Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (9 page)

Here seventeen-year-old Jane Butzner earned her first journalistic spurs, “
doing routine items about weddings, parties, and the meetings of the Women of the Moose and the Ladies’ Nest of Owls No. 3.” These, be it said, are Jane’s words, written in 1961, and you might think she’d made them up. She hadn’t. Both were real women’s clubs of the era, offshoots of men’s fraternal organizations. On a page dappled with photos of
recent and future brides, readers learned that a baritone had been signed to sing in a musicale for the Lackawanna chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star. A week devoted to “The American Girl” had concluded at the Masonic Temple with a show depicting the seven ages in the life of a girl, based on Shakespeare’s seven ages of man.

Some women’s-page reporting got more room to breathe, as in a story appearing under this headline:

MOONLIGHT PICNIC

AT SCRANTON HOME

PROVES BIG SUCCESS

HUNDREDS OF REPUBLIC MEN

AND WOMEN ARE PRESENT

AT AFFAIR

The event had taken place on the “spacious grounds at ‘Marworth,’ the country estate of Mrs. Worthington Scranton,” sponsored by the Lackawanna council of the Federal Republic Women—and, of course, was successful beyond expectation. There was a picnic, music, fortune-telling, booths devoted to national cuisines, and, “although there were plenty of candidates on the grounds,” a happy absence of speech making. Meanwhile, “the weatherman provided the moonlight on schedule.”

The paper rarely carried bylines, so we can’t know whether this or any other
Republican
story was Jane’s. For the most part, her time there is shrouded in legend—some of her own making. For example, she was known to make up recipes, like one for Normandy apple cake that couldn’t possibly come out right; by one family member’s account, Jane called for half a cup of baking powder instead of half a teaspoon. “
It was preposterous and caused a huge outcry.” Of course, she goes on, “Jane had never cooked anything.” Jane’s work sometimes took her off the women’s pages, too. She covered civic meetings, and wrote film, book, and theater reviews. But it didn’t matter, really; you learn the rudiments of journalism whatever your subject. Suddenly, facts count, spelling counts. Mrs. Worthington Scranton’s bash had taken place just hours before the paper went to press for the morning edition: deadlines count.

One time, asked to revitalize the letters-to-the-editor section, Jane took to writing letters herself, on politics and local affairs. When her first efforts failed to prime the pump, she implored her father, “What
in the world am I going to do?” He suggested she write a letter against dogs—that ought to rile up readers. She did, and it did. The section began generating interest. Jane never had to write another phony letter again.

How did she land the job in the first place? The way she told it later, the editor needed a reporter but had no money to hire one. “I can
work for you for nothing,” said Jane. The editor was taken aback, but agreed: “We can see how it works out, whether we like it and whether you like it.” Later, on job applications, Jane would record her pay as
$18 a week; it was just—and this was not uncommon during the Depression—that she never actually got it. Though the paper was unionized, Jane recalled, “
nobody objected to my…make-do barter agreement.” The paper assigned one of its reporters “to look after me and
be my mentor. I wrote things and they put them in the paper. And I got a big bang out of that.” The
Republican
, she’d say at another time, was “my
‘journalism school,’ and I think it was a good one.”

During her time at the paper, she’d often sleep late, work into the evening, then drop by to
see her father, who kept evening hours during much of the Depression. Around 1930, he had moved from his old office in the Dime Savings Bank building downtown to new ones, designed to his specifications, in the new
Medical Arts Building, a brick- and stone-faced building fronting on Washington Avenue across the street from the
Republican.
The elevator operator would take Jane up to the ninth floor. Suite 909, at the end of a tiled stretch of corridor, had a long, skinny waiting room, Dr. Butzner’s consulting room in the corner, and two small treatment rooms.

