June 15, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I forgot to say that yesterday was the last day of school until August. I am promoted to the high third grade and I got a pink certificate instead of a plain white one. That means that I was a very good pupil not an ordinary one. Grandfather said that even though I was a special star in my class, I still don’t know everything. Tonight when I go to bed I’ll try to think of just how many things I don’t know.

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When I attended in elementary school in San Francisco in the 1960’s, we had low and high grades like Hilda. I don’t know if such a system existed in other places. Instead of all children beginning the school year in the fall, a child might start in spring instead, based on one’s birthday. Hilda’s birthday in January and mine in March meant that we started school at the beginning of the calendar year.

June 14, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Tante Esther was here all day today. I think she just wanted to say nasty things about Suzanne. I didn’t hear all she said because Grandmother kept sending me out of the room to get things for her. Once it was for her needlework and then her glasses but she had her glasses all the time. I thought she had but I knew that she didn’t want me to hear all the things Tante Esther was saying. I did hear her say some of the same words that Gladys used. I wish Tante Esther died instead.

June 13, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Grandmother is right. The thirteenth is an unlucky day. Some ladies came for tea, only it was coffee and I was also at the table. That was because they were not talking about anything interesting. If they do talk about anything interesting Grandmother always says, “Hilda Dear, I know you would rather take your tea upstairs at your own little tea table.” Sometimes I just hate grown-ups but I must tell what happened. One of the ladies spilled some marmalade on the table. I looked over at Grandmother to see if she would spill some of hers too but I guess she hadn’t noticed. So, I took a big spoonful of mine and put it on the table. Grandmother yelled the way she always does so of course I had to explain. I told just what I had learned in school, that Miss Hare taught us that when our guests have bad manners we must have bad manners too, just to make the guest feel comfortable. I said that Miss Hare learned that from Queen Victoria and I started to tell what a good woman Queen Victoria was and how much she loved Prince Albert but I couldn’t finish it because Grandmother sent me from the table. Later I had to come downstairs to apologize to the lady but I still don’t know why? Miss Hare really did tell us that story and Queen Victoria did pour her tea into the saucer. Maybe you should only copy the guests that pour their tea into the saucers, not the ones that spill marmalade.

June 12, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Today was Suzanne’s funeral. I wanted to go and say good-bye to her, but I wasn’t allowed to but just before the family left Grandfather said to me, “Look, darling, I’ll tell you what you may do. You may pick a beautiful rose from the garden and I will put it in Suzanne’s hand and tell it is from you.” So I did. Ito cut if for me, a pink rose, and I gave it to Grandfather and then I felt better.

June 11, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Just when I opened my book to write, everyone came home so I had to stop. No one must know that I know. Gladys told me that Suzanne was in bed with a man and that in the middle of the night he shot her and she died right away. She said the man was not Mr. Leonard. Then she said that it served Suzanne right because no good woman ever sleeps with a man. I said that Grandmother sleeps with Grandfather every single night, and she is a good woman and she is always telling everyone how good she is. Gladys says that is different but I don’t see why? Anyhow Gladys is lying because Suzanne was better than just plain good. She was dear and sweet and pretty and kind and gentle and I told Gladys so and she got mad and she called Suzanne by words that I never heard before and I don’t know how to spell. “Slut” was one of them. I can remember that one because it is short. When I asked her what it meant she said if I ever repeated it that she would wash my mouth out with kitchen soap so it must mean something ugly and I know that “slut” was something that Suzanne wasn’t.

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As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have not been able to find any information about Suzanne. In my newspaper searches, there were very few mentions of the name, so it apparently was not popular at the time. I wondered whether it was not her given name or perhaps a nickname.

In previous searches when I tried to find mention of her as a dancer, I searched for “dance",” “Scheherazade,” and “ballet.” None of those words yielded success in the San Francisco papers available online through 1912 and 1913. After reading about Suzanne’s death, I looked through a few week’s worth of papers, searching the obituaries and for articles about a woman’s violent death. No reports of anyone being shot, although there were articles about someone named Shirley who had been stabbed to death in Half Moon Bay. Could Suzanne’s given name have been Shirley? After searching further, I discovered that Shirley was the last name of a man who was killed in a fight at a bar.

So Suzanne remains a mystery. Suzanne was one of the few adults Hilda loved and felt accepted by, perhaps the first person she cared about who died when she was old enough to understand the concept.

June 10, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Suzanne is dead. When I came downstairs for breakfast this morning, Grandmother was crying and Aunt Tillie was crying and Grandfather was trying not to cry. I can’t remember which one of them told me that Suzanne had died. Grandfather had a newspaper in his hand but he hid it. That is all that happened. Then they all got dressed and went out. They said they had to go and see Suzanne’s father and mother and I should be good while they were gone. Then Grandmother whispered to Gladys, “Not a word to the child.” The moment they were out of the house I made Gladys tell me because I knew that Suzanne didn’t just die.

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What a shock! Although I have found ample evidence of most of the events and activities in Hilda’s diary, I have been unable to find anything about a woman named Suzanne. Nor of the ballet “Scheherazade” in which she was an understudy. I searched through local contemporary newspapers and could not find the newspaper article her grandfather seemed to be hiding.

