ELEVATORS: A reader just found out why his elevator-operator relative would get so annoyed when the elevators in the former Emery Hotel would break down: He would have to crawl through the floor to get out. There was no one to help him.

He learned this after we talked about it in the Aug. 15 column.

That’d put a damper in our day, too.

Speaking of elevators, Sam Sylvester of Congress Street wrote to us with more on the topic:

“In the early 1950s, I worked as an after-school stock boy at A.J. Olsen department store on the corner of Main Street and Webster (now Festival Way). We had a small elevator, mainly for staff to go to the 3rd floor office, but on occasion, a customer would request to use it for shopping on the second floor and I would be asked to operate it.

“It was a very small elevator, 4 to 5 feet square with a scissor gate and a simple lever to go up and down. We also had the pneumatic tubes carrying change to and from the office to the sales floor.

“Incidentally, the second floor of the store was quite special. There was an elegant curved staircase leading to it and a wide selection of men’s suits, ladies’ dresses, a full line of fur coats, stoles and a milliner’s corner. All of this was complemented by salesmen in suits and ties and sales women in dresses and high heels. It was impressive.”

LOOKING UP: The Associated Press mentions the anniversary today of two events related looking up at the moon.

On Aug. 21:

“In 1609, Galileo Galilei demonstrated his new telescope to a group of officials atop the Campanile (kahm-pah-NEE’-lay) in Venice,” the AP states.

According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, it was later this year that he used what he observed in his telescope to draw the moon’s phases and describe the surface of the moon.

Then, in 2017, “Americans witnessed their first full-blown coast-to-coast solar eclipse since World War I, with eclipse-watchers gathering along a path of totality extending 2,600 miles across the continent from Oregon to South Carolina.”