Oct. 6, 2025
Zoe Anderson Norris
Zoe Anderson Norris, known to her friends in the Ragged Edge Klub as the Queen of Bohemia, was born in Kentucky in 1860, moved to Wichita, Kansas, with her first husband, and then to New York City, where she forged a career for herself as a journalist and novelist, eventually launching her own magazine, The East Side. In The East Side and in her journalism, she often focused on the lives of immigrants and the poor. Joining me in this episode is Eve M. Kahn, author of Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Come to the land of Bohemia,” composed by George Evans, with lyrics by Ren Shields; this performance by Hatvey Hindermyer was recorded on April 30, 1908, in New York, and is in the public domain and available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is of Zoe Anderson Norris from 1909, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Additional Sources:
- “To Fight for the Poor With My Pen: Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia,” Grolier Club Online Exhibitions.
- “Zoe Anderson Norris,” by W.J. Lampton, New York Times, February 27, 1914.
- “Zoe A. Norris,” Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912,” by John Wilson Townsend, Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1913.
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[SPEAKER_03]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Zo Anderson was born on February 29, 1860, on a farm in Herod'sburg, Kentucky, the 11th of 13 children born to Henry and Henrietta Anderson.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Henry also had two older children
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[SPEAKER_03]: Henrietta had her hands full raising children.
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[SPEAKER_03]: While Henri preached to disciples of Christ congregations, wrote for religious periodicals and twiled away at translations of the New Testament.
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[SPEAKER_03]: When Henri died in 1872, and Henrietta moved to Kansas to Homestead, Zo was sent to Daughters College, a boarding school in Herod'sburg.
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[SPEAKER_03]: She later described the school as, quote, a magnificent college of rare stateliness of colonial build of Doric columns much be-ivid, of sloping lawns richly carpeted with grass of a velvety green, unquote.
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[SPEAKER_03]: There, she was taught subjects, including zoology, constitutional law, and philosophy, and she was encouraged to think for herself.
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[SPEAKER_03]: On June 11, 1878, days after she graduated from daughter's college, Zo married Spencer William Norris, who was then working as a confectioner.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Less than a year later, Zo gave birth to a son, Robert.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Zo Spencer and Rob lived with Spencer's mother and grandmother.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In 1881, Zo gave birth to her second and last child, a daughter named Mary Clarence, who went by Clarence.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The family of four moved to Wichita, Kansas, where Spencer worked as a grocer, and Zo was hired as an art teacher at Lewis Academy after apparently inflating her credentials to do
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[SPEAKER_03]: At the 1893, World's Columbia and Exposition in Chicago, so and other members of Wichita's ceramic club displayed their painted porcelain.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In late 1893, so writing under the pen name, Nancy Yanks, started contributing a regular column to the Wichita Eagle.
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[SPEAKER_03]: That was only the beginning of her writing career, and soon Zoe was publishing poems and short stories in various publications.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Her depictions of Wichita and its residents were unflattering, and she had her share of critics.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In January of 1898, Zoe and Spencer divorced, due to Spencer's infidelity.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So was granted custody of Clarence.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Spuncer, when bankrupt, later that year, a never-paid zoo, the Alamone, she'd been awarded in the divorce.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Zoes sunrobes stayed in Wichita where he worked for a railroad.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Clarence headed to a Catholic boarding school in Kentucky and Zoe moved to Manhattan where she joined the women's press club of New York and wrote for several different periodicals.
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[SPEAKER_03]: As the 19th century drew to a close, Zo and Clarence, whom Zo claimed was her sister, headed to London, and then to Paris during its 1900 exhibition.
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[SPEAKER_03]: At the fair, Clarence met Harold William Morris, whom she married in July 1900.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Within months, the marriage failed, and a pregnant Clarence sailed back to the US with Zo
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[SPEAKER_03]: Back in New York, Zo published her first novel, The Color of His Soul, with Funkin' Wacknulls, where Zo was friends with the literary advisor.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The cover of the book was illustrated by Jack Bryan's, whom Zo was dating.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The book was marketed as, quote, brilliant sketches of newspaper and bohemian life, unquote.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The novel was widely reviewed and may well have been a success, but an acquaintance of Zo claimed that he had been Zo's inspiration for a very unflattering character, and he threatened libel suit.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Funk and Wagnos reacted by pulling the book and destroying the warehouse supply.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It was later reissued by another publisher, but it never found success.
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[SPEAKER_03]: and March 1902, so and Jack married.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So lying about her age on the marriage certificate.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Jack was 12 years her junior.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So began undercover reporting, working as a servant and writing about it for American agriculturalist, a sister publication of good housekeeping.
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[SPEAKER_03]: She was not well paid for the pieces, though.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In 1902, Zo also published her second novel, which was widely ignored.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Jack, again, provided the cover art, but their marriage ended soon afterward.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It's unclear if they actually divorced, but since Zo never remarried, it didn't matter.
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[SPEAKER_03]: As Zo turned to newspaper reporting, she increasingly focused on the plates of immigrants
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[SPEAKER_03]: However, she also did a series in the New York Sun, where she imagined interviews with animals like the central park hippos and the Bronx Zoo giraffes.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In 1908, Clarence remarried to Fletcher-Chelph, a Kentucky farmer, and she and her son moved to Herod'sburg where Zo had grown up, leaving Zo alone in Manhattan.
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[SPEAKER_03]: After a false accusation of anti-Semitism, editors were wary of implying so, and it became harder to find writing work.
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[SPEAKER_03]: After a magazine accepted a report of undercover work from her, but changed it without giving her credit or pay.
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[SPEAKER_03]: so launched her own magazine, The East Side in 1909, where she wrote nearly all of the content and served as the quote, office boy, business manager, editor, and chief managing editor and owner, unquote.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The East Side ran until 1914, with William Oberhart, providing artwork in exchange for the free theater tickets so had for review purposes.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In 1910, Zo launched the Ragged Edge Club, a way to socialize with her magazine subscribers.
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[SPEAKER_03]: The club met in various restaurants around New York, with everyone paying their own way.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Zo dubbed her friends with royal titles, calling herself the queen of Bohemia.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In 1914, Zoe dreamt that her mother's ghost arrived and when she asked her mom, am I next?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Her mom answered yes.
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[SPEAKER_03]: In issue 29 of the East side, Zoe predicted her death.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And indeed, on February 13, Zoe died at the age of only 53.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Her death certificate listed her as 47 years old.
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[SPEAKER_03]: After a funeral in New York, her children, Rob and Clarence, buried her back in Herdsburg, Kentucky.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Joining me in this episode is Eve M. Kahn, author of Queen of Bohemia, predicts own death,
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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm late where they'll drive on to a trouble the way I will take you there if you live alone I'm the lander for you
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[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, where the light's breaking thine Oh, where that pillow makes love to get snowy Oh, come, where could the whole night Oh, where the turn is open Oh, the door is open Oh, where the land of monies Oh, where the prodigal foe
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[SPEAKER_01]: I eat, thanks so much for joining me today.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a thrill to be here, Kelly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for inviting me.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I was so excited to learn about Zoe Anderson Norris and it was really fun to read the book.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I wanna ask you how you came to know who she was and got started on this project.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, I am a member of an organization called The Girl Your Club.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is a hybrid club museum and library on 60th Street between Park and Madison.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Our members include some of the most rarefied niche collectors of the printed word and image on Earth.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And one of them is Steve Lamezo, who's got the world's great collection of American magazines.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He has 83,000 at last count.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, I went to visit him with a growl-year group in the fall of 2018, and we were in a house piled with magazines, and he pulls out a magazine called The East Side, a bound volume six issues, and I said, who's this woman who published this in the 1910s, who put her own name huge in spiky letters, so Anderson Norris, on every page that she could, and
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[SPEAKER_01]: How is it possible that this is obviously not a Jewish person, but she is sympathetically describing my mother's parents and aunts and uncles who were recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and so hauntingly beautifully described there, not their specific sufferings, but the sufferings of the people they got on the boat with in Ukraine at a time of virulent antisemitism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I pulled out my phone while I was still in Steve's Maso's basement, and I scrolled for any scholarship about her, and there was nothing out there, nothing substantive.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you decided to write a book up basically.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, well, you never know what's going to be a book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You need an ocean of material, and it wasn't clear that I had an ocean of material till a few months into the journey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When I realized how many millions of words she had published in newspapers and periodocals.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And you did a lot more than look at just her written words, so could you talk some about what your process was to research her thoroughly and write this book?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So if you've ever been in a maybe 1920sish building where there's an elevator dial, that's with an arrow moving to show where the, what floor the elevator is on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Your listeners cannot see that I am making the dial motion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry about that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The fan shaped dial motion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in my head, when I research, I almost invariably research women and they almost invariably are
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[SPEAKER_01]: So Anderson Morris.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in my head, I said, let's see if I can sort of feel like I've really completed my research and what I've got at the end of it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I watched the elevator dial move and move and move while I dug into every imaginable aspect of her life going back into her family story as deeply as I could.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking centuries back to her British ancestors and then her contemporary legacy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I found her family members all around.
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[SPEAKER_01]: my process.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Kelly, this will scare away future biographers if I explain how I don't watch TV.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And while my family's watching TV, I'm there poking around newspapers.com, intentionally misspelling.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Zoam Derson Morris.
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[SPEAKER_01]: to see if I could find more references to people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't watch TV, that's really, really, really key.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the only podcast I listened to are the ones like yours about forgotten women.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the ones my daughter makes, she works for Frick and Omex, she's a podcaster.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that is a little scary.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure people will still want to write by Omex.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Good, good, good, good, few, okay?
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[SPEAKER_03]: One of the challenges in writing about anybody, but especially someone like so is teasing a part what about herself presentation is true, accurate?
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[SPEAKER_03]: What is presentation?
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[SPEAKER_03]: She obviously wanted to hide things like her age and her true relationship with her daughter.
