My sister handed me a timeworn, canvas-bound scrapbook and said, “I don’t know where this came from, but knew you’d want to see it.” With its somber hues and cherubic child, the cover looked like a Victorian valentine minus the hearts. Wearing a blue, lace-edged dress and white apron, a little girl tips her head close to an open book, strands of her red hair tumbling forward. Inside, each heavy, age-browned page held newspaper clippings from 1910.
A quick perusal proved this was someone’s personal version of People Magazine. The book was plump with pictures of presidents, royalty, society weddings and travels, stage performers, scandals, and murders. Whose book was this?
My grandmother, Byeo, was eight in 1910, so, an unlikely candidate. Could it have belonged to Jessamine, her mother and my great-grandmother? Women of the time could not vote, and with options for work and activities as confining for female behavior as corsets were for one’s body, might the risqué doings of actresses, the affairs of the wealthy, and gruesome murders be a source of release for a young woman, however proper she seemed to be?
Or maybe my father’s mother, Frances, was the book’s creator? The woman I knew as my grandmother was kind but guarded, having lost her firstborn son in an accident when he was 18 months old. Still, I’d heard stories of her youthful self, and of escapades with her best friend Sally. It was hard to believe that my reserved Gaga could have been the girl who snuck into a morgue with two young, male, hospital aides, but she told me the tale herself, adding details about an ID tag dangling from a corpse’s toe. That girl might well have been intrigued by such lurid headlines as “Charlton Woman Alive When Placed in Trunk.”
Certainly, I was intrigued. I tapped in a Google search and discovered a bounty of vintage coverage. Two fishermen out for a day’s catch pulled in a large trunk and hoped it held valuables. Instead, it contained the body of Mary Porter Charlton, murdered by her husband, stuffed in a trunk, and dumped into Italy’s Lake Como. Beyond that, five pages of articles and pictures followed the trial of 17-year-old Hattie Le Blanc, accused by Mrs. Clarence Glover of murdering her husband. Mr. Glover was handsome and young Hattie, quite lovely, so I was not surprised to learn that Hattie was acquitted and Mrs. Glover’s innocence questioned. Apparently, I shared a morbid curiosity with the book’s owner, for I Googled that story too.
The clippings collector was not solely concerned with court cases and crimes and snipped historically significant photos and headlines as well. The death of England’s King Edward VII and the succession of his son, George V; the doings of President Taft and his wife; the family vacation plans of (then) Colonel Theodore Roosevelt; and the multi-million-dollar union of Marjorie Gould and Anthony Drexel fill the pages.
The lives of women better able to call their own shots clearly held allure judging by numerous pictures of stage performers in exotic attire. It appeared that Opera singer, Geraldine Farrar, however, turned traitor to her sex as she was quoted as discouraging girls from following her path. One wonders, though, what she actually said. She may have simply spoken honestly about the challenges facing a woman striving to live beyond the dictates of a patriarchal society. Perhaps the newspaper’s editors chose to twist her words to conform to traditional values. For, bellowed in bold caps next to Farrar’s picture was the headline: “BETTER STAY HOME AND WASH DISHES THAN GO ABROAD AND SING.”
Such messages must have fueled the fires of the Suffragists and inspired socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth who formed a political study club under the guise of keeping in touch with her husband’s work.
Beyond gathering images of the stars, fashions, and news of her day, the scrapbook’s owner seemed playful and ironic in her juxtaposition of pictures and headlines. Surely she was grinning in gluing grim Mrs. Gilbert in her somber garb next to actress Lora Lieb with her self-possessed pose and graceful sweep of lace and feathers. And what were her thoughts in the line-up of a “feverish tenement tot,” “Boston’s mammoth cat,” and Mrs. Astor’s engagement?
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