The Widow Nolen at Harvard

 

 

Illustration from Harvard Celebrities (1901)

William Whiting Nolen orbited Harvard for the better part of 43 years. During much of that time, he annoyed the hell out of the faculty and administrators.

The native Philadelphian arrived at Harvard College in 1880, graduated summa cum laude, and went on to earn a master’s in science. Next, he enrolled in the law school but soon dropped out. He landed in the biology department as a teaching assistant.

W. W. Nolen hoped to become a professor but was not up to snuff. Yet he did have a gift for coaching students. In 1891, he opened a school on Brattle Street, offering “printed lecture notes, digests of required reading, and forced feeding just before the examinations,” wrote the eminent Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn.

The school thrived. By 1895, Nolen had moved to larger quarters and hired top Harvard graduates to help handle the load. His program could get you through your entrance exams and help you pass (perhaps ace) Latin, history, chemistry, physics, mathematics, French, English, and philosophy.

In July 1913, former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Nolen about his third son, Archie:

 

Naturally Mrs. Roosevelt and I are immensely pleased with Archie’s success. I take pleasure in sending the check – there could be no money I should be more delighted to pay. I feel that he has benefitted immensely by what you have done for him, and I am very much pleased with what you say of him personally.

 As tutees flocked to Nolen’s “cram parlor,” its proprietor raised his rates to $5/hour. “Harvard Men Attending in Hundreds,” declared the Boston Globe:

 

. . . what Harvard student ever failed to attend a Nolen “seminar” at least once? It is part of the Cambridge experience. Students attend who need it. Others attend who don’t need it. To attend is one of the set college duties. It is the proper thing to do, so to speak.

Nolen’s school was neither affiliated with nor authorized by Harvard. Yet Nolen managed to insinuate himself into the college, poaching exams, infiltrating lectures in disguise, paying for class notes. He also sold pamphlets: History I: Tutoring Notes, 1901; Self-Tutoring Notes, English 23, 1902, and so forth.

 

1895

Harvard professors decried his effect on their students’ grades. They called him a bloodsucker. It was said that the faculty often discussed how to put Nolen out of business.

Yet while the university’s presidents and trustees loathed his very presence, they recognized that Nolen steered the sons of great wealth through Harvard. Those diplomas, perhaps earned craftily, would be worth their weight in bequests. 

By most accounts, Nolen was kind, generous, and eccentric. He also bore an odd nickname. Even those who did not know him personally could recognize it: “The Widow Nolen.”   

Where did the nickname originate? The prevailing theory was that a character named “Widow Nolen” appeared in a play attended by several of his earliest students, and they took it up.

Teased in the pages of the Crimson, the Lampoon, and yearbooks, parodied in songs and theater, the “Widow Nolen” seeped into Ivy League culture. Even the poets pounced on him.  

 

Poem by Henry Ware Eliot, Jr. [brother of T.S. Eliot] in
Harvard Celebrities: a book of caricatures and decorated drawings 
(Cambridge, 1901).  

 

***

The tutoring business was lucrative, yet the Widow Nolen lived modestly in a building called Little Hall, opposite Harvard Yard. He inhabited the top floor with three French bulldogs. Students could rent rooms below, and classrooms filled the first floor.

In 1923, Nolen, who had diabetes and a heart condition, died at the age of 63. Even before the will was probated, the question arose: would Nolen’s tutoring school continue at Little Hall?

The answer was no. Rather, a new school, Manter Hall, absorbed Nolen's business and carried on the glory. 

Indeed, in the absence of Nolen’s monopoly, five new tutoring schools sprung up in Cambridge. In 1936, the Harvard Student Council appointed a committee to study their “sharp, noisy competition” as they jockeyed for customers, according to Time magazine. Nothing came of it.

Three years later the Crimson published an angry editorial: “Lined up on Massachusetts Avenue, grinning obscenely down over Harvard Yard, there is a row of intellectual brothels  . . . making a mockery of a Harvard education, a lie of a Harvard diploma.” 

