Happy Holidays--and an Ima Audio!

Happy Holidays! And a fine 2015!

Ima was born 133 years ago this coming July.

I hope she would  be pleased that she's now on an Audible Book, just out in December.
Get it on Amazon, Audible Books, or iTunes.

River Oaks: “A veritable wildlife sanctuary”

      On January 23, 1925, an advertisement in the Houston Chronicle promised that River Oaks, Houston’s newest residential development, would be a fine place for wildlife, “one that will not be polluted with gasoline fumes and the furry and feathered creatures will not be frightened by the roar of motor cars.”

       Hmmm.

       This was a reasonable hope in 1924, when live oaks and loblolly pines were the only residents of River Oaks. Jungles of underbrush furnished homes for snakes. Wild violets shared the land with oceans of mud. When the first lots were offered for sale, the developers ordered two truckloads of rubber boots so that prospective buyers could tramp around in the muck.

       Individual lots at 64 by 100 feet went for $2,000. For that, in the 1920s, you could live in River Oaks.

       Hmmm. 

A dirt road across a prairie: River Oaks Blvd. 1924.

       “Country Club Estates,” they called it. A 1,100-acre piece of land three miles west of Houston’s downtown. The Hogg brothers and Hugh Potter saw a planned residential park, a haven for affluent homeowners in a city of 250,000 people where zoning was a pie-in-the-sky idea.

       A model of urban planning, the new community would have wide, winding streets intersected by only three cross-streets. There would be parks and cul-de-sacs, and all the utility wires would be laid underground. That was in 1924!

       In July, ground was broken on River Oaks Boulevard, the first street in the new subdivision. At the north end was, and still is--the River Oaks Country Club. At the other end, across Westheimer, Lamar High School was built in 1937. Jokesters were fond of saying that River Oaks Boulevard was the only street anywhere with two country clubs--one at each end!

       River Oaks, once just a muddy road, would become Houston’s premier residential neighborhood, home of the rich and famous.

      

       But in 1924, property on that dirt road on the outskirts of the city was a hard sell.

Christmas is coming, and so is Ima Audio!

 IMA HOGG: THE GOVERNOR'S DAUGHTER is in production as an audio book!
More news to come on this blog.
Meanwhile, Happy Holidays to all.

Will Hogg, where are you when we need you?

      While we don’t yet know all about Ima Hogg’s adventures in Germany, we know what her elder brother was up to, and we shall not see his like again. Who in his right mind would seriously argue for a “fool-proof and sensible city zoning plan” in Houston? Will Hogg, that’s who--in 1927. And that was when Houston had only 250,000 people. But we remained, then as now, resistant to any zoning plan, sensible or not.

       Will did what he could on his own. He bought land just northwest of downtown’s business district for $260,000, because he thought we needed a civic center. He then persuaded the city to purchase the land and pay for it with a bond issue. That area is now occupied by City Hall, the Jesse H. Jones Center for the Performing Arts, Wortham Center, Hobby Center, and the Houston Public Library.  Largely because of Will Hogg, we have Memorial Park, one of the largest city parks in the nation. Will named it to honor Houston soldiers who died in World War I. With his brother Mike and his old UT chum Hugh Potter, Will bought land 3 miles out in the country, west of downtown. That would become River Oaks.

       

      More about that later.

Ima leaves Germany in 1908, and returns, and returns...

     What was Ima doing in 1908 in Germany? She returned to Houston late that year, or perhaps early in 1909. We know that she was in a friend’s wedding in Lampasas in April 1909, and she began to give piano lessons to a small, select group in Houston that year.

       But in the summer of 1910 she returned to Europe with her brother Mike. She kept a journal of their tour, describing cities and sights she wanted Mike to see. The two of them went first to Berlin. They stayed there a week--but there is not one word about what they did or saw there. Ima had lived in Charlottenberg, a suburb of Berlin, for over a year, but she does not mention anything about her stay, or about people she knew.

       Why--when she describes every other stop on their tour in some detail?

      
       When Ima Hogg had a secret, she kept it.

1907:Ima plans to stay in Germany

On January 4, 1907 Ima went to the American Consulate in Berlin, and signed a "Certificate of Registration" allowing her to reside in Germany "for the study of music," as she wrote.

