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Marguerite Borden Head in the 1930's.
Photo donated by Vic Head.
by Vic Head, Autumn 2008
The antique value of the old cradle that sits full of books in my living room was probably cut in half or worse when, some fifty years ago and shortly after Mother Zuella’s death, I sanded off all the hideously cracked original varnish. Somehow antique fanciers don’t like that, but I coated the beautiful mahogany grain with bar-top varnish. My mother, maiden name Marguerite Borden, was born in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, on August 29, 1886. She often talked about that cradle, how as a child she would go up to the huge attic and rock it violently from one end of the house to the other. She said she was the sixth generation of the Page (sometimes Paige) family to have used it as a baby and that it had been imported from Holland. Figuring typically three generations per century, five generations back would have been 160 years before her birth or perhaps 50 years before the American Revolution. Her birth place was a huge thirteen-room house a few yards west of the Concord/Hopkinton town line.
Age six saw her in the same one-room schoolhouse where I took seventh and eighth grades decades later. That was in the famous year of 1892, where all eight grades joyfully surrounded the little Borden girl singing how Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, etc. Of course Lizzie was innocent—see my “Two Unsolved Mysteries,” GRIST, three issues: Summer 1996, Fall 1996, Winter, 1996-97.
At age seven, Marguerite was in a beautiful brick house with stained glass windows in Denver, Colorado. Her father had been in ill health and, following doctor’s orders to get outdoors, had moved west intent on prospecting. Later, the empty house was destroyed by vandals.
At age fifteen she was back in New Hampshire.
I don’t know where or when she took piano lessons, but I do know she had wonderful touch. In New Hampshire where I lived with her from 1929 to 1931, I was thrilled, and still am at the memory of her playing something called Song of the Pines. As a teenager or early twenties she had played piano with an orchestra at Tampa Bay Hotel in Florida. She had also spent some years at a religious community called Koreshan Unity at Estero, Florida. She told me of some of her Florida adventures:
She and other girls used to love to talk a “language” which I’ve heard called “Tutney” and also “Double Dutch” wherein English words are spelled in a secret alphabet, a bub-cus-dud-e-fuf-gug-ache, I juj, kuk, etc. Once as the girls chattered away, a male employee who was scrubbing down the tables, walls and floor of the community fish house, heard one of the girls say “Wash hutch yub dud o nun tut wash e tut a kuk e o wash a lul kuk?” He stepped out the door and yelled, “Wash fish house I—bughouse you, I none.”
Once a male employee had nearly drowned—unconscious when they pulled him out. Later he was asked what was the last thing he thought of. Answer: “I wondered who would get my new shoes.”
Once lightening struck and the wire supporting a mirror in front of her face was cut. The mirror crashed and a hair brush on a shelf in front of her shattered into hundreds of pieces that flew all over the room while she had a sensation as if she had been lifted several feet in the air—but unhurt.
Another time during a thunder storm she saw what has been called “ball lightening”—a glowing sphere of air that retains its form for many seconds. She saw it roll down a flight of stairs like a beach ball, then touch a water pipe and vanish. For centuries “ball lightening” had been classified as an “old wives’ tale” until a few decades ago about a thousand reliable scientists were queried and 5% of them reported having seen it. It is even speculated that this phenomenon could explain some reported UFO sightings, though if a technical understanding of ball lightening has been reported, I haven’t seen it. (Sorry, I’m computer illiterate. Recently, I read this much to Carol Walker of the Alpine Historical Society and right while we were on the phone she used her computer magic to produce pages—even the last Tsar of Russia saw ball lightening.)
Someone shot a large white bird which she thought was a crane. Decades later I dyed feather tips black and made my “Indian war bonnet.”
Then there was the boy. He was Robert T. C. Head, born February 4, 1892, in Washington,
D. C. He was only fourteen years old and she was nearly twenty when Robert made his first appearance in Florida. They were married in Concord, New Hampshire on April 21, 1910. Thereafter, financed by Marguerite’s mother (Lucie Elizabeth Page Borden, born June 10, 1859 in the old Page place in Hopkinton, New Hampshire) Robert briefly attended Mount Hermon School for Boys, Massachusetts, then a two-year course in electrical engineering at Bliss Electrical School (near Washington, D. C. I think) where Robert graduated in 1911. Thereafter, Robert and Marguerite lived at various places in New England where he was employed by Bell Telephone as a lineman. Their first three children were born in New England: Norman Robert Head, April 27, 1912, Somerville, Massachusetts; Sylvia Virginia Head, April 18, 1914, Somerville, Massachusetts; Consuelo Roberta Head, December 5, 1915 (Ken Schulte, my nephew and Consuelo’s son, who ought to know, tells me her middle name was Madison and not Roberta), born in Manchester, New Hampshire. Robert was studious and learned from the famous hunchback Steinmetz of General Electric how to use hyperbolic functions to calculate line losses. When Bell decided to run telephone lines intercity up and down the west coast, they sent Robert west to determine how far apart they must place reamplification stations. And that’s how it came about that their fourth child, Victor Page Head (that’s me) was born in East San Diego, California, on December 31, 1917.