By that time, nine tutoring schools inhabited Harvard Square. The Crimson refused to take their advertising and called for their demise.

In 1940, the crammeries were shut down for good.

From Alice's Adventures in Cambridge
by Richard Conover Evarts (1913)

TO BE CONTINUED.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/03/the-widow-nolen-at-harvard.html

A Long Way from Junction City

Postcard of Junction City, early twentieth century

Someday I’ll get to Junction City, Kansas, where Alice Edwards came of age during the early twentieth century. She had six brothers and sisters, and her daddy went back and forth to Ohio where he’d spent his youth and had another large family with a woman who was not his wife.

When Alice died at the age of 95 in 1993, her daughter said, “It was a long journey for a little girl from a wheat field in Kansas to an old woman in Maine.” 

Author of 23 children’s books about nature, Alice once described her goal as a writer: “To combine a sense of wonder, beauty and appreciation of the world around us without in any way sacrificing scientific accuracy.”

Junction City is located in the Flint Hills, which run longitudinally through central Kansas. Nearly 10,000 square miles, it is the largest area of tallgrass prairie left in the world. The undulating landscape, cast in green and gold, is breathtakingly beautiful.

I know that because I’ve been there, although not to Alice’s hometown.

The days of Junction City started in 1858. The town flourished on the banks of the Kaw River in the shadow of Ft. Riley, which brimmed with Indian killers led by George Armstrong Custer. During the Civil War, Ft. Riley was a defensive post and prison for Confederate soldiers, but fell into disuse for many years after.  

Wild Bill Hickok came to Junction City in 1871, stayed at the Empire Hotel, shot wild birds and restored order at the request of the city marshal. After the outlaws left, everyone went back to farming, lumbering and working in the grain mills and sawmills. 

Junction City, late nineteenth century

Alice’s father John was a farmer. He must have had a terrible time during the 1870s when drought and grasshoppers wrecked the crops and betrayed the promise of the land. Around that time, many Plains farmers switched from corn to wheat, which proved to be less vulnerable to the plagues.  

Alice finished at the top of her high school class. I wasn’t surprised to find she was a debate star. The Kansas high schools have long produced competitive, talented debaters. In fact, the Kansas High School Debating League was established in 1910, just before Alice entered Junction City High School. 

The League sounds awfully dry and bureaucratic. But that was not the case!

The brainchild of Kansas native Richard Rees Price, who had gone off to Harvard for a master’s degree and returned full of verve, the League was part of the University of Kansas Extension Division over which Price presided. It embodied ambitious, progressive ideas about education, which usually is cause for excitement.

Richard Price and KU chancellor Frank Strong took a page from the University of Wisconsin, whose president enunciated the “Wisconsin Idea” in 1904: the boundaries of the university should be one and the same as the borders of the state. It was more than an idea, of course; really a plan to educate all citizens about government, society, and the big issues that wracked the world.

University of Kansas, 1910

Through KU’s Extension Division, any resident of Kansas – even in the smallest town, which probably lacked a public library – could borrow magazines, books, and digests to better understand the federal income tax, immigration restrictions, government ownership of the railways and so forth.

Alice at the University of Kansas

Needless to say, the flow of information was a boon to debaters like Alice and her champion teams.  

Like most American high schools, those in Kansas offered several curricula: commercial, vocational, college preparatory, and normal (teaching). In 1915, Alice received a combined degree in the latter two.

Alice standing, far left

Although members of the Edwards clan had not previously attended college, Alice unquestionably would. She went off to the University of Kansas, established in 1865 on Mount Oread, a treeless ridge in Lawrence about 100 miles west of Junction City. After college she taught in a one-room schoolhouse on the prairie.

Alice married her first husband in Kansas in 1918. He was her ticket out of town. Wayne G. Martin, Jr. worked for the Miller Publishing Company, which owned newspapers nationwide. The couple moved east during the 1920s and lived in a suburb of New York City. They divorced in 1945.

