Journey into the Past

Fascinated with family or local history? The Massillon Public Library is the place to come! We’ve been busy with local history questions and have had a great time digging into the past. Massillon natives from the early 1900’s and 1940’s have held the spotlight during the recent weeks. The Reference Department from Stark County District Library called on us for help with researching Robert Scott, a former Massillon Tiger football player who received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Their patron was an author writing a history of Ohio High School Sports and wanted to know if Mr. Scott played football in Massillon. The answer was found in a 1932 yearbook.

A second query came in concerning Massillonian Robert P. Skinner, former Ambassador to Ethiopia and author of several books on the subject. Our patron was a student from Walsh University working on a graduate thesis. We were able to provide assistance by finding information on a Library of Congress microfilm owned by the library.

As you can see, researching people, places and family can be quite fun and interesting. We have a host of resources and programs here at the library ready for your curiosity and fingertips. Massillon City Directories, Washington High School Year Books, the Massillon Business Database, the Obituary Index and The Rotch-Wales Papers make up just a few of our local history resources. Visit our Genealogy page on the library’s website to find numerous links and additional resources. Also, be sure to check out our Calendar of Events for upcoming programs.

A Grab Bag, If You Will

The Massillon Public Library's reference desk has been hopping for the past few months. Yes, hopping. Hopping so much, in fact, that there hasn't been much time for reference blogging. But fear not, loyal reader(s)! We're still here. And to make it up to you, we're going to give you a rundown of all of the interesting and/or bizarre and/or interestingly bizarre questions that have crossed our desk since last fall. And by golly, we have a lot to talk about. You might want to pull up a chair.

• A few days ago, we got the ever-popular "How many people are there in the world?" query. And it was World Bank to the rescue, pointing us to the mind-boggling number of 6,692,030,277 (as of 2008).

• A couple of days later, a patron visited our reference desk and asked us if carrot leaves were safe to eat. Not trusting the USDA's claims of the leaves' safety and remaining skeptical when a handful of cookbooks concurred with these rulings, our patron finally convinced our Head of Reference Services, Sherie, to call the Food Safety Division of the Ohio Department of Agriculture to obtain a triple verification. When they agreed that yes, carrot leaves are indeed safe to eat, our patron left the library with a simple answer and some major peace of mind.

• Did you know that cooked halibut offers your diet more magnesium than a cup of dry roasted almonds? Neither did we, until one of our loyal elderly patrons called and asked for a list of magnesium-rich foods to add to her diet. We pulled up a very helpful chart from the National Institute of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements website and gave her the complete list over the phone. "I'm 86 years old now," she told us, "and maybe adding more magnesium to my diet will help me make it to 87!" We hope so!

• During one of our recent KnowItNow exchanges, a student opened the chat session with a doozy of a question: where is Einstein's brain? And the answer? Much more complicated than one would initially expect. This is because Einstein's brain is... how should we say this? Einstein's brain is no longer one entity. According to various sources, including NPR's "The Long, Strange Journey of Einstein's Brain" and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "Doctor Kept Einstein's Brain in Jar 43 Years," Dr. Thomas Harvey removed Albert Einstein's brain during the famous mathemetician's 1955 autopsy, divided it into 24o pieces, and kept each piece in separate jars throughout his home for 43 years. It was in 1998 when Harvey finally turned over the famous pieces of gray matter to Dr. Elliot Krauss, a pathologist at Princeton University (where Einstein's brain has remained since). Yet another answer to fall into the already jam-packed Jeopardy-worthy category of Who Knew?

• Ever wonder if you had a couple of (hundred?) (thousand?) dollars sitting somewhere unclaimed? Believe it or not, a lot of our patrons do! We've found that referring them to the State of Ohio's Department of Commerce is usually the most helpful way to check on the possibility of unclaimed monies. Their Division of Unclaimed Funds includes an online search form and an exhaustive list of very helpful FAQs. You never know if you don't try, right?

