Author Archives: Lynn Niedermeier

A Sober Agreement

A Contract for Sobriety?

A Contract for Sobriety?

“He lived to a good old age, three score and ten.  He was an honest man and a good citizen.  May the sod rest lightly upon him.”  So was the blessing of an old friend on hearing of the death of James William “Gee” Pool in 1907.

A member of one of the oldest families of Metcalfe (formerly Barren) County, Kentucky, Gee wore several hats during his life, one of them being, as we have seen, that of a hotel-keeper in Horse Cave.  In addition to having a wide circle of lady friends (one of whom referred to her rivals as his “sugar plums”), in his youth Gee appears to have enjoyed raising a glass or two with his cousin and contemporary, John I. Pool.

Feigning regret at such indulgence (and possibly under the influence at the time), the two entered into an agreement.  “It is highly necessary that we should curtail the use of ardent spirits,” read their contract.  Therefore, under penalty of one gallon of “good rye whisky,” they covenanted “not to get drunk but three times in the next twelve months,” said times being July 4, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.

But there was a mile-wide loophole in the contract.  Given the obvious benefit of spirits to “our health, morals & good name,” the cousins also agreed to “get gentlemanly tight on all Election days, horse races, shows, Temperance celebrations and on all irreligious and religious occasions”. . . and, for good measure, on January 8, February 19 and March 4, dates having a significance known only to these two drinking buddies.

Gee and John Pool’s “contract” is part of the Howard and Anne Doll Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on A Sober Agreement

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

A Historic “Hotel Impossible”?

Albert Shirley's hotels

Albert Shirley’s hotels

After the Civil War, the Pool and Shirley families of Metcalfe County, Kentucky added hotel-keeping to their many commercial ventures.  Albert H. Shirley (1842-1895) operated the Garnett House in Richmond, Kentucky, and later the Hotel Shirley in Glasgow.  In 1876, when his cousin James W. Pool (known as “Gee”) and his father William C. Pool leased a hotel property in Hart County, Albert drew on his own experience to offer advice to this new family enterprise.

As the risk of being “officious,” Albert wrote Gee, he had thought “a great deal” about the business and believed it would be a success if managed properly.  His greatest concern, however, was that his cousin would be too soft-hearted: “Your entire patronage almost will be acquaintances and friends, . . . & I have feared you would pass too many without charging them any bill.”  Only friends paying a “special visit” should expect a complimentary stay; the rest, Albert believed, should not look for such indulgences and ought to be charged the same as any other business.

Albert had another suggestion: When a drummer (that is, a traveling salesman) stopped in, he should get “the very best room.”  Able to spread the word quickly about a bad experience, these customers were the equivalent of a hotels.com review.  “I have often heard your predecessor, Mr. Biggerstaff,” wrote Albert of the hotel’s previous proprietor, “abused for his dirty rooms and especially mean beds.”  Albert also urged his cousin to drive a hard bargain with food suppliers, for it was at the dining table that he could make a good profit from his hungry guests.

Finally, in what sounded like the pilot for a 19th-century reality show, Albert told Gee of his wish to make an on-site visit and “be with you for about half a day, I could then say a good many things to you that would be of service to you.”

Albert Shirley’s letter is part of the Howard and Anne Doll Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives unit of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For more of our family collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

 

Comments Off on A Historic “Hotel Impossible”?

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Land of Contrasts

Iceland 5 krona banknote (Frank Chelf Collection)

Iceland 5 krona banknote (Frank Chelf Collection)

June 17 marks the official anniversary of the 1944 founding of Iceland as a republic independent of Denmark.  Two Kentuckians had the opportunity to experience this nation of “extreme contrasts” (to quote its web site) both before and after its independence, and their impressions are recorded in the collections of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

In January 1942, Hopkins County native Jim Wooton, then serving in the U.S. Army, was ordered to Iceland to help staff a transfer station for troops and equipment being sent to England.  He and 1,200 other men experienced a rough, late-winter crossing in a 300-foot United Fruit Company “banana boat,” but arrived in Reykjavik unmolested by German U-boats.  Hunkered down with his fellow soldiers in reinforced Quonset huts, Wooton vividly recalled the howling winds that gusted as high as 120 miles per hour.  He returned from his 9-month tour of duty understanding the reason for the island nation’s high literacy rate: “everyone stays home and reads.”

