April 23, 2025 • 30 mins
After struggling to raise her siblings and start an art career, Wanda Gág’s life changed almost instantly with the publication of her first children’s book. Part two of her story looks at how her books sustained her financially so she could also make the art she wanted.
Research:
- Anderson, Phil. "Gág, Wanda (1893–1946)." MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society. http://www.mnopedia.org/person/g-g-wanda-1893-1946
- Cox, Richard W. “Wanda Gág The Bite of the Picture Book.“ Minnesota History. Fall 1975. https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/44/v44i07p238-254.pdf?__hstc=98931905.4376bcd11fc21fde4cdd335d087cb15e.1742826273001.1742826273001.1742826273001.1&__hssc=98931905.1.1742826273001&__hsfp=979038277
- Cox, Richard, and Julie L’Enfant. “Old World Symphony.” Minnesota History. Spring 1996. https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/55/v55i01p002-015.pdf?__hstc=98931905.4376bcd11fc21fde4cdd335d087cb15e.1742826273001.1742826273001.1742826273001.1&__hssc=98931905.1.1742826273001&__hsfp=979038277
- Gág , Wanda. “Growing Pains.” Coward-McCann. 1940. https://ia801401.us.archive.org/10/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.88331/2015.88331.Growing-Pains-Diaries-And-Drawings-For-The-Years-1908-1917.pdf
- Gág , Wanda. “Millions of Cats.” Coward-McCann. 1928. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Millions_of_Cats/2YjWAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
- Gág , Wanda. “The Funny Thing.” Coward-McCann. 1991. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Funny_Thing/c1nhAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
- Gág , Wanda. “SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.” Coward-McCann. 1938. Accessed online: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/Gág -snow/Gág -snow-00-h-dir/Gág -snow-00-h.html
- Gág , Wanda. “Snippy and Snappy. Coward-McCann. 1931. Accessed online: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/Gág -snippy/Gág -snippy-00-h-dir/Gág -snippy-00-h.html
- Gregory, Alice. “Juicy As a Pear: Wanda Gág’s Delectable Books.” The New Yorker. April 24, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/juicy-as-a-pear-wanda-ggs-delectable-books?_sp=0d46b6ea-f03e-46b9-aa69-dd7bd3c6100b.1742826428861
- Hurley, Beatrice J. “Wanda Gág - Artist, Author.” Elementary English, vol. 32, no. 6, 1955, pp. 347–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41384370
- Keller, Sara. “Reciprocal Connections: Wanda Gág and her Hometown Community of new Ulm, Minnesota.” Kappa Omicron Nu. https://publications.kon.org/urc//v9/Interconnected-Through-Art/keller.pdf
- Popova, Maria. “Pioneering Early-Twentieth-Century Artist and Creative Entrepreneur Wanda Gág on Our Two Selves and How Love Lays Its Claim on Us.” The Marginalian. March 11, 2015. https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/11/wanda-Gág -growing-pains-me-myself/#:~:text=By%20Maria%20Popova,was%20already%20on%20her%20deathbed.
- Scott, Alma. “Wanda Gág : The Story of an Artist.” Kessinger Publishing. 2007.
- Showalter, Elaine. “These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties.” Feminist Press at CUNY. 1989.
- “Wanda Gág.” Wanda Gág https://wandaGág house.org/wanda-Gág /
- Wigglesworth, Michael. “The Day of Doom.” Spiral Press. 1929. Accessed online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x000889310&seq=9
- Winnan, Audur H. “Wanda Gág .” University of Minnesota Press. 1993.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This is the second
part of our two parter on artist and author Wanda Gog.
(00:21):
In part one, we talked about her formative years and
her financial struggles as she tried to finish her education,
get to art school, and support her mother and six
siblings after her father's death when she was just a teenager.
We're gonna pick up right where we left off, so
if you haven't listened to the first episode, you should
probably go back and do that, or this won't really
make all that much sense or have all that much gravity.
(00:43):
So we mentioned at the end of part one that
Wanda had published an essay called a Hotbed of Feminists.
That's kind of where part one ends. And this was
published in the periodical The Nation, And while it was
obviously about the Gog household, the family's aim in this
piece was changed to merr and it shares the story
of growing up in a family of almost all girls.
(01:07):
It opens with quote the smell of olive oil and
mama in bed. This combination always meant a new baby
in our family. It was one girl after another, which
pleased me greatly, for I considered boys not only unesthetic,
but extremely unnecessary creatures. It offers insight into the growing
(01:27):
up years of the household, noting, quote, my mother, who
was a natural iconoclast, arranged our hair in unusual ways,
refused to burden us with starch clothes, and considered shoes
and stockings unnecessary in hot weather. Sundays included. It also
shares what it was like for Wanda growing up in
a non religious home, noting that when her classmates asked
(01:50):
her what denomination they were, she just told them they
were nothing, which led said classmates to tell Wanda her
family was unfit for heaven. When she asked her father
about it, he tells her quote, nobody knows what will
happen to us. Just do the best you know how,
and everything will be all right. This essay also shares
(02:12):
the details of the really difficult times the family faced
immediately after Anton's death. It mentions how the final year
of her father's life was stressful because he couldn't work,
and that while her mother had been told to take
in washing to make ends meet. Afterwards quote. But mother,
after the strain of the past year, was too weary
(02:32):
and ill to even do her own housework, and I
could see that the few dollars I would earn as
a clerk in the village store would never solve our problem. Besides,
I was needed at home to help with the housework
and to take care of the baby. This I did,
and by drawing place cards and writing children's stories, which
I illustrated, I earned about as much as the store
(02:54):
job would have brought. There followed years of struggle for us.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
All this essay they may or may not have led
to the next big accomplishment in her life. Some versions
of Wanda Gog's life story say that a woman named
Ernestine Evans read this essay and was inspired to reach
out to Wanda. Other accounts say that Evans attended an
early nineteen twenty eight exhibition of Gog's work and there
(03:20):
became interested in her. It's also possible that she saw
the article and then sought out the exhibition. Still other
versions say that Evans was a socialist and recognized Wanda's
socialist values and wanted to elevate them. But regardless of
how Evans found Gog and loved her work and was
in a position to offer her a project that would
(03:42):
become a significant part of her legacy. Ernestine Evans was
an editor at Coward McCann Publishing, and she offered Wanda
a contract to create a children's book. Wanda actually had
a kid's book that she had been working on since
at least nineteen twenty. Partner Earle had even helped her
shop it around to publishers, but no one had wanted it.