• And lastly, to round out the list, we had another always-entertaining celebrity query cross our path about a month or so ago. One of our patrons approached the reference desk and asked, very simply, "What is a Bennifer?" And, without flinching, we cited a Fox News article that fixated on the celebrity uniname phenomenon, explaining that a "Bennifer" is not a rare animal species. It is, in actuality, the merging of the given names "Ben" and "Jennifer," the most famous example being, of course, the ill-fated union of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Yes, indeed.

We couldn't make this up if we tried, we promise.

You Could Even Say It Glows

It may only be September, but one of our more recent reference questions gave us a hankering for hot chocolate and stop-motion animated TV specials!

On Saturday afternoon, a patron asked us if we could provide her with some information about the history of the popular Christmas song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." After fine-tuning our search strategy within our online catalog, we zeroed in on a book that looked like the perfect resource: Ace Collins' Stories behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas. In it, a small section devoted to the history behind everyone's favorite rosy-nosed ruminant mammal comprises the book's 24th chapter.

Thankfully, the item was checked in on our shelves and we, along with our patron, were able to take a gander at the quality of its contents. We were pleased to find that not only was the book helpfully informative, but it was entertaining to boot! According to Collins' work, Bob May, an advertising copywriter for Montgomery Ward, was the man behind the famous Christmas tune. In 1938, May was struggling to provide for his cancer-stricken wife, Evelyn, and small daughter, Barbara. When his daughter climbed up into his lap one night after visiting Evelyn in the hospital and asked "Why isn't my mommy just like everybody else's mommy?," May was inspired to find a creative way to comfort his daughter and reassure her that being different wasn't always a bad thing.

May used his copywriting magic to create the tale of Rudolph, a reindeer with a large red nose who often felt out of place because of his unique appearance. The story turned out to be a hit with Barbara and its retelling became a nightly ritual within the May family's household, with the plot and characters becoming more elaborate with each evening's recount. Since he was unable to afford an expensive Christmas gift for Barbara that year, May crafted his story into a homemade book for the little girl and presented it to her on Christmas morning in 1938. Barbara was expectedly delighted, and it wasn't long before May's co-workers found out about his heartwarming creation. They encouraged him to share the story at a Montgomery Ward holiday party, which attracted the attention of the head of the company. The generous CEO bought the rights to May's homemade book and had tens of thousands of its copies printed and shipped to Wards stories across the nation just in time for the 1939 holiday season. By 1946, the store had given away six million copies of May's Rudolph, and every major publishing house in the country was clamoring for a chance to print a new version of the story. The rights were given back to May, who had since remarried after Evelyn's passing, and the struggling copywriter experienced a tremendous amount of wealth after the book's mass-market release that year.

Rudolph became an instant best seller, inspiring dozens of toy and product deals shortly after its commercial release. It wasn't long afterwards that May's brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, who had written music for a handful of major recording stars during that time, suggested that the story be turned into a song. After Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, and a few other popular artists passed on the demo that Marks eventually created, Gene Autry, who was looking for a follow-up tune to his earlier Christmas hit, "Here Comes Santa Claus," finally gave the song a chance. At the urging of his wife, Autry recorded the song for Columbia Records in 1949 and the rest, as they say, is history. Gene Autry's version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" became the second best-selling Christmas song of all time, just behind "White Christmas."

In the immortal words of Paul Harvey, now you know the rest of the story!

You Say Crostata di Ricotta, I Say Cheesecake

...and we're back!

We apologize for the delay, loyal readers (all three of you!). What with the furlough we experienced in mid-August and the back-to-school rush that has kept our Reference Department hopping for the last three weeks, we haven't had much time for blogging. But we're back, and we'll continue to provide you with the quirkiest and/or interesting and/or interestingly quirky reference questions our patrons bring to us. We promise.

Today's post comes courtesy of a culinary-inclined gentleman who approached our desk over the weekend. He told us that he needed the recipe for Joyce Goldstein's Italian cheesecake which was, as he explained, available online. Could we track it down for him, he asked?

