A Costume for Playing Calliope

Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

Carole Mullen

Catalog Number: 1994.094.01

Local piano teacher Juanita Beck’s spangled violet pantsuit helped to put people who came to hear her calliope in a festive mood. With silver stripes, loops of gold sequin beading, a matching pillbox hat, and a treble clef and “Juanita” on the jacket back, the costume went well with the ornate circus wagon housing Juanita’s calliope.

Beck’s vibrant costume was sewn by local seamstress Della Schultz in 1956, and it was donated by Schultz to the La Crosse County Historical Society in 1994. The fitted violet jacket and pants probably were considered daring for a woman in the mid-1950s.

A pantsuit was practical for Beck for a couple of reasons. First, it wouldn’t get in the way while she was seated inside the small wagon the way a fashionable crinoline would have. Second, Beck had a limp and wore a metal leg brace, which the pantsuit concealed. Her limp was caused by unsuccessful surgery after injuring it while chasing one the Palomino horses that she and her husband, Brownie, rode in parades. One of her later costumes, an old-fashioned fuchsia gown with matching picture hat, accomplished the same objective.

Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

By the time her violet pantsuit was made, Beck had been playing calliope for many years. She and her husband, Brownie, acquired the former Ringling Brothers calliope in 1946, along with a circus wagon once used as a monkey cage. Joseph Schoenberger of Hackner Altar Co. was commissioned to carve six wooden mythological scenes that were attached to the wagon holding the calliope.

The restoration of calliope and wagon took a few years, but by 1949 Juanita and Brownie Beck were on the road with a colorful calliope wagon drawn by eight pygmy mules.

Over the years, they hit the circuit of Midwest parades and festivals, dazzling spectators with circus nostalgia and the potent draw of Beck’s calliope playing. She was quite the trooper, playing song after song inside the hot, steam-filled wagon. Many remember her calliope playing as the much-anticipated finale of the Oktoberfest Maple Leaf Parade.

After Brownie’s death in 1980, Beck continued to play calliope in the Maple Leaf Parade for another decade, and she taught piano lessons almost until her death in 1993.

In the late 1960s she had made a record of her calliope playing, “Calliope Capers,” also preserved at La Crosse County Historical Society.

Beck was justifiably proud of her music on a difficult instrument, and on copies given to friends she signed the record, “Try and forget me now.” But for those who heard this talented local musician play, Beck’s calliope made her hard to forget.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on December 16, 2017.

This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.

Christmas Tree Lights

Peggy Derrick

Catalog Number: 1987.071.01 

Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

As we approach the shortest day of the year, let us give thanks for electric lights. When we rise in the dark and come home from work or school in the dark, a brightly lit home, however humble, is a true comfort.

Many of us add the sparkle of a brightly lit Christmas tree, or other holiday lighting, to our homes. And as a community, we love to bask in the magic of the 4 million colored lights in the Rotary Lights display in Riverside Park.

The first Christmas lights were created, fittingly enough, by Thomas Edison, in 1880. He strung together a series of his incandescent light bulbs and hung them outside his Menlo Park laboratory. Two years later his partner, Edward H. Johnson, hand-wired red, white and blue bulbs together and strung them on his revolving Christmas tree. The use of decorative Christmas lighting grew right alongside the use of electric lights in general.

After that, various companies saw the potential and began marketing Christmas lights. This splendiferous strand boasts eight round bulbs that were once painted different colors. The remains of the original label on their box says “Franco, Decorative lighting with Edison miniature incandescent lamps.” Each lamp has a little point, called an exhaust tip, and carbon filaments.

These lights were donated to the La Crosse County Historical Society in 1987 by Frederick G. Davies. Davies was a retired history professor who taught for 29 years at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, or the State Teachers College, as it was then known. Davies was recognized as a scholar of the American Civil War; he was also locally famous for the corncob pipe he smoked and for banning the chewing of gum in his classroom.

