This was quite a surprise cookie. I hesitated to make it due to the ingredients, but then I remembered. Mom made this recipe book of our family’s favorites. It had to be tasty.

So who is Aunt Lena? Aunt Lena was Magdalena “Lena” Reiss Haag. She was born in 1890 in Huntingburg, Indiana, the youngest child of George Reiss and Mary Kryschak Reiss. Around 1905 and the death of her husband, Lena’s mom moved the family to Evansville. In 1910, Aunt Lena was working as a seamstress for the local buggy works. Later that year in June, she married my grandmother’s brother, William Ferd Haag. Grandma was close to William, stood up for them at their wedding, and continued to be close to that family. I don’t remember much about grandma’s siblings, but I do remember Aunt Lena.

Lena was my great-aunt, but I always knew her simply as Aunt Lena. Mostly what I remember abut her is that she was a large woman who liked to give big hugs to children. I wish I remembered more. She died in 1974 at the age of eighty-four.

Aunt Lena had four children, but the one I remember best is Dorothy Haag Logsdon. Dorothy was just a year older than Mom, and they were friends during their teenage years. They also lived near each other because Grandma’s siblings received property on Riverside Drive where they built their homes.

Dorothy married Freddie Logsdon in 1933, and the couple moved away from the area. A few years later, though, they returned to Dorothy’s family home and lived there long after her parents had died. Mom and Dad kept in touch with Dorothy and Freddie for years. Even after we moved away from Riverside Drive when I was one, they continued to visit us at the house where I grew up which was only about a mile away.

I always thought it was surprising how much Freddie and Dad looked alike. In 1983, I was there to celebrate Dorothy and Freddie’s fiftieth wedding anniversary with their family and friends.

In the late 1990s, Dorothy and either her daughter or granddaughter came to my house with an envelope of family pictures. We sat on the back porch while she explained who was in the pictures and even wrote down a list of relatives she evidently thought I needed to know about. She had no idea that she would be the one who sparked my obsession with genealogy. Unfortunately, I didn’t become truly interested until after she was gone. She died in 2000 at the age of eighty-five.

Although this recipe was part of Mom’s 50s and 60s collection, Aunt Lena was born in 1890, so the cookie may reach back much earlier. Its old-fashioned instruction to add “flour enough to roll, but not stiff” suggests a recipe handed down by feel rather than exact measurement. The spices, raisins, nuts, sour milk, and soda place it in the older fruit-cookie or hermit-cookie family, while the fruit cake mix and orange icing give it the holiday flavor I associate with the 1950s and 60s. The closest recipe I found was a “Fruit Cookies” recipe in The Pilgrim Cook Book from 1921.

Let’s get started!

I made some changes, which I have noted on the ingredients list. I also listed how much flour I used which was missing from her recipe.

Aunt Lena’s Fruit Cookies

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter

• 2 cups sugar

• 2 egg yolks, beaten hard for 5 minutes

• 2 tablespoons sour milk (2 tablespoons of almond milk and ¼ teaspoon vinegar)

• 1 teaspoon cloves (1/2 teaspoon)

• 1 teaspoon nutmeg (¼ teaspoon)

• 1 teaspoon soda

• 1 tablespoon cinnamon

• 2 cups chopped raisins

• 1/2 lb. fruit cake mix

• 1 cup chopped nuts

• Flour enough to roll, but not stiff (2 ¼ cups of flour)

• 2 egg whites, beaten

Instructions

1. Cream the butter and sugar.

2. Add the egg yolks that have been beaten hard for 5 minutes, and the milk.

3. Stir in the cloves, nutmeg, soda, cinnamon, raisins, fruit cake mix, and nuts.

4. Aunt Lena’s recipe says to add enough flour to make a dough that can be rolled, but not stiff. I found that about 2 ¼ cups flour made a soft, sticky dough.

5. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

6. Instead of rolling and cutting the dough, I pinched off pieces, rolled them into balls, and pressed them down on a parchment-lined cookie sheet.

7. Bake at 325°F for about 13 minutes, or until the tops are set and no longer shiny.

8. Let the cookies rest on the baking sheet for 4 minutes before removing them to the rack to cool.

9. Optional: Ice with powdered sugar flavored with orange juice. I chose not to ice them. Makes 5 dozen.

So what did the tasters think? Here are some of the comments. “I don’t like fruit cake, but I love these cookies.” I love fruit cake, and they remind me of them.” “This is the best cookie you’ve baked so far.” “Can I have the recipe?” To say I was surprised is an understatement. They are good, but too spicy for me even though I cut the spices down from her recipe. I thought I’d object to the candied fruit, but it tasted great, and the spices all played nice together.

Source:

The Pilgrim Cook Book Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church (Chicago, Ill.) Ladies’ Aid Society 1921, page 95

In the fall of 1932, three years into the Great Depression, Americans went to the polls to decide whether to remain with Herbert Hoover or take a chance on the New York governor who was promising a “new deal for the American people.”

Mom was seventeen that autumn, a high school junior far more consumed with Francis’ silence than with Hoover or Roosevelt. But even she couldn’t escape the election. On November 2, with school just back in session, she complained, “Oh, these campaign talks drive me nerdy. Well, it won’t be long now.” By her own account, she was more lonesome for Francis than curious about the ballot box, but the election earned a line in her diary all the same.

Six days later, Election Day arrived. “Today is election day,” she wrote on November 8. “It will mean Hoover or Roosevelt. Which shall it be? Roosevelt is leading in nearly all the states. So we shall see what we shall see.”

By the next night, the returns were in, and Mom recorded the result in a line that would prove more insightful than she knew: “Well, Mr. Roosevelt was elected, and how. Maybe we’ll get beer back now.” Franklin D. Roosevelt had defeated Hoover in a landslide, and Mom, seventeen years old, had put her finger on exactly what many Americans hoped the new administration would deliver first: the end of Prohibition. She would be right, though it would take another year to arrive.

The president-elect almost didn’t make it to his own inauguration. On the evening of February 15, 1933, Roosevelt was in Miami, wrapping up a fishing cruise aboard the yacht Nourmahal, when he stopped to give brief remarks to a crowd of roughly 25,000 people gathered at Bayfront Park. As he finished speaking and Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak stepped forward to greet him, an unemployed bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots from a pistol at close range.

Roosevelt was untouched. The bullets struck five bystanders, including Cermak, who was hit in the chest as he stood near the president-elect’s car.

The Evansville Courier and Press ran the Associated Press account on February 17 under the headline “Roosevelt Won’t Hide Himself or Curtail Activity.” Traveling north by train the next day, Roosevelt gave reporters his own account of the chaos: “Just then I heard what I thought was a firecracker, then several more. The man talking with me pulled back and the chauffeur started the car. I looked around and saw Mayor Cermak doubled up, with Mrs. Gill collapsing. I told the chauffeur to stop.” He took Cermak’s pulse and held him the rest of the way to the hospital, believing at one point that “his heart had stopped.” Cermak died of his wounds on March 6, three weeks before Roosevelt’s inauguration.

Mom heard about it two days after it happened, and her reaction was brief: “At Miami, FL an assassination was attempted on President Roosevelt. It missed Roosevelt but hit Mayor Cermak and four others. I think it’s awful.”

Zangara pleaded guilty and, on March 20, 1933, was executed in Florida’s electric chair at Raiford State Prison, five weeks after the shooting and two weeks before Roosevelt was sworn in. A syndicated column published soon afterward, Arthur Brisbane’s “Today,” described his final minutes: “He walked to the death chamber with the back of his head shaved and his shirt open at the neck, waved off the two guards beside him, and sat down in the chair as quietly as though he were sitting down for lunch.” “No camera man here?” When told no, he shouted, “Lousy capitalists!” as the current was turned on. The column ran in The Evansville Journal on March 21, 1933, the day after the execution.

That same February 17 edition of the Evansville Courier and Press carried another story that would have caught Mom’s eye almost as much as the shooting: The U.S. Senate had voted 63 to 23, five votes more than the two-thirds needed, to send the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment to the states. “This marks,” the paper’s editorial declared, “the beginning of the end of the most foolish, the most costly, experiment ever tried by any government.” I’m sure Mom wasn’t drinking beer at seventeen, but her father enjoyed it, so when she wrote, “Maybe we’ll get beer back now,” I can hear him speaking through her. Nine months after Mom guessed that a Roosevelt victory might bring beer back, the machinery to do exactly that was already turning.

“Today Mr. Roosevelt was inaugurated,” Mom wrote on March 4, 1933. “Maybe he will help the situation and bring back good times; we hope so.” Three sentences for one of the most quoted inaugurations in American history, the one in which Roosevelt told a nation with a quarter of its workforce unemployed that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Three weeks later, on March 26, The Sunday Courier and Journal’s magazine section ran a full-page tribute titled “A Real President.” An editorial cartoon showed Uncle Sam pumping Roosevelt’s hand above the caption, “Where have you been for the last four years?” The accompanying essay listed what the new president had already done in his first weeks: closed the failing banks, stopped the outflow of gold, and, tellingly, moved on beer. “In the shortest presidential message on record,” it read, “the President informed Congress that the Volstead Act be changed, and promptly the House of Representatives voted, overwhelmingly, to change it and bring back light beer.” The piece had not forgotten February, either: “When a half-crazed creature attempted his assassination, President Roosevelt showed no fear or nervousness. His mind was on the wounded man who represented duty and compassion, not upon himself.”

That was the man Evansville was watching that spring: decisive, unafraid, and already making good on the promises of his campaign. That summer, he turned his attention to the businesses and paychecks of ordinary citizens.

“Voting is a right, not a privilege” was drilled into us when I was growing up. We weren’t a particularly political family, but Mom and Dad followed elections and were especially pleased when John Kennedy, a Catholic, became president. I don’t know what Mom’s parents taught her about voting, but her diary shows that even at seventeen, she was paying attention to what was happening beyond her own life. Somewhere along the way she learned that voting mattered, and she passed that belief on to us. We were taught that every vote counted and that not voting had consequences. In our family, not voting was never an option.

If you aren’t familiar with holy cards, they are small, handheld pictures of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, saints, or biblical scenes. They were used as a visual aid for prayer and meditation. They also served as bookmarks.

Holy cards began as devotional images for prayer, first appearing in the 1400s as affordable keepsakes that pilgrims could carry with them. Over time, they became a familiar part of everyday Catholic life. They were given out at church and often as a little reward in grade school for doing a good job.

I treasured these little works of art. I always put my name on the back, and sometimes my address, hoping that if one got misplaced, it would find its way back to me. Often, when I was given one, there would be a special message written on the back as well. Below is one of mine from Father Gabriel, “God reward and bless you.” The other, much smaller card, was probably one of Mom’s from Sister Mary Sheila. Her message was “May you have a blessed Christmas and may the Christ child bless you always and always.”

My interest in these cards with the beautiful artwork disappeared as I moved away from the church, and I ended up sending my sister most of what I had that had anything to do with the Catholic church including rosaries, scapulars, missals, and these cards.

However, I held on to those that marked special moments, like a church dedication or a priest’s ordination.

I also kept the ones that are especially valuable to my genealogical research: the memorial cards passed out at funerals. When I first became serious about researching my ancestors, I was thrilled to find these cards, which listed the deceased's name, birth and death dates, and a prayer.

Although holy cards are not primary sources, they can provide valuable research leads. When I began looking through the cards my grandmother and mother had collected, I compared the names with the Ancestry tree I had recently created. I recognized several people right away, including the wife of Dad’s boss, but others left me wondering why Grandma had saved their cards. Those required more research. One turned out to be the sister of a second cousin’s husband, someone who does not appear in my tree. Evidently, my family had been close to his family.

I especially love memorial cards that include a photograph of the deceased. Beyond the birth and death dates, they put a face to the name, and give me an image I can add straight to the family tree.

As I mentioned, these are secondary sources. The death date is reliable since the cards were handed out at the funeral, but I’ve found a few birth dates to be incorrect, which makes sense, since some of these people were quite old and the birth date was likely just a guess.

Holy cards have changed in size over the years. The ones from the 1920s measure 2 x 3½ inches, while current cards, according to Amy at Ziemer Funeral Home in Evansville, Indiana, run 2½ x 4¼. The earlier cards are black and white with ornate designs, while newer ones are full color and simpler. Amy added that besides the larger size, today’s cards can include a photo of the loved one on the back along with the birth and death dates and a prayer just like the older cards did. Families choose the image for the front, though funeral homes also honor special requests, such as a card featuring their favorite saint.

Looking back, my grandmother and mother weren’t just being sentimental when they saved these. They were, without knowing it, building a family archive one funeral card at a time. What they preserved as keepsakes, I recognize as pieces of our family story.

We may not all inherit special objects, such as jewelry or a treasured piece of furniture, but we all likely have verbal heirlooms.

Verbal heirlooms are the sayings our parents, grandparents, or other adults repeated to us while we were growing up. The one drilled into my head was, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

According to Quote Investigator, that saying has been attributed to several people over the years. Still, the version closest to the one I heard appeared in Cal Stewart’s collection Uncle Josh Weathersby’s Punkin Centre Stories. His character Josh Weathersby said, “But the wheel what squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.”

My parents brought up that saying often. The message was simple: You have to tell your story. You have to stand up for yourself.

I became a majorette during my sophomore year of high school. I had tried out as a freshman but was the only girl who was not taking lessons from Susan, the official twirling teacher. I didn’t understand why that should matter. I was taking lessons from a majorette who had already graduated and was one of her former students. Still, of all the girls who tried out, I was the only one who did not make the squad.

Needless to say, Mom signed me up for Susan’s classes after that. That was when I learned that there were unwritten rules, and one of them was that you took lessons from Susan if you wanted to be a majorette at Bosse High School. The following year, I made the squad, and was happy to be a pregame majorette.

A little explanation of the majorette hierarchy is necessary here. The difference between a pregame and a varsity majorette was much like the difference between junior varsity and varsity in sports. Pregame majorettes performed before games and, on some occasions, took part in the background of the halftime show. Varsity majorettes held the more prestigious positions and were featured during halftime. They also wore cute outfits!

After spending so much time taking lessons from Susan and practicing the routines, most of the squad aspired to be varsity. But not everyone could make it. Only eight girls were chosen.

Marching varsity was a big deal. The varsity majorettes often appeared at the front of the band as it entered the field. Later, as the band marched and played, the musicians would open their formation so the majorettes could move through it, performing synchronized dance steps and baton routines.

It was such a thrill to strut in front of the entire band, under the stadium lights, with all the Bosse fans watching.

I spent my first two years as a pregame majorette. We usually found out who made varsity during band camp, just before school began in the fall. While we practiced, the varsity majorettes would gradually be pulled out of the larger group.

