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The Obama Girls Dolls Revisited

Posted in Barack and Michelle Obama, PEOPLE, tagged Obama girls dolls on February 4, 2009| 2 Comments »

Ty, the company that makes Beanie Babies, is honoring First Lady Michelle Obama’s wishes and dropping the names “Marvelous Malia” and “Sweet Sasha” from its Ty Girlz collection. CEO Ty Warner still maintains that the dolls weren’t intended to look like Malia and Sasha Obama. The dolls will be renamed Mariah and Sydney.

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The Madness of Mary Todd Lincoln

Posted in Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Mental Institutions, tagged Abraham Lincoln, biographies of first ladies, biographies of political wives, biographies of women, committed, Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, insane asylums, Mary Lincoln, mental illness, Robert Lincoln on February 3, 2009| 12 Comments »

Regarding some of my recent posts on insane asylums (see sidebar, “Categories: The Insane Asylum”), my neighbor and friend, Karen O’Quin, wrote:

I really liked your blog – thanks for sending!! I see a theme there. My experience with Austin State Hospital is that when I first started working at Travis State School in 1967, they only had men there – they called them “boys”. Some had been there for years as they had been admitted to ASH long before because they were a little “weird” and then became too institutionalized to be let out. They did not have IQs consistent with mental retardation. Some were later placed in group homes. I don’t know if you’ve read Mary, Mrs. A Lincoln, but it is her account of being committed to a lunatic asylum by her son, Robert. Someone very recently found letters she had written to her attorneys from the asylum. I think they were going to be a book, too.

Mary Lincoln (1818-1882)

When I was young, I remember my mother talking about Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, and her inappropriate and extravagant spending sprees during the depth of the Civil War. Above all I remember Mom mentioning that Mary had a collection of about 300 pairs of gloves. Thinking about it now, it reminds me of Imelda Marcos, wife of the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, and her closet rack of 2700 pairs of shoes.

Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln came together as husband and wife from two very different worlds. Mary was pampered and rich; Abraham was tested and wise. Both were prone to depression but it was Mary, with her fragile mind, perhaps schizophrenic or bipolar, who finally cratered under the constant barrage of grief and loss that became her sad lot in life. Three of her sons died while her husband was president during a bloody and acrimonious civil war. The hate mail sent to her husband was unbelievable. Then her beloved Abraham, her anchor, was assassinated. It was more than Mary could bear. She descended into madness.

She began to wander hotel corridors in her nightgown, was certain someone was trying to poison her, complained that an Indian spirit was removing wires from her eyes, and continued her frantic spending, purchasing yard after yard of elegant drapery when she had no windows in which to hang it. (PBS American Experience: “The Time of the Lincolns”)

The doctors treated her with laudanum which gave her hallucinations, eye spasms, and headaches. She began to behave bizarrely, creating a public scandal. Her only surviving son Robert, a practicing attorney, arranged an insanity trial and had her committed to the asylum Bellevue Place just outside Chicago. Although Mary was only hospitalized for three months, she never forgave Robert for the humiliation and deprivation.

A recently published book, The Madness of Mary Lincoln by Jason Emerson, awarded “Book of the Year” by the Illinois State Historical Society in 2007, examines Mary’s mental illness. The book is based on a rare find – a trunk of letters found in the attic of Robert Lincoln’s lawyer. They contain the lost letters written by Mary during her stay in the asylum. The book sheds light on the ongoing mystery of Mary’s mental illness, its nature, roots, and progression, and suggests that Abraham Lincoln had some understanding of it and provided stability.

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The Haunted Hotel

Posted in PEOPLE, tagged history, Paranormal Experiences, the Lodge at Cloudcroft on January 30, 2009| 7 Comments »

Jacob Marley's Ghost from A Christmas Carol by Dickens

Now I get to tell my ghost story. It happened in July of 1999. I remember the date exactly because my daughter Katie’s birthday is July 27. She, my husband, Tom, and I were taking a summer road trip up through El Paso to Santa Fe. Katie had her eleventh birthday while we were away and she wasn’t happy to be so far from home. She had wanted a birthday party back in Austin with her friends.

On our way up to Santa Fe, I had booked us a night at a famous and historic mountain inn in a little town in south central New Mexico, Cloudcroft. My uncle Max was once a forest ranger there. Nine thousand feet above sea level in the Sacramento Mountains and surrounded by 200,00 acres of the Lincoln National Forest, the Lodge also boasts a nine-hole golf course, a four-star restaurant, and a ghost named Rebecca – but I didn’t know the last part until the day of our arrival.

Established over a hundred years ago, The Lodge is very impressive – elegant, yet cozy. Inside and out, it looked just as you would expect a mountain inn to look. The lobby featured a stuffed and angry brown bear reared up on his back legs, a fireplace with a bright and shiny copper roof, and the head of a buck mounted on the wall. The decor was both Victorian and Southwestern with heavy dark wood furniture, thick pile carpet, and leather couches.

Guests are warmly welcomed. The reception area had a huge basket of red apples. I wanted one. I was carrying some green Granny Smith apples already in what Tom and Katie called my Mary Poppins bag. If you’ve seen the movie, “Mary Poppins,” you know what I’m describing. It’s a bottomless carpet bag. Anyway, the Granny Smith apples in my bag were for Tom but I don’t really like them. They’re too tart. I like red ones better and so does Katie. So I reached into the hospitality basket and helped myself to three or four red apples. I tucked them into my Mary Poppins bag. I tucked them down deep into the bottom below the magazines and books so they wouldn’t spill out and zipped the bag shut.

The Lodge at Cloudcroft, NM

We were shown to our guest room which faced the front. It was tucked into a dormer which meant the inner walls – covered with a Victorian printed wallpaper – were sloping. Tom and I were to share a four-poster queen bed while Katie had a window seat sleeping arrangement. We parked our bags – I heaved the Mary Poppins bag up onto a tall antique chest of drawers – and then we all went outside to explore.

