One Year Later

On Monday May 23, 2011 my day began as usual.  I started up the coffee maker and fired up the laptop.  Everything went wrong that day as soon as I saw an e-mail from my sister.  Its subject line was “CALL ME EMERGENCY” and had no further information.

My first thought was that something was wrong with my grandfather, who at the time was ninety-four, and that Rachel had been delegated to tell me the news.  My phone was off, and I immediately started searching for it.  Once I had it, I saw I had a text message from Rachel repeating “CALL ME EMERGENCY,” even though she knows I’m not a text-er.  I also had several missed calls and a voicemail from my mom.  Before calling Rachel, I listened to the voicemail, which said the problem was with Rachel.  One week before Rachel had a tongue biopsy and had since been in agony.  My heart sunk even further.  I suspected then.

Still, I wanted to get the information from Rachel herself so I called.  “I have cancer,” she said.

From there, the world quickly began to fall apart.  The “cancer journey” worsened at every turn, a chronicle I do not wish to outline on this blog.

Rachel Pauline Kahan passed away on April 27th, 2012.

A biblio blog at heart, I love to write about books and hope to continue doing so shortly.  However, this post is about someone I love, and how misinformation and ignorance killed her.  Until May 23, 2011 happened, no one who knew about Rachel’s tongue issue equated the cut on her tongue with possible cancer.  Not even her idiot dentist suspected, as he watched Rachel’s tongue situation progress for four months.

Misconceptions about oral cancer followed this terrible diagnosis.  Several well meaning people rushed to calm me, telling me how easily treatable this cancer is.  Some reacted in initial shock to the word cancer, only to tell me it didn’t really count if it was only on her tongue.  One person called to ask if Rachel was a smoker (no), which I of course roughly translate to, “please tell me a reason your sister deserves cancer so I can write this off and go about my life as usual, thanks.”  Some people who insisted that this was an “easy” or “not so bad” cancer deny ever having said that, and most have probably entirely forgotten these conversations.  The misinformation surrounding this disease is far more important than who said what when.  Other “facts” I heard include that oral cancer doesn’t metastasize around the body (WRONG!) and that it has a universally very high survival rate.

Sometime in the future, there will be a steep learning curve regarding this disease.  It may become more common knowledge that a non-healing cut or sore on the tongue could be cancer.  Perhaps people will begin to learn that oral cancer isn’t just an “old smoker’s” disease, but that a perfectly healthy twenty-five year old can have it too.  Someday, the medical profession may even begin to get a better handle on this disease, which they certainly don’t have now.  My big sister fell on the wrong side of all of these learning curves.

So now it is May 23, 2012, one year later.  Rachel has been dead for nearly one month, and I desperately miss her.  She suffered terribly, and nothing will ever make this okay.

I’m ending this post with transcripts of the eulogies I delivered and a picture of Rachel and me as I remember us, before the illness in August 2010.

May 2nd eulogy at formal funeral in Michigan:  RP

May 14th eulogy at less-formal life celebration in Washington, D.C.:  RP DC

Rachel Pauline Kahan:  July 13, 1985 – April 27, 2012.

Recycled Cover Art, Round Two!

Why design new cover art during a Great Depression when one can simply recycle?  My favorite middlebrow mid-century publisher seems to have used this technique often.  I will now emulate this virtuous notion of hasty production by writing a blog post which doesn’t necessitate 200-300 pages of reading.  Time is money, people!

In the set pictured above, the green dust jacket to the left is the original.  Love’s Ecstasy by May Christie was first published in 1928.  The Skrenda art work was then re-used for the 1934 second printing of With Banners by Emilie Loring.  Even the skyscrapers along the spine are identical, although not visible in the above picture.  With Banners was originally published by Penn, although G and D frequently reprinted Loring’s work as copyright fiction.

With Banners actually has three cover designs that I know of:  this one, the Penn original, and a later G and D production.  So a new design was eventually commissioned, but not before the recycled Skrenda gal made her re-appearance.

Hopefully another vintage read will be making its way to thegoodbadbook shortly.  In addition to everything else, I seem to have drifted onto the Hunger Games bandwagon.  These things happen sometimes.

