Julia was leaving Rome on a fast train to visit Saturnia and its thermal spring baths. She had been 10 days in the Eternal City and wished to luxuriate in the water and its healing powers. The temperature was said to be 99.5 F. The Medieval legend has it that...
Imagine being both blind and deaf and still earning a BA from Radcliffe College of Harvard University, being the author of 14 books and being named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century! Ponder travelling to 35 countries around the world advocating for those with...
“My kind of town, Chicago is.” What better way to enjoy a week than in Chicago in golden mid-September! Chicago remains a world-class city along the sparkling waters of Lake Michigan. White sailboats dot the horizon and multi-nationals converse as their children play in the waters of the Millennium Park...
The feminine tranquil birth of the river Le Seine was named after the goddess, Sequana. The Seine has a 483-mile journey from Burgundy to the sea. She begins at 1,540 feet above sea level. The Gallo-Roman goddess Sequana’s name comes from the Celtic squan meaning serpentine. Its source has been...
“You will come back changed. The river will change you.” —Father E.V. Jotter The year was 1938. The first-ever federal minimum wage was set at 25cents an hour. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length animated feature to be seen in theaters. Its song “Whistle While You...
When the Victorian period began (in the 19th Century in England), small retail shops sold goods produced on the premises. Grocers blended tea, roasted coffee, ground sugar and packaged dry foods. Shop assistants were hired to learn the trade. Young women who were neat, responsible, well-spoken, and literate, would work...
“Be slow to fall into friendship. But when thou art in, continue firm and constant.” —Socrates What a precious gift is friendship. To give and receive. Another person thinks friendship with you has value and merit. They trust you with their secrets and know your most intimate life details. They...
Ingrid Bergman delivered her audition pieces to the Royal Dramatic Theatre. The year was 1933. One of her choices was a Hungarian play about a peasant girl who flirts with a bold country boy. She jumps out of the wings on to the stage and stands there, hands on hips,...
“Memory is the scribe of the soul.” —Aristotle Salt water, storms, and headwinds, leaky decks and the November winds coming in did not deter the 102 passengers on the Mayflower in 1620. The thin-walled cabins below deck overflowed with chests of clothing, “casks of food, chairs, pillows, and rugs. A...
Camille Pissarro was born in the West Indies in 1830 coming from a Jewish family of Danish citizenship. The Pissarros were middle-class business people working the colonial trade. Camille was sent to school in Paris. In 1852 he threw up a commercial career and left for Venezuela with a Danish...
Cantigny Park is a bucolic 500-acre park in Wheaton and is the former estate of Joseph Medill and his grandson Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publishers of the Chicago Tribune. In the late 1800s the land was acquired as a country estate which Medill called Red Oaks. In 1896-97 Medill built...
For a while artists well-established 19th Century artists, Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh lived at 23 Place Lamartine, the Yellow House, in Arles, in southern France. One thing they had in common was an intense fantasy life in which their own real lives merged with their reading. Van Gogh...
I met a rich man today. He was on the Chicago BNSF (Burlington Northern Sante Fe) #1315 train returning to Aurora. His daughter sat with him, playing with her toys and eating Good and Plenty candies. She had just had her hair done by her older sister so it was...
It was a bucolic Summer’s day and a short train ride to the Brookfield Zoo with a picnic to be savored. I wanted to take photographs of the Zoo animals for my next children’s book with a working title of “A Zoo Menagerie.” The Chicago Zoological Society manages the Zoo,...
In 1743, King Louis XV had a so-called, “flying chair” that connected his apartments with his favorite mistress. By 1895 The Biltmore Estate had installed an elevator. Hotels began to install them for their rich customers’ comfort. Following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, new Tiffany & Co. art deco...
Jeanne d’ Arc was a peasant girl who heard voices, saw visions, raised the siege of Orleans and was burned to death by the English at Rouen. It was said that an English soldier made two pieces of wood into a cross and gave it to her as flames rose...
“New feet within my garden go. New fingers stir the sod. A Troubadour upon the Elm, Betrays the solitude.” —Emily Dickinson Poet Emily Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what might be possible, but not yet realized. The literary marketplace offered new ground for her...
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” —Abraham Lincoln The man who would serve as the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln,...
“L’Abbaye de Thelene” Do what you will J. Baker. Josephine Baker, American beauty, French hero, and British spy, was born in poverty and named Freda Josephine McDonald, June 3, 1906 in St. Louis. Her grandparents were former slaves. She lived in a series of run-down dwellings without gas or electricity,...
Imagine enjoying a light lunch al fresco when a shattering boom roars through the marketplace of Pompeii. The ground around you shakes so violently that your meal of fresh fish and red tomatoes ends up in the street. Inhabitants look to Mount Vesuvius, a massive volcano that rises above the...