The grounds were magnificent. We wandered onto the golf course. There were apple trees with little red and green crabapples weighing down their branches. I was from South Texas and had never seen apples growing on trees before although I was forty-four years old that summer! We walked around in the cool, crisp mountain air. It soon grew dark and our legs were tired from so much climbing, so we went inside for dinner.

In the dining room aptly named “Rebecca'” after the “ghost,” I had my first Spring Mix salad with raspberry vinaigrette. Back in Texas, we were still eating iceberg lettuce with Thousand Islands Dressing. The food and service were first class.

: “Rebecca”

The hotel was really capitalizing on the ghost of Rebecca theme. A painting of Rebecca hung in the restaurant. I asked the waiter if the rumors of a ghost were true. He said he had never seen the ghost himself but the chef had had some really weird supernatural encounters. He went and got the chef for me. The chef said that, on more than one occasion, knives had flown through the air of his kitchen right toward him. He was convinced the ghost was responsible. I chuckled and went back to my food.

After dinner, the others went upstairs to the room but I wandered into the gift shop. I browsed among the books where I found The Ghostly Register, by Arthur Myers. Chapter 43: “The Ghost Who Makes Phone Calls,” was devoted to the legend of Rebecca. The ghost they call Rebecca – no one has researched this – is believed to be the spirit of a chambermaid who was killed by her lumberjack lover when he found her in the arms of another in the early 1900s. Those who claim to have seen her wandering the halls of the Lodge describe her as a beautiful redhead who wears a long, flowing gown. Guests and employees have reported many unexplained happenings at the Lodge that they attribute to Rebecca – ashtrays that slide across tabletops unassisted, phones that ring yet no one is on the line, footsteps, and knockings on doors. She was often seen near Suite 101, the Governor’s Room. I bought the book and left.

I decided to conduct my own investigation of the ghost. This “ghost of maid killed by jealous lover” legend is attached to many hotels and I was sceptical that Rebecca was more than that. I wandered into the hallway of Suite 101. I hung around a while but everything seemed perfectly normal – no ectoplasm there – so I went upstairs to join the others. I found both Katie and Tom piled up their individual beds with books. I decided to get ready for bed and then join them.

After I’d changed into my nightgown, taken off my make-up, and washed my face, I was ready to climb up in bed alongside Tom with a good book. It was then that I remembered the juicy red apples in my Mary Poppins bag. I wanted one. I walked over to the chest of drawers.

Tom and Katie weren’t paying me any attention. They were still deeply absorbed in their reading. I grabbed my Mary Poppins bag and pulled it toward me. It was heavy. I got up on my tiptoes to peek inside the bag and tilted it toward me some so I’d see well enough to select a sweet red apple rather than one of Tom’s sour green ones. I found a nice red one, then rooted around inside some more until I’d found my book. I then pushed everything back down again in the bag and shoved it back in place on the dresser. I didn’t zip the bag shut this time, though; I left the mouth of it open.

I then turned and set my book on the bed, before padding off to the bathroom to wash my apple before eating it. I was surprised when I heard a couple of thuds behind me. Something had fallen on the floor. I turned to see two red apples rolling along the carpet behind me like bowling balls aimed right for my feet. I looked over at Tom first and then Katie but neither of them had moved a muscle. Nevertheless, it could have been a trick. I put my hands on my hips and asked, “Hey, who did that?”

“Who did what?” they both wanted to know.

“Threw those apples at me?” I pointed to the carpet where the two red apples now lay at rest.

“What are you talking about?” Katie asked. I told them what had happened, that I thought someone had thrown the apples at me.

They laughed. “Maybe you just left your bag open and they fell out,” volunteered Tom, wanting to get back to his reading.

I knew that wasn’t true. Those apples had definitely been hurled at me by someone or something, but I didn’t speak of the incident again that night. I didn’t want to scare Katie. Tom and Katie just resumed their reading and I joined them. When we turned out the lights, my heart beat hard in my chest, but I still didn’t reveal how frightening it was to be in the dark in that room in that hotel. But the next day, when we were checking out to head to Santa Fe, I took the lead and cancelled our reservations for the return trip. I wasn’t about to sleep another night under that roof. That place was definitely haunted. I didn’t know how that chef could show up to work each day knowing that each day might be his last, that he’d spend it dodging knives – or apples.

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Elke Sommer’s Ghost Story

Posted in PEOPLE, tagged biographies of actresses, biographies of women, Elke Sommer, history, Hollywood, true life ghost story on January 29, 2009| 34 Comments »

I was thinking it was time for a good ghost story. I was tossing around some ideas in my head when I recalled something I’d seen on TV as a child. Of course we didn’t have any Discovery Channel back then, but the program was definitely a documentary type. It featured haunted houses and the people who lived in them. I remember the narrator talked with a family who lived in a house in which a rocking chair rocked with no one sitting in it. That felt a little hokey so I wasn’t spooked. It was when the narrator interviewed a person I recognized that I scooted to the edge of my seat.

Sommer and Sellers in "A Shot in the Dark" (1964)

It was the beautiful, blonde, and sexy Hollywood actress Elke Sommer (b.1940). She was familiar to me because she had played the voluptuous maid Maria opposite Peter Sellers in the second Pink Panther movie, “A Shot in the Dark” (1964), which ReadersDigest.com names as one of the top funniest 50 films of all times. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Sellers) trails after Maria whom he suspects of committing multiple murders, one of which is in a nudist camp.There’s a hilarious scene of Maria and Clouseau fleeing through Paris naked. a-shot-in-the-dark-movie-poster

Anyway, Elke and her husband Hollywood columnist and Bogart’s best friend Joe Hyams (1923-2009) lived in Benedict Canyon in North Beverly Hills. They claimed that a ghost was living in their house. My husband Tom also remembers seeing the same show when he was young. “They (Elke and Joe) had a ghost in their dining room,” he recalled. “The chairs would move around at night. They would put marks on the floor below the chairs before they went to bed, then, the next morning, they’d look, and the chairs wouldn’t be standing on the marks anymore. The chairs would be all over the place.”

