Aurelia Moves Out of the House

Built in 1925

Aurelia Schober roomed her first year after college at 86 Vinton Street in Melrose, Massachusetts, teaching at Melrose High School in 1928-29. In the group photo of the faculty she looks older than 22. Melrose, where no windows look out upon the sea, isn't far from her parents' and siblings' house in Winthrop. But she'd lived during her senior year in her college dormitory in mid-town Boston, and instead of moving back in with her family, the novice teacher roomed in this house perched on a hill, with the elderly homeowner, his wife, their grown daughter, and a seamstress.

Vinton Street was a half-hour walk from Melrose High School, then at 585 Main Street. One of her students, Mary Stetson (1911-1994), later known as novelist Mary Stetson Clarke, became Aurelia's good friend and correspondent. [1]

Whether teaching at Melrose was a one-year appointment, or what the rooming arrangements were, we do not know. On November 5, 1928, as Aurelia and her boyfriend of two years, her first love, Karl, were hiking in the Middlesex Fells Reservation just west of Melrose, he broke up with her. She cried and was horribly grieved. Karl moved on to date and marry a Radcliffe graduate student. Fifty years later, Aurelia incorrectly remembered their painful parting as taking place in 1927. We know it was autumn 1928 and the exact date and place because he kept a diary.

Aurelia waited tables in New Hampshire in summer 1929 and attended Boston University graduate school during the academic year 1929-1930 (while Mary Stetson was a freshman there). Aurelia lived in Winthrop with her parents while earning her master's degree, and remained at home after securing a very good full-time teaching job at Brookline High School. In 1932 Aurelia quit her job and moved in with her new husband Otto Plath. But we cannot say Aurelia otherwise ever really left her parents. They rented out their Winthrop house and stayed with Aurelia and Otto during the summer of 1932, while Aurelia was pregnant with Sylvia, and also in summer 1933.

[1] Aurelia S. Plath to Mary Stetson Clarke, letter 15 March 1959.

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.

"Forbidden Fruit": Aurelia Plath's Poems*

 

 

Aurelia Schober was 17 years old when her high-school yearbook, The Echo, 1923, published her poem "Forbidden Fruit." The Winthrop, Massachusetts High School yearbook, like many high-school and college yearbooks of the time, printed samples of students' creative writings. Aurelia's college yearbook in 1928 published another of her poems, unsigned (p. 196), but in the 1970s Aurelia Schober Plath identified it for Plath biographer Harriet Rosenstein:

 

A CHILD'S WISH

 

The sky is blue and the wind blows free,

Oh come for a run on the beach with me!

 

We will delve in the sand and race with the waves

We will jump on the rocks where the salt sea laves,

We will ponder the driftwood strewn up by the tide,

We will search for a cavern where mermaidens hide.

 

And then in a calm we might hear a roar

Of very great waves on a distant shore.

Far out on the point a light tow'r we see,

Oh won't you come for a run with me?

 

Emotionally and technically "A Child's Wish" is such a regression that if Aurelia wrote it after writing "Forbidden Fruit," and after reading contemporary poetry books that we know Aurelia owned and annotated, such as Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon (1926) and Edna St. Vincent Millay's The King's Henchman (1927), "A Child's Wish" might be a "decoy" or "dummy" poem. Remember, Aurelia in 1928 was not yet married, a mother, or a schoolteacher, so did not write this poem for her children.

 

A "decoy" poem is what a college student caught in and crushed by a fiery love affair with a man 22 years older writes to show her parents, who want her to be a secretary, that she is still pure and innocent. Aurelia was her college yearbook's editor that year. The yearbook's creative-writing pages printed 17 pieces, all unsigned; at the end are listed ten different authors, including Aurelia. What I call a "dummy" poem is a bloodless exercise on an unobjectionable topic, such as a child on the beach. Maybe a reader of "Forbidden Fruit" had hinted to Aurelia that young women should not write, for all the world to see, about succumbing to temptation, and suggested to her that poetry in general led into morally dubious territory.

Or else "A Child's Wish" was the best Aurelia could do.

 

Aurelia's annotations on her daughter Sylvia Plath's letters and papers show how habitually Aurelia expressed one thing while thinking another. Proof that she wasn't born that way is that Aurelia never hid her feelings well. What's building as I research Aurelia's life is a picture of young Aurelia as a leader, intrepid, adventurous, game; then backpedaling. Sylvia too played at feminine artifice, but became renowned for finally telling it like it was.