All summer and at band camp before my senior year, I had been one of the girls pulled out to march varsity. I was so excited. Finally! At the first football game of my senior year, I would at last be a varsity majorette.

Then, during practice the week before that first game, the band director removed me from the varsity group, putting someone else in my place.

I had never been especially assertive, but it was time to stand up for myself. My parents had drilled the squeaky-wheel lesson into me, and I decided I needed to do something.

During a free period that day, I went into the band director’s office. I had hardly ever spoken to him before, but I told him that I was a senior and this was my final season. If I was not going to march varsity, I was quitting.

He was stunned. He didn’t know what to say.

Shaking from the encounter, I walked out of his office and headed straight to the phone booth in the hall to call Mom and tell her what I had done. My majorette days were over, and that was okay. She was so proud of me. In fact, the band director had called her immediately after I left his office. He told her he had not realized I was a senior and assured her that I would march varsity.

And I did. I marched varsity throughout my final season.

That day, the squeaky wheel was me. I spoke up, got his attention, and got what I wanted.

It would not be the last time I thought about that saying. Throughout the years, whenever I needed to speak up, take a chance, or move beyond my comfort zone, I could still hear my parents reminding me that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. It’s a verbal heirloom I’ve carried with me throughout my life.

Thanks again to for her inspiration. What about you? Do you have a verbal heirloom?

This is the seventh article in Mom’s Diary series.

Tucked into Mom’s scrapbook, between the party invitations and dance cards there is a page titled “Books of Particular Appeal.” Below that page heading, she listed seventeen titles with their authors, mostly popular women’s fiction of the early 1930s. Faith Baldwin appears three times. Temple Bailey, Ethel M. Dell, Katharine Brush. And then, sitting in the middle of all those romances, with no explanation, is Dracula, by Bram Stoker.

She made that list deliberately. She listed those books in her scrapbook alongside the other things she wanted to keep. If the diary tells us what she did and felt day to day, that list tells us something quieter — the books she thought were worth remembering. Mom was a reader.

The diary confirms it in just a few entries. On February 3, 1932, she noted almost in passing:

February 3, 1932 — I got a library book, The Villa by the Sea, by Clark. Francis was out a little this evening. I like him a lot. I intend to wash my hair yet this evening.

Library book. Francis. Hair. All in the same thought. Reading wasn’t an event; it was just part of her life.

School made reading books mandatory. In April of her junior year, a teacher assigned Pride and Prejudice, and she recorded her challenge:

April 11, 1932 — I’ve started a book, Pride and Prejudice, by Austin. Have to finish it by Friday, and it has 565 pages. Virginia said Joe wanted a date with me, maybe next Sunday, I hope.

She misspelled the author’s name “Austin.” Joe Haggard was very much on her mind. But it was Monday and she had just until Friday to finish it.

The best book entry in the diary comes from October of 1933, by which point she was eighteen and out of school and reading for pleasure:

October 20, 1933 — I’m reading a swell novel, Walls of Gold, by Norris, and this evening Francis and I went to see it at the American. It was cute, but it spoiled my book.

Walls of Gold, by Kathleen Norris, was one of the bestselling novels of 1933. Mom was reading it before she saw the film. The book came first, and the movie ruined it.

I inherited her love of books. Summers before boys and cars were a high priority, the heat took my breath away as I walked the six blocks to the closest public library, nestled in the local elementary school on Washington Avenue, named appropriately Washington Grade School. The WPA-built building had creaky scuffed wood floors and chairs that were hard to sit on. Instead of staying there, I carried my books home in my arms, no backpacks back then, and took them down to our cool basement and read on the couch with a sweaty metal glass of Kool-Aid until the afternoon was gone.

Unlike my sister, who loved Nancy Drew, I read a variety of books, but primarily teenage fiction. It’s funny that I can’t remember what I read, except for one book when I was a little older. It was about how friends could be family. I never knew how much I’d think about that theme over the years.

By high school I was using the Central Library in downtown Evansville, catching the Bellemeade bus to Main Street and walking a block to a massive Art Deco building that had opened in 1932 — the same year Mom was checking out library books of her own, and the same year she started keeping the diary that would sit in a drawer for decades before I owned it. Those large front windows showcased ever-changing displays, luring people off the sidewalk and inside, toward the card catalog and the information desk. I didn’t know then that I was following a path she had already walked.

Reading and letter writing are related interests. A book brings the world to you — other voices, other places, other lives pressed between covers and carried home from the library. A letter sends you out into the world. Both are ways of reaching past the street you live on and the people you already know.

Mom did both. The diary documents her letter writing. She kept up a correspondence that spanned hundreds of miles and several years, and she took it seriously. Letters required attention; they required you to sit down and think about someone far away. When Francis came home from a trip to Baltimore, she noticed she was slipping:

April 6, 1933 — I’m getting slow in answering letters since Francis is home.

The letters had kept her company while he was gone. Now he was back, and the correspondence suffered. She said so plainly, without apology, just an honest accounting of where her attention had gone.

Catholic schools in the 1930s encouraged pen-pal correspondence. St. Anthony’s Messenger, a Franciscan magazine delivered monthly to many Catholic homes, featured a “Penpals Wanted” column that published the names and addresses of people looking for correspondents. Strangers could write to one another, and the practice was considered wholesome—an opportunity to strengthen letter-writing skills, learn about the wider world, and help young Catholic women maintain friendships across long distances.

Mom corresponded with many pen pals from across the United States, along with Leo Acosta, who lived in the Philippines. Among the others was Virginia Bryson of New Mexico, who sent Mom her very first graduation gift—a small compact. There was also Marge; Marianne Holt of Cincinnati; Mildred Pocta of Cleveland; Gertrude, Janet, and Bea. Many others appeared only once in the diary, leaving behind little more than a first name and a brief glimpse of a friendship carried on through letters.

February 25, 1933 — Mother and I were good and went to confession. Got a letter today from Marge, Harold, Alvah, and another girl.

Pen pals sent photographs giving Mom a face to put with the name, a person to imagine on the other end of all those letters. Among Mom’s papers I found a small collection of them.

But there were two who appeared often in her diary: Irene McDonald and Ginny Reily.

Irene McDonald lived in San Francisco, attending St. Paul High School. In June of 1933, Irene graduated. Mom received the announcement — engraved, formal, with Irene’s name card tucked inside: Miss Irene Dolores McDonald. Mom kept it. Then came the news.

January 16, 1934 — This morning I received a letter from Irene McDonald’s dad telling me that Irene died January 4th. Honestly, I felt like I had lost my last friend.

Irene’s father wrote the letter himself, in careful cursive on folded stationery. Irene had been ailing for quite some time, but not complaining sufficiently to worry them until that last Sunday of the year. He described the vicious streptococcus germ that had rooted itself in her tonsils. They laid her to rest the following Saturday. “She was as beautiful in death as she was in life,” he wrote. He asked Mom to write to Mrs. McDonald when she got the opportunity. He signed it, “Irene’s dad.”

Mom was nineteen. She wrote in the diary: Honestly, I felt like I had lost my last friend. Not “one of my friends.” Her last one. It was exactly what it felt like that January morning when the letter arrived. The medium that had connected them delivered the ending of that friendship.

Among her correspondents, one name that appears in the diary more often than any other was Ginny Reilly. She mentioned a letter from her in January of 1933, while she was buried in civics exams:

January 19, 1933 — I’m knee deep in the work studying civics and everything. Got a letter from Ginny Reilly. She writes the sweetest letters. I just love to hear from her.

Genevieve Reilly Bauer became more than a pen pal. She became a family friend. Ginny was born in 1916 in Harrison, New York, graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s in English, and spent thirty-two years teaching elementary school in the Harrison Central School District before retiring in 1973. She and Mom connected through St. Anthony’s Messenger in the early 1930s, both in high school, responding to the pen pals column. In a letter she wrote to me years later, Ginny recalled how it worked: names and addresses were printed in the magazine, and she had responded to several of them. “Your mom and I just hit it off,” she wrote. “We really kept the mailman weighed down.”

Their letters were long. They were often written over several days — started in the morning, continued in the evening, finished, sealed and sent. For years, those letters were the lifeblood of their relationship. They never lost touch, not through the Depression years, not through the war, not through the decades that followed.

Their first in-person meeting happened around 1951. Ginny later wrote that it was “an outstanding event” in her life. Dad and Ginny’s husband, Bill, hit it off immediately — one of those easy friendships between people who recognize each other on first meeting. The families visited; Mom and Dad traveled to New York. Even with the distance, Ginny was always a part of our lives. She sent me letters at summer camp and called me her “other daughter.”

When Mom died, I was the one to call her. Just hearing her voice was comforting. And then Ginny and I began to write to each other — her long handwritten letters, my shorter ones at Christmas and on Mother’s Day. In 1996 she wrote: “Your mom was and is my closest and dearest friend. Mildred was always first in line.” She remembered the smocked dresses Mom had made for Ginny’s daughter Janet, and the robe she’d made for Ginny. “Your mom was a very talented girl,” she wrote, “always sharing her ability.”

She told me things I didn’t know. Dad had insisted on choosing my name when I was born. “Mildred told me that he was really smitten with you.” When a tornado came through our area, she had trouble reaching me and ended up enlisting her son to find my phone number. When her sweet husband Bill died, I received that letter too.

In December of 2009, her Christmas card came back with no forwarding address. Months passed. I tried her old number and heard a stranger’s voice. But I had saved all of her letters. From the return addresses and details in her writing, I remembered that her son Jack lived in a nearby state and had a daughter. I found the granddaughter on Facebook. From there, everything opened up. Ginny was alive and well, living with Jack, and we spoke on the phone. Our connection was restored.

Ginny died in 2014. In our last conversation, her voice was quieter. She spent her final years with her son and his family, surrounded by the people who loved her. A friendship that had begun with two teenage girls writing to each other through a magazine column became a family friendship.

Mom didn’t sit us down and tell us that we should write letters to strangers. It just happened. My sister Martha, thirteen years older than me, started writing servicemen when she was in high school in the early 1950s. Mari, my other sister, wrote to men in prison.

I had pen pals of my own many of them from countries I would never visit including a woman in Yugoslavia. Like most of Mom’s correspondents, they eventually drifted away. I recently reconnected on Facebook with my French pen pal, Alain Dumas, who had sent me this drawing he penned for me in 1969. I kept it framed and hanging on my wall for years.

Mari, Martha, and I never thought about where the habit came from. We didn’t sit down and decide to become a family that wrote letters to strangers. It was simply something we did, the way families carry on habits modeled for them before anyone is old enough to recognize the pattern. Mom wrote. Her daughters wrote.

The diary itself feels like a letter, written to the writer and to those fortunate enough to read it. Mom never expected me to be among them. She wrote because putting words on paper was the best way she knew to record her life. She could not have imagined that, more than ninety years later, her youngest daughter would find herself on every page.

Who was Reat Allen? Her name was familiar to me, although I don’t remember her. Reat was born Marguerite Greenwell in 1911 in Waverly, Kentucky, and graduated in the Morganfield High School’s Class of 1929. From 1932 to 1934, she worked for the Census Bureau in Washington, D.C. In 1935, she moved back home and married Henry Benjamin Allen Jr. in Morganfield. They lived in several places before settling in Evansville in 1948, just a mile from Mom. She remained there until Mr. Allen died in 1981. They had four children; their firstborn died at age eleven.

Mom and Reat knew each other through St. Benedict Catholic Church. Two of Reat’s children were in the same grades as two of my siblings at both St. Benedict Grade School and Memorial High School. Reat also taught music at St. Ben’s, as we called our school, although I haven’t yet discovered when she began teaching there. The 1950 census lists her as not working, so she may have returned to the workforce after her children were grown. She was also most likely a member of Mom’s card club. Reat died in 1998 at age eighty-six in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where she was living with her daughter.

Over the years, Mom and Reat probably lost touch. When Grandma died, Mom wrote Reat’s name and address on the page labeled “Other Tokens of Sympathy.” Reat had not signed the visitation book, so apparently she had not come to the funeral home.

Six months later, when Mom died, Reat did come to pay her respects and signed the visitation book with her married name. I wonder whether she regretted not going to Grandma’s funeral where she could have seen Mom one last time.

Let’s get baking!

I found several sour cream coffee cake recipes, but none exactly like this one. Reat’s version stood out because it used cake flour, and the nut-and-cinnamon topping was layered in the middle as well as scattered over the top. Unlike many coffee cakes, most of the sugar was mixed into the cake itself rather than reserved for the topping.

Reat Allen’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake

Ingredients

Cake

• 1 cup butter

• 2 cups sugar

• 1 cup sour cream

• 2 whole eggs

• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

• 2 cups cake flour

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Topping

• 3/4 cup chopped nuts

• 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

• 3 tablespoons brown sugar

• Powdered sugar, for sifting on top

Procedure

1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

2. Add the sour cream and beat.

3. Add the eggs and vanilla.

4. Sift together the cake flour, baking powder, and salt.

5. Mix the dry ingredients into the creamed mixture.

6. Pour half of the batter into a greased 10-inch tube pan. (I used a 9 x 9-inch pan)

7. Mix the chopped nuts, cinnamon, and brown sugar for the topping.

8. Spread the topping over the batter.

9. Add the remaining batter and then top with the rest of the cinnamon nut mixture.

10. Bake at 350° for 60 minutes. (Mine was done 40 minutes since I used a 9 x9-inch pan)

11. Cool completely.

12. Sift powdered sugar over the top.

The cake was easy to put together. Reat’s recipe called for a tube pan, but I decided a 9 x 9-inch square pan would work just fine.

And the results—oh my! The cake flour gave it a light, fluffy texture rather than the denser crumb of a typical coffee cake. It was delicious and definitely another one of Mom’s recipes I will make again.

During the three years Mom kept her diary, death entered her life again and again. She didn’t write long passages of grief. She recorded the facts, sometimes added a feeling, and then returned to the ordinary rhythm of school, church, friends, dances, and family life.

It began in January 1932 with a phone call or a knock at the door—the diary doesn’t say how the news came, only what it was. “Daddy’s mother died today suddenly,” she wrote on January 20. “She had heart trouble; the funeral is to be Saturday.” Three lines. She continued her reporting on this event for the next couple of days. She noted the “pretty spray” her father’s office sent and watched her mother leave early for the funeral while she spent the day alone at home. When her father finally came through the door that evening, she made a quiet observation that said everything: “Daddy was nearly dead when he got home.”

Mom didn’t call her “Grandma,” but “Daddy’s mother.” Mary Magdalene Deyss Schatz Wissel lived in Adyeville, Indiana, more than sixty-five miles from Evansville, and from that entry alone, it was clear she had not played a large part in Mom’s life. Mom’s father had his own troubles with his stepfather, Frank Wissel, conflicts serious enough that he ran away from home at sixteen. With many of his mom’s relatives living in Evansville, he had a safe place to land when he left at such a young age.

