Terry Hovey is a doctor of chiropractic medicine and is now practicing body balancing, neuro-reflex activation, whole food nutrition, and polarity therapy at the Yachats Healthcare Clinic on Beach St.
TYG: How did you get involved in the chiropractor business?
Terry: Well, I thought I was going to be a dentist. But I fell and hurt my back while I was in high school, and my mom took me to a chiropractor, and my pain was gone like that [snaps fingers], and I thought that was pretty cool! He showed me the charts of how the neuro-system works and it was pretty interesting. And then I forgot about that. I was enrolled in pre-dental studies, and about my second year, my biology teacher brought in two articles from Scientific American. One was called “Regeneration of Body Parts.” In the article, it talks about how if you cut off a salamander’s front leg, it gets a new front leg. If you cut a frog’s front leg off, you get a stump. Then—I don’t know why they decided this was a good idea—they took the nerve out of the hind leg, and put it in the part where they cut the leg off, where there really would be a stump, and it grew the front leg.
TYG: Ok, that’s creepy.
TYG-Graphic Design: A front leg?
Terry: Yep. Not a hind leg, but a front leg. And then they took just a nerve ganglion—a nodule of nerve—from along the spine, separate it so it wasn’t even connected to the wiring system of the nerves, and put those in there, and it grew a front leg. So the sum of the article was: the ability to regenerate body parts is directly related to the ratio of nerve tissue to somatic tissue in the area. That’s what chiropractors do: they release the nerve energy to the tissues. And I thought: That’s cool! And then the other article was about the pre-capillary sphincter. In our body, you know, you have little tiny capillaries to supply nutrients to the tissues. But if you have all the blood in all your capillaries at once, you’re in shock—there’s nothing going to your head. So the nervous system controls these little sphincters.
TYG: Of course—that’s the way the body keeps pressure, by closing off certain things.
Terry: And it’s feeding part of the time here, part of the time there. And that little sphincter controls the nutrition, and the blood supply of the body. [...] So I read those two articles and said, “That’s it!”, and walked out of the school and signed up to be a chiropractor.
TYG-GD: That took a lot of nerve!
TYG-Editorial Assistant: So to speak.
Terry: [laughs] Yes. And then later, I studied a class on a technique to release circulation by reflexes to the neurovascular system. I was there as a third semester student, studying these post-graduate seminars—whenever I would get a chance, I would get in the door. And the instructor said, “Well, Dr. Bennett discovered what he called the effector mechanism, which controls the circulation in the capillary bed, and therefore the nutrition and oxygenation of the tissues, and lately,” he said, “there’s been an article published in the Scientific American, and does anybody know what that mechanism is called?” And I said, “Well, it’s the pre-capillary sphincter.” And he said, “How did you know that?” And I said, “Well, I read it. My instructor gave me the article to read.” He said, “How long have you been practicing, Doctor?” And I said, “Oh, I’m a third-semester student.” And he said, “Well, we don’t allow students—but you can stay.” [laughter]
And years later, I had a patient who was a next-door neighbor to one of my assistants. He’d had a stroke, and one of his legs didn’t work, and his hand was [all curled up] and brown and cold, and he was catheterized for two years. And he always complained about his neck, and [my assistant] said, “Could you come and take a look at John’s neck?” So I said, “Sure!” and on my day off we went about 40 minutes up the road. And I thought, “Well, what the heck, I’m here...” so I held his points [which control circulation and balance] and five days later I’m in the office: “Doctor, come quickly!” John’s standing in the doorway. “Doc, I’m looking a lot better!” Walking. No catheter. Hand was a little warm, still a little [curled]. Two weeks later his hand is back, skin color is back. Two months later, he’s back practicing as a tile layer. Just that thing that I learned when I started as a student in that class—probably one in a million where he had just enough spasm that he couldn’t function, but his nerve tissue hadn’t been destroyed. And I just happened to touch that spot, and [snaps fingers].
TYG: [awed whisper] That’s incredible. That must have been amazing to see him recover.
Terry: Yes! I’ve had a lot of transient ischemia patients that recover within minutes. [...] I’ve seen a lot of stroke patients, but most stroke patients have ruptured blood vessels, and if they have that, you can’t do much for them. But the transient ischemia patients, who have spasms in their vessels—there’s no damage to them. So there are probably a dozen of those where you can touch their heads and hold them, and within a few minutes they’re walking around.
TYG: That’s just incredible.
Terry: Yes, it really is. Well, the body is incredible! It’s all controlled by the nervous system, and it’s all alive.
