Girl Sleuth (7 page)

Originally a kind of weeklong summer camp for families that specialized in education for Sunday school teachers, reflecting the nation's growing interest in the professionalization of teaching, the nondenominational, though very vaguely Protestant, Chautauqua assemblies soon grew into gatherings that welcomed anyone interested in “education and uplift” in the form of lectures, plays, music, and readings. By the turn of the century, Chautauqua was known as “a center for rather earnest, but high-minded, activities, that aimed at intellectual and moral self-improvement and civic involvement.” In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, it was “typically American, in that it is typical of America at its best.” Its adult education courses of study could be followed in one's living room as easily in Iowa as they could in New York, and as graduates of the program went out into the world, spreading the movement's gospel, independent Chautauquas sprung up all over the country, with an especially large number in the Midwest. Geared toward the lower and middle classes, Chautauqua was an emblem of the new American zeal for self-betterment through education. For women, especially, the program was one of the few ways to gain the skills they needed in order to rise above confined roles as farmers' wives or domestic help in the years when very few other opportunities were open to them. “Chautauqua functioned for many lower- and middle-class women much as the elite women's colleges did for upper-class women,” according to the group. “They were training grounds from which women could launch ‘real' careers.” What came to be called Circuit Chautauqua, in which performers traveled around the company and set up temporary shop in towns and settlements, spread nationwide. By the time the movement crested in the mid-1920s, they were appearing in forty-five states around the country and playing to upward of forty million people a year.

It was exactly the kind of program suited to an up-and-coming prairie town settled by intelligent men and women in search of a new life. Ladora's Chautauqua was run and put on by locals, who enlightened their fellow townspeople on everything from politics and psychology to music. On one occasion, at least, Jasper Augustine took advantage of the opportunity to perform and tried his hand at Hamlet's soliloquy. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, a fact that had not always been appreciated by his wife. Instead of presenting her with a diamond ring when asking for her hand in marriage in the late 1890s, the exuberant young suitor had offered a complete leather-bound set of the bard's works. She never let him forget it.

By the time of Mildred's birth, the Augustines had built themselves a large wooden house on Ladora's main street. A sign of Jasper's burgeoning medical practice, it had a huge porch and a bedroom apiece for Mildred and Melville. There was enough money for a bit of help, so there were no chores to be done and Mildred was generally left to amuse herself. Such comfort, however, had to be earned by someone. “There was an awful lot of work in the family,” Mildred once said, looking back on her childhood and pondering the roots of her own tireless work ethic. Her mother assisted her father at his practice and, she remembered, “They worked sometimes until 8 or 9 o'clock at the office and those times I ate whatever I could find for food.” Relentless prairie pioneer energy ran deeply through the Augustine family.

In 1907, when Mildred was only two years old, Lillian's beloved Ladora Presbyterian Ladies' Aid Society published a pamphlet of “Favorite Quotations.” Each church member was asked to choose a motto that had especially inspired him or her, and these various lines were bound together in a pamphlet and handed out to the congregation. The collection testified to the self-sufficient, stoic nature of Ladora Presbyterians, but it also revealed their wide range of reading and their feeling for a philosophical, often lovely, phrase. Like his gift of Shakespeare to his bride, Jasper Augustine's choice belied the image of the man of science who had no time for the more ephemeral things in life. The line from Ruskin that he contributed exemplified his physician's nature, but it was also concerned with a man's soul: “The nobleness of life depends on its consistency, clearness of purpose, quiet and ceaseless energy.” His wife's choice, from Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts Phillips Brooks, echoed this idea while casting it in a more feminine, though hardly submissive, light: “Be such a woman, live such a life, that if every woman were such as you, and every life like yours, this earth would be a God's paradise.”

Melville, who was seven years older than his little sister and later would go off to join the army, had inherited his parents' sense of industriousness. He chose a simple quotation that embodied the very essence of the American dream, despite having first been uttered by the Roman historian Sallust, who lived from 86 to 34
B.C.
: “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.”

As for Mildred, she was a toddler, barely capable of speaking full sentences. Nonetheless, her high-minded family bestowed upon her some lines from Milton. The passage they chose was perfectly in keeping with the Augustine ethos, and Mildred, though she surely had no idea at the time that it was hers to aspire to, would live up to its sentiment for the rest of her life: “Truth, that golden key / That opens the palace of eternity.”

L
IFE FOR CHILDREN
in a small prairie town like Ladora was full of the outdoors, and Mildred and her friends were free to roam anywhere they pleased. Athletically inclined from the start, Mildred had a great deal of freedom and was a frequent sight at coed baseball games played in backyards around town, wearing dresses her mother made for her—she herself despised sewing and left it behind as soon as she could—and stockings, her red-gold hair swinging behind her in a long braid. In the summertime she also jumped rope—her favorite grandfather would hold one end of the rope from his rocking chair and tie the other end to a porch support—and made mud pies, which she sold for a penny apiece. In the deep, frigid winter, she went ice-skating, always alone, on a frozen creek nearby, and in the spring she helped her grandparents tap trees for sap and boil it into maple sugar. Even seven decades later, Mildred still remembered with perfect clarity going out to see Halley's comet with her family when she was six years old. The Augustines stood on the unpaved main street that ran past their door and “watched the firey beast, with long devil's tail, move low across the horizon,” she recalled. “The ornery rascal seemed very close and unfriendly.”

