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Punch's Fancy Portraits by (Edward) Linley Sambourne (1884-1910), last half of1881.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Purchasing Pop Culture
PURCHASING POP CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
By E.M. Sanchez-Saavedra
Growing up in the pre-credit card era, I was familiar with small coins and the (very) occasional dollar bill at birthdays or Christmas. Being allowed to handle and examine an honest-to-goodness five or ten dollar bill was a genuine treat for a kid whose weekly income amounted to twenty-five cents or so. These days, I rarely deal with a heavy pocketful of little metal discs and the few coins that come my way are generally tossed into a drawer. Thanks to inflation and a rethinking of the nature of the money supply, most of the world’s hard coinage has little or no intrinsic value or purchasing power, and only serves to pay odd amounts of sales tax. Canadian one- and two-dollar coins (“loonies” and “toonies”) and European Union “Euros” are exceptions. Paper bills reign supreme elsewhere. Until 1964, U.S. minor coinage was composed of metal with intrinsic bullion value -- silver -- or industrial worth, like copper and nickel. Only coins manufactured by the three government mints at Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco were legal tender. Although paper money was largely backed by gold reserves, in 1933 the U.S. officially went off the gold standard and private citizens could not own gold except for numismatic items or jewelry. In 1964 U.S. coins became purely tokens and after 1971 currency could no longer be redeemed in gold. By 1979, the yellow metal had skyrocketed from $35.00 to over $800.00 per ounce. Recently, it has reached over $1,700.00 and will probably go higher.
In the era of story papers and dime novels, the U.S. financial landscape was a nightmarish jungle, where millions of foreign coins circulated alongside odd-looking coins in odd denominations, flimsy paper money issued by flimsier banks and corporations, commodities like gold dust and foodstuffs, postage stamps and tokens or paper scrip.
Paper money had been a mainstay of North American commerce since the seventeenth century, along with whatever foreign hard money arrived in the pockets of immigrants and seafarers. Trade limped along by barter and a mixture of English, Dutch, French and Spanish coins. The American Revolution had been financed by the printing presses of the Continental Congress, whose paper money emissions became ever more worthless as the war progressed. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, most issuing authorities had little or no specie reserves to back their promissory notes, and the federal government provided no safety net like today’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect receivers of bank notes. Many a wall was papered with worthless “broken bank” notes after the issuers went belly-up. Like the inflationary German “Notgeld” produced after the First World War, American “wildcat” bank notes are infinitely varied in design, colorful and now highly collectible, but they often spelled ruin to the consumer.
Walking into a newsdealer’s shop and buying a story paper or magazine was not as straightforward as an equivalent purchase would be today. If the purchaser tendered a banknote, the merchant would have to calculate whether or not the bill was counterfeit (about 50% of all bills in circulation were bogus), whether or not the issuing bank was still in business, how far away the bank was (the more distant, the less the bill was worth), and whether or not he had enough smaller bills and coins in the till to make change! More astute shopkeepers subscribed to “banknote reporter” publications with diagnostic illustrations of recent counterfeits and news of bank failures.
Some of the same problems cropped up if the buyer offered a coin instead. Was it genuine? Had some of the precious metal been clipped off? If it was a foreign coin, how much was it worth in U.S. money? If it was a gold coin, what was the spot price of gold on that day? (Bullion value and face value of gold rarely coincided.) These questions varied regionally as well. Westerners distrusted anything but gold and silver and paper money was virtually unknown until late in the century. Small change almost exclusively consisted of Mexican “reales.” The big “piece of eight” (“peso de ocho reales”) was worth a dollar. The two-real piece, “two bits” or “pistareen,” was valued at twenty cents, the one-real, or “bit,” at ten cents and the half-real, or “picayune” at five cents. Larger coins were often cut into wedge-shaped pieces to create small change. In New York the English shilling, valued at 12½ cents, and the sixpence at 6 ¼ cents, remained the standard from the eighteenth century through 1857. Local money in the mid-Atlantic states was often backed by cotton or tobacco, and fluctuated according to market conditions abroad. Antebellum New York goods often cost 12 ½ or 6 ¼ cents, and were presumably paid for in English coins or Mexican cut "bits", since the U.S. never minted a farthing ("fourth" -ing) coin.
