Dining Alone - The sushi bar

Hiroshige - "Bowl of Sushi" 19th century

If you're not familiar with Japanese cuisine, the sushi bar might seem challenging. But a sushi bar is a place where anyone can feel comfortable dining alone. Except you're actually not alone. When you sit at the sushi bar, you are in a relationship with a true artist of food - the sushi chef, or itamae.

Los Angeles is home to many trendy sushi bars, where you can get fabulous concoctions and fusion-inspired combinations, complete with grilled pineapples, waving insect antennae crafted from carrots, mayonnaise-based sauces and fried fish skeletons - but Hide Sushi on Sawtelle Boulevard isn't one of them.

It's just a small neighborhood joint, simple and friendly. There are about eight chairs at the sushi bar, and a handful of tables in the small room. Have a seat at the sushi bar. Hide Sushi has three chefs working during a busy weekend lunch hour.

When the hostess seats you, she offers a warm damp towel. This is to clean your hands. Do so, and then fold the towel and place it so that you can use it again to wipe your fingers while you eat. You order hot food, drinks, soup, etc. from the waitress. You order sushi and sashimi from the sushi chef. That's the way it works.

The sushi bar has a raised shelf above the main part of the table. The chef will put a plate - usually a rectangular platter - on this shelf, and upon it you'll find a thimble-sized nub of green wasabi and a flower-sized cluster of finely sliced pickled ginger. Be patient. Take your time. The itamae may be working on someone else's order.

I usually watch politely as he works, then wait for a subtle signal like a nod, or eye contact. You can ask for something you like. Or you can ask for what he recommends. What's good? What's in fresh today? If you wish, you can ask for omakase or chef's choice, which means you put yourself in his hands. He may ask you what you like, or if there's something you don't like.

If you want a long and varied meal, start with sashimi - this is simply raw fish, sliced and served without rice. Sometimes it will come with a simple sauce or flavored oil, or a sprinkling of herbs like scallions or shizo leaf. You eat sashimi with chopsticks. You can get something called chirashi-sushi that is sashimi served on top of sushi rice in a bowl.

The chef will place the sushi on the platter. Keep the platter on the upper shelf for his convenience. You may be given another plate to keep in front of you - or he may serve some kinds on their own platter, especially if they are served with sauce.

"Sushi" means the rice, not the fish. The rice is flavored with vinegar, and it's served with toppings, fillings, or condiments. There are mainly four different styles.

Tuna, yellowtail and octopus nigirizushi and cucumber, oshinko and pickled plum makizushi

Nigirizushi is rice pressed into an oblong about the size of your thumb. A slice of fish or seafood is laid on top of it - often with a bit of wasabi, or the grated root of a plant similar to horseradish. Nigirizushi is usually served two pieces to the order.

Makizushi is made by lining a sheet of dried seaweed, or nori, with rice, topping it with fillings, and then rolling it up into a tight cylinder. The cylinder is then cut into bit-size pieces - an order may have five or six pieces. You can have small maki, with just one filling, or you can have larger maki - futomaki - made with an assortment of fillers. California rolls are a kind of futomaki.

Gunkanmaki (or battleship roll) - is similar to nigirizushi, with a pressed oval of rice topped with seafood, but it's wrapped with a collar of nori to help enclose a topping that's loose - like fish eggs - or soft, like sea urchin.

Temaki are also called handrolls. A sheet of nori is rolled into a cone, and filled up with ingredients like an ice-cream cone.

If you worry about it, the etiquette of eating sushi is somewhat daunting. It's good to know what NOT to do, that might offend the chef. But the rules are pretty simple, and in Los Angeles today, I think most sushi chefs have seen just about anything, and are pretty tolerant.

At Hide Sushi, the chef who served me was a dignified and quiet man with a nice smile, and it would have pained me to be impolite to him. And while I'm too tongue-tied to speak to him in the few Japanese phrases I know, I do try to remember these basic steps:

1) Don't scrape your chopsticks together as though to rub off splinters. This implies the chopsticks are cheap, so it's an insult.

2) Pour a little soy sauce in the dish, but don't mix wasabi in it. The chef has flavored your sushi as he intended, so trust him. If you find you'd like more wasabi on the sushi, ask the chef to put more on the next piece he makes for you.

3) Dip the fish side into the soy, not the rice side.

4) It's OK to eat with your fingers, or with chopsticks. I use my fingers.

5) Try to eat the sushi in one bite - or if you have to eat it in two bites, do so at once, don't put a bitten-in-half piece back on the platter. I'm told American sushi tends to be bigger than that served in Japan. I have to take two bites for most, except the small maki.

The pickled ginger is meant to be a palate cleanser between different flavors. I take a tiny sliver with my chopsticks, and I love the spicy taste.

L to R top: Saba (mackerel), Sake (salmon), Ebi (shrimp) nigirizushi. Bottom: Maguro (tuna), Yellowtail nigirizushi, Tobiko gunkanmaki

I like simple sushi - I don't generally go in for the fancy rolls. I like plain good fish like fatty tuna, albacore, and yellowtail. I also like the salty, strong-tasting mackerel, called saba in Japanese. I also like scallops, and ankimo (or monkfish liver), and tobiko, or flying fish roe with tiny bright red eggs that crunch between my teeth. I'm not a fan of sea urchin, and while I like octopus all right I have hard time chewing it. One of my favorite maki rolls is oshinko-maki, which is just pickled daikon - I love its odd taste and its vegetable crunch.

