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- [00:02]
Jodi Avergan
We're living through a pretty rocky present. Maybe the past can help. Check out Radiotopia's this Day, hosted by Jodi Avergan with historians Nicole Hemmer and Kelly Carter Jackson. Three times a week they take you into one story from that day in US History, from Eisenhower's weird vendetta against squirrels to the time we accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on North Carolina, to the women who fought against the right to vote. It's smart, surprising, and actually fun. This is a big moment for history. Next year is America's 250th birthday and, well, look around. There's lots of history being made. Subscribe to this day for your historical perspective, wherever you get your podcasts, as well as YouTube and Instagram.
- [00:52]
Vivian Le
Growing out my hair, which I've been doing since the pandemic, has felt like a long journey. In fact, my buddy Vivian Le once teased me that I started growing out my hair because I don't have a pet. And it's true. Sometimes my hair does feel like my pet. What can I say? I love to spoil her. The way that I'm going to treat her this summer is by using Nutrafol. It's the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand trusted by over one and a half million people. Anything truly worthwhile takes time and effort. And with Nutrafol, see thicker, stronger, faster growing hair and less shedding it in just three to six months. We all dream of a pet who doesn't shed. While many supplements rely solely on ingredient studies, Nutrafol clinically tests final formulations to ensure their efficacy. In a clinical study, 90% of women saw overall improvement in their hair after taking Nutrafol Women's hair growth supplement for six months. And it's not just for women. Everybody can enjoy Nutrafol for a limited time. Nutrafol is offering listeners of articles of interest $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping when you go to nutrafol.com and enter the promo Code articles spelled N U T R a f o l.com promo code articles that's nutrafol.com promo code articles.
- [02:12]
Avery Trufelman
Articles of Interest is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Hi, it's Avery peeking out of hiding.
- [02:37]
Nate DiMeo
I've been mostly holed up trying to.
- [02:39]
Avery Trufelman
Write this book, banging my head against.
- [02:40]
Nate DiMeo
The keyboard every morning, trying to make words come out. It's been so hard.
- [02:45]
Avery Trufelman
And I was like, why didn't anyone.
- [02:46]
Nate DiMeo
Warn me that writing was so hard? And then I remembered that is almost entirely all that writers ever talk about. I just didn't listen.
- [02:55]
Avery Trufelman
But this process makes me all the.
- [02:57]
Nate DiMeo
More in awe of Nate DiMeo. Nate has been a hero of mine for years now. His podcast, the Memory palace, tells these little delicious vignettes from obscure parts of history. They are so perfectly written, each one just this little transportative. Bon bon. The Memory palace was one of the first podcasts I ever discovered, and it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before.
- [03:21]
Avery Trufelman
The show is really simple.
- [03:22]
Nate DiMeo
Nate just reads these short stories. They're like 15 minutes usually.
- [03:28]
Avery Trufelman
And he's got this warm, elegant voice. It's a really easy conceit, right? Just excellent writing, excellent reading.
- [03:34]
Nate DiMeo
Nate's been doing this for like 15 years. He's a master. His show has been a Peabody finalist. He was the artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I even once, totally by accident, stumbled upon an interpretive modernist dance performance that was made out of one of his stories. And now Nate has finally assembled a book of all of his beloved stories from the Memory Palace. It is called the Memory True Short Stories of the Past. It is a delight, and not only to finally have his work in solid paper form, accompanied by beautiful photographs and illustrations. The real treat is that Nate has also released a special audiobook version where he asked his various friends to essentially cover his stories. So you can hear versions of Memory palace episodes read by my friends and heroes like Roman Mars from 99% invisible, Rishikesh Hirway from Song Exploder, and even some A list actors like Carrie Coon and Ryan Reynolds. So I am so honored that Nate also asked me to read one of his stories.
- [04:35]
Avery Trufelman
And so I thought I'd give you.
- [04:36]
Nate DiMeo
A little peek into the Memory Palace. First, I'm going to play an excerpt from the audiobook, the little story that I read, written by Nate DiMeo. Then there'll be a little pause and then I will play my very favorite episode of the Memory Palace. It's about fashion, but that's not the reason it's my favorite episode.
- [04:55]
Avery Trufelman
Sound good?
- [04:56]
Nate DiMeo
Okay, here we go.
