“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, April, 1923, throughout central London

Last October, a group of Conservative party Members of Parliament held a meeting at the private 91-year-old Carlton Club and took the decision that their party, the Tories, should withdraw from the coalition supporting the Liberal party government of David Lloyd George, 60, thereby triggering a general election. They won.

Carlton Club

That national vote brought into power their own current Tory Prime Minister, Bonar Law, 64. Now, some of the new backbench Tory members who were elected last fall have started a private dining club which meets regularly, calling it the 1922 Committee. The backbenchers hope this will give them more of a voice with senior members of the Conservative party.

In the House of Commons, MPs have voted to defeat a bill that would have introduced American-style Prohibition to the United Kingdom by a 236 to 14 vote. The bill had been proposed by Parliament’s only Scottish Prohibition Party member, newly elected MP for Dundee, Edwin “Neddy” Scrymgeour, 56.

Neddy Scrymgeour

*****

Just a few blocks away in Westminster Abbey, preparations are proceeding apace for the royal wedding of Prince Albert, Duke of York, 27, to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, 22, not a princess! But from a good family.

The couple’s wedding rings are made from 22 carat Welsh gold. The bride, attended by eight bridesmaids, will be wearing a dress modelled on an Italian medieval gown with two trains, one falling from the hips and one from the shoulders, with a ring of leaves instead of a tiara securing her veil.

The groom will be wearing his Royal Air Force full dress uniform.

Wedding party of the Duke and Duchess of York

After a wedding breakfast at Buckingham Palace, the couple will honeymoon in Surrey, followed by a trip to Scotland.

Lady Elizabeth had turned down Bertie’s proposals twice before giving in earlier this year. She is not looking forward to living in the fishbowl that royal life demands. But at least her husband is second in line for the throne; his brother Edward, Prince of Wales, 28, is the one who will have to be king.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, inaugurated last fall, wanted to record and air the wedding on the radio, but the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, just turned 75, refused to allow it because of concerns that men might listen to the broadcast in pubs. And how would that look?

*****

About a mile up the Thames, at the Strand Theatre in the West End, the play Anna Christie has premiered to great acclaim. The first play by Irish-American Eugene O’Neill, 34, to be performed in London, the drama and its original Broadway cast received thunderous ovations—even after the first act!

Original cast of Anna Christie

*****

Mountaineer George Mallory, 36, is disappointed. He has received word that the planned expedition to climb Mount Everest has been cancelled.

Mallory was chosen to be part of this team after the partial success they had last year; one team member topped the previous record by going past 8,000 meters (just over 27,000 feet).

But the Common Everest Committee, which organizes these trips, had invested much of its funds in the British-run Alliance Bank of Simla, based and loosely regulated in India, which has just gone bankrupt.

Mallory realizes he will have to spend at least another year as a lecturer for the Extramural Studies Department of Cambridge University to support his wife and three children. He just hopes that the Committee can get it together to mount an expedition next year. Mallory is itching to go again.

Last year’s British Mount Everest Expedition team

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I will be talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, late February, 1923, East 40th Street, New York City, New York

Henry R. Luce, 24, knows how this day is going to pan out.

Henry R. Luce

Luce and his partner, fellow Yale alum Briton Hadden, just turned 25, have been planning their magazine for well over a year. Now they are coming down to the deadline to start the presses so the new magazine, Time, will appear on newsstands with a March 3^rd cover date.

Serious discussions hadn’t started until Hadden, then learning the publishing ropes from editor Harold Bayard Swope, 41, at the New York World, contacted his old buddy from the Yale Daily News, Luce, who had recently been dumped by the Chicago Daily News. He suggested they both go to work for the Baltimore News.

Briton Hadden

In late night talks they began brainstorming the concept of a weekly magazine called Facts which would condense the important news of the day for busy businessmen. Eventually, they came up with the name Time, and the slogan, “Take Time—It’s Brief.” Hadden thought it should be fun as well as informative, including news, celebrities, politics, culture and sport.

Funded by $100,000 raised from other Yale alumni, and working out of this abandoned brewery, Hadden, as editor, is overseeing the process he and Luce learned in their short publishing careers:  Get the flats together. Race over to the printer at 36^th Street and 11^th Avenue. Stay up all night with the staff writing copy to fill holes and cutting copy to make columns fit. Then write captions for the three-inch square fuzzy photos.

