Monthly Archives: February 2012

Passages

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The Virginia – 1930s

The court order came through on August 12, 1930. Finally the state of California had given Jane Hall and her brother Dick permission to “visit” their aunt in New York City where “said minors” would pursue their further education. Rosa Sutton bought the tickets on the Panama Pacific Line’s passenger and cargo ship, SS Virginia. She insisted on first class so her grandchildren could be together. (Men and women were separated in tourist.) When the ship sailed through San Pedro Bay toward Central America on Monday, August 25, a despondent Gram* watched as the only children in her immediate family left California.

It did not take long for the two bright and gregarious young passengers to attract notice, and the Captain kept an eye on them. “It is almost uncanny how much they do by machinery,” Jane wrote to one of her friends in Manhattan Beach after the Captain took them up on the bridge to show them how the electric turbine worked. “The steering is done by some kind of a machine which makes it absolutely automatic. It seems as though all they do on the bridge is regulate the speed of the boat and ring so many bells every half-hour.”

She continued: “The Panama Canal is so simple it would astound you. The only machinery is that which opens and shuts the gates of the locks. The water is stored up during the rainy season so no pumps are necessary. Everything is green in the Canal Zone, and we happen to strike it on the coolest day of the journey. Some of the other days made me wonder about the relative humidity of Hell. For the first time the ship ran completely out of beer – the day after leaving Havana.”

She was not a huge ship – 613 feet long with 350 in crew, and space for 184 in First Class and 365 in Tourist. Some passengers in First had the amenity of a private bath– or the privilege of applying to the Bath Steward to use one at a definite time each day. Jane loved the superb food and smooth seas except on the night when they hit the tail end of a hurricane. Even that was not a problem for she wrote, ”Seasickness on this floating hotel is impossible.” She learned how to tell ship’s time and defeated all the chess players on board including a former member of the New York Chess Club. And her flippant tone in the letter to her pal back home belied her natural empathy. “For slums galore go to Panama and Havana . . . due to the heat some of the children wear nothing but coats of tan;” she was quite startled by their one room homes, really “just holes in the wall,” that opened right onto the narrow streets.

Aerial View of the Tip of Manhattan 1931- Hudson River Piers on Far Left

The scene was quite different on September 8** as the Virginia approached her final destination. Slowly she made her way through Lower New York Bay into the Narrows — the tidal strait that separates Brooklyn from Staten Island. The low moans of the ship’s horn and the sounds of smaller ocean and river craft crisscrossing New York Harbor added to the excitement of the two travelers as they cruised 18 miles through the Upper Bay into the Hudson River. Long-awaited scenes came into view: the massive pale green figure of Liberty – the tip of her torch reaching 305 feet off the ground and the unforgettable crisp, jagged Manhattan skyline. 432,580 passengers had traveled in and out of the crowded Port of New York in the first six months of 1930. By the summer of 1931, the economic chaos that afflicted the nation and the widespread bankruptcies of its wealthiest citizens would sharply cut American tourist traffic to Europe and other parts of the world.

As the Virginia turned into Pier 61 near west 21st Street, the children of Daysie and Dick Wick Hall leaned over the railing to scan the eager faces that gazed up at arriving passengers. Did they look presentable? Would their Uncle Randolph be disappointed? Jane wore her white skirt with the new blouse that  Aunt Rose had sent. She wanted to be first to spot the distinguished older gentleman and his elegant wife who would shape their future. Within moments either she or Dickie called out with great relief – “There they are!”

Notes:

*Rosa Sutton was not alone when the ship left. Her youngest daughter, the children’s Aunt Louise, was there with her husband Hugh Parker. The very same Hugh Parker who had been married to Rose. (Apparently he wanted to stay in the family.)  None of the children’s relatives in Arizona or California wanted them to move east and that would cause friction in the coming years.

**Rose mentions the 8th as the date of the ship’s arrival; Jane had predicted the 8th or 9th when Rosa bought the tickets.

This is post number 14 in the series. Please use the contact tab at the top of the page for any comments or suggestions. For easy access to the entire series so far go to the Blog Tab on the home page, select “Salome to Hollywood” and scroll down to the beginning.

 

“Old ladies and old gentlemen are my weakness . . .”

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“I don’t want you to be too grown up when you come – I just want a sweet little girl and everyone will love you. I think Randy will be crazy about you.” Rose Hicks wrote from her office in the Fisk Building at 250 West 57th Street* as she watched the majestic S.S. Leviathan steam out of its birth on the North (Hudson) River. “Someday we’ll sail on her,” she promised Jane. In June 1930 Rose had so many plans for their future together. First Jane and her brother Dick had to travel from Manhattan Beach to her Manhattan. Rose would insist — as soon as the court order came through allowing the children to leave California — that they come by ship. As the summer wore on, the correspondence between Rose and her niece was more affectionate and more playful. But when Rose mentioned that she’d heard Jane was overweight and Dick was too thin, Jane bristled.

