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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
I T A L
The Renaissance of the
Knee
THE
women of the early village that was the Prairie Capital had no
games or sports. They did and could play croquet. but this is not
an exception to the first statement. Croquet can not he called a
sport being rather a form of penance. It is certainly not
athletic. Which is why the women then could play it. Custom and
costume forbade their taking part in anything likely to produce a
sweat. Few games more strenuous than tiddledewinks can be played
without legs. And woman then had none. She had limbs. Basket ball
cannot be played with limbs. For women to play games they needed
to evolve from limbs to legs. Tennis and the bicycle started this
evolution. They brought about the renaissance of the knee.
The first bicycle was the old high wheel
bone
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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
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breaker. It was, of course, impossible for women and indeed,
for most men. No women, except perhaps some spangled hussy in the
circus, tried it. No men except daredevils like Will Hardy and Eb.
Mockett, tried it. Both these gentlemen escaped without fractured
skulls. This would indicate that the bonebreaker reputation of the
high wheel was undeserved, or else ...
When the safety bicycle appeared with its drop
frame, girls could ride without becoming outcasts. The first to
try it, of course came in for criticism. Although panoplied in all
the female trappings of corset, bustle, petticoats in plural
quantities, and everything a perfect lady ought to wear and did,
they yet were criticized. But the vehicle was so convenient and so
swift that it soon came into general use. Criticism was hushed
even when skirts began to shorten. The sport grew in popularity.
Clubs were organized. Women joined. Even the Century clubs had
women members who followed or sometimes set the pace of their 100
miles a day. When the town began to pave its streets and when the
long stretch on Seventeenth to South was laid, crowds of boys and
girls on every summer night glided through the dusk. When the
bicycle built for two appeared nothing could keep the girls from
learning to ride. They sometimes learned as slowly as they now
learn to swim if the swimming instructor happens to be a handsome
brute. After riding a wheel a little daring would enable a girl to
ride cross saddle and get away
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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
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with it. After the comfort of a shortened skirt, the old street
sweeper was just too bad.
Tennis helped. The game appeared in several
parts of the town. Its focus was on Seventeen street about F. Here
was a real court. A group of socially prominent young folks;
called "love all" across the net. Which sounded silly. The men
wore the tennis blazer and white duck trousers. The girls wore
high collared, puffed sleeved blouses and wide white skirts that
swept the ground. And bustles. Mr. Ripley may believe it or not,
but they wore bustles. The place was called the "Dude's
Pasture."
Nobody knows which came first, the hen or the
egg. So nobody knows whether women wear the costume to play the
game, or play the game to wear the duds. Whatever was the motive,
the movement toward fewer clothes for women went on and gathered
speed and momentum as it went. With some setbacks, the renaissance
of the knee proceeded. Old timers looked with dread lest it
acquire such impetus it could not be stopped. In 1930 it seems to
have been stopped and just in time.
[42]
T H E P R A I R I E C A
P I T A L
Shows
FOR
the most part the Good Old Days are good chiefly in the
imaginations of those who recall them. The old swimming hole of
boyhood's happy memory turns out on mature inspection to be a
terrible place. Many of the features of the village days of the
Prairie Capital appear in the same light. In the matter of shows
the case is different. The swimming hole has been replaced by the
sanitary pool. Public services have been vastly extended and
improved. Traffic and communication, by means undreamed of in the
80's, are commonplaces today. But the stage of the old time has
not been improved upon. The cinema has supplanted it, but does not
fill its place.
The "stage" then included the lecture platform.
It was the day of the Pond lectures and celebrities from Charles
Dickens down toured the country. Not
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T H E P R A I R I E C A
P I T A L
that Boz ever came to Lincoln., but all the contemporary
great did. Bob Burdette, the humorist of the Burlington Hawkeye,
lectured on "The Rise and Fall of the Mustache." Bob Ingersoll,
the atheist and free thinker, lectured on the "Mistakes of Moses."
The town, greatly daring the lightning, went to hear him. it was
the day of elocution, the lady elocutionists recited "Cornelias
Jewels" and imitated famous male orators. They put on coats and
stage beard, and stood behind a draped table that concealed the
figure from the waist down, thus modestly avoiding the necessity
of donning trousers.
The big show, the biggest on earth, then as now
was the circus. But it was bigger then. In 1880 the population of
the town was 13,003. In August of that year the circus came.
Twenty thousand people saw it. They came from miles around. They
started before daylight. It was dawn next day before some of them
reached home.
Next to the circus the minstrels held the high
place in popular esteem. Their houses were always crowded.
Laughter and tears swept the audience. The inevitable high tenor
song the inevitable "Silver Threads." They burlesqued "The Mikado"
under the name "High Cardo." Everybody agreed the takeoff was
better than the original. For weeks afterwards their jokes were
repeated. They were old familiar friends.
