Richard Hayley Lever: Story of a Painter

President Coolidge accepts Hayley Lever's painting
of the presidential yacht, Mayflower (1924)
(Smithsonian Archives of American Art)

Richard Hayley Lever is not considered an exceptional artist, although some of his paintings are very pretty and appear in the collections of important museums.  They are rarely displayed, however.

Perhaps his brightest moment came in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge commissioned him to paint a picture of the presidential yacht, the Mayflower.  The dour Coolidge always took an awkward photograph, and the one wherein he accepts the painting is the same. 

Born in Australia in 1876, Hayley Lever studied painting in England.  He became captivated by the wild sea and countryside at Cornwall, a peninsula at the southwest corner of England. Just before World War I, he left England for New York where he became friendly with George Bellows, John Sloan, and other artists who comprised the “Ashcan School.”

Hayley Lever's painting of the Mt. Vernon, N. Y.
train station, in the style of the Ashcan School, 1930s
(www.1stdibs.com)

The Ashcan painters were urban realists who coalesced during the early twentieth century in reaction to the Impressionists who had dominated painting for at least three decades.  Ashcan subjects included tenements, immigrants, and streetscapes.  

In New York, Hayley Lever became a member of the National Academy of Design, a prestigious honorary association of artists.  He also taught at the Art Students League, although the school does not list him among the famous artists who trained or taught there. Every summer he traveled to Gloucester, Mass., to paint the ocean and boats that reminded him of Cornwall.

During the early 1930s as the Depression set in, Hayley Lever fell on hard times.  He was forced to sell his home in New Jersey and faced limited options.

Fortunately, he received offers to run studio art clubs in two communities just outside of New York City.  As a well-known East Coast painter, he must have been considered quite a catch. 

The electric company building in Mt. Vernon, N.Y.
appears in Hayley Lever's paintings below.
(Westchester County Historical Society)

The artist probably didn’t earn much of a living, but he was of the moment.  

Through the 1920s, as the upper-middle class gained leisure time, a hobbyist culture had emerged in the U. S.  Wealthy men and women took up golf, bridge, ham radio and the like.  Civic involvement and club activities increased steadily until 1930.

Railroad Yards, Mt. Vernon, N. Y.
(Richard Hayley Lever, 1940s) 

Eager to stay busy and develop their interests, many suburban women were drawn to painting. Unsurprisingly, Hayley Lever’s plein air classes became very popular as he took students around to lakes, a waterfall, a harbor, and woods.

Considering his love of nature, one might imagine that he lived in a pretty place.  But that was not the case.  He lived on a busy street, in a room in a bungalow overlooking a deep stone railroad cut where the New York-New Haven trains came through.

It’s those Ashcan scenes which he knew by heart, and painted again and again during the last two decades of his life. 

City Scene, painting of downtown Mt. Vernon, N. Y. by
Richard Hayley Lever, 1943 (www.1stdibs.com)

*He died in 1958.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/04/story-of-painter.html?m=1

Grace T. Lewis & How She Grew

Grace T. Lewis's Mt. Vernon, circa 1910

In 1915, Miss Lewis started as a clerk in the high school business office; within six years, she became Dean of Girls. Her voice may have been thunderous or eerily quiet, but definitely one or the other considering the power she wielded. Plus, she had the ear of the assistant superintendent with whom she lived in what used to be known as a Boston Marriage.

That was a polite term for a relationship between two single women, usually intimate friends, who lived together. Often their careers made them financially independent, which was the case with Grace Theodora Lewis and Catharine Inglis Rhodes.

Miss Lewis and Miss Rhodes were Methodists who did not drink or dance. But the two women loved the Metropolitan Opera, which they attended in drooping gowns with lace handkerchiefs twirled around their little fingers.

Ah yes, ancient perfume wafting across the porch as they stepped through the door of 223 South Second Avenue, a rambling Victorian house that Lewis inherited from her father. She called it “223.”  

The only child of a banker who served two years as the mayor of Mt. Vernon, N.Y., and his second wife, whose family owned a department store on the city’s “avenue,” Grace (dare I call her that?) must have been prim and proper from the moment she set eyes on the world. 

She always made it clear that her family descended from the explorer Meriwether Lewis. Evidently he was a melancholy man, but Grace didn’t inherit that gene.

Born in 1892 in Mt. Vernon Hospital, Grace attended the public schools and graduated from Goucher College, a Methodist women’s college in Baltimore, in 1913. She returned to her hometown, attended secretarial school, and found work locally.

