It was a dark and stormy night. In fact it had been a dark and stormy day. My name’s Craig and I work out of the 99th precinct. But tonight I was on a caper of my own.

It was raining (did I mention it was a dark and stormy night?), So I pulled my trench coat around me and held my fedora low on my head. As the wind howled and the storm stormed, I ducked in to the first genealogy blog I spotted to find shelter. The storm had knocked out some of the neon lights, but the sign appeared to read “f*****Mave*s.” Which I suppose could have several meanings, depending upon how you looked at it. I looked at it and saw “famous Mave’s.” I’d never heard of it, but you know what they say. They say “any blog in a storm;” that’s what they say.

I could immediately tell that this was not just any blog. The place was dazzlingly lit and decorated with thousands of old photographs. It was near closing time so there weren’t many folks hanging about.

I noticed an attractive blonde at one table. On the table in front of her was a long thin clove cigarette – perfectly legal – but I had an investigation to conduct. So I went over pulled out a chair, took off my fedora, leaned across the table and began with one of my favorite investigative techniques.

“So what’s a bad girl like you doing in a nice place like this?”

Sheri, she said her name was. That was what her name was, Sheri.

[Oops! Wrong reel! Rewinding .. . .]

At one table (a a different table than the one I didn’t notice in the wrong reel), I noticed an attractive blonde (a different blonde than the one I wasn’t supposed to notice. In the last reel, you recall). On the table in front of her was a huge stash of cash – perfectly legal I assumed. What it looked like was she was counting the night’s receipts is what it looked like – but I had an investigation to conduct. So I went over pulled out a chair, took off my Fedora, leaned across the table and began with one of my favorite investigative techniques (a different one of my favorite investigative techniques than the one I wasn’t supposed to use. One that was more woman friendly you might say; more politically correct you might say, if you said things like that).

“So you the dame that owns this place?”

“I am,” she said crisply.

“Mave?”

The dame arched her eyebrows, and said, “Brilliant deduction, Lieutenant, but it’s Maven.”

She motioned with her right hand summoning the bartender over. She whispered something in his ear and he left in the direction of the backroom.

“Where is that guy going?” My hand was reaching for my .38 Police Special in my shoulder holster.

“What’s it to you?” the blonde dame said.

“Well I’ve got an investigation to conduct, and I don’t need no trouble.”
“An investigation?” she asked. “Have you got a warrant¹?”

“I don’t need no stinking warrant,” I said using my best professional law enforcement officer voice. “I’m just trying to find somebody. You can help me here or or you can help me downtown; it’s up to you, sister.”

The blonde pulled the cash closer to her looked up and said, “You know what the fourth amendment ² is, don’t you? Or how about the fifth ³ or the sixth ⁴.”

How does she do that I wondered, but did not ask.

“So what about the guy?”

“Well, if you must know – and it seems you must – I sent him to fetch my Nez Perce.”

“You mean your pince nez.”

“No, I meant my –. . . .“  At that moment, the bartender returned with a middle-aged Native American man, who took a seat at the table and folded his arms across his chest. The blonde arched her eyebrows at me again.

She was already wearing glasses. Her hair was up in a bun and she wore high collared collared frock. Attractive for sure, but she reminded me a little bit of a law librarian I once knew.

“Some people have the wrong impression of law librarians.”

I stood up with a start. Had I said something out loud? She continued, “Some of the best parties I’ve ever been to were thrown by law librarians, you know.”

Yes, I did know. Internal Affairs also knew about the Criminal Law Update after-party thrown by the North State Association of Law Librarians after I had been their keynote speaker.

“Sit down, Lieutenant,” she said.

I sat back down. “You said you were looking for someone. Who might that be?”

“I’ll tell you, but first, you tell me how you did that thing. That thing with the numbers appearing behind each sentence you spoke?”

She smiled. “I’m not just any maven⁵,” she said, “I’m footnoteMaven.”

“I’m from Missouri—you’ll have to show me.”

“So am I—from Missouri that is.”

I believed her. She pronounced it correctly—not like some drawn-out homonym of “misery.”

“How’d you know all that stuff about the Constitution?” I asked the Maven.

“I went to law school,”  she said.

“Really? So did I.”

“So who are you looking for?”

“A woman—my sister,” I told her.

“Have you got a photograph of her?”

I handed her the photo I had pulled from my pocket. She studied it awhile. A strange look overtook her.