As to shows like the "Black Crook," only half
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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
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the town saw them--the male half. No lady went-- if any did she
was no lady. They never needed the sign "Men Only" but the "S. R.
0." was in constant use. Delighted tradition tells of one dear
lady who did not approve of the theater but got her dates mixed
and went as she thought to hear Frances Willard. Her shocked face
and her quick retreat as the rising curtain disclosed the chorus
of Lily Clay's "Varieties" will never fade from memory. That
chorus was of course high, wide and handsome, this being in the
days before women began to take off pounds as well as petticoats.
When the "Black Crook" was revived last year in Hoboken, it was
thought a charming old fashioned spectacle for children.
The stage proper was housed in the Academy of
Music, later in the Hallo Opera House, the Centennial, the Funke
theater, and still much later in the Lansing-Oliver. Ed Church was
an early manager. Frank Zehrung was the local magnate at the
height of the town's theatrical glory. Players came to town even
before the railroad did. With the growth of railroads Lincoln
became a part of the road. On that read toured the great ones of
the stage and a lot of the little ones. Lincoln saw them all. Four
cadets in uniform were the army of Shenandoah. Ten university boys
composed the populace that Anthony addressed at the bier of
Caesar. A gallery of their college chums stopped the show with
their comments and applause, to the profane disgust
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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
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of Anthony backstage. A list of the names of players who came
to Lincoln in those days reads like a Who's Who of the American
stage. They have passed to their final exit. The beauty they
portrayed has flickered out like their own footlights. An old time
lover of the old time stage feels that its place is empty. The
good Old Days.
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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
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Schools
LINCOLN
always from the beginning has prided itself upon its schools. And
equally from the beginning it has had difficulty its providing the
necessary facilities for the rapidly increasing school population.
It always has been a matter of wonder where all the kids come
from. No sooner has provision, apparently ample, been made than
overcrowding appears and more buildings must be erected.
A]ways there has been opposition. Always the opposition has
proved noisier than numerous. The needed room has been
provided.
In the beginning they used what they could find
or could improvise as school rooms. They used the State House for
some of them. Also it was natural that there should be many
private schools to supplement the inadequate public facilities. A
fre-
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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
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quent announcement was that of the opening of a new school in
somebody's private house or in some temporarily unused public
building. Some of these private schools did a good job and left a
distinct impression on the character of the community. Miss Claire
Link conducted one such on the north side of the Capitol park
where the Catholic rectory now stands. An even more significant
school was that of Miss Elizabeth Irwin at Twelfth and H streets.
Many boys and girls, now old, received there a lasting inspiration
from a true teacher of youth.
Among the several makeshift school houses,
memory fondly records the old stone church at Twelfth and K, known
in the school slang of the time as the "Stone Jug." Many men and
women now prominent in the life of the city went there. Just
before it disappeared from the scene Mrs. Tiffany was its
presiding genius. This was a teacher with a profound knowledge of
boys and an uncanny ability to get a little knowledge into their
heads without an operation. She was stern of countenance and soft
of heart. She was a disciplinarian as she needed to be. She took
no chances of spoiling any child by a too sparing use of the rod.
She had at various times under her charge Leonard Chapin, Emory
Hardy, Paul Lauer, Walt Roberts, Ray Edmiston, Jake Oppenheimer
and Ned Brown. The sedate conduct of these gentlemen in their
maturer years affords evidence that she belabored not in vain.
There is none
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T H E P R A I R I E C A P
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of them who does not hold her in grateful and affectionate
memory.
When the city got around to building the High
School on the present McKinley site, it had a really adequate
beginning of its school plant. This stood at first in lonely
grandeur far to the east of the town. It housed all grades. In
time it was supplemented by the various ward schools, a few of
which are still in use. A high school commencement in those old
days was a real event. The classes graduating were small, and they
furnished their own oratorical program. The opera house would be
crowded to hear orations of the Per Aspera ad Astra type, and to
see the president of die school board present diplomas. It was a
"Big Doings."
The town became a focus for many educational
enterprises. Wesleyan University and Cotner were founded and grew
apace. Union College at College View was added. The Episcopal
bishop founded Worthington Academy north of Belmont. Private
capital built the Western Normal and Lincoln Normal. Of these two
the irony of change has turned the first into a penal reformatory.
The second is Doctor Bailey's Green Gables, with some emphasis on
mental disorders. Add the long list of schools of music,
expression, business practice and there can be no doubt the
Prairie Capital was distinctly school conscious.
[49]
© 2000, 2001 for NEGenWeb Project, submitted by Kathie
Harrison <NelliBlu28@aol.com>
"I'd like to dedicate this to the memory of the early people of
Lincoln, Nebraska
in honor of my Grand Aunt Ellen Hogan Keane"
