Ruminations on a Long Life: An Autobiographical Typescript / by Virginia Gardner (ca. 1989)

Virginia Gardner (1904-1992) was a journalist, a communist, and biographer of Louise Bryant. She was raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas and graduated with a B.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1924, then worked at several Midwestern newspapers before joining the Chicago Tribune in 1930. Gardner gradually became a radical, joined the Communist Party c.1937, led the small Newspaper Guild group at the Tribune, and was fired for her union activism in March, 1940.

Blacklisted in Chicago, she moved to New York where she worked with the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. After her divorce from journalist Marion (Red) Marberry, Gardner moved to Washington, D.C. in 1942 and was briefly Executive Secretary of the American Council on Soviet Relations. Between 1940 and 1942 Virginia Gardner was active as a member of the Citizens Committee for Harry Bridges, serving as its Executive Secretary in 1941. From 1942-1943 she worked for the Federated Press (a labor news service), resigning over its unwillingness to criticize John L. Lewis. Gardner next worked for the New Masses, resigning in 1947 when it became a monthly.

She moved to Los Angeles, working for the Peoples World (the CPUSA West Coast newspaper) until her dismissal in 1951, and was then briefly employed at a meat packing plant. In 1952 Gardner moved to New York where, again, her first job was at a meat plant in Jamaica, Queens, before being employed by the Daily Worker, where she covered the Rosenberg case in 1953, and later wrote "The Rosenberg Story," which was published in 1954. In 1959 Virginia Gardner left the Worker, and between 1960 and 1962 she worked as a medical writer. From 1963 to 1971 she worked as editorial assistant to Corliss Lamont. Her Louise Bryant biography was published in 1982. Soon afterwards she began working on her own autobiography. Gardner died in San Diego on January 5th, 1992.

June 27, 1904: Born in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. Has two older sisters, Gertrude Miller and Catherine Carson.

1910: Mother died when she was 10 years old.

1921 to 1924: Attended University of Missouri; graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism.

Dec. 17, 1927: Married Jerome Butler, a socialist newspaperman and copy reader

1927: Employed at the St. Louis Times.

May 1927: Father died.

1929: Hired by Chicago Tribune.

July, 1937: Married Marion (Red) Marberry whom she described as a leftist who never joined the Party. He was also a newspaperman and wrote three books: Joaquin Miller American Poet (1953); Vicky: A Biography of Victoria Woodhull (1967); The Golden Voice: A Biography of Isaac Kelloch (1947).

September, 1937: "Decided to join the Communist Party."

April, 1938: Joined the Newspaper Guild in Chicago.

1938: Active in Hearst strike in California.

1939: Joined the Communist Party.

1939: Filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board regarding unfair treatment at the Chicago Tribune.

1939: Assisted in publishing the Tribunit, a publication of the Chicago Tribune workers.

March 22, 1940: Dismissed from Chicago Tribune because of involvement in Guild activities at the paper.

1940: Moved to New York, where she worked with the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee.

1941: Voted as lifetime member of the Newspaper Guild.

1941: Acted as Executive Secretary of the Citizens Committee for Harry Bridges (President of the ILWU) in New York City in an attempt to prevent his deportation from the United States.

1942: Moved to Washington D.C.; divorced Marion (Red) Marberry (January); began work at Federated Press, a labor news service; served as Executive Secretary to the American Council on Soviet Relations, a precursor to the National Council of American Soviet Friendship (NCASF).

1943: Resigned from Federated Press. Began working as Washington correspondent for New Masses.

1947: Resigned from New Masses and moved to Los Angeles, where she began working for The Peoples World.

1948: Subpoenaed to appear before the Tenney Committee (California's Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities).

1949: Wrote a few articles for Masses and Mainstream.

1951: Dismissed from The Peoples World.

1952: Moved back to New York; worked in Jamaica, Queens in a meatpacking plant.

1954: "The Rosenberg Story," published by Masses and Mainstream.

1955: Began work at the Daily Worker.

December 1959: Resigned from the Worker.

Feb.-June 1960: Worked on staff of Factor, a monthly magazine which covers issues related to psychiatry.

1960 to 1962: Freelanced as a medical writer.

1962: Left the Communist Party.

1963 to 1971: Employed as editorial assistant to Corliss Lamont.

1982: Published Friend and Lover, a biography of Louise Bryant (New York:

1984 to 1989: Worked on her unpublished autobiography.

1989: Grandson, John Dorney died; in failing health.

1992: Died in San Diego, January 5th.

Family history - Childhood - High School romance with Brady Pryor

I can think of quite a number of people in my family whose lives could have made fascinating autobiographies had they bestirred themselves to record them. Now if my great-grandfather John Carnall had had a mind to, he could have left an intensely interesting account of his life. Born in Virginia and educated at the University of Virginia, he was an early settler in Fort Smith, Arkansas, taught school, initiated the high school, founded the Fort Smith Elevator in 1878 and was known for his advanced ideas.

To encourage the women in the Fortnightly Library Association, whose goal was to have a library building open six days a week, he turned over one issue of the paper. I have it before me, dated April 15, 1898, with its masthead reading: "SPECIAL LIBRARY EDITION/ of the Fort Smith Elevator / Published Once in a Lifetime."

My mother's father was Captain Edmund E. Boltwood, reared in Amherst where at the home of his uncle, Lucius Boltwood, married to the cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he heard stirring talk by the foremost abolitionists of the period. After war was declared he enlisted at the age of seventeen, and commanded a company of black cavalry throughout the Civil War--no small achievement, and he wasn't even a captain then but a second lieutenant.

As a result, Grandpa Boltwood had no higher schooling, although his older brother Henry, who had not dashed off to war but received proper education, became head of the public school system of Evanston, Illinois, with streets and schools named for him.

My own immediate family provided some rich samples of singular lives and/or achievements. My two older sisters were wonderfully witty. In the Fort Smith high school my Latin teacher Miss Kearns wept before the class and said of me, "She had two sisters who were brilliant Latin scholars. What went wrong here? Brilliant she's not. She's no more than ordinary, and she a Gardner!"

Katharine, the oldest, only began writing when money was rather desperately needed; it began to roll in when she did potboilers under pseudonyms, finally writing under her name two remarkable novels. Just as she began to get acclaim and the Milwaukee Journal in feature story and photographs paid homage to her, she quit writing. Her husband was then making money. Katharine really didn't like to write; she was just a genius whose life as a whole was one of self-abnegation, dedicated to bolstering up the fragile ego of her husband, purely out of love for him. Love and, I suspect, gratitude for a satisfying sex life that helped to obscure for her his essential mediocrity.

My stepmother, Caroline Klingensmith Gardner, would have written a compelling autobiography if it resembled the letters she wrote. As it was she published a few things under the pseudonym Janet Kenworthy and wrote a novel which Pearl Buck found impressive. But Mrs. Buck, then reading for a publisher, at the same time she praised it offered a suggestion; that she inject sympathy for at least one character. Caroline put the novel aside; she knew better than the celebrated novelist. Caroline continued to fill dresser drawers with sheafs of yellow paper, typed or handwritten --fiction and articles--into her eighties, all of it pitiless.

It has always been somewhat mysterious to me just why or how I was attracted by anything revolutionary. I never liked Dickens until I read A Tale of Two Cities, and at once when I did it galvanized me. I still have in my bookcase the Sounder, the Fort Smith High School yearbook of 1920, with "A Bolshevist Romance," one of two fiction pieces. I was a junior then, and its author. It was a comedy, surprisingly lively.

I'd like to know what strands of my early environment were involved in this interest. I'm convinced there were such, despite the fact that I had anything but a deprived childhood. My Uncle Dudley used to say that my genes made me a rebel, that I was "just like your mother."

I was born in the Indian Territory. Father had been sent by an Arkansas bank to Sallisaw--where the Joads in Grapes of Wrath came from--as branch banking in another state was then not illegal. When I was two years old we moved back to Fort Smith. When I was old enough to qualify for Social Security I needed a birth certificate, and learned in correspondence with the state of Oklahoma that only Indian children were registered in the Indian Territory. I sort of liked that bit of reverse discrimination and, when I submitted some record of baptism once we were back in Arkansas, it was accepted as proof of birth and so I really was not inconvenienced.

When I was twelve and my sister Gertrude fifteen we were invited to a house party at the Wheelers' home in Sallisaw, and discovered that about half the town was related to us. It came about in this way. When my great-grandfather John Carnall came to Arkansas about 1830 he brought with him his bride, Frances Turner, also from Virginia, although she had moved with her family to Missouri. Four of the Carnall-Turner family children survived, including Emma who married Bill Wheeler; his mother was the daughter of the chief of the Stan Waitie division of the Cherokee Indian nation. In notes on my family compiled by my stepmother Caroline, she wrote: "They lived in Sallisaw in a baronial manner. But they had eight children and their wealth was divided and dissipated and did not suffice to make any of them rich. They were all poor when I last heard of them." Be that as it may, we had a wonderful time at that Sallisaw house party.

My mother, Gertrude Boltwood Gardner, died when I was five years old. She was only thirty-six, according to her obituary, and I was her fourth child, all girls, one of whom, Alice, died before I was born. I am certain that Mother was a feminist, and Grandma, too. When Grandma's six children were growing up, in Ottowa, Kansas, or on a farm nearby, Grandma saved and scrimped throughout the year in order to make new dresses for the girls each summer for the big event of the year, the Chautauqua. Grandma greatly admired a woman doctor who spoke more than once; she electrified them all and inspired them to look for more, demand more, as women. Mother was seriously interested in the Indians and was writing a history of the Cherokee nation. When I was a baby I went with her to spend a summer in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in the home of a chieftain. Mother also used to like to attend hearings in the Federal Court in order to sketch the Indians; in those days Fort Smith was the seat of all federal litigation involving Indians of the Indian Territory. She also was interested in parks and playgrounds and her efforts to arouse public concern over Fort Smith's need of them met with a great deal of opposition. One small, rather sleazy park was named the Gertrude Boltwood Gardner Park after her death, almost as if to mock this energetic woman from the North for whom the four walls of her home were insufficient to bind her.

When I was two, I was told, Father contracted tuberculosis and was taken hemorrhaging on a stretcher to Colorado, with Mother and I accompanying him. He returned in the fall to work, and on other summers also went to Colorado, but after the first one I went to Kansas with my sisters to stay with Grandma. Father was always frail.

I have only a couple of distinct memories of Mother. She was very pretty, small, with great dark eyes, curly hair, animated face and little feet, unlike her daughters'. I recall her in a pink striped skirt and shirtwaist getting bacon from the oven for breakfast. Gertrude and I were playing in the attic once when she came up to kiss us goodby. She was on her way to a fancy luncheon and wore a lavender dress, gathered tightly around her tiny waist, and a big hat with a bunch of lilacs on the brim.

Caroline, my stepmother, was jealous of my mother and in many ways was belittling. But, possibly regretting or trying to curb her jealousy, she wrote late in life of Mother: "She was small, with huge brown eyes, a lovely skin, the color of a magnolia petal. When I knew her, she looked like a high school girl--I remember thinking your father was not good enough for her--and then three and one-half years after her death, I married him. In another letter she said my mother "was one of the few women in Ft. Smith who took an interest in current affairs and in art and letters. That sort of thing was badly needed. She was ahead of her time."

My sister Katharine in one of her two fine novels, Nice Lady, (Putnam's, 1940), portrayed Mother, a subsidiary character, most skillfully and most unsympathetically. As Fay Mathis, wife of John Mathis, banker, she turns her immense energies to introducing Culture to Marshall (Ft. Smith)--all of which she would give up gladly to be a member of the leading social set. My sister was twelve or thirteen when Mother died. She was wild about Father and jealous of Mother. The jealousy remained, and showed itself in more than a novel.

I can still see in my mind's eye the marvelous sketches of Indians which Mother had made. She had a deft touch with a pencil. A little drawing of my sister Gertrude when she was about four, made on rough tablet paper a youngster uses in school, I have framed and hanging on a wall; the faded red ribbon in Gertrude's hair is reflected in a narrow red frame; it caught her look--and the lines on the tablet were once faintly visible. To spend hours in the Federal Court sketching was not the work of a dilettante, but that is the way Katharine saw all Mother's efforts including her interest in suffrage. In her appraisal of Mother she never got past the adolescent estimate frozen at Mother's death.

