East to the Dawn (16 page)

Margaret was undertaking the education of her twin daughters Nancy and Jane at home, but unlike Amy's feeble attempt, which had so quickly ended in failure, Margaret, in the forefront of educational change, was deep into the new Montessori method and a highly successful teacher. “I can still remember the big boxes from Italy, and the big colored letters,” Nancy, one of the twins, would say many years later. Keeping an eye on another niece was for Margaret the most natural thing in the world. As
a matter of course, particularly since money was still short, Amelia spent vacations with her aunt.

What Margaret had not expected, however, were the jams Amelia got into—especially those caused by her penchant for climbing. Margaret as parent-in-place was held accountable and telephoned by school authorities whenever there was a problem. Several times she had to deal with the school when Amelia was caught climbing on the roofs of the school buildings, “I remember Mother wearing a gray dress and a very snappy hat,” Nancy would recall, “I remember Mother putting on the hat, her mouth full of hat pins [holding the hat pins in her mouth] and saying, ‘I have to go out to Ogontz to see about Amelia. She has been climbing on the roof in her nightie again.' ” But at the beginning of the term the Balis house was off limits to Amelia, because, as her cousin Annie Otis was deputed to call and tell her, Jane was sick and the house in quarantine until mid-November—necessitating even Clarence Balis's enforced absence.

Ogontz was a school with a strong conservative tradition. It had begun life in 1850 as the Chestnut Street Female Seminary in Philadelphia. By Amelia's day, it was a finishing school located on the Jay Cooke estate outside of Philadelphia and had a new name: Ogontz, the name of an Indian chief after whom Cooke had named the house. The headmistress, Abby Sutherland, originally from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, fluent in French and German, a cum laude graduate of Radcliffe, began her career at Ogontz in 1902 teaching English. In 1913 she became head of the school, which under her stewardship grew rapidly and shed some of its more austere traditions. It was, however, still the goal of the school to seek out and educate what the headmistress proudly described as “the
jeunesse dorée,”
by which she meant, as she put it, those from “the best social stratum.” However, if Ogontz was consciously filled with the children of families of the “best” American lineage and culture, it did at least seek geographical diversity; almost every class included students from all over the United States and usually from foreign countries as well. And if it had no black students, it did have at least a few Jewish ones. As Abby Sutherland delicately put it, “In 1903 the then head of the school, Miss Eastman, with conscientious Christian scruples, decided to accept a few individuals of the Jewish race and fit them into the group, thus solving the problem empirically.”

Abby Sutherland was less interested in spoiling her young charges than in inculcating sound values; less interested in shielding them from the world than in instilling healthy habits. During her years as headmistress,
“the training in neatness and thriftiness; the beautiful surroundings, and above all the Christian atmosphere” would overwhelmingly impress the girls.

Under Miss Sutherland's stewardship, Ogontz paid good salaries and provided excellent housing, with the result that the teachers were of a very high caliber; many were college graduates or had unusually varied backgrounds. Abby Sutherland, herself rather worldly, insisted on the constant interaction of faculty and students with what was going on in the world. During the summers teachers were expected to travel abroad and otherwise keep in touch, and guest lecturers were constantly sought out and brought to the school. Throughout the year the girls made trips to art centers in New York, Washington, and Chicago.

The result of all this was that Ogontz did a very good job of educating its
jeunesse dorée
—more than half of its students went on to institutions of higher learning, and many of those institutions gave college credit for Ogontz courses. Ogontz students became singers at the Metropolitan Opera, heads of civic organizations, doctors, lawyers, State Department officials, teachers, and artists. But being a wife and mother came first; it was a rare Ogontz girl who did not marry.

The physical well-being of the girls was considered to be just as important as their mental health, and therefore vigorous exercise was an integral part of the school day. Fencing was taught by a fencing instructor from the Drexel Institute, field hockey by an English lady who coached at Bryn Mawr, and dancing by (among others) Martha Graham; the horseback riding program ended with a horse show each June. There were also tennis and basketball. For the “unathletic” who, according to the diligent Abby Sutherland, “were always with us ... the required hours of exercise ... could include a walk, not a stroll, in the open country.” During military drill, obligatory at many of the girls' schools of the period, the girls marched in uniform, complete with wooden guns, to the orders of the headmaster of Bordentown Military Institute. Miss Sutherland attributed the fine carriage and walking manner “characteristic of all alumnae” to the marching, and it was evidently very popular with the girls, although not with Amelia, who informed her mother, “Drill is awful,” in her first letter.

Amelia took to Ogontz quickly. Putting distance between herself and Amy was like a tonic. Able at last to put down the burden of caring for her mother, Amelia became once again the teenager, the child, the student—she could act her age and enjoy life. She threw herself into everything.

