Firefly Sky

 

 

Now and Then

 

Why We Celebrate Our Holidays 
by Mary I. Curtis (1924)

In the chilly spring of 1888, James Russell Lowell was invited to give an address at the newly established Reform Club of New York. 

A well-known political and social observer, the bushy-bearded Lowell had honed his intellect since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1842. Poet and essayist, diplomat and abolitionist; a linguistics scholar who became the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell moved in distinguished literary circles.

Lowell also drew contempt. Some of his peers dismissed him as a moody lightweight who espoused convenient, inconsistent arguments. He and the Transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller detested each other. “Posterity will not remember him,” she once wrote.   

However, in his remarks at the Reform Club, just a few years before his death at age 72, Lowell identified an interesting twist in American culture. It seems especially intriguing now, when we face controversial interpretations of patriotism and American history.

Up until the start of the Civil War, Lowell told the elite audience, Americans were filled with optimism, “seeing the future in rose-color.”  

He had an explanation for this antebellum anticipation of endless American glory. 

“The hues of our dawn had scarcely faded from the sky. Men were still living who had seen the face and heard the voice of the most august personage in our history.”

Did he mean George Washington? I believe so. 

“This was what may be called the Fourth of July period of our history,” Lowell said.

During that time, he explained, Americans were still close to the epochal events of the past. Inevitably, many traditions had fallen by the wayside. A few old holidays—once momentous celebrations—had lost their meaning, and industrialization chipped away at community cohesion.

Yet thousands of Americans still remembered the big events or held onto the 18^th- and 19^th-century stories recounted by people who were there in the moment. For many years, those memories drove profound feelings of citizenship. 

Of course we could not live perpetually in the Fourth of July period, but it continued to glimmer.

During the Bicentennial in 1976, the writer Brendan Gill mused aloud that we possess founding documents but no recordings of founding voices. After a pause, his friend Ned announced: “I have heard an eighteenth-century voice.”

 

“We pressed him to tell us how that was possible,” Gill recalled. ‘I was born in 1883,’ Ned said, ‘and I was brought up in part by my great-grandmother, who as a little girl was taken down to the new Federal Hall, on Wall Street, to observe Washington being sworn in as the first President of the United States. That was in 1790.’”

Statue of George Washington
Federal Hall, New York City
(National Park Service)

Through these remarkable leaps, 20^th century Americans could touch the deep past. My mother liked to recall a parade in the 1930s where she watched veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic march by.

Really? I’d ask, dubiously.  

Yes, really. In fact, there is a newsreel of the parade. On Memorial Day 1935, Civil War veterans were among the soldiers who marched up Broadway toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park.  

Universal Newspaper Newsreel, May 1935

G.A.R. veterans at the 1935 parade

Even today, the past may resonate unexpectedly, unprompted by a monument, fireworks or a battle reenactment. You might be driving on Interstate 435, a beltway that surrounds the Kansas City metropolitan area. Along the way, the road slopes down to a marsh. The land is undeveloped although not primeval. A low bridge carries you across the Missouri River. 

You might recall “Shenandoah,” a popular 19^th-century American folksong.

 

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, you rolling river

            Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

            Away, I’m bound away, ’cross the wide Missouri.

             

“Shenandoah” is a lilting river ballad filled with love and longing. Any online search will tell you that. Shenandoah was an Indian chief whose daughter the riverboat captain wished to marry but had to leave behind. 

And there you are, back in time and place, brushing up against the Fourth of July period of our history. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/07/now-and-then.html

Vilna Lamplight

 

My grandparents during the late 1920s

When the 19-year old immigrant arrived in New York City in 1914, he knew all about fur. This was borne out by a story that he—my father’s father—liked to tell my brother and me. The incident took place in the shadowy nineteenth century long before his birth.

The family lived in Vilna, a city in Lithuania, a Northern European nation that borders the Baltic Sea on the east and Belarus to the west. During that time, Vilna was part of the Russian Empire.

His grandparents owned a fur shop—beautiful minks, he described, laid out on deep wooden counters.

One day, like many other days, the Cossacks came to plunder Vilna.*

Inside the store, they demanded: “Give us the furs.” But his grandmother cried, “Never!” and flung her body across the pelts. Why would they spare her life?

By the time we heard this story for the first time, in our grandparents’ apartment in the north Bronx, he had retired from the fur business and liked to watch the Lawrence Welk Show on a Zenith color television.    

Now, looking at early 20^th century photographs of Vilna: the cobblestone streets crowded with old, bearded men and little boys wearing caps and short pants, I understand fully the distance that he, like all immigrants, traveled.  

In the winter of 1934, a naturalized American at last, married with two sons, co-owner of a small fur processing company, he returned to Vilna. His parents had died but several brothers and at least a dozen cousins remained.

“I went back to Vilna,” he would often say. “I stood under the lamplight and waited. And my own brother walked by. I stopped him and . . . ” 

Here he would tear up. “I said, ‘It’s Josef, it’s me! Your brother!'” 