In the middle of the night, Elke and Joe would wake up to what sounded like a dinner party going on downstairs in the dining room, hearing voices, chairs scooting, glasses tinkling, and silverware clanging. Yet they would go downstairs and no one would be there. Elke said, “Things would move all the time and it would be very noisy and (it was) the usual poltergeist nonsense, you know.” (1) The ghost was described as being a middle-aged man wearing a white shirt. (2)

After battling the spirits with no relief, they called in some help, contacting the Parapsychological Institute at UCLA. When Life photographer Allan Grant arrived at the house to take some pictures, he was a sceptic – but not so when he left. He said:

Something happened that spooked me. On one roll of film that I shot in a particular room where they first spotted the ghost there were about four or five frames of film that were progressively fogged down to the end of the frame, giving it a ghostlike appearance, especially (of) Joe Hyams, who was in the shot. When that was processed and I took a look at it, I thought, there’s no way that would happen…in the center of a roll…something else had happened that I couldn’t explain and I’ve spent years as a photographer and that had never happened to me before….Something did happen in that house. (1)

The haunting continued. A mysterious fire erupted one night. Fortunately, Joe and Elke were able to get out through a window. Shortly thereafter, they moved out of the house permanently. (1) Joe Hyams wrote a book about it called The Day I Gave Up the Ghost. Evidently, though, the ghost didn’t give up. The “severely haunted house” at 2633 Benedict Canyon “was bought and sold more than seventeen times since Sommers vacated it, and many have reported ghostly phenomena.” (3)

(1) youtube interview: “Actress Elke Sommer with a Poltergeist.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRLasAUl-eI
(2) California Paranormal Travel Guide.
http://www.haunted-places.com/californ.htm
(3) Ghosts of Hollywood: Celebrities Who Have Seen Ghosts. http://paranormal.about.com/cs/trueghoststories/a/aa022304_3.htm

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Dina Vierny, Artist’s Muse (1920-2009)

Posted in Dina Vierny, muse, PEOPLE, tagged Aristide Maillol, Art, biography of women, Dina Vierny, history, muses on January 28, 2009| 3 Comments »

Dina Vierny in January 1944 with the sculptor Aristide Maillol.

I came across this fascinating obituary by William Grimes in yesterday’s New York Times:
“Dina Vierny, the model whose ample flesh and soft curves inspired the sculptor Aristide Maillol, rejuvenating his career, and who eventually founded a museum dedicated to his work, died on Jan. 20 in Paris. She was 89.

Her death was announced by the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, which she founded in 1995.

In the same period when she was modeling, Ms. Vierny, who had joined the Resistance early on during World War II, led refugees from Nazism across the Pyrenees into Spain as part of an American organization operating out of Marseille.

Ms. Vierny was a 15-year-old lycée student in Paris when she met Maillol, in the mid-1930s. The architect Jean-Claude Dondel, a friend of her father’s, decided that she would make the perfect model for the artist, who was 73 and in the professional doldrums.

“Mademoiselle, it is said that you look like a Maillol and a Renoir,” Maillol wrote to her. “I’d be satisfied with a Renoir.”

For the next 10 years, until his death in a car accident in 1944, Ms. Vierny was Maillol’s muse, posing for monumental works of sculpture that belied her modest height of 5 feet 2 inches. By mutual agreement, the relationship was strictly artistic.

Maillol threw himself into his sculpture with renewed energy and, at Ms. Vierny’s urging, began painting again. After his death, she worked tirelessly to promote his art and enhance his reputation, eventually creating the Maillol Museum and donating 18 sculptures to the French government on the condition that they be placed in the Jardin des Tuileries. She later added two more.

Ms. Vierny was born in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, in 1919 and was taken by her parents to France when she was a child. Her father, who played the piano at movie houses, made a modest living while opening his home to an entertaining collection of artists and writers.

Ms. Vierny, who was intent on studying physics and chemistry, took to the role of artist’s muse reluctantly at first, posing during school vacations and glancing sideways at her schoolbooks on a nearby stand. The generous modeling fees and Maillol’s sense of fun won her over.

For the first two years, though, she kept her clothes on, not out of modesty — she and her friends belonged to a nudist club — but because of Maillol’s timidity. She herself later proposed that he try some nude studies. “Since he never asked, I figured he would never have the courage,” she told National Public Radio last year.

The Mountain,” one of Maillol’s depictions of Ms. Vierny

Her Rubenesque figure and jet-black hair indeed made her, as Dondel had predicted, “a living Maillol,” memorialized in works like “The Seated Bather,” “The Mountain,” “Air,” “The River,” and “Harmony,” his last, unfinished sculpture. Maillol also turned to her as a subject for drawings and painted portraits, like “Dina With a Scarf,” now in the Maillol Museum.

In 1939, Maillol took refuge at his home in Banyuls-sur-Mer, at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees. There, Ms. Vierny, who had already begun working for a Resistance group in Paris, was approached by the Harvard-educated classicist Varian Fry, whose organization in Marseille helped smuggle refugees from occupied France into Spain. Unbeknownst to Maillol, she began working as a guide, identifiable to her fleeing charges by her red dress. The work was doubly dangerous because she was Jewish.

Ms. Vierny soon began dozing off at her posing sessions. The story came out, and Maillol, a native of the region, showed her secret shortcuts, smugglers’ routes and goat paths to use. After several months of working for the Comité Fry, Ms. Vierny was arrested by the French police, who seized her correspondence with her friends in the Surrealist movement but failed to notice stacks of forged passports in her room.

A lawyer hired by Maillol won her acquittal at trial, and to keep her out of harm’s way the artist sent her to pose for Matisse in Nice. “I am sending you the subject of my work,” Maillol told Matisse, “whom you will reduce to a line.”

Matisse did several drawings and proposed an ambitious painting that he called a “Matisse Olympia,” after the famous painting by Manet. When Maillol heard that the project would take at least six months, he hastily recalled her to Banyuls.

