Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  The family’s situation grew even worse when they arrived in the little town of Bowdle, “the dustiest and dreariest of the Dakota towns my mother was to know.” Progress in Bowdle, as measured by the Bowdle Pioneer, consisted of churches outnumbering saloons, four to three. There was one cement sidewalk crossing muddy Main Street, a street sometimes filled with herds of steers driven into town to board railroad cars and travel east to market.

  Hick was thirteen when her mother died in Bowdle of a stroke. “A very sad death occurred at 1 o’clock A.M. Sunday,” the Bowdle Pioneer reported, “taking from the home—a mother—and what could be more sad than to leave a husband with three young girls in the home.” The sentiments were especially true in this case: Lorena’s two younger sisters, Ruby and Myrtle, were swiftly sent off to live with relatives, and before long Lorena found herself unwelcome in her father’s house. The housekeeper who took over from her mother soon became Addison Hickok’s second wife. Within the year, she informed Lorena that she had better find another place to live—and quickly.

  Fortunately for the fourteen-year-old Lorena, she had formed a close friendship with a schoolmate, Lottie McCafferty, who found her a job working in the house of a kind Irish couple with two young children. That was one of the better jobs. After that, young Lorena worked in a mice-infested boardinghouse in nearby Aberdeen and in a run-down rooming house where railroad workers stayed at the edge of town. At the rooming house, she put a chair against the door to keep out male intruders. After that, she worked in an unhappy home she called “the house of discord” and in a farm kitchen, where she had to rise before dawn and work frantically to feed the threshers.

  As she rode the train back to Bowdle after leaving the job on the farm, a chance encounter changed Lorena’s life. As she was about to enter the coach, she saw her father. She slipped into the next car, hoping to avoid him, but he had spotted her. He followed her and sat down in the seat beside her. He was wearing his “town clothes” and his brown derby—part of an attempt to further himself in the world—but he looked ill at ease in them. He started in on Lorena, berating her for being an “ungrateful daughter.” But Lorena noticed, as he continued his tirade, a subtle change in his attitude toward her; there had been a shift in the balance of power between them. “I felt . . . a new and wonderful exhilaration. That change in his attitude gave tacit recognition that I was no longer a child, to be cuffed about and beaten. He would never strike me again. I was grown up!”

  Lorena got off the train at Bowdle. Her father remained on board. She was fifteen years old, and she never saw him again.

  There were a few bright spots in Lorena’s hard young life. One was her friendship with her Bowdle schoolmate Lottie, with whom she corresponded for the rest of her life. Another was a first crush on the daughter of the owner of the Aberdeen Hotel, an elegant oasis of dark carved wood and carpeted floors on a Main Street of shoot-’em-up saloons. The girl’s name was Elizabeth Ward. Elizabeth’s hair ribbons were “great, crisp silken butterflies that matched her dresses.

  “Her dresses fitted her, they were new and clean, and she had so many—a different dress for each school day! I used to stare at her for long minutes when I thought she wasn’t looking, and she was the first living person ever to become an inmate of the world into which I retired with my imagination.” By that time, Lorena’s own appearance was “exceedingly shabby.” Her hands were red and chapped, her hair unkempt, and she remembers “stuffing wads of paper into the soles of my shoes that winter because the snow and pebbles hurt my feet.” Her school attendance depended entirely on the demands of her work at various jobs.

  Fortunately, an unlikely trio of kind women, along with one wise male teacher, came along at crucial moments and saved her from spending her entire life as a maid in other people’s houses, lacking even a high school education. Perhaps it was her touching hunger for affection that made them want to help. When caring adults intervened, she responded—wholeheartedly.

  The first to help her was a Mrs. Dodd, a friend of Lottie’s family who was looking for household help. Mrs. Dodd “lived in the cleanest house I had seen since my mother died.” It wasn’t just the house, though. “I can close my eyes now,” Hick wrote some forty years later, “and still experience the wonderful feeling of serenity that came over me as I walked into it for the first time.”

