building with a very later-twentieth century concrete facade there now). He was working just around the corner at the furniture store belonging to his future brother-in-law, Abe.  The furniture store is student apartments now, and it was on my walk home from the library. 

In 1939 the Rosenblooms moved to Olean, NY, and opened a furniture store of their own, and that's the end of their Binghamton story. But it was fun while it lasted. 

The former Bern's Furniture store. See the tiny bit of red next door? That used to have giant white letters saying The Rug Store, and it was the best part of the building and I don't know why on earth they would have removed them.

The Rosenblooms of Binghamton

While I was in California I met a man  (Paul) whose grandparents had lived briefly in Binghamton and he asked me if I'd go past their house and take a photo. Once I got home, Paul sent me a text with the details. He didn't have an exact address, but thought it was Oak St. Before I even hit the city directories at the library, I did a quick search through a privately-maintained database of upstate New York newspapers and found this story:

I showed this to Karen at work, and she lives on Sibley Rd., in Owego, named, apparently, after the brother of the 1938 Owego Police Chief. Paul was also appropriately tickled by this story and will be sharing it with all the relatives.

With an address in hand, I swung by Oak St and took a photo of the the house. It was only a half block off one of my regular walking routes. It looks like it is being renovated, because there is a big dumpster (skip) out back, and a work crew was arriving when I was taking the photo, so I had to snap it real casually. 

Just down from the high school and right across the road from my lawyer (who I haven't seen in a long time, but we should probably make an appointment to update our wills, since Ella is no longer 3 years old.

Then when I was in the library reading 1890s newspapers (omg, the saga of corruption over the awarding of asphalt contracts for city road paving to cronies of the council members!), I took a moment out to look at the 1937 and 1938 city directories.

City Directories were amazing. The 1930s ones cross listed people by name, including their address and occupation. Then they also listed every street address and who lived there. The 1890s ones I've also been looking through don't do the street lists, but they have people by name and occupation and I could read them for hours. In 1890 they also listed every teacher at every school and all the clubs (oh, I have a post coming about clubs, I believe), and all the churches and all the businesses and I went down some serious rabbit holes.

In 1937, before he married Rose and moved to Oak St, Irving Rosenbloom was living at 70 Henry St, otherwise known as the Henry Hotel (which no longer exists. There's an office building with a very later-twentieth century concrete facade there now). He was working just around the corner at the furniture store belonging to his future brother-in-law, Abe.  The furniture store is student apartments now, and it was on my walk home from the library. 

In 1939 the Rosenblooms moved to Olean, NY, and opened a furniture store of their own, and that's the end of their Binghamton story. But it was fun while it lasted. 

The former Bern's Furniture store. See the tiny bit of red next door? That used to have giant white letters saying The Rug Store, and it was the best part of the building and I don't know why on earth they would have removed them.

2023: May 13: My Week In California

I feel like someone should have told me about California sooner. As in, "no, seriously, you would love it, believe me." I don't know if I want to risk earthquakes and drought and wildfires and atmospheric rivers and insane house prices and all that traffic to live there permanently, but so much else about the state speaks to me. Ocean and cities and wild coastlines and wine and birds and wildflowers and good coffee. 

I went out last week for two reasons. 

First, a writing retreat. I feel the need to build writing community, so I'm doing a few things to try to move that along. The retreat was run by woman from a San Francisco writers group, and we stayed on a zen center and farm in Marin County. It was nestled in gum and pine trees, surrounded by bare hills and walking trails, a 20 minute walk to the ocean, and I stayed in the guest house with twelve other writers and one shower. We ate the plain farm food, except on the days when someone said "let's walk down to the pub this afternoon and eat oysters and drink wine," which, well, I'm not going to say no to that. I came away with several scenes of my Binghamton book sketched out, a couple of new friends, and the sense that trying to be a writer isn't totally ridiculous. 

Going to Marin County meant crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a totally normal thing for thousands of daily commuters, but which had me silently thrilled at being on an architectural icon. Silent, because I was on an airport shuttle.

 

The guest house where we stayed.

Then I shifted gears and headed across the bay to Oakland and my friend Robin's son's Bar Mitzvah (I'd found the writing retreat because the dates matched the Bar Mitzvah). Coffee shops and mani-pedis and a hotel room with a shower all to myself and taking light rail and ubers and going to brew pubs. Oakland was cool,. The Bar Mitzvah made me ponder the importance of ritual and community and ancestors and family, in a good way and I made a couple more new friends and walked even more than in Marin.

I made Robin take a photo of me during our mani-pedis, because this is only the second one I've ever had, and she stopped her complex party planning long enough to indulge me, because she's a good friend like that. 

 

 

2023: May 7: Home Again

Literally just walked in the door after a week away (ok, I took a moment to say hi to the cats). I was in California, and I'll write more about it next time, because right now I want to go to bed. In the meantime, here is a photo of me and my friend Robin at a brew pub in Oakland, CA, after her son's Bar Mitzvah (only one of the reasons I went to California this time). 

