Before smartphones, before voicemail, before the advent of answering machines, the easiest way to record your voice for a loved one was to step into a Voice-O-Graph booth.

The Voice-O-Graph was a do-it-yourself recording studio the size of a small closet. Walk inside, close the door, deposit 35 cents and make a record of your own. The machines cranked out a lacquer-coated disc that held about a minute of crackling sound. During World War II, soldiers and their families swapped the plates across oceans. They felt more alive than a letter, and they didn’t clog up what was then a limited number of long-distance phone lines.

Painted advertisements on Voice-O-Graph booths promised technological wonder rarely available to regular folks at the time. “Step in! Record your voice!” “Hear yourself as others hear you!”

Voice-O-Graph booths once peppered movie theaters, arcades, state fairs and bus stations across the U.S. But with the advance of compact cassettes in the ‘60s, the machines were relegated to garages, cellars and garbage heaps — obsolete and unwanted.

Of all the passenger vessels that once plied the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps none had as interesting a life as the S.S. President Warfield, flagship of the Baltimore Steam Packet Co., aka the Old Bay Line. It saw more of the world than most ships of its kind.

The ship’s namesake was Solomon Davies Warfield, president of the Old Bay Line. Warfield came from a wealthy Baltimore family with a deep affection for the South. (Or an antipathy for the North. Warfield’s father was one of the Maryland legislators imprisoned by the Union after the start of the Civil War.)

The 400-passenger boat was originally going to be called the Florida, but a month after its keel was laid at the Pusey & Jones shipyard in Wilmington, Del., Warfield died. One of Warfield’s nieces did the honors when it was christened in 1928, but not his most notorious niece, Bessie Wallis Warfield, whom the world would later know as the Duchess of Windsor.

The President Warfield was the nicest boat in the Old Bay Line’s fleet, painted a gleaming white, with a saloon paneled in ivory, a double staircase and some staterooms fitted with actual bathtubs. Dinner came from Maryland’s bounty: terrapin, canvas back duck, quail, oysters, roe. When the 18th Amendment was repealed, the ship even boasted a bar. (Before then, the space was a barbershop.)

Three months after Delbert Shorter’s food stamps were cut off, he still does not know why.

At first, he thought that his $180 a month allotment from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called SNAP or food stamps, was just late. But as one week turned into another, Mr. Shorter, 78, who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, grew more anxious, and hungrier. He stockpiled canned foods from a church food pantry, borrowed $60 from his home health aide and turned to a senior center to help get his food stamps back.

“It’s very hard,” he said. “If I knew it was really going to come, I would not have to worry about the next meal.”

Even as New York City has embarked on a campaign to increase access to food stamps in recent months, Mr. Shorter’s plight illustrates the barriers that remain for those who are already enrolled. Many people who rely on the benefits say they have had to navigate a frustrating and overly bureaucratic process whenever there is a question or issue with their benefits, or when they are required to renew their eligibility. In the confusion, some lose the benefits.