She signed her name with her distinctive signature, always making her first name illegible.

What other secret was she keeping?

(Research in progress!)

Ima in Germany: A diary begun--and suddenly ended.

         Ima was ever the dutiful tourist on her “grand tour” of Europe in 1907. She was twenty-five years old. Every museum, every painting, every cathedral, every building, filled her travel journal in guide-book detail, from June to October.         

         Then, for reasons still undiscovered, she suddenly decided to stay in Germany. She said she wanted to learn German and work on her music. With the help of a “Mrs. Cranberry” (Grandberry?) she took a room in a house (Mrs. Cranberry’s?) in Charlottenberg, a suburb of Berlin, then a neighborhood for Jewish artists and intellectuals.

         Ima acquired a Bechstein piano, and a famous music teacher, Xaver Scharwenka. She went to operas and concerts and practiced her German and her music. She played checkers with “Buddy,”a handsome young man who  lived in the house and played the violin. (Was he a family member? A tenant?)

         

     Ima began a diary on January 1, 1908, and abruptly ended it on February 29.

          Why?

         Mystery upon mystery.

Ima's first trip to Europe, 1907. Her journal begins.

      In the summer of 1907 Ima Hogg, still grieving over her father’s death the year before, set off on a grand tour of Europe. It was her first trip, and it lasted from June till October--and then she stayed on. (More about that later.)

      She kept a journal of her travels:

This is a chronology of my trip to Europe--not a diary of personalities.

June 22--Sailing-

President Lincoln, Hamburg-American Line.

Cabin 63 - Room-mate Mrs. Ben Thompson.

An auspicious start--a glorious warm day, our ship - 618 ft. long--making its maiden trip. Many friends had telegrams, letters, books and flowers as farewell to me, and we waved them a far away good-bye with grateful hearts for their remembrances - a home leaving being at best somewhat sad....

         Ima traveled with family friends, the Lewis Thompsons of Texas, their sons Ben & Lewis, and their governess, Magdalena. IH’s roommate on the voyage and probably on land travels was Mrs. Ben Thompson from Nacogdoches (a relative of the Thompsons, most likely.) This group from Houston was joined by a Mr. Scott, a chemistry professor at Austin College, and a Mr. Ben Foster and his sister Miss Ione Foster from Kansas City.

The passengers are mostly German so we have fallen completely in to the spirit of things, even trying out our bits of “Deutche” words on them. Really, though, have made comparatively no acquaintances. My table seat to my right though is occupied by a lovely old gentleman Rev. Wilkie from Florida and his wife to his right. A Mr. Dick from Newcastle Eng. Has played bridge with us and defeated us all. Much of our time has been spent at cards, some at reading, we have been dutiful enough to dive into guide-books--then we’ve walked leagues. Shuffle-board is a great game- I can’t play it much, but intend to spend lost of time at it on the return. Mr.  Thompson and I matched Mrs T. & Mr. Dick at “ring-toss” --they beating us by one point only.

       Ima was always competitive.

“He’s a fat old hog, ain’t he?”

       Jim Hogg's newsworthiness extended beyond Texas, particularly in New York.

       In September 1903 the "Man in the Street" column of The New York Times ran the following anecdote about him:

      

       Ex-Gov. Hogg of Texas, who has a reputation for liking to play a practical joke every time he gets a chance, says he has been cured of the habit. The last time he was in New York the joke he tried to perpetrate was turned back at him in great style. It happened that he wanted a shoe shine. The bootblack, a small-size Italian, began to chatter at him after he had taken his seat in the high chair. Not being in a conversational frame of mind, the portly Governor thought it would be a good plan to feign that he was deaf and dumb. So he responded by signs to everything the bootblack said.

       This proceeding naturally caused the desired silence on the part of the Italian, and the Governor was wrapped in his own thoughts, when suddenly a little newsboy ran up and asked him if he wanted a paper. Before he could reply the bootblack turned to the boy and said:

       "You nota talka to him. He deaf."

       The newsboy looked him over, says the Governor, and then remarked in a loud voice:

       "Well, say, he's a fat old hog, ain't he?"

