In this
fourth, and final, installment of our blog series about the history of Mrs.
Glessner’s Monday Morning Reading Class, we will look at the last 24 years of
the class, during which time the class thrived in spite of the changing
fortunes of Prairie Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood. Although many of the members abandoned the
South Side for new homes in other parts of the city, most continued to travel
to 1800 S. Prairie Avenue each Monday for the class and its treasured
friendships.
The standard
readings for the class, led by Mrs. Nathalie Kennedy, were often supplemented
by special presentations from authors and others. In April 1905, Frances Glessner noted “Last
Monday I had Mrs. Wainwright of Boston give a lecture before the Reading class
on English Gardens – it was illustrated with a stereopticon and was very
delightful.”
The last
class of the season was always special, often including musical entertainment,
and Frances Glessner was always the recipient of abundant flowers. The last class held in May 1907 was typical:
“Monday, May
6th was the last meeting of the Reading class. There was a large attendance and many flowers
sent by the ladies. We had a pleasant
hour’s reading and before the ladies moved from their places, Frank Baird’s
quartette sang standing back in the parlor.
It was very beautiful. After the
singing (an hour) we had luncheon. The
quartet ended the program with “Come Dorothy” and this was kept for me as a
surprise. We all went into the parlor
and enjoyed the music. After the
luncheon, I gave each of the ladies a box of flowers, Miss Trimingham and Mrs.
Kennedy each a box. Later, I sent some
to the children and some to St. Luke’s Hospital.”
A special
treat for the class took place in April 1908, when “Miss Anna Morgan read a
paper on Kipling, and read selections from Kipling which she did exceedingly
well.” Morgan was a prominent teacher of
the dramatic arts and was well known as a reader in the naturalistic style. A decade earlier she had opened the Anna Morgan
Studios in the Fine Arts Building, where she taught the Delsarte method of
reading, which emphasized the conveyance of emotions through body positioning
and gestures.
In November
1908, John Glessner read the first of several papers before the class. “Monday, we had the first meeting of the
Reading class. Over sixty ladies were
here. Mrs. Kennedy read the first hour
and John read his paper on The Potato which he reads tomorrow night at the
Literary Club. We had a fine time.”
Two speakers
of note in 1909 were Frances Shaw and May Morris. Frances Shaw, the wife of architect Howard
Van Doren Shaw, was a talented writer and read her paper “Wanted” which she had
prepared for the Friday Club.
May Morris
Later that
year, May Morris, the daughter of the English designer William Morris, and a
noted designer and embroiderer in her own right, spent a month in Chicago
speaking on a variety of topics. Given
Frances Glessner’s great interest in William Morris and her widespread use of
his wallpapers, fabrics, and rugs, she was no doubt very pleased at this
opportunity to welcome May Morris into her home. (The wallpaper Frances Glessner selected for
her courtyard guestroom, Arcadia, was a design by May Morris). Frances Glessner noted that May Morris gave a
lecture entitled “Design in Costume” to the Reading Class in November of 1909.
William French
A notable
presentation took place in April 1910.
“Mr. French of the Art Institute came up at twelve and gave us the most
interesting talk imaginable about the wit and wisdom of the crayon. He illustrated the talk with very rapid and
clever crayon sketches.” William French
was the first director of the Art Institute, serving in that capacity from 1885
until his death in 1914.
When the
class concluded its season the next month, Frances Glessner was too ill to
attend. Frances Glessner Lee hosted the
class in her home at 1700 S. Prairie Avenue and did a splendid job, as noted by
John Glessner in the journal:
“Frances Lee
had the Reading Class on Monday May 2, with the luncheon, and Frank Baird’s
quartet of singers and about 60 ladies present.
Altogether the meeting was a very good one and well managed. I have heard much praise of Frances Lee’s
entertainment. Her house was beautifully
decorated with flowers etc.”
January 1914
brought an entirely different type of entertainment to the class:
“There were
about 65 ladies at Reading Class. Mrs.