Soon after, Alice married Earl Goudey, a science teacher in the local public school. She started writing books for children, including the “Here Come” nature series about deer, bears, bees, beavers, dolphins and other animals. Two of her books were runners-up for the Caldecott Medal.   

It was a long way from Junction City but a journey that had to be taken. Go west or east but go somewhere. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the farm had grown less and less attractive to young people.

In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Commission on Country Life to study the social problems of rural America and figure out how to make agriculture a more appealing profession. But the tide kept turning.

“I’m not sure what I’ll do, but – well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”

So spoke a young woman to her small-town suitor in “The Ice Palace,” a 1920 story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/12/a-long-way-from-junction-city.html

A Son & His Father

Earl Starrett Goudey, 1937

I always hoped to circle back to Earl Starrett Goudey, born in North Adams, Mass. in 1895, a man who took a circuitous path to his vocation.

Earl Goudey spent 35 years teaching biology and sex education to students at the public school in Bronxville, N.Y., a suburban village outside New York City, 29 minutes by train to Grand Central Terminal. Unruffled by controversy, he worked calmly with parents and pastors who wished to keep a lid on things.

The eldest son of Nova Scotian immigrants Henry and Mary Goudey, Earl battered his way out of his boyhood home and navigated through the thicket of church and school before launching himself into the world.

Mary Goudey died of consumption in 1906, leaving her husband with four children, the youngest just two years old. Their father, Henry James Goudey, was a minister affiliated with the Advent Christian Church. He preached in North Adams and Lynn, Mass., Hartford, and Brooklyn.

Reverend Goudey often delivered a speech, “Facts About Hell,” at the local YMCA. With his mother, sister, and brother, Henry had sailed on the schooner Gladiator from Yarmouth to Boston in 1871 and imbibed some sort of gladiatorial ferocity along the way.

Reverend Henry J. Goudey, 1935

He directed his abusive temperament at Earl, forcing the boy to memorize long passages of the Bible as punishment for scrappy behavior. At the age of thirteen, Earl ran away from the family’s wood frame home in Lynn and became a loom setter. (During the late nineteenth century New England’s textile industry had begun to shift to the South, but plenty of cotton and woolen mills remained.)

Earl finished high school at night and, trying to please his father, entered the Newton Theological Seminary in Newton, Mass. In the spring of 1917, on both the verge of graduating and the eve of the U.S. entrance to World War I, Earl headed to the Boston Navy Yard and enlisted. He joined the Navy Medical Corps as an apprentice seaman and served as a Pharmacist’s Mate First Class. 

A PHM1 is a petty officer who – under the supervision of physicians – offers care to naval personnel. In the course of his work on a hospital ship, Earl came to know David Linn Edsall, dean of the Harvard Medical School and an expert in preventive medicine and public health. They worked together on a study of the 1918 flu pandemic, and Edsall encouraged Earl to become a doctor.

First he needed a college degree, so he enrolled at Boston University where he met his first wife, Marjorie Pelton. Her father, who ran a business college, told Earl to skip medicine and go into the brave new world of sales.

Once again Earl danced for others, climbing the ranks to become a top salesman in the soap and ice cream businesses. To assuage his conscience, he also directed “boy’s work” at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston. He would always have a soft spot for wayward boys.

Imagine Earl during these years. Is he frantically trying to find a place in the confusing decade that followed World War I? Is he philosophically ticking through the professions in order to figure out which one is right for him?

When I interviewed Earl’s son Pelton in 1997, he did not know how Earl came to the attention of the superintendent who presided over the nationally-known progressive school in Bronxville. But Willard W. Beatty had a nose for great teachers, and in 1928 Earl joined the faculty.

Clipping about "Elementary Biology," the
sex education class Goudey taught in Bronxville

During the 1920s, Reverend Goudey remarried and divorced and remarried. In 1936, he hopped on a train to Miami, where he felt welcome and decided to stay a while. The Adventists gobbled up his screwball theories about astronomy and physics.

“The earth is an outstretched plain,” he explained, “founded upon the waters of the deep; the sun, moon and stars in motion above; over the whole being the firmamental vault or floor of Heaven.”     