Leap Year Bride

Happy Leap Day, everyone!  Since I feel a book about a leap year should be read on a leap year, I could either have read Leap Year Bride now or not have had another chance until 2016.  Published in 1932, this book is only twenty years old, if we pretend it was published on February 29th.  So here it is, Leap Year Bride by Laura Lou Brookman.

The “plot” of this novel starts with a leap year tradition of “leap year proposal” wherein a woman asks a man to marry her and if he loves her, he can’t refuse.  Cherry asks Dan to marry her and they immediately elope.  Cherry, our protagonist, is a wealthy society girl who is more or less disowned when she elopes with Dan, a newspaper reporter.  This story revolves around their first six months or so of marriage.

This story also revolves around Cherry’s sense of fashion and how it (d)evolves over the course of her marrying a man without means.  After her elopement, she buys a new outfit and then has buyer’s remorse.  Her dresses get ruined from house-cleaning and she is often seen by former acquaintances wearing last season’s outfits.  She wears a panama hat well into September, but then finally learns to sew, and thus becomes cool again.  Unfortunately, she starts this journey in an unfortunate sounding monochromatic beige outfit.  And oddly enough, I think Cherry and I may have an outfit in common: an entirely white tennis frock (from the 1930s!) “with tiny sleeves and a full skirt.”

Returning to the “plot” of this story, Cherry learns to cook and clean, while Dan is a big jerk about it all.  He doesn’t appreciate her work, or acknowledge Cherry’s continual isolation from the outside world.  Even in the “happy” ending, this is never quite resolved.

Dan writes stories for a newspaper but aspires to write the next great American novel.  He goes about this task by cheating on Cherry with a classic romance novel villainess:  alluring to men, manipulative, and ugly in daylight.  This creates a tangible problem for our main characters to work out and fix hastily in about the last twenty-five pages of the book.

The other quick-fix shady character is Max, Dan’s somewhat sketchy friend.  Dan tells Cherry, “Max doesn’t care much for most girls.  Never goes around with them.”  I read this one way, and then the story went another.  Who knew Max would go for Cherry after that introduction?  Max inappropriately hits on Cherry, so a formulaic plot device offers Max a job which he accepts in the book’s final chapter.

So Happy Leap Day, and don’t do anything rash such as storm out of your parents’ mansion to marry a newspaper reporter.

Heart Throbs

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I present the super-scholarly Heart Throbs magazine.  This is the issue from March 13, 1928, but has a very February feel to it.  My guess is this issue hit the newsstand around Valentine’s Day in 1928.

Adorning the cover is Clara Bow, a.k.a The It Girl.  She was a huge star of the silent era, and everyone should see at least one silent film starring her.  She alone makes this magazine worthwhile.

Unfortunately, Clara is about all I can see in this magazine.  Purchased from a bargain bin at a pulp and paperback show, Heart Throbs is in really rough shape.  It currently lives in a magazine bag on my bookshelf, and more or less disintegrates to the touch.  Published over eighty years ago, Heart Throbs was not supposed to be a masterpiece for the ages.  The cheap pulp paper is just too brittle.

Well, that’s about as much Valentine’s cheer as I can muster this year.  Truthfully, I wasn’t expecting anything this Valentine’s Day, so my expectations have already been exceeded.  I’ve been sent two vintage Valentines AND a care package full of candy.  To my Valentine senders, thank you.  This post is for you guys.  <3

Last Semester

My mom gave me Last Semester as a present two years ago during my last semester at Cornell.  An Etsy find, this semi-gag gift is a fun one.  It may have taken me two years to read this, but seeing as how this is another “last semester” for me, I couldn’t resist!

Phyllis Crawford wrote Last Semester, published in 1942.  The back of the dust jacket has a letter from the author, urging the “Girls of America” to purchase U.S. War Savings Stamps.  “In peace time a girl sometimes needs a soda, a movie or a wad of gum to keep up her spirits…Ten years from now you wouldn’t even remember if you didn’t have that soda and wore the same old dress to the dance Saturday night.”  Actually I still do remember the hand-me-down dresses that never quite fit during some of the more awkward years, but that is besides the point.

