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 Jan Troell 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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Confessions of a Teenage Bibliophile

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childhood memories, confession, Galena, librarian, library, nostalgia, reading

Do you know how certain smells or sounds can send us hurtling back to another place and time? The experience can be a crapshoot, pleasant, or nostalgic, sometimes painful. For me, the strongest memory trigger is a squeak—the protest of wooden steps many decades old. They originate in two places. One is the old house where I grew up with a narrow, steep stairway to the upstairs. The steps are grooved in the center from so many years of feet stomping up to bed and down to breakfast for a new day. You might think that my home would be the most poignant memory for me, but it isn’t. It’s where I spent my summers when I wasn’t swimming.

The avenues and venues for entertainment nowadays are legion. Cell phones alone, the constant texting, searching, and calls, can suck up huge chunks of our time. Not so in the early sixties. TV was in its infancy. Books were the most reliable and inexpensive source of entertainment, the means to sail away into intrigue, history, romance, or adventure. It was all there at the library. My hometown of Galena, Illinois is mostly hills, steep inclines and terraced streets, endless steps, and all of it a pistol to traverse, especially when it was a fourteen block walk, then a trudge up another hill with arms full of books. I kept thinking about the reason for the trek. Back and arm aches were worth it, so I could spend lazy summer days by an open window, a book propped in my face.

Galena Library was completed in 1894 and reportedly the first library in Illinois mandated to have four women on its board. Sturdy and august, the library has weathered over a century with grace. One of my clearest memories of the library is Mrs. Dodds, petite, thin, with round spectacles. She always answered the phone with three of her names, never one. “This is Mary Eustace Dodds.” She gave me the gimlet eye one summer when I chose to check out Tropic of Cancer, but she stamped the book and handed it over the counter. Before she did, she repressively said it wasn’t appropriate reading material for my age. (I judged it boring and liked War and Peace better.)

Then was the age of card cataloging, and if asked a question, Mrs. Dodds immediately stopped the search she was in the middle of, wedged a pencil stub between the cards, and answered my question. She may not have been happy about the interruption, but she was the librarian and took her position seriously.

I never had a bike, and thought one with a basket would be luxury, whether or not there were hills damn-near perpendicular to push the thing up. No matter. I trudged the blocks to the library, opened the door, and there they were—squeaky steps rising up to the library. Squeaky steps going down to the basement. So many books and stories. The smell of old bindings and paper. My favorite (and still is) the sculpture that rested on a pedestal by the door, an alabaster chariot drawn by two rearing horses. I surreptitiously touched them every time I entered, but it was the crunchy creak of the wood with every footstep upward, the expectation and possibilities of more exciting stories waiting to be discovered.

The library has changed a lot over the decades. The counter, where Mrs. Dodds stamped out my books, swiftly inspected them upon return, and wordlessly accepted my late fines, is gone. Now there are computers, an elevator, a different arrangement of the book shelves. My chariot and horses have been moved but are still there, and best of all, the stairs still squeak.

How the Bug Bit Me

Tags

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, cleaned, and repaired enough to open The General Store, where nothing was 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, waistcoats, 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 him 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.

 

Chicago Can Kill You

Tags

Chicago, Everleigh, Galena, Macabre, mystery, prostitution, serial killers, urban legend, Whitechapel

No, I don’t mean driving down into the Loop during peak traffic hours, dodging fenders and offensive drivers. Freewheeling mayhem. An experience where all hairs stand on end. Even though I learned how to drive on the LA Freeways, I always feel like I’ve won an incomprehensible victory by the time I’ve made it from one side of downtown Chicago to the other. Chi Town’s expressways are a terror but have nothing on its history of violence and weirdness.

I first became entranced with Windy City by reading about its achievements and its relationship with Galena, Illinois, not its scary legacy of politics and murders. The wild times of the twenties gets most of the publicity, but the years prior to the turn of the century had its own high spots.

Murders from Chicago boasted a certain cache when it came to the modi operandi of its killers. The most famous is the serial killer who strolled around the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The horror of that lived on for years. When my mother attended the world’s fair decades later, she walked in terror of being snatched up by a killer or slaver.

I got the biggest chill reading about the serial killer who got rid of his victims by dissolving them in a vat of acid in his basement. Ugh.

One could say that the city was made rich on death. The major slaughter houses massacred so many cattle, dumping the wastes into the Chicago River, that the butchering rendered the smelly liquid from the city water taps brown and greasy. Ee-yew.

The infamous Whitechapel Club, where journalists hung out, enacted gruesome rituals. A Chicago bartender by the name of the Michael (Mickey) Finn is given the credit for concocting a lethal drink (chloral hydrate) to poison his enemies—hence the saying of slipping one a Mickey.

