I don’t know a lot about my maternal grandfather, whom I never met. Here he is on the left as a young man in front of a store that says Lipsohn & Friede Woolens. I do know that later in his life he worked on Wall Street. Did family members own this store? A mystery to me. More on my maternal grandfather. And much more on my maternal grandfather, Solon Friede.

Here is what I scanned in before tweaking the photo in Photoshop:

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Can anyone guess what this is? Hint: read this post about our summer visitors. Another hint: the name of the image file. Finally, this didn’t really work.

For more photos with a little or a lot of red, visit Ruby Tuesday:

We have three guinea pigs visiting us this summer. This is Vanilla Cream. I sometimes call her Vanilla Bean. We nicknamed her the Adventuress.

This one is named Apricot. She is a favorite of one of her owner’s daughters who is away at camp. She doesn’t move around quite as much as Vanilla Cream, her sister.

This is the Mama of Vanilla Cream and Apricot. I think her real name is Stickers, but we call her the Mama. We also refer to her as the protectress.

This post will be a clue to a question I plan to ask for Ruby Tuesday.

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From the title, perhaps you were expecting something biblical? Or about American history? Sorry to disappoint, but this is a post of my son’s latest episode of Motor Wars. Enjoy.

See a previous Ruin Rui episode.

This originally was going to be a post with a photo of the red afghan that my grandmother crocheted many years ago. However, my daughter showed up and posed with her book in front of the afghan. Of course, the photo with her in front of the afghan reading The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald is far more interesting than the others with only the blanket.

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This is a photo of my maternal grandfather, whom I never met, on a boat. No idea who the man on the left is – the captain? I am guessing the photo was taken before my grandfather went to Russia as a salesman for Ford(?) and met my maternal grandmother, whom he married in Russia and then returned to the U.S – my grandmother and mother came a few years after, needing special permission to enter the country (they came in 1929, one month before the stock market crashed).

•  More on my maternal grandfather

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How many of you had relatives that came through Ellis Island? My paternal grandparents did and possibly my maternal grandparents and mother as well. I highly recommend American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent Cannato. He writes about the different commissioners of Ellis Island and their styles, Castle Garden (the immigration inspection predecessor to Ellis Island), nativist vs. immigrant lobbies, and recent politics of rebuilding Ellis Island as a museum.

There is a funny passage in the book where Theodore Roosevelt declares at a dinner that “he had chosen [Oscar] Straus without regard to race, color, creed or party. To that, an elderly and increasingly deaf Jacob Schiff nodded and said in his thick German accent: ‘Dot’s right, Mr. President. You came to me and said, ‘Chake, who is der best jew I can appoint Segretary of Commerce?”” Sad are the descriptions that investigators bring back of the situation in Eastern Europe – poverty, starvation and disease were too abundant in the late 19th – early twentieth century.

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