Dear reader,
A few months ago my mom gave me some manila envelopes with old family photos, along with my grandma’s travel diary from a trip to Europe in 1955. Because I find myself temporarily unemployed, but with a new job looming on the horizon (and thus don’t need to spend my days frantically sending off job applications), I’m able to spend my days doing whatever the hell I want, which I’m well aware is a luxury. I chose to spend the last week, then, typing up Grandma’s diary so I could share it with the whole family, and so it would be preserved even if the physical diary was lost. As I was typing, I of course couldn’t help but add my own little details and embellishments (in the form of footnotes, of course) and do research to provide context to what she was referring to. For example, when she wrote that “My back teeth were floating” at the end of a night out in Rome, it meant that she had to pee. When she refers continually to “Cook’s men” in every city she goes to, she means the travel agency Thomas Cook, whose men were extraordinarily helpful and happily met Grandma – a beautiful 24-year-old American girl – at every port and train station.
She carefully recorded the details of her transatlantic cruise, including what movies they showed (The Black Knight is the only one she comments on, and here she just puts in parentheses the word ‘terrible’) and who she met. Late March on the Atlantic would be sunny and calm one day and then the next, as she writes with her typical creative spelling, ‘ruffer.’ This makes me think of when I was in the spelling bee in sixth grade, and it was my one school event that Grandma didn’t attend; I remember thinking this was likely because she was too embarrassed to watch 12 year olds out-spell her.
One entry from the boat says “Laughed with Kathy over shower - no towel. She thinks I look solid. Will send me anything she has published.” The fact that Kathy, who has not been previously introduced as all the others Grandma met on the boat were, thinks she looks solid indicates that Kathy is an excellent judge of character. This is precisely how I would describe my Grandma as well, and likely not how I would be described by someone who met me on a cruise (“seasick” would be a more apt word for me).
The entry stuck out because prior to this, all of the people she’d met had been dutifully noted with first and last names along with nationalities (“Canadian”), occupations (“nurse from VA hosp. Cincinnati”), or intentions (“Driving from England”). Kathy doesn’t get these, though, so I flipped to the back of the book to see if her information had been recorded as others’ had. In the address section, I found a Kathryn Johnson listed with her home address in Atlanta, Georgia. Because the entry mentioned publishing, I decided to look her up to see if I could find out what type of writer she was – because I am, of course, a narcissist most interested in finding others who share my occupation. Forget the VA nurses, I want details on the writers.
The results of my search pulled up Kathryn Johnson in Atlanta, a pioneering civil rights reporter for the Associated Press. She would have been 28 or 29 in 1955. An interview with her from 2007 mentions her living in the neighborhood that the address from the diary lists her in. It feels like a reasonably safe bet that this is the same Kathryn Johnson who considered Grandma solid, though of course, I could be wildly off-base. Either way, I learned that Kathryn Johnson – perhaps one-time traveling friend of Grandma, or perhaps separate individual with no connection – was a secretary at the AP in 1955 and became a reporter in 1959. She was notable for being one of the only female reporters of the civil rights movement. She befriended Coretta King, and was invited to the Kings’ house for dinner several times. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, she went to the family home and spent the day and following week with the Kings. She was the only journalist allowed inside the house the day of his assassination. She was bold and built her career by reporting on things the men didn’t want to. I can picture her telling Grandma that she was a writer, though she had not yet been allowed to have a reporter job. It’s worth noting that their conversation was likely not about civil rights – Kathryn only became interested in the movement once she became a reporter and covered an early sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant.
When the ship arrived, Grandma disembarked and headed to Paris. She writes about the wine being very potent, that she had to do “2 hours of sign language” (she didn’t speak French) at the Post Office to call her sister in Germany, whom she would meet up with in a few days. She went to the Folies Bergere, a cabaret music hall, and writes of the experience: “Beautifully staged and costumed. Flat chested women.” To her, the coffee tasted like tar. Her companion went to the American Express office to pick up a ticket “which they were very sorry wasn’t ready. The words hurry or on time just are not in their vocabulary.” She had coffee and chocolate at the Deux Magots where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, et. al. used to spend time, and where, more importantly, I once ate duck. She carefully recorded her “Impressions” or “Comments” about each place she visited, and of Paris she writes that the people’s clothes are shabby, they “walk along the street munching 3 ft long pieces of bread,” but that the parks are lovely and the streets are very clean. On the subject of the French themselves she doesn’t hold back: “Men - short dark-mustached and greasy looking. Most smell of cheap wine, garlic, and stale cigarettes.”