TYG: I’ve often wondered what the definition of “alive” is. Like, you think about it, and you’ve got the classic seven things. But so many of them don’t work now. For example, one of the most key ones, reproduction, the ability to reproduce by itself: even the most basic robot, with the right set of materials and a good set of programs, can do that, can build another one. [...] So the line is getting more and more hazy between “alive” and “not alive.”
Terry: Well, there’s something that animates things and organizes them that’s intelligent, a force that makes things be whole and not fall apart, and continue on; in the chiropractic profession you call it the innate intelligence. You can call it whatever you like, but that life spark is there; it’s an intelligent function and it all processes through the nervous system. They estimate that the nervous system receives about 200 million messages a second, and puts out about 150 million messages a second just to keep you alive and functioning. If you take the nerves in the spinal cord and you make the nerves the size of the little thin wires in a telephone cord, the spinal cord would be a mile and a half in diameter. There’s a lot of stuff in there—a lot of stuff.
TYG: And of course neurons use single cellular fibers, which are much, much thinner than wire, so that’s the only reason we can have a spine.
Terry: And you think: there’s the neuron, the fluid around it, the cell membrane around that, and that thing can spark off a biochemical reflex that can send a neurological message at 260 miles an hour. There’s diffusion of the molecule inside and out of the membrane, and that’s what propagates the electromagnetic impulse; and that happens at up to 260 miles per hour.
TYG: I would think of that as more of an average, because it depends on where the sender and the receiver are. If the sender and receiver are right next to each other, it can be almost instantaneous. Or if the sender and receiver are linked by basically one very long neuron... as far as I can gather, most of the problems happen at checkpoints between the neurons—that’s where most of the slow-downs happen.
Terry: Yes, the transmission point where it jumps the gap.
TYG: Right, because at that point it goes from an electrical reaction to a chemical reaction. Chemical is inherently messier and slower.
Terry: Yes, most of those chemicals are made out of B vitamins and sugar.
TYG: Which can be damaged much more easily than electric signals by lack of vitamins.
Terry: Yes—nutritional deficiencies cause a lot of problems. If you don’t have the chemistry to make the chemicals your body needs to run on, things don’t work right. Nutrition is very important.
TYG-GD: So, did you use to be in Waldport?
Terry: Yes, we had a practice there, since 1993. And then last June we shut that and sold it to Dr. Adams. Then I took nine months off—I thought I was just going to quit, but then friends and patients I’d seen before asked me, “Well, will you please help me?” I like doing the work, but the thing that really put me off was the increased, lugubrious paperwork, and insurance companies dictating the healthcare. I mean if a person has a neurologic problem and is in danger of having a permanent loss and needs surgery, and insurance says well, we won’t approve that unless you have six weeks of conservative surgery first... Just all that kind of thing. [Here,] we don’t bill insurance, [and] that makes it fun again. Because I’m the person that decides. And the person who comes to see me, they get results—or not! I fix you, you pay me. You take your car to the shop, you pay to get it fixed.
When I started practice, there was no such thing as insurance! It was $7.00 a visit. And if you got results, people would tell their friends and they’d come to see you. And if you didn’t, you’re out of here! So the quality of care, the doctor had skills—because if you didn’t, you were out of business! When I was just out of school an article came out in the Wall Street Journal about the three most optimum earning professions: dentistry, medicine, and chiropractic. Chiropractic was second. Well, that year that the article came out, enrollment jumped 200%. Then you started getting insurance coverage, and they started having these seminars all about building your codes, how to satisfy the desires of the insurance companies so they’ll pay your bill. Patient care, technique—not even discussed. And that disgusts me. [...] Hey, if you want to make a lot of money, just go into real estate or open a store. I’m old-school—I’m just a codgy old-timer. [laughter] [...]
TYG-GD: So, what procedure do potential clients use to get in touch with you and schedule something?
Terry: Oh, you can just call 541-547-5889 and leave a message on the answering machine. We have hours on Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoons, and I’m mostly focusing more on diet and nutrition, health maintenance, that kind of thing.
TYG-GD: What does that consist of?
