Volume 7: Lucke, German Social Clubs, and Dancing
Omaha, Nebr. Dec 10, 1908
2132 N. 29th St
Dear Harry: –
I guess this will be the only letter you will get from me before you come home. We got out of school the eighteenth and you may come home Saturday. Alma said she bet you would come with us girls that night and I said you wouldn’t be cause you would be too tired. But she said if she asked you that she knew you would go. Now, I’m kind of anxious to see whether you’ll go or not.
I guess Harry Hough will be down as soon as possible too. He is sending us all kinds of cards and asking us if we got this or that. He is up in Canada & having a visit to Santa Claus, you see.
I heard that you said I didn’t write such nice letters to you as I did to ma but then you see if I tell you anything you tell it back so I don’t dare. Marion does the same thing. Of course, you don’t care who I have because I don’t care who you have, so now we’ll each do as we please. Oh! dear. I’m having a great time. You’ll hear all about it when you get home. They tease me like everything at home. Dear me, I hope you’ll like this little sawed off fellow. He knows you & he says he’s not at all afraid of you. But you’ll have to learn to dance Harry or you won’t be in it. I think you & Dean are the only ones that don’t know how. We try to teach Dean but he forgets in between times so we don’t get ahead very fast.
The debate is next Friday night and Mr. Lucke and myself are going. Now, isn’t that fine. I had 5 tickets to sell & I asked him to buy one and he did. Then when we walked home he asked me if he might take me. Alma told me I shouldn’t ask him to buy a ticket because he’d think he’d have to ask me but ma said it was all right. Well, I got to go. He came up to school at noon for the ticket because that was the only time I’d get to give it to him & then I met him after school & we walked home to-gether. I guess you think I’m getting bad, but ma said it was all right so it is.
Oh dear I believe this letter is all Lucke so I better change the subject.
Ma made her mince meat last night. I split peanuts & then I went to bed and was asleep before the nine o’clock whistle.
Oh, yes I went skating last Sunday afternoon with (Well, never mind who I was with) and had a dandy time. The ice was pretty rough. I can’t skat[e] at all this year. I guess I’ll have to learn over.
…
Tuesday night, Charley & I went to that Orchestra at Miss Bradshaws home. There were nine there and we practiced about an hour. We go home about ten o’clock but next week we won’t be so late.
I simply can’t think of any-thing else to tell you so I guess I better quit.
Lillian Parsons
1912
P.S. Harry Hough. I guess he is buying you a pretty nice Christmas present so you know what to expect. Ma is wondering if you got that dollar but says you mustn’t say anything in the letter but let her know by a private letter or postal card.
Lillian’s last letter was six months prior to this one, and during the summer and fall of 1908 apparently some things changed. There are no known letters from the missing six months, but Harry would have been home from school for the summer, so a gap isn’t unexpected. Sometime after the fall, when Harry returned to Chicago (or he would have been present for the transition and there would be no reference to whether or not Harry and Robert knew each other), Lillian began spending more time with Robert Lucke. By December, as Harry is about to return home for the Christmas holidays, her letter was “all Lucke.”
Lillian mentioned Robert Charles Lucke for the first time in January 1908, but wasn’t mentioned again until almost a year later. Robert Lucke was the oldest of two boys; his brother Richard was a year younger than Lillian’s brother Charley. A third child was born prior to 1900, but was deceased by 1900.[1] Robert’s father, also named Robert (middle name Sidney), was a surgeon born in Wisconsin in 1863 to German immigrant parents. He married Elizabeth Stroetzel, also the child of German immigrants, on 13 September 1888 in New York City. Robert was born almost a year later in New York.
