Datebook 1922: December 2015

The year 1922 was an important one for Stanford Closson. Not only did he start graduate school at Boston University, where he eventually studied to be a minister, but Boston is where he met his future wife, Mary Leah Yant. General Electric had a big year, too. Thomas Edison visited for the last time in 1922, important technologies were invented, and in December, the city had a major fire that destroyed part of the downtown area.

Below is a photograph of Thomas Edison and William D. Coolidge, who, according to the Edison Tech Center website,

"was one of the most important innovators of the 20th century in his field. Coolidge developed the ductile tungsten filament used in lightbulbs, fluorescent lamps, car ignitions and vacuum tubes. He worked on transformers and cathode ray tubes, high vacuum tubes and he was one of the early leaders at the General Electric Research Lab. He had a remarkable understanding of physics and made improvements to many technologies."

I'm looking forward to starting Stanford's 1922 diary in just five days! I hope you will join me.

About this blog . . .

I've created this blog to make a record of the hand-written journals of Stanford Stillman Closson (1900-1982), who was in his life a Methodist Minister, grandfather, father, brother, husband, son and friend. This is the fourth installment of Date Book, covering 1922 (the first three cover 1919-1921). For as long as seems practical, I will record subsequent years (they continue into the 1970s). I'm matching the days--January 1, 1922 to January 1, 2016, for instance--with one entry per day.

The daily entries are pretty short, though, so in addition to recording the diaries, I'm also annotating them, giving additional information about the people, places and events mentioned by Stanford.

And this year, because Stanford moves to Boston when he starts his graduate program at Boston University, I will be adding information about early 1920s Boston as well as Schenectady.

Through these annotations, I hope to convey a sense of Stanford's life and times. And of course, I'm also hoping to give his descendants a fuller picture of who he was as a young man.

1922 - An Important Year for Stanford Closson