by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As has been oft-stated here before, it is frequently surprising what can be found in the historic artifacts in our Museum’s collection that are not obvious when they are acquired. This is true of today’s featured object, which is the June 1914 yearbook of the McKinley Avenue Intermediate School, located in Historic South-Central Los Angeles. The Craftsman-style publication, titled “Purple and Gold” after the school’s colors is one of many yearbooks in our holdings, acquired to bolster what little we have about children and young people during our interpretive time period of 1830 to 1930.
Typically, the publication is chock full of interesting material about the students, faculty, clubs, athletics, essays, poems and nearly thirty pages of advertising, mostly from local businesses, but an unexpected contribution to the yearbook is a description of a visit to the school by Helen Keller (1880-1968), one of the most famous disabled persons in American, if not world, history.
Her renown is not so nearly well-known today, but her ability to communicate through touch, including a system developed with her long-time teacher and companion, Anne Sullivan Macy, learning to speak, writing with a customized typewriter and her strong activism on multiple issues made her a very prominent public figure for much of the 20th century.
Keller was on a national tour when she, Macy and others paid a visit to greater Los Angeles (Keller’s first trip to this region) over about a week in March 1914. Media coverage was extensive as Keller and Macey gave talks at the [Temple] Auditorium, across from the northern side of Pershing Square in the Angel City, as well as at Claremont, Fullerton, Pasadena and Santa Ana. The presentations at the Auditorium were given under the auspices of the Los Angeles City Teachers’ Club with proceeds from ticket sales to go for programs and services for classroom instructors.
A good deal of press attention was given to Keller’s life, as well as the work done by Macy, and the Los Angeles Times of 3 March, in going into some detail about the relationship of the two women and Keller’s communication development, added that “only in the last two years has she managed to make herself audible in a theater,” beyond just a few feet, as was previously the case.
The next day’s edition of the paper reported that Keller and Macy were either to visit or received pupils from the Sixteenth Street School for the Deaf, with principal Mary Bennett telling the Times that “the children are pathetically eager to see the women who is in their own plight, and worse, being blind, who has accomplished so much.” Note the words “pathetically,” “plight,” and “worse” in this short statement. It was added, however, that the school was, for the first time, to host a graduation ceremony in June for a quartet of middle school students, who were ready to attend Los Angeles Polytechnic High School.
The 4 March edition of the Los Angeles Record recorded that “great interest is being taken in the coming visit . . . when citizens will have an opportunity to see and hear this wonderful young woman, who, although deaf and blind since birth,” this not actually being the case, as she contracted a disease (meningitis or scarlet fever) at 19 months that caused these conditions, “has persevered and become famous all over the world.” The Auditorium event proceeds, it added, were to help build a summer Teachers’ Club building at the beach or mountains.
The Los Angeles Express of the 5th briefly remarked that, as Keller and her group arrived at the Salt Lake railroad depot in the late morning, she was “bringing a message of love and understanding to all who cannot see, cannot talk and cannot hear.” While she could not do two of these things, it was added, she could certainly feel and told the entourage greeting her that, as paraphrased, “California is the most wonderful and beautiful place in the world.”
That day’s Times remarked that the two-year tour of Keller and Macy “has been the dramatic sensation of the age” and also commented that interest in tickets was such that “the advance sale . . . exceeds the figures made by Tetrazzini,” this being opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini, who appeared over several days at the Auditorium following Keller’s appearance there—the references to entertainment are striking.
The paper went into a long account of Keller’s meeting backstage after a play starring David Warfield, namesake of the theater in his hometown of San Francisco, and who exclaimed after she left, “Mark Twain said that girl and Napoleon were the most interesting characters of the nineteenth century. Humph! She is greater than Napoleon.”
Separately, the Times remarked that “there is decided interest in all educational circles” in the visit as “it is said by distinguished aural surgeons” that Keller’s development was “to be the greatest individual achievement in the whole history of education,” with respect to the more than a quarter century of effort by her and Macy to get to the point where Keller could communicate as she did.