In August 1977, Bowling Green’s Clara Hines, the widow of cake mix magnate Duncan Hines, visited Iceland as part of a tour of several Nordic countries.  Her experience, needless to say, was starkly different from Wooton’s.  The intrepid 73-year-old hopscotched around the island by bus and small plane, viewing lakes, forests, lava formations, natural hot springs and waterfalls as well as picturesque villages.  The weather was warm and sunny most of the time–she only found the wind “very cold” on the walk from her hotel to the airport.  She spent her krona on a souvenir doll and a figure of the god Thor fashioned from lava, and pronounced herself tired but exhilarated by the sights in this “fantastic country.”

Click on the links to access finding aids for Jim Wooton’s and Clara Hines’s impressions of Iceland.  For more accounts of travels by Kentuckians, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on Land of Contrasts

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Looking for a Candidate

Alben W. Barkley (Lincoln, Ill. Evening Courier)

Alben W. Barkley (Lincoln, Ill. Evening Courier)

It was 1952, and his sinking popularity had convinced President Harry S. Truman not to run for reelection.  But Truman disliked and distrusted the front-runner for his party’s nomination, Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and began conspiring with other party leaders to find a more acceptable candidate.  Truman backed Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, but Stevenson hemmed and hawed about jumping into the race.  Frustrated, Truman turned to his own vice-president, Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky.

Among those enlisted by Truman to promote Barkley at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was Charles W. Sawyer, a delegate-at-large from Ohio.  When Sawyer met with him, Barkley and his wife Jane had just hiked a mile from the railroad station to their hotel in order to demonstrate the 74-year-old’s robust health.  Sawyer urged Barkley not to be shy about his desire for the nomination and to court as much publicity as possible, especially with his attractive wife by his side.

It worked, and soon Barkley was garnering attention as a serious candidate.  Unfortunately, his rivals, Senator Kefauver and diplomat W. Averell Harriman, convinced two prominent union leaders to pronounce Barkley too old for the nomination.  Barkley, a strong labor supporter, was devastated by the betrayal, and despite Sawyer’s urging to stand and fight, prepared to withdraw.

The party, nevertheless, offered Barkley a chance to speak at the convention.  He was tempted to lace his remarks with bitterness, but Sawyer discouraged him.  Barkley followed the advice, charming the convention with a generous speech and even reviving hopes that he could win the nomination.  But it was too late.  Adlai Stevenson had finally agreed to stand as the party’s nominee, only to suffer defeat in the general election at the hands of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Charles Sawyer’s account of his efforts on behalf of Vice-President Barkley at the 1952 Democratic Convention are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more political collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on Looking for a Candidate

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

“They are too many”

Paris at peace; Verdun, 1918

Paris at peace; Verdun, 1918

It was originally called Decoration Day, a time to place flowers on the graves of the war dead.  Now, as Memorial Day, it also marks a long weekend, store sales, and the beginning of summer, and the public is often indifferent to the  solemnity of the occasion.

For James Knox Polk Lambert, its meaning was fresh.  In Paris on May 30, 1919–Decoration Day–the Kentucky native was on duty with the YMCA, ministering to soldiers awaiting repatriation after World War I.  “Delightful weather,” he observed in his diary, “and charming scenes–bright sunshine, a clear sky, soft atmosphere, rich blooming flowers, sweet singing birds and throngs of well dressed people from all parts of the world.”

But the contrast between that lovely spring day, and the past year spent touring a country shattered by war, immediately clouded his thoughts.  Wrenched back to all that he had seen during his time overseas, he continued:

It is not possible to decorate with flowers all the graves of this war’s dead.  They are too many, too widely scattered; in France, Belgium, Italy; in the Balkans, the Gallipoli peninsula, Mesopotamia; in Russia and the Far East; in unmarked graves and in the fathomless ocean, but wherever they are, sleeping in great cemeteries or still in lonely graves hard by their rendezvous with death, they are not forgotten.

James Lambert’s diary is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other war collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on “They are too many”

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Upper and Lower Worlds

Paris; Mammoth Cave cottages

Paris; Mammoth Cave cottages

A recent donation to the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections widens our perspective on the brief life of Oliver Hazard Perry Anderson, a Frankfort, Kentucky native and successful merchant.