Within the 32 pages—including the cover featuring retiring congressman and former Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives Joseph G. Cannon, 86—were brief pieces on:

• The Kansas legislature considering a bill to make smoking illegal;
• The wife of the Pennsylvania governor beseeching Congress to put women in charge of enforcing Prohibition, which cost the country $15 million last year;
• Charges by muckraker Upton Sinclair, 44, that department stores have too strong an influence over newspapers because of their heavy advertising spends;
• Influential British art critic Clive Bell, 41, declaring that cubism is dead;
• A review of Black Oxen, the new novel by Gertrude Atherton, 65, which categorizes the writers who lunch regularly at the midtown Algonquin Hotel as “Sophisticates”; and
• A review of the hit Broadway play, Merton of the Movies, by two of those Sophisticates, Marc Connelly, 32, and George S Kaufman, 33, calling it a “skillful dramatization” of the original novel.

Newsstand price is 15 cents.

First issue of Time magazine

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through III, covering 1920 through 1922 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This month I am talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York City in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, after Easter, 1922, Hertford College, Oxford; and Trinity College, Cambridge

Evelyn Waugh, 19, is absolutely over the moon to be back on campus at Oxford.

Waugh has just been at home in Hampstead, London, with his father for Easter vacation. He thought he’d go mad with the boredom.

Evelyn Waugh

Having won a scholarship late last year, Evelyn entered Hertford College in January. Starting halfway through the academic year put him somewhat at a disadvantage, as all the other first-years have been making friends since their arrival last September.

Despite this awkward timing, Waugh has been fitting into campus life quite well. He smokes a pipe; he rides a bike. He is writing for both college magazines, Cherwell and Isis, and has given his maiden speech at the Oxford Union. He chose to oppose the motion,

This House would welcome Prohibition.”

However, one of the other disadvantages of his late start was that all the good rooms had been taken and Evelyn is left with a tiny, dark, ground floor chamber next to the buttery.

This location makes it a natural stopover for the campus drunks, day and night. The other evening, an inebriated member of the Bullingdon club vomited into Waugh’s window.

*****

About 90 miles northeast, at Trinity College, Cambridge, Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov, about to turn 23, is returning to campus for his final term. He is not in good spirits. Spring always makes him think of past years spent with his family in the Russian countryside, before they were forced by the Bolshevik Revolution to go into exile.

Vladimir Nabokov

And less than a month ago, his father, V. D. Nabokov, 52, had been assassinated by two Russian monarchists at a political conference in Berlin. They were aiming at another politician; Vlad’s Dad tried to shield him and was shot twice.

Despite his melancholy, Vlad is determined to pass his final exams and graduate in June. He is going to throw himself into studying and not allow any diversions.

However, one of his fellow Russian students has just come into his room with a novel he has discovered, Ulysses, and he is reading out incredible passages from some raunchy woman’s soliloquy.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, Fall, 1921, Belleville, outside of Paris

From his high perch atop the step ladder, American ex-pat Gerald Murphy, 33, can get a better view of the huge canvas he is working on, refurbishing the sets for the Ballets Russes.

Serge Diaghilev, 49, the founder and director of the ballet company, has asked Gerald, his wife Sara, just turned 38, and some other young students who are studying painting to travel out here daily to his atelier to work on restoring the sets designed for his Ballet by local artists. Such as George Braque, 39. Andre Derain, 41. Pablo Picasso, 40.

Serge Diaghilev

The Murphys jumped at the chance. Not only have they had the opportunity to meet some of the top cubist painters of the time, they get to hang out with the crowd around the Ballets Russes. Gerald is thrilled that they are not only allowed to watch rehearsals, they are expected to. And to discuss their opinions of the work.

These artists are not like the ones the Murphys have known before in America. Gerald sees Picasso as “a dark, powerful physical presence,” like a bull in a Goya painting. And the Spaniard seems particularly interested in Sara.

Their life in Paris is so much different—so much better—than what they left behind in America when they boarded the SS Cedric for Southampton, England, in June.

Gerald has taken a leave of absence from the landscape architecture course he was enrolled in at Harvard. They packed up the kids—Honoria, 3 ½; Baoth, 2; and Patrick, 8 months—and the nanny and spent some time in England visiting the stately homes that Sara had known when she lived there as a child.

