Marlene Wagman-Geller

“I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.”

      Artists and eccentricities go together: Vincent van Gogh gave his severed ear as a present to a prostitute; Virginia Woolf heard birds sing in ancient Greek, Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat. And eccentricity on steroids describes the pop art, polka-dot princess.

 “From my window I overlooked a pond in which a former butler had drowned himself. As one gloomy day succeeded another, I began to feel a deep sympathy for him.” -Consuelo Vanderbilt upon moving into Blenheim Palace.

Blenheim Palace (opened 1950)

Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England

During the Gilded Age, the mating dance between American heiresses and the British aristocracy replaced matters of the heart with matters of money. In the prosaic process, the daughters of the nouveaux riche received titles; their cash-strapped husbands received an infusion of funds. Downton Abbey’s Cora Crawley was a husband-hunter whose calling was to transform to Lady Crawley. Cora’s nonfictional counterpart was Consuelo Vanderbilt, the chatelaine of Blenheim Palace.

Chapter # 17  A Facial Attraction       (1940)

         In some scenarios, soap operas can play second fiddle to reality, especially when family fortunes and over-sized personalities are part of the dramatis personae. Fact triumphed fiction in the case of a surgically enhanced cat lady, a dynasty with Nazi associations, and a trove of treasures.

Prudence Crandall

“My whole life has been one of opposition.”—Prudence Crandall (age eighty-four)

Prudence Crandall Museum (opened 1984)

A 1907 song by Will D. Cobb and Gus Edwards recalls, “School days, school days / Dear old Golden Rule Days.” Not everyone waxes nostalgic about school days, which was the case with the girls who attended the Canterbury Female Boarding School. To enter the Prudence Crandall Museum is to step into a threshold where great courage walked together with great hate.

“I believe in being everlastingly on the warpath.”

–Carry A. Nation

Carry A. Nation Home & Museum (opened in 1950)

Medicine Lodge, Kansas, the United States

The lyrics to Peter, Paul, and Mary’s folksong held the promise, “If I had a hammer/I’d hammer in the morning/I’d hammer in the evening…” Carry A. Nation’s choice of instrument of social justice was, rather than a hammer, a hatchet. In the Carry A. Nation Museum, one can learn about the activist who was never temperate in terms of the Temperance Movement.

“Art is a tyrant. It demands heart, brain, soul, body…I wed art.” 

–Rosa Bonheur

Château de Rosa Bonheur (opened 2017)

Thomery, France

As she lay dying, Queen Victoria whispered for Turi, her Pomeranian, to be brought to her bed. Another nineteenth century woman who worshipped animals was a French painter. To view her canvasses, to learn about a road less travelled, proceed to the Château Musée Rosa Bonheur.

“I got my start by giving myself a start.” –Madame C. J. Walker

In William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” the speaker bemoans, “I all alone beweep my outcast state.” In contrast, rather than indulge in a pity party, Sarah Walker turned her misfortune into a fortune, and in the process, she became America’s first female, self-made millionaire.

Jane Austen’s House (opened in 1949)

  Chawton, United Kingdom

Jane Austen’s nephew observed of his aunt, “Of events her life was singularly barren, few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.” Although Jane may have had a seemingly placid existence–she never left England–she nevertheless had her share of sunshine, of storm. 

                                                                                                     Semper Fidelis

Lois Wilson

“Hearts understand in ways our minds cannot.”—Lois Wilson

Stepping Stones (opened 1988)

62 Oak Road, Katonah, New York 10536

Visitors migrate to Katonah, New York, for its intriguing name or to scratch a historical itch as the region is dotted with sites ranging from pre-Revolutionary gristmills to Gilded Age mansions. Stepping Stones serves as a shrine to Lois Wilson, the First Lady of Sobriety.

Lois revealed that alcoholism is a cancer that also ravages the addict’s loved ones. The remarkable individual was born in 1891 in Brooklyn Heights, the eldest of six children of Dr. Clark and Matilda Burnham. The family were members of the Swedenborgian faith which counted amongst its followers Helen Keller and Robert Frost. The children attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, one of the first American schools to offer kindergarten (German for “Children’s garden”), followed by enrollment in the Quaker Friends School. The Burnhams spent summers in Manchester, Vermont, where the siblings played with Abraham Lincoln’s grandchildren. Robert Todd Lincoln had constructed Hildene, a twenty-four-room mansion, converted to a home museum. In her memoir, Lois Remembers, she described her childhood as “idyllic.”

While summering in Vermont, Lois met a friend of her younger brother, Rogers. Bill Wilson felt that the rich city girl viewed him with condescension. To impress Lois, who spent afternoons sailing on Lake Emerald, Bill outfitted his grandfather’s rickety rowboat with a bed-sheet sail. A gust of wind flung him overboard; caught in the sheet, he looked like a water-borne mummy. Lois rescued Bill—the beginning of a life-long pattern.

“Reject hatred without hating.”—Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy Historic House (opened 1931)

8 Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts

The most famous bath in history led the ancient Ancient Greek Archimedes to discern whether jewelers had added base metal to King Herod II’s gold crown. After his discovery, Archimedes ran naked through the streets of Syracuse crying, “Eureka! I found it!” Another aha! moment that originated from a watery discovery occurred when Mary Baker Eddy slipped on a patch of ice. An intriguing destination is the Mary Baker Eddy Historic House.

“I am constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason.”

–Sarah Winchester (in a letter to her sister-in-law

How the West was won–or lost– depending on one’s perspective, was determined by who wielded the Winchester Repeating Rifle. The heiress to the company’s fortune, Sarah Pardee Winchester, had a life bookmarked by guilt and guns.

“As for what other people think of me, I could worry about that every day, but choose not to.” –Wendi Deng Murdoch
 

 In 1972, the group Hall and Oates released their song that carried the refrain, “You can rely on the rich man’s money.” The lyric could have applied to Wendi Deng whose “old man” was billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Their relationship could have made copy in the Austrian aristocrat’s tabloid.