Go back to the Sulcers in the Roaring Twenties.
The young lady we saw walking down the aisle with Henry at the opening of this book, my grandmother that I never met, was lucky enough to be born into the creative and musically rich family of the Englewood Thearles. She was the only child of Fred Thearle Jr. and Nettie Baker, both talented singers deeply involved in church music. Charlotte certainly followed in their footsteps and probably surpassed them, musically.
Although her life’s ambition was to be a composer, when adversity struck the family during the Great Depression, her strength emerged; she came to embody the Latin motto of her women’s college, “A Woman Led Them”.
Charlotte came of age in the boom-time that followed the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The signature event of that age – the internationally famous World’s Columbian Exposition, known as “The White City” – was constructed practically on her doorstep at the age of 9.
Like many affluent young Midwest women of her time, Charlotte was sent East for a young lady’s education, to what some would call “finishing school”. The Boston area was a natural choice given her mother’s family roots there. In the world of Lasell Seminary for Young Women she would have been filled with learning social graces, music, art, home economics, and elocution. It also boasted a relatively scientific approach to teaching, and a subset of the Harvard Curriculum, encouraging leadership qualities that seemed to have emerged later in her life.
It’s not surprising that she became a musician, though it was not a typical opportunity for young women of the time. It must have helped that her father ran the annual all-city Sunday school choir festival, her Uncle Harry operated an opera house in Englewood and represented world class performers – including famous violinist Eduard Remenyi, and one of the best known singers of the day, Blanche Marchesi. Her Uncle Ernest directed the West Coast’s largest music store. Of course, Charlotte sang in the Glee Club as a soloist as well as in the chorus.
She frequently travelled to San Diego to stay with her Uncle, and sang for his friends at “musicale” evenings as a strong soprano, accompanied on the piano by her aunt Nettie Thearle (nee Smith).
After returning from Boston, Charlotte attended the University of Chicago for several years, and subsequently became very active in the Alumnae community.
She sang professionally in churches in the area and was known for her “beautiful and cultivated voice”. With her father’s help, she opened a small studio on South 63rd Street to give vocal lessons – both for singing and public speaking – splitting her time with an office in downtown Chicago to cater to students city-wide.
It seems inevitable that she and Henry would come together, though we don’t know exactly how it happened. I imagine them meeting at one of the many musical gatherings going on around the University. Then again, they may have known each other for years – after all, Charlotte’s Uncle Harry was a top agent of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau agency that had represented Henry’s Asetceam Trio. Or, did they meet in her days at the University’s Glee Club, with Henry a recent graduate and former President? Was Henry a student of hers? Did they meet as fellow students of Oscar Saenger in New York City?
Perhaps someone will eventually solve this riddle. In any event, we can certainly guess that the passionate musicians made a natural couple in 1910. Like many alumni, they chose make their home around the campus of the University in Hyde Park, just a few miles from Charlotte’s home in Englewood, and a short ride on Illinois Central to get to Chicago’s business district, the Loop.
Unlike many women of her day, Charlotte did not give up her career after getting married, and re-opened her music studio immediately after her honeymoon. Even the arrival of two babies in short order, “Hap” and “Teen”, did not lessen Charlotte’s passion for music. She wrote to her friends that between lullabies, she was studying composition and even writing an occasional song. She stayed active in the community, and even gave a lecture to a women’s club about women composers, a rare thing even today, let alone 1915.
As America joined the “Great War” – World War I – in Europe in 1917, the country was swept by a patriotic fever; while Henry gave his patriotic speeches about war bonds, Charlotte contributed her own way, composing and copyrighting a patriotic piece called Old Glory’s Call, with words by Ervin A. Rice.
Perhaps influenced by becoming a mother herself, she took an interest in children’s music, using some of the best-known children’s poetry of the time as the text. Some were her own copyrighted art songs based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s work; such as My Bed is a Boat, and others by Rose Fyleman, such as:
Since ever and ever the world began
Robert Louis Stevenson – Fairies Have Never a Penny to Spend
They danced like a ribbon of flame,
They have sung their song through the centuries long
And yet it is never the same.
And though you be foolish or though you be wise,
With hair of silver or gold,
You can never be as young as the fairies are,
And never as old.
Sometimes Charlotte performed with her sister in law, Nettie Smith Thearle, accompanying her on the piano. They found venues to do this during extended trips to San Diego with her father, bringing young Teen (Eleanor) along, playing at musicale evenings, or at recitals at the Thearle Music store at 640 Broadway in the heart of the city. And, of course, she was a guest soloist at the Baptist Church in San Diego.
Like her parents, and husband, Charlotte also loved church music, especially around the holidays. She and Henry had a tradition of creating a musical composition and sending it to friends and family in lieu of the traditional Christmas card. Henry wrote the words and Charlotte wrote the music. One year, it was a lullaby called The Home Hour. Another year, it was a multi-part Christmas carol, which my family used to sing over the holidays in the 1970s and even revived the holiday tradition by using it as a Christmas card one year.
Over the years, Charlotte never gave up composing and performing. She frequently appeared at many of the neighborhood clubs, such as the Fortnightly Club that met in members’ homes on a regular basis. She tried out new compositions in front of the Englewood Women’s Club, sometimes bringing along Henry to sing her compositions “still in manuscript” while she played the piano.
Charlotte was a strong, talented woman who never gave up her ambition to compose children’s and church music. Until the stock market crash of 1929, no one in the family would have imagined that she would become the breadwinner as well.
Go on to read about how the family coped with the Great Depression and coming war.
Sources
- “Lasell Leaves” Vol. XXIX, May, 1904 – available at http://www.mocavo.com/Lasell-Leaves-1901-1904-Volume-28-29/645212/464 on 22 August 2014
- “Lasell College” – available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasell_College on 24 August 2014
- The school motto of Lasell is Dux Femina Facti, “They were led by a woman”
- San Diego Evening Tribune, December, 1905;
- For the period of the entire decade, Charlotte is only listed in the Cap and Gown for 1907, which lists her as class of 1910. Hence the assumption that she left college, possibly to pursue a career teaching music.
- Riverside Daily, Vol. XXV, 28 June 1910, Riverside, California
- San Diego Evening Tribune, 16 December 1905, p. 7
- “Resumed Voice Teaching – Mrs. Charlotte Thearle-Sulcer”, Englewood Times, 30 September 1910
- “Harry B. Thearle”, The Book of Chicagoans, edited by John W. Leonard, pp 565, A.N. Marquis & Company, Chicago, 1905 – available at http://books.google.com/books?id=OyV4vWP7aG4C on 5 January 2014
- “Lasell Leaves”, Vol. XXXXI, November, 1915 – available at http://archive.org/stream/lasellleaves4041lase/lasellleaves4041lase_djvu.txt on 22 August 2014
- “Charlotte Sulcer to Read Paper on Women Composers”, Suburbanite Economist, Chicago, IL, 29 October 1915
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Library of Congress, Part 3: Musical Compositions, Vol. 13 Part 1 Nos. 1-6, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1918
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Library of Congress, Part 3: Musical Compositions, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1914
- Fyleman, Rose, Fairies and Chimneys, George H. Doran Company, New York, 1920
- San Diego Union, 13 November 1920, p. 12
- “Musical Remembrance Received by Friends”, Riverside Daily Press, 31 December 1913, p. 4
- “Englewood Women’s Club”, Englewood Times, 26 February, 1915