Didn’t like it. Really hot summer and the gardens were all parched and brown.

So they decided to go to Paris for a bit and then head home.

But when the Murphy family arrived here in early September, their American friends convinced them to stay. Everyone’s coming to Paris.

After they had been in their furnished apartment at 2 rue Greuze for about a month, Gerald was stopped in his tracks by a display in the window of an art gallery:  Cubist paintings, like the ones he had seen in the Armory Show in New York eight years ago, by some of the same artists—Braque, Derain, Picasso.

Gerald told Sara,

That’s the kind of painting that I would like to do.”

He and Sara found a recently arrived Russian cubist/futurist, Natalia Goncharova, 40, who teaches painting in her studio on the rue de Seine in the Left Bank, and they have been taking lessons from her every day. Goncharova only allows abstract painting, nothing representational. Or, as Sara says,

No apple on a dish.”

Natalia Goncharova

Goncharova has created set designs for Diaghilev, so she told the Russian impresario about her eager American students and he immediately sensed an opportunity for free labor, getting his sets fixed up for the coming spring season.

The Murphys don’t mind volunteering their services. They have Sara’s family income of about $7,000 a year, and the franc is going for less than 20 cents on the dollar.

And in France, they can have cocktails with dinner. No Prohibition.

Set and costume designs by Picasso for the Ballets Russes

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and in print and e-book formats on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

At the end of February I will be talking about the Publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 years ago, July 2, 1921, Boyle’s Thirty Acres, Jersey City, New Jersey; and Tony Soma’s, West 49th Street, New York City, New York

Boxing promoter George “Tex” Rickard, 51, knew that bringing his client, world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, 26, into the ring to defend his title against world light heavyweight champion Georges Carpentier, 27, would draw a big crowd.

Tex Rickard

So big, in fact, that, rather than hold the bout in his usual venue, Madison Square Garden, Rickard has built this new facility, Boyle’s Thirty Acres, across the river in Jersey City, New Jersey, to hold 90,000. Besides, he’s been having a bit of trouble recently with the New York State Boxing Commission and Tammany Hall.

Dempsey has an almost 20-pound weight advantage over the Frenchman. But Rickard has spun the story for the newspapers so that this is seen as a fight between the handsome French war hero, Carpentier, and the American draft dodger [in reality, Dempsey received an exemption for family reasons] who recently divorced his wife. As a result, Tex has more women buying tickets for a boxing match than ever before.

Program from Dempsey Carpentier fight

The winner gets $300,000. The loser, $200,000.

Rickard is hoping that this will be the first million-dollar gate in boxing history. It is the first fight to be sanctioned by the newly organized National Boxing Association. And the first sporting event to be broadcast live in more than 60 cities across the country.

*****

In a Midtown brownstone on West 49^th Street, past an iron grille and a locked wooden door with a peephole in it, a group of revellers are drinking illegal booze out of big white coffee cups at tables covered with red checkered cloths.

Tony Soma’s is the speakeasy of choice for the Manhattan writers and editors who lunch regularly a few blocks away at the Algonquin Hotel.

Dorothy Parker, 27, Robert Benchley, 31, and Robert Sherwood, 25, met when they worked together on Vanity Fair magazine. But since a bit of a tiff with management at the beginning of last year, Dottie has been free-lancing, and Benchley and Sherwood are editing the humor magazine, Life.

On this Saturday of a long Fourth of July weekend, they are joined by friends just returned from their first holiday in Europe, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, 24, and his pregnant wife, Zelda, 20.

In the New York Evening World, Parker and Benchley’s friend, magazine illustrator Neysa McMein, 33, has sketched Carpentier, calling him “The Pride of Paris,” commenting that Michelangelo “would have fainted for joy with the beauty of his profile.”

Tonight they are all here to listen to the radio broadcast of the “Fight of the Century.” As they always do, Benchley’s friends are urging the teetotaler to at least try some alcohol. How can he be so against something that he’s never tried? Benchley has taken the pledge to not drink, and even voted for Prohibition.

But tonight, he figures, What the hey. He orders an Orange Blossom.

Benchley takes a few sips. He turns to Parker and says,

This place should be closed down by the police.”

Then he orders another.

By the end of the evening, Dempsey has defeated Carpentier in the fourth round. And Orange Blossoms have defeated Robert Benchley.