But she wanted to go into the field of education. In 1921 she earned a Master’s degree from Teachers College of Columbia University. Then, amid slight controversy, Lewis promptly was appointed to the newly created position of Dean of Girls at the high school.

Grace Lewis’s companion, Miss Rhodes, followed a similar trajectory. Born in Aurora, Illinois, in 1893; Vassar College, 1915; Teachers College, 1923. A Mt. Vernon High School math teacher, she became assistant superintendent in 1940 but previously ran things behind the scenes for many years.

It goes without saying that Lewis and Rhodes had been fierce supporters of woman suffrage.

I have the feeling, though, that Catharine Rhodes got stuck in time, especially after she retired in 1962. Several years later, she responded to a questionnaire from her alma mater:

              What do you like most about today’s world?

              All the people who are doing their best to improve conditions lawfully and quietly.

What do you hate most about it?

Riots and fighting, cheap conduct and dirty dressing. Lack of publicity for all the good things being done.

It’s hard to blame Miss Rhodes for feeling chilled.

Some people endure relatively little social upheaval during the course of their lives. Others’ lifetimes fall along different lines.  

Another way to put it might be: in the space of her 92 years, the national protocol shifted from going to church and dressing for dinner on Sundays, to not dressing for church or Sunday dinner, and possibly not attending church or dinner at all.

If one feels besieged by change, every adjustment is hard. 

So on to Miss Lewis.

From her perch at Mt. Vernon High School, built high above the street with a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt – inexplicably reclining – on a plaza below, Grace T. Lewis saw a student population very much in flux.

In the early 1920s, the city government continued to be controlled by Mt. Vernon’s historically Protestant establishment, whose children attended the public schools.

Now, however, the schools also were charged with educating growing numbers of black children whose parents had fled the South after the First World War, second-generation Jews, and the sons and daughters of Italian immigrants whose hard labor could be seen in the high stone walls of the railroad cut that separated Mt. Vernon’s north and south sides racially, ethnically, and socio-economically.

In fact, Grace Lewis’s high school was one of two citywide. Its college prep curriculum contrasted with that of Edison Technical High School, whose vocational program made it the right place, in the opinion of counselors, for most of the students who faced disadvantages and discrimination.

That was a scheme with endless ramifications; it haunts the city today. 

Excerpt from a 1959 letter from Grace T. Lewis to my father,
then a Ford Foundation official, asking for consideration of a grant
to her alma mater, Goucher College

But the point here is that, as a product of her time, there would have been no expectation of Lewis to recognize the need to extend educational opportunity to students from all corners of the city’s diverse population. 

Yet she devoted herself to the pursuit of higher education for many Mt. Vernon students no matter who they were.

In 1922 Lewis established a Students’ College Fund to help “the son of foreigners, who is acting father for a large family of younger brothers and sisters . . . who has to work during his entire high school life to help support his family,” as she described in an article for The School Review.

“The colored girl, whose work has been faithfully and creditably done in adverse surroundings, should be encouraged to carry out her longing to prepare herself for teaching,” Lewis wrote.

Thousands of dollars were raised. Between 1922 and 1962, the fund inspired hundreds of Mt. Vernon’s working-class students to finish high school and enabled them to attend college.

Incidentally, the Grace T. Lewis Scholarships for Women in the Sciences are still awarded at Goucher College. Her bequests also included Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the nation’s second oldest medical school for African-Americans, and other historically black colleges.

Miss Lewis surely registered tone deaf about certain social inequities. However, on an individual basis she righted many wrongs in her beloved city.

She was, admirably, all about education.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/grace-t-lewis-how-she-grew_18.html?m=1

The Long Arms of Zayda Zabriskie

Zayda Zabriskie, 1914

It’s surprising to see Romer Shawhan’s name listed as one of the ushers at Zayda’s first wedding in 1911. She would marry and divorce thrice before they took their own vows 25 years later in the marriage chapel of New York City’s Municipal Building, a wedding-cake structure in lower Manhattan.

And that was just 11 days after she secured a divorce from husband #3, in Reno.

Later on, Romer said they were childhood sweethearts. So you have to wonder what happened during the years between.

It reminds me of Rhett Butler’s line in Gone with the Wind: “I can’t go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.”

After marrying in 1936, Romer and Zayda were together until her death two decades later.