In July 1841, Anderson arrived in southern France after a lengthy sea voyage from parts unknown.  In a letter to his sister Penelope, he described in detail the Straits of Gibraltar, whale sightings, and his landing at the ancient city of Marseilles, followed by a 4-day ride to Paris.  Anderson then took Penelope on an epistolary tour of the palaces, churches and historical monuments of this “magnificent city,” but then claimed, surprisingly, that “I cannot see Paris, I am not well enough” and expressed an intense anxiety to continue on his way home.  The reason: Anderson was dogged by a debilitating tubercular cough, and his travels in search of a remedial climate had given him only occasional relief.

Anderson’s time in the City of Light contrasted remarkably with his experience 15 months later, when he became, literally, a cave dweller.  In the winter of 1842-43, he resided with a handful of other tuberculosis patients in stone cottages inside Mammoth Cave in hopes that the pure, cool air would help his lungs.  Dr. John Croghan, who specialized in the disease and also happened to own the Cave, had constructed the underground sanatorium as an experimental treatment center.

As shown, however, in letters already in our collection dated in December 1842 and January 1843, Anderson found any improvement in his condition to be little more than a mirage.  The darkness and dampness of the Cave and the constant smoke from cooking stoves convinced him, when he finally emerged, that “I would be better out than in.”  Whether in the “upper world” or below it, he struggled with alternating periods of strength and good appetite, then fatigue, cold symptoms, and always, the cough.  He finally succumbed to the disease in 1845 at the age of 32.

Click on the links to access finding aids for Anderson’s letters from Paris and Mammoth Cave.  For more of our collections about Mammoth Cave, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on Upper and Lower Worlds

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Elaine “Penny” Harrison

Elaine "Penny" Harrison, 1924-2016

Elaine “Penny” Harrison, 1924-2016

WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections lost a valued former colleague with the May 6, 2016 death of Elaine “Penny” Harrison.

According to her family, it was while watching a movie that the young Elaine Maher and two childhood friends decided to assume the names of the film’s three heroines.  Thus was born Elaine’s lifelong nickname, “Penny.”

A Connecticut native, Penny met WKU alumnus Lowell H. Harrison while working at New York University.  After they married in 1948, she followed him to London on his Fulbright Scholarship, then to Texas, where Dr. Harrison taught at West Texas State University and Penny earned a master’s degree in history.  In 1967, Dr. Harrison returned to Bowling Green to teach at his alma mater and Penny joined the Kentucky Library (now part of the Department of Library Special Collections), where she served as manuscripts librarian until her retirement in 1986.

While at WKU, Penny earned a master’s degree in library science, completed special studies in archives at the University of Wisconsin, and developed a manual for processing manuscript collections at the Kentucky Library.  The first treasurer and archivist for the Kentucky Council on Archives, she was honored with a KCA fellowship in 1987 to recognize her outstanding contributions to the profession.  Special Collections Librarian Sue Lynn McDaniel says that Penny also enjoyed mentoring students in her field.  In fact, McDaniel recalls, “she gave me the career/education advice that allowed me to become her successor as Manuscripts Librarian at WKU.”

Penny and Lowell Harrison (who died in 2011) also gave generously to WKU and the Kentucky Library.  Acknowledging their financial support for collection development, then-Special Collections Department Head Riley Handy told them simply: “We have no better friends than you.”

Comments Off on Elaine “Penny” Harrison

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives, People

General Pershing’s Teeth

After graduation from the Louisville College of Dentistry, Edward Wallace Barr (1887-1962) joined his father’s practice in his home town of Bowling Green, Kentucky.  When the U.S. entered World War I, however, Barr was commissioned a lieutenant in the Army Dental Corps and sent to France.  As a member of the Sixth Heavy Artillery, he was considered the first dentist to “go into the trenches,” but in November 1917 was put in charge of the dental offices at the general headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces in Chaumont, France.  There, his patients included Commanding General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing.

