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Crochet

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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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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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.

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Theater

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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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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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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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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Schools

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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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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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.

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© 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"