  Mrs. Dodd, a grandmother raising a child, was “one of the gentlest, most patient women I have ever known.” She went to work on Lorena’s appearance. “My resentment simply melted away under her warm, soothing personality.” Mrs. Dodd gave Lorena scented soap for her bath and “a can of cool clean smelling talcum powder.” She taught her how to shampoo her hair and care for her hands. Mrs. Dodd also instructed her on how to do housework more efficiently, and “even praised me when I did things right.”

  It may have been Mrs. Dodd’s influence that made Lorena decide she needed go back to school. She returned to Bowdle from Gettysburg, the small town where Mrs. Dodd lived, reenrolled in ninth grade, and took a job—not for wages but for room and board. The school in Bowdle consisted of a principal and two teachers, instructing all the children of the town in one lone frame building surrounded by a bare playground. But the principal, a “tall homely Scandinavian” who was “the most unappreciated man in town,” saw something in Lorena. “It was he who first began to cultivate in me a taste for good literature and good music.” After she wrote an insulting verse about him—“His eyes are green, his hair is white, / His nose is crooked, he’s a fright”—he responded by making her the class poet, “remarking drily that I seemed to have an aptitude for verse.”

  Lorena lived with a couple who were the “upper crust” of Bowdle and expected the hired girl to contribute to keeping a perfect house. “Every waking minute outside of school hours,” Lorena remembered, “belonged to Mrs. Bickert.” In the morning, work kept her so long that she had to run to school. In the evening, she helped with laundry and carried coal to heat the range. There was no time for schoolwork.

  The final straw came when Lorena was chosen to represent Bowdle High School in a declamatory contest. When a rehearsal made her late coming home, Mrs. Bickert delivered “one of the worst tirades I had ever been forced to listen to” and announced that Lorena was to scrub the kitchen and pantry the next morning, no matter how late she was for school. “I carried out her orders the following morning, missed a half day of school, and quit, after actually finding the courage and the words to talk back to Mrs. Bickert.”

  In desperation, Lorena went to see Mrs. Tom O’Malley, a woman “held in low esteem by the good women of Bowdle.” A seventy-year-old whose husband had run a local saloon, she dressed in outrageous costumes, wore a wig, painted her face, and sometimes drank herself into a stupor. She was, Lorena wrote fondly, “an elderly and somewhat frayed bird of paradise stalking defiantly about a barnyard populated by little brown hens.”

  Lorena had a soft spot for Mrs. O’Malley, who had stopped her one day on the street shortly after her mother died and talked to her gently and sympathetically. Now it was Mrs. O’Malley who took her in.

  In her sober moments, Mrs. O’Malley devoted herself to several projects. One was hunting around the barn for a cache of money she suspected Mr. O’Malley had hidden from her. The two women—one young, one old—spent hours out there, going through old boxes of letters and finery and talking about Mrs. O’Malley’s colorful past.

  The other project was Lorena’s future. Mrs. O’Malley decided the sixteen-year-old should get married. Bowdle in those days was full of young men working on the railroad, and Mrs. O’Malley zeroed in on one of them and invited him to dinner. That led to a date. Lorena, arrayed in one of Mrs. O’Malley’s “lacy confections,” went with the young man to the movie and the drugstore for ice cream. When a prolonged whistle sounded, calling the railroad workers to an emergency somewhere along the line, she went down to the station to see him off. As he was about to lea
ve, Lorena’s date grabbed her and kissed her. Lorena responded by slapping him with all her might. At that point Mrs. O’Malley gave up on matchmaking. But she didn’t give up on helping Lorena find her way.

  It is a tribute to Lorena’s intelligence that she scored well on a test that would have allowed her to teach in a country school, despite her spotty education. She was sixteen, but could pass for the required age of eighteen. She might have gotten the job, but an older girl came along and edged her out. Undaunted, Mrs. O’Malley began quizzing Lorena about her mother’s relatives: wasn’t there someone, she wanted to know, who could take Lorena under her wing? There was: the “tiny, dainty and lame” woman Lorena called Aunt Ella. Aunt Ella, who was actually her mother’s cousin, was “the first human being I ever loved. . . . She never scolded, and I could talk to her, confident and relaxed. She seemed to understand me, to be interested in what I was saying. . . . I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  Aunt Ella and Uncle Sam lived in Chicago, in very comfortable circumstances, and had tried to keep in touch with Lorena after her mother’s death. But young Lorena had “a horror of family authority, of being bossed. . . . I never answered her letters.”

