Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  The visit was a great success. Though Harriet would be required to take entrance exams in everything from Shakespeare to Chaucer, algebra, Latin, and modern languages to determine her course of study, both she and her father were confident that she would demonstrate enough learning to enter the college without serious handicaps. In addition to making a flurry of arrangements concerning clothes and furnishings for her new rooms, Harriet was taking extra French lessons in preparation for college language courses and, like any teenager about to leave home for the first time, anxious about who her roommate would be. By all accounts, she was looking forward to the new challenge as she attended to various last-minute items, including the mailing of her “Chemical Laboratory Notebook” to Wellesley to prove she had achieved the necessary standards in that subject.

  While Harriet was busy dreaming of college, Edward and Lenna had enrolled her sister, Edna, then fifteen, in a private girls’ boarding school called the Centenary Collegiate Institute in Hackettstown, New Jersey, about forty-five miles away. She had been taking violin lessons for several years already and was signed up to study “a ‘combination’ course of violin instruction, art (painting) and literature and languages.” No doubt the Stratemeyers had it in mind to ease their younger daughter’s path to college—with a private school education, there would be no need for extra language lessons and fretting over the chemistry course as Harriet had. After less than a month at her new school, however, it became clear that Edna was not adjusting. She went home for a visit, and Edward wrote to the headmaster to say that she “appears to like the school so far as the teachers, pupils and studies go, but does not seem to be able to get used to being away from home and her folks.” Still, he was optimistic and believed that with his and Lenna’s encouragement, their daughter would come to see the value of the kind of independence and intellectual curiosity her sister so cherished.

  The episode was a harbinger not only of Edna’s future in general, which would be marked by a nervous disposition and poor health, but her relationship to Harriet, whom she eventually came to feel had been given everything in comparison to her paltry share. In late October Edward wrote again to the headmaster, describing the family’s fruitless efforts to impress upon Edna the benefits and pleasures of going back to school: “Yesterday Mrs. S and myself tried again to induce her to return but she collapsed so completely that I knew it would be folly to attempt it, that she would be in no condition to study . . . as soon as I can possibly get away I will be up with her to help her in packing.”

  The Stratemeyers eventually sent Edna to a local private school called Miss Townsend’s, and from then on she stayed at home, content there even as Edward loaded his elder daughter and all her belongings into his new Cadillac in September of 1910 and drove her up to Wellesley in style. Harriet was about to enter into the years she would claim as the most formative of her life in terms of her will to succeed as a wife, mother, and businesswoman. The Wellesley motto, “Non Ministrari Sed Ministrare”—“Not to be ministered unto but to minister to”—became Harriet’s motto in all things, and she intoned it on numerous occasions. Eventually, she claimed it for Nancy Drew, too, saying: “Why is Nancy Drew so good? Because of the Wellesley College motto,” and telling reporters that she was sure that had Nancy ever gone to college, she would have been a Wellesley girl.

  2

  Mildred

  IN THE SUMMER of 1905, just a few months after Edward Stratemeyer launched his newly formed literary syndicate into the world, Mrs. Lillian Matteson Augustine, resident of the tiny prairie town of Ladora, Iowa, gave birth to a baby girl. Her name was Mildred. She was delivered at home on July 10, in the scorching heat of summer on the Great Plains, by the town doctor and surgeon—who also happened to be her father, Dr. J. L. Augustine.

  Jasper Augustine, like Edward Stratemeyer the son of a forty-niner, was an Iowa native. He had grown up on a farm in the town of Agency, then gone to medical school at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City. Upon graduating in 1893, he moved immediately to Ladora, where he established “a most extensive and successful practice.” Not only was Augustine the local medical authority, known for his devotion to keeping his knowledge of procedures and treatments up to date and for his diagnostic “touch,” but he was an officer of the town bank and the president of the Ladora Lumber and Grain company. His stature was such that he merited a profile in the magisterial 1915 tome History of Iowa County and Its People, which chronicled the beginnings of the region and its most prominent citizens.

  While Augustine was an exceptional man and doctor with, perhaps, more than the average amount of civic pride in his blossoming town, there was another, simpler reason for his high standing in so many institutions: In a settlement of fewer than three hundred people, there were not enough men to fill the official positions created as it expanded. Located in Iowa County, roughly eighty miles from the state capital of Des Moines, Ladora had been founded in 1867 and officially incorporated in 1880. It was a prototypical homesteader town, forged from the open prairie by pioneers in search of a better life. Originally the province of the Sac and Fox Indians, the land had been sowed with cornfields for decades by the time Mildred was born. Ladora was an up-and-coming place, with its own mill, post office, railroad depot, school, churches, and saloons. It even had a town song of sorts, with a refrain that listed the various amenities and institutions that bigger places counted as their own, and then proclaimed, with characteristically stubborn local pride, “The little town of Ladora is good enough for me.”

