Beulah Vee's Cedar Chest (3)

To recap: in a series of five posts I'm exploring the contents of a cedar chest belonging to my aunt Beulah Vee Wright, who died in 1939 at the age of 18. Background on her and this project can be found in part 1.

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

My aunt seemed to have pretty good grades in most elementary and high school subjects. Geometry and English gave her trouble as a junior in high school, but music and history must have kept her interest. That would explain the number of song and music books in the cedar chest.

This driver's license issued just two months before she died presents a puzzle. This item is the only place any family members have seen her middle name as "Victoria". We also learn she was five feet six and a half inches tall, had brown hair and blue eyes and weighed 120 pounds. 

I wonder how this renewal came about while she was in the middle of a serious illness. You'll see below in her journal "First steps in 7 weeks Oct. 27". 

My grandmother saved lots of materials related to her daughter's funeral. 

These are only some of the pages from the flower list booklet.

This notice probably appeared in the Gadsden Times on December 10, 1940. I've seen similar notices in newspapers in recent years, although such things have mostly migrated to Facebook and other social media today. The "A.J. Wright" is my father. 

During Beulah Vee's ultimately fatal illness both she and her mother kept journals. Pages from my grandmother's notebook will appear in a subsequent post. These pages show Beulah Vee as alternating between high spirits and fatalism. In the page above she says "The ride was swell!" about her trip in an ambulance to Holy Name of Jesus Hospital in Gadsden on September 7, 1939.

This postcard of the hospital is dated in May 1947. 

Source: Ala. Dept. of Archives & History Digital Collections 

Beulah Vee seems to have had an interest in numerology. That last note is chilling. 

These are the first and last pages from a long senior essay written by Beulah Vee. 

Beulah Vee's Cedar Chest (2)

To recap: in a series of five posts I'm exploring the contents of a cedar chest belonging to my aunt Beulah Vee Wright, who died in 1939 at the age of 18. Background on her and this project can be found in part 1.

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

Here's the cedar chest resting in its current home in my daughter Becca Leon's house in Oklahoma. 

Open the chest and here's part of what you see.

Whitman's chocolates have been around for a long time--since 1842.

There are several song and music books in the chest. 

Lots of small, personal items are stored in the chest.

My aunt apparently received this memory book on her 17th birthday. On the pages below she's written her favorites in various categories.

Interesting that she listed English as one of her "Pet Studies". As we'll see in a subsequent post, high school English was not her best subject. 

She apparently had her share of boyfriends! Note one of the names in the middle: Joe Lane. He will make an interesting appearance in another post. 

Beulah Vee seems to have been a fan of Tyrone Power, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, all popular film actors of the 1930's. Faith Baldwin was a very prolific and popular novelist at the time. I presume "Night and Day" is the popular 1932 song by Cole Porter. Singer, songwriter and saxophonist Wayne King started his own orchestra in 1927. 

Here's one of many similar items my grandmother saved from Beulah Vee's school days. 

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