I still haven’t read a conclusive solution to the mystery of the Marshal Field heir shooting “accident” that begat a series of tap-dances to cover up the mess. One version has the Chicago scion getting shot by one of the legendary beauties of the Everleigh Club, the fanciest bordello in the city. The Everleigh sisters owned the crowns for the most elegant establishment in the country and were also known for their closed mouths. They had the healthiest, prettiest, most talented girls. No one ever tattled. This fact says a great deal about how frightening the two madams must have been as employers.

The story goes—well, one of them—that the sisters, Ada and Minna, trundled the bleeding Field, the Younger, out of the swanky social club and back to his house before his wife, children and straight-laced father got wind of the adventure. The scandal lives to this day but threats and gossip never stopped the Everleighs. They eventually retired as millionaires, traveled the world and settled down to become “model” matrons.

Having hailed from Galena, Illinois, now a burg of less than five thousand, it seemed impossible that Chicago once courted Galena, even invested in a railroad to join the two cities. It was true that Galena was a thriving boomtown when Chicago was still the mud hole that Native Americans called “stinky onion” or Chickagou/Checagou. Nice. Anyway, the name stuck and not to be outdone, Chicago pulled itself out of the mud by raising the city. Pullman was part of the effort when buildings were lifted out of the muck. Guests in the hotels stayed during the event and stated that they never noticed the procedure.

Galena faded as the lead veins gave out, decimated by the Civil War, but Chicago thrived, rebuilt itself and continues to do so today. Galena may have some of the best ghost stories and prettiest terrain, but Chicago knows how to rise above the macabre.

If you’re still hungry for something grisly, check out Mysterious Chicago Blog:

http://www.mysteriouschicagoblog.com/

Next time: Something Not So Grim

Hometown Ghost Stories or Yesteryear Urban Legend

Tags

creepy, Galena, ghosts, urban legend

Everybody’s got a creep story to tell. I come from a small, once-famous town, where there are endless tales and legends. It’s got a rep for grisly stories. I read that there was only one official hanging in Galena and five thousand people showed up. Of course, there are accounts of unofficial hangings.

If you do a search of Galena, you won’t need the Illinois part. “Ghost stories” pops up right away. There are ghost tours and cemetery walks. Most of the buildings on Main Street creak and crunch. They were built in the late eighteen-forties, and those that haven’t been gutted inside for the excellent woods, don’t like to be messed with when renovation occurs. The One Eleven Main restaurant got a raft of surprises when the place was spiffed up. A photo of the building’s façade at the time of renovation was blurred by swirling, white images. The picture made national headlines and the ghostly images were said to have been verified as not doctored.

Servers and patrons in the many excellent restaurants on “Main drag” tell of unexpected people showing up where they shouldn’t, sometimes in clothes from long ago. As a kid, I never liked walking alone in the dark anywhere in Galena. It felt “crowded” and as if I were being watched and followed. I moved back for a few years and noticed that it didn’t feel as creepy as it used to. Maybe I grew up or the spirits got bored with hanging around and went Home.

Some creaks and wood groans aren’t bad. I still get nostalgic and melty inside whenever I climb the steps just beyond the Galena Library’s entry door. The crunchy squeaks sweep me back to childhood and teen years, when I loaded my arms with books and carried them for blocks and blocks, then up a steep hill to home. Those are the good-squeaks memories. Then there are the other kind.

Pieces have been written about Turner Hall, where a ghostly argument occurs in the balcony. I didn’t sit up there often, not because I heard anything, but because it had an occupied feeling. I never stayed in the building alone or after dark. No way. Did it once and that was the last. Had to stifle the urge to run, girly-screaming, from the building. What I recall best about Turner Hall was not the performances I acted in and watched there, but the history that has been destroyed. As a youth, I loved to read the back wall of the theater. Performers over the decades had written their names and the dates of their performances everywhere. It broke my heart when I saw that they’d been painted over—a legacy discarded.

Aunt Marie told a sad tale of a little girl who skimmed her sled down the hillside of Grant Park and was killed on the railroad tracks. I remember reading a poem about a prostitute, who was arrested one spring night and held in a shack overnight on the Galena River levee. Nobody thought about her, but the river rose, as it always does at that time of year, and she drowned, locked in the submerged shack.

It’s good to know that so many people nowadays talk and write about the weird feelings and sounds of Galena. I never said a word to anyone, other than good friend Suzie. She didn’t laugh at me. Others would have thought I was nuts, and I was already a bit on the not-like-everyone-else side.

If you can’t make a trip to Galena, there’s a lot written about it on the web. It’s a gorgeous place to visit and walk from end to end, but think twice about bringing your bike. It’s all hills and valleys. And ghosts.

Next time: You Can’t Make Me Wear That Corset