Sometimes, there were still patients waiting to be seen, in which case Jane would wait like everyone else for Dr. Butzner to be free. If she was restless, she could step over to the window and take in the view of Scranton to the north and east; the city was set in a bowl, hills rising around it. It was uncanny on how small a stage the last few years of her life had played out. Sighting down from her ninth-floor perch to Washington Avenue below, she could see, a few blocks north, the girls’ entrance to Central High, poking out from the bulk of her old school building; across from it, the high, steeply pitched roof and dormer gables of the Albright, the library she loved; and then, just across the street, the Powell School and the offices of the
Republican.

Once her father was free, she’d go in, he’d put down the medical journal he was likely reading, and they’d talk. Sometimes about weighty,
even philosophical subjects. More often about patients he’d treated or stories she was covering for the paper. Did they go on from these, her early journalistic efforts, to what she might do next, to career goals, to grand plans for the future? If so, they were soon rendered moot. Because, by the late spring of 1934, her year at the
Republican
was over, Scranton was seven hundred miles behind her along the backbone of the Appalachians to the north, and Jane was in North Carolina, beginning the third “semester” of her post–high school education.

—

In the early years of the twentieth century, an ex-librarian and sometime adventurer named Horace Kephart dispatched his wife and six children back up north to Ithaca, New York, traveled through the Great Smoky Mountains, fell in with local backwoodsmen, and stayed. Later, he wrote a book about them,
Our Southern Highlanders
, which told of bear hunting and moonshining, of local people never getting around to chinking up their drafty wood-slatted cabins, of local accents so thick an outsider, a “furriner,” could scarcely understand them, of people who wanted nothing but to be left alone. Where Jane found herself now, in the spring of 1934, in Higgins, North Carolina, was about the same distance through the dense hollows of the Pisgah mountains to the north and east of Asheville as Kephart had explored to the west. The locals here were not Scots-Irish, though, but
mostly of English stock; the village had been founded by three Higgins brothers and their families in the early 1700s. Various and sundry Higginses—Dewey, Edith, Lizzie, Viola, Hoover, and Carrie were some of them—still lived here, virtually all Higgins residents tracing their lineage back to the three brothers.

Near Higgins, not far from Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, hills rose to five and six thousand feet. The whole mountain region was one of unspeakable beauty, range after range of peaks fading into one another in the distance, all enveloped in the mists that made the Smoky Mountains appear smoky and the Blue Ridge Mountains blue. Place-names like Bee Log, Bald Mountain, and Crooked Creek studded the map. But the roads were so rude or nonexistent, that, until recently, many people Jane met had never set foot in the county seat, Burnsville, population 866, just twelve miles away. The people were so poor, she’d write, “that the
snapping of a pitchfork or the rusting of a plow posed a serious financial crisis.” Jane’s explanation for how she’d wound
up here? “My parents,” she would write, “thought I should get a good look at a very
different and interesting kind of life.” But maybe, you can hear it said among the family today, maybe it was as much Jane getting on her poor mother’s nerves:
Well, now, Jane
, we hear Mrs. Butzner saying,
why don’t you just go down and visit your aunt Martha…

A local paper
noted Jane’s coming, as it did that of almost everyone else arriving in the mountain hamlet.

Higgins, May 17. (Special). Miss Jane Butzner of Scranton, Pa., has arrived at this place to spend the summer. Miss Butzner is the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. J. D. Butzner. Since her graduation from the Scranton High School and the Powell Business College she has been a reporter on the Scranton Republican. She expects to continue her writing while here, as well as assist in the various community activities being outlined for the summer. She is a niece of Miss Robison and is a member of the Sunshine Cottage family.

The news squib didn’t need to say who Miss Robison was. Miss Robison was Jane’s aunt Martha, her mother’s sister, the big-bodied, round-faced fifty-nine-year-old ball of energy and devotion who, in important ways,
was
Higgins. She and Bess had grown up together in Espy and Bloomsburg and attended the Normal School there. But Martha, five years older, was the more driven of the two. She knew the alphabet at two years of age, was writing at three, could read at six. Her intelligence and personal force were of the kind that, by century’s end, would yield a generation of high-powered women lawyers and executives; Martha became a high-powered missionary. When in 1930 the census taker came to her house in Higgins, that’s just how she replied, plain and simple, when asked her occupation:
Missionary.

