Back for one last section of the Great River–and a post from the archives
In November, 2015, My Own True Love and I began what turned into a multi-year adventure, driving the Great River Road along the Mississippi from where the river begins in Minnesota to where it ends in Louisiana. * We envisioned doing the entire trip in three weeks—a totally unrealistic assessment given the fact that between us we are interested in just about everything. On our first trip we lasted the better part of three weeks: We spent two days in Memphis, three days in and around New Orleans, and then drove back again north without a schedule. We got as far Vicksburg, where the weather turned ugly and we gave up. On our next trip, we drove north to Lake Itasca in Minnesota and started to work our way back south. At the end of that trip, we had many miles left to travel and many things still to see. Last summer, we “finished” the project with a series of day trips out of Memphis.**
In fact, we had one piece of the road left: As we reached southern Minnesota, in 2018, we decided to skip over the Twin Cities and go back another time. There was so much to see in Minneapolis and Saint Paul that we knew we wouldn’t make any progress down the river if we stopped.
We finally made it back this year. By the time you read this, we’ll be back home.
Driving north, we decided to travel by U.S. highways rather than the interstate. As we went, we found ourselves reminiscing about places we had stopped on previous trips: the Froelich tractor museum, the lock master’s house in Guttenberg, the lumber museum in Clinton. The Great River Road became a trip down memory lane.
My guess is the entire adventure took us close to fifteen weeks, broken up in chunks of ten days and two weeks.
*Actually, we had intended to do the trip in 2014, but had to revise our plans due to an ailing elderly cat and an elderly house in the middle of extensive renovations. Instead of the big trip, we took a bite out of the middle on a four-day weekend from Nauvoo to Quincy in Illinois. It was a very good start.
**I didn’t write a single blog post about the experience. I was deep in the run-up to releasing The Dragon from Chicago Instead of chronicling our adventure, I was writing posts about women journalists. (Sorry. Not sorry.) However, I did write a newsletter looking at the trips as a whole. You can read it here.
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One of our most memorable stops in the stretch through Iowa and Minnesota was the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa. I was pleased to re-visit the post I wrote then. I hope you enjoy it, too.
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On the first day of our Great River Road adventure (1), My Own True Love and I veered about 45 miles off the Great River Road so I could sneak in a bit of a research for the book proposal I’m working on at the Vesterheim Norwegian American Museum and Heritage Center in Decorah, Iowa.(2) Sandy was a willing co-conspirator because 1)it would be a shame to have to come back if I sell the book and 2)it looked like a pretty fabulous museum.
And let me tell you, it IS a pretty fabulous museum.
The museum explores the story of Norwegian immigration to the United States, putting it in the context of nineteenth century Norwegian culture and the broader experience of nineteenth century immigration to America. It also celebrates Norwegian folk art, then and now. In fact, if you’re in Decorah for a longer period, you can sign up for classes in rosemaling, traditional embroidery techniques (3), folk music, flatbread baking (4), etc, etc, etc.
Kubbestol–Traditional Norwegian log chairs. More comfortable than they look!
The folk art exhibits are breathtakingly beautiful. Well-trained docents give tours of a campus of well-maintained historic buildings, ranging in size and complexity from a small log storage cabin (5) to a nineteenth century Lutheran church. And the exhibit on Norwegian immigration not only told me a portion of the story of immigrants to the United States that I had not heard before, but it made elements of the broader story of nineteenth century immigration to this country more vivid for me.
Here are some of the things that caught my imagination:
- The first group of Norwegians emigrants sailed from Norway on July 4(!), 1825. They were known as the “Sloopers” because their ship was a sloop that was tiny for ocean-going even by the standards of their time. Like so many early emigrants they were religious dissenters. Some of them were Quakers; (6) others followed the pietist teachings of Hans Nielsen Hauge. The official state church of Norway persecuted both groups.
- Norway was second only to Ireland in the percentage of its population it lost to emigration in the century between 1825 and 1930. Norwegians left their homes for many of the same reasons as the Irish: growing population, limited arable land (7) and the potato famine that swept Europe in 1845.
- In the mid-nineteenth century, emigrants provided their own food for the voyage and cooked it on the ship on open fires in long bins filled with sand.
- A “stove wood” house, built of pieces of wood cut to the length that would fit in a woodturning stove and held together with plaster. The walls were about one foot thick and well-insulated. Unlike log cabins, a man could build a stove wood house by himself.
