September 29, 2006
The Serendipitous Pleasures of Historical Research Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:45 PM EST When I was writing The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street, a history of Wall Street in the 1860s, I decided to go through the New York Herald—then the greatest newspaper in New York and perhaps the world—for the period. It was unindexed, so I went over to the New York Public Library Annex on far West 43rd Street and looked through it in hard copy.
It took forever, not because there was so much material—individual issues were seldom more than eight pages long—but because I kept getting distracted by articles that had nothing to do with Wall Street. Civil War battle reports, juicy murders in Wisconsin, baseball games, deaths of European royalty such as the prince consort, Atlantic cable layings, draft riots, French invasions of Mexico, etc., etc. It was a window into the world of the 1860s such as no historian can recreate, for it was the very same window the people who lived in New York in the 1860s had used in order to see the world beyond their ken.
Yesterday, while looking for something else entirely, I came upon an article in The New York Times of April 26, 1934, with the headline, “Rowland Stebbinses Hosts at a Musicale.” Naturally I read it, not because I have much interest in musical soirées of the early 1930s but because Rowland Stebbins was my great uncle (his wife, Aunt Marie—short for Marion and pronounced like “marry”—was my grandmother Steele’s sister). I don’t remember Uncle Rowland, who died when I was four, but I loved Aunt Marie dearly until her death in 1972 at the age of 88. I still remember her surprisingly bright blue eyes twinkling with glee as some witty remark bubbled up from within.
It was quite an evening. The singers were Edward Johnson, a very popular tenor at the Metropolitan Opera, who became the general manager of the Met the following year, and Florence Page Kimball, best known as a vocal coach, whose most famous pupil was Leontyne Price.
As was usual in these sorts of articles, the guest list was given. Many were my assorted Stebbins relations, and friends of the family whose names are familiar to me even now, decades after they died. But what I found most interesting of the guests was my grandfather Gordon. He and uncle Rowland had been partners on Wall Street before Uncle Rowland had left the Street in August of 1929 (good timing, Uncle Rowland!), but they were not particularly close friends. My mother, then 12, and my father, then 15, would not meet for another six years.
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