Adding to the confusion was the fact that much of the silver coinage never reached general circulation. U.S. silver dollars and half-dollars were virtually unknown at home. These were used in bulk as specie reserves in bank vaults, or shipped abroad for foreign trade. The Mexican piece of eight, later renamed the “peso,” was the international trade dollar of its day, accepted from New York to China at full face value. In the 1870s, the U.S. began to issue a “trade dollar” to compete with it and with the French “Piastre du Commerce,” the Austrian “Maria Teresa” crown, the English dollars minted for Hong Kong, and several other standard pieces circulating in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
There was a brisk market in “ready reckoner” handbooks, which illustrated some of the coins likely to pass over a shop counter, in addition to giving tables for estimating bulk quantities of flour, lumber, and other commodities, and tables of currency conversion, weights and measures and so on.
Although credit cards would not become commonplace until the 1970s, merchants often extended credit to regular customers, who could purchase goods “on tick” and settle up monthly or quarterly. An English invention did much to simplify small transactions: the humble postage stamp. Introduced by Sir Rowland Hill in 1840, the prepaid postage stamp revolutionized global postage delivery and relieved American shopkeepers of much uncertainty. Until then, recipients had to pay for a letter or parcel upon delivery. If they refused to pay, the mail ended up in the dead letter office. Postal carriers often shirked their duties if the prospects of payment were dim at the receiving end. But if the fee were paid up front, the post office could complete the delivery with no fear that their labors would go unpaid.
Because postage stamps were issued by stable governments (more or less) and had a recognized redemption value at any post office, they became an ideal auxiliary currency. Once the idea caught on in the U.S. in 1847, stamps were used as money as often as they were for their intended purpose. The federal government even authorized three-cent silver and three-dollar gold coins to facilitate the purchase of three-cent first-class stamps in quantity. Recognizing the fragility of little paper stamps, canny merchants encased them in brass disks, covered with transparent mica, bearing advertising material on the reverse sides.
In the financial panic of 1837, merchants took to issuing their own cent and half-cent “Hard Times” tokens with political and commercial slogans. These circulated for the next two decades, since the Philadelphia Mint could never keep up with the demand for small change. During the panic year of 1857, the feds attempted a sweeping coinage reform by demonetizing all foreign coins, abolishing the half-cent and replacing the large cent with a small coin costing less to produce. Thanks in part to the sinking of the S.S. Central America, with its huge gold shipment destined for New York banks, the country was plunged into another depression, from which it emerged in time for the outbreak of Civil War.
The Civil War years saw the disappearance of almost all small change thanks to hoarding. Once again, merchants issued millions of patriotic, political and trade tokens to supply the need. This time, the government responded with the issuance of the first true federal paper currency (greenbacks), including an extensive fractional currency, based on postage stamps. According to Horatio Alger, Jr.’s novels of New York street waifs, “stamps” became a universal synonym for money. His fictional bootblacks, newsboys and street vendors were always trying to “raise the stamps” for a meal or other purchase. Although the currency had been designed for redemption only in actual stamps, it quickly supplied the place of small change in everyday transactions. Despite rampant inflation, the Confederate government likewise issued a fifty-cent fractional bill during the war. Various Southern cities and counties issued a wide variety of fractional bills to substitute for nonexistent coins. The older large cents circulated in the Confederate States during the war along with foreign coins, but hard money was rare by 1863.
Cheap publishers began including images of coins and paper currency in their cover designs, beginning with the firm of Beadle and Adams. Their Dime Novels series, started in 1860, featured a cut of the reverse side of a silver ten-cent piece in the center. Beadle’s earliest competitor, George Munro, featured a cut from the ten-cent postal currency note on the title pages of his Ten-Cent Novel series. Fractional notes were issued until the 1870s and remained in circulation long after.
Following the Civil War, the U.S. government issued three- and five-cent pieces made of a nickel alloy, concurrently with the older silver "trimes" and half-dimes. In 1877, Beadle’s Half Dime Library featured a cut of a nonexistent U.S. coin, an 1877-dated half-dime. (The last one had been minted in 1873.) It matched the cut of a silver dime featured on Beadle’s New York Dime Library. The Nickel Library, published first in Chicago and later New York, prominently displayed one of the new nickel five-cent coins. Street and Smith’s Nugget Library carried a masthead design showing a mixture of gold nuggets, nickels and half-dimes.
