The Mysterious Gap of 1958

Aunt Aurelia bought us a parakeet!

There are no letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother Aurelia between August 13, 1958 and July 9, 1959. Aurelia in Letters Home said that Sylvia and her husband Ted had moved to Boston and "We were close enough to visit often, and used the telephone." (322)

Sylvia wrote that Aurelia phoned ("the usual depressing call from mother") and visited. But knowing how militant Aurelia was about presenting her family as conflict-free, I think Sylvia in that 11-month gap must have mailed her mother something, at least one thing, that has been removed. There is not even a December happy-birthday note to Sylvia's Grampy. 

Aurelia was conscious of that gap and tried to fill it in Letters Home with three excerpts from her own journal, dated August 3, September 9, and September 20, 1958. Aurelia's editor at Harper & Row published only the August 3 entry (348).

In one of Aurelia's notebooks her reflections on autumn 1958 have been razored out.

All this made me suspect dirty family laundry.

Aurelia maybe didn't want us to know that in 1956 she dismissed from her house her 75-year-old widower father, "Grampy," after his 12 years in residence, telling her sister Dotty and brother Frank that it was now their turn to host him.

Grampy was also going blind. None of his three adult children wanted him. Sylvia wrote her brother that Aurelia faced Grampy's resentment along with Dotty's and Frank's. Sylvia's letter is dated April 23, 1956; Grampy's wife wasn't even dead yet.

They sound like a typical American family.

Dotty lived near Wellesley and Frank in Pennsylvania, and both had spouses and kids. In June 1956 Grampy went to Dotty and lived on a porch enclosed to make a room. [1] Aurelia from then on did only respite care, taking Grampy to Bermuda and doing summer Dad-sitting. Aurelia wrote a friend in 1959 that she abandoned the novel she was writing, to keep her father company. [2]

Grampy was a burden. But whoever hosted Grampy got access to his pot of retirement money.

Dotty and Frank's "underhanded business with Grampy's money" -- as Sylvia described it; we don't know the details -- was perhaps exposed or fought over in autumn 1958. In 1959 Frank and Dotty both bought really nice new houses; Dotty's a second house. Sylvia's letter to Aurelia (January 16, 1960) comments on Aurelia's report that Dotty ducked questions about the purchase.

Shipped away to Frank's house, Grampy stayed only eight months because Frank became seriously ill. Grampy went back to Dotty's.

What Grampy wanted is not known. But Aurelia wrote a friend that she bought Grampy a parakeet, an unpredictably noisy little gift and hard for a man with low vision to care for.

Aurelia and siblings were willing to offload and carousel their elderly dad so they might enhance their own lives with his money. If this wasn't the issue, whatever it was, Aurelia wiped it from written records. Meanwhile, in autumn 1958 Sylvia was entangled in her own agonizing problems, described in detail in her journal.

While Aurelia was in England in summer 1962, Dotty put Grampy in a nursing home. On August 27 Sylvia wrote to Aurelia, who was back in the U.S., "I am glad to hear that Grampy is better off in the home and think that decision was the best & only one."

[1] "a converted porch," Harriet Rosenstein transcript of K. Goodall interview on 24 June 1974, Special Collections #1489, Box 3, Folder 3, Emory. [2] "the novel," ASP to Miriam Baggett, 6 February 1960, Smith.

The Beaches at Winthrop

"At Winthrop Beach," 1951

"Point Shirley and Beach," 1936

"Point Shirley and Deer Island", 1937

"After the Blow," March 8, 1931

"The Boulevard," 1907

 

The Schobers moved to Winthrop, Mass., in 1918, the Plaths in 1936. Wanting to see the Winthrop they knew and lived in and Sylvia wrote about, I sorted on eBay through postcards, focusing on waterfront scenes. Those from 1905-11 feature resort hotels and the Boulevard promenade atop the seawall. A plethora of cards are postmarked summer 1907, just before the stock market plunged by 50 percent ("The Panic of 1907"). Several postcards, such as the 1931 example, picture disastrous storm damage: flooding, a shattered boulevard, winter waves. I purchased the hand-colored postcard above. It gives me context for the time the Plaths moved to Winthrop, what it looked like then.

