It
is 1948. Taking a drag on his African Cameroon wrapped Partagas cigar, Charlie
Samuels was ready to call his only son, John, after a long day at the mines. Or
so he imagined. Mr. Samuels is 89 years old, a sufferer of Dementia living in
Rosemead, California with his wife Marilyn. He had a very fortunate child hood
but also extremely sheltered; his father was one of the few who got lucky during
the California Gold Rush in 1848.
On
January 24th 1848, James Marshall found a few tiny gold nuggets by
the American River near Sacramento. This started one of the largest human
migrations as millions of people all over the world travelled to California
hoping also to achieve this dream. The first notice of this discovery was
printed in the March issue of ‘The Californian’ in San Francisco. Soon other
people found golden nuggets in the Feather River and Trinity River. Quartz
mining began in 1849 in Mariposa County and gold was regularly found in the
quartz veins. In 1850, gold bearing quartz was found at Gold Hill in Grass
Valley. This directed the expansion of the underground mines in that district
and a huge industry that continued for more than 100 years. By 1852, California’s
annual gold production reached $81 million.
Mr.
Samuels lived a happy life until he was diagnosed with Dementia. Dementia is a
syndrome that occurs when the brain is affected by specific diseases and
conditions. Symptoms include memory loss, depression, visual and mental
hallucinations and changes in personality and mood. Mr. Samuels was heavily
affected and having his only son dying in 1940, it certainly has not been any
kinder to him. Since he was diagnosed in 1938 he has almost lost all sense of
reality. One day Mr. Samuels insisted to his wife Marilyn on cleaning the attic.
After spending half the day rummaging through his old coal mining tools he
brought down a pair of denim waist overalls he used to wear everyday on the
mines. Marilyn had not seen Mr. Samuels’s face with such delight since he knew
of his illness. The indigo denim waist overalls were so beautifully dirty and
worn. You could make out one side of the selvedge edge tearing and fraying at
the seam and multiple holes around the knee and ankle areas. While he scurried
down the ladder as fast as he could he tried to unbutton and unzip the overalls,
but his mind could not judge the distance he had between each step and fell
midway. Normally failing to do something as simple as stepping down the ladder
would frustrate Mr. Samuels so much he would curse and hit himself, sometimes even
cry. Marilyn dashed to the hallway and stopped watch to in awe as for the first
time her husband smiled and ignored the fact he just fell and probably twisted
an ankle. He pulled himself up from the banister of the stairs and limped to
his room closing the door. Five minutes later he came out wearing his denim overalls
and his wife has not seen him wear a different pair of trousers since.
Denim
is thought to have originated from the name ‘serge de Nimes’; a twill fabric of
a wool and silk mix produced in the South of France. However, the denim made in
America
in the late eighteenth century was made of cotton. In the early 1870’s a tailor
named Jacob Davis was one day requested to create pair of strong pants for a
woodcutter. Workmen’s trousers at the time wore out and tore very quickly at
the weak stress points. Davis
decided to hammer copper rivets into the corners of all the pockets, hoping to
strengthen them. Eventually these riveted pants were extremely popular, and his
business was being spread by word of mouth to many other workers who were also
in need of stronger trousers. Understanding
that this major success could be easily reproduced by others, Davis contacted Levi Strauss who was at the
time a supplier of dry goods to fund a patent application. He offered a half
share of his invention and in May 1873, the patent was finally granted for an
‘improvement in fastening seams’. This patent
meant that Levi Strauss & Co. was the only company that could produce these
riveted pants between 1873 and 1890 until the patent went into public domain. Soon
the first riveted overalls were being manufactured and sold. There is no exact
date as historical records were lost in the earthquake of 1906. The denim used
for these riveted pants were from the Amoskeag mill in Manchester, New
Hampshire which was known for its high quality of fabrics.
‘Waist
overalls’ was the original name for work trousers because the early pants were
designed to be worn like protective work gear over normal street clothes.
People started to wear them as normal pants and were then just called overalls
after 1900.
What
Marilyn thought was an encouraging moment for her husband turned out to be a
rerun of disheartening visions. This was eventually going to be one of Mr.
Samuel’s first mental hallucinations as the next morning he woke up, lit his
cigar and dialed his son’s number on his rotary dial telephone to rant about
his day at the mines. He had retired from coal mining 15 years ago. Mr. Samuels
would call his son, John, everyday but no matter how much John and Marilyn
explained that he does not work on the mines anymore, he would not listen and
persisted. They never knew whether their father and husband did this
intentionally, to in a way, relive his days when he could function properly
mentally and physically or if it was a result of his Dementia worsening. But
John decided to keep his father content and happy and listened to him talk about
his day mining every day no matter how busy he was in New York.
In
the 1600’s, when the founders of America settled in the eastern seaboard, they
did not expect to find that the land underneath them contained enormous amounts
of coal. In fact, colonial blacksmiths, who were the first users of coal, fired
their furnaces using stone coal and fossil coal imported from Nova Scotia and
England. The first coal miners in America were likely to be farmers who dug the
coal from beds exposed on the surface. In 1748 the first production of coal
began from the mines in Richmond, Virginia. At the time the coal was being used
to construct shell, shot and other war material during the Revolutionary War. By
the 1800s, the Americans discovered even larger amounts of coal beneath their
land and found other ways of using the coal. For example in southwestern
Pennsylvania, the coal was being burned to heat salt brines to provide sources
of salt. The demand for coal was growing stronger and stronger and the steam
shovel was invented in 1839. This transformed the growing coal industry to
mechanized surface mining. In the 1870s, coal demand soared through the roof.
