AKA or Why Jacob Cohen "Get's No Respect"

When I was retrieving the index there were all kinds of things lying around that seemed interesting. While there was definitely a depression era feel to the house it didn't really feel like my grand-mother would be classified as a hoarder. I don't think it was a compulsive need to keep everything, but rather that because of the index, everything had value. In the main room there were stacks of magazines and travel brochures. She didn't hold onto them because she couldn't imagine life without them, she held onto them because they contained facts of value. I can just imagine her taking time out of every day to explore the piles ready to learn something new. It would have been impossible to keep everything and I felt the index gave me a sizable enough project that would take years to explore. There were a lot of collections that have been disposed of. In the basement there was an entire wall stacked with cigar boxes. Each cigar box had a different collection in them. The collections were varied and included (among others) fabric materials, doll clothing patterns, and rocks. I only kept one of these boxes, which was a collection of buttons you pin to your clothes. Sometime soon I will take some pictures and share them on the blog. Across from the cigar boxes was a desk and a file cabinet. I only looked through the materials for a couple of minutes but it seemed to me that it was a larger and clumsier attempt at the index. There were file folders filled with newspaper clippings, instruction manuals, and catalogs. I thought that if after I loaded the index and there was more room in the car then I could go back and grab some of it. But the index barely fit into the car so the file cabinet has been lost to history.

The index was spread out over three spaces. Most of the index was housed in one of the guest bedrooms. In that room I found a stack of papers which seemed to have names listed from top to bottom of each one. As I was trying to beat rush hour I didn't really pay much attention to their content other than to think it was probably a list of names my grand-mother was planning on creating index cards for. I quickly stuffed the papers into one of the crates and put it into the car.

Last week when I was unpacking the index I came across those papers and handed them to Jill. She quickly observed that it was a list of aliases. There are roughly 320 "stage names" in one column and an equal amount of "given names" in the other. Here they are:

















It is hard to figure out when exactly she made this list or if it was used to update or check the index but once again it really illuminates the degree of detail my grand-mother poured into this project. It seems as if the index cards do contain this information, though I have only checked two of them. Here is Woody Allen's card (along with just a sample of the clippings included in the card):



The first piece of information listed on the card is his given name "Allen Stewart Konigsberg."

This seems to validate that the list was used in connection to the index. I also looked up Rodney Dangerfield's card. I did this because on the list posted above his name actually includes two aliases. The first alias which is written in the same pen as the "stage name" is Jack Roy. However next to Jack Roy is another name, Jack Cohen. Jack Cohen is crossed out in pencil and next to that is written Jacob Cohen, which is Rodney Dangerfield's given name. His father, Philip Cohen, was a vaudeville performer who used the name Phil Roy. When Rodney was 19 he began as a joke writer and used the name Jack Roy. Then in the 1960s he changed his name to Rodney Dangerfield. Here is the card for Rodney Dangerfield with a selection of its contents:



What I find interesting about this card as related to the list is that while the name Jack Cohen is included, the name Jacob Cohen is not. As I mentioned the list was written and then edited by pencil to include the Jacob Cohen name, but somehow this information never made it to the card.

Every time I interact with the index I find it becomes more and more interesting. I have decided that this will become my full time research project and have already started researching relevant books and thinking about family interviews. While there are a million ways to approach this project I have started by thinking about the brain and memory. As I mentioned in an earlier post, part of my grand-mother's justification for this project was that the act of creating the index was viewed as mental exercise. She was attempting to keep her mind sharp. The book I am currently reading offers a really good layman's overview of how the mind has been perceived and understood. I actually started reading the book to see if it could be used in one of my media and communication courses (I think it will be) but quickly realized that it was as relevant to the Ethel Index. The book is Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. I was interested in the book because of Carr's 2008 Atlantic essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Basically Carr examines McLuhan's famous phrase "the medium is the message" in order to examine how our brains our being rewired from the zeitgeist shift from print to digital media. While I find the entire argument extremely interesting and it all fits in really well with my courses, for the purpose of this blog and the Ethel Index, the point he makes in the book is that the while the synapses in our brains do become harder to reprogram as we age, if we choose to do so we can continue to make new links, which can for the post part be considered mental exercising. There is a lot more to be said about this and I haven't given it enough thought as of yet but I do believe that my grand-mother's creation of the index effected her mind differently than if she had just decided to read an encyclopedia. She was actively participating in the creation of knowledge, even if this knowledge was being filtered through her unique perspective of culture and the world.