Honoring the largest high school regatta in the world

This week in North Philly Notes, we honor the recent Stotesbury Cup Regatta by posting an excerpt from Dotty Brown’s Boathouse Row, 

Edward T. Stotesbury was 78 years old in 1927 when he decided to underwrite a high school rowing cup. Little did he know that this small gesture would prove to be his life’s greatest legacy, setting the course for a legendary high school regatta.

Called “Philadelphia’s first citizen,” and a “banker’s banker” by newspapers and civic leaders of his time, “Ned” Stotesbury was one of the richest men in the nation, with a net worth of more than $100 million (nearly $1.4 billion today). A widower for many years, at age 62 he married a socialite and built her Whitemarsh Hall, a 100,000-square-foot mansion on 300 acres in suburban Wyndmoor, Pa. With 147 rooms, 28 bathrooms, and 24 fireplaces, it was described as the “Versailles of America.” The couple summered and wintered in their other palatial retreats in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Palm Beach, Florida, where they entertained the likes of Henry Ford, Will Rogers, and the crown prince of Sweden.

The son of a Quaker mother and Episcopalian father, Stotesbury had worked his way up from a clerk’s position at Drexel & Company to become senior partner of the banking behemoth. He was also a partner in J. P. Mor- gan, finance chairman of the Reading Company, and a top fundraiser for the Republican presidential campaigns of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. With his economics acumen much in demand, he was recruited to the boards of nearly three dozen banking, rail, and coal companies, and helped open the doors to China trade by negotiating a major loan to its railroads. He was also a trustee of both the University of Pennsylvania and the Drexel Institute (now Drexel University).

Civic-minded as well, for 26 years he served as president of the Fairmount Park Commission. He also chaired the American Red Cross’ local chapter during World War I, helping to raise $3.5 million and winning the gratitude of the French, who honored him as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

If his now-forgotten achievements went on for pages, so did his membership in clubs and societies, through which he sought recognition and connections, as did so many Philadelphians of his time. The Social Register of 1901 lists Stotesbury’s membership in nine clubs before ending its entry in “etc.” These included the Ritten- house Club, the Art Club, the Philadelphia Cricket Club, the Radnor Hunt, the Germantown Cricket Club (vice president), the Union League (president), and the Racquet Club (president).

In his acerbic look at Philadelphia society, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy, Nathaniel Burt attributes Stotesbury’s social reach to his not quite blue blood. Stotesbury, he writes, was “fairly definitely not an Old Philadelphian, despite a good old-fashioned semi-Quaker family and so his social row was harder to hoe than that of his predecessors.”

It may be one reason why in 1887, the aspiring Stotesbury, still in his 30s, decided to join the Bachelors Barge Club, though not as a rower. He valued the camaraderie of the club on Boathouse Row, whose members were of the highest pedigree. Only a social member, the slim, jocular financier dined at the Bachelors’ upriver club, the Button, with men with names like Burpee, Clothier, Lippincott, and Wyeth. There, members would address Stotesbury by his one-syllable nickname, a Bachelors tradition that continues today. Stotesbury, who had a quirky sense of humor, was “Brother Gum,” perhaps deriving from a song he liked to sing about a shared family toothbrush, “all covered with slime.”…

One day in 1927, “Brother Gum,” now 78, was approached by 32-year-old “Brother Loft”—high-flying rower Garrett Gilmore, who three years earlier had won Olympic silver in the single scull. Gilmore wanted to see a blossoming of schoolboy crew, which had so faded after the war. He asked Stotesbury to fund a silver trophy cup for a new eight-oared race on the Schuylkill.

Along with Gilmore, another Olympian, John B. Kelly Sr., was also trying to lure more teenagers into crew and had begun recruiting students at West Philadelphia Catholic High School for Boys to build bench strength for his club at the time, Penn AC.

Six weeks after the West Catholic boys began practicing with Penn AC’s storied coach Frank Muller, its crew won the very first Stotesbury Cup race, on May 30, 1927.… In 1935, Gilmore expanded the Stotesbury cup race into a full-fledged regatta.