Coke, a product of heating coal, became the chief fuel for iron blast furnaces.
Electric power generation is today’s primary use of coal and can be traced back
to Thomas Edison. He built the first practical coal-fired electric generating
station in 1882 and this supplied electricity to some residents in New York
City.
Some
mornings Mr. Samuels would wake up from dreaming about his day’s coal mining. Just
like today, thinking he really did just come back from work, he would hurry
over to his telephone, ready to call John.
Mr.
Samuels owned a Model 202 Western Electric rotary dial telephone. This was a
gift from John so he could keep in constant contact with his parents when he
moved to New York. It sat on the middle of his oval top wooden stand in the
centre of the sitting area. He was fond of rocking on his chair in space
whenever on the phone; he would like to think that he deserved it since he did
spend the whole day on his feet and knees mining. This phone was introduced in 1930;
it is easily recognized by its oval base. The E1 handset was almost unchanged
with its unique ‘spit cup’ to focus the speaker’s voice into the transmitter.
From
the 1830’s, there was a variety of inventions of dials for sending telegraph
signals. In 1877, construction of the first regular telephone line was completed
from Boston to Massachusetts and by the end of 1880 there almost 48,000
telephones in the United States. The first patented dial telephone was jointly granted
to Connolly and McTighe in 1879 and in 1882, Leroy Firman received the first
patent for a telephone switchboard. There were many competitors, and 26 patents
of push buttons, dials and similar mechanisms to indicate which telephone
subscriber was requested were issued before 1891. Many of the inventions
required extremely expensive, complex mechanisms and involved the dialer to carry
out difficult manipulations.
Taking
another puff from his cigar, Mr. Samuels dialed John’s number. After five
attempts of trying to get through to John, he ignores the fact that John has
indeed not answered and begins his conversation, sometimes speaking as if he is
replying to Johns comment. This of course is disheartening for Marilyn to see,
everyday she would watch her husband repeat these actions. It is out of her
control and every night she prays for the day Mr. Samuels’s syndrome disappears.
Yet, as each day goes on, watching her husband reminds her that it will never
happen. Their son died in 1940, and the tragedy of this deeply worsened Mr. Samuels
Dementia. Eventually suffering from mental hallucinations, for the past six
years his wife has not only been his lifelong partner, but his carer and
protector.
Long before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New
World, natives of Hispaniola in Central America already smoked tobacco for
their religious rituals and for pleasure. While on his journey in 1492,
Columbus’ two crewmen first encountered tobacco when they were presented with
dry leaves that had an unusual aroma. Tobacco was not smoked in the forms of
cigars that we have today, Indians in Cuba twisted the dried tobacco
leaves and wrapped them in either plantain or palm leaves.
Schlottmann, a merchant from Hamburg discovered the cigar
in Spain. He was deeply intrigued and started to produce them in 1788. They did
not sell well initially because pipe-tobacco was much cheaper. In 1809, the
Brockhaus Conversation Lexicon stated, ‘A particular method of smoking tobacco
should be mentioned here, namely the cigarros: these are leaves which are
rolled together to form hollow cylinders of about the thickness of a finger,
are then lit at one end and smoked by inserting the other end in the mouth. This
method of smoking, which is used instead of a pipe in Spanish America, is
beginning to be common in our country; whether it results in an enhanced
enjoyment of the tobacco, or not, is difficult to determine.’ Cigar smoking
gradually spread, it was popular because the amount of preparation was much
easier than a pipe. Eventually only lower class people smoked pipes while
fashion conscious gentlemen dragged on cigars.
Europeans also discovered that cigars travelled better
than tobacco. The cigar eventually arrived in North America in the 17th
century where tobacco had been grown by settlers with enormous amounts of Cuban
tobacco seeds and a selection of Havana cigars. Factories were later set up in
the area of Connecticut to process the tobacco. In the early 19th
century, Cuban cigars were being imported in considerable numbers. But cigar
smoking itself did not become so popular until the time of the Civil War in the
1860s. By the end of the 19th century many individual brands emerged
and the cigar became a status symbol.
Quality cigars are still carefully handmade to this day. Blending
up to 10 different types of tobacco creates the most aspired effect. It takes
three elements to produce a cigar; ‘filler’, ‘binder’ and ‘wrapper’. The maker chooses a reasonable proportion of
filling, forms the shape, rolls a leaf around it and presses it into a mould
made of wood. Another worker takes the pressed roll and gives the cigar its
outer form. The finished cigars are sorted into colors and American producers
have sorters that divide the cigars into wide categories: grey, fawn, blond,
brown and red before being divided into anything up to 180 finely differentiated
colors. Mr. Samuels has only one type of cigar that he smokes; the African
Cameroon wrapped Partagas.
Marilyn was going to see this image of her husband wearing
his old coal mining overalls, rocking on his wooden oak chair, puffing on his
African Cameroon wrapped Partagas cigar and talking to his late son on his
rotary dial telephone.
