Beulah Vee's Cedar Chest (1)

Part 2 of this series can be found here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here.




My dad's older sister and thus my aunt Beulah Vee Wright has always been something of a mystery in the family. Born in Gadsden on November 2, 1921, she died soon after her eighteenth birthday on December 10, 1939. She had attended Etowah High School, graduating that spring despite a serious illness that had begun in March. She is buried in Forrest Cemetery in Gadsden with my grandfather Amos J. Wright, Sr., and grandmother, Rosa Mae Wright. 

This event was a cataclysmic one in the family, especially for my grandmother. She never really got over it despite living until 1997. My grandparents' social life apparently changed drastically. My grandfather and father pretty much had to warn everyone not to bring up Beulah Vee's name; the memory must have been too painful. Unfortunately, I never brought the subject up with my father before he died; his memories of his sister would have been interesting to know, since he was 13 when she died.

Despite its effect on her and her desire not to talk about her daughter, my grandmother maintained something of a shrine to her. The furniture purchased for Beulah Vee's bedroom became the guest room furniture in a house where she never lived that my grandparents moved to in the late 1940's. My aunt's portrait shown below hung on the wall of that guest room. And then there was the cedar chest.

My grandmother saved clothes, documents, and various objects of her daughter's life and kept them in the cedar hope chest she and my grandfather had bought for her at some point. Some of those items will be explored in several posts to follow. The chest is stuffed with material--it is a time capsule that captures the life of a young and then a teenage girl in Gadsden, Alabama, in the 1920's and 1930's. 

My daughter Becca is the only grandaughter on my father's side; there are also three grandsons. Her great-grandmother thus wanted her to have Beulah Vee's furniture and chest. The furniture has been kept in our house in Pelham since my grandmother died in 1997; the chest remained at my parents' house in Huntsville. 

Recently Becca and her husband moved to Oklahoma, and they took all the furniture and the chest with them to fill a guest bedroom. In these posts I'll share our fascination with all this material and a young woman neither of us ever met.

In this post I want to introduce Beulah Vee using some family photographs. Most of them below have handwritten captions; they were written on the back by my father.  

In the lower right corner of this oil portrait of my aunt is the artist's signature in red: "T. Takada". And therein lies a tale. Just after World War II my dad's cousin in the military, Lacy Wright, was stationed in Japan. He noticed a number of Japanese artists were painting portraits from photographs for a small fee. He wrote his aunt Rosa Mae Wright, Beulah Vee's mother, and told her he would have such a portrait done if she would send him a photograph.  

Here is the famous cedar chest. The contents will be explored in more posts in this series. 

W.E. Striplin Elementary School as it exists today

Source: Gadsden Public Schools

Movies with Alabama Connections (7): The Alabama Hills

On the eastern slope of the Serra Nevada Mountains in Inyo County, California, is an area of rock formations known as the Alabama Hills. The name originated in the exploits of the CSS Alabama during the Civil War. Prospectors mining for gold in the area and sympathetic to the Confederate cause began naming their claims after the warship. Eventually the entire area had that name.

In 1969 the U.S. Bureau of Land Management designated almost 30,000 acres of public land in that region as the Alabama Hills Recreation Area. The Hills are a popular spot for hikers, rock climbers, photographers, etc.

What does all this have to do with the movies? Well, quite a bit, actually. In the early 1920's Hollywood filmmakers discovered the Hills and since then the formations have been featured in numerous productions. The Internet Movie Database has 363 titles of movies and TV series episodes with the Alabama Hills-Lone Pine area as filming locations. The Museum of Western Film History in the town of Lone Pine documents that heritage in this area about three hours north of Hollywood.

Of course, many western films and series have used the area to film. But the Alabama Hills have also been used by productions as varied as Gunga Din, Gladiator, Django Unchained and the science fiction series Firefly. Alabama is thus connected in this minor way to many Hollywood productions.

In March 2019 18,000 acres of federal land were designated the Alabama Hills National Scenic Area. 

Charles Michael Morfin's 2014 book Location Filming in the Alabama Hills documents over 500 productions in the area. 

  

The photograph above shows some typical rock formations in the Alabama Hills. The one below shows the area that served as the Khyber Pass in the 1939 film Gunga Din. 