That is all I know about his visit except that the encounter with his brother must have occurred in the Jewish Quarter. Also that most of the family members whom he saw on that trip were still living in Vilna in June 1941 when the German occupation began.  

In May, while visiting Vilna, I looked for the light under which he perpetually stands. But there are so many. Turning down this street and that, a multitude of iron lanterns revealed themselves and lit up my grandfather’s story.  

I am ever, ever grateful that he left to become an American. 

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

Note: Following the formal recognition of Lithuania's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Vilna became Vilnius. After World War I, when the city was part of the Second Polish Republic, it was called Wilno. 

 

Through a Screen, Darkly

 

Onstage with Evelyn Archer

 

Evelyn Archer, newspaper photo, 1927;
earliest known picture of her. 

One of the lovely aspects of early-twentieth-century American life was the wide-open opportunity for reinvention. Not just once, but as often as necessary. You could hop on a train and disappear into cities and small towns. Abandon everything, even your past! Not a breadcrumb left behind.

Eva Sterry Hubbard, born in Wisconsin in 1878 or 1880 or 1885, got out as soon as possible. She would have done well enough in the river city of Eau Claire, the daughter of Martin, a county clerk, and Alice, a descendant of settlers, who liked to address the crowd on patriotic holidays. 

Perhaps Eva consulted an astrologer and saw her future in the theater, so off she went to Chicago. While time ticked on and the century wound down, she probably worked as a cabaret dancer. Burlesque had kicked and teased its way into the city with the 1893 Columbian Exposition.    

Eva decided to take a stage name—“Evelyn Archer”—and her star rose a bit. Cast in Quo Vadis?, a six-act drama about Nero’s destruction of Rome and the rise of Christian martyrs, Evelyn toured Jim Crow America with performances in Indiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, and Kentucky.

In 1901, she married James Dille Barton, born Dillie Barton Black in Newark, Ohio, son of a Scottish immigrant physician.

Barton was at least 12 years older than Evelyn but the same age in ambition. He, too, escaped his hometown, along with his given name, because he saw his future in show business. The couple left Chicago and went east where J.D., as he dubbed himself, hit the jackpot as a theatrical agent and producer.

J.D. Barton, passport photograph

They settled in a New York City suburb, Mount Vernon, and built a grand house. Evelyn had a baby, bought a brindle bull puppy, and forsook the theater for a while. She and J.D. gadded about town. When they visited the circus, a monkey reached through the bars of his cage, grabbed a $300 diamond pin from Evelyn’s lapel and swallowed it “with a little jerk of his neck,” noted a reporter. The circus refused to chloroform the monkey or reimburse the Bartons. 

Archer appeared on Broadway in 1918.

The marriage ended quietly and the glitz receded. Evelyn and her little girl moved to a more modest house several blocks away. Evelyn landed a few Broadway roles, including The Copperhead (1918), opposite Lionel Barrymore. Before long she heard the siren song of Florida.

St. Petersburg, 1920s

The 27^th state had become its own brand of the Wild West, a place for reinvention; perfect for Evelyn. She and daughter Polly, now about 11 years old, arrived in St. Petersburg right after the end of World War I when the land boom began its rumble. By the mid-1920s, real estate speculation reached a frenzy as investors snapped up waterfront lots for hotels, apartment houses, and casinos. 

But September 1926 spelled devastation. The Great Miami Hurricane wiped out the coastline, local banks, and investors. In fact, the hurricane triggered Florida’s economic decline well before the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Evelyn landed on her feet, or perhaps on her Cuban heels. She had married Fred Rittenhouse, a prominent dentist and realtor, in 1925. Newly launched as president of the “New York Society”—an association of 330 New Yorkers who wintered in Florida—Evelyn regained social stature and influence.    

Cuban heels were all the rage in the 1920s.

After Polly won a few beauty contests, Evelyn brought her daughter back to New York City, helped her get a job with the Ziegfield Follies, and guided her toward movies. As Polly Archer, she appeared in Java Head, The New School Teacher, and The Enchanted Cottage in the early twenties.   

Her greatest feat was yet to come. On New Year’s Eve, 1929, Polly wed a local theater owner while soaring high over St. Petersburg in a “Tin Goose,” Henry Ford’s three-engine airliner.

Polly Archer's wedding photo

The city sparkled 1,500 feet below as the bride and groom walked to the rear of the plane, where the Reverend J.A. McClure performed the ceremony at the stroke of midnight.

The guests threw rice as the plane began its descent. Two hundred people greeted the bridal party at the end of a grass runway at Piper-Fuller Field.

Polly’s career languished and she became an apartment building manager in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, the snowbird population grew and Evelyn came to preside over an empire. Inevitably, as the years passed, she lost her cache and had to let go.

I guess they made the best of things, a mother and daughter who didn’t land in the place they’d hoped for.