Aurelia also wrote a greeting-card-type poem for her daughter Sylvia's 13th birthday, rather cliche, nothing special. Yet it is fortunate for literature that Aurelia loved poetry and had practiced the craft, hands-on, and then guided and supported her gifted Sylvia, although Aurelia herself ultimately gave it up.

*Aurelia Plath did not compose the poem "Rebecca," about a little girl with a doll, Rebecca, who "caught a chill" and needed special care. The poem, credited to Eleanor Piatt, first appeared in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, vol. 36, in 1909. Aurelia copied it into a letter she sent to Sylvia in 1938, specifying that it was a poem she had enjoyed as a child.

Aurelia and the Great Equality Debate: Winthrop High School, 1924

Debating team, Winthrop High School yearbook 1924, p. 58

 

Among the first four girls to break Winthrop High's debate team's gender barrier was senior Aurelia Schober [front row, third from left]. A packed auditorium heard the boys debate the girls about whether female teachers should be paid as much as males. The school yearbook, The Echo, narrates:

By reason of the fact that we of the class of '24 have been as radical in all our enterprises as one could reasonably expect from students who want something different, it is not at all remarkable to note that the debating team has also been changed somewhat and is now co-ed.

 

The girls made their debut, and debut it was, for they completely took the boys off their feet with their eloquence and ability that had previously been a joke among the opposite and superior (?) sex, on Friday evening, February 29 [1924], in a debate with the boys on the subject: Resolved that women teachers should receive a salary equal to that of men teachers for equal device.

 

Much propaganda had been broadcasted during the first term but no results were apparent until the girls began coming to the boys' trial debates and holding sessions of their own. Then from a group of aspirants that rivaled one of our athletic turnouts, [team coach] Miss Drew selected four of the best and issued a challenge to Coach Sowle, which was to prove a nemesis to his well organized crew ere long.

 

In the meantime several outside debates were talked of and even scheduled for the boys as in the past, but because of various affairs that conflicted and made these impossible, they were one by one cancelled until the high school debate, that of the boys and girls, was the main feature in this field.

 

The affirmative was upheld by the girls, comprising: —

Aurelia Schober, Rebuttal Speaker

Esther Chisholm

Marjorie McCarthy

Elizabeth Kent, Alternate 

 

And the negative by the following boys: —

Morris Jacobson, Rebuttal Speaker

Charles McCarthy

Walter O'Toole

Newall Perry, Alternate 

 

Speaking in an overcrowded auditorium, the girls won a unanimous vote from the judges, and also the right to be represented by two speakers at any other debate in which the High School might participate during the rest of the year. Miss Chisholm was chosen best speaker of the evening.

Why Was Sylvia Plath Shut Out From Harvard Summer School?

Sylvia Plath’s summer 1953 breakdown and suicide attempt are said to have hinged on being denied admission to author Frank O’Connor’s short-story-writing course at Harvard Summer School. The course catalog said enrollment was limited, but how was it that Plath, a well-published writer at age 20, was not admitted?

 

Irish-born writer O’Connor (1903-1966) in 1953 was internationally famous, a literary star. Enrollment in his course that summer was not restricted to undergraduates or Boston-area locals. Anyone could apply. The catalog entry stated only a preference for those with some experience in creative or critical writing.

 

Plath recorded her very reasonable doubts about competing for admission with “professional writers and grown-ups” from across the nation (CL1, 636). Plath saw the summer-school course catalog in March (CL1, 586), but applied only after Harvard offered her a $75 scholarship, news that arrived at her home in Wellesley around June 3. Plath was in New York for the month. Her mother Aurelia Plath, opening Sylvia’s mail, relayed this information, and also that O’Connor’s course required applicants to send in a writing sample. Plath asked her mother to retype her story “Sunday at the Mintons’” and mail it to her in New York. From there Plath mailed her sample between June 8 and 13 (CL1, 636).