In 1941 Henry published Earth Not A Globe, Scientifically, Geometrically, Philosophically Demonstrated, in which he summoned 75 reasons to explain why the earth is flat.

It was as if he couldn’t stop punishing Earl but realized he’d have to swap out Bible passages for scientific bunk in order to torture his son to the greatest extent possible.

Henry Goudey died in Boston in 1947.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/10/a-son-his-father.html

The School Superintendent Who Needed a Home

Eastchester High School, 1940s

Needless to say, the members of the board of education were shocked to discover that the superintendent and his wife and children had been living in the local high school. 

At the end of each day when the teachers, students, and coaches were gone, when the drama and orchestra rehearsals had wound down and the custodians had banished the last banana peel and crumpled math quiz – the superintendent would make his way to the wing of the school where vocational classes were held.

Warily he would usher his family into the rooms occupied by the school’s home economics department.  There was a bedroom and bathroom, kitchen and living room.  Nothing fancy, but furnished and well-lit. 

Girls learning homemaking in school, 1930s

Good enough for the family to relax, prepare and eat meals, complete homework, wash up, and sleep through the night. 

It was the fall of 1945 in Eastchester, N.Y., a town in the New York City suburbs that started life as a seventeenth-century English settlement.  Within its five square miles, the direst housing shortage in the nation’s history had come home to roost.

Worst of all was that the returning veterans had to scramble for places to live.  “Dog-tired soldiers can’t come home to Detroit.  There aren’t any houses,” according to a headline in the Detroit Free Press.

A classified ad in the Omaha World-Herald offered “Big ice box, 7 x 17 feet inside.  Could be fixed to live in like a trailer.”

The housing famine, as some called it, preceded the postwar boom in housing and roads. Out on Long Island, Levittown’s 17,000 houses would go up in a record four years, but the farmers who sold their land to the builder were harvesting their potatoes until construction started in 1947. 

It was estimated that the nation would need 12.6 million new dwelling units during the first decade after the war.

But major shortages stood in the way of a quick end to the housing crisis: a shortage of labor and a shortage of supplies, their destinies entwined.  

From Architectural Forum (1945)

While the Army had released large amounts of lumber to industry, the timber remained standing in the woods of northern California, Oregon, Washington State, and Idaho.  The reason was that 60,000 American Federation of Labor (AFL) members had struck in nearly 500 lumber camps and logging mills, asking for $1.10 / hour.  No one held out hope for quick mediation.  

Labor was missing across all manufacturing sectors.  Big American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corp., which formerly turned out 3,000 bathtubs per day, was now fortunate to produce 3,000 tubs per week.  Steel production had slowed, with capacity output not expected until spring of 1946.

Keg of nails?  How quaint. 

As housing starts stalled, veterans and labor organizations looked reflexively to the government for a solution to the crisis. 

Three senators – Robert F. Wagner of New York, Robert H. Taft of Ohio, and Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana – started work on a bill that would “provide a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family.”  This bill also mandated the clearing of urban slum areas to create low-rent housing, which created new problems related to the displacement of poor people.

  Georgia, 1945: black families displaced by
postwar construction lived in tent cities 
that resembled Eastern European shtetls. 

Meanwhile, private industry recognized that the time had come to reject price controls and set its own production goals or else submit to interminable government regulation.

Indeed, after Congress finally declared a national housing emergency in May 1946, President Truman took steps to free builders from government constraints on supplies and construction.    

But he met fierce opposition from veterans’ groups who opposed the government’s removal of priorities, subsidies and market guarantees.  They worried that veterans would be unable to afford the new housing.  The stalemate lasted several years.

"A home from a Quonset Hut" appeared in
House Beautiful (September 1945).

Back in Eastchester, Superintendent Ward I. Miller, who had moved his family into the high school, was not a veteran.  Perhaps he wanted to save money, or his salary did not cover housing costs, or he could not find just the right home.  Which it was remains unknown. 

