Aurelia and Her Man Friend at Camp Maqua

Camp Maqua in season welcomed girls and women age 16 to 35 to its rustic lakeside cabins in Poland, Maine. The above brochure said $15.50 per week included a bunk and meals plus camp activities: swimming, boating, guest lectures, fireside storytelling and singing. In 1927, college student Aurelia Schober left her home in Boston for a summer office job at Camp Maqua. She was 21. She returned to Maqua in summer 1928. One of those summers was heavenly and the other was hellish, and not because of the weather.

 

On Sunday, July 24, 1927, Aurelia welcomed to the camp a very special visitor: her boyfriend, an Austrian engineer guest-teaching at MIT. Dr. Karl Terzaghi in 1926 had needed a German-speaking secretary, and college sophomore Aurelia Schober, 19, daughter of two Austrians, got the job. When they met, Karl was 43, divorced, and dashing. In a few months he and Aurelia were dating. It was not a fling or a dirty-old-man thing. He admired her intelligence and sensitivity. Aurelia brought Karl home to meet her parents. Karl took her to her junior prom. They both loved the great outdoors. In July, Karl was delighted to leave stuffy Boston and spend a week at Camp Maqua near his girl.

 

In the camp’s guest quarters, Karl wrote in his diary, “Felt today five years younger. Strain gradually disappearing, the wrinkled skin gets smooth under the gentle touch of L.’s caressing hand.” Karl called Aurelia “Lilly,” a nickname German speakers use for a dream girl. Karl’s diaries, now in archives, describe the pair’s two-year relationship and refer to Aurelia first as “Miss Schober,” then “A.,” and then “L.” All that idyllic week, after Aurelia finished her workday, the pair spent late afternoons and evenings rowing for miles, swimming in springs and coves, hiking at sunset, dining at farmhouses. Of course they shared quiet moments. Curfew was midnight.

 

A geologist by training, Karl observed nature with an artist’s eye:

 

. . . One more hour at the lake shore. Separated from the world. No sound but the voices of sleepy birds and now and then the breeze gently passing through the foliage. Fragrant smell of the woods, and the passionate kisses of the girl, curled up on the blanket and pressing her body against mine, trembling with overflowing tenderness. Rowing home at midnight, 6 miles to the camp. No moon. The sky fairly clear, the stars shining through transparent mist. To the left an unbroken wall of dark forest, the smell of the woods saturating the atmosphere. To the north the silvery lake stretching as far as the eye can see, smooth like a mirror, bordered by a pale blue rim of low hills, covered by forest, with horizontal crests. Vast distances, pale colors, horizontal lines, here and there a little light shining at the lake shore as a link between now and the endless past and the future . . . . [1]

 

On July 30 Karl boarded the train to Boston and “the memory of a week in fairyland went with me.” “What shall I do with my love for this child?” he asked his diary. Karl Terzaghi (1883-1963) was famously plainspoken, but never wrote a critical or salacious word about Aurelia except to say he scolded her: “You will never make a man friend unless you get rid of your self-sufficiency!” [2]

 

The following summer Aurelia pined for Karl while again working at Camp Maqua. Karl was with clients in Central and South America. She worried he no longer needed her. The couple met again in autumn, only to break up. Aurelia was inconsolable. Karl moved on. His colleagues had become her friends and she probably heard he was dating a Radcliffe graduate student.

 

In summer 1929 Aurelia waited tables at a New Hampshire vacation hotel, saving up to go to graduate school herself. In summer 1930 she worked for camps in Pine Bush, New York, possibly at the YWCA’s Echo Lodge. [3] The Great Depression closed Maine’s Camp Maqua. [4] It was sold and became a boys’ camp in 1936.

[1] Terzaghi Diary 27.1, pp. 57-72.

[2] Ibid., p. 37.

[3] Letters Home, p. 8.

[4] Another YWCA Camp Maqua operated in Michigan until the 1970s.

The pier at Camp Maqua, Maine, 1924

Inside "Ocean 1212-W"

892 Shirley Street, Winthrop, Mass. USA, photographed in 2018.

Sylvia Plath claimed her grandparents' house at Point Shirley as her true childhood home and spiritual nexus in a 1962 essay we know as "Ocean 1212-W." Prepare for a unique and savory treat: Aurelia's Austrian beau Karl in 1926 described in his diary his first view of and visit to the town of Winthrop and Point Shirley, and an evening in Aurelia's family home. Present were her parents (later "Grammy" and "Grampy" Schober; Karl culls a few new facts) and Aurelia's siblings, future aunt and uncle to Sylvia and Warren. More about Karl here. I discovered this passage in May and you are the first to read it. It's verbatim and I think beautiful. Thanks to the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute for granting access to the Karl Terzaghi diaries. Diary page numbers are in the brackets.