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[SPEAKER_03]: How do you approach that as biographer?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, at one point, I was literally thinking to myself, I have to somehow find a publisher that will publish this in three different colors of ink, where I'm making this up.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Black would be the stuff that we know is documented, that she, that she just said about herself, that's accurate.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And pink is fiction that reflects her true story, and green is journalism that distorts her true story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then I realized it's even more fun that she lied in a way, because I get to say, we don't know if X or Y happened, but we know that she fictionalized a story like this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know what happened to her when she ran into her estranged second husband on the street.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But we do know that she wrote a short story about a woman like her who runs into her strange second husband on the street and says, I bless the gods that the hand of God that took you from me basically so relieved to have him out of her hair.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I ended up really happy with interweaving fiction and journalism and saying, we know this, I know for sure that she's lying here, but isn't it fascinating that she's lying here?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yes, definitely.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So let's talk some about her background then the stuff we do know about her background or maybe the stuff she presented to us and how that shapes who she becomes or doesn't shape who she becomes.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So she grows up then Kentucky and you know what what does that look like?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So she's born and raised well she's born in 1860 as you've already said and she is raised in what she Delight later calls a little old dog kennel town and again your listeners can't see the air quotes I'm making a little old dog kennel town called Harrodsburg.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's about a half an hour by modern standards from Lexington Kentucky
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[SPEAKER_01]: She, her father, was an impractical theologian who brought the family to the brink of poverty by spending his time unprofitably translating the new testament again from ancient Greek sources through the lens of his evangelical faith, the disciples of Christ.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He published a couple of additions of it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He never made any money at it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She would have grown up at what she would later describe as the raggedage of poverty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think that shaped her work ethic definitely.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It shaped her sympathy for the poor when she lived on the Lower East Side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I also think that her parents, her father's religion was so rigid.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that he spent much of his time arguing in print with other seaologians.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He had 15 children and what he did with his time was to argue with other seaologians in in in, in mind, numbingly boring religious periodicals.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think that she developed a distaste for
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[SPEAKER_03]: And she became relatively well educated for a woman of the time, especially one who, as you say, was on the ragged edge of poverty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I don't know who how she managed to afford going to such an elite girls boarding school in her hometown, the little old dog kennel hometown, but it was an excellent school and she prided in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She prided in it to the point that when she moved with her first husband to
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[SPEAKER_01]: on so many people who hadn't had the kind of broad and deep education that she had somehow been able to to either pay for or it had somehow been fine.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was financed by relatives or it was financed by friends somehow.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And her siblings didn't all have that same kind of education, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: No, two of her sisters went to art school.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I can't find any record of any other form of higher education for any of her siblings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of them would have been born and raised.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them, you know, they spent time in Louisville.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They spent time in cities.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They spent time in the countryside.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I can't find any trace of any higher-level education for any of them.
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[SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned that she moves them to Wichita with her first husband.
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[SPEAKER_03]: She's got terrible taste and match.
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[SPEAKER_01]: her descendants will agree with you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_03]: So can you talk to them about that like how what her marriages look like and you know it's clear from her leader writing that you know she's like marriage was bad.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I shouldn't have done that.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So her father was sick, was poor her entire life and sick for much of her life, and she would have grown up in the chaos of all those siblings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think she saw marriage as a form of stability, that her first husband, he was a storekeeper, he seemed like a solid young man.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He must have
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[SPEAKER_01]: As she married at 18 days after graduation from the school where the head of the school had specifically told the girls, do not marry until you have developed enough professional skill perhaps as a teacher or a stenographer that you can support your family if the male breadwinners you're counting on, value somehow.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was by all accounts brutally handsome and he was by those
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[SPEAKER_01]: to deal with as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not clear how much of his behavior was shaped by having an absconded father who died young.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He went through a lot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Spencer, her first husband went through a lot as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But she did then end up with children from this marriage.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So she had a son named Robin, a daughter named Clarence, and her second husband hated children.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So she, I'm imagining that that was never even on the table between them when they married as a possibility.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_03]: And motherhood and grandmotherhood eventually seemed like they're so important to her, but yet she becomes estranged from her son.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Could you talk some about the relationship she has with her kids and how that develops?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So, we know that she threw herself into motherhood because, at least in Wichitao, it's documented because the newspapers constantly reported on the parties she was throwing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the costume she was stitching for her children, it was a provincial town, and she stood out as this through an excellent seamstress and very sociable.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She really stood out there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know what her children's early lives with her were like, but I can tell you that she made them gorgeous costumes for all kinds of costume balls and recitals, this sort of thing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When she and her husband divorced on the grounds of his admitted adultery caught inflegrante with a blonde, apparently her son, Rob was so distraught that he ran away for a while, how mortifying in a small town for him to have parents who divorced.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was so unusual, and he was not a minor anymore at the time of the divorce rob, so he could choose his own fate, and for whatever reason he chose to stay in Wichita and he had to work for railroad lines.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And her daughter Clarence was a minor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a suing Clarence did want to go, but she certainly didn't have a choice in that matter.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and so pitilously wrote about her children by the time she became a writer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So by the time of the divorce, 1898, when the fire hose of words is really going strong, both her children appear in her writing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes it's unkind.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I love her anyway, but I'm not sure I would have wanted her as a mother, but her passion for motherhood and grandmotherhood in her writing and her admiration for how the poor mothers of the Lower East Side sacrificed everything for their children should beautifully hauntingly documents in her work.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Steve mentioned her writing several times now and she writes both fiction and then for newspapers and then eventually for this magazine, how does this career develop?
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[SPEAKER_01]: So when she first started working at all, she was teaching art at her own, her alma mater.
22:45.779 --> 22:56.725
[SPEAKER_01]: The boarding school that she had gone to back in Harrodsburg, that's the first kind of work I can find out that she did, and she continued to teach art briefly when the family moved to Wichita.
22:57.405 --> 22:58.746
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea.
22:59.486 --> 23:23.322
[SPEAKER_01]: why this housewife, this board restless ignored housewife who had excellent stitching talents and art talents, decided that putting words on the page was going to be her calling, there's she doesn't really write about what when it clicked, but she writes vividly that once it did click, she had no choice in the matter.
23:24.303 --> 23:31.994
[SPEAKER_01]: that everything she saw just was annealed in her, that it had to be processed somehow for her writing.
23:32.194 --> 23:39.465
[SPEAKER_01]: Once it clicked, she was so, so, so determined from the moment it clicked to keep
23:41.810 --> 23:53.713
[SPEAKER_03]: See, I mentioned her kids might have had a difficult time, but it's not just her kid, she writes about everybody, she encounters, how in the world did she maintain any friendships?
23:54.394 --> 23:56.874
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I read her eulogies.
23:57.054 --> 24:00.775
[SPEAKER_01]: I quote most of her eulogies in my book, Kelly, people loved her.
24:01.235 --> 24:06.177
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, if she were my friend in New York, oh, she would have been a blast to hang out with.
24:06.817 --> 24:08.878
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, even if she had a sharp tongue.
24:09.258 --> 24:13.840
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, she parodies her friends in print, but they are all at her funeral.
24:13.880 --> 24:15.040
[SPEAKER_01]: They came back from war.
24:15.461 --> 24:21.223
[SPEAKER_01]: People that I know that she had made fun of her being boring or gossipy or adulterous.
24:21.563 --> 24:22.864
[SPEAKER_01]: They're all there at her funeral.
24:23.744 --> 24:27.565
[SPEAKER_01]: And they all try to keep her friend group going after her death.
24:27.585 --> 24:29.946
[SPEAKER_01]: They hang out with each other after her death.
24:30.767 --> 24:33.048
[SPEAKER_03]: She did make a few enemies from her writing, though.
24:33.668 --> 24:35.429
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, along the way, definitely.
24:36.684 --> 24:44.110
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's talk then about her novel that ends up because of an enemy that she makes with her writing ends up
24:44.491 --> 24:49.213
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, basically getting pulled and never has the success that it might have otherwise had.
24:50.733 --> 25:00.376
[SPEAKER_01]: So she took an actual person that she knew from Wichita, who had moved to New York as around the same time that she did.
25:00.776 --> 25:09.519
[SPEAKER_01]: She took an actual person that she knew named Courtney Lemon, who was a socialist orator in Harlem, and she turned him into the villain of her first novel,
25:13.170 --> 25:23.660
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's so much that she wrote about him that my archival searches and that all back up exactly how she wrote about him, accounts of him by his friends.
25:23.980 --> 25:36.652
[SPEAKER_01]: He was in fact a drunk and a predator and a hypocrite preaching sympathy for the wage slaves of the world, although he has a teenage mistress and when she gets pregnant, he abandoned her and she dies in childbirth.
25:37.272 --> 25:46.780
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know the Courtney Lemon actually impregnated anyone, but when he came forward after the novel debut to Brave Reviews and said, she's modeled this horrible mancy Somalon on me.
25:46.860 --> 25:53.927
[SPEAKER_01]: He literally had to say, I guess I never impregnated anyone that I know of who ended up dying in a charity hospital.
25:53.967 --> 25:59.972
[SPEAKER_01]: This kind of thing, he exposes himself to the most, to the most awful comparisons just by coming forward.
26:01.481 --> 26:21.447
[SPEAKER_03]: you obviously have read all these words that she's written what is if anything is stylistically different about her fiction writing, her newspaper reporting, her magazine columns like what does she have a voice that goes throughout those is such a subject that's different.
26:22.880 --> 26:25.882
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, her style is pretty consistent.
26:26.482 --> 26:28.703
[SPEAKER_01]: She is not flowery.
26:29.223 --> 26:30.964
[SPEAKER_01]: She's not wordy.
26:31.524 --> 26:46.532
[SPEAKER_01]: She loves vivid word pictures of the skyline, the prairie, the lights on the building windows, the street car light, the passing street car lights, this kind of atmospheric detail.
26:47.052 --> 26:51.314
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that different in her fiction or and and her journalism.
26:51.675 --> 27:00.899
[SPEAKER_01]: What the beauty with which she's writing may pot boilers for in newspaper syndication stories that would appear in hundreds of newspapers nationwide.
27:01.800 --> 27:05.582
[SPEAKER_01]: The quality of the prose is consistent.
27:05.902 --> 27:08.884
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of women writers of her time who are forgotten.
27:09.704 --> 27:12.569
[SPEAKER_01]: But they are not as vivid.
27:13.009 --> 27:15.513
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't find they are descriptions as vivid.
27:15.893 --> 27:17.916
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't find their dialogue as Whitty.