- [04:59]
Avery Trufelman
Looking up a postcard from The Waldorf Astoria, May 19, 1910. They started crowding into the express elevator at 10 o' clock, bundled in their topcoats, puffed in their furs, friends who'd been up there earlier in the week had warned them about how cold it gets on the roof. And besides, a little extra protection might be useful on a night when there was a chance they might all die. Astronomers were in heaven. They'd trained their telescopes on Halley's comet as soon as it rounded the bend on its 76 year circuit of the solar system. They had learned so much about its relative velocity, its eccentricity, its aphelion, its perihelion. And they discovered two things that had made headlines beyond the academy. First, the Comet's 24 million mile long tail was composed in part of cyanide gas. And second, for six hours in 1910, when the Comet would be at its brightest in the night sky, that tail would envelop the earth. Those things were in all the papers. That neither the cyanide nor the comet's tail posed any but the very slightest, barely calculable danger to anyone at all was less widely covered. Instead, there were stories of panic in every corner of the soon to be destroyed globe. Many were overblown supposed mass suicides in Hungary, riots over the exorbitant costs of voodoo protections in Haiti. Others were true. The Florida man selling space on his submarine where people could be safe from the comet's rays. The miner in California who crucified himself convinced that the end times were nigh. But here were well bred and well read Manhattanites stepping off the elevator and into the most exclusive party in the world, knowing that the chances that that world would end were incredibly small, but still big enough to make the whole thing extra fun. So onto the roof of the Waldorf Astoria and into the crisp night air, into music and French perfume and cigarette smoke. The women compared their silver comet pins and their gold comet tail charms and their diamond fireball. The men fetched them Comet cocktails from the bar. They smiled at friends, at people they'd run into now and then at the symphony or in the men's lounge after a squash game, smiling at anyone. Because to be here at all was to be someone worth smiling at. Just before midnight, when the planet first became enwrapped in the comet's tail, they could look out across the rooftops of their city and know there was nowhere else on earth they would rather be. They could see the lights from other parties on other rooftops. The Plaza and the Gotham and the Knickerbocker and the St. Regis and the Astra and the Belmont and the Majestic. They could make out people standing on the observation decks of steamships churning the Hudson. They could see the construction site of the Woolworth building which someday soon would rise higher than they were right now. But not tonight. They could look out to New Jersey where the mayor of Woodbury had ordered the police department to make wake up calls to make sure no one slept through the big moment. They could look down on tenement roofs, down on the people who lived there, the people who read the rags that sold fear to sell papers, some of whom had bought so called Comet pills or sucked on Comet inhalers in the hopes that when morning came, if morning came at all, they'd be the smart ones left to rebuild the ruined world. They could look out over the whole city, awake and alive, leaning out of windows, craning their necks, playing the this could be our last night on earth card on reluctant lovers passing bottles between neighbors on stoops and fire escapes, dancing like there was no tomorrow, letting the kids stay up late talking to strangers on the street. They could look out and see the whole world looking up.
- [09:09]
Nate DiMeo
Audio excerpted courtesy of Random House Audio from the Memory palace by Nate DiMeo read by a full cast Excerpt read by AVERY TRUFELMAN Copyright 2024 Nate DeMeo Phonographic Copyright 2024 Penguin Random House, LLC.
- [09:20]
Avery Trufelman
All rights reserved.
- [09:22]
Nate DiMeo
So, I mean, I have to say, with the holidays coming up, this book again called the Memory True Stories from the Past, would make a perfect gift for book lovers on your list or the person who's impossible to shop for. I can also just imagine gathering around on Christmas morning and having the book lying around, just reading little bits from it between snippets of conversation and getting up to help yourself to leftovers. It's a gem. Congratulations, Nate. Tell me all your writing secrets, please. After the break, you'll hear the original, my favorite episode of the Memory palace, coming right up. The surefire sign of a good podcast episode is that you can remember where you were when you listened to it. I remember I listened to this when I was leaving the Metropolitan Museum because I had gone to see Nate DeMaio's.
- [10:06]
Avery Trufelman
Residency there, and I was like, oh.
- [10:07]
Nate DiMeo
I'm on this Memory palace kick. And I right away queued up this one and was like, whoa, what is this?
- [10:15]
Avery Trufelman
This is called the House of Lo.