(04:05):
For the next several months. After meeting Evans, Wanda worked
on the manuscript and illustrations, and it was published before
the end of nineteen twenty eight. That book, Millions of Cats,
was groundbreaking in a number of ways. The layout of
the book was very unique for its time. This was
a period when children's book illustrations were not typically laid
(04:27):
out in a way that integrated them with the text.
There was usually text and story on one page and
an illustration on the facing page, but Gog's illustrations flow
from page to page in concert with the lettering, and
the story features an elderly couple who want a kiddie,
but when the husband ventures out to find a beautiful cat,
(04:47):
he cannot choose just one and ends up leading millions
of cats home without thinking about the resources it will
take to care for them. They do things along the way,
like they all want to drink water, and if each
of them has one lap, they empty out a lake,
and they all want to eat. And if they each
eat a blade of grass from a hill, the hill
is left barren, et cetera. Spoiler alert jump twenty seconds
(05:12):
ahead if you don't want to know. The cats all
eat each other, except for one skinny straggler who becomes
the couple's beloved pet. One of the most alluring aspects
of God's Book for Children, present right here from the
beginning and Millions of Cats, is that the stories are
actually kind of dark, obviously from that synopsis. In this way,
(05:34):
they harken back to the oldest fairy tales, and they're
often ghoulish twists. This is generally attributed to the cultural
tone of her family's background and her upbringing. She would
have been told stories as a child that came from
her parents' bohemian folklore, rather than the more sanitized, hyper
positive and cheery children's stories that had become popular in
(05:55):
the US in the early nineteen hundreds. This reflected in
her own account of her early years, written in nineteen
forty quote, I was born in this country, but often
feel as though I had spent my early years in Europe.
My father was born in Bohemia, as were my mother's parents.
My birthplace, New All, Minnesota, was settled by Middle Europeans,
(06:17):
and I grew up in an atmosphere of old World
customs and legends, of Bavarian and Bohemian folk songs of
German Markin and turnver inactivities. I spoke no English until
I went to school.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Millions of Cats is, despite those weird circumstances of the
de Newment, incredibly charming with its repeated refrain of cats here,
cats there, cats and kittens everywhere, hundreds of cats, thousands
of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats. And
if you want to hear that read in the best
possible way, there is a version of it that's read
(06:51):
by James Earl Jones, and I highly recommend it. Wanda
was a cat lover herself, although she only had two cats,
not millions, which was named Snoopy, which is so cute,
and she used her own cats as models to create
the drawings of the hordes of Cats in the books.
We'll talk about the success of Millions of Cats and
what the book meant to Wanda in just a moment,
(07:13):
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Millions
of Cats was hugely popular right out of the gate.
It had sold ten thousand copies by January of nineteen
twenty nine, and another five thousand by the end of February,
(07:37):
and it just kept going. Its success offered Gog her
first taste of real money and lasting financial stability, and
that book is still in print almost one hundred years later,
making it the longest running illustrated book in print in
the US. Millions of Cats was an accidental insurance policy
for economic uncertainty. The royalties from this and later book
(08:00):
projects provided Gog with a dependable income even throughout the Depression.
Though the first thirty eight years of her life had
involved a lot of financial difficulty, Millions of Cats really
ended all that very quickly, and it also won her
a Newberry Award. Writing for Minnesota History Magazine in nineteen
(08:20):
seventy five, Richard W. Cox noted quote when Wanda took
her manuscript of Millions of Cats to publishers in nineteen
twenty seven. Little did she suspect the significance of this
moment to herself or American art. Millions of Cats became
the prototype for the picture book, defined as one in
which a single artist conceives, writes, illustrates, and supervises the
(08:43):
printing of the whole book project. Her success in the
children's book field should not have come as a surprise,
as her upbringing and later training left her peculiarly prepared
for the new genre. Telling, reading, writing, and illustrating stories
was a major pastime in the Goog home, and Wanda
proved to be more imaginative here than the other children.
(09:05):
Wanda may have been the most imaginative of her siblings,
but she was not the only one with artistic talent,
and she involved her family in the project. Her brother,
Howard lettered the book. This was in service to its quality.
Coward McCann had a letterer do the work, and Wanda
had rejected it, so then she had her brother do
it instead, and he would letter everything she worked on
(09:26):
going forward. Millions of Cats, as we said, made Wanda money,
and it also made her famous. She was suddenly put
in a position of having to do interviews and have appearances,
but the success for her was all about putting her
in the more important position of being able to make
art for art's sake. Everything in her life was in
(09:48):
service to her art, and she was adamant that the
priority was always going to be art. Coward McCann and
other publishers were eager to make deals for more books
with her signature style, but her business decisions were always
guided by the question of whether it would enable her
to make the art she wanted to make, Like basically,
(10:08):
how much can I make on this project and how
long can I then just go to my studio and
paint the stuff I want to make. Everyone knew Wanda
because of millions of cats, but to her this book
was just a tool to sustain her true calling. She
also had a lot of offers to illustrate children's books
written by other people, and that was always a hard pass,
(10:28):
with one sort of odd exception.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
That was in nineteen twenty nine when she illustrated Michael
Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom that was not the work
of a contemporary author. It was originally published in sixteen
sixty two. Wigglesworth was a Puritan minister and the book
describes the day of judgment. It's fairly dark, so it
was sort of up Wanda's ali. She took imagery from
New England to gravestones for the art in the book.
(10:54):
Many of Gog's most well known works have sort of
long stories in how they develop over time, for example,
jumping forward for a moment. In nineteen forty one, she
produced a lithograph called Macy's Stairway, and this shows a
fairly pedestrian view of an industrial style stairway illustrated in
Gog's moody, almost cartoonish way, showing the coiled up emergency
(11:18):
fire hose on one of the landings and the mounted
handrail along the exterior edge of the stair with a
glimpse of the heavier wooden mules and balusters on the
other side of the stair. But she started working on
this image eleven years earlier. She apparently loved Macy's department store.
She often shopped there, and she spent an afternoon there
(11:40):
drawing in January of nineteen twenty nine, and then that
drawing was refined to a finish drawing and then was
made into an etching. She was not very happy with
the etching, and then it wasn't until eleven years later
that she was ready to revisit this image for its
lithographic form, which is essentially a copy of that original
(12:00):
finished drawing. Later, in nineteen twenty nine, gog published her
second book with Coward McCann, The Funny Thing. The story
is about a man named Bobo who serves the birds
and rabbits and mice beautiful food that he prepares, until
one day a very strange creature shows up. That quote
looked something like a dog and a little like a giraffe,
(12:22):
and from the top of its head to the tip
of its tail there was a row of beautiful blue points.