Cherry blossoms on the sidewalk in front of Hide Sushi

The simple and traditional fare served at Hide Sushi makes me remember when I first ate sushi with my dad, in New York City. I lived in the Village and worked in dingy lofts on the Lower East Side doing theatre, and my dad commuted into town from New Jersey to work for corporate clients as a consultant. Sometimes he'd invite me to lunch. The part of town where he worked was filled with Japanese restaurants and ramen shops, and sushi shops. It was the 1970s, but in Manhattan, on Third Avenue in midtown, no one was making California rolls.

I never sat at a sushi bar with Dad, we always sat at the dining tables. I don't know, now, whether he sat at the bar when he visited these restaurants alone. I like to think that he did - he was exactly the kind of person who would have enjoyed the polite, somewhat ritualized relationship between customer and sushi chef.

Great Uncle George's Guide to Paris

When I was cleaning out my mom’s house this spring, I found a lot of things that belonged to my father’s mother’s family. Much belonged to my great aunts, the old ladies that raised my Dad, bullied him, supported him and loved him. But in one old secretary, I found some things that had belonged to their brother, my Great Uncle George.

George with his little sister, my Great Aunt Snow

George was the Ole Sourpuss’s only son. Born in 1884, he was a boy with five sisters. As an adult, he worked in the lumber business. He married, but died in 1921, at the age of 38, with no children. His obituary doesn't state the cause of death, other than an unnamed illness.

The cluttered drawer of the secretary held an autograph book from high school, and two small red-bound travel guides. As we were clearing the house, at the last minute I decided to keep Great Uncle George’s books. I wrapped them up in newsprint, and stuffed them in a box along with some photos and letters.

Saturday while checking the windows and doors, in preparation for our trip, my eye fell on the compact newsprint package on a pile of books in the living room. I opened it.

Just as I'd remembered, it was George's Baedeker's Guide to Paris. Published in 1900, it has George's signature on the flyleaf, dated May 27, 1901. He would have been eighteen. Perhaps a gift for his birthday - was he given the traditional coming-of-age tour of Europe many educated American families gave their young sons? Or perhaps he just dreamed of seeing Paris.

George as a young man

Paris in 1901 was different from the Paris we think of - much of the legends of arts and letters that form our image of Paris took place in the 1920s, after the war. In George's Baedeker, an essay on the Art of France praises Delacroiz, Ingres and Corot, with barely a mention of "impressionists Degas, Monet, Pissaro, Renoir, Raffaelli and their friends, whose aim is to reproduce a momentary effect."


Great Uncle George's Guide to Paris is a small, compact little book, with a binding the color of ripe red plums, and gold letters. It has wonderfully detailed maps in a section at the back, that accordion out.

I slipped it into my purse just before we left. It's here with me, now, in Paris. If George didn't get a chance to visit Paris, he's getting one now.

Old Houses

The Libby House, Angelino Heights, Los Angeles

As a second grader, in St. Charles, Illinois, I walked to school through an older residential neighborhood. There was one old wooden house that was tall and had a funny sloping roof, spiky iron railings and lots of carved wooden decoration. It looked like cartoons in a book my parents had.

Charles Addams cartoon from "Monster Rally"

When we moved to Batavia, Illinois a year later, I was allowed to go to the Public Library after school. It was an old limestone house, two-storied with porches and gables and a big wooden staircase. It was wonderful to sit at the small tables in the bay windows of the old house and read.

One of the books I read was Jane Langton's "The Diamond in the Window", where Edward and Eleanor Hall's old Victorian family home is threatened by local busybodies, who view its architecture an eyesore in the historic town of Concord, Massachusetts. "A monstrosity of course," says one. "Those dreadful towers, those turrets." But Edward and Eleanor contemplate their house:

All the other houses on the street were neat white buildings with dark shutters and simple pitched roofs. Out from among them mushroomed the Hall's house like an exotic tropical plant in a field of New England daisies. It was a great wooden Gothico-Byzantine structure, truly in need of painting. Big as it was, it looked airy and light, as thought the wind might pick it up and carry it away. Screened porches ballooned and billowed out of it all around, and domes and towers puffed up at the top as thought they were filled with air.

I read "The Secret Garden" about Mary Lennox exploring the many closed-up rooms in Misselthwaite Manor. I read about the crumbling old lakeside homes in Elizabeth Enright's "Gone-Away Lake." Nancy Drew was always exploring old houses like Blackwood Hall and Heath Castle, solving mysteries, and it thrilled me.

In my small Illinois town, and later in Cincinnati, there were many neighborhoods where old houses remained. I always liked to look at them - usually from the car window as we drove on errands. I wished I could live in one, instead of in the brand new, boring ranch house I lived in.

Photo of house in Deal, N.J. from Library of Congress Historic American Building Survey

We next moved to New Jersey. Great sprawling shingled estates sat behind overgrown hedges in Rumson and Atlantic Highlands. Huge rambling seaside cottages lined the highway running through the beach towns of Deal, Monmouth Beach and Long Branch, set among the run-down carnival games and band pavilions.

