According to "dispatches"? From whom and where it didn't say. Otto Plath had divorced the day before, January 4. That news arrived in Boston overnight? Did Otto phone the Boston papers to tell them? Did Aurelia's mother phone in to get ahead of any gossip? Was Otto so well known? The fancy biology professor divorced in Sin City, U.S.A. some Lydia gal. Who knew?
The tattlers were Reno's squad of part-time newspaper "stringers." These freelance reporters wrote up and telegraphed to papers news too minor for full-time journalists. Stringers in Reno got the list of the day's divorces -- public information. They chose and distilled them, then wired them overnight to the parties' hometowns(!). A published dispatch paid the stringer $2, or $5. For a celebrity's divorce, maybe $10.
The Plath divorce notice again appeared January 8 in The Boston Post, specifying Carson City, Nevada. Not a peep about Otto and Aurelia marrying there.
Otto Plath wasn't in the newspapers much. He spoke to a beekeepers' society in 1923, gave a few other public talks. Aurelia took little Sylvia to hear Otto speak at Boston University, I think on February 23, 1935. The Boston Transcript said his topic was "Nature Study." Maybe it's that memory Sylvia wrote about in her short story "Among the Bumblebees":
Alice had thought, then, of the great hall at college where her father stood, high upon a platform. She had been there once with Mother, and there had been hundreds of people who came to listen to her father talk and tell them wonderful strange things about how the world was made.
3 comments:
Imagine what Otto, Aurelia, and her mother talked about during that trip on two-lane roads from Boston to Reno and back. The logistics alone—tourist cabins? Meals, peeing?—are daunting.
Maybe Aurelia’s papers hold clues. She kept letters from Otto as well.
We know from a postcard now at Yale that Aurelia and her mother and possibly other family members drove to Colorado in 1922 to see Aurelia's Greenwood grandparents. Hope I can learn more. There is a 45 percent chance they drove a Model T, and a good chance they drove instead the T's competitor, the Chevy 490. An adventuresome trip considering the cars and highways then. Aurelia's mother was later partial to the Chevrolet brand ("the glove-gray Chevrolet").
Post a Comment