Old News recently ran across a letter Mrs. Bernie Babcock sent to the editor of the Arkansas Democrat 100 years ago (see arkansasonline.com/220last).
When I poked the archive for more letters from this once famous Arkansan, up popped an ad in February 1922 for a love story the paper published in 20 installments: "Billy of Arkansas."
The Democrat bragged that it was the first statewide daily to publish Babcock's serial, and that seems true; but "Billy" had been published in 1914 by The Arkansas Progress, a short-lived temperance weekly in Little Rock. "Billy of Arkansas" was a love story and a temperance tract.
By the way and a little off-topic, the Progress merged later in 1914 with The National Menace of Fordyce, becoming The National Progress. It was a biweekly advocate for the prohibition of alcohol. I could tell you more about this, but I only brought it up so we could pause here briefly to imagine the profound privilege of working for a newspaper called "The National Menace."
Through some rigmarole we don't need to rehash, Yours Truly went looking for a copy of "Billy of Arkansas" and wound up paying a visit to the second floor of the Roberts Library in downtown Little Rock, where the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Center for Arkansas History and Culture share a research room.
UALR's center houses the Bernie Babcock Collection.
A video on the center's website explains what to expect during a visit to the research room.
Because I'd dutifully made a request for permission to view materials at least two days in advance, Box 1 of the collection's third series of boxes was waiting for me. Steve at the research desk handed me a gray fiberboard box of about 15-by-10-by-5-inches and weighing not too much.
The quiet, dim room has small reading tables placed below individual pendant lights. I sat down and opened the box.
What a rush of intimacy one gets handling a dead person's things, as though your fingertips were somehow close to their fingertips. That's a genuine experience but hard to describe without sounding dopey.
Inside were nine manila folders and then Item No. 10, a three-ring binder, black, apparently bought long ago at an S.H. Kress & Co. store. It held loose-leaf, feint-ruled pages aged to the color of very weak tea. Their hole reinforcement rings were still white.
In this binder was an incomplete scrapbook of "Billy" as published by the Democrat from Feb. 12 to March 9, 1922. Only some of Babcock's story had been pasted onto the notepaper. Most of the binder was bare pages.
I want to think Babcock compiled the columns, and I noticed that whoever was the compiler did the job with care, what little they did of it. Example: The bottom of one column of type had been cut in the middle of a paragraph, slicing ascenders off the words on the line below the cut. Had the compiler not re-cut the rest of the column, its first line would have suffered a haircut. It didn't. The compiler took the time to get another copy of that day's paper to cut up.
That level of care can be tough to sustain, which suggests to me that it's no wonder the scrap-booking stopped short. Such projects of mine start in diligent determination, but years later I come across their unfinished corpses under a stack of books or a pile of blankets.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » arkansasonline.com/220plan]
BILLY COMES HOME
I'm halfway through "Billy." So far, it's notable for wittiness, clear characterizations and the breezy determination of its fun-loving young heroine.
Billy Camelton is a wealthy girl who has been away from Arkansas at school. Orphaned, she's the last shoot off an old and self-consciously aristocratic Southern family, the Alexanders, although other families' inferiorities might mingle in her blood. Such is the fear of her elderly aunties, Miss Nan Alexander, Mrs. Isobel Regan and Mrs. Peter Drake.
Here's how Babcock describes these genteel biddies:
"Miss Nan, the oldest, a faded but uncorrupted type of the woman cavaliers admired, reveled in the hallowed memories of the Old South as a bit of yellow lace revels in lavender from which the fragrance has long since gone.
"The sage tea shade of hair, carefully powdered wrinkles and up-to-date lorgnette of the second sister, Mrs. Regan, lent a clinging air of worldliness that hinted the social leader she had been in her day. Long since Mrs. Regan had been twice a widow.
"Mrs. Peter Drake was the wife of Captain Peter Drake of Drake's Landing, an ex-steamboat pioneer, who in other days had been known up and down the river as well for his proficiency in swearing as in steering free of snags and sandbars."
There had been a fourth sister, Billy's grandmother, but long ago she had passed from the tears and sunshine of life, and now rested below a gray stone in a quiet corner of Mount Holly "where vines trailed and mocking birds mated."
Miss Nan has the most forceful personality of the three aunties and the most snobbish, provincial opinions. She's clearly an earnest old gal, as Babcock mocks her horror of all things modern — girls smoking! Girls wanting to vote! What bothers her is not that girls do these things but that girls from old families do. Old families should be honored, not disgraced.
Also, Nan has inexcusably fond memories of her plantation home from "the war." She says, "Many times I have looked down on that garden at midnight, breathed the heavy perfume of honeysuckle and jessamine and watched the moonlight shimmer on the magnolia leaves — many times.
"Those were golden days. Every child in the family had its own nurse, every woman as many maids as she wanted and of house-servants there was no lack for the Alexanders owned five hundred slaves."
Miss Nan is not only a figure to be mocked, she shall be scandalized as her great niece Billy sweeps home to cheerfully ignore unnecessary constraints and thwart hypocrites in Little Rock society. She's had plenty of beaus and ignored them all, which the aunties see as troubling. What if she doesn't mean to marry? Oh no! She must be taken in hand before her debutante ball.
Billy worries her aunties even more by announcing that she does intend to marry and to raise a whole yard full of children.
"But Billy, it is so common to have large families. Only negroes and poor whites do such things," Nan cries. "Not one Alexander woman raised a large family. Delicacy was one of their chief accomplishments."
This story is set during Prohibition — an old-fashioned era in American history. So it's bracing to notice that the most modern thing about Billy in this story is her well informed disdain for alcohol.
Her aunties have the outmoded, stuffy idea that alcohol must be served. They shake their chins over the recent disgrace of a promising debutante who drank too much with a fellow in public. That poor girl is ruined forever. But they don't blame alcohol. They blame her. They believe only easily corruptible people become drunk — people from bad families.
Nan avers that anyone who doesn't understand that must be a Yankee, "or he would know that a little drinking has no effect on the right kind of blood."
So you can imagine these old gals' horror when they find out how Billy knows their premise is false. And then they find out how Billy disgraced her family at her debutante ball.
It's not what you think. We'll sample a bit of it next time.
[This is a series. See part 3 at arkansasonline.com/227three/]
Email: cstorey@adgnewsroom.com