Terry: Well, the first two [diet and nutrition], I just look at symptoms, and see if they have functional symptoms that indicate deficiencies, and rule out any pathological symptoms or refer the [patient]. We use the Standard Process products. Dr. Lee started making these products—he was a dentist, and also an inventor. He had 101 patents on electrical stuff—coils, that kind of stuff. He was independently wealthy. Anyway, when he was 19 or 20, his mom was diagnosed with a heart condition and had about six months to live. And he’s this guy who’s really interested in nutrition, and very, very smart. He knew she had a crappy diet, so he said, “She’s dying of malnutrition.” He had things he figured would fill in all the gaps, and he called the product Catalyn, with broccoli and this and that. But what he did was take products that were organic, and dries them into a powder at 74°F, so they’re never cooked. So he had these little tablets which were the source of organic food, and that was his core thing. He gave that to his mom, and she lived another 12 years. So the neighbors asked for that stuff he gave his mom, and then he had to build a large facility to produce it. And then if he got a specific challenge, like thyroid or whatever, he would make them a custom formula for that. And he also discovered that he could take the cellular structure apart, and take material out of the nucleus—in modern medicine they call it the determinant factors: if you take a thyroid cell and put it into a liver cell it turns into a liver cell—he called them protomorphogens, things that are there before it takes form. He used these to regenerate damaged tissue. He extracted them and put them in tablet form. [...] The products evolved, so there’s thyroid formula, and combinations that make it easy to absorb and function. The core is basically whole organic food nutrition to fill in the gaps and to get away from the stuff that destroys health: sugar, things that deregulate your autoimmune system and your fat metabolism system. So I provide diet and nutrition advice.
TYG-GD: So you do that more of that than the actual adjustments?
Terry: No, we do the adjustments—everything’s an adjustment. If the body’s out of balance, it affects the nervous system. If the nervous system is irritated, it affects the musculature, particularly along the spine. So a lot of things that chiropractors adjust are misalignments and tensions that develop in the spine as the result of organ irritations from the inside out. So it’s a two-way street. The nervous system is all one merry-go-round—where do you want to get on? Mental stress, physical excess, fatigue, lack of nutrition—all those things that affect the living organism are mediated through the nervous system. We’ll have people come in, and find that they have a particular pattern of spinal distortion—a very common one is like third, fourth thoracic vertebra. That’s very often where you find the reflex from the gallbladder. So when I find that, I ask them: “Do you have any trouble with digestion?” So I poke around their gall-bladder and check their liver, and [...] if they’re tender, I say “Wow, I could adjust you forever and it would be good for my pocketbook, or we could talk about changing your diet and nutrition, making your gall-bladder happy so it’s not bombarding your spine causing the spasms that make your back hurt and your limbs out of place!”
TYG: Or of course there might be a gall stone.
Terry: Yes, there can be gall stones, pathologies... the functional symptoms are usually pretty mild. For instance, liver symptoms could be a pain behind the eye, sometimes a milky film on the eye—you can’t get rid of it, but your eyes are healthy. We have a symptoms survey form, and it has all these crazy symptoms, grouped by liver/gall-bladder, or pancreas/gall-bladder, adrenals, thyroid. And if it shows up, we can do blood tests, find out if it’s a pathology or not. And if it’s a functional problem, here is where we relieve the stress, usually through diet and nutrition.
TYG: Thank you so much for your time!
Terry: Thank you—it was a pleasure!
Interview with Maeona Urban, Painter
The Yachats Gazette was pleased to speak with Maeona Urban, a painter who moved to Yachats about three years ago with her husband Ron. Maeona is part of the Yachats Arts Guild.
TYG: So, what kind of art do you do?
Maeona: Mostly I do oil paintings. I do some watercolor and some acrylic, but I like paintings the best.
TYG: I’ve never personally worked with oil, but I hear it’s a very fun medium.
Maeona: I like it because I like the way it smells. My husband doesn’t think it smells so good. [laughs]
TYG: I have sort of a similar thing with Sharpies. Just the smell of them... I wouldn’t say “intoxicating,” because that’s not the right word, but it’s sort of a nice smell, and I enjoy working with them.
Maeona: It’s also forgiving, because oil painting doesn’t dry quickly, so I can push it around where I want to, and oil paints cover up other oil paints. If you make a mistake, you just wait for it to dry, you paint over it.
TYG: Acrylic is sort of the same, but it’s not quite as good. There’s a bit of mixing. But for watercolor... phhh. You make a mistake, you have to re-start the whole painting.
Maeona: Well, there are things you can do, but it changes the picture. The artist that did the... my mind went blank: he did the Campbell’s soup cans...
TYG-Graphic Design: Andy Warhol?