Follow Dotty Brown’s blog on Boathouse Row history at: 

www.BoathouseRowTheBook/blog and on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/BoathouseRowBook/

Announcing Temple University Press’ Fall 2019 Books

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase the titles on Temple University Press’ Fall 2019 catalog.

 

Action=Vie: A History of AIDS Activism and Gay Politics in France, by Christophe Broqua
Chronicling the history and accomplishments of Act Up-Paris

The Battles of Germantown: Effective Public History in America, by David W. Young
Lessons from Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood on how the public engages the past

Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan, by Malini Johar Schueller
Making visible the afterlives of U.S. colonial and occupation tutelage in the Philippines and Japan

Disabled Futures: A Framework for Radical Inclusion, by Milo W. Obourn
Offering a new avenue for understanding race, gender, and disability as mutually constitutive through an analysis of literature and films

Feminist Post-Liberalism, by Judith A. Baer
Reconciling liberalism and feminist theory

Immigrant Rights in the Nuevo South: Enforcement and Resistance at the Borderlands of Illegality, by Meghan Conley
Examining the connections between repression and resistance for unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Southeast

Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins, Alex Tizon; Edited by Sam Howe Verhovek; Foreword by Jose Antonio Vargas
Unforgettable profiles of immigrants, natives, loners, villains, eccentrics, and oracles

Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity, Edited by Michael Omi, Dana Y. Nakano, and Jeffrey T. Yamashita
A groundbreaking study of ethnic identity and community in the everyday lives of Japanese American millennials

Protestors and Their Targets, Edited by James M. Jasper and Brayden G King
Examining the dynamics when protesters and their targets interact

Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial, Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vazquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray
Putting the environmental humanities into dialogue with Latinx literary and cultural studies

Little Italy in the Great War: Philadelphia’s Italians on the Battlefield and Home Front, by Richard N. Juliani
How Philadelphia’s Italian community responded during World War I

Memory Passages: Holocaust Memorials in the United States and Germany, by Natasha Goldman
Considers Holocaust memorials in the United States and Germany, postwar to the present

Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, Edited by Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum
A living handbook for vital perspectives on public art and history

Pennsylvania Politics and Policy: A Commonwealth Reader, Volume 2, Edited by J. Wesley Leckrone and Michelle J. Atherton
Addressing important issues in Pennsylvania politics and policy in a constructive, nonpartisan manner

Power, Participation, and Protest in Flint, Michigan: Unpacking the Policy Paradox of Municipal Takeovers, by Ashley E. Nickels
The policy history of, implementation of, and reaction to Flint’s municipal takeovers

Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, by Andrew Israel Ross
How female prostitutes and men who sought sex with other men shaped the history and emergence of modern Paris in the nineteenth century

Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique, by Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Examines the insidious ramifications of the un-ended Korean War through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works

The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s, by Masumi Izumi
Dissecting the complex relationship among race, national security, and civil liberties in “the age of American concentration camps”

Rock of Ages: Subcultural Religious Identity and Public Opinion among Young Evangelicals, Jeremiah J. Castle
Are young evangelicals becoming more liberal?

Stan Hochman Unfiltered: 50 Years of Wit and Wisdom from the Groundbreaking Sportswriter, Edited by Gloria Hochman, Foreword by Angelo Cataldi, With a Message from Governor Edward G. Rendell
50 years of classic columns from one of Philadelphia’s most beloved sportswriters

Strategizing against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment, by Matthew S. Williams
Explores how U.S. college students engaged in strategically innovative activism to help sweatshop workers across the world

Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously: Developmental Insights and System Challenges, by Christopher J. Sullivan
Comprehensive developmental insights suggest pragmatic changes to the complexity that is the juvenile justice system

The Age of Experiences: Harnessing Happiness to Build a New Economy, by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, With a Foreword by B. Joseph Pine II
How the booming experience and transformation economies can generate happiness—and jobs

The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique, Edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Guy Beauregard, and Hsiu-chuan Lee, With an Afterword by Madeleine Thien
Considers the ways Asian American studies has engaged with humanitarian crises and large-scale violations

Mourning the loss of lindy hopper and author Norma Miller

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post the obituary from the May 5 issue of the New York Times that celebrated the life of Norma Miller, author of Swinin’ at the Savoy. 