One person everyone was agreed on: My grandmother, Kate Powers Boltwood. An orphan, of 100 per cent Irish descent, she was adopted by the Hastings family in Amherst, and was graduated from Mt. Holyoke College and went to work as a school teacher. I adored Grandma: all of us did, including Father.

I have a photograph of Grandma in a large oval frame, looking very sad, it always seemed to me, and it either was on her wedding day or I just believed it was. Her dress is off the shoulders, exposing her graceful neck; there is a wistfulness in her eyes, both hope, and wisdom. She is not counting too strongly on hope; if it fails she will make do, a firm but gentle jaw line and the upturned corners of her mouth seem to say.

Before Aunt Bess died, she told me that Grandma's parents were members of an Irish players' group in this country. In some epidemic they both died. Grandma and her brother were separated. She often spoke of the Hastings who had reared her; at age three she sat on a hassock and recited verses from the Bible. They were stern and unyielding but they were unable to kill the spark in her, the Irish gaiety, the electricity that ignited people around her.

In her telling of events Caroline did embroider them with suppositions. But she wrote, in her late years, of Grandma that she: "was one of the most remarkable women I ever knew. She had a brilliant mind. She was enormously energetic. She was totally unselfish. Your father adored her--I was jealous of course--but I tried not to let my jealousy show, which means that I had a little sense."

The three oldest Boltwood girls all found husbands in Fort Smith when they came there to teach school, but only Mother stayed on in Arkansas. Mother had attended Washburn College in Topeka for a time; all had normal school diplomas except Aunt Alice, or Lollie, who did not teach but married a local man, not for the better but the worse. Alone among the Boltwood women she was pliant, self-sacrificing--and raised three unhappy children. Grandma's eldest, Katharine (Aunt Ta), was extremely ambitious, and able. She married a perfectly charming Irish Fort Smithian, Hugh Dodson, who had gone through two small fortunes and, rejected as a working priest because he was too impractical, was when she met him employed as a clerk in the post office. In St. Louis, after the birth of her second son, Aunt Ta ran an ad in a newspaper as a teacher of foreign-born and self-made business men, and soon had a flourishing School of Private Tutoring, still in existence and run by her son Joe when I last heard. Uncle Hugh taught Latin, Greek and math for her. Joe was my favorite cousin.

While my mother was alive the only disturbing thing I recall is that I had nightmares. It was the same one. I slept in a cot in my parents' room. I'd awaken them screaming and they'd take me into their bed. Gertrude and Katharine used to taunt me, reciting a James Whitcomb Riley jingle that ended "And the goblins will get you if you don't watch out." It frightened me and I would howl and get Mother to make them stop. In the dream there always was a band of ragamuffins dancing about. Even after I was taken into their bed, I recall putting my arms around Father--when he turned into the leader of the band. Then I'd turn to Mother. Perhaps I at times turned first to Mother and she became the leader--I can't be sure--but I know that eventually I'd put my hand on her cheek and say "Softie," a name I had for her, and go to sleep.

Mother was sick a long time, or so it seemed to me. I never knew what she died of. Caroline said the diagnosis was "inflamed liver." and it was her belief it probably was cancer. But she was definitely not reliable when it came to facts about Mother. It was summer, and very hot, and the nurse kept the shades down in her room. One day the nurse lined us up, Katharine going in first, alone. When my turn came I tried to crawl up on her bed but she motioned me down. I tried to kiss her cheek but she held out her hand. It was very white, and I still can see it, and the gold wedding ring--given to me and eventually given by me to my son for his first wife, a lovely person, Judy.

The next morning Father came into our room. All three of us were sleeping in the same bed. We jumped up. We knew by his face at once. All three threw our arms around him. "Mother's gone to heaven." Not until years later, at his own funeral, did I learn he was an atheist, and rejoice, as I was too by then. He spoke in the language he did because he always had "gone along" with Mother's religion, and our instruction; he also always contributed to the Episcopal Church, too, but the only time I ever saw him in the church was at Katharine's wedding.

When Father died my stepmother asked a Methodist minister who had lived in Fort Smith to come from Texas to conduct the services. She always had the idea that Fort Smith didn't appreciate Father, and as the Episcopal service consists of prayers alone, she wanted something else. The minister and Father had become fast friends. As he told the crowd gathered in our home, "We had long arguments, and they were never resolved, for Mr. Gardner was an atheist. We talked often about it and were in disagreement there. But he never wavered. Yet I must say that Mr. Gardner led as near a Christlike life as any man I ever knew."

Did Fort Smith fail to appreciate Father? Perhaps. One man did not, certainly; Presley Bryant, the managing editor of the Southwest-Times Record. In his column "As It Seems to Me", he captured the essence of the man. Father died on May 2, 1927, and the May 3 issue of the newspaper carried Bryant's column, which began:

John Gardner is dead.

That terse statement, an explanation of a telephone message, struck consternation in the Southwest-Times Record news room last night. To the newspaper man, titles are of little use, but everyone knew him as Mr. Gardner.

He came into large contact with newspaper men. He was an outstanding authority on securities. Federal receiver in several highway improvement districts, he had an that they got their roads finished. Later, in the case of some districts in southwestern Arkansas that were delinquent, he withstood personal attacks, when ill-advised land owners swarmed into a sale of property, with threats in their throat.

Mr. Bryant went on to observe that "He was one of the few men who know how to say and have the courage to say 'no.'" He then described Father's tireless work as liquidating agent of a bank he had helped rescue--which I will go into further on--saying:

He worked arduously at the task of liquidating the ill-fated bank. Probably these heavy, protracted labors weakened him against his fatal illness. He never complained. Schooled against betraying emotion, he never even showed to casual observation the strain under which he must have bent. This man, universally trusted for his adherence to a rigid code; beloved by fast friends and too strong to make loose friends, has passed and left a great vacancy, to be filled only by someone's painstaking accretion of experience, careful and repeated rejection of temptation and the cultivation of a quiet tolerance in the face of disillusionment upon disillusionment. There is no easy substitute for seasoned wisdom, courage and integrity.

Father was considered stern, probably because he had no small talk. True, he was a man of few words. But I felt comfortable with him, on those few occasions when I was alone with him, when we both were silent. I knew he loved me, although he never said so. He was not demonstrative except with small children. In his fight against a return of the tuberculosis he came home for lunch each day and then rested on a sofa. One of my earliest memories is crawling up on the sofa, where he let me play with the gold watch fob he wore with the watch his grandfather had given him; the watch I was not allowed to touch.

We had one bad spat when I was in high school. He was resting in the south front room and overheard me as I talked to some boy on the phone. He came in and reproved me sharply for using slang. He said it showed "a paucity of vocabulary." I retorted hotly that he had no business listening in on my conversations, and he slapped me. The first and only time. I fled upstairs and was dissolved in tears, lying on my bed, when Caroline came up. She talked and at last I quit crying. I knew it was Father's way of half-apologizing to send her, and she knew I was sorry I'd been fresh. He never mentioned it nor did I.

When I was sixteen I went to my first formal dance. It was around Christmas and I had a "blind date" with someone coming home for the holidays from Staunton Military Academy, arranged by the matrons who were sponsoring the dance. I had been told my date would be in uniform. The doorbell rang and I could just feel Father looking him over as he answered it.

I went down and saw my date standing in the hall. His name was Brady Pryor and the first thing he said to me was "I don't dance." I said uncertainly, "I thought you'd be wearing a uniform." He laughed. "That monkey suit? Never unless I'm forced to."

Not an auspicious beginning. But he did dance. He was just shy, and given, as I would come to understand, to chronic under estimation of himself and all his talents. An undercurrent of raillery, directed at himself and often quite funny, ran through his conversation always. I noted he was handsome, with those expressive Irish blue or blue-gray eyes and dark hair and regular features.

A waltz was starting, and Brady said, "Listen, I can't waltz. What if we ran away from the dance, drove to Van Buren and had an ice-cream soda?"

Oh, sure, I said uncertainly. But as I went to get my wraps I felt mortified. Only one boy had cut in on me--Forrest Ford who had been in love with me in the first grade.

Behind the wheel, Brady seemed more relaxed and talkative. He was eloquent on his hatred of Staunton, and he had another year after he completed the coming semester--unless he improved in his grades and made up some work. Then he'd enter law school; of course it was all arranged that he'd go into his father's law office. I was beginning to enjoy this escape from the dance when Brady asked: "What if your father asks if you came straight home from the dance? I noticed he looked me over with a steely eye. Asked me if I was Tom Pryor's son."

"Well, I could never lie to Father. But why should he ask?"

"He might just because he doesn't like me--or my father." Without another word, although we were just passing the old electric park and were about five minutes away from Van Buren, he turned the car around and headed back. "I don't want you lying to him."

It was the following summer, though, that I saw Brady more often. Not that Father made it easy. He was hardly civil to him. I was with him every chance I had, just the same. One night he took me to a dance at the clubhouse atop a bluff outside Van Buren. On the way home he stopped the car half way down the mountain and kissed and held me and I wanted to swoon and never have it end. We would be married as soon as he got through law school and passed the bar exam, he said. I told him he'd have to face Father and tell him we were engaged. Why? he argued. We'd just go to Greenwood (like Fort Smith, a county seat of Sebastian County, where his mother's family held the town in the hollow of its hand), wake someone up to marry us, go on back to Fort Smith and his family's house, and in the morning they'd jubilantly greet us. I knew they would, too. But I felt that it would be disloyal to Father. Also that it would show him Brady was afraid to stand up to him. Why did I think a man had to be so damned strong? It was an argument repeated over and over, for some years.

At that time I still felt that Brady and I would make it together, somehow. Nothing else seemed possible. The night before I was to leave for Columbia, Missouri, to go to the University and take a journalism course, Brady and I drove around and parked on a hilltop. There was a full moon. In another month, he said miserably, I'd be looking at the moon with another boy. Would he write? I asked. Yes. He had another year at Staunton, then law school. Could he be sure I'd come back, and sure that I'd wait for him? "I'll love yo all my life long," I said, and it was almost true.

College at University of Missouri (BA in Journalism) - Intellectual development and romances

In his heart Father wanted each of us girls to come home and be belles in Fort Smith, and in turn each of us disappointed him. When it came to me he not only wanted me to want to live in Fort Smith, but he hated the idea of my going into newspaper work. He was afraid I'd marry a newspaper man. He got to know some of the reporters on the Fort Smith Elevator , having done some odd jobs around the paper while his grandfather was still alive. He thought the men on the Elevator often interesting, even charming, and better educated than he would ever be. "But most were footloose, drifters, going from job to job. Unstable. Not the kind of men to make good husbands, Ginny."

The eldest of John Carnall's motherless grandsons, Father was brought into town from the farm on Massard Prairie where he was born, and sent to high school, living with his grandfather and graduating in the first class to be turned out, in 1890. He had longed to study medicine but his grandfather died shortly after he was graduated and with no one to encourage him, he gave up the idea.

Caroline occasionally managed to dig things out of Father about his childhood. Father told Caroline that in the years when he lived in town with John Carnall, on nights when his grandfather couldn't sleep he would tell the boy interesting stories. All were true, all bits of history. He had been a fine classical scholar and when he came to Arkansas he was the first sheriff and the first school teacher in the county. Thus Father had not only the education provided by the high school John Carnall had promoted, but a liberal dose of history and tales from the classics taught by the old man himself.

When I went away to the University of Missouri--for although Father did not want me taking a journalism course he would not deny my right to take what I wanted to, and Missouri's School of Journalism was outstanding--my sister Gertrude was in training to be a nurse at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. I always felt Gertrude got the short end of things in our family. Just why that was I am unsure. One thing was unmistakable, though; it was Katharine who was the pivotal figure in the family.

Katharine went to the University of Kansas, but at the close of her first year there Father had a letter from an English professor who explained that Katharine was the most talented student he ever had but he had been forced to flunk her. After he read something to the class she had written she went on strike, refusing to write anything else. Father wrote him that he had done the right thing. It ended Katharine's college, but it was war time by then, and she entered a nurse's training at Barnes Hospital. Then she was sent home with a heart condition said to be the result of rheumatic fever.