 

Andrew Wilson’s 2013 biography Mad Girl’s Love Song hazards that because Wilson did not find Harvard’s rejection letter among the hundreds of other letters in Plath archives, Mrs. Aurelia Plath “perhaps” intercepted and destroyed what was in fact an acceptance letter so as to keep Plath at home serving family members that summer (pp. 209-212). If so, it was the only time Mrs. Plath shot down her writer daughter’s rising star to get her own way. Biographer Carl Rollyson gave no source for a claim that O’Connor deemed Plath “too advanced for his class” (American Isis, 64). Heather Clark’s Red Comet notes that source is an unpublished Plath biography archived at College Park, Maryland. 

 

All of that is wrong.

 

It is unlikely that Mrs. Plath, an educator, plotted to deny her daughter instruction from the moment’s most celebrated short-story writer at the nation’s most prestigious university, where Sylvia might write stories to sell for badly needed money. Wilson guesses that Sylvia was fooled but then discovered, too late, her mother’s treachery, triggering that summer's matricidal and suicidal urges. The “Sylvia was too advanced” theory flatters Plath. A 2010 essay by Peter K. Steinberg reasoned:

 

Plath had, after all, published five stories and four poems in Seventeen and Mademoiselle before June 1953. In addition, she had three poems and three journalism pieces in The Christian Science Monitor, and more than two dozen articles published anonymously as a Press Board correspondent in the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Springfield Daily News. While she had no published criticism, it would be surprising if other candidates for O’Connor’s class had such a résumé. (1)

 

This ingenue’s résumé might not have impressed O’Connor, an Irish Republican Army veteran, former political prisoner, W.B. Yeats’ playwriting protege at Dublin’s Abbey Theater, biographer, poet, translator, critic, memoirist, and fiction writer. Knopf published his collected stories in 1952. An O’Connor biography, quoting O’Connor's assistant, said Plath’s writing sample made O’Connor think her “demented” and when Plath’s suicide attempt made local and national news that summer O’Connor said it proved he had been right (2). Mrs. Plath wrote in Letters Home (LH, 123) and elsewhere that Sylvia’s application, sent in mid-June, was a late one for a course that began on July 6 and had already filled.

 

In Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, a careworn Esther Greenwood, just back from New York, sourly accepts this bad news. Esther soon receives and opens for herself a follow-up letter:

 

Propped on the table I found a long, businesslike letter from the summer school and a thin blue letter on leftover Yale stationery, addressed to me in Buddy Willard’s lucid hand.

 

I slit open the summer school letter with a knife.

 

Since I wasn’t accepted for the writing course, it said, I could choose some other course instead, but I should call in to the Admissions Office that same morning, or it would be too late to register, the courses were almost full. (Bell Jar, 97)

 

If this second letter is as much fact as fiction, and O’Connor’s assistant told the biographer the truth, Harvard and not Aurelia Plath denied Sylvia admission to the writing course, the only course she cared to take that year. Sylvia Plath’s Journals (pp. 185-187, pp. 546-549) show her weighing and dismissing summer-school alternatives and choosing, for financial and not familial reasons, to stay home in Wellesley and write on her own.

 

Maybe O’Connor’s choice not to admit Plath to his writing course was unfair. Maybe, as Steinberg suggests, “Plath’s creative self . . .was still forming,” meaning Plath was adolescent and so was her work. At age 20 no writer, even Plath, is too advanced to learn from a successful writer with 30 years’ experience and an international reputation. “You are too advanced” is to this day a common rebuff to an applicant maybe naïve enough to believe it. “The course has filled” also softens a “No.” For whatever reason, “no” was a disappointment, the greater because Plath had planned her entire summer around O’Connor’s course.

 

Showing professionalism rare in disappointed young writers, Plath never groused in writing that O’Connor had misjudged her tremendous value or that her qualifications had entitled her to admission--or that it was Mother’s fault she didn’t get in. Plath wrote in her journal that the course “was closed to me” (J 543), and to correspondent Eddie Cohen that she had felt “miffed” (CL1, 655) rather than devastated or furious. In a few years she would pore over O’Connor’s stories, seeking the secrets of success.

 

(1) Peter K. Steinberg, “They Had to Call and Call: The Search for Sylvia Plath,” Plath Profiles 2010, p. 108.

 

(2) My blog post of November 1, 2022 documents in detail the source of this remark, mentioned in passing in Deirdre Blair’s “Enmity, Torment, Adversity,” review of Voices: A Life of Frank O’Connor, The New York Times, Section 7, page 11, May 22, 1983.