Maeona: Andy Warhol, yes. A lot of his paintings are acrylic, and they’re starting to let go of the canvas. So they’re trying to figure out how to maintain the paintings... and there are some other paintings that are some fairly famous works of art that are done in acrylics that are also starting to let go.
TYG: You know what would be amazing... Can you imagine if you were able to take the paint off as one unit, and then have it, so it has holes where he didn’t paint. So it almost becomes like an iron-clad thing—you know, like the artwork that’s on fences, often? Can you imagine how cool that would look with the classic old soup can!
Maeona: [laughter] Yes! You can kind of do that with Polaroid photography—are you familiar with the old Polaroid cameras where you take a picture and then you pull it out the end of the camera? They’re kind of self-developing. Well, there’s a method—it’s called Polaroid transfer (real imaginative name). You take the picture, and then you put it into water. The gel that the picture is in separates from the piece of paper. And then you can slide other materials in behind it very carefully, sort of work your way up, and pick the photograph-developed gel onto new material. You can put it onto antique materials, and it looks like it’s a hundred-year old photograph. It’s very difficult, like trying to pick up not-quite-set Jello. It can kind of be fragile at the edges, and it gives them this funny antiqued appearance. Our oldest son took courses at Seattle Art Institute Photography, and he made some like that. They’re pretty cool!
TYG: How did you get into oil painting?
Maeona: My mother was attempting to do some painting, and I was eight years old, and when she finished what she was doing she gave me what was left on her palette. I have my first completed oil painting still—I have it hanging on the wall in the other room. It’s a baby duck [said in a funny voice]! [laughter] It’s kind of a funny little painting when I look back on it! But I’ve been doing oil painting since I was eight, and my grand-mother (my mother’s mother) grew up in a Quaker family, in an era where women didn’t work outside of the home. So Quaker women all learned painting and arts and crafts and sewing and knitting and crocheting and canning and all the things women should know. So she, from home, taught ceramics and china painting.
TYG-GD: So they did work, but it had to be from home?
Maeona: It had to be from home. They could make things, and sell things, you know, hand-made items...
TYG-GD: What was the rationale behind that?
TYG: Probably the men didn’t want the women to take credit.
Maeona: It was just the way things were—women didn’t work outside the home. It was just one of those rules we’ve outgrown. So she did a lot of those things. [My mom] was just searching for something to do. She was okay at it—she still has some of the paintings that she did. But eventually she figured out that she liked making jewelry and rock-hounding, making the jewelry from scratch. My step-dad did silver-smithing, and so they made jewelry!
TYG: That must have made a good combination!
Maeona: Yes. They’re 90 years old this year, and they’ve just decided to sell their rock-cutting and all the equipment that goes with making cabs [cabochons: half-rounded focal point polished stones] and jewelry. And last year... or was it two years ago? Marc Taylor’s shop [Nature’s Bling] was still a second-hand store, and he went over to my parents and bought more rock than his wife was pleased with. [laughter] He brought it back, and ever since then the stuff he’s been doing with the rocks has exploded exponentially.
TYG: Absolutely. Some of the stuff he has is just beautiful.
Maeona: I just go down there and look—I can’t bring things home, or I’d bring it all home. So I feel like I should apologize to his wife. [laughter] Rock-hounding, and the pretty stuff they make from them whether it’s jewelry or sculptures or whatever—they just form a community bond. My parents used to go every year to a place called Quartzite, Arizona. It is, and isn’t, sort of a town: once a year, everybody—nationally and internationally—takes their campers and RVs and whatever they’re going to stay in, and they all go to Quartzite—thousands of people!
TYG-GD: It’s like Burning Man.
Maeona: Yes! It’s like that—only it’s about rocks. They all meet there and buy and sell and trade rocks and talk with each other about all the new stuff they’ve found.
TYG-GD: So is oil painting the only kind of art that you do?
Maeona: No, I still do some acrylic. The northwest coast Native American artwork designs that I do I do in acrylic, because it dries quickly. Because I do them on small canvases with small detail, I have a tendency to lay my hand on it, so I do it in acrylic because acrylic dries quickly.
TYG: Can you imagine if you did that on an oil painting? The whole painting would be wrecked!
Maeona: Well, I’ve done it a whole lot of times. [laughs] Oil painting is very forgiving. Sometimes I do, I just push it back into place. Like this painting here [motions to the “Beach Fort” ] ...
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| “Beach Fort,” Maeona Urban, 2016. Oils. (Note: shadow at the top is from the easel) |
TYG: Whoah, that’s a painting? I thought it was a photograph—that’s amazing!
