Author Archives: Lynn Niedermeier

Apollo 8 stamp; Apollo 11 Congressional resolution

On this day (September 6) in 1969, David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity” hit the U.K. music charts.  Although the song debuted only six weeks after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, it didn’t make the U.S. charts until its re-release in 1973.

Reactions, artistic and otherwise, to a half-century of space exploration can be found in some of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Like many Americans, Franklin, Kentucky native Tom Moody was shaken when the Russians launched Sputnik II and its passenger, a dog named Laika, in November 1957.  “It is an alarming situation,” he wrote his aunts from college in Memphis.  “We have always been first at everything, and now that we aren’t, maybe it will wake us up.”

Soon, America awakened.  In 1968, WKU faculty member Marvin Russell penned a poem, “Apollo Six,” his “first serious effort in this realm of expression,” and presented it to his colleague and muse, English professor Gordon Wilson.  The next year, Paducah native John Scopes, who had earned notoriety in more down-to-earth pursuits–specifically, the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools–obtained a first issue cover of a stamp commemorating the Christmas message delivered by the Apollo 8 astronauts as they orbited the moon.

Bowling Green native Mary (Rodes) Helm witnessed the launch of the greatest manned mission to date, Apollo 11’s journey to the moon.  Writing to her father, Judge John Rodes, she confessed her reluctance to brave the July heat in order to watch the spacecraft lift off from Cape Kennedy.  But she quickly found it “a very moving and emotional experience which I did not expect.”  As the rocket rose, a man behind her whispered “God speed,” and “I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks.”  At a dinner attended by prominent members of the space program, she met astronauts Jim Lovell and Wally Schirra.  She was struck, however, by a McDonnell-Douglas executive’s prescient question: “Where do we go from here?”  Already fearing a loss of public interest after the great feat was accomplished, he nevertheless insisted that “we need space–for man’s knowledge & for the use of his creative imagination & talents.”  Those sentiments were echoed by Congressman Tim Lee Carter, a Monroe County native and WKU graduate, who co-sponsored a resolution calling for international efforts “to conquer the frontiers of space exploration for the benefit of all mankind.”

When it comes to space travel, the question “Where do we go from here?” has a way of moving from the technical to the philosophical.  As Marvin Russell phrased it (though perhaps not as memorably as Major Tom), Each stage, each generation, propels the next. / How much?  What direction?  The questions vex. / Help and hindrance combine to perplex / Actions and factions around orbiting specks.

Click on the links to access finding aids for the relevant collections.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Ryan Monroe Robertson; Lattie (Robertson) Coombs

Through the mid-19th century, Ryan Monroe Robertson (1827-1883), a young merchant in Bowling Green and Woodburn, kept in touch with his friends and extended family in Tennessee, Alabama and Texas.  Cousins, siblings and their spouses wrote to him of births, deaths, life on the farm, and other everyday matters.  But a recurring topic was matrimony: who was achieving it, where they were finding it, and how the still-single might join the club.  The gossips, however, were not stereotypical husband-hungry women; rather, it was Robertson and the young men of his circle who were preoccupied with their chances of finding a mate.

It might have started on the day a phrenologist examined Robertson’s skull for clues to his personality and declared him to be “very fond of the Ladies.”  As he entered his mid-20s, he made no secret of his yearning for a wife.  “[Y]ou stat[e] in your letter that you wanted to mar[r]y and if I cou[l]d find any yo[u]ng lady that wanted to mar[r]y to send you,” wrote cousin Martha McWilliams from Alabama.  From Louisiana, his sister Ellen Skaggs encouraged him to come “down here to catch yo[u]ng girls fore there are as many girls as frogs.”

Robertson’s buddies were no less circumspect about their designs.  One was ready to try marriage to cure his health problems “provided that I can git some gally to believe the same way.”  “You may tell the young ladies of your acquaintance,” drooled Simpson County neighbor and friend Berry Whitesides, “that if any of them wishes to marry. . . I will be prepared to say to them in the language of the poet, ‘Pretty girl I want a wife.'”  In the meantime, there were always opportunities to dish about the romances of others.  Robertson heard from his cousin Sarah Malone that “Thomas [Hargroves] is still leaning up to cousin Adaline like a kitten to a hot rock.”  (Mr. Kitten and Miss Rock wed in 1852).

