On April 8-10, 2014, the LBJ Presidential Library on the University of Texas campus hosted a Civil Rights Summit to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unable to attend, but living right here, I watched as much of the live stream coverage as I could. President Obama, and three of our four living former presidents (all but George H. W. Bush) were speakers at the summit.
My very favorite panel/speaker was the interview with former President Jimmy Carter. The emotional story behind the Camp David accord alone is worth watching the nearly hour-long interview. I have such respect for President Carter’s continuing work after his “retirement.” He is sharp as a tack and working relentlessly for women world wide as well as his many other projects. (A little music by Graham Nash precedes the interview.)
I was also intrigued by the panel “Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement” – with Julian Bond, Andrew Young, and Representative John Lewis. Missing from the panel, however, were any female heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. Well – they did bring it up and gave a nice pat response about how great so many women were …. but, you know, it seems that some of the story is missing. I did enjoy the discussion and insights and stories told and would encourage you to watch their panel. I think you can find pretty much everything from the summit on youtube.
Our local PBS affiliate is airing some programs they put together to coincide with the summit and the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. I watched one the evening of April 24th and was pleasantly surprised that the local production did not give short shrift to the women in Austin who played significant roles in the Civil Rights movement here. I have two new heroines: Bertha Means and Ada Anderson. Coincidentally, while I was watching their stories on PBS, Bertha Means, now age 94, was being honored by iACT (Interfaith Action of Central Texas) as a community leader who helped shape Austin. You can watch “Austin Revealed: Civil Rights Stories” here. I hope you will!
After watching three days of speakers and panelists talking about the civil rights movement, I began to wonder what stories I might find in my own family. I sent out an email request to the various branches of my family tree hoping I would get something in return. I got one response – from Dolores Webber McLean:
“My father, Fred M. Webber, marched in the 1963 March on Washington.”
What??!!!
I have written about Fred M. Webber before – here, here, and here. He was my Grandmother Abbie’s brother and a minister – first as a Baptist and later as a Presbyterian. I never really knew my great uncle Fred, but I know we met at least once.
I followed up with a series of questions to cousin Dee. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell me much more as she wasn’t living at home at the time. Dee suggested I ask her younger sister.
Let’s just say this got me started digging for more. And I’m not finished. Stay tuned for the rest of the story – hopefully coming soon.
If you would like to read more about Fred M. Webber, click the Fred Myron Webber tag/link at the bottom of this post.
I spent my early years in Iowa, but not in Des Moines, so when news broke that the historic Younkers department store building had been destroyed by fire on March 29, 2014, I was saddened by the loss, but felt no personal connection to the building.
The Younkers building, more than a century old, closed in 2005 and was under renovation as a multipurpose building – residences on the upper floors and retail space on the bottom. No cause for the fire has been determined and the building was a total loss.
My cousin Karen felt the loss personally and wrote down a few of her memories and posted them to Facebook. She has kindly given me permission to share them here.
Before we get to Karen’s piece, I thought this video would be a nice introduction because it portrays the same sense of loss and provides a glimpse into the building of the past. If my understanding is correct, the video was made by a husband and wife who met while working at Younkers. I believe they are the giver and receiver of the gift later in the video – and have the chandelier from the tearoom in their store.
May the Gilded Old Lady Rise From The Ashes
By: Karen Lonsdale
When I worked downtown at the Capital Square, I would walk the skywalk with Jennifer, one of my best friends. We chattered like schoolgirls. We shared confidences, giggled and laughed, and sometimes cried although we were in our fifties. But when we reached the Younkers building, I nearly always looked up from watching where we were going to peruse the blacked out windows, remembering what was, imagining what is, and pondering what could be.
The “what was” was an elegant but old-fashioned lady of gilt with accents of red, blue, green, crystal…whatever season it might be. I could see the elevator with the seasoned old man who asked what floor we wanted. And there was that half-floor, the mezzanine. Did it provide an opportunity to shop for shoes? I don’t remember, but just that I always seemed to land on it when I was looking for the floor above or below.
One of my most poignant memories of my mother, now gone five years, involves the downtown Younkers store. When I was around twenty, she bought me a burgundy, velour, drop-waist dress in an upper-floor woman’s department. I was so excited for several reasons. Not only was it beautiful, it was a size smaller than I had been wearing, and it was a Liz Claiborne! My first designer dress! I wore that dress for years and never wore it out. And every time I put it on , I thought of Younkers downtown and Mom.