She also posed for Dufy and for Bonnard, who used her as the model for “Somber Nude.”

In 1943, Ms. Vierny was again arrested, this time by the Gestapo, in Paris. She was released after six months in prison when Maillol appealed to Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.

After the war, Ms. Vierny opened an art gallery in Paris, where she exhibited Maillol’s work, as well as that of others. After traveling to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, she began collecting and showing work by dissident artists like Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov.

A passionate and unpredictable collector, Ms. Vierny accumulated no fewer than 90 antique carriages, including the omnibus that Toulouse-Lautrec used to pick up his friends and the carriage used by Chateaubriand when he was ambassador to Italy.

In the early 1970s, Ms. Vierny decided to start a Maillol museum. She began buying up apartments on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris, selling off her collection of 654 dolls along the way. In 1995 she opened the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, whose permanent collection also includes work by Degas, Kandinsky, Picasso, Duchamp and assorted naïve artists, yet another of Ms. Vierny’s enthusiasms.

It was at the museum that Ms. Vierny lived the rest of her life. She is survived by her two sons, Olivier Lorquin, the director of the Maillol Museum, and the art historian Bertrand Lorquin, its curator. The Maillol connection continues after her death. It may even have preceded her birth.

“One day, I was climbing up an almond tree and Maillol turned to my father,” Ms. Vierny told The Independent of London in 1996. “He said to him, ‘You made her, but it was I who invented her.’ And he really did believe that he had invented me. He said that he had been drawing my features for 20 years before my birth.”

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Teddy’s Bear

Posted in Teddy Bears, Teddy Roosevelt, tagged Booker T. Washington, Clifford Berryman, Rose and Morris Michtom, teddy bear, Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. Presidents on January 27, 2009| 6 Comments »

11/16/1902 Washington Post cartoon by Clifford Berryman, "Drawing the Line in Mississippi"

Everyone knows that the teddy bear is named after the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, but they may not know why.

It happened in November of 1902. Teddy Roosevelt was on a bear-hunting trip through Louisiana and Mississippi. It was an “exasperating” hunt, said Roosevelt, and after five days, he never got a shot. Out of pity, his companions corraled and roped a bear for his prey. But Roosevelt refused to kill a defenseless animal. The press printed the story and the public applauded their president’s restraint. But the story really caught fire when a political cartoon appeared on the front page of the Washington Post two days later, with cartoonist Clifford Berryman portraying Roosevelt as “turning away with disgust, with sloped rifle,” from a “very black bear being roped around the neck by a very white catcher.” (1)

Berryman was commenting on Roosevelt’s race relations. Roosevelt thought that “negroes” as a group were far inferior to whites. He, however, also believed that individual blacks could rise to social heights. In 1901, he became the first president to invite a black man to the White House when he sat down to dinner with African-American educator Booker T. Washington.

Anyway, whether or not the readers of the Post picked up on Berryman’s allegory is not what we remember today. What is recalled is that the cartoon sparked a full-scale teddy bear craze. (2) The public fell in love with the cartoon bear. People wrote and begged Berryman to draw more “bear cartoons,” which he did. In subsequent cartoons, he made the bear rounder, smaller, and cuter, and thus all the more endearing with its prickly pear ears, imploring eyes, and scraggly fur.

Skip to a candy and toy shop in Brooklyn. Shop owner Morris Michtom had seen Berryman’s cartoon. He asked his wife Rose to create a stuffed bear like the one in the cartoon.

That night, Rose cut and stuffed a piece of plush velvet into the shape of a bear, sewed on shoe button eyes and handed it to Morris to display in the shop window. He labeled it, “Teddy’s bear.” (3)

To Michtom’s surprise, not just one but a dozen customers wanted to buy the bears. Michtom received Roosevelt’s permission to use his name on his product and began the mass production of the cuddly toy bears which sold for $1.50.

Oregon family c.1900 with prized family teddy bear

Today the teddy bear craze is still going strong and we think of teddy bears as being toys for children. But, back at the beginning, women bought the teddy bears for themselves, made them clothes they read about in Ladies’ Home Journal, and carried them with them everywhere.

(1) Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. Random House: New York, 2001.
(2) History.com: http://www.history.com/home.do
(3) Jewish Virtual Library: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

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The Obama Girls Dolls

Posted in Barack and Michelle Obama, PEOPLE, tagged Obama girls dolls on January 27, 2009| 2 Comments »

Ty Girlz dolls named Marvelous Malia and Sweet Sasha

The Obama Girls are hot and Ty, the maker of Beanie Babies, is riding the wave. They just came out with two new dolls, Marvelous Malia and Sweet Sasha, that are obviously modeled after the two new First Daughters, though the toy company denies it . However, the soft brown-skinned dolls appear to be the only African-American ones in the 30-doll Ty Girlz collection.

These little dolls are darling. Kids are going to love them. They will be infinitely more fun to play with than the presidential paper dolls Dover produces.

Dover Publications

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Annie Oakley: Hitting the Bull’s-Eye

Posted in Annie Oakley, PEOPLE, tagged Annie Oakley, biographies of women, biographies of women sharpshooters on January 23, 2009| Leave a Comment »

: Expert Markswoman Annie Oakley performing her famous mirror trick (see Jan. 16 blog entry)

Aim at a high mark and you will hit it. No, not the first time, not the second time and maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting – for only practice will make you perfect. Finally, you’ll hit the bull’s-eye of success.
-Annie Oakley (1860-1926)

Chief Sitting Bull, whose army had defeated Custer’s troops at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, was so impressed with Annie Oakley’s amazing precision with a shotgun that he gave her an Indian name, Watanya Cecila, or Little Sure Shot.

Annie Oakley was one of the first people to be filmed by Thomas Edison, inventor of the motion picture camera. (1) This 80-second film from late 1894 shows Annie firing a rifle 25 times in 27 seconds and shooting glass balls tossed in the air by manager husband Frank Butler. View a clip of it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN85Nj_bfQo

(1)Macy, Sue. Bull’s-Eye. National Geographic Society: Washington, D.C., 2001.