By Robert D. McFadden

Norma Miller, who danced the Lindy Hop on Harlem sidewalks as a child, and as a teenager dazzled crowds on international tours in the 1930s and early ′40s doing the same kicks, spins and drops that had made it a Jazz Age jitterbug craze, died on Sunday at her home in Fort Myers, Fla. She was 99.

Her longtime manager and caretaker, John Biffar, announced her death.

Among the cultural prodigies who arose after the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s “hop” from New York to Paris in 1927 — hence the dance’s name — Ms. Miller, known as the “Queen of Swing,” was the youngest recruit and last survivor of the original Lindy Hoppers, the all-black Herbert White troupe that broke in at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom and popularized the Lindy Hop in Broadway shows, on tours of Europe and Latin America, and in Hollywood films.

In the movies, she danced and sang in memorable black-cast numbers in the Marx Brothers’ “A Day at the Races” (1937) and in the madcap Olsen and Johnson comedy “Hellzapoppin’ ” (1941). She later thrived as a choreographer, comedian, television actor and author, and was honored by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003 as a conservator of the Lindy Hop.

With her own black companies, the Norma Miller Dancers and Norma Miller and Her Jazzmen, she joined early fights to undermine segregation in the nightclubs and casinos of Miami Beach and Las Vegas, where black entertainers — even stars like Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. — drew big crowds but afterward had to leave through the kitchen and stay in segregated accommodations.

A child of poverty whose father died before she was born, Ms. Miller lived with her mother and sister in a cramped, noisy Harlem apartment, whose back windows looked out on the ballroom that would be her steppingstone to stardom. On the horizon were professional friendships with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw and other musical legends.

She was discovered on Easter Sunday 1932 by the great swing dancer Twist Mouth George Ganaway as she flashed her moves on the sidewalk outside the Savoy, a blocklong rhythm factory on Lenox Avenue between West 140th and 141st Streets. She was only 12, too young even to get into the swanky, mirrored emporium of swing that Langston Hughes called “the heartbeat of Harlem.”

“I was a precocious youngster,” Ms. Miller said in “Queen of Swing,” a 2006 documentary on her life. Mr. Ganaway spotted her performance and gave her a Coca-Cola. From inside the Savoy, a swing band’s hard-driving sound beat its way to the sidewalk, and there she and Mr. Ganaway danced.

“He swung me out,” she recalled. “I don’t know if I ever hit the floor. He just flew me all around.”

Norma, wiry and nimble, already knew some Lindy Hop moves: the swing out, the hip-to-hip, the side-flip, the sugar push. Mr. Ganaway was impressed. He took her into the Savoy, ignoring the technicality of her age, and they were soon captivating the regulars with through-the-legs slides, over-the-head flips and acrobatic aerial lifts. Later, they won a Lindy Hop contest at the Savoy.

She continued to improve. After watching her win the Harvest Moon Ball dance contest at the Apollo Theater in 1934, Herbert White invited her to join his new troupe, the Lindy Hoppers. She agreed, and at 15 came under the tutelage of Mr. White’s choreographer,  Frankie Manning, the master of swing-era dances, who was the inspirational coach of the Lindy Hoppers.

What followed over the next few years was the professional education of a dancer: the wider world of hard work and the excitement and grind of travel to faraway places, of dancing in Broadway shows and on a seven-month tour of Paris, London and other European cities, then performances across America with Ethel Waters and a girl’s first adventure in Hollywood.

She was not quite 18 when she met the Marx Brothers, Allan Jones and Maureen O’Sullivan on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot and made her film debut in “A Day at the Races.” She danced and sang with the Lindy Hoppers in the well-known black-cast barn scene number, “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” which featured Ivie Anderson and Duke Ellington’s orchestra. The Lindy Hop sequence was nominated for an Academy Award for dance direction.

