In June 1923, Prohibition was the law in the United States. Movies were still silent. Jazz was brand new and selling a lot of 78rpm records and Victrolas.
American women had gotten the right to vote nationwide three years earlier. Their first chance to vote for U.S. President had come in 1920. Warren Harding was elected that year, his success often attributed to new women voters.
My four grandparents were adults, making their way in the “Roaring Twenties”. I’ve sometimes wondered what their lives were like back then, and what they were like as young people.
I knew three of the four, but only when they were well into old age. Old pictures, letters, newspaper stories, and things I remember them saying tell me they led rich, fun, exciting lives when they were younger.
But did their Twenties roar?
My best sense is all four of my grandparents suffered little from Prohibition. The United States had gone dry at midnight on January 17, 1920. It became illegal to make, sell, or transport alcoholic beverages, though not to possess or consume them.
But the savvy and well off in the United States never stopped getting access to alcohol. My grandparents were surely no different. There’s an old line about how Prohibition didn’t stop people from drinking, it just made it more fun. That sounds about right.
My grandparents were active, connected, cultured people, three of the four living in New York City, the fourth well-traveled and based in Washington, DC. They lived at the leading edge of the emerging modern age.
John Redmond Farrar, Jr. and Roberta Becker Farrar
In 1923, my mother’s parents, Redmond and Roberta Farrar, were 25, married since 1919. They had met in Brooklyn society, both active in and connected, via their families and schools, to the social scene in the borough.
Their first child, Robert Bartlett Farrar was born in June 1923. His mother Roberta was social and outgoing. She had been a teen-age dance champion. She was an active part of Brooklyn society. But she began that year three months pregnant with her first child and was establishing what was a more domestic life.
Redmond worked at a bank. He was a key figure and performer in the alumni musical shows of his school, Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (called then and now, Poly Prep). The shows were a big deal. He composed music for them, as well as for Tin Pan Alley publishers. In 1923, he co-wrote three published songs.
By that year or soon after, Roberta and Redmond were living in the newly-built apartment building The Rulian, at 295 St. Johns Pl. in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
The Rulian was “Brooklyn’s Most Beautiful Apartment House”. In was one block from Prospect Park and convenient to the subways. During the summers, Roberta and Redmond went to Sound Beach, Connecticut. In 1924, they stayed there from early August to the end of September. This is near where they ended up building their Riverside home (in 1930) where they raised their three children, Robert (born 1923), Joan (born 1925), and my mom Judith (born 1930).
At the Rulian, they could enjoy a “built-in needle shower” and “every modern convenience” in their own apartment. And by as early as 1924 they had a telephone (no. STE(rling) 4945).
Roberta’s parents had both died, and she was their only surviving child. She was close to her father’s sisters, Karolina Becker Brion and Louise Becker Stoltze, and their families who lived in Brooklyn.
Redmond’s parents also were in Brooklyn, on Hudson Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, about 2 miles from their apartment. Redmond’s father, John R. Farrar, Sr., was still active as a Brooklyn Superior Court Judge. Redmond’s older sister, Grace, then 29, was studying voice at The Fontainebleau School of Music, a conservatory southeast of Paris in France.
In 1923 Redmond published (as co-writer); “Hurry Up Matilda,” “I’ll Have Vanilla,” and “When the Moon Shines on the Cow Shed”.
“I’ll Have Vanilla” was the biggest hit among them. Recorded by (and co-composed) Eddie Cantor, then a huge star of Vaudeville and radio, it was Redmond’s closest brush with real music success. (Listen to it here).
Redmond’s song collaborators were established, even notable composers. While he wasn’t making a real living at composing songs, it had to be a big deal for him. That year, as noted, he was likely working in a bank; his 1918 draft card noted he was a clerk at Farmers Loans. By the 1930 Census, his profession listed as stock broker. He was not yet writing “B” side tunes for Plaza ARC Records, which he did later in the 1920s as a house composer for that label.
That Spring, Redmond continued to help create and appeared in the alumni shows of Brooklyn Poly Prep, his all-boys middle and high school. He played “Kitty May”, giving a ‘fine characterization, for he is a true artist as a delineator of the fair sex…’
Isabel Ruth Cooper and Charles D. Mahaffie, Sr.
In 1923, Isabel and Charles had not yet met. Each was still single. Isabel was 31. She worked, part of the year, in South America, at scientific illustration, and lived an artist’s life in New York City. If her twenties roared, she brought her own flavor and style to it, and favored the artistic and bohemian life. She was no flapper.
In March 1923, Isabel sailed with William Beebe’s scientific expedition on the Noma for the Galapagos Islands, via the Panama Canal. The ship returned to NYC in May. This was the first of two trips to the Galapagos she joined. She went again in 1925.
Isabel, emancipated at 18 from her guardian aunts who had raised her as a late teen, had cobbled together work as an artist and in adjacent areas. She wrote about these jobs in 1924, when she had spent a few years in her preferred one, “wild-animal painting in the jungle”:
“I used to dream of such a job as I went bleakly about my various occupations, such as assisting at the legerdemain of interior decorators, or degrading oriental perfections to terms of a modern rug factory, or building feeble disguises for player kings and queens, or filling in the cracks of my time with painting lessons, sadly convinced the while that you cannot learn to be a painter and accomplish anything else the same year.”
Among other accolades, in 1923 Isabel had two species of moths named for her: Cirphis cooperi and Paectes isabel.
Isabel didn’t meet Charles until the next December (1924). By then, she had committed to a second trip to the Galapagos. They wrote long letters back and forth during that second journey. It was a courtship by post. They finally married in 1928. They had one child, my father Charles Jr., born in 1931.
When not off on an expedition, Isabel lived at 136 West 65th Street, New York (site today of The Lincoln Center). That address housed other artists and at least one art studio around that time.
Part of that time she lived there with a pet red howler monkey, brought back from South America. That lasted until the neighbors objected to it, presumably for its howling. (Howler monkeys are the loudest land animals on Earth, with their howling audible from 3 miles away.)
Charles D. Mahaffie, Senior, still a bachelor at 39, was out and about with his great friends George and Dorothy Putnam and others. (The Putnams later introduced Charles and Isabel.)
He lived at the University Club on 15th Street, in NW Washington DC (on McPherson Square). There were about a hundred residents at the Club, all men. Charles was on the Committee on Literature, Art, and Decorations at the club. Before moving to DC from Portland Oregon in 1916, he had lived in the University Club there.
From a1924 description of the Washington, DC University Club in its yearbook:
“This dignified, well proportioned building faces McPherson Square, one of the small parks so characteristic of Washington. The large reading room, the spacious and beautiful lounge, the library, the large and dining rooms, like the spacious entrance hall and beautiful open stairway, which extends to the room floor, secure open spaces and airiness, an important matter in Washington.”
“The Club also provides for newspapers and periodicals and for cards and billiards.” Gambling was not allowed, and women were only allowed in the designated ladies rooms.
Charles was Director, Bureau of Finance, of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It was a job that took him all over the United States, attending to the Federal regulation of the railroad industry.
His salary was $6,000 per year. Senator Charles Curtis, presumably for political partisanship reasons, wanted Charles removed from that job. Curtis, a Republican, was even from Charles’ birth state, Kansas. The senator ended up as Vice President under Herbert Hoover. But Charles kept the job and soon rose to become a Commissioner of Interstate Commerce.
Each of these four people were distinct personalities and lived active, interesting lives.
So did their 20s roar? I’d say yes!