Kellogg played her accompaniments and Mr. Charles Kellogg of Kellogg Springs,
Morgan Hill, California, gave the most remarkable entertainment the class ever
has had – reproductions of the songs of birds and talks of their habits and his
experience with them.”
The class
ended in April that year due to the reader, Mrs. Kennedy, sailing for an
extended trip to Europe:
“On Monday
the Reading Class at its last meeting for the season gave Mrs. Kennedy a purse
of $250 in Express Co. checks and Frances gave her $100 in gold, preparatory to
her sailing for Europe on Wednesday. Her
class on the North Side gave a purse also.”
Notes: Her European travels took an unexpected turn
when Mrs. Kennedy found herself in Austria when the Austro-Hungarians fired the
first shots of World War I in anticipation of their invasion of Serbia. She quickly made her way to Milan, Italy and
then back to the United States. The
“North Side” reference is to a class, similar to the Monday Morning Reading
Class, that had been established in the Gold Coast area several years earlier. Mrs. Kennedy served as the reader for that
class, as well, which followed the same course of reading as Mrs. Glessner’s
class. It met on Thursday mornings.
The
twentieth anniversary of the class was celebrated at a special breakfast held
on Thursday January 7, 1915. Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge, the well-known music patron, and the daughter of the
Glessners’ close friends, Albert and Nancy Sprague, hosted the event and wrote
and read an original sonnet:
“Dear Guest,
whom we delight to honor most,
We drink to
more than twenty happy years
Of
comradeship that heartens and endears.
Come, join
we all! Friends, sisters, hostess, host!
Let’s drink
to constancy, of whose modest boast,
Of quiet
work and steadfast aim, one hears
Nothing at
all; Btu in whose train appears
Uplift with
sweet benevolence. A toast!
Stand with
me now, and pledge the heart and mind
Whose love
and wisdom guided you to this.
Pledge me
the Roof beneath whose shelter kind
No warmth
nor freedom has been known to miss,
Now, Class,
stand up! And bless the ties that bind,
Leaving
“within the cup” a First-class Kiss.”
Coolidge
presented Frances Glessner with a beautiful illuminated copy of the sonnet,
which hangs, to this day, in Mrs. Glessner’s dressing room.
The class
season of 1914-1915 was memorable for another reason as well. In the fall of 1914, the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra passed an order requiring female patrons to remove their hats during
concerts. The ruling met with opposition,
although Frances Glessner fully supported the idea. To show her support, she made a similar
request of the ladies at the Reading Class that they, too, remove their hats
for the class. This move was noted in a
February 1915 article in the Chicago Tribune, entitled “Hats Off Edict Rules at
Mrs. Glessner’s” which read in part:
“The members
of Mrs. John J. Glessner’s Monday morning reading class, which for twenty years
has been a feature of south side society has met with a great adventure this
winter. . . The class, numbering about forty or fifty, sits around the long
library. This fall, simultaneously with
the stirring order to unbonnet all patrons of the Symphony concert, came the
request that members of the Monday class should remove their hats during the
morning.
“This
created one of the greatest sensations Prairie avenue has ever known, for the
hat of the woman who has ordered her household, looked over her mail,
telephoned several times, and been to market, all before 10 o’clock, usually
covers a multitude of sins of omission.
“But, trying
as it was, the ground rules have obtained, and careful observers say that the
women of Prairie avenue are now much better coiffed than formerly.”
World War I
brought a new flurry of activity to the class.
The women gave up their embroidery needles and knit hundreds of sweaters
for servicemen. John Glessner noted their devoted work in his informal
history of the class written in 1925:
“And while
the readings went on, the Class members have worked women’s work – the needle
trades, you know, they call it commercially, and I know it when I come home on
Monday evenings and find pins on the floor and needles sticking in the arm of
the sofa at my place – but it’s all right – I only reflect on the dainty
fingers that put them there. The ladies
have worked with a will for the needy, for soldiers of the World War, for
hospitals and sweet charity, generally.
Did you ever think how far it would extend if your work of these
thirty-one years were stretched out in one continuous line? Like Banquo’s ghosts’ procession before the
horrified Macbeth, it would stretch to the crack of doom.”