As she wrote her mother:

Amelia immediately excelled in field hockey, informing her mother, “I played hockey yesterday and made two goals, the only ones made. I am continuing this letter Monday evening. I played Hockey again to-day and made a goal thru my legs.” As a result of her prowess, she was invited to become a member of one of the secret societies, Alpha Phi, the athletic sorority. She also did well in her studies and was pleased to be placed in French III her first term. (“Did I tell you that I have a reputation for brains?” she writes her mother.) By Christmas she had dropped the chemistry lab she had started.

In all her classes in the year and a half Amelia spent at Ogontz, her marks varied within a very narrow range from G (good) to G+ to E (excellent), even in drill and punctuality, subjects on which the girls were also meticulously marked (although she did get two fairs in Bible). In light of Amelia's habit of deliberately misspelling and otherwise fooling around with words for her own amusement, it is interesting and informative to note that after two semesters of spelling class, in both of which she received a grade of excellent, she was exempted from spelling for the rest of her time at Ogontz. In her literature class that first year, among other authors she read Wordsworth, Byron, Burns, and Shakespeare; in Latin she read Horace; in her French class, George Sand. Even so, she found time to devour books on her own—so many, it came to the notice of Abby Sutherland, who wrote, “Amelia was always pushing into unknown seas in her reading.”

There were still worries about money, though. Compared with the other girls, Amelia was poor. She tried to reassure Amy and not complain. “I can wear an old suit with a little alteration so it will be more reasonable. I hate to spend money for things I never will need nor want.” She bought a pair of used high-heeled pumps from a friend for five dollars. At the end of a letter to her mother in the spring, she wrote: “Dearie, I don't need any spring clothes so don't worry about sending me money. I have a few dollars still in the bank and I know you all need things more than I.” The next fall she is apologizing to her mother for needing twenty-seven dollars for senior caps and gowns, an obligatory expense and the alternative was that she must borrow from Miss Sutherland “if it is not convenient to send me some cash soon as is the custom.” Abby Sutherland thought she handled the situation with aplomb. “Her style of dressing was always simple and becoming. At that period her purse as well as her innate taste required the fewest and simplest clothes. But she helped very much to impress the overindulged girls with the beauty and comfort of simple dressing.”

Carefully supervised, Ogontz girls were encouraged to go on cultural expeditions into Philadelphia. In the fall Amelia went to a concert performance of the Philadelphia Symphony. In the spring she went on excursions to hear Ian Hay, to visit the Victor Talking Machine Company, and to see theatrical productions of
Treasure Island and Joan the Woman.
Then there were the cultural events brought to Ogontz, such as the Orpheus Club, a phenomenon she described to her mother as “a musical organization of Philadelphia, composed of about twenty men aged from twenty-five to eighty.” They “came out to dinner here and gave us a concert. There were some magnificent voices caged in very unprepossessing exteriors and one German Baron looked as tho he would burst his earthly shell when he sang, but his voice was a wonderfully clear barytone. He sung from Faure and Die Walkyrie (I know how to spell it.)”

Her horizons were broadening: she was beginning to think of the future and what she would do with her life. She started to look for and clip newspaper and magazine articles about women who had careers, and she quickly had enough to paste into a scrapbook that she called “Activities of Women.” Among the women thus singled out: a League of Women Voters activist who was the mother of five; Mrs. Paul Beard, a fire lookout in the Federal Forestry Service, whose post was on Harney Peak in South Dakota, in a glass house lashed to a rock; a budding film producer; a county medical society that “breaking all precedents ... last night elected a woman as president”; a police commissioner in Fargo, North Dakota;
Miss R. E. Barrett who was city manager of Warrenton, Oregon, the first Indian woman admitted to the Bombay Bar; Queen Victoria's god-daughter, Victoria Drummond, the first Englishwoman to win an engineer's certificate, who wanted to skipper an ocean liner; and four women in the Belgian Union of the League of Nations. One of the few pictures in the scrapbook shows an enormous open touring car with the top down, in which sit Lillian Gilbreth, identified as an industrial psychologist, her husband, and their twelve children. Interestingly, there is no clipping of any woman who was famous as a result of battling for women's suffrage, which was just on the brink of becoming law. (Women would vote for the first time in the presidential election of 1920.) Amelia's focus was narrow—she was only interested in women achievers.

That summer Amelia, having been invited to vacation with her new school friends, stayed as far from home as she could. She spent several weeks vacationing at a camp on Lake Michigan with a girl named Sarah. She had acquired a boyfriend, Ken, and as she wrote her mother, “The boys have been lovely and Kenneth has done so much for me. He is very nice and sensitive and almost brilliant. We four [her friend Sarah and Sarah's friend Harry] have just ideal times together and have gone on innumerable canoe trips, walking jaunts etc. together.” The foursome were going to stop off together at Chicago on their way home, but disappointingly Amelia's hostess became sick, she informed Amy. “Harry and Ken were going to take us to everything in Chicago this week as I had been urged to visit, at Miss Tredwell's. Grand opera, baseball, sand dunes, anything we would go to. They are such nice boys and we had had a wonderful time with them.”