Author Archives: Lynn Niedermeier

by | August 27, 2015 · 2:47 pm

A Railroad Man

Bowling Green depot, 1936; Morehead Hotel, 1921

Bowling Green depot, 1936; Morehead Hotel, 1921

Edwin “Ed” Tanksley (1898-1975) joined the Louisville & Nashville Railroad in 1925.  By the time he retired in 1960, he had witnessed many changes in the railroad industry and its significance for his home city of Bowling Green, Kentucky.  The transcript of a 1967 interview in which Tanksley talks about his long career is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

As a clerk and then a yardman, Tanksley became closely acquainted with the mechanics of train operation and the skill of his fellow workers.  There was Smith Wood, “one of the grandest men you ever saw handle a throttle,” able to “tool those big steam engines around these bends in the track and not spill a drop of coffee.”  There was engineer “Grandma” Garr, known for his love of buttermilk, and John “Dink” Petty, a wizard on the air brakes who could give his crew in the caboose a whiplash-free ride.  Their jobs could be stressful: Tanksley recalled the anguish of engineers unable to stop their trains to avoid hitting someone on the tracks.  There were also hazards in the yard, especially for those handling the couplers between rail cars.  “I used to work with men that didn’t have but two or three fingers left on a hand because they would get them pinched off,” he remembered.

Tanksley became familiar with many of the Bowling Green hotels that catered to railroad employees and the traveling public in the 1920s and 1930s.  There were the upscale hotels, the Mansard and the Morehead, the smaller Webb Hotel, operated by a former railroad conductor, and the Rauscher House, known for its good food.  Travelers on a layover in Bowling Green could pass the time at 5-cent picture shows, or at the Potter Opera House being entertained by minstrel companies whose actors and scenery came to town via the railroad.

The railroad also brought many VIPs through Bowling Green.  Tanksley remembered evangelist Mordecai Ham and whistle stops by governors, senators and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  FDR was a “railroad man’s friend,” said Tanksley.  The Railroad Retirement Act, a piece of New Deal legislation that provided pensions to those two- and three-fingered retirees, was “the reason a railroad man is pretty crazy about Franklin D.”

Click here to access a finding aid for Ed Tanksley’s interview.  For more collections on railroads, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 20, 2015 · 2:55 pm

High School Confidential

Letters to B.G. Davidson

Letters to B.G. Davidson

At this time of year, high school seniors face many changes in making the transition to college freshmen.  It was no different for Benjamin Gideon “B.G.” Davidson and his friends in Bowling Green High’s Class of 1933.  Some enrolled at WKU or at the Bowling Green Business University down the street, but B.G. headed off to Centre College in Danville, where he hoped to make the football team.

Nevertheless, the old crowd kept in touch.  In particular, tall, dark and handsome B.G. was a sought-after correspondent among the young ladies he had known at Bowling Green High.  “We are having a time up on the Hill,” wrote one.  She was happy with her schedule, which gave her Tuesdays and Thursdays off to “sleep as long as I want.”  But another was nostalgic for the days of their senior hijinks.  “Sam, Allen and I were talking about some of your all’s escapades in chemistry laboratory the other day,” she wrote.  “We had a good time down there at B.G.H.S.”

Of special concern among the group was whether the flirtations and romantic attachments of high school could survive distance and the new social whirl of their college lives.  As they reported on their leisure (and occasionally academic) activities, the young ladies B.G. had left behind couldn’t resist pulling his strings.  “Darling, the Cotillion Club is giving a Thanksgiving dance,” wrote a longtime sweetheart.  “But someone asked me to go with them; however, I thought it was going to be the night you’d be home for the holidays and we’d rather go together, hadn’t we? . . . At least that’s the way I feel about that night and every other night and day you’d be here.”  Her main rival for B.G.’s affections had joined him for a dance at Centre, but afterward nervously wrote: “I don’t see how you could remember me even a tiny little bit after all those good-looking women. . . .  I noticed you weren’t sporting your frat pin — so I guess one of them has ’bout beat my time.”  Nevertheless, she had returned home to dream of seeing her favorite beau “coming down the street — and all the good times we’re gonna have this summer.”

Letters to B.G. Davidson, which give a vivid picture of the joys, pastimes and obsessions of Bowling Green’s college-age youth in the 1930s, 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 collections about schools and students, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

A letter to B.G. Davidson

“Dear B.G. (Benjamin to you), Too bad we could not get together last Saturday, but after much arguing and persuasion mother consented to let me come to the Beta formal next Saturday night.”