I came away stunned by new awareness of just how hard it was for emigrants to leave their homes to travel to a new country. I was also stunned by the love of decoration pervasive in traditional Norwegian culture.
If you’re anywhere near Decorah, take the time for a visit.
(1)Part 3, or maybe Part 4, depending on whether you count our consolation prize four-day weekend in 2014. And you really should, because it was weird and wonderful.
(2) Yes, that’s a hint. But it won’t help you much.
(3) Personally, I’m tempted by the hardanger classes. (Autocorrect changed this to harbinger classes. Perhaps a good choice for Halloween weekend. Beware, beware….)
(4) Or Norwegian Christmas cookies
(5)The answer to the question of where people stored things in a one-room cabin.
(6) Norwegian Quakers, you ask? I did, too. According to our docent, Denmark/Norway fought on the French side in the Napoleonic Wars. (Brief pause while I check this.) Some Norwegian prisoners of war were taken to England, where Quakers and Methodists visited them in prison and managed to convert a number of them from the state-sponsored Lutheran church.
(7) In the case of Norway, the limits were imposed by the country’s geography. In the case of Ireland, they were artificially created by British policies.
Lady Duff Gordon, aka Lucile
I honestly thought I had written my last post on changes in ladies’ lingerie. Then Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (1863-1935) floated across my path in one of the romantic and subtly sexy gowns with which she wowed the fashionable world at the turn of the twentieth century. I was already familiar with Lucile’s trademark tea gowns and evening dresses. It never occurred to me that her (relatively) insubstantial dresses would need something different in terms of underwear. But of course they did.
Lady Duff Gordon, ca. 1919
Lucile, then Lucy Wallace (née Sutherland), entered the “rag trade”in 1890 because she was desperate for money when her alcoholic husband, James Stewart Wallace, abandoned Lucy and their daughter. Lucy moved in with her mother and she began supporting herself as dressmaker. When one of her dresses was a hit at a weekend house party, her career took off. In 1894, after divorcing James Wallace, that nice little dressmaker Lucy Wallace turned herself into the mononymous Lucile, owner of the exclusive Maison Lucile, which catered to a wealthy clientele that included aristocracy, socialites and stars of the film and stage, such as Lily Langtry, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Mary Pickford, and Irene Castle. A few years later, Lucile married, Scottish baronet Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon. Already a celebrity as a couturier, her new title added additional cachet to her career.
Lucile was best known for her tea gowns, evening dresses, and luxurious lingerie. She dubbed her evening gowns “Gowns of Emotion”, and gave them evocative, if not very descriptive, names like “Give Me Your Heart” and “The Sighing Sounds of Lips Unsatisfied.” The gowns were made with floating layers of diaphanous fabrics in pale colors, soft drapery, and dramatic asymmetrical effects. They had low necks, and slit skirts, daring and scandalous at the time. The lingerie that went under her dresses was sheer, trimmed with tiny hand-made silk flower, and provocative—no boned corsets under a Lucile gown!
Lucile made more innovations in the world of fashion than just her dresses. She was the first couturier to train lovely young women as professional models. She originated the “mannequin parade” as a technique for displaying her gowns and luring women into placing orders. Invitation-only, the parades were important social events. * For most of the year, the parades were held at Maison Lucile, but in the summer Lucile held the fashion shows in her garden, where models walked pedigreed dogs with jeweled collars and leashes.
Over time, Lucile transformed Maison Lucile into the first successful international couture business, Lucile Ltd., with houses in London, New York, Chicago and Paris. Beginning in 1910, she wrote weekly columns for the Hearst newspapers and monthly columns for Harper’s Bazaar and Good Housekeeping. In addition to creating gowns for famous actresses, she designed costumes for theatrical productions, including the operetta The Merry Widow, several productions of the Ziegfeld Follies, and more than eighty movies. For a brief time she also had a successful mail-order business with Sears, Roebuck, offering a lower-priced, mass-produced line with her name.
During World War I, Lucile closed her couture houses in London and Paris and based herself in New York. Her business did not revive after the war. Fashions had changed and Lucile’s trademark romantic style seemed old-fashioned compared to the bold new fashions of the flapper era. Lucile Ltd. closed in 1922, though Lucille herself continued to design for private clients in London.
A few odd tidbits:
Lucile was the older sister of novelist, screenwriter and film producer Elinor Glyn, who popularized the terms “It” and “It Girl.”
