Salinas Junior College - La Reata Yearbook (Salinas, CA)

Page 55 text:

dress; (and they were trammels, I assure you, with numerous and volum- inous petticoats, heavily lined full dresses, faced with stiff buckram and bound with braid, tight in the waist and wide in the skirt! No five ounce garb in those days!) Dr. Walker was a small woman, delicately framed, who looked odd in the complete masculine attire she adopted, and invariably attracted a following. Times change, and no one could have foreseen the maids of today in shorts, overalls, or riding trousers gaily tripping about, free as birds on the wing. Through the courtesy of Mrs. Lockwood I attended one morning the trial of Guitteau, the assassin of President Garfield. At Wellesley College, where I taught Latin for a year after my gradua- tion from Cornell, I knew Vida Scudder, then a young instructor, who has now retired, an author of many books and woman of note, and who has been my friend all through the years; Katharine Lee Bates, whose AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL ought to be our national anthem; Flor- ence Wilkinson, a little freshman of that year, whose poignant poem THE FLOWER FACTORY is familiar to everyone; Florence Converse, another freshman, later author of LONG WILL and other stories and poems, and member of the ATLANTIC staff ; Miss Eliza Scudder, blessed saint, vitally alive and interested in all things, but especially in the life of the spirit, and writer of some of our most beautiful hymns. I heard, too, that year, the venerable Julia Ward Howe speaking at the Saturday Morning Club. The following year at Swarthmore College I had a student who under her married name, Helen Riemensnyder Martin, has since written some twenty-two novels and is still publishing, though to my mind none is quite equal to her first success, TILLIE, THE MENNON- ITE MAID. Who else is numbered among my celebrities? Harriet Beecher Stowe, wraithlike, gliding about the ways of Nook Farm in Hartford, listening while my mother played hymns, and then wandering on; other Forest Street figures were familiar — Charles Dudley Warner; his brother George; Mrs. George Warner ' s brother, William Gillette, for many years after a notable figure on the American stage : John Hooker, saintly man, and his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker; around the corner on Farmington Avenue Mark Twain. At Cornell I knew and loved the charming young daughter of Ole Bull, the great violinist, Olea, who has always seemed to me the perfect type of the radiant maiden and whom I later saw with her mother at their home in Cambridge the year they were living in James Continued on Dlvliion fage Book V