September 3, 2020
I’ve written about Google Doodles before. Yesterday – the blog was too full to include this piece – to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first publication of the comic strip Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger, the Google Doodle honored the life of its creator, Jackie Ormes.
The caption for the panel says, “Gosh – Thanks if you're beggin’ for me – but how’s about getting our rich Uncle Sam to put good public schools all over so we can be trained fit for any college?”
In Ginger’s right hand is a fund-raising instruction booklet titled “Negro College Fund” and falling to the floor are cards that say “Pledge.” The United Negro College Fund started four years earlier to help finance such private schools as Tuskegee and Howard universities.
Jackie was born Zelda Mavin Jackson, and was brought up in Monongahela, Pennsylvania. It was there that she learned to draw and got her first start at professional cartooning through caricatures in the Monongahela High School yearbook.
After a few years of working at respected Black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, in 1937 Jackie Ormes was given the chance to have her own comic strip published. This became Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem – the first nationally-published comic created by a Black woman – which balanced humor with the harsh realities faced by those moving north to escape racism.
Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger ran from 1945 to 1956, and inspired a run of Patty-Jo dolls, styled after the comic’s younger main character. These Patty-Jo dolls – manufactured by a company called Terri Lee – were groundbreaking as the first Black dolls in America with high-quality clothes.
eBay had one original Patty-Jo when I wrote this. She sold for $599.00 plus shipping.
👉 Back to Jonathan Street. Jonathan Street in Hagerstown gets few mentions in Maryland history books, but as early as the 1790s, the area was home to a mix of free and enslaved Black people living side by side. They built churches like the Second Christian Church and Ebenezer A.M.E., which began in a log cabin and later was used as a hospital for Union soldiers during the Civil War.
As was typical in the decades of segregation, there was the bowling alley where an attendant reset the pins by hand. Black residents would not have been allowed inside Hagerstown’s all-white bowling alleys. Walter Harmon, one of the most well-known and wealthiest African American men living in Hagerstown at the turn of the 19th century, built his own bowling alley – on Jonathan Street – where blacks were welcome.
Given the unfortunate reality of racialized violence in America, black motorists needed to find out what places would be tolerant of them. In 1936, New York City mail carrier, Victor Hugo Green, created The Negro Motorist Green Book, commonly called the Green Book. In its foundational years, The Green Book provided a small number of locations in New York, and over time it grew into a resource containing over 1000 locations in most of North America including Maryland.
The Green Book was created as a guide by and for African Americans to safely find everyday amenities like restaurants, stores, pharmacies, and motels in a time of intense segregation across America. The Green Book listed over 100 welcoming sites in 26 towns across Maryland.
Two locations in Hagerstown are known to have been listed in the Green Book: the Ship Tea Room at 329 N. Jonathan Street and The Harmon Hotel at 226 N. Jonathan Street.
Walter Harmon died while in his 40s but his widow, Florence Key Harmon carried on the family business, including operating the Hotel for the next 40 years, including the years it was listed in the Green Book.
During Florence’s leadership, Harmon Hotel arguably hosted it’s most famous Green Book traveler in 1951. Baseball great, Willie Mays, known for his iconic leaping catches in the outfield and his strong-and-steady presence at bat, stayed at the Harmon Hotel while playing for the Trenton Giants, a New York Giants farm team. The game was against the Hagerstown Braves (The Hagerstown Braves were a powerhouse Class B farm club of the Boston/Milwaukee Braves during the early 1950’s. The club posted four straight winning seasons, won two pennants and one playoff championship.).
👉 Let’s do another Etch-a-Sketch incredible drawing, look at the original and then some parodies. Today is American Gothic, painted in 1930 by Grant Wood. It depicts a farmer standing beside his daughter – often mistakenly assumed to be his wife. The figures were modeled by Wood’s sister Nan Wood Graham and their dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby.
The setting for the painting, the Dibble House, is in Eldon Iowa.
The next time you are there, you can pose for your own “American Gothic.”
And now some parodies.
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| American Gothic Selfie |
Tomorrow – on Etch-a-Sketch, the original, and in parody – the most recognized painting in the world.
👉 Today’s closing is by Paul David Tripp.
I was in Northern India, in one of the high, holy cities of Hinduism. It was my first time ministering there, so I was on a four-day introduction tour of Hinduism. We had entered a temple that held the most horrific idol I had ever seen. It was one of the darkest spiritual scenes I had ever seen. The scene was so spiritually oppressive that all I wanted to do was get out of the building.
I kept saying to myself, “I thank God I’m not like these people.” Then it hit me – I am! No, my idols aren’t the dark idols of formal religion; they’re the subtle idols of my everyday world. They’re things that claim the place in my heart that only God should have. At that moment, I cried out for the rescue that only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ could provide.
Worship is not something we do only in formal religious settings once a week. Everything we do is the product of worship. All of this takes place in the little moments of our lives, and for that we need moment-by-moment grace. That’s why John counsels us to keep ourselves from idols (1 John 5:21). There is no greater argument for our need for grace than the ease with which our hearts fall under the rule of things other than God. But that grace is ours for the taking.
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Your comments on discrimination in the 40's and 50's are something that people like me in their 70's witnessed and were thought of as normal in those times. I'm glad that "normal" has changed because it was a great disservice to black Americans. You had to live it to understand it.
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