27:18.197 --> 27:23.525
[SPEAKER_01]: The other consistent thing even in her fiction and her journalism is that much of it is first person.
27:24.606 --> 27:36.092
[SPEAKER_01]: right so she's describing the experience of living in a Paris boarding house and she's describing the experience of the farmer's wife struggling to keep the corn crop from getting destroyed by drought.
27:36.112 --> 27:46.838
[SPEAKER_01]: There's often a for either the subject, you know, the, the, the, the central characters are speaking in the first person or there's a narrator saying, I know this, I knew this woman and this is what happened to her.
27:47.158 --> 27:51.841
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this rye slightly distant voice explaining, you know,
27:53.682 --> 27:56.203
[SPEAKER_01]: and her journalism is hilarious because it's first person.
27:56.523 --> 28:01.064
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a ton of her journalism that's not signed and you ask about my process earlier.
28:01.084 --> 28:03.285
[SPEAKER_01]: A ton of her journalism isn't signed.
28:03.745 --> 28:05.106
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, the New York sun, et cetera.
28:05.146 --> 28:07.346
[SPEAKER_01]: These places would run features that weren't signed.
28:07.786 --> 28:15.129
[SPEAKER_01]: So all you have to do is go on newspapers.com and figure out, okay, her stories almost invariably appeared on Sundays.
28:15.849 --> 28:20.774
[SPEAKER_01]: And here's the date range in which they appeared on Sundays, like you can limit your searches by day of the week.
28:21.174 --> 28:37.971
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you can put in phrases, I'm from Kentucky, or in Kansas, or, you know, cyclones, these kinds of tell-tale words that enabled me to identify her un-signed unbi-lined work.
28:38.632 --> 28:38.912
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
28:39.012 --> 28:39.393
[SPEAKER_01]: Bless her.
28:40.140 --> 28:55.096
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, eventually, she starts this magazine and, you know, a lot of people at the time, even now, start magazines and they go nowhere, but hers lasted a long time and she was really successful at it.
29:02.898 --> 29:16.269
[SPEAKER_01]: So, there are literally hundreds of dreamers in her time who found their own underfinanced understaffed magazine, told from the viewpoint of one strongly opinionated owner or editor.
29:16.529 --> 29:19.532
[SPEAKER_01]: There's literally hundreds of them in her time.
29:20.152 --> 29:29.019
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ones that survive, it's often a fluke of some kind that they happen to have a rich significant other of some kind, or some some
29:31.181 --> 29:37.566
[SPEAKER_01]: subgroup of enthusiasts clowned on to the magazine and were able to to keep it going.
29:38.106 --> 29:45.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Her magazine was so, her presence in her own magazine is so powerful.
29:46.732 --> 29:56.942
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think people really appreciated hearing this unfiltered raw woman telling you what how through her own lens, what the world looked like.
29:57.583 --> 30:01.066
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there were so few people writing
30:01.787 --> 30:06.910
[SPEAKER_01]: with a sense of humor and a sense of perspective about the slums she was not a shrill reformer.
30:07.331 --> 30:11.513
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't simply produce a magazine that gave a list of all the ills that she was seeing.
30:11.874 --> 30:21.800
[SPEAKER_01]: She produced a magazine that that just resonated these vivid word pictures of particular incidents of joy and misery on the Lower East Side.
30:22.200 --> 30:22.741
[SPEAKER_01]: And also,
30:23.421 --> 30:31.363
[SPEAKER_01]: her illustrator William Oberhardt surpasses his works or passes anything that I've seen in any small magazine of her time.
30:31.763 --> 30:36.404
[SPEAKER_01]: And also she was, I think people appreciated that she was quite committed to it and fairly reliable.
30:36.925 --> 30:45.627
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of her competitors, their magazines came out so erratically that they are known in amongst scholars today, not as periodicals, but as sporadicals.
30:46.557 --> 30:54.787
[SPEAKER_01]: Why would you pay a dollar a year for a magazine that promised you six issues, but actually only two or three managed to actually reach your mailbox?
30:54.847 --> 30:58.551
[SPEAKER_01]: She was pretty steady within her limitations.
31:00.353 --> 31:05.720
[SPEAKER_03]: And she even went undercover sometimes to develop some of these stories.
31:06.678 --> 31:06.998
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
31:07.719 --> 31:15.385
[SPEAKER_01]: So she describes in such vivid, memorable detail how she made herself look poor.
31:16.086 --> 31:26.795
[SPEAKER_01]: She describes, you know, tearing her gloves and, you know, putting on a downcast face and, you know, by realizing that her clothes weren't dirty enough in one case, right?
31:26.815 --> 31:29.077
[SPEAKER_01]: So she wasn't actually being persuasive.
31:29.697 --> 31:36.180
[SPEAKER_01]: She describes getting used to lying to some extent and then feeling terrible because people are being nice to her.
31:36.820 --> 31:40.802
[SPEAKER_01]: And she knows that she's pretending to be poorer than she is.
31:41.122 --> 31:46.224
[SPEAKER_01]: She was pretty close to the poverty line, so the stories came easily to her.
31:46.584 --> 31:49.266
[SPEAKER_01]: She would say, she would tell a charity worker,
31:50.346 --> 31:59.284
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've been living with a friend who can't support me anymore, and it was close to the truth because the the friend I was talking about was me self she writes
32:00.584 --> 32:17.130
[SPEAKER_03]: So another thing that recurs throughout her life and right up to her death is her premonitions that she has and her belief that she's got like a connection, a psychic connection to her daughter and to other people in her life.
32:17.330 --> 32:18.670
[SPEAKER_03]: Could you talk some about that?
32:18.710 --> 32:22.592
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really interesting aspect of her biography.
32:22.612 --> 32:28.234
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, it seems to at least in the end been pretty reliable her premonition.
32:29.290 --> 32:31.051
[SPEAKER_01]: from the beginning of her writing career.
32:31.591 --> 32:38.674
[SPEAKER_01]: She is documenting having vivid premonition dreams and vivid telepathy from the beginning of her career.
32:38.754 --> 32:52.881
[SPEAKER_01]: She's describing getting telepathic messages from her daughter having a bad feeling about things, you know, her that seeing her mother spirit at her at her bedside in which it all went, her mother was dying in Kentucky.
32:53.621 --> 33:02.674
[SPEAKER_01]: she writes about to interviews other people about their accurate, their dreams that turn out to be accurate from the beginning.
33:03.295 --> 33:09.224
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've had descendants of hers and collateral descendants of her joke around that oh yeah, we're a spooky bunch, this kind of thing.
33:10.345 --> 33:25.964
[SPEAKER_03]: So is not the first woman you've written a biography of, as you mentioned, in this time period, even, do you see yourself doing more of this kind of work, are you thinking about other women of the time period who might be interesting to write about?
33:26.684 --> 33:27.345
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, sure.
33:27.525 --> 33:44.818
[SPEAKER_01]: She had a friend named Mabel Herbert Erner, who was a newspaper woman, a short-story writer, a novelist, Mabel went on to become a screenwriter, and also a massive collection married.
33:45.098 --> 33:50.622
[SPEAKER_01]: Her second husband was a very wealthy antiquarian book dealer, and she amassed an enormous
33:54.925 --> 34:04.269
[SPEAKER_01]: embroidery samplers and her collection survives at the at the met museum and I am trying to dig into her story.
34:04.530 --> 34:17.916
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not clear it's going to be a book but it's it's just funny Kelly how these you know so I start researching one of Zo's subscribers just to make sure I've got her names spelled right her name is Donna Rita Cole
34:18.436 --> 34:26.829
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized, oh my God, her daughter, April Cole, became briefly the most famous woman bookbinder in America.
34:26.849 --> 34:33.779
[SPEAKER_01]: This is nothing to do with Zo, but while I'm Googling around to make sure I've got Donna read a Cole described accurately.
34:34.400 --> 34:36.802
[SPEAKER_01]: then I've got to tell a rural coal story.
34:37.062 --> 34:48.811
[SPEAKER_01]: So that turned into articles and I'm not sure there's a book lurking in a rural coal and I'm not sure there's a book yet lurking in maple herbert earner, but yes as I said it's usually women with three names.
34:50.150 --> 34:53.613
[SPEAKER_03]: So speaking of those friends, she forms this club.
34:53.793 --> 34:56.515
[SPEAKER_03]: I think you mentioned earlier, the Ragged Edge Club.
34:57.095 --> 35:02.760
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is when she dies, it is many of the members of this club that are morning heard that comes to the funeral.
35:03.100 --> 35:07.343
[SPEAKER_03]: So can you just talk a little bit about what is this club?
35:07.644 --> 35:14.088
[SPEAKER_03]: And clubs it seems were fairly popular at the time, but hers is perhaps a little bit different than a lot of the others.
35:15.283 --> 35:28.354
[SPEAKER_01]: So in her day, you could, if you were upper crust and in with the right crowd, join some of the and a man, you could join the Century Association, the Metropolitan Club, this sort of thing.
35:28.374 --> 35:32.638
[SPEAKER_01]: There were formal men's clubs with gorgeous stand-alone buildings.
35:33.399 --> 35:37.362
[SPEAKER_01]: There were co-ed clubs beginning to form.
35:38.443 --> 35:42.644
[SPEAKER_01]: that didn't have a particular space that they owned or rented.
35:42.704 --> 35:44.205
[SPEAKER_01]: They just went, they were nomadic.
35:44.645 --> 35:47.166
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were of different political stripes.
35:47.866 --> 35:52.728
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were a bunch of them that were progressive and so thought those were rather dull.
35:53.208 --> 35:55.709
[SPEAKER_01]: What she wanted from her club with a K.
35:56.489 --> 36:13.376
[SPEAKER_01]: was to dedicate itself to nothing but the killing of care with a K, with comfortable with a K, exclusiveness with a K, shouldn't want any rules, shouldn't want any membership directories, no constitutions, no emotions, no emotions to return, just the killing of care.
36:13.756 --> 36:16.818
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, no, the rules were no rules.
36:17.738 --> 36:19.459
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a fascinating group of people.
36:19.819 --> 36:29.163
[SPEAKER_01]: It's physicians and filmmakers and writers and artists and posers and liars and businessmen just curious about life on the Lower East Side.