The pair probably met in the Bay Area where both grew up. His father left the family a few years after Romer was born in 1888. His mother, Ada Romer Shawhan, a painter and illustrator, worked out of a studio on Sacramento Street in San Francisco. And his beautiful, ethereal sister, Violet, pursued a career as a modern dancer.

Romer attended Lick-Wilmerding High School and graduated with technical and college preparatory degrees. At age 17, he submitted a plan to redesign the city’s Dolores Park, on the western edge of the Mission District. Romer’s design clearly was inspired by the work of the landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.  The city fathers chose it but before anything could be done, the earthquake happened.

Ada, Romer, and Violet all were bold, creative, and enterprising.

In 1910 Romer went to New York City to study architecture at Columbia University. Zayda Zabriskie already lived there with her parents. She attended Brearley and Miss Porter’s before heading off to Bryn Mawr.

Her father, Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, made his fortune as vice president and general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Zabriskie Point in Death Valley is named for him. The company’s 20-mule teams hauled the borax from the mines to the nearest railroad in Mojave, California.

Zayda stayed just one year at Bryn Mawr before marrying Frank Buck, heir to a California fruit company, who inherited great wealth and invested it well. The ceremony took place in New York at the Little Church Around the Corner on 29^th Street.

Zayda Zabriskie Buck in her wedding gown,
pictured in the New York Sun, April 30, 1911

After the wedding, and after Zayda had been presented in her wedding gown at the Court of St. James, the couple moved to the West Coast where their four children were born.

Meanwhile, Romer studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Returning home, his projects included various office buildings around the country.

The U.S. entered World War I in April 1917. In August, Romer enlisted in the Air Service and became a lieutenant and fighter pilot. He served as Assistant Operations Officer on the staff of General William Mitchell, Chief of Air Service in the American First Army. Romer’s fellow pilots included Eddie Rickenbacker and Theodore Roosevelt’s son, Quentin, who was killed during a dogfight in the Second Battle of the Marne.

Romer received the Pershing Army Citation, the Croix de Guerre, and the Distinguished Service Medal.

Romer Shawhan, circa 1917

Through the 1920s, he worked with several prestigious architectural firms, living in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis. Building materials especially interested him. He published articles about slate, terra cotta, and marble.

Out in California, Zayda stuck with Mr. Buck (who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a New Deal Democrat) until the mid-1920s. Then they divorced and she married Scott Springer Hendricks, who also ran for the House (as a Republican) but lost.

In 1927, Zayda and Scott testified on behalf of a friend in a custody case before the New York State Supreme Court. The cast of characters included a deceitful father, an adulterous mother, a blind aunt who stated the child always looked dirty, a maternal grandmother whose Garden City home was said to lack sufficient yard space, and a governess who was ill or told to be ill whenever a dashing real estate developer came around . . .  largely played out against the backdrop of dozens of dinner parties in San Mateo where liquor flowed freely.

Zayda displayed some wit on the stand but she definitely stayed with her story.

Sometime in the early 1930s, Zayda and Scott divorced, and she married a lawyer named Mark Daniels. A few years later, she divorced Daniels in Nevada and within two weeks married Romer.

He was working for the Federal Government so they lived in Washington. During World War II, he served four years as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S.A.F. The man must have adored flying.

After the war, they bought a house in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where family antiques, art, and relics were arranged throughout the spacious rooms. Subsequently, Romer helped found the Marble Institute of America. This organization brought together quarriers, wholesalers, importers, finishers, and contractors to create standards for quality and craftsmanship of marble.

After Zayda died in 1956, Romer stayed in the house with his sister Violet. They lived out their days painting and reading. Romer died in 1970 and is buried with Zayda at the Lone Mountain Cemetery in Carson City, Nevada, surrounded by Zabriskies.

Shawhan House, Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

See also April 13, 2016 + December 29, 2015 posts.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/the-long-arms-of-zayda-zabriskie.html?m=1

Brazil

My high school boyfriend emigrated from Brazil to the U.S. around 1960. Crazy in love, I tried to pry that story out of him, looking to make sense of his changeable personality. He didn’t want to share, so I picked up not a single detail about his early life.

Lately, though, the coverage of government corruption and social instability has helped me to imagine the situation from which his family fled. It’s clear that the people of Brazil have never caught a break.

In 1930 after a contested election and military action, Getulio Vargas became president through a junta. This began the Second Republic, marked by nationalism and authoritarianism. But Vargas did institute social welfare programs which is why Brazilians still celebrate the “Father of the Poor.”