Recipe for an Orange Blossom:

1 ounce gin

1 ounce fresh orange juice

1 teaspoon powdered sugar

Orange peel

Shake gin, orange juice, and sugar over ice. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with flamed orange peel.

This recipe from the Robert Benchley Society appears in Under the Table:  A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick [Guilford, CT:  Lyons Press, 2013]

Orange Blossom cocktail

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volume I covering 1920 is available in print and e-book format on Amazon. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

This summer I am talking about The Literary 1920s in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at the University of Pittsburgh. In the fall I will be talking about Writers’ Salons in Dublin and London before the Great War in the Osher program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, July 6, 1920, Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, California

Almost over. Thank God.

The endless Democratic National Convention is finally coming to a close. 9 days. 14 candidates. 44 ballots.

Guest pass to the 1920 Democratic Convention

H. L. Mencken, 39, reporting for the Baltimore Sun, who had hated the smelly Chicago Coliseum where the Republicans had held their convention last month, rhapsodizes about the Democrats’ choice of venue, the Civic Auditorium:

So spacious, so clean, so luxurious in its comforts and so beautiful in its decorations, that the assembled politicos felt like sailors turned loose in the most gorgeous bordellos of Paris.”

Novelist, playwright and former full-time journalist Edna Ferber, 34 (but she only admits to 31), on special assignment for United Press, is as unimpressed with the Democratic delegates as she had been with those from the other party:

It was, in its way, almost as saddening a sight as the Republican Convention had been…Once the opening prayer had piously died on the air, there broke out from two to a half dozen actual fist fights on the floor of the assemblage—battles that raged up and down the aisles until guards separated the contestants. The meeting droned on. Nothing seemed to be accomplished.”

The New York Tribune’s Heywood Broun, 31, however, gave the edge to the Republicans:

They were able at Chicago to say nothing in just about one-tenth the number of words which the Democrats needed to say the same thing.”

Every time a woman delegate was given the floor to nominate or second a candidate, the band played the ragtime hit, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.”

Sheet music

By yesterday, everyone was so frustrated at the group’s inability to decide on a candidate, the Missouri delegation cast a .50 vote for sportswriter Ring Lardner, 35, whose syndicated columns have been delighting the country. He says he will run on the same platform he used to not be elected mayor of Chicago:

More Beer—Less Work.”

Ring Lardner

Finally, at 1:43 am today, on the 44^th ballot, Ohio Governor James M. Cox, 50, received enough votes to secure the nomination. When he is informed of this by the Associated Press telegraph wire three hours later in his Dayton office, he is stunned.

Now there is the matter of the running mate. Who to nominate for vice president?

Cox favors the new, young star of the show, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and fifth cousin of the late Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 38. As Cox says,

His name is good, he’s right geographically, and he is anti-Tammany [Hall].”

And FDR has been running around the convention making friends, wooing the rest of his New York state delegation by turning his rooms on the battleship New York into a Prohibition-violating reception.

That’s good enough. The convention nominates Roosevelt by acclimation. Exhausted acclimation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and James M. Cox

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

My presentation, “Such Friends”:  Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table [Heywood Broun was a member] is available to view on the website of PICT Classic Theatre. The program begins at the 11 minute mark, and my presentation at 16 minutes.

This fall I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, June 28, 1920, Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, California

For the opening of the Democratic National Convention, Prohibition appears to have been repealed. Each delegate is welcomed upon arrival in San Francisco by an attractive young woman proffering a bottle of illegal alcohol, courtesy of the mayor.

The front runner for the presidential nomination, at 2 to 1 odds, is Ohio Governor James. M. Cox, 50, who is still dodging questions about his divorce of nine years ago—just to clarify, he had been charged with cruelty, not infidelity.

Incumbent President Woodrow Wilson, 63, almost on his deathbed in Washington, DC, and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, 60, whose political career is on its deathbed after three unsuccessful runs for high office, are each still unrealistically hopeful of getting the nomination.

Today, at the opening ceremony, as the New York Tribune’s Heywood Broun, 31, reports:

A huge American flag fluttered from the ceiling…The flag was cheered. By and by the flag was raised and there nestling behind it was a large picture of President Wilson. It was not a very good picture, rather red faced and staring and frightened, but it served as a symbol of the man in the White House, and the cheering burst out, or if it didn’t burst at any rate, it began…[The 21-minute pro-Wilson ovation was not] animated by sincerity.”