“I am very healthy thanks to the powers that be, and 15 years of the right bringing up, but fat! God forbid. Everyone around here still calls me “Little Jane” but I know you will think I am enormous as I’ve grown so much since you were here. I’m 5 foot 1 1/2 inches.” It was a Saturday late in June and Jane was “making the manse sparkle” while Dick drove their grandmother in Teresa into Los Angeles “to water Gram’s yard.” Jane loathed housework — “I do love to cook but that’s all.”

Most of all she wanted to impress her Uncle Randolph whom she had never met. She had chosen “slogans” from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for people she liked. This one (slightly misquoted) she told him, seemed to suit him: “His was a gentle life and the elements so mixed in him, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world –’this is a man.’”

Jane Hall — Some Early Sketches

And how happy she was that he admired her sketches! ” I’m so glad Uncle Randolph likes the foolish little things I draw. I love ART but not the kind they teach at Redondo High . . ” The art teacher had told her she had “marvelous ability” but did not like the fact that Jane drew “cartoons” of people and animals on the sides of her mechanical drawing sheets. So Jane, alas, had never had an “A” in Art.

According to Daysie Hall’s will, “Mrs. Randolph Hicks of New York,” was  the custodian of her two children “with full power of attorney to take care of their interests in the way she deems best.” Because she lived in New York and Virginia, Rose would not officially be their legal guardian until the end of 1930 when Jane and Dick had spent some time with her. In the meantime, she and her 60-year-old husband prepared to become    parents for the first time. One thing was clear. Randolph Hicks could no longer afford to retire — the financial roller coaster that was to plague even the most prosperous families during the 1930s had only just begun. Still, the Hickses were among the more fortunate Americans as they focused on their priorities for Jane and her college-age brother.

Rose Sutton Parker Hicks in Virginia circa 1939

At forty-eight, Rose Hicks’ ebony hair had  turned white but her large black eyes still intrigued new friends and intimidated others when she was displeased.** She was a polished, well-read and well-traveled woman with a keen mind and unlimited curiosity. Her husband, a scholar of Latin and history as well as the law, appreciated her high standards and her intellect. And, she would tell her niece, “he loves me because I have a lot of character—he likes that better than anything else.” By the time they married in 1919, Randolph Hicks had kept his business interests in Norfolk, Virginia but transferred his law practice to the prestigious firm of Satterlee, Canfield and Stone on Wall Street. Rose’s and Randolph’s social life was an extension of his work; they moved in exclusive circles among accomplished men and their  prominent wives. (Herbert Satterlee’s wife, Louisa, was the eldest daughter of J.P. Morgan.)

R.Randolph Hicks at Poplar Springs in Virginia circa 1939

An eminent trial lawyer, Randolph was also indispensable to his former partner, Arthur J. Morris, who had established the Morris Plan system of industrial banks that gave average Americans installment credit for the first time. Throughout Daysie Hall’s illness, he had done everything he could to support her and his niece and nephew: “The house in Virginia is gradually being built and when it is finished we shall expect to have you there, perhaps we may be able to find a horse for you,” he wrote to Jane as the finishing touches were being put on his fieldstone home at Poplar Springs Farm in Fauquier County, Virginia.

Although Jane may not have known all the details of her uncle’s career or the full extent of her aunt’s plans for her, she was aware that her life was about to change dramatically. Over the next decade the question would be could she remain true to herself in this new world? Rose had asked  if she had ever been out on a date without a chaperone. “Far from it,” Jane fired back. She assured her aunt that she had “no desire to make herself ‘common.’ I have never been “‘out’” at all anyway. Old ladies and old gentleman are my weakness.” Some of the boys she had met called her a “wisey” and were not too keen on her sassy personality. So she had no beaux, “some good friends, that’s all. Boys are very amusing, yes?”  And she continued, “I love things with a polish too, Aunt Rose, but how I detest anything or anybody that’s ALL polish, and nothing underneath! I don’t like anything crude or raw except nature.”