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Nellie Bly: Just Have Her Committed – Part 7

Posted in Mental Institutions, Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged biographies of women, biographies of women journalists, insane asylum, mental illness, Nellie Bly on January 23, 2009| 5 Comments »

victorian-silhouette In Nellie Bly’s book, Ten Days in a Mad-House (see category, “Nellie Bly,” for related posts), Nellie Bly described various women she met in the Blackwell Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum. She was confined to Hall 6 with 45 of the least dangerous women in the institution. While some of them were certifiably “crazy,” (her words), many, she felt, had been wrongly locked up. A Frenchwoman, for example, named Josephine Despreau, fell sick in a boarding house and the woman of the house called in the police. They arrested her and took her to the station-house. She didn’t understand the proceedings because of the language barrier and the judge paid no attention to her protests. She was locked up in the insane asylum in no time.

Well into the twentieth century, it was easy to get a woman locked up in a mental institution. It was not unheard of for a man to tire of his wife in favor of another woman and get his wife declared insane and committed to an insane asylum. I was remarking upon this horror the other day and my mother told me that my great uncle Sam P did this very thing to his wife Helen. He had her committed to an asylum in San Antonio. Helen found a way out, though, and slipped away to Corpus Christi to live with her sister.

Do any of you have any asylum stories to share?

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Mama Remembers World War II

Posted in Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, PEOPLE, World War II, tagged biographies of actresses, biographies of women, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, depression years, war bonds, World War II on January 21, 2009| 17 Comments »

Carolyn King Waller

My mother Carolyn King Waller stopped by Lisa’s History Room this afternoon for a little chat. Carolyn was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1934. She has a mind like a steel trap; her ability to recall stories from the past is legend.

Lisa: Thanks for stopping by today, Mom. Everyone knows that you love history. What would you say is your favorite period?
Carolyn: Probably the World War Two years, 1941 to 1945. And of course World War Two for other countries was longer that. 1941 to 1945 were America’s war years.
Lisa: And why is that your favorite period?
Carolyn: The fate of the world hung in the balance. It was a lot of drama – really, truly, good against evil.
Lisa: So it fascinates you.
Carolyn: I’m not the only one…others are fascinated by it still…of course, we didn’t know about the Jews being exterminated, 6 million…then the Stalin thing…Stalin moved in from the east, we (the Allies) moved in from the west. The countries that Stalin occupied in the east became known as the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Churchhill coined the phrase. The poor people who had been under Germany were then under Russia! We didn’t really free them. The people in those countries had no freedom. We slowly woke up to who Stalin was. The Russians never left, including East Berlin, so World War II strengthened the Russians, it helped one problem, it created a worse one though, by increasing the strength of the Communists. Roosevelt was blamed for that but there wasn’t much he could do. It was said that Roosevelt gave too much away to Stalin at the 1945 Conference of Yalta,

1945 Conference at Yalta

but there really was very little he could do about it. They (the Communists) were there – they had occupied Eastern Europe – they had “boots on the ground.” We didn’t know then that Stalin had murdered millions of his own people, that he was a monster. In the early days, Truman even said, “I like Old Joe.”
Lisa: What else makes it an interesting period?
Carolyn: Outsized personalities of Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchhill – huge . Churchhill was a fabulous orator, Roosevelt knew about ships, had knowledge of the military, selected good generals. Hitler was a poor strategist; he entered all those countries at once. He told the generals what to do but he wasn’t good at military strategy. He was just a madman.
Lisa: To learn more, are there some books you would recommend?
Carolyn: Books about the period abound, certainly the biographies of those four men, stories of the war itself would be good.
Lisa: Does a particular book come to mind?
Carolyn: Kennedy’s thesis that became a book, While England Slept, No Ordinary Time, the Churchill bios by William Manchester – The Last Lion, A Man Called Intrepid…
Lisa: What films capture the flavor and the truth of the war?
Carolyn: “The Best Years of Our Lives” showed the problems of returning servicemen from the war. “Edge of Darkness,” with Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan depicts the Norwegian struggle. Norway was given away by the Quisling leader. The Norwegians had to fight Germany in an underground movement. There may be another movie, “A Moon is Down,” by John Steinbeck about occupied Norway, but I’ve not seen it.
Lisa: What else?
Carolyn: “Escape” which was a book by Ethel Vance, with Robert Taylor and Norma Shearer; “Night Train to Munich,” with Rex Harrison; and, of course, “Casablanca; “Ministry of Fear,” with Ray Milland; “Cloak and Dagger,” with Gary Cooper and Lily Palmer, night-train-to-munich “Watch on the Rhine,” with Bette Davis and Paul Lucas, and “OSS,” with Alan Ladd. All of those are great movies.
Lisa: What was it like to be a young girl in the war years?
Carolyn: In elementary school, our room would get the American flag for the week if our class bought the most war stamps and bonds that week. The classes competed to have the flag on display at the front of the room. It was a big deal. I was at Fisher School two years. Stamps were ten cents, bonds were $18.75 redeemable in ten years for $25. You had a book of stamps and you would try to fill the book with stamps. You would turn in a certain amount of stamps to redeem for a bond. That paid for the war! My grandparents sold cattle during the war years and they gave me money to do it because I was always a big stamp buyer. The government was smart to do that. It was an easy way for the government to get money from the citizens to finance, to fight the war. So many (citizens) had schoolchildren. While boys – women and men were fighting and dying in the war around the world – I was a young girl busy doing cartwheels in the front yard and joining little clubs – I was totally isolated. I didn’t know anyone who died in the war.
Lisa: Changing the subject, you wanted to say something about (actress) Carole Lombard.

