In the 1916 University of Kentucky yearbook, the statement next to John’s senior class picture describes him as follows: “Only a few men on the campus know John’s real worth. He has worked silently and calmly regardless of any immediate reward. We who know him know only that when John promises you to do anything, you can just as well forget it, knowing it will be done.”
And interesting too, in that same yearbook, is the class prophecy predicting that in ten years John Marsh would be a proofreader for the “Bowling Green Suffrage Journal.” His classmates made this statement because John was proofreading the articles written by Kitty Mitchell, his college sweetheart, a suffragette who planned to return to her hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky, to write articles about women’s issues.9 The prophecy is important to note because it suggests that even at this early stage John was influencing the writing of others.
In 1916, he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree, with a major in English. He was then accepted into graduate school and hired as a part-time English instructor. He taught two sections of English composition at the University of Kentucky while he was doing his graduate work and at the same time still writing for the Lexington Leader; his articles now carried his byline.
In September 1917, he enlisted in the Barrow Unit of the Armed Services at Lexington. According to a Frankfort, Kentucky, newspaper clipping datelined February 26, 1917, John was paid the highest compliment by a rising vote of the Kentucky legislature commending him for patriotism in joining the army.10 Although many others in that area volunteered to go into the service, John was the only young man who received a standing ovation from the legislators, indicating how much he was admired and respected, both professionally and personally. He enlisted in a hospital unit organized by Dr. David Barrow of Lexington; his unit was called to duty in February 1918. He was first sent to England to work in the office of a hospital for seven months, and then to France. While away, John frequently wrote long, descriptive letters to his family and also many articles that the Leader published. In 1918, the editor of that newspaper wrote to Corporal John Marsh asking him to return to the staff: “Personally I consider you a young newspaper man of unusual promise and I believe you have the personal character back of your talent to support any reasonable ambition which you may have in connection with your literary work.”11
3
Just about the same time that Peggy, after her mother’s death, was returning to Northampton in early 1919 to complete her spring semester at Smith, John was on his way to France. He was stationed at a hospital in Savenay, which he described as “an insignificant little French village located on the Loire river not far from the Coast, but the Americans have made it hum.”12 In a letter to his mother on March 15, he described his surroundings, saying that from the third floor of the main building, where he worked, he could see the village of St. Nazaire and beyond that the sea. “The Loire river valley is just to the southwest of us, a beautiful wide plain cut into tiny fields by hedges and dotted here and there by small villages or farm buildings huddled together. The river becomes an arm of the sea and widens out into the proportions of a bay before it finally loses its identity in the Bay of Biscay.”
Stationed in an area where there were eight base hospitals within a radius of a few miles and several thousand patients, John wrote that the most serious patients were taken to his hospital—Base Hospital 69, “located in a French school building, an ‘Ecole Normale,’ built of irregular blocks, with almost a stucco effect.” He explained, “Some of the buildings of the school just across the road are still used by the French and are filled with students, young men, who wear dark blue uniforms and little smashed down soldiers’ caps like we see in pictures of the Blue and the Gray.” Not wanting to worry his mother with detailed accounts of the suffering that he saw in the hospital, he simply said: “There is scarcely a day when from one to three hospital trains do not leave from here with patients for the States or arrive with new cases from the interior. I have seen more men short a leg or so here than I ever saw in one place before.”
In addition to the hospitals, he said there was a large detachment of marines, military police, and several hundred prisoners of war:
This is my first experience with captured Germans and Austrians, and I find it interesting to study them. All the types can be seen, the extremely youthful, rosy-cheeked lad, the angular be-spectacled professor type, the heavy brutal Hun (occasionally), but most often the stolid, slow, submissive type that doesn’t look any different from the Germans in the States. They are “well-nourished,” warmly clothed and apparently not at all rebellious against their condition. The guards who take the P.W.’s out to work on the roads say that it is impossible to lose them. Occasionally one gets separated from the others but he is always sure to come back as soon as he can find the way.
One weekend in May, he visited Dijon and wrote descriptions of the magnificent museums that he visited there. However, he thought that the most interesting place to visit was the Rue de Forges, a street where the Huguenots’ quarters used to be located and where, he said, “I conjectured that our Kercheval ancestors might have lived.” Giving a little history of the place, he wrote: “It was here that the Huguenots were assembled one day back in 1500, several thousands of them, and it was planned to massacre them all, but someone intervened and, instead, they were driven out of the city. It sounds very much like the story of our ancestors, and I am trying to find some history here that will tell me more about it. I haven’t met anyone over here by the name of Kercheval yet but stranger things have happened.”
In one of his letters to his mother, he enclosed a book of Keats’s poems that he had purchased in England and said he wanted back when he got home. He also enclosed a little present for his sister Frances. He called it a “golliwog” and said that he had gotten it in England, where these items were considered “lucky charms and worn for protection against air-raids.”
