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Death of a Flapper |
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My grandmother graduated from Beaver College near Philadelphia in 1928 with a degree in Kindergarten and Primary Education. As its name did not intend to imply, Beaver was an all-girls school. A beautiful, stone, Eastern campus, it was full of good-looking upper-middle-class white girls, mostly from Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Girls who dated guys from Princeton, Penn, and Yale. Girls whose only encouraged options upon graduation were of the educational, secretarial, or matrimonial kind. And so it was that college was the most freedom and the most fun these girls would have in their lives. What a time it was to be in college. 1928 was the last full year of the roaring twenties. Flappers. Speak-easies. The Charleston. Everything forever glamorized, canonized, and mythologized by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway. In
1928 life was grand and my grandmother was young and free.
In her yearbook, she was described as “a happy-go-lucky girl with a
smile for everyone…a good sport and a good comrade.”
She listed as her favorite pastime staying out late.
Her life’s ambition was to have long hair.
This was surely a poke at the fashion of the times, as she could have
had long hair had she wanted. But
the style of day was the bob, and without exception, every girl pictured in
the 1928 “Beechbark” had her hair chopped off just below the ears. Most
of the photos in the Beechbark were of a quality that made them appear as if
they’d been taken yesterday. Some
of the girls looked demure, some confident, some crazy, some a bit bored by
sitting for a formal portrait. A
few were remarkably beautiful, staring straight at the viewer, still able to
pique an interest after so much time. It
was strange to think that these bright-eyed, smoothly-complected young women
were either now dead or incontinent, wrinkled, and frail.
As if reading my mind, one of the girls had eerily scribbled next to
her image, “Remember how lovely we were?”
While
she lay on her bed, I went through the book with my grandma and read aloud to
her the rest of the hand-written comments in the margins. “I’ll
never forget our parties and feeds.” “Love
ya heaps.” “I’m
in a fog at present…but I’ll never forget you.” My
grandma laughed at that last one. “We
had a pretty good party the night before graduation.” There
were more than a few mentions of good parties.
One cryptic message referenced a soiree in Philadelphia in which
something happened with some boys. The
note concluded with, “Good luck teaching kindergarten, but really it’s
much nicer teaching 25-year-olds, don’t you agree?”
“What
was that about?” I asked with a shocked smile.
“I can’t remember,” my grandma replied.
“Likely excuse,” I said.
“Do you remember this girl?” I asked when I got to the picture of a
startlingly beautiful young blond. I
read the name out loud. “Mabel
Brown.”
“Mabel Brown from Allentown,” my grandma replied with a smile,
reciting words she probably hadn’t used in 70 years .
Her yearbook entry described Mabel as “a little flapper with many
interests at Penn, Harvard, and Princeton.”
She had listed as her favorite phrase:
“Just ask me.” “What
a girl,” I commented, before reading the cursive loops of ink that had dried
73 years earlier. “Best of
luck, Marion, in love and in war…Mostly love.” My grandma’s eyes dimmed a bit. In many ways 1928 was the last year of real happiness she had known. In October of twenty-nine, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. Shortly thereafter my grandmother married a handsome, charming fella who, she would discover too late, valued his friendships with Mr. Beam, Mr. Daniels, and Senor Cuervo more than anything else. “Let’s not talk about all that,” my grandma said. That was her way. Don’t make a fuss. “I’m
dying, Jimmy,” she said as she squeezed my hand.
“You
think that’s a better topic?” She
was dying and we both knew it, but to hear the words aloud made me sad. My grandma sensed this and quickly added some cushion to her
declaration. “But
we’ll all see each other again someday.” “Do
you really believe that?” I asked. She
squeezed my hand again, as her sense of realism and straight-talk came back to
her. “Actually…no, I
don’t.” We
both laughed. After
a pause, we thought about what she’d just said and laughed a second time. “Is
there anything I can get you?” I inquired.
“Another pillow? A
blanket?” “How
about a whiskey sour?” she replied.
That was the last conversation we had.
She died on August 18, 2001, five days after her 93rd
birthday. The
yearbook now sits on my bookshelf. In
the future, I’m sure I’ll flip through it occasionally and remember our
conversation. And I’ll remember
how lovely she was, even at the end. Broadway Jim Sosnicky
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