Diary 26.1, p. 104 October 24, 1926

Yesterday, Saturday, met A. at the [105] Public library, lunch among lights and colors at Brau Haus, a delightful, quiet hour. After lunch to Orient Heights, from hill above station one of the most beautiful views of Boston I ever saw. Beacon Hill in blue grey against the lighter sky, dominated by the Custom House tower. Chelsea: a series of drumlins with gentle skyline covered with grey houses. At the foot of the hill the red brown saltmarshes with wide, winding channels, mother of pearl; so beyond Beachmont N.E., the silver grey ocean, the horizon behind the flat, grey shape of Nahant Island on the horizon & in the East [106] the friendly hills and narrows & peninsula of Winthrop. From the Orient Heights we wandered across Winthrop, & on the Boulevard, along the beach, from Drumlin to Drumlin: Grovers Cliff, Winthrop Head and out to Shirley Point: the ocean calm, in color reminding the Persian sea, now and then a low, gentle wave breaking at the beach. Dark stone standing out of the water – low tide, a brown belt of sea weed stretching between the water and the seawall – the dominating white water tank of Winthrop [107] Head standing like the tower of a Sarazene castle – and the dear little girl with shining brown eyes, showing her treasures, the beach, and the walls and the sea she loves. An evening in her home at Shirley Point, remote from the world. Her mother a plump little lady with irregular features, brutish forehead, but lovable and kind and goodnatured. The father, who arrived somewhat later, serious, official, simple, but sincere, agreeable, regular features. Assistant manager of the Alston Manor. The light and [108] the beauty of the home: The children. Sitting at the fireplace, fed with driftwood, paved with cobblestones from the Drumlins. A., the oldest, with her gentle, lovable features, her sister, fifteen, a strong husky girl, with clear, open grey eyes, blond, straight hair and a strong nice chin, and finally came the little boy, warm from his bed, insisted to see me, tried to behave like a little man, and explained to me his monkey. – About storms in Winthrop, the breakers washing through the gaps between the houses, the children [109] spending days on the beach, in bathing suits, in direct touch with gentle and violent nature – the library in Shirley Point, grocery store a little world in itself. The father from Aussee, Gasthof Schober, wanted to study medicine, some time in Italy, met in London brother of his wife, both went over to Boston and settled. His brother-in-law headwaiter at Copley Plaza. The early days of the young couple, tramping up in White Mountains, since then living in this little home, no travels, except the family for short time [110] to Colorado Springs – her father.

            Towards eleven I left, went with A. and her father around the Shirley Point back to W. station beautiful moonlight, the ocean calm. The dear little girl tight at my side and while we walked behind her father, I told her silently how I felt, by a kiss.

            Today, a quiet day, still under the impression of yesterday’s evening. The picture of the girl was with me: her innocence, her happiness at her wealth in her modest surroundings, the [111] blessings of an education paid for by the self restraint of conscientious parents, a bud, on the point of becoming a flower – her lovable way of nursing the smaller ones of the family, the drumlins and the ocean as a background. I had the feeling as if I had found something I was longing for since years.

Aurelia Plath's First Love

Austrian civil engineer Dr. Karl von Terzaghi was invited to the U.S. in 1925 to teach and establish a program at M.I.T. and, incidentally, to explain why new M.I.T. buildings on the Charles River banks had been sinking an inch per year. Terzaghi (1883-1963) founded two new sciences: soil mechanics (the physics and hydraulics of soils; he proved that soil types, like any other building materials, had principles) and foundational engineering, now called geotechnology. Terzaghi hired "Miss A. Schober" as his secretary in 1926 -- not 1927, as Aurelia has it in her introduction to Letters Home. That's where Aurelia, who never gave his name, wrote about:

". . .[w]orking at the close of my junior year (1927) for a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a handwritten manuscript in German dealing with new principles of soil mechanics. As he had a publication deadline to meet, I usually worked into the early evening, so we often had dinner together before I left Boston for home. It was during these meals that I listened, fascinated, to his accounts of travel and colorful adventures, fully realizing that I was in the presence of a true genius in both the arts and sciences. I came away with my notebook filled with reading lists. . ." (6)

She wrote that this self-education would one day benefit her children, but that is not the whole story. The friendship ripened into love.

For two years they enjoyed the theater, museums, hikes, camping, gardens, evenings with Karl's faculty friends, dining and dancing, and conversation most of all. The above photo was taken in 1926, when Karl, 43 and divorced, Boston's most eligible bachelor, chose Aurelia Schober, 20, moved by her innocence, intelligence, and sensitivity. He took her to her junior prom at the Kenmore Hotel on May 13, 1927 and then at 4:00 a.m. in Winthrop ate the post-prom breakfast Aurelia's mother had left prepared for them with instructions, Austrian style. Terzaghi wrote about it in his diary. His 82 volumes of diaries are in Oslo. I learned where his diaries were by reading his biography. ("Aurelia's boyfriend has a biography?")

Terzaghi centennial stamp, Austria, 1983

Shorthand transcription unlocked and confirmed his identity; he's the "Karl" in young Aurelia's lovelorn Gregg shorthand annotations in her copy of poet Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon. That book is in Sylvia Plath's personal library at the Lilly Library in Bloomington. Find the transcriptions here.

In 1928 Terzaghi left the U.S. for a prestigious engineering professorship in Vienna. Ten years later when the Nazis expelled his Jewish students and pressured him to work on the German Autobahn he returned to Boston, taught at Harvard and consulted worldwide. His legacy includes the Chicago subway system and the Aswan Dam, plus immortal equations and elegant problem-solving designs. In 1975 Bostonians in certain circles, or engineers, or Aurelia's college friends, could have guessed whom Aurelia was describing in Letters Home -- it's obvious, now that we know.

Their story is heartbreaking. For more of it, click here. Sylvia, taking her cue from her mother, married her own foreign-born male genius, Ted Hughes.

References: Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist (Goodman, 1998); Letters Home 1950-1963 (Plath, 1975); Norwegian Geotechnical Institute Terzaghi Library; Geoengineer.org; Wikipedia: Karl von Terzaghi (mentions Aurelia Schober, future mother of Sylvia Plath); Wikipedia: Ruth Terzaghi; Geotechnical Hall of Fame; American Society of Civil Engineers