He did reconnect with his immediate family, and Mom’s visit to the Wissels showed up in her diary later that year. But this was her father’s loss, not quite her own. She recorded it, felt it for him, and moved on.

Ten days later, another death. “Grandma Macke died this morning,” she wrote on January 30. Then, she added “seems as though they’re going one by one.” She was just a teenager, and she was already keeping count.

Grandma Macke wasn’t Mom’s grandmother by blood or marriage. She was Aunt Lucy’s mother-in-law. Lucy and Mom’s mother were sisters but close friends. Aunt Lucy also gave Mom the diary on Christmas Day in 1931. The families were close. Close enough that Aunt Lucy’s mother-in-law had earned the title “Grandma” in Mom’s world. Her loss was a real one.

When the funeral came the next day, Mom didn’t go. Her parents went. She stayed home with Grandma Haag, who couldn’t be left alone. It’s a quiet detail. Grandma Haag was already fragile enough to need a sitter, and Mom was the one who stayed. The two of them were alone in the house, while the rest of the family buried another grandma.

Grandma Haag was Mom’s maternal grandmother, and she lived with them. When the house was built on Grandpa and Grandma Haag’s land for Mom and her parents in 1923, a small apartment was added to the back, but it was accessible from the main house. I assume it was built for one of the Mom’s grandparents in the event of one of the spouses’ deaths. So even before Grandma Haag moved in with them after her husband’s death in 1927, Mom lived next door to these grandparents. They were an important part of her life. Grandma Haag’s husband, Peter Haag, died in 1927, and in the years since, Grandma had been under the same roof as her daughter, her son-in-law, and Mom. When she began to fail in early 1932, the whole household felt it.

Grandma Haag had been declining since at least mid-February, when Mom noted she had received the last sacraments. “She’s pretty sick,” she wrote. Two days later, a positive sign: “Grandma’s a bit better this evening.” But the improvement didn’t last long. Through March and into April, the household lived in that suspended state with ordinary days interrupted by the knowledge that everything is about to change.

And then it did on April 21, 1932, at 1:45 in the morning.

At the top of the April 21 page, in pencil, Mom wrote: Grandmother died. Not in the entry itself but above it, as a header. The three-year diary gave her the same page for April 21 across three years, and she wanted to find this one.

“Sad news, diary. Grandma died this morning at 1:45,” Mom wrote. What followed was unlike a careful, witnessing account of the final moments. “I think she had a peaceful death, no struggle. The last agony lasted until about 1:40; she just groaned and looked at Lucy and was gone.”

The phrase “last agony” was Catholic terminology, the final physical and spiritual struggle a person experiences during the transition from life to death. Mom had been raised in the Church and knew the language. But there is nothing clinical about what she wrote. She was there and she wanted the diary to hold it: the groan, the gaze toward Lucy, the going.

The next morning she wrote about the flowers. “We sure had lots of pretty flowers. Grandma sure looked nice for how skinny she was.”

At the funeral, Father James preached. Mom thought the sermon was wonderful, but one private hurt lingered. Grandma Haag had sons—Ed, Joe, Bill, and Ferd—and Mom had wishes for all of them. “I hope Ed, Joe, Ferd and Bill would be Catholics,” Mom wrote. But it was Ed she singled out: “Ed wasn’t even to see Grandma while she was sick. I think she would have been happier if he had come.”

Ed lived just a few houses away. There was no distance to cross or travel to arrange. His dying mother was steps from his front door, and he hadn’t come. Mom knew it, and she put it in the diary.

Five days after her grandmother’s funeral, another death: Aunt Maggie.

Margaret “Maggie” Dewig Helmich was Grandma Haag’s sister, and she died on April 26 at 5:30 in the morning. “Aunt Maggie didn’t know about Grandma, though,” Mom noted, a detail that suggests the family had kept the news from her, perhaps because she was already too ill to bear it. Within a single week, Mom had helped bury her grandmother and was now preparing to bury her grandmother’s sister.

The school excused her from the George Washington Bicentennial program. “Because my aunt died,” she wrote. Father James gave the funeral sermon, and Mom recorded that it was not as good as the one he had given for Grandma.

After the spring of 1932, death disappeared from the diary for a while. Life went back to dances, movies, letters from Francis, and all the other ordinary happenings of a teenager’s life. But it didn’t stay away.

On April 13, 1933, she wrote: “Today is six years since Grandpa died.”

Peter Haag had not died of illness or old age. He had taken his own life.

For nearly a year before his death, the family had known he was in danger. He was 79, just a day before he turned 80, worried about his failing health and business matters, his mind increasingly clouded. Whether the date was chosen or simply arrived, it’s not recorded. His sons had been keeping watch over him, a deliberate, organized watch, because they feared what he might do. On April 13, 1927, he spent the day with his son Edward at Ed’s home, playing with the grandchildren. At some point he remarked to his daughter-in-law: “Grandpa won’t be around to see you much longer.” They thought he was speaking of his ill health. That afternoon, he went downtown and bought a revolver and cartridges. Then he went home, to the house he shared with Grandma Haag, Henry, and Ferdinand and his wife, and fired the shot. Henry was in the next room. He heard it.

Mom was eleven years old. She grew up knowing how her grandfather died. In a family and a time that didn’t speak of such things, it was the kind of knowledge that she carried. When she wrote “Today is six years since Grandpa died,” it was just one line. She was still carrying that pain.

The weight of that day didn’t fall on Mom alone. Ed had been the last one with his father. He had heard the remark to the grandchildren and hadn’t acted. Whether he blamed himself, whether Grandma Haag blamed him, whether something between them had been broken beyond repair, the diary doesn’t say. But five years later, when Grandma Haag lay dying steps from Ed’s front door, he didn’t come. And Mom noticed. And she wrote it down.

On August 2, 1933, Mom sat down and wrote: “Marguerite Bosler drowned this morning in the Ohio River. She was spending the day with Effingers. It was a shock to all of us. She was only 20.”

She was only 20. Mom was eighteen. This was not a grandparent’s death, expected and surrounded by ritual. This was a girl her own age, on an ordinary summer day, gone.

Marguerite wasn’t a stranger. She had graduated from Memorial High School in 1931, two years ahead of Mom. She was a member of St. Benedict’s, the same parish where Mom’s family attended. She was part of the same small Catholic world, the same neighborhood of familiar faces. When Mom wrote “it was a shock to all of us,” she meant it literally.

Two days later, she and Francis went to see the Bosler family. On August 5, she and her mother attended the funeral. “Gee, there were so many people there,” she wrote. “Many fainted.” The entry is short but told it all.

In January 1934, a letter arrived.

It was from the father of Irene McDonald, one of Mom’s many pen pals. He was writing to tell Mom that Irene had died on January 4th. By the time the letter reached Mom, her friend had already been dead for nearly two weeks.

“Honestly,” Mildred wrote, “I felt like I had lost my last friend.”

It is one of the most emotional moments in the diary. Irene McDonald may have been someone Mildred had never met in person, but the friendship had been real. And now it arrived as a past tense, delivered by a father’s hand.

Later that spring, Mom’s father’s world was shaken too. On May 2, 1934, she wrote: “Dad’s all upset over William Lex’s death. It was so sudden.” William Lex owned Evansville’s Central Union Terminal and was her father’s boss. He was thirty-five years old when a heart attack killed him.

This was not an old man’s death, not the slow departure Mildred had watched claim the grandmothers. Lex was young, prominent, in the middle of things, and then he wasn’t. He left behind a wife and four children, the youngest three years old, the oldest eleven. Her father had worked for this man, had known him as a daily presence, and the shock of it landed hard enough that Mildred felt compelled to record it: Dad’s all upset.

Two days later, her father served as pallbearer at the funeral. Mildred noted it in a single line. She had been watching her father closely enough to know how he was hurting.

Not all the losses that year were human. On October 24, 1934, tucked into an otherwise ordinary entry about shopping with her mother where they purchased an oven thermometer, a cake pan, and a pan scraper, Mom wrote: “Tommy, our cat, was lying on the stoop dead this morning.”

Tommy is the only cat who appears anywhere in the diary. She didn’t say she was sad. She just recorded it, the way she recorded everything that mattered: plainly, and without looking away.

Mom had, in those three years been touched by more death than many do at that young age, and more than any teenager should have to experience.

I took a look at my diary Mom gave me when I was in the sixth grade. I wasn’t nearly as faithful about writing in mine as she had been in hers, but what struck me was what I had left out. There were no deaths mentioned in the years it covered.

Mom’s father, my grandfather John Schatz, died when I was in seventh grade. He had been a big presence in my life, yet I didn’t write one sentence about him, either before or after his death, or in the years that I continued to keep that diary.

I didn’t record it then, but I vividly remember that crisp March day in 1963 when I rode my bicycle the two miles to my grandparents’ house to spend time with him. He had been ill, and when I arrived, he greeted me from the hospital bed set up in the dining room. I was used to seeing Grandma’s large quilting frame filling that space, with her friends gathered around it, thimbles on their fingers, pushing needles through the patchwork while spinning stories of their own. But no quilters were there that day.

Bampie, our nickname for him, looked happy to see me and appeared to be getting better. Our conversation turned to gardening, and he shared his excitement about putting out his garden in the spring. When I came home from the visit, I told Mom that Bampie was feeling better. She shook her head and put her arm around me, telling me that wasn’t the case. He was dying, and there was no cure for his illness. He died the next day.

Maybe that is why Mom’s brief diary entries about death mean so much to me now. She did not explain much. She did not linger. She wrote the fact, sometimes added a feeling, and then returned to school, friends, church, dances, and ordinary days. But those small entries marked the places where loss touched her life.

My own silence in my diary tells another part of the same story. Some things were too large, too confusing, or too painful for me to put into words. Mom wrote down deaths I would never have known about otherwise. I left out one I still remember. Between her words and my silence, I can see how differently we carried loss.

When I think of summers past, besides spending lots of time outdoors with the neighborhood kids playing hopscotch on our sidewalk or kickball in the Sabel’s side yard, barbecue chicken was often on the menu.

Most American barbecue sauces can be traced to a sauce common in the eastern regions of North and South Carolina. Back in the 1920s and ‘30s, backyard cooks made their own sauces from cookbook recipes. They started basic, relying on just a few staples: vinegar, salt, and pepper. These recipes, like my Mom’s, used oil and water with vinegar and mustard for tang and spices for depth. These were mop sauces, used to baste the chicken with a brush over low heat for what always felt like an eternity!

Sugar, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce started to be added to the recipes. By 1947, the Cookbook for Brides called for many of the ingredients that are listed in my family recipe. Heinz Barbecue Sauce was introduced in 1940, and General Foods followed with its Open Pit brand. Kraft entered the market around 1960, using full-page color spreads in women’s magazines. These were tomato-based with lots of sugar and molasses.

Although these bottled sauces were readily available during the 1960s, our family continued to make this barbecue sauce.

This sauce is not your normal sweet spread. When I first tasted other barbecue chicken, I was pretty taken aback. It was way too sweet for my taste. Since I don’t eat spicy food anymore, I was wondering if I’d still like this family sauce I loved as a child. The ingredients are a list of no-nos for those of us with GERD related issues. Dave was hesitant after reading the ingredients and chose to just have one leg slathered with this sauce.

Once the ingredients were in the saucepan and it was simmering, all the memories came flooding back. Dad would light the charcoal grill while Mom cooked the sauce on the kitchen stove. Then I’d wait.

I couldn’t find a picture or video of Dad grilling the chicken, but I did find my aunt Irene, his sister, demonstrating how to baste with the sauce still in the same pan Mom cooked it in on the stove.

Barbecue Sauce for Chicken

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup salad oil

• 1 1/4 cups water

• 2 tablespoons chopped onion

• 1 clove garlic

• 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon chili powder

• 1 teaspoon paprika

• 1 teaspoon pepper

• Dash of cayenne pepper

• 2 tablespoons vinegar

• 1/2 tablespoon mustard

• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

• 1 teaspoon Tabasco

Instructions

Combine all ingredients and simmer for 30 minutes. Add the chicken to the sauce and marinate for an additional 20 minutes. Remove chicken from the marinade and place on the grill. Continue basting the chicken with the sauce while grilling. Be careful when brushing sauce on the chicken due to the oil in this sauce. This flames whether you use a gas or charcoal grill.

I was quite surprised. Looking at the ingredients now, since it has been years since I made this sauce, I thought the chicken would be too spicy to eat. On the contrary. The barbecued chicken was mild but tangy. It brought back all those wonderful memories of Dad, drinking a beer while manning the round, black Weber grill.

Dave thought it was too dry, and that it needed a sauce. For me, it’s just perfect!

Source:

Moss, Robert F. (2010). Barbecue: The History of an American Institution. University of Alabama Press. pp. 189–192

On December 15, 1933, Mom went to her friend Iona Lutterbach’s house for a card party. “Lots of fun,” she wrote. Evidently, that party gave Mom an idea. Five weeks later, on January 19, 1934, she welcomed seven classmates into her home and into a brand-new plan.

“Tonight I had a party, or just a bridge party,” she wrote. “Eight girls and we’re going to form a club. I’m just learning to play, and I had the highest score.” It was beginner’s luck, perhaps, but she recorded it with pride. The card club was the beginning of something that would thread its way through the rest of that year and, three decades later, into my own life.

Bridge clubs were a fixture of middle-class social life during the Depression, especially for young women. Local newspaper society pages from the period are filled with notices of card parties and bridge clubs, hosted in one living room after another. They required little money, just a deck of cards and a hostess willing to provide refreshments. They offered a reason to dress up, get out of the house, visit with friends, and enjoy a little friendly competition. For Mom and her circle in Evansville, Indiana, the club became a welcome escape in an otherwise uncertain decade.

The eight members were graduates of the Memorial High School, class of 1933, in Evansville. When they gathered at Mom’s house that January evening, they had been out of school for barely six months. They were nineteen years old, single, and enjoying the time before careers, marriage, and family life began to shape their days.

The club wasn’t new, just the natural continuation of friendships that had already been created over the high school years. The regulars read like a roll call of Mom’s closest friends: Anna Mae Rollett, Minna Hesse, Adeline Warner, Mary Jane Ahlering, Henrietta “Hen” Coudret, Iona Lutterbach, and Loyola Wolf. Loyola’s name was distinctly Catholic, a tribute to St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and fitting for a circle of girls from Evansville’s tight-knit German Catholic community.

