First Lady Afternoons

First Ladies Hall pamphlet, 1968.
(Note that Mrs. Johnson's gown, far left, is the most recent dress on display.)

She must have been in her early 50s but seemed ancient to me with her gray hair, wavering voice, and thick eyeglasses.

I’m sure that she offered a snack but the real treat lay spread out on a large table: intricate drawings of the First Ladies’ gowns, which were then displayed on mannequins in vast glass cases in the Smithsonian Institution, along with the muslin patterns she was creating.

Going back to a 3rd grade homework assignment, First Ladies completely, utterly fascinated me. But during the 1960s, just a few anthologies contained brief sanitized biographies of the women. Bottom line: if you were interested, it was largely about the gowns.

Mrs. Sally Taft had been commissioned by the collection’s curator to preserve the designs and details of the dresses that were starting to fall apart after years of being exhibited under bright hot lights. A very fine seamstress, she had worked in couture at some of New York’s best department stores. Her correspondence with the curator, which resides in the Smithsonian’s archives, suggests that she came to the project through a mutual acquaintance at Julius Garfinckel’s, an exclusive women’s clothing store in Washington, D.C.

One of my mother’s friends had arranged the visits with Mrs. Taft. Thrilling! Every few months during my last years of elementary school, instead of walking home from school I went over to her house. I knew a great deal about the First Ladies and she knew everything about the dresses. We found lots to talk about. 

The ladies who followed Eleanor Roosevelt into the modern era, along with Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dolly Madison, held little interest for me. They were far too popularized. But the mournful mid-19th century women whose husbands were military heroes (of a sort), who never wanted to come to Washington, rarely saw visitors, holed up on the dark second floor of the White House – very intriguing. Perhaps unbalanced, too, although I didn’t quite know the word.

One of my clearest memories is of Mrs. Taft describing how the gowns exuded the ancient odor of perspiration.

So many years later, the Smithsonian’s exhibition smartly focuses on role and image with minimal whitewash. Some gowns and memorabilia are also displayed. The staff includes experts in chemistry and textiles as well as historians.

Sally Taft’s muslin patterns are history, too. It’s hard to argue with technology. What I love most about this story, though, is that in 1966 the Smithsonian curator didn’t think the job called for an academic. She was just looking for the best dressmaker she could find.

*Mrs. Sally Taft was not related to President Taft.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/first-lady-afternoons.html?m=1

Flowers for Paris

Drawing by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/blog-post_14.html?m=1

Queenie

"Winner of a prize in the Mitchell Hill Owners Hill Climbing Contest
and Scene at Start," San Francisco Call, July 4, 1908

You were “Queen Marion Walcott” in the emergency passport application dated 1924. But two decades later your death certificate from the town of Villeneuve-Loubet, France, stated that you were “Marion Queen Walcott.” And in 1895, when a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle described how you rode a bicycle “so blithely over the smooth park roads,” he referred to you as “Miss Queenie Walcott.”

What on earth were you doing in Villeneuve-Loubet in February 1944? The French General Philippe Petain, a hero of the Great War (the “Lion of Verdun”), went to live in this Mediterranean village soon after the Versailles Treaty was signed. He considered it his home through World War II when, as a Nazi collaborator, he served as Prime Minister of the Vichy government. 

It looks like Queenie may have gone went south in search of a cure.

Why else might she have left Paris, where she moved in the early 1920s to teach wealthy young women how to ride horses? It made sense; for years she worked as a riding instructor at the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California. That was after a decade spent racing up and down the Pacific Coast in a Mitchell roadster, winning first prize in 1908 and 1909 for finishing a mile in one minute, 34 seconds, at Arum Rock in San Jose. Her stenography business also drew attention. "She incidentally solicits a large part of her business with the help of an attractive automobile of silver hue,” the San Francisco Call reported. 

It’s interesting that Queenie, figuratively born on wheels, ultimately devoted herself to the animals that cars replaced.  

She was the youngest of four children born to John and Rebecca Josephine Butterfield Walcott, New Englanders who moved to the farm town of Magnolia, Illinois, and then to Santa Barbara because the weather would improve the health of their oldest child, Earle. (See November 4 post.) Earle, twenty years older than Queenie, pursued life as a writer and civic official. His sisters – who ended up being the ones who died young – became teachers. Queenie, who arrived in 1879 when the three eldest were preparing to enter Berkeley, would not be . . . well, bookish.

