INFLUENCE

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antiques, civil war, costumes, Galena, history, inspiration, pioneer, research, travel, writing

There are those who long for a fairy godmother. As I’ve mentioned before, I had a fey aunt, Marie Louise Duerrstein, and tagged after her in fascination with how her mind and imagination worked. It wasn’t until a few months before she could no longer speak clearly from a stroke that I realized that whenever she told me her ideas, I saw them exactly as she created them in her mind.

As a girl, it never occurred to me not to do what Aunt Marie said. There were some chores I didn’t like doing, but then there were the times when she told me to audition for a play. The thought of saying no or that I couldn’t do it never entered my head. I was her living mannequin for newspapers, magazines, and in first grade, a documentary I’d forgotten about until my sister, Sarah, saw it in a history class.

Aunt Marie put together parades and pageants, reenactments and Santa Claus Houses. She’d hand me a paint brush and tell me to paint a horse because she wasn’t good at that. She once told me to make an elephant after she erected its frame, which got stuffed with newspaper, covered in burlap, and painted gray. Later, she told me to make a much larger one for a Republican Party event.

She amassed her own museum, The Old General Store, what she called: A Step into the past. And it was, and so convincing Ingmar Bergman used it in his film, The Emigrants. Until becoming a curator, she made a living as a seamstress and selling bits of this and that of her artwork. She got artifacts for the museum with her wily sense of acquiring what she needed for nothing or next to nothing. Her motto was: Never pay for advertising. She didn’t, and yet her museum was known all over the world and in major magazines from National Geographic to Good Housekeeping.

Galena, Illinois was one of the first boomtowns of the West. In the 1820’s, Illinois was considered the edge of the world. By the 1840s, Galena’s Main Street was lined with four and five story brick and stone buildings (still intact) that survived spring floods from the Mississippi backing up the Galena River, filling the first floors with muddy water. Businesses moved merchandise to the top floors. And forgot about a lot of it. Aunt Marie didn’t. She knew the town’s history and went to store owners in the early 1950s. She said she’d clean out their attics if she could keep what she found. The items ended up in her museum, like-new boxes never opened, some from prior to the civil war.

When she opened her museum in 1957, she dressed me in a costume she’d sewn and in high- button shoes seventy years old. I worked in the museum, as did most of my family, after learning local history from Aunt Marie, who learned it directly from old timers. One was a woman in her nineties, who remembered sitting perched on her father’s shoulder to listen to Lincoln speaking from a Desoto Hotel balcony.

To this day, the 1800’s seem more comfortable to me than the present. Nine of my formative years had been spent surrounded by the past. That’s how it became easy to write in the time period. I know how to trim lamp wicks, fill them with kerosene, and clean the chimneys. I still use a coffee mill from that time. My home has antiques from her collection and the maternal side of my family. I know I will never taste anything as exquisite as the crispy lightness of a waffle made on the range with a waffle maker of cast iron. And that’s how I could write a story about a woman moving from Chicago in 1891 to a cabin in Colorado. So maybe there is something to the adage about writing about what you know.

Avenue to Heaven was released 11/01/17. It’s the first book in the Westward Bound series, stories about women who make new lives for themselves on the other side of the Mississippi, women of courage and determination. The ones who actually accomplished this are our past and our heritage.

https://www.amazon.com/Avenue-Heaven-Westward-Bound-Book-ebook/dp/B076HVGS98/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1509530295&sr=1-1&dpID=41zH8uAUeKL&preST=_SX342_QL70_&dpSrc=detail

 

Below is one of the ”living mannequin” moments. I was twelve at the time and can’t remember what it was for, magazine or newspaper. The background is the museum and mannequins she made to “dress” the store.

 

And Aunt Marie as a stand-in for the movie Gaily, Gaily

 

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Blog: https://historyfanforever.wordpress.com/

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://partners.bookbub.com/authors/1163516/edit

 

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How the Bug Bit Me

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advertising, antiques, fashion, film, Galena, museum, painting, parades, period costumes, sewing

We’ve all heard about the fairy godmother. I had a fey aunt. She had the broad, capable hands and blunt fingers of our German ancestors. With them, Aunt Marie created magic, in paintings, clothes, costumes, sculptures, parades, pageants, Santa Claus Houses, and in 1957, a museum, The Old General Store, known as far away as Russia. From her, I developed a love of history and the understanding that we must nurture whatever talents we’ve been given.

