Friday #6: July 8, 2016

I have always found it fascinating to get a peek deep in the weeds of other people’s hobbies and interests, even if I don’t share their particular obsession. Hopefully my readers here will feel something similar about this little side trip down the back lanes of one of my particular interests: Late nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s literature.

I’ve already mentioned the Melendy family books in my blog intro about The Saturdays. Then of course there’s Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Anne of Green Gables series, the All-of-a-Kind Family books, and certainly not least, the Betsy-Tacy series.

Author Maud Hart Lovelace wrote the nearly-autobiographical series about growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, which became “Deep Valley” in the eight books that spanned Betsy Ray’s first meeting with best friend Tacy Kelly (Bick Kennedy in real life) at age five, to Betsy’s move to Minneapolis and marriage to fellow-writer Joe Willard (Delos Lovelace) just as World War I was breaking out.

As a card-carrying member of the Betsy Tacy Society, I attended one of their annual conventions a few years back – totally geeky and totally fun! I have made several pilgrimages down to Mankato to see the restored tour-houses where Maud and Bick grew up, and to bask in the stories that they engendered about a lifelong friendship. There’s something immensely gratifying to me to see the hard evidence of the connection between a writer’s fictional work and its intersection with reality, the connection between past and present, and between where an artist works and the work that they created.

I was planning another trip down to “Deep Valley” this very weekend with my friend Barb, who had never been to Mankato but loved the Betsy-Tacy books. With our visit on the calendar for Saturday, I thought I’d take advantage of this week’s Bifocal Friday summer hours to visit the sites in Minneapolis that were featured in the last book of the series, Betsy’s Wedding.

For some reason I had never done this particular poking around in my own backyard before. But armed with good information from the Internet, I was able to track down all the real-life addresses for the places that were important in Maud and Betsy’s Minneapolis. I set out on my trek after a lovely lunch with Drew downtown at the Monte Carlo. The Monte opened in 1906, so it was definitely around in Betsy’s time, although her gentle-bred character somehow never mentions stopping there for a generous martini or their famous chicken wings as we often do.

Coming Home from Europe

The Minneapolis sites referenced in Betsy’s Wedding center around the East Lowry Hill neighborhood southwest of downtown known as the Wedge, a pie-shaped section of the city bounded by Lyndale, Hennepin and Lake Street. After Betsy finished high school, the Ray family moved from Deep Valley to 909 Hazel Street in Minneapolis.  In the real-life parallel, this was 905 West 25^th Street, where the author’s parents had moved when she was a young adult.

I knew from my research that this particular house didn’t exist anymore, having been torn down in 1974 to create Mueller Park, but I still wanted to see the area. So I parked my car across the street from the park, which now occupies the entire block, and tried to picture the house being situated where the park’s wading pool now is.

The stucco bungalow that once stood here was built in 1911 by W.H. Evans, and Maud’s parents Tom and Stella Hart were its first owners. It was the middle of three houses on that corner, all of which were razed to create the tidy park and community center which stand there today. The Hart/Ray’s modest home was kitty-corner from the white Colonial-Revival Gluek mansion that was built in 1902 for John Gluek, son of the brewery founder, and which still stands in all its glory today at 2447 Bryant.

In Betsy’s Wedding, “909 Hazel” was described lovingly through Betsy’s eyes as she returns from a European grand tour:

"Talk was still gushing when the cab stopped. Betsy gazed out at the gray stucco bungalow, gay with striped awnings and flowers still bright in window boxes around a glassed-in porch. The porch was covered with reddening vines, which her father had transplanted from their home in Deep Valley. They swarmed into the wicker-and cretonne-furnished porch. Betsy rushed for the chaise longue where she used to love to lounge and read. She flung herself down. Jumping up, she spun through double doors into the living room, which had dark woodwork, leaded-glass panes, and a soft, green, oriental rug. At one end rose a small platform with a full-length mirror which reflected the stairway. At the other, the fireplace was flanked by bookcases, with niches above for photographs and the goldfish bowl. Her father’s leather chair stood near. Betsy ran to hug it.”