 

2023: April 29: Comps

I'm trying not to think of publishing as my ultimate goal for writing, but let's be real, it's a large part of it. There are a ton of enthusiastic and wonderful people in publishing, but it's also, I'm learning, a complicated business shaped by marketing, profits, gatekeepers, and processes that take a large part of the power away from the writer. Since that's the way it is, currently, I'm going to try my best to negotiate the system and see what happens. 

As I revise my draft, and research my next project, I'm also reading "comps" - books similar to mine that I can include in my agent query to let them know where my book sits in the market. Part of me wonders why I have to do this, isn't it the job of an agent to know the market themselves? And so I look around for advice and find stuff like this.

This is actually very helpful in its way, but I've since tried to steer clear of Publishing Twitter.

I am generally very obedient and follow directions carefully, so I am dutifully combing lists of recent Young Adult fiction and re-activating my library card, which lapsed during Covid times. I stopped reading YA a while back because Ella wasn't around to bring it into the house, and also because I didn't want to get overly influenced by other stories (more than I already, constantly, am). I have learned that:

• Stories, like mine, set a couple of hundred years in a future where the US has broken apart, went out of fashion about 10 years ago, so that's an added challenge.
• About half the recent YA involves magic and while some of it is very good, dear lord, it's awfully repetitive. Young person is cursed and has to go on a journey with a companion they gradually come to trust but who eventually betrays them (or do they!? cliffhanger!).  Along the way they figure out how to use their new powers and who their family really was and perhaps they even bind a demon to themselves. There's a large and generally hard to follow battle at the end, and an exhausting amount of life-threatening danger all the way through. This is sold in the blurbs as "fast-paced."
• The other half of recent YA is contemporary teenagers trying to figure out their identities while navigating crushes and family trauma. I mean, I taught high school for twenty years, I know teens spend most of their time thinking about this stuff, but I'm pushing 60, so what am I doing here?
• Climate change is going to be so much worse than my current draft supposes. I didn't need to read YA to figure this out. 

Despite these frustrations, it is rather nice to curl up with book after book and tell myself I'm working.

Saturday morning reading pose number one

Saturday morning reading pose number one: side view

2023: April 22: Books from home

When I left New Zealand in 1986 for what I thought would be my multi-year Overseas Experience, I sent a box of books to my aunt Sandra, thinking maybe her kids would like them. 36 years later, she had them still, and I picked out my favorites to bring back to New York. 

 

These are the ones that made the cut. They're so much shorter and smaller than all the teen fiction on Ella's shelves. Why? Why have YA books gotten so much longer in the twenty-first century? I have no idea.

 

I spent most of January re-reading them. All the Moomins! God, the genius of Tove Jannson. Bittersweet, efficient, dark, hopeful, funny, surreal stories of family and friendship. That 22 Letters book, man, I'd forgotten how influential that was on me, thinking about "ordinary" people and the big picture of history. And the John Christophers, possibly the first post-apocalyptic novels for young people I read (I don't think the term Young Adult Fiction existed then, so I don't really know what to call them). The Green and the White, I loved that. Fantasy without the onslaught of magic and constant danger that today's YA fantasy seems required to drown you in. (The author, Dianna Moorhead, was from New Zealand, but she doesn't even have a wikipedia page to link to). I don't know about that Queen's Brooch one, though. I thought it would be more like Rosemary Sutcliffe's historical fiction, which I also loved as a young reader, but was it much more gory than her usual stuff. A tale of Romans fighting Boadicea's forces. I think the author had been to war and wanted to show how horrific it was. He succeeded. 

I took the ones that sparked something inside me, or that had an inscription from my father (a whole bunch of them were birthday presents, and he would write the date in his lovely handwriting on the inside).  I left behind some that I liked, but which I already had copies of, or which weren't in great condition any more. 

 

The left behind.  Milly Molly Mandy didn't make the cut, even though I remember enjoying it. I am also fond of Dr Doolittle in a nostalgic kind of way,(actually, I think it is his dog and his London sparrow and his pig that I remember the most), although he hasn't aged well culturally, and this copy just wasn't special enough to take up international suitcase room.

 

 

2023: April 15: Publishing is a business

I have finally finished a draft of my novel that won't be too excruciating to show anyone. As I've gotten closer and closer to the end, I've begun poking around in the world of how-do-you-get-published, and, my lord, it's a big scary universe. Large swaths of it are horrifically business and marketing focused in ways that make me want to run far far away to a land where artists roam free, parts of it seem like genuinely supportive community building. From what I can tell, there are about a hundred steps, and I'm at step One-Point-Five.

1. Write your novel. I still have to review the last chapter a couple of times and do some hardcore proof reading of the whole thing, but generally, I'm done. Ten years, one step at a time, I plodded my way to Draft One of a quiet little story about a teenager trying to save their dad.

When you really want to start writing in the morning but the cats are using your desk for a meeting.

2. Get some friendly people who aren't closely related to you to give it a general read-over and provide some broad feedback. This is called beta-reading, and there are a Considerable Number of Writing Bloggers out there willing to share beta-reading worksheets and tips. I'm about to put out the call to a few people who have seemed interested and see if they're actually willing to volunteer.