One wants to feel bad for the French, but with their 3 ft long pieces of bread and potent wine, they’re doing alright for themselves.
Her bluntness was something that she took with her throughout her life and all the way into her last years, which were filled with forgetting, confusion, and round-about conversations with the same questions asked over and over again. (When told I had a girlfriend, Grandma said, “That’s great, a young woman should have many girlfriends and only one boyfriend.”)
She stayed at the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, and when I looked it up to find a photo, I learned that in WWII, the Nazis occupied the best hotels in Paris, and the Lutetia became the headquarters for the Abwehr, the German counterintelligence unit. (Just before the staff left, a sommelier hid the hotel’s collection of fine wine inside a tunnel. The Nazis never found it.)
In 1945, survivors of the concentration camps returned to Paris. The city’s plan was for them to be processed at the Gare d’Orsay, a train station. Olga Wormser-Migot, an attaché assigned to France’s ministry of war prisoners, deportees, and refugees, wrote: “When we thought of Gare d’Orsay to welcome the deportees we could not imagine the survivors’ conditions. We thought that once the reception formalities were completed, they could go home and resume a normal life right away. However, we should have known. We should have been aware of the rumors from the camp.” Instead, Charles de Gaulle decided that the best place to house the survivors was a hotel, rather than a train station. They came to Paris by car, train, and on foot, and at the Lutetia they received food, shelter, 2,000 Francs, and a Red Cross coupon for clothing. Family members came to the hotel looking for loved ones. One survivor wrote, “When we entered the Lutetia we were just numbers; when we left we had become citizens again.”
Ten years later, it was just another nice hotel in Paris, and Grandma doesn’t have much to say about it, which likely means she thought it was perfectly fine.
From Paris, she took a train to Germany, where her sister was living with her husband and daughter at the Hahn Air Force Base in the Rhineland-Palatinate, which incidentally is where the German side of my family comes from (the ancestors of Grandma’s soon-to-be-husband). She spoke German and immediately was much more impressed by Germany than France; reading this and remembering my adventures in Europe during college, I am sure that her understanding of the language heavily informed her impressions of the places she visited.
In the back of the diary are tucked some letters she sent her parents. From Hahn she wrote to them that “This is more like a storybook land than anything I have ever seen.” She also told them that her niece, their granddaughter, was “big but not horsey looking.” Her love for her niece, though, radiates through these pages (when she goes to Easter services at church, Grandma writes that her niece “looked good enough to eat.”). Within the next 8 years, she would have 3 daughters of her own.
From Hahn, she and her sister went to Switzerland – Lucerne and Interlaken both impressed her, of course, as it’s hard to imagine the Alps not impressing anyone. After a few relatively unremarkable days in Switzerland (“The girls all look healthy, rosy cheeked and a little plump” – but were they horsey?), they traveled to Venice. They visited St Mark’s Cathedral and the Doge’s Palace: “We got quite sick of chubby angels and gold mosaics and gold leaf.” She described the town as “damp, cold, and dark,” and was largely unimpressed. She did seem to enjoy the palaces at night though: “Like an old and wrinkled woman this city appears much more favorably in dim light.” She saw the cardinal of Venice who would later become Pope John Paul I, who was pope for only 33 days in 1978 before he died, likely of a heart attack but perhaps (and more intriguingly) of being murdered. Interestingly, the way I know that the cardinal she saw became the Pope is because it’s written in the margins of the diary in pencil, the only such note, indicating that she went back through her diary over 20 years later and added that. I like to think that it was added when he became Pope, and she excitedly remembered having seen him. “Such ring kissing and bowing we had never seen,” was her impression of the scene.