Carole Lombard and Clark Gable

Carolyn: Yes. Japan attacked us on Dec. 7, 1941. In January 1942 Carole Lombard went on a war bond tour – to Indiana I think. She wanted to get home to see (her husband and actor) Clark Gable afterward, in a hurry, because they had had a fight over Lana Turner. She insisted on flying out to California late at night when it was dark and foolish to fly over the Rockies. She should have waited for a better plan but she insisted on flying out. She crashed in her plane in the Rockies. She was only 33. All they found of her were her earrings. Clark went to the scene and was distraught. He was always a good drinker, but he isolated himself for a few days afterward or so and drank heavily before he came back out. Roosevelt said she (Lombard) was one of our first casualties of the war or maybe even first hero. Before she had left, she had said to Clark Gable, “Pappy, you need to join this man’s army (meaning the United States Army).” After she died, Gable did just that; he enlisted. He was about 41. He didn’t need to sign up. They were not drafting men of his age. But he was distraught and he did it. He was made a captain or something at the top – he became brass right away – he was too important to be just a regular fellow. He may have been in the Army but he was still a celebrity.
Lisa: Was Clark Gable decorated?
Carolyn: He was stationed in Great Britain, he was an officer, he may have been in some forays over Germany.
Lisa: What will we be talking about during your next visit to Lisa’s History Room?
Carolyn: What should we talk about? Should we talk about history?
Lisa: Well, if you had something you wanted to tell, what would it be?
Carolyn: I’d tell about the depression years. We had butter beans at Mother’s, and (my grandmother) Nona cooked cheap things, rice pudding, bread pudding, onions….the hobos, I don’t want to say that, the homeless people, they would come to the back door. Nona would give them a plate of food and they would to go and sit out under a tree in the backyard and eat their food. People weren’t afraid of other people back then.
Lisa: Okay, save those stories for next time. Thank you so much for stopping by today.
Carolyn: Well, bless your heart, you make me feel like a celebrity!

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Both Annie Oakley & Oprah Used Cocaine?

Posted in Annie Oakley, Oprah Winfrey, PEOPLE, tagged Annie Oakley, biographies of entertainers, biographies of women, biographies of women sharpshooters, Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, cocaine addiction, Lucille Mulhall, Oprah Winfrey, queen victoria's jubilee on January 16, 2009| 9 Comments »

annie-oakley-poster1 I was just at Randall’s picking up some Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream for Katie, O’Doul’s for Tom, and mango sorbet for myself when I happened to glance at the magazine rack at the checkout stand. “Oprah’s Cocaine Relapse!” shouted the headline on the National Enquirer. “Stedman furious as her secret lover TELLS ALL. PLUS: THE SHOCKING VIDEO!”

How ironic. I’d just been reading about Annie Oakley, eager to blog about her, and not sure where to start, her life is so rich with stories. Leave it to the National Enquirer to give me the nudge. I’d write about the media libel that almost took down Annie Oakley’s reputation. Who’d have thought that Oprah Winfrey and Annie Oakley would have something in common?

Actually, that’s not so strange. Annie Oakley (1860-1926) was, in her day, as big a superstar as Oprah Winfrey is today. As most everyone knows, Annie Oakley was to shooting what Lucille Mulhall (see last post, “America’s First Cowgirl”) was to roping. For 17 years, she received second billing as an expert markswoman with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, at a time when women were largely restricted to home, church, and school. In 1887, she set sail with the troupe to England where they performed for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. For six months, they remained in Europe. Royalty from all over Europe came to see the show and Annie Oakley was one of its biggest attractions. She shot glass balls that her husband Frank Butler sent skyward. She charmed the audience with her girl-like antics. “The loudest applause of the night is reserved for Miss Annie Oakley, because her shooting entertainment is clever, precise, and dramatic,” a London reviewer wrote. (1)

Annie Oakley never walked onto the stage. She skipped in, bowing, waving, and throwing kisses. She had some thrilling riding tricks but her most famous antic involved shooting a target with the aid of a handheld mirror. She would turn her back on her target and take aim at it by looking in the mirror. Sometimes the target was an apple sitting on the head of her dog, Dave. Then she would prop her shotgun over her right shoulder, aim it behind her, and shoot without turning around. When she hit the target, when she almost always did, she would do a little jumpkick then skip happily out of the arena. The audiences loved it. If she missed the target, though, she would turn her face to the crowd and pout dramatically. The audiences loved that, too.

No doubt about it. Annie Oakley was an entertainer. But she never lost sight that she was foremost a lady. As an athlete, she might have been more comfortable in pants but she refused to wear them, considering them unladylike, and wore A-line or pleated skirts instead. Her costumes were always wholesome, her legs below her short skirt covered entirely by dark, pearl-button leggings, and her shirt longsleeved, covering neck and wrists. Her starched white blouse with its high collar gave her a prim look. She was considered by her friends as “straitlaced.” (1)

When she traveled, she and Frank shared a tent, which Annie made homey with knick-knacks, photographs, a welcome mat, and sometimes a white picket fence. Annie Oakley took great care to keep up respectability.

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So it came as a great shock to her when she learned of an article that appeared in two Chicago newspapers on August 11, 1903, smearing her good name. The papers reported that someone by the name of Annie Oakley was in a Chicago jail after pleading guilty to stealing “the trousers of a negro” to get money to buy cocaine. (2) “ANNIE OAKLEY ASKS COURT FOR MERCY–Famous Woman Crack Shot…Steals to Secure Cocaine,” screamed one headline.The bogus story was picked up by newspapers nationwide.

At the time, Annie was 42 years old and had just finished starring in The Western Girl. Any plans she may have had of continuing her acting career on the stage came to an abrupt halt. She filed lawsuits against 55 newspapers for blackening her good name. She spent the next seven years testifying in court about the damage done to her reputation by the false newspaper articles. She won 54 of the 55 lawsuits. The woman who had been arrested that August day turned out to have been an impostor posing as Annie Oakley who had confessed to the crime. Her name was Maude Fontenella. She had once performed in a burlesque Wild West show as “Any Oakley.” It was the fault of a Chicago reporter named Ernest Stout who filed the false story, saying that the police inspector had verified that the woman was the real Annie Oakley. (2) Annie Oakley was neither a thief nor a drug addict.