       The Governor, who weighs 300 pounds or more, relishes telling the story, but he adds feelingly that he kept up his bluff after hearing the brutal comment of the newsboy.

—“Man in the Street,” The New York Times, Sept. 6, 1903

Ima goes to the opera in Munich: another mystery

Excerpts from Ima Hogg's 1907 travel journal of her first trip to Europe:

Aug. 19. Monday. Munich. Hotel Linfelder [She went out by herself to pick up opera tickets she had ordered from London.]

Out looking--got lost--having left my dear old Baedecker somewhere--reached hotel 3:30 P.M. tired hot & hungry....

Aug. 21^st Wednesday Munich.

Four o’clock Tristan & Isolde! Started from hotel in a carriage at 3:30 in plenty of time...

[She described the opera in great critical detail. Was she alone?]

Had dinner between 2^nd and 3^rd Acts....

Came home decided on leaving out Vienna & staying for [Wagner's Ring] Cycle --if my ticket could be redeemed.

Thursday Munich. [Aug. 22]

Ticket redeemed, place engaged at Musicians Pension where Mrs. [name left blank] from Houston is staying & she, too, goes to the opera.... 

Ima bade farewell to her travel companions (a tour group mostly from Texas) and moved into a pension, where she stayed for nine days, going to the opera--and doing what else? Hmmm.

“A dromedary for dudes” --Jim Hogg labels the bicycle.

Ima’s father had a way with words. Here is an item from a Galveston newspaper in 1896:

       It was the Hon. James Stephen Hogg, not then governor of Texas, who spurned the bicycle, not many months ago, as ‘a dromedary for dudes.’ But is it a useful and tractable sort of dromedary, and the Hon. Jerry Simpson of Medicine Lodge, Kan., a populist in good and regular standing, is one of the ‘dudes’ who rides it. Contrition begins to boil within the vast bosom of the Hon. James Stephen Hogg. He feels that he has slandered a worthy steed and a great institution. In the moonlit nights and on bright dawns he may be seen, on quiet country roads, ponderously revolving on a quadricycle, a most excellent device propelled by a crank. With time, confidence and steadiness, he will come to master the tricycle. Then, if he is not seriously injured in the trials, he will attain at last unto the bicycle. It will be a great day for rotation when he bursts upon the public on his wheel.”

-- The Galveston Daily News, Nov. 29, 1896

“Sockless Jerry” Simpson on a bicycle, yes.  Jim Hogg, who weighed 300 pounds, no.

Who was Areal? Ima's mysterious suitor surfaces

        On January 1, 1908 Ima Hogg wrote in her Berlin diary, "who should appear but Areal?" Areal and others unnamed, she wrote, "stayed until late in the afternoon and we all drank eggnog together."

Hmmm.

What we know so far:
1. Ima had met Areal sometime during her travels the previous summer.
2. He came to see her again on January 4, when they had what may have been a lover's quarrel.
3. Areal was a probably a student at the University of Heidelberg. "He is off to Heidelberg in the morning," Ima wrote.
4. "Areal" is a Jewish name.
5. Ima was living with a German family at 22 Mommsenstrasse, a house in Charlottenberg, a suburb of Berlin that was a center of Jewish intellectual/artistic life in the early 1900s.

What do we think? More clues forthcoming!

Ima was very good at keeping secrets.

       When Ima Hogg did not want something known, she was very good at cover-ups. She idolized her father, James Stephen Hogg, and she wanted nothing to tarnish his reputation. She watched his biographer like a hawk, to be sure nothing got into it that she thought harmful to the legacy of J. S. Hogg. She didn't want anything about why she was named "Ima, " so the official biography omits that. Needless to say, she didn't want any stories about a sister named "Ura," either.
     
       In the bound volumes of J.S. Hogg's letters, there are missing pages.
     
       In the family letters, there are passages deleted.

       In Ima's diaries in 1907, 1908, 1910, and 1914 there are mysterious omissions.

       In the little notebook she kept on her summer vacation in 1918, pages have been removed.

       But in the voluminous files of the Hogg Collections in the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin,  there must be clues.

       Ima couldn't censor everything.

What was Ima's "secret"?