Skimming through history, there was a 1937 coup and Vargas’ establishment of the New State (Estado Novo), a political and economic system known as “corporatism” that also found favor with Mussolini. Vargas kept coming back until 1954 when he committed suicide rather than resign.

Violence, terror, and poverty; I guess my ex-boyfriend’s parents had enough by then.

They were very young. I knew that because his mother bore him at the age of 18, possibly earlier. She was a sweet worried lady who hugged me the only time we met. His stepfather, I learned later, harassed him even though he earned excellent grades and didn’t make trouble. 

Clearly there was discord in his family, but he never talked about it. Not that family life felt harmonious anywhere in the U.S. during the 1970s.

Looking back now, I think: why should he have shared his Brazilian immigration story with me?

Between 1948 and 1980, many of the kids who went to public school in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., were the grandchildren of Italian, Irish, and Eastern European immigrants.

We didn’t tell our families’ stories to each other. We knew them, all right. They weren’t that far in the past. But why would teenagers, already embarrassed by so much about themselves, draw attention to stuff that would make them feel even more conspicuous?  

I wouldn’t have told anyone that my grandfather slept on a park bench in Union Square after he got off the boat at Ellis Island in 1914. 

As an adult, however, I've found that some of the best stories that friends share are about the lives of their parents and grandparents. Some are about immigration. Overall, they grant greater understanding and intimacy.

Meanwhile, here I am stuck with a tenacious habit, gravitating toward any and all information about Brazil. After 42 years, still trying to figure out that boy.

  

Collage by Claudia Keenan

See also 2015 posts: November 5, November 23, December 21 + December 29

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/brazil.html?m=1

Miss Violet Romer

Violet Romer, 1910

It made complete sense that they lived in a quintessential American house: an elegant Foursquare with generous bay windows that overlooked the sidewalks lined with elm trees.  

The elderly brother and sister at 108 Forster Avenue filled their home with art, antiques, and such memorabilia as a broken plate pulled from the rubble of the San Francisco Earthquake.

While we trudged to school through sunshine and snowstorms, Violet and Romer Shawhan moved about in rooms hung with the portraits of ancestors. A few of these men had accumulated tremendous wealth before and during the Gilded Age.

Their paternal grandfather, descended from a Kentucky family whose money came from whiskey distilleries, moved West after the Civil War and invested in mining, streetcars, and stocks.

John E. Shawhan had everyone living in grand style at the Palace Hotel until the State of Virginia defaulted on its “consols” (consolidated annuities). Then he became known for “Shawhan’s Folly” – the California Street property where he built a stable to house his collection of splendid horses and carriages.

The horses drank from marble troughs and occupied stalls carved of birds-eye maple. In a private room at the stable, Mrs. Shawhan entertained friends and reporters. She showed off her gold-tipped harnesses and whips.

After the bankruptcy, the Shawhans decamped to Nevada where the missus filed for divorce. But their son James made a bit of a recovery when he married Ada Romer, a free-spirited painter whose father had arrived in California during the Gold Rush.

Ada’s father, John Lyons Romer, made his fortune in real estate and as a founding director of the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad Company and vice president of the Sausalito Land & Ferry Company. Her portrait of him won a silver medal at the 1909 Alaska Yukon Exhibition in Seattle.

Sometime around 1890, Ada’s husband took off and left her with their two children, Violet and Romer. She turned to art full-time, set up the Shawhan Studio, and earned money illustrating books and painting society portraits. She became well-known in California and often was written up in the San Francisco Call, where a woman reporter followed the art scene closely.

It’s evident that Ada nurtured her children, who developed confidence and worldliness. In 1896 Violet wrote to her grandfather Romer, who was visiting Colorado:

I think we are going to San Francisco and I am glad for I am just getting so I hate the sight of Los Angeles, business is so poor here I don’t know how it is. I guess you have lots to tell about Denver. I guess it is a nice city. Of coarse those big citys all are.

Violet Romer's letter to her grandfather, "Parmer," 1896

Within several years, Violet was dancing her heart out. She never took formal lessons or studied classical ballet. Like Isadora Duncan, Violet danced interpretively and free form, eschewing ballerina costumes. Isadora, also raised by an artistic single mother in the Bay Area, had long gone to France by 1904 when Violet performed as a hamadryad in a redwood forest grove for members of The Bohemian Club.