“Bible study, a godly Sunday School teacher and other influences,” she’d write, “led me to give my life to the Lord for fulltime service at 18 years of age.” After leaving Bloomsburg, she’d taken short courses in religious education at Auburn Theological Seminary, worked for the Sunday School Association for fifteen years, and in 1920 she finally came to the Presbyterian Church’s Board of National Missions. She “never thought seriously of any other work,” she’d write, and by the time Jane reached Higgins in 1934, Martha had been the guiding light of the missionary center there for twelve years.

On a trip north in 1928, Martha told a gathering of church people how her great adventure had started. It was on “a
wet, murky, gloomy January day” in 1922 after riding twelve miles along muddy roads to reach Higgins. Her assigned task was to use the scant money provided her to set up, over three months, a house for a permanent missionary worker, then move on. Instead, she remained for seventeen years, until shortly before her death. In the valley that reached a mile or two north and south of the blip on the map that was Higgins (though few maps noted it at all) and up the sides of the mountains flanking it, she found squalor, the local school rarely in session, a Sunday school that had never functioned for so much as a year at a time, a local preacher who boasted he hadn’t learned to read until he learned to preach and who could not be persuaded that the world was round.

Early on, the story goes, Martha stumbled on some mechanical gear remarkably cleaner than anything else around—
part of a still, naturally, that hardy staple of Appalachian moonshining lore. But Martha found others of her prejudices undercut. It was “most unfair,” she’d tell her northern audience in 1928, “to describe extremes as though they were typical and to make general and sweeping assertions” of the mountain people. She found among them men and women stuck firmly in the past, but others forward looking; some intelligent, others “not only illiterate, but whose minds are closed to all that means growth and broadening of life.”

One day, listening to an egregiously ignorant religious debate among some of the locals, she was seized by the “
overwhelming conviction” to stay right where she was and try to better the community. She set about building up the Sunday school. She began men’s bible classes, directed plays at the church, managed to prop up its finances. In the early days, sometimes forty or fifty children would crowd into her own modest house for bible school lessons. For seven years, with little support, she struggled.

Then, in the second week of November 1929, two weeks after the stock market crash, she
received a letter from her cousin, John Markle, a wealthy Pennsylvania coal baron. Markle had learned of her work in Higgins, taken an interest in it, and wanted to help, with money. A few days later, in tones of mingled gratitude, astonishment, and hardheaded practicality, Martha wrote him back, sketching in some of what she’d done in Higgins, and outlining her needs: a school, a building to house
it with room for craftwork, and an infirmary; recently, a little girl had almost died before they could get her to Asheville, forty miles away. The list went on. “You see, all these things for our work I’ve been dreaming about—but
never dared think they would ever, any of them, come to pass. I think the heavenly Father,” she added, “must have put in your heart the idea of helping some of these dreams to come true.” Early the following year, Markle
promised to give $25,000 toward Martha’s work, an amount today worth half a million or more.

Soon the money was flowing south and a building was going up, with a mansard roof and great stone chimneys, like a chateau lifted intact from the French countryside. The first floor had a community library, a health unit, and a meeting room; the second floor was divided into three spaces, for woodwork, weaving, and pottery. “
The spaces are all ample and yet hospitable and folksy,” Markle heard in a letter from the Presbyterian Board of National Missions in 1931.
Film footage shot probably around the same time shows a small level area in front of the Markle building and the adjacent minister’s house, with a few automobiles; it’s the only such area around, the rest of the site rising up toward the surrounding hills. We see movement and bustle, working men in overalls, suspenders, and caps, a little island of modernity conferring big-city grace notes on the otherwise isolated mountain community.

Soon, local people were making quilts, chairs, and brooms of
tightly tufted straw, working the three looms on the second floor. And soon outsiders were coming to see what Martha (and cousin John) had wrought. “Welcome,” declared a sign, in artfully inscribed letters, beside the road, to the