My sister Joanie was 14 years older, and I always looked up to her. She drew beautiful paper dolls and their fashions for me. Before I entered school, she had graduated from high school, and left to work in Salt Lake City. She was a single working girl for several years before she got married and had children. At first she lived in a boarding house on A Street in the Avenues, and then later shared a house on 21st South with other working girls. During that time I wrote letters to her, and she sent me many gifts, among them paper dolls and two Madame Alexander dolls, which I still have. One is Jo March from Little Women.
Joanie likes to read, and I like to read, and one Christmas when I was ten or eleven, she gave me a copy of Good Morning, Young Lady, by Ardyth Kennelly. It was, and is, one of the most magical books I have ever read. It is both a Cinderella story and a Robin Hood story.
It is set in the early days of Salt Lake City. The heroine is Dorney Leaf, whose grandfather in Wyoming has told her romantic stories about the outlaw Butch Cassidy and set Dorney's imagination astir. Dorney's parents and her grandfather die and she must come to Salt Lake City to live with an unkind sister, and some unattractive nieces. She works in a laundry. Then she goes to work as a housekeeper for a former beauty Queen, who is married to a well-to-do restaurateur. Queen Alma's husband dotes on her, takes her to dine, and brings her boxes of chocolates. The Queen gains weight and cannot get into her beautiful clothes, so she gives her dresses to Dorney.
Dorney finally meets Butch Cassidy, and another man, too--a schoolteacher. Butch gets in trouble and wants her to run away to South America with him, but Dorney's sister foils their plans, and--oh, oh, oh! I cannot devour the pages fast enough. It is a bittersweet story, worrisome but satisfying, about dreams and realities, and realities that are like dreams. I have read the book many times, and it still has the same effect on me.
Butch Cassidy was from Circleville, Utah. We drove through Circleville and past Piute High School on our way to Salt Lake City. We played Piute High in high school basketball. Butch's given name was Robert Leroy Parker, and reporters loved to come to Circleville and interview his elderly sister, Lula, who lived in Circleville, and write stories about Butch (I found a similar situation when I edited The Tombstone Epitaph; reporters loved to interview Cochise's grandson, who was in the nursing home in Tombstone, and write the old stories about Cochise).
After reading Good Morning, Young Lady, I wanted to read every word that Ardyth Kennelly had ever written. I found The Peaceable Kingdom and its sequel, Up Home, and they were every bit as satisfying, and I read them again and again. They are also set in the early days of Salt Lake City, when polygamy was practiced. The heroine is Linnea, who is the second wife of Olaf, a tailor. Olaf's first wife, Sigrid, is thin and beautiful. Linnea, who is a midwife, may be sturdier, but she has heart and grit and many friends. Linnea and her children move often, and each chapter is an adventure. On the day of the temple dedication, Gertrude drops her new hat down the outhouse. After a move, the Linnea's dish cupboard falls on Rudie. Linnea is privy to many domestic secrets--Who is love with whom? Who is the father of that baby?
The Linnea novels are based on stories that Kennelly's grandmother told her. Linnea is Swedish. When she moves, which she does often for various reasons, she loves to clean house and arrange her furniture, then sit down and have a good cup of coffee. She says the Mormon proscription of coffee in the Word of Wisdom does not apply to Swedes.
I did not know for many years how many books Kennelly had written, but when I went to a library, I always looked for her name.
In March of 1968, my husband, Kent, entered the Air Force. His draft number had come up, and so to avoid a sure trip to VietNam and to have time to finish his master's degree in psychology at the University of Utah, he joined the Air Force, which was a four-year commitment. We were living on the Avenues in Salt Lake City, at about 10th east and C Street, in a four-plex. I loved the location and the little apartment, which had a hookup for a washing machine. We had found a used washing machine in the classified ads, and I liked hanging out clothes behind the apartment.
I had been taking some classes, too, and working at the Holy Cross Hospital in personnel, and as a typist at the Political Science Department at the U. I remember those two quarters I attended the University of Utah as one of the happiest times of my life, when the light was crisp and bright. I understand now that I was emerging from a period of depression. One of the symptoms had been a fear of driving. I hadn't told anyone, I just avoided it. My brain had changed settings, had switched from "anxiety" to "sponge," and I absorbed every photon of fall light and every fact and nuance. At the U. I took anthropology classes from Charles Dibble and John Dewey and a young MesoAmerican specialist, physiology from Dr. Goldfarb, and geology from W. L. Stokes. Lo, forty years have passed, and I still remember those classes.