Someone deposited her at the Irving Institute, a boarding school for young ladies in San Francisco, but she did not complete the course.

By the time Queenie died, only her nephew remained to be notified. I wonder whether Willard Walcott Beatty, an eminent progressive teacher and administrator with a deep understanding of child development, ever reflected on how his aunt educated herself. 

Queenie's death certificate, France 1944

See also: November 4 + 29, December 2, 2015; January 12 + 16, 2016 posts.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/you-were-queen-marionwalcott-in.html?m=1

Young Businessman, Father of Two

Flyer mentioning Kyrle Elkin, 1951
(Brooklyn College Archives)

Through one of those surprising historical leaps, while growing up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., I conversed occasionally with a man who had known and worked with W.E.B. Du Bois.

This man was a good friend of my parents named Kyrle Elkin, tall and soft-spoken with a large mustache; always wore a black suit. He lived with his wife Lillian – elegant, thin, long red hair in a braid – in a Dutch Colonial house set on a slight rise up from the street. Both were born in New York City in 1915, which made them just over a decade older than my parents give or take a few years.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born in 1868, wrote The Souls of Black Folk in which he famously declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” The first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, he co-founded the NAACP and edited its journal, The Crisis, for 24 years. Until his death in 1963, Du Bois challenged racism and poverty all over the globe and advocated for human rights and world peace.

I didn’t know about Mr. Elkin’s connection to Du Bois or frankly much about Du Bois until many years later when the second volume of David Levering Lewis’s biography of him won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. Then my father told me he remembered his friend’s involvement with Du Bois but said they hardly spoke about it. By that time his friend was dead. 

Kyrle Elkin grew up in Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a salesman and later owned a hardware store. His mother, born in the United States, was a bookkeeper. They must have been enormously proud of their son when he was admitted to Harvard in 1936. I speculate that his pacifism and commitment to social justice emerged during the late 1930s although Lewis states he came to organized politics through Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign.

In 1950, Du Bois agreed to chair a new organization called the Peace Information Center whose five officers included Kyrle Elkin as treasurer. The group’s first task was to promote the newly-written Stockholm Peace Appeal which petitioned the United States to undergo nuclear disarmament. We were barely into the Korean War.

After Secretary of State Dean Acheson denounced the Stockholm Peace Appeal as Communist propaganda, the Department of Justice demanded that the PIC register “as an agent of a foreign principal within the United States.” At that point, Du Bois and his four colleagues decided to dissolve the PIC but the government would not permit it. Indicted and arraigned in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, each would pay $10,000 and serve five years in jail if convicted.

With the formation of the National Committee to Defend Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Associates, support grew for the principals of the now-disbanded PIC. Albert Einstein, for example, testified on behalf of Du Bois. In November 1951 the charges were dismissed.

By the time my parents met Kyrle Elkin, a decade had passed since the PIC trial. The former defendant was now a successful hardware manufacturer. Since we didn't have a television, my family went to the Elkins’ house to watch President Kennedy’s funeral. 

I remember Mr. Elkin sitting on his screened porch just before a summer thunderstorm while the war escalated in Vietnam and Mount Vernon’s residents battled over integrating the city’s public schools.


https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/businessman-young-father-of-two.html?m=1

Buffalo Timekeeper

In 1901, the year my husband’s grandmother was born, someone brought the baby girl a green leather change purse from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, and other U.S. cities hosted fairs that displayed important examples of industrial invention. The most soaring of these were the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and Chicago’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition. It is impossible to do them justice in a few paragraphs. Many books and articles attest to their grandeur as well as the racism and sexism that pervaded fair politics and exhibitions.

Just past the turn of the twentieth century, here came Buffalo with its dazzling illumination of the fair’s elaborate white buildings: behold the future of hydro-electric engineering generated by the power plants of Niagara Falls. However, the thing that Americans remembered most about the fair, at least for a generation, was the assassination of President William McKinley as he stood shaking hands with visitors outside the Temple of Music.

President McKinley is not often cited. But in his last speech, soon before the assassin stepped forward with a gun swaddled in a handkerchief, he delivered a quotable quote: “Expositions are the timekeepers of progress.” That dusty remark seems worth noting.

It hearkens back to the years when most Americans had to travel somewhere in order to see big advances in technology, medicine, communications, and the like. Since then, for a very long time, innovation has come right to our door or perhaps during a visit to the Apple Store. A public exposition where people go to find out about new things -- obsolete.