“Does she sometimes wear glasses?” the Maven asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

The Maven adjusted her glasses. “I think I can help.” She went on to explain that the e photograph ahd been taken on April 22 (birthday of great women, I thought but did not say) year with a particular brand of camera. It had been printed on a particular paper available only in certain years in certain parts of the country. As she spoke, the little superscripts appeared above her head punctuating and sourcing each of her statements.

“Well, all that’s very interesting, Maven, but how does that help me find her?” I asked.

“You said you went to law school, right?” she asked.

“Yes, but . . . “

“Which legal fraternity?”  she pressed.

“Phi Delta Phi,” I replied.

The Maven stood up, undid her hair and took off her glasses. She held her arms out and said, ”Brother!”

ooOoo

Happy Birthday!!

My sister "in Law", a perennially phenomenal and brave woman who sometime wears glasses.

Photo Source: shamelessly stolen from Shades of the Departed, 2008, in contravention of copyright law and even common decency.

Read the rest of this Shades special:

. . . The Albuquerque Journal said that 1000 enumerators were assigned in New Mexico. The Journal printed a list of what it said were the “main questions” to be asked by the enumerators. (Apr 1, 1940, p. 5).

. . . The Gallup Independent reported that the start of census taking was delayed from Monday, April 1 to Tuesday, April 2 “to prevent  practical jokes.”

. . .The Clovis News Journal opined that the  census was  in “trouble” because some people believed that “Uncle Sam is going a little too far when he sets out to discover intimate details of family life.”  But the paper said that most people would cooperate as long as the enumerators “remain courteous.” (Mar 15, 1940,p.2)

The Deming Headlight offered the advice that “Census enumerators learning howl to ask personal questions” could get a lesson from “listening to the little woman who catches hubby coming in at 4 in the morning.” (Mar 22, 1940, p.2).

. . . Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for Gone With the Wind, becoming the first African-American Academy award winner (Feb 29).

. . . Hitler and Mussolini decided to fight Britain and France (Mar 18).

. . . Germany invaded Denmark and Norway (Apr 9).

. . . 198 people were killed in nightclub fire in Natchez, Mississippi.

. . . Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain (May10).

. . .Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a small hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California (May 15).

. . . Auchwitz-Birkenau, an extermination camp opened in occupied Poland (May 20).

. . . The Germans took over Paris (June 14).

. . . The first Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was held in South Dakota (June 16).

. . . Bug Bunny made his first screen appearance in the film A Wild Hare, which was later nominated for an Oscar.

. . .Penicillin was first described as a useful medicine (Aug 28).

. . .Germany began bombing England (Sep 7).

. . . The first-ever peacetime draft registration began in the United States (Oct 16)

. . .Walt Disney’s Fantasia opened and became Disney’s first box office failure (Nov 13).

. . .California opened its first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (now CA 110, the Pasadena Freeway).

So what do Billy the Kid, Smokey Bear, Kit Carson, Microsoft, atomic bombs, and Isabella of Castile have in common?

They each in some way have iconic connections to our 47th state, the Land of Enchantment, which was admitted to the Union on January 6, 1912. And you can learn more about each of them and their place in New Mexico’s rich cultural history during GeneaBlogie’s All-New Mexico Weekend!

And there’s more! We’ll discuss conducting genealogical research in New Mexico and the genealogy of some of the leading figures in New Mexico history, which of course stretches back many, many centuries before Europeans and the first Africans arrived.

Check frequently during the weekend for something different each time.

O, Fair New Mexico, we love you so!

Coming this week at GeneaBlogie!

And I know something about rocket science itself. I was born several years before the Sputnik launch, and was in school after that event as America wrung its collective hands about “why Johnny can’t read” and whether American kids were up to competition with Communist Russian kids.

Then, as a child of the space age, I desired nothing so much as to be an astronaut. Living on a semi-secret atomic weapons base, I was surrounded by scientists, technologists, and engineers. And the aforementioned semi-secret atomic weapons base was adjacent to a large Air Force base, which housed several aeronautical laboratories as well as all sorts of aircraft and pilots to fly them. Between the main gates of the semi-secret atomic weapons base and the large Air Force base on Gibson Boulevard in Southeast Albuquerque, there was the Lovelace Clinic, where astronauts, starting with the first Mercury seven, came for their physical examinations. In our neighborhood, our neighbor across the street was a flight surgeon and his physicist wife, both then in their 30s.