The scandal behind her, the verdicts just, Annie went back on the road with another wild west show, though now she wore a brown wig. Her hair had turned completely white.

I’ve read the National Enquirer on Oprah. It seems that Oprah has admitted on TV to past cocaine use. But, fortunately, in these modern times, her past indiscretion did not ruin her reputaiton.

(1) Macy, Sue. Bull’s Eye: A Photobiography of Annie Oakley. National Geographic Society: Washington, D.C., 2001.
(2) Kasper, Shirl. Annie Oakley. The University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1992.

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Lucille Mulhall: America’s First Cowgirl

Posted in Lucille Mulhall, PEOPLE, tagged biographers of cowgirls, biographies of entertainers, biographies of women, Cowgirl, Geronimo, Lucille Mulhall, Mulhall, Oklahoma, rodeo cowgirl, Teddy Roosevelt, wild west show, Will Rogers, Zack Mulhall on January 16, 2009| 19 Comments »

Lucille Mulhall (1885-1940)

Lucille Mulhall was an authentic cowgirl who found fame in both wild west shows and the rodeo circuit. She interests me for several reasons. For one, humorist Will Rogers began his career as a cowboy on her father Zack Mulhall’s Oklahoma ranch, later joining Mulhall’s wild west show, billed as the “Cherokee Kid.”

It was Will Rogers who claimed that the term “cowgirl” was first coined (circa 1900) to describe Lucille Mulhall and her ranch skills. Lucille is famous for many reasons, largely because she could rope and ride like none other. She could rope eight men riding abreast (1). She was the most famous cowgirl of her time, catching both Teddy Roosevelt’s eye (who invited her to the White House) and Geronimo’s (who gave her a beaded vest and a decorated bow).

But I started researching Lucille Mulhall largely because of a reference in many sources to her uncanny ability as a horse trainer. She could train horses to do things others couldn’t. Of her unique ability, Lucille Mulhall said,

My system of training consists of three things – patience, perseverence, and gentleness. Gentleness I consider one of the greatest factors in successful training….Governor, the horse I ride in our exhibitions,…has nearly forty tricks….He can shoot a gun; pull off a man’s coat and put it on again; can roll a barrel; can walk up stairs and down again – a difficult feat; is perfect in the march and the Spanish trot; extends the forelegs so that an easy mount may be made; kneels, lies down and sits up; indeed, he…does nearly everything but talk.

I’d love to have seen Governor’s tricks, especially the one when he pulls off a man’s coat. But what is unclear is whether or not Governor is pulling the coat off his own body or some man’s!

(1) Alter, Judy. Wild West Shows: Rough Riders and Sure Shots Watts: New York, 1997.

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The Ice Pick Lobotomist: Dr. Walter Freeman

Posted in Dr. Walter Freeman, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Kennedys, the, Mental Institutions, PEOPLE, Rosemary Kennedy, tagged Dr. Walter Freeman, insane asylum, Kennedys, lobotomy, mental illness, the on January 16, 2009| 30 Comments »

Dr. Walter Freeman, the ice pick lobotomist

I’d fully intended to move away from the subject of insane asylums and talk about a cowgirl from Oklahoma by the name of Lucille Mulhall. But I cannot in good conscience leave the subject without telling what I’ve learned about the barbaric brain surgeon responsible for Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy, the operation that permanently incapacitated her at the young age of 23. Rosemary had been acting in an agitated behavior, according to her father, Joseph P. Kennedy, throwing fits and showing interest in boys, and he sought an operation to settle her down. Two doctors were in the operating room that day in 1941: Dr. Walter Freeman, the director of the laboratories at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., together with his partner, James W. Watts, MD, from the University of Virginia.

Dr. Freeman was obsessed with finding a cure for mental illness. In the day before psychiatric drugs, mentally ill patients were shuttered away in institutions like St. Elizabeth’s. Shock therapy, pioneered in the thirties, though not completely successful, had effectively reduced some psychiatric symptoms in agitated patients, rendering them calmer for a time following treatment. Psychiatrists like Dr. Freeman wanted to find the locus of mental illness of the brain. They understood that there were regions of the brain and were looking for surgical answers instead of just locking people up for life. Freeman, however, was not a surgeon but a neurologist. He was wildly ambitious and longed to achieve the lasting fame of his grandfather, a pioneer brain surgeon, once the president of the American Medical Association. Freeman was determined to find a procedure that would root out the defect in the brain that he believed responsible for mental illness.

Freeman discovered the work of a Portuguese neurologist named Egas Moniz who had performed a radical new operation on a group of 20 mental patients. By taking small corings of their brains, Moniz asserted, it had been possible to rid a third of these patients of their symptoms. Moniz didn’t explain why this worked. He had a crude notion that people “who are mentally ill are sort of obsessed, he called them fixed ideas. And that these fixed ideas probably resided in some way in the frontal lobes.”

Along with Dr. Watts, Freeman began to perform lobotomies, or surgeries on the frontal lobes. After several operations, Dr. Freeman called his operation a success. According to Edward Shorter, Medical Historian, “Freeman’s definition of success is that the patients are no longer agitated. That doesn’t mean that you’re cured, that means they could be discharged from the asylum, but they were incapable of carrying on normal social life. They were usually demobilized and lacking in energy. And they were that on a permanent basis.” Many had to be retaught how to use the toilet. They were definitely not the same persons they were before the operation.

Why didn’t the medical establishment stop Drs. Freeman and Watts from performing this radical and untested procedure? This was back in the day when it was considered unethical for doctors to criticize their peers – plus, Dr. Freeman manipulated the press in his favor. He proclaimed he’d found a cure for mental illness. Soon he was receiving glowing reviews. The Washington Star called prefrontal lobotomy “One of the greatest surgical innovations of this generation.” The New York Times called it “surgery of the soul,” and declared it “history making.”

