The celebrity autographs pictured here come from a souvenir book Kiki’s great aunt kept when she worked as a “Harvey Girl” on the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in the 1930s. The Chicago-to-Los-Angeles luxury cars saw a lot of celebrities in the days before jet travel, and it was common practice for Harvey Girls to collect signatures from their most glamorous passengers.
Thumbing through the 100-page autograph album the other day, Kiki and I marveled at the fact that the names we recognized — Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Eddie Cantor — would likely be unrecognizable to today’s younger generations. The more we considered this, however, the more it felt like the true revelation was that, amid this collection of several hundred celebrity signatures from the 1930s, we were only able to recognize the names of four people.
The book of Ecclesiastes asserts that human actions are like that of vapor on a cold day — that the people of previous ages “have no further reward, and even their names are forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished.” Then, a couple verses later (as if to soften the existential tenor), the Hebrew wisdom-book adds: “Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do.”
So it was that Kiki and I elected, at the end of that unseasonably warm day, to drink some wine, go for a walk, watch the sunset, and do our best to be grateful for the now we have.
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