Maeona: I’ve been working on that one for more than a month. It’s totally dry right now. I’ve done it in sections, and I’ve been posting as I go along online—specifically for my oldest sister in Mayville, Oregon, because her and her friends paint there, and she asked me to post them as I did them so they would be able to ask me questions and I could give them pointers on how to do things on their paintings. But the white that comes right out of the tube on the foreground there has taken almost a month to dry, and I have more detail I want to work on without laying my hand on that. So I’ve had to wait for that to dry so I can go in and finish just a few other little details that I want to put in. [...] They don’t always turn out that well. Some paintings, when I paint outdoors, when I do what’s called plein air painting, sometimes I go there and I paint three or four hours, and I come home and I look at it and I say to myself, “Ick.” [laughter] “I don’t like what I did today.” I take an old rag, and a can of paint thinner, and I just smear it all off of the canvas, throw it in the corner, and wait for another day.
TYG-GD: Isn’t that hard to do? Did you have to learn to be able to accept that part of painting?
Maeona: Yes. For a long time—and sometimes still, even—when I do a painting, I’m never really, totally satisfied. There’s always something I’m looking at going, “Oh, I should have done...” or “I could...” and I really don’t like to hang my paintings around where I’m going to have to look at them. Because thirty years later, I’m still going “I should have...” [laughter] And to get to the point of wiping them off, yes. Because lots of times I would let them dry, and then rework them. And rework them. And rework them. And they didn’t get any prettier. So I realized I was wasting a lot of effort and mental aggravation. It’s a lot easier to just come home and realize that I didn’t get what I wanted and just take a big rag and wash it off.
TYG: Wow. It must take quite some mental resolve.
Maeona: It takes, I think, less—I think that’s why I learned to do it—than to keep it and try to fix it. If somebody gets a third eye, it’s just not going to get any better. [laughter]
TYG: Where were you before here?
Maeona: Before here we came from Scappoose, Oregon, which is about 25 miles northwest of Portland.
TYG: I think I’ve passed through there once!
TYG-GD: Yes, because we used to live in Kalama, Washington.
Maeona: If you go from Portland to Astoria, you have to go through Scappoose.
TYG-GD: It’s along the Oregon side of the Columbia [River], and then there’s a bridge to Longview.
Maeona: We lived there 38 years, and we vacationed here 30 years. So when we retired, our kids were old—they’re 42 and 47—and we just said, “Bye! We’re going to the beach!” [laughter]
TYG-GD: Who are you calling old? [laughter]
Maeona: For kids, they are! They’re not ... thirteen?
TYG: Yes, just turned! April 10!
Maeona: Oh right, teenager! Hah! “Hire a teenager while they still know it all!” [laughter, and protestations from the Publisher] Before [Scappoose], I came from Portland—I was born and raised in Portland. So I haven’t traveled that far. [...] Most of my experiences have been right here in Oregon. I’ve been to [Canada, to] Yellowstone, and I’ve been over the border into California, and that’s about it. I don’t travel well—when I was in the sixth, seventh grade I got scarlet fever, and back then you either got well or you died from it. It affected my equilibrium, so I get car sick, train sick, plane sick, boat sick—if it moves, and I’m not in control, I can get sick really quick because I have inner ear problems. So I don’t travel a lot, because it’s not all that fun! [laughter]
TYG: How did you get involved with “Art in the Kitchen”?
Maeona: I’m a member of the Yachats Arts Guild, and we were discussing ways to let the community know that the Art Guild existed other than the sales that we have on the Fourth of July and on Labor Day. And it was one of the ideas that came up during that discussion, to invite people to all come gather together and do art work! It’s also one of the things that the guild I belonged to in Columbia County did, and there was a group of 70 artists that I belonged to—the Portland Plein Air Artists—we did that with them as well.
TYG: I still have some questions about the Art in the Kitchen program. Is there an age limit, positive or negative?
Maeona: I don’t think there’s an age limit, or an ability [requirement]. It’s a $5 donation because we have to rent the room from the Commons. You should come down!
TYG: I prefer pencils and markers.
Maeona: I’ve been bringing—for the last few times, although I don’t come every week—I’ve been bringing an adult coloring book and an extra pack of pencils, in case somebody just comes in and doesn’t know what we’re doing and wants to join in. I’ve been doing a project that I’ve been working on several years in the Art in the Kitchen. It’s called my “Anglo-Saxon Colored Pencil Folk Art Bible.” [laughs]
TYG: Long title!
