Oh! So Long Ago

Being a Tender Glance Back into That Era Known as the Famous Winter of 1910-11

CHARLES G. SHAW

THAT a full two centuries was required to popularize the wearing of wigs—and an even longer period to establish the custom of tea drinking in polite society—must appear not a little odd to us now when we consider it was only seventeen years ago that in Denver, Colorado, Miss Laura Burdick was arrested for smoking a cigarette in public and A. J. Drexel of Philadelphia hung up a new world's aviation altitude record by soaring to the silly height of approximately twelve hundred feet! The two-step was still the current ballroom frolic of America, while half the nation whistled Gee I Wish That I Had a Girl; Douglas Fairbanks grinned his way through Thompson Buchanan's The Cub and Mel Sheppard, blooming with Olympic laurels, romped the half mile for the Irish American A.C.; Shanley's Times Square lobsterpalace, had scarcely settled into its fresh coat of paint and countless parodies of Kipling's A Fool There Was flooded the magazine market. In London, Dr. Hawley H. Crippen was hanged by the neck until dead on a charge of murder, three days subsequent to the demise of Count Leo Tolstoy in far-off Astapova, while Officer Matt McGrath smashed record upon record in that diversion known as throwing the hammer.

At the Eden Musee, Cyrus J. Willets, direct from Peru, Ind., viewed with open mouth the world in wax, Mary Roberts Rinehart had caused a mild sensation with The Man in Lower Ten, and a portion of the country was beginning to pass its evenings in figuring out the difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties.

But let us further plumb the period. Here and there one heard vague reports of something called the Turkey Trot and Grizzly Bear, the Marathon craze still revealed symptoms of life, Editor Edward Bok of The Ladies' Home Journal gave heart-to-heart advice to all, while drug stores (incredible as it may sound) dealt almost entirely in drugs! It was not the smart thing, then, for nice young ladies to pass their nights in smoke-soaked dance dives, nor even, for that matter, to visit such resorts. The automobile death rate, at the time, was less than two per hundred thousand population .and Irene Castle had not yet clipped her locks, which was eventually to produce a nationwide crop of bobbed female heads. That the saloon would be but a memory a decade later seemed a thing too absurd to contemplate and Gargantuan were the free lunches that certain of these glad retreats dished out. The first Narcotic Act had only just been put into effect and one-way thoroughfares, the vitaphone, cooperative flats, butter-and-egg plutocrats, and non-alcoholic vermouth were, to all intents, yet unheard of.

Lulu Glaser, in The Girl and The Kaiser was playing the Herald Square Theatre, Gaynor was Mayor of New York, and the knitted tie rage was at its pinnacle. Lots in swank Old Westbury sold for a paltry three hundred dollars, while a nine room Park Avenue apartment rented for but three thousand! This was an age innocent of chain hotels and dinner dances, but one which still celebrated New Year's calls and rejoiced in goggles, dusters, "banting", "rats", "puffs", and mutilated college hats.

Joe Dawson, in a Marmon, had won the Savannah Cup and Caruso had opened the opera season as Renaud in Gluck's Armide. Posters lauding the virtues of Colonel Ruppert's "Beer That Satisfies", Redfern's whalebone corsets, and bottled Club Cocktails sprinkled the countryside for miles and miles around. The girls of the day flaunted feathered picture hats and the young men sported checkered flannel vests. H. G. Well's The Netv Machiavelli had just made its appearance, a group of Boston females were seriously taking up wrestling, and in Washington the proposal of a halfcent piece was presented before Congress. Still the press echoed with the Dr. Cook exposure, and Youssepof— "The Terrible Turk", was a Madison Square Garden favorite, while in whispered awe the White Slave issue was surreptitiously discussed, the Trusts, in the meantime, along with Mr. J. P. Morgan, serving as the inevitable target for the public's slings and arrows.

Divorce had not yet become the fashion it is now, and here and there, certain traces actually existed of that obsolete condition known as "family life". The cigar market overshadowed the cigarette field, barber shops were spoken of as "tonsorial parlors", and Anthony Comstock was czar plenipotentiary of vice in general.

Perhaps the chief change that began to make itself felt at this time and one which has since left its mark indelibly fixed, which put an end for good and all to the evenings around the fireside, was the dance restaurant, forerunner of the later cabaret, and still later night club. Prior to this, restaurants served exclusively as bibulous or gastronomic haunts. A few possessed orchestras but the joys of Terpsichore were yet to visit themselves within their confines. Dancing was a thing apart. For this divertissement there were halls. Then, by degrees, the dance restaurant appeared upon the scene and flourished with such success that in a very short while a goodly section of the nation was swaying nightly to the clink of glasses and the rhythms of the moment.

Boyish figures for girls had not at the time been designed nor had that institution of subsequent years—the country club—yet fully come into its own. In Viterbo, Italy, the trial of the Camorrists for the murder of the Cuoccolo family was conducted in cages and by a court decision the Corthusian Monks, of Chartreuse fame, won their fight against a New York corporation to prevent the latter from using their noted trade-mark. It was during these days, too, that the world of art was suddenly thrown into consternation by the abduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, from the galleries of the Louvre.