Occasionally, others “subbed” when someone couldn’t make it, but these seven and Mom were the core. The club rotated through their houses on the monthly schedule, each hostess taking her turn. Mom tracked it all with the attention of someone who took her social calendar seriously: “Next month at Henrietta’s,” she noted in April, and sure enough, the April 23 entry records: “Tonight’s club at Henrietta’s. Francis took us and came for us. Gosh, we had some time. Adeline is as crazy as a coot. Mary Jane has club next.”

Iona Lutterbach, whose December 1933 card party had sparked the whole idea, had been one of Mom’s closest companions through their teenage years, going uptown together, seeing shows, and riding around Evansville on summer evenings. In 1933, while others were possibly thinking about marriage and children, Iona enrolled at Lockyear Business College, a fact Mom noted: “Iona is taking a course at Lockyear Business College. Some girls sure like to go to school. But she’s sure of getting a job.” It was a path that would eventually take her far from Evansville.

The grand and booby prizes were awarded every evening, and Mom faithfully recorded them. Anna Mae was the consistent winner. “Anna Mae carried off the prize again. That girl is lucky,” Mom wrote after the June 18 gathering at Minna’s. Loyola, too, had a winning streak. “Loyola won the prize again,” in October, and again in November. As for Mom, she was not very lucky. After the club met at Hen’s sister’s house on December 3, she wrote: “Mary Jane won the prize, and I went home prizeless as usual. But there’ll come a day.” The booby prize, for its part, circulated in the group. Adeline collected it in July, Henrietta in October, and Mildred herself on at least two occasions, including the very first club night.

The refreshments were also important to document. Mom recorded them in her diary with the same attention she gave to fashion and movies, carefully and with opinions. After the November meeting at Mildred Scheffer’s, a substitute hostess that evening, she wrote: “We had the best lunch: chicken sandwiches, cranberry salad, hot chocolate. Very good.” The October gathering at Minna’s featured “fruit salad, sandwiches, and orange juice. Good.” The St. Patrick’s evening in March brought ice cream in a “seasonal design.” And the December 26th meeting at Mary Jane’s was a Christmas party. The food mattered. It was part of the evening’s fun, and something worth writing down.

Choosing what to wear was also an important part of the club. On June 15, Mom learned that the next meeting would be at Minna’s, and her first thought was her wardrobe: “I guess I’ll wear my new plaid dress.” The next day she went uptown specifically to buy a pearl buckle to complete the outfit. “Then I can wear it to Minna’s Monday evening,” she wrote, as if this settled the matter. On July 2, she reported back from Loyola’s house: “I wore my red & white stripe. Gee, everyone thought it was pretty.” A card club was not merely a card club. It was an occasion to dress up.

Francis Heines, already a steady presence in Mom’s life, served as the group’s unofficial chauffeur on many of these evenings. He dropped her off at Anna Mae’s in February, drove her and Minna to Henrietta’s in April, and picked them up afterward. The card club was threaded into the fabric of their courtship.

But Mom wasn’t the only one who gathered friends for card games. Mom’s mother, Lillian, had her own card circle, playing 500, a popular trick-taking game related to Euchre, at St. Vincent’s Day Nursery, and in late June she hosted three tables at her home as a fundraiser for the church summer social. “Mother had three tables of cards for the benefit of the summer social,” Mom wrote on June 28, noting that she had baked two cakes for the occasion. “They sure did go after my cakes.”

The game itself was evolving. Contract bridge surged in popularity in the early 1930s, replacing auction bridge as the fashionable card game of the day. Ely Culbertson helped make that happen, not only through tournament victories and publicity, but through his wildly successful Contract Bridge Blue Book, published in September 1930. By 1934, the girls were catching up. On June 20, Mom wrote simply: “This afternoon we went out to Mary Jane’s to learn contract.” They were not behind the times; they were right in the middle of them.

By December 1934, the club had been meeting for nearly a year. On December 26, the club gathered one last time that year at Mary Jane’s Christmas-party style, names drawn and gifts exchanged. “Adeline had my name and gave me a compact,” Mom wrote. “It was more fun.”

They were barely twenty years old when the diary went quiet. The club may have continued into 1935 and beyond, though there is no record either way, and the world these eight women shared was already beginning to shift. Over the next several years, their lives would change, and those friendships would never be the same.

Looking back across the lives of the eight women who formed that club, I’m surprised at how their lives unfolded. Anna Mae Rollett, the club’s most reliable prize winner, stayed in Evansville and never married. In 1937, she was listed in the Evansville Press as a hostess for her own card club with her own circle of friends. She worked at the Evansville Shipyards during World War II, later joined Hayes Freight Lines, and helped found the Evansville Women’s Traffic Club.

Mary Jane Ahlering, who hosted more club nights that year than anyone and taught the girls contract bridge at her house, also never married. She moved to Indianapolis with her family, worked as a secretary for Allison Engine Company, and died there in 1973 at the age of fifty-seven — a year after Mom died.

Some friendships from the club continued, at least for a while. Minna Hesse and Henrietta Coudret remained close after the card club year. In 1939, they traveled to Chicago together. In 1941, Minna hosted a wedding shower for Henrietta. Two years later, Minna and Henrietta hosted a party for Minna’s soon-to-be husband, and Henrietta and her husband stood up for the couple at their marriage in 1943. Minna went on to build a long career as a fashion buyer in Cincinnati. Henrietta, who had worked for Mom’s father at Schatz Transfer before her marriage, raised her family in the Evansville area.

Adeline Warner married, raised two children, and eventually moved to Michigan. Loyola Wolf married, raised three children, led a Girl Scout troop, and later served as secretary for the Diocese of Evansville. Iona followed her Lockyear training all the way to New York, where she worked for the New York Daily News. She married, divorced, and many years later returned to Evansville, living with her brother until her death at age ninety-six.

Of the eight, four never had children, and three lived essentially their whole adult lives single, a remarkable number for young Catholic women of their generation.

I never knew any of these women. Not one of them appears in my memories of growing up, and I don’t remember hearing their names around the dinner table. That includes the ones who married and stayed in Evansville.

Mom was the first to marry in October 1935. By the time the first two of the group who stayed in Evansville married in 1941, Mom was already deep into diapers and Pablum, the precooked, vitamin-fortified infant cereal produced by Evansville’s Mead Johnson. If their paths crossed again, more than likely too much distance had grown.

The card club had been a friendship of a particular season: young, single, living at home, school still fresh behind them. When that season ended, earlier for some than for others, so did the ties that had held them together. New marriages brought new neighborhoods, new churches, and new friendships built around children.

Mom may have crossed paths with Loyola again in the early 1950s, when both were Girl Scout troop leaders. She may also have kept track of Iona from a distance. Iona’s more independent life, leaving Evansville, working in New York, marrying, divorcing, and eventually returning home, may even have influenced the advice Mom later gave me.

Both of my sisters married at nineteen. By the early 1970s, when my friends were marrying in college or shortly after, and I could see the pool of suitable suitors shrinking, Mom would tell me just to wait until I was thirty.

“By then, they’ll all be available again.”

Divorce still carried a real stigma in Catholic Evansville at that time, and yet Mom seemed to take it as a given that some of those young marriages would not last. Maybe she said this because she had watched my oldest sister’s marriage fall apart in her thirties. Or perhaps, knowing now about Iona’s short-lived marriage, I wonder whether Mom had been remembering her old friend.

My own circle of six high school friends all married, which may be the more surprising fact. By the time we came of age, the world had changed in ways our mothers could hardly have imagined. Women were entering the workforce in greater numbers, and marriage was no longer the only respectable path forward. And yet all six of us chose it. Of the six of us, two left town. Four had children, and two did not. We had more choices, and in many ways easier choices, than those eight girls gathered around a card table in 1934. But their lives remind me that women have always found ways to shape their lives, even within the limits and expectations of their time.

That card club may have ended in 1935. But years later, in the early 1960s, I was pressed into service as a little hostess when Mom’s own club came to our house. The preparations began early in the day with the cleaning of the living room and dining room, the setting up of two card tables with four chairs each, and the laying out of tally sheets, crisp linen napkins, and our good silverware, the same silverware my sister and I took turns polishing for holiday dinners. A bowl of nuts sat on each table for guests to nibble on.

Dinner had to be on the table early so the kitchen could be put back in order well before the guests arrived. One of Mom’s favorite desserts, maybe her popular fruit cocktail cake or Marianne Clayton’s Toffee Squares, was plated and waiting on the dining room table beside the electric percolator, ready to be enjoyed at the proper time.

Because we would be mixing with the guests, my sister Mari and I were dressed in our Sunday best. The ladies arrived dressed in their finest too, as if they were going somewhere important.

Years later, Mari confessed that she thought they were high-society women. I explained that they were just Mom’s friends: women like Mary Schmalz, our neighbor, a tall, slender seamstress who worked out of her home and helped Mom whenever a sewing project got the better of her; and Pinky Sheets, my godmother, whose friendship with Mom went back to childhood, when she lived just down the street from Mom.

There was something in the way those women arrived dressed up, and in all that laughter, that turned an ordinary evening into an occasion. Mom hosted more than her share, and the house was always ready. I loved every minute of playing hostess, unlike my sister, who hated it.

I never inherited the card-playing gene. At the University of Evansville, between classes, I played a bit of euchre at the Wooden Indian, the campus snack shop, and later joined a short-lived bunco club, but that was my extent of card playing.

However, as much as we talk about the card game, it was never really about the cards. It was sharing an evening with friends she loved, a table set with her best linen and something she had baked, and a few hours away from whatever the world was asking of her.

In 1934, that meant the Depression pressing at the edges of everything: the uncertainty, the scarcity, the future that hadn’t sorted itself out yet. Thirty years later, it meant stepping away for a little while from children, housework, daily responsibilities, and any challenges the day had brought.

The cards gave them a reason to gather. What kept them coming together was everything else.

In the summer of 1933, Mom was 18, living at home on East Riverside Drive in Evansville, Indiana, keeping a diary, writing letters, and thinking about boys during one of the hardest times America had ever seen. The Great Depression had been grinding on for nearly four years. One quarter of the nation’s workforce was unemployed. Those fortunate enough to still have jobs often worked under difficult conditions for shrinking wages. In Evansville, as everywhere, people were getting by as best they could, hoping that something, anything, would turn the tide.

That something arrived on June 16, 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act into law. The act created the National Recovery Administration, the NRA, and Washington wasted no time letting the whole country know about it. Roosevelt’s man in charge was General Hugh S. Johnson, a forceful, larger-than-life figure who threw himself into the job with the energy of a wartime commander. In many ways, that was exactly how he saw it: a war on the Depression itself, with every American being called to serve.

The idea at the heart of the NRA was straightforward, but the details weren’t. With millions out of work, the government wanted businesses to spread their available hours among more workers rather than working some people long hours while others were unemployed. Codes of fair competition would be drawn up industry by industry, setting minimum wages, maximum hours, and fair prices. Businesses that agreed to participate would display a Blue Eagle in their windows, the symbol of the NRA, along with the motto “We Do Our Part.” Shoppers were encouraged to spend their money only where the Blue Eagle was displayed. It was patriotism applied to everyday purchases.

The Blue Eagle’s reach extended well beyond store windows. Under the NRA’s codes, manufacturers across dozens of industries agreed to specific standards for wages, hours, and working conditions, and each participating company was entitled to display the eagle’s symbol on the goods it produced. Tucked away in her scrapbook Mom kept during these years is a small fabric tag, white cotton, printed in blue, that carries the Blue Eagle and reads: “Manufactured Under Coat and Suit Code Authority / We Do Our Part.” A compliance number, 0006462, runs along one side. It is easy to overlook, a scrap of cloth that survived while the garment itself did not. But it speaks to something important: that the NRA’s ambitions were not confined to certain industries. They were stitched right into the fabric of everyday life, one tag at a time.

On July 29, she wrote in her diary, “Saturday night and of course that means going up town! But next Saturday, under the NRA, the stores will close at 6:30.” It was her observation of what the NRA was changing in her life. The stores were changing their hours, and that affected her world directly.

Then on August 1, the very day the NRA went into effect, she wrote: “The NRA, the National Recovery Act, sponsored by F.D. Roosevelt, goes underway today. Yes, I hope it does some good for us all.” That same day, the Evansville Journal captured the mood with a headline that said it all: “Local Stores Plastered With NRA Insignia.” Overnight, more than 1,000 stores, shops and offices across Evansville had put up the protective wings of the Blue Eagle. Banks opened at 9 and closed at 2. Groceries ran from 7 in the morning to 6 at night. Retail stores were settling into new hours of their own. The whole city was reorganizing itself at once, and the newspaper documented every step of it. Even the advertisements in the paper carried the Blue Eagle insignia at the top, so that a reader couldn’t turn a single page without the symbol gazing back at them. It was everywhere, all at once, impossible to ignore.

What she didn’t yet fully realize was that the NRA was about to affect her family’s world in a much more significant way.

Her father, John Schatz, was a well-known figure in Evansville’s business community. He had come to the city from Rockport, Indiana, at age sixteen and built what would become a substantial enterprise from the ground up. By 1933, he had been running Schatz Transfer Company for nearly twenty years and also operated the Central Union Terminal Warehouse Company. He was not a man who sat on the sidelines when something important was happening in his industry.

So when the NRA called on businesses to sit down and hammer out the codes that would govern their industries, John Schatz was in the room. On August 3, Mom noted in her diary, “Daddy had to go to the transfer’s NRA meeting and try to set a code.” While his eighteen-year-old daughter was wondering about store hours, her father was at a Chamber of Commerce meeting helping shape the very rules that would govern Evansville’s trucking and freight industry. For a man who had spent two decades building his business, the stakes could not have been higher.

Two days before that meeting, the Evansville Journal had noted it was coming. Seed, feed, and flour merchants would gather at the Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday night to work out their business hours, while transfer men would hold a similar meeting of their own. John Schatz would have read that notice in his morning paper and known his evening was already spoken for.

He wasn’t alone in stepping up. On August 3, the Evansville Courier and Press published a list of 323 local businesses that had rushed to file their certificates of compliance at the post office to qualify for their Blue Eagle badge. John Schatz’s name was right there among them, alongside Ballard Transfer, Meyer Transfer, Pelz Transfer, and other freight operations across the city. The transfer industry in Evansville was moving together, and John Schatz was moving with it.

Back on the streets of Evansville, the new rules were causing a lot of confusion. Stores were trying to figure out exactly what the codes required, and not everyone was getting it right. On August 6, Mom wrote, “There certainly was a row over the NRA. Sears and Monkey Ward remained open while the others closed at 6:00, and were they picketed!”