This creature is the Funny Thing. It calls itself an
ammal and tells Bobo that it doesn't want his cheeses
and puddings because he eats dolls. This distresses Bobo so
much because he cannot bear the thought of children losing
(12:43):
their dolls in this way. So he comes up with
a way to feed the Funny Thing something else. So,
in spite of this dock market crash, people seem to
have money to buy the Funny Thing, because it, like
millions of Cats, was very popular Gog found herself once
again requested all kinds of appearances and interviews. She also
(13:03):
had a book tour during which she visited her family,
including her sister Stella, who was at that point married
with a child, and she visited her grandparents. These visits
were very inspirational for Gog, and she produced a series
of lithographs that captured scenes from her family's living spaces,
including Grandma's parlor. One of the hallmarks of Gog's work
(13:25):
is this sense that the lines used to create the
images are moving or vibrating slightly, and Grandma's parlor is
a perfect example of that. What is essentially a static
scene showing part of a Victorian looking couch, a bureau,
and a small side table that sits in front of
a window with long curtains feels very much like there's
(13:45):
movement in the room. It's a really interesting and unique illusion,
particularly because the style of the art is not realistic,
so it's kind of like looking into a slightly cartoonish
parallel dimension. During the nineteen twenties, Gog and Earl Humphries
spent a lot of time at a rented place out
(14:05):
in the New Jersey Country they called tumble timbers. The
rural life that Wanda loved, which came with few amenities,
would not have been possible if Earle had not been
willing to handle a lot of the heavy labor aspects
of life on a farm. He kept the firewood chopped
and ready, made sure they had food, and tended the
gardens that Wanda loved so much. His willingness to do
(14:28):
the farm's heavy labor made it possible for Wanda to
work on her art without having to concern herself with
the day to day chores. But there was tension in
this relationship. Earl cheated on Wanda at the end of
the nineteen twenties, and Wanda reciprocated by also cheating. The
pair decided at that point to have what basically sounds
(14:48):
like an open relationship, although they called it vacation. Admittedly,
the parlance of an open relationship did not exists then, right, right,
So it makes sense that they're like, we're on vacation
from our regular Yeah. Yeah, there were no pollocules at
this point.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Wanda eventually began an affair with Karl Zigrisser avwaya Gallery,
as he had long made it clear that he was
interested in her once they started their sexual relationship, though
it seems to have gone pretty awkwardly. It was an
on again, off again kind of situation over several years,
and it seems like it just sort of found a
feeling kind of forced.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah. Wanda also saw other people once she was on vacation.
She felt very free to flirt and see whoever she wanted.
Like when she went to visit New York, she would
often have dates and have brief romantic dalliances with people there.
Wanda and Earl moved away from their home at Tumble
Timbers in nineteen thirty and they first moved to a
(15:51):
place in West Cornwall, Connecticut that was owned by a friend,
and there she worked on her book Snippy and Snappy,
which is about two sibling field my mind and a
wild adventure that they go on when the ball of
yarn that they love gets picked up by a little
girl and they follow that little girl home. During the
years leading up to the nineteen thirties, Wanda had moved
(16:12):
a lot. While she spent spring and summer in the country,
she was often back in New York for the entire winter,
and she was tiring of the inconsistency of just picking
up and moving every few months. She wanted a more
permanent and stable home and not to be maintaining two residences.
She had reached a point in her career that she
(16:33):
had the money to start looking for her own property,
so in June of nineteen thirty one, she purchased a
farm in Milford, New Jersey. When she purchased it, the house,
which sat on a pretty sizable acreage of land, was
not updated, but Wanda and Earl renovated it. They added
indoor plumbing. Her brother Howard did some of the renovation
(16:53):
work on the house. Wanda also had a separate studio
space built on the property away from the house. She
called All Creation at the name that eventually came to
be used for the entire farm. Once she was settled
in a place that felt truly her own, Gog once
again found her groove as an artist, and she produced
(17:13):
a lot of lithographs and multiple books. Her lithographic work
during this period showed an embrace of nature and a
move away from representing city life, instead focusing on landscapes
and still lifes. She was working at the time on
what would become the ABC Bunny for Coward McCann. When
her artistic interest was drawn elsewhere, she started working on
(17:36):
an illustrated version of her favorite book, Henry David Throse Walden.
This was initially something she wanted to submit to a
book contest, but although she put in a load of
work to prepare it, at the last minute she changed
her mind and didn't submit it because she felt that
this would only get a limited run if it actually
(17:57):
won the contest, and she wanted it to a wider audience.
But oddly she never seemed to pursue it any further.
It was never published. Meanwhile, the Great Depression had caused
her income from selling her fine art to slow to
just about nothing, so she went back to The ABC Bunny,
which was published in nineteen thirty three. The ABC Bunny
(18:20):
isn't solely an ABC book. It has a narrative structure,
with each letter representing the next event in the bunny's story.
Like her other books, her brother Howard lettered this one,
and her sister Flavia also wrote a song for it,
which is included in score format at the beginning of
the book. Coming up, we'll talk about the last years
of Wandagg's life, starting with a sabbatical that she took
(18:43):
to just paint and draw whatever she liked. We'll talk
about how that worked out after we hear from the
sponsors that keep the show going. After the publication of
The ABC Bunny, Gog felt like she had earned some
(19:04):
time to once again focus solely on her own art.
But once she had that time, she was not feeling
especially inspired, so she eventually went back to working on
another book, and that became Gone Is Gone, or The
Story of a Man who wanted to do housework. And
in this story, a man named Fritzel is convinced that
(19:24):
he works harder in the fields than his wife, Lisi
works taking care of the house and the animals and
the baby, So the pair decide to switch places for
a day. Some rather frightening things happen in this book.
We've already mentioned that Wanda Gog's art style in her
book style is a little dark. Fritzel almost kills the
family's cow by accident, for example, and at the end
(19:46):
of the day he begs his wife to please take
back the housework so he can go back to the fields.
Lisy did great in the fields, by the way, throughout
these early years, at all creation when she was working,
initially on sabbatical and then on this book. Gog's diaries
show a new maturity where she's very reflective about her
work and less prone to the sweeping generalizations about artistic
(20:09):
gifts that she made in her younger years. She evolved
her view of the artist's job as including the need
to cultivate their own work and be judicious about creative
choices instead of only following every muse that pops up.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Her next two book projects were adaptations. She published her
version of Grim's fairy tales Tales from Grim, which she
rewrote and illustrated, in nineteen thirty six, and in nineteen
thirty eight she published snow White in the Seven Dwarfs.