During moments when she was alone with her thoughts, Jane grappled with her faith; she had remained a Catholic ever since Rosa Sutton—their Gram– had taken both Jane and Dick to St. Vincent’s Catholic Church in Los Angeles to sponsor their baptism on Christmas Eve, 1919. (Dickie was then seven and Jane four.) Jane adored her Gram — they had the same strong-willed streak that Rose also shared. She went to a Catholic Church on Sundays even after her mother leaned toward Christian Science, and she loved being around the sisters whose good, clean, plain, faces “make you feel a little holy to talk to them.” Jane had been to a Catholic school in the first grade. In 1928 – before it was clear that her mother was desperately ill – she had hoped to go to St. Mary’s Academy for girls in Los Angeles as a boarder. That would have pleased her grandmother who had been educated in a convent school, but it was not to be. Fortunately, Redondo Union High School had worked out well.

So Rose would have to make sure that her free-spirited and quite spiritual niece fit into the narrow slice of New York and Virginia society that she and her husband frequented. She had been a newcomer to this world just ten years earlier and knew what was expected of the family of an attorney with old Virginia (British, protestant and patriarchal) roots, and memberships in The (Episcopalian) Church Club of New York and the all-male Gilded Age Metropolitan Club. A private school for young ladies that fostered strong values and a sense of propriety might be just right for Jane’s last two years of high school. After all, she was unusually smart, perceptive and eager to please —  that would help.

How relieved Rose must have been that Dick’s immediate future had been settled. He would attend The University of Virginia – her husband’s alma mater — and Rose had no doubt that his scholarly abilities would serve him well. But just to be sure he made a good impression among their friends, she would list him in the New York Social Register*** as “Richard Hall;” the name “Dick Wick” did not sound quite right. How that list of socially prominent families would have amused Dick’s father whose “Salome Sun” poked fun at just such pretensions!

 

*For a time, Rose worked for Randolph’s close friend and client William C. Durant after they all lost a great deal during the Depression. His offices were probably on a high floor. (See link above for the description of the building and its history.)

**During the 1909 high-profile naval investigation into her brother’s death, reporters commented on the then Mrs. Parker’s mesmerizing black eyes.

***Originally there were 18 annual volumes of this list of notable families (usually with Dutch and English ancestry) representing 26 cities. Today there is one definitive book “listing the nation’s foremost families.”

This is post number 13 in the series. Please use the contact tab at the top of the page for any comments or suggestions. For the entire series so far go to the Blog tab at the top of the page and scroll down to the beginning.

 

 

“I’m caught in the mesh of the desert’s grip. . .”

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As her sophomore year came to a close, fifteen-year-old Jane Hall left her friends and teachers at Redondo Union High School for the last time; perhaps she would miss the editors who had encouraged her career as a writer most of all. Down came the sign on the front door of 1148 Manhattan Avenue that identified her as manager of the local office of the Redondo Daily Breeze. Now her mission was keep the house in Manhattan Beach running smoothly until she and her brother could leave California to join their aunt and uncle in New York.

For several weeks after her mother died, Jane’s natural exuberance remained dormant under a cloud of grief. It was almost impossible to “take it on the chin.” Please tell me “you love me better than ANYBODY in the world except Uncle Randolph and Gram and Dick,” she wrote to her Aunt Rose. It helped that she was preoccupied by so many responsibilities. First on the list was her brother’s graduation from Redondo Union High School on June 13, 1930.  Dickie had just turned 18 and still needed new shoes, a white shirt and a black tie. Along with their class pictures in the yearbook, the High Tide, each senior listed his or her “Ambition,” “Fatal Failing” and “Hobby.”

Dick Wick Hall, Jr. R.U.H.S. Graduation June 13, 1930

Dick said he wanted to be “a famous lawyer,” his flaw was “studying” and his hobby “books.” His classmates predicted that in 10 years he would be the world chess champion and “owner of the Toledo Blade.” And there was a bit of a poet in Dick as well. An entire page of the 1930 Pilot was devoted to “My Harvest,” which he wrote before his mother died. With a lighthearted resignation that would have made his parents proud, Dick Wick Hall, Jr. proclaimed his willingness to accept the arrival of the Reaper. It ends,

Let there be a joyous harvest;
When my time comes, let me laugh.
On my tombstone in the Valley
Please inscribe this epitaph:

“When the reaper came to get me
With his blade and sickle slim,
When he came he found me smiling,
Ready to be garnered in.”

But Dickie was not the least bit domestic and arthritis confined seventy-year-old Rosa Sutton to being an emotional support for her grandchildren. So that left Jane to organize their packing, to be The Caretaker, The Responsible One; it was a role that would be central to her self-image for the rest of her life.