Katharine visited Mrs. Breckenridge in Muskoka Lakes on other summers and there met and madly fell in love with Mrs. Breckenridge's nephew Joseph Carson. Father, a great believer in being from a "good family," ignored the fact he was taking her to Saskatchewan to a life of penury and hardship and insisted that she have a church wedding. Katharine wanted to escape anything fancy, but yielded. So it was that Father's pride in showing off the Breckenridge kin as son-in-law prevailed over his reluctance to set foot in the Episcopal Church.

Gertrude went to the University of Colorado for a year--but she had paid for it herself with money earned working summers for the bank. Then she entered nurse's training at Barnes Hospital and was there when I went to the University at Columbia, Missouri. She was an awfully good nurse, and could have made a fine doctor, but in those days few people thought of encouraging nurses to attempt medical school. Meanwhile Gertrude and I spent Christmas and other holidays together; I would stay with her at the nurse's home and became devoted to her best friends there.

I went away to school with Dorothy Harris, an attractive young woman with amazing grace as a dancer. We both were pledged as Pi Beta Phis but freshmen were required to live in rooming-houses that first year; willy-nilly we became roommates. I put Brady's picture on my dresser. I wrote him long letters and had two very sweet, loving letters from him. Then came a letter that dismayed me. I had written after reading his latest that I went around with a big grin on my face all day. No one but Brady would have thought that I meant anything other than that his letter made me very happy. But Brady interpreted it to mean I was laughing at him. Nor did he write again after I wrote and explained. No further letters from him all that year.

In an enormous class in economics, where we were seated alphabetically tier upon tier, next to me was Paul Garrison, who wrote funny little notes to me in class. Then he asked me to a Phi Gam dance, I had a very good time--and from then on he explained economics to me--both bourgeois and Marxism. As if it was an entirely commonplace statistic, he said, "Of course I am a Socialist. So is my father." His mother had died when he was pretty young; he had a younger brother and a younger sister. In their home in St. Louis they had all sorts of Socialists coming and going, men like Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas.

I was fascinated. I'd once been electrified by hearing (I was eavesdropping as the doors were closed) a talk between Father and Carson Breckenridge, then stationed with the Marines at Peking. At first it was Major and then Colonel and always when he came to visit his mother--that lovely gracious lady--he brought us Chinese toys. My favorite was the beautiful egg containing smaller and smaller eggs until the last one was barely a thumb's breadth. That was when we were small. He always said we would be his friends until we were twelve, he was afraid of women older than twelve. As I was older than twelve but not enough older not to take seriously what he'd said I was keeping out of sight. But I crept close enough to hear voices raised, Father saying: "But Carson, if I understand what you're saying, you're nothing but a damned socialist!" I had never heard him say the word "damn" before this. Carson, completely calm, replied, "That is just what I am, John."

Paul and I became inseparable, and it seemed there was no end to my curiosity about socialism. We both made "S" (superior) in economics and I went to all the Phi Gam dances.

When Paul first kissed me I told him about Brady--after the kiss. Well, was I engaged to him? No, I said, not exactly--but we had an understanding. Paul's logical mind came to the rescue. Since the thought of Brady apparently hadn't bothered me when I kissed him, it must be that I cared for him, Paul, a little, yes? "Oh, I do." Then couldn't we just go along as we were and perhaps I'd find that I cared for him in the way he cared for me? "But I'll feel guilty," I murmured. Paul answered: "The whole idea of guilt--well, I don't think much of it. Actually you should feel guilty only if you betray your class, or your principles. Or if you pretend something you don't feel." I asked what my class had to do with it. He had a lot of teaching to do, and the best he could come up with was, "You wouldn't be a strikebreaker, for instance." No, I said, but it seemed to me were drifting pretty far afield.

In the spring Dorothy had had bad news from home: the death of her father, which in turn revealed that family finances were not of the best. She had to drop out of school. I was genuinely sorry --it seemed a great shame, especially as it happened just after she made a great hit as the solo dancer in the annual journalism school play.

I had gone on seeing Paul, an increasingly engrossing experience. Spring term was optional at Missouri. I stayed for it, to make extra credits, as I felt the need of getting a degree as soon as possible, and a job. I moved to a house with a big el-shaped front porch and a swing. I loved spring term, I adored my philosophy class and Dr. Sabin, who taught it as teaching should be done. It was freeing me from the last vestiges of religion. He didn't lecture, he talked, effortlessly, while I hung on his words and felt the chills go up and down my spine.

Then, on one of those spring moonlit nights in Columbia when just to be alive was ecstasy, I did a terrible, inexplicable thing. I think I had never been so happy. Paul and I walked almost empty streets. The world seemed ours. On my big front porch, shaded from the bright moonlight, Paul took me in his arms and kissed me. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I knew now that with Brady I had been awed by his passion, which I tried to gratify in some way as I wanted to make him happy. But for the first time now I felt passion, was engulfed by it, was swept away, far out, and frightened of losing my moorings. I was giving in to it. I had no will, I was no longer me. Feebly I murmured, as if it could stave off this gulf in which I was drowning, "I hate men."

I came to when I was pushed aside by Paul--who remained leaning against a pillar of the porch. He actually smote his forehead but it was not theatrical, it was real, and I heard smothered words. "To think I felt--as I did toward my mother . . . ." Then he was gone, almost staggering down the walk.

I was paralyzed, aghast at what I had done, the words I had spoken. I hadn't meant it, it was all a lie. I ran after him, I called his name, ran down the brick sidewalk. I can still see the bricks, with some moss growing between them here and there. He did not turn around. At last I went back, slowly, flung myself on my bed. It was irretrievable. That was the worst thing, and I knew it. What had possessed me? I did not understand. I still do not understand. I did not hate men, I just wanted to--to what? To still be able to think, I guess. Well, he hadn't imperiled that.

Had I but had the maturity to write him and say that it was just a crazy reaction to the first time I had felt real grown-up passion I might have saved the situation. But I didn't have it. From that time an impenetrable wall existed between us. Twice, in later years, it was almost broken. By then I should have been able to bring things out into the open, tell him I wasn't that way, it was not myself talking, it was a forked tongue I did not recognize. But, circumscribed by my culture that said a woman should wait until a man moved toward her, I waited, and he didn't make a move toward me.

The rest of that spring I felt unutterable depression. I alternated between hating myself because I had hurt him so much--and without reason, as it was an aberration of my true feelings--and trying to justify myself.

I soon heard that Paul was going with a tall, beautiful junior and that he was drinking (which was bad for his asthma). Once in the Palms, a restaurant, I passed by him. His head was turned, but I felt that he saw me in the mirror. He did not speak. What did I expect? The big front porch making an el, and my room where I'd shed so many tears, became unbearable to me, but I had just paid a month's rent in advance and was too frugal to think of moving.

I had a history course that spring term in which I wrote a long paper on "A Comparison of Causes of the French and Russian Revolutions." A young and quite liberal man taught it, I did a lot of reading in the library for the course and enjoyed it. I would have gotten more out of it but that seated across the table from me was the handsomest of all the handsome Indians I had ever seen. A streak of white in his forelock, repeated in lashes over one eye, had me spellbound. He flirted with me but never spoke. He was from Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and I longed to tell him that I spent one summer there with my mother in the home of an important Cherokee chieftain, and that Mother was writing a history of the Cherokee nation. But although I flirted back, no word ever escaped those chiseled lips. Finally I appealed to George Berry, a rather horrid man who insulted people freely. Because we were in some class together he treated me with great respect. Or so I thought. He was a Sig Alph, as was the beautiful Indian. I told George of my predicament and he arranged a date. To make it easier, he said, for the Indian was shy, he would go with us to a movie, then drive us back to my place and leave us. Thus it was, and we bade George goodby and sat in the swing--but only briefly. Still without a word, the man with the white eyelashes grabbed me in a way that meant business. Gasping for breath, I finally extricated myself enough to say I had hoped to talk to him--and I stalked into the house.

In my room, I first gave way to venomous thoughts. Hadn't I seen a sinister gleam in that eye beneath the white lashes? But after a bit my always too-late common sense took over. Why had I been fool enough to depend on George Berry? Doubtless it was his idea of sport with me to fill the lad with tales of my great passion for him. I could just hear him propounding the best techniques to use to satisfy this usually aloof young woman the Indian had inspired.

Of course this incident ended the eye flirtation in the history class. Never again did he even look at me. How simple it would have been, had I not been brought up never to make "advances" to a male, to write him a note saying I'd once visited Tahlequah, rather than depend on the vagaries of George Berry. As it was, it was my farewell to Tahlequah, beautiful sounding name. It had acted as a diversion, too, to my grieving over both Paul and Brady.

By remaining for spring term I had missed spring in the Ozarks. The dogwood and the wild cherry on the hillsides surrounding Fort Smith were gone, the silver moon rose on our back fence was petering out, the Japonica had bloomed its last. It was hot, and year in, year out, Fort Smith matched Yuma, Arizona, as the hottest town in the country. It was a dry heat, as I recall, otherwise unbearable.

I was in a sad mood. Caroline, my stepmother, sensed it and I tried to talk to her about Paul but found I could not tell her how I had messed things up. Had I been able to it might have saved me untold hours of grief, for she was a woman with insight, with a fund of common sense in crises that did not concern her directly, however impossible she could be in other areas. She loved me as much as she could love any other female. She was primarily a man's woman.

It is true that six months before I was to graduate she wrote me in terms of dire poverty so alarming that I wrote Father I was quitting Missouri. He wrote back I was doing no such thing and what made me arrive at such a conclusion? Actually she had written that they were so broke she hadn't the money to buy the baby- Cliff, our adored Kiki--shoes. I did not mention this to Father but simply said I'd rather not be a financial burden any longer. He wrote back to pay no attention to Caroline, that she had just wanted to get the upstairs redecorated before Mary Breckenridge came to visit. A complex woman, she still would have rallied had I been able to tell her about Paul.

When I finally did see Brady, although I had sworn to myself that I would not, I wound up telling him I also loved Paul Garrison. I remember being struck with how desirable Brady seemed, even as he was withering in his sarcasm. "I gave you a month. It probably didn't take that long, did it?" I couldn't say a word, and was silent, feeling small and sad.

A few days later I saw Brady with Dorothy Harris, my former roommate, at a dance at the Country Club. So she'd won him. I wished I could sneak away. But I was all smiles, and this time, unlike that dance Brady took me to when I was 16, men did cut in on me. Word must have got around that I was popular at the University of Missouri, a thing I'd never been in Fort Smith. In the women's room I ran into Dorothy. I'd not seen her since her father's death and put my arms around her, feeling something of a hypocrite. She was effusive--letting me know that "Brady is still yours" as she was "just a passing fancy." I said it was mighty nice of her to tell me and we glared at each other grimly and returned to the ballroom arm in arm.

College experiences continued - First sexual experience - A summer with her sister Katherine in Saskatchewan

For years I loved Paul and Brady equally and with equal futility. Back in Columbia the next fall I finally got up the nerve to write Paul and say I wanted to see him. To have the chapter in the Pi Phi house reserved you had to be an old graduate or have a visit from a long absent parent. But some of the sisters were tired of seeing me always in the doldrums. They did not know why but knew I was no longer seeing Paul. I don't remember how it was arranged, probably through my house mother Mary Banks, but one afternoon at the appointed hour Paul and I sat on the sofa in the chapter room with doors closed. He looked acutely uncomfortable.

I told him I could accept anything if I knew it were true. I asked him to say so if it were all over and he no longer loved me. Paul got that stubborn look on his face and said nothing. So I asked him to repeat after me my words and, not looking at him, I said, "You're to say "I do not love you.'" Reluctantly and slowly, he did. Then I flew out the door, and upstairs ran to my room on the third floor, and he was left to make his way out as best he could. I wept and wept. I was tragedy Jane all right. I suppose I had felt sure that he would refuse and then I would find myself in his arms. No such luck. I wanted to die.

Fortunately I had a number of beaus who were also good friends, and they helped, especially Dick Chomeau, from St. Louis, who lived next door in the Phi Psi house. Dick told me the house was divided about me, half of them hating my guts and half liking me a lot. Why? I asked. What had I done to make anyone hate me?