That was the year after Walt Disney released his film
version of snow White, and the Gog version serves as
sort of a counter to it, an alternative version. In
(20:47):
Gog's telling of the story, the queen turns literally green
with envy when the mirror tells her that snow White
is more beautiful, and when the Prince finds snow White
in an eternal slumber and a casket in the wood,
he does not kiss her back to life. He decides
to carry the princess back to the castle, and she's
jostled on the journey, with a piece of apple lodged
(21:08):
in her throat being dislodged that leads to her awakening.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
There are interpretations of Wanda Gog's literature for children that
see it as an expression of Wanda's larger worldview. Richard Cox,
once again, writing for Minnesota History in nineteen seventy five,
notes quote the cat battle in Millions of Cats may
reflect her revulsion against the destruction caused by World War One.
Peasants abound in nearly all her stories, and Wanda's regard
(21:36):
for the peasant class was almost legendary. Her seven dwarfs
are frugal, hard working, sensible men, not Disney's famous likable
comic fools who anxiously stumble around the forest cottage awaiting
snow White's next kiss. Wanda spoke of peasants in the
sense of all honest workers trying to maintain their integrity
(21:57):
amidst the pressures of the industrial Western world. The picture
book proved to be a good way for her to
serve humanity and to vindicate herself from earlier accusations of elitism.
And being out of touch with ordinary human beings. She
also revealed in her children's books the strength and dignity
of women like Wanda herself. Females in her books assert
(22:18):
their opinions and make decisions. They suffer the same sins
of pride, vanity, and greed as men. One is. Artwork
in these books, over which she had complete editorial control,
is whimsical, but it's not simplistic. Gog refused to apply
lesser standards to her work for children's picture books than
(22:39):
she would to any fine art lithograph she made.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Coward McCann remained eager to leverage Gog's popularity and had
been suggesting that she write about her unconventional upbringing. This
led her to revisit her journals from her early life,
and in nineteen forty Gog published the diaries she had
kept from the ages of fifteen to twenty three, basically
the period of time between when her father died and
(23:04):
when her mother died. She wrote in the opening to it, quote,
I had often wondered how I would feel upon rereading them,
and had even speculated about it in my diary. At times,
I found that I was able to regard my youthful outpourings,
while with a natural interest and hence not complete detachment,
still with considerable objectivity. True, all the usual juvenilities were
(23:27):
still there, the slang and silliness, the girlish gush and crush,
the introspection, the agonizing over love, the youthful arrogance and trigidity.
But recognizing these traits as typical of the various age
groups of which I was successively a part, I saw
myself as only one of many going through the normal
phases of adolescence.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, people were very interested in this book, of course.
I will say. She also did edit those diary entries
a good bit, including the name change that we mentioned
earlier in talking about her. Through the years, Wanda and
Earle had stayed together, although they had continued to have
their vacation periods where they were free to see other people,
and they definitely did. And then on August twenty seventh,
(24:13):
nineteen forty three, they married rather suddenly. And this sounds
pretty romantic, and there may have been an element of
romance to it, but this move was actually catalyzed by
a work issue for Earl. So because it was wartime,
Humphries was working in a war job. He was working
in a machine shop, and he had organized the workers
(24:34):
there into a union. The shop managers threatened to fire Earle,
but their reason had nothing to do with his unionization,
even though it really did. The reason that they gave
was that he was living in sin with a woman
who was not his wife. So Wanda and Earl fixed
that lickety split, and Wanda became a bride at the
(24:55):
age of fifty. Wanda was having some health issues at
this point. She'd gone to various doctors and they'd all
told her that she just needed rest. Problem that still
exists today when women go to the doctor. Wanda felt
she was having menopause related problems, but the doctors told
her she was too young for that. In some cases,
they were reportedly shocked when she told them she was
(25:17):
almost fifty. She was very petite and thin for her
whole life, and a lot of times that made her
seem a lot younger than she really was. She was
mistaken for a teenager well into her adult life, but
none of that addressed why she felt terrible a lot
of the time. Yeah, there are some references in her
diary where you can tell she's talking about not feeling great,
(25:41):
and it reads as being almost tentative to actually write
down what she's experiencing because it seems a little scary.
By nineteen forty four, though, Wanda was often complaining of
shortness of breath, and it was bad enough that she
could not work on her art, which for her was
like not being able to breathe, and then just day
(26:02):
to day things like brushing her teeth became simply too
much for her. At this point, she had started staying
exclusively in an apartment that she had gotten in New
York because the winters at all Creation were too cold
and traveling between the two was too arduous. Finally, in
February of nineteen forty five, she was admitted to Doctor's
(26:23):
Hospital for exploratory surgery, and the resulting news was very bad.
Wanda had lung cancer and had months to live. This
news was not given to Wanda, but to Earle and
Earl and Wanda's brother, Howard discussed the matter and decided
not to tell Wanda or her sisters. This is how
(26:45):
it was often handled at the time. I'm not excusing it,
but that's like how it was often handled at the time. Yes,
Wanda still had treatments and her diary entries indicate that
she figured out from those treatments that she must have
had one or more malignant growths, and she knew she
was only getting worse. Earle did everything he could to
(27:05):
make Wanda's life as comfortable as possible. They spent time
in Milford when she felt well enough, and he drove
her to Florida for a vacation in the spring of
nineteen forty five. After they got back to New York
and then to New Jersey, she oversaw the planting of
her annual vegetable garden and worked on another project, more
Tales from Grimm for Coward McCann. In late June of
(27:27):
nineteen forty five, Wanda rapidly declined and was admitted to
Doctor's hospital once again. She died there on June twenty seventh.
Today you can visit the new Olm House, designed by
Anton Goog, that Wanda and her siblings grew up in
if you happen to be visiting Minnesota. It is open
regular hours June to October and then by appointment throughout
(27:48):
the rest of the year. So if that's something you
want to do, highly recommend you check out their website.
So that you get all the details before you show
up and find out maybe you couldn't go in. But
that is Wanda Gog. I have so much behind the
scenes stuff to talk about for her, and in the
meantime I have a little bit a listener mail. This
(28:08):
is a listener mail about one of my favorite topics
of recent past, spite houses. This is from our listener Lily,
who writes, Hello, lovely ladies. Your podcast has been one
of my favorites for years, so firstly, thank you for
all your good work and wonderful and interesting content. I
got especially excited about your episode on spite houses, which
is just a hilarious concept to me. In December twenty
(28:31):
twenty two to March twenty twenty three, I had the
opportunity to work and live in Lebanon, and towards the
end of my time there I learned about Abasa translated
to English the Grudge. This is the thinnest building in
Beirut and was the result of feuding brothers arguing about
how to share the property their father had left them.