Standing there on the street, it was easy for me to imagine the house, even in the gaping absence of it. That bungalow style is so common to South Minneapolis architecture, and many existing homes fit this description today.

As I walked back to my car to look up the next address on my list, I got waylaid by two young girls – just a little older than when Betsy and Tacy first met – who were tacking this sign to a telephone pole. 

I couldn’t resist making a detour to the sloping front yard of their rambling old house, and indulging in the age-old tradition of an ice-cold glass of lemonade poured reverently and carefully from a pitcher, little hands gratefully collecting my two quarters and thanking me shyly for being their first customer.

Newlywed Nest

Betsy didn’t linger long at the family home after she returned from her adventures abroad in Betsy and the Great World. When she and Joe married early in Betsy’s Wedding, they set out to quickly find an apartment of their own:

“Betsy had budgeted Joe’s salary of $155 a month and she would not pay more than thirty dollars for rent. The search for an apartment at that figure took them all over Minneapolis, and Betsy thought often how beautiful it was – set on the storied Mississippi, glimmering with lakes. A chain of lakes ran actually through the city. Their shores were lined with homes, and even closer to the water lay the public boulevards, scattered with picnickers, fishermen, children with buckets, adventurous masters of sailboats and canoes. ’How lucky we are to live here!’ she exclaimed.”

I think the same thing every single day. Especially today as I make my pilgrim way through Betsy’s world. The “Bow Street Apartment” still exists today in almost exactly its same state as it did then, at 2400 Aldrich Avenue South, where the author Maud and her young husband Delos rented their first apartment, just west of Lyndale, a block from The Leaning Tower of Pizza. The multi-unit building was developed by local architect William Dunnell, who lived next door and built it on the site of his family’s adjoining tennis court. 

The setting and the building as described in Betsy’s Wedding:

“Bow Street was an old street. The elms were old and had turned yellow and were spattering the lawns with leaves. The houses were old, with spacious porches; and few of the barns had been made into garages. In front of one house, a horse and buggy was hitched. The apartment building was set on a large elmy lawn. It had an entrance porch with fat fluted pillars, and looked like a large, stone, private house except for sets of triple windows, bulging out.” Inside, they went “up a flight of carpeted stairs, to the left-hand back apartment. Betsy calculated quickly. ‘It will face south and east.’”

It’s easy to imagine both the fictional and the actual author cheerfully doing her light housekeeping chores in the tiny apartment, struggling with learning to cook for her new husband, and then settling down to write at the desk which looked out into the branches of a large yellowing elm tree.

First Home

“I think that Canoe Place is cute,” she said, “because it’s only a block long.”

As much as Betsy loved the Bow Street apartment, when her husband’s aunt came to live with them for a time, it was clear they needed a larger place. They purchased their first home just two blocks down the street from her parents’ house, at 1109 West 25^th Street, and this house shows up in Betsy’s Wedding as 7 Canoe Place.

I’m not sure exactly where Maud came up with the idea of a one-block long street, because in reality West 25^th Street runs for about five miles straight from the Mississippi River to Lake of the Isles. It may be that she was charmed by the tiny Levin Triangle park a few blocks away, across Hennepin and on the way to the lakes, which she would have likely walked regularly. Or perhaps the curving little block that is Kenwood Isles Drive between West 28^th Street and Humboldt Avenue. In any case, it’s fun to speculate, and if the actual address was a little bit fictionalized, I found the house itself to match up pretty closely with how it was described when Joe and Betsy first came upon it, including the fact that when I saw it today it appeared to be empty:

“The brown-and-yellow cottage was set on a very small lot. It didn’t have a barn or a garage. At the back rose the back of a tall apartment building, but there were only houses on Canoe Place itself. There were maple trees along it, and the cottage had a neat lawn, cut in two by a walk leading to the porch.