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by | August 13, 2015 · 4:32 pm

V-J Day: “It has passed like a tornado”

Happy warriors: Dee Perguson and Chester Travelstead

Happy warriors: Dee Perguson and Chester Travelstead

Kentuckians heard the first report on August 13, 1945: the war with Japan was over.  Stationed at a center for returning servicemen in Miami, Florida, Ohio County native Dee Perguson reported that “a scream rose to the roof” among his fellow soldiers listening to the radio.  On duty at an air base in India, McLean County native John Owens witnessed joyful men “firing off flare guns, machine guns, pistols and hollering at the top of their voices.”

Unfortunately, the report was premature and quickly retracted.  As surrender negotiations continued, Perguson stayed close to the radio, “hoping to hear the longed-for news.”  Angry at both the false report and Japan’s apparent recalcitrance, he declared himself “all in favor of dropping some more atomic bombs to help them decide to accept.”

Still, when the surrender was confirmed on August 15 — Victory in Japan Day — Perguson had a hard time believing that, at last, “the United States is not at war.”  Navy officer Chester Travelstead, stationed in Seattle, agreed.  Writing to his mother, WKU music teacher Nelle Travelstead, of the atomic bomb, the negotiations and the surrender, he remarked that “It has passed like a tornado.”

But there was little calm after the storm.  First came the celebrations.  In Miami, Dee Perguson witnessed streets filled with people and cars, a Navy band playing, Russian trainees bellowing out songs, and soldiers and sailors trading hats in a communal expression of joy.  Bars and liquor stores had closed the moment the surrender was announced, but “many people who had prepared for the day had their bottles.”  In Seattle, Chester Travelstead wrote, “Everybody kissed everybody.  Paper was thrown from the buildings by the wagonload . . . . The horns tooted a constant din; people shouted and ran.”

Then came the avalanche of work, gathering force since V-E Day, that would be necessary to accomplish the orderly demobilization of millions of soldiers.  The day after V-J Day, Travelstead found himself deluged with directives and orders.  Perguson, working in one of many Miami hotels commandeered by the military, expected to be kept busy either reassigning soldiers who remained in service or providing occupational counseling to veterans returning to civilian life.  And both men were thinking about where they stood in the long line of servicemen eager to get their discharge papers, go home and get on with their lives.

Letters of Kentuckians about V-J Day are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click on the links to access finding aids.  For other collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 6, 2015 · 7:59 pm

Sadie and Susie

Max Nahm; the Nahm home, site of a murder

Max Nahm; the Nahm home, site of a murder

It was a domestic tragedy that devolved into a spat about domestic servants.  On June 7, 1945, Sadie Brown, the longtime African-American cook of prominent Bowling Green banker Max Nahm, was arguing with a male acquaintance in the kitchen of Nahm’s home at 14th and College Streets.  The argument ended when he grabbed a knife, slashed her throat, and fled.

From her State Street home a block away, Martha Potter wrote the news to her children.  For most of her life, Martha, who kept boarders in her home, relied heavily on African-American domestic servants, but the past few years had been a trial.  Susie Potter, her own longtime cook and maid with whom she shared a surname, had resigned in 1937, and recently the attraction of better-paying war work had made replacements scarce.

But now it was Max Nahm’s turn to experience a “servant problem.”  As the local African-American community reacted in shock to Sadie’s murder, Susie told Martha of their folk beliefs regarding violent death.  “Susie said that murder blood was hard to wash out and that if it wasn’t washed up before the victim’s death it never would come out,” Martha informed her children.  Sally, her current cook, had agreed, adding that “every time there is a thunderstorm that spot will come back.”

A few weeks later, Susie herself was cooking for Nahm, but his search for live-in help remained futile because no servant was willing to stay overnight in the house.  Then Susie became ill, and she and Martha made a secret pact: after Susie’s recovery, she would return to work for Martha, not for Nahm.

The conspiracy continued through the fall of 1946, with Martha confiding to her children that “Max still says she is coming to work for him.”  When Susie finally rejoined Martha’s household in spring 1947, Nahm “got mighty mad,” but Martha haughtily denied having “stolen” his cook.  Although he found a replacement, the 84-year-old banker nursed a grudge that Martha attributed solely to ego.  “Max is still pouting with me about Susie,” Martha wrote in June 1948–a full three years after Sadie Brown’s tragic death in his kitchen.

Martha Potter’s letters about the politics of domestic service are part of the Lissauer Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more collections of Bowling Green family papers, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | July 23, 2015 · 2:10 pm

A Global Village

The Pike, a mile-long stretch of carnival-style attractions at the St. Louis World's Fair.

The Pike, a mile-long stretch of carnival-style attractions at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

With its 1,200 acres of technology, art, shops, concessions, carnival amusements and exhibits from more than 60 countries, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, dazzled some 19 million visitors from April to December 1904.  Included in the crowds were members of the Obenchain family of Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Sixteen-year-old Margery Obenchain attended the Fair in August while visiting friends in St. Louis.  Then it was the turn of her mother, Lida Calvert Obenchain, and younger sister Cecilia.  On September 23, while 9-year-old “Cecil” and a cousin toured the massive Palace of Manufactures Building, a weary Lida sat on the steps and composed a letter to her sister Josephine.