Ms. Miller and the Lindy Hoppers were showcased in the Broadway musical revue hit “Hellzapoppin’ ” in 1938 and in 1941 appeared in the Hollywood version, both of which starred Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson and Martha Raye. It was a slashing satire of show business, with slapstick mayhem, horned demons, collapsing staircases and fun house slides that led straight to hell.

In a sequence widely regarded as the best example of the Lindy Hop on film, four couples in backstage-workers’ get-ups swing out, one after the other, into acrobatic shines at a frenetic tempo. Ms. Miller and Billy Ricker, dancing in chefs caps like animated rag dolls, execute breathtaking flips, slides, kicks, splits, lifts and lightning moves that seem to defy gravity and human speed limits

After completing the filming, the Lindy Hoppers flew to Brazil and were performing in Rio de Janeiro when the bombing of Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II. Unable to find transportation home, the troupe toured for six months in South America before returning home exhausted and nearly broke.

With the war on, the Lindy Hop began to fade as musical tastes changed. In 1942, Ms. Miller made her last tour with the Lindy Hoppers, appearing in New York, Washington and Baltimore. When her dance partner was drafted into the military, she left the troupe, which disbanded soon after. While her career went on for decades, it never returned to the high notes of her early years.

The Savoy Ballroom, which opened in 1926 and brought blacks and whites together in an era of racial segregation, was torn down in 1958 to make way for a housing project. On any given night, thousands had packed its hardwood floors as swing music by Ellington, Basie or Chick Webb inspired the Norma Millers.

“Black girls didn’t have many outlets,” she told a Florida radio station in 2015, eight decades after her heyday. “You had laundry. You had hairdresser. Or teacher. Now, I didn’t qualify for any of those. I could dance. I could just do it naturally.”

Norma Miller was born in Harlem on Dec. 2, 1919, the second daughter of Norman and Alma Miller, immigrants from Barbados. Her father, a shipyard worker, died of pneumonia a month before her birth, and her mother worked as a charwoman to raise her and her sister, Dot. Norma was fascinated with dance, and her mother, though struggling to pay rent, enrolled her in Saturday dance classes. Norma danced at her mother’s “rent parties,” as friends chipped in.

In the Roaring Twenties, music was everywhere in Harlem, but after 1929, when the Millers moved into a tenement apartment on West 140th Street, swing from the Savoy boomed nightly through their back windows. Looking out on the ballroom’s rear windows, Norma saw dancing patrons as shadows moving behind the curtains, doing the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.

She and her friends practiced the dances in the gym at her school, P.S. 136, and after church on the sidewalk outside the Savoy, where Mr. Ganaway discovered her. As her talents grew, she was enrolled at the Manhattan School of the Arts on the Upper West Side.

After her meteoric Lindy Hop career, Ms. Miller reinvented herself in 1952. She founded and choreographed the Norma Miller Dancers, a jazz-dance troupe that toured America and Australia for two years, then joined Count Basie on a national tour. In the pervasive racial segregation of the day, Ms. Miller and her group faced daily reminders of their secondary status in renting rooms, riding in the back of buses, dining in black eateries and sometimes confronting white protests.

In 1957, the Norma Miller Dancers played long-running engagements in Miami Beach and Las Vegas as part of an extravagant production called the “Cotton Club Revue.” The show, starring Cab Calloway and a 48-member all-black cast, drew huge nightly audiences for months. But it also stirred racial unrest, as had been anticipated: Every cast member was given an identity card issued by the police, and after each show had to retreat to a “colored” hotel.

“We were to be the first all-black show to play the Beachcomber in Miami Beach,” Ms. Miller recalled in “Stompin’ at the Savoy: The Memoir of a Jazz Dancer” (2003, with Evette Jensen). “During rehearsal, racial tensions surfaced. The day of our big dress rehearsal, there were headlines in The Miami Sun telling Murray Weinger” — a Miami nightclub owner — “that they didn’t want his colored show on the beach.”

Ms. Miller lived in Las Vegas for much of the 1960s and ′70s. She did comedy routines in clubs with Redd Foxx and taught children’s dance classes. In 1972, she entertained American troops in Vietnam. She had roles in three of Mr. Foxx’s NBC sitcoms: “Sanford and Son” in 1973-74, “Grady” in 1976, and “Sanford Arms” in 1977.

