Here is a tribute to the humble scrapbooker. My wife and I don't know for sure where this scrapbook came from, but it was from her family, for sure. It is an imposing book, 15 inches tall and 12 inches wide, and around 3 inches thick. Our best guess is that the book came from her maternal grandmother's parents, her great grandparents. We haven't given up hope, and may yet positively identify the source.
For decades, my wife's family kept minor matchbook collections, and we have a couple of jars full. Also in her family, and lost to the turmoil of people moving around, was a small wall display, with horizontal slats, which could display matchbooks by folding them around the slat and closing the cover as usual. Why did this family think collecting matchbooks was neat? This scrapbook may hold the answer.
My wife found this book in a box of old things in our garage, and her first instinct was to get rid of it, because the book is quite large. Not the kind of thing to keep when you are trying to downsize. I suggested instead scanning the book so we would not lose the content, and deal with the physical book later.
The collection in the book clearly dates from the 1930's. There are matchbook covers from the expositions in San Diego (1935) and San Francisco (1939), and even Chicago (1933). And the Washington Bi-centennial in Mount Vernon, 1732-1932. Whoever collected the matchbooks traveled a lot. And I suspect someone who was very meticulous salvaged the matchbook covers and pasted them into this scrapbook.
A note about composition: The covers were pasted vertically in the book in the same manner you see on the Web page, and I tried hard to preserve the original orientation as well. Each subject heading represents one of the 90 pages in the book, although the original scrapbook had no writing in it at all. Some of the pages in the book have blank spaces, but everything is kept on a grid to make room for later additions. The Web page skips any blank space and runs everything together. In the end I am happy with the Web page as a reasonable representation of the scrap book.
My initial guess was that someone in the family was a traveling salesman or something, and that the matchbooks were brought home to a dedicated scrapbooker who kept the home fires burning, and who pasted the covers into the scrapbook as a hobby. But there's no real data to support this origin story.
To try to solve the mystery of where the scrapbook of matchbook covers came from, I decided to consult ancestry.com, starting with my wife's grandmother, Dorothye Brockelmann. Born Dorothy Hayward in 1905, she was part of a landed family in Orange County, California. And we knew she had two sisters, Mary Louise (1908) and Lucile (1909).
Dorothy was married twice, the first marriage producing a daughter, Janice Cole, my wife's mother. When that fell apart and she was married a second time, she changed the spelling of her first name to Dorothye. Mary Louise married a fellow named French, and lived happily ever after. Lucile was also married twice, the second time to a man named James Decker, but it was the first marriage that was interesting. From about 1932 until 1935 she was married to Fred Northrop Burlew.
Fred was apparently quite a catch. Ancestry just lights up with clues as to things he did as a young man. Passenger manifests show he took a boat trip to Oahu in around 1927. He went to Stanford, class of 1931, studying geology and mine engineering. He played alto clarinet in the Stanford Military Band. And he apparently was also a pilot, and a second lieutenant in the Volunteer Marine Corps Reserve. In August 1932 he participated in an air race from L.A. to Cleveland. It is not clear if he finished.
Fred Burlew apparently loved to travel, and his position as a Marine aviator probably enabled this, and opened doors that would have otherwise been closed to him. This may explain how he was able to get matchbooks from several of our country's warships.
In 1935, Fred Burlew apparently took a job as a co-pilot on a commercial plane, and in an almost unspeakable tragedy, he was killed on September 1, 1935 when his plane crashed. The pilot and a flight attendant were also killed. No passengers were on the plane. Fred Burlew was only 23 when he died.
When my wife was growing up, nobody in her family wanted to talk about Lucile's first husband, which is understandable, so we were unprepared to figure out where the scrapbook came from. Dorothye, my wife's grandmother, lived at her home in Laguna Niguel until she died, but her sisters had to enter nursing homes. So it seems likely that Dorothye took some personal possessions of her sisters for safekeeping when they moved into nursing care. No doubt we got the scrapbook when Dorothye died, but nobody was around to tell us where it came from, or the tragic story behind it.
As for the identity of the scrapbooker, I believe it was one of the three sisters. My wife knew her grandmother Dorothye quite well, and spent lots of time with her, and no words were spoken about a scrapbook. We have talked with a daughter of Mary Louise, and if her mother was the scrapbooker, she probably would have known. By elimination, the person most likely to be the scrapbooker would be Lucile, but she never had children, so we probably won't find any direct evidence. If she was the scrapbooker, the book must have been a powerful reminder of her lost love, so it was rarely or never brought out or discussed.
The story of the scrapbook does not end with Fred Burlew. Some of the matchbook covers date from after 1935, such as the San Francisco exposition of 1939. So even after Fred, Lucile continued adding to the scrapbook, until around 1939. Nothing in the book indicates a date later than that. The daughter of Mary Louise has reminded us that Edgar Herman Brockelmann, Dorothye's second husband, was a logistics officer during the war, and worked in logistics as a civilian, a job that required extensive travel. And, he smoked, cigarettes, cigars and pipes. I'm sure picking up a few matchbooks was the least he could do for his widowed sister-in-law.
New feature: Wallpapers of the matchbook covers.Click any matchbook cover to enlarge and see different views.