I worked for J. D. Williams and Helmut Callis in political science. I had met Dr. Williams from a distance while I was still in high school, because he had moderated the Model United Nations conference that I had attended for three years. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School, a Democrat, and had run for political office. He took the office staff out to a restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City for a prime rib dinner at Christmastime. I had never eaten prime rib.
Dr. and Mrs. Callis were historians specializing in China, and had escaped Nazi Germany to China, thence to the United States. Dr. Callis was so pleased with my spelling and accuracy in transcribing his manuscripts that he invited us to the Callis house to see their collection of Chinese art objects. They included large carved cabinets that were taken apart like puzzles so they could be shipped to the United States. The Callis house had a red door. He told me that red is the color of happiness in China, and that Chinese brides wear red wedding dresses.
From our apartment, I walked to the University along tree-lined narrow streets. I wore navy blue knee socks and a wool houndstooth skirt, a tan cableknit sweater, and a very uncomfortable, undoubtedly too small, pair of blue loafers that rubbed blisters on my heels. I often took the bus home at the end of the day. I was also typing notes for a political science doctoral student who was researching conflict in the Middle East. He marked passages in books, and I typed the excerpts onto 3x5 cards for him. I used my old turquoise-colored Royal portable typewriter to type the cards on our kitchen table, for Kent's master's thesis, we rented an IBM electric typewriter for a few weeks.
Kent turned in his thesis and completed his oral exams at the end of winter quarter, we returned the rented typewriter, put our few belongings in storage, and I left him at the airport. We had a round-back white Volvo, with red seats. I drove to Escalante to see Mom and Dad, then to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I spent a few weeks with Joanie, then I drove solo across country to Biloxi, Mississippi, where my airman husband was completing basic training at Keesler Air Force Base.
For a short time, we lived in a little moldy trailer that reeked of gas, then we found an apartment in the upstairs of an old two-story white frame house on the Beach Highway, where one of my husband's friends from the Air Force and his wife also lived. Our landlady was Miss _; her daughter, Miss _, also lived with her. They pronounced the air base name Kees-lah. Jeff Davis' house, a historical attraction, was just down the street. The cemetery vaults were above ground. I was in another country. The summer of 1968 was memorable in other ways; it was the summer of the Moon Walk and Hurricane Camille.
We were up high with a beach view, and out of the trailer, but our mattress smelled like mildew, and the cockroaches seemed as big as mice. They flew out of grocery bags, and they scattered like a school of fish when I came into the dimly lit foyer at night. The mosquitoes were vicious, and sometimes I saw a disoriented crab scuttling sideways down the highway. My husband was gone much of the time, assigned to KP duty in addition to his other training. I could not find a job, so I spent my time at the air-conditioned library on the air base. I looked for Ardyth Kennelly on the shelves, and I found The Spur.
It was like running into an old friend in an unfamiliar place, and sitting down with a good cup of coffee and interesting conversation. The Spur, about Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is not as common as Kennelly's other books, especially the Linnea books, at least one of which was published in a book club edition. But it is every bit as good. Kennelly was fascinated with John Wilkes Booth, and read everything she could find about him. One of the books she relied upon heavily for her novel, she said, is The Mad Booths of Baltimore, by Stanley Kimmel. Booth was wearing spurs in the Ford Theatre and he caught his spur in a theatre curtain when he jumped from the balcony to escape. He was injured, and his injury changed the trajectory of his story, and history.
When I was at Utah State University, I heard a scholarly presentation about neglected Western women writers. Ardyth Kennelly was one of them. The book flap text of The Spur is revealing about women's status at the time Kennelly was writing. Much is said about Kennelly's doctor husband's accomplishments, and Kennelly is said to enjoy housekeeping. But then Linnea enjoyed housekeeping, too. And so do I. And that cup of coffee in a clean house is deeply satisfying.
When I came to Sewanee, I learned that John Wilkes Booth had once visited the old Brooks Hardware store here (now Taylor's), where he pawned his pocketwatch.
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