It gets worse. Freeman decided that there was a simpler way to get into the brain than through the top of the skull, as he had done with Rosemary Kennedy. He decided that the skull was thinner behind the eye and that he could make an incision there with an ice pick. Freeman “would hammer the ice pick into the skull just above the tear duct and wiggle it around.”

transorbital lobotomy

He began to travel around the nation in his own personal van, which he called his “lobotomobile”, hawking this new procedure which he performed with a gold ice pick, and training other doctors in his methods. He even performed a few lobotomies in hotel rooms. Before he was stopped and the lobotomy discredited, Walter Freeman had performed over 3,500 lobotomies. His medical license was revoked when one of his patients died during a lobotomy. Nevertheless, he continued to tour the country in his lobotomobile, visiting his former patients, until his death from cancer in 1972.

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Nellie Bly and Rosemary Kennedy – Part 6

Posted in Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Kennedys, the, Mental Institutions, Nellie Bly, Rosemary Kennedy, tagged biographies of sick women, biographies of women, biographies of women journalists, Joseph P. Kennedy, Kennedy family photos, Kennedys, mental illness, Nellie Bly, Rosemary Kennedy has a lobotomy on January 15, 2009| 28 Comments »

Nellie Bly (1864-1922)

I’ve been thinking about the very different lives of reporter Nellie Bly and Rosemary Kennedy. Although over fifty years separated these women, both found themselves at the age of 23 at the mercy of mental health “professionals.” Nellie Bly placed herself in a dangerous lunatic asylum as an investigative journalist because she was desperate to land a job in a world that didn’t welcome female professionals. How else was an uneducated woman to earn a living in 1887?

Bly was the thirteenth of her wealthy father’s fifteen children, her mother being her father’s second wife. When Bly was six, her father died, failing to make specific provisions for Nellie, her mother, and her two brothers. Like many other great women, Nellie Bly (like Annie Oakley) took it upon herself to find a way to take care of her family. She ran a boarding house with her mother and marveled that her uneducated brothers were able to find jobs as clerks and drummers yet, because she was an uneducated woman, she could only aspire to be a chambermaid or washer-woman. Thus it was Nellie’s poverty and the absence of a father that lead her to have herself committed, at the age of 23, to an insane asylum.

But the converse was true of Rosemary Kennedy. Rosemary landed in a mental institution because she was rich and had a father. She had the misfortune to be born “mildly mentally retarded, into a family dominated by her driven and ruthlessly ambitious father,” Joseph P. Kennedy. Rosemary had been living in a convent to keep her out of the public eye, but, as she developed as a young woman, she had begun sneaking out to see boys, and Kennedy was worried that she might damage his famous family’s reputation.

Rosemary Kennedy (back) (1918-2005), with sister Jean and brother Robert

In an attempt to settle her down, her father, without telling his wife, used his money and powerful connections to arrange for his 23-year-old learning-disabled daughter Rosemary to undergo experimental brain surgery, one of the first prefrontal lobotomies ever performed. The operation took place in 1941, but, according to the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, “something went terribly wrong.” Rosemary emerged from surgery not better, but far worse. She regressed to a state of helpless infancy and was confined to a mental asylum for the rest of her life until her death in 2005. Nellie Bly’s story, though, has a happy ending. She walked out of the asylum a free woman and an international celebrity.

To read more on the Kennedys on this site, scroll down the right sidebar to “Categories – People – Kennedys.”

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Nellie Bly in the Madhouse – Part 5

Posted in Mental Institutions, Nellie Bly, PEOPLE, tagged biographies of women, biographies of women journalists, insane asylum, investigative journalism, mental illness, Nellie Bly on January 14, 2009| 2 Comments »

ellie Bly was put on the island boat and sent to Blackwell’s Island. For ten days, she experienced firsthand the horrors of being locked up in cruel and inhumane conditions. Upon her arrival, she was fed a disgusting meal of pink watery tea, prunes, and bread that was dirty and black and mostly dried dough. She found a spider in the slice given her. She didn’t eat it. Later she learned that the nurses didn’t like it when you didn’t eat your food. They might beat you for that.

After sitting in that long, freezing dining hall on bare yellow benches for what seemed an eternity, Bly and the other women in her ward were marched in two lines into a freezing cold, wet bathroom. As everyone looked on, the nurses stripped Bly of every bit of her clothing. They took away her dress, her skirts, her shoes, her stockings, and her hat. She then was forced to bathe in an ice-cold tub and be scrubbed by one of the craziest women in the ward.

“My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold,” Nellie wrote later of the experience. “Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head – ice-cold water, too, into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth.”

The nurses then put her, dripping wet, into a short flannel slip and locked her in an individual cell for the night. She couldn’t sleep. She kept picturing what would happen should a fire break out in the asylum. Every door was locked individually and bars covered the high windows. Should the building burn, there was no way the nurses or doctors could possibly unlock each door before the flames would engulf the building. She and the others would roast to death.

The asylum was spotlessly clean but it wasn’t the nurses who kept it so. The patients did all the work. There was little to distract the patients’ mind from the terrible cold and gnawing hunger. There were no books. The inmates did enjoy their short walks around the beautiful grounds. It was on one of those walks that Nellie Bly passed the kitchen and got a glimpse at the sort of food being prepared for the nurses and doctors: melons and grapes and all sorts of fruits, beautiful white bread and nice meats.

Bly complained to the doctors about the thin clothing issued to the patients, the intolerable cold, and the inedible food, but nothing came of it. It was only after her release ten days later that Nellie Bly would be able to draw attention to the neglect and abuse of people with mental disorders and others unfortunate enough to be sentenced to the asylum. Her expose of the conditions within the Lunatic Asylum, published in the World and later in book form, Ten Days in a Mad-House , caused a sensation. Nellie Bly became an instant celebrity.

The public demanded to know how Nellie Bly had managed to hoodwink four physicians into believing she was insane. A grand jury launched an investigation into the claims made in Bly’s report and recommended the changes she had proposed, prompting an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections for the treatment of the insane.

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