Despite their shock, the school trustees did not fire Miller.  He stayed on until 1946 and then became superintendent of schools in Wilmington, Delaware. 

One must admire Miller’s clever choice of a place to live. 

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, as student enrollment soared, U. S. public school administrators accepted the charge to teach homemaking.  School buildings were constructed or retrofitted with small apartments where girls learned to cook and clean under the tutelage of home economics instructors who knew all the best recipes for gruel.   

Since the home economics curriculum modeled hygiene, diet and family life, it fit neatly with the overarching goal of Americanizing immigrants.  In Eastchester, such an effort would have been directed at the daughters of Italian immigrants who began moving to the town during the mid-1920s.   

Surely the Millers left the apartment in immaculate condition when they tiptoed out each morning.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/11/the-school-superintendent-who-needed_5.html

The Schoolman

Ballroom at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in Des Moines, Iowa, site of the
1921 convention of the National Education Association 

Summer is always hot as hell in the Plains States and that’s inscribed in his soul, for he was a boy in rural Kansas and a young man in Nebraska. 

Now it’s July 1921 and Fred Hunter is ready to handle the heat of Iowa.  He’s on top of the world as he pulls open a bronze door to enter the lobby of the Hotel Fort Des Moines.  He’s ready for anything. 

Fred is president of the National Education Association, the nation’s most prestigious organization of school teachers and administrators.  The 64-year old group’s annual convention is about to begin.

Fred Hunter was a rising star in the
field of public school education.

In and out of the hotel’s ballrooms and lounges, Fred will preside over five days of discussions, debates, and reports.  Four thousand participants are expected.  Most will arrive in time for “Educational Sunday,” as described in the official program: Homer C. Stuntz, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal church of Omaha, will speak about “Educating the Other Half of the World.”

The next morning, in between greetings from college presidents and state officials, the group gathered for an Americanization pageant performed by children in the Des Moines Public Schools.  Since the late nineteenth century, the children of immigrants had been the focus of Americanization programs in the nation’s public schools.

Immigration slowed during the Great War but after the Armistice it surged again.  Consequently, Senators Albert Johnson and David Reed were busy drafting the nation’s harshest immigration law to date.  The Immigration Act of 1924 would encompass the Asian Exclusion Act and, using drastically revised quotas, slam the door on Italians, Jews, and Slavs.   

Back at the convention, female teachers and male administrators discussed salaries, tenure, visual and music education, daylight in the classroom, rural school consolidation, the creation of the junior high school, and educating the Negro.

Excerpt from the NEA's 1921 Report on the Negro in Rural
Education and Country Life.  Utter indifference among those
who could have made a difference.

The leading topic was student health and hygiene, including the trachoma epidemic* and proposals for sex education.  Nearly 20 sessions were devoted to health issues.

Some of the charts concerning student health which
appeared in the 1921 NEA convention program 

But the real buzz at the convention concerned something else entirely:  the application of business practices to schooling.  Educational administrators had fallen under the spell of efficiency.

Styling themselves as executives, the schoolmen – as they now liked to call themselves – sought better ways to monitor truancy and supplies, keep costs down, and standardize teaching practices.  They wanted more student testing.  They wanted to account for every red rubber playground ball. 

And so school administrators shifted their emphasis from education to efficiency.  As school districts grew larger, the schoolmen called in experts and ordered surveys.  Not until the thirties did the trend start to wind down, although arguably it never went away entirely.

Fred was an adherent of the education efficiency movement, but he didn’t stay a schoolman.  He had set his sights on higher education soon after kicking off his career in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he served as superintendent of schools between 1912 and 1917.

During those years, as popular culture stormed across the country, Fred voiced deep concerns.  He worried about the movies, dance halls, and penny arcades where wide-eyed youngsters learned about divorce, adultery, suicide, drinking, and robbery.  Teenagers were dancing the Tango and the Maxixe.  Church socials had been swapped out for bowling parties.    