English paperbacks and penny dreadfuls sometimes included coin designs on their mastheads. For a few years, Beadle and Adams maintained a London branch and produced Beadle’s American Sixpenny Library. After Beadle discontinued the London operation, the firm of George Routledge purchased the plates and continued the series. In place of the dime, a sixpence takes pride of place. The Union Jack, a penny paper conducted by W.H.G. Kingston, and later by G.A. Henty, showed the reverse of a large English penny, featuring a seated Britannia.
When examining a dime novel, or other piece of Victorian ephemera, it’s fun to speculate on how, and with what currency, it was first purchased. In England, paper money was relatively scarce, and until Victoria’s reign small change was also in short supply. Many merchants issued private tokens to relieve the lack, and counterfeiters proliferated. Poorer people sometimes clubbed together to buy or rent the latest issues of penny papers. In London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew reported that thrifty working-class readers of penny dreadfuls often purchased larger sized publications because they could get more resale value per pound from the rag-and-bone dealers. Many surviving American novels have been stamped and restamped by used-book dealers who often traded a new issue for two or more back numbers, and then sold the used pamphlets for half price or less. So pure barter enters into the equation as well.
In modern terms, just how much was a penny worth? Since 1971, the English “new penny” has been a small coppery-appearing coin, superficially resembling U.S. and Canadian cents. Unless he or she subscribes to the belief in “pennies from Heaven,” the average citizen of the U.K. will not bother to stoop and retrieve a dropped penny from a sidewalk -- it is not worth the effort. The Victorian English penny was a large bronze coin, the same diameter as a U.S. half dollar -- about 30.6mm. -- exhibiting a left-facing bust of Queen Victoria on the obverse and a seated figure representing Britannia holding a shield and trident on the reverse. These were termed “coppers” or “browns,” and intrinsically worth their face value in scrap bronze. In other words, pennies were not mere tokens.
In the present age of plastic credit and debit cards and electronic fund transfers, it is hard to realize that the nineteenth-century world operated on a bullion standard, in which circulating coins were made of precious metals, according to accepted ratios of gold to silver to bronze. This system dated back to the international coinage of the ancient Roman Empire -- the forerunner of the “Euro.” Even the traditional abbreviation for penny, “d,” stands for the Roman silver denarius. It has been estimated that the pound sterling of 1871, was roughly equivalent in purchasing power to two hundred dollars in modern U.S. currency. A penny was 1/240 of a pound, giving a rough value of 83 cents in early twenty-first century money. Such equivalencies are problematic at best, because we do not consume the same goods or purchase the same services as our nineteenth-century forebears. How does one quantify chamber pots, antimacassars and bears’ grease hairdressing against television sets and automobiles? Candles vs. light bulbs? We know that a well-paid author of penny fiction could live a survivable, though threadbare, existence on two pounds a week. An American artisan made a dollar per day, (up to fourteen hours,) or six dollars a week, and could support a family in modest living quarters and adequate groceries. Family members of all ages had to contribute either household labor or outside work to supplement papa’s wages. There was no government-funded welfare, unemployment insurance, health insurance, or much of anything else. People were compelled to be self-reliant, economical, hardy and practical to survive.
England’s central Royal Mint provided the kingdom with the necessary hard coinage to carry on its everyday business, and the Bank of England issued incorruptible paper money. By contrast, the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia, and several branch mints for coining California gold and Nevada silver, could never provide enough coins or currency for America’s burgeoning commerce. The same inflation estimate as used for English money generally works for U.S. money. At the time, a pound sterling was tariffed at about $5.00. An 1871 dollar was worth approximately fifty dollars or more in today’s money. A one-cent newspaper would cost about fifty cents now. A dime paperback book would thus retail at $5.00. (If you have purchased a trade paperback recently, Beadle’s Dime Novels look like a pretty good bargain.)
Despite the petty annoyances of ATM machines that can’t read your card, or credit card “swipe” readers that choke up occasionally, we actually have it pretty easy compared to our forebears (so long as there are enough funds to cover the transaction!)
Part II Gallery HERE
Friday, November 25, 2011
Yesterday’s Papers Greatest Hits.
Yesterday’s Papers Greatest Hits.
My most popular posts to date seem to be about war and propaganda which is now more often referred to as “public diplomacy” a less distasteful connotation. Once the study of propaganda is begun you begin to see it everywhere. One minor manipulative example involves American President Barack Obama. Whenever the cameras are rolling and Obama is talking to the “folks” he dresses in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up -- it is a bit subtle but leaves the impression in the targets' mind that he is, or is preparing to do, some hard and dirty work -- just like real “folks.”