The edition of the following day exclaimed that Keller “became one with all California” as she disembarked from the train “and spread out her hands to sense the golden sunshine.” While she could neither see nor hear, the paper continued, “her spotless life shines forth from her expressive face as though lighted by some inner radiance” while her soul and thoughts “have led her into a life that is one of high ideals and great mental attainment.”
Beyond these attributes, the Times felt it had to add that she was “a pretty girl,” though Keller was nearly 34 years of age, and that “she looked like a debutante,” though after discussing her physical attributes, the account focused on her laugh, which “comes from a heart fresh and free from any of the sorrows that awake some echo in the laughter of those who have lived out in the world of physical color and sound.”
The Express of the 6th also reported on Keller’s feelings on arriving in the Golden State, quoting her as exclaiming, “California is beautiful—it is wonderful!” as she could “feel it in my blood,” while remarking, “if it affects me in this way how must if effect [sic] all those who can readily see all the wonders it must contain!” She also mentioned that “there is something in the atmosphere” and the influence of the sunshine that “brings out the spirit of aptimism [sic.]”
The article contained an epigraph in the form of another quote from the visitor:
One could always be happy and care-free if one could forever dwell beneath the sunny sky of Southern California and breath[e] the sweet perfume of its orange blossoms.
Elsewhere in its pages, the Express reported that Keller visited the opera singer Minnie Saltzman-Stevens, who went from Bloomington, Illinois to the fabled houses of the operatic world from 1908 onward and specialized in Wagnerian performances until the First World War halted concerts by the German composer and the singer’s voice was affected by a throat ailment. Saltzman-Stevens, performing with the Chicago Grand Opera in “Parsifal,” went to the Auditorium office of manager Lynden E. Behymer to get some tickets for Keller’s lecture and found her there. The paper remarked that Keller, an admirer of Wagner, lightly touched the singer’s lips as she performed two of the composer’s pieces in the office and that “Miss Keller showed by her face the joy the music was giving her.”
The next day’s Times, however, wrote that “yesterday saw the working of a miracle for Helen Keller” as “for the first time in her memory [she] actually heard sound” because, during Saltzman-Stevens’ renditions “the sound of the highest notes reached the girl’s brain.” The account continued that “with uplifted hands and heaving bosom, she exclaimed over and over at the completion of the song, “Oh, I have heard! I have heard! I could weep for joy!”
Notably, Macy told the press that, when high-pitched sounds were made to Keller, she recoiled from pain and that these were not audible. Dramatically, the account went on, Saltzman-Stevens had her arm around Keller as she sang and then stopped looking at the sheet music and gazed at her auditor and “threw all magnetism and vibrance she possessed into the last triumphant bars of the melody.”
Keller took her hands from the singer’s lips and put one to her ear, “her expression one of awe” as she blushed and tears filled her eyes. The singer was so affected she didn’t finish the ending, but Keller said “the sound I heard was like what I have thought water falling from a height must be like—a sweet tinkling. I am sure I heard.” Later, Keller was recorded listening with her hands to the great opera singers, Enrico Caruso (1916), and Gladys Swarthout (1952), but, whether she could actually hear them or any others for the rest of her life is the question.
In his “Up and Down Broadway” column in the Times of the 6th, Gardner Bradford wrote that he knew Keller when he lived in the eastern states “and she is one of the most fascinating people in the world to watch” because “her face is an absolute mirror of every impression she receives,” while asserting that, if she could see, Keller “would make the most wonderful actress who ever lived.” He added that her voice “holds thousands spellbound” even if she could not always be heard. Lastly, he relayed that, right after stepping off the train, she said she wanted to feel the Pacific Ocean.
A poem to Keller was published in the paper that day with Los Angeles bard T. Howard Wilson versifying that
‘Mid childhood’s dancing dreams the sudden dark
Fell swart across her crimson leas of life,
Nor bloom, nor star, nor song of soaring lark
Was left to kindle flame against the strife
That nearing came on bitter wings of dread,
Her soul fared in a tomb where joy was dead
The faintest tingling at her finger tips
Made span across the sudden night’s abyss;
Joy lived again, but no sound passed her lips
Where discord hung with its malignant kiss.
