Topic: CRS Versions
Lynn Rohrbough’s Cooperative Recreation Service grew slowly from the 32 customers he mentioned in 1942. [1] Larry Holcomb lists four new titles in 1946, seven in 1947, and five in 1948. Instead of church groups, these were 4-H clubs. [2] They were in addition to reprints and new editions of existing books. [3]
The musical plates all were made by Jane Keen. As mentioned in the post for 26 September 2021, Rohrbough met her at the 1936 Northland Recreation Workshop near Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she made stencils of songs introduced by E. O. Harbin. She began doing piece work for him from her home in Henry, South Dakota, in 1938.
To be useful to CRS, her work had to be as good as that done by a commercial company. Below is the opening line of a song from Singing America, published by C. C. Birchard. Below that is the copy made by Keen.
The first measure includes quarter and eighth notes. The second has two quarter notes and a half note, while the third begins with a dotted eighth, followed by a sixteenth. The stems are not quite as vertical as the mechanically produced ones, and the tails are straight, not curved.
Her lettering is narrow to fit the needs of the page. The words do not all fall under their associated tones. The “g’s” and the “m” in “blooming” have some flourishes, while she uses italics for the tempo marking. The uneven fill of the notes may be the result of the printing press, rather than her work.
Her skills improved. She, no doubt, got feedback from CRS’s customers through Rohrbough. The plate for “Over the Meadow” was remade in 1944. The stems of her notes are shorter: the C at the end of the first measure no longer extends below the staff lines.
Around 1947, she moved to Delaware, Ohio. This allowed easier communication with CRS, and exposed her to new ideas. The next plate for “Over the Meadows” again simplifies the notation. The eighth notes are re-separated, with curved tails that are close to the original printed version. They are spaced for the text. The half note again is angled and the stems have returned to their former heights.
The plate for “Over the Meadows” was redone in 1957 to add guitar chords. The key was changed to make it easier for a beginning instrumentalist. All the stems are exactly the same length, and perfectly perpendicular. While most of the words appear below their texts, the first word of the first verse remains a problem.
Keen’s father’s family migrated to the Hudson River valley of New York probably sometime in the 1750s. [6] The earliest ancestor born in this country, Jacob Keen, was born in Orange County, New York, in 1758. [7] Her great-grandfather moved from there to Wayne County, Pennsylvania, in the Poconos mountain, where he ran a sawmill and took in boarders. [8]
Her parents and great-grandparents settled in Garden City, South Dakota, [9] perhaps after her parents married in 1890 in Gravity, Pennsylvania. [10] In 1915, her father, Edward Keen, was managing the local telephone company in nearby Henry. [11] Jennie, as she then was called, [12] first came to public notice in 1913 when she won a scholarship for having the highest grades in Codington County. [13] She probably quit school soon after her mother died in April of that year. [14]
The next public notice, this time for Jane Keen, appeared in 1923 when she was a supervisor of the Codington County girl’s club. [15] By 1926, she was a 4-H leader, and in 1930 secretary for the state 4-H leaders’ association. [16]
She was sufficiently important in 1936 that Horace Jones, director of 4-H in South Dakota, took her to the Northland Recreation Laboratory when he was invited by the organizer, Fred Smith, to attend. [17] She must have discovered puppetry at the spring workshop, [18] because in June she staged a puppet show at a local 4-H camp. Jones led the singing. [19] At State Club Week in October, she put on another marionette program, while Peter Olson taught folk games. [20] He also had been at the Northland meeting. [21]
Codington County escaped the worst effects of the early Depression, which mainly hit central and western South Dakota. However, the county population dropped 2.4%. [22] Keen’s father’s telephone company probably had been merged into another years before, and telephone usage in rural areas, in general, started dropping in the 1920s. [23] Whatever other employment Edward found, it is not the kind to appear on the internet. With crop failures in the county in 1934, he may have lost his job. Sometime in or after 1935, her obituary says she became a recreation leader for the WPA. [24]
Her name last appears in Huron, South Dakota, in 1946 when she was awarded a silver pin for twenty-years service as a 4-H leader. [25] Her father had died in 1944, [26] and she moved to Delaware, Ohio, when she was 49 years old. Mary Lea Bailey remembers when she visited the Rohrboughs in 1948, “she was working in the barn behind the Rohrbough house.” [27]
Keen died in 1960 when she tried to avoid a dog in the road and swerved into oncoming traffic. She then was president of the Delaware Business Girls Club and still in touch with three cousins in Pennsylvania. [28] Someone returned her ashes to Garden City and erected a headstone near those of her family. [29]
Life may never have been easy for Keen. Bob Nolte recalled she “had a residual limp from childhood polio” and had an “uncorrected overbite.” [30] Her mother suffered from inflammatory rheumatism for six years before she died. [31] Even so, Keen was experimenting with writing as early as 1910, [32] and, in 1931, won a prize in a photography contest sponsored by Popular Science. [33]
By 1934, the local newspaper in Henry gave her space each week to publicize 4-H activities. She sent a cartoon to National 4-H Club News that shows her lettering abilities and skills as a draughtsman when she was 36 years old.