Six of my greatest “hits” involve propaganda; four are about popular comics and their artists: Charles G. Bush, H. T. Webster, George Herriman and the father/son José Luis and Alberto Salinas. These have remained consistently popular throughout the last year. The top of the list in my top ten still generates 80 to 100 hits per week.
American Propaganda in World War I
15 Nov 2010
2,423 Pageviews
12 May 2010
929 Pageviews
Charles G. Bush and the Comic Strip
28 Mar 2010
771 Pageviews
Kronprinz Wilhelm Randolph von Hearst
4 Dec 2010
590 Pageviews
15 May 2010
581 Pageviews
11 Jan 2009
566 Pageviews
All House-painters aren’t Hitlers
1 Feb 2011,
406 Pageviews
21 Aug 2010
375 Pageviews
7 Jun 2011
365 Pageviews
Comic Strips, Cold War and Vietnam
25 May 2011,
361 Pageviews
Thursday, November 24, 2011
A Civil War Relic Paperback Book
A CIVIL WAR RELIC PAPERBACK BOOK
By E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra
Among the scarcest relics of the Civil War that pitted U.S. Federal armies against the determined forces of the breakaway Southern Confederacy are ephemeral paper items with known use in the field. These range from personal letters and documents, operational maps and dispatches, to books and magazines that somehow survived the rigors of wet tents, haversacks full of rancid pork, combat and ordinary wear and tear. Reading matter would circulate from hand to hand until it fell to pieces, and the scraps often served as everything from tinder to wrapping paper to toilet tissue.
Glenn Tucker’s High Tide at Gettysburg: The Campaign in Pennsylvania (The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1958) pp. 69-70, gives us a glimpse of Civil War reading habits in the Federal army as seen by a Southern reporter for the Daily Richmond Examiner, June 23, 1863.
In June 1863, after Union General Joseph Hooker abandoned his encampments along the Rappahannock River,
The Richmond Examiner sent a correspondent to Stafford Heights to study the Federal army by what it had left behind. The heights above the Rappahannock were a desolation, stripped of trees and fuel, littered with “innumerable dead horses and men” and camp debris.
Besides tons of foodstuffs in edible condition, the Federals had left behind fancy articles and luxury items, including books and periodicals.
The Richmond scribe had a pleasant time scanning the reading material. He discovered in the officers’ quarters occasional copies of the Atlantic and Harper’s but found that “their literature for the most part is of the lowest and most depraved character.” More specifically, “the works of licentious French authors, and the blood and thunder productions of Ned Buntline and Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., were strewed about as thick as autumnal leaves in Vallambrose.” This literature, he told Southern readers, showed “the most dissolute and abandoned” characteristics of the Army of the Potomac.”
Like many another useful commodity, reading matter often became a spoil of war. Enemy newspapers were highly prized for both their military intelligence and for their entertainment value. On June 3, 1862, the Daily Richmond Examiner advertised:
FOR SALE -- YANKEE CURIOSITY -- A copy of FRANK LESLIE's ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER of May 1st, captured on the battlefield last Saturday, containing Yankee scenes and pictures of the war. Enquire at Examiner Office.
Recently, an example of a “licentious French” novel owned by a young Federal soldier has come to light. (Despite the jaundiced reporting by the Confederate journalist, most French novels were respectable adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas, psychological thrillers by Victor Hugo, Vidocq’s Memoirs and melodramatic potboilers by Eugene Sue (1804-1857). The prolific Sue, the wastrel son of a wealthy surgeon, turned to journalism and fiction to pay off his debts. He soon espoused socialist ideas, embodied in his best-known work Les Mysteres de Paris of 1842-1843. This long novel spawned a flood of urban “Mystery” novels by Harrison Ainsworth in England and by George Lippard and Ned Buntline (E.Z.C. Judson) in the U.S.
One of Eugene Sue’s novels came into the possession of a teenaged soldier who proudly signed his name and unit designation on the cover and title page of the thick paperback. The 194-page book, measuring 6 x 9 ½ inches, is the first volume of an ambitious nineteen-volume work entitled The Mysteries of the People, which appeared between 1849 and 1857. It is a forerunner of the sprawling novels later written by James A. Michener, concerning the adventures of a “proletarian” family from remote antiquity in ancient Gaul up to the revolution of 1848. Slurs against the Jesuits and political revelations led to the book’s suppression by agents of the Third Empire.