Victorian Village house, Columbus, Ohio - photo from Webshots

I went to college in Columbus, Ohio. After the dorm, I rented a house south of campus with some other girls. It was a neighborhood of fantastic turreted houses, red brick with ornate decor - slate roofs and carved brickwork, in the style called Richardsonian Romanesque. My boyfriend had a studio apartment fashioned from the ground floor parlor of such a house - there was a built-in room divider with balls threaded onto wooden dowels. I remember that woodwork more clearly than I remember our relationship.

Every time we moved, my parents never bought an old house. It was always a new house - in fact, in most cases it was a newly built house. I always wondered why.

By the 1920s, the architecture of the turn of the century was out of fashion. The elaborate decor of the Queen Annes had given way to the spare simplicity of the arts-and-crafts bungalow.

Photo of house on Bunker Hill, L.A. from Library of Congress Historic American Building Survey

It was almost as if people were embarrassed by Victorian houses. Many were torn down in the 1920s as cities expanded and older residential areas became commercial zones and low-income neighborhoods. Those that survived became rooming houses, or were divided into apartments. They lost their fanciful wooden trim which was expensive to maintain. Owners repainted them in plain colors, covering up the bright multiple color schemes. Billowing porches were walled in to create more rooms - or torn off the houses altogether.

Edward Hopper loved painting Victorian houses. His 1925 "House by the Railroad," shows such a house, isolated by the changing urban landscape. His biographer Sheena Wagstaff describes his fascination with:

our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo-gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not, with eye-searing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps.

The negative image of Victorian architecture was reinforced - whether on purpose or not - by Hollywood. During the 1940s and 1950s, Bunker Hill with its crumbling tenements and decaying Victorian mansions, made a perfect location for movies about crime, poverty, and squalor.

From LACMA Collections online

Artists and writers lived on Bunker Hill because rents were cheap. Millard Sheets captured Bunker Hill in this 1931 painting titled "Angels Flight." It shows the back-alley clotheslines, the jumble of buildings, and dizzying height of the hill rising above Broadway. You can imagine Arturo Bandini, the hero of John Fante's "Ask the Dust" climbing out the windows of the rooming house below.

When I first started looking to buy a home, I searched the older neighborhoods of Seattle, which were the ones I could afford and also the ones I was drawn to because of the older housing stock. Although I dreamed of finding a beautiful old treasure I could restore, the reality was more modest. I could afford an old house, but I wasn't skilled enough to do the work myself. And I couldn't afford to pay someone. So we bought a little cottage, old but stripped of its charm by a 1950s remodel. Then we sold it for a good price, and bought a larger old house, remodeled by a speculator. Our house was a 1911 four-square, with beautiful lines and spacious rooms, but its new sheet-rock and modern kitchen lacked the mystery and sense of history I longed for.

Among my family's keepsakes is this photo of a house. I think it is the home built by my great grandfather on Swiss Avenue in Dallas, Texas. He was a prominent leader of the Methodist Church, and in 1896, when he moved his family to Dallas, Swiss Avenue was one of the best neighborhoods in town. The house is as fine an example of Victorian architecture as anything in a museum or historic preservation district.

My father was raised in this house. The Old Sourpuss died in 1915, and my great-grandmother died in 1929. The 1930 census shows my father living there with his parents, his two unmarried aunts Snow and Hattie, and a lodger. At some point, my father's parents divorced. In 1934 Aunt Louie Boyd, a widow now, came back to Dallas from Abilene. In 1933 the house was remodeled into separate apartments. My father was raised in a crumbling Victorian house with his mother and three unmarried aunts.

It was the Depression, and times were hard. A comparison between the 1920 and 1930 census shows how the neighborhood declined. In 1920, single families headed by teachers, contractors, managers, publishers, shopkeepers lived on this block. By 1930, there were waitresses, clerks, mechanics, seamstresses and salesladies - many living as roomers and lodgers.

It must have been hard to be a teenage boy living with a bunch of middle-aged ladies. They were strong-minded ladies, too - especially Hattie, who possessed a missionary's zeal.

Perhaps when my father started his own family, he didn't want to be reminded of living in a shabby old Victorian rooming house. He wanted smooth drywall, fresh paint, modern bathrooms. He wanted firm concrete patios instead of shaky Victorian balconies with dry-rot and broken balusters. A built-in garage for a modern car, not a shed for a Model A Ford. He wanted a house that broke ground in new land, where no house had been built before.

As a child, I never saw a photograph of the house my father grew up in - I saw it for the first time last fall. It's exactly like the house I've always longed to own.

Miss Hattie's true love

My father's Aunt Hattie led an interesting and fulfilling life. She made a big impact on her community, and people in her circle.

But one of the most interesting things about Aunt Hattie is her private life.

In 1919, Hattie, at the age of 30, became engaged to a man who was the love of her life. His name was George T. Moore, and although they had met decades earlier when her father preached at Shearn Methodist Church in Houston, they met again, fell in love, and pledged themselves to one another in 1919.

Only there was a hitch.

George's mother had died when he was young, and he'd been raised by his aunt, Miss Mollie. Miss Mollie could not bear to think of George leaving her, and so the couple decided to keep their engagement - their entire relationship, even - a secret from her. Once she passed away, they reasoned, they could marry.