She accompanied her submission with a note that indicated a sense of humor helps “especially since they lost their county agents and have to contend with drouth and hoppers.” [34]
The posts for 8 May 2022, 15 May 2022, 2022and 29 May have more on her lettering skills.
Graphics
1. “Over the Meadows.” Czech tune with English words by A. D. Z. 53 in Singing America. Boston: C. C. Birchard and Company, 1940. Copy from the office of the Battle Creek, Michigan, Camp Fire Girls. Singing America is discussed in the post for 26 September 2021.
2. Jane Keen autograph for “Over the Meadows.” Czech folk song from SINGING AMERICA, by permission of A. D. Zanzig. 27 in Joyful Singing, prepared for The National Convocation of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Custom Printed Songs. The MYF meeting was held in 1944. Joyful Singing is discussed in the post for 20 February 2022.
3. Jane Keen autograph for “Over the Meadows.” Czech song from Singing America, by permission of A. D. Zanzig. 22 in Songs of Many Nations, for Evangelical and Reformed Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Custom Printed Songs, 1944. The editor probably was Edward Schlingman. The songbook is discussed in the post for 20 February 2022.
4. Jane Keen autograph for “Over the Meadows.” Czech song from SINGING AMERICA, by permission of A. D. Zanzig. 16 in Sing Along the Way, edited by Marie Oliver for the YWCA’s Woman’s Press. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service. Same cover and most of the same songs as the 1951, fifth printing. I assume this was earlier, and the date was added to avoid confusion. This songbook is discussed in the post for 20 March 2022.
5. “Over the Meadows,” English by A. D. Z., plate made by Jane Keen using a music typewriter. 8 in Sing Along, edited by Mary Wheeler, Lura Mohrbacher, and Augustus D. Zanzig for the YWCA’s National Board, Bureau of Communications. Czech song from SINGING AMERICA, by permission. Delaware, Ohio: Cooperative Recreation Service, Cooperative Song Service, revised 1957.
6. Cartoon by Jane Keen published by National 4-H Club News 12(6):2:June–July 1934.
End Notes
1. Rohrbough’s 1942 list is discussed in the post for 20 February 2022.
2. Larry Nial Holcomb. “A History of the Cooperative Recreation Service.” PhD dissertation. University of Michigan, 1972. 106–107. One songbook was for Azalea Trails. In 1976, it was sponsored by San Gorgonio Girl Scout Council of Colton, California.
3. This is a conservative estimate. I have purchased more that these on the internet that were published in this time period.
4. “How a Sampler Is Made.” Song Sampler Number 3:7–8:July 1956. Quoted by Holcomb. 134.
5. “Jane Keen Dies After Head-On Collision.” The Delaware Gazette, Delaware, Ohio, 31 December 1960. Copy provided by Joe O’Rourke, Delaware County District Library, Delaware, Ohio.
6. James G. Leyburn. The Scotch-Irish. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962. 244.
7. Dea Lowry. “Jacob Keen.” Geni website; last updated 10 November 2018.
8. Rhamanthus Menville Stocker. History of the First Presbyterian Society of Honesdale. Honesdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press Association, 1906. 194 on George Murray Keen. It was a coal mining and glass making area then. Tourists probably arrived later. [35]
9. Blanch Flanigan. “George M Keen.” Find a Grave website, 15 January 2012. He is Jane’s paternal grandfather and died in 1925. Her uncle also moved with the family. [36]
10. “Death of Mrs. Cybil H. Keen.” The Citizen, Honesdale, Pennsylvania, 8 April 1913. 1. Posted to the internet by makummerer on 30 April 2015.
