Notes from a Time Traveler

 

I am a time traveler. Nearly every day I set off on a journey to meet people in some far-off place in the infinite dimensions of history. However my span of infinity is actually pretty narrow as modern time transport technology has strict limitations. Generally it's some date between 1845 and 1945, though occasionally I'll end up somewhere during my lifetime. 

Most of my encounters with people of the past are very brief, only lasting a split second really. Sometimes we might be properly introduced, but typically they remain nameless. And, due to the fleeting brevity of this moment, I am invisible to their eyes, so they never know that I can see them. I tend to seek out musicians, though once in a while I'll be attracted to other showbiz occupations like dancers, singers, or comedians. Lately I've become fascinated by aviators and artists. 

When I do learn who these vintage people are I like to ask questions about their life, their family, and in the case of musicians, their instruments and musical ensembles. Unfortunately in that blink of an eye that we connect they don't talk much, so it's a real challenge to get answers. In fact the time goes by so fast that I'm lucky if I can determine a location or a decade of when I first make their acquaintance. 

Today, in honor of the special 750th weekend of the Sepia Saturday Club (more about that later), I thought I would present a few of my antique friends whom I've renewed contact with on my time travel adventures in just the last few weeks. They should be familiar to longtime readers as I have already featured  them  in previous stories here on my blog. One is the gentleman that begins this post. He is the celebrated Norwegian violinist Ole Bull. I've grown so found of him that I often set the controls on my time machine to go visit him. But first I'll bring back a new souvenir of one of my favorite child performers.

I first introduced these three boys in July 2022 in my story The Little Vernon Brothers. They are Sidney Clyde Vernon, the tallest boy holding a violin, born 1878 in Elgin, Ontario, Canada; Howard Alexander Vernon, the boy with a piccolo, born 1881 in Marshalltown, Iowa; and Percival Lessington Vernon, the youngest with the long blond hair and a cello, born 1884, also in Marshalltown.  The three brothers are accompanied in this picture by their mother, Mary Jerusha Vernon, who is seated at a reed organ.  

This cabinet card was produced by the Holdridge studio of Trenton, New Jersey, at 223 East  State Street. The other four photos I have of the "little" Vernon brothers were taken by photographers in Marshalltown, Iowa; Beloit, Wisconsin; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That photo is of the whole family with their mother Mary and their father, Edward H. Vernon, an accountant who evidently was successful enough to support moving his family around the country. 

This photo from New Jersey shows Sidney at his tallest so based on my previous research I think it was taken around 1895-96. This photo was also the only one that came with a caption for the "Little Vernon Brothers" so it was clearly intended to be a promotional photo for their performances. Unlike a troupe of vaudeville theater entertainers, the Vernon family played at churches and society halls. Their repertoire was designed to appeal to a family audience with an emphasis on Christian songs, hymn tunes, and wholesome folk tunes, interspersed with recitations of poetry. This review from 1895 describes one of their concerts in Goshen, New York.

Goshen NY Democrat
14 March 1895

The entertainment in the Presbyterian church last Friday evening was a success.  It was well attended, considering the condition of the roads.  The Little Vernon Brothers are all they are recommended to be.  Sidney, the eldest, who plays the violin, has a very fine touch; Howard, the next, plays the piccolo well; and Percy, the child who plays the violincello, is a prodigy, is natural and homelike on the stage, plays his part perfectly and sings just as well.  His childish movements on the stage are a strong hold on the public. 

_ _ _

The Vernon brothers began performing in 1889 in Marshalltown, Iowa and continued giving regular concerts around the country until about 1899 when they were not so little anymore. By the turn of the century the Vernon family was living in Detroit and the boys were beginning higher education. What I find remarkable is that all three brothers entered seminaries and became ordained ministers, two in Baptist churches and one in a Presbyterian. Reader's can find out more in my original story of the Vernon brothers. 

* * *

One genre of postcards that I regularly search for is "orphan bands". I few weeks ago I spotted this one and recognized it as a picture of a children's band that I featured on this blog back in 2018. There are 14 boys and girls holding musical instruments, mostly brass, and dressed in nice Sunday best. They called themselves "The Jolly Entertainers". I told their story in two parts, The Children's Home Band of Des Moines, Washington and Mr. Draper's Children's Home Band of of Des Moines, Washington. This "Children's Industrial Home" was established and run by Mr. Herman M. Draper, seen here seated center holding a cornet. A native of Canada, Draper was born in Ontario in 1857, but immigrated to the United States in 1882. As a young man he pursued a career as a music teacher, specifically for chorus and voice using a music education technique called Solfège which uses syllables for the musical scale pitches, i.e. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti. 