June 9, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

In Sunday school today our teacher told us the story of Adam and Eve. Whenever she tells us a story, at the end of it, she always asks if any of us have any questions. So I raised my hand and asked her if we were going to have a vacation from Sunday School just like we were going to have from our regular school? She said that she didn’t mean that kind of question, she meant a question about the story but I didn’t have any.

June 8, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Tonight when Grandfather put me to bed, I told him that he didn’t have to tell me a story, that I would tell him one instead. So I told him the one about Florence Nightingale and he loved it very much. He said that he had never heard it before because when he was a little boy in Austria, he didn’t have a good Grandmother who could buy him books and even if he did have a good Grandmother that had wanted to, they had no money because they were so very poor. I asked him if they were poorer than the poor family who live around the corner from us, the ones that Grandmother is always sending pots of soup to and he said, “Kindchel, we were poorer than anyone you ever heard of but we were good, all of us.”

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This is one of the few windows we have into Hilda’s grandfather Jacob’s past. He was the brother of my grandmother Adolph’s father and this corroborates my her story of how poor the family was and how miserable life was after their mother died in childbirth and their father remarried. According to my grandmother, “One fine day, the oldest son Adolph, then 10 years old, packed his bundle to be off. He had neither money nor any idea where to go but for the fixed plan to go to school wherever he would have an opportunity.” The other children went to America to seek their fortune. The simplified family tree shows two of the siblings.

June 7, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I was naughty last night. Grandmother says “wicked” but Grandfather got mad and said that wicked is only when you kill someone or steal or tell lies that hurt people. He said that what I said to Mr. Leon wasn’t very nice but that after all I was only a child. Besides he said that it was Grandmother’s fault for always making me “How do you do” to the grown-up company. Mr. and Mrs. Leon were here for dinner last night, so I had to go to the parlor before I went to bed. I didn’t know Mr. Leon and Grandmother said, “Hilda, you know Mrs. Leon. She was here for tea just a week ago. This is her husband.” So I said very politely, “I’m very pleased to meet you Mr. Leon.”, then I remembered what Mrs. Leon told the ladies and so I asked him why he didn’t give Mrs. Leon any peace at night. I explained, “You know, sometimes ladies are very tired and they like to be quiet and don’t want to fight” but I couldn’t finish what I was saying because Grandmother screeched “Hilda!” the way she always does when she’s mad and sent me flying upstairs. Later she came up and asked me how I dared be so rude and talk about things I didn’t know anything about and she said she was so ashamed of me she could hardly go back to the parlor but she did.

June 6, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Now I can finish the story….

There isn’t much more to tell. Only that at the time, the only ladies who would take care of the sick people were dirty old ones who had been in prison and men were the main nurses and no one was very clean, not even the doctors. All the rest of Florence’s life, she went around begging all the hospitals to be very clean and asked the doctors and nurses to wash their hands. And they found out that she was right and that there were really germs all around and they had to be careful, just like she said, and everything in the hospitals got antiseptic, sparkling white and they all lived happily ever after.

June 5, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I couldn’t finish Florence Nightingale last night because I had to go to bed early to help my arithmetic. Tonight too.

June 4, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Now I can tell the rest about Florence Nightingale….

She lived to be a very old lady and if it hadn’t been for her, we wouldn’t have nice clean hospitals or nice clean nurses today because before Florence began nursing, they did all kinds of terrible things to sick people, they really didn’t know very much, especially about cleanliness. They always kept the windows shut tight and everyone thought that night air was unhealthy but Florence asked her doctor about night air when she was very young and she doubted that the air at night was any different than the air during the day. That was very smart of her, wasn’t it? And in the hospitals, they let the very sick sleep with people who had all kinds of other things wrong with them and then they all got sicker than they were already. When people had fevers they stuffed them with soup and hung silly things like rabbits’ feet or onions and garlic around their necks or tied them up with stockings soaked in bear’s grease. They must have smelled terrible.

June 3, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This is the day that Miss Hare wanted us to tell her why a day in June is so rare. I didn’t know because I thought about Florence Nightingale instead. It didn’t make any difference though, because the whole class talked about it anyhow. Miss Hare started off by asking us what the word rare meant, and Robert said that it meant a steak that wasn’t well cooked and still looked bloody. Miss Hare said that was only one meaning but not the meaning of rare in the poem. She said in the poem the word meant something precious and beautiful like a diamond or a pearl or a perfect sunset. Then she went from one pupil to another and asked each of us what we thought was rare about a June day. Someone said that most of the month of June the school was closed and then vacation began and someone else said “June Bugs” but Miss Hare said that bugs aren’t beautiful but that’s not true as they are so I raised my hand and told her so. I said that ladybugs are very beautiful, all shiny, brown and red with little white specks. She said perhaps I was right, that she had never noticed them and then everyone else said all kinds of different things like red roses and clouds and sunshine and the smell of woods. I’m still not sure what rare means.