I went to college at a small elite school nestled against the Rocky Mountains, in the shadow of Pike’s Peak. At that school, rocket science was a required course for everyone, even the humanities majors. I had been admitted with freshman honors to a large research university in the upper Midwest, but I chose the small, mountain school because the chances of achieving my occupational goal were, if you’ll excuse the expression, astronomically higher at the Front Range college. And I intended to discover the origins of the universe by visiting every part of it that I could in my lifetime.

Alas, my dream of being a rocket scientist was dashed early on, when at the midterm of my freshman fall semester, I had garnered no better than a “C” in one of my two-required-even-for-English-majors-math courses. (I had a “B” at that point in the other course). One day, my freshman advisor, a math professor, looked at my grades and said “You’ll make the Dean’s List, but man, you ain’t gonna be no rocket scientist at this school!” (With all due respect to rocket scientists, I should point out first, that he was an engineer by profession—probably from Georgia Tech—and, second, that’s not exactly what he said, but the words had the same effect on me.) By the end of the day, I was being welcomed to the political science department. (As a poli sci major, I still had to finish the math program, which was two more courses beyond the freshman two, and I had to take, as did all students, advanced physics, chemistry, aeronautical engineering, mechanical engineering, and astronautical engineering).

After I graduated, I became a I became a missile launch officer and learned a little more about navigation in outer space. Years later, I returned to the faculty of the school as a law professor to teach law to real undergrad rocket science majors. (Law, philosophy, psychology, economics, were required of all, even-for-the-rocket-science majors). At the same time, I was on the adjunct faculty of a well-known Midwestern university where I taught a graduate seminar in “space law and policy” to real rocket scientists, at least one of whom became a famous astronaut. And during this same time period, I served a tour in the office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon in the program nicknamed “Star Wars” (by the press) as special counsel for space law, international law, arms control and treaty compliance. Here I interacted with some of the nation’s greatest rocket scientists.

So, I know a little bit about rocket science.

I also know a little bit about genealogy.

I know enough about each of them to say that genealogy is not rocket science. But that is merely to state a fact, not to denigrate genealogy nor to exalt rocket science. There are similarities, however.

When I was teaching law to undergraduates, mostly majoring in science and engineering, they would complain bitterly at the beginning of the semester about having to take what they called “fuzzy studies.”¹ They claimed that courses like law, philosophy and psychology, lacked the pedagogical discipline and predictable structures of science and engineering. “Where are the equations?” they would lament. “The answers are too ambiguous,” they would object. “The processes are result- oriented,” they would loudly declare. (My favorite joke didn’t help: “Math Professor: What’s 2+2? Law Professor: Whatever my client needs it to be!”)

By the end of the semester, however, I had demonstrated to and convinced them that in the law, there are “equations” which when populated with the same variables produce the same results every time, with scientific regularity. (The trick is, however, the lack of exactness of any two variables in the legal universe. But then again that’s true in the physical universe as well). I had also convinced most of them by the end of the semester, that ambiguity is endemic to science; that without ambiguity there would be no science. They also came to accept that the “answers” in the fuzzy studies frequently were to be had by the same deductive and inductive processes used in science. That imagination and creativity are as important in the sciences as they are in the fuzzy studies. (It’s no mere accident that so-called “fuzzy logic” has played a key role in the 20th century/early 21st century scientific advances).

I don’t think I know any genealogists who are rocket scientists or any rocket scientists who are genealogists. But genealogy is like law and rocket science. All possess accepted conventions, regular processes, universally recognized methodologies, and require disciplined problem-solving. Serendipity mightily figures into all of these practices.

Rocket scientists don’t worry about who is a “professional” rocket scientist or who is a “hobbyist” rocket scientist. Among rocket scientists the term “professional” has less to do with pecuniary remuneration than it does with credibility. This term “professional” is either an adjective or a noun applied to one who displays qualities of “professionalism.” And while among rocket scientists degrees of professionalism may be suggested by credentials, or the lack thereof, that’s all they are–a suggestion, a rebuttable presumption. This same may be said of genealogy.

A rocket scientist becomes well-known by his work, his ethics, and his ability to communicate the essence of his work to the scientific community. The same may be said of genealogists.

Efforts to label genealogists based on credentials, or clientele, or celebrity are almost entirely exclusionary and useless. A reputation in the genealogical community that is based upon recognition of quality of work is the most valuable credential a genealogist may have. Having said that, let me offer some adjectives that are useful in vetting genealogists:
Responsible
Credible
Precise
Reasonable
Careful
Conscientious
Efficient
Accurate
Well-prepared
Respected
Responsive
Thoughtful
Creative

In genealogy and rocket science there is the danger that one can be trapped by formulaic orthodoxy. That is the antithesis of the scientific method and a great way to stifle productive inquiry. It is a form of laziness.

Not everybody can be or wants to be Robert H. Goddard or Werner von Braun. One may be perfectly happy and well-respected without being Elizabeth Shown Mills or Donald Lines Jacobus. The director of the local genealogical society in Chester, Illinois, or Thomaston, Georgia, each may be as “professional” as any FASG.

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a 24 year-old Kansas farmer lacking any college education, discovered the dwarf planet Pluto. Volunteer and non-academics long have been the backbone of research astronomy. They form the considerable of core of workers seeking Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Similarly, volunteers and “no-name” workers comprise the largest part of the genealogical research community. They’re the ones who ferret out obscure local records, lecture for local societies, maintain family and local histories and index world and national records.

I have no bone to pick with the well-known genealogists. They’ve earned their notoriety. But I do think that far too much effort is spent on trying to create an occupational taxonomy for genealogy. Let’s forget about that and accept that the many individual paths to experience and wisdom lead to enlightment for all.

Mrs. Cooper was my fourth grade teacher. I remember her (from the vantage point of a half century past) as an “older” woman with graying hair that probably had been blonde. Of course, as a fourth grader, I had no clue as to her actual age. All I know is that looked older than my mother who was 31 years old as I began fourth grade. She wore glasses which she kept on a chain around her neck. She dressed conservatively. I don’t recall her voice, but she liked to laugh when laughter was called for. Somehow, I associated her with the term “grandmother,” but I’ve subsequently learned that she was not ever a grandmother.

She liked to laugh when laughter was called for.

Here’s what I’ve learned about Mrs Cooper 50 years later:

Theodora Erikson was born in Oscoda Township, Iosco County ¹, Michigan, near the shores of Lake Huron on 22 January 1907 ². She was the seventh of nine children³,⁴ of Charles Severin Erikson (8 Mar 1862-9 Jan 1933)⁵, ⁶ and Natale Erikson (7 Jun 1873-2 Aug 1941)⁷, ⁸, who had come to America from Sweden in the 1880s. Charles Erikson worked in construction for the township road department.

(Mrs Cooper never mentioned her status as a first-generation American, nor anything about her Swedish heritage. How interesting that might have been to our class!)

“Teddy,” as she was called, attended Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti⁹. She was active in the Euclidian Club ¹⁰. This activity would serve her well in her later career. Teddy was also an active member of the Upsilon chapter of Theta Lambda Sigma sorority. ¹¹.

Teddy eventually earned a Lifetime Certificate in Teaching from the Michigan State Normal School¹²(the school is now known as Eastern Michigan University). She taught in several rural and urban communities, including the village of Harrisville in Alcona County, Michigan¹³

She met and married Ray Cooper, a physician, and they took up residence in Albuquerque, New Mexico¹⁴ In Albuquerque, Teddy earned a Bachelors of Science degree in education from the University of New Mexico in 1948 ¹⁵. When she thereafter began teaching for the Albuquerque Public Schools, Mrs Cooper was assigned to the elementary school at the semi-secret atomic weapons installation in southeast Albuquerque¹⁶ known as Sandia Base.

Sandia Base was the follow-on to the Manhattan Project and thus was the nation’s premier nuclear weapons base throughout most of the Cold War¹⁷. At Sandia Base Elementary School, Teddy Cooper taught the children of highly trained military personnel and civilian nuclear scientists. She spent twenty-five years at Sandia Base Elementary School before retiring.

Mrs. Cooper became very popular with her students, her colleagues, and the Sandia Base parents. She frequently teamed with her friend and colleague, Nathalie Harshman, to team-teach various subjects¹⁸ Around the state of New Mexico, she was regarded as an expert in the teaching of arithmetic, and frequently was called upon to attend teacher conferences to demonstrate her techniques¹⁹ She also enjoyed and excelled at the teaching of reading.

(I always thought of her as a reading specialist. My reading skills took a quantum leap forward under Mrs. Cooper’s tutelage and the use of the relatively new SRA Reading Laboratory, which I enjoyed immensely. She read to us and had us read parts of sevreal books, including Winnie the Pooh and Dr. Dolittle. I’ve never seen an adult laugh as hard as Mrs Cooper did watching my classmate Billy Smith do his impression of the Hefalump!)

Teddy Cooper was active in the Association of American University Women and the New Mexico Council of Teachers of Mathematics ²⁰. She founded the Junior Red Cross chapter at Sandia Base Elementary School²¹ She was especially empathic with a great sense of humor.

Mrs. Cooper, the daughter of Swedish immigrants and a transplant to New Mexico from Michigan, taught us Spanish. After a year with her, I had nearly the same fluency as someone of comparable age who had been raised in the language. I was especially pleased that she selected me to play El mal lobo in the class production of Los Tres Cerditos.

On Friday, November 22, 1963, Mrs. Cooper had dismissed our class for lunch. When we returned, most of us had already heard the tragic news and were not surprised to find our fourth grade teacher weeping openly over the murder of the President of the United States ²² The President had visited Sandia Base less than a year earlier and his motorcade had passed down Wyoming Boulevard which ran directly adjacent to the school’s front lawn ²³, Over the next several weeks, Mrs Cooper made special efforts to help her students cope with the emotional depression that had settled like a fog over the entire nation.

Teddy’s husband, Ray, died an early death and she never re-married. They had one child, Foster Cooper ²⁴

Theodora Erikson Cooper died on Sunday, June 4, 2006 ²⁵, ²⁶.
She was 99 years old. She is buried in Oscoda, Michigan.

Special Thanks to the Huron Shores Genealogical Society of Iosco County, Michigan, for their great resources which contributed to this piece!

It was great fun sharing memories with folks and I found one of my sixth grade classmates on that page. I don’t think I ever expected to see or hear from her as I become a “junior” senior citizen.

Well, I, too, was curious about what had become of some of my favorite elementary school teachers. And not being able to leave well enough alone, I undertook, in what my wife calls my “copious spare time” [of course, that is her sarcasm] to find out about these teachers who had helped shape my foundations.

I discovered quite a bit about them, not all of which in some cases was complimentary. But teachers are human beings like the rest of us. This undertaking in looking at the (mainly) women “behind the curtain” helped me to understand much about the way in which I was educated, including the biases (positive and negative) that inhered in that education. It actually heightened my appreciation for what they did.

So I commence here an occasional series about “My Teachers.” But, like all things, these genealogical vignettes have a context of time and place.

From second through sixth grades, I attended Sandia Base Elementary School at the semi-secret atomic weapons base on the southeast edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico. My classmates were the children of highly trained military personnel and civilian scientists, all working in the follow-on phase to the Manhattan Project. Most of our parents couldn’t speak about what they did or where they went to do it.

When my family arrived at Sandia Base in 1961, the historical context was shaped laregly by these ten facts:

1. Just over fifteen years had passed since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the eventual end of World War II. [Think about how the last fifteen years of your life has passed!].

2. A mere fourteen years earlier, the Manhattan Project had been placed in the hands of the military’s Defense Atomic Support Agency at Sandia Base.

3. Nine years earlier, the United States had tested the world’s first “thermonuclear” weapon, with much of the heavy lifting of design and fabrication done at Sandia Base and nearby Los Alamos. [The test itself occurred at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific, with many personnel from Sandia Base present.]

4. Six years earlier, the Soviet Union had tested its own hydrogen bomb.

5. Four years earlier, the Soviet Union had launched and orbited the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, much to the consternation of the United States. There was much hand-wringing about whether our educational system was strong enough to have beaten the Soviets into space.

6. For much of the six years before we arrived at Sandia Base, the topic of racial desegregation of the the schools was at the top of the national agenda. President Eisenhower in 1957 used federal troops to enforce the courts’ orders to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, over the objections of Governor Orville Faubus. Southern states, especially Virginia, had promised a campaign of “Massive Resistance” to school desegregation.

7. The same year we came to Albuquerque, Cold War tensions had been ratched up by the construction of the Berlin Wall.

8. Also, that same year, 1961, the Soviet Union again beat the United Sates in putting the first man into outer space.

9. In 1961, the end of the Civil War and emancipation of slaves were less than a century past distant.

10. New Mexico had not yet marked 50 years as a state; meanwhile, in the preceding three years, two new states had been added to the Union. That meant that some of my teachers had been born when there where just 45 stars on the Flag, and some even before that. All had grown up with a maximum of of 48 states in the Union.

These ten facts and their aftermath in a turbulent decade that followed, shaped the course that my teachers had to steer. I can appreciate that now like never before. And I’m most grateful.

Coming next: My Teachers: Theodora Cooper