Montgomery Ward, known affectionately as Monkey Ward to just about everyone, and Sears had apparently decided the closing-time rules did not apply to them, or perhaps simply chose to ignore them. Their neighbors on the street had closed up as required and were not pleased. Picketers showed up outside both stores, and the incident became the talk of the town.

The confusion ran deeper than Sears and Montgomery Ward. The Evansville Press reported that feed, seed, paint, and hardware dealers had been granted a special extension of hours by the Retail Recovery Board because so much of their business came from farmers who kept their own schedules. While most merchants operated from 9 to 5:30, these dealers were open from 7:30 in the morning until 5 in the evening. Groceries had their own separate rules and could make emergency deliveries outside regular hours, as long as the store itself remained closed during those deliveries. Every industry, it seemed, had its own set of exceptions and adjustments.

Two days later, on August 8, Mom captured the confusion when she wrote, “No one knows how to adapt themselves to this NRA. The stores found out they were wrong by closing at 6:30.” Even the stores that had tried to comply had gotten it wrong. The closing time was 6:00, not 6:30, and the whole episode left merchants and shoppers scratching their heads.

The grocery stores and butcher shops added another twist. By August 9, Mom noted they were back to their regular hours. “The groceries and butcher shops, too, are staying open again,” she wrote. “That’s what the NRA wants, same hours and more helpers.” She had put her finger on the right point. The whole idea was not to shut businesses down, but to spread the work around, keeping more people employed even if each person worked a little less.

By mid-August, the NRA excitement in Evansville was building. The Evansville Journal reported on August 18 that the city was preparing for a massive Recovery Day parade and public celebration. Mayor Frank Griese declared Monday afternoon a city holiday, and his proclamation left no doubt about the spirit of the occasion: “Evansville and its citizens have never failed in a crisis to make necessary sacrifices and substantial contributions to correct national difficulties.”

This was no small event. Approximately 2,000 workers from local trade and factory unions would march together. Motorcycle police would lead the procession, followed by horseback riders, uniformed sailors from the USS Kankakee, and the union musicians’ band. Afterward, multiple bands would gather at Bosse Field to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” described by the paper as the first time such a musical presentation had ever been staged in Evansville. Adding to the festivities, a Blue Eagle airplane piloted by Carl Weber would fly over the entire parade route.

There was also a touch of theater planned that captured the mood of the moment perfectly. A mock funeral procession called the “Funeral for Depression” would wind through downtown Evansville, with a coffin draped in black and bearing letters large enough for all to read: “Burying: Old Man Depression.” It was equal parts civic ceremony and collective wishful thinking. After four grinding years, Evansville was ready to bury the Depression and move on.

Mom’s diary entry from August 11 contains no grand reflection on the historic significance of the moment. Instead she wrote simply, “Had a NRA parade here, more fun, Gee, was it ever long! Just about ten miles. I never got so tired of standing in all my life.” Ten miles of motorcycle police, horseback riders, sailors, bands, union workers, and a Blue Eagle airplane overhead, and what my mom remembered most was how tired her feet were.

While the parade was the most visible sign of the NRA in Evansville that summer, the new rules were quietly reshaping everyday working life as well. On August 7, Mom noted: “The NRA is one big discussion at present. Where Francis works, they cut his hours from 8 to 5, not bad, and no work on Saturdays.” Francis Heines, the young man who had caught my mom’s attention and would figure increasingly in her life in the years ahead, was already feeling the direct effect of the new codes. Fewer hours, no Saturdays. It was exactly what the NRA intended: freeing up those hours for another worker who needed them.

The Evansville Journal captured the mood of workers heading back to their jobs under the new codes with a line that might seem puzzling at first glance. Men and women, the paper reported, returned to their old jobs “happily in the realization that their working hours would be fewer, their paychecks larger and their leisure hours longer.” Fewer hours and a larger paycheck sound like a contradiction. But the NRA codes were meant to make that unlikely combination possible. Along with setting maximum hours, they also established minimum wages, often higher than what workers had been earning before. A worker who had been putting in long hours at very low pay might now work fewer hours but earn more per hour, bringing home a larger paycheck and gaining time off. The NRA was betting that businesses would absorb those higher wage costs and hire additional workers to cover the hours that were freed up. For workers who still had jobs, the promise was real. Whether businesses could deliver on it was another question, and one that the next two years would answer.

Across Evansville and the country, the same adjustments were being made in workplaces large and small. Mom’s father was navigating it from the owner’s side, having helped set the very codes that now governed how many hours his drivers and warehouse workers could put in each week. If he needed the same amount of work done, he would have to hire and train additional workers to cover the hours his experienced men could no longer work. It was a significant operational challenge for a man running multiple freight and warehouse operations, and one he had helped negotiate himself at that Chamber of Commerce table.

By late August, Mom had moved on to other things in her diary. The NRA had been the talk of the town all summer, a constant presence in her entries through July and August, and then it simply wasn’t anymore. Life in Evansville carried on. There were movies to see, letters to write, and a young man named Francis whose hours had just gotten a little shorter, leaving perhaps a bit more time for her.

The NRA staggered forward for nearly two more years. Businesses grew frustrated with the complexity of the codes. Compliance became increasingly difficult to enforce. Public enthusiasm faded almost as quickly as it had arrived. On May 27, 1935, the United States Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act as unconstitutional, and the NRA was finished. Few mourned it.

What the NRA left behind in Evansville was less visible but more durable than any Blue Eagle in a store window. In November 1934, sixteen months after those first code-setting meetings, the Evansville Journal reported that a new organization had been formally established at the Hotel McCurdy: the Southwestern Chapter of the Indiana Motor Traffic Association. John Schatz, representing the Central Union Truck Terminal, was named treasurer. The stated purpose was to combat adverse legislation affecting trucks and promote safety campaigns, but the organization itself was the real story. The NRA had put these men in the same room, given them a common language for their industry, and handed them the habit of working together. The program was gone. The association endured.

Most of the NRA faded faster than the Blue Eagles were peeled from windows, and the Recovery Day parade was just another event Evansville had done once and then forgotten. But in Mom’s scrapbook, the fabric tag remained. And in her diary, the summer of 1933 remained too: the stores adjusting their hours, her father going off to his meetings, Francis working fewer Saturdays. She hadn’t known she was watching history. She was just watching her life.

Sometimes, looking back, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Black walnuts always make me think of my brother John.

John lived near McCormick’s Creek, not far from Bloomington, and I visited him often. During my autumn visits, we’d stop by the park and other places he knew where black walnut trees grew, gathering the lime green, egg-sized balls that had fallen to the ground.

Getting the outer hulls off wasn’t too difficult, but then we were left with those hard brown shells. I’m not sure how we managed to crack them open, other than with a hammer. We did consider driving over them with the car, but decided against it.

But the memory isn’t about the challenges of cracking black walnuts. It’s about John, and those fall days, and all the other times I spent with my big brother. That is what came back to me when I chose this recipe from her notebook to bake. However, for this batch, I didn’t have to hunt for black walnuts. I ordered them online.

Mom’s recipe was not complete, and I had a lot of questions. How was I supposed to mix the ingredients? Did everything just go into the bowl together? How long should the rolls chill before baking? What oven temperature should I use, and how long should the cookies bake?

After some research, I found a similar recipe on the Welcome Company website for her grandmother’s ice box cookie. It wasn’t an exact match, but it gave me enough guidance to work with.

Mom’s recipe called for ground raisins, which sent me down another rabbit hole. After several tries with a knife and then a food chopper, I ended up soaking the raisins and then pounding them until I had something close to a paste. Of course, now you can buy ground raisins and save yourself some time!

I’ve included Mom’s original instructions under the ingredients. Below that, I’ve added the complete instructions I used to make these cookies.

Black Walnut Ice Box Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup white sugar

• 1 cup brown sugar

• 1 cup shortening

• 1 cup ground raisins

• 1 cup black walnuts

• 3 eggs

• 1 teaspoon soda

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1 teaspoon salt

Flour enough to handle - about 5 cups. Roll in wax paper & put in ice box to harden. Slice & bake as needed.

Instructions:

1. Cream the butter and sugars together in a stand mixer (or with an electric mixer) until light and fluffy, about 3-4 minutes.

2. Add and incorporate the eggs, one at a time.

3. Add ground raisins.

4. Mix the salt, soda, and cinnamon into two cups of the flour. Add this to the shortening mixture, then continue adding the remaining flour one cup at a time, only until the dough is firm enough to handle. I ended up using just a little less than the full five cups.

   Note: Mom’s recipe called for five cups of flour, but I didn’t need quite that much. Next time, I will mix the salt, soda, and cinnamon into only two cups of flour first. That way, if I don’t use all of the remaining flour, it can go back into the flour container.

5. Mix in the roughly chopped black walnuts.

   Note: The black walnuts I ordered were already chopped, but not as finely as I wanted for these cookies, so I ran them through a nut chopper.

6. Shape the dough into three rectangular logs by dividing it into thirds and placing each portion on a sheet of plastic wrap. Use the wrap to help shape the dough.

   Note: Mom suggested wax paper in some of her other recipes, which I had tried before. Plastic wrap, which wasn’t available to her back then, worked much better for shaping the logs.

   

7. Refrigerate the dough for several hours before slicing. If the dough is not well chilled, it will be nearly impossible to slice. This chilling step is why these are called “icebox” cookies.

8. After the dough has chilled, remove the plastic wrap and slice the logs into cookies, about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick.

   

9. Place the cookies on an ungreased baking sheet about 1 inch apart. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the edges are lightly golden.

   Note: I lined my baking sheets with parchment paper for easier removal.

   Makes: About 4 dozen cookies.

This was another one of Mom’s recipes I didn’t remember by name, but as soon as I tasted the cookies, I remembered them. They were never my favorite of her sweets, but they sure were tasty. The testers loved this recipe. Several commented on the earthy flavor of the black walnuts, which brought back memories for them, too.

Unlike some of her other recipes that I’ve found to be much too sweet, this one was just right. The ground raisins added sweetness, but they blended in so well they really couldn’t be detected. I’ll be making it again. Adding other nuts, instead of black walnuts, would also be good.

Sources

My Grandmother’s Ice Box Cookie Recipe, https://welcomecompany.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/my-grandmothers-ice-box-cookie-recipe/

Before turning to AI for help organizing her 1,097 entries, I started by picking a topic, something I remembered from the many times I had read through the diary. Then I looked through every page to find entries related to that topic, which meant going through the entire diary again and again. I knew there had to be a more efficient way to pull out all the information I needed.

That’s when I decided to transcribe the entries myself. I knew it would be a big job since there are just over three years’ worth. I started by writing down categories I had come across while reading: baking, pen pals, travels, sewing, her parents, and so on. Then I began typing the category, the date, and her entry into a Word file. It was taking far too long. I’d never finish the book this way.

My next solution was to dictate directly into Word. I had to clean up the dictation, but it worked. I then pasted the results into a Word file organized by category. I made it through about four months’ worth and then quit. It was just too overwhelming, and I set it aside for awhile. Meanwhile, I was able to write a couple of stories using that file, but I really needed the whole diary transcribed if I wanted to finish the book.

Then this year in Chronicle Makers, Denyse Allen’s community designed to help family historians transform their research into stories, I was introduced to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, which offers more than just chat. Cowork is an app you download to your desktop, and from there you can grant it access to the folders you want it to read. I set up a folder for her diary information, including that Word file with the completed entries, and added a separate file listing all the categories I had found while reading through the diary. Now that Cowork had what I thought were the first four months of entries, I asked it to put everything into a spreadsheet so I could pull up specific topics when I was ready to write.

The spreadsheet turned out great, but now I had to figure out how to categorize and add the remaining entries. My first attempt was to scan pages from the diary, have Cowork transcribe them, and then add them to the spreadsheet. I hit my token limit quickly and had to wait four hours for the next session to continue. When I reviewed the results, I discovered question marks where Cowork couldn’t read the handwriting. I should have asked it to show me the transcription before moving on. On top of that, scanning and uploading were labor-intensive. This wasn’t going to work either.

To ensure my entries were accurate, I needed to go back to dictation. I first asked Cowork whether handing off the transcription to another AI would be easier, and it confirmed that receiving clean transcriptions would be much faster. So I turned to ChatGPT.

I went back to dictating, but this time in ChatGPT, which understood my speech much better than Word and required very little cleanup. Once I finished, I asked it to put each entry into a separate paragraph, leaving the categorizing for Cowork to handle. I copied those cleaned-up dictations into Word documents and added them to my diary folder. Cowork took those files and, just as it had done with my original entries, added everything to the spreadsheet, assigning categories even though I hadn’t included them. It also added comments along the way, some of which made me laugh. Because it remembered previous entries, it often noted connections between them. More about that later.

When we finished, I asked Cowork how many entries were in the spreadsheet: 791. That felt incredible until I thought about it and realized that three years and two days equals 1,097 entries.

So I asked Cowork to check the spreadsheet and tell me exactly which entries were missing. It listed them, and I went back and filled in those gaps. Finally, all the entries were in the spreadsheet.

Now I can start writing my stories. When I want to write about baking, for example, I just ask Cowork for those entries, and it lists them in chronological order. Yes, I could sort the spreadsheet myself, but this is so much faster and lets me focus on what I actually want to do: write.

Cowork also gives me ideas for further research. One of Mom’s entries mentioned going to a dance at the Vendome Roof Garden. Cowork noted that it was one of Evansville’s premier entertainment venues, a comment that reminded me to look into it further. Another entry mentioned her shopping on Dollar Day, coming home with a new pair of shoes. Cowork explained, “Dollar Day was a Depression-era retail promotion where items were marked down to a dollar.”

In another instance, Cowork made an unexpected connection for me. When I uploaded a newspaper clipping about one of Mom’s childhood friends who had been in a serious automobile accident, it linked the clipping to a diary entry with this comment: “The February 1934 car accident clipping takes on new weight, knowing it was Mary Jane. She’s the one Mildred visited and wrote about with such concern: the girl with 22 stitches.” Without Cowork, I would have had to search through every entry in February 1934 to find that connection myself.

If you have a large amount of material that needs to be digitized and organized, as I did with Mom’s diary entries, I found this process far easier than anything I had tried before. It did take time, but nothing like what it would have taken me working alone.

This project has been in the thinking stages for years. It felt so overwhelming that I couldn’t see how I would ever work through organizing these entries, much less write the stories contained in them. With the help of ChatGPT and Claude Cowork, my vision for this book, and for honoring Mom’s story, finally feels like a reality.

On November 7, 1909, the Evansville Journal ran a small notice on page seventeen.

TO MARRY IN CALIFORNIA

Miss Elizabeth Simpson, well known on this side, leaves Tuesday for Fresno, Cal., where she will be married next week to John Klee of that place. The bridegroom formerly lived in Evansville.