Well, Miss Mollie was a healthy old thing. Hattie threw herself into her church work while she waited for George, spending years in San Antonio, Abilene, Austin and in West Dallas, ministering to people, helping the poor, advocating for people without a voice, and inserting herself into peoples' lives in general.

A woman with the drive and energy to overcome resistance and to venture into difficult situations can also be a woman with an annoying tendency toward bossiness, especially toward members of her own family. While Hattie directed her romantic frustrations toward the poor and downtrodden, she also bossed her sisters around, especially her baby sister, my grandmother. My mother later told tales of Hattie's meddling in Ruth's shaky marriage.

In 1937, Miss Mollie passed away, and finally George and Hattie were free to marry. She quit her good works, and joined him in Houston. He was sixty-five, she was fifty-seven.

Were they happy? It's hard to know. I wonder whether they got used to being single for so long. Was it a big adjustment, to finally live together in holy matrimony? And Hattie, of course, gave up her work, which meant so much to her. That's what women did, in those days.

In her scrapbook, I found two valentines they exchanged - one from George to Hattie. It's an off-the-rack card, with slogans and a poem to "My Wife," but it is without a signature. Not a man of many words, George.

Hattie kept her valentine to George, too - another off-the-rack card, with a sentimental poem. Which she signed, "Your Hattie."

George passed away only four years after they married, in 1941. I hope that he and Hattie enjoyed their time together, finally.

Aunt Louie Boyd's piano

Piano showroom ad from the Henry Piano Company, 1909

My great grandfather had five daughters and one son. His youngest daughter was my grandmother, who died before I was born. Another daughter was my Great-Aunt Snow, who was the closest thing to a grandmother I ever knew.

The daughter that made the greatest mark on the world was my Great-Aunt Hattie, who had things named after her that still are around today.

But there was another daughter who was blessed with talent, beauty, and brains, but whose mark on the world has faded. I want to bring back her memory.

My great-grandfather's third daughter Louie Boyd was born in 1881. I don't know why they named her that. But she was always called both names together, "Louie-Boyd."

Here she is with her sister Hattie, in front of their Houston home in 1896 or so, just before the family moved to Dallas.

Louie Boyd was a talented pianist, studying with prominent musicians. By the time she was twenty, she was teaching piano at Kidd-Key Conservatory, a music and fine arts school in Sherman, Texas.


The town of Sherman was known as the "Athens of Texas" because of the many institutions of higher learning located there. It was the home of North Texas Female College, supported by the NorthTexas Methodist Conference, and Austin College, a men's school, supported by the Presbyterian Church. Two other womens' schools were located in Sherman, affiliated with the Baptist Church and the Disciples of Christ church.

North Texas Female College's Music and Fine Arts Conservatory had been founded by Mrs. Lucy Ann Kidd-Key. In 1897 she recruited Finnish composer and pianist Harold von Mickwitz to be director of the music program.

Pencil sketch of Mickwitz from the 1931 yearbook of Austin College, Sherman, TX.

Maestro Mickwitz taught many Texas women, and gained a devoted following among Texas piano teachers, including Aunt Louie Boyd, who, later in life, was an active member of Dallas' Mickwitz Club. The club presented piano concerts honoring the Maestro, and Aunt Louie Boyd helped edit his memoirs. Louie Boyd served on the music faculty at Kidd-Key for eight years.


By 1907 Louie Boyd was back in Dallas, teaching piano students. The Dallas Morning News announced her recitals, where her students played pieces ranging from "The Little Story of a Mouse" and "The Elephant's Dance", to Mozart's "Concerto in D Minor." She had a studio in Dallas' Bush Temple of Music.

Louie Boyd, as a teacher of piano

Another Mickwitz protegee was an Abilene girl named Nettie Tillett. In 1912, she performed in Dallas with other Mickwitz students. She was a talented musician and by 1914 she was on the Music faculty at Simmons College in her home town.

Nettie's father was a State Senator, lawyer, and Judge. Her mother was an interesting person, as documents show she was enrolled as an Art student at Simmons College while in her 40's. In 1918 Nettie's mother died - her death certificate lists the cause as "apoplexy", so it must have been a sudden death and a terrible shock to her family.

Were Nettie and Louie Boyd friends? They were only seven years apart. Or had Louie Boyd, as a member of Mickwitz's faculty, taught Nettie? Did they socialize or meet one another's families?

In any case, in 1920, Nettie's father, the recently widowed Judge Tillett, married my Great-Aunt Louie Boyd. He was twenty years her senior. She was only seven years older than his daughter Nettie, and only four years older than his oldest son, Smith.

Louie Boyd, undated hand-colored photo

She and the Judge lived in Abilene. The family home on Butternut Street was given over to the Judge's son, Junior, but the newlyweds lived just a few doors down, in a newly built brick house.

The Judge was an outspoken man, writing letters to the Dallas newspapers on subjects ranging from politics to religion. The couple hosted dinners at their home to entertain the Judge's distinguished colleagues. Louie Boyd is included in the guest list at a 1927 gala luncheon, where the wealth brought to the community by the oil boom was gaudily celebrated. Table decor included miniature oil derricks, and the color scheme reflected the symbolism of the bounty of oil - with florals of golden jonquils, and a signature cocktail called "Liquid Gold" served in orange shells with be-ribboned straws.

