Writing historical fiction based in the 1930s, makes me curious about how my heroines dressed. Kate and Betty Hadley, my starring ladies, live in Louisburg Square, Beacon Hill, Boston. That means they have money. Well, their father does, anyhow, and they live at home with him. (They are still young.)
With that said, they are not at all poor and they do not have to work for their food and living accommodations. They do not dress like the poor Depression-era women in their wrap-around cotton dresses with the tiny print design, kerchiefs and comfortable oxfords. The styles are extremely different from the Roaring 20s when women were just getting voting equality. To accent equality, they often wore their hair short, straight, masculine. Their clothes were also square cut, with a dropped waist, hiding their feminine shape
My ladies dress more like the Hollywood actresses, or, at least, like the other Boston Brahmins. Let’s look at a few instances.
Hair:
Betty is blonde and Kate is brunette. Their hair has long since grown out of the square cut boy-look of the 20s. Straight hair is out. Waves and curls are in. And since most of us do not have naturally wave-perfect hair, that means help is needed. Finger curls and pin curls solve many of the problems of trying to get the hair to curl. Short hair is curled into ripples by wetting it and placing open hand on the hair, press down and pull fingers together, hold a minute then gently pull away without disturbing the hair. Another technique, especially for longer hair, is curling the damp hair and pinning the curl against the head, then waiting until it dries. Taking the pins out gives the patient woman a head-full of curls. The finished product often has barrettes or flowers to enhance the femininity of the look.
Different hairdos require different hat styles. Over time, the stylish cloche added a brim and the brim grew. It became a slouch hat, with the brim turned up at the front. This hat is mostly for straight hair styles or short- hair. The most common hat is a small felt one with a single feather. In the summer, two types of hats are popular, the small white, flat one or the large wide-brimmed one, to help with the sun. Late in the decade, the men’s style fedora became popular, and Kate and Betty wear them when trying to look serious.
A very important part of dress is accessories. Bags at the beginning of the decade were small and flat, carrying very little. Later in the decade, they got a little bigger, with handles. They are big enough for Betty to carry her pen and notepaper, which she always does. However, the bags do not work with evening dresses. For that the ladies change to small purses, with jeweled clasps, or gold and silver lame cloth. The other important accessory is gloves. A well-dressed woman always wears gloves when she goes out. During the day, the gloves reach mid arm length. They are made out of fabric like cotton, or lace, or leather, depending on the outfit. Coordination is of the utmost importance. For those who can afford it, coordinating shoes, purse, gloves and belt is considered very chic. Evening gowns require longer, over-the-elbow gloves, usually white or a very pale pastel. However, that depended on the style of dress. Some dresses have matching boleros, in which case the long gloves do not work.
Why would a woman think her husbands loves his Stutz Bearcat more than he loves her? What did he mean when he repeated “The Stutz, the Stutz” as he lay dying? For that matter, what is a Stutz Bearcat? The answers are in the new book, coming soon.
A few people have asked me how did I find all the details for the story of “The Ragman Murders”.. After all, it is a true story, for the most part. Much angst and sweat went into the research. It is almost a book, itself. Be prepared for a long read; the story behind the story.
What started as an innocent question, thinking I was going to get a simple answer, ended up becoming the most intense research project of my life. I wondered how a woman died. Yes, it happened nearly 100 years ago. Yes, it involved a group of people who did not speak about the subject for all those years. But I wanted the answer.
I had been told the answer, or answers, as I discovered over time. She was either killed in a car accident in Italy with her husband. Or, she died in childbirth and her heart-broken husband ran away. Or, she took a bullet for her husband when an angry neighbor brandished his gun. None of these turned out to be the truth. All I knew is that Carmela Amato died in the early 1910s, probably in Hartford, Ct.
I began at the end of the story. Or, so I thought. This was twenty years ago, before a google search was known. Before ancestry.com existed.
Working on what seemed to be the most likely scenario, that she took a bullet from a neighbor’s gun, I looked up the phone number for the Hartford, Ct police department. It was a whim. I was brave enough to ask what might be a totally foolish question. The phone operator was kind enough to pass me through to Detective Lt. Jose Lopez. Instead of taking my phone call as a silly one, Detective Lopez listened to my not very clear description of what I knew and said he would get back to me.