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Mr. Arnold Bennett was instructing the world in the problem of how to live on twenty-four hours a day and Miss Maude Adams delighted us in M. Rostand's Chantecler. The current weeklies decried the evils of child labor, white enameled wooden beds with cane head and foot-boards were to be encountered in the best bedrooms, while the chauffeurs of the period, in no uncertain terms, demanded a "closed shop."

This was the year also that gave birth to that theatric abortion tagged the Winter Garden, whose runway creaked beneath the weight of hefty near-nude show girls, while at the Majestic The Blue Bird of M. Maeterlinck glorified that elusive thing called happiness. The late John Drew magnificently stalked through makebelieve drawing-rooms in Inconstant George. The Hen Pecks made merry at the Broadway, and the prolific Augustus Thomas had given us The Harvest Moon. The Scarecrow, with Edmund Breese, garnished the boards of The Garrick and from nearby Weber's wafted the strains of Alma, Where Do You Live? while a few blocks further off Elsie Janis and Joe Cawthorn clowned it in Henry Blossom's The Slim Princess.

U. S. Steel was then selling down around seventy-two, though a tiny hatch of letters, penned by James A. McNeill Whistler, brought as high a figure as $775.00 at public auction. John Paul Jones of Cornell had broken the amateur mile record in four minutes, fifteen and two-fifths seconds and Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, in a speech before the Knife and Fork Club, heartily indorsed the recall. While one J. A. Irwin fumed against paying a cab driver two dollars for a taxi ride across Central Park, a group of members of the Ladies' Four-in-Hand Driving Club made a fifty-four mile run, on the Club Coach, "Arrow", from the Colony Club to Greenwich, Connecticut, and fifteen hundred suffragists marched in protest against a Legislature which had persistently refused to recognize women's right to vote. In Oakland, California, a section of a girl's skull was cut away by a surgeon to cure her from committing further theft about the same time that an affluent, though hitter, farmer, in Oswego, fired a charge of No. 7 shot into another girl, as a warning not to undress before an uncurtained window. By a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court, the Standard Oil Co. of N. J. was held to he an illegal monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust law, Mr. Eugene Higgins startled the chess universe by defeating the Cuban maestro, Signor Jose Raoul Capablanca, in Paris, and the Territories of Arizona and New Mexico were admitted into the Union as States.

Only the previous summer in England J. M. Barrie had declined a knighthood, women's skirts still dangled shyly around the ankles, while Dr. Munyon, with upraised finger, informed us there was "hope". Hunter Baltimore Rye, Wilson Whiskey, Great Western Champagne, and Evans' Pale Ale gladdened the billboards throughout the land, best sellers fetched a dollar and forty cents and linen collars sold at two for a quarter. In Philadelphia, with becoming modesty, a movement to drape statuary was launched and in California Boss Abe Ruef of San Francisco was bundled off to San Quentin Prison for a term of fourteen long years.

It was during this epoch that Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth, straight from vaudeville, made their initial appearance as stars in a hodge-podge entitled Little Miss Fix It, commemorable for those ditties: I've a Garden in Siveden and Turn off Your Light, Mr. Moon Man. Carter H. Harrison, following the example set by his daddy, was elected Mayor of Chicago for the fifth time by a plurality of twenty thousand and Jack Johnson was given jail for repeated infractions of the speed law.

Along the Mexican border a steady unrest boiled, the Krupps of Germany had patented an anti-aircraft explosive, while M. Delcasse, of Paris, predicted that France's navy for the year 1920 would lead that of the Fatherland in cruisers. Money on the New York Stock Exchange loaned at 2½ per cent and the Night and Day Bank had changed its name to the Harriman National, the trial of Joseph G. Robin was front page news for weeks, and through the Middle West, Black Hand threats and bombs shocked a peaceloving populace. The New York Yankees were known then as the Highlanders, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh was just commencing to cabbage attention, while the motor cars of the moment embraced the Baker Electric, the Rambler, Thomas, Stevens-Duryea, and Stoddard-Dayton makes. Orchestra seats at the Metropolitan Opera House were raised from five to six dollars and the Day Letter, for the first time, was inaugurated by the Western Union Telegraph Company.

It was about this period, too, that William Gillette began a farewell engagement at the Empire Theatre in his sure-fire Secret Service. Richard LeGallienne tossed off verse for Harper's Weekly and fat John Bunny puffed and blinked from the silver screen, while Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl is The Right Little Girl for Me floated through tha halftwilight from the corner barrel organ.

A day, true enough, devoid of radio philosophy and the twelve mile limit, flesh-coloured stockings and aircooled knees, cut-rate taxis and dresssuited gunmen, ultra-violet bathing parties and gilt-edged speak-easies, tabloid news and endurance dancing, but a day when a single nickel bought a schooner of suds the size of a bucket and a few simoleons produced a branigan that lasted a whole night. A day when there wasn't a mad scramble to be everywhere at the same moment and a still madder scramble to make a million over night. A day when life flowed lazily by and the echoes of a rosy yesterday carelessly blended with those of a golden to-morrow.