It's easy to wonder about the family dynamic. Did the Judge's children welcome their new stepmother or see her as a gold-digger? As the new, socially active wife of a distinguished man, did Louie Boyd like the glamor and glitz? Did she enjoy entertaining politicians twenty years older than she, or did she feel out of place? As a Dallas girl, did she find Abilene a small-town back-water, or was the Judge's status a step up for her?

Meanwhile, Nettie's career continued, and she became the director of the Fort Worth Conservatory of Music, part of Texas Christian University. Did Louie Boyd envy her young friend, and miss the world of music she'd given up? In 1929, the brilliant young pianist Bomar Cramer came to Abilene to present a concert, and Louie Boyd was interviewed by the local paper. She'd known him as a young student during her years at Kidd-Key, and is quoted praising his talent. You can sense a wistful tinge of envy, as the article quotes recent New York and Chicago rave reviews, while Louie Boyd remembers his young days at Kidd-Key.

In March of 1930, Judge Tillett had a heart attack and died. He was 69 years old, and Louie Boyd was 49.

My mother has always hinted, darkly, that there may be something more sinister to the Judge's passing. As she recalls the tales, the Judge may have been overextended financially, and the crash of the market drove him to despair. One clue that supports this is a classified ad that appeared in the Abilene paper in 1927 where "Mrs. Tillett" seeks a gentlemen boarder for a room with a private entrance in her new brick home - could the couple have been experiencing financial troubles? Did the Judge take matters into his own hands? My mother cites the fact that the news coverage of his death is minimal, which is odd considering his celebrated service to the community during his life.

The 1930 census, taken only a month after the Judge's death, shows Louie Boyd living in her home with two gentlemen roomers and three servants. Her profession is listed as "Piano Teacher." In August, a news article announces her opening of her piano studio.

The Judge's death must have left her strapped financially, if she needed to earn her living again. Or did she return to teaching for the love of music?

It was the beginning of the Depression, and times were tough for everyone. Louie Boyd tried to make a go of it in Abilene, but by 1934 she'd had enough. She returned to Dallas, moved back into the family home on Swiss Avenue with her sisters Hattie and Snow, and announced the opening of her Dallas piano studio.

For the next fifteen years, Louie Boyd taught piano, participated in Dallas musical activities, and taught at the Dallas-based Southwestern Conservatory of Fine Arts.

She and other ladies of the Mickwitz Club were featured in the news for organizing a concert to honor their mentor. Here she is, on the left. Don't they look like the Pick-a-little-Talk-a-little ladies?

Like her husband, she wrote many letters to the editor on subjects ranging from politics to music to culture, and she was outspoken. In 1941 she wrote to take issue with politician Pappy O'Daniel's use of popular music for his campaign rallies.

In 1951, she moved to Houston along with my grandmother. Her health was poor, and she had taken time off from teaching. The next few years would be difficult. At some point during this time, finances forced Louie Boyd to sell her piano. In a 1954 letter, her sister Snow talks about how "heartbreaking" it had been, how it "liked to have killed her."

Although Aunt Louie Boyd sent me birthday cards and Christmas checks, I only met her in person one time. In the 1960s, my family visited her and Aunt Snow in Houston. By this time, Louie Boyd was in her eighties, and in poor health. I remember that her hands were crippled and twisted with arthritis. It must have been particularly hard for her not to be able to use her hands to make music. Only one old and blurry photo remains of her at from that time.

When she died, at the age of 85 in 1966, her sister Snow moved into a residence hotel. She shipped Louie Boyd's belongings up to Illinois, where my Mom let me help unpack them.

Today, I have the Haviland china service and the silver flatware mongrammed with the Tillett "T", that Aunt Louie Boyd and her husband used to entertain guests in their Abilene home. I have her medallion, the rather awful memento to her father's memory.

Announcements for Louie Boyd's students' piano recitals appeared in the Dallas Morning News, starting in 1907 and through1949. That's 42 years of little girls playing "The Happy Farmer" and "Spring Song" - plus the occasional brilliant student who would go on to outshine the teacher. Louie Boyd must have known how to coax simple tunes from clumsy fingers, and to recognize talent when she encountered it.

I studied piano myself as a young girl. And, frankly, I was terrible. I hated practicing, and I was a sullen student, mediocre at best. Now I wonder how much better I could have been if I'd had a teacher like my Aunt Louie Boyd, a woman who lived her life for her music.

Miss Hattie's legacy

In 1935, a middle-aged Dallas church worker read a newspaper story about a hardened criminal who'd been sentenced to die in the electric chair in a few days. His mother was visiting him for one last time at the penitentiary.

For the last few years, the papers had been filled with stories about Ray Hamilton and the murderous crimes he committed with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, before they were gunned down by a posse. The Barrow gang had sprung him from jail in 1934, and since then he'd gone on a crime spree of his own, robbing banks and shooting it out with the law. He'd finally been captured in April of 1935, and was sentenced to die.

Raymond Hamilton

Though there was no doubt the man deserved justice, the church worker was moved to tears by his mother's grief, and the hard realities of the poverty in West Dallas that would lead a man to pursue a life of crime.

