Thursday 21st January 2010 - Another Favourite Place

          The phone rang first thing in the morning.  I was in the shower.  How is it people know just how long to let it ring so that when you get to it they've just hung up?  I call back when I'm dressed.  It turns out to be the car rental company.  Apparently Silver's licence is about to expire, and they have to send the new "tags".  They want to know where I am, and can I stay there for seven days?  Well, no, actually.

          When I realise that if I don't do it I'm going to get stopped a lot, I go out of my way to be helpful.  As it happens, I've been promised a bed for the night at the other end of the state on Burns night.  So I get that address, and pass it on.

 

          Then it's off to Martin, to the University library.  It's a fine library, superbly peaceful, but it has very little of interest to me.

          A Glasgow got divorced in 1881, on grounds of desertion.  There is a court summons for the witnesses.  The sheriff, of course, is supposed to serve summonses, but he simply records, in pencil, on the summons itself, that he has deputised the plaintiff to serve it.

          In 1980, a lady in California applied for membership to a society called the "First Families of Weakley County".  British readers will no doubt instinctively see that as a snobbish thing, but it is a quite literal reference to the original settlers.  She wants to prove she is related to the original Glasgow, and provides a lot of research about the family names, when and where they were born and died, their Revolutionary war regiments, and their land patents.

         Since that was all there was, I settled into working my way throught the microfilmed records of the "Dresden Enterprise" for 1927 (I'm guessing that's a special year in the life of Lube Glasgow).  But I don't find anything relevant.  There is quite a lot about the saga of Charles Lindberg's transatlantic flight, with new items dragging it out week after week.  When I'm doing this, I sometimes thing I could happily spend the rest of my life reading old newspapers.

 

          Later that night, the bar had one of those fairground games where you control a little crane to try to lift up soft toys and drop them down a chute.  Now I've always thought they were simply a scam, that it was more-or-less impossible to do.  Imagine, then,  my surprise watching a grown-up lady, with, I have to say, a considerable amount of alcohol concealed about her person, relieve said machine of six toys, in short order, as though it was easy.