Last Semester is set at Langhorne-Evans, a small all-girls liberal arts college.  The end papers are illustrated as a map of the school, and there is a statement on the rear flap of the dust jacket that Miss Crawford spent two years researching contemporary collegiate life.  It is that level of research and detail which makes Last Semester such a gem.  I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the dating parlor and curfew bells.

Our protagonist is Janey Lou Cates, or J.L. for short.  She’s generally very happy to be at Langhorne-Evans, and doesn’t take herself too seriously.  Janey Lou lives in the moment, enjoying the company her lively dorm presents, and is always involved in the latest passing activity.  The underclassmen take up perhaps too much of her time.  She’s clumsy.  She has a “magnificent” orange cat named Augustus.  It’s no wonder my mom bought me this novel.

Unfortunately, Janey Lou has always had a problem with grades, and she’s in zero formal extra-curricular activities.  She can probably recite the academic probation policies of Langhorne-Evans all too well.  After seven semesters of coasting, she’s faced with the abrupt reality that she might not graduate.  This book is about Janey Lou securing her degree no matter what.

Langhorne-Evans is a small college with strong spirit.  The “even” and “odd” graduating years are always at war, pranking each other.  Janey Lou helps the sophomores with “even day,” where they decorate the entire college with a theme for a day, and she also helps write the senior class graduation song. There are also the silly activities, such as the day Janey Lou and a friend dress up as two old ladies and parade around introducing themselves as Miss Spitch and Mrs. Eaple to everyone they come across.

It is Janey Lou’s idea which becomes the senior gift, although a letter may have been forged in the school paper that she didn’t actually write.  The school president actually listens to her ideas, has a dialogue with Janey Lou about her suggestions, and generally appears and interacts with the students several times throughout the book.  This is foreign to me.  My last semester, I wrote to the president of my university about the prison fences that were being installed all around campus.  As a friend sarcastically said, “yeah, I’m sure the university president carefully read your letter and took your opinion into serious consideration.”

Oh, and Janey Lou just happens to have a job fall into her lap on the last page of the book.  She graduates of course.

Last Semester is an undergraduate novel at heart.  Reading it two years after the fact at the beginning of another “last” semester is quite the trip.  Of course, this last semester is very different from my last-last semester.  Last-last semester I technically could have graduated early, and was in it for the experience.  I took two freshman-level electives, and two deeply interesting upper level and graduate level courses in my major areas of study.  I actually had some time to enjoy that semester.

This last semester is different.  If I could trade in my current worries for mere bad grades, I’d do so in a heartbeat and never look back.  But I can’t.  Doesn’t work that way.  The challenges facing my family this last semester are too great to sum up in a paragraph.  Like J.L., this last semester is about graduating no matter what, because that is what someone very important to me has requested I do.  And so, it is what I now aim to accomplish.

One Girl Found

Finally!  Here it is, the book that may have taken me longer to read than it did for Mr. Andrews to write.  I wonder if he too got caught on chapter eighteen for four months.  Somehow I doubt it.

But no matter, here it is, the first review on a vintage read in months.  As promised, up for discussion is Robert D. Andrews’ One Girl Found, published in 1930.

The Mach Tey cover art best exemplifies the principle of the sequel.  It’s okay on its own, but quickly fades in comparison to the original Three Girls Lost cover.  Also, for the longest time I thought the cover depicted two people in a convertible and it took me two hundred thirty-nine pages to figure out this is actually a boat chase being illustrated.  What I did pick up right away was Marcia the protagonist’s dark hair, which is not in any away accurate to both books’ tendency to ramble on about how blonde Marcia is.

Set a year after the end of Three Girls Lost, One Girl Found picks up shortly before Marcia loses all her money in a scam.  While the original book sparkled with new adventure for three girls, the sequel instead starts with the sociopath of the group hitting bottom.  Following that is a description of how she slowly runs out of any money and starves, unable to find work.  She then asks a rich man out to dinner for a meal and he doesn’t realize his date is starving.  Instead of feeding her, this man buys champagne and insists on dancing.  Marcia faints, and it is revealed that she can no longer afford to feed herself.

That’s great and all, except it’s been done before, or later, or both.  That entire set up, including the date fainting, is identical to the one towards the end of No Such Girl.  I suspect a cliché here.