Additionally,
in late 1918, when Frances Glessner Lee took up management of Wendell House in
Boston, which served as a half-way house for soldiers and sailors returning
from the war, the ladies of the Reading Class financed the equipment and set up
of the cafeteria.
The class
continued uninterrupted until the spring of 1930 when Frances Glessner became
seriously ill. By summer, it became
apparently her condition would not improve, and so her husband John sent out a
letter to all class members in September announcing that the class would have
to be disbanded. The letter read, in
part:
“Mrs.
Glessner’s prolonged serious illness, beginning last spring, has so impaired
her vitality that she should withdraw at this time as far as possible from
social activities. She is improving, but
very probably may never have the same physical strength s before. I am constrained therefore to ask that The
Monday Morning Reading Class be disbanded, and its name be no longer used.
“Mrs.
Glessner has had great joy and pride in this Class since its inception nearly
forty years ago. She has looked forward
with eager pleasure for each meeting, and she hopes that you have had some
measure of the same enjoyment. It will be
a great cross to her to give up this delightful intimate association with her
friends, and we would not think of it did not the conditions imperatively
demand it.
“Of course
neither she nor I can or will have the slightest objection to your forming
another class for a similar or other purpose if you so desire, thought much
preferring that this organization and its name be abandoned.”
Frances
Glessner died two years later, in October 1932, and her husband John died in
January 1936. With his passing, ownership of the Prairie
Avenue house passed to the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of
Architects. Before that organization
took possession, however, Frances Glessner Lee and her sister-in-law, desired
to have a final reunion of the Reading Class.
Invitations were sent out for a reunion meeting and luncheon on April 6,
1936, before the house was “altered or dismantled.”
Dozens of
ladies attended the reunion, one of the last grand social events to take place
on Prairie Avenue, which by now consisted largely of boarding houses, printers
and publishers, and vacant lots. The
Chicago Tribune ran an article on the reunion and wrote, in part:
“Mrs.
Frances Glessner Lee, who was hostess at yesterday’s meeting, occupied the
chair that her mother, the late Mrs. John J. Glessner, occupied for so many
years, but the chairs of the other members who have died, including Mrs. Harry
Pratt Judson and Mrs. Charles L. Hutchinson, were left vacant.
“There was
no reading yesterday by Mrs. Kennedy, although she made a brief talk, but Mrs.
Lee read a greeting that her father, the late John J. Glessner, had written
several years ago when he had planned to invite the members of the Monday
reading class for a final reunion.
“Illness
prevented his carrying out the plan so his daughter and his son’s widow, Mrs.
J. George M. Glessner, were hostesses at the reunion, probably the last social
affair that will be held in the old mansion at 1800 Prairie avenue.
“Mrs. Lee’s
younger daughter, Martha, who made her debut in the old mansion in December
1915, was at the meeting yesterday, having arrived just a few hours before from
California on her way back to her home in Milton, Mass. She is Mrs. Charles F. Batchelder, Jr.
“Mrs. George
Glessner, who lives in Littleton, N.H. where the John Glessners had their
country home and where Mrs. Lee also has a home, also arrived from California
yesterday, accompanied by her daughter Miss Emily Glessner.
“All of the
members signed the late Mrs. Glessner’s autograph album, a cherished possession
of Mrs. Lee’s.”
Frances
Glessner Lee also presented each member of the class with a small memento – a tea
cup, small vase, silver spoon, etc. – accompanied by a note which read:
“Believing
that the members of Mrs. Glessner’s Monday Morning Reading class would care to
possess some tangible memento of the house wherein the Class met for so many
years, Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee has pleasure in tendering this trifle to
______.”
The reunion
was, in fact, the last social event to take place in the house. Soon after, the contents of the house were
packed up, the furnishings and belongings distributed amongst family members,
and the fifty years of occupancy by the Glessner family drew to a close. The cherished memories of the Monday Morning
Reading Class lived on with all those who had participated through the years,
and the story of the class continues to enchant visitors to this day.