  Finally, Mrs. O’Malley managed to worm Aunt Ella’s address out of Lorena and write her a letter. A letter came back immediately, enclosing a check for Lorena’s train fare to Chicago. Mrs. O’Malley plunged enthusiastically into the task of dressing Lorena Hickok for her great adventure.

  On a hot August day in 1909, Lorena boarded the train dressed in a new blue suit and “one of the strangest hats ever turned out by Mrs. O’Malley,” on her way to another world. It was dusk in the busy Chicago station when the sixteen-year-old, “solemn and tongue-tied,” emerged from the train, wearing a now-rumpled blue suit. A tiny woman in an immaculate gray ensemble limped forward to greet her.

  “The hands she held out in greeting,” Hick remembered, “were encased in spotless chamois gloves. It was the first time I had ever seen a pair of real chamois gloves.”

  —

  AUNT ELLA WATCHED OVER Lorena all through high school and college. She first sent her to live with another aunt, in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she finished high school in three years. Then, with Aunt Ella’s support, Lorena tried twice to attend Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, first for a year and then, a second time, for a semester. She was a very bright girl, the president of Lawrence assured Aunt Ella, but there were gaps in her record—it was “simply a question of . . . developing habits of regularity and faithfulness.” He must have offered a more detailed explanation, however, because Aunt Ella sent “Rena” a gentle reprimand. “Now my dear girlie you know my faith in you, I do sincerely believe that next year you will rank among the very best in college. . . . Please try very, very hard to overcome getting angry that is the cause of many diseases.” Later, Lorena told friends that she had been deeply hurt and angry when no sorority invited her to join. She summarized her experience in her autobiography: “discover I’m complete misfit there and give up.”

  In 1912, at age nineteen, Hick began working as a cub reporter at the Battle Creek Journal, covering the visits of celebrities to the sanitariums of Kellogg and Post. It may have been the example of Edna Ferber, whose novels were just beginning to attract attention, that led Lorena, at twenty-one, to look for newspaper work in Milwaukee. Ferber had also attended Lawrence, then honed her skills at the Milwaukee Journal, writing stories of everyday life that later made their way into her novels. Now Lorena began to do the same thing.

  Defiantly, she took the pen name “Lorena Lawrence,” derived from the place where she had felt unwelcome, and began to write funny feature stories with herself in the lovable misfit role. Lorena Lawrence got one of her first bylines for a story about a dark and handsome musical impresario from Spain who announced that he was looking for a wife. “Girls!” the headline shouted. “Here’s Your Chance to Get a Husband!”

  “I won’t do,” the young Lorena wrote. She went on to catalog her faults: too tall, ten pounds overweight, and “too radical a suffragist.” But according to the story, the handsome genius from Barcelona liked Lorena’s blue eyes—one of his requirements—and warmed to her when he discovered her musical tastes.

  In real life, of course, Lorena Hickok preferred women to men. But Lorena in her reporter role pretended to be smitten but magnanimous: “Being a big hearted, unselfish woman,” she wrote, “I am willing to give other Milwaukee girls a chance.”

  The story about the eligible Spaniard was followed by another, about an attempt to interview the celebrated soprano Geraldine Farrar. After a muddy slog through a trainyard, she succeeded only in meeting Farrar’s dog Wiggles and ruining her best suit.

  Some stories were more poignant than humorous. Dame Nellie Melba’s rendering of “Songs My Mother Taught Me” reminded her of her own mother. She wrote, “I would die for Melba—big-souled, warm hearted Melba—Melba who kissed me!” The admiring story she wrote about another diva, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, resulted in the gift of Schumann-Heink’s ring and a lifelong friendship.

