To hear my father tell it, my grandfather, Charlie Kircher, was a witty man, with enough time on his hands to indulge that wit. He worked his way up from a stationary engineer with the Northwestern Pacific Railroad to become chief engineer of the ferryboat Eureka. The crossing between Sausalito and San Francisco took about 30 minutes. On each crossing Charlie was actively engaged in working the machinery the first and last five to seven minutes of each run, and the remaining time was spent monitoring things, often by the way the equipment sounded. This gave him about 18 minutes of each crossing to engage his brain, perhaps with a crossword puzzle, letters to his family, or a humorous list of synonyms, such as the following sheet I recently found in a box of letters. I'll leave it to you to figure out the topic. Awry-eyed, bishe_________, blotto, calcified, c_________________, chirping-merry, coc_________, doused, down with the barrel fever, edged, embalmed, elevated, full of Dutch courage, flooded, frazzled, fuddled, fully-fumed, galvanized, groggy, halfs-hot, hiccins, doccins, half seas over, horned, illuminated, inebrious, kenned [?], knee-haltered, loaded, lit up like a xmas tree, lubricated, mellow, muddled, maudlin, on a jamboree, oozed, ossified, obfuscated., primed, paralyzed, pickled, pie-eyed, pruned, polluted, pifflicated, plastered, stiff, started,sloughed to the gills, stewed as a boiled owl, soused, snooted, salubrious, squiffed, submerged, tambourined, tanked, tangle-footed, tight, tipsy, toasted, three sheets to the wind, wet-nosed, zig-zagged and zipped.,1 (Apologies - the upper right corner of the sheet is missing. Can you come up with some missing B, C and D synonyms?) 1 List must have been put together sometime around 1923-24. The reverse side is some sort of payroll sheet from {Something] Dock Company For the Calendar Year 1923. The left side of the page is missing so I can't tell what the name of the Dock Company is.
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AuthorMary Kircher Roddy is a genealogist, writer and lecturer, always looking for the story. Her blog is a combination of the stories she has found and the tools she used to find them. Archives
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