I was so fortunate to have a friend in Beirut
(28:53):
who took me there so I could see the building
and the stunningly beautiful view that the one brother wanted
to block from the other. Looking for wered to hear
about hopefully more spite houses around the world and all
other things you come up with. I've attached photos I
took of the grudge and also a few of my
little fur ball, Wilma Waffle. She's a ten year old,
cuddly and very gracious lady from a little island on
(29:14):
the Arctic Circle right off the coast of Norway, Trena,
and she lives to lay on the floor for a
big belly rub. She also loves smelly shoes and bird watching.
You know, I had a cat that was very obsessed
with smelly shoes and we used to discuss that he
looked like he was huffin' when he got in there.
She is adorable, by the way. I want to rub
that tummy so much. And I love the grudge. I mean,
(29:34):
I don't love it, but I love it. It's one
that did come up when I was looking at spite
houses online, but it's a little newer, and also I
didn't have a ton of info on it. But it
is a very very narrow house that has been built
to block a beautiful view from another house, because that's
(29:56):
a number of spite houses come about that way. I'm
just laughing about spite houses now. If you would like
to write to us about spite houses, or kiddies or
wandagg or children's literature or any of the other many
many things, you can do that at History podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. If you have not subscribed to the
(30:17):
show and you would like to, I promise you that
is the easiest thing you will maybe do today. You
can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite podcasts.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This is the second
part of our two parter on artist and author Wanda Gog.
(00:21):
In part one, we talked about her formative years and
her financial struggles as she tried to finish her education,
get to art school, and support her mother and six
siblings after her father's death when she was just a teenager.
We're gonna pick up right where we left off, so
if you haven't listened to the first episode, you should
probably go back and do that, or this won't really
make all that much sense or have all that much gravity.
(00:43):
So we mentioned at the end of part one that
Wanda had published an essay called a Hotbed of Feminists.
That's kind of where part one ends. And this was
published in the periodical The Nation, And while it was
obviously about the Gog household, the family's aim in this
piece was changed to merr and it shares the story
of growing up in a family of almost all girls.
(01:07):
It opens with quote the smell of olive oil and
mama in bed. This combination always meant a new baby
in our family. It was one girl after another, which
pleased me greatly, for I considered boys not only unesthetic,
but extremely unnecessary creatures. It offers insight into the growing
(01:27):
up years of the household, noting, quote, my mother, who
was a natural iconoclast, arranged our hair in unusual ways,
refused to burden us with starch clothes, and considered shoes
and stockings unnecessary in hot weather. Sundays included. It also
shares what it was like for Wanda growing up in
a non religious home, noting that when her classmates asked
(01:50):
her what denomination they were, she just told them they
were nothing, which led said classmates to tell Wanda her
family was unfit for heaven. When she asked her father
about it, he tells her quote, nobody knows what will
happen to us. Just do the best you know how,
and everything will be all right. This essay also shares
(02:12):
the details of the really difficult times the family faced
immediately after Anton's death. It mentions how the final year
of her father's life was stressful because he couldn't work,
and that while her mother had been told to take
in washing to make ends meet. Afterwards quote. But mother,
after the strain of the past year, was too weary
(02:32):
and ill to even do her own housework, and I
could see that the few dollars I would earn as
a clerk in the village store would never solve our problem. Besides,
I was needed at home to help with the housework
and to take care of the baby. This I did,
and by drawing place cards and writing children's stories, which
I illustrated, I earned about as much as the store
(02:54):
job would have brought. There followed years of struggle for us.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
All this essay they may or may not have led
to the next big accomplishment in her life. Some versions
of Wanda Gog's life story say that a woman named
Ernestine Evans read this essay and was inspired to reach
out to Wanda. Other accounts say that Evans attended an
early nineteen twenty eight exhibition of Gog's work and there
(03:20):
became interested in her. It's also possible that she saw
the article and then sought out the exhibition. Still other
versions say that Evans was a socialist and recognized Wanda's
socialist values and wanted to elevate them. But regardless of
how Evans found Gog and loved her work and was
in a position to offer her a project that would
(03:42):
become a significant part of her legacy. Ernestine Evans was
an editor at Coward McCann Publishing, and she offered Wanda
a contract to create a children's book. Wanda actually had
a kid's book that she had been working on since
at least nineteen twenty. Partner Earle had even helped her
shop it around to publishers, but no one had wanted it.
(04:05):
For the next several months. After meeting Evans, Wanda worked
on the manuscript and illustrations, and it was published before
the end of nineteen twenty eight. That book, Millions of Cats,
was groundbreaking in a number of ways. The layout of
the book was very unique for its time. This was
a period when children's book illustrations were not typically laid
(04:27):
out in a way that integrated them with the text.
There was usually text and story on one page and
an illustration on the facing page, but Gog's illustrations flow
from page to page in concert with the lettering, and
the story features an elderly couple who want a kiddie,
but when the husband ventures out to find a beautiful cat,
(04:47):
he cannot choose just one and ends up leading millions
of cats home without thinking about the resources it will
take to care for them. They do things along the way,
like they all want to drink water, and if each
of them has one lap, they empty out a lake,
and they all want to eat. And if they each
eat a blade of grass from a hill, the hill
is left barren, et cetera. Spoiler alert jump twenty seconds
(05:12):
ahead if you don't want to know. The cats all
eat each other, except for one skinny straggler who becomes
the couple's beloved pet. One of the most alluring aspects
of God's Book for Children, present right here from the
beginning and Millions of Cats, is that the stories are
actually kind of dark, obviously from that synopsis. In this way,
(05:34):
they harken back to the oldest fairy tales, and they're
often ghoulish twists. This is generally attributed to the cultural
tone of her family's background and her upbringing. She would
have been told stories as a child that came from
her parents' bohemian folklore, rather than the more sanitized, hyper
positive and cheery children's stories that had become popular in
(05:55):
the US in the early nineteen hundreds. This reflected in
her own account of her early years, written in nineteen
forty quote, I was born in this country, but often
feel as though I had spent my early years in Europe.
My father was born in Bohemia, as were my mother's parents.