  Lorena Hickok was twenty-five, and still trying to get a college degree, when she moved to Minneapolis. During the day, she was a student at the University of Minnesota, making her way from class to class as Alice L. Hickok. At night, she worked as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, interviewing the university president about the alarming spread of Spanish flu on campus. It wasn’t long until the student, Alice L. Hickok, left college behind and became Lorena Hickok, a full-time and prolific reporter who finally began to put her preferred name on her stories.

  At the Tribune, Lorena found a home. She became “Hick,” a favorite of editor Charlie Dillon, who was fondly addressed by everyone as the “Old Man,” or OM. She was a regular at the various haunts on Newspaper Row, a cross section of newspapers, bars, and theaters that drew a rich collection of Minneapolis newspaper people, artists performing at the Metropolitan, and sports enthusiasts who gathered to watch for scores of Minnesota football games announced on a banner reeled out over 4th Street. Hick partook of it all, and wrote about it all. She never went back to college.

  There were a whole series of stories written in the “girl reporter” mode, as she tried, awkwardly and disastrously, to play golf, box, and understand those mysterious male games of baseball and football. Some of the stories came with comic illustrations of Hick, looking fatter than she actually was. There was a hilarious piece in which Hick spelled the department store Santa and got stuck in the display chimney. “Santa, who has been overworking of late and going without a good many breakfasts and lunches on account of the Christmas rush, has to wear a pillow stuffed in front. I didn’t.”

  Tucked in among the frivolous features were stories in which Hick showed her empathy for outcasts of every kind. She wrote touchingly of the humiliating life of midgets: a thirty-two-year-old told of having a young woman pick him up at a water fountain and ask, “Does him want a dink of water?” A diminutive married woman described waking up on a train ride and finding herself being cuddled in the arms of a strange man who thought she was a lost child.

  Another time, Hick wrote with “a lump in my throat” about a fifteen-year-old girl who had run away from sexual abuse at home. “I guess I’ve gone through too much to be afraid of anything,” the girl told Hick from her cell in the city jail.

  “What sort of things do you mean?” Hick asked.

  “Out of her wise blue eyes,” Hick wrote, “she gave me a knowing look.”

  Hick wrote of a World War I veteran, desperate for work, who showed up at an interview with a bulge in his overcoat. The bulge turned out to be a very young baby. His wife was dead, he explained, and he had no place to leave the infant.

  Toward the end of her nine-year tenure at the Tribune, Hick’s career took a surprising turn. After being the “girl reporter” who didn’t know a thing about sports and who called footb
all practice a “rehearsal,” she suddenly began writing colorful and savvy pieces about the University of Minnesota Gophers and their chances against their Big Ten rivals. “We dispatched . . . the Invincible Illini,” she writes, “trailing their proud banner in the dust.” And in a report from Ann Arbor, Michigan, before the all-important game against the Wolverines: “Even here in enemy country tonight they say the chances are even.” Among fans and players, she acquired the nickname “Auntie Gopher.”

  It was going to require another transformation for Hick, the over-the-top sportswriter, to become a sober national reporter for the Associated Press, covering big stories like corruption in Tammany Hall, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the decline and fall of New York mayor Jimmy Walker, and the rise of a promising new politician, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the New York governorship. But Hick, on the comeback in 1928 after her breakup with Ellie, badly needed a professional success after the disappointment she had experienced in California. Just as she had taught herself to write long pieces that touched her readers’ hearts, she now mastered the kinds of short, fact-laden dispatches required by the AP. Yet even there, she excelled at finding the human angle: when the steamship Vestris sank in 1928, killing more than one hundred passengers, Hick was the first to get to the lifeboats carrying survivors as they arrived in New York. She managed to snag a great storyteller who gave her a minute-by-minute account of his ordeal. “I guess there’s just one more thing,” Paul A. Dana told Hick as he concluded his account. “About two minutes after we were hoisted aboard the American Shipper [which rescued survivors], a dead body floated alongside. And two sharks.” Hick’s piece ran above the fold in the New York Times.