Winthrop goes out of style in the late teens and 1920s after people buy cars and drive to vacation places beyond the reach of trains. Yet there were vacationers enough that the Schobers in 1932 and 1933 rented their Shirley Street house and stayed with Otto and Aurelia in Jamaica Plain. Aurelia, Sylvia, and Warren spent the dreadfully hot summer of 1936 in Winthrop with the Schobers, and the Plaths bought their Winthrop house on Johnson Avenue that fall. 

Sylvia's uncle Frank Schober Jr. built his own sailboat, rather like the young men on the 1937 postcard, and in 1940 Otto Plath bought it and that summer went fishing in the bay, daily catching mackerel he insisted be served for supper.

The White Waiter: Sylvia Plath's Grandfather at Work

More cosmopolitan than either his daughter or granddaughter was Frank Schober, Aurelia Plath's father and Sylvia Plath's "Grampy," headwaiter at Boston's elegant Hotel Thorndike from 1908 to 1921. He spoke four European languages; neither Aurelia nor Sylvia ever matched that. Schober had worked in hospitality since his boyhood in Austria and then in Italy, France, and England. Neither his daughter nor his granddaughter ever went abroad to find work.

Schober had arrived in the U.S. in June 1902, stating his destination as Magnolia, Massachusetts, where rich Americans vacationed at seaside resort hotels. He is listed in the Boston city directory as a "headwaiter" in 1905, and "Hotel Thorndike" is first specified in 1908. His brother Henry was a waiter there too.

Credit: New York Public Libraries

Built in 1886 on "Boston's Fifth Avenue," Boylston Street, by the Public Garden, Hotel Thorndike was one of giant knot of downtown Boston hotels built from the Gilded Age into the Jazz Age. Thousands of recent European immigrants like Frank and Henry Schober staffed the Thorndike, the Parker House, Hotel Vendome, the Westminster, the Touraine, the Lenox, and more.

European staff, desirable in these "European-style" hotels, displaced African-Americans who'd held those jobs during the 19th century. African-American waiters were well organized by the 1880s and making gains. [1] European hotel staff in 1904 created their own trade association, the international Geneva Association of Hotel and Restaurant Employees. The Boston Globe noted in 1908 that the Association's annual ball drew 2000 attendees, many not arriving until after 11 p.m. when their shifts ended. Frank Schober served on the reception committee. The hotels' owners were invited and feted. [2] 

The Geneva Association was not a labor union. In that time and place "Geneva" seems to have evolved into a code word for "white." [3] In case of a strike, hoteliers could replace white staff with African-Americans, as happened in New York City in 1912. The striking white workers became furious not at management but at the African-Americans.

The Hotel Thorndike had a relatively modest 150 rooms, 100 with private baths. Handwritten on the Thorndike picture postcard is "The English Room is the best place in Boston." Harvard students frequented the hotel's Olde English Room and were sometimes thrown out. 

"American-style" hotels provided lodging plus meals. In "European-style" hotels, guests paid for their own meals, so it paid to have a fine hotel restaurant. Here is a December 1907 Thorndike dinner menu [click to enlarge. I will have the roast duck, thank you. How easily I imagined myself the served rather than the server]. The Thorndike also gets credit as the first Boston hotel to make an event out of New Year's Eve, packaging food and drink with entertainment and lodging.

Prohibition, enacted in 1920, ruined fine dining and cut off highly profitable liquor sales, so it is no surprise that Frank Schober's headwaiter job changed and then vanished. From 1924 to 1926 he worked in Swampscott, Mass., hosting at a dine-and-dance palace called The Sunbeam. In 1929 he was a steward at the Hotel Westminster. Then came the Great Depression, and the grand-hotel era was over.

Aurelia's father, 1910

Also gone, forever, in America: "waiter" as a steady job that might support a family. Schober in the 1930s managed unspecified dining rooms, and in 1938 specifically a bakery-tearoom, Dorothy Muriel's, at 127 Tremont Street, one of a chain of about 50 local Dorothy Muriels. [4] The 1940 census shows him unemployed at the end of 1939. [5] As of 1942 he worked as maitre d' at the Brookline Country Club. The "Grampy" Sylvia Plath knew best was required to live at work.