Source for both photographs: Wikipedia

Old Alabama Stuff (13): Women in Alabama Industries in 1924

In 1924 a publication entitled Women in Alabama Industries was published by the U.S. Department of Labor. Subtitled "A Study of Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions", the work was the 34th "Bulletin" from the Women's Bureau", an agency within the Labor Department established by Congress in 1920 and still functioning today. Alabama was the 11th state examined in the series. Let's take a look at the report, which sold for 15 cents.  

As noted in one of the excerpts clipped below, there were almost 224,000 women "gainfully employed" in Alabama in 1920. Many worked as domestic servants, laundresses and farm laborers. However, some 15,000 were in textile mills, garment and food factories, printing and publishing plants, and other manufacturing jobs. Another 5400 worked in retail stores, and about 1200 worked in power laundries. Sample industrial locations were studied in 31 towns and cities, including Birmingham, Dothan, Gadsden, Mobile, Montgomery, Selma, Sylacauga, Talladega and Tuscaloosa. These surveys were done in February, March and April 1922.

The report has five parts. After an introduction, areas such as hours, working conditions, wages and demographic and sociological characteristics of the workers are all examined in great detail. For instance, section three on working conditions covers such things as posture, ventilation, lighting, toilets, lunch rooms and health and accident hazards. 

In 1920 the population of Alabama was about 2,348,000. Thus 9.5% of the people in the state were women working outside the home or on farms. Of course, a much smaller percent worked in manufacturing as covered in this report. Most of these women probably worked because they were not yet married, were widowed or were adding needed family income. They were also setting the stage for even greater influxes of women into the state's workforce during World War II and again in the 1960's and following decades until the present. 

Birmingham Photo of the Day (48): Symphony Orchestra in 1963

This photo was taken at a performance on the Jacksonville State College campus on February 1, 1963. The school's A Capella Choir appeared with the orchestra.

Orchestra-size ensembles based in Birmingham appeared beginning in the early 1920's. By 1956 a professional group known as the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra had formed. In 1979 the organization became the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. 

That day in Jacksonville in 1963 the music director and conductor of the orchestra was Arthur Winograd. In 1964 he became the director of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, where he remained until his retirement in 1985.

Arthur Winograd [1920-2010]

Source: BhamWiki

Bryce Hospital: Some Photographs (1)

The original structure of Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa is currently undergoing an extensive restoration; you can read about it here. The wonderful Alabama Mosaic site has a number of old photographs taken both inside and outside Bryce over the years. I've posted some here with comments below each one. There are many more, so I'll revisit this topic at some point.

These photographs are eerie in their appearance of "normalcy". The Alabama Insane Hospital, as the facility was originally known, had a long history of innovation in treating the mentally ill well into the 20th century. As the decades passed, Bryce developed the same problems as similar facilities--too many patients and too little staff and funding. In 1972 Bryce became the subject of a landmark lawsuit that changed mental health care in large institutions nationwide. 

In August 2014 I posted an item with a few photographs about a quick trip to Bryce. You can read more about Bryce Hospital here and its namesake Peter Bryce, the first superintendent, here.

In 1881 Joseph Camp spent five months as a patient at Bryce; his account has been published as An Insight into an Insane Asylum. In 1992 The Letters of a Victorian Madwoman, edited by John S. Hughes, was published and documented the thirty years a female patient spent at Bryce from 1890 until 1920. 

This postcard of the drive up to the front entrance dates before 1940.

This pre-1950 photograph shows the main entrance from a different angle and another building in the background.

A more prosaic view of some Bryce buildings, probably in the 1940's 

Two nurses around World War I

Male patients in the dining room in the 1940's

Female patients in the dining room in the 1940's 

A ward of hospital beds in the 1940's

Male patients in the reading room, 1940's 

Children's dormitory ca. 1950. There seems to be a patient in the crib at the lower left.

Inside the cupola of the main building

An aerial view of the hospital campus some time before 1980

An operation in progress around 1916

The "Recreation Hall" around 1916. Note female patients seated on one side, males on the other. Female patients are dancing with female nurses and male patients with male attendants.

The library, presumably for staff, around 1916

The records room around 1916. I wonder if any of these have survived.