Sue’s florid and often brutal novels became a mainstay of cheap publishers in Europe and America. In 1850, New York bookseller Ransom Garrett formed a co-partnership with William B. Dick and Lawrence R. Fitzgerald under the firm name of Garrett & Co. The company specialized in self-help manuals and cheap reprints of English and European novels. In July 1857, Garrett retired and the publishing house was renamed Dick & Fitzgerald. The edition of The Mysteries of the People under consideration here has a “Garrett & Co.” wrapper, but a “Dick & Fitzgerald” title page and a ten-page Dick & Fitzgerald catalogue. Since the catalogue includes Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel East Lynne, it was probably printed in 1861 or 1862. The firm continued until 1917.
In August 1862 an eighteen-year-old Ohioan named Edwin Augustus Lee enlisted in the Union Army. He was mustered into the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry at Camp Massillon, Ohio, on September 18, 1862. The regiment had a large proportion of skilled mechanics and artisans in its ranks. It was facetiously called the “Second Methodist Regiment” because of its preponderance of Methodists, including clergymen. Its first year of service consisted chiefly in guarding forts, arsenals, storehouses and magazines in Ohio and Kentucky, until ordered to Chattanooga, Tennessee in October 1863. The regiment became a part of the huge Army of the Cumberland and was assigned variously to the 12th and 20th Corps, 2nd Division. Much of its service involved maintaining vital railroad lines and bridges on the Nashville and Chattanooga R.R. during the 1864 siege of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The unit was mustered out on June 23, 1865, having lost one officer and eight enlisted men mortally wounded, and four officers and 138 enlisted men to disease.
Lee was assigned to Company F, which was made up of two companies too small to muster alone, raised in Decatur and Ramsey, Ohio.
Private Edwin A. Lee survived the war and became an accountant. In March 1867 he moved to Canton, Ohio, where he served as deputy county auditor under the former adjutant of the 115th Infantry, Henry C. Ellison. He became chairman of the Republican County Committee. From 1873 to 1875 he served as Auditor of Stark County, Canton Ohio.
In his official capacity he came to know another Union army veteran, a young lawyer and later prosecuting attorney (and later U.S. President) named William McKinley. Both men had been born in 1843 and had had similar life experiences. On January 25, 1871, E.A. Lee attended McKinley’s wedding to miss Ida Saxton at the First Presbyterian Church of Canton, Ohio. After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Lee wrote a short article about the nuptials for The National Magazine.
Lee’s later career is obscure. According to his short article “I traveled West for a number of years, but whether in Portland, Oregon, or El Paso, Texas, the name of McKinley reached me.” Lee was a member of the renomination committee in 1900, and accompanied the Grand Army Band of Canton to the White House. “As the president saw me approaching in the line he said: ‘Ed, I am glad to see you,’ and taking my hand, which he held a considerable time, he passed it to that of Mrs. McKinley, who was seated, and said: ‘Ida, you must remember Mr. Lee.’”
Unlike modern armed forces personnel, most of the young soldiers of the 1860s had never been more than a few miles from home. Coming from isolated rural communities, they had little immunity to disease and no experience with worldly temptations. Many suffered horribly from loneliness and homesickness and the shock of being herded with uncouth strangers. Some succumbed, others thrived and most stoically endured the hardships of camp, battle and/or prison. A number of men from the 115th O.V.I. were captured at Murfreesboro, paroled and died tragically when the overcrowded riverboat Sultana exploded on their homeward journey. Others died in Andersonville and other Confederate prison camps. The survivors returned home changed men. Edwin Lee and his comrades were among the more fortunate ones. Their service did not include the horrific meatgrinder slaughter fields of Antietam, Shiloh, Gettysburg, the Seven Days’ battles, Franklin and other unimaginable struggles. This is why Private Lee’s paperback book still exists. Perhaps he purchased it from the regimental sutler (storekeeper) who marked it up from 50 cents to 60 cents. It doubtless whiled away dull off-duty hours at remote block houses and railroad sidings in rural Tennessee. When examining antiques and artifacts, the phrase “Oh, if this object could only talk” tends to crop up. Private Lee’s little paperback speaks volumes.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Rube Merrifield (1860-1932)
Reuben Robert Merrifield was born 21 Sep 1860 at Wellington, Ohio. He went to work at Kohl and Middleton’s Clark Street Dime Museum in Chicago as a banner and scene painter. Kohl and Middleton’s chain of dime museums stretched all through the Midwest, in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland, Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The peak years for the dime museums were between 1880 and 1900. Entertainments were a variety of ‘platform entertainments', freak shows, hirsute women, dog-faced boys, magicians, mesmerists, learned lecturers, lightning cartoonists, spectacle melodrama, waxworks and the newfangled cinema. In New York in 1886 it was said that “dime museums have sprung up in Brooklyn like mushrooms. One can hardly walk a block in the Eastern District without meeting a dazzling electric light, beneath which he reads in six foot posters that a “refined and elegant entertainment is to be enjoyed within for the small sum of ten cents.””