36:29.183 --> 36:32.645
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a fascinating group of people and so, so many of them.
36:33.525 --> 36:34.666
[SPEAKER_01]: didn't use their real names.
36:35.027 --> 36:44.016
[SPEAKER_01]: That's that, you know, when I dig deeper, which is so mentions them in her magazine, and then I dig deeper, I realize, oh, they're on the run from a scandal back in there, conservative background somewhere.
36:44.497 --> 36:53.366
[SPEAKER_01]: And Kelly, I'm having so much fun talking about the book because everywhere I go, and I talk about her, sometimes I get a new insight.
36:54.047 --> 37:11.744
[SPEAKER_01]: So I gave a talk on her at the University of Louisville in the Judaic studies department, and I described some of the restaurants that's so frequented, including a place called Joel's Bohemia, near Times Square, run by a guy named Joel Ronaldo, and a woman raises her hand and says, I'm directly descended from one of his sisters.
37:12.565 --> 37:14.807
[SPEAKER_01]: And Renaldo, that's not their real name.
37:15.427 --> 37:22.653
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a family legend that's something along the lines of they named themselves after a circus strong man.
37:23.093 --> 37:34.842
[SPEAKER_01]: They were Polish Jewish immigrants and they loved the name Renaldo, because it made them sound so much tougher than their actual, you know, Polish name that entered in whatever OFF or SKI.
37:35.502 --> 37:35.963
[SPEAKER_01]: Renaldo.
37:37.851 --> 37:38.531
[SPEAKER_01]: It's wonderful.
37:38.551 --> 37:39.531
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't they can discover these?
37:39.711 --> 37:40.192
[SPEAKER_03]: No, yeah.
37:40.852 --> 37:43.792
[SPEAKER_03]: So there is so much in this book.
37:44.112 --> 37:45.713
[SPEAKER_03]: Her story is so fascinating.
37:45.873 --> 37:46.693
[SPEAKER_03]: We're not gonna get it.
37:46.713 --> 37:48.253
[SPEAKER_03]: She has talked about all of it.
37:48.293 --> 37:50.914
[SPEAKER_03]: So I would like to encourage people to read the book.
37:51.174 --> 37:53.155
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you tell them how they can get a copy of the book?
37:53.875 --> 38:02.197
[SPEAKER_01]: So a buy it from bookshop.org, which means you'll patronize whatever independent bookstore is in your neighborhood.
38:02.677 --> 38:05.217
[SPEAKER_01]: But then go on good reads or Amazon and give me a good review.
38:05.397 --> 38:06.498
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're gonna give me a bad review,
38:08.398 --> 38:09.138
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I advice?
38:11.279 --> 38:14.059
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else you want to make sure we talk about?
38:15.020 --> 38:28.122
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so I can't encourage a budding historians more strongly to contact descendants of the people that you're writing about and the people that they knew.
38:28.502 --> 38:30.303
[SPEAKER_01]: Because this is a very mobile.
38:31.043 --> 38:45.375
[SPEAKER_01]: and a constantly disposing country, and yet you can't imagine how often I find a direct male descendant because the name hasn't changed, and he inevitably says, oh yeah, call my sister.
38:46.422 --> 38:48.082
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, she's got boxes of paper.
38:48.382 --> 38:57.384
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't believe how many people have stuff in the garage or the attic, and it's as if they've been waiting to hear from a historian.
38:57.664 --> 39:01.125
[SPEAKER_01]: The ones who don't call me back, I'm just assuming they don't have anything.
39:01.325 --> 39:06.406
[SPEAKER_01]: The worst that happens is if you call an email, these people is that they don't contact you back.
39:06.626 --> 39:08.387
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can't imagine, I mean, people are thrilled.
39:08.687 --> 39:11.708
[SPEAKER_01]: Just the other day, I heard from direct descendants of those friend,
39:13.988 --> 39:21.394
[SPEAKER_01]: who had finished a book that she had started with her, with her husband, Owen Kilder, and they were thrilled that I was interested.
39:22.215 --> 39:25.598
[SPEAKER_01]: Her grandson is in his 90s, and he was thrilled to talk about her.
39:25.638 --> 39:32.303
[SPEAKER_01]: She was one of those classic colorful characters telling lies all the time, lying about her age, this kind of thing.
39:32.323 --> 39:34.145
[SPEAKER_01]: Those friends had a lot of fun.
39:34.165 --> 39:35.706
[SPEAKER_01]: Amazing.
39:35.746 --> 39:40.109
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if thank you so much for speaking with me, this was really fun to learn about, so.
39:40.934 --> 39:43.316
[SPEAKER_01]: I could go on for another hour, Kelly, and let's get it.
39:43.356 --> 39:45.077
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get all your listeners away.
39:45.337 --> 39:46.398
[SPEAKER_01]: This was wonderful.
39:46.498 --> 39:47.038
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
39:47.158 --> 39:47.639
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
39:47.659 --> 39:49.280
[SPEAKER_01]: This is such a delightful time.
39:49.400 --> 39:50.461
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for everything.
39:50.821 --> 39:51.161
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
39:51.241 --> 39:51.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
39:51.802 --> 39:53.923
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
40:08.517 --> 40:15.982
[SPEAKER_02]: Not hungry, bohemian's alone, every night, their diaries and Germans are away.
40:16.623 --> 40:19.725
[SPEAKER_02]: Loved up good, alone, and each one are right.
40:20.145 --> 40:23.348
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll know by the collapse of their hand.
40:23.988 --> 40:31.594
[SPEAKER_02]: Why either have a beat for angels to write, can be anywhere else in the night?
40:32.394 --> 40:34.536
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm still the land of bohemian.
40:35.190 --> 41:02.313
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
41:03.608 --> 41:05.469
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to UnSung History.
41:06.249 --> 41:09.750
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to UnSung History on your favorite podcasting app.
41:10.250 --> 41:15.732
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41:16.352 --> 41:22.434
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41:23.255 --> 41:30.117
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41:30.770 --> 41:37.430
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41:38.173 --> 41:42.125
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41:42.486 --> 41:42.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye!
00:00.111 --> 00:08.817
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.
00:09.697 --> 00:11.779
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.
00:12.539 --> 00:19.424
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.
00:20.564 --> 00:25.127
[SPEAKER_03]: Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never
00:27.769 --> 00:32.831
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to.
00:37.954 --> 00:44.937
[SPEAKER_03]: Zo Anderson was born on February 29, 1860, on a farm in Herod'sburg, Kentucky, the 11th of 13 children born to Henry and Henrietta Anderson.
00:44.997 --> 00:46.858
[SPEAKER_03]: Henry also had two older children
00:58.222 --> 01:01.263
[SPEAKER_03]: Henrietta had her hands full raising children.
01:02.143 --> 01:11.907
[SPEAKER_03]: While Henri preached to disciples of Christ congregations, wrote for religious periodicals and twiled away at translations of the New Testament.
01:13.367 --> 01:25.772
[SPEAKER_03]: When Henri died in 1872, and Henrietta moved to Kansas to Homestead, Zo was sent to Daughters College, a boarding school in Herod'sburg.
01:27.155 --> 01:42.246
[SPEAKER_03]: She later described the school as, quote, a magnificent college of rare stateliness of colonial build of Doric columns much be-ivid, of sloping lawns richly carpeted with grass of a velvety green, unquote.
01:43.587 --> 01:53.154
[SPEAKER_03]: There, she was taught subjects, including zoology, constitutional law, and philosophy, and she was encouraged to think for herself.
01:54.773 --> 02:06.019
[SPEAKER_03]: On June 11, 1878, days after she graduated from daughter's college, Zo married Spencer William Norris, who was then working as a confectioner.
02:07.540 --> 02:11.343
[SPEAKER_03]: Less than a year later, Zo gave birth to a son, Robert.
02:12.683 --> 02:17.186
[SPEAKER_03]: Zo Spencer and Rob lived with Spencer's mother and grandmother.
02:19.035 --> 02:27.998
[SPEAKER_03]: In 1881, Zo gave birth to her second and last child, a daughter named Mary Clarence, who went by Clarence.
02:29.538 --> 02:44.363
[SPEAKER_03]: The family of four moved to Wichita, Kansas, where Spencer worked as a grocer, and Zo was hired as an art teacher at Lewis Academy after apparently inflating her credentials to do
02:46.192 --> 02:56.983
[SPEAKER_03]: At the 1893, World's Columbia and Exposition in Chicago, so and other members of Wichita's ceramic club displayed their painted porcelain.
02:58.564 --> 03:08.695
[SPEAKER_03]: In late 1893, so writing under the pen name, Nancy Yanks, started contributing a regular column to the Wichita Eagle.
03:09.979 --> 03:18.505
[SPEAKER_03]: That was only the beginning of her writing career, and soon Zoe was publishing poems and short stories in various publications.
03:19.886 --> 03:26.451
[SPEAKER_03]: Her depictions of Wichita and its residents were unflattering, and she had her share of critics.
03:28.032 --> 03:34.417
[SPEAKER_03]: In January of 1898, Zoe and Spencer divorced, due to Spencer's infidelity.
03:35.824 --> 03:37.845
[SPEAKER_03]: So was granted custody of Clarence.
03:38.946 --> 03:45.371
[SPEAKER_03]: Spuncer, when bankrupt, later that year, a never-paid zoo, the Alamone, she'd been awarded in the divorce.
03:46.792 --> 03:50.814
[SPEAKER_03]: Zoes sunrobes stayed in Wichita where he worked for a railroad.
03:51.655 --> 04:03.243
[SPEAKER_03]: Clarence headed to a Catholic boarding school in Kentucky and Zoe moved to Manhattan where she joined the women's press club of New York and wrote for several different periodicals.
04:04.829 --> 04:17.276
[SPEAKER_03]: As the 19th century drew to a close, Zo and Clarence, whom Zo claimed was her sister, headed to London, and then to Paris during its 1900 exhibition.
04:18.797 --> 04:24.380
[SPEAKER_03]: At the fair, Clarence met Harold William Morris, whom she married in July 1900.