11. “Henry Union Telephone Company v. Dakota Central Union Telephone Company.” In Public Utilities Reports, edited by Henry Clifford Spurr and Ellsworth Nichols. Rochester, New York: The Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company, 1915. 938. Codington County abuts Clark County, with Garden City, on the east.
12. Her full name may have been Samantha Jane. [37] “Jenny” had been a nickname for “Jane” in the family since the early 1800s. [38]
13. “A Story from the West.” The Citizen, Honesdale, Pennsylvania, 17 January 1913. 8. Posted to the internet by makummerer on 30 April 2015.
14. “Death of Mrs. Cybil H. Keen.”
15. “Leader’s Cartoon.” National 4-H Club News 12(6):2:June–July 1934. Four-H became active in South Dakota in 1919. [39] For more on the history of the rural youth group, see the post for 3 October 2021.
16. Item. “County, State and National News.” National 4-H Club News 24(1):8:January 1946. The government paid 4-H agents, but leaders were volunteers. Her position as secretary may not have been paid.
17. Bob Nolte. Northland Recreation Lab: A History. 1984. 7. Copy provided by Heidi Ryan, 21 June 2016. 13. Minneapolis is about 200 miles due east of Watertown, the seat of Codington County. [40] Northland is discussed in the post for 26 September 2021.
18. Nolte. “Jane Keen.” 13–14 in Nolte. 13. He called her a “classic introvert” and believed she chose puppetry because “she could hide behind the set and project her usually restrained personality through the puppets.” His memory may have confused her with Deborah Simmons Meador who was a puppeteer in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She ran part of the WPA program on puppetry and offered workshops. Either she, or one of her students, must have taught Keen at Northland. Meador argued: “by protecting the children from the sight of the audience, it frees them from self consciousness.” [41]
19. Evelyn Htrtatgei. “Girls Enthuse About 4-H Camp Raymond Club Members Had Good Time At Lake Kampeska; Want To Return.” The Daily Plainsman, Huron, South Dakota, 26 June 1936. 4. Some errors introduced by digitization.
20. Item. The Evening Huronite, Huron, South Dakota, 26 October 1936. 20.
21. Nolte. 15.
22. W. F. Kumlien. Graphic Summary of the Relief Situation in South Dakota (1930-1935). Brookings, South Dakota: Agricultural Experiment Station South Dakota State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, Bulletin 310, May 1937. 53.
23. Claude S. Fischer. “Technology’s Retreat: The Decline of Rural Telephony in the United States, 1920-1940.” Social Science History 11(3):295–327:Autumn 1987.
24. “Jane Keen Dies.” The WPA recreation program included puppetry. [42]
25. National 4-H Club News, 1946.
26. Blanch Flanigan. “Edward L. Keen.” Find a Grave website. 15 January 2012.
27. Mary Lea Bailey. Email to John Blocher, Jr., 25 June 2016.
28. “Jane Keen Dies.”
29. Blanch Flanigan. “Jane Keen.” Find a Grave website, 15 January 2012.
30. Nolte. 13. He added that as soon as she was able, she had corrective dental work done.
31. “Death of Mrs. Cybil H. Keen.” Inflammatory rheumatism was a generic term for debilitative anti-immune system diseases.
32. “Story from the West.”
33. “Winners of First Contest.” Popular Science Monthly, October 1931. 78.
34. “Leader’s Cartoon.”
35. Corinne K. Hoexter. “A Colorful Corner of Pennsylvania.” The New York Times, 31 May 1987.
Michael O’Malley. “Wayne County: A History Deep and Clear.” Pennsylvania Heritage, Summer 1988.
36. Blanch Flanigan. “Willard N Keen.” Find a Grave website, 15 January 2012. He was born in 1863 and died in 1931.
37. “Ed L Keen.” My Heritage website.
38. “Matthias Keen.” Ancestry website. He was Jacob’s son and George Murray’s father.
39. “History.” South Dakota State Fair website.
40. Google Maps.
41. Curt Brown. “Puppetry Lifted St. Paul Woman from Poverty.” Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 17 July 2017.
42. George H. Field. Final Report on the WPA Program for 1935–43. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946. 62.
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