So what is today’s equivalent of a timekeeper? I’ll venture that it could be something small that looks back instead of forward. Perhaps it’s not about the future; it’s of the past. For me, the Buffalo change purse, once a child’s souvenir, is keeping time well beyond its century. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/buffalo-timekeeper.html?m=1

Autumn Space

Trees bare, early darkness: as the year winds down for me, it turns toward childhood. Much more than recollection, deeper than memory; walking home from school young and impatient day after day, while each day takes forever – yet mature enough to understand childhood’s constraints.

During the 1960s, a full-page ad for something very glamorous ran every week in the New York Times Magazine. The ad made a strong impression on me. The tagline was “By this time you should have quite a past.” Until today I remembered it as an advertisement for Blackglama mink but it turns out that the mink tagline was, “What becomes a legend most?” So that was not it.

Perhaps the quote came from an ad for perfume? Scarves? Anyway, I can’t retrieve it.

What I know is that waiting and walking, shuffling through leaves, I would say to myself: “By this time you should have quite a past.”

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote exquisitely about childhood, reverie, and space. By space he meant the places with which we have an affinity, where we daydreamed as children; places thick with association. Bachelard referred often to the childhood home as one of those places.

For me that walk from school in early autumn, filled with longing to be older with the mystery of a past, is a space that I go back to year after year. 

Collage by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/autumn-space.html?m=1

Superintendent Beatty

Willard W. Beatty, 1936 Bronxville High School yearbook

Rebecca Josephine Butterfield Walcott came roaring out of the internet bedecked with nineteenth-century spiritualism and suffrage. I did not expect her. It was her grandson for whom I’d been searching for nearly two decades. He had been superintendent of schools in Bronxville, N.Y., between 1926 and 1936.

The village’s old-timers recalled the former superintendent as controversial and brilliant. “There were rumors that he was a little pink,” an elderly alumna said, sipping iced tea on her porch.

How incongruous it seems now: the staid square-mile village 30 minutes north of Grand Central Station welcoming a reformer during the 20^th century’s most conservative decade. Yet the school board composed of Republican businessmen hired him precisely to make a break with conventional schooling. They wanted their children to be well-educated and happy. 

I encountered the superintendent while researching a history of the school, looking for a few personal details about the man with a whiff of radicalism who had stepped onto the local stage 60 years earlier. So I wrote to the former superintendent’s son whose name appeared in his father’s obituary. The story was ¾ of the way through a reel of New York Times microfilm that snapped and crackled through the groaning machine. 

In the meantime, a school administrator unlocked a closet where old photos and records were stored. Several pictures showed the superintendent in meetings and posing with the faculty. A retired teacher pointed him out. He appeared modest, with a small build and glasses.  

But in 1936, the yearbook editors grandly dedicated a full page to the departing superintendent, whose “assumption here ten years ago marked the beginning of a new era in the world of education.” The accompanying photograph startlingly resembled young FDR. I couldn’t wait to hear back from his son. 

Finally a response arrived. “His mother died when he was six and shortly after his father left San Francisco,” the son wrote of his father. “He was brought up by an uncle from his mother’s side of the family who lived in the city. He had no siblings.” It sounded like a rough start. I concluded that the superintendent overcame a childhood of hardship and struggled to get to college and navigate the world. This turned out to be completely wrong.

Willard Walcott Beatty became the ward of his uncle in 1901, the year he was orphaned. A better guardian could not have been found. Journalist, novelist, social observer, and city official, closely involved in San Francisco culture, Earle Ashley Walcott would see his nephew through grammar school to Lick High School to the University of California, Berkeley, and beyond.  

Lick-Wilmerding High School yearbook, 1909

It was impossible to know this in 1995 because the internet had not yet the habit of yielding obscure documents. Just a year ago, it threw up the fact that Earle – a sickly boy – was the reason his parents left rural Illinois for Santa Barbara. Then Willard’s mother Mabel, his aunt Maude, and father William stepped out of the pages of college yearbooks. And with sufficient poking, the internet revealed that the boy’s grandmother, Rebecca Josephine Butterfield Walcott, harnessed the late nineteenth century like it was her own wild ride.

See other posts: November 11, 2015; January 12 + 16, 2016; August 3, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/superintendent-beatty.html?m=1