In 1887 he taught music in several Nebraska public schools where he developed his own methods for teaching elementary music. Ten years later in 1897 he moved to Calumet, Michigan where he was employed as a superintendent of an orphanage of about 50 children. In 1906 after a dispute with the orphanage's board of governors Draper and his wife left Calumet and "took" six children with them to Seattle where he decided they could operate a smaller but more compassionate orphanage in the Pacific Northwest. After a couple of years in Seattle, in 1908 the orphanage moved to Des Moines, a small village on Puget Sound named by its first settlers after the much larger Des Moines, Iowa.

Draper wanted it to be a self-supported private orphanage so he trained his young charges in various practical trades including music and printing. I have two other postcards with the same image that date from the summer of 1910, but this one has a notice on the back that is not on the others. It reads:

Help us pay for

OUR HOME

We own a complete printing outfit and

our boys are printers;  send us an order

for cards, letter heads, bill heads, etc.

We guarantee satisfaction   and

We need your help.

But there is a message too, which cliched the sale for me. 

Geo. saw these
children as he
came from     
Seattle the    
other day.     
He wanted the
little girl marked
X  but they would
not let her      
go.               

The message is a bit ambiguous since the writer is not identified and we don't know if Geo(rge) is age six or sixty.  So it is both charming or creepy depending on ones interpretation. But the X mark is actually on the back just above the U in OUR. It corresponds to the little girl seated right with an alto horn. 

This postcard was produced at a time when Mr. Draper was beginning to take his children on short tours in the region. He had some success so purchased a small bus and organized more trips to Oregon and California. In 1925 he undertook the biggest adventure taking 22 children on a year-long tour of the United States playing benefit concerts everywhere they could. It made the pages of newspapers all across the nation.

Sadly Mrs. Annie Draper died on 13 April 1927. Her husband, tragically followed her just four days later before her funeral, succumbing to a heart condition. Herman M. "Daddy" Draper was 70 years old. He and his wife had cared for over 300 children at their orphanage. It's an inspiring story of perseverance, dedication, and love. Here's the link to part one.

* * *

We met this handsome violinist in my three part series Ole Bull, Adventures in America, part 1, part 2, part 3. He is Ole Bornemann Bull (1810–1880) a Norwegian violin virtuoso who was one of the first violinists in the early 19th century to create a successful career as a concert soloist. By 1837 Ole Bull was performing hundreds of concerts each season in Europe that established him as the equal of other Romantic musical artists like his contemporaries: Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), Robert Schumann (1810–1856), Franz Liszt (1811–1886) and the great Italian violinist  Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), whom he tried to emulate as a violinist and composer,  too. But no concert artist of his time ever covered as much distance in traveling the world as Ole Bull. 

My series on Ole Bull focused on a set of carte de visite photos that were produced by a Chicago photographer in the winter of 1867-68. This was during his third tour of America just after the end of the Civil War. He made his first tour in 1843-45 and his second tour in 1852-57. This happened to be when photography was just becoming popular as a new portrait art form. However early photographs like daguerreotypes and ferrotypes of the 1840s and 1850s were each singular positive images and could not be easily duplicated. In the 1860s when the carte de visite, or cdv, were introduced the process used a negative image on a glass plate which allowed multiple copies to be printed quickly and cheaply. It was the perfect medium for an entertainer who wanted pictures to promote themselves. In 1867 Ole Bull clearly recognized the value of cdvs as souvenirs for devoted fans. 

Since publishing my Ole Bull series in January 2021, I've acquired even more photos of him, including more cdvs from Chicago, a ferrotype–tintype, and recently last month a couple of larger cabinet card photographs. The first one shows Ole Bull seated in a relaxed pose. His hair is long but now quite white. The photographer was S. W. Felt of Chicago, a different photographer than the one who made the cdvs in 1867-68. This photograph could have been taken during Ole Bull's fourth appearance in America in 1871-72 when he played Chicago in March 1872. That was just  five months after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the city center's theater district where he had last performed. But I think this image fits better with his fifth tour from 1876-77 when reviewers took note of the "snow in his hair." The photograph print is a bit soiled and abraded but I like that his name is written in pencil on the front. I'm not certain yet, as the simplicity of his name makes it easy to reproduce, but I think it might be Ole Bull's real signature. 

This second cabinet card of Ole Bull is very clear and well preserved, requiring little correction of contrast. It shows a 3/4 view of him with his violin and bow in playing position. The photographer was J. P. Moore of Meriden, Connecticut. Ole Bull's face and expression resembles his other photo, so I think this may date from 1876-77 too. 

Bull returned to America once more in 1878 but reports describe him as diminished,  no longer fit as a fiddle as some might say. He did play a final concert in Chicago in May 1880, but concern over his poor health forced him to return to his home in Bergen, Norway where he died on 17 August 1880. Readers can read about the exciting adventures of Ole Bull's 1867-68 tour by starting at this link.

Most of the musicians I meet in my time machine are mute, their stories and biographies locked away in the secret vaults of history. Ole Bull is a rare exception as there are literally thousands of newspaper reports, letters, and books on his life. It makes it much easier to know the man, but more difficult to puzzle out exactly when his photos were taken. I'm planning a reprise story on Ole Bull so I can display these two photos alongside the other new photos I've found. Stay tuned.