Traits of a good headwaiter: patience, poise, supervisory skills, and a knack for service. Complaining in letters to her mother about how hard it was, Sylvia waited tables for a month in summer 1952 before getting sinusitis and, instead of facing her manager and quitting, had Aurelia do it. Waiting tables was by then a default job, menial, the last in any list of Sylvia's choices; a part-time job for minorities and students. Plath scholars portray it as almost tragic that Plath had to serve lunches or chop vegetables at her Smith College dormitory to earn part of her tuition.

Sylvia Plath had The Bell Jar's narrator kick an African-American orderly who was serving dinner. Now we have further context for that seemingly gratuitous act.

[1] "An African-American Waiters' Ball, Boston, 1892," The American Menu, August 11, 2014. Web.

[2] Boston Globe, "More Than 2000 Make Merry," Dec. 15, 1908, p. 9.

[3] Boston Globe, Sept. 21, 1914, p. 6, reports on a Boston waiter's marathon swim and lists three fellow waiters in his support boat: Francis Schober, Fred Kreuzer, and A. Tussin "of the Geneva Athletic and Swimming Club."

[4] The Dorothy Muriel's bakery chain was bought out in 1940 by what eventually became Brigham's bakery and ice-cream shops.

[5] In Winthrop in mid-March 1940, Frank Schober reported to the federal census that he had been unemployed for 13 weeks and was seeking work as a restaurant manager.

A Friend of the Family

 

“Robert J. Roberts, teacher of gymnastics,” pictured above, witnessed and signed Francis Schober’s Petition for Naturalization papers in Boston in February 1909. Francis "Frank" Schober, born in Austria, was Aurelia Plath's father and Sylvia Plath's grandfather and father figure.

 

I looked up "Robert J. Roberts," expecting nothing, and got a surprise.

 

While employed at the Boston YMCA for 40 years, athletics director Roberts revolutionized the gym, installing floor mats, mirrors, and the first indoor track. He invented pulley weights and the “ring” shower head for the one-minute showers he recommended after exercise. Roberts coined the terms “body building” and “medicine ball.” In youth, Robert Jenkins Roberts (1849-1920) modeled for the iconic "Minute Man" statue at Concord, Massachusetts, sculpted by Daniel Chester French.

 

Before Roberts, gyms were “gymnastic” as in the sport of gymnastics: parallel bars, pommels, rings, swings, tumbling; acrobats and ropewalkers used gyms and taught there. Skinny “pigeon-breasted” Roberts in his teens lifted huge heavy “strong man” weights (the only type available) to develop his chest and shoulder muscles, neglecting his back, and learned the hard way how unsafe and unhealthy that was. He conceived of the gym as a place not for stunts but for Everyman to exercise, mildly and daily, all muscle groups for physical, mental, and spiritual health. His ideas caught on. In the above photo, taken in 1901, Roberts was age 51 or 52.

“All exercises,” Roberts opined, “must be safe, short, easy, beneficial, and pleasing.” Roberts invented the 20-minute workout – with light dumbbells; he loathed heavy ones. That daily 20 minutes was all the exercise the body needed, he said. He recommended four small meals a day rather than two large ones, and deep breathing, stretching, fresh air, and daily spiritual reading. Roberts also invented those little cards at the gym on which to record changes in one’s measurements. Roberts was 5’5”, waist 32” and chest 43".

 

It is not known how Roberts met Frank Schober, a waiter then in his late 20s, but nightly at 8:00 the Boston YMCA invited visitors to watch the famous light-dumbbell workout class. Six months' acquaintance was required to serve as a petitioner's character witness, and Schober was granted the favor by this avatar of the Y's founding principles of "muscular Christianity" and helping young immigrants assimilate. Scraps of information do exist about Frank Schober’s athletic interests, and we know "Grampy" swam expertly, Sylvia clinging to his back when she was a child.

Roberts led classes for gym instructors, who spread his ideas nationwide; the YMCA, founded in London in the 1840s, spread them worldwide. The book The Body Builder (1916; reprinted 1921) was compiled and published by the YMCA in Roberts' honor and preserves Roberts’ exercise routines and sayings such as, "Men should look their best in their birthday suit until old age wears it out."

Aurelia Plath's Birthplace and the Myth of Her Childhood

2047-2049 Columbus Ave., Boston, today. Built in 1890.

