Monday, August 21, 2006

A 1904 Diary, "Holy Cats!", and The Radium Dance

[many pages have small drawings at the bottom]

[Willy was an amateur photographer, pasting small portraits on many pages of the journal]

While reading the Something Awful forums, I came upon this thread. "Chaoskitty" collects old, abandoned journals and photographs on Ebay. She has begun scanning and posting pages from a 1904 diary written by William L. "Willy" Tuttle, an eighteen-year-old railroad worker in Boston. Response to the SA thread was so positive that she began a blog about the diary and other historical ephermera that she collects: Holy Cats! takes its name from one of Willy's pet expressions.

The thread itself is worth looking at, as other contributors supply music clips of Dance Hall music referenced in the diary, and unearth census records that give a glimpse of what happened to Willy in the years after the diary. I was driven to locate a collection of Scot Joplin songs as a result of reading this...Posted by Picasa


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