04:26.601 --> 04:32.224
[SPEAKER_03]: Within months, the marriage failed, and a pregnant Clarence sailed back to the US with Zo
04:35.721 --> 04:45.745
[SPEAKER_03]: Back in New York, Zo published her first novel, The Color of His Soul, with Funkin' Wacknulls, where Zo was friends with the literary advisor.
04:47.186 --> 04:51.628
[SPEAKER_03]: The cover of the book was illustrated by Jack Bryan's, whom Zo was dating.
04:53.088 --> 04:59.451
[SPEAKER_03]: The book was marketed as, quote, brilliant sketches of newspaper and bohemian life, unquote.
05:00.932 --> 05:14.875
[SPEAKER_03]: The novel was widely reviewed and may well have been a success, but an acquaintance of Zo claimed that he had been Zo's inspiration for a very unflattering character, and he threatened libel suit.
05:16.175 --> 05:20.256
[SPEAKER_03]: Funk and Wagnos reacted by pulling the book and destroying the warehouse supply.
05:20.276 --> 05:25.217
[SPEAKER_03]: It was later reissued by another publisher, but it never found success.
05:26.909 --> 05:30.312
[SPEAKER_03]: and March 1902, so and Jack married.
05:31.433 --> 05:34.595
[SPEAKER_03]: So lying about her age on the marriage certificate.
05:35.356 --> 05:37.237
[SPEAKER_03]: Jack was 12 years her junior.
05:38.699 --> 05:47.426
[SPEAKER_03]: So began undercover reporting, working as a servant and writing about it for American agriculturalist, a sister publication of good housekeeping.
05:48.246 --> 05:50.368
[SPEAKER_03]: She was not well paid for the pieces, though.
05:52.027 --> 05:56.928
[SPEAKER_03]: In 1902, Zo also published her second novel, which was widely ignored.
05:58.349 --> 06:02.770
[SPEAKER_03]: Jack, again, provided the cover art, but their marriage ended soon afterward.
06:03.950 --> 06:09.231
[SPEAKER_03]: It's unclear if they actually divorced, but since Zo never remarried, it didn't matter.
06:10.731 --> 06:16.013
[SPEAKER_03]: As Zo turned to newspaper reporting, she increasingly focused on the plates of immigrants
06:18.895 --> 06:29.562
[SPEAKER_03]: However, she also did a series in the New York Sun, where she imagined interviews with animals like the central park hippos and the Bronx Zoo giraffes.
06:29.782 --> 06:41.790
[SPEAKER_03]: In 1908, Clarence remarried to Fletcher-Chelph, a Kentucky farmer, and she and her son moved to Herod'sburg where Zo had grown up, leaving Zo alone in Manhattan.
06:43.356 --> 06:51.424
[SPEAKER_03]: After a false accusation of anti-Semitism, editors were wary of implying so, and it became harder to find writing work.
06:52.946 --> 06:59.473
[SPEAKER_03]: After a magazine accepted a report of undercover work from her, but changed it without giving her credit or pay.
07:00.909 --> 07:15.677
[SPEAKER_03]: so launched her own magazine, The East Side in 1909, where she wrote nearly all of the content and served as the quote, office boy, business manager, editor, and chief managing editor and owner, unquote.
07:17.078 --> 07:26.783
[SPEAKER_03]: The East Side ran until 1914, with William Oberhart, providing artwork in exchange for the free theater tickets so had for review purposes.
07:28.603 --> 07:35.828
[SPEAKER_03]: In 1910, Zo launched the Ragged Edge Club, a way to socialize with her magazine subscribers.
07:37.329 --> 07:42.132
[SPEAKER_03]: The club met in various restaurants around New York, with everyone paying their own way.
07:42.152 --> 07:48.997
[SPEAKER_03]: Zo dubbed her friends with royal titles, calling herself the queen of Bohemia.
07:50.638 --> 07:58.224
[SPEAKER_03]: In 1914, Zoe dreamt that her mother's ghost arrived and when she asked her mom, am I next?
07:58.824 --> 07:59.945
[SPEAKER_03]: Her mom answered yes.
08:01.506 --> 08:05.890
[SPEAKER_03]: In issue 29 of the East side, Zoe predicted her death.
08:07.191 --> 08:12.374
[SPEAKER_03]: And indeed, on February 13, Zoe died at the age of only 53.
08:13.675 --> 08:15.877
[SPEAKER_03]: Her death certificate listed her as 47 years old.
08:18.467 --> 08:24.970
[SPEAKER_03]: After a funeral in New York, her children, Rob and Clarence, buried her back in Herdsburg, Kentucky.
08:26.390 --> 08:33.433
[SPEAKER_03]: Joining me in this episode is Eve M. Kahn, author of Queen of Bohemia, predicts own death,
08:46.688 --> 08:57.401
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm late where they'll drive on to a trouble the way I will take you there if you live alone I'm the lander for you
08:59.682 --> 09:25.541
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, where the light's breaking thine Oh, where that pillow makes love to get snowy Oh, come, where could the whole night Oh, where the turn is open Oh, the door is open Oh, where the land of monies Oh, where the prodigal foe
09:27.488 --> 09:29.409
[SPEAKER_01]: I eat, thanks so much for joining me today.
09:29.429 --> 09:31.750
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a thrill to be here, Kelly.
09:31.790 --> 09:32.871
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for inviting me.
09:33.471 --> 09:38.773
[SPEAKER_03]: I was so excited to learn about Zoe Anderson Norris and it was really fun to read the book.
09:38.793 --> 09:45.297
[SPEAKER_03]: I wanna ask you how you came to know who she was and got started on this project.
09:46.457 --> 09:51.058
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I am a member of an organization called The Girl Your Club.
09:51.338 --> 09:57.059
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a hybrid club museum and library on 60th Street between Park and Madison.
09:57.699 --> 10:03.981
[SPEAKER_01]: Our members include some of the most rarefied niche collectors of the printed word and image on Earth.
10:04.621 --> 10:10.122
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of them is Steve Lamezo, who's got the world's great collection of American magazines.
10:10.522 --> 10:11.162
[SPEAKER_01]: He has 83,000 at last count.
10:16.884 --> 10:41.403
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I went to visit him with a growl-year group in the fall of 2018, and we were in a house piled with magazines, and he pulls out a magazine called The East Side, a bound volume six issues, and I said, who's this woman who published this in the 1910s, who put her own name huge in spiky letters, so Anderson Norris, on every page that she could, and
10:43.004 --> 11:05.358
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it possible that this is obviously not a Jewish person, but she is sympathetically describing my mother's parents and aunts and uncles who were recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and so hauntingly beautifully described there, not their specific sufferings, but the sufferings of the people they got on the boat with in Ukraine at a time of virulent antisemitism.
11:06.418 --> 11:14.223
[SPEAKER_01]: And I pulled out my phone while I was still in Steve's Maso's basement, and I scrolled for any scholarship about her, and there was nothing out there, nothing substantive.
11:15.444 --> 11:17.205
[SPEAKER_01]: So you decided to write a book up basically.
11:18.726 --> 11:21.428
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, well, you never know what's going to be a book.
11:21.888 --> 11:27.852
[SPEAKER_01]: You need an ocean of material, and it wasn't clear that I had an ocean of material till a few months into the journey.
11:28.152 --> 11:33.616
[SPEAKER_01]: When I realized how many millions of words she had published in newspapers and periodocals.
11:34.767 --> 11:43.657
[SPEAKER_03]: And you did a lot more than look at just her written words, so could you talk some about what your process was to research her thoroughly and write this book?
11:44.712 --> 11:57.521
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you've ever been in a maybe 1920sish building where there's an elevator dial, that's with an arrow moving to show where the, what floor the elevator is on.
11:57.581 --> 12:00.783
[SPEAKER_01]: Your listeners cannot see that I am making the dial motion.
12:00.843 --> 12:01.484
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry about that.
12:01.684 --> 12:03.125
[SPEAKER_01]: The fan shaped dial motion.
12:03.625 --> 12:10.069
[SPEAKER_01]: So in my head, when I research, I almost invariably research women and they almost invariably are
12:14.092 --> 12:14.913
[SPEAKER_01]: So Anderson Morris.
12:15.153 --> 12:23.479
[SPEAKER_01]: So in my head, I said, let's see if I can sort of feel like I've really completed my research and what I've got at the end of it.
12:24.060 --> 12:35.168
[SPEAKER_01]: And I watched the elevator dial move and move and move while I dug into every imaginable aspect of her life going back into her family story as deeply as I could.
12:35.328 --> 12:41.693
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking centuries back to her British ancestors and then her contemporary legacy.
12:41.713 --> 12:43.595
[SPEAKER_01]: I found her family members all around.
12:43.995 --> 12:44.976
[SPEAKER_01]: my process.
12:45.316 --> 12:51.900
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Kelly, this will scare away future biographers if I explain how I don't watch TV.
12:52.521 --> 12:59.526
[SPEAKER_01]: And while my family's watching TV, I'm there poking around newspapers.com, intentionally misspelling.
13:00.146 --> 13:02.248
[SPEAKER_01]: Zoam Derson Morris.
13:02.888 --> 13:05.751
[SPEAKER_01]: to see if I could find more references to people.
13:05.771 --> 13:08.593
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't watch TV, that's really, really, really key.
13:08.774 --> 13:14.259
[SPEAKER_01]: And the only podcast I listened to are the ones like yours about forgotten women.
13:14.919 --> 13:18.002
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ones my daughter makes, she works for Frick and Omex, she's a podcaster.
13:18.823 --> 13:19.944
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that is a little scary.
13:22.106 --> 13:24.388
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure people will still want to write by Omex.
13:24.408 --> 13:26.871
[SPEAKER_03]: Good, good, good, good, few, okay?
13:28.338 --> 13:39.866
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the challenges in writing about anybody, but especially someone like so is teasing a part what about herself presentation is true, accurate?
13:40.186 --> 13:41.747
[SPEAKER_03]: What is presentation?
13:42.108 --> 13:49.212
[SPEAKER_03]: She obviously wanted to hide things like her age and her true relationship with her daughter.
13:50.053 --> 13:52.635
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you approach that as biographer?
13:54.058 --> 14:07.765
[SPEAKER_01]: So, at one point, I was literally thinking to myself, I have to somehow find a publisher that will publish this in three different colors of ink, where I'm making this up.