     When Ima Hogg wanted something hidden, she was very good at concealment. In the archives in Austin, the 1908 diary she began while she was studying music in Berlin starts with “January 1.”  She wrote in it nearly every day--until the end of February. 

     

     She wrote about her music studies, the piano pieces she was working on--and about a young man named “Areal” whom she had met the summer before. He came to see her January 4, but, she wrote, “He is off to Heidelberg in the morning.” That was the end of him--as far as we know. The diary ends abruptly on February 28. The rest of the little leather-bound book (with a lock) is blank. There was no more need to lock it. 

     If the “secret” that Ima mentioned in a letter to her brother Tom in April 1908 was something she wanted to keep to herself, she did: From February to October 1908 I have yet to find any record of her.  We have Tom's letter to her mentioning the "secret," but we don't have her letter to him. Did she destroy it? From Ima we have no letters, no diary, no nothing. We know that she was still in Germany, maybe still living in Berlin. 

        

         What was she doing?

Did Ima have a secret romance in Germany?

       Off to search archives for clues to Ima’s mysterious love life.  Rumors persist that the love of her life was someone she met in her 20s in Germany, and when he was killed in World War I she destroyed all his letters. Some say that is just romantic hearsay. But maybe, just maybe, there is something she forgot to hide, preserved in these files at the Briscoe Center for American History:

Ima Hogg Papers

Box

4Zg86 IH Travel diaries 1908, 1914

3B153 Diaries 1898, 1908, 1912, scrapbook of postcards from          European tour 1907

3B170 Notebooks and notes, 1908, 1912, 1926

4Zg78 Correspondence, “the girls,” 1902-1909, 1903-1936

4Zg81 Correspondence, Letters from old friends, 1906-1933

3B154 Social life, correspondence 1899-1918, dance cards, etc.

2.325 D5c another scrapbook? “oversize materials”

2.325/V26 “Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung” 1936, “Adolf Hitler: Ein Mann und Sein Volk” ??

Why did she save this newspaper and this book?

         When Ima went to Europe, she always visited Germany. Other rumors say that she kept up with her beloved’s family over the years. Or maybe it was just the family she stayed with when she studied music in Berlin. I’d like to think it was both.

“Miss Ima Would Roll Over in Her Grave.”

         Leaving Ima in Germany for the moment, as she was 107 years ago, to survey one of her favorites in the more recent past:

         One of Ima Hogg’s favorite restoration projects is aging and frail: the Winedale [Texas] Historical Complex is woefully short of funding. The nineteenth-century houses and barns she lovingly restored, hand-hewn nail by hand-hewn nail, in the 1960s, are falling into disrepair.

         Miss Ima gave the Winedale buildings to the University of Texas as a center for the study of Texas culture and the arts. But decades later, time and money are scarce, and the funding to maintain Winedale as it was in her day has dwindled. What was once a festive and historic Hill Country place is now a shadow of its former self.

         Those who care about this project, according to a Houston Chronicle article on July 7, 2014, say that “Miss Ima would roll over in her grave.”

        

         What a pity.

Ima's Mysterious Young Man

        Ima’s brother Mike’s war wound was not serious, but in the summer of 1918 she may have lost someone very dear to her in World War I. The evidence thus far is merely circumstantial, but it is tantalizing, and if it is true, tragic. An old photo, undated, shows Ima and a young man on an outing in Germany’s scenic Harz Mountains. (We know that because “Harz Mts” is scrawled in Ima’s hand across the back of the snapshot.) The couple are smiling. The sun is shining. They are both wearing broad-brimmed hats (hers topped with flowers) and both carry walking-sticks, as if they are out on a ramble.

         Who was this young man to Ima? Was he the same young man whose likeness she sketched in her notebook on another occasion? A pencil drawing in Ima’s skilled hand shows a handsome face in profile. He could well be the one in the photograph. In this sketch he wears a cap, not a hat. Another half-finished sketch shows Ima’s attempt to capture him in full face. She apparently gave up and handed the pencil to another, less talented hand--no doubt, her companion’s. We can almost hear her saying, “Now you draw me.” The result is a rough picture of Ima, seated, holding a walking-stick. Beside her is a picnic basket. The drawings are on the pages of a small bound journal that Ima kept in Germany in 1907-1908.