The 1920 Democratic National Convention

In his keynote address, Democrat National Committee Chairman, twice-divorced Homer Cummings, 50, eulogizes Wilson and compares his tribulations to those of Christ on the cross. In Broun’s opinion,

It did not seem a great speech…although there were elements of excellence in the first hour and a half.”

Heywood Broun

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

This fall I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, March 3, 1920, Casino Club, Chicago, Illinois

About six weeks in to his third American lecture tour, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 54, is in Chicago, at a banquet given in his honor by Poetry:  A Magazine of Verse, and its founder-editor, Harriet Monroe, 59.

Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune interviewed him over the phone when the reporter woke him in his hotel room after midnight. Yeats was quoted as saying,

I like Chicago, but Prohibition’s hell, isn’t it?”

The Yeatses in the Chicago Tribune

Monroe had come right over to his room with

a flagon of…surcease for your sorrow…I read in the Tribune this morning of your unpreparedness.”

Harriet Monroe

Yeats’ talk at the banquet on “Poetic Drama” goes well. Arguing for smaller theatre companies and more intimate venues, he tells the crowd,

I am trying to create a form of poetical drama played by one company, all of whom could ride in one taxicab and carry their stage properties on the roof.”

Afterwards, back at the Auditorium Hotel, a group of reporters wake Yeats up and bring him down to their party in one of the private dining rooms. Willie perks up as soon as they offer him a glass of whiskey. And a second. And a third. His wife, Georgie, 27, soon shows up to drag him back to bed. On his way out, Yeats proclaims to the group,

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons before and after the Great War in Ireland, England, France and America in the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning program.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

 

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, February 16, 1920, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

One month after the Volstead Act took effect, prohibiting the sale and distribution of alcohol throughout the country, the wets’ predictions of increased crime are coming true.

Pittsburgh is described in a government report, as

wringing wet…Pennsylvania is very wet and only the price is needed by those who want whiskey and plenty of it.”

Pittsburgh in 1920

Almost three hundred doctors in the area have legal prescription pads to write their patients medicinal whiskey orders.

A popular mixture of creosote, denatured wood alcohol, and caramel coloring is known as Pittsburgh Scotch.

The posh William Penn Hotel in downtown opens a speakeasy under the lobby with a secret escape route to Oliver Avenue in case of a raid, while the Dry Federation of Pennsylvania holds meetings upstairs. The nearby Nixon Theatre also has a speakeasy called Flying Squadron, where jazz singer Helen Morgan, 20, performs on top of the piano.

The Nixon Theatre

The US attorney John D. Meyer tells the Pittsburgh Press,

If necessary, I will put a spy on every doorstep in Pittsburgh.”

In the South Side flats section of the city, state representative Thomas J. Gallagher, 36, and his wife Flossie Cleis Gallagher, 35, welcome their seventh child, Virginia Mary Gallagher, my mother.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

In 2020 I will be talking about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and others in both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University’s Osher Lifelong Learning programs.

Manager as Muse, about Perkins and his writers, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

 

 

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, January 30, 1920, New York City

Irish poet William Butler Yeats, 54, and his wife Georgie, 27, are enjoying the first few days of his American lecture tour. They have left their 11-month old daughter, Annie, back in Dublin with his sisters, and are looking forward to the freedom of traipsing around the United States for the next four months.

Although it is just sinking in that Prohibition started a couple of weeks ago, and they can’t get a drink in this town. Or any town.

Georgie has met her father-in-law, the painter John Butler Yeats, 80, for the first time, and finds him charming. He’s quite enamored of his new daughter-in-law as well, writing to Willie’s sister back in Ireland that Georgie has

no vast depths…[but] endless kindness and sympathy and I fancy a lot of practical talent.”

Chalk drawing of John Butler Yeats

Tonight the Yeatses are probably going to attend the Metropolitan Opera’s Oberon or The Elf King’s Oath, which their friend, Irish-American art collector, John Quinn, 49, has recommended. They are excited about seeing the performance by the fantastic Rosa Ponselle, just turned 23, one of the Met’s top young stars.

Rosa Ponselle

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

In 2020 I will be talking about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and others in both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University’s Osher Lifelong Learning programs.

Manager as Muse, about Perkins and his writers, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.