My birthplace, New All, Minnesota, was settled by Middle Europeans,
(06:17):
and I grew up in an atmosphere of old World
customs and legends, of Bavarian and Bohemian folk songs of
German Markin and turnver inactivities. I spoke no English until
I went to school.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Millions of Cats is, despite those weird circumstances of the
de Newment, incredibly charming with its repeated refrain of cats here,
cats there, cats and kittens everywhere, hundreds of cats, thousands
of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats. And
if you want to hear that read in the best
possible way, there is a version of it that's read
(06:51):
by James Earl Jones, and I highly recommend it. Wanda
was a cat lover herself, although she only had two cats,
not millions, which was named Snoopy, which is so cute,
and she used her own cats as models to create
the drawings of the hordes of Cats in the books.
We'll talk about the success of Millions of Cats and
what the book meant to Wanda in just a moment,
(07:13):
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Millions
of Cats was hugely popular right out of the gate.
It had sold ten thousand copies by January of nineteen
twenty nine, and another five thousand by the end of February,
(07:37):
and it just kept going. Its success offered Gog her
first taste of real money and lasting financial stability, and
that book is still in print almost one hundred years later,
making it the longest running illustrated book in print in
the US. Millions of Cats was an accidental insurance policy
for economic uncertainty. The royalties from this and later book
(08:00):
projects provided Gog with a dependable income even throughout the Depression.
Though the first thirty eight years of her life had
involved a lot of financial difficulty, Millions of Cats really
ended all that very quickly, and it also won her
a Newberry Award. Writing for Minnesota History Magazine in nineteen
(08:20):
seventy five, Richard W. Cox noted quote when Wanda took
her manuscript of Millions of Cats to publishers in nineteen
twenty seven. Little did she suspect the significance of this
moment to herself or American art. Millions of Cats became
the prototype for the picture book, defined as one in
which a single artist conceives, writes, illustrates, and supervises the
(08:43):
printing of the whole book project. Her success in the
children's book field should not have come as a surprise,
as her upbringing and later training left her peculiarly prepared
for the new genre. Telling, reading, writing, and illustrating stories
was a major pastime in the Goog home, and Wanda
proved to be more imaginative here than the other children.
(09:05):
Wanda may have been the most imaginative of her siblings,
but she was not the only one with artistic talent,
and she involved her family in the project. Her brother,
Howard lettered the book. This was in service to its quality.
Coward McCann had a letterer do the work, and Wanda
had rejected it, so then she had her brother do
it instead, and he would letter everything she worked on
(09:26):
going forward. Millions of Cats, as we said, made Wanda money,
and it also made her famous. She was suddenly put
in a position of having to do interviews and have appearances,
but the success for her was all about putting her
in the more important position of being able to make
art for art's sake. Everything in her life was in
(09:48):
service to her art, and she was adamant that the
priority was always going to be art. Coward McCann and
other publishers were eager to make deals for more books
with her signature style, but her business decisions were always
guided by the question of whether it would enable her
to make the art she wanted to make, Like basically,
(10:08):
how much can I make on this project and how
long can I then just go to my studio and
paint the stuff I want to make. Everyone knew Wanda
because of millions of cats, but to her this book
was just a tool to sustain her true calling. She
also had a lot of offers to illustrate children's books
written by other people, and that was always a hard pass,
(10:28):
with one sort of odd exception.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
That was in nineteen twenty nine when she illustrated Michael
Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom that was not the work
of a contemporary author. It was originally published in sixteen
sixty two. Wigglesworth was a Puritan minister and the book
describes the day of judgment. It's fairly dark, so it
was sort of up Wanda's ali. She took imagery from
New England to gravestones for the art in the book.
(10:54):
Many of Gog's most well known works have sort of
long stories in how they develop over time, for example,
jumping forward for a moment. In nineteen forty one, she
produced a lithograph called Macy's Stairway, and this shows a
fairly pedestrian view of an industrial style stairway illustrated in
Gog's moody, almost cartoonish way, showing the coiled up emergency
(11:18):
fire hose on one of the landings and the mounted
handrail along the exterior edge of the stair with a
glimpse of the heavier wooden mules and balusters on the
other side of the stair. But she started working on
this image eleven years earlier. She apparently loved Macy's department store.
She often shopped there, and she spent an afternoon there
(11:40):
drawing in January of nineteen twenty nine, and then that
drawing was refined to a finish drawing and then was
made into an etching. She was not very happy with
the etching, and then it wasn't until eleven years later
that she was ready to revisit this image for its
lithographic form, which is essentially a copy of that original
(12:00):
finished drawing. Later, in nineteen twenty nine, gog published her
second book with Coward McCann, The Funny Thing. The story
is about a man named Bobo who serves the birds
and rabbits and mice beautiful food that he prepares, until
one day a very strange creature shows up. That quote
looked something like a dog and a little like a giraffe,
(12:22):
and from the top of its head to the tip
of its tail there was a row of beautiful blue points.
This creature is the Funny Thing. It calls itself an
ammal and tells Bobo that it doesn't want his cheeses
and puddings because he eats dolls. This distresses Bobo so
much because he cannot bear the thought of children losing
(12:43):
their dolls in this way. So he comes up with
a way to feed the Funny Thing something else. So,
in spite of this dock market crash, people seem to
have money to buy the Funny Thing, because it, like
millions of Cats, was very popular Gog found herself once
again requested all kinds of appearances and interviews. She also
(13:03):
had a book tour during which she visited her family,
including her sister Stella, who was at that point married
with a child, and she visited her grandparents. These visits
were very inspirational for Gog, and she produced a series
of lithographs that captured scenes from her family's living spaces,
including Grandma's parlor. One of the hallmarks of Gog's work
(13:25):
is this sense that the lines used to create the
images are moving or vibrating slightly, and Grandma's parlor is
a perfect example of that. What is essentially a static
scene showing part of a Victorian looking couch, a bureau,
and a small side table that sits in front of
a window with long curtains feels very much like there's
(13:45):
movement in the room. It's a really interesting and unique illusion,
particularly because the style of the art is not realistic,
so it's kind of like looking into a slightly cartoonish
parallel dimension. During the nineteen twenties, Gog and Earl Humphries
spent a lot of time at a rented place out
(14:05):
in the New Jersey Country they called tumble timbers. The
rural life that Wanda loved, which came with few amenities,
would not have been possible if Earle had not been
willing to handle a lot of the heavy labor aspects
of life on a farm. He kept the firewood chopped
and ready, made sure they had food, and tended the
gardens that Wanda loved so much. His willingness to do
(14:28):
the farm's heavy labor made it possible for Wanda to
work on her art without having to concern herself with
the day to day chores. But there was tension in
this relationship. Earl cheated on Wanda at the end of
the nineteen twenties, and Wanda reciprocated by also cheating. The
pair decided at that point to have what basically sounds
(14:48):
like an open relationship, although they called it vacation. Admittedly,
the parlance of an open relationship did not exists then, right, right,
So it makes sense that they're like, we're on vacation
from our regular Yeah. Yeah, there were no pollocules at
this point.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Wanda eventually began an affair with Karl Zigrisser avwaya Gallery,
as he had long made it clear that he was
interested in her once they started their sexual relationship, though
it seems to have gone pretty awkwardly. It was an
on again, off again kind of situation over several years,
and it seems like it just sort of found a
feeling kind of forced.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah. Wanda also saw other people once she was on vacation.