Winsor McCay, famed creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland, painted banners at Kohl and Middleton’s Vine Street Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio from 1891 to 1900. In 1945 wood engraver Charles D. Stewart recalled that time in Little Nemo’s Pa.
“For three years I had worked among artists, being an apprentice wood engraver who made illustrations for books and catalogs. McCay was interested in that. Then too, I knew considerable about color. Most important of all I was acquainted with the work of Merrifield, a really talented artist who made the fronts for the Clark Street museum in Chicago. He was so good that lithographers and other commercial artists would visit the museum on Monday mornings to see what Merrifield had done next in the way of coloring. McCay, in his days in Chicago, had been attracted by the museum -- he was a natural showman himself -- and he had learned much by studying Merrifield’s ideas and his knowledge of color combinations.”
Merrifield provided banners, show-cards, posters and building murals for fairgrounds, side shows, dime museums and circuses throughout the Midwest. He also dabbled in illustration and submitted artwork to the Chicago Exposition. His work appeared in Four O'Clock a Chicago-based "Monthly Magazine of Original Writings," which lasted from 1897 to 1902. Four O'Clock merged with The Philharmonic after Dec 1902 and continued in 1903 as The Muse.
He manufactured his own weather impervious paint, Silko, made from a secret formula that would not crack or rub off of the canvas.
From 1910 Merrifield lived in Brooklyn where he kept a banner-painting studio at Dreamland, Coney Island. Dreamland and its buildings were burnt to the ground in 1911. “Many animals -- lions, tigers, elephants, bears and others in the Ferrari Animal Show -- were burned to death. It was the biggest fire in the history of Coney Island, the loss being several million dollars. Dreamland’s great tower, which was visible for miles out at sea, burned with a roar like that of a volcano, and soon completely collapsed. Fire alarms brought fire-engines and fire-fighting apparatus from all over Brooklyn.” Within two days reconstruction was well on its way.
Side show banner painter Snap Wyatt was apprenticed to Rube Merrifield at Dreamland before opening his own Coney Island shop in 1920. “Before Rube began painting,” he recalled, “which was a long time ago, because he was there with the old Barnum and Bailey shows, the banners were painted in oil and they were pretty drab and stiff. He was a master with the bizarre and unusual, and put color and ad appeal in his painting. Before Rube came along no one thought of using oranges and reds.”
Between 1923 and 1927 Merrifield was busy decorating the buildings at various ‘fetes;’ a Chinese fete in 1922 and a Dutch fete in 1923. He also designed the posters for the events. Seventy carpenters were kept busy “in the construction of the wonderful scenery painted by Rube Merrifield, and in erecting the enclosure, the tents, the booths, etc. There are huge windmills and rows of quaint old Dutch buildings, street scenes and harbor scenes, and fields of tulips, all combining in a riot of color, and all carrying out the distinctive Dutch idea.”
In June 1927 another fete in Long Island was held with a Venice theme. “Two men well known to the residents of the south shore are playing an important role in bringing to Bay Shore this unheard of opportunity. They are Leander G. Homan… and Rube Merrifield, whose magic brush and vivid imagination have time and again made strange and beautiful cities spring up over night. This year Mr. Merrifield is working on the most magnificent and brilliantly colored group of buildings that will overshadow those of early years.”
Rube Merrifield died 13 Apr 1932 in New York leaving behind five children. One of the boys Richard ‘Dick’ Forrester Merrifield worked as an illustrator. Sign painters are rarely remembered to history and its likely that the memory of Merrifield, famous among banner painters and illustrators in his own time, would have been completely forgotten if not for the papers left behind by his first wife Izola Forrester, a pioneering female journalist on the New York World.
*Reuben Merrifield photos HERE
*Thanks to Gene Meier and Peter Hastings Falk, publisher of Who was Who in American Art.
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