Dick liked to laugh at me but never kidded me. He was older than most of the men there. I could pour my heart out to him as he never gave me any false steers. So I told him about my farewell session with Paul. It was a day in late fall and we took a long walk that led past the Phi Psi house and into something almost like country, and were sitting on a big stump and admiring the colors of late October in Missouri. "You were as subtle as a meat-axe with Paul." he said in his half amused, half indulgent way. "You're always too outspoken, you know. Aren't there any halftones with you?"

"Is there any single thing good about me? Tell me one."

"Yes, you're very good to kiss," he said, illustrating.

It was a story with us. I always felt that I could let him kiss me, and enjoy it, that he'd not "go too far."

"That's one trouble, you're still a virgin." he chided.

I protested. "It's really very hard losing your virginity. At home it's impossible, because I'm a nice girl, you see--and my father is a powerful figure."

"And here?"

"It's the same thing. You know you yourself wouldn't if you could, and knowing that, I trust you. But with us it's something else too. You and I are honest with each other--too honest to have love enter in. Or else I'm all muddled today."

"No, I think that's about it. But I just may some day fool you."

We both laughed and had a farewell smooch and set off for our walk back. Although I remained friends with Dick, I never knew what became of him and at times wondered, hoping he was not too bad off.

After Dr. Sabin left the university, as so many did when they were offered more pay elsewhere, I went from course to course in philosophy--which I needed like a hole in the head for a Bachelor of Journalism--hoping to find someone like him. I never did. The third one I tried was almost his exact opposite. It was an enormous class and instead of wanting queries as Sabin had, he strenuously objected to them. Once he even sent me out of the room, like a child. He was orderly, exact, we must cover a certain amount of text each day. But he was the fairest man imaginable. He had to be to give me an E (for excellence; it was not mandatory, as a proportion of s's were, for "superior"). George Berry was the only other one in the class to make E. I was wild to take French Thought in the Eighteenth Century, which he taught. He had told me I couldn't. I left his office and ran into George, who was headed that way. I told him I'd just been refused. Later I saw George; he had been accepted, and had asked why Gardner was not welcome in the class. He said, "That girl's personality drives me wild. I wouldn't have her in another course if I had to leave the university for refusing her."

That first spring term I had had a course in Johnson and His Time from Dr. Harry M. Belden. The first day I decided it would be worth while so long as I could sit where I could see the profile of Jack Waters wearing an open collared white shirt like Lord Byron's and being far handsomer. Then I forgot to watch Jack Waters I was so taken up with listening to Dr. Belden. A little brown berry of a man with twinkling eyes, he had the most resonant, thrilling voice I'd ever heard. So in my last year I applied to take his course called Versification so I could hear him read poetry. He looked over my credits and said, "Why, Miss Gardner, you've never had English Life and Lit. You mean to finish in June? How can you have gone this far without English Life and Lit?" I offered no excuse, only looked at him in despair. He decided: "Oh, well, if you've gone this far without it you might as well graduate without it." Nothing was a fixed rule with Dr. Belden.

Dr. Belden was a most important influence on me, extending not only through college but for years to come--until his death really. I have a number of cherished letters from him. For years, at every important juncture of my life I wrote to him, beginning with the summer after my graduation.

In my third and final year at Missouri many things happened. My chief beau at the time was Al Bunting, from Kansas City. There was little danger of my taking him seriously. He often expatiated on the life he meant to live. "I'll make money, being a Bunting; I'll marry a woman who will give me good healthy children. And for love I'll have a mistress." Al was always on the point of flunking out, but it didn't bother him.

The most exciting thing that happened to me that last year was that I was adopted by a small group of talented students, all non-fraternity--the intelligentsia of Columbia. Sara Saper, whom I knew in Journalism school, was responsible. Some were poets, as she was and as Joe Berger was. Others were unclassified; all were very smart. I felt rather like an imposter. There was no fixed time for meeting, it was all informal. Some, like Eleanor, came and went as they pleased. Sara, Libbie and Dorothy occupied rooms above the main floor, once a sort of theater, where we met. It was a building Gladys Wheat had had built in her mother's back yard. As it was once used for plays or art exhibitions and the culture Gladys Wheat represented at an earlier time, it doubtless had a name, but we knew it only as "The Studio." The room where we met contained a fireplace that worked and was a beautiful room. Mrs. Wheat was offered all sorts of payment but refused to consider any roomers save Sara and her friends. She knew her friends would not start a fire or engage in drinking parties.

There were ardent disputes, all literary as I recall. They were serious people, and critical--but not too serious. Once we had Dr. Belden as a guest and Libbie baked a chicken and a chocolate cake and we served him tea. We considered ourselves rebels, but what we were rebelling against is terribly vague. Missouri was an insular college: Columbia was a little backwater town untroubled by the Sacco-Vanzetti case which rocked Eastern campuses.

In that group I made lasting friends. Sara Saper Gauldin and I have written each other for the last fifty-seven years, and when I lived in California, we saw each other from time to time. We have often talked about our days in The Studio, and remember not one time when we spoke of the battle to reverse the conviction of two innocent men that raged throughout the years following their verdict in 1921. The years at Columbia, Sara and I agreed, floated by us. We were called radicals but so far as we can recall we never talked about the two men whose names are known throughout the world. Even so, it was high excitement for me when Sara or Joe Berger or Jimmie Reese read aloud one of their poems.

In that year, one night when I was spending the night with the Rogers sisters--not among my newfound friends--in their big house on the edge of town, we had the macabre experience of hearing strange cries in the night. They seemed to come from the direction of the bridge past the Rogers house. We were awakened and stood by the windows listening, for a time. The next day we learned that a black man had been hanged, accused of rape but never tried. The shocking thing was that in the mob were some students. Francis Misselwitz, a Journalism School student and correspondent for a Kansas City newspaper, broke the story indicting the students but not by name. If any investigation was ever made as to the presence of the students, it was not out in the open. We spoke of this event in hushed tones, and it remains a horrible shadow faulting the sunlight of the University of Missouri.

Before the end of the school year, I finally achieved the status of being no longer a virgin. Sara and I talked about it afterward. "What's supposed to be so great about it?" She said she didn't know and we cried together. I told her, "I keep trying to see something beautiful in it but I'll be damned if I can." She said, "Never mind, you don't have to." I think she cried harder than I, but I knew it was for the man she had been in love with for years, a poet whom I did not know. All I remember is being pushed to the wet sidewalk in the side yard of the little house where Frankie and I lived, and the blood--and this boy Bill saying he was going to the drug store and would be back. After I'd gone upstairs and was frantically trying to get myself clean I heard the bell and went down. He handed me Kotex and something else--whatever it was, I applied it as if it would stave off pregnancy. I told Sara I thought he was the most callow, pretentious man I'd ever met, superficial, silly, with his phony British accent. What had I fallen for, his yellow hair?

Father sent me a roundtrip excursion ticket to Banff and Lake Louise. I was not to go to the famous destination, as that would cost money, but to change at Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where I got a train to Hawarden. Father said I was to help Katharine for the summer, returning by the expiration date of the ticket. Katharine in the first three years of her marriage had had three children, all girls, and three miscarriages. She had married Joseph Carson, a Mississippian who had graduated from the University of Wisconsin's agricultural college and invested his inheritance in a wheat ranch five miles from Hawarden in order to escape the draft for World War I. Anyone growing wheat was deemed to be aiding "the war effort" and properly patriotic, too.

I immediately relieved Katharine of all the chores she had had to do alone up to then. She had even been climbing up a ladder in the barn to throw down fodder for the cows. I also took over all the washing, of diapers and everything else--and in addition pumped troughfuls of water a day for the cattle, a thing she had not had to do. She liked to cook, and was a wonderful cook.

I was as strong as a young Arkansas mule and didn't mind the work. But those first weeks were an agony to me. Would I menstruate? The time came and went by. I did not dare tell her. Secretly I tried to plan; I thought of all sorts of wild schemes for getting away if I was pregnant. In the midst of my worries came a letter from Bill, this awful man--the only man I was ever ashamed of having cared for however briefly--assuring me of his undying love and letting me know he would think of me by land or sea--he was joining the merchant marine. My period came about two weeks late. I began writing a story. The setting was Saskatchewan and it revolved around a male chauvinist although I'd never heard of the term.

After a hard day's work outside the house and within, leaving it spotless, at night I wrote on my sister's old typewriter, then took a turn up and down the road to look at the sky. The nights were mysterious and beautiful, the Milky Way stunning in its brilliance. Everything was sky. The earth below was completely flat, barren of trees or even shrubs, little houses all but invisible so far apart were they, the whole presenting a spectacle of man's fragility compared to the sky, alight and powerful.

That summer was one long drought. My brother-in-law's black mood was understandable, since there would be virtually no crop. At lunch he would sit and stuff mashed potatoes in his mouth listlessly. If he spoke it was a sour remark. Katharine would have made some delicacy for dessert, but he stuffed that in, too, without comment. I could not stand her docility. She, the proud one!

It worried me that the children were so good. For nothing at all Joe would make Katie leave the table and stand behind her chair with her back to us. I smoldered and my appetite left me. I shared the room with little Foncie, and she never uttered a sound until I awoke. Katharine let me sleep until eight o'clock, and I always felt guilty when I saw Foncie was awake, smiling radiantly, her arms outstretched as she saw me come toward her.

Joe had no love for me, but I was a good worker. At his suggestion I began on his potato pit, a revolting task requiring countless hours. Daily because of the nauseous smell I had to remove the khaki pants, shirt and high boots I wore, leaving them in the back yard when Katharine brought out clean things. The long pale stems sprouting from the rotten potatoes bore little potatoes, and Joe took them to the county fair and won a prize for growing the earliest crop.

Day after day the sun was hot, the sky cloudless. Joe's face was a revelation in despair. His conversation at dinner was apt to take on a jeering attitude toward me. What did I intend to do in September (when the return ticket would expire)? I said cheerfully, "I'll go to St. Louis and live with Gertrude and get a job." What made me think I could? Did I really think that little piece of paper--my degree in journalism--would open doors? It became a favorite theme. "You'll find pretty quick that you can't make a living. Any more than Katharine could. Why, if something happened to me, what could Katharine find to do? Not a single thing."

Katharine soothed him. "That's right. I'd be lost without you."

One night I flared up. "What do you know about it?" I told Joe when he became obnoxious. "Times have changed. You speak as if the only chance a woman has to survive is to marry. Look at Aunt Bess and Aunt Ta, both of whom are married but had important careers!"

The next day Katharine took me aside and said she could not have me arguing with her husband in front of the children. But she stopped short of asking me to leave. Knowing how frail she was, I buttoned my big mouth. The Sunday came when we set out for the Porters' farm ten miles distant. They were English people; he had emigrated to Canada to escape the draft in the Boer War. A long avenue of trees led to their roomy attractive house. All was green and lovely. The little girls were in ecstasy. The Porter children, older, took charge of them. Puppies and kittens to play with, a sandbox for little Foncie, a swing for Katie. I wandered about wonderingly, looking at flowers and grass.

Returning to the house, I overheard snatches of talk between Mrs. Porter and Katharine. They were talking of books! How long had it been, I thought, since Katharine had found anyone with whom she could discuss books. Yet this sister of mine after exhausting the fiction in the Fort Smith Public Library came home with Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and delved into it--at a time when Katharine was in high school. She was a product of Fort Smith, though; smart girls were not popular. When she was named valedictorian, the weeping and wailing that went on in our house was unsurpassed. She would refuse to take part in the graduation. A rip-roaring scene. Only when Father said she could not go to the University of Kansas in that case did she calm down.

We started home from the Porters' place in Joe's ancient car and it chugged along until we got about a mile from the Carson farm, when the engine died. We had to walk. Ginny, the baby, had to be carried, and I think was in Joe's arms. The time came when Pang, as little Florence called herself, could walk no farther. Katharine wanted to take her and I said, "Absolutely no, it would be bad for your heart." Joe snorted: "Nothing at all the matter with Katharine. It's that stupid doctor you all had at Fort Smith --" I didn't argue but took Pang myself. It was when, farther on, that Katie, such a good, willing, cooperative child, not quite four now, said she had to take a pebble out of her shoe--and Joe snapped at her, that I boiled over. To scold the children at such a time when they were trying so hard was outrageous, I said.