* * *

My final photo is a postcard that just arrived in the post a few days ago. It's obviously not a picture of a musical group but, as the caption says. it's a track team from E.P.H.S. Those initials stand for East Palestine High School and some of these boys appeared in my three part series The Glee Club of East Palestine, Ohio - part 1, part 2, part 3. 

East Palestine, Ohio is another place I frequently check out in my time machine, specifically during the period from 1906 to 1910 when one young man in particular was a student there. Here he is seated on the floor in front, one of ten members of the track team and the only one with a dark African complexion. His name is James Aaron Washington and I'm rather proud to have figured out who he was, as he did not grow up in Ohio but in Asheville, North Carolina, the city where I now live. 

This photo was taken in 1909, either in the spring or maybe the previous fall of 1908. In 2024 this picture is not unlike thousands of similar high school team photos. But in 1909 it was exceptionally rare to see a Black student sitting as an equal with fellow White students. America's terrible legacy of slavery continued in the post-Civil War era with society strictly divided by race using countless harsh laws to enforce racial segregation. How James Washington came to be in eastern Ohio was the first question I asked in part 1 of his story.  Certainly in 1909 North Carolina a young African-American man would never be accepted as a member of a high school athletic team, much less photographed with one. There are still many questions I want to ask but may never get an answer. 

This postcard is also an example of when I get to hear someone from the past speak across the vastness of the spacetime continuum. It was sent to Mrs. C. E. Oliver of Pittsburg, Pa. on 19 May 1909, perhaps care of Mercy Hospital.

Will be up Saturday
if my head gets
well.  I will have to
jump against the
same fellows that I
jumped against Saturday

The boys competed in springtime track meets against other high school teams in the region. A year later in May 1910 there was an all-county contest with four schools and the East Palestine Reveille Echo reported that Washington placed second in the 220 yard dash and Oliver got third in the running broad jump. But their rivals as Lisbon High still took the most points to win the championship leaving East Palestine to settle for a 2nd place. 

If you look closely some of the boys have medals pinned to their shirts. James has one and the boy behind  him on the right has six. The boy to the left is the same boy in the E.P.H.S. Glee Club photos wearing a top hat. I believe his name is Cecil Oliver. He and James sang duets in the Glee Club concerts. Could he be the son of Mrs. Oliver writing for some sympathy on this postcard? Yet another question that may go unanswered. 

This is actually the second photo postcard I've found of the E.P,H.S. track team with young James Washington. The other one is dated 1908 and is even more remarkable because James is not the only Black athlete in the group. That photo is in the Postscript at the end of  part 3.   

James Aaron Washington's story took another surprising turn when I discovered that after high school he returned to North Carolina; attended Shaw College in Raleigh; got married in Asheville, raised a family there; and then in the 1920s moved to Washington, D. C. where he worked for the U. S. Post Office. That's all explained in part 2.  

But the biggest surprise was to learn that his son, James Aaron Washington Jr. became a noted civil rights attorney, a law professor and dean at  Howard University in D. C., and later a judge to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia appointed in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. But more significant was that Professor James Washington Jr., the son of the young man in East Palestine High School's Glee Club and track team, was also one of the advisors who helped to craft the 1954 case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka which became a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that U. S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools were otherwise equal in quality. That's a real story of bending the arc of justice.

I am a time traveler.
Even just a glimpse of a moment in time
can contain millions of threads of history.
Some lead backwards and some forward,
but they all weave into an amazing fabric of time.
That's why I keep alert when I'm in my time machine.
You never know when you might meet an old friend.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where everyone is celebrating

the art of vintage photos.

This is my 724th post on my blog TempoSenzaTempo — Time Without Time. I first joined the Sepia Saturday club hub pub on January 8, 2011, number 56. I submitted A Mystery Band which seems incredibly brief compared to my usual output (like this one) in 2024. It took me a few more weekends before I settled into the idea of following Alan's theme image, but since February 2011 I have participated in nearly every Sepia Saturday, which makes about 690 weekends. That's a lot of postcards and photos.

I never expected that my hobby of collecting vintage musician photos would become the passion it is today. (Some people, like my dear wife, think it might be an illness.) But the inspiration really came from meeting fellow time travelers who shared my interest in telling stories about old photographs. It's sad to say that many of those bloggers have faded away into the Sepia Mists. But I am very grateful for all that I learned from reading each blogger's stories and gaining a different perspective on writing, collecting, analyzing, research, and presentation on this wonderful medium of the internet. I continue to delight in every blogger's contribution to Sepia Saturday. Thank you, Alan, for keeping the Sepia Saturday club pub going and offering up a fascinating image every week. I look forward to Number 1000. I'm pretty sure I'll still have enough photos in my collection to make a good match.