Track down a cheesecake recipe on the Internet? No problemo, we thought. With sites like Recipezaar, Cooks.com, and AllRecipes reigning over the Interwebs, surely Ms. Goldstein's recipe would be documented somewhere.

But alas, our confident searching slowed to a snail's pace when we discovered that the ingredients for this scrumptious dish were nowhere to be found. Sure, we found references to it on BigOven and BecomingAChef.com. But the recipe itself was never listed.

So we searched. And searched. And searched a little more. We tried different search terms, strategies, and sources, but the elusive cheesecake recipe (which was starting to sound more and more delicious by the second) seemed just beyond our reach.

It was after we began to peruse a course schedule from the Oregon-based In Good Taste Cooking School that we started to sense some progress. Apparently, Ms. Goldstein taught a cooking class called "Italian Slow and Savory" at the In Good Taste Cooking School back in 2004, and guess what was on her menu? You guessed it! Only instead of calling it "Italian cheesecake," it was called crostata di ricotta. No wonder we were coming up empty: we weren't using the right search terms to conduct our research.

Within just a minute or two, we found the recipe -- in its original form! Thanks to the ever-helpful GoogleBooks, we were able to print out the authentic recipe for crostata di ricotta* and even placed a hold on the cookbook in which it originally appeared (Cucina Ebraica, available via SearchOHIO) for the kind gentleman who was so eager to bake this delicious dish.

This reference transaction was a humbling reminder that we're only as effective as our search strategies. Google may seem all-knowing and all-powerful, but yes, it has its limits. That's where your librarian steps in!

So...

...who's in the mood for some cheesecake?

* ETA: While we had no problems accessing the recipe in its entirety over the weekend, Google Books is now only allowing us to view page 189; the ingredients for crostata di ricotta, however, appear on pages 188-189.

We're currently searching for a solution to this problem. In the meantime, if you're interested in ordering Cucina Ebraica, click here!

Awesomely Twangy?

Seems like our patrons just can't get enough of their country music trivia these days! Hot on the heels of last week's Conway Twitty query was a reference question about the good ol' Statler Brothers. But not just the Statler Brothers. No, our patron wanted to know the name of Harold Reid's (the bass singer's) mother.

Right.

Where does one search for this type of information, you ask? That's what we were asking ourselves as we racked our brain for possible resources. Since Harold Reid's mother isn't really considered a celebrity, the likelihood of finding her name in connection to her famous son's band was slim. Perhaps her name would be included in an album's liner notes, but even if Harold wanted to thank his mama for her love and inspiration, it's doubtful that he'd use her first and last name to correspond with his words of gratitude.

Hmm.

After doing a little extra digging, we found that Harold Reid's brother, Don S. Reid, was also a member of the Statler Brothers. (Wonder why the band wasn't called the Reid Brothers?) Both brothers are listed to be in their mid-60s (thanks, IMDB!), so we began to wonder if Mama Reid was still alive. If she wasn't, there was likely an obituary floating around out there that confirmed her first and last name along with her connection to Harold and Don Reid.

Off to Ancestry.com we went. A really helpful feature there is their advanced search of the United States Obituary Collection, where you can conduct searches using a deceased person's survivors' names. Since we knew Harold and Don's names, and since we knew that the Reids were natives of Virginia, we plugged that information into the engine.

Sure enough, after scanning a few pages of search results (ten, to be exact), we found her! Frances Craun Reid Shiflett, aged 92, of Staunton, Virginia (home of Harold and Don Reid) passed away on May 23, 2004. Harold and Don's names are listed in the obituary along with a lovely tribute to their mother's life and family.

(And no, this particular Frances Reid is not to be confused with the Frances Reid of Days of Our Lives!)

Another completed reference question in the books! Please excuse us while we prepare for our next shift at the Reference Desk by reading biographies about Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton.