Welcome to the Collage

During the past year, I’ve returned to creating collages from cardboard and magazines, an art first learned in a class at the Rhode Island School of Design.

It was the summer of 1974. Let me recall some of my “firsts” that summer:

- Read the poems of Dylan Thomas

- Drank coffee

- Met a lot of people from all over the country

- Spent time in a college town

- Understood that drawing light is like capturing movement on a page

- Grasped the oneness that flows from shared experience 

We were encouraged to check out an exhibition of faculty work. On the wall beside one painting, someone had scribbled in pencil, “If this painting could talk, it wouldn’t say anything.”

Everyone floated in and out of the dormitory rooms. Coming upon a group of friends, you would start by saying, “Hey people. . .” It took me a long time to shake that habit.

We girls wore peasant blouses and faded jeans with holes in the knees. Everyone roamed over College Hill, the beautiful green neighborhood that encompasses Brown University and most of RISD.

But coming around to collage – that was what I learned best that summer.

We started with a shirt cardboard cut in half. Nowadays many men request that their laundered shirts be returned on hangers but in those days folded in a box was typical; thus the cardboard.

The vast tables in the sunlit studio were covered with magazines, wallpaper books, and fabric.

The professor kindly persisted with me even after I produced several pieces that weren’t at all what she wanted. They were patchworks of color that looked like quilts. She dismissed them as pretty pictures.

Playing around one afternoon, I realized that a collage is a place to go. Step inside, it says, come on in. There’s music playing. It’s calm. It’s crazy. It’s a day in the country. It’s a room in a house where you can sit and look out the window. 

The collage starts with large shapes that fall into place because you know where they belong.

You already can tell that it’s autumn because of how the light falls across the floor.

Or it’s winter. The sky is full of snow which means there’s all the time in the world as it was when we were growing up.

It’s the end of the day at the beach when the wind picks up and the sun wheels toward the horizon.

Or you want to be alone.

As the collage grows, available space dwindles and assumes more challenging shapes. Things become complicated. It’s all part of finding your way to the place you’re evoking.

That’s life inside a collage.

Collage by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/welcome-to-collage.html

A Syracuse Story

West Genesee Street, Syracuse, 1900

Jane looks out steadily, as if you hadn’t just surprised her by opening the case. She’s trapped in a daguerreotype, surrounded by a decorative brass mat. No rings yet adorn her fat fingers. It is 1860 and she is wearing a complicated day dress with ridiculous plaid puffs along the sleeves and a shawl and drooping headdress.

A scrap of paper is stuck to the velvet; faint message from the past:

PJ Bumblebee the hardest customer in Rochester City. He came to Oswego to ask consent. His courage failed. He finally concluded he would not marry at all.

Now it’s clear – she is waiting for the Bumblebee. 

PJ finally gets courage and she accepts. They move to Syracuse where he starts in men’s furnishings. He builds a fabulous shop with counter cases made of French plate glass and walnut. He employs tailors who work all night sewing Continental style suits. The business grows and PJ becomes a wealthy man.

Three daughters were born: Neeltje, Annabel, and Jessie. 

They didn’t come in a rush; 1864, 1870, 1877. PJ and Jane made sure that their daughters rose to the top of Syracuse society. There was a lot of money. The city’s economy flourished with the salt industry, banking, diverse manufacturing, and Syracuse’s development as a railroad center.

Debuts and balls, the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts,  summers at Saranac Lake, an expansive home on West Genesee Street . . . 

No wonder that Neeltje (known as Nellie), who married Henry Elmer of West Springfield, Mass., in 1890, brought her son and daughter to Syracuse for such protracted visits.

I just don’t understand how Henry and Nellie met. He hardly ever left his house, let alone West Springfield.

In the meantime, Annabel and Jessie married Syracuse men and continued to enjoy busy lives close by their parents. When PJ died in 1902, he knew they could afford lifetime upper-crust memberships. Their husbands prospered. It helped that they were well-launched by wealthy fathers.

Annabel married a man named William Buell Gere, the son of William Henry Harrison Gere who served in the New York State Legislature, worked as New York State Division Engineer, and made money in iron and salt.  

William B. Gere spent his career as the secretary and chief inventor of the Merrell-Soule Company, which developed a modern method for creating a powdered milk called Klim (milk spelled backwards). William B. Gere also led the invention of low-moisture canned mincemeat (“None Such”) and vegetable and soup powders, as well as new types of canning and food packaging. He held numerous patents, including one for pumpkin powder. He died prematurely in 1915. In 1927, Borden acquired Merrell-Soule.

Jessie married a man named Alfred Howlett Durston, Ph.B., Yale, 1899; class president. Son of James Franklin Durston, president of Lefever Arms Company, a Syracuse gun manufacturer best-known for its hammerless shotgun. Alfred worked in the factory and sales, and as secretary and vice president. He received a patent for a gun cleaner in 1902. It looks like Lefever produced automobile gears as a side business for some years. In 1916, the Durstons sold Lefever and reincorporated as the Durston Gear Corporation with Alfred as president, a position he held until his death in 1926.

And then there was “poor Nellie,” stuck in tiresome West Springfield with her in-laws living right next door on Main Street. Her husband Henry had attended the public schools and worked at a hardware store, then for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. He obviously adored his hometown, serving as school trustee, town selectman, and treasurer of the West Springfield Co-operative Bank.

After Nellie died in 1926, he married Lilian. A schoolteacher, she had been a boarder in the Main Street house for some years. She lost her first fiancé in World War I.

Henry never made a lot of money or held a patent.

His glory days arrived while he served as treasurer of the town of West Springfield. 

During World War II, Henry defied New Deal fiscal guidelines for local governments yet managed to secure the town’s largest cash balance in 170 years. 

It’s family lore that The Wall St. Journal cited this achievement in an editorial, but no one has been able to confirm that.

See post 2/10/16

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/syracuse-calling.html

Well Jess you have got the best of everything

North End Bridge over the Connecticut River, seen from West Springfield, 1900

Jessie already seemed wise beyond her years by the time her brother was born. Their parents, Henry and Neeltje, were 40. The children had four grandparents, two great-grandparents, and a dozen aunts and uncles who had treated Jessie as an adult since she was small. 

When John came along in 1901, her maternal grandfather, Pieter John Brummelkamp, wrote to her from Syracuse:

My dear Jessie, What news did I hear. I must have dreamed it that you have a Brother. Am I right or wrong. If I am right then enclosed you will find a Bill. Go down the street and buy him a pair of boots and tell him to get up and shovel snow. If you haven’t any snow tell him to come to grand Pa, we have got plenty. Well Jess you have got the best of everything. It isn’t everybody that can have a Brother. Love to Ma & Pa, PJB

Two cities dominated the children’s early years: Syracuse, N.Y. and West Springfield, Mass. In both places Jessie came down from a long line of Jessies. Her mother’s mother, sister, and great-grandmother all were Jessies. Her father’s mother was a Jessie and his great-great-grandmothers both were named Jessie. 

This particular Jessie, born in 1894, would be the end of the line; married late, no children.

The families wore their homes like badges of honor, posing for photographs on Easter Sunday, the afternoon sun shining right into their eyes. 

In Syracuse, they composed themselves in lawn chairs with the photographer clear on the other side of West Genesee Street so that the figures are barely recognizable. 

In West Springfield, they sat under an enormous beech tree surely 200 years old.  

Jessie and John’s parents were not an obvious match. Neeltje thought West Springfield unfashionable and decamped each year for the social season in Syracuse where she stayed and stayed, often bringing the children with her. They moved between the sumptuous décor and service of the Brummelkamp home and rough-and-tumble West Springfield where John chopped down a dead apple tree, repaired a canoe, and fetched sugar from the A & P when they were down to two lbs. 

Neeltje was one of three beautiful daughters whose mother was one of five lovely daughters. PJ, a stocky immigrant from Utrecht, had business with Jane Brewster’s father and fell madly in love with her. 

After PJ and Jane married, he brought her to Syracuse where he built a successful men’s furnishings store. He ran it until 1883 when Governor Grover Cleveland appointed him superintendent of the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation.* In 1890 PJ was photographed “at camp” in the Adirondacks, wielding a fishing rod and dressed prematurely like a Rough Rider.

Onondaga Salt Springs, 1908

After PJ died in 1902, some thought that Henry and Neeltje might grow closer but that was not to be, for Neeltje spent even more time in Syracuse with her mother.

As Jessie later said of herself, she was “born raised” and largely brought up John. 

She enabled him to carve out a childhood. 

She insisted that her father take his son skating on the Connecticut River during the long frozen winters. 

She encouraged John to become manager of the high school baseball team and apply to Tufts because he hoped to be an engineer. 

She appreciated John’s enthralled interest in the future although her manner and views always marched resolutely out of the Victorian past.

*Jesuit missionaries first discovered salt springs around Onondaga Lake, about 6 miles northwest of Syracuse, in the mid-17^th century. Between 1797 and 1917, the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation produced more than 11.5 million tons of finished salt.

See post 2/17/16

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/well-jess-you-have-got-the-best-of_10.html

Remembering Andrew Patner

My friend Andrew Patner died one year ago today at the impossibly young age of 55. He was a pitch-perfect cultural critic and fine writer.

Over time his intelligence brightened and deepened, and his knowledge of everything: music, literature, politics, race, religion, his beloved native city of Chicago – EVERYTHING – expanded, along with his natural ability to be reflective.

The author of an imaginative study of the radical journalist I.F. Stone, host of a wide-ranging radio show, “Critical Thinking,” on WFMT-Chicago, and producer and host for Chicago’s NPR affiliate, he wrote about the arts for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than two decades.

Andrew definitely knew how to stir the pot. He was a superb interviewer. With his persistent curiosity, intuition, and understanding of social problems, his work evoked that of his friend, Studs Terkel.

Unfortunately, for various reasons he and I had not been in close touch for many years. I’ll regret that forever.

But thankfully and happily, I remember the moment Andrew first stepped into the office of the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper of the University of Chicago. It was September 1978. That year the paper felt particularly reinvigorated. 

We ran more investigations, hit the administration harder, expanded coverage of arts, literature, and sports, and increased space for serious issues in the surrounding community. Of course, our masthead was one-quarter of the size of most that appear on campuses today.

Now here came Andrew, who had grown up in Hyde Park. His perspectives on the neighborhood, university, and city were astonishing. It was always worth talking to him about a hunch or a story; well, really about anything.

He had an elegant generosity. He shared ideas and insight, bestowed encouragement and praise, and made time for rumination, speculation, and, perhaps most delightfully, debunking.

He and I shared a wistfulness about having been born too late for the student movement of the 1960s. Along those lines, we pored over volumes of old newspapers crammed on the office shelves, and pried our way through dusty wooden file cabinets looking for photos of the action we missed. We talked about the past. And we even got up close to some of the people who were deeply into the scene.

Since the twenties, the Maroon office had been located on the top floor of a neo-Gothic hall that resembles, as a university PR officer once wrote, “a Tudor English manor house.” One entered the building through a cloistered courtyard, perhaps bought a cup of coffee at the bakery on the first floor, and hurried upstairs. Someone was always there, perhaps even banging out a paper for a class.

We had no thought that the worn oak desks and chairs, floorboards that lost their varnish years earlier, manual typewriters, and an endless supply of yellow copy paper would someday not be there. Maybe we hoped for a few electric typewriters. But who could imagine that the newspaper wouldn’t always come to life in this perfect office with leaded casement windows and ivy that occasionally crept under the sill?

Now it’s all computerized and located in the basement.

But in my mind’s eye, Andrew stands in that faraway room; 19 years old, caught in the afternoon light, turning toward us, starting to smile, starting to speak. 

Drawing by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/andrew-patner.html

Mary Katharine Reely's Big Life

First page of Mary Katherine Reely's first published play

Born in 1881 in the hamlet of Spring Green, Wisconsin, Kate Reely never outgrew the misty river landscape of her childhood. But once she left the farm in the Dells, Reely jumped right into the twentieth century.

In some ways, Mary Katherine (her given name) resembled many smart women of her generation. She tried Normal School but decided not to become a teacher. Then she joined the Unity Settlement House in Minneapolis, which served a Scandinavian immigrant community, as a social worker. 

In 1909 she entered the University of Minnesota where she excelled in English, Rhetoric, and Geology, graduating in 1912.

Kate Reely went straight to work at the H.W. Wilson Company of Minneapolis, started by a man who stood on the threshold of library science.

Halsey W. Wilson was a pioneer in organizing sources of information: bibliographies, book indexes, and digests. In 1901, he began publishing the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, probably the best known of these sources, which pointed readers toward the articles they sought.

But what about people who did not have access to those articles? What if one’s local library, perhaps newly endowed by Andrew Carnegie, did not subscribe to Scribner’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines that covered current events?

Wilson responded to that need. For example, he created debaters’ handbooks. These were notated summaries of articles and speeches that represented both sides of hot topics: woman suffrage, the income tax, capital punishment. 

Women’s clubs, granges, and service and political groups, along with student debaters, relied heavily on them.  

In charge of these books were six University of Minnesota alumnae, including Kate Reely, to whom Wilson graciously granted authorship credit. The women conducted intensive research and analysis. Minimum wage and immigration were among Reely’s topics. 

After a few years, she was promoted to editor of Wilson’s popular Book Review Digest.

In 1916, Halsey Wilson decided to move the company to New York City. Kate Reely and two others decided to go with him. That decision took Kate's life in a different direction.

It turns out that Kate had made her debut as a dramatist in 1913 with Anyman: A Modern Morality Play in One Act, on the subject of suffrage. In 1914, her play The Helpmeet, a Domestic Comedy appeared in The Masses, a lively Socialist magazine that published articles by John Reed and other radicals of the time.

My hunch is that Kate Reely’s friends and colleagues knew something about her writing. But I don’t think they were aware of her participation in Greenwich Village culture and politics at such an exciting time in American history.

In 1917, Reely helped start and edit Four Lights, a newsletter of the Woman’s Peace Party of New York City. The biweekly began publication just a few months before the U.S. entered World War I. 

Four Lights “will attempt to voice the young, uncompromising woman’s peace movement in America, whose aims are daring and immediate – to stop the war in Europe, to federate the nations for organized peace at the close of the war, and, meanwhile, to guard democracy from the subtle dangers of militarism,” reported the New York Times. 

That same year, The Survey, one of the foremost social sciences journals of the early 20^th century, honored Reely’s writings on social and economic issues. Calling itself “a journal of social exploration,” The Survey investigated public health, prison conditions, and other Progressive-era issues. 

The economist Edith Abbott, reformer Belle Moskowitz, and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons were among those honored with Reely. That was pretty good company.

Kate continued to wrestle with labor and rural life in three one-act plays – Daily Bread, A Window to the South, and The Lean Years – published in 1919, which were produced widely through the 1920s.

She also stayed close to the political left. The One Big Union Monthly – published by the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) – featured her play, Solidarity, a Rural Drama of Today, in its August 1920 issue. The play is about a Scandinavian farmer in the Midwest, worrying about credit and paying the bank.

Reely's play, Solidarity, appeared in the
August 1920 issue of The One Big Union Monthly.

While the H.W. Wilson Company continued to flourish, Kate Reely decided to return to Wisconsin in 1921. She moved to Madison, joined the faculty of the Wisconsin Library School, and edited the Wisconsin Library Bulletin.

Then she really got going in theater. It’s difficult to retrieve all of the plays she wrote, but here are a few titles: The House Can’t Build the Barn, a Play in One Act (1923);  They Just Won’t Talk! - A Play in One Act (1924); and To Be Dealt with Accordingly: A Play of Social Adjustment in One Act (1924). 

When Kate Reely died in June 1959, friends and obituaries scarcely referred to her plays and longstanding support of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. 

Rather, they memorialized her contributions to the state of Wisconsin, especially her service to the Free Library Commission where she had focused on the principles of book selection. 

Book selection? That sounds like censorship. In fact, it means the opposite. A central tenet of book selection is that librarians must understand the scientific, social, cultural and intellectual forces that shape the modern world.  

Book selection became Kate’s crusade during the 1920s and ‘30s. The time was ripe. Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926, was well into dictating what middle-class Americans should read. Concurrently, libraries in small towns and big cities alike confronted “vice suppression” – attempts to ban books and magazines deemed immoral or which portrayed the underbelly of capitalism or "radical" views.

Even after her retirement in 1947, Kate Reely continued to field questions about so-called weeding in local libraries. It infuriated her. She wanted readers to have all available literature, even if the state paid for it to arrive by mail. After all, she was a writer, too.  

Mary Katherine Reely, 1926
(courtesy University of Wisconsin-Madison)

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/a-big-quiet-life.html

Mr. & Mrs. Bernard H. Ridder

Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1910

After her father’s death, Nellie’s life meandered along. There she is, in the social pages of the Mount Vernon papers, the guest at numerous lawn parties for children. 

It’s pleasant to imagine her chasing bubbles from out of the shadows near the deep porches where adults, including her mother’s patron, spoke quietly.

The city’s first treasurer who subsequently became postmaster and vice president of the First National Bank of Mount Vernon, Clarence S. McClellan served as co-administrator of Daniel Hickey’s estate because Hickey died without a will. Claiming “no business experience,” Hickey’s widow petitioned the court for McClellan, a calm man with a large mustache, to join her.

As guardian of her underage children, Ellen Hickey would provide to the Surrogate’s Court an annual report of expenses made on her youngest daughter’s behalf until Nellie turned 21 in 1908.

In the meantime, the pince-nez’d Reverend Flynn, who had presided at Daniel Hickey Sr.’s funeral, watched over Nellie at the Sacred Heart Convent. There she struggled with catechism. Nellie had distractions.

Records of Surrogate’s Court show that Nellie sought medical attention at least twice monthly. Ellen Hickey must have felt both stricken and annoyed each time Nellie visited the doctor, which necessitated hiring a carriage. One can’t help but imagine Victorian-style woman’s troubles.

Robert Howe, M.D.                                   $  6.00

Wm. Stump, M.D.                                     $  3.00

Jos. J. Sinnott, M.D.

Services at Hospital                     $157.14

Visit                                                    15.00

Visit                                                     6.00

Visit                                                   40.00

Dr. J.J. Higgins

              Visit                                               $   5.00

              Visit                                               $ 10.00

J.J. Thomson, M.D.                                 $   5.00

               

It’s fair to conclude that Dr. Joseph John Sinnott – a young surgeon who graduated from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1903 – performed an operation on Nellie when she was 21 years old.  

Dr. Sinnott might have made a good husband for Nellie but her mother likely hoped for a man who would amass greater wealth. To that end, Ellen Hickey invested persistently in her daughter’s appearance and social standing:

Mrs. H. Fowler, dressmaker                 $   6.00

                                                                          1.50

                                                                          1.00

A.S. Clark, dressmaking                         $ 55.19

Rosen & Yale, tailor                                $  2.00

M. Jenks, dressmaker                             $20.47

B. Altman & Co.                                       $35.45

                                                                          8.70

                                                                          5.30

                                                                          2.22

M. Kereng, dressmaker                           $  7.25

                                                                     $22.95

R.H. Macy, dry goods                              $  4.44

Stern Brothers, trimmings                     $  2.04

Ufland Millinery Co.                                $22.00

                                                                          3.00

                                                                             

The Manhattan hat shop owned by Moe Ufland was known widely for its extravagant creations: crown of French-blue fancy straw, having the side-crown covered with black poppy leaves, two black spires upstanding at the left back, as described in the Millinery Trade Review in 1914.

Trimmed up and unchaperoned, Nellie was sent off to mingle in places where she might find a husband. In Larchmont, N.Y., she stayed at the stylish Bevan House one block from the beach along Long Island Sound; at Lakewood, N.J., she luxuriated at the Laurel-in-the-Pines Hotel, a winter resort where trains purportedly arrived every 20 minutes from New York City. 

She wasn’t a gold-digger – the term came into use in 1915 to describe working-class women and showgirls who sought wealthy husbands – but it’s easy to imagine Nellie dressing for dinner, lounging in the lobby, hoping to catch someone’s eye.

Hotel Laurel-in-the-Pines, circa 1900 

That person would be Bernard H. Ridder, the newly-divorced son of the publisher of the Staats-Zeitung, the nation’s largest German language weekly newspaper. Bernard and Nellie Hickey eloped on December 31, 1915, two months after the death of Ridder’s father.

The old man did not leave his sons in a good spot. The company had lost money through risky investments in typesetting equipment, although Bernard and his brothers would get it back on track and build it into the large newspaper corporation, Ridder Publications. 

Meantime, back in Mount Vernon, Nellie’s mother moved to the nicer side of town. Eventually Daniel Hickey, Jr. followed their deceased father into politics, becoming a ward supervisor, supervisor of elections, and State Tax Appraiser. He and his siblings continued to live at home.

So the question is: how did Nellie and Bernard come to know each other?  

Very likely they met in 1915, through efforts to create a nationwide organization called Friends of Peace, which opposed U.S. entry to World War I. Its immediate demands were that the U.S. stop exporting ammunition to England and that England lift its blockade of German boats. Bernard Ridder and his father were among the group’s organizers.

In September 1915, Friends of Peace held its first big meeting, a two-day convention, in Chicago. 

Many who attended – including Nellie – were Americans of German and Irish descent who opposed any alliance between the U.S. and England. Labor unions considered joining in, but were scared off by the anti-U.S. rhetoric. 

In this way, Friends of Peace differed from pacifist groups like the Woman’s Peace Party.

One wonders what lesson Bernard Ridder took away from World War I, after which the family fell under suspicion for publishing pro-German propaganda. Two decades later, he would be drawn to Germany after Hitler rose to power, going so far as to meet and publish a sympathetic interview with the Fuhrer.

By that time, Bernard had divorced Nell.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/mr-mrs-bernard-h-ridder.html

See January 20 + January 24, 2016 posts.

Nellie Hickey & Her Father

Nellie Hickey stands at right outside Chicago's Medinah Temple, 1915;
image is backwards (Chicago Historical Society)

Mount Vernon lies just north of the New York City, a twenty-nine minute train ride from Grand Central Station. It was Nellie’s hometown.  

Across the railroad tracks on Second Avenue, the public library endowed by Andrew Carnegie houses a local history room established in 1976 with bicentennial money. It is rarely open because the library can’t afford to staff it. The tables are piled with files and boxes spilling over with papers.

Lying on a dusty desk is a photograph of two women delegates at a 1915 peace convention in Chicago’s Medinah Temple. The caption states that one of the women is Nellie J. Hickey of Mount Vernon, N.Y.  

Who was she? Perhaps a peace activist or suffragist who worked with Jane Addams? She could have been prominent in local political circles or even on the national scene.  There ought to be information about her in the cabinets arranged like a maze through the dark room, creaky wooden drawers crammed so tight that nothing breathes.

But it turns out that Nellie doesn’t occupy even one folder.  Instead there is much about her father, Daniel C. Hickey, a 19th-century Democratic Party operator, borne out in headlines.      

The Democratic Town Convention.

A LIVELY SCRAP AMONG HEELERS.

Throw Down Sheriff Duffy

To PLEASE HICKEY

 Keen Competition for the Churches

And the RACETRACK.

It was all about political battles. Nellie’s father had a long reach. He probably kept his shady dealings out of the house or at least on the front porch. But the children surely were introduced to a few important visitors; for example, the power-broker William Bourke Cockran, a brilliant orator and congressman who championed Irish home rule.

Further down the road, Cockran would align himself with German-American opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. That made sense because the Germans and the Irish shared a furious loathing of England. 

Thus, although he died years before his daughter went out to the Chicago peace convention – which was, in fact, a pro-Germany rally – at home in Mount Vernon, Nellie’s father had made associations that would shape her future.  

***

Back in time, when Nell’s father schemed and triumphed all over New York State, he had to pinch himself to remember that he came penniless from Ireland in 1840. From his office at 48 Dey Street in downtown Manhattan (right near the site of the World Trade Center), Hickey built a fortune as a railroad contractor. 

Hickey met equal success in politics. With astonishing whitewash, the author of a 1913 history of the county wrote:

Hickey engaged in politics as a pastime, a recreation from the cares of business, an enjoyment that cost him large sums of money, as he was not an office seeker for himself nor did he expect other pecuniary reward.

It was the polite language of the day, but of course Hickey’s pastime had many rewards. After all, he played politics inside the most notorious big city machine in American history: the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall.

Tammany’s origins lay in late 18^th century New York where its first leader, Aaron Burr, transformed it from a society of speech-makers to a political machine. Through the mid-19^th century the Irish came to dominate the organization.

After the Civil War, William Marcy Tweed became Tammany’s first boss, presiding over the ward system through graft, fraud, and plunder. Everything was corruptible. Although the repulsive Tweed was indicted and died in prison, Tammany arose again under the bosses John Kelly and Richard Croker, both good friends of Mr. Hickey.

THE KELLYITES TRIUMPHANT!

Hickey the Master of the Situation!

However, by 1894 when he died from a cold he caught while overseeing railroad construction in the Lehigh Valley, Hickey no longer was master of the situation. Tellingly, the governor had recently ignored several of his patronage requests.

You can bet that the Tammany politicians jostled each other on the steps of the Church of the Sacred Heart in the flat light of that funeral morning. The men put their heads together to figure out the next play while the widow Ellen Elizabeth Bird Hickey and her six children sat shocked in the chapel.

The family did not need to worry about money, however. Within a few weeks, the papers reported that Daniel Hickey left no will but his estate included $93,000 in personal property and $75,000 in real estate.

 Church of the Sacred Heart,
Mount Vernon, N.Y.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/nellie-her-father.html

See also January 20 + 28 posts, 2016.