Fred called for “a constructive program to control the amusement instinct” – build more playgrounds and sponsor activities at local schools.  Insist on vocational guidance for each student.  Establish an “efficiency list” comprised of reliable girls and boys who are available to perform tasks for local merchants.

But he probably didn’t want to keep wrestling with social deviance and the health crisis in the public schools.  As president of the University of Denver and chancellor of the Oregon Higher Education System – he would hold both positions – he could largely detach himself from those problems.

So here’s to Fred, president of the National Education Association, slamming down the gavel on July 3, 1921.  He welcomes everyone to the glittering new ventilated hotel and jovially shakes hands with his fellow schoolmen. 

Despite the sobriquet “Roaring Twenties,” the decade was disastrous for immigrants, minorities, and poor people (although very good for business). 

The schools were besieged by single-issue influencers ranging from the American Legion to Nativists to the Women's Christian Temperance Union.  The teaching of history became a battleground. The juvenile justice system meted out thousands of sentences.  For many public school students, it was the worst of times.

Dr. Frederick Maurice Hunter
1939

*Trachoma is a contagious disease of the eye that can lead to blindness.  Many thought it was brought to the U.S. by immigrants, but it also proliferated among white Appalachians and Native Americans.  

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/07/the-schoolman.html

Edith + Edith Again

The H. W. Wilson Company produced The Debaters
Handbook Series between 1910 and about 1950.

In 1907, a Minneapolis publishing executive named Halsey W. Wilson was looking for writers and researchers to work for his growing company.  Spurred by his wife, Justina, he asked a University of Minnesota professor to recommend several alumnae.  A young woman named Edith Phelps left her teaching job and came on board right away. 

In short order, Edith would become a supervisor and editor at the H. W. Wilson Company.  She wrote dozens of guides to such topics as the income tax, immigration, and the League of Nations.  

These became known as “debaters’ handbooks,” and were used by high school and college teams who sparred competitively about the social policies and laws of the rising century. 

But really, the handbooks had a larger significance.  They were particularly useful to people who lived in rural areas, with their reach extending well beyond debaters to men’s and women’s clubs, voting leagues, and adult education programs.  

In fact, making this literature widely available tied into the Progressive ideal of educating as many Americans as possible. 

Halsey W. Wilson
(1868-1954)

In 1913, when Halsey Wilson decided to move his company to New York City, Edith Phelps went with him.  For the next 40 years, she worked in the vanguard of what became known as information sciences.  In 1922, she became an officer of the company. 

Back to the other Edith.

Within several years of Edith Penney’s arrival in New York, she made her mark on one of the most innovative projects in the history of American education: The Eight-Year Study.  This experiment posed a challenge to the time-honored methods of evaluating college applicants long used by admissions officials. 

The study explored whether students’ performance in the college preparatory curriculum was the best indicator of college readiness and future success.  What would happen if students were to pursue an alternative high school curriculum in the humanities and social sciences?

That question lay at the heart of The Eight-Year Study, launched in 1930 by the Progressive Education Association.  That year, high school teachers and administrators started to collaborate with researchers and college professors to revise the traditional curriculum. 

Between 1933 and 1940, 29 public and private high schools and 200 colleges and universities participated in the experiment.

Along came more classes in the manual and fine arts, a shift from survey-style courses to electives that focused on a few texts or a historical era, and the elimination of material that students had regurgitated since elementary school.  There was a concerted effort to embrace unconventional opinions and interpretations.   

The outcomes were positive.  When it came to college the Eight-Year Study students turned out to be as successful as students who followed an established curriculum.  They also developed a wider range of interests outside the classroom.    

As a high school principal and member of two committees that directed the study, Edith Penney became committed to educational reforms that would have been unheard of during her Minnesota childhood.  

Radical as the work seemed during the 1930s, several of the ideas that emerged from The Eight-Year Study have endured.

 The Eight-Year Study was published
in 1942 in five volumes.

Professional development for teachers, testing methods that would provide more accurate and meaningful measures of students’ knowledge, and greater variety and student choice of courses were among the changes.  

