Archive for the ‘ Obits/Memiors ’ Category

Thursday:

Hurricane Floyd floods the streets with debris. Fringe organizers are frantic. Should they cancel? They decide no. I am reviewing Tere O’Connor Dance at 7pm.  Can I make it downtown in time? Kelly (still the East River Drive to me) Drive is closed and the Surekill is at a crawl. I decide I can get into town via Ridge Avenue and down through my old Fairmount neighborhood. At Ridge and Midvale I commit the driving sin I most hate — gaper gawking, rubbernecking, call it what you will — but the river has come almost up to Ridge Avenue and up to the chins of the traffic lights on the drive. In my whole life in Philly, I’ve never seen anything like this!

Though the winds are still high, the rain has died down to a spit. I wind through Fairmount around 2601 and cut over to Spring Garden where I park in my secret spot and walk down Second Street. (Despite the wind I detour past Findings to get my head, but the hurricane has kept it and many other shops and restaurants closed.)

The show goes on to a sparse audience. Wimps, I call the no-shows. Meanwhile, O’Connor’s six terrific dancers engulf the stage with tears and laughter.

The Painted Bride won’t comp me to see Danny Hoch, and on freelance wages I can’t afford a ticket. I pop down to Serrano for a beer and a bite at the bar before deciding whether to go home and write my review or see something else.  Sean is the new bartender there. Jude, one of the owners, introduces us. We get to talking. Turns out he’s the composer for a dance concert called Crush, on at 9:30. I rush over to National to see if its worth adding a sentence or two to my already circumscribed five inch review space. Hmm, sampled drum and bass type stuff (in my book usually not what I would call composing) but the choreography and dancing of Kate Watson-Wallace are terrific to take in and so is Rebecca Sloans harness work inside a strobe lit box. Very David Parsons a la Caught, but the box takes it to another dimension. I try to fit something into my review, but O’Connor gets all my space.

Are you also related to this nutcase? She clearly is the ancestor of the Tea-Party. For that I heartily apologize to the American public…

Lucy Casad Wilhoite born April 8 1856, died? Married Louis Wilhoite born after 1840

Children: Jasmine, (my grandmother, mother of Edwin Philip Jackson, died 1979) Gladys and Harold Wilhoite all born after 1880

The letter to Carrie Nation:

My life was despaired of by my friends and I knew I was very near the borderland, and as I lay on my bed of suffering in the still hour of midnight, God showed me the awful desolation which our thirty eight saloons and five wholesale houses were making in the homes of Wichita and surrounding country, The sight so overwhelmed me, I cried unto the Lord and said, “Oh my God! Have I done all I could during this life of mine to dam up this fearful tide? Then I said, show me Lord, what this means. Immediately a great cloud of human souls came rolling down a steep decline and as my eyes followed them, saw them rolling on and on until they finally fell into a pit from whence fire and smoke were ascending. Then my eyes were turned again up the ascent from whence the souls were coming. When, Lo! I saw the National Capitol, with her Senate and Congressmen. I saw the Legislative Halls, and our Educational Institutions. I saw our churches with her educated ministry, and her secret societies, our public libraries and reading rooms, our National State and Local W. C. T U’s, all of them right in the track of this awful tide of human souls, yet they still rolled on and on until they reached the pit. Then I cried again unto the Lord and said, “Oh, Why do you show me these horrible things, when I am on the brink of the grave? And still the picture or vision remained before me, growing more and more vivid every moment until I struggled to my knees, and said, ‘O God, if I can do anything to dam up this fearful tide, just heal this body, and let the healing be the seal that I can do something to help, and I shall do it if it costs my life. Then a deep calm and soul rest settled over me and I sank into a deep sleep, when I awoke I realized the pain was gone and also the fever. I lay there, looking up to God and I said, “Now, Lord, show me what you want me to do. Immediately, like a great scroll reaching across the sky, these words appeared, written in letters of gold. “Spill it out!” Then he showed me the very place I was to attack Mahan’s Wholesale Liquor House.

“For many weeks I pondered upon this vision and prayed about it most earnestly, that I might not be mistaken and know of a truth that it was God’s will. I never found any soul rest until I wrote to Mrs. Nation, and told her the time was ripe for God and that we must attack Mahan’s Wholesale Liquor House, that was helping to degrade so many women and debase so many men. This resulted in an attempt to carry out God’s purpose on Sept. 30, 1904.

I was true to the “Heavenly Vision,” which is only the beginning of the fulfillment, for there are yet many things to be spilled out, not only the liquor, but also the hypocrites in the church, and the false prophets with sin of every kind, and our lives also.

The Wichita Eagle Reporter, uttered a profound truth, whether he intended to or not, when he said, we walked into the Court Room like a poem, a sort of a ‘Lead Kindly Light’ poem, for we were lead of God, who is the Light of the world. And we intend to follow on until this vision is fully realized.”

Yours for God’s love for Him and suffering humanity,
MRS. LUCY WILHOITE.

From the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
By Joe Blackstock, Our Past
Created: 05/11/2006 09:34:10 PM PDT
L.C. and Lucy Wilhoite lived their lives deeply devoted to combating one of society’s evils — demon rum — and they weren’t shy about getting into a fight about it.Before they came to live in Upland in the 1920s and 1930s, Lucy Wilhoite was twice jailed in Kansas with prohibitionist Carrie Nation, after they used hatchets to break up saloons in Wichita.

Lucy Wilhoite later came West and became a minister, still continuing the fight against booze as president of San Bernardino County’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

One day in 1932, her 83-year-old husband got into an argument with a man about Prohibition and was arrested for threatening him and using profane language. City Attorney Edward E. Gray said Wilhoite was ‘‘intoxicated with anger.”

Given the choice of a $60 fine or 30 days in jail, he stubbornly chose the latter.

http://www.dailybulletin.com/family/ci_3812989

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