The next morning Katharine took me into another room. The girls were busy with crayons and Ginny was in her playpen. "I've told you before that I could not have you arguing with Joe in front of the children. Your raising a scene last night was the last straw. I'm afraid you'll have to go."

I began packing, asking her to phone as to a train. I was all packed and waiting in my room when she came in after lunch, which I'd skipped. Obviously Joe had put his foot down on losing the good worker. She had to eat her words. She did it awkwardly, with little pretense of graciousness. It was more painful than if she had yelled and screamed at me. But that was the trouble in our family: we were brought up to be ladies.

So I stayed out my time at the farm in Saskatchewan. Possibly all my letters to Aunt Bess, then women's page editor on the Milwaukee Journal (where Uncle Dudley was Sunday editor), would result in the Carsons' hastening their departure from Saskatchewan for the States. Eventually they did come to Milwaukee, Joe leaving the farm with regret, Katharine with joy.

First newspaper jobs - Romance with Andy Anderson

In St. Louis it began to look as if Joe Carson had been right and that I'd never get a job. I tried department store advertising, with no takers. At the Star I was told I could work as a reporter but without pay. I had fallen for a similar proposition given me by some woman who ran an advertising agency, and put in two weeks without pay and without any promise of it. I balked at the Star's offer: "Thanks but I can't afford it."

After the advertising woman had "employed" me I had written home that I had a job. Then Father came to St. Louis on business. He had been offered a vice presidency in a bank there. He took me and Trudy for a splashy meal and ordered for us-a steak dinner we devoured. He told us he was declining the vice presidency the St. Louis bank offered. "I'd rather be a big frog in a little pool than a little frog in a lake." He urged me to go home with him. He had guessed that the advertising job was payless, and I confessed. He'd sent me checks but I'd sent them back, determined to make it on my own. I was living with Trudy in a room near Barnes Hospital. We kept milk on the window sill and she brought me sandwiches in her nurse's uniform pocket when she could. I also earned $10 a week by working for Aunt Ta at the Dodson School of Private Tutoring, doing odd jobs.

Not long after that visit with Father, I had a wire from Mary Banks, my sorority mother, from Pawhuska, Oklahoma. "If you can stand working from 1 P.M. to 1 A.M., society and personals, this job is yours. It pays $30 but is an oil town, prices high." Father lent me the money for my fare, with ample to live on until pay day; he did not consider it a loan, but I did.

Pawhuksa was the capital of the Osage nation, and an oil town. Oil had been struck on the land of the Indians and many were immensely wealthy; the town abounded in crooked lawyers who fattened off the Indians' wealth. But working 12 hours a day, six days a week, left me little time to explore. I hated Mr. Gay, the editor of the Pawhuska Daily Journal, but Mr. Marple, the city editor, was another story. A big, silent man, bald, he had endured his impossible job for years, writing everything in the paper except the canned stuff, the editorials and what I wrote; he lasted by agreeing with Mr. Gay and then ignoring his unreasonable orders, by being a diplomat with the printers and cultivating all important news sources without ever promising anything or ever misquoting them by a single word. I grew very fond of him.

I turned in up to five columns of copy a day, up to three of personals and from one to two of society; Mary Banks had made the rounds of her sources and introduced me. Before we entered the Citizens' National Bank she said, "Now I'll introduce you to the officers, and to Andy Anderson, a teller. Andy's just the cutest man in town. Dry; modest, too, but he's been around." She also introduced me to Texas Tate, the cop who walked her home each night. It was a rough town, and not deemed safe for unaccompanied women walking home at 1 A.M. She warned me, though, that Texas could be an awful bore.

But Texas obviously considered himself irresistible to women, and when he told me, on the way to the home of Mrs. Rippley where I roomed, "You and me was made for each other," he meant it as a compliment.

I really could manage Texas Tate. But it made a good story, and who to tell it to but Andy Anderson? I had great respect for Mary's judgement--of people and things in general. Andy had the perfect solution. It wouldn't do to offend Texas. Andy lived two blocks away from Mrs. Rippley in a cottage shared by four, and he and one or more of his roommates played cards most nights until 1 A.M. They could come by and pick me up--a perfect excuse to get rid of Texas.

The little white house surrounded by a big yard where Andy lived harbored, with one exception, a most attractive group. I met eventually the one occupant who was, to me at least, uncongenial, Frank Monk, who prided himself on being an intellectual. Rather impulsive, his claim was that he possessed such devastating charm for women that he was paid a considerable ransom to stay out of Baltimore by the husband of a woman who had been his paramour.

The other three did not take him seriously, but tolerated him, I suppose because he liked to cook. The others were Andy, Dr. Witcher, a handsome and pleasant person, and Henry Duncan, a lawyer and friend of the Indians and, I came to believe, the only one of 79 lawyers in the town who did not exploit the Indians shamelessly. In time I became friends with Mrs. Coffey, an Indian woman whose son I knew in the School of Journalism. Not one of the wealthy Indians, she seemed to support Henry's judgement of the town's legal profession.

It was around Christmas time that I heard about Dud Jarrett's suicide. It was shocking and depressing to me, and taking advantage of the three days off I had over the holiday, I went home to try to get my bearings. I had a need of seeing familiar people and places.

While I was home that time I saw Brady. In my mind it was always connected with being in his 1921 Chalmers car (it was now January 1925) and stopping on our way down a mountain, I had not seen him in a long time. Away from him, I never knew how I stood with him.

But, as it always was, when I was with him I was profoundly convinced it was I whom he loved. It all happened in a minute, for it was dangerous to park a car on the side of a hill. He drew me to him and kissed me, and so far as I was concerned, I knew no one else ever could take his place. In my unerring way of doing the wrong thing, I felt compelled then and there to tell him I was no longer a virgin. I think I said I had "given myself" to another. A euphemism in this case, as actually I never had. The poverty of that brief experience lying on the damp sidewalk, or the equal bleakness of its only sequel, when I visited him in Kansas City, and after a few minutes' impersonal intimacy he wrapped me in a not too clean bathrobe--I did not tell. Or the fact that I now thought of him as a braggart and a pretentious bore.

No, I just let fall the admission. Brady cried and said I was good and could do nothing bad. While I remained dry eyed and stony, stuck with my betrayal as I saw it. Then he shifted gears and we went silently on our way. I loved him more than ever but felt that I had lost him. I probably had, but not because of my blunt recital.

Once at home and in bed, the tears came. Why did I have to tell him? I did not know. But I knew I'd do it over again. My damned honesty; how could I be otherwise with Brady, though?

Back in Pawhuska, I began working on some short stories after my 12-hour day and my journey home accompanied by Andy and, at times, Henry, too. Mr. Marple occasionally gave me a feature story to do. There was excitement over a big fire in an oil well near Pawhuska, and I went there by bus. A man was tried for murder in Pawhuska and I went to his trial one day and interviewed him in jail, too. Otherwise it was just personals and society items, the latter obtained by phone. I skimped the society; my long suit was personals.

I was getting interested in Andy. On my day off we went on drives with Don, an officer in his bank, and his wife. They had a Victrola; "Rhapsody in Blue" was new and they had a record, and I could not hear it often enough. Paul Whiteman's band was playing. With Andy and Don and Marie I learned to drink. Don stopped the car on some out-of-the-way stretch of road, and he and Andy got out their flasks. They also had one of plain water. Andy told me to take a sip of the water, and before swallowing it, a sip of the corn whiskey. I did, and felt it scalding my insides. I sputtered. Andy said: "It takes a little while. Everyone does that at first." In school I had had only a few cigarettes in all, but in Canada I smoked, as did Katherine. It was the only diversion I had, and I got used to inhaling. The cigarettes there were strong, like the tea. It was the high point of the day for both of us when Katherine and I allowed ourselves in the late afternoon to have a cigarette. I never got used to more than a couple of thimblefuls of corn whiskey, though.

Came the weekend when Don and his wife drove us to Tulsa to see what in Fort Smith we called a "road show." It was a musical comedy, Irene. No match for Gershwin.

I had a hard time spending my $30 a week. I saved enough to buy Father a beautiful sweater, knickers and a set of golf clubs. I had returned the $100 I'd borrowed to get to Pawhuska and he had sent it back. I longed to see him playing golf again. He wrote me:

My dearest Ginia

You are a very extravagant and profligate girl - but a very delightful one - at the same time. It was so generous of you to send me that nice golf bag - mashie and putter - and to add to all that a whole half dozen balls. In the old days when I played golf I never had a half dozen new balls at one time in my life. You should not have done all that my dear, but I would be a miserable hound if I could not appreciate so much.

It means a lot to you just now to spend all the money on me, when you need many things yourself. It shows how much importance you attach to the idea that I should be taking some exercise and I shall get to doing it, soon now, first because you attach so much importance to it, and secondly, because I am now so much equipped. It was very dear of you and while I logically condemn you for such unwarranted extravagance, I at the same time love you for it. Thank you, so many times, my dear for the very wonderful gift.

Lots of love

Father

The letter reminds me that I sent the golf knickers and sweater after the golf clubs. Another letter from Father sent to me in St. Louis that year answered my plea that he go back to playing golf in this way: "I don't see how I can start golf now, Ginia dear, although I would really like to do it. I paid out last month about $575 and my bills the first of this month amounted to about $375, so I can't spare the money to buy the golf equipment until spring." But when he died in May 1927 the golf things were unused.

At times I began to think that Andy was interested in anything but making love. I needn't have worried. After he kissed me for the first time he held me at arm's length and gave me a quizzical look. He asked: "Were you putting that on?"

"I don't know. I didn't know I was."

After he'd gone I became rather angry. I could only assume that he thought I was pretending to be more passionate than I was. All right, I decided, he'll wait a long while before he again catches me off guard. Or was there some truth in what he said? Never mind, I too can be cool and sophisticated when I like, I told myself.

One Sunday we had dinner at Don and Marie's house. Andy picked me up in his old car as it was too far to walk easily. We danced to records and I just sat drinking in the Paul Whiteman record. Instead of driving home when we left them Andy drove outside of Pawhuska a little way and parked. It was a pretty night but I began to chatter at a great rate. When I stopped for breath and he drew me to him I was deliberately wooden. I thought of Dud Jarrett's "Bah, you are passive!" Andy said: "Well, well, not in the mood?"

"At least I'm not putting this on."

"All right. Let's agree that was stupid on my part, and I just got my comeuppance. Quite right. But why should it upset you so?" He had a way of asking me questions that were down to earth.

"I don't know. It just made me self-conscious."

"Is there anyone else you're in love with?"

"Yes there is, Brady. I've been in love with him on and off for years, but it's hopeless; I'm trying to put it all out of my head."

"So that's it. And the other night you were thinking it was Brady you were kissing?"

"Not at all." Then I added: "What about you?"

"No hangovers here. I surprise myself a little. Forgotten how it could be."

When he tried again my barriers melted--not altogether, but enough. Afterward, I said: "I think you're genuine."

"Good. So I've passed the test in that regard. But you're perfectly right, to keep on weighing me. I don't want to parade under any false colors. I've led less than a saintly life."

"I know, I never thought you had." Then I explained: Mary Banks had bestowed the accolade on him, and Mary was a sophisticated lady--and one of the best.

Unruffled, he said he'd not known he had something to live up to, then kissed me lightly, smoothed my hair and started the car. It was 11 P.M. when we got to my place, and after I'd told him goodnight, I found Doris Rippey still up, sewing. I had the feeling her life with the dentist husband was a lovely one. She made hot chocolate and we talked--about men and women, of course. She asked how old I was. Twenty. It was then early in 1925. She said: "You look different tonight. Are you feeling happy?"

"I'm trying not to fall in love. Seems I'm always in love and that it always ends unhappily."

"Don't marry too young." She listened as I told her about my sister, who had married the only man she ever loved, was living a miserable life and still was almost worshipful of him. She said maybe she had a good sex life.

I replied: "Yes, I'm sure she does. But I could never look up to a man as she does. My father, yes, but not my husband."

The day came when Mr. Gay said he wanted to talk to me. He said it was true I got more personals than anyone he'd ever had, but went on: "Little girl, it's easy to fall, but hard to rise again."

"Meaning what?"

He said he had heard about me, smoking cigarettes in the Chinese restaurant next door. "So I'm giving you your walking papers. I can't abide such goings-on."

"But if it's after office hours and my work done, what does it matter to you?"

"You"ll see. I've put an ad in Editor & Publisher and I'm giving you two weeks' notice."

"Okay," I said. "That's that."

Going my rounds to get personals, I thought it great fun to say to my sources that I wouldn't be there long. "Mr Gay thinks I'm a scarlet woman and is replacing me."

Before the week was out, to my surprise a delegation of three businessmen, including two professionals, went to Mr. Gay to protest. Oh, he told them, I was a good worker, "But I won't stand for any loose behavior."

They made strong protests. One of the delegation was Dr. Witcher; another was Henry Duncan the lawyer. The third was unknown to me. Henry, I heard, spoke in rounded sentences of the high respect in which I was held by the community, and the gross impudence of Mr. Gay's letting himself be influenced by the tattle of someone, probably a printer, who had a grudge against me. Mr. Gay promised to think it over.

Before my supposedly last week was over, Mr. Gay said to me: "I've decided to give you one more chance. If you improve, cut out your flamboyant ways, I'll let you stay on--on trial, so to speak."

But by then I had a job on the Ponca City, Oklahoma paper. Dr. Witcher knew the society editor there, who was quitting to get married. Mr. Clyde Muchmore, the editor, had told me to report to work when my time was up. It was a bigger town, and more of an oil center; my pay would be the same, $35 a week. By the time I left Pawhuska Andy and I were engaged. On my suggestion we would tell no one until I told my family. An exception was Mr. Marple. I was sorry to leave him. I knew something of his story by now, both from my friend Mrs. Coffey and from Mr. Marple himself. His wife had gone off, taking with her their only child, whom he adored. He kept up his payments to her and kept on hoping she would return with the child. Finally she quit writing and he presumed the child was lost to him.

My job in Ponca City had a few advantages over the Pawhuska job. For one thing, there was a toilet for women. In Pawhuska I would use a bathroom in a department store just before I had to return to the Journal to begin writing. A few times I had to take a taxi home around 7 P.M. and walk back. The new job bored me, however. I had enjoyed getting the personals; none was required here, and there were no feature stories assigned. Society news left me cold and a higher standard of society news than I was used to was a precedent here. I had felt I was learning under Mr. Marple; not so here.

Nor was that all. I had answered an ad for a room, took it although I loathed the house, because I had little time to look for a more desirable place. Andy drove over with some of my things, accompanied by Frank Monk as he had to drive back that night and was afraid of falling asleep if alone. Frank looked at the house and pronounced it "a brick abortion with a stucco afterbirth."

The married couple I rented from were completely obnoxious, moreover. Their togetherness was repulsive. Triumphantly each reported bowel movements to the other. When he called her from his office, I told Andy and Frank, I heard her exclaim, "That's just wonderful; and was it a big one?" Frank said, "Perhaps it was an oil well that came in."

On most weekends Andy drove over from Pawhuska. He was unfailingly even tempered, and he was exciting. But however much I looked forward to seeing him, on his arrival I began to break out in hives. He said they were his barometer of my affections. Secretly I wondered if they meant that I did not want to be married. One night when we were at a dance given by a friend of Dr. Witcher's, they were so severe that I went to a bathroom, stripped and clawed myself. Andy decided I should go to a doctor at once. I did, and was given a shot of adrenalin that stopped the rash.

Then I developed a pain in my side. Consulting the same clinic, said to be the best doctors in town, I was told I had appendicitis. A date was set for the removal of my appendix, and I told my editor, and it occurred to me I should wire home. Andy was with me when I received a wire from Father that he was on his way to Ponca City. He arrived late, with his brother-in-law, a physician, in tow, and Gertrude, who had happened to be home on a visit, with her nurse's uniforms, ready for anything.

I introduced Andy. Father was a bit surprised that I should be entertaining a date. Will punched me here and there. "It's not appendicitis. What kind of doctors do you have here? I can't say for sure what it is--perhaps an ovarian cyst, or t.b. of the uterus. But I know it is not appendicitis."

"Then we're taking you home with us, " Father said.

"But what about my job?"

"You can tell your editor in the morning. We'll wait for you. But you're going with us, young lady."

"Father, I didn't write about it but was going to. Andy and I are engaged."

He shot Andy a look, but not one of actual disapproval. Andy was poised. He looked Father in the eye unfalteringly, and after Will Klingensmith and Father left us to find a hotel room in which to get some sleep, Gertrude tactfully left us alone for a few minutes. She was to stay with me and we'd talk later.

It was a rushed farewell. He would come over to visit me as soon as I was well enough. "Your father is right, you can get a correct diagnosis at home. I'll write, and you must, too, and give me your phone number there."

He kissed me and held me as well as he could. It was not easy for me to stand more than a minute or so. I said: "It's not the end of the world or anything. But it seems all wrong to me." I had a sinking, awful feeling of some doom hovering over us.

Andy soothed me. "You're just tired and nervous, understandably. Remember to tell me when you set a date. You know I don't want it prolonged, but your health comes first."

"Andy, Andy." I could do no more than repeat his name. Then he was off, waving from the doorway. He was starting back to Pawhuska that night. That worried me, too, his driving alone so late, and so tired. I felt morbid about everything. Trudy tried to calm me, too, and after the briefest kind of quizzing in regard to Andy, said I must sleep now.

It was a long, hard ride back to Fort Smith. The old Hudson took it well, but I worried about Father, always overworked and frail, and now this to tax him.

At home, Dr. Cooper sustained Will's judgment. There need be no operation for the present; possibly not ever. I limped about, bending forward slightly.

End of romance with Anderson - Reporter for the Kansas City Journal Post

It was hot when Andy made his first trip to Fort Smith. Not the blazing heat of mid-summer, when crossing Garrison Avenue was perilous, the bricks slipping on the asphalt beneath them, but hot enough just the same. It was the time of year when crape myrtle spread its magenta blooms in every dooryard in Fort Smith, or so it seemed. Andy brought Frank Monk along to keep him awake as he drove. Gertrude was still home, with the job facing her of fending off the amorous Frank--but she was smart enough to enlist Katherine Miller of Van Buren to make it a threesome. We gave the men the downstairs bedroom. The rest of us, including Father and Caroline and the children Jane and John, were using the upstairs sleeping porch, for the upstairs bedrooms already were too hot for comfort.

After our guests had washed up and changed clothes we all sat on the front porch awaiting Frances's call for dinner. Monk spoke at length on the newest book he'd read. Caroline turned to Andy and asked, "What have you read lately, Mr. Anderson?"

Andy replied evenly, "I don't read books, Mrs. Gardner." He did read, actually, but he was not going to get into competition with Frank Monk. I could see that both Caroline and Father liked him for that. Caroline smiled at him with sudden warmth, and Father observed it was getting pretty late for dinner--which for him was being loquacious. Then Frances appeared in the doorway and called us in. She had outdone herself.

I had shined the silver and put flowers on the table, and candles, which I lighted, but Father turned on the electricity and began to carve. Andy was seated between John and Jane, as each had demanded to sit next to "Bibby's beau." The etiology of the name Bibby was as follows: Gertrude used to call me V-Dippy, as I remember after a baby elephant in a visiting circus; as Jane couldn't pronounce "Dippy" it became "Bibby."

After everyone else retired, and the folding doors to the downstairs bedroom were carefully shut on Frank Monk, Andy and I lay on the sofa in the north living room and I realized for the first time what love-making could be with a man mature enough and experienced enough to value the pleasure he could give a woman. Nor did I have any tremors that Father might come downstairs. Whatever happened, Andy would be equal to it. He had put his penis inside me "just to see if we fit, and we do." But to prepare me he had aroused me with his fingers as no one ever had, so I was in a transport, and thought that was everything, until he said: "And this is just an infinitesimal part of what it will be all through your body when we have the real thing."

Only later did I realize that neither then nor at any earlier time had I had any trepidation over how Andy would react on discovering that my hymen was no longer intact. I would be twenty-one shortly and I was certain that he would think that a woman at that age was entitled to have lost her virginity.

Later I lay awake in my corner of the sleeping porch and felt content. But I know full well, and for all I know the smart Andy also suspected, the reason I had broken out in hives in Ponca City. It was related to that terrible sinking feeling I had had when Father told me he was taking me home with him. Things were all right so far--but I had not seen Brady. I was walking on egg-shells.

Before going away Andy told Father: "I expect to return soon and you'll have some questions to ask me. I'll be ready for them." He could see how Father and Caroline had warmed to him. Frank, a showoff, they could not abide. He was a good foil for Andy, who in his unpretentiousness revealed a strength. On his return to Pawhuska he wrote, on bank stationery, in his neat hand; among other things: "I could see that you'd lost weight. I have a proposal. If you'll put on ten pounds I'll lose ten." It was more heroic than if he'd offered to fight 10 duels.

Even as I wrote him that I'd try, but let's make it eight, a less formidable number, I was assailed by fear. Andy could handle anything, but could I?

I couldn't do the walking around necessary for reporting, but I started doing some work for the newspaper at home, just copyreading time copy for the Sunday paper for $20 a week. One day I ran into Brady on Garrison Avenue as I was homeward bound. He asked if he could take me home. It was nothing, just a short ride, almost nothing said between us.

Nothing had changed really. By that I mean there was no altering of the relation between me and Brady; it was all over. Nor did I want to linger on in Fort Smith and wage a wordless struggle with Dorothy over Brady. I just wanted to get away. But I no longer wanted to marry Andy.

In my usual way, I wrote telling him everything. Not that there was much to tell. I said I'd seen Brady. That there was nothing between us any longer, but I just felt I couldn't marry. I was going to leave Fort Smith, go to Kansas City and look for a job. I knew that he, Andy, loved me and that I loved him and that he was the man I should marry. But I couldn't. I wrote longer versions, but this in the end is all I said. I didn't apologize, I didn't add that as I wrote I was shedding tears all over the place.

If I as the tragedy queen envisioned Andy's brushing aside my objections, overriding me and carrying me off, after which I would find myself grateful, Andy was not about to plead with me or remonstrate in any way. He wrote a little note saying that he'd like to drive me to Kansas City. No reproaches. He had the time coming to him, and might as well ask for it then--or whenever I would say.

My family greeted my news less than jubilantly. Father asked what the problems were and I replied there were no problems. "Leave it to you, Ginia," he said. "If there aren't any troubles you'll manufacture them." My father was pretty shrewd.

Caroline waited until Father was watering the back yard, then, joining me on the front porch, said: "There's a man, Bibby, who loves you more than Brady ever did, and you're throwing him over."

Andy arrived, and seeing him so slender, and in a new suit, was a jolt at first. His wedding suit, I thought, and winced, for I had not even bought a new hat. We set out the next day. I'd written Frankie that I'd like to have a room at her house if possible and could pay $20.

In Kansas City Andy took a room at the Muehlbach and seemed bent on throwing away as much of the money he had saved for our honeymoon as was possible. He treated Frankie and her friends and me to lavish dinners. The Franks had let me have a room but for several days I seemed to sleep there only a few hours. It was a round of gaiety, Andy footing the bill. My worthless cousin Phil Williams, a leech, turned up out of nowhere and added himself to the party, and after Frankie and I had gone home one night, took Andy to some dive where they got drunk and Andy was rolled for $250. I had a hunch it was with Phil's connivance.

The morning he was to leave Andy had a farewell breakfast with Frankie and others in attendance. When he went up to pack his bag I went with him. I felt funereal. It was all unreal, his actually going away, our parting for good. He kissed me and I begged him to take me. Very firmly he took my arms from around him and said: "No. It might be wonderful--and then I'd never forget it. Or it might be awful--and then think how both of us would feel. No." He took his bag--a new one, I noticed, and handsome--and walked out the door. I had no choice but to follow him.

Finding a new job was far from easy. There were only two papers, the Kansas City Journal Post and the Kansas City Star, whose morning paper was the Kansas City Times. I soon exhausted those possibilities. I learned there was a man who would put anyone on at space rates and pay when payment was received from any of a battery of trade magazines he supplied with news items. His name was Brown--I forget his first name. Sure enough, when I found his nest in some decayed walkup building, he put me on, and I shared assignments with Reed Molesworth, a debonair type and a fancy dresser. It was rough going for me. I wrote bits for an undertaker's magazine; a beautician's journal; wrote up a convention of chiropodists and a style show of corsets and women's underwear, and so on, and by the end of the first month had made $40. This would not pay room rent at the Franks'. But Gertrude had arrived, throwing up a perfectly good job in a hospital in San Francisco when she learned I was there, and though she arrived penniless, having lived on apples and Hershey bars all the way from California, she soon had a job. We shared a room at Frankie's and now I would not starve to death.