- [10:19]
Nate DiMeo
This is the Memory palace. I'm Nate DiMeo. Everything was ruined. It wasn't her fault. She had done everything right. She finished on schedule with two weeks left to tinker if she needed to. But she didn't even need to. But the water main just burst. Everything was ruined. All the bridesmaid dresses, all that work, the cutting, the sewing stitching by hand, the consultations with the mother and then the bride and then the bride with the mother and on and on, all the drawings and fittings and alterations. Hundreds of yards of fabric just ruined two months of work, ruined 10 days before the wedding. There was nothing Ann Lowe could do but wipe her tears and get back to work. The family didn't need to know. She would remake the dresses, all of them, pull all nighters every night. She would call in every seamstress she knew, every favor, all hands on deck. She'd overpay them, she'd pay them overtime, whatever it took to get as many hands on deck as possible. She would throw money at the problem, though she didn't really have the money to throw at the problem. She had expected to clear $700 profit on the job. This was the early 50s, but now with the new fabric and all the help and the extra hours, she was going to wind up two grand in the hole. But the money didn't really matter, she would tell herself as she wrote another check. These were good clients, they had been good to her. But this wedding, this was the one, the social event of the year, maybe the decade, and the work she'd get from it. You had to spend money to make money, right? Isn't that how all her clients made theirs? The publicity, the exposure from this kind of thing, having her name out there, it would all pay off. The money didn't matter, she would tell herself, but she wouldn't need to tell herself when she would stand up from her stool, sore from sitting for hours, needle between her teeth, and stand back and look at her work, at the dress on, the form coming together, coming back to itself now, the ivory silk shimmering peach in the light coming through her studio windows as dawn broke after another all nighter. The money didn't matter. This was what she was meant to do. Born to do, she would say. Her mother was a dressmaker and her mother was a dressmaker, and her mother became a dressmaker for the family who owned her and it kept her out of the fields. So she taught her daughter to make dresses, too, hoping it would help save her from some of the worst fates in the plantation. Enloe was born in 1898 and learned to make clothes by playing with the scraps of fabric that fell onto the carpet at her mother's and grandmother's feet as they worked the treadles of their sewing machines in a shop they had built over the course of decades. Little Ann would make dresses for her dolls and for herself. She loved making silk flowers Camellias, azaleas, magnolias, all from trimmings and remnants and bits and bobs from the gowns and corsets and petticoats her mama and grandmama would make for the elite white families of Alabama. And so by the time she was 17 and a full fledged apprentice in that shop and her mother died suddenly while in the middle of an order for the governor's family and was able to wipe her tears and finish the job by the next year, she was married and had a baby son. Her new husband didn't want her to work outside of the home. He thought that making clothes for he and their family should be enough. And she was thinking about that and how she just couldn't imagine that, couldn't imagine how she was supposed to live a life without making beautiful things. As she walked through a department store in Montgomery, she had been there many times before, but this time she felt like she was being stared at. There was an older white woman whispering to an older white clerk, and she knew that they were whispering about her, probably about how she didn't belong. And she was gearing up to give that woman a piece of her mind when that same woman turned to her and asked her who made that dress she was wearing. She simply had to know who designed it. So Ann Lowe introduced herself, and when the woman said she would pay her to move to Tampa to make dresses for her daughter's wedding for all the women in her family, Ann Lowe thought of her husband waiting at home, wanting her at home, and she left him there. She wrote this in her diary. I left my husband today. I packed my belongings, grabbed my young son and sought my freedom. My great grandmother was enslaved, her every move controlled by others. My grandmother was enslaved. I will not be. It is 1916. I will not be enslaved. For 10 years, Anne dressed anyone who was anyone on Florida's Gulf coast, and she loved it. And Mrs. Lee, the woman who brought her there, loved her work, loved Anne and her young son Archie, and encouraged her when she wanted to study fashion in New York. Anne sent off an application and dresses and sketches and was accepted into the most prestigious design program in the city. But when she arrived in the first day of class, the head of the program was dumbfounded. He'd had no idea he'd let a Negro into his school. There was no way for him to tell by her portfolio, and he was sorry. But he just never imagined that Enlo spent what she would remember as the loneliest year of her life as a fashion design student in New York. Her Teachers, her fellow students didn't want her there, made sure she knew it. And she dropped out of school. But she didn't quit. She opened up her own shop in Harlem. And eventually, after years of work on Madison Avenue in the heart of the fashion district, she stitched together a career, dress by dress, client by client. Clients who would pass around her name like a secret lest they lose her to the larger world, lest she become too big and too busy to make them their dresses. Anne's name seemed to find its way to any American city where its wealthiest citizens debuted their daughters. She dressed Astors, Roosevelts, Lodges, Rockefellers, Duponts, Rothschilds and Bouviers. She made Jackie Bouvier's mother's second wedding dress, made she and her sister Lee's debutante dresses. And when it came time for Jackie to marry Jack Kennedy, the young senator, it would have to be Ann Low. Jackie's mother loved Ann's work and Jackie's future father in law loved the idea that an African American would make Jack's bride's dress. It might help him with the black vote down the road. But then the water main broke. Neither Jackie's nor Jack's family ever found out. They never knew just how exhausted Ann must have been