*Evelyn Barton Rittenhouse died in 1970, outliving Polly by eight years. J.D. Barton flourished as a writer and producer, including his 1907 drama Through Death Valley, based on his encounters with rattlesnakes while living in Arizona.       

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/

 

 

 

Betty Wales Gardens: A Mount Vernon Story

 

Newspaper advertisement for home
 in Betty Wales Gardens, 1921

The Goldman Costume Company took off right around 1900, turning out dresses, skirts, and shirtwaists for America’s young women.

New York City’s garment industry flourished in sweatshops while the exhausted girls who hunched over sewing machines marched and struck for nearly a decade before they won higher wages and fewer hours. 

By that time, Jacob Josiah Goldman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and president of the company, had become restless. In the manner of E.H. Harriman, he became J.J. Goldman and decided to leave the city.

J.J. moved his family—wife Lollie and four children—to Mount Vernon, N.Y. He purchased a massive stone house, “Grey Rocks,” up on a hill near the border of the highly restrictive village of Bronxville. 

Stone pillar at the corner of "Grey Rocks" property

There, in 1913, J.J.’s son Louis was married in a spectacular wedding where potted palms outnumbered guests. The mansion still looms over the street below, largely unseen by passersby.

In August 1914, while the world panicked about troop mobilization in Europe, J.J. Goldman announced a contest in the trade journal Women’s Wear Daily. Fifty dollars for the reader who proposed the best name for a new line of dresses for young women, to be manufactured by the Goldman Costume Company.

Up in Rutland, VT, Lena B. Carr, the business manager of a local power company, occasionally sat down at her typewriter and wrote articles for Women’s Wear Daily. That’s how the contest came to her attention.

Carr didn’t pull “Betty Wales” out of the air.

One of her neighbors in Rutland, Edith K. Dunton, was a Smith College graduate and author of a series of popular books starring a young woman named Betty Wales. Dunton wrote under the penname Margaret Warde.

The first book, Betty Wales, Freshman, was published in 1904. Seven more followed, in which Betty Wales attended college and found her first job, as a secretary.

Before J.J. Goldman chose the name “Betty Wales” and handed a $50 check to Lena Carr, he went to Vermont to meet with Dunton. They signed a licensing agreement. At Goldman’s request, Dunton penned the last book in the series, Betty Wales, Business Woman (1916).

It was a great match of bestsellers: Betty Wales dresses and Betty Wales books. Occasionally Goldman advertised promotions: buy a dress, get a free book. He opened Betty Wales shops around the country. Department stores carved out prime retail space for the brand.

Then Goldman turned his attention to real estate.

 

***

 

Unfortunately, Mount Vernon was effectively segregated by a railroad cut, dug in the late nineteenth century, which created a “South Side” and a “North Side.”

By 1917, investors had bought up land well north of the cut. They intended to create residential neighborhoods far from the commercial district in the four-square mile city. 

Among the picturesque properties, the 75-acre Forster Tract, assembled during the 1890s, cried out for development. There was a rush to lay out and macadamize streets, plant trees, and build houses.

As a well-known philanthropist and founder of Mount Vernon’s Rotary Club, J.J. Goldman surely had made the acquaintance of local businessman Walter King Cooley, a crackerjack realtor and builder, president of a new firm, Gramatan Homes, Inc., where a talented young man named Lewis Bowman was chief architect.

Announcement in the 
Mount Vernon Daily Argus, 1917

Now they joined together to create “Betty Wales Gardens,” a 12-house community with a swimming pool and tennis courts. The Mount Vernon Country Club lay a block away.

The 12 English cottages would be designed by Bowman. Gramatan Homes announced:

 

The property is to be laid out in the form of an English garden, with shrubbery, trees, etc., and will probably have its own water supply from artesian wells.

 

Within two years, “two of the cutest little homes that have ever been built” were put up for sale on Wales Place, a new street without sidewalks that wended its way down a small hill.

More cottages followed and the development was successful. Bowman designed a few Tudor-style homes, too. I have identified 11 houses but not the twelfth.

Betty Wales cottage, built 1918

Then tragedy struck in 1921. J.J. and Lollie Goldman, who had sold Grey Rocks and moved to the Hotel des Artistes in Manhattan, were in a  car crash outside Chicago. Lollie was killed.

Goldman returned to Mount Vernon, where his daughters and their families lived. He moved into yet another stone mansion where his daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) Einstein lived with her husband Jay and their three children. 

Eventually, Goldman retired to Miami, where he died in 1948. By then, new brands were overtaking Betty Wales dresses.  

Wales Place remains, a quiet lane with an incongruous name off the beaten path. Some of the houses have been refaced or painted bright colors, and one or two look abandoned. 

And not an artesian well in sight.

Aerial view of Betty Wales Gardens
(Google maps)

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2026/04/betty-wales-gardens-mount-vernon-story.html

April 1

April 1