Recovering from a scam that just rocked her world, Marcia immediately dives into getting involved with a Chicago gangster’s shady business venture of starting an over-priced school for models.  She continues to associate with an older rich man from the end of The Girls Lost as well as the sketchy “stock broker” who is obviously bad news.  All the while her inner monologue rambles about hating men and how to get even.  Then she meets Jerry, who is a complete fumbling idiot in one chapter and then suddenly a suave, rich cowboy with a boat a bit later on.

The school for models is in a haunted house or something, with strange noises and a machine gun lying around.  One of the women working for the school disappears while spending the night in the house.  Immediately following this, Marcia moves into the house, because this is obviously a good idea.  The flawless plan works out so that gangsters are smuggling drugs from within the walls of the house in the middle of the night, and Marcia decides to remove her shoes before running out after them.  At this point, Jerry has staked out the place with his older cowboy dad, who is there to turn what transpires into a western chase scene.

Surprise surprise, Marcia ends up marrying the cowboy instead of the awkward older rich man who has been funding all her adventures up to this point.  The older man is a “good loser,” and Marcia’s abducted co-worker is recovered.  Noreen and Gordon from Three Girls Lost are expecting a baby, Marcia has ended up with a cowboy, and nobody knows what has happened to Edna, as she wasn’t even mentioned in the sequel.

Three Girls Lost

One of my favorite vintage romance plot lines I collect is, “small town girl moves to big city.”  I prefer my novels to have a heroine who moves to a big city to pursue a career such as dancer, artist, or actress, but this is not always the case.  Sometimes I simply have to “settle” for three heroines moving from a small town to a big city who all just happen to be on the same plane even though they are arriving from Oregon, South Dakota, and Nebraska.

This is the premise of Three Girls Lost by Robert D. Andrews, published in 1930 first as a serial in The Chicago Daily News and then in book form by Grosset and Dunlap as a “Sparkling Romance of the Modern Girl.”  In addition to a spectacular 1930s storyline, this book has great Mach Tey cover art.  Mach Tey did a bunch of Grosset and Dunlap dust jackets around this period, of which Three Girls Lost is one of my favorites.  The scene of the three girls walking is taken from chapter two of the book, and translates excellently.  I love how bright and bold the cover is, but I do not love that someone wrote on my copy in marker.  I’d like to have words with whoever did that.

Anyway, so our story starts with the three girls on the plane and quickly moves on to the three of them living together in downtown Chicago.  This book can be interpreted as “three girls come to the big city and find romance and adventure awaiting them” or as a 284 page novel about the trouble with roommates.  Noreen appears to be the normal roommate, who quickly finds a steady job and has to deal with the other two’s shenanigans.  Edna sneers a lot, is nasty, and actively seeks trouble.  Marcia is compared to a small child, briefly fascinated with the newest and shiniest toy, with little concern for others.

The main action of the novel starts when the mob boss who is “very nice” to Marcia is mysteriously murdered.  Marica lets her neighbor, actor Gordon Wales, take the fall.  Noreen loves Gordon and sets about to prove his innocence.  This leads her and Marica to a showdown with the mob boss’ wife, Ellie Parsons, who wishes to frame Noreen and Marica for something or other.  Basically, this is only important for the hilarity factor, as Ellie Parsons does what no fictional villain should do:  spends a lot of time boasting and revealing her plot.  She even gets an exit line, “And remember nobody ever two-timed Ellie Parsons and got away with it,” before being promptly tackled by the police.

Edna is still brewing up trouble with a moustached foreign guy, so naturally she is stalked and kidnapped.  Marcia is off at a fashionable club-hotel at this point.  Noreen teams up with Gordon Wales to find her.  Up until this point, Gordon has been rather doofy.  However, for this part of the book he suddenly is ready for action, and violence.  We know this because he has popped his collar and is wearing a slouch hat.

At the end of the story, Edna goes home to the country, as Chicago has defeated her.  Noreen and Gordon awkwardly become a thing when after sitting in uncomfortable silence, Gordon puts his arm around her on a bus.  Marcia carries on doing whatever exactly it is she does.

Up next:  the sequel, One Girl Found.