Otto Plath in the News

I'd thought a Nevada divorce was your own business and no one else's, so was surprised to read about Otto's in the old Boston American, January 5, 1932.

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.

Aurelia Plath, Young Wife and Mother: 24 Prince Street, Jamaica Plain

Newlyweds Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath rented here the lower left unit from 1932 until 1936. This was where the couple rewrote for publication Otto's dissertation about bees. Here Aurelia studied Latin for a college course Otto had her take so she could better draft his paper about insects. Sylvia Plath was born in a Boston hospital, but this house in the Boston neighborhood called Jamaica Plain was her first home. In a little pink baby book Aurelia chronicled her daughter's growth and milestones. Sylvia spoke her first words at eight months old. At 14 months Aurelia noted that Sylvia said, "Daddy," "specially when someone shakes the furnace!" Back then, someone had to shake the house's furnace about every 12 hours to knock the ashes off the burning coals.

In this house Sylvia learned to walk, talk, and read. Little Sylvia, using tiles, here copied onto the living-room carpet an image of the Taj Mahal, artwork that delighted her father. Built in 1916, 24 Prince Street is a short walk from the Arnold Arboretum, a botanical garden and haven for bees, where Otto had dwelt for years with a houseful of fellow Harvard graduate students. Sylvia could recall from her very early childhood her grandparents' house in Winthrop, by the ocean, but only Aurelia recalled in writing some of the events that took place here.