Lida found two aspects of the extravaganza the most interesting: the flowers, which she termed “the glory of the fair,” and its international flavor.  The French pavilion was “so gorgeous and magnificent that we held our breath and talked in whispers.”  The Austrian and Italian pavilions were also full of “beautiful things.”  The Brazilian pavilion, by contrast, was just “coffee, nothing but coffee, with a few photographs thrown in.”  She also alluded to the Fair’s “living exhibits,” where exotic peoples from the Americas, the Far East, the Philippines and Africa demonstrated their native customs in a manner that tended to reinforce the onlooker’s prejudice about the superiority of Western, industrialized ways.  What were mere curiosities for Lida, however, were objects of scholarly interest for another visitor, her niece Jeannette Brown Obenchain, then studying anthropology at the University of Chicago.  Jeannette was “listening to lectures and hobnobbing with the savage races,” Lida reported.  “They treat her like a man and a brother and she thinks they are ‘perfectly lovely.’  Indians, Filipinos, Cliff Dwellers and all seem to recognize her as a kindred spirit.”

And Cecil?  True, she “went into raptures” over the lace displays at the Belgian pavilion, but was also busily accumulating a good deal of souvenir “plunder” and demanding popcorn, candy and “other trash” whenever they passed a concession booth.  No mention, however, of whether she sampled that confection now most famously associated with the Fair, the ice cream cone.

Lida’s letter from the St. Louis World’s Fair is part of the Calvert-Obenchain-Younglove Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For other collections relating to fairs and exhibitions, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | July 9, 2015 · 1:37 pm

The Stamp of Creativity

One of Loraine Neff's stamp collages

One of Loraine Neff’s stamp collages

While designing for a maker of hand quilts in the 1930s, Jefferson County native Loraine Neff (1899-1994) saw two Chinese postcards depicting a man and woman dressed in clothing made of cancelled postage stamps.  Fascinated by this unique art, she put the cards in her “Retirement – To do” file, then returned to them 25 years later to take up the craft herself.

Stamp collage detail

Stamp collage detail

Five of Loraine Neff’s stamp collages are now part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Delicate and colorful, they feature a bonneted country woman churning butter, hanging laundry, airing a patchwork quilt, rocking a cradle, and taking a winter stroll.  The elements of each, of course, are carefully cut from uncancelled postage stamps, which Neff would purchase from a dealer after sketching her idea and deciding on the colors to use.  “It has given me contentment because I lose myself in the art,” Neff wrote in a magazine article about her pastime.

Click here to download a finding aid for the Loraine S. Neff Collection.  And click here to see our recent blog about another stamp artist.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Loraine Neff stamp collage

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by | July 1, 2015 · 5:10 pm

Smiths Grove Grrls

Two young Smiths Grove womenI have got a secret to tell you — now listen — don’t let Janie take Jim Otter for I love him myself — get her to keep putting him off till I get home — then I will marry him.

Sallie is coming to Bollinggreen to go to school . . . I will be very glad for then I will have somebody to pester.

There has been a big meeting going on in town . . . I like to got God but I was afraid that I would have to quit dancing.

Jennie I am so fat that [I] hardley can see out of my eyes.

Jennie if you tell any one or let any one see this I will never tell you any thing.

If these letters are any indication, Eliza Jane “Jennie” Smith (1845-1876) of Smiths Grove, Kentucky was the kind of girl in which her friends at Smiths Grove Academy and at Science Hill School in Shelbyville liked to confide.  The Civil War was simmering around them — one of them was planning to visit Shelbyville unless there is danger of the Rebels tearing up the Railroad — but they preferred to fill their letters with news and gossip that kept Jennie apprised of their own doings and those of others in their circle, whether liked or not.  Wish you would kill that Ellen Shobe, wrote the girl with her sights on Jim Otter.  I don’t love her one speck.

Jennie herself was more circumspect when communicating with her parents.  She had finished sewing a new dress, she wrote from Science Hill, and was anxious for them to visit during her exams.  But she warned that they could expect no more letters before she returned home:  I will give you my reasons some other time.  Just to think in 4 weeks I will be free to write and say what I please.  Too many prying eyes in the halls of academe, perhaps?  In any event, her grrl-friends were probably salivating at the prospect of that summer’s exchange of letters.

Jennie Smith’s correspondence is in the Rasdall Family Papers, available in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For other family collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | June 17, 2015 · 2:00 pm

Two Picnics

Picnic at the old fairgrounds in Bowling Green, 1886 (Library Special Collections)

Picnic at the old fairgrounds in Bowling Green, 1886 (Library Special Collections)

Seeking always to present himself as a proper and gentlemanly correspondent, Luther Carpenter of Smiths Grove, Kentucky weighed his words carefully when he wrote in July, 1861 to his future wife Sallie Duncan about attending a picnic in Chalybeate Springs.