Sylvia Plath's memoir "Ocean 1212-W" says of her grandparents' house at Point Shirley in Winthrop, Massachusetts, "My mother was born and brought up in the same sea-bitten house," and a bunch of biographers have assumed that is true when it's false. Records show that her mother Aurelia's parents, the Schobers, lived from Aurelia's birth in 1906 until 1918 in Boston's landlocked neighborhood Jamaica Plain, moving to Winthrop and the seaside house when Aurelia was 12.

Downtown Jamaica Plain, 1906

For two years, until 1908, Aurelia's parents rented a flat in a three-story rowhouse at 2047 Columbus Avenue [color photo up top], where Aurelia was born. The young family then separated, and in 1909 Aurelia's father, Frank Schober, a waiter, was listed as a roomer at 95 Gainsborough while the toddler Aurelia and her 21-year-old mother left the U.S. and stayed on the Italian Riviera. Reunited in mid-1909, the Schobers moved back into the same Columbus Avenue rowhouse, this time occupying number 2049. Anticipating the birth of Aurelia's sister Dorothy in 1911, in December 1910 Frank bought a duplex at 34 Peter Parley Road in Jamaica Plain.

The addresses 2047 and 2049 Columbus Avenue have adjacent entryways. Housed at the 2049 building in the year 1910 along with the Schobers, who were German-speaking Austrian immigrants, were the Ranks, a German immigrant and his American wife; and the Winslows, an American husband with a German wife and one child. Most neighbors on the block were American-born with Anglo surnames. The 1910 census also shows Irish immigrant families concentrated a few blocks away on Washington Street.

Frank Schober’s brother Henry, also a waiter, lived at the Peter Parley Road address during 1912. In June 1912 Henry married, and in October his wife had a baby girl named Esther. Henry and his family then moved to 1 Roslyn Place, also in Jamaica Plain: a house with a verandah that Aurelia said in Letters Home she liked to visit.

Aurelia's mythical seaside childhood stems from Plath's "Ocean 1212-W," written in 1962, and was reinforced by the phrase "early childhood" in Aurelia's autobiographical introduction to Letters Home (1975), page 4. Before Aurelia ever mentions Winthrop, she narrates her "first day of school" incident and her promotion from first grade to third, events that had to have happened in Jamaica Plain. 

Aurelia then writes that Sylvia Plath's "interest in minorities" grew out of Aurelia's "account of my early childhood in a primarily Italian-Irish neighborhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts, during World War I." Aurelia proceeds to describe schoolmates bullying her for having a Germanic surname, Schober. Such harassment was common during World War I. But even in her first days in Winthrop, Aurelia was past "early childhood" and into girlhood. The families on the Schobers' Shirley Street 800 block in 1920 were named Hagen, Whittier, Fletcher, Somerby, Thompson, Boles, Ryan, Brimsley, Hughes, Ferington, Pert, Walsh, Eaton, and Harwood. By "minorities" Aurelia meant Germans, and she met the Irish and Italians not in her Winthrop neighborhood but at school, which was far enough away that Aurelia rode a bus to get there; and in Jamaica Plain rather than Winthrop.

Sylvia Plath, born to Aurelia and her husband in October 1932, lived in Jamaica Plain until autumn 1936 when the Plaths moved to 92 Johnson Avenue, a middle-class Winthrop neighborhood populated by families with Anglo surnames ("Ingalls," "Tewksbury," "Westcott," "White") and a few Jews. Aurelia implies that Sylvia (in her memoir "America! America!") appropriated as her own her mother's multi-ethnic schoolyard milieu.

Because Aurelia's father was an avid swimmer, Aurelia probably had memories of early-childhood days on Boston-area beaches, or on Cape Cod in summer, or archaic memories of the Riviera. Aurelia loved the sea, and so did Sylvia. But neither was born or reared from infancy at 892 Shirley Street in Winthrop.

Only Aurelia’s much younger brother Frank Schober Jr., born in 1919, spent his early childhood at 892 Shirley Street, between a bay and open ocean, the only home Sylvia had ever known “Grampy” and “Grammy” Schober to have. By 1942 the Schobers had moved in with their widowed daughter and her children Sylvia and Warren Plath, ages nine and seven, to the Johnson Avenue house in Winthrop. Then they all moved, as a unit, west to Wellesley.