She was no stranger to disadvantaged people. She'd just returned to her family home in Dallas after working for several years at the Methodist Mission in San Antonio. There, she'd ministered to unwed mothers, alcoholics, orphaned children.

She got into her car, a Model A Ford, and drove to West Dallas, to the home of Ray Hamilton's mother, Mrs. Steve Davis, and knocked on the door.

According to a Dallas Morning News story written seven years later, Miss Hattie knocked on the door and Mrs. Davis tried to turn her away. She persisted, saying, "My heart aches for you. I want to pray for you." Mrs. Davis opened the door.

During the days that followed, Miss Hattie comforted and ministered to the grief-stricken woman. She prayed with the family during the long night of Ray Hamilton's execution, and helped arrange his funeral.

Miss Hattie stayed in West Dallas and rented a small house across the street, and began to hold church services and Sunday school classes there. She went door to door in the rough neighborhood, encouraging people to attend and send their kids. By the end of the summer, over 100 people were attending services at the Eagle Ford Mission, including Mrs. Henry Barrow, the mother of the deceased bandit Clyde Barrow. She promised to bring with her "a gang of people who never saw the inside of a church."

The mission flourished, and as Miss Hattie raised more funds, a new building was built and the Eagle Ford Mission was renamed Rankin Chapel in her honor.

Miss Hattie continued to minister to people whose lives were hard, and to those who were outcast by mainstream society. It wasn't enough for her to simply bring them to the Lord, she wanted to make sure they had something else in life besides crime. A missed opportunity that led to tragedy strengthened her efforts.

Some of the neighborhood boys promised they'd come to Sunday school if the chapel sponsored a team. Miss Hattie did her best to raise money for equipment, but was unsuccessful. The team remained nothing more than a wish. A few weeks later, she opened her morning newspaper to see that four of the boys had gotten into trouble, brawling and beating an old man to death with a beer bottle. They were charged with murder.

As she wrote in a letter to the editor: "Folks wonder why so many West Dallas boys turn out to be criminals.... they haven't a dog's chance to be anything else. We have no parks, no playgrounds, no handy schools, no lights, no water, no gas. The dogs in Dallas are housed better than our boys and girls."

Miss Hattie was my father's Aunt. His mother was her baby sister. My father's parents had divorced, and my grandmother needed help caring for him. She and her two unmarried sisters still lived in their family home on Swiss Avenue. In 1935 my father would have been eleven years old, just approaching the age when a young boy could get into trouble. Perhaps Aunt Hattie felt that he was in need of spiritual guidance, so she took him with her on her trips to West Dallas - my father used to tell stories about riding in Aunt Hattie's Model A Ford to West Dallas during the time when many police officers were afraid to go there.

Floyd Hamilton was on the loose, running from the law. Floyd was even more notorious than his brother Raymond had been. He had run with the Barrow Gang, but then broke with them, wanting to pull off bigger and grander jobs. He and his partner terrorized the South, killing police officers and robbing banks, stores, and even a Coca-Cola bottling plant near Nashville.

But Aunt Hattie had no fear of Floyd Hamilton. When she began her Sunday School services, she had borrowed his back yard to hold classes. She remained friends with Floyd Hamilton after his arrest in 1938, and corresponded with him while he was incarcerated at Alcatraz.

Photo, Texas filling station 1931, Library of Congress

In 1941, James A. Johnston, warden of Alcatraz prison came to Dallas for a law enforcement conference, and spoke about the issues of Youth and Crime. He said that most of his charges shared a common background of poverty, abuse and lack of education. "We find a record of broken homes, poverty, gangsterism in mere children. There is no escaping the fact that they suffered from lack of training for good citizenship."

According to those who knew him, Clyde Barrow's motivation for the Barrow Gang's murderous crime spree was the brutal treatment he received at the hands of the Texas juvenile justice system, and the tendency of police to blame poor kids from West Dallas for all crimes. His rationale may be self-serving - but by the late 1930's many voices were calling for reform of the Texas prison system.

In 1936, Aunt Hattie knew instinctively what criminologists and sociologists accept as truth today - that lifting young people out of poverty fights crime as effectively as armed posses and electric chairs.

In 1943, Floyd Hamilton and two other men attempted a daring escape from the high security prison. He did not succeed. Surviving the cold waters of the bay, he hid in an onshore cave before sneaking back into the prison, where he was apprehended and returned to his cell. Aunt Hattie continued to write him.

In 1951, another warden from Alcatraz, E.B. Swope, came to Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reported that he visited Aunt Hattie, crediting her with Floyd Hamilton's rehabilitation. "Your counsel and spiritual advice have changed the man immeasurably."

Floyd Hamilton was later released, and lived a quiet life until his death in 1986.

The Wesley Rankin Community Center still serves West Dallas today. The city of Dallas' Hattie Rankin Moore Park in West Dallas provides a recreation center and swimming pool for local kids.

Thematic Photographic - Floral

This week at Thematic Photographic, Carmi asks us to explore the theme FLORAL. So share some flowers with us - real ones, and maybe some that are less literal, expanding our horizons.


