MAY 26, 2024 – I recognized the small, embossed leather pouch with its tidy snap-down cover and bearing the stylized initials “CPA.” The gold letters were undiminished by time, though long expunged from memory is the identity of the pouch’s original owner. I’d uncovered the object among an unorganized cluster of odd-lot keepsakes consigned to obscurity. The light rain giving sustenance to lawn and garden outside, had forced me to weed inside—starting with long-forgotten household repositories.
Though I’d encountered the pouch several times before, I’d never given it much thought except that it was an item curious enough not to be carelessly discarded. “CPA,” I was certain, didn’t stand for “Certified Public Accountant,” but no one among several generations of ancestors—direct or shirt-tail—had such initials. Across a spectrum of probabilities, I surmised that the inscribed letters belonged to no one in our family tree or forest but rather, to a person whose personal effects were part of a storage lot in our family’s warehouses in Rutherford, NJ (See my blog series, Inheritance, beginning 6/1/2023). The lot was eventually abandoned, I figured, and its contents dispersed by the combination of a public auction, consignment to a dumpster and public landfill, and . . . retention by my grandfather, the warehouseman, who—surprise, surprise—was a supreme hoarder. Perhaps the enchanting little pouch had caught his attention just as it had snagged my own; and he had put the enduring object aside for later consideration exactly as I had . . . I, a hoarder of sorts but in a sandlot league compared to Grandpa, a captain of the moving and storage industry.
Given that I’m a good 10 years older since I’d first encountered the pouch and because of the gentle melody produced by the light rain outside—audible through the modestly raised windows—I examined the item more carefully than on prior contacts with it. Most significant: this time I opened it to inspect its contents.
Packed tightly inside the pouch was a collection of calling cards. My mindset shifted instantly from the banal task of cleaning out a household drawer to the work of an anthropologist-archaeologist. I struggled to remove a few of the cards to free the rest. Printed on high quality paper stock, the cards had yellowed with time and though they’d occupied the same, small holder, they were not of uniform dimensions. The lettering likewise varied. I passed the cards one by one onto the desktop: “Mary Ann Pappin,” “Virginia Kanost,” “Betty Lee Fuller,” and so on—36 in all. All women.
I wondered, was “CPA” . . . a Don Juan of premiere magnitude, or was she a social monarch amidst a swarm, a rabble, a kaleidoscope of high-class butterflies?
If you’ve already solved the puzzle, good for you. You’re quicker than I was—but in no event would you be much under the age of 40. Two cards, I noticed, were anomalous: off to the side on each were displayed the modest sized letters “H” and “S” guarding between them an elongated design consisting of three thin lines connected at the top. Upon closer scrutiny I detected embossed but colorless numerals: 1938. Without thinking, I shifted my eyes to the open pouch lying next to the stack of cards. For the first time I noticed that incorporated into the embossment like bookends around “CPA” were the figures “19” and “38.”
Bingo! This being academic graduation season, I knew immediately what I’d been puzzling over: high school graduation cards among a group of 36—37 including the pouch owner—young women graduates from “M” (for “Montclair”? “Morristown”?) High School. Simultaneously, I remembered my own graduation from high school way back in 1972 C.E. (52 years ago but only 34 years after the Class of ’38), when according to tradition, high school seniors would (still) send out fancy announcements . . . with fancy calling cards enclosed.
1938: Five years after Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany; four years after Germany’s unopposed occupation of the Rhineland; three years after Japan’s savage invasion of China and the start of WW II in Asia. 1938: The year of Anschluss and Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland; the year Neville Chamberlain declared after signing the Munich Agreement with Hitler, “I believe I have secured peace for our time.” 1938: One year before Germany would invade Czechoslovakia, then attack Poland, triggering WW II in Europe. 1938: Three years before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the largest conflagration in the history of the world.
By graduation day 1938, the storm clouds had already grown dark on America’s distant horizons.
I wondered about the young women whose cards I’d flipped through. One was named “Cleo,” my mother-in-law’s name—Cleo Piper Boger—who also happened to be in the Class of ’38, albeit 1,000 miles west of Montclair and Morristown, New Jersey. How much did those eager graduates—or their families, friends, teachers, classmates, for that matter—know or care about distant rumblings? Given how America had recoiled from international engagement after “The Great War,” and retreated into isolationism, I knew that the Class of ’38, as well as the three classes that followed it, were oblivious to the developing fury of their collective fate.
I remained at the desk, my eyes set on the open pouch and time-worn cards that most likely hadn’t seen light in 86 years. Only the sound of light rain outside the windows encroached on the silence around me. I pondered further the inferno that was gathering fuel and fuses on Graduation Day 1938; the War to End All Peace that would produce enough dead in that conflict and subsequent wars to give sustenance to Memorial Day now, still, in 2024 when the youngest American veterans of WW II are 96 years old.
As today’s graduates receive their diplomas, which of the black clouds on our horizons will mushroom into cataclysms for which Americans today are ill-prepared? Which storm clouds will rain only upon people and countries far distant from our shores? Which towering thunderheads will dissipate harmlessly—after our hand-wringing has chafed our body politic raw?
I packed the cards back into the pouch and . . . put the little leather package aside though not back in the drawer—for later disposition. Such is the mindset of the anthropologist-archaeologist—who is the grandson of a hoarder in the storage business . . . and the grandson of a violinist who became a soldier of The Great War.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
