Edith McDowell, Grace McDowell

All Aboard! Memoirs of the MacDowell Sisters, Sweethearts of the Air (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In 1930, Edith & Grace McDowell committed their memoirs to paper - a journey which began in 19th Century rural Ohio and roamed America, from the dust storms of Kansas to the new state of Oklahoma, to the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. From the halls of Congress in Washington DC to exotic Hawaii. From San Francisco to Boston, New York and points in between. And from the recording studio of Thomas Edison to the airwaves of a new entertainment medium: radio.

In an era before their gender was allowed to vote, two sisters blazed trails in business and entertainment, touring North America and earning their way: as public stenographers, war correspondents, secretaries to senators, journalists, musicians and early radio celebrities - bringing native Hawaiian music to the mainland as The MacDowell Sisters, "Sweethearts of the Air".

Discovered in family archives and now made available to readers at large, ALL ABOARD! is a firsthand account of exceptional women living in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th Century, in an age of steamliners and Pullman rail cars. It is a fascinating travelogue of the people, places and events that mattered, and of a pioneering spirit and the will to succeed.

- foreword by author RL Pace - preface and historical notes by publisher Todd Downing - 40 pages of vintage photographs

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Deep7Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Juni 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781370382507
• Artikelnr.: 72358345

Autorenporträt

Edith and Grace McDowell were the daughters of Ohio farmers Daniel McDowell and Helen Wilson McDowell. The middle of seven children, the two women grew up among hardy frontier stock in the late 1800s. From the dust storms and Indian raids of the Kansas prairie to the devastation of typhoid, tuberculosis, multiple marriages and the deaths of their children, Edie and Grace never succumbed to adversity. Their lives saw the transition from horse-and-buggy to railroad and steamship, to automobile. They witnessed the birth of the radio and recording industries, and they did so as independent women in an era before their gender could vote.

Although putting themselves through business school in Toledo was initially a way to help strained family finances, the ladies eventually made their own way as public stenographers, blazing a trail as independent businesswomen in the early 1900s. From Toledo, Ohio to the new state of Oklahoma, to Detroit, New York and Boston, to San Francisco (where they discovered their attraction to Hawaiian music at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition), to San Diego (where they set up shop in the lobby of the US Grant Hotel and did steno work for Charlie Chaplin, DW Griffith, Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand), the McDowells were always on the move. When the Great War came, they served their country in Washington DC, first as assistants to Congressmen and then as war correspondents for the Daily Oklahoman (and later in syndication). They lunched with senators and the First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson, and photographed President Warren Harding on the White House porch.

After the war, they traveled to the Hawaii Territory with a Congressional delegation, and ended up learning the music that would become the dominant popular genre on the mainland. Upon their return to the States, they began to perform, teach, tour, record, and finally broadcast their music on the infant medium of radio (although it is not known where the discrepancy in the spelling of their surname originated, their professional materials are always spelled MacDowell). From New York to Dallas, from the New Jersey studio of Thomas Edison himself to the Hollywood of the silent film era, the MacDowell Sisters, aka the "Sweethearts of the Air" eventually became the #2 most popular radio act in the country. In the days when radio broadcasts piggybacked on station relays, the Sweethearts received up to a thousand fan letters a week, from as far afield as Alask...