It was the kind of item that appeared regularly in small town papers, a few lines to let the community know that one of their own was moving on. Everyone who read it would have nodded and moved along to the next column. Lizzie Simpson, the seamstress, the housekeeper, the quiet oldest daughter of John and Margaretha Magin Simpson, was finally getting married at fifty-one to a man who used to live here. And in California, of all places.

She left two days later.

The wedding never happened.

Three months passed. Then, on a February morning in 1910, an envelope with a postcard enclosed arrived at the Simpson home on West Illinois Street. It was from Lizzie.

Her mother Margaretha would have recognized the handwriting immediately. What she wouldn’t have questioned, not for a moment, was the return address.

Mrs. J. A. Klee. 1831 Mariposa Street. Fresno, California.

Of course, it said that. The paper had said she was going to marry him. So she had.

The card inside was cheerful and ordinary. Lizzie wished she could be there to celebrate her mother’s birthday. Her rheumatism was still bothering her, but she had been out in the country for the week and had just gotten back. With wishes from Lizzie and John.

A wife writing home. Nothing more, nothing less.

Margaretha Simpson accepted it completely. When she died in September 1924, her obituary named her surviving daughters, and there was Lizzie, simply and unquestioningly listed as Mrs. John Klee. Her sister Anna’s obituary in 1933 did the same, and Mary’s in 1943 followed suit. For thirty-eight years, from the day that first newspaper notice appeared until the last of her Indiana sisters who died before her was laid to rest, Lizzie Simpson remained Mrs. John Klee to everyone who had known her growing up.

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Simpson was born on October 15, 1858, in St. Wendel, a small German Catholic settlement in Posey County, Indiana. She was the oldest surviving daughter of John Simpson, who had come to Indiana from Pennsylvania, and Margaretha Magin, who had emigrated from the Palatinate region of Germany as a young woman and found her way to St. Wendel, where the faith and the language felt familiar enough to call home.

Lizzie grew up in a large, close family. By the time she was old enough to work, there were seven siblings behind her — Katherine, Mary, Johann, William, Gertrude, Anna, and finally little Maggie, born in 1880 when Lizzie was already twenty-one. The Simpson girls were workers. Anna, Gertrude and Maggie spent years at the Evansville Cotton Manufacturing Company, feeding its spindles and looms through long, dusty shifts. Lizzie took a different path working as a seamstress.

After the 1880 census, the city directories place her at home with her parents for the next sixteen years, with no occupation listed. Perhaps she was keeping house, or sewing quietly for neighbors and friends. Her father, John, died in June 1899. After that, Lizzie went to work as a housemaid, then a domestic, and later a housekeeper for the same Evansville family, a position she held from 1900 until she left for California in the summer of 1909.

By that time she was fifty-one. That was the life she had built: sewing, mending, and altering clothing, and later tending to other people’s laundry, meals, and daily needs. It was honest, respectable work, the kind her sisters knew well, too. But it was not the kind of life that left much room for a story of her own.

And then came John Klee.

According to his obituary, John Arnold Klee was born on September 25, 1856, in Evansville, though that detail has been difficult to confirm in the records. He was two years older than Lizzie and, like her, came from the same corner of Indiana.

By 1880, he was a boarder on West Indiana Street in Evansville, working as a blacksmith. Sometime around 1886, he headed west, passing through Los Angeles before landing in Fresno in 1887, where he opened one of the first blacksmith shops in the city at Fresno and K Streets. He was active in local politics and served as treasurer of the Hoosiers of Indiana Society, the kind of man who showed up and stayed. He operated his blacksmith shop on G Street for twenty years before retiring in 1906.

And then, in 1906, he did something that now seems significant: he returned home.

For three years, John Klee lived in Evansville. His Fresno obituary notes it plainly: he retired and “returned to his native Indiana for three years.” And it was there, in those three years, that whatever had existed between him and Lizzie Simpson took shape into something that would last the rest of their lives.

We don’t know how they knew each other before that. Evansville was a small world, familiar names, overlapping neighborhoods, the same church pews. It’s possible they had known each other for years. What we know is that by November 1909, the Evansville Journal was announcing their wedding, and Lizzie was on her way to California.

The wedding never took place. And here is where the records run out, and the questions begin.

There were several men named John Klee in Evansville in the late nineteenth century, which makes the paper trail hard to follow. One of them had been married and divorced. Whether that was Lizzie’s John Klee has not been confirmed. But if John Arnold Klee did have a prior civil marriage behind him, then everything that followed begins to make sense.

In the German Catholic world where Lizzie had grown up, divorce was not a mere technicality. The Church did not recognize it, and a divorced man could not marry in the Church. For a woman like Lizzie, who would spend her final years as a member of St. John’s Altar Society and be buried in Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery, marrying outside the Church may simply not have been something she was willing to do.

So perhaps they made a different arrangement. Perhaps they always meant to.

By the time Lizzie arrived in Fresno in late 1909, John had already lived there for more than 20 years before moving back home. He knew the city the way only an early arrival can, the streets before they were paved, the businesses before they had competitors, the faces of those who had built the place alongside him. It was nothing like the settled German Catholic neighborhoods of Evansville. It was louder, newer, and more anonymous.

Besides John’s civic activity, their life together centered on the rooming house on Mariposa Street, first at 1831 and later at 2031. In 1910, the census listed Lizzie as John’s sister, the story given to the enumerator, though the postcard they signed to her mother suggested something quite different. By 1920, she was listed as head of household, keeping house in what had become a full boarding operation. By 1930, she was listed as a roomer.

When John Arnold Klee died on January 5, 1936, at the age of seventy-nine, the Fresno Bee noted that he had been a pioneer blacksmith, a civic figure, and a treasurer of the Indiana Society. His funeral services were held at Sullivan Chapel and at St. John’s Cathedral, the same church where Lizzie worshipped and was an active member of the Altar Society.

The obituary ended with a single line that is difficult to read.

Klee leaves no known relatives.

But a week after his death, a Card of Thanks appeared in the Fresno Bee. It came from the people closest to John Arnold Klee, thanking friends for their kindness during his illness and death, and for the beautiful floral offerings. It was signed: Elizabeth Simpson.

Not Mrs. Klee. Not companion or partner or housekeeper. Just her name, making a quiet public claim to a grief his obituary had refused to acknowledge.

They lived together for twenty-six years on Mariposa Street, in the rooming houses John ran and Lizzie managed. She took his name in every letter home and every assumption her Indiana family ever made. In Evansville and to her sisters who lived in other areas of the country, she was Mrs. John Klee. She kept both versions of herself alive for nearly four decades. In Fresno, she was Elizabeth Simpson. Even though not married, they were life partners.

In September 1937, just a year after John’s death, a fire damaged the rooming house. Lizzie was seventy-eight years old. She repaired what could be repaired and kept going. In the 1940 census she was listed as the manager, running the place on her own at eighty-one, just as she had always done: quietly, capably, and without much fuss.

Sometime around 1942, she moved to 524 Thomas Avenue, into the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Stymans, described in her obituary simply as friends. William was a custodian for the public schools, and also listed as a carpenter. Those skills may have brought William into her life through repairs or work needed at the rooming house. She lived with them for six years, cared for and among people who knew her for who she was: an elderly woman from Indiana named Elizabeth Simpson, a member of St. John’s Cathedral and its Altar Society, and someone whose life partner had passed. She died there on August 1, 1948, at the age of eighty-nine.

Two days later, the Fresno Bee published her obituary. It appeared under the name Elizabeth Simpson and referred to her as Miss Simpson. It noted that she was a native of Evansville, Indiana, a member of St. John’s Cathedral and St. John’s Altar Society, and was survived by three sisters. Funeral arrangements would be announced by Sullivan, Burns & Blair, the same funeral home that had handled John Klee’s arrangements twelve years earlier.

There was no mention of John Klee. Not his name, not his rooming house, not the twenty-six years they had spent together on Mariposa Street. The two people who had run the same rooming houses and spent countless hours side by side, were on paper, strangers in the end.

Just as his obituary had erased her, hers erased him. Whatever they had been to each other, it belonged to them alone, unrecorded, unofficial, unremarked upon in any newspaper that has survived.

Her surviving siblings, Katherine, Gertrude, and Maggie, mourned the loss of Lizzie. Whether they knew the truth about her life is also unknown. The obituary that told the truth about Lizzie Simpson would never reach the people who had believed the other story for thirty-eight years.

She was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery on West Belmont Avenue in Fresno. John Arnold Klee was buried there, too, in the mausoleum. Lizzie was laid to rest in the general grounds, in a separate section.

Together in the same cemetery. Apart, as always, on paper.

This is another of Mom’s favorites that she received from a friend. This was Brink Small’s tasty treat – one of my hubby’s favorites.

I remember the Smalls living across the street from my grandparents on Riverside Drive in Evansville. Brink, her husband Rufus, and their two children, Bill and Gail, lived there. I vaguely remember Gail, who was nine years older than I was and appeared in photos with my older sisters. Bill was even older, and I have no memory of him. I also remember Rufus. As a child, I always thought his name was interesting.

Brink was born Elta Elizabeth Brinkmeyer on September 30, 1906, in Huntingburg, Indiana, to Christian Frederick Brinkmeyer and Jane Aufderhar. She was one of five daughters.

After graduating from Huntingburg High School, she enrolled in the nursing program in Evansville. On June 26, 1930, Elta completed the three-year nursing program at Deaconess, graduating with fifteen other students.

The 1930 Evansville city directory shows Elta living with her sister Violette, also a nurse, at 320 Adams Avenue. I also found Elta at that same address in the 1930 census, taken in April of that year, though Violette was no longer in the household. Instead, Elta was living with another nurse, Lillian Adler.

What no one knew at the time was that Elta had already married. She and Rufus Small were married in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 14, 1930. Yet according to the Huntingburg Argus of March 13, 1931, they had kept the marriage secret until then. If Deaconess followed the common nursing-school practice back then of expecting student nurses to remain single while in training, that secrecy may help explain why the marriage was hidden.

Elta, later known as Brink, died at the age of 90 on December 26, 1996. Her obituary says she retired from nursing at Deaconess Hospital in 1969, although none of the census records show her working. Her youngest child was born in 1941, and the 1950 census lists her as not employed. My guess is that she returned to nursing later, perhaps in the mid-1950s or 1960s, after her children were older. I do not remember her, and that may simply be because she was working when I was visiting grandma and grandpa.

Let’s get to baking. The closest recipe I could find to this one was on the Foods.com website. It was called Old Fashion Oatmeal Raisin Cookie. They were described as “Cookies like Grandma used to make. The secret is boiling the raisins to plump them up, which adds a great dimension to the wonderful spicy taste of this soft cookie. These are real special!” Looking at it again, it’s close but not that close to this one.

Brink Small’s Oatmeal Crispies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup seedless raisins

• 1 cup shortening (I used Spectrum Organic All Vegetable Shortening)

• 1/2 cup water

• 1 1/2 cups flour

• 1 teaspoon soda

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

• 3 cups oats

• 2 cups brown sugar

• 2 teaspoons vanilla

• 1 cup nuts

Instructions

1. Combine the raisins, shortening, and water in a pan.

2. Heat slowly until the shortening is melted.

3. Let the mixture cool.

4. Sift the flour, then add the soda, salt, and spices. Sift into a bowl.

5. Add the oats, brown sugar, and nuts, and mix.

6. Add the vanilla to the cooled mixture.

7. Combine the wet and dry mixtures.

8. Roll the dough in waxed paper and chill.

9. Break off small pieces, roll into balls, and flatten with a glass covered with a damp cloth. (I dampened a paper towel and pressed down with my hand.)

10. Bake at 350° for 15 minutes.

11. Let the cookies cool on the pan for 5 or so minutes before moving them to the rack.

    

This recipe makes 4 dozen cookies.

When I rolled up the dough it was really dry and would not come together. I added a little water and worked with it until I was able to roll. I only chilled it for a couple hours. Next time I will chill it for a little longer, maybe overnight. When I took it out of the refrigerator it was still dry. I made my hands wet after I broke of the pieces and rolled into balls. I really didn’t think they would stick together. However, they were perfect.

I had never boiled the raisins before, but it worked great. I might try that in other recipes where raisins are part of the cookies. Dave said they were his favorite of the cookies so far, and they were a hit with the tasters. They do freeze well as we had some left over.

I’m so glad Mom included Brink’s recipe. It is a keeper. Dave has already requested that I make it again.

What I wanted, as a teenager, was what my girlfriends and I wanted back then: a peroxide streak. The style was to apply peroxide to one section of hair on the side of your face and let the sun do the rest. After enough time outside and several applications, you’d have one bright streak, that stood out from the rest of the hairdo.

My problem was that I kept parting my hair in different ways. So instead of one streak, the peroxide affected most of my hair at the top of my head. It didn’t look terrible. In fact, it looked more like highlights, which I liked. I just wasn’t sure how to keep it up.

My mother watched all this and did what she always did when she saw a problem she thought she could solve: she came up with a solution.

Mom always talked about her “mousy brown” hair. She worried that mine would turn out the same, but I didn’t see my hair that way. I saw it as dishwater blonde, nothing dramatic, nothing you’d write home about, but not mousy brown either. It made me sad that she didn’t like her hair. I could never quite understand that. After all, it was just hair.

In our family, coloring hair was accepted. It was normal. Both of my sisters colored theirs. Martha, my oldest sister, became a redhead in her early twenties while doing a bit of modeling, and Mari dyed hers blonde before eventually ending up red too. I always assumed she decided on red because she wanted to look like Martha. Only after her death did I learn she had done it because she wanted to fit in with her then-family of redheaded stepchildren.

Mom told me she had just the thing, a Clairol product that I always remembered as Doesn’t Do Much. I could swear that’s what it was called. Not finding it in my research, it was probably Clairol’s Summer Blonde Hair Lightener, which may tell you something about what I remembered most—what it promised. It promised soft highlights, just a little something, and since I had already been trying to brighten my hair on my own, this seemed like a more sensible way to do it. It would be easier. It would look better than my attempt at adding color to my hair.

We began with Doesn’t Do Much, until it did quite a lot.

Before long, my hair was no longer just highlighted. It wasn’t merely “tinted” or “brightened.” It was dyed a shade of blonde. The Doesn’t Do Much started to grow out. I had roots from a product that was supposed to do no more than highlight. Once we crossed that line, Mom decided that if she was going to color my hair, she would do it properly and use Miss Clairol, a permanent hair color product. Instead of just one shade of blond, she chose a couple of shades to mix together to get the color she thought would look best on her youngest. What began as a teenager’s attempt at a sun streak became, under my mother’s steady hands, a full head of blonde hair.

