When I was consolidating containers on Sunday, in one of them were a few books that had been passed to me from my folks. One of those items was a book that had been passed to them from my dad’s aunt, Ruth Welton.

It was a nice old hardbound volume, so I picked it up and scanned it over to see what it was.

It was a daily poem reader, arranged with one or two poems selected for reading on each day of the year.

I thought, hey, I should read this, so I took the book in the house and placed it on the kitchen table for additional study later.

Last night I saw the book and remembered I was going to use it, so I took it into my bedroom to put on the night table by my bed. Before I turned off the light, I picked it up. I might as well see what poem(s) were on the slate for the date.

It was nice, opening the book to the first page, to find this:

Wow.

The book was given to Aunt Ruth in 1936, in the year it was published.

81 years ago.

I asked my Dad when Ruth had been born, and after some brief research, he found an award she received in 1910, when she had finished 4th grade. This meant Aunt Ruth had been born near the turn of the century, in 1900 or 1901- and so she received the book when she was in her mid-thirties.

Doing some research, I found that…

In 1936, the automatic electric blanket with a thermostat was created.

The U.S. was still in the throes of the Great Depression.

Jesse Owens won his 4 gold medals at the Olympic Games in Berlin.

The Hindenberg took its maiden flight.

The Spanish Civil War began, and China and Japan also went to war.

FDR was elected to his second term.

And the first suntan lotion was manufactured and sold, because paleness was going out of style.

That was a while ago.

I then did a flip through the book pages to see if there was anything else in the book, like a bookmark, or handwritten notes, or maybe an old gum wrapper.

It turns out there WAS something in the pages…

There was a 5 franc bill from the Bank of Algiers, dated 1941.

Money from Algeria in 1941.

At that time, Algeria was still a territory of France, except in 1941, France was a territory of Germany. The artist who did the bill was a popular French engraver named Emile Deloche who produced bills not only for his native country, but also for nine of its territories.

The Vichy government in France had a short tenure of civil authority over the country (1940-1944) after it was occupied by Germany at the start of World War II. When Germany moved in, they only wanted to use the north part of the country, really, to further their war interests, which was predominantly to take down Britain. France’s civil capital was therefore moved south from Paris to Vichy during this period, where it gave the French a sense of autonomy and continuity despite hosting occupying forces.

It’d be nice to know the story of how my aunt ended up with a piece of money that was produced by the Vichy French in her bedside poetry reader.

It would be an interesting story indeed.

—

The poem for today, May 23rd.