Dick Wick Hall’s brother Ernest had been looking out for their property in Salome since 1927; he would continue to do so. In June, Jane and Dick with their Gram made a final trip to Arizona to ship some of their father’s belongings – including his desk and chair and ”about 5 or six hundred pounds” of “very good” books by freight to Casanova, Virginia. There Rose and Randolph Hicks were adding two bedrooms to third floor of their country retreat for their niece and nephew. During this last visit to Salome, Jane came across this informal snapshot (one of my favorites), probably taken when she was about nine and Dickie about twelve. Here they are, “The Three” as

Daysie Hall with Dick and Jane in Salome circa 1924

Jane would call them after her father died. When the two orphans faced their new life 3000 miles away, their character and resilience would be tested. Jane would find very different material to write about as she made new friends in rural Virginia and New York City. And yet for the rest of her life, the dry, rugged wide-open sand hills and mountains in what was then Yuma County remained part of her “heart and soul;”  she said as much in her “Ode to the Desert.” How she would have loved Arizona’s Centennial Celebrations that are in full force this week!

I had one brief respite
From a city’s blare;
So I left for the wasteland’s blight,
And the torrid glare
Of a desert sun.

A bare six days in that silent heat I spent;
But the lure of the stars, and the gaunt mesquite,
And the pulsing throb
Of a raw life’s beat
All worked their spell,
And I knew what living meant.

The realization brought terrible toll
For I’m caught in the mesh
Of the desert’s grip . . .
Heart and soul.

I have seen black hills
On a flame-red sky,
And stood in the spot
Where echoes die.

I have thrilled to the feel
Of a desert night,
That soothes like a gentle hand
Each stunted tree and sickly bush
In the whole of that fevered land.

At last I have known the warm caress
Of an evening wind and I’ve felt the dawn
Brush past my cheek, and hurry on
To its noonday reek of burning sand, and blistered flesh,
And dust-dry water-holes . . .
Ah, such a brief, brief week.

Well I’m here again,
With the milling throng,
But now my aim is fixed and strong.
All I want is a one-room shack,
Painted by sunset glow . . .
I promised the desert I’d come back,
And some day, I shall go.

 

Many thanks to Therese Martinez and the Archive staff at Redondo Union High School for their help in locating information about Jane Hall and her brother Dick Wick Hall, Jr.

 This is post number 12 in the series. Please use the contact tab at the top of the page for any comments or suggestions. For the entire series so far go to the Blog tab at the top of the page and scroll down to the beginning.  Happy Anniversary Arizona!

 

 

“With you, my heart and soul have flown . . .”

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“An American Paper for the American People – The Great Newspaper of the Great Southwest—The Paper for People Who Think.” The Los Angeles Examiner was bold in its claims and on February 18, 1930, for the Hall family, it was the paper to read. On the front page of Section Two a short article proclaims: “Manhattan Beach Girl, 14, Proving Literary Prodigy.” That may have been enough to inspire another reporter from a feature service to make an appointment with Jane (who was actually 15) the next day. “Desert Humorist’s Daughter Writes, Too,” by Donovan Roberts came out in at least one and possibly several papers. Jane was so excited. She told Mr. Roberts that her goal was to be a novelist, not a humorist. “‘I guess daddy was the only humorous one of the family. And besides, humorists are so glum and work so hard to be funny.’ ” During Roberts’ visit to 1148 Manhattan Avenue, he also spoke to Daysie who explained that she never saw Jane’s work until after it was published. And if the stories were rejected, “‘I don’t see them at all,’ says Mrs. Hall, quite proudly.”

Jane immediately wrote her Aunt Rose that “my picture and biography will be in 100 different papers all over the United States! It’ll probably be in some New York papers so maybe you’ll see it.” She also mailed her a clipping of an Arizona Republican  story (February 23, 1930) called “An Arizona Girl Is on the Way.” Again the reference was to a “literary prodigy on the coast over whom the Los Angeles newspapers are raving and in whom Arizonans must feel a proprietary interest.” And Jane’s happy news continued. Thanks to the generosity of a family friend, she and Dickie had tickets to see “The Love Parade,” starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald in her first role. The musical comedy, director Ernst Lubitsch’s first “talkie,” had its general release in January 1930. Over the next few years all the studios would reorganize to incorporate dialogue into their pictures. In less than a decade Jane Hall would benefit greatly from this revolution in the history of film.

Daysie Hall circa 1927- How she loved hats!.

Throughout March and April of 1930, Jane and Dick had high hopes their mother’s health would improve. Daysie was not up to writing letters, but Jane reported on April 27 that she cheered up every time she heard from Rose – “Things are beginning to look much brighter, I Really think mother is going to make the grade.” In the meantime, Jane – the expert chef – kept their household on a strict budget: “When we spend something, we get something,” she assured her aunt. “I’ll bet Silas Marner would think I was a tight-wad.” Rose wrote again on April 28 to remind Daysie that she thought of her all the time. “Rest as much as possible and you will be surprised how that will help you improve. Remember you have nothing to worry about except getting better. Lots of love my darling, from Rose.”