And he did. About two weeks later, I received a phone call from Detective Lopez. I was at work and, luckily, it was a slow day. The first thing he said was, “Are you sitting down?” I sat down immediately. Then the detective told me that he had combed the archives of the Hartford Courant and found several long articles referring to the death of Carmela Amato…..by her own husband. Stunned, I listened to his information and his promise to send me copies of the articles. It was only a few days later when I received the package including a personal letter.
Soon, my curiosity got the better of me, so, I called Detective Lopez and arranged a meeting to personally meet him and, separately, a crew from the Hartford Courant while I arranged two days of research at the Connecticut State Library. I found this all very exciting and decided to bring my 13yo step-daughter, Teresa, with me. I figured she could learn something about doing research. We drove the three hours across state lines and into Hartford. The first order of business was getting registered with the security department of the library, thus procuring an ID for me to be acceptable.
The library had microfiche readers, files full of microfiche film for every New England newspaper I had ever heard of and many I hadn’t. There were copies of city directories for as long as they had been published lining the whole wall of one of the rooms. Another room contained legal documents such as wills and coroners’ reports. The place was ripe for the picking. I was overwhelmed and wanted to start everywhere at the same time. I set Teresa to reviewing all the Hartford city directories, looking for my great-grandfather’s name in each. I, meanwhile, began going through all the newspapers looking for follow-up news reports dated after the murder. I found several supporting articles and printed them.
Trying to raise a young family and work full time does not leave much time for research. I read the newspaper articles over and over, trying to commit them to memory and find a hint as to where to find the next step.
At this point I had these three sources of information: very detailed (read: yellow journalism) newspaper reports of the murders which took place in July, 1912, a hastily put together will, dated the day our female victim died, giving her a name and an alias (why would anyone include an alias for a housewife?), and the coroner’s reports of our two victims (gee, there were a lot of bullets shot!). It wasn’t enough to answer my questions. But I had to put it on the back burner as family responsibilities took priority.
It was almost two years later when I had a chance to go back to Hartford for more work. More research for newspaper articles was first. I found nothing of significance. I turned my attention to another question: What happened to the children of our victims? We knew that the murderer certainly did not stay around to raise his own children after killing their mother. Where did they go? Before I could answer that, I chose to find their births and baptisms. I remembered the names of the children from family talk. Now I had to find proofs of their existence.
Calling the diocese chancery office, I found that the church where most Hartford Italians would have gone, St. Anthony’s, was no longer open for Masses. But the records of sacraments had stayed there. So, I had access to baptism files. This time with a friend, we went into the dingy, crowded storage rooms of the church basement. We were given free access to whatever was there. Large, hard-bound books filled with yellowed paper were arranged in chronological order along multiple shelves. I knew the birth date of only one of the six children. But I knew that child was the second oldest. So I began with the 1905 book.
As I opened the first book, I realized I had come across quite a find. Not only did I find the child’s name and date of baptism, they also listed the names of the godparents. This meant that not only could I identify correct names and dates of baptism of the children, as well as noting their birth order, I also had the name of two adults, not the parents, who had a relationship with the family. What struck me was the names as I knew them, were not the same as the names as recorded. For example, the child, Jimmy, was baptized Giuseppe Carmelo. And the child, Mary, was actually Maria Annunziata, because she was born on the Catholic feast of the Annunciation, March 25. Now I knew the correct names, dates of baptism (which was usually within days of the birth) and birth order.
I did not find the oldest child’s baptismal listing, which only meant she was not baptized in that church. But I did get six new names to add to the list of people of interest.
Twice more, I tried my hand at finding more information at the State Library in Hartford. There was less information acquired each time.
Early on, I had gotten a bit of information from the son-in-law of the murdered female victim. He said that the children, now grown, had called the murderer on the phone in 1930. Of course, the son-in-law was now in his mid 80s. Perhaps he was inventing stories due to Alzheimer’s? That bit of information was quite a stretch! But, no, he gave details. He, his wife and their little baby had gone to Hartford to visit relatives. They did not go often because it was a long arduous journey of almost a day to get there. His wife had actually talked to her father on the phone! And the man was not interested in resuming a relationship. A man, even an old man, would not think up something so hurtful, unless it was at least partly true.
So, I decided that calling long distance from Hartford being as expensive as it was back then, the phone call must have been to somewhere relatively close. The people who would have been calling were young, just getting on their feet, financially. So, I spent one of my trips to Hartford pouring through old city directories looking for men of the same name, Giuseppe Amato, in towns an hour or two away from the city. I could not find a good match. The name is rather common. It was always the wrong age, wrong occupation, or something else. I was barking up the wrong tree, I could see. It was one of those projects I had to put on the back burner until I had more information.