Besides “Queen of Swing,” John Biffar’s documentary on her life, Ms. Miller appeared in at least nine other documentaries on dance, black comedy and other subjects, including Ken Burns’s PBS series “Jazz” (2000). She was the subject of a children’s book by Alan Govenar, “Stompin’ at the Savoy: The Story of Norma Miller” (2006). Her own books include “Swing Baby Swing” (2010, with Darlene Gist), a chronicle of swing dancing over her century.

Ms. Miller, who never married and left no immediate survivors, had a long-term relationship with fellow Hellzapoppin’ performer Roy Glenn, who died in 1971. She traveled widely to appear at swing and jazz festivals and give talks on her dancing days. “The Savoy was our community,” she told Bobby White in one interview in 2016, “and the dance floor was the place we found freedom.”

In 2018, Ms. Miller appeared at the Herrang Dance Camp in Sweden, an annual gathering since the 1980s of Lindy Hop lovers from around the world. “A place like this is unbelievable,” she said. “It’s like Brigadoon” the musical about a Scottish village that magically reappears once every 100 years.

Why Everyday Life Matters

This week in North Philly Notes, Ulka Anjaria, author of Reading India Now, explains the importance of reading literature to understand the Indian present and its political futures.

The Indian general elections are once again upon us. Like the upcoming U.S. election, this one too is fraught with anxiety about whether the country will re-elect the right-wing party of its incumbent prime minister. As part of legitimate fears about a global right-wing turn, this is the brief period when Indian politics becomes global news. But what is happening in India between globally-significant elections? What is the daily life of this fast-changing country beyond institutional politics, what are the stories that might never make global headlines? How are people coming to terms with recent changes – not only at the voting booth, but as they imagine their everyday lives?

When I spent a fellowship year living in Mumbai in 2015-16, one of the many things I was struck by was how distant both scholarship and the news media are from everyday life in India. There were several disturbing and violent, national-level events that occurred that year, such as the assassination of Kannada writer M. M. Kalburgi in August and the Award Wapsi movement that followed, where dozens of writers protested the government’s increasing indifference to mob violence by returning their national literary awards. A beef ban was instituted in Maharashtra, exposing the encroachment of Hindu hegemony on eating practices in the supposedly secular nation. Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student, committed suicide in Hyderabad, revealing the continuing casteism that plagues even university campuses. But in between these events, daily life went along at an everyday rhythm, much as it does around the world. Looking around to see where I could begin to read about this everyday rhythm, I found that it was largely absent in the news media and in scholarly accounts. While the news media, in both India and abroad, focuses mostly on party politics and violent events, scholarship tends to take a longer view, uncovering the influence of historical forces such as colonialism and Partition on the Indian present. While both of these are important tasks, I found that I had to turn to literature, specifically contemporary Indian literature, to begin to understand the contours of the Indian present.

For in fact, India is experiencing a massive expansion of its publishing industry, with some anticipating that India will be the world’s largest English-language publisher within a decade. This means that whereas in the 1980s and 1990s, many Indian authors had to gain legitimacy by publishing first in the US or UK, now Indian publishers have made it much easier to publish as an Indian writer. This has resulted in an expansion of what genres authors can publish in, such as fantasy fiction, mysteries and detective fiction, romance, chick lit, self-help fiction, graphic novels, and so on. Most of these new works are geared toward Indian readers rather than, as was in the past, international ones. This is coinciding with an expansion of the English-language readership in India beyond those who are western-educated, to first-generation English readers who might otherwise be reading in the bhashas (Indian vernacular languages).

Reading India Now, looks at the implications of this publishing boom for rethinking what is important in the study of India. Much of this new fiction is written for young people trying to make their way in a new India, and are thus local stories for local readers. As such, they do not often engage with historical analysis or with who is in power, but address issues of more local importance: what is the meaning of success, what are the possibilities and limitations of the new capitalist economy, what are the new social and sexual mores of the new India, and so on. If read as complex works rather than just simplistic, market-oriented fictions, these new books tell us a huge amount about the kind of daily life that never makes the headlines.