That spring Rose Hicks took a job at the office of William C. Durant, one of her husband’s clients and a close friend who had founded General Motors. For she and Randolph, along with many of their prosperous contemporaries, including the Durants, had experienced huge losses in the Wall Street crash. Not even the 2.9% of Americans who were invested in the market realized they had entered what would be a multi-year Depression. And so it was with a certain amount of resignation on or about May 11 that Rose read a shocking letter from her frantic niece. Daysie was back at The California Hospital and, just as Jane had feared two years earlier, the all too imaginable had happened.

“Mother is much worse– can hardly turn her head and I suspect that she was delirious part of the day. I went to see her after school. Oh, if only I didn’t have to go to school! I hate it! And she was very sick, Aunt Rose, I don’t know what’s the matter with her. The doctor thinks Cappy is a serious matter but he doesn’t seem to attribute mother’s [latest] illness to that. He doesn’t know. Nothing has been said about an operation as yet and I think it’s a rotten hospital and the doctors are nonentities. Mother is beginning to get awfully discouraged and dissatisfied. (I can’t spell tonight) They’re charging $126 a week (nurses and room and FOR WHAT?) She is ten times as bad as she was when she went, a week ago. . . .”

Should she leave school? Jane wanted to and she felt helpless.” If only they’d let me stay with her at the hospital she would be all right but they won’t and she’s getting worse all the time. Aunt Rose everybody said she’d be better there but she isn’t. What shall we do? If anything happened to mother it would be all off with me but nothing will happen to her will it? I’m also glad you’re going to write every day. Things seem so sort of bleak. Aunt Rose I hate to wire collect any time. If I don’t have the money, I just don’t wire. It seems too cheap to telegraph collect. With all my love, Jane E”

Then Jane added a postscript –“Gram has been really lovely to us.”  Rosa Sutton’s presence was a comfort to Rose who now regretted the long distance that separated her from her West Coast family more than ever. On May 12, 1930, Rose sent a telegram to her sister: DARLING BE PEACEFUL AM STANDING BY WILL KEEP CHILDREN TOGETHER LOVE ROSE. But it may have been too late. There is no record of whether or not Daysie saw this message on the day she died.

Rose immediately wired the funds for a cemetery plot and sent flowers for Daysie’s grave.  She had now lost a brother and a sister and Rosa Sutton would bury a second adult child, this time at the bottom of a gentle slope at Inglewood Park.

A week later, on May 20, Daysie’s 48th birthday, both Rose and Jane felt her presence. Jane revealed her despair to her aunt with a reference from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—a speech by Cassius [Act IV, iii]: “I’d like to ‘weep my spirit from mine eyes’ if only I could! Don’t worry about me crying too much. I’d give anything if only I could cry and cry and cry. Instead I just hurt inside. Oh well, maybe it’s a good thing. Mother always said to ‘take it on the chin’ for the sake of those around me, and I hope that’s what I’m doing.” She and Dick wanted to place the statue of an angel on their mother’s grave but Rose may have thought it was too expensive. At least the simple headstone spelled “Daysie” the way she liked it.

As she had done for her father, Jane soon created her own eulogy.

“Dirge –To Mother.”

We swore that death

Would never part us,

But it has.

Death has come between us

Like a slim, cold flame . . .

And you are gone.

Am I the same?

The scythe which cut you down

Took two instead of one,

For two hearts may lie

In a single grave

If those two hearts beat as one.

The life that was you has faded away,

And the hope that was I is gone.

Will that life ever come back,

And that hope be renewed,

In the glow of some distant dawn?

What is the use of going on?

Of living, as they say,

When already a part of me is dead,

And moldering day by day?

I have lost, with you, a sunset’s light,

And the warm, sweet bliss of a desert night . . .

I have lost the luster of crystal joy,

And the sheen of a crested wave.

What is there ahead, when all these are behind,

Deep tucked in your lonely grave?

With you, my heart and soul have flown,

And that park of ambition’s pride

Which means life itself; there is nothing left,

But the mourn of an ebbing tide.

 

This post is Number 11 in a series. Jane’s adventures have barely begun. For an easy way to follow the story from the beginning, go the Blog Tab at the top of the home page, click “Salome to Hollywood” and you will have all the posts on this topic, starting with the most recent. If you are new to the site be sure to read Post No. 1 (the featured post) on the home page first.