14:07.885 --> 14:13.428
[SPEAKER_01]: Black would be the stuff that we know is documented, that she, that she just said about herself, that's accurate.
14:14.048 --> 14:22.453
[SPEAKER_01]: And pink is fiction that reflects her true story, and green is journalism that distorts her true story.
14:23.333 --> 14:37.240
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I realized it's even more fun that she lied in a way, because I get to say, we don't know if X or Y happened, but we know that she fictionalized a story like this.
14:37.680 --> 14:42.343
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know what happened to her when she ran into her estranged second husband on the street.
14:42.763 --> 14:56.254
[SPEAKER_01]: But we do know that she wrote a short story about a woman like her who runs into her strange second husband on the street and says, I bless the gods that the hand of God that took you from me basically so relieved to have him out of her hair.
14:56.274 --> 15:07.863
[SPEAKER_01]: I ended up really happy with interweaving fiction and journalism and saying, we know this, I know for sure that she's lying here, but isn't it fascinating that she's lying here?
15:08.827 --> 15:10.410
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yes, definitely.
15:10.430 --> 15:24.331
[SPEAKER_03]: So let's talk some about her background then the stuff we do know about her background or maybe the stuff she presented to us and how that shapes who she becomes or doesn't shape who she becomes.
15:24.931 --> 15:29.073
[SPEAKER_03]: So she grows up then Kentucky and you know what what does that look like?
15:30.454 --> 15:45.301
[SPEAKER_01]: So she's born and raised well she's born in 1860 as you've already said and she is raised in what she Delight later calls a little old dog kennel town and again your listeners can't see the air quotes I'm making a little old dog kennel town called Harrodsburg.
15:45.721 --> 15:49.163
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about a half an hour by modern standards from Lexington Kentucky
15:50.063 --> 16:07.813
[SPEAKER_01]: She, her father, was an impractical theologian who brought the family to the brink of poverty by spending his time unprofitably translating the new testament again from ancient Greek sources through the lens of his evangelical faith, the disciples of Christ.
16:08.173 --> 16:09.574
[SPEAKER_01]: He published a couple of additions of it.
16:09.774 --> 16:10.895
[SPEAKER_01]: He never made any money at it.
16:11.235 --> 16:15.418
[SPEAKER_01]: She would have grown up at what she would later describe as the raggedage of poverty.
16:16.378 --> 16:19.683
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that shaped her work ethic definitely.
16:20.343 --> 16:24.509
[SPEAKER_01]: It shaped her sympathy for the poor when she lived on the Lower East Side.
16:25.330 --> 16:30.877
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also think that her parents, her father's religion was so rigid.
16:31.858 --> 16:36.401
[SPEAKER_01]: that he spent much of his time arguing in print with other seaologians.
16:37.042 --> 16:48.029
[SPEAKER_01]: He had 15 children and what he did with his time was to argue with other seaologians in in in, in mind, numbingly boring religious periodicals.
16:48.670 --> 16:51.872
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that she developed a distaste for
16:59.465 --> 17:06.907
[SPEAKER_03]: And she became relatively well educated for a woman of the time, especially one who, as you say, was on the ragged edge of poverty.
17:08.008 --> 17:21.811
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I don't know who how she managed to afford going to such an elite girls boarding school in her hometown, the little old dog kennel hometown, but it was an excellent school and she prided in it.
17:22.191 --> 17:26.352
[SPEAKER_01]: She prided in it to the point that when she moved with her first husband to
17:29.913 --> 17:39.258
[SPEAKER_01]: on so many people who hadn't had the kind of broad and deep education that she had somehow been able to to either pay for or it had somehow been fine.
17:39.298 --> 17:42.720
[SPEAKER_01]: It was financed by relatives or it was financed by friends somehow.
17:43.721 --> 17:47.163
[SPEAKER_01]: And her siblings didn't all have that same kind of education, right?
17:47.963 --> 17:50.545
[SPEAKER_01]: No, two of her sisters went to art school.
17:50.705 --> 17:54.827
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't find any record of any other form of higher education for any of her siblings.
17:55.188 --> 17:56.709
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of them would have been born and raised.
17:57.009 --> 17:59.030
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of them, you know, they spent time in Louisville.
17:59.050 --> 18:00.011
[SPEAKER_01]: They spent time in cities.
18:00.051 --> 18:01.391
[SPEAKER_01]: They spent time in the countryside.
18:01.752 --> 18:06.274
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't find any trace of any higher-level education for any of them.
18:07.235 --> 18:11.217
[SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned that she moves them to Wichita with her first husband.
18:11.798 --> 18:13.399
[SPEAKER_03]: She's got terrible taste and match.
18:16.777 --> 18:18.418
[SPEAKER_01]: her descendants will agree with you.
18:18.878 --> 18:19.218
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
18:20.558 --> 18:32.982
[SPEAKER_03]: So can you talk to them about that like how what her marriages look like and you know it's clear from her leader writing that you know she's like marriage was bad.
18:33.002 --> 18:34.283
[SPEAKER_03]: I shouldn't have done that.
18:34.703 --> 18:34.823
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
18:35.736 --> 18:48.179
[SPEAKER_01]: So her father was sick, was poor her entire life and sick for much of her life, and she would have grown up in the chaos of all those siblings.
18:48.979 --> 18:58.681
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think she saw marriage as a form of stability, that her first husband, he was a storekeeper, he seemed like a solid young man.
18:59.181 --> 19:00.041
[SPEAKER_01]: He must have
19:03.962 --> 19:23.270
[SPEAKER_01]: As she married at 18 days after graduation from the school where the head of the school had specifically told the girls, do not marry until you have developed enough professional skill perhaps as a teacher or a stenographer that you can support your family if the male breadwinners you're counting on, value somehow.
19:23.710 --> 19:27.292
[SPEAKER_01]: He was by all accounts brutally handsome and he was by those
19:30.733 --> 19:32.876
[SPEAKER_01]: to deal with as well.
19:32.996 --> 19:38.764
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not clear how much of his behavior was shaped by having an absconded father who died young.
19:39.245 --> 19:40.046
[SPEAKER_01]: He went through a lot.
19:40.246 --> 19:42.289
[SPEAKER_01]: Spencer, her first husband went through a lot as well.
19:42.890 --> 19:46.835
[SPEAKER_01]: But she did then end up with children from this marriage.
19:47.548 --> 19:48.408
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yes.
19:48.448 --> 19:55.892
[SPEAKER_01]: So she had a son named Robin, a daughter named Clarence, and her second husband hated children.
19:57.713 --> 20:06.857
[SPEAKER_01]: So she, I'm imagining that that was never even on the table between them when they married as a possibility.
20:07.339 --> 20:07.599
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
20:08.079 --> 20:17.764
[SPEAKER_03]: And motherhood and grandmotherhood eventually seemed like they're so important to her, but yet she becomes estranged from her son.
20:17.784 --> 20:23.747
[SPEAKER_03]: Could you talk some about the relationship she has with her kids and how that develops?
20:25.028 --> 20:40.406
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we know that she threw herself into motherhood because, at least in Wichitao, it's documented because the newspapers constantly reported on the parties she was throwing.
20:41.087 --> 20:50.550
[SPEAKER_01]: And the costume she was stitching for her children, it was a provincial town, and she stood out as this through an excellent seamstress and very sociable.
20:50.590 --> 20:51.651
[SPEAKER_01]: She really stood out there.
20:51.911 --> 21:03.375
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know what her children's early lives with her were like, but I can tell you that she made them gorgeous costumes for all kinds of costume balls and recitals, this sort of thing.
21:04.035 --> 21:22.560
[SPEAKER_01]: When she and her husband divorced on the grounds of his admitted adultery caught inflegrante with a blonde, apparently her son, Rob was so distraught that he ran away for a while, how mortifying in a small town for him to have parents who divorced.
21:22.900 --> 21:36.549
[SPEAKER_01]: It was so unusual, and he was not a minor anymore at the time of the divorce rob, so he could choose his own fate, and for whatever reason he chose to stay in Wichita and he had to work for railroad lines.
21:37.290 --> 21:39.051
[SPEAKER_01]: And her daughter Clarence was a minor.
21:39.992 --> 21:44.335
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a suing Clarence did want to go, but she certainly didn't have a choice in that matter.
21:45.235 --> 21:50.497
[SPEAKER_01]: and so pitilously wrote about her children by the time she became a writer.
21:50.697 --> 21:59.140
[SPEAKER_01]: So by the time of the divorce, 1898, when the fire hose of words is really going strong, both her children appear in her writing.
21:59.620 --> 22:00.961
[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes it's unkind.
22:01.781 --> 22:20.855
[SPEAKER_01]: I love her anyway, but I'm not sure I would have wanted her as a mother, but her passion for motherhood and grandmotherhood in her writing and her admiration for how the poor mothers of the Lower East Side sacrificed everything for their children should beautifully hauntingly documents in her work.
22:22.025 --> 22:33.813
[SPEAKER_03]: Steve mentioned her writing several times now and she writes both fiction and then for newspapers and then eventually for this magazine, how does this career develop?
22:35.253 --> 22:44.858
[SPEAKER_01]: So when she first started working at all, she was teaching art at her own, her alma mater.
22:45.779 --> 22:56.725
[SPEAKER_01]: The boarding school that she had gone to back in Harrodsburg, that's the first kind of work I can find out that she did, and she continued to teach art briefly when the family moved to Wichita.
22:57.405 --> 22:58.746
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea.
22:59.486 --> 23:23.322
[SPEAKER_01]: why this housewife, this board restless ignored housewife who had excellent stitching talents and art talents, decided that putting words on the page was going to be her calling, there's she doesn't really write about what when it clicked, but she writes vividly that once it did click, she had no choice in the matter.
23:24.303 --> 23:31.994
[SPEAKER_01]: that everything she saw just was annealed in her, that it had to be processed somehow for her writing.
23:32.194 --> 23:39.465
[SPEAKER_01]: Once it clicked, she was so, so, so determined from the moment it clicked to keep
23:41.810 --> 23:53.713
[SPEAKER_03]: See, I mentioned her kids might have had a difficult time, but it's not just her kid, she writes about everybody, she encounters, how in the world did she maintain any friendships?