In 1858, Ryan Monroe Robertson finally tied the knot with Jane Elizabeth Potter of Bowling Green.  Soon, it was their children’s turn to contemplate matrimony.  But when their daughter Lattie married Phineas Hampton Coombs in 1892, one of her former beaus advised her to retire whatever lovey-dovey tactics she had used to bring “Hamp” to the altar.  “Please don’t act like newly married people,” he implored her.  She shouldn’t drop by her husband’s office three times a day, or cry if he missed dinner.  Above all, she shouldn’t be spooney.  Perhaps he was simply jealous as he watched one more “frog” leap out of the pond.

The Robertson letters are part of the Coombs Family Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library.   Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections involving courtship and marriage, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

She was one of those “scribbling women” famously derided by Nathaniel Hawthorne–lady authors who, through idleness, creative yearnings, or economic necessity, inundated 19th-century publishers and popular magazine editors with their prose, poetry and articles.

Cornelia Stanley (Allen) Smith (b. 1839?) was a native of western New York who could trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower Pilgrims.  The wife of Philadelphia banker Alfred Smith, she was the mother of two young children by the mid-1860s.  For the next three decades, both personally and through literary agents, she submitted her poems, stories, and articles under the pen name “Clio Stanley” to publications such as the New York Weekly, The American Rural Home, the Chicago Ledger and the children’s magazine The Nursery.

Like authors everywhere, Smith endured a steady stream of rejections.  “The third installment of your story is just received, and is herewith respectfully returned, together with the portions preceding,” advised Moore’s Rural New Yorker.  “We regret to have to return your manuscript but it is quite unsuitable for our columns,” wrote another prospect.  While some of the rejections were fairly brusque, others offered an apology common to the trade.  “We are really so overstocked with manuscripts of all kinds that we have to decline everything that is sent in just now,” explained Saturday Night to Smith, by 1873 one of its longtime contributors.

Sometimes, however, “Clio Stanley” hit pay dirt.  “The two little poems sent to us are accepted for publication,” wrote Arthur’s Home Magazine, although the publication date was uncertain as there was “so much matter already in our hands.”  Moore’s Rural New Yorker paid $6 for her story “Linnet,” and The People’s Literary Companion remitted $15 for two stories, “Making Believe” and “Behind the Door.”  Sometimes her assignments were unsolicited.  A children’s publisher asked for an article to accompany a photo of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and Saturday Night requested “one of your prettiest pieces of poetry” for its Valentine’s Day issue, an assignment that likely earned Smith about three dollars.

Editors’ letters to Cornelia Stanley (Allen) Smith are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections about authors, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

It was an appeal to the voters of Kentucky’s Seventh Congressional District for the opportunity to represent them.  If elected, the candidate promised, “you shall have in Congress my most zealous and constant attention to your business,” the first priority being defence.  But the candidate was not asking to be sent to the nation’s capital, nor was he sounding the call to arms on behalf of the U.S.A.  Rather, Horatio   Washington Bruce (1830-1903) was seeking election to the first Congress of the Confederate States of America.

H. W. Bruce, candidate for Confederate Congress

Bruce, a Louisville attorney and former member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, had run unsuccessfully for the U. S. Congress before casting his lot with the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War.  He attended two conventions held at Russellville in October and November 1861, where delegates drew up a resolution of secession and formed a provisional Confederate state government.  In the campaign for the first elected Congress, Bruce pledged himself to the “defence of our young, but glorious and gigantic Confederation of Southern States” and to making “final and eternal” its separation from “the Northern Abolition Despotism.”  His work, he promised, would focus on securing appropriate terms for peace and on establishing a boundary line between the resulting two governments–a demarcation in which, he promised, “I shall claim every foot of Southern soil.”