Violet’s career really took off when The Papyrus Club, a San Francisco woman’s group, decided to sponsor her. She danced at the city’s Columbia Theatre accompanied by a 6o-piece orchestra and returned a week later by popular demand. Soon after, Ada took Violet to London and Paris where the young dancer’s “inspirational” performances drew acclaim.  

That same year, Violet caught the eye of an impresario named Marc Klaw who co-controlled the Theatrical Syndicate, which monopolized theater bookings nationwide during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By 1910, the powerful syndicate was losing its influence to the Schubert Brothers of New York, but Klaw and a former drama critic, Harrison Grey Fiske, were producing the Arabian play Kismet. They cast Violet as “the Egyptian Girl.”


Kismet ran for two years on Broadway and made Violet’s reputation. She stayed in New York to star “sans hosiery” in Joseph and His Brethren, a pageant by a British playwright named Louis N. Parker. A critic wrote: 

It may shock a number of persons in the present generation to see graphically depicted on the stage the disreputable bunch of crooks from which sprung the whole Jewish race of today, but they will find comfort in the immaculate qualities of the Joseph of Mr. Parker’s play.

Violet turned 30 years old in 1916. The following year she returned to California, moved in with her mother and taught dance at a studio into the early 1920s. Thereafter she dropped her stage name and became Violet Shawhan. The two women lived together until Ada died in 1947, with Violet working in a library. 

Romer, who married in 1936, had bought the Foursquare in Mount Vernon, N.Y. just before World War II. His sister crossed the continent for the last time to live with him and his wife.

1910

 

See also December 29, 2015 + January 12, January 16 + April 27, 2016 posts.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/violets-story.html?m=1

40 Years Since High School

I still remember the 1970s classrooms in Mt. Vernon High School, not that they were distinguished. Loose chairs and desks strewn around the room, which the teachers made orderly after each class.

The furniture was built of chrome and a plastic composite whose manufacturer probably guaranteed indestructibility. But the desktops were gouged and covered with crossed-out insults and messages written in the unmistakable blue of a leaky Cristal Bic pen.

On the walls, a few posters: the kitten clinging to a rope telling us to “Hang in there!” And always, the image of a girl and boy silhouetted against a sunset:

I do my thing and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

Now this is interesting. Looking up the quote to make sure it is as recalled, I learned that these words did not appear first in a Hallmark card. Rather, this is the “Gestalt Prayer” written by Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist, in 1969.

And there is a last line that I swear was not included in the Mt. Vernon classroom posters:

If not, it can’t be helped.

Oh well. Keep it positive. After all, the school presented many challenges.

A sprawling modern building, modeled after Harvard president James B. Conant’s post-war comprehensive high school, it surrounded a courtyard planted with pathetic trees and grass. Their growth likely was stunted by the clouds of smoke that filled the air during lunch and every time classes changed.

Getting a new high school had been controversial, polarizing the city for more than a decade as referendums repeatedly were defeated by anti-tax, anti-busing, and anti-integration groups. A liberal coalition of Protestants, blacks, and Jews ultimately won the day. Black students were bused from the South Side – across the railroad cut – to the North Side, where the school arose on land formerly owned by Hollywood mogul Harry Warner, who built a ranch there during the 1930s.  

Opening in 1963, Mt. Vernon High School fell far short of integration. Based on test performance, students were assigned to classes which often broke down by race. We self-segregated in the cafeteria. The great leveling occurred in physical education. The first decade of the new school encapsulated some of the most troubling issues in public schooling during the twentieth century.

Of course it’s been four decades, as the reunion invitations insistently remind me. And despite my awful description of the school, I do recall a few instances of revelation in those classrooms.

Despite longtime math troubles, the year of geometry had near-perfect clarity!

In 10^th grade World History, the teacher assigned Anatomy of a Revolution by Crane Brinton, published in 1938 and now surely considered an antique (although it has been revised and remains in print). The book compared the Russian, American, and French revolutions and the seventeenth-century English Civil Wars. I had read a fair amount of history but never before encountered a thesis, and loved it.

Finally, one of our English teachers handed out a literature book that somehow got by the censors. It was full of counterculture poems and art. I tore out two pages and kept them; they illustrate this post.

Let’s not forget the flap when a boy in my homeroom refused to say the Pledge. It must have been 1973, since the war was still raging. We were born in the late fifties, therefore too late for the student movement. But, his transgression duly recognized, he was sent to the principal’s office.

See posts November 2, 2015; November 23, 2015; December 21, 2015; March 16, 2016; May 18, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/03/40-years-since-high-school.html?m=1