She felt very free to flirt and see whoever she wanted.
Like when she went to visit New York, she would
often have dates and have brief romantic dalliances with people there.
Wanda and Earl moved away from their home at Tumble
Timbers in nineteen thirty and they first moved to a
(15:51):
place in West Cornwall, Connecticut that was owned by a friend,
and there she worked on her book Snippy and Snappy,
which is about two sibling field my mind and a
wild adventure that they go on when the ball of
yarn that they love gets picked up by a little
girl and they follow that little girl home. During the
years leading up to the nineteen thirties, Wanda had moved
(16:12):
a lot. While she spent spring and summer in the country,
she was often back in New York for the entire winter,
and she was tiring of the inconsistency of just picking
up and moving every few months. She wanted a more
permanent and stable home and not to be maintaining two residences.
She had reached a point in her career that she
(16:33):
had the money to start looking for her own property,
so in June of nineteen thirty one, she purchased a
farm in Milford, New Jersey. When she purchased it, the house,
which sat on a pretty sizable acreage of land, was
not updated, but Wanda and Earl renovated it. They added
indoor plumbing. Her brother Howard did some of the renovation
(16:53):
work on the house. Wanda also had a separate studio
space built on the property away from the house. She
called All Creation at the name that eventually came to
be used for the entire farm. Once she was settled
in a place that felt truly her own, Gog once
again found her groove as an artist, and she produced
(17:13):
a lot of lithographs and multiple books. Her lithographic work
during this period showed an embrace of nature and a
move away from representing city life, instead focusing on landscapes
and still lifes. She was working at the time on
what would become the ABC Bunny for Coward McCann. When
her artistic interest was drawn elsewhere, she started working on
(17:36):
an illustrated version of her favorite book, Henry David Throse Walden.
This was initially something she wanted to submit to a
book contest, but although she put in a load of
work to prepare it, at the last minute she changed
her mind and didn't submit it because she felt that
this would only get a limited run if it actually
(17:57):
won the contest, and she wanted it to a wider audience.
But oddly she never seemed to pursue it any further.
It was never published. Meanwhile, the Great Depression had caused
her income from selling her fine art to slow to
just about nothing, so she went back to The ABC Bunny,
which was published in nineteen thirty three. The ABC Bunny
(18:20):
isn't solely an ABC book. It has a narrative structure,
with each letter representing the next event in the bunny's story.
Like her other books, her brother Howard lettered this one,
and her sister Flavia also wrote a song for it,
which is included in score format at the beginning of
the book. Coming up, we'll talk about the last years
of Wandagg's life, starting with a sabbatical that she took
(18:43):
to just paint and draw whatever she liked. We'll talk
about how that worked out after we hear from the
sponsors that keep the show going. After the publication of
The ABC Bunny, Gog felt like she had earned some
(19:04):
time to once again focus solely on her own art.
But once she had that time, she was not feeling
especially inspired, so she eventually went back to working on
another book, and that became Gone Is Gone, or The
Story of a Man who wanted to do housework. And
in this story, a man named Fritzel is convinced that
(19:24):
he works harder in the fields than his wife, Lisi
works taking care of the house and the animals and
the baby, So the pair decide to switch places for
a day. Some rather frightening things happen in this book.
We've already mentioned that Wanda Gog's art style in her
book style is a little dark. Fritzel almost kills the
family's cow by accident, for example, and at the end
(19:46):
of the day he begs his wife to please take
back the housework so he can go back to the fields.
Lisy did great in the fields, by the way, throughout
these early years, at all creation when she was working,
initially on sabbatical and then on this book. Gog's diaries
show a new maturity where she's very reflective about her
work and less prone to the sweeping generalizations about artistic
(20:09):
gifts that she made in her younger years. She evolved
her view of the artist's job as including the need
to cultivate their own work and be judicious about creative
choices instead of only following every muse that pops up.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Her next two book projects were adaptations. She published her
version of Grim's fairy tales Tales from Grim, which she
rewrote and illustrated, in nineteen thirty six, and in nineteen
thirty eight she published snow White in the Seven Dwarfs.
That was the year after Walt Disney released his film
version of snow White, and the Gog version serves as
sort of a counter to it, an alternative version. In
(20:47):
Gog's telling of the story, the queen turns literally green
with envy when the mirror tells her that snow White
is more beautiful, and when the Prince finds snow White
in an eternal slumber and a casket in the wood,
he does not kiss her back to life. He decides
to carry the princess back to the castle, and she's
jostled on the journey, with a piece of apple lodged
(21:08):
in her throat being dislodged that leads to her awakening.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
There are interpretations of Wanda Gog's literature for children that
see it as an expression of Wanda's larger worldview. Richard Cox,
once again, writing for Minnesota History in nineteen seventy five,
notes quote the cat battle in Millions of Cats may
reflect her revulsion against the destruction caused by World War One.
Peasants abound in nearly all her stories, and Wanda's regard
(21:36):
for the peasant class was almost legendary. Her seven dwarfs
are frugal, hard working, sensible men, not Disney's famous likable
comic fools who anxiously stumble around the forest cottage awaiting
snow White's next kiss. Wanda spoke of peasants in the
sense of all honest workers trying to maintain their integrity
(21:57):
amidst the pressures of the industrial Western world. The picture
book proved to be a good way for her to
serve humanity and to vindicate herself from earlier accusations of elitism.