  Though some mistook it for being of French origin—La Dora—the town’s quirky name was actually the inspiration of a music teacher by the name of Mrs. General Scofield, who suggested using three syllables from the musical scale—“la,” “do” and “ra,” or “ray”—as the town name. Perhaps for lack of a better one, the idea was met with virtually unanimous approval. It seemed, in any case, wholly appropriate for a town that had its own opera house, its own band, and a thriving cultural life.

  Jasper and Lillian Augustine were passionate participants in this life, believing, like many of their fellow Ladorans, that dwelling in a small town should be no obstacle to a refined existence. Lillian, in addition to being her husband’s assistant in his practice and running the household—which also included Mildred’s older brother, Melville—was an accomplished painter and musician. She played the piano and organ frequently at social gatherings and official town functions, as well as at the Presbyterian church, to which she was devoted. (Her daughter did not share this piety, recalling much later: “My mother was quite a church goer and she tormented me to death going to church. I went as long as I had to and then I never went to church again.”) Of the Augustines, she was the more conservative parent—Mildred remembered her mother always encouraging her but also trying to make her “into a traditional person. But I resisted that. I just was born wanting to be myself.” The daughter of one of the area’s original Vermont pioneer settlers, Lillian Augustine was a stern, loving woman, not much given to shows of affection, who held herself and those around her to high standards. Mildred’s salvation came in the form of her more liberal father, who took her on house calls with him along the dusty back roads, first by horse and buggy and later by car. Though he was not musical like his wife, Jasper Augustine had a literary streak, as evidenced by his eager participation in the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, a group modeled on the legendary program started in 1874 by the Methodist minister John Heyl Vincent on Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York.

  Originally a kind of weeklong summer camp for families that specialized in education for Sunday school teachers, reflecting the nation’s growing interest in the professionalization of teaching, the nondenominational, though very vaguely Protestant, Chautauqua assemblies soon grew into gatherings that welcomed anyone interested in “education and uplift” in the form of lectures, plays, music, and readings. By the turn of the century, Chautauqua was known as “a center for rather earnest, but high-minded,
activities, that aimed at intellectual and moral self-improvement and civic involvement.” In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, it was “typically American, in that it is typical of America at its best.” Its adult education courses of study could be followed in one’s living room as easily in Iowa as they could in New York, and as graduates of the program went out into the world, spreading the movement’s gospel, independent Chautauquas sprung up all over the country, with an especially large number in the Midwest. Geared toward the lower and middle classes, Chautauqua was an emblem of the new American zeal for self-betterment through education. For women, especially, the program was one of the few ways to gain the skills they needed in order to rise above confined roles as farmers’ wives or domestic help in the years when very few other opportunities were open to them. “Chautauqua functioned for many lower- and middle-class women much as the elite women’s colleges did for upper-class women,” according to the group. “They were training grounds from which women could launch ‘real’ careers.” What came to be called Circuit Chautauqua, in which performers traveled around the company and set up temporary shop in towns and settlements, spread nationwide. By the time the movement crested in the mid-1920s, they were appearing in forty-five states around the country and playing to upward of forty million people a year.

  It was exactly the kind of program suited to an up-and-coming prairie town settled by intelligent men and women in search of a new life. Ladora’s Chautauqua was run and put on by locals, who enlightened their fellow townspeople on everything from politics and psychology to music. On one occasion, at least, Jasper Augustine took advantage of the opportunity to perform and tried his hand at Hamlet’s soliloquy. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, a fact that had not always been appreciated by his wife. Instead of presenting her with a diamond ring when asking for her hand in marriage in the late 1890s, the exuberant young suitor had offered a complete leather-bound set of the bard’s works. She never let him forget it.

  By the time of Mildred’s birth, the Augustines had built themselves a large wooden house on Ladora’s main street. A sign of Jasper’s burgeoning medical practice, it had a huge porch and a bedroom apiece for Mildred and Melville. There was enough money for a bit of help, so there were no chores to be done and Mildred was generally left to amuse herself. Such comfort, however, had to be earned by someone. “There was an awful lot of work in the family,” Mildred once said, looking back on her childhood and pondering the roots of her own tireless work ethic. Her mother assisted her father at his practice and, she remembered, “They worked sometimes until 8 or 9 o’clock at the office and those times I ate whatever I could find for food.” Relentless prairie pioneer energy ran deeply through the Augustine family.

  In 1907, when Mildred was only two years old, Lillian’s beloved Ladora Presbyterian Ladies’ Aid Society published a pamphlet of “Favorite Quotations.” Each church member was asked to choose a motto that had especially inspired him or her, and these various lines were bound together in a pamphlet and handed out to the congregation. The collection testified to the self-sufficient, stoic nature of Ladora Presbyterians, but it also revealed their wide range of reading and their feeling for a philosophical, often lovely, phrase. Like his gift of Shakespeare to his bride, Jasper Augustine’s choice belied the image of the man of science who had no time for the more ephemeral things in life. The line from Ruskin that he contributed exemplified his physician’s nature, but it was also concerned with a man’s soul: “The nobleness of life depends on its consistency, clearness of purpose, quiet and ceaseless energy.” His wife’s choice, from Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts Phillips Brooks, echoed this idea while casting it in a more feminine, though hardly submissive, light: “Be such a woman, live such a life, that if every woman were such as you, and every life like yours, this earth would be a God’s paradise.”