23:54.394 --> 23:56.874
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I read her eulogies.
23:57.054 --> 24:00.775
[SPEAKER_01]: I quote most of her eulogies in my book, Kelly, people loved her.
24:01.235 --> 24:06.177
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, if she were my friend in New York, oh, she would have been a blast to hang out with.
24:06.817 --> 24:08.878
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, even if she had a sharp tongue.
24:09.258 --> 24:13.840
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, she parodies her friends in print, but they are all at her funeral.
24:13.880 --> 24:15.040
[SPEAKER_01]: They came back from war.
24:15.461 --> 24:21.223
[SPEAKER_01]: People that I know that she had made fun of her being boring or gossipy or adulterous.
24:21.563 --> 24:22.864
[SPEAKER_01]: They're all there at her funeral.
24:23.744 --> 24:27.565
[SPEAKER_01]: And they all try to keep her friend group going after her death.
24:27.585 --> 24:29.946
[SPEAKER_01]: They hang out with each other after her death.
24:30.767 --> 24:33.048
[SPEAKER_03]: She did make a few enemies from her writing, though.
24:33.668 --> 24:35.429
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, along the way, definitely.
24:36.684 --> 24:44.110
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's talk then about her novel that ends up because of an enemy that she makes with her writing ends up
24:44.491 --> 24:49.213
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, basically getting pulled and never has the success that it might have otherwise had.
24:50.733 --> 25:00.376
[SPEAKER_01]: So she took an actual person that she knew from Wichita, who had moved to New York as around the same time that she did.
25:00.776 --> 25:09.519
[SPEAKER_01]: She took an actual person that she knew named Courtney Lemon, who was a socialist orator in Harlem, and she turned him into the villain of her first novel,
25:13.170 --> 25:23.660
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's so much that she wrote about him that my archival searches and that all back up exactly how she wrote about him, accounts of him by his friends.
25:23.980 --> 25:36.652
[SPEAKER_01]: He was in fact a drunk and a predator and a hypocrite preaching sympathy for the wage slaves of the world, although he has a teenage mistress and when she gets pregnant, he abandoned her and she dies in childbirth.
25:37.272 --> 25:46.780
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't know the Courtney Lemon actually impregnated anyone, but when he came forward after the novel debut to Brave Reviews and said, she's modeled this horrible mancy Somalon on me.
25:46.860 --> 25:53.927
[SPEAKER_01]: He literally had to say, I guess I never impregnated anyone that I know of who ended up dying in a charity hospital.
25:53.967 --> 25:59.972
[SPEAKER_01]: This kind of thing, he exposes himself to the most, to the most awful comparisons just by coming forward.
26:01.481 --> 26:21.447
[SPEAKER_03]: you obviously have read all these words that she's written what is if anything is stylistically different about her fiction writing, her newspaper reporting, her magazine columns like what does she have a voice that goes throughout those is such a subject that's different.
26:22.880 --> 26:25.882
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, her style is pretty consistent.
26:26.482 --> 26:28.703
[SPEAKER_01]: She is not flowery.
26:29.223 --> 26:30.964
[SPEAKER_01]: She's not wordy.
26:31.524 --> 26:46.532
[SPEAKER_01]: She loves vivid word pictures of the skyline, the prairie, the lights on the building windows, the street car light, the passing street car lights, this kind of atmospheric detail.
26:47.052 --> 26:51.314
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that different in her fiction or and and her journalism.
26:51.675 --> 27:00.899
[SPEAKER_01]: What the beauty with which she's writing may pot boilers for in newspaper syndication stories that would appear in hundreds of newspapers nationwide.
27:01.800 --> 27:05.582
[SPEAKER_01]: The quality of the prose is consistent.
27:05.902 --> 27:08.884
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of women writers of her time who are forgotten.
27:09.704 --> 27:12.569
[SPEAKER_01]: But they are not as vivid.
27:13.009 --> 27:15.513
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't find they are descriptions as vivid.
27:15.893 --> 27:17.916
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't find their dialogue as Whitty.
27:18.197 --> 27:23.525
[SPEAKER_01]: The other consistent thing even in her fiction and her journalism is that much of it is first person.
27:24.606 --> 27:36.092
[SPEAKER_01]: right so she's describing the experience of living in a Paris boarding house and she's describing the experience of the farmer's wife struggling to keep the corn crop from getting destroyed by drought.
27:36.112 --> 27:46.838
[SPEAKER_01]: There's often a for either the subject, you know, the, the, the, the central characters are speaking in the first person or there's a narrator saying, I know this, I knew this woman and this is what happened to her.
27:47.158 --> 27:51.841
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this rye slightly distant voice explaining, you know,
27:53.682 --> 27:56.203
[SPEAKER_01]: and her journalism is hilarious because it's first person.
27:56.523 --> 28:01.064
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a ton of her journalism that's not signed and you ask about my process earlier.
28:01.084 --> 28:03.285
[SPEAKER_01]: A ton of her journalism isn't signed.
28:03.745 --> 28:05.106
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, the New York sun, et cetera.
28:05.146 --> 28:07.346
[SPEAKER_01]: These places would run features that weren't signed.
28:07.786 --> 28:15.129
[SPEAKER_01]: So all you have to do is go on newspapers.com and figure out, okay, her stories almost invariably appeared on Sundays.
28:15.849 --> 28:20.774
[SPEAKER_01]: And here's the date range in which they appeared on Sundays, like you can limit your searches by day of the week.
28:21.174 --> 28:37.971
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you can put in phrases, I'm from Kentucky, or in Kansas, or, you know, cyclones, these kinds of tell-tale words that enabled me to identify her un-signed unbi-lined work.
28:38.632 --> 28:38.912
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
28:39.012 --> 28:39.393
[SPEAKER_01]: Bless her.
28:40.140 --> 28:55.096
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, eventually, she starts this magazine and, you know, a lot of people at the time, even now, start magazines and they go nowhere, but hers lasted a long time and she was really successful at it.
29:02.898 --> 29:16.269
[SPEAKER_01]: So, there are literally hundreds of dreamers in her time who found their own underfinanced understaffed magazine, told from the viewpoint of one strongly opinionated owner or editor.
29:16.529 --> 29:19.532
[SPEAKER_01]: There's literally hundreds of them in her time.
29:20.152 --> 29:29.019
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ones that survive, it's often a fluke of some kind that they happen to have a rich significant other of some kind, or some some
29:31.181 --> 29:37.566
[SPEAKER_01]: subgroup of enthusiasts clowned on to the magazine and were able to to keep it going.
29:38.106 --> 29:45.711
[SPEAKER_01]: Her magazine was so, her presence in her own magazine is so powerful.
29:46.732 --> 29:56.942
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think people really appreciated hearing this unfiltered raw woman telling you what how through her own lens, what the world looked like.
29:57.583 --> 30:01.066
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there were so few people writing
30:01.787 --> 30:06.910
[SPEAKER_01]: with a sense of humor and a sense of perspective about the slums she was not a shrill reformer.
30:07.331 --> 30:11.513
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't simply produce a magazine that gave a list of all the ills that she was seeing.
30:11.874 --> 30:21.800
[SPEAKER_01]: She produced a magazine that that just resonated these vivid word pictures of particular incidents of joy and misery on the Lower East Side.
30:22.200 --> 30:22.741
[SPEAKER_01]: And also,
30:23.421 --> 30:31.363
[SPEAKER_01]: her illustrator William Oberhardt surpasses his works or passes anything that I've seen in any small magazine of her time.
30:31.763 --> 30:36.404
[SPEAKER_01]: And also she was, I think people appreciated that she was quite committed to it and fairly reliable.
30:36.925 --> 30:45.627
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of her competitors, their magazines came out so erratically that they are known in amongst scholars today, not as periodicals, but as sporadicals.
30:46.557 --> 30:54.787
[SPEAKER_01]: Why would you pay a dollar a year for a magazine that promised you six issues, but actually only two or three managed to actually reach your mailbox?
30:54.847 --> 30:58.551
[SPEAKER_01]: She was pretty steady within her limitations.
31:00.353 --> 31:05.720
[SPEAKER_03]: And she even went undercover sometimes to develop some of these stories.
31:06.678 --> 31:06.998
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
31:07.719 --> 31:15.385
[SPEAKER_01]: So she describes in such vivid, memorable detail how she made herself look poor.
31:16.086 --> 31:26.795
[SPEAKER_01]: She describes, you know, tearing her gloves and, you know, putting on a downcast face and, you know, by realizing that her clothes weren't dirty enough in one case, right?
31:26.815 --> 31:29.077
[SPEAKER_01]: So she wasn't actually being persuasive.
31:29.697 --> 31:36.180
[SPEAKER_01]: She describes getting used to lying to some extent and then feeling terrible because people are being nice to her.
31:36.820 --> 31:40.802
[SPEAKER_01]: And she knows that she's pretending to be poorer than she is.
31:41.122 --> 31:46.224
[SPEAKER_01]: She was pretty close to the poverty line, so the stories came easily to her.
31:46.584 --> 31:49.266
[SPEAKER_01]: She would say, she would tell a charity worker,
31:50.346 --> 31:59.284
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've been living with a friend who can't support me anymore, and it was close to the truth because the the friend I was talking about was me self she writes
32:00.584 --> 32:17.130
[SPEAKER_03]: So another thing that recurs throughout her life and right up to her death is her premonitions that she has and her belief that she's got like a connection, a psychic connection to her daughter and to other people in her life.
32:17.330 --> 32:18.670
[SPEAKER_03]: Could you talk some about that?
32:18.710 --> 32:22.592
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really interesting aspect of her biography.
32:22.612 --> 32:28.234
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, it seems to at least in the end been pretty reliable her premonition.
32:29.290 --> 32:31.051
[SPEAKER_01]: from the beginning of her writing career.
32:31.591 --> 32:38.674
[SPEAKER_01]: She is documenting having vivid premonition dreams and vivid telepathy from the beginning of her career.
32:38.754 --> 32:52.881
[SPEAKER_01]: She's describing getting telepathic messages from her daughter having a bad feeling about things, you know, her that seeing her mother spirit at her at her bedside in which it all went, her mother was dying in Kentucky.