We were cleaning out my mother's house to put it on sale, and I was emptying the cabinets in her bathroom. There were a lot of cabinets, and they were all full of stuff. I found some packages wrapped in brown paper. They clanked a little, so I was gentle when I unwrapped them.

What I found turned out to be this extraordinary construction - four ruffled trumpet-shaped glass vessels, and a strange flat dish with an odd pedestal in the center. The glass horns fit into it, and looked like uplifted flowers.

Fresh out of the dishwasher, all cleaned up. An odd, awkward yet magnificent piece. What the heck was it?

Well, I learned that it is something called an epergne - A late Victorian vessel for displaying elaborate floral arrangements. They would also be used to display fruits and sometimes sweetmeats for festive occasions. Some epergnes have little trays and baskets to hold tidbits. This one appears to be more geared for flower arrangements.

The tradition began in England and France during the eighteenth century, when they were often made of silver. During the Victorian era, the tradition was revived, and epergnes were often made of art glass. The Fenton Art Glass Company from West Virginia, made elaborate epergnes from milk glass, carnival glass, opalescent glass, and hobnail glass. The online photos at eBay of Fenton epergnes look an awful lot like this one, so I wonder if perhaps it's a Fenton piece.

I have to admit, when I got it assembled, it was so ridiculous-looking it made me want to laugh.

Where did it come from? It was certainly not anything I remembered from childhood. My parents' home had became the repository of things - both junk and treasure - from the estates of my father's mother and his four aunts. As I looked at this bizarre thing, I knew it must have come from one of them.

Only two of my great aunts led lives that would include such elaborate entertainment. One married a wealthy real estate developer. The other was the second wife of a former Texas Senator and Judge. It must have belonged to one of them. It's given me something else to be curious about my oddball family, something else to research.

The piece itself will be included in a sale at my mother's house. Intriguing though it is, I do NOT want it in my house.

A letter to Miss Hattie

My paternal grandmother's older sister was a Methodist missionary worker, and in our family she always had a reputation as an uptight, overly righteous, domineering termagant.

But when I was cleaning out my Mom's house, I came across an unfinished scrapbook of hers. It dated from a fourteen-year period in the 1920s when she worked as the assistant to the pastor at Travis Park Methodist Church in San Antonio, Texas. In San Antonio, Aunt Hattie had worked with disadvantaged young women, and with women incarcerated in the town jail. She arranged for them to work on sewing projects to make clothes for the children in the Protestant Orphan Home, and she raised funds to buy the prison a piano so the women prisoners could learn to sing and play music.

Aunt Hattie may have been a self-righteous prig, but she wasn't afraid to get involved with people who were hurting. In her scrapbook, she preserved this letter, written on a sheaf of pages torn from a cheap lined notepad:

City Clinic Hospital
10/31/28

Dear Miss Hattie,

Just these few lines to let you know I am well + hoping you are the same. But I am feeling very blue and heart sick and I certainly hope you will come here to see me, as I have very important business to talk over with you.

If I had of taken your advice when you told me I wouldn't be in trouble now. And I am praying to God for you to give me just one more chance and I'll do the right thing.

Miss Hattie if you see Mother Culberson of the Mission Home ask her for God's sake to take me back for I have lost all the hopes in the world, that is my baby and you.

God knows I do want to lead a straight life from now all.

And please Miss Hattie come and see me, I am in the City Clinic again. And if you do I'll promise to be a decent girl forever and please try to get my baby back for me.

I never realize the advice you gave me until it was too late.

I talked to Mrs. Bailey last week and she said she would talk with you and see what you could do.

You are the only one who can help me now, as mother has gone away.

I am praying to God that he will help you to understand and I am willing to do anything you tell me to do.

if you could only win my baby back. You and my baby could make me happy again.

Hoping that you will do me this personal favor. I remaine as Ever,

Truly your freind,
Anita Webb

P.S.
I am praying to God for you + He to forgive me for the mistakes I have made. And am hoping to see you very soon please not not forget me. May God bless you.

Library of Congress photo, Harlingen, TX 1939, mother and child relief clients.

I wonder what happened to Anita Webb and her baby. I hope they were reunited. I hope Aunt Hattie interceded on her behalf. I am hoping the reason Aunt Hattie kept Anita's letter is that Anita succeeded in her quest for happiness.

Mercy Percy!

When I was growing up, one of my favorite grown-ups was my Aunt Snow.

She wasn't really my aunt, she was my Dad's aunt. She was his mother's sister. His parents divorced, and he was raised by his mother, the youngest of six children of a prominent Texas clergyman. Aunt Snow was unmarried and helped my grandmother raise my Dad.

My grandmother died before I was born, but my three great-aunts filled the grandmother role for me and my brothers. They lived in Houston, Texas, and we received birthday cards and Christmas presents from them. Every winter they sent a case of Ruby-Red Texas Grapefruit to us - the fruit was wrapped in red and green cellophane we loved to play with. And although she was an old lady, Aunt Snow would fly up north to visit us - which seemed very adventurous of her.

In the 1960s, old ladies still dressed the way old ladies dress in Bugs Bunny cartoons today. They wore frocks or suits, carried handbags, and wore hats when they went out; little hats with veils.