        

         Why, oh why, didn’t she write down this young man’s name?

Deadly weapons of [mass] destruction

         As Europe went to war in August 1914, Ima Hogg and many other American tourists were stranded abroad. The earliest passage home that she could book was on the American Line’s St. Paul--on October 3.

         Before Ima sailed for home, a huge German army had plunged through Belgium into northern France. From September 5 through September 12 the armies fought near the Marne River in what would be called the first battle of the Marne, involving over 2,000,000 men and 500,000 total dead and wounded. That was just the beginning. Oddly enough, Ima wrote only two letters home that fall.  What did she do, all that dreadful autumn?

         World War I was the first modern war: the first war to use tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery that could fire a shell sixty miles. Such destructive power produced devastating losses of life and limb. No one planned it that way. At the turn of the century, international conferences had banned new and deadly weapons of destruction: bombs dropped from the air, chemical warfare, and certain kinds of bullets.

         From 1914 to 1918 World War I killed 8,528,831 (including 53,513 Americans) and wounded 21,159,154 (204,002 of them Americans). 

            

         One of the wounded would be Mike Hogg.

“The tragedy is like nothing I can imagine.”

More from Ima’s August 4 cable about leaving Germany:

We bade goodbye, ourselves, to many stalwart, handsome fellows. The tragedy is like nothing I can imagine. In Bremen, everything seemed suspended -- people gathered in small groups -- in hushed voices, talking eagerly. Here [in London], it is the same.

         On August 5 Germany invaded Belgium. 

         On August 25 Ima wrote: Poor Germany--my heart just aches for her. Anybody who knows Germany and the Germans is bound to sympathize.

          

         Ima Hogg knew Germany well, and so did many other Americans. As children Ima and her brothers had learned German prayers at the knee of their mother’s Bavarian maid. As an aspiring concert pianist, Ima had recently spent nearly two years studying piano in Berlin. She may have met the love of her life there. Since 1908 she had returned twice to Germany, once with her brother Mike--who would soon return to Germany under quite different circumstances.

        

         The United States was still neutral in this war, but that would not last.

World War I : A house of cards tumbles down.

         Neither Ima nor her friends nor anyone else could believe that the great powers of Europe, bound by networks of civility and diplomacy, would suddenly declare war on each other. Besides, that, George V of England, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany were first cousins: they were the grandsons of Queen Victoria.

         No one imagined that a single assassination would topple the elaborate house of diplomatic cards that had kept Europe stable since the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. But Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia offended Russia, a defender of Serbia. On July 30 Russia prepared for war against Austria-Hungary and Germany. On August 1 Germany declared war on Russia.

         That was the day that the Chemnitz docked in Bremerhaven. Ima and other passengers who had looked forward to a late-summer holiday in Germany were quickly re-routed. On August 3 Germany declared war on France, and on that day Ima Hogg and many others sailed on the St. Petersburgh, bound for England. As soon as she arrived in London, Ima sent another cablegram home:          

         The situation on the Continent is already is frightful, even if nothing more happens, and I am sure more is to come of it. However, none of us are sorry we came. We were among the last of two ships to be allowed in the North Sea and to land in Germany. The voyage from Germany to England was a terrible trip, yet still without discourtesies. . . . A great many things happened--lack of food, crushes of people, no place to sleep. . . .

          Ima arrived in London on August 4, 1914.

          That day England declared war on Germany.

War in Europe, 1914: Ima was there.

When World War I broke out in August 1914 Ima was on her way to it.  She had sailed from Galveston, Texas, June 11 on the Chemnitz, a German ship bound for Bremen, Germany. (Was this another visit to someone she loved in Germany?) The Chemnitz was at sea when the fateful event that set off the war occurred: Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Duchess Sophie (whom many historians forget about) were killed by a Serbian assassin in Sarajevo on June 28 (a date that also happened to be the couple’s wedding anniversary). That very day Austria declared war on Serbia.

The next day, on June 29, Ima Hogg sent a cable from the Chemnitz to her home in Houston:

“When news came of the Austro-Serbian conflict and the Triple-Alliance complications, our imaginations even pictured us being captured by an English cruiser in the Channel!” Traveling with friends, she was not really alarmed.

