Print block

 In a letter to a cousin, my mother relates a tidbit about a cousin for whom she had great affection: 

"I do remember […] Edna Beck Kiesler. She had been a Christian missionary in India, and retired to Berkeley; my mother and I went to her house for tea one time, and the furnishings were the carved tables and screens she had brought from India. […] Edna was a lovely woman."

It made sense that my mother would be attracted to a remarkable, independent woman with a graduate degree: in addition to being a missionary, she was a PhD, and a mother of three children. The Beck family was known for their adventuresome streak, having come to California not overland from the east coast, but rather by ship from Tasmania. 

Edna herself writes a lovely letter to her aunt Jessie and Eugene Cutting, dated May 6, 1902:

"Thinking you would be more interested in hearing from me from my new home than from one of the numerous ports where we landed. I deferred writing until now, when I have had time enough to form a few notable impressions of this very foreign land.  You can imagine how one's former ideas are completely upset by meeting day after day conditions and circumstances so entirely opposite to one's training and environments.  To see camels travelling back and forth in front of one's home as often as one has heretofore seen horses; to drive along the street and find an elephant carelessly filling his spacious trunk with water, then transferring it quietly to the oesophagus, an elephant twelve feet high, then led away by a small boy not more than three and a half feet high; to find men dressed in attire resembling skirts and women wearing pantalons, all the things are a little bit startling! Do you wonder I needed some time to clear my wondering and amazed brain?

How thankful I was to reach the end of my journey-almost seven weeks long. My rest at Honolulu and visit with you was so delightful - it was like another taste of home. I was quite willing to prolong it.

[…a description of the trip, via Japan (Tokyo and Nagasaki), China (Shanghai and Hong Kong), and Singapore...]

We stayed in [Penang] port one day and then started for Calcutta - at the beginning of the new week we found ourselves landing at Calcutta, the city of palaces. Calcutta, a noisy, very dirty place - with few palaces, if any. My journey from Calcutta up through the country to Apere was made alone, lasting two days and two nights.

My new home is delightful - I am very fond of the work, the people, the country."

In my mother's art supplies was a hefty hand-carved wooden block used to print fabric. Given its typically Indian design and our family history, it is reasonable to believe that this block made the trip back with Edna when she returned to retire in her native California. 

Edna's print block and pattern rubbing

On the shelf

My mother was a debutante, back when "coming out" meant a young lady was presented to society as being available for suitable young men to consider as marriage material. The houses in her neighborhood had ballrooms and staff for such festivities, and personal shoppers were standing by to make sure she was wearing a different evening frock for each event, in case a picture should make it into the society pages. And they did.

From the time she graduated from high school to the time she married, her name features in dozens of columns dubbed "World of Women" and "Pauline's Causette." She is usually throwing or attending a party to celebrate pending nuptials for her sorority sisters, or among the bevy of matching bridesmaids pictured in grainy black and white. 

After she graduated from high school, she moved on to college, where she joined a sorority. For a young women who had grown up as an only child, it brought her a special joy, and she kept in contact with the brides-elect for the rest of her life, even when distance separated them. 

From her stories, both told and written, we know there were several gentlemen deemed suitable by her parents, but as things got serious, there always seemed to be flaws. Her father invested a small fortune in tennis lessons, piano lessons, and even cooking lessons: none of them really "stuck." She didn't play tennis well; she was tone deaf so couldn't hear the wrong notes when she played piano. But it wasn't always her: there was the fellow who was an artist--not a financially viable prospect, though we do have a lovely oil he gifted her.

After I sifted through her scrapbooks, I checked to see what else online archives could provide me, and I struck gold. In the early 50s, when she is very much was still "viable"--and an undergrad, I note, the papers refer to her in passing as a bride-elect; then the wedding date is set for the summer after her graduation, with the usual list of attendants and happy parents. Only thing is, I have never heard of the fellow, and it appears that wedding never happened. 

The papers go quiet for a few years as most of her friends are now married (right out of college, naturally). I know from my mother that she was interested in pursuing graduate studies, but her father insisted that she prove she could make enough to support herself. The unspoken message was that if she wasn't going to get married, she'd have to learn to make her own money. So, together with two other sorority sisters, she rented an apartment, and landed herself a job as a secretary at Del Monte. 

There is a glimmer of hope in 1954 when one paper notes that she caught the bridal bouquet--of one of her roommates. And then a terse, almost sad mention in the spring of 1958 noting that she joined the Spinsters and Dames Ball: "… the sole spinster of the contingent." 

There is a happy ending--before she was officially "on the shelf" an article notes that her parents "informally announce" the pending nuptials--this time to my father. She was 27.