Maeona: It needs all the words to describe what it is. It’s “Anglo-Saxon” because I’ve been raised within a white community, and so my teachings, what people have taught me, are from a white English-speaking reference point. They’re 18” by 24” posters. I’m doing one poster for each book of the Bible, and it’s in colored pencil, and it’s not in a detailed, realistic style—it’s loose. So it’s the “Anglo-Saxon Colored Pencil Folk Art Bible.” But I’ve been doing that down there, because I usually have my oils set up here and I’m working on something, and I don’t want to take it down to work on my colored pencil stuff, and then when I get the colored pencil stuff up, I don’t want to take it down to put the oil stuff back. So I’m using that colored pencil project to take down to Art in the Kitchen. That’s my Wednesday project. [Art in the Kitchen takes place in the kitchen room at the Commons on Wednesdays from one to four in the afternoon.]
TYG: I thought you had to be an adult to do it...
TYG-GD: Oh no!
Maeona: It’s not teaching, it’s not class time and stuff like that; it’s just everybody brings what they want to do and works on it, and we all look at what everybody is working on and go “Oh cool!” and sometimes we ask each other for help, like “What does this picture need?” The picture your mom just finished, with the blue bird catching the fish: we all sort of agreed that her log in the picture needed to extend out past the bird a little. Your mom did that to it, and it really made a difference, I think. So we kind of help each other.
TYG: Anything else you want to talk about?
Maeona: The button collection! I inherited a button collection that used to belong to my grandmother. Then my mother worked on it, and my mother is 89 now, and she has passed it on to me. There’s something ridiculous like over 5,000 buttons in it. There are buttons from the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, military buttons, buttons from the 1800’s women’s clothing, and ... there’s a LOT.
TYG-GD: All kinds of different materials?
Maeona: Yes! There’s metal ones and glass ones and plastic ones. I’ve learned six or eight different kinds of names for plastics, what metals are magnetic and which ones are not. So I’ve been studying the buttons. In the internet age in which we live, we can just type in stuff and find out about things. When my grandmother and my mother were studying these things, there was no internet, so they didn’t have as much information. It’s been interesting for me. I took the metal ones first, because a lot of the metal ones have words imprinted on them and I’ve looked them up on the internet, just typing in what the words were. So I got information about historic things, and Civil War things, and all kinds of railroads.
TYG: That’s my thing!
Maeona: I have buttons from the people who worked on the railroads in the 1800’s—I have buttons from their uniforms. I have a button from the uniform of a person who worked at the Oregon State Mental Hospital.
TYG-GD: How did you even get it?
Maeona: My grandparents lived in Salem, and I don’t know if they knew someone...
TYG-GD: I mean, what do they say? “Hi, I like your buttons, do you mind if I take one for my granddaughter 200 years from now?” [laughs]
Maeona: Well, it’s on a card that has work uniform buttons. But how she got that particular one, I really don’t know. I don’t know how she got any of them, you know. “Can I have the buttons off your pants?” [laughter] There’s a lot of imported Czechoslovakian glass ones... it has the buttons off my grandfather’s World War I uniform, and her brother’s World War I uniform. There are national button societies, state button societies, local button clubs... I had no idea. None whatsoever. I went to my mother’s because she said she was going to give me the button collection. I hadn’t seen it since I was... ten? I expected a box of buttons. Instead, my whole trunk was full of boxes of buttons.
TYG-GD: And they come on these big sheets, right?
Maeona: Yes. These ones I’m re-carding, because the card is falling apart. [...] They were sewn on, but the threads are rotten. And this is what the official Button Society cardboard looks like. I mean, they even have “official cardboard.” [laughter] These are from the 18th century. And these—can you feel that material? What that was for is, they didn’t bathe regularly. So they didn’t smell very good!
TYG: [laughs] So that is a smell absorber, or a perfume carrier?
Maeona: Yes! To make you smell good, after you haven’t taken a bath. [Looks through more button cards] They’re everywhere!
TYG: Wow. My mom has a couple of these! I’ve always loved the pure black ones.
Maeona: There’s boxes and boxes of them. [A box falls on the Publisher] My “Anglo-Saxon Colored Pencil Folk Art Bible” is attacking you! This one is the book of Isaiah! [She takes the drawing out of the box.]
TYG: [gasps] Mom, come and see this!
Maeona: She sees them every Wednesday.
TYG: Wow. It’s amazing! [...] Well, thanks so much, Maeona!
Maeona: Thank you, Allen!
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