June 2, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I should be thinking of the word rare and why a day in June is that but I really want to write some more about Florence Nightingale in case I forget and if someone doesn’t return the book because I really love this story.

Well, she lived in this beautiful, big house and had everything she wanted but she didn’t want all the things she had. She wanted only to be a nurse. In those days, it wasn’t polite for a lady to be a nurse and her parents didn’t want her to be one but one day something very nice happened. There was a big war between England and Russia. All the English soldiers had to go to Russia to fight and they needed lots of doctors and nurses so Florence said that she was going even if it was impolite for ladies to be nurses. She went to visit hospitals so she could learn how to take the best care of patients and she also taught other young ladies how to do it because they too thought that the job of nursing was not just a man’s job and she and all the young ladies went to Russia to take care of sick soldiers. Everyone loved Florence very much. The soldiers used to kiss her shadow on the wall as she went from one to another during the night.

June 1, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I must stay home today and do my homework because I am far behind the rest of the class. Grandfather says that it is not because I was stupid but because I was sick. My homework for today is to think about what is rare about a day in June. In class today, Miss Hare made us take our pens and write in our blank books, “And what is so rare as a day in June.” She said it is the first line of a beautiful poem by an American poet whose name is James Russell Lowell and she made us write down his name too so we would remember it but she said the poem was very long and for now the first line was enough. We must think about the first line over the weekend and on Monday morning we must be able to tell her why a day in June is beautiful and what the word rare means.

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Apparently many people have asked the same question. A google search for the meaning of “And what is so rare as a day in June” brought up 361,000,000 results! The poem is from the Prelude of a much longer poem called “The Vision of Sir Launfal.”

May 31, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I had my arithmetic lesson and I am learning and it isn’t as hard as I thought it was so now I can write a little more about Florence Nightingale….

All the children in the neighborhood used to bring their sick animals to Florence. She put a splint on the leg of a little fox terrier, and a salve on the wound of a tiny kitten who had been bitten.

Kitten and Bitten rhyme and together, they make poetry, but if I say that the kitten was bitten by a dog, then the poem is spoilt, so I won’t say it, but she was.

Well, besides the kitten and the terrier Florence tried to nurse a goldfish that had jumped out of his bowl of water but though she rubbed him ever so hard and put him in a bowl of fresh water, he died anyhow and Florence cried tears all over him.

May 30, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I couldn’t write more about the story yesterday. I won’t be able to write more for a while because every afternoon a private teacher is coming to help me with my arithmetic. The doctor found out that one of the reasons I have an earache is because I hate arithmetic so. He found out, I guess I really told him, that I am afraid to go to school because I don’t know how to add or subtract and I have been copying answers over Ellen’s shoulder but when I am at the blackboard there is no one’s shoulder to copy from and then when I see Miss Hare coming, it is just as if she is a big wild animal and I feel terrified and I feel as if she is really going to eat me up alive. Then in bed at night I feel scared about going to school the next day and I can’t sleep and my ears begin to ache. So the doctor told my Grandfather that I don’t need a doctor at all, just a private teacher to help me learn. Now I have one. Her name is Miss Jackson and she is very pretty and she is very nice.

May 29, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I think that I shall write down the story of Florence Nightingale and read it to myself when I am eighty years old because maybe in the meantime I will lend my book to someone who will forget to return it to me, like the way Antoinette forgot to return “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” I will start now. I think that I will start it “Once upon a time,” like the real story.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in London, England and her name was Florence Nightingale. Her father was very rich and she lived in a very big house. She was a good little girl and loved everyone, especially when they were sick, because then she could take care of them. Whenever her mother had bad headaches, she always pulled the shades down in her room and brought her cool towels for her brow and hot tea to drink and when her mother was sleeping, she wouldn’t even let people walk on the floor above. She saw to it that everything was quiet so her mother could get a good rest.

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Perhaps the book given to Hilda was The Story of Florence Nightingale by Inez N. McFee which was published in 1912. That book mentions another by Laura E. Richards, entitled Florence Nightingale, the Angel of the Crimea: A Story for Young People, published in 1909.

How wise Hilda was to understand that things sometimes are lost and that she wanted to preserve the memory of things she cared about. I don’t know whether she reread her diary when she was 80, but would like to think so.

May 28, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I was in bed all last week and I had a very nice time between earaches. One day last week Grandmother went downtown and she said that she would buy me a book and what kind of book did I want? So I said, “Please pick out a book about someone real, not about good little girls and Bible stories, or morals.” So she did bring me a wonderful book about a real little girl called Florence Nightingale. Isn’t that a lovely name? Just like the real bird who sings at night. Florence, too, was a lovely little girl. When she was my age she liked to take care of sick people. I hate sick people. They are always so cross.

May 22, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I am writing with a pencil because I am in bed with an earache and Grandmother doesn’t want me to write with ink because it can spill on the sheets. I am very pleased about the earache, as it doesn’t hurt too much and it’s much nicer than arithmetic. The doctor says I cannot go to school for at least a week.

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Sad to say, Hilda also takes a break from writing in her diary. She’ll return on May 28.