“We had a very genteel company,” he assured her, before which young ladies “with their delicate hands spread the snow white cloths under the tall and spreading oaks, and poured thereon basketfuls of dainty luxuries.”  When someone brought out a fiddle, he declined to dance, preferring instead “a nice promenade with the ladies.  I enjoyed myself hugely,” he confessed, even though he had thought of Sallie often and wished she was there.

Fast forward to July, 1890, when Luther and Sallie’s 20-year-old daughter Annie May received a free-wheeling account from her friend Jennie Amos of a “selfish picnic” on a creek near Erin, Tennessee.  Why selfish?  Because, Jennie slyly noted, it was “just the women folks, understand.”  Although her group dressed primly in shirtwaists, upon arriving at the picnic site “we took off our corsets.  We had everything to make us comfortable,” Jennie sighed, “and old dresses to go in bathing.”

Unfortunately, their paradise was soon invaded by “two town dudes just to play a joke on us.”  The girls were angry at first, but well enough acquainted with them not to care “if we did look like the devil,” and at the end of the day even rode with them back to town sans corsets.  Nevertheless, Jennie observed, “we would have had a better time without them.”

These letters describing two generations of picnicking are part of the Carpenter Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections about Kentucky families, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | June 1, 2015 · 2:59 pm

Absquatulate!

Muster notice to Andrew Kellis, 1847 (SC 98)

Muster notice to Andrew Kellis, 1847 (SC 98)

In 1849, 26-year-old David Barclay Campbell and some other young Warren County, Kentucky men were out west trying to strike it rich in the gold fields of California.  David’s family and friends wrote from Bowling Green to update him on all the local gossip, but one of his pals (the torn letter has obliterated his name) was particularly chatty and irreverent.  He even found something to snicker about when recounting the city’s cholera outbreak of 1850, which “swept away several of our inhabitants to that last resting place in which there is no return.”

Writing jauntily of efforts to avoid the scourge, he declared that “Never in my life did I witness such confusion [as] a great many of our citizens vamosed or absquatulated to parts unknown.”  Unfortunately, the contagion occurred at the same time as a scheduled drill of the county militia, and David’s correspondent mirthfully described the outcome: “[A]s the military gentlemen armed and equipped as the law directs, would come riding in squads & sections and approach the main plaza or square of the city & hear of cholera, they would wheel to the right about face in double quick time, and homewards antelope without waiting [for] orders.”  And so, he concluded, “the glittering steels and toploftical plumages” of the citizen-soldiers “remained unsheathed,” and gone were the “conspicuous field officers parading up and down the streets on their high headed war nags.”  But no matter.  The gloomy summer plague soon passed, business and social life revived, and our correspondent resumed his youthful pursuits.

Letters to David Campbell during his sojourn in California are part of the Garvin Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | May 22, 2015 · 1:35 pm

“Raging, Roaring, Tearing, Whirling”

Nancy Brooks's 1855 letter

Nancy Brooks’s 1855 letter

Among many letters received from the far-flung members of his family by Cumberland County’s Reuben Alexander (1785-1864) was one from his niece, Nancy Brooks, who lived with her husband and son on a plantation near Pontotoc, Mississippi.  Writing on March 22, 1855, she described her harrowing experience of a tornado:

Last Friday night, the 16th of March, an awful, raging, roaring, tearing whirling Tornado passed over, among and round about us, with terrifying fury!

My family were all at home. . . .  [We] secured everything as well as we could.  I had scarcely got my little son, and several of us, in a little shed room which I thought the safest place, and lifted up my heart & voice in prayer, before the deafening roar of the storm commenced. . . .

The next morning we went out of our house and looked around — destruction reigned around our premises!  An immense quantity of large timber fallen, and torn to atoms. . . .  Our meat house, kitchen, cabbins, corn houses, stables, unroofed and wrecked. . . .

In Pontotoc, a neighbor reported, the destruction was “awful”:

One man got his leg broken, when a very large new brick Livery stable was blown to atoms. . . .  Only two horses were killed, but a great smashing of buggies & carriages.

Also lost was a new school, set to open the following week:

The pride of our town, the Male Academy, a substantial beautiful brick building, was blown down! . . . They were teaching in one of the churches, waiting for a little finish, on the Academy, but alas!  how their hopes are blasted!

Twenty miles away, a woman had been killed and her clergyman husband seriously injured in their collapsed house, but Nancy wrote that her son and husband, who was “very busy at work, helping to repair our shattered place,” had survived “what I fervently implore my Heavenly Father that I may never experience again.”

Nancy Brooks’s letter is part of the Alexander Family Papers in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections about Kentucky families, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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