Together with her husband, her maid, and nine other people, Lucile survived the sinking of the Titanic in boat designed for forty. The Duff-Gordons were cleared of charges of having bribed crew members to not allow others on the boat, but Sir Cosmo’s reputation was permanently smeared. Lucille seems to have gotten off more lightly in the public eye: on the day that she testified at the public hearing about the disaster , the room was packed with society women wearing their Lucile creations in support of their favorite designer.
*Women came to look at their dresses. Unattached young men—ostensibly escorting their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and old family friends—came to look at the models.
A Light in the Northern Sea: A Q & A with Tim Brady
I am fascinated by stories of the resistance in World War II. (My guess is that comes to no surprise to those of you who have been hanging out here in the Margins for a while.) And I have slowly come to realize that the resistance took different forms in different places. All of which explains why I said yes with no hesitation when I was offered an advance copy of Tim Brady’s A Light in the Northern Sea: Denmark’s Incredible Rescue of Their Jewish Citizens During WWII. (This despite the fact that I have been turning down most of the books publicists offer me because life is short and the To-Be-Read piles are tall.)
I’m glad I did: the story is amazing.
I’m also glad Tim Brady agreed to answer some questions. Take it away, Tim
What path led you to the story of the Danish resistance movement in World War II? And why do you think it is important to tell this story today?
After finishing Three Ordinary Girls, which told a story about the Dutch Resistance during WW II, I was looking for another resistance story to tell. I knew vaguely of what had happened in Denmark—the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews—but only at a surface level. When I decided to dive into research, I quickly realized what a powerful story it was. These early efforts were occurring just as Russia was invading Ukraine, which seemed like a very timely example for what happens when a powerful, authoritarian nation occupies a lesser power with democratic traditions.
The resistance in France and the Netherlands has been the subject of many books in English over the last few years, including your own Three Ordinary Girls. How did the Danish resistance differ from these better know experiences?
The Danish resistance was slow to begin. The German occupation began in April 1940, but as a consequence of the agreement signed by the Danish government at the time, the German takeover was less oppressive than occurred in other Western European nations, and a majority of Danes were not moved to resistance by the presence of Germany in their daily lives. It would take three years before an effective resistance evolved in Denmark.
Why do you think people are drawn to these stories today?
I think readers have grown more interested in the nooks and crannies of the history of World War II. While the great sweep of the war remains a powerful focus of its history, many are looking into lesser-known aspects of the conflict to get a better sense of what happened to a wide variety of its participants.
You introduce your readers to individual members of the resistance, who come to the work by different paths and carry out different missions. Do you have a favorite among them?
Jurgen Kieler and the whole of his family are great heroes of mine, and of much of the Danish nation. The Kieler’s alignment with and participation in the resistance grew out of a deep moral conviction that the German presence in Denmark could not be tolerated. They struggled within the family, particularly Jurgen and his older sister, Elsebet, in how best to respond to the oppressive nature of the occupation, before ultimately siding with a violent resistance. They paid deeply for their decision; four siblings, and their father, all spent time in concentration camps before the war ended.
Was there a story you were sad to leave out?
There was no one story that I was sad to leave out, but collectively I wished I had more opportunity to delve deeper into the story as a whole: more history of Denmark, extending back before the 20th century; more depth about the nature of the Danish character—what were the roots of their collective decision to come to the aid of the nation’s Jews? More understanding of the Danish monarchy and how it worked with the country’s democratic institutions. More details about particular aspects of the resistance like the rescue of the Jews through Bispebjerg and other hospitals in Copenhagen. More about the White Bus rescue— how it was organized and how it worked.
What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?
I would say the most surprising thing was the fact that I found the story was essentially as true as its reputation. I’m by nature, and probably by profession, skeptical when it comes to history stories that promise heroics and good deeds across a wide swath of a nation’s populace. While there are many footnotes and asterisks to go along with this story, I think it lives up to its reputation; the Danish people deserve a tip of the cap for what they did to rescue 95% of the country’s Jewish population from capture by Nazi Germany.
Tim Brady is an award-winning author whose books—Twelve Desperate Miles, A Death in San Pietro, His Father’s Son, and Three Ordinary Girls—have received wide critical acclaim. He has contributed to PBS history documentaries and has written frequently for the History Channel Magazine. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.