Mom started the process by tying on her apron and draping an old towel around my shoulders. I sat on a high stool with a red Naugahyde seat, one of those kitchen chairs with a footrest that pulled out so it could double as a little ladder. In the summer, when I was wearing shorts, even with the window air conditioner humming, my bare skin stuck to that red seat.

Wearing gloves, Mom mixed the color with the activator, stirring until it turned into a smooth, creamy mixture. For the very first application, she combed my dry hair, parted it into four sections, and worked methodically through the lengths and ends in small sections. We waited about fifteen minutes, and then she checked a few strands to see how light they were. After that, she applied the thick, smelly concoction to my roots. Then we waited another thirty minutes or so. After those minutes had passed, she checked again to make sure the color was exactly the way she wanted it. When she was happy with the color, I bent over the porcelain sink and rinsed my hair in the same sink where we later washed the dishes, all those chemicals swirling down the drain, followed by shampoo and conditioner.

After that first time, it became a maintenance routine. Every three weeks, she applied the color only to the new growth, letting it process for twenty minutes or so, just until the roots matched the rest of my hair. It became part beauty routine, part maintenance schedule, part quiet time with my mother. She took it seriously. Getting the color just right mattered more than anything on those afternoons.

It was always just Mom and me. My siblings were grown and living elsewhere by then, and Dad kept himself busy far away from the kitchen and the stinky smell. I sat there and let her work her magic, one more step in becoming the young woman she had pictured in her mind long before I ever did.

One day, while she was in the middle of dyeing, our neighbor, Mrs. Sabel, knocked on the door and called out, “Hello.” Mom answered, “Come on in. I’m dyeing!”

Mrs. Sabel panicked. “Oh my God! You’re dying?”

Mom said, “No, no. I’m just dyeing Lynda’s hair!”

That story still makes me laugh, and I can hear it as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

There were times people teased me that my hair wasn’t natural. I’d act offended and say, “What are you talking about? I’m a natural blonde.” They’d laugh and say they were just kidding.

But photographs have a way of telling on you. My prom pictures and my student ID, even with my hair freshly dyed, showed dark roots. You might not see the roots in person, but the camera caught them.

We kept that routine going through high school and college. It was our special time, a time when we weren’t interrupted. By then, the process was so automatic for her that we could settle into those quiet conversations that pass between a mother and daughter.

She died after I graduated from college, and the ritual ended. It had been our time together, and once she was gone, I let it go. It was one of the first things I faced without her.

There was so much more to these sessions, even more than our conversations. In many ways, Mom was living her life through me. I was doing things she had wanted to do but never had the chance to, and she sometimes pushed me toward things I might not have chosen on my own.

I let my hair grow out. I’ve had it highlighted many times over the years, and for awhile had it permed, but I’ve never really colored it again. I just didn’t care to. Maybe it was no longer about being blonde. Maybe it never really was. Without realizing it, the dyeing had become one more way of being cared for by my mother, and one more way she tried to give me what she believed would help me shine.

She died at fifty-seven, so she never saw herself go gray. My hair is not completely gray yet, but I love it. I loved my dishwater blonde hair too. And now, when I look in the mirror, I sometimes think about those years at the kitchen sink, my mother mixing shades of blonde, determined to get it just right.

I may not have really cared about being a blonde. However, those regular sessions gave Mom and me time together that belonged only to us. Back then, it was just a routine. Now I see it for what it was: a gift of time my older siblings never got to experience. And I’m thankful.

I’m back to making desserts from Mom’s booklet, and this time it’s a chocolate cake, though I don’t remember her making it for the neighborhood kids and our family.

Due to the attention I’ve given this booklet over the past year since I’ve been writing this series, it’s definitely showing the wear. On this recipe page, the instructions at the bottom are missing. So how am I supposed to make the dessert when the instructions aren’t complete?

When I research Mom’s recipes, I can often find something close to what she made. But this time, I found the exact recipe, almost word-for-word. It’s Betty Crocker Cocoa Chiffon.

It was promoted as the “Biggest Cake News in 100 Years.” The ad called it “a new type of cake . . . more exciting than any cake ever known before,” and described it as “indescribably lovely—good to eat.” It also promised it would stay fresh “amazingly long,” thanks to the “surprise shortening.” The ad went on to praise Softasilk cake flour, saying it gave the cake exceptional volume and delicacy, making it more tender than angel food, and then listed directions for both a large cake and a smaller one.

I was thrilled to find the recipe, especially after realizing it matched Mom’s handwritten version so closely. And I must admit, the 1948 sales pitch pulled me in too: angel food lightness plus butter-cake richness plus real chocolate flavor. That piqued my interest.

So, let’s get to baking.

Mom’s directions left out the vanilla, which I think was simply an oversight on her part. I followed the recipe as written, although I used Swan’s Down Cake Flour, which is what she would have had in her cupboard back then. I also left out the red food coloring and chose the 9 x 13-inch pan version.

I followed the directions and did not grease the pan. That turned out to be a mistake. The cake was very difficult to remove.

I checked the cake at 45 minutes and removed it from the oven, but I think it may have still been slightly overbaked. Later, I found a review that said 40 minutes was enough, and that might have changed how I felt about it. The texture was spongy, more like angel food cake, which was a good thing. As for the chocolate flavor, I expected a stronger taste, and it wasn’t very sweet.

It really needed icing. I remember a white disappearing icing, but also a chocolate one she might have used on this cake. I took it to my tasters with whipped cream. They were all happy with the cake, even without icing.

I’ll bake it again, but I’ll start checking on it at about 35 minutes. Unlike so many of Mom’s recipes from this era, which are very sweet, this one wasn’t. Since it was one of her favorites, it must be better than this first attempt. Next time, I might add a little more sugar or simply give it the icing it clearly needs and deserves.

On February 25, 1913, when the Persia glided through the Golden Gate, among its passengers was a 20-year-old single woman returning from six months touring Asia with a theatrical company. She gave her name as Betty Devereaux.

But Betty Devereaux had not always been Betty. To understand how she arrived in San Francisco with a new name and a new life, we must return to an earlier time and place: Evansville, Indiana.

Evansville at the Turn of the Century

In 1900, Evansville was an industrial river city of about 60,000 people. Its economy was powered by factories, mills, and trade along the Ohio River. Working-class families lived in densely packed neighborhoods where wooden houses stood close together. Men worked in the factories and mills, and women and their daughters often helped support the household by taking jobs at the Evansville Cotton Manufacturing Company.

In 1900, eight-year-old Bessie Simpson lived with her parents, William Henry Simpson and Dorothy (Dolly) Simpson, and her aunt and uncle in one of these Evansville neighborhoods. The Simpson family would have been surrounded by other working families, by the sounds of industry, by the rhythms of a life where survival required long hours and steady work. Childhood in such neighborhoods meant playing in the streets with other children, attending local schools and churches, and families staying together even when that meant enduring unhappiness or worse.

William Henry Simpson worked as a sawyer, trimming and cutting lumber for one of the 41 furniture factories in Evansville. But by 1900, he had been battling pulmonary tuberculosis for what would become a two-year struggle with the disease. Tuberculosis, then called consumption, was one of the leading causes of death in early twentieth-century America, particularly among working-class people living in crowded urban conditions. The disease was wasting, terrifying, and often fatal. There was no cure. Patients grew progressively weaker, coughing and struggling to breathe, watching themselves deteriorate over months or years.

Whether William’s illness contributed to the breakdown of his marriage is unknown, but by June 1902, Dolly Simpson had done what many women in her position could not; she had left her husband. She moved to a west-side boarding, hired Attorney R. C. Wilkinson, and filed for divorce. In an era when divorce carried social stigma and when many women lacked the economic means to survive independently, Dolly’s actions represented both courage and desperation.

On the evening of June 19, 1902, William Simpson came to Dolly’s boarding house and made his position clear: “If she did not return to him, she would not live at all and that he would not live either. He told her he would do what he meant to do before the sun went down.” He had made such threats before Dolly told the court. Once, he had brandished a revolver and warned that if she didn’t shut up and behave herself, there would be another “Conway” affair, referring to a recent bloody triple tragedy on the West Side that would have been fresh in every Evansville resident’s mind.

The next morning, Dolly filed a sworn statement asking the court for a peace bond for her protection. The Evansville Journal reported the story that afternoon, describing a thirty-year-old woman terrified by her husband’s threats, working at the cotton mill to support herself, with a little daughter, ten-year-old Bessie. After a hearing, Justice Francke ordered William to post bond to keep the peace. When he failed to do so, he was sent to jail. Three months later, on September 27, 1902, William Henry Simpson died at age thirty-five. The cause of death was pulmonary tuberculosis, the disease that had been consuming him for two years. He died in Evansville, still married to Dolly; the divorce she had filed was not yet final.

Looking back, William’s threats take on a different light. He was a dying man, watching his wife slip away as his own strength faded, and he may have understood the end was close. Whether that made him more dangerous or simply more desperate, we don’t know. What we know is that Dolly took them seriously enough to go to court, and that ten-year-old Bessie lived through all of it: the threats, the court hearing, her father in jail, his death three months later.

We don’t know whether Bessie visited her father before he died, whether she was present at the end, or whether she grieved or felt relief. Those details are lost. What we know is that she was old enough to understand what had happened.

Going West: Denver and the Missing Years

According to an article in the Evansville Journal dated July 8, 1904, Bessie and her mom were already living in Denver. In 1905, when Dolly married Jacob Kraft, the city was booming, with a population of more than 200,000 people. Jacob, originally from Rochester, New York, gave Dolly a new name and Bessie a stepfather.

From 1905 to 1912, the historical record offers almost no trace of Bessie’s life. However, I found another thread that points back to Denver: the Evansville newspaper noted that Dolly’s sister-in-law, Maggie Simpson, was visiting there in 1908 and 1909. It doesn’t prove where Dolly and Bessie were living, but it suggests they still had ties to the city during that period. Between ages twelve and twenty, she would have attended school, perhaps worked, and almost certainly began shaping the ambitions that later propelled her toward the stage. Whether she stayed in Denver, moved to Rochester where Jacob came from, or lived elsewhere, we cannot say. But we know that by August 1912, Bessie Simpson had joined the Ferris Hartman Musical Comedy Company, preparing for a six-month tour of Asia.

For a young, unmarried woman to join a theatrical troupe in 1912 was to risk stepping outside conventional respectability. The early twentieth century did bring women more opportunities. The suffrage movement was gaining momentum, and women were entering colleges and professions in growing numbers. But becoming a chorus girl still carried a whiff of scandal. Theatrical women were often viewed as modern and daring, yet also morally suspect. They traveled without chaperones, performed for strangers, and lived in ways that challenged the domestic ideal dominant in American culture. Bessie’s decision to join the troupe suggests not only talent and ambition, but a willingness to embrace uncertainty. She left behind whatever life she had known for the promise of the stage.

Six Months Across the Pacific

In August 1912, the Ferris Hartman Musical Comedy Company departed San Francisco aboard the Persia. American theatrical companies regularly took vaudeville, musical comedy, and light opera overseas, performing for expatriate communities and for local audiences curious about American culture. These tours could be genuine cultural exchanges, but they were also practical business. There was money to be made entertaining Americans stationed abroad and affluent audiences eager for modern Western entertainment.

Life aboard the Persia was a mix of hard work and enforced downtime. The chorus girls rehearsed daily to keep their numbers sharp for each port. They lived in cramped shared cabins, wedging costumes and trunks wherever they could. When the sea turned rough, seasickness was common, but rehearsals still went on. In the hours between practice and performance, they mended costumes, tended sore muscles and minor injuries, and tried to rest. The ship was both transportation and temporary home, and the troupe became its own close-knit world, held together by shared purpose and shared discomfort.

In Honolulu, the company played for three weeks, long enough to be serenaded by bands and royalty. The chorus girls learned the hula from Hawaiian dancers and tried to teach them to “rag” though the Oakland Tribune later reported that the Hawaiian women could not get the hula entirely out of their movements no matter how much rag they added. The cultural exchange was real, even as it showed its limits.

Manila, a U.S. colonial possession since the Spanish-American War of 1898, offered a different experience. The troupe performed for six weeks to American audiences, including soldiers, administrators, and businessmen stationed in the Philippines.

In Japan, the troupe discovered that expressions of pleasure could cross cultural boundaries in unexpected ways. Company manager Ferris Hartman later explained that Japanese audiences would show their teeth and draw in their breath with a sharp intake of air, a sound that at first made American performers think they were being hissed at rather than applauded. That moment captured the strangeness of performing across cultures, and the way even laughter sometimes needs translation.

In Shanghai, often called the “Paris of the East,” the American girls found themselves showered with gifts. When they returned to San Francisco months later, some wore rich furs from the Siberian coast, along with rare laces and mother-of-pearl ornaments given by admirers. The Tribune reported that “the American girl is always queen in Shanghai” reflecting real fascination with modern American women.

Somewhere during these six months—aboard ship, in a foreign port, in the close quarters of the traveling troupe—Bessie Simpson became Betty Devereaux. The name change was more than cosmetic. It represented a shedding of the past, a conscious reinvention. Betty Devereaux was who she would be when she set foot on San Francisco soil in February 1913.

San Francisco: Art, Ambition, and Reinvention

When Betty returned, San Francisco was a city in transition. Nearly seven years after the 1906 earthquake and fire had destroyed much of the city, San Francisco was rebuilding not only its streets and buildings, but also its cultural identity. The planned 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition was meant to be proof of that recovery, a grand welcome that would put the rebuilt city on display.

It was also a city where the arts scene, and the bohemian circles around it, could make room for women willing to step beyond conventional boundaries. San Francisco’s art community included artists, sculptors, painters, theater people, and patrons who mixed at balls, galas, and charitable events. For a young woman with theatrical experience and social ambition, San Francisco offered possibilities that Evansville never could.

When Betty made a brief visit to Evansville in August 1913, the local newspaper reported that Miss Bessie Simpson, a former Evansville girl, was visiting before leaving for New York, where she would make her home. However, for unknown reasons, Betty did not go to New York. She returned to San Francisco to build her new life.

By 1915, Betty had become part of San Francisco’s art world enough that she was asked to model for a statue at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The exposition drew millions of visitors, celebrating both the completion of the Panama Canal and San Francisco’s resurrection from earthquake and fire. However, while the Evansville paper reported that her statue was in the Court of Palms, I could not find any documentation to confirm that fact, or any specific figure in that court. For her to be named as a model at all suggests both recognition and a particular kind of visibility. She fit an ideal of modern American womanhood that the fair loved to display: young, graceful, and fashionable.