In describing his location, he wrote that Savenay had narrow, dirty streets, but good cafés where “one can buy eggs and French fries, occasionally steak and a few others things that taste like a million dollars.” Apparently his favorite café was the Café des Allies, a tiny place that he said was “presided over by Susanne, who does not look like a mademoiselle, with her yellow hair, rosy cheeks, and bovinely pretty face. I found out that she is a Belgian, and for the Americans she is the belle (no pun intended) of the village, characteristically vivacious and with enough English to ‘carry on.’ . . . My French is progressing slowly.”
Like thousands of other soldiers’ mothers, his mother worried, among other things, about John’s falling in love with some girl overseas. She must have mentioned something to him about being careful in his associations with the French women, because John reassured her: “Don’t worry about me and the mademoiselles francais. . . . I haven’t even seen a goodlooking one since I left Paris. Incidentally . . . it is well to remember that just at present I am too much interested in at least one Kentucky girl to be able to realize that there are any others in the world.”
Not long after he made that comment, he received word that Kitty Mitchell, that Kentucky girl he was so interested in, had met and married a wealthy, older Cuban businessman and gone to live in Santiago. This news devastated John. Yet, painful as it was at first, he was willing to maintain the friendship that she wanted to keep with him. A few years later, Kitty visited him in Atlanta on two occasions, and they corresponded with each other throughout the remainder of their lives.
Just a few weeks before he was to return home to the States, John became seriously ill with ptomaine poisoning after he, along with at least three other soldiers, consumed some contaminated food. He remarked to his brothers later that he felt “pretty ridiculous going through the war without getting a scratch and then damned-near getting killed from eating supper in the army mess hall.”13 In 1927, the government sent him financial compensation for this illness.
4
On June 9, 1919, he wrote his m
other that he was headed home to the States and expected to be in Kentucky by the middle of July. “When we came over here all of us were thoroughly confident that we would be coming back to see our families and friends some day, but when we leave our French friends and our friends in the Army and among the ‘Y’ girls, it is with certainty that we will never seem them again. C’est la guerre!” His troop left Beaune for Marseilles on Wednesday morning, June 11, at six o’clock. On June 30, while still on board the U.S.S. Belvedere about three hundred miles from New York, John wrote about what a great experience his trip through the Mediterranean was and how much he enjoyed his visit to Gibraltar, where he was permitted to go ashore one morning to see the “quaint old Spanish town that apparently pays little attention to the mighty fortress above it and is still so thoroughly Spanish that the English names to the streets and other English features seem incongruous.” Crossing the Atlantic was uneventful, he told his mother, “until a storm raised merry H——Up to this time, I had sometimes regretted that I had crossed the ocean and back without seeing a storm, now I am satisfied. . . . Best get the fatted veal up in the barn lot because I am coming for it with my teeth sharpened up on 16 months of corned willy, goldfish, plum and boiled potatoes. You don’t know how much it will mean to me to be home again.”
Discharged as a sergeant, he returned to the United States on June 30, 1919. After a visit with his family in Maysville, he went back to work in Lexington, Kentucky, at the Leader.14 But, within a few months, he decided not to stay in Lexington. In late March 1920, when he was twenty-five years old, he moved to Atlanta, an exciting newspaper town where he got a job as a reporter for the Daily Georgian, one of the chain of papers owned by William Randolph Hearst.
When he first arrived in Atlanta, he rented a room in a boarding house on Currier Street, saying, “It was in a rather a run-down neighborhood with a family easiest described as ‘poor but honest,’ but with somewhat inconvenient ideas concerning ‘bath nights.’ I couldn’t quite get accustomed to that flaming lithograph of ‘Paul and Virginia Fleeing before the Storm’ which adorned my bedroom wall.”15 Soon Ed Danforth, a classmate of Henry’s at the University of Kentucky and also a writer for the Georgian, told him about a vacancy in the place where he was boarding. John moved into this house, which had an excellent location, just a block from the Georgian Terrace Hotel, on 305 West Peachtree Street. The landlady was a Mrs. Prim, a widow with a daughter in grammar school. John described Mrs. Prim as congenial, and as “a motherly sort of woman of ‘the quality,’ who keeps every thing perfectly clean.”16
After a month in Atlanta, he wrote his brother Henry that he was beginning to feel at home as a Georgian, though he missed his family and friends in Kentucky. “The Kid Sister [Frances] and I had become great buddies and if I could afford it or could find work for her here wherever I go I would ‘carry’ her about with me. That word ‘carry’ appears in every sentence uttered by a Georgian. They ‘carry’ their girls out to dinner, and ‘tote’ a box of candy out when they go to see her.”17 He went on to relate an experience that he recently had when he became “a revenooer and went into the Georgia moonshine section to raid some stills and capture a good feature story” for his paper. Because he covered the Federal Building, he said,