Marie Louise Duerrstein was born just after the turn of the last century in the Northern Illinois village of Guilford, approximately ten miles away from Galena. Television was decades away. Entertainments were homegrown. Mom and Aunt Marie played in the Small Pox Creek with their three other sisters. They made up games, hiked the spectacular countryside, had picnics, and dressed up strange costumes. Their first car, the Jumpin’ Jive, got reupholstered in lively colors, and its wheels painted yellow, and took them laughing and bouncing over the country back roads.

Mom always longed for her youth in Guildford, but Aunt Marie had dreams. Galena was close enough and just the right size for her head full of ideas. She became a seamstress, sold paintings, and asked the old-timers about Galena history. From Grandma Swing, (no relation and over a hundred), Aunt Marie heard about Lincoln campaigning in Galena, at that time, a boomtown three times its present size. The original buildings on Main Street are still standing, something she fought to preserve.

Until the dike was built in the nineteen-fifties, every spring the town flooded. Merchandise was moved to the top floors, a lot of it forgotten. Aunt Marie told the  owners that she would clean out the top floors if she could keep what she found. She unearthed, clean, and repaired enough to open The General Store, where nothing is for sale. She dubbed it “A Step into the Past,” and it felt like it when you walked through the door with its tinkling bell. Later, she expanded, adding an office, tavern, WC, and living quarters. The kerosene lamps worked, the pot-bellied stove and range in the living quarters supplied heat. The apples and crackers in the barrels were real, the food on the dining table, the cookies and hard candies in the jars. She made the mannequins and dressed them in clothes from the eighteen-eighties. People came from all over the world to hear her talk about Galena history.

Her apartment was stacked to the ceiling with labeled boxes filled with ribbons, fans, underwear, celluloid collars, vests, and hats. When film crews came to town, they stopped to talk to her first. Her collection of period clothes provided for a fashion show and helped costume more than one film, but what I loved the most was her sly humor when Halloween rolled around. My favorite of her many costumes was the year she made the Two-Faced Couple. Mom was in a dress, halved, so the front was the same as the back. Masks had the same face on both sides. Aunt Marie dressed as the man—the shoes had no backs, only fronts, the same as her clothes. When she and Mom walked in the grand march at the Turner Hall party, Aunt Marie walked backwards, and you couldn’t tell. Her shoes, clothes, gloves and hat were exactly the same on both sides.

To follow are some photos. (Forgive my lack of expertise and impatience with the creation of an interesting layout.) The first is an early painting (with the use of perspective and highlighting that I needed private lessons to understand), high school picture, as an extra in the film “Gaily Gaily, and Mom in the fashion show, in a duster walking her dog, Orby.

Like a Pied Piper, she badgered people into helping her create pageants and parades. She wanted Santa to be real and every year did what she could to keep him alive with a “house” where children could sit on his lap, tell them their wishes, and get a cookie. Funding for all of her projects came from handmade donation containers Galena merchants kept by the registers.

Since I followed her around, there no was no chance of staying idle. She slapped a paintbrush in my hand, dressed me up and put me to work in the museum, showed me how to make a life-sized elephant, used me as a model whenever a newspaper or magazine came to interview and photograph the museum. Her mantra was “never pay for advertising,” and yet the store ended up in regional and national newspapers and magazines. Her last project was her undoing—a fashion show with period clothes. A stroke followed, but before it hit, she said she had another idea, this time, about a circus, but she had difficulty with vision and talking afterwards. There were no more Santa Houses and parades. Galena evolved without her into a haven for artists and one of the few historic sites in the US left intact.

I have no doubt that Aunt Marie is in heaven, arranging for some event, having fun with her sisters, and finally able to create the ideas and visions that were too big for this too small world.