And being out of touch with ordinary human beings. She
also revealed in her children's books the strength and dignity
of women like Wanda herself. Females in her books assert
(22:18):
their opinions and make decisions. They suffer the same sins
of pride, vanity, and greed as men. One is. Artwork
in these books, over which she had complete editorial control,
is whimsical, but it's not simplistic. Gog refused to apply
lesser standards to her work for children's picture books than
(22:39):
she would to any fine art lithograph she made.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Coward McCann remained eager to leverage Gog's popularity and had
been suggesting that she write about her unconventional upbringing. This
led her to revisit her journals from her early life,
and in nineteen forty Gog published the diaries she had
kept from the ages of fifteen to twenty three, basically
the period of time between when her father died and
(23:04):
when her mother died. She wrote in the opening to it, quote,
I had often wondered how I would feel upon rereading them,
and had even speculated about it in my diary. At times,
I found that I was able to regard my youthful outpourings,
while with a natural interest and hence not complete detachment,
still with considerable objectivity. True, all the usual juvenilities were
(23:27):
still there, the slang and silliness, the girlish gush and crush,
the introspection, the agonizing over love, the youthful arrogance and trigidity.
But recognizing these traits as typical of the various age
groups of which I was successively a part, I saw
myself as only one of many going through the normal
phases of adolescence.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, people were very interested in this book, of course.
I will say. She also did edit those diary entries
a good bit, including the name change that we mentioned
earlier in talking about her. Through the years, Wanda and
Earle had stayed together, although they had continued to have
their vacation periods where they were free to see other people,
and they definitely did. And then on August twenty seventh,
(24:13):
nineteen forty three, they married rather suddenly. And this sounds
pretty romantic, and there may have been an element of
romance to it, but this move was actually catalyzed by
a work issue for Earl. So because it was wartime,
Humphries was working in a war job. He was working
in a machine shop, and he had organized the workers
(24:34):
there into a union. The shop managers threatened to fire Earle,
but their reason had nothing to do with his unionization,
even though it really did. The reason that they gave
was that he was living in sin with a woman
who was not his wife. So Wanda and Earl fixed
that lickety split, and Wanda became a bride at the
(24:55):
age of fifty. Wanda was having some health issues at
this point. She'd gone to various doctors and they'd all
told her that she just needed rest. Problem that still
exists today when women go to the doctor. Wanda felt
she was having menopause related problems, but the doctors told
her she was too young for that. In some cases,
they were reportedly shocked when she told them she was
(25:17):
almost fifty. She was very petite and thin for her
whole life, and a lot of times that made her
seem a lot younger than she really was. She was
mistaken for a teenager well into her adult life, but
none of that addressed why she felt terrible a lot
of the time. Yeah, there are some references in her
diary where you can tell she's talking about not feeling great,
(25:41):
and it reads as being almost tentative to actually write
down what she's experiencing because it seems a little scary.
By nineteen forty four, though, Wanda was often complaining of
shortness of breath, and it was bad enough that she
could not work on her art, which for her was
like not being able to breathe, and then just day
(26:02):
to day things like brushing her teeth became simply too
much for her. At this point, she had started staying
exclusively in an apartment that she had gotten in New
York because the winters at all Creation were too cold
and traveling between the two was too arduous. Finally, in
February of nineteen forty five, she was admitted to Doctor's
(26:23):
Hospital for exploratory surgery, and the resulting news was very bad.
Wanda had lung cancer and had months to live. This
news was not given to Wanda, but to Earle and
Earl and Wanda's brother, Howard discussed the matter and decided
not to tell Wanda or her sisters. This is how
(26:45):
it was often handled at the time. I'm not excusing it,
but that's like how it was often handled at the time. Yes,
Wanda still had treatments and her diary entries indicate that
she figured out from those treatments that she must have
had one or more malignant growths, and she knew she
was only getting worse. Earle did everything he could to
(27:05):
make Wanda's life as comfortable as possible. They spent time
in Milford when she felt well enough, and he drove
her to Florida for a vacation in the spring of
nineteen forty five. After they got back to New York
and then to New Jersey, she oversaw the planting of
her annual vegetable garden and worked on another project, more
Tales from Grimm for Coward McCann. In late June of
(27:27):
nineteen forty five, Wanda rapidly declined and was admitted to
Doctor's hospital once again. She died there on June twenty seventh.
Today you can visit the new Olm House, designed by
Anton Goog, that Wanda and her siblings grew up in
if you happen to be visiting Minnesota. It is open
regular hours June to October and then by appointment throughout
(27:48):
the rest of the year. So if that's something you
want to do, highly recommend you check out their website.
So that you get all the details before you show
up and find out maybe you couldn't go in. But
that is Wanda Gog. I have so much behind the
scenes stuff to talk about for her, and in the
meantime I have a little bit a listener mail. This
(28:08):
is a listener mail about one of my favorite topics
of recent past, spite houses. This is from our listener Lily,
who writes, Hello, lovely ladies. Your podcast has been one
of my favorites for years, so firstly, thank you for
all your good work and wonderful and interesting content. I
got especially excited about your episode on spite houses, which
is just a hilarious concept to me. In December twenty
(28:31):
twenty two to March twenty twenty three, I had the
opportunity to work and live in Lebanon, and towards the
end of my time there I learned about Abasa translated
to English the Grudge. This is the thinnest building in
Beirut and was the result of feuding brothers arguing about
how to share the property their father had left them.
I was so fortunate to have a friend in Beirut
(28:53):
who took me there so I could see the building
and the stunningly beautiful view that the one brother wanted
to block from the other. Looking for wered to hear
about hopefully more spite houses around the world and all
other things you come up with. I've attached photos I
took of the grudge and also a few of my
little fur ball, Wilma Waffle. She's a ten year old,
cuddly and very gracious lady from a little island on
(29:14):
the Arctic Circle right off the coast of Norway, Trena,
and she lives to lay on the floor for a
big belly rub. She also loves smelly shoes and bird watching.
You know, I had a cat that was very obsessed
with smelly shoes and we used to discuss that he
looked like he was huffin' when he got in there.
She is adorable, by the way. I want to rub
that tummy so much. And I love the grudge. I mean,
(29:34):
I don't love it, but I love it. It's one
that did come up when I was looking at spite
houses online, but it's a little newer, and also I
didn't have a ton of info on it. But it
is a very very narrow house that has been built
to block a beautiful view from another house, because that's
(29:56):
a number of spite houses come about that way. I'm
just laughing about spite houses now. If you would like
to write to us about spite houses, or kiddies or
wandagg or children's literature or any of the other many
many things, you can do that at History podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. If you have not subscribed to the
(30:17):
show and you would like to, I promise you that
is the easiest thing you will maybe do today. You
can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite podcasts.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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