When he donated these lights to LCHS, he wrote on his donation form: “… lights from my first Christmas tree, Dec. 25, 1911 … at this time we lived at 1004 Pine St., Winnetka, Ill. My parents were Cora Belle Gould Davies and Rev. J.W.F. Davies.”

A year later, Davies would be dead, at 78. His professional life is memorialized in the Special Collections at UW-L’s Murphy Library, but with this donation of Christmas lights, something of his personal life is illuminated as well. He had saved this memento of his childhood for his entire life, and in giving it to LCHS he made sure to honor the memory of his parents and his childhood home.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on December 9, 2017.

This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.

Hixon House hot chocolate pot

Peggy Derrick

Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

With Christmas on its way — and winter as well — some of us will use steaming mugs of hot cocoa, topped with marshmallows or whipped cream, to take the chill off while celebrating the season.

In Gideon and Ellen Hixon’s day, hot chocolate also was enjoyed, but they would have been surprised by the size of our servings. Their hot chocolate set has small cups, holding barely 4 ounces, poured from a special chocolate pot.

The hot chocolate set is presently in the family parlor at their home, Historic Hixon House, as we like to imagine that Mrs. Hixon and a friend, or perhaps a grandchild, would have enjoyed a cup or two together in that room.

This is a late 19th century reproduction of an 18th century set. How do I know that? By the small size of the serving cups and by the tall narrow shape of the chocolate pot.

In the 1700s, hot chocolate was a complicated affair, and an expensive one. It was a luxury item, served from elegant porcelain or silver pots. But to make the hot chocolate you had to laboriously grind the cacao beans with sugar and spices, and then mix that with hot water or milk. The mixture constantly wanted to settle to the bottom, so the hot chocolate required much stirring. Tall narrow pots were used, with a lid that had an opening in the middle: the finial would have been removed and a long stirring rod inserted through the hole so that the chocolate could have been stirred and kept in suspension.

All that went away in 1828 when the process of preparing cocoa powder from the cacao pods was invented by a Dutch chemist named van Houten. Cocoa powder made hot chocolate easier to make and consume, and the price went down as cocoa powder became more readily available.

This chocolate pot does not have a hole in the center of its lid, telling me that it was produced after cocoa powder became commonly used. It has no maker’s marks at all, and I have no way of confirming how this even came to be in the house. Was it purchased by the Hixons in La Crosse, or is it a souvenir of a trip to Europe? They traveled there several times and brought back a great many things by ship.

I am inclined to think that Ellen Hixon did bring this back from a trip to the Continent, based on the motifs on the pieces. Victorian Americans, just a few generations removed from their Puritan ancestors, did not hold with a lot of nudity in their art, while Europeans have enjoyed the human form in all its unclothed glory since the Renaissance. Greek and Roman mythology have been the excuse for nudity and violence ever since, elevating our natural human interests to a mythical, classic plane.

It’s hard for me to picture Doerflinger’s department store selling this chocolate pot set. Cupids, nymphs, goddesses and one mortal male are depicted undressed, frolicking and fighting. I know the man is mortal because he has just been stabbed by a bare-chested goddess standing over him with a spear, while he appears to be dying in the middle of the lovely pastoral landscape.

The small crown on her head, combined with the fact that her modesty is partially maintained by floating draperies, makes me think she is meant to be Hera, wife of Zeus. But I’m just guessing, and I am not up on my Greek mythology enough to know who she was killing or why. Perhaps the maker was simply inspired by the original Mayan belief that their chocolate was the “food of the gods,” long before Europeans discovered it and took it back to Europe with them.

This chocolate set was much more than a way to drink hot chocolate, and by the end of the 19th century the availability of cocoa powder may have led most people to drink theirs from standard-size cups. This was a way of showing the user’s appreciation of European culture and history.

Today we still associate Cupid, the god of desire and affection, with chocolate, but we’ve removed the sex and violence that was a part of his world.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on December 2,  2017.