Dead End #1--Rose Wilder Lane & King Zog

Dead Ends--#1--Rose Wilder Lane

When I first began writing about Berta and Elmer Hader, I had no idea of how to write a biography. I asked others who had tackled this type of writing for advice. My son, historian Harold Cook, suggested noting every person who crossed their paths and making a file card for each. Besides family and neighbors, they had an amazing group of friends who often went on to major achievements. I used my computer to keep track of the key names and words on file cards as I came across them. They piled up.  Harold’s advice was right on. But many references turned out to be just dead ends.

 Berta moved several times as a child, while her widowed mother, Addie, worked as a social worker to support her two children—not easy in the late 1800s. Addie may have helped Berta learn social skills, as they moved from Mexico to Texas, Kansas City to Suffern, New York. Elmer had a far more stable childhood, but his parents also had to learn to adapt to new people and places. His father worked on the railroad, following it across the United States to San Francisco. His Swedish born mother would have learned how to adapt to new places and new people, as she collected recipes from the other immigrant women she met along the way. 

When Berta took over Eva Shepherd’s fashion illustrating business in 1915, she also did some freelance work for the San Francisco Bulletin. There she met two of their lifelong friends: Bessie Beatty, who was head of the women’s pages, and journalist Rose Wilder Lane.

Rose was beginning to regret her marriage to Gillette Lane—a man who had big ideas about making money, but who relied on Rose’s salary for support. The Lanes lived in the same apartment house as Berta—Rose’s mother Laura referred to Berta as the “little artist girl who lives in the basement.” When Rose left Gillette, the two women moved to tiny affordable studios on Telegraph Hill, where they became friends with more young artists and writers. As I found more about each friend, my biography cards began to fill up.

World War I scattered the group. Bessie Beatty was sent by the Bulletin to cover the Kerensky Revolution in Russia. Rose signed up with the Red Cross and was sent to Europe, and Berta went to New York City to wait for Elmer’s return. Later, after her Russian assignment, Bessie became editor of McCall’s magazine and hired Berta to work for her. After the war was over Rose moved to New York City and roomed with Berta in an unheated, run-down, old house--now the much-improved and heated Jones Street Guest House. After Elmer and Berta married, Rose’s restlessness returned and she eventually returned to Europe and Albania—a country that fascinated her.

I found a reference to a letter Rose wrote to her parents saying she received a proposal of marriage from Bey Ahmet Zogu, who later became King Zog of Albania. A letter to Berta from their mutual friend Jane Barrow referred to the proposal and said Rose had asked Berta to paint a miniature portrait of King Zog while he was in New York City. I wondered if I could find it. So I googled King Zog to see when he’d been in New York. There were no such references. Other Lane biographers implied it would have been impossible for his family to allow such a marriage. 

Still hopeful, I wrote to the Hoover Presidential Library, where Lane's papers are housed in their archives. They kindly sent me a copy of the six-page, single spaced letter she sent to her parents. In the letter she refers to “my Bey” as a diplomat in the Albanian government. It is full of details about her “proposal from a Prince” whose name she "could not mention because mail is being censored in Italy.” They were both in the town of Tirana when it was suddenly attacked by one of the mountain tribes. “Bullets, bullets everywhere and not an idea of why.” The next day her Bey sought out Rose in her Red Cross office, and proposed marriage. First he told Rose that her prematurely white hair "looked marvelous in the moonlight.” He then asked if her heart was free. "Quite, I said, and very fond of freedom. At that, the lid of Tirana blew off…and a bullet came in and took a lot of plaster off the wall behind us but we didn’t notice it much.”

She goes on about the attacks, and the history and ends the letter by saying “there is no use asking you whether or not you want an Albanian Bey for a son-in-law, as I shall decide it one way or another…I have not the least notion what a Moslem wedding ceremony is like.”

 Imagine that letter arriving at Almanzo and Laura’s house in Mansfield, Missouri! Full of references to a “Bey.” Of course the presumption was it was King Zog of Albania. The story went through the small town, and probably all her friends as an example of small town girl makes good.

I loved the letter. Rose wrote vividly. Reluctantly, I left it out of my biography because the engagement never happened, nor did Berta ever paint a miniature portrait of King Zog. 

The Cluttered Computer Problem

Email is a wonderful research tool. I find a reference, look it up, and fire off an email to find out more about the topic. I add the note to my manuscript and go on, completely ignoring the source of the information. It seems automatic to document information from articles and books, but impossible to be equally as thorough with the emails. It’s because I save the emails, knowing the computer can find the item I need easily. What I hadn’t realized is how quickly my computer got cluttered, to the point that even it couldn’t find all the things I’d stashed in various folders under different names. If I don’t remember the name or key word in a message, it hides forever.

Another problem was changing ISPs when I moved. The emails stayed in the folders set up with the previous provider. I wasn’t able to access them all. So I finally hired someone to come over and get all my emails in one place. I wound up with about 5000 emails to and from all sorts of people. The only useful thing was that in most queries I had put the name of my subjects—Haders or Berta and Elmer Hader--in the subject line. Most (but not all) replies repeated what I had used. Unfortunately, sometimes I used a different subject, because the Haders were not the main focus. Such as finding information on impressionism, or miniature painting, or a particular friend.

So the last month or so has been spent tediously going through every email, deleting and/or moving every single one. Not fun!

Some were easy. Long ago I told friends that I would never pass on anything that would promise rewards, prevent disasters, or improve the world. I‘d deleted every funny that came in if it required going somewhere else like YouTube to open. However I’d saved far too many other funny cartoons and sayings sent to me by well-meaning friends. I’d gotten the first chuckle out of them—did I think there’d be more?

A few shortcuts helped get rid of another thousand or so. I first:

1) sorted the emails by the date column. Most of the ones before 2009 (when I started this project) were out of date. It was relatively easy to go through those earlier ones and toss them. Sometimes there was a date or a new address, and I noted those down on a piece of paper. (Yes, paper still makes my world go round.)

Then I

2) sorted the remaining emails by the sender column. That made it easy to go through and delete political messages, offers I’d kept to think about, notes pertaining to old newsletters I had edited and so on. I also was able to get rid of most of the “funnies” sent by friends, since most of them came from the same dozen people.

3) Sort # 3 was by subject. This worked well since the remaining emails were now ordered by subject, sender, and date. I found plenty of political messages, invitations to join newsletters from writer friends and organizations, magazine sales pitches and others I’d missed on the first go around, and more subjects I didn’t recognize. I used some of the subjects to set up mailboxes. Anything relating to the Haders went into a mailbox with that label. I labeled another one “IMPORTANT”: airline reservations, orders not yet received, items that needed immediate follow-through. Others were for family, friends, research items such as useful websites, possible publishers for other writings, and so forth. You’ll know what you need...and never want to see again.

4) For emails containing only a tidbit of something useful, I copied the tidbit to a computer sticky note or a “FOLLOW UP” blank page for things to do later. With the date on the note, I had an organized list—easy to check off or file later.

I was surprised how much info was hidden in the email clutter. I still have another thousand to go through, and more arrives every day. I’m debating about using the e-computer to automatically send things to smart mailboxes, but I’m afraid I might not never even notice them there. In many ways this paperless trail is too easy to ignore. With paper, I eventually have to face the paper piles or I can’t move!

Anyone have any more ideas for managing the computer flow?