32:53.621 --> 33:02.674
[SPEAKER_01]: she writes about to interviews other people about their accurate, their dreams that turn out to be accurate from the beginning.
33:03.295 --> 33:09.224
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've had descendants of hers and collateral descendants of her joke around that oh yeah, we're a spooky bunch, this kind of thing.
33:10.345 --> 33:25.964
[SPEAKER_03]: So is not the first woman you've written a biography of, as you mentioned, in this time period, even, do you see yourself doing more of this kind of work, are you thinking about other women of the time period who might be interesting to write about?
33:26.684 --> 33:27.345
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, sure.
33:27.525 --> 33:44.818
[SPEAKER_01]: She had a friend named Mabel Herbert Erner, who was a newspaper woman, a short-story writer, a novelist, Mabel went on to become a screenwriter, and also a massive collection married.
33:45.098 --> 33:50.622
[SPEAKER_01]: Her second husband was a very wealthy antiquarian book dealer, and she amassed an enormous
33:54.925 --> 34:04.269
[SPEAKER_01]: embroidery samplers and her collection survives at the at the met museum and I am trying to dig into her story.
34:04.530 --> 34:17.916
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not clear it's going to be a book but it's it's just funny Kelly how these you know so I start researching one of Zo's subscribers just to make sure I've got her names spelled right her name is Donna Rita Cole
34:18.436 --> 34:26.829
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized, oh my God, her daughter, April Cole, became briefly the most famous woman bookbinder in America.
34:26.849 --> 34:33.779
[SPEAKER_01]: This is nothing to do with Zo, but while I'm Googling around to make sure I've got Donna read a Cole described accurately.
34:34.400 --> 34:36.802
[SPEAKER_01]: then I've got to tell a rural coal story.
34:37.062 --> 34:48.811
[SPEAKER_01]: So that turned into articles and I'm not sure there's a book lurking in a rural coal and I'm not sure there's a book yet lurking in maple herbert earner, but yes as I said it's usually women with three names.
34:50.150 --> 34:53.613
[SPEAKER_03]: So speaking of those friends, she forms this club.
34:53.793 --> 34:56.515
[SPEAKER_03]: I think you mentioned earlier, the Ragged Edge Club.
34:57.095 --> 35:02.760
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is when she dies, it is many of the members of this club that are morning heard that comes to the funeral.
35:03.100 --> 35:07.343
[SPEAKER_03]: So can you just talk a little bit about what is this club?
35:07.644 --> 35:14.088
[SPEAKER_03]: And clubs it seems were fairly popular at the time, but hers is perhaps a little bit different than a lot of the others.
35:15.283 --> 35:28.354
[SPEAKER_01]: So in her day, you could, if you were upper crust and in with the right crowd, join some of the and a man, you could join the Century Association, the Metropolitan Club, this sort of thing.
35:28.374 --> 35:32.638
[SPEAKER_01]: There were formal men's clubs with gorgeous stand-alone buildings.
35:33.399 --> 35:37.362
[SPEAKER_01]: There were co-ed clubs beginning to form.
35:38.443 --> 35:42.644
[SPEAKER_01]: that didn't have a particular space that they owned or rented.
35:42.704 --> 35:44.205
[SPEAKER_01]: They just went, they were nomadic.
35:44.645 --> 35:47.166
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were of different political stripes.
35:47.866 --> 35:52.728
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were a bunch of them that were progressive and so thought those were rather dull.
35:53.208 --> 35:55.709
[SPEAKER_01]: What she wanted from her club with a K.
35:56.489 --> 36:13.376
[SPEAKER_01]: was to dedicate itself to nothing but the killing of care with a K, with comfortable with a K, exclusiveness with a K, shouldn't want any rules, shouldn't want any membership directories, no constitutions, no emotions, no emotions to return, just the killing of care.
36:13.756 --> 36:16.818
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, no, the rules were no rules.
36:17.738 --> 36:19.459
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a fascinating group of people.
36:19.819 --> 36:29.163
[SPEAKER_01]: It's physicians and filmmakers and writers and artists and posers and liars and businessmen just curious about life on the Lower East Side.
36:29.183 --> 36:32.645
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a fascinating group of people and so, so many of them.
36:33.525 --> 36:34.666
[SPEAKER_01]: didn't use their real names.
36:35.027 --> 36:44.016
[SPEAKER_01]: That's that, you know, when I dig deeper, which is so mentions them in her magazine, and then I dig deeper, I realize, oh, they're on the run from a scandal back in there, conservative background somewhere.
36:44.497 --> 36:53.366
[SPEAKER_01]: And Kelly, I'm having so much fun talking about the book because everywhere I go, and I talk about her, sometimes I get a new insight.
36:54.047 --> 37:11.744
[SPEAKER_01]: So I gave a talk on her at the University of Louisville in the Judaic studies department, and I described some of the restaurants that's so frequented, including a place called Joel's Bohemia, near Times Square, run by a guy named Joel Ronaldo, and a woman raises her hand and says, I'm directly descended from one of his sisters.
37:12.565 --> 37:14.807
[SPEAKER_01]: And Renaldo, that's not their real name.
37:15.427 --> 37:22.653
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a family legend that's something along the lines of they named themselves after a circus strong man.
37:23.093 --> 37:34.842
[SPEAKER_01]: They were Polish Jewish immigrants and they loved the name Renaldo, because it made them sound so much tougher than their actual, you know, Polish name that entered in whatever OFF or SKI.
37:35.502 --> 37:35.963
[SPEAKER_01]: Renaldo.
37:37.851 --> 37:38.531
[SPEAKER_01]: It's wonderful.
37:38.551 --> 37:39.531
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't they can discover these?
37:39.711 --> 37:40.192
[SPEAKER_03]: No, yeah.
37:40.852 --> 37:43.792
[SPEAKER_03]: So there is so much in this book.
37:44.112 --> 37:45.713
[SPEAKER_03]: Her story is so fascinating.
37:45.873 --> 37:46.693
[SPEAKER_03]: We're not gonna get it.
37:46.713 --> 37:48.253
[SPEAKER_03]: She has talked about all of it.
37:48.293 --> 37:50.914
[SPEAKER_03]: So I would like to encourage people to read the book.
37:51.174 --> 37:53.155
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you tell them how they can get a copy of the book?
37:53.875 --> 38:02.197
[SPEAKER_01]: So a buy it from bookshop.org, which means you'll patronize whatever independent bookstore is in your neighborhood.
38:02.677 --> 38:05.217
[SPEAKER_01]: But then go on good reads or Amazon and give me a good review.
38:05.397 --> 38:06.498
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're gonna give me a bad review,
38:08.398 --> 38:09.138
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I advice?
38:11.279 --> 38:14.059
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else you want to make sure we talk about?
38:15.020 --> 38:28.122
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so I can't encourage a budding historians more strongly to contact descendants of the people that you're writing about and the people that they knew.
38:28.502 --> 38:30.303
[SPEAKER_01]: Because this is a very mobile.
38:31.043 --> 38:45.375
[SPEAKER_01]: and a constantly disposing country, and yet you can't imagine how often I find a direct male descendant because the name hasn't changed, and he inevitably says, oh yeah, call my sister.
38:46.422 --> 38:48.082
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, she's got boxes of paper.
38:48.382 --> 38:57.384
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't believe how many people have stuff in the garage or the attic, and it's as if they've been waiting to hear from a historian.
38:57.664 --> 39:01.125
[SPEAKER_01]: The ones who don't call me back, I'm just assuming they don't have anything.
39:01.325 --> 39:06.406
[SPEAKER_01]: The worst that happens is if you call an email, these people is that they don't contact you back.
39:06.626 --> 39:08.387
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can't imagine, I mean, people are thrilled.
39:08.687 --> 39:11.708
[SPEAKER_01]: Just the other day, I heard from direct descendants of those friend,
39:13.988 --> 39:21.394
[SPEAKER_01]: who had finished a book that she had started with her, with her husband, Owen Kilder, and they were thrilled that I was interested.
39:22.215 --> 39:25.598
[SPEAKER_01]: Her grandson is in his 90s, and he was thrilled to talk about her.
39:25.638 --> 39:32.303
[SPEAKER_01]: She was one of those classic colorful characters telling lies all the time, lying about her age, this kind of thing.
39:32.323 --> 39:34.145
[SPEAKER_01]: Those friends had a lot of fun.
39:34.165 --> 39:35.706
[SPEAKER_01]: Amazing.
39:35.746 --> 39:40.109
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if thank you so much for speaking with me, this was really fun to learn about, so.
39:40.934 --> 39:43.316
[SPEAKER_01]: I could go on for another hour, Kelly, and let's get it.
39:43.356 --> 39:45.077
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get all your listeners away.
39:45.337 --> 39:46.398
[SPEAKER_01]: This was wonderful.
39:46.498 --> 39:47.038
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
39:47.158 --> 39:47.639
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
39:47.659 --> 39:49.280
[SPEAKER_01]: This is such a delightful time.
39:49.400 --> 39:50.461
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for everything.
39:50.821 --> 39:51.161
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
39:51.241 --> 39:51.782
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
39:51.802 --> 39:53.923
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
40:08.517 --> 40:15.982
[SPEAKER_02]: Not hungry, bohemian's alone, every night, their diaries and Germans are away.
40:16.623 --> 40:19.725
[SPEAKER_02]: Loved up good, alone, and each one are right.
40:20.145 --> 40:23.348
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll know by the collapse of their hand.
40:23.988 --> 40:31.594
[SPEAKER_02]: Why either have a beat for angels to write, can be anywhere else in the night?
40:32.394 --> 40:34.536
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm still the land of bohemian.
40:35.190 --> 41:02.313
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
41:03.608 --> 41:05.469
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to UnSung History.
41:06.249 --> 41:09.750
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to UnSung History on your favorite podcasting app.
41:10.250 --> 41:15.732
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript at UnSungHistoryPodcast.com.
41:16.352 --> 41:22.434
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41:23.255 --> 41:30.117
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41:30.770 --> 41:37.430
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41:38.173 --> 41:42.125
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41:42.486 --> 41:42.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye!