The exposition also brought together artists and patrons from across the country. Among those who exhibited was Edgar Walter, a sculptor who had studied at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute and in Paris, and whose work included an elaborate Beauty and the Beast fountain for the Court of Flowers. Whether Betty and Edgar met at the exposition or in the broader social world of San Francisco’s arts scene is unknown, but by 1915, their paths were beginning to intersect.

By October 1916, Betty appeared in the San Francisco Examiner society pages including being photographed at a Cubist-Futurist ball at the St. Francis Hotel. The Cubist-Futurist ball reflected San Francisco’s engagement with the modern art movements sweeping through American culture in the 1910s. By attending events like this, Betty aligned herself with the city’s modern set and signaled that she belonged there. Edgar Walter was known not only for his sculptures but for supervising decorations at these sorts of charitable balls and galas.

By February 1919, when Betty’s mother Dolly (now widowed from Jacob Kraft and living with Betty) hosted a supper dance for 150 guests, Edgar Walter was on the guest list. The social world of San Francisco’s arts community was small enough that artists, patrons, and performers knew each other, attended the same events, and moved in the same circles.

On July 3, 1920, Edgar Walter and Betty Devereaux quietly married in Redwood City. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the event came as a surprise to many of their acquaintances. Betty was described as well-known in San Francisco society and art circles, and as a friend of Princess Troubetzkoy. There was no mention of Evansville, no mention of Bessie Simpson, no mention of the threats made eighteen years earlier in a west side boarding house.

Betty Devereaux had successfully reinvented herself. She had transformed from a child marked by domestic violence into a woman who moved comfortably in San Francisco’s cultural elite. The transformation was not accidental; it required deliberate choices, sustained effort, and the willingness to leave the past behind.

Epilogue: A Legacy of Beauty

Betty Devereaux and Edgar Walter remained active in San Francisco’s art world through the 1920s and 1930s. Edgar continued his own work, served as director of the San Francisco Art Association, and became president of the San Francisco Art Commission. He also collected rare etchings by Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer, among others. Over time, Betty developed her own expertise as a connoisseur, earning respect from dealers and collectors. Edgar died on March 2, 1938. In his will, he left $150 per month (over $3,400 in today’s money) to Betty’s mother, Dolly Simpson, for the rest of her life.

Betty later remarried and divorced, but when she died on October 22, 1958, at age sixty-six, like other women of that era, her obit lists her as the “widow of San Francisco sculptor Edgar Walter.” In her will, she left an art collection valued at approximately $300,000 (over $3.5 million in today’s money) to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, a legacy that testified to a life built on her love of art rather than defined by violence.

Betty never used the name Simpson again. The erasure was complete and deliberate, and in its own way, triumphant. She had escaped. She had rebuilt. She did not just change her name. She became someone new.

Sources

California, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists, 1882-1959, British Steamer Persia, arrived in San Francisco 25 Feb 1913, passenger Betty Devereaux; NARA microfilm publication M1412, San Francisco 1903-1918, roll 08.

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Robert Patry, City of Four Freedoms (Evansville: Friends of Willard Library, 1996), 35.

Death certificate for William H. Simpson, 27 Sep 1902, Vanderburgh Co., IN; Indiana State Board of Health, Certificate of Death, Record Number 703; Indiana, U.S., Death Certificates, 1899-2017; digital image, Ancestry.com.

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An elderly gentleman, maybe ten years older than me, came up beside me, and we fell into an easy conversation about the weather. In January, this part of Maui is cool in the morning, warm in the afternoon, and then it cools off again in the early evening. It’s perfect. I mentioned how much I love it here, especially those cool evenings, and he smiled like he knew exactly what I meant.

“That’s why we started coming here back in 1987,” he said.

I told him we’d been coming for several years too, and that we feel the pull of this part of the island, and this condo.

“How long do you stay when you come?” I asked.

“We used to come for a couple of months,” he said. Then he paused. “But now only for a couple of weeks.”

He added that he’d had a heart attack on one visit and ended up in the hospital, staying a couple of extra weeks. He even gave me the exact date, one I immediately forgot.

The elevator arrived. We stepped in together, and as the doors slid shut, he added, almost matter-of-factly, “I only stay for a couple of weeks now. My wife is in a care center.”

My heart ached.

What do you say to that?

I was stunned, not only by the news, but by how calmly he said it, as if he’d had to practice saying it. The ride up was short, too short to find the right words, too short to end a conversation that suddenly felt heavy and unfinished. When we reached my floor, I stood in the open doorway, wanting to offer something that didn’t feel flimsy, wanting him to feel, if only for a moment, that someone had truly heard him.

All I could manage was, “I’m so sorry. But I’m glad you’re able to come back, even for a short time.”

He nodded. Then the door closed.

I stood there in the quiet of the open-air walkway, and it felt like being smacked in the face with my own mortality. Someday that will happen. One of us, or both of us, won’t be able to get this brief respite from winter. We won’t be the ones taking that morning walk before breakfast, heading out for the day, then pulling on a light jacket to watch the sunset from our lanai. We won’t be here at all.

After that, I hoped I’d run into him again. I wanted to know more, not out of nosiness, but because his one sentence had opened a door in my mind I couldn’t shut. I wondered about him and his wife. What brought them here to this condo the first time? What kind of Maui vacation did they have together?

Did she sit beside him and watch the waves? Did they walk on the beach in the evenings? Or was she a wife who stayed tucked away in the condo with a book? Did they frequent the farmer’s market across the street, choosing the perfect papaya for breakfast, or stop by the bake shop just steps away for a malasada or one of the other pastries? Did they start their visits years ago as tourists, going on whale watches, visiting the cats on Lanai, driving the Road to Hana? And as the years went by, did they stop filling their days and simply spend quiet time at the condo, content with “being” instead of doing?

He was carrying a beach chair and a towel when we met. I wondered if that was something he and his wife had done every year. I could picture them sitting side by side, simply enjoying the weather. He mentioned that family sometimes visited, and I imagined a wider circle too, everyone down on the sand together, watching the grandkids play in the surf.

I kept looking for him after that, but I never saw him again.

A few days later, I mentioned the conversation to Maryann, the office manager. She knew exactly who I was talking about. She told me his wife had not been well for the last several years when she visited and often relied on a walker to get around. She also said he had lost his son to brain cancer this past November. His son had been ill for several years, she explained, but it had suddenly gotten worse. Maryann did not remember the heart attack and thought it probably happened before she started working there.

It’s amazing what a short conversation with a stranger can do. I wanted to know more about him. I wanted to hear his story.

But what I brought back with me was my own. His words followed me down the open-air walkway, and I could feel my gratitude and my grief sharing the same small space inside me. I kept thinking about how easily life shifts, how one sentence can open a door you didn’t know was there, and how, whether I’m ready or not, time keeps moving. And I also knew what to do with that feeling: to notice the air, the light, and to just be. To enjoy the now while I can.

Charm bracelets keep rising to the surface when I think about those personal things. Each bracelet, with stories embedded in each charm, is a diary of that particular time in my life.

I am fortunate to have Mom’s charm bracelet, made of oval silver links that appear substantial but are surprisingly light. A small gold heart, engraved with her initials on one side and Dad’s on the other, rests among the links. The padlock-shaped piece is the clasp used to open and close the bracelet, with no key required. She never mentioned this bracelet in her diary, even though she would have received it during that time. I find that surprising, since she recorded so much of her daily life. When did Dad give it to her? Was it in her 16th year? Was it a special occasion? Questions that will never be answered.

Then I come to my own three charm bracelets.

This one is from a boy I dated years ago. My friends referred to him as my “long-distance man.” He lived about 1,000 miles away and was visiting his cousin when we met. The relationship was carried mostly through letters, with a few phone calls and occasional visits. We met on July 12, 1967—the date is engraved on one of the charms—when we were paired on a tennis date. He was a cousin of my friend Carole’s boyfriend. The bracelet is made of twisted oval links and holds a small collection of charms, including tennis rackets, my birthstone, a majorette charm, and several others that were added over time. A short safety chain connects the clasp to the bracelet, designed to keep it from being lost if it came undone. It’s a sweet, delicate bracelet, one I was happy to wear at the time.

Not to be outdone, my second bracelet is one my parents gave me, also when I was sixteen. Unlike the one from my boyfriend, this one is sturdier, with a heavier chain, and it carries pieces from many parts of my growing-up years. There are a couple of majorette charms, a Sweet 16 charm, and several from the trip Mom, Dad, and I took to Colorado to visit my sister Mari. One of the charms reads Estes Park, where I bought a navy blue corduroy jacket that became my favorite and stayed with me until it was threadbare. On that trip, Colorado planted itself in my mind, a place I would later feel drawn back to for a solo winter ski trip.

There are also Bosse High School charms, a tiny pencil sharpener, and a small carton of Cokes. As kids, we used to walk a couple of blocks to Woods Drugs, where we’d drink those nickel Coca-Colas, sitting across from each other in one of the red leather booths, sipping through straws from tall glasses, leaning in close, whispering and giggling over whatever was going on that week. There’s a pair of dice from Nevada from my older sister Martha, even though I never traveled there during that time, and a charm from Mari’s wedding in 1966.

The last charm bracelet is from my husband, Dave. He bought the charms and bracelet during our 2006 trip to Italy. Unlike the others, this Italian-made modular bracelet features interchangeable stainless steel links that click together to form a band. These links can be personalized with a variety of charms. There’s a Colosseum charm, a reminder of standing in a huge crowd, looking up at architecture so vast it felt almost unreal. A gondola from Venice marks the ride we took—less romantic than I had imagined, since we shared it with several other people, but memorable all the same. There are also cherries, a small nod to afternoons spent picking them from Dave’s cherry trees back home. Unlike the others, this is a bracelet I continue to wear.

But what happens to these once I’m gone? They can’t be reclaimed or repurposed. They’re not gold, like Mari’s bracelet, which could at least have been melted down and given a new life. My charm bracelets, those diaries written in metal, are only valuable to me. And that is enough.

The holidays always bring memories of family traditions. One of my most vivid childhood memories is visiting Grandma, especially around Christmas when she baked cookies. Alongside the familiar sugar cookies, she made springerles. I was never a big fan of them. The strong anise flavor was a bit much for me. I’m sure I ate them anyway, but what I really loved was watching her make them, rolling out the dough on her porcelain-topped kitchen table—the very table I use now in my dye studio.

Over the years, I’ve developed a taste for springerles. Even though one of Dave’s cousins gave us a family springerle rolling pin, I’ve never attempted to make them myself. Instead, we usually buy them locally at Donut Bank or order them online from the Sisters of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Ferdinand, Indiana. We’ve shopped there in person before, but their website is much more convenient. Sometimes their springerles are heavy on the anise, so I’m especially drawn to their Almerle cookies, almond-flavored springerles with the same crisp exterior and soft center as the traditional kind. They never last long around here.

Another cherished tradition took place on Christmas Eve. Santa always came early. After all, he couldn’t possibly deliver all his presents on Christmas Day alone, so we were lucky enough to get an early visit. The family would gather: Grandma and Grandpa, Mom and Dad, my oldest sister, Martha, and her husband, Jim, my sister Mari, my brother Johnny, and me. We’d have a nice dinner, but a light one—nothing like Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, when the table would be filled with all our favorite sides and, on Christmas Day, a ham.

As we waited for Santa, Martha and Jim would suggest piling into their car to look at the outdoor Christmas decorations. We’d drive around with Christmas music blaring from the radio, enjoying the lights before heading back home. And every year, we missed Santa. Dad would always say, “You JUST missed him.” I was the youngest, so I’m sure my older siblings enjoyed keeping this going year after year. When I’d whine that we were going to miss him again, they reassured me—not this year, it would be different. But it never was. Eventually, I caught on, and the rides to see the lights ended.

One of my own traditions is baking biscotti, something I started 26 years ago after getting tired of paying so much for a tiny slice at the local coffee shop. When Dave and I toured Italy in 2006, I couldn’t wait to try “real” biscotti. I learned that biscotti literally means “twice-baked,” and that the specific cookie I was looking for—and the one I bake—is called cantuccini. These cookies are small, usually about two inches long, not the oversized versions we’ve come to know here in the US. Since returning from that trip, I’ve tried to keep my biscotti small, more like the authentic Italian cookies I enjoyed so much. I usually make several batches while I’m “in the dough.” I haven’t made any yet this Christmas, and time is running out, but I’ve been known to bake them after the holidays, too.

Another tradition I once kept was making my own Christmas cards. I started with blank cards, stamping and stenciling each one by hand, then moved on to pasting photographs onto the cards, and eventually had them professionally printed. The following photo was taken a previous Christmas. That year I purchased a Nativity set and placed it on top of the entertainment unit. One day during the holiday season, I walked into the living room to find Shel sitting right in the middle of it.

In 2009, Dave and I thought we might start a tradition of using our own photos for Christmas cards. That tradition, however, was short-lived.

The tradition that has lasted is our ornament exchange. It began with our first Christmas together in 2005. We met in March of that year, hit a rough patch in October, and parted ways—only to find our way back to each other just in time to put up our first Christmas tree. That Christmas, Dave surprised me with an ornament he had made—a papier-mâché birdhouse he painted and sprinkled with glitter, with a roof made from pinecone scales we gathered during a walk together. That first ornament became the start of our tradition.

Since then, every year we secretly work on an ornament for each other and reveal them on Christmas morning. Our Christmas tree is full of ornaments we’ve made for one another, along with a few treasured ones from our families’ collections.

For the first few years, I framed photos of us as ornaments. This one is from 2007, using a picture from our wedding just a couple of months earlier. Behind it is a framed photo from a previous year. Nearby is a Joy ornament Dave made by filling a clear ornament with peppers from his garden—bright red in 2012 and now brown with age. Under the tree sits another one of Dave’s birdhouses, along with the guitar I made a few years ago when he started spending more time playing.

My ornaments now reflect whatever I’ve been working with at the time, and usually involve fabric. A couple of years ago, when I was repurposing old jeans, I made a little bird.

Dave’s ornaments often involve his woodworking skills, including Georgie, the green-nosed reindeer. The star hanging behind it was one I made when I was learning how to use my cutting machine, crafted from paper.

Here is another one of Dave’s wood creations. But he doesn’t just work in wood. See the 2010 felt stocking.

After buying a serger one year, I serged everything in sight including a LOVE ornament from my dyed fabric. Sitting under the tree is our first Christmas booklet—something I put together back when I was still experimenting with paper.

Tomorrow morning, we’ll exchange ornaments once again, just as we have for the last twenty years. The tree is full of handmade pieces, shared moments, and stories layered on top of another, each ornament marking a moment in time.

Some traditions have faded, others have stayed, and new ones have quietly taken their place, shaped with the same care as Grandma’s cookies rolled on a floured counter. And that feels just right. Because in the end, the best traditions are the ones that still bring joy.