High schools also began to push back against onerous college entrance requirements. 

Unfortunately, the results of The Eight-Year Study received little attention when they were published in 1942.  Some critics thought they were inconclusive while others feared change.  Regardless, by the time the war ended, school administrators were not in the mood to innovate.  Every so often, however, the study draws renewed attention.

Edith May Penney retired in 1948 and died at the age of 96 in 1974.

Edith May Phelps retired in 1948 and died at the age of 98 in 1980.

  

Continued from post June 5, 2019.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/06/edith-edith-again.html

Edith + Edith

Edith May Penney, passport photo, 1930s

Once there were two women named Edith May, and coincidentally both of their surnames started with a “P.”     

On top of such fortuity, both women were born in Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota.  Each launched her career there; each in the field of education.  Both moved to New York and never returned to their native state.  But they did not know each other. 

For a long time I have juxtaposed them in my mind.  It’s not just the coincidences listed above, but also the allure of their American lives.  Neither married.  Both descended from English settlers.  Both were very serious people.  One of the women lived to the age of 98; the other, 96.            

These two could have been Victorians, but they cast off the demon.

Edith Penney was born in 1878, the daughter of Frederick Constant Penney and his wife, May.  The descendants of New England farmers, Frederick and May were swept into the great westward movement during the early 1870s when the Civil War was a fresh memory.  In a wagon they traveled to Minneapolis, whose population would soar from 13,000 in 1870 to 165,000 in 1890.

 

Soon after they arrived, Frederick zoomed into real estate.  He purchased land that would eventually be incorporated into the new city, and improved it by grading and paving the streets.  He made a lot of money, and then became a builder.

Although Frederick lived to the age of 108, he never again saw Canaan, Maine, nor his father, Uriah, and brothers and sisters Sylvanus, Almira, Arvesta, Isaac and Silas.   

However, Frederick and May would return east in 1925 when Edith, now an English teacher, was hired as high school principal in a village just outside New York City.  The family bought property in the town next door – far more affordable – and Frederick built a stone house that still stands, its back to the woods and a meandering creek. 

Edith Phelps was also an educator, but in a different way from Edith Penney.  

Born in 1881 in Beaver Falls, Minnesota, she too was the daughter of an East Coast transplant.  Her father, Charles Levi Phelps, had been a little boy when he and his family departed from New York before the Civil War.  Charles would meet and marry Alice, a Wisconsin native.  He worked in a sheet metal plant, as a grocer, and as a foreman in a flour mill.  The family moved around the city as his income dictated. 

Edith and Aura Phelps, center and right;
University of Minnesota yearbook (1907)

When the University of Minnesota beckoned to Edith and her younger sister, Aura Idella, the parents encouraged them to go.  Upon graduation in 1907, Edith and Aura became teachers.  Then an unusual opportunity came along.

University of Minnesota

  (1911)

For nearly 10 years, a Minneapolis entrepreneur named Halsey W. Wilson had capitalized on rising literacy among Americans.  He, too, was a graduate of the University of Minnesota, and owned a bookstore near campus.  As the twentieth century loomed on the horizon, Wilson noticed a trend.  His customers increasingly asked for specific articles, or for all articles on one particular topic.  He started reprinting these articles as a side business. 

H.W. Wilson Company Bookstore, circa 1900

But how did the readers learn about the articles they sought?

Only by word of mouth, Wilson realized.  There was no place to go look things up, no compendium that listed recently published material.  So he started to produce digests of articles and books, a book review index, informational handbooks, bibliographies, and, perhaps most famously, the weighty The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, each volume of which required a crane to be lifted from a library shelf.*

These reference guides may sound dull as dishwater.  But they were extremely important to enthusiastic readers.  Schools, libraries, scholars and students – no one could get information fast enough. 

Now Wilson needed intelligent, motivated employees to make it happen at lightning speed. 

See post on June 26, 2019, for part 2.
*The H. W. Wilson Company is still in the information business, although today its products are largely digital.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/06/edith-edith.html