Most likely the Luckes moved to Omaha by 1890, but they were certainly there by 1896 when Richard was born. In 1900 they shared a home with Robert Sidney’s parents, Charles and Amelia, and one of his sisters, Theodora. Charles Lucke died in 1905, and Amelia in 1908. The Luckes lived a mile or so from Lillian and her family with Theodora, who was a schoolteacher. Robert Sidney was reputed to be a founding member of the Omaha Turnverein, though it is more likely he was a founding member of one of several turnvereins established in the 1890s in Omaha, as the Omaha Turnverein was first established in 1878, when Robert Sidney was still living in Wisconsin.[2] What is a “turnverein,” you ask? Essentially, it is a German gymnastics and social club, or at least it was back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they were at their height of popularity in the United States. Turnvereins developed in Germany as a way to promote strong bodies among men and boys. The movement made its way across the pond where it thrived in the German immigrant community around the United States. Equal parts gymnastics and German social club, German was the standard language used within the turnverein until anti-German sentiment developed with World War I. Though they began in Germany in the early 1800s, by the time the Omaha newspapers were peppered with the activities of the local turnvereins, “Turners,” as they called themselves (and still do today), consisted of men, women, boys, and girls of primarily German, but really any background. Local regulations required that members were American citizens or had declared their intention to become so.[3]
Lillian’s reference to dancing is a thrill of mine, and one of my greatest personal joys in finding these letters. In 1908, social dancing among young people was reaching an explosion point. Ballroom dancing up until the late 19th century had been primarily the domain of the wealthy, who could afford dancing masters and expensive training in the morals, etiquette, and dancing skills deemed essential to navigate the ballroom. Much to the chagrin of the expensive dancing masters, the mass production of dancing manuals combined with the increased leisure time and discretionary income of the middle class in the mid to late 19th century allowed the middle classes to emulate their wealthy counterparts on a smaller scale. Simultaneously, ragtime music hit the scene in the 1890s. The syncopated rhythms and the youth of the composers, typically in their teens and twenties, combined with the mass production of sheet music, lit a fire under the social dance movement. Between 1906 and 1908, “rag dancing” saw the development of the one-step and a barnyard’s worth of “animal” dances like the Turkey Trot, Bunny Hug, Grizzly Bear, and more.[4]
In Omaha, the “dance craze” was reflected in a more traditional, and probably more typical, scene than the crowded cabarets of New York City and other big cities that would hit their stride within the next few years. Dances at “Chambers,” or Chambers Dancing Academy, and other locations are of frequent mention in Lillian’s letters. Chambers is best known as the dance studio where a pair of juvenile performers born in Omaha first learned to dance: Adele and Fred Austerlitz, better known by the name Astaire. In fact, just four days before Lillian wrote this letter to Harry, Omaha hosted the Adele and Fred (then 11 and 9 years old) at the Orpheum Theater on their first homecoming since their mother moved them to New York City several years earlier. They made front page news in the Omaha Daily News the next morning as “the brightest and biggest luminaries on the Orpheum stage.”[5] Given that Adele was the same age as Lillian’s brother Charley, and Fred two years younger, and given that the Parsons lived only about a mile away from the Austerlitzs and frequented some of the same locations before their removal to New York, there is every possibility the families may have crossed paths at some point.[6]
At Chambers and similar, Lillian would have participated in some (tamer) versions of the new rag dancing craze, as well as more traditional ballroom dances like the waltz, in a setting drawing upon the long-standing ballroom etiquette of the Victorian era. It is clear from this letter that Robert Lucke was a dancer, as were most of Lillian’s acquaintance at this point except for, apparently, her brother Harry. Robert was also a musician, as was Lillian. She clearly had quite a bit in common with this “little sawed off fellow!”
[1] 1900 U.S. census, Omaha, Nebraska, population schedule, Ward 9, enumeration district (ED) 92, sheet 35-A, Robert S. Lucke household; NARA microfilm publication T623, roll 925. Also 1910 U.S. census, Omaha, Nebraska, population schedule, Ward 11, enumeration district (ED) 78, sheet 2-A, Robert S. Lucke household; NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 8444. On both censuses, Elizabeth Lucke is identified as having given birth to 3 children, 2 of whom were living as of the census dates.
[2] The Omaha Morning Bee, “Dr. Lucke Will Be Buried Here,” 7 May 1937, page 13, column 5.
[3] Omaha Daily Bee, “Turners Show Their Work”, 26 November 1898, page 5, column 4.
[4] Lisa Weaver, “The Evolution of American Style Competitive Ballroom Dancing,” (American Public University System, 2011.)
[5] The Omaha Daily News, 7 December 1908, page 1, column 2.
[6] 1900 U.S. census, Omaha, Nebraska, population schedule, Ward 5, enumeration district (ED) 54, sheet 5-A, Fred Austerlitz household; NARA microfilm publication T623, roll 924.