With an endorsement from the Louisville Courier, Bruce was elected in January, 1862 and reelected two years later.  Serving until the end of the war, he returned to Louisville, pardon in hand, to a life of law practice, teaching and judgeship.

A handbill setting out Horatio Washington Bruce’s appeal to the voters of Confederate Kentucky is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Like the one they’re awaiting in Britain, it was another highly anticipated royal birth.  In 1830, Atkinson Hill Rowan wrote from Spain to his mother in Bardstown, Kentucky that Queen Maria Christina was about to “give birth to a prince and all Madrid indeed all Spain will present a scene of rejoicing and merry making, cannon are already placed in every square and open place of the city.”  He explained that it was customary to place the baby on a silver base, then carry it to an antechamber where assembled foreign ministers could attest to the birth.  If the baby was female, then the ministers’ wives joined in the ritual.

Jonnie Brown’s baby book, 1919

As shown in the collections of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library, a birth is big news, even if most newborns don’t receive a 21-gun salute.  “We have just received intelligence that you are the happy father of a fine son,” wrote the brother of Bowling Green lawyer Robert Rodes in 1849, remembering his own fatherhood a few months earlier when “my feelings were racked in those few moments of suspense that seemed like so many years.”  A century later, cake mix king Duncan Hines sent a check from Bowling Green to a new mother with instructions that her daughter was to spend the gift from “Uncle Dunk” on anything from a teething ring to a “bucket of lemonade, or what, I wouldn’t know!”

Birth announcements like the one to which Hines was responding have evolved in style and content over the years.  Compare, for example, the gaily colored announcement from the parents of Jeffrey Daniel Ashworth in 1947 with the engraved notice of Enid Stuart Jagoe’s birth in 1918, where her first “calling card” was tied to that of her parents with a tiny silk ribbon.

Birth announcements, 1918 and 1947 (Coombs and Ferguson Collections)

Once a newborn arrived, of course, it was time to start a baby book to record the milestones that arrived in regular succession: first laugh, first tooth, first word, first shoes, favorite toy.  Whether it was little Jonnie Brown in Rosetta, Kentucky in 1919, or Kathryn Ann Duncan in Bowling Green in 1931, these small steps in their journey were lovingly noted.

Click on the links to download finding aids for these collections.  For more collections that feature babies and children, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Many of the collections in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library offer evidence of the drastic treatments visited upon their patients by 19th-century physicians.

You will inject a large tea spoonful of the solution in the large bottle up each nostril three times a day. . . . a half hour after each injection you will drop up each nostril six or eight of the Black drops.  This was the sinus-rocking remedy prescribed about 1840 to Colbert Cecil of Pike County, Kentucky, for an unspecified ailment.  About the same time, W. P. Payne recommended to his cousin the following treatment for cholera:  In all cases of great puking and purging or cramp take 2 parts [of preparation] no. 6 & 1 part spirits of turpentine (warm) and rub the patients stomach bowels, spine legs & feet well with it.

Hart County physician’s prescription, 1909

Many physicians originally acted as their own apothecaries, not only prescribing but preparing the potions they recommended.  With the late 19th-century separation of medicine and pharmacy into two distinct professions, however, patients began to take their prescriptions to a drugstore to be compounded by a pharmacist.  In addition, the 20th century brought closer regulation of dangerous or addictive pharmaceuticals.  Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections include evidence of these developments.  Bowling Green druggist John E. Younglove, whose store was a fixture on the downtown square, kept recipes for pills, salves, tonics and other curatives for both humans and animals.  In Glendale, Kentucky, Dr. Warner J. Shacklett recorded his orders for opiates as required by a 1914 federal law.  In Hart County, doctors sometimes used prescription pads supplied by local drugstores, complete with advertising.  When national prohibition restricted the dispensing of remedies containing alcohol, Dr. James O. Carson of Bowling Green wrote Lattie Robertson Coombs an order for medicinal liquor (to wit, a pint of whiskey) on a Treasury Department form for delivery to her druggist.

Prohibition-era prescription for medicinal liquor, 1933

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections.  For more collections relating to doctors and pharmacists, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.