The latest news,” she wrote, “makes us think all will be peaceably settled.”

Little did she--or anyone else--know what was to come.

---

[i]  Ima Hogg to Will Hogg, July 29, 1914, Box 3B125, Family Papers, Ima Hogg Papers, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

“There’s nothing in a name....”

         Yet another salvo in the ongoing name controversy, a defense from an Ima fan who knew her and family.

         Governor Hogg’s daughter was, unfortunately, called Ima by her mother, who had some sentimental attachment to the name, and her parents never realized the disadvantage of it until she went to school and the children began to make fun of it. But it would have been untrue to the characteristics of her family to retreat under fire, so Miss Hogg kept her name, and, in spite of all temptation, continues to keep it, and to prove that there’s nothing in a name as a handicap to the right sort of person. Her three brothers--none of whom has freak names, though the same class of wits that invented “Ura” have endowed them with a choice collection--are all men of mark in their communities and a credit to their father’s influence and upbringing.

         May I not in this conjunction sign myself, as one of our most picturesque politicians always did,

         Ellen Maury Slayden, “of and for Texas.”

--Charlottesville, Va., Nov.4, 1922.

         Who was she?

          Ellen Maury Slayden (1860–1926). was born at the Maury family home, Piedmont, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1860; she received her education from tutors at home. On June 12, 1883, she married James Luther Slayden, a merchant and rancher in San Antonio; they had no children. Mrs. Slayden served for a time in 1889 as society editor of the San Antonio Express. Upon her husband's election to Congress in 1896, they moved to Washington, where they maintained a residence for the next twenty-one years. She continued her writing, contributing to various magazines and newspapers, and was a tireless record keeper and diarist. Her notebooks concerning observations of the social and political life in Washington from 1897 to 1919 were left to her nephew F. Maury Maverick. Maverick's widow, Terrell Webb, with her second husband, Walter Prescott Webb, had the journal published in 1962 as Washington Wife. Ellen Slayden died in San Antonio on April 20, 1926.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsl04

Accessed 5/5/14.

“In Justice to Gov. Hogg.”

         This letter from a Texas woman who had known James Stephen Hogg appeared in The New York Times, in 1922.

         I am surprised to see in The Times a repetition of that cheap and vulgar myth that “Governor Hogg of Texas called one twin daughter ‘Ima’ and the other ‘Ura.” It appears in an article by Mary Fisher Torrance in the Magazine Section of Oct. 16. The story might be dismissed by a simple statement of the fact that Governor Hogg had but one daughter, but when a man has done as much for his State and reflected such credit upon it as Governor Hogg did upon Texas it is not fair to let flippant writers go unchallenged when they pervert history and do injustice to a good and wise man for the sake of making a “snappy” article.

         The story gives a wrong impression of the Governor. Hogg, whom I knew well personally, was a man of good family and right traditions, a relative, I believe, of the “Ettrick Shepherd” (James Hogg) to whose portrait he bore a marked resemblance.

          James Hogg (1770-1835), James Stephen Hogg (1851-1906)

          Look-alikes??

"Who Gave You This Name?"

Ima had to put up with stories like this for most of her life:

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 15, 1922

"Who Gave You This Name?" By MARY FISHER TORRANCE

Worthy old 'Archbishop Peckham . . . thought it expedient to Issue a warning that " Minister shall take care not to permit wanton names to be give to children baptized; and if otherwise It be done, same shall be changed by the Bishop at confirmation."

What would his Worship have said, I wonder, had he sat in judgment in the case of Governor Hogg of Texas, who called one twin daughter " Ima," the other, " Ura"? But one never hears that the girls themselves took any exception in later years: probably because they were too thankful in the possession of a papa with a sense of humor. "

Twins? A new twist! 

But someone--not Ima, who shrugged off such items--responded. 

Log in next week.

Ima Revisits Germany in 1910. Why?

In  the summer of 1910, Ima and her brother Mike toured Europe. They sailed from Galveston, Texas, to Bremen, Germany, arriving July 18. They visited Berlin. Did Ima introduce Mike to her German friends? Did she share her “secret” with her brother?

(This is a research work in progress, but it’s summertime, and I may take some blogtime off.) Stay tuned.