When it is finally open-window season and the cats take frequent turns ousting each other out of the prime spot in the window right next to your desk. 

3. Revise your manuscript based on what was most useful from the beta-readers. There's also a great deal of How To Sift Through Beta Reader Comments And What To Do With Them advice on the internets. There will be people who love your book (you hope) and people who don't, and people who don"t finish it. 

When the cats finally settle down on what used to be Ella's bed, but they're so gosh darned cute, look at them pretending to be friends like that, and so you have to stop and take photos to text to Michael at work.

4. Query agents endlessly until finally one of them shows an interest in representing you to publishers. Apparently "querying" is both an art and a science and if Publishing Twitter (which I had to stop reading, it was too demoralizing even when it tried to be helpful - "I queried ten thousand agents and they all hated it, and if that happens to you, you're still a good person!"), is anything to go by, agents are very picky about what information you send them and in what order and in what format (they all make it extremely clear they're busy people who don't have time to mess around in your disorganized submission, and I very much respect that vibe). I've got a short list of agents I might query, and it should probably get longer. This is actually what I came here to write about today, specifically "comps," which is where you tell the agent what other books yours compares to. But I have too much to say about that, and all the young adult novels I've been reading for my research, so I'll leave it for another day.

When you take a (scheduled) bathroom break and the cats insist on coming with

There's lots more steps, but I can't think about any of them yet because those first four could take me another year, and so they're enough for now. 

2023: April 9: Disassembling

I am not especially handy. I believe this should come as no surprise to anyone. But I have to do something with the 4 laptops and one 2008 mac desktop piled up in the sun room with all the other electronic junk before I take them to the landfill's hazardous waste drop off day. So I did what the kids do, and watched some videos on how to remove and destroy the plates in a hard drive before recycling. I have learned that every single computer has at least 3 different types of screw head, at least two of which I've never heard of before, and they're all different sizes and I had to go to the hardware store today and buy a special set of screwdrivers. (Did you know that Lowes is not open on Easter Sunday. Like, a total dead zone. Sorry, stay home and think about Jesus rising up, or go to Home Depot, I guess.). But I also got to impulse buy some sugar snap pea seeds (and plant them when I got home) and measure the root balls on some dogwood trees so I can start thinking about digging a big enough hole (might need to watch another video for that: "How to plant a tree with Bob" or some such). 

Now here are some daffodils. My favorite spring time vibe. They make me terribly happy. 

I planted these last fall, in a moment of faith that spring would return one day.

2023: April 2: Around Town

This is DWI Tom. Or, as my brain keeps seeing it, Twit Tom. Why does my brain do that? Who knows. Michael's brain does that sort of thing far more than me, he sees anagrams everywhere (yes, I know this isn't quite an anagram but don't tell my brain that because the principle is the same).  

Clinton St., Binghamton.

Twit Tom started showing up across a two county area last summer. At first Michael thought it was a political attack ad, as in "don't vote for Tom, he has a DWI." But then we figured it out. 

Ok, so the theme today seems to be random photos from my camera roll about the mundaneness of my city. So, here you go, an old blockbuster video store that has never been repurposed in all the time since video rental stopped being a thing, and a tree, pruned to insanity because it was planted under a power line, 

Main St, Binghamton

  

Crestmont St, Binghamton.

 

Maybe not terribly interesting, just the everydayness of walking around.

2023: March 25: Microfilm

I have an idea for my second book (or maybe it's my third, depending if my first book ever gets a sequel). And I need to do some research, so I've decided to spend a few hours a week at the Broome County Public Library reading old local newspapers on microfilm. I spent a lot of time back in the 1990s reading newspapers this way, getting distracted by astounding recipes for creamed cauliflower (boil for an hour and puree with actual cream, if I remember correctly) and millinery advertisements. Nowadays many national historical newspapers are digitized and available on line, but for local color, you still have to search out the upstairs back room of your local library.

So many newspapers came, went, or got consolidated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it is hard to keep track of them, so thank goodness for the county historians. Most papers were partisan, as the idea of an impartial press didn't really exist back then (and now we're in the post-impartial era). The Evening Herald began as a small local paper, claiming to be free of political bias (unlike, say, the Binghamton Daily Democrat or the Broome Republican), but after reading only a few months worth, I'm think I'm detecting a slight pro-labor stance, which is intriguing. I'm waiting to see what they have to say about the up-coming cigar makers' strike. 

The main difference between now and my dissertation research in the nineties is that now I have to take my glasses off and get up close to read this stuff. Otherwise I still love it. I skim over the national dispatches, and linger on the local gems. Stories of "sporting gentlemen" harassing "colored" ladies on the street (I think sporting means well-to-do and prone to drink, and the number of publicly acceptable words for black women is fascinating, this particular woman was also described as "of the Egyptian lineage"), church petitions against touring mind-readers playing at the Opera House, runaway horse accidents, train timetables to Albany, Scranton, and Buffalo (oh, wouldn't it be nice if we still had passenger rail service to Binghamton), and who is visiting town from Elmira.