I got wise to a big raid which was to be pulled off in North Georgia, a section where there are more stills to the square foot than there are to the square mile in Kentucky. A party of about ten of us, officers, and a moving picture photographer, went up in automobiles and stayed three days, knocking down the stills in quick order and traveling over some of the poorest excuses for roads I ever thought possible. A big rain forced us to come back and I wasn’t at all sorry as my bones had begun to work loose and wobble about in my skin as a result of the jolting.18
As a souvenir of the trip, one of the officers gave him a black Smith and Wesson .32 revolver that the officer had taken off a moonshiner. “It is the long size and will kill at 75 yards I am told. I didn’t try it out.” This was the pistol that he later gave to Peggy when she felt as if she needed one.19
5
With its great railroads, hotels, and fine restaurants, Atlanta was a popular convention city in the 1920s, just as it still is now. Well-known personalities in sports, theater, politics, business, and opera were steadily passing through and, in those days before television, they were all too willing to get good press coverage through interviews and statements. The three big newspapers were the Atlanta Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Georgian, two of them built facing each other across the street and the other right around the corner. Each day, they raced to get editions on the street and tried to out-muscle each other in news coverage, features, sensations, reforms, and blazing headlines. With radio in its infancy, newspapermen were constantly struggling to get any important news out first in “extra” editions. The Georgian was the Journal’s most formidable competitor because the Constitution was only a morning paper.20 Although it had never been as financially or politically successful as the Journal, the Georgian was relentlessly competitive. For thirty years, the two papers battled furiously. In December 1939, the Journal bought out the Georgian.
The newspaper world that John fit right into was a rugged, masculine world in the 1920s. William S. Howland, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal at that time, said that reporters—he, John, and others—“wrote hard, factual news stories—often of crime and punishment—but with an almost fanatical zeal for factual accuracy and with a politeness, strange in today’s news writing, when dealing with unfortunates.”21
About his new job, John told his brother Henry:
Working for Hearst is no different from other newspaper work, except that it gives greater opportunities for and more encouragement to originality in writing. I don’t know what effect it will have on my reputation in the future when I try to join up with some other paper, but there is nothing in the way the Georgian’s office is run to give any grounds for condemnation. Of course, I frequently disagree with the editorials, but that has been my experience with every paper on which I have worked.22
By late 1921, when he met Peggy, John had led an interesting, hardworking, successful, and relatively happy life. He had great confidence in himself and was optimistic about his future. Just the opposite was true of Peggy; she felt decidedly unhappy, shamefully unsuccessful, and woefully uncertain about her future.
6
After Peggy’s return to Atlanta from Smith College, at her father’s request, she launched her career as a socialite by entering the Debutante Club for the winter season of 1920-1921. Her picture, along with Courtenay Ross’s, appears in the Atlanta Constitution on September 26, 1920, above an article titled “A Debutante Group for the Social Season of 1920 and 1921.”23 The sole purpose of the organization was formally to introduce the young girls from old, aristocratic Atlanta families to others from the same social sphere. Expectations were that all the debs would marry well.
Taking her new role seriously, she began to study fashions. “When a girl is making a social career, clothes are a uniform to be worn like a soldier’s—always well done—never sloppy.”24 Although she was never the least bit neat about keeping her room or even her house tidy, she was fastidious about her person and dress. She carefully selected a wardrobe that not only complemented her beauty and size but also suited the various roles she wanted to enact. Photographs of her during this period show her demurely dressed in dark, tailored suits and T-strapped heels, or with bulky sweaters worn over long skirts together with crisp, white, tailored blouses, low-heeled shoes, and cloches jauntily pulled down on one side of her head. Other, more glamorous pictures show her seductively staring into the camera, dressed in bare-shouldered, diaphanous evening gowns and with ribbons in her dark hair. At this stage of her life, she was very pretty.
Adjusting to being home again was difficult, especially without her mother to deflect her father’s criticisms of nearly everything she did. Since Maybelle’s death, Eugene had become overly p
rotective and crankier than ever. He had always had difficulty understanding his daughter once she became a teenager, but now he did not understand her at all. After having had a taste of freedom that she could not give up, Peggy began asserting her independence by smoking cigarettes, using profanity, staying out late at night, insisting on being called “Peggy” rather than “Margaret,” and seeing other young people of whom her father and grandmother disapproved. She and Peggy Porter (Margaret Lowry Porter), who lived in the house directly behind the Mitchells’, ran around with what one of her friends described as “renegades of various types, divorcees, girls with reputations and often with more uninhibited wit and joy of life than the usual girls of this age.”25 Her unconventional ways and her dating every night of the week were the subjects of much delicious gossip that worried her father and outraged her grandmother.26 In no time, her relationship with her father began to deteriorate because of what he thought of as her rebelliousness and unseemly decorum.
Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh Page 9