Research Goes Interesting Places Sometimes

I'm starting on the research for my assistantship by trying to find information about one Robert Gatliff of Miama, Florida who invented an "Automatic City Directory", patented 1921. I got really excited when I happened on this while looking through Access Newspaper Archive:

"California cannot, it seems, claim credit for the hardware hat idea. Florida, so certain citizens of Miama have emphatically stated, has been making such curious millinery creations for several years and gaining considerable publicity as a result.

Two years ago, Robert T. Gatliff, window dresser in a Miami hardware shop, put together half a dozen such hats and enlisted the aid of as many pretty girls to wear them while cameramen clicked shutters and popped off flashlight bulbs.

"Modiste" Gatliff, if his neighbors know what they're saying, designs much more thrilling hats than those produced out on the west coast. He has exceptional originality and employs all sorts of gadgets to get his effects. One of his best numbers, it is reported, was a bridesmaid's hat fashioned of copper screening, metal scouring cloth, a soup strainter, a small paint brush and several hand-picked pieces of fishing tackle."

-The San Antonio Light, July 12, 1936

Tell me this does not sound like a guy who's probably spending most of his time tinkering with hardware in his garage! There are even pictures of his hats!

I don't know whether I've talked about it here. My RAship will involve genealogical research on people who patented cartographically related inventions through the mid nineteenth century. Dr. Monmonier thinks it will make for an interesting parallel literature to academic literature and journals.

Reading List

What am I reading lately?

The first half or so of James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State."
E. E. Schatschneider's "The Semisoverign People." (Done! Really interesting political theory!)
Susan S. Fainstein's "The Just City."
Henri Lefebvre's "The Urban Revolution." (Translation by Robert Bononno.)
Christian Axsiom's "Transportation Transformations and the 1936 Syracuse Jubilee." (1999 SU masters' thesis.)
William Roseboom and Henry Schramm's "They Built a City: Stories and Legends of Syracuse and Onondaga County." (Thanks to restoman for the loan!)
And some journal articles.


I'm only a couple chapters into some. But when I lay it all out like that, it does feel like I'm getting something done. Which helps me relax a bit! I figure I need to approach this like a job. I should spent at least eight hours a day reading, researching and, once class starts, doing work. (So far, I have not done this. But I should start.) My plan is that If I get sleepy, or distractable, I read something else, or I get up and ride somewhere, or do whatever; then I come back to it.

I'm going to bike over to the police station and register one of my bikes, then drop by the campus to do some more reading if I have time. Then there's a departmental party at a grad student's house over in Westcott!

Clothing

I think I'm going to wear this to the departmental party tonight. Does it all work together? Does it look western, somehow, with the vest? I want to start experimenting with vests, but I'm not going for western.