Aunt Snow was great with kids, and we loved her Texas accent and her use of phrases like "you-all," so exotic to us in Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Aunt Snow was eleven years older than my grandmother. Here's a picture of her as a young girl. In 1896, around the time this photo was taken, the family moved from Houston to Dallas, where their father was hired as the editor of the Texas Christian Advocate, a Methodist newspaper.

By the first decade of the 20th Century, things were changing, and women had more opportunities. Baylor University's School of Nursing began its degree program in 1909 in Dallas. Aunt Snow enrolled, and graduated in 1912 with her degree. Her father, who was important enough to publish his autobiography, included her portrait and noted her accomplishment in his book.

In 1915, Aunt Snow's father suffered a sudden bout of indigestion, which later proved to be a fatal heart attack. He died in the family home with his wife and Aunt Snow in attendance. She was 30 years old.

In the spring of 1918, America had joined the Allied Forces in the First World War in France. The Germans had mounted an offensive in March, and the American Expeditionary Force was taking high casualties. The Army Nurses Corps began recruiting nurses for duty in the war.

Aunt Snow signed up in August of 1918. She was 33 years old. She was first shipped out to Camp Shelby in Mississippi for training. At Camp Shelby hospital, the nurses treated soldiers with measles, mumps, and meningitis.

At the beginning of November, she reported in at the Hotel Albert, at 11th Street and University Place in lower Manhattan. Though Armistice was signed on November 11th, there was still a great need for medical personnel in France. On the 22nd of November, she embarked from Hoboken, New Jersey for France.

Upon arriving in France, she was sent to U.S. Base Hospital Number 6. It was located in Bordeaux, and had been established by staffers from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1917. Now that the war had ended, the Massachusetts staff was rotated out for home, relieved by new recruits like Aunt Snow.

Unlike the field hospitals, which were only 3 or 4 miles from the front lines, the base hospitals were large, and far enough from the battle to be safe. Base Hospital No. 6 was in Talence, and had been established in an old school.

Conditions between March 1918 and November had been horrendous for medical personnel, but arriving after Armistice meant that Aunt Snow missed the worst of the war. The field hospitals were disbanding. The horrible casualties were no longer coming in; the danger of shells and gas to nurses serving in the hospitals was no more.

Photo from "History of the Massachusetts General Hospital Training School for Nurses" by Sara E. Parsons.

Still, it was daunting. The Army's call for recruits during the tough times of summer had gone unfulfilled - snafus with transportation kept nurses like Aunt Snow stateside during the time they were needed most in the field. It was cold, damp, and living conditions were harsh. A lack of resources had strained the system. When she arrived, the hospitals were dealing with illness, shell-shocked patients, patients stricken by mustard gas, and the new Spanish flu epidemic. Even though the war had ended, the months of November and October saw many deaths from influenza, among both patients and medical staff.

Aunt Snow's paperwork shows she reported to Base Hospital No. 6 until mid-December; then transferred to Base Hospital No. 208. However, the history of the Army Nurse Corps indicates that the staff of Base Hospital No. 6 disbanded, and the staff of No. 208 relieved them in the same location. So Aunt Snow probably stayed on in Talence, working with the new staff after the Massachusetts General folks went back home. Her new colleagues had served in Autun, just behind the front, and had seen heavier casualties.

In April of 1919, she was granted a seven-day leave. She returned to base, and then shipped out to Kerhoun, in Brittany, embarking for New York. She left the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in July of 1919, returning home to Dallas, to the family home on Swiss Avenue, to live with her mother and her older sister Hattie, and her younger sister Ruth.

My dad was born in 1924. Aunt Snow helped his mother care for him. Aunt Snow had a job at a Dallas department store, Titche-Goettinger's, as the store nurse. After school Dad remembered taking the street-car down to stay with her in the afternoon.

Throughout the 1930s, the family's fortunes rose and fell. The sisters lived together and supported one another. Dad grew up, went to college, met my mother, and they moved to Atlanta and then Pennsylvania for graduate school and his career.

Aunt Snow's nursing skills were put to the test. In 1952, her sister Hattie died of cancer. Family letters from the time describe her suffering and how hard Snow worked to care for her. Less than a year later, my grandmother died.

By the early '60's when I remember Aunt Snow and her visits to us, she and her sister Louie Boyd lived together in a little brick house in Houston.

When my parents started their family, far away from Texas in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Aunt Snow was not a young woman, but she was still active, and came up to visit us regularly. I suppose if you were the kind of person to ship off to France in 1918, flying Delta up to Pittsburgh to see your nephew's new baby girl wasn't that big a challenge.

That's my brother, S. with Aunt Snow.

I am my Aunt Snow's namesake, so she is special to me. But even if I weren't, she would still have made an impression. She was a single woman, who had her own life, and it was different from what '60s stereotypes promoted. She was both proper - with her day-dresses and veiled hats - and brave enough to travel on her own. She was funny, too - my brothers and I used to giggle and squeal with delight whenever, surprised or thrilled with our antics, she would throw up her hands and exclaim, "Mercy percy!!!"

Here is Aunt Snow in an undated photo. She is holding a picture of herself and her older sister Laura, who died in 1961 at the age of 85.

When she grew older, Aunt Snow suffered two hip fractures, which hastened her decline. Still, she was a tough old bird. I wonder if her training as a nurse helped her survive. She died in 1980, at the age of 96.