Challenges of Frankish Letters Book 5

I could definitely make use of software that is well equipped
to decipher Mr. Frankish’s handwriting. In the meantime, Tanya has been a great
help in deciphering them.
Thanks Tanya!

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Week before the Final….

This was my last week before I take a break for my final exams. I continued to work on the metadata for the collections from the A.K. Smiley Public Library. The items that I uploaded this week mostly consisted of letters, telegrams and receipts. The main subjects that were under discussion through the various formats of written communication were of payments that had to be made to certain parties, negotiation of rates for supply of goods, shipments of goods and water supply for irrigation. I also had the opportunity to photograph and edit a few oversize
items. Using the Hasselblad camera after nearly 6 months was exciting. I
also had the opportunity to look at the new Phase One camera that will
be used henceforth for photographing oversize items. I hope I get an opportunity to work on the Phase One camera after I come back from my finals week.

Your basic needs

Working with the camera can be physically and emotionally
draining. You may wonder what can help to ease the process. Here are a few tips
that may make your trips to the camera room a little easier. First, coffee can
help. Drinking a few cups before the photo shoots may give you anxiety but will
help you stay alert. Second, be prepared to spend a few hours in the camera room.
It will take a few tries before you get that perfect shot. Nothing will ever be
perfect; but after a few hours, you will get close to what you want. Third,
bring power bars as you may need to skip lunch or grab a late one – a very late
one. Finally, bring a friend who actually knows everything about using a
camera.

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Don’t send anyone unless he is very good

Have you ever struggled to fold laundry, vacuum or clean ovens? If yes,
you may have something in common with Mr. Charles Frankish. In 1891, Mr.
Frankish was searching for someone to do household work. Someone who would be
very quick and very clean. In a letter to L. A. Fawn, he wrote, “…Now don’t
send anyone unless he is very good as I won’t pay anything to one who is no
good.” 

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Land, water and money….

This week I continued to work on the collections from the A.K. Smiley Public Library. Since I was working on the metadata, I had read through some of the items in order to form a description. While doing so, I found an interesting item. It was a letter sent between a landowner and James T. Taylor (sometimes also referred to as Jas T. Taylor), one of the investigators who was selected by a board of committee
members to investigate and ascertain the most reliable and at the same
time the cheapest water supply to the City of Perris.
The landowner stated in his letter that he had around 80 acres of land located in the Alessandro district and wanted water supply given by the Bear Valley Water Company at a reasonable price in order to irrigate his land. Since I had never heard of the location, I started to do a little research on the Alessandro district and found out that irrigation in Southern California was begun by Spanish Mission priests in the beginning of the 19th century. The means of construction for irrigation was crude and narrowly limited along with a lack of experience and technology. The developments in advanced irrigation had only begun by around 1870. One of the reasons why the Alessandro district became an attractive location for irrigation was because it was all upon one plain, sloping south toward a basin whose immediate bottom is occupied by a great rugged cluster of granite hills i.e. the plain slopes from the surrounding hills to the base of this interior group in the San Jacinto Valley, making it an ideal place of irrigation.
Considering these facts, I was able to understand why many landowners wanted to irrigate large portions of their land. Because of the requirement of water supply, the Bear Valley Water Company and the Bear Valley Irrigation Company were later established leading to establishments of residents forming a whole mini-economy.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”

While looking for an item to post on the social media page, I discovered an interesting newspaper article from the California Water Documents collection on the building of the ‘Colorado Aqueduct’. The article talks about the speeding of the work related to building of the aqueduct by certain citizen groups and the engineers. The idea of the aqueduct was conceived by William Mulholland but the construction was headed by Frank E. Weymouth, the Metropolitan Water District chief engineer. This aqueduct was one of the largest projects that existed in California during the Great Depression. This project had given employment to more than 10,000 people in a year. It was one of the primary sources of drinking water for Southern California.
While I was doing research on the Colorado Aqueduct, I was directed to the page of the ‘Los Angeles Aqueduct’ that was the basis for the movie ‘Chinatown’ (1974), directed by Roman Polanski. The movie talks about the murder of the chief engineer who refuses to build an aqueduct, which was set on the background of the water wars that existed in California. There were a lot of controversies surrounding the ‘Los Angeles Aqueduct’ as it had completely sabotaged the agricultural land that existed in Owen’s Valley. ‘Chinatown’ (1974) being one of my favorite movies and screenplays, I was highly intrigued on finding an item on similar grounds.

More about scanning

Previously I raved about scanning a book. Most books are
relatively easy to scan. Nevertheless, caution is required as one should not
apply pressure to books in order to flatten them for image capture as it may
break the spine of the book. Still, a
brittle piece of paper needs more
care. The texts may be obscured by persistent folds
which need to be flattened by weights. Items that are oversized need special
attention and may instead need to be photographed. Overall, scanning seems
to be an art in its own right.

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Approval Pending

We regret to inform you, the five people that somehow bother to read any of this, that the publication of this post is delayed until our censor return. Due to the writer/employee/student/prankster’s extremely high level of immaturity, we have to review each submission carefully multiple times to weed out any potentially offensive language and innuendo hidden in various pop culture references and dank memes. As a token of our sincere apology, please click on this message and bask in the vast, white, empty space of nothingness right below the text. (Note: glue paste is provided at the physical location of the library.)