Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Theodore and Jennie Hoss

Printed: T.R. Williams, Centralia, Wash.

I have been told this is a photo of my great-grandparents, Theodore and Jennie (Reeves) Hoss, on their wedding day, Feb. 20, 1890.

Theodore Jacob Hoss was born in Wisconsin in 1863. Part of his childhood was spent in Nebraska. The Hoss family arrived in Washington Territory in the mid-1870s.

Theodore and Jennie were a power couple. She "became the leader in every group she joined," according to one family member. The Red Cross and the GAR were two groups where she was active, and she was indeed the State Chair of the GAR for a year.

He was a progressive Democrat who was a frequent candidate in a conservative Republican county. Occasionally he'd get elected to a city or county office. His runs for the legislature were not successful.

How radical was he? As the Democratic nominee for US Congress in 1918 he stood for equal wages for equal work for men and women. That was pretty radical.

But he was also a successful businessman and had a role in starting Centralia's first electric utility and streetcar line. Theodore died in 1947.


Theodore and Jennie are buried in Centralia's Pioneer Cemetery

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Morty Comix # 2488


We had our family holiday gift exchange a couple days before Christmas. Susan gave me a potato gun with two spuds to use as ammo.



It does NOT shoot up to 50 feet, as we shall see. However, I am looking forward to years of service. We'll get back to this gift in a bit, but let's move on to ...

... a somewhat revolting present from Bryan and Zach. These dismembered plastic monkey parts are in a bag. And as if that wasn't creepy enough, the monkey's eyes on the severed monkey head BLINK!
 
Stay with me now. All will be be revealed by the end. I made a grid with 50 little squares on a sheet of cardboard.

Then I arranged the disgusting monkey parts on a TV tray. 

The grid was placed under and behind the tray.

I shot several potato pellets at the monkey parts, which were precariously balanced at the edge of the tray. Although the little spud bullets hit the targets, they lack the required velocity to knock them to the floor. So when the label declared "Shoots Harmless Potato Pellets," they meant it.

So it was time to haul out a more advanced technology to achieve my goal. I went to the toybox and extracted the gyroscope.

 You can tell the monkey's expression is politely apprehensive at this juncture.

 I let the gyroscope rip

It did not fail me as it knocked over two revolting monkey parts. A foot landed on numbers 27, 28, and 32.

Now it was time for the next phase, but I knew the potato gun would not be able to do the job. Mr. Spud himself told me this was all a half-baked idea anyway, and he took his leave. But I thanked him for helping me with the initial parts of this project.

  
So I made a much simpler grid, narrowing the field to three.

And this time I brought out the heavy artillery,  foam darts!
 
It took a few tries, but in less than 3 minutes I knocked a repulsive monkey hand into the grid. It landed on number 32.
 
32. That means Minnesota, the 32nd state, admitted to the Union in 1858. I've been over Minnesota in a passenger airline but have never set foot there, but hopefully someday I'll be able to pay a visit.

None of my ancestors parked there on their way West in the pioneer era (but a few were next door in Wisconsin in the 1850s-1860s).

Minnesota has a great tradition of creative comic art, was one of the hotspots in the Newave era, and today remains a prominent place for our brand of comix. Meeting Matt Feazell at SPACE 2011 was a real honor and even though he now lives in Michigan, I nominate him for Minnesota's Cartoonist Laureate for his amazing past contributions.

 Anyway, I rolled the dice the for the next step. As you can see, the number was 7. That's lucky!

And the 7th largest city in Minnesota is Plymouth. I consulted a map of that city and decided to just pick a street name I liked, and Cheshire was my choice. A co-worker calls me the Cheshire Cat and I admire that character.

So I randomly selected an address on that street, which turns out to be home to a business enterprise. I'm mailing it tomorrow morning. This issue of Morty Comix will probably be tossed in the trash or recycling, but I hope you readers enjoyed the narrative. Actually, in many ways, these blogposts are the real Morty Comix, the hardcopy product is residue.

Obscuro comix in action!