Next she went to Florence, which was an exciting section for me because she was visiting all of the places I, too, would visit in 2016 when I went to the city with my now-wife. She visited the Duomo, climbed the Campanile next to it to see the view of the red city below, saw Michelangelo’s David and was as impressed and awed by it as I was. Florence has become a special place to me since that visit, as it’s the first trip Kayla and I took together, at the time just friends. Reading Grandma’s diary I get the strange feeling that she’s tracing our steps – she was in the Duomo, where we went! – but it was I who traced her steps unknowingly.
I get the same feeling when reading the sections from London and Edinburgh, which she visited at the end of her trip. Of time being compressed and all things happening, as I feel they do, at once. I am reading her words as she is writing them; she is climbing the Campanile and looking at the women in heels just as I am doing the same 60 years later. Perhaps if I had squinted I’d have seen her, and she’d have seen me. In London, she saw the beheading site of Anne Boleyn, reminding me that just a few weeks ago I’d found some information that our distant ancestor, John Pye, Mayor of Oxford in the 1530s, attended Anne Boleyn’s coronation. How we are all, always, connected.
She was at the precipice of something during that trip, though she didn’t know it. Less than a year later, she married my grandfather. She had met him prior to her trip, and he’d asked her out but she had declined, saying that if he was still interested when she returned from Europe, she’d reconsider. It seems that he must have remained interested, and while she never once mentions him in the diary, he is somehow in the margins. Throughout – in Hahn, in Rome, in Edinburgh – men fall all over themselves for her, and she coolly turns them down. In Rome, for example, she met a Maltese Marquis – or a man who said he was a Maltese Marquis – and was unimpressed. “Very tall, dark and chubby with a leering smile - rather like a self assured cat. Had trouble shaking him.” This was the night that her back teeth were floating.
At Edinburgh Castle, a man approached her and admitted to having followed her. She was alone, which for me threw up a trillion red flags, but she seems not to have been concerned for her safety and rather, he “seemed so sincere that I could not be huffy and refuse.” I want to reach into the past and tell her that she has the right to refuse any man who gives her the ick. But she handled him well, and in a fully Grandma-fashion – he was a philosopher, and she told him he ought to use more humor in his writing, which is hilarious given that she doesn’t seem to have read any of it, but rather, presumed that he was incapable of being funny based on their conversation. Through the rest of her life she continued to suggest humor as medicine in just about any situation, to the point it became an inside joke in our family. Funny to see her here, in 1955, with the same suggestion. She finally shook the guy: “He left me - needless to say, wondering about my irresistible charms or this new method of a pick up. He took the usual way down rather than jumping off the wall as his doleful expression indicated he might.”
It wasn’t all cutting remarks about locals, though. She carefully recorded things she’d learned and seen, and her impressions about cultural differences. In Edinburgh she (a nurse herself) “found that nurses here work 58 hour weeks with daily split shifts. Pay is also very poor. … [Head waiter] was amazed to hear that we have city hospitals and free medical care for those who need it. Was very much in favor of national medicine here.” Ha!
I find myself feeling lucky to get to know her in this new way. She was a few years younger than I am now, and her voice is so strong. There are echoes of who she was when I knew her, the strong-willed woman with equally strong opinions who was also so kind, caring, smart, observant. She had high standards because she knew what she deserved. She raised strong daughters and strong grandchildren through her example. She spent the rest of her life traveling, taking it all in, meeting people, learning about the rest of the world. Reading the diary has given me two opportunities: the first is to know her, and the second is to see the world. To learn about Kathryn Johnson and the Lutetia, to look up photos of Venice in the 1950s, to imagine a post-war Europe clawing its way back.
In Florence, when she sees Michelangelo’s David, she writes: “Perhaps the most inspiring piece in Florence with a calm and assurance that shows the artist’s genius at the early age of 25 years.” Calm and assurance indeed – navigating the world in her own way, speaking to and learning about people whose lives were entirely different from hers. I knew her well, but I didn’t know her in this exact way, and I feel lucky to get to read her words now, and share them with you so that you might hear her voice too.
As I take this ancestry journey, I’m trying to find ways to hear voices. This is an easy way, through a diary, a written record of thoughts and impressions. But there are other ways too – census responses, wills, names. If you feel so moved, I’d love to hear from you in the comments about how you find voices from the past and how you listen to them.
Warmly,
Helen