Every Saturday night Andy would telephone me. Each time I found myself crying uncontrollably, feeling unutterably sorry for him, missing him dreadfully--and then afterward I cried more.

My fits of weeping when he called grew worse. I felt like such a heel that more than once I was on the verge of saying, "Let me come back to Pawhuska and you." I might have, too, but the thought of doing something irreversible weighed on me. Then one night he said, "If it only makes you unhappy for me to call you, would you rather I didn't? If you say the word, I shan't." I said it, and inconsolable, threw myself in Trudy's arms and said I should never get over it. I think we never get over those we loved. It was certainly true regarding Andy, for I felt that I had wronged him and, needlessly, deprived myself. Andy never called again, although we wrote to each other every now and then over a number of years.

I got an announcement of his marriage, and then one of the birth of a child. After more years reports of his death reached me but they were vague, unverified. I kept hoping they were false.

Almost 20 years later, on one of my peregrinations from one coast to another, I went by Oklahoma City to see Henry Duncan. I knew he was there as he'd written asking me to help him write a book on his vast experience with the Indians, but without saying what I was to live on while doing it. I looked him up just to ask if it were true about Andy. Oh, yes, he said, Andy had been dead for years.

After a few months I got a job on the Journal-Post at $25 a week. There I worked with some of the finest people I ever knew, and I still have large stacks of letters from Malvina Lindsay and Ray Runnion written over the years. Vina was on rewrite most of the time, occasionally covering a story of something special. When Frank Harris came to town she was sent to interview him. It was after the first volume of his My Life and Loves appeared and the city editor, Paul Jones, said on her return, gloatingly, "You ought to have a juicy story for us." I don't recall what Vina wrote but remember her reply to Jones: "All he would talk about was his stomach pump."

I spent many an evening at the home of Ray Runnion, a wonderful man, and his wife Winifred, equally fine and interesting, and their little boy. After dinner we'd sit in the back yard under the trees and talk. Sara Saper was there that summer for a time and would come along. To talk of books under the trees, to hear Sara recite a poem or two from memory, and watch the fireflies seemed about as much as life could offer.

I often thought of Andy, though, and that sense of time as palpable and alien, never to be understood by me, let alone mastered, swept over me then. Through my own fault I had lost him, and now he was gone, unattainable.

Occasionally I went to the Ed Schauffler's house for an evening, too. Joe Berger was in town, too, and took me and Gertrude to plays and concerts. We had another beau in common, too, Van Cleve Stears, whom we liked a lot. Gertrude had another beau with whom she was in love. But then Father came to town and the beau, Scott Hovey, patronized him. After Father had gone, Scott laughed at his necktie. Gertrude and I both froze.

I found working for Paul Jones a torture, however much I liked the staff. I was the youngest and the newest on the paper, and although Ray, Ed, Vina, the Sunday editor, Tom Collins, all tried to tell me that he was not worth being frightened over, my whole day was spent in fear. He would begin yelling at me and I would be running as fast as I could for the city desk but he continued to yell. One day after I'd been there several months Phil Scott, a rewrite man, said to me after I returned to the local room from the washroom: "Why do you wait until the home edition is put away to go cry, Miss Gardner?" I was mortified. I had thought that the careful facewashing and addition of powder and lipstick had concealed all traces of weeping.

Occasionally the owner of the Journal Post, a Mr. Dickey, a utilities magnate who knew nothing about newspapers and had only recently acquired the old Bonfils paper, used to escort people he wanted to impress on a grand tour of the rather rickety building. We would see them on the other side of a railing that bounded the local room, and hear him say as he waved an arm at us, "And these are my clerks!" While the rest of the staff seemed suddenly frozen in immobility, the news editor would pull over a typewriter and bang out copy furiously. "What is he writing?" I asked once after the Dickey entourage was receding, for I knew that his job was to edit, not write. Vina said: "Probably a letter home. He certainly makes it look good, though."

I had a talent for getting the middle initial or even the first name wrong every time a story concerning a friend of Mr. Dickey came my way. On the other hand, if I took an item over the phone from our police beat man, I busily hunted in the city directory for the name of every prostitute or gangster mentioned.

I loved to hear tales of what it was like when Bonfils owned both the Denver Post and the Kansas City Post, especially stories about Kelley. Kelley was the crack rewrite man. For years, every time he angrily quit either the Denver or Kansas City paper, he knew he ahad a job at the other one and showed up there. At last editors of each paper received orders that at each remove of Kelley's he was to be docked $5 a week.

In Kansas City the weather story was a special feature in both newspapers. One day Kelley was tossed a weather report and told, "Make it funny." He took it, wrote a glum piece and turned it in. Came the city editor's growl: "Kelley, come get it. I said make it funny." Kelley again set to work, seeming to work punctiliously--it was close to the home edition deadline--and took his offering to the city desk. This time an angry shout came from that spot: "Do you call this funny?" Kelley's rejoinder: "It's just about as funny as $35 a week."

There were stories galore about Kelley, but I recall only one more. Kelley had been on a drunk for days when he showed up and demanded that the presses be stopped. Drunk or sober, he would know if he had a story. The order went out to stop the presses. Kelley sat down at a desk and wrote furiously. But when the office boy went to grab the copy, the page was blank. The typewriter had no ribbon in it. What his great story was never became known.

The present staff of the Journal-Post included also Ace, a very serious music critic who became in subsequent years a very funny man widely known to radio audiences. Once in a while he would have two things to cover and would let me handle one of them. As there was no regular art critic, occasionally the city desk would send me to the Art Institute to see what I could pick up in the way of a story. So, though I knew nothing about art and less than that about music, such assignments were pleasant diversions from the ordinary to me.

Although I knew him personally less well than almost anyone on the staff, I sort of adored Eddie Meisburger, the quiet, softspoken assistant city editor, whose bulldog jaw contradicted his demeanor. I never exchanged a personal word with him, but I felt his presence as eminently stable and reassuring no matter what the swirl of strident voices and general to-and-froing around the city desk.

I had written home about the tensions of working under the city editor, and my stepmother, Caroline, began writing me urgent pleas to come home. She was pregnant again, for the fourth time. She needed me. I was willing to be wooed, and told Mr. Jones that duty called.

Death of father - Start of job at St. Louis Times

It was good to be home. I had brought presents from Gertrude and myself for Jane, John, and Kiki (Cliff), who was then almost three; a book for Caroline and a simply beautiful, expensive tie for Father. I felt I could work and still help Caroline around the house, and I got a job on the paper, the Southwest American. Now consolidated with the morning paper, the Ft. Smith Times-Record staff had to do a lot of the work for the morning issue. A new paper, a bit of opposition, had started up. Although I was given occasional assignments, I was put on rewrite to a large extent, and not to my liking.

Father refused to let me come home alone since it was often after dark when I got off work. He came by the office and parked his car and waited for me. It made me nervous, trying to speed through all the little rewrite jobs dumped on me toward the end of the day. One day, after making him wait past the usual time, I simply left a few of the items on my desk with a note saying that was all I could do. Below, I saw Presley Bryant, the managing editor, and VerBeck, the city editor, returning to the office after dinner. I waited until they were abreast of me and said: "Mr. VerBeck, I didn't finish. My father is waiting for me and I decided not to keep him waiting longer."

"Fire her, VerBeck," said Bryant.

VerBeck made pacifying gestures, but I said: "Very well, I'm fired," and got in the car.

Before we had gone a block I sputtered angrily to Father, "And I hope from now on you won't give them anything, but will give any news you have to the new paper."

Father said evenly: "I'll do nothing of the kind. I'll treat them just as I always have."

Of course I knew he was right, and because I had been revealed as petty and unworthy, I was crying. Neither of us said anything more and we drove home in silence.

Caroline was delighted, saying she really did need me. I felt cheap and shaken. In the morning VerBeck called early and said they expected me in to work. I was torn. I admired Mr. Bryant and I knew that he was a quick-tempered but very just man. So I told Mr. VerBeck that my stepmother really needed me, and that there were no hard feelings.

Pep (Preston) Meek, a great friend of the family, came by often in his Coca-Cola truck and took me and Kiki riding with him. Often, as the winter wore on, Pep Meek would call to take me to the movies in the evening. He was tall, handsome and extremely nice, and I found him physically very attractive; although the shadow of Brady Pryor was always between us.

A few days before Christmas, Father averted a near catastrophe in the town of Fort Smith. The Arkansas Valley Bank, already robbed in the spring of $112,400 by one of its directors, M.M. Hayes, who was imprisoned for it, discovered a new loss--an embezzlement of $30,000 by its head bookkeeper. On Wednesday night December 22, after the town's bankers declared they would not absorb the assets and liabilities of the failing bank in exchange for a guarantee subscribed by its directors, Father insisted that the business and professional men of the town be called in. None believed his plan would work, but he prevailed. They indeed appeared in the middle of the night and, addressed by Father, agreed to guarantee an amount sufficient to insure the absorbing banks against any loss exceeding $25,000. The result was that, on December 24, the failing bank was paying its depositors in full and Christmas shopping in the town proceeded undisturbed.

I watched to see how the papers would play it. When they named Father, who headed the Arkansas Valley Trust Company, an institution separate from and unconnected with the Arkansas Valley Bank, as liquidating agent, but gave the bankers of the town full credit for everything and ignored Father's role in originating the plan and fighting to carry it out, I wired the Kansas City Star. When Father came home very late that night, I took the story I'd written to the bedroom where he and Caroline were and said I hated to disturb him, but would he verify it. He made two minor corrections regarding sums of money, I called a taxi and took it to the railway depot, where the Western Union operator sent it. I stayed to see if any query came through and when none appeared I went home.

On Friday, December 24, 1926, the story appeared on page one of The Kansas City Star. The headline was "YULE SPIRIT SAVES BANK." The decks beneath were: "A Fund is Subscribed by Town after Defalcations / As a Result, the Depositors in the Arkansas Valley Bank of Ft. Smith, Ark., Have Money as Christmas Gift."

After the lead paragraph, the story described John C. Gardner as an "obscure hero of the near tragedy" who, when the failing bank's directors decided on Tuesday night to close its doors the next day, persuaded them at a meeting of bankers to remain open another day. In a public meeting the next night, business men were informed of the defalcation of $30,000 and subscriptions to the guarantee soared. By means which bankers had termed impossible, the bank was saved. Thus, the business and professional men of the city "were shown the crisis which the town faced. Bitterly opposing factions met on common ground for a common cause, and old battles were forgotten in a dramatic effort to unite for the town's good." They subscribed $48,000 so that the other banks might absorb the failing bank, whose directors subscribed $70,000. The two sums were enough.

Father was in the bank, acting as liquidating agent, and depositors were being paid off when the Star wired for his photograph. The newest one we had was many years old. I telephoned Mr. McCann and urged him to take a flashbulb picture of Father, whether or not he looked up. I warned him Father might be a problem; he was not to ask him for his consent. I called Father to say I was sending Mr. McCann to take his picture in answer to the Star's request.

Father's reply: "Ginny, don't bother me." He hung up. McCann shot two photographs. The Star used, in its Sunday issue, the one in which he glanced up. The other, in which he just went on signing something, is not as good a news photo, but it is softer and the only decent photograph we have of Father.

Naturally it pleased me to have the Little Rock Gazette and the Fort Smith papers follow suit and give Father full credit for preventing a bank failure. Several papers outside of Arkansas also ran editorials on the event. The Star wrote me to ask if I would be its correspondent, and I wrote declining and revealing my identity. I had initially used, with her consent, the name of my friend Mary Tancred in querying the Star. In declining, I explained I was going to St. Louis soon, and that otherwise I would gladly accept.

The country club was opening its new building on a cliff overlooking Massard Prairie, where Father was born. Caroline and I already had persuaded him to get a new tuxedo for the occasion, but Caroline, being far along with Lucile, could not go with him. Father asked me to accompany him. Since I already had a date for it--with John McShane, an attractive person who, on his father's death, had come home to run the family business, the Arcade department store--I suggested Father take John also, which is what happened.