I liked to shop at the downtown Younkers store at Christmas for all of my gifts. I could find anything from the smallest nic nacs to unusual men’s ties to things I could not identify. I would amble around in the basement looking at and touching men’s items, household goods, and…stop! What did I find? Pastries! Gooey, delectable, flakey goodies. And of course I had to stop for that. And that brings to mind my favorite part of the downtown store. The tearoom.
I think my mother introduced me to the tearoom way before I was able to go by myself. And after I married and began shopping alone, I would head for the tearoom for the lettuce salad with cucumbers. No matter what dressing I had, it had the flavor of cucumbers which I still look for and crave whenever I eat a garden salad. I was so disappointed when the Merle Hay Mall Younkers store was built without a tearoom, especially after the downtown store tearoom had been closed.
The “what is” was sad. I tried to look between the blackout papers someone had applied to the inside of old lady’s windows on the skywalk, but the crack was just too small. So what I saw in my mind was the gilded lady draped in darkness. It was hard to visualize the racks of multi-colored clothes missing, the gold-toned tube that carried the money from the departments’s stations to finance and back to the clerk gone, the dings that were a part of the living Younkers silent, the display counters gone or broken. It was not possible that my memories—and those of others, I was sure—were blocked from sight, to be hidden from us.
Friday, March 28, 2014 the “could bes” that I voiced to Jennifer were coming true. I had fantasized that, “Someone should renovate this, make boutiques and stores on the main floor and apartments above.” Someone had purchased the old lady and was starting renovations. I was glad. I was excited, hoping someday to go to the boutiques and to maybe see pictures of the condominiums. But at midnight, March 29, 2014 a fire, already blazing stories high, was reported in the old, gilded lady. The icon was ablaze. And we rose six hours later to learn the old lady was gone, a total loss, unsalvageable.
And so the memories will live in my mind, but I can never again visit the old lady to make my mind dance to these memories. I am sad, and I am heartsick. My one hope regarding this grand old dame is that she rise out of the ashes stronger and, hopefully, looking much as she did in her early years.
If you have any memories of the old Younkers building in Des Moines, please share them in the comments or send me an email!
I asked all of the branches of my family to send me their memories of President Kennedy and of his death. I shared my memories in a previous post. Here are the memories I received from the Webber (my paternal grandmother) side of the family – in the order in which I received them. (I have added photos and video clips.)
Bea Webber Haskins: I was in a large lecture hall, one of those tiered rooms, at the University of Maryland, College Park. I don’t remember what class. All of a sudden, there was a gasp from someone way up high in the back. The professor stopped and asked very sarcastically if he was interrupting someone. A girl’s voice said, very haltingly and seriously, “Oh, my God. The President. The President. He’s been shot.” In the stunned silence that followed, the professor said something like, “How do you know?” or “What are you talking about,” something like that. She held up a transistor radio and said she was sorry, but she had been listening to it during the lecture and this news was just announced. The professor, to his credit, realized the student was not fooling around and asked her to bring her radio to the front, where he turned it up as loud as he could so we could all hear it. I don’t know if he dismissed us or if an announcement came over the P.A. system, or what, but eventually we left. Classes were cancelled and it was almost time for the Thanksgiving break. My then boyfriend, later husband, picked me up. He was not a Kennedy fan, but he was as saddened by the assassination as I was.
Photo credit: By ArnoldReinhold (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
Tom Kessler:
Tom’s parents – Woodrow Wilson Webber and Orville Kessler
The election of 1960 when JFK was elected was the first one I remember. I would have been 6 at that time, and Dad took me with him when he went to vote after work. I have dim memories of a long voting line and feeling very excited about getting to go along. I was 9 years old and in the 4th grade in November 1963 and can remember learning about President Kennedy being killed from my teacher in school that day after lunch. I don’t remember much about the discussion except for one boy saying that when he first heard about it he thought it was a bad joke.
I had forgotten that the assassination was on a Friday, but that would explain why I have a sense of time sort of standing still and not going back to school until after the funeral which was on the following Monday when school was cancelled. By that time we had a TV in the house, and I watched all the funeral coverage – including of course the iconic images of the funeral procession with the riderless horse, the flag draped casket and the Kennedy family with JFK, Jr. saluting the casket.
Wilda Morris:
Wilda’s “Vava” – Myron D. Webber and Dorinda Webber (my ggrandparents)
I graduated from high school in 1957 and went to American University in Washington DC to study political science. I grew up under the influence of Vava (Grandfather Webber), so of course I joined the Young Democrats (Vava named his youngest daughter Woodrow Wilson Webber; that is pretty strong evidence of his political proclivities).
In the fall of 1960, the Young Democrats succeeded in arranging for John F. Kennedy to speak briefly on campus on October 7, the same day as his second televised debate with Richard Nixon. I was, of course, in the crowd of excited students listening to and cheering Kennedy. I was also among a small group of American U students who headed up Nebraska Avenue to WRC-TV, the NBC station where the Kennedy-Nixon debate took place. We stood along the
street by the driveway into the station and eagerly awaited the arrival of both candidates. Security wasn’t nearly as strict in those days as it is now. I could have reached out and touched Kennedy’s and Nixon’s cars when they arrived (though of course I didn’t). After the candidates went into the station, we returned to campus and watched the debate on the TV in the lounge of a dorm (In those days students did not have TV sets in their dorm rooms.).
The 1960 election was the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote. After I received my absentee ballot from Johnson County, Iowa, I went with a Republican friend to vote and have our ballots notarized. If my memory is correct, we did that at the Registrar’s Office. We joked about cancelling each other out, though we were voting in different states.
There were evidently not many Iowans vying for tickets to the Kennedy inauguration. At any rate, my Congressman responded favorably to my request for a ticket. I had to pick it up at his office the day before the inauguration. On that day, eight inches of snow fell in D.C., more that DC knows how to handle! A lot of cars were abandoned, and traffic was a mess. It took longer than I expected to get to the Capitol Office Building, but I succeeded in getting my ticket. Standing on a street corner, waiting for a bus that would take me back to campus, I got very cold. I decided it would be better to walk than just stand there. I hiked the bus route, so I could catch the next bus, but it was a long time before one got through.
My roommate had two reserved-seat tickets to the inaugural parade. The temperature had dropped drastically so she decided she did not want to go. A friend (whose name I cannot recall) and I were happy to receive the tickets. My friend did not have a ticket to the inauguration itself, but she stuck close to me. Whenever I had to show my ticket to go through a gate, she just followed me in. No one stopped her. My ticket was for a standing-room section—we had to stand through the whole ceremony, including the new president’s speech. But we were so happy to be there that we didn’t complain. The standing room area was pretty crowded, which helped keep us warm.
After the ceremony, my friend and I walked up Pennsylvania to find our seats. We were quite fortunate, for the seats were in front of the US Treasury Building, just east of the White House. As the parade approached our seats, every act came alive. The bands began to play their best songs. Everything designed for the delight of the new president and his family happened within our view. With our coats buttoned up, our scarves tied tightly, gloved hands in our pockets, and our legs wrapped in blankets, we stayed through the entire parade.
I graduated from American University in 1961, but stayed in DC for the summer, working fulltime in the Registrar’s Office. I met Edgar Morris briefly on the last Monday evening of the summer—shortly before we both started graduate school at the University of Illinois. After we were married on August 31, 1963, we moved to College Park, Maryland, because Ed had a job at the National Bureau of Standards. As a result, we were back in the Washington area at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy. I was at home, straightening up the apartment and listening to the radio when I heard the terrible news. I called Ed at work to tell him, but I think he had heard the news there. I remember the radio playing mournful music between updates. The Bureau of Standards closed and Ed came home early. This was the first big shared sorrow of our married life.
Ed and I went to DC to watch the procession that transferred the President’s body from the White House to the Capitol Building. We had the sense that we were witnessing a tragic piece of history as the riderless horse passed by.
Howard and Sue Rees who worked with Baptist students in the DC area knew we were pretty distraught by the president’s death. They also knew we didn’t own a TV, so they invited us to their home to watch the funeral with their family. Had it been just me, I might have gone downtown in hopes of seeing some of the world leaders who came for the funeral. Some of our friends from Calvary Baptist Church did go to the vicinity of Saint Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church, and saw Charles de Gaulle and Haile Selassie, as well as others who attended the service. We only saw them on TV.
I lost some of my naiveté and some of my optimism when Kennedy was assassinated. Before the assassination, I don’t think I believed things like that still happened—they were part of history but not the present. Would that it were so!
Yvonne Addis:
Yvonne’s Grandmother Dorinda Webber
On that November 22, I was at my sorority house in Iowa City eating lunch in the dining room downstairs when our house mother came into the doorway and said, “Girls, the president has been shot.” It is a freeze-frame moment for me. We all went up to her apartment and huddled around the TV. Another memory I have is that soon after he was killed, I took my Grandmother Webber for a ride in our car. I remember her weeping and saying, “It’s like losing a member of the family.”
P.S. It’s not too late to share your memories, Webber (or any other branch) family. I’ll just add them on.
And any other readers – please share your memories too!
I’m linking this to Sepia Saturday as it fits the prompt theme for today.
Please feel free to read my personal memories of JFK here and my memories of the space shuttle Challenger disaster here.
But, my all means, see what others are sharing at Sepia Saturday!