That Time Bugs Bunny Headed to Alabama

Many of us of the Baby Boom persuasion remember classic Bugs Bunny with great fondness. The "wascally wabbit" first appeared in 1940 and numerous cartoons followed until 1964. I have not seen many of his various incarnations since he reappeared in 1976, but I sure remember watching his older adventures on Saturday morning cartoons. He was always a favorite of mine; his savage sarcasm in the face of everything made Mickey Mouse seem like a wimp.

There are many gems among the classic Bugs cartoons. One I especially like is the 1957 "What's Opera, Doc?" After the Marx Brothers 1935 film A Night at the Opera and this cartoon, I'm not sure how opera has survived as a serious art form. 

Now we come to the subject of this post, the 1953 cartoon "Southern Fried Rabbit".  Since it was released just over a year after I was born, I doubt if I saw it in the theater. I do seem to remember it from those Saturday morning marathons. I have been unable to find a copy online, but according to the Wikipedia page for the cartoon, it has been released on a Looney Tunes DVD.

"Southern Fried Rabbit" times in at just under seven minutes in length. The cartoon opens with Bugs lamenting, "What carrots. Look at this tired specimen. I haven't seen a decent carrot for months around these parts." He then notices a newspaper headline announcing a record carrot crop in Alabama. "Alabama? Well, I'm Alabamy bound!" the rabbit announces. Bugs is referencing a 1924 Tin Pan Alley tune made famous by singer Al Jolson.

Of course, there are complications. Confederate Yosemite Sam tries to shoot him as soon as he crosses the Mason-Dixon Line. Bugs tells him the war ended over 90 years earlier, but Sam announces, "I ain't no clock watcher." Many in our fair South seem to share that philosophy.

You can read the details of Bugs' visit to the South below, where I've copied the Wikipedia description. Bugs wonders why the South is so far south, another bit of wisdom hiding in a cartoon. I don't think Bugs ever makes it to Alabama and those great carrots.  

Source: Wikipedia

Title card from the cartoon

Source: Wikipedia 

A severe drought has ruined the carrot crop in Bugs Bunny's northern home. Upon learning of a boom crop in Alabama, Bugs decides to make the trip to the fertile soils (later exhaustedly asking, "I wonder why they put the South so far south?"). As soon as he crosses the Mason–Dixon line, he is shot at by "Colonel" Sam, who chases him but then quickly realizes that he crossed the Mason–Dixon line and runs back, saying he has to burn the boots as they "touched Yankee soil!". Bugs asked Sam what the deal is, only to hear that Sam believes he is a soldier of the Confederate States of America and has received orders from General Robert E. Lee to guard the borders between the Confederate States and the United States. When an annoyed Bugs points out that the "War Between the States" ended nearly 90 years ago, Sam says that "I ain't no clock watcher!" and shoots Bugs away, prompting the rabbit to make several attempts to shake his antagonist.

First, Bugs disguises himself as a banjo-playing slave, singing "My Old Kentucky Home." When Sam asks for something "more peppy", Bugs promptly sings "Yankee Doodle," leading Sam to call Bugs a traitor. Bugs then begs Sam not to beat him, pulls out a whip (disguised as a banjo string), and forces it into Sam's hands, making Sam look guilty. After fleeing, the rabbit immediately comes in disguised as Abraham Lincoln, scolding Sam for "whipping slaves". Sam tries to protest with repeated "buts" but Bugs in response hands him a card to "look me up at my Gettysburg Address". Bugs' cover is blown, however, when his cotton tail shows through Abe's trenchcoat, prompting an infuriated Sam to chase Bugs into a tree. Bugs twice blows out Sam's match as he's trying to light a cannonball (the second time with an extended pipe), but the third time (even though Sam takes the precaution of going even further away from the tree than the second attempt) results in Sam taking an explosion.

Bugs then disguises himself as Stonewall Jackson (here as "General Brickwall Jackson"), fooling Sam into marching into a well. Later, Bugs flees into a mansion, where he disguises himself as Scarlett O'Hara (from Gone with the Wind), and when Sam searches the mansion for Yankees, he takes a cannon explosion looking inside a closet.

Bugs at last succeeds in getting Sam when, disguised as an injured Confederate soldier, he informs him that "the Yankees are in Chattanooga" in Tennessee. Sam marches to "Chattanoogee", and the finale has him using a shotgun to threaten the New York Yankees, preventing them from competing in an exhibition baseball game against the Chattanooga Lookouts: "The first dang Yankee to step out of that dugout gets his head blasted off!!!".