  Melville, who was seven years older than his little sister and later would go off to join the army, had inherited his parents’ sense of industriousness. He chose a simple quotation that embodied the very essence of the American dream, despite having first been uttered by the Roman historian Sallust, who lived from 86 to 34 B.C.: “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.”

  As for Mildred, she was a toddler, barely capable of speaking full sentences. Nonetheless, her high-minded family bestowed upon her some lines from Milton. The passage they chose was perfectly in keeping with the Augustine ethos, and Mildred, though she surely had no idea at the time that it was hers to aspire to, would live up to its sentiment for the rest of her life: “Truth, that golden key / That opens the palace of eternity.”

  LIFE FOR CHILDREN in a small prairie town like Ladora was full of the outdoors, and Mildred and her friends were free to roam anywhere they pleased. Athletically inclined from the start, Mildred had a great deal of freedom and was a frequent sight at coed baseball games played in backyards around town, wearing dresses her mother made for her—she herself despised sewing and left it behind as soon as she could—and stockings, her red-gold hair swinging behind her in a long braid. In the summertime she also jumped rope—her favorite grandfather would hold one end of the rope from his rocking chair and tie the other end to a porch support—and made mud pies, which she sold for a penny apiece. In the deep, frigid winter, she went ice-skating, always alone, on a frozen creek nearby, and in the spring she helped her grandparents tap trees for sap and boil it into maple sugar. Even seven decades later, Mildred still remembered with perfect clarity going out to see Halley’s comet with her family when she was six years old. The Augustines stood on the unpaved main street that ran past their door and “watched the firey beast, with long devil’s tail, move low across the horizon,” she recalled. “The ornery rascal seemed very close and unfriendly.”

  Mildred learned to read so early that she couldn’t even remember it, and got started on the classics straightaway. “I had a little affair with Peter Rabbit when I was just four or five years of age,” she remembered ruefully. “And I wanted that book so badly . . . so I went and copied it by hand.” Her parents, though they had the means, didn’t realize how desperately their daughter wanted to own the store-bought version of Beatrix Potter’s tale, a slight that, while she revered her mother and father, Mildred never forgot. But literary riches, albeit borrowed, were soon to come her way nonetheless. On a summer vacation to Chicago, Mildred discovered an institution that was to be her saving grace, at many times and in many cities: the public library.

  The grand building on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, built out of solid stone—the great fire of 1871 had changed that city’s construction methods forever—was a product of the same kind of civic sentiment that led to the rise of Chautauqua. In the 1880s and ’90s, Americans were just beginning to understand the public library as a means of disseminating information to all people equally, and Mildred was a part of the first generation to benefit from this new ethos. As the movement to provide free books to all Americans grew, it gained many notable champions, including Andrew Carnegie, who eventually spent more than $56 million to build libraries in towns and cities all over the country.

  So it was that while Mildred’s father brushed up his surgical skills at Cook County Hospital and her mother attended to other matters relating to his practice, their daughter, who had been dropped off alone in the safe sanctuary of the public reading room, spent eight hours a day devouring books. “Coming upon a shelf of fairy stories, I read each wonderful book as fast as I could,” she remembered. Back in Ladora, she had to make do with what she could get, which wasn’t much. The town was too small to have its own library, and though Carnegie’s famed program had came to Mildred’s area, it bestowed a library not on Ladora, but on the nearby town of Marengo. The Marengo Public Library was opened just after Mildred’s birth in August of 1905, but she never went there. Her father made use of the horse and buggy, and later the family car, for house calls, and no one had time to take Mildred the long seven miles to Marengo.

  This was a difficult situation, t
o say the least, for there was nothing she cherished so much as reading. “I read everything I could get my hands on as a child,” she told an interviewer, including the newspaper, in which she followed the far-off events of World War I as it escalated. “I craved to read, but the available literature neither challenged nor satisfied me. Magazines in part filled the void. St. Nicholas, a monthly, was my favorite,” she remembered. “I devoured every page, but mystery serials by Augusta H. Seaman and a series of career articles devoted to men who accomplished unusual things in the work world especially appealed to me.” Even the town’s high school library, her one possible resource for books, was a bust, “a single glass case filled mostly with dusty textbooks and a complete set of Dickens, through which I struggled laboriously.” On the long, hot summer days, when even the school library was closed, she would sit in a big leather chair in the family’s sparsely furnished library and attempt to read her parents’ few and lugubrious volumes. “[They] weren’t very readable books most of them,” she confessed later. So, in order to get her fill—or at least as close to it as was possible—she did the obvious thing, with her usual determination: “I just borrowed them from whoever. I got books wherever I could find them.”