• He purchased the oak ballroom floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania's Rose Room after a fire, and used it as for a theater and basketball court in our barn in Chester County.
• He bought a plantation in Virginia, then had photographs of his ancestors blown up and painted over. These instant ancestor portraits were then hung over the stairs.
• He helped invent the GG-1, an important (as these things go) diesel/electric locomotive.
• He was a track runner in his youth; the favorites at the track events were always Irish, so he ran under the made-up name "Terrence O' Flanagan", which he invented to improve his bookmakers' odds.
• He traveled in a Pennsylvania Railroad executive car, which used large blocks of ice for air conditioning -- my father can remember the sound of the ice blocks being changed under the car at stops.

Once I got the photo home, I slid the back of the frame off in order to clean the glass. I discovered several things inside; press clippings from speeches that my great-grandfather had given on methods of rail transportation, lists of society club officers, and last, the photo to the left, in a cardboard studio frame. It's a studio portrait of a well-groomed spaniel; the back is stamped "Photograph by GEORGIA ENGELHARD, 1211 Madison Avenue, New York, NY." The photo is signed in pencil by Georgia Engelhard, apparently a posh pet studio photographer. The print is even retouched; Moppets' curls have been darkened in several places, and highlights were added to the eyes!

The dog photo was funny enough, conjuring up for me a world of silver-framed pet photos on grand pianos, striped wallpaper, and bonbons eaten in colossal four-poster beds. But tucked into the edge of the frame was one more item -- a folded newspaper clipping with forties-era cosmetic advertisements on one side. On the other was clear evidence that life wasn't all satin pillows and ground turkey for the dog in the picture.

The text reads as follows:

Canned Goods, Butter Offered As Reward for Missing Spaniel
Somewhere around town there is a small shaggy black spaniel with a price on his head that would have made the James boys snarl with envy.    Mrs. Hope Aspell, mistress of the dog which ran from its home at 1620 Thirty-Third street N.W. last Monday and has been missing since, is offering for the safe return of the pet the following items: Her entire April allotment of canned goods and one precious pound of butter.    Mrs. Aspell, who is an economic analyst in the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, explained that her dog, "Moppet" by name, has been with her since December of 1940 and that the pet is more dear to her even than a No. 3 can of tomato juice. She said she will manage to get		along on fresh vegetables if "Moppet" is returned and she pays out the reward.    She said that she felt rationed goods would be more of an inducement than a cash reward.    "What good is money nowadays?" She asked.    It was pointed out that neither rationed coupons nor rationed goods may be given away as gifts under OPA regulations. Mrs. Aspell explained that she had lived in England as late as 1940, when food was already rationed there, and that she and her neighbors frequently traded rationed items they did not like for those they preferred. This was against British rationing regulations, she said, but nobody took it too seriously because the transactions did not increase the amount of food rationed.

I wonder what happened to Moppet. Was a pound of butter enough to bring Moppet home? Did Moppet stay AWOL for the rest of the war? Was the photo taken (gasp) posthumously, of a stuffed spaniel? Perhaps the pound of butter was a "dead or alive" reward. In that case, the bemused look on Moppet's face is a faithful record of a lap dog's last expression when confronted by a mad, ration-starved mob of New Yorkers intent on getting a pound of butter, and not caring too much about niceties.