No light of day, no voice of babbling rill,
But touch and scent and dawn upon the hill . . .
May all the birds in our southern clime
Link melody to wit for her delight,
And may our winy winds blow at this time
Their softest tones to soothe her feeling sight;
The best we have is none too good, I ween,
For her who sees what we have never seen.
The Express of the 7th covered the first of the Auditorium presentations, noting that, before a crowd of thousands, “as the words came, slowly and sometimes indistinctly, the wonderful deaf and blind girl brought expressions of sympathy, a tear or a laugh from the vast audience almost at will.”
When she walked on stage, “a pin dropped could have been heard” and it was asserted that “the audience seemed to feel that before it stood someone who had attained a height that no other moral under the same circumstances had ever reached.” Macy discussed their many years of work together, after which the crowd “was greatly moved—and understood what a great feat had been accomplished.” Notably, the famed Black educator and orator, Booker T. Washington, arrived in Los Angeles that day and spoke at the Auditorium among other regional locations through the 22nd.
Keller gave a second address at that venue on the 7th and went on to appearances at Claremont, Fullerton and Santa Ana before venturing north. Notably, at Sacramento and San Francisco, reports focused on her Socialist politics, something that would have horrified the staunchly conservative and anti-union Times, though, by the mid-Twenties, she was no longer associated with Socialism.
Her visit to the McKinley Street Intermediate School may not have garnered any media coverage, but 9th-grade student Helen Taylor’s essay provides us a review of her appearance:
On the morning of March sixth, nineteen hundred and fourteen we were told of the possibility of having Miss Helen Keller visit us.
Joy and disappointment alternated during the day, as our hopes arose and fell at the reports we had of the probability of her coming.
During the afternoon the bell rang for a yard call and an almost breathless crowd gathered in front of the steps where Miss Helen Keller and Mrs. Macy, her wonderful teacher, were awaiting us.
After an introduction, Keller told the students, “Dear boys and girls, I am so happy to be with you, to see your happy faces. For I have eyes in my soul, and I really can see. I want you to learn above all things that the only life worth living is the life of service to others; it is a life of love.” Helen related that Keller’s voice did not have much resonance and “it seemed impossible that she could not see, for her eyes are the truest blue,” and it was added, “her face is pretty and radiates the sweetness of her smile that seems to gather in every one.”
Following a brief relating how Macy taught Keller to read lips and how Keller knew she was being applauded by vibrations she felt, while Macy was lauded for her efforts, Helen wrote that “at the end of her talk to the pupils, [Keller] gave them flowers of which she had brought a great armful. She shook hands with the pupils” as they returned into the school building “and felt of the faces of some to see with her fingers how happy they were.”
Observing that students “all treasure the flowers which they received from one so wonderful,” Helen concluded with,
Many can see her yet, standing as she stood on the school steps with the wonderful smile on her face and stretching out her eager hands to the boys and girls whom she seemed to love so truly.
The school, which opened as East Vernon School in 1889 and was renamed McKinley in 1912, took on another important name change reflecting the changing demographics of the community when it became Dr. George Washington Carver Junior High (now Middle School) in honor of the great African-American agricultural scientist and inventor just after his death in 1943.
Keller lived for more than a half-century after her 1914 visit in greater Los Angeles, continuing with myriad forms of activism, with well-regarded Hollywood films made about her and Macy, and, later in her life, including the awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Her second sojourn in the Angel City was in 1918, as a prior post here notes.
Four years later, not long before her 88th birthday, Keller died, widely celebrated for her incredible personal and social courage and efforts, including her co-founding in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union, and much more during her long and fruitful life. Her status as among the most remarkable of American women deserves remembrance even as it has been nearly six decades since her passing, especially during this Women’s History Month.