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Time Machine: College in Crinoline
Author Marjorie Medary’s books reflected her Eastern Iowa roots
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Author and native Iowan Marjorie Medary’s roots were squarely in the printed page.
Born in Waukon in 1890, she was the daughter of Waukon newspaper publisher Edgar Medary, who published the Waukon Democrat for more than 40 years. Her grandfather, Thomas Corwin Medary, published the Lansing Mirror and Allamakee Journal before the Democrat.
Medary graduated from Cornell College in Mount Vernon in 1912 and earned her master’s degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., in 1914.
After teaching in Rhode Island, Illinois and Indianapolis, she headed to New York City to work for textbook company McGraw-Hill.
Medary’s first book, “Orange Winter,” published in 1931, was drawn from her memories of a childhood trip to Florida as well as her mother’s tales about Florida in the 1870s.
The story of a Canadian family settling in northeast Iowa, “Prairie Anchorage,” came next in 1933, followed by “Topgallant,” a story about Medary’s favorite bird, a herring gull, in 1935.
College adventure
Medary’s fourth book, “College in Crinoline,” was released by the New York branch of British publisher Longmans, Green & Co. in August 1937.
Set at “Cromwell College” in the village of “Mount Wesley,” it is “a story of customs and incidents which prevailed when girls first enrolled as students at Cornell College in Mount Vernon” in the 1850s, The Gazette reported.
“Heroine Bessie Q comes to Cornell from Allamakee County, and her long ride by wagon and stagecoach is more adventurous than freshmen can boast today,” Cornell Professor W.H. Horton wrote in a 1947 review for The Gazette.
“Domiciled in Old Sem, she finds that her first task is to fill a straw-tick brought from home with fresh straw from a nearby farm. Her room is warmed, if not heated, by a little box stove, replenished from woodboxes in the hall.”
Another key to Cromwell’s direct connection to Cornell is the legend of the ginkgo tree. When young women combed their hair at night beneath the tree, their wishes came true. And if they carried a mirror, it reflected the face of the young woman’s true love.
Bessie Q, on her last night of her freshman year, sits beneath the tree, making a wish for the well-being of her friends.
2 years per book
Medary bought a home in Hampton, Conn., in 1941, intending to spend all her time writing. World War II changed that plan, and she took a job as an editor for textbook publisher Ginn & Co. in Boston during winters, returning to her Hampton home in summers.
Medary, interviewed in 1949, said, “Youngsters nowadays think that I lived in the crinoline days about which I wrote. But not quite! Still my own childhood is beginning to sound old and quaint. Some of my happiest memories are of the horse-and-buggy trips from Lansing to Waukon.”
Asked how long she worked on a book, Medary said about two years. “That’s partly because I do a full-time job in textbook editing. I have to do my writing evenings and weekends. It’s also partly because characters and plot mature slowly in my thinking.”
She did a lot of writing in the Athenaeum, the old library on Boston Hill.
“There’s a good alcove there of ‘Iowana’ which helped in checking the notes I had made in the state historical library in Iowa City, among the dusty mellowed files of early Iowa newspapers,” she said.
She also owned her father’s old newspaper files.
More books
Medary wrote “Joan and the Three Deer” in 1939, “Edra of the Islands” in 1940 and “Buckeye Boy” in 1944.
“All in a Day’s Work” and “The Store at Crisscross Corners” were published before “Prairie Printer,” her ninth and final young people’s historical novel, was published in 1949.
“Prairie Printer,” set in pioneer days in northeast Iowa, was dedicated to her father and grandfather.
While visiting Iowa in 1952, Medary was interviewed by The Gazette. She said her work was rejected at a writers’ conference years before. The experience made her determined to succeed.
“I don’t think I could write a book about modern young people,” she said. “I don’t feel I know them well enough.”
While in Eastern Iowa, she visited her sister, Dorothy Higbie, librarian at Cornell.
She also spent time researching and writing the centennial history of Cornell for the Iowa State Historical Society publication the Palimpsest.
Before she left town, she donated a year’s worth of royalties from “College in Crinoline” in honor of Cornell’s centennial in 1953.
Medary’s next book didn’t appear until 1954. “Each One Teach One,” a treatise on the 40-year literacy campaign of missionary Frank C. Laubach, began with a Moro tribesman in the Philippines who told Dr. Laubach, “This (literacy) campaign must not stop. ... It is the only hope. Everyone who learns must teach someone. If he doesn’t, I’ll kill him.”
Laubach was shocked by the violent response, but it led to his idea of how to get people of all nations and tribes to learn to read and write their own language. Each person who learned to read must teach at least one other person to read.
“It is part biography, part social history. It is full of adventures and punctuated with excitement,” The Gazette reviewer stated. “It is the story of a man whose campaigns have won an estimated 60 million persons from the darkness of illiteracy.”
Medary published some of her 40 years of poetry in 1975, “Under Many a Star.” The collection of 61 poems about Florida birds, youth in Iowa, travels out West and in Europe, included her very first poem, “School As Usual,” written about 1930. It was about Charles Lindbergh’s mother, a teacher, teaching her class while thinking about her son flying across the Atlantic.
Medary died May 2, 1980, in Hampton, Conn., at age 89.
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