Thinking that maybe the police department had a whole file on the murder was another dead end. Apparently, when the department moved out of their big Main Street building, much was lost, or thrown away. There was nothing.
Calling the State Police lead nowhere, also. They did not get organized until a few years after the murder. And the telephone operator was rude!
Then I decided to write to the city hall in the town of origin for the Amatos, Serra San Bruno, Calabria, Italy. I had so little information. I knew that Amato is a pretty common name. I knew for sure that Amato was the victim’s maiden name. I did not know for sure if Giuseppe had the same last name or if he had adopted his wife’s last name when he came to America. As a matter of fact, the prevailing theory was that his name was really Amateau, French, not Italian. There had been stories….! I had heard a story that the two had eloped. Maybe that was the reason. So, I got someone to translate my letter which was very general: “Can you please give me information on the marriage of Maria Carmela Amato around 1901-1904.” Several months later, my letter came back with a note saying there was no information available. Now I know why. There are too many Amatos. They would want more information before they answered such a question. Like when? Or who was the groom?
Life took over and all I did for the next few years was arrange old photos in albums. However those photos were a peek into the past, as far back as 1915. There was one exception to that date. I had a photo, obviously cut from a larger picture, showing the female victim, Maria Carmela Amato, probably on her wedding day, judging from the ornateness of the dark dress. She was squinting into the sun. And her sister, sitting in front of her, looked just like her. I later learned that she was married in 1900.
Years passed and I had done nothing with the information I had, other than transcribe the newspaper articles. All I had was the basic story. No background. No conclusion. Then came the day when I discovered that the internet was a great addition to a computer. It was no longer just a word processor!
I quickly discovered search engines and started looking for the names of the people in the articles. There was more about the police officers who investigated the homicides than there was about the victims or the perpetrator. I found more than I could put in a single novel.
Then I discovered a small editorial, dated 1922, in a Bridgeport, Ct. newspaper. It was a discussion about domestic abuse. In it was a reference to a murder which had taken place in Hartford ten years before. The editor commented on the fact that the police were of the opinion that the double homicide was a case of domestic abuse, at first. But, then, as they investigated the days leading up to the murder, and the consequent flight of the murderer, they dismissed that theory in favor of a planned homicide. That information had not been given to the journalists in Hartford and it had not been discussed in the newspapers.
There was one interesting line in the article: It was known that Giuseppe Amato, our killer, had moved to British Columbia soon after his escape from police. That explained why I never made a connection with any Giuseppe Amatos in Connecticut! I now had to broaden my search.
I decided to find out any information I could about the Amatos previous to their coming to America. And the best place for me to look first was the amazing LDS (Mormon) files. At the time all these files were on microfiche. Files for Serra San Bruno covered the years 1801-1910. And, at $5 per roll of microfiche, I could hold them at the LDS center near my home and research them in the hours that it was open to the public. It was there that I found, after hours of fighting the poorly maintained readers and comparing names and dates, marriage certificates for Maria Amato and Domenico DeFrancesco, Carmela’s sister, and a baptismal certificate for Maria Teresa Amato, first daughter of Carmela and Giuseppe. Her godfather was named Salvatore Timpano. I meant to go back for more but I found a better choice.
The website ancestry.com had been out a few years by the time I joined. I combed the forums and put out feelers, addressing anyone who mentioned “Serra San Bruno” or “Amato”.
I also found a website, named italiangenealogy.com, where one can ask questions and people on both sides of the ocean will attempt to help answer them. Two women at the site, Tessa and Suanj, having great amounts of research knowledge, helped me with my very elementary questions. I thought that anyone with the names Giuseppe and Carmela Amato had to be my Giuseppe and Carmela. But, of course, research is not that easy when you have common names. The Amatos who came in via Boston were not mine. The Amatos who married in Vancouver were not mine. Over the space of several weeks, we discovered that Giuseppe had come alone, twice, and Carmela came later, with a new baby girl, Maria Teresa, in 1904. And they moved in with Domenico and Maria on Asylum Ave. They also found the ship manifests which listed who came with Maria when she came in 1903, who traveled with Giuseppe when he returned to America in 1904. And for the first time, I found a reference to Giovanni Tassone and his wife, Rafaella Gentile, outside of the newspaper reports. These two hardworking ladies found dates of arrival of each and the marriage certificate issued in 1901.
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