By Gary Topping–
Like our chief blogger, Mike O’Brien, I’m a history fanatic. Unlike Mike, though, history is my daily work. While he’s there in his law office poring over the law books, interviewing clients, and preparing briefs for his next case, I’m in the archives reading letters, diaries, memos and other documents never intended for my prying eyes. Yes, there’s a bit of a voyeur, a bit of a gossip, in all of us historians. But oh, what fun it is!
One of the things that has always amazed me about history is how often humor keeps peeking through, even in some of the most tragic events. Yesterday I ran across two photographs of my grandparents and my aunt Katie as they poked through the cremated remains of their once lovely Victorian home which had burned to the ground in September, 1936 along with almost all of the town of Bandon, Oregon. My grandfather is wearing a three-piece suit and a big fedora hat, smoking a cigar and still looking every bit the prosperous lawyer, judge and political figure he had been, even though at present he was homeless. In one of the photos he is looking almost into the camera, and I wanted to look into his eyes and ask, “Grandpa, you’ve just lost everything; what are you thinking at this moment”? And then I remembered: he did tell me, in a letter he wrote perhaps on that very same day, not to me (I wouldn’t be born for another four years), but to his nephew Willard Topping in Portland. After a hair-raising narrative of the family’s flight barely ahead of the flames, he mentions that they had managed to salvage enough clothes that they wouldn’t have to take up residence in a nudist colony quite yet. Humor? At a time like that? And then I remembered: in addition to his legal practice, my grandfather had sold fire insurance! Nobody wants to see their house burn down just to show what great insurance they have, but if it’s going to burn anyway. . . .
One more example. The summer of 2010 was a particularly happy time in my life. I had just retired from Salt Lake Community College, and I had won a fellowship for a week-long study of the Gilded Age (the period from the Civil War to World War I) at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Fremont, Ohio. It was a very intense week, during which I and about fifteen other scholars spent our days and evenings listening to lectures by distinguished Gilded Age experts, consulting in small group sessions with those experts, and doing our own research in the immense library and manuscript collection. It was heaven for historians.
On about the first day of the seminar, the head librarian met with us to introduce us to the vast resources of the library, and as an example, she brought out a guest register that Rutherford and Lucy Hayes had maintained in their home. Now to understand this story, you need to know two things: the Hayeses were very widely read and intellectually alive people who were friends with most of the leading literary and cultural leaders of the time–Thomas Edison, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain. Also, Lucy Hayes was a ferocious temperance advocate—total abstinence, she called it—who, when she was First Lady, had occasionally irritated White House guests for her refusal to serve liquor, for which she had earned the pejorative nickname of “Lemonade Lucy.” On one of his visits to the Hayes home, Lucy asked Mark Twain to sign the guest book. At this point, the librarian handed the book to me and asked me to read to my colleagues what Twain had written. There, in Twain’s own handwriting, were the following words: “Total Abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extreme. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to Totally Abstain from Total Abstinence itself.”
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