The porch was big; it was screened. The porch door was locked and the house was plainly empty. They walked around to the left side and saw lofty leaded windows. ‘They’ll be over a built-in buffet. That must be the dining room. The kitchen’s behind, probably,’ Betsy decided. On the right side were two large windows and one small leaded one. They peeked in on what was certainly a living room. The leaded window rose above a turn of the stairs. They squinted at the upstairs windows. “Must be three bedrooms, Joe said.”

The price was $4,500 in 1917. It’s difficult to imagine getting a three-bedroom house in Uptown for even the inflation-adjusted price of $103,000 today. Or being able to make a down payment of just six percent, which is what Betsy and Joe’s three hundred dollars of available cash amounted to. But it is easy to imagine the joy with which this young married couple took possession of their first house, exploring the shiny, empty rooms, finding the kitchen to be “a good place to have a cup of coffee,” making inexpensive white ruffled curtains, settling their few precious books into the built-in bookcases, scouring second-hand stores for faded oriental rugs, and carefully choosing the few good pieces of new furniture that they could afford on a newspaperman’s budget.

Fictional Friends & Real-Life Matchmakers

For my next stop, it was time to travel a little further afield, down through the Uptown neighborhood and farther into south Minneapolis, to the stately house that had been the real-life home of Harry and Lillian Wakefield, fictionalized in Betsy’s Wedding as Bradford and Eleanor Hawthorne:

“The Willards were invited to the Hawthorne’s’ for dinner. Betsy wore the dark maroon silk, dressed her hair with care, manicured her nails, added bracelets and perfume. Joe change his tie twice, and they went out on the streetcar through a frigid December night. The Hawthorne house stood on a corner. An arc light gleamed over the snowy lawn showing tall oak trees and a tall house with so many narrow gables that it seemed to rush up into points.”

This perfectly describes the house as it stands today at 4648 Dupont Avenue South, an impressively large corner lot in south Minneapolis near the east side of Lake Harriet. Delos worked for Harry Wakefield, who was the city editor at the Minneapolis Tribune. Lillian owned a publicity bureau, and hired Maud to write for her, eventually introducing Maud to Delos at a dinner party hosted at their impressive home.

In a 1974 interview, Maud described the meeting. “Mrs. Wakefield was a great matchmaker, and she invited Delos, myself, and Helen [Maud’s sister] to dinner at her home – I think she invited Helen because she was young enough not to give any competition. Well, we had a lovely time. Delos and I were seated across from each other and we kept eyeing each other. I remember we walked Helen home and then Delos and I walked and walked, around the lakes, and talked and talked – it was practically dawn before we reached my home. After that, whenever possible, Mrs. Wakefield would send me on assignments out to Fort Snelling,” where Delos was stationed.

In the fictionalized version of Betsy’s Wedding, it was Joe who first worked for Mrs. Hawthorne at the publicity bureau, and later landed a job with her husband at the newspaper. But as the fictional Hawthornes did with Joe and Betsy, the real-life Wakefields embraced young Maud and Delos and they became lifelong friends. Maud even dedicated Betsy’s Wedding to Lillian Wakefield.

The Violent Study Club

The last literary stop of my day was a quick drive-by of 4941 Lyndale Avenue South, which was featured in the book as the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Cliff.  Joe and Betsy were among a rollicking group of newspaper writers that met semi-regularly for a lively, informal “salon” at the Cliffs. 

The club’s name was a rip on the name of a more prim and proper local women’s group at the time called the Violet Study Club. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information about the real-life inspiration for these encounters that made their fictional way into Betsy’s Wedding, but since the house had been identified I had to see it for myself and check it off the list. I could easily imagine the group stomping the snow off their feet on a wintry evening and gathering inside the cozy house “to talk writing, read aloud, argue, and drink coffee while Jimmy Junior dashed up and down on his kiddy car.”

If you have made it all the way to the end of this post, thank you for your interest in my peculiar little outing this week. It set the stage perfectly for the trip the next day with Barb to revisit the rest of the Betsy-Tacy sites in Mankato, and to bask once again in this special place and time in literary history.