Friday, November 11, 2011

Bed Making Class


There is a photograph of a few girls and a teacher smoothing a bed with this caption in Wonder World, Volume VII.
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4 comments:

TC said...

I always wondered what went on in Home Ed class, but was afraid to ask.

The early years were spent in an apartment so tiny that bed-making was mostly a matter of folding and unfolding the Murphy Bed.

The Murphy Bed, surprisingly enough, was named for its designer, William L. Murphy. The lore is faintly curious.

Mr. Murphy was born in Stockton, California in the late 1870's. He moved to San Francisco at the turn of that century.

In the city he met a lovely woman named Gladys with whom he was quite taken.

He wanted to begin courting her, but he had only a one-room apartment, and in those days it was not permissible to have a lady enter a gentleman's bedroom.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention and Mr Murphy's actions seem to support that. He began experimenting with a folding bed; and created the Murphy-bed.

Of course in the end of this wonderful tale he and Gladys came to a reckoning, and were blissfully wed.

To speak truly, Mr Murphy puts me in mind, a bit, of Touchstone, who spoke poetically of a great reckoning in a little room.

SCENE III. The forest.

Enter TOUCHSTONE and AUDREY; JAQUES behind

TOUCHSTONE

Come apace, good Audrey: I will fetch up your
goats, Audrey. And how, Audrey? am I the man yet?
doth my simple feature content you?

AUDREY

Your features! Lord warrant us! what features!

TOUCHSTONE

I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most
capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.

JAQUES

[Aside] O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove
in a thatched house!

TOUCHSTONE

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a
man's good wit seconded with the forward child
Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a
great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would
the gods had made thee poetical.

AUDREY

I do not know what 'poetical' is: is it honest in
deed and word? is it a true thing?

TOUCHSTONE

No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most
feigning; and lovers are given to poetry, and what
they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign.

AUDREY

Do you wish then that the gods had made me poetical?

TOUCHSTONE

I do, truly; for thou swearest to me thou art
honest: now, if thou wert a poet, I might have some hope thou didst feign.

November 11, 2011 at 10:02 AM
ACravan said...

From small things, great things come. This is a wonderful series. Jane started making her bed, and making it very well, practically before she could speak. She's always been very orderly in that way, although now she's working hard on developing teenage disorderliness. But it's an effort for her; basically, she's neat. Personally, I salute great bedmaking (and excellent bedmaking drawings). Curtis

November 11, 2011 at 6:50 PM
Lyle Daggett said...

Most of my dad's relatives were farmers, though he himself grew up in a city, and so did my sister and I. Once when he was talking on the phone to one of his cousins, he mentioned that my sister was taking horseback riding lessons (she would have been junior high age at the time), and his cousin found that the funniest thing in the world, he couldn't get over it, the notion that someone would need to take lessons to learn how to ride a horse. (I've never learned how to ride a horse.)

Bed making class.

This is one strange world we live in.

November 11, 2011 at 10:49 PM
Nin Andrews said...

I had no clue of the history of the Murphy Bed--but I thought they sounded like a good idea until I stayed in one at a cheap hotel once--and was not enchanted. It was one of those beds you can't share because it has a valley in the middle . . .
As to bed making, my mother is very particular about her bed, and spent a great deal of time teaching me how to make the perfect bed. I asked her if she ever had a class in it, and of course she just laughed and said she didn't think so but her own mother might have. (My mother is 94.)

November 12, 2011 at 11:53 AM

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