as she drove herself up from New York to Newport. Or knew how close they had come to not having dresses for their wedding day. Twice actually. That thing with the water main. Then when she pulled up in the circular driveway in front of the Victorian mansion at the edge of the Atlantic, when she was told she would have to enter through the servants entrance in the back. And she said the bride wouldn't be getting dressed that day unless she were allowed to walk through the front door. And they never knew how it must have felt to drive home. Salt air through the open windows. Mid September in Rhode Island. Her job done and done well. Knowing that all that work had been worth had cost her all those sleepless nights and $2,000 she didn't really have. But people were going to know the name Ann Low. Just wait till the world saw her dress. The next day Jackie Kennedy in ivory taffeta was international news. The portrait neckline, the full flowing skirt, the little wax flowers tucked into the folds. It was a sensation, the dress appearing in papers all over the world. But Annloe's name did not. Fame never came to Anlo like she'd hoped, like she deserved. Let's just say it plain. One afternoon years earlier in 1946, she was sent to Paris by a black owned newspaper to cover its first fashion Week after the war, she wasn't showing herself. But as people raved about the dresses she was wearing that of course she had made, she felt like it was just a matter of time before she would be back watching her own collection walk the Runway. She was at a party with a client, Marjorie Meriwether Post, the glamorous socialite and art collector who made a fortune running the Post cereal company after her father's death. When she was 27, Ms. Post brought Christian Dior of the ascendant French house of Dior. She brought him over to meet her favorite designer and introduced her as Ann Lowe, the head of the American House of Low. But most of Anne's clients were content to keep her name like a secret. That same year, Olivia de Havilland handpicked one of Anne's dresses to wear to the Oscars. Wore it on stage when she won Best Actress. A pale blue green with hand painted flowers. The camellias and azaleas of Anne's youth. Olivia de Havilland didn't even know who designed it when she was asked. And in 1961, when Jackie Kennedy was First lady and everything she wore seemed to become what every young woman wanted to wear, a reporter asked her about her wedding dress. America wanted to know who'd designed it. Brides to be had been wondering for eight years. Jackie replied. A colored woman, not haute couture. Ann wrote a letter to the White House the next day. She said that it wasn't so much that Jackie didn't mention her name that bothered her. She wrote that she was used to that. It was the last part that got to her. Not haute couture. She thought of herself as an esteemed Negro designer. She'd wish the first lady had said something like that at least. Jackie's personal secretary called her to apologize, said the first lady couldn't control how the stories come out. But she was not going to push for the correction or the public statement that Ann was requesting. Some Years later, the IRS came after Ann's business. She owed $12,000 in back taxes, which wasn't all that surprising. There wasn't anything untoward going on. Her books were just a mess. She was an artist who would always spring for expensive material if it was the right material, who would always rather make the dress she wanted to make, help make that dress what it wanted to be and cut corners. But she had to liquidate the business and take jobs as an in house designer for Saks Fifth Avenue and other department stores to make ends meet. But then one day the IRS wrote to say that her debt had been paid and she never knew who did it. She liked to tell herself it was Jackie Kennedy making amends, but she seemed to have no reason to believe it besides wanting to. Before she died at the age of 83 in 1981, she did an interview looking back on her life and career. She hadn't worked for several years. Glaucoma had robbed her of her eyesight and one of her eyes. She missed the work terribly, but she was proud and said she was so happy to look back on her life spent doing what she loved to do. She said she harbored no grudge against Jackie Kennedy and it is nice to know that she died contented, having loved the work that defined it, that filled its days and many sleepless nights. And some of her dresses are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, others at the Museum of African American History and Culture on the mall in Washington D.C. but now that she is no longer with us, no longer here to harbor a grudge against Jackie or the other wealthy and powerful women who could have made her name but instead kept it their special secret, I will let you know and I will suggest that you listening here now. Join me if you're so inclined in harboring one on her behalf. That she should be a colored woman when she should have been haute couture, that we should know the House of Lo like we know Dior. The least we can do is say her name.
- [22:22]
Sam
Sam.
- [22:52]
Avery Trufelman
The House of Low was written and Produced by Nate DiMeo, research assistance.
- [22:55]
Nate DiMeo
From Eliza McGraw, engineering assistance by Elisabeth Hubert, and by the way, Nate mentioned at the end that Anne Lowe pieces are now displayed in the Museum of African American History and Culture. So it's actually a very interesting story about how her clothes got there. There's a reason why this designer isn't forgotten and it's mostly because of the dogged work of one woman, my friend Enya Hennings and I actually told that story in an episode of Articles of Interest called the Black Fashion Museum. If you're curious about it, it's an episode that's super dear to me. But honestly I first heard about Ann Lowe through the Memory Palace. The Memory palace and Articles of Interest are both proud members of Radiotopia. What is Radiotopia? They are a non profit and they help us sell advertisements to on our shows and all the shows fundraise and pool resources together. They are not our bosses. They do not make our episodes for us. We are all independent shows and Radiotopia is an organizational cooperative model that prioritizes art over profit because believe me, shows like the Memory palace and Articles of Interest are not in the profit generating business. Learn more and even donate if you wish at Radiotopia fm.
- [24:07]
Avery Trufelman
And thank you so much Radiotopia from PRX.