It was a very happy evening for me, seeing Father the center of attention. I liked John McShane, but I never expected to see him again as I planned to leave for St. Louis. I was wrong, but it was some years before we met again.

On January 13, Caroline gave birth to Lucile. As always, she insisted on coming home from the hospital too soon. She developed a breast infection of some kind, necessitating trained nurses around the clock. And she was captious, playing the queen as she did each time she had a baby, exacting servitude, impossible to please. I took charge of her trays. At each meal she would return the tray, often twice; the salad dressing was wrong, or the biscuits were cold, or the lamb chop overcooked. I never took the tray in, for fear of showing my temper. As I recall, Frances took the tray in.

One night I had a date with Pep Meek. Father was at the bank late. Pep and I had meant to go to a movie but it was late when I got through putting Kiki to bed and I suggested we just stay home. Pep was very patient; that was fine with him.

As it happened, we were necking on the sofa in a front room when Father opened the door. I suppose I was in a very compromising position. It was a passionate embrace--all of Pep's were--and I had been so involved in it I had heard neither Father's car nor his footsteps.

Father asked if I could get him his cold milk and biscuits. He followed me into the kitchen and said: "You should pull the shade down, Ginny."

He went upstairs, and I faced Pep with a face that told everything. He asked if he could come over next day, a Sunday, and talk to Father. I said no. He left.

The next morning at breakfast, Father said he had to go to the Bowles farm and would like me to go along. Just before we reached the Bowles farm, one he had to visit occasionally as it was in trust to the Trust Company, he stopped the car on a rise in the ground. He took his cigarette case out and offered me one, a signal honor. I took it. Then, without a word of the reproach I was braced to hear, he said: "Pep Meek is a fine man. If you and he want to marry, I'll put up a thousand and I am sure Mr. Meek will do the same, to start you out in life."

I said: "But Father, Pep hasn't asked me to marry him."

Finally he said: "Then you might as well go on to St. Louis." And then, as if it was an aside that no longer mattered, "I'd hoped you were over that Brady business."

I couldn't stop crying. I felt as if I'd dealt him a low blow.

I stepped up my plans for St. Louis, wrote Gertrude I was going there, and as soon as the nurse or nurses departed I also did.

No sooner had I arrived in St. Louis than I was assailed by an infection that left me voiceless. Still I had to get a job, for I had very little money, at my own insistence. So I made the rounds, writing notes and sticking them in front of the editors I managed to see. One was Bill Bradley, managing editor of the St. Louis Times, the smallest of St. Louis's papers. He asked me how much I made in Kansas City, and I lied and said $30. He twisted his red hair, a gesture that became most familiar as time went on, and looked perplexed. He could use me, he said--he had no woman on the staff at present--but he could start me at only $25. "And as for the raises," he went on, "what can I say? The Times is owned now by a couple of lawyers who know nothing about the newspaper business. If a miracle happens maybe I can raise you in three months."

"I'll take it," I wrote on a slip of paper.

I loved the Times, more even than the Journal-Post. I was to report for work the coming Monday. By then I had found my voice and Gertrude was on her way from Kansas City. From the outset working for the St. Louis Times meant low pay, but it was a dream world in every other way. I think my first assignment had to do with the city budget. Bill Bradley had figured that if less was spent on sewers and plumbing, the allotment for the Art Institute, already shabby, would not have to be cut as was being proposed by the city fathers. Something like that.

I was to interview the dignitaries who ran the city. I felt utterly at home from the day I entered the local room in St. Louis.

My interviews were played up. George Marsh, the city editor, was also a dream. Willie Ries, the photographer, was a soul mate. And so on. I, the only woman on the staff, was spoiled within weeks.

I had not worked there very long when a telegram came from Dr. Cooper of Fort Smith: Father was dying. Gertrude, who was working at Barnes Hospital, borrowed money from a man who had beaued her around earlier, and was granted leave from her job. I had no one to borrow the fare from but the St. Louis Times. I put it to Bill Bradley, who twisted his red hair again and said that he had no authority to lend such money. Eventually, he did manage to extract enough for the railway fare, and he promised that my job would be kept open for two weeks. Trudy and I took a night train out and in the morning, when we were having breakfast in the diner, Mr. Singleton, a railway conductor, and our next door neighbor, appeared. He confirmed the telegram, the unspeakable thing we were trying not to face. He also tried to justify Caroline's not telling us: she was afraid if we came home Father would know he was dying and quit trying to live. All right. We at the moment were not in a mood to blame Caroline for anything. Then, in Fort Smith, we were first taken to the Singletons' house. That seemed strange, but I concentrated on being polite and did not ask why.

When we were allowed to go home, Caroline met us with false cheerfulness and an air of conspiracy--as if, providing we did as she said, Father might not die at all. Gertrude went in, and I stayed behind to be coached further by Caroline. Father should not know why I came. I must not let him know that he was dying. "You must tell him, Bibby, that you just got tired of your new job and that you came home to stay this time."

It wasn't the first time she had persuaded me to act in a way that I felt was unfair to him, but this was the most outrageous of such demands. After Gertrude came out, I went in. The nurse was taking some time off and I was alone with him. He was out of his head, but speaking--if you can call reciting columns of figures speaking. I listened in a sort of terror. I had known for long that even though he liked the trust company business better than the banking business, he didn't really like any of it. Now his compulsive uttering of numbers, numbers and their addition, suggested the terrible strain he had been under as liquidating agent of the near-failed bank--but also the burden he carried year in and year out regardless. Then he changed, and I realized he was conscious.

I went through the song-and-dance prescribed by Caroline. He shot me a look--that discerning look so peculiarly his. Then the hallucinating, the figures, were gone and he said, "You wouldn't try to fool me, would you, Ginia?"

I had my chance then. And I muffed it, completely, finally, irreversibly. I could have said, "You're right, Father--I came because I was told you were dying and I want to be with you while you die." But I didn't say it. The hallucinations began again, the numbers, and--did I imagine it? or did he say, meaning Caroline with four children, one only months old, "What will she do without me?"

I believe he said it. Then the hallucinations began again in earnest. I told myself I was clearly rejected by now, and I made my escape. Gertrude found me in the backyard, lying on the earth, not crying, just wishing I were in the woods and trying to substitute for it by clutching the earth. She finally got me to go into the house. Father was dead.

At some point in the night that followed, I inadvertently opened a door and saw him during some lull in the industry that accompanies death. Lying alone in the room, on the couch in the north living room, stripped, he looked very white and very small.

The next morning we were up early. It was May and the silver-moon rose was in full bloom along our back fence--that most beautiful of roses, single petaled, exquisite, and I picked armloads of them and put them throughout the house. And because it was May other things were in bloom, all white that I remember--the spirea, for example, in bushes in the front yard, and white iris. I recall that for more than two years I could not bear to think of, much less see, a white blossom.

The house was beautiful and very crowded, and the front yard was also full of people. My stepmother was obsessed with the idea that Fort Smith did not appreciate Father (although the city flew the American Flag at half-mast that day), so she had imported from Texas a Methodist minister, a friend of Father's, to preside, as I have related. I was seated in one of the little camp chairs someone had contributed for the occasion, in the bedroom adjacent to the north living room, when I was gripped with excitement, hearing the minister say that Father was an atheist.

I remember little else--the front yard so crowded we had difficulty in getting to the cars; nothing of what happened at the cemetery. After it was all over, in the downstairs hall I saw Father's old topcoat flung over a bench, and that completed it. Without tears up to now, I raced up the stairs and streaming with tears, headed for the seclusion of the sleeping porch. In such times it is a great luxury to be all alone.

My cousin Ronald Gardner, whom Father had taken into the Trust Company, came out one afternoon before I left Fort Smith and took me for a drive. He tried to convince me that death at 54 did not mean Father's life had been other than happy or satisfying. He said: "His children were his luxury." I said nothing. He added:

"He did love little children"

I thought to myself, "Oh, Ronald, he never had a chance to live in any ease, any at all. Do you call that living?" But I didn't want to argue with Ronald. Let him think as he would. I, however, thought of his golf clubs and the golf clothes I'd sent him, still unused. In the picture carried in the Kansas City Star, though, he wore the tie I'd brought him, and now he wore it in his coffin. "I'm not saying, Ronald, that Caroline didn't make him happy. I think she did." I felt like saying bitter things, but I didn't.

It was Ronald who told us that Father's will--which I never saw--made no provision for us girls, not even railroad fare to his funeral. Gertrude and I felt, for our part, that it was all right because we were working and had been able to borrow the money. But for Katherine, coming from Canada, we thought it was grossly unfair.

I was angry with myself for letting Caroline inveigle me into lying to Father about why I'd come home. It was not the only time she had been able to make me an ally. I still flinch when I think of how she got me to join with her in laughing at Father because he continued to honor checks Aunt Lelia had drawn against his account, forging his name. So Father stopped--and this half-sister of his committed suicide not long after and it was on page one of the home papers.

Gertrude had a few more days off than I, thanks to Barnes Hospital. Colonel James Carson Breckenridge had come to the funeral and took the same train I did to St. Louis, whence he was to proceed to Rhode Island while I reported to the St. Louis Times. We had sleeper tickets but sat up all night, talking. Carson, like all the Breckenridge family, adored Father--and not just because he had spent so many years of his life undoing the mistakes of old Major Breckenridge. The major, a strictly honorary title, had once headed the Arkansas Valley Bank and Trust Company, and Father had saved the remnants of the Breckenridge estate. I appreciated all that Colonel Carson Breckenridge said about Father because he also thought it was a great tragedy that John Gardner was dead. He attributed the death to the added work Father had taken on to save the failing bank, from which he had divested himself years earlier and with which he had no ensuing connection at all. "But we can"t be bitter about that, that was John Gardner!" I was able to tell Carson that, before he died, Father had paid back all that the banks had lent the failing bank, without ever calling on the individual businessmen for the amounts they had pledged. (Shortly after this a federal bank examiner, visiting Fort Smith, went out to see Caroline and praised Father's rescue of the bank as unique and unassailable.)

When we pulled into the station in St. Louis, Carson insisted that I have breakfast with him at his hotel before I set out for my office. It was an old and imposing hotel, with a lovely dining-room. We had soft-boiled eggs and I watched with awe as he carefully broke off pieces of his toast and put them in his egg cup. I said, "I've always wanted to do that but never had the nerve." Carson said airily: "I am a Breckenridge and can get away with it." And he smiled disarmingly.

It was good to have him as a real friend now that I was no longer a child but a mature woman. The friendship grew and lasted for years, until his death just before our entrance into World War II, at which time he was General Breckenridge, second in command of the Marine Corps, newly retired.

Troubled marriage to Jerry Butler - Start of employment at Chicago Tribune

I was depressed and morbid over Father's death. When I learned that Johnnie, my 7 year-old brother, was seriously ill--they suspected diabetes, and that is what the subsequent diagnosis verified--it tended to make me, if anything, even more morbid. If I had been home, I felt, Father would not have died. I would have been upstairs with the boys tending to them when they had measles--not Father. At the time, in fact for years, I connected their infected ears with Father's contracting pneumonia, remembering how he used to blow smoke in my ears when they ached when I was little.

A letter I wrote Carson Breckenridge hinted at my taking on this unfounded guilt, judging from his response, a lengthy and sensitive letter to me dated May 23, 1927, in which he said in part: "When one who is both loved and admired is separated from us we are naturally prone to find shortcomings in ourselves, and to blame ourselves for things we either did, or left undone. This is natural but we always exaggerate it. Self-blame is a reaction of self pity."

He himself was still trying to make my acquaintance, wrote Carson. "I want to mean something in your life you know. I think I know about how you feel about your Father. He possessed all the elements of nobility, and I see that word in its highest and most dignified sense."

In this same letter Carson wrote that he was "vastly interested in the moving picture you went to see--What Price Glory? I have seen it two or three times, and it is way-and-beyond the best and most realistic picture of all . . . . Your friend who was a Marine during the war was quite right, and I hope you will give him my compliments and very good wishes."

Until I read this old letter I had forgotten that Jerry Butler entered my life quite this early.