Long pause. The reader must realize that I am an antique who will be 91 by the end of 2008. Try to imagine the shock of the last few days when relatives have bombarded me with website pages and census records full of partially erroneous stuff about Estero and Tampa Bay. The dates and places of birth I’ve given here should replace the wrong records. Imagine finding that Estero is now one of Florida’s preserved historical sites!
Marguerite and her mother were both listed in 1900 Chicago census under Cyrus Teed community and also in 1900 Hopkinton, New Hampshire census under my great grandmother, Ellen (Mariah Cutter) Page’s, household.
So, were they really in Chicago or New Hampshire? I have a photograph of Marguerite which she had marked “age 15” which was processed by a photo shop in Concord, New Hampshire and so confusion reigns. At all events, Cyrus Teed and his Koreshan Unity group moved from Chicago to found the Estero Community in Florida.
My nephew Ken Schulte has found a book by Marie McCready, “Memories—Days of Long Ago,” 1966. She was one of the Koreshan Unity girls and a friend of Marguerite. Here at last I learn that Teed had one building equipped with musical instruments and provided teachers. It was here that my mother learned her wonderful touch on the piano. It was an Estero orchestra that was invited to play in Tampa Bay.
I have told elsewhere of my own life after the divorce, in Sacratero Valley and other places in southern California up to June, 1929, when we moved to the place in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, her birthplace which she loved to call Maplehurst because her bedroom window looked out into a tangle of maple trees planted by earlier Page generations. But what of Marguerite’s life before 1929? From hearsay:
She wanted to get into movies and took a course in “movie make-up” which claimed several well-known stars as having taken the course. When she got nowhere, she contacted several stars who said they’d never taken the course. Marguerite wrote up the story and was paid $35.00 by The Los Angeles Times. Then The Times reporters continued the story for weeks until a judgment of fraud was brought by the courts. But all she got was the $35.00.
She accepted a job as what today we would call a nanny to the children of a man who was mentor and agent for the movie star Gloria Swanson. She described this experience in a ten-chapter novelette titled “Where the Jazz God Plays,” using the pen name Olive Paige. This was published by Movie Weekly starting with the August 12, 1922, issue. For the most part, this was a true story but with fictitious names. The magazine added the sub-title, “The Feverish Everyday Life of a Movie Star.”
When she became the third librarian at Alpine, California, she also wrote “Alpine Notes” for one of the San Diego newspapers, either The San Diego Sun or The San Diego Union, I don’t know which and I have no copies and I don’t know whether by name Marguerite Head or pen name Olive Paige or whether by this time she had adopted the name Zuella Sterling.
She was not above a bit of doggerel and limerick just for fun. Whether published or not, these I remember:
A Chinese dog and a Persian cat
Out on the highway went and sat
Till the cruel wheel
Of an automobile
Crushed them presto nice and flat
To a Persian rug and a Chinese mat.
Then there was:
There was a young man named Paul
Who took a two-hundred-foot fall.
He went to Descanso
And took a wild chance so
They found him next day and that’s all.
Or, again:
There was a young man named Paul
Who went to a formal dress ball.
In one of the dances
He fractured his pantses
And had to go home in a shawl.
Somewhere along the line facial makeup for women was being promoted. This had previously been the custom only for actresses and prostitutes and she was shocked. She wrote a poem whose first line was: “The mouths are coming down the street.” She sold it to a popular magazine, Colliers, I think. It was never published. They only bought it to suppress it. After all, they were looking forward to huge profits from cosmetic advertisements.
So far as I know, she wrote only one poem that would properly be called a ballad, and she called it “America’s Gold,” a thrilling and chilling tale. I don’t know if it was ever published.
After we moved to New Hampshire in 1929, she spent a great deal of her time at an old-fashioned upright Underwood typewriter. I knew she was writing a daily column called “Wings of Song” for the Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor, using the pseudonym Zuella Sterling. I took seventh and eighth grades, 1929-1931 in New Hampshire. For the next ten school years I was at Mount Hermon School for Boys, Massachusetts, and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, and only home summers, or was waiting on table or being general handyman at the Robbins Nest in northern New Hampshire. Here, the owner, Kenneth W. Robbins, filled the role of as near to father as I ever had. Somehow I escaped with my life after building a glider and flying on a hill near Maplehurst. See “Lindbergh Field and More,” GRIST, Summer, 1998.
The property in New Hampshire was about eighty acres, partly in Hopkinton, partly in Concord. It had many acres of prime white pine, typically ten to fourteen inches in diameter. She counted on this as a future source of income. Then came the hurricane of 1938. She was standing near a living room window when it shattered and blew in. I was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Well I remember how the Hudson River rose up to the top of an entrance on Front Street where a sign read “PARKING--25¢.” I went with RPI cross-country team to run against the United States Coast Guard Academy on the southern shore of Connecticut. After the race I strolled east on the beach where I spied the prows of two ships well up on the shore. WRONG! When I got closer I saw it was only one ship, prow split wide open so it looked like two from a distance.
That severe hurricane had crossed Long Island, then the State of Connecticut, then way way up into New Hampshire. It reduced Mother Zuella’s pine timber forest to a yards-high jumble of Jackstraws. The government in Washington, D. C. created a “Timber Salvage Company,” offering $12.50 per thousand board feet. She had lumberjacks get out 10,000 board feet, but it cost $12.00 per thousand, so all she got out of the mess was a total of $5.00.
She kept on with her daily “Wings of Song” column all this time.
In 1939 I paid $25.00 for a ’29 Model A Ford and drove my new sweetheart, Florence Lawler, and her mother Bertha Winterberger Kinne Lawler to Long Island to take in the World’s Fair. I was unaware of the existence of the New Hampshire Pavilion, where, I later learned, a plaque was hung naming Zuella Sterling as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. Many in Concord had filled scrapbooks with her hundreds of poems. About 1940, foreseeing that we were drifting ever closer to taking part in what we now call World War II, she started using the caption “Looking at War.” All told she published several hundred columns. A few of them contained works of other contemporary poets with brief biographies of each. Her admirers in Concord had no idea how close to abject poverty was her life, what with $75.00 per month alimony and $2.00 per week from The Concord Monitor.
Her mother had lived on income from Boston and Maine Railroad stock until dividends stopped shortly after the 1929 crash. I can still remember the shocked look on Grandmother Borden’s face when two inch headlines on her New York Herald Tribune in the fall of 1932 announced that FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT had won the election, and he a DEMOCRAT!! Anathema to New Hampshire people in those days! Grandmother died a year or two later.
Zuella sold Maplehurst in 1945. She had been living with no running water, no telephone, no radio, no electricity, a three-holer in the frigid woodshed, a wood fire by day in the kitchen. The whole place with hundreds of antiques including the tools in a wood-working shop over the woodshed. She sold it all for $5,000.00 The buyer put in conveniences and sold it a few years later for $18,000.00.
She moved back to Alpine (Foss Ranch I think) where she drove around in a tiny battery-powered vehicle. In 1949 she was living on a hill in Santa Barbara where I found her during what my nephew Ken Schulte, now of Barstow, California, has named “Vic’s Odyssey,” which he put on video tape and later a DVD from my eight rolls of 16mm movie film covering our route from Hatboro to Oregon, thence to San Diego area and a quick visit to Hazel and Forrest Hohanshelt and of course Patty Heyser and her two little sons.
In the early 1950’s, Zuella came east to live in a house I bought for her in Warminster, close to Hatboro. She had what used to be called dropsy. Once I found her on the floor and carried her to her rocking chair. Laughing, she said, “All my life I’ve wanted to live in a house with a bathtub, and now I have one I’m too weak to climb into it.”
There was a period when a great deal of interest in “Spiritualism” was rampant, popularized the more when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of “Sherlock Holmes” fame espoused the subject and declared that Houdini had aid from the spirit world for some of his feats as a magician. Of course, Houdini denied it and devoted a great deal of effort exposing the trickery used by self-styled mediums at séances. It was, however, well known that Houdini and his wife had made a pact with a secret code to be used by whichever died first if communication between this world and the next were possible. Some time after Houdini’s death Zuella wrote his wife, whose lawyer wrote back to say that no convincing communication had occurred.
Still, Zuella’s interest in the occult continued. Once she challenged me to experiment with what she called psychometry. She held three envelopes and handed them to me one by one, telling me to hold each to my head, make my mind blank and then say whatever I visualized.
First envelope: “I see a red dress.” Open it to find a valentine to me from Patty Foster which she’d saved all these years.
Second envelope: “I see a list of names.” I imagined it as a column of names, one below another. Open it to find a letter from my former beloved “cross-eyed angel” school teacher. There was no column, but in mid-sentence “musicians such as name, name, the names of about ten famous musicians in succession.”
Third envelope: “I see a lot of flowers.” Zuella: “Can you be more specific?” Me: “Well, they are white.” Zuella: “Still more specific?” Me: “Well, perhaps a spray of something like bridal wreath.” Open it, find a thank-you letter for boxes and boxes of lilies of the valley which she had sent to the Women’s Press Club to decorate the tables at their banquet in Boston. There was perhaps a half acre of these plants growing at Maplehurst, but she couldn’t afford to attend the banquet.
Carl Sagan, famous for his “COSMOS” series on television, was also the most famous skeptic of the 20th century—see his book “The Demon Haunted World.” Self-styled atheist, he left some doubt in the last chapter of his novel, “Contact” when he titled the last chapter “The Signature of the Artist.” I think it would have been impossible to make the content of this chapter convincing on a movie screen, but in print it makes “Contact” one of the best bits of science fiction ever written—at least for scientists, engineers and mathematicians, that Sagan was a very religious man who never realized it. Now, I think the envelope experiments which my mother called “psychometry” would be better called “telepathy.” I don’t think it was necessary to hold each envelope against my forehead, but only that she knew the content of each as I held it. Carl Sagan, in over 400 pages of put-downs of superstitions in his book “The Demon Haunted World” has only one exception I’m aware of. Near the bottom, page 224, speaking of telepathy, he says “It is barely possible that a few of these paranormal claims might one day be verified by solid scientific data.”
There in her house in Warminster she lived night and day in a rocking chair, afraid to lie down for fear the dropsy would drive her into deep senility as it had her mother some years before. She busied herself sorting out what she considered her best work for a possible publication in book form, and writing former publishers for permission. These last works and permission letters went west to the home of one of my sisters who hoped to get the book out, but it never happened. Apparently, burglars stole the whole trunk which contained them. I do have a paper bag crudely stuffed with hundreds of undated columns of “Wings of Song” and “Looking at War.”
She shared space with Robert Frost in “An Anthology of New Hampshire Poetry” (New Hampshire Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1938).
Another book containing two of her poems was “Golden Iris,” the American Literary Association Anthology 1931-1932, where are found “Two Jewels” and “Passion,” both by Zuella Sterling.
While she was living in Santa Barbara, Chaparral Poets, of the Santa Barbara Chapter of California Federation of Chaparral Poets, published “Wild Grape Brew—an Anthology” in 1951. Here we find four poems by Zuella Sterling: “Bridges,” “Revenge,” “Sonnet for Manuelita” (her daughter-in-law, my brother Norman’s wife) and “Concerning Books.”
As far as I know, she wrote only one poem that could properly be called a thanatopsis. I have wanted to use it at funerals or memorial services for friends and relatives but I felt that several of her stanzas were too effeminate so I replaced some with stanzas of my own. I had hoped to have it read at Hazel Hohanshelt’s service but I didn’t get there in time.
THE FOREST PRIMEVAL
by Zuella Sterling and Vic Head
I will go out when the last door closes,
Out of this land where the old leaves fall,
Seeking a season of exquisite roses,
Finding a forest where whippoorwills call;
Peace in the valley by slow running waters,
Children at play in deep grass on the banks,
Those we thought vanquished, beloved sons and daughters
Thrilling to new life and kneeling in thanks;
Gales on the mountain top, rock cliffs of challenge,
Chickadees dee-ing and darting away,
Cataracts splashing and churning and falling,
Nourishing pin cushion moss with their spray;
Works to be started, in grandeur undreamed of,
Music of choristers, songs of the snow,
Thrills of the teller of tales of adventure,
Firelight on faces all ruddy aglow.
I will go out to a forest far flinging,
Odors of balsam and jewels of dew.
Let me leave days on the earth and go winging,
To Eden primeval, Dear God, and to you.
I had developed the habit of a quick visit before work. One morning as I walked in, she announced in calm voice with a smile, “I’m going to die today.” As the day wore on, her speech became less intelligible, partly about the book she had been preparing, then about three pennies she had put on her dresser which she wanted paid to somebody. True to her word, she died that day in May, 1954. Her ashes are buried near a dogwood tree at “Sunset Memorial Park” on the north side of County Line Road, a few miles east of Hatboro.
Her never-ending love for California was shown in one poem which appeared not only in her “Wings of Song” column but was also printed on cards which she often gave away and also perhaps in other anthologies I haven’t seen:
The Church Sublime
A single vast cathedral of our time
Was formed before the Christ of Galilee.
Surviving centuries, this church sublime
Still stands, a type of immortality.
Three hundred feet and more the steeples rise,
While open windows, wrought in living green,
Let golden rays of heaven emphasize
A ministration from the realms unseen.
An edifice not made by hands, but blest
Like holy seraphs, through unnumbered days
A temple thronged by Indians of the West,
Where Spanish Padres knelt in silent praise:
Huge redwood trees grown up on hallowed sod
Became this great cathedral built by God.
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