Mildred learned to read so early that she couldn't even remember it, and got started on the classics straightaway. “I had a little affair with Peter Rabbit when I was just four or five years of age,” she remembered ruefully. “And I wanted that book so badly . . . so I went and copied it by hand.” Her parents, though they had the means, didn't realize how desperately their daughter wanted to own the store-bought version of Beatrix Potter's tale, a slight that, while she revered her mother and father, Mildred never forgot. But literary riches, albeit borrowed, were soon to come her way nonetheless. On a summer vacation to Chicago, Mildred discovered an institution that was to be her saving grace, at many times and in many cities: the public library.

The grand building on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, built out of solid stone—the great fire of 1871 had changed that city's construction methods forever—was a product of the same kind of civic sentiment that led to the rise of Chautauqua. In the 1880s and '90s, Americans were just beginning to understand the public library as a means of disseminating information to all people equally, and Mildred was a part of the first generation to benefit from this new ethos. As the movement to provide free books to all Americans grew, it gained many notable champions, including Andrew Carnegie, who eventually spent more than $56 million to build libraries in towns and cities all over the country.

So it was that while Mildred's father brushed up his surgical skills at Cook County Hospital and her mother attended to other matters relating to his practice, their daughter, who had been dropped off alone in the safe sanctuary of the public reading room, spent eight hours a day devouring books. “Coming upon a shelf of fairy stories, I read each wonderful book as fast as I could,” she remembered. Back in Ladora, she had to make do with what she could get, which wasn't much. The town was too small to have its own library, and though Carnegie's famed program had came to Mildred's area, it bestowed a library not on Ladora, but on the nearby town of Marengo. The Marengo Public Library was opened just after Mildred's birth in August of 1905, but she never went there. Her father made use of the horse and buggy, and later the family car, for house calls, and no one had time to take Mildred the long seven miles to Marengo.

This was a difficult situation, to say the least, for there was nothing she cherished so much as reading. “I read everything I could get my hands on as a child,” she told an interviewer, including the newspaper, in which she followed the far-off events of World War I as it escalated. “I craved to read, but the available literature neither challenged nor satisfied me. Magazines in part filled the void.
St. Nicholas,
a monthly, was my favorite,” she remembered. “I devoured every page, but mystery serials by Augusta H. Seaman and a series of career articles devoted to men who accomplished unusual things in the work world especially appealed to me.” Even the town's high school library, her one possible resource for books, was a bust, “a single glass case filled mostly with dusty textbooks and a complete set of Dickens, through which I struggled laboriously.” On the long, hot summer days, when even the school library was closed, she would sit in a big leather chair in the family's sparsely furnished library and attempt to read her parents' few and lugubrious volumes. “[They] weren't very readable books most of them,” she confessed later. So, in order to get her fill—or at least as close to it as was possible—she did the obvious thing, with her usual determination: “I just borrowed them from whoever. I got books wherever I could find them.”

This often meant getting books on loan from the town boys, which was fine with Mildred. She was an inveterate doll-hater and much preferred boys' pastimes anyway. After she proved herself, they even allowed her to join their games, provided, she explained, that she played “according to their rules and I couldn't be a sissy.” School recess was a far cry from the genteel snack time familiar to later generations. In fact, it was out-and-out warfare: “We had a hut that we built down there on the school yard and we had fights . . . during recess time . . . we had organized battles, with sticks, and we'd pound each other [until] they put a stop to that,” Mildred recalled. “We could hardly wait to recess to start our fights.” She liked boys' books just as much as she liked their battles. Among the volumes she tore through were not only the books that Edward Stratemeyer had loved as a boy, but the ones he had begun to write. “In general, I preferred boys' books to those written for girls,” she remembered. “I raced through many of the Horatio Alger books because they were everywhere, the
Rover Boys,
and a few of the popular
Ruth Fielding
stories, never dreaming I would be asked to write this series in later years.”

Her mother had somewhat different ideas about Mildred's recreation habits, however. “She was always trying to get me out of the books. She thought I stayed in the house and read too much so she was always trying to get me to go outdoors and play with the other children.” Perhaps for this reason, her mother entered her into school early, just before she turned five, so that she could at least have the company of other children for the final month of the school year. This idea seemed a fine one until Mildred learned that because of her age, and because she'd had only a month of schooling, she would not be moving on to the next grade with her classmates. She was highly distressed and, never one to be left behind in any sense of the word, in the coming years twice made up for the repetition, first by going through high school in three years and then by completing college in the three years after that. She graduated from the University of Iowa just a month or so shy of her twenty-first birthday.

Always, there was one thing on Mildred's mind. “I . . . wanted to be a writer from the time I could walk. I had no other thought except that I would write.” In keeping with her lifelong belief that writing was essentially a self-taught skill, she toiled alone on her efforts. Her parents never read what she was working on, even when she was a young girl, but they did provide two very valuable commodities: “My mother always encouraged me to keep writing and my father provided the stamps.” As she hung around the post office waiting to see if any of her submissions to magazines would come back with an acceptance attached to them, Mildred used the spare time to compose and mail fan letters to her favorite movie star, Lillian Gish.