E. Wallace Barr's Army ID

E. Wallace Barr’s Army ID

As his appointment book showed, Dr. Barr treated many servicemen until his discharge early in 1919, but perhaps it was only General Pershing who merited a discussion between Barr and Pershing’s former dentist, Colonel Ross T. Oliver of the Chief Surgeon’s Office.  “I am glad you found that upper bridge in good condition,” he wrote Barr.  As to the gum disease affecting the General’s lower molars, “that condition has existed for a number of years.”  His recall of one particularly troublesome tooth that had “such a loss of substance that we could easily run an instrument through the bifurcation” suggested, nevertheless, that Pershing could look forward to many more happy hours in the dentist’s chair.

Records and correspondence relating to E. Wallace Barr’s service in the U.S. Army Dental Corps are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections about medical professionals, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on General Pershing’s Teeth

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

“A great deal to answer for”

Letter to Hitler from Fort Knox, Kentucky

Letter to Hitler from Fort Knox, Kentucky

Early in the morning of April 29, 1945, Adolf Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun.  The next day, with Soviet troops only blocks away from his bunker at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, he and his bride committed suicide.

Among the millions who received the news without a flicker of mourning was Martha (Woods) Potter.  The 76-year-old lifelong resident of Bowling Green had followed Hitler’s rise to power with outrage.  “Isn’t Hitler the last word in audacity or is it Mussolini?” she asked as early as March 1936.  “That pair could come over here and take America away from us if they took a notion.”  In September 1938, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated with the Nazi leader over the fate of Czechoslovakia, she observed to her daughter that “Hitler will have a great deal to answer for if he lets the world go to war.”  After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, she understood the Fuhrer’s grip on his people, declaring “We all hate Hitler and blame him instead of the Germans.”  In June 1940, with France about to fall and England in the crosshairs, Martha was in favor of America sending the British “all the armaments they want,” and deplored Congressional reluctance to do so.  “They are all afraid of what Hitler will think,” she complained.  “Who cares what the Hun thinks?  He needs a rope around his neck and while they are tying they might get Mussolini’s neck caught in the same noose.”  At news of the Fuhrer’s ignominious death, Martha was triumphant.  “Now if we can give Hitler’s dead body a few kicks it will be to suit me,” she wrote her children.

Martha’s animosity was nothing, however, compared to that of an unknown soldier at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  In “A Letter to Hitler,” he laid out in explicit verse the indignities awaiting the dictator–specifically, the fate of certain of his body parts and the pristine splendor of his “palace”–once American GIs caught up with him.

Click on the links for finding aids to these letters, part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on “A great deal to answer for”

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

The power of a ‘trusty friend’

Part of John Denny's power of attorney

Part of John Denny’s power of attorney

When six of his slaves were spirited away from his Mercer County, Kentucky plantation in 1824, John Denny (1750-1834) gave his “trusty friend” John Guthrie power of attorney to track down, regain possession of the fugitives, and “dispose of them in whatever way he may think proper.”  This grant of agency is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

According to the power of attorney, the slaves were stolen by James Hall Denny, John’s own 21-year-old son, and James’s brother-in-law Asher Labertew.  The younger Denny had become strongly opposed to slavery and, perhaps in defiance of his father, may have tried to escort the slaves to freedom in Indiana, where both he and Labertew settled soon after.

A testament to this family drama, the power of attorney was also evidence of the curious intimacy between slaveholders and the African Americans whose bodies they owned and controlled.  In order to assist and support Guthrie’s authority to repossess the runaway slaves, Denny shared his knowledge of their physical characteristics.  The group consisted of a woman, her children and grandchild.  There was Nelly, a “heavy woman” with “foreteeth somewhat [in] decay” and a forefinger broken and “lyed down in her hand she cannot straiten it out,” a daughter, a “bright mollato [mulatto] named Mariah” with “a little man child at her breast,” and another, Milly, who was “middling Chunky.”  Eliza was six or seven, and the youngest, three-year-old Mary, was “somewhat inclined to a yallow coulor.”

Whether John Guthrie recaptured the six is not known, but an ominous clue appears in the fact that the power of attorney was recorded in Mississippi ten months later.  Perhaps Guthrie found his quarry and, in accordance with the authority granted him, “disposed” of the family by selling them down the river.

Click here to access a finding aid for John Denny’s power of attorney.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on The power of a ‘trusty friend’

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives