Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton, (William Jefferson Clinton) spent the first 6 years of his life in this house in Hope, Arkansas. It is located at 117 South Hervey Street and was built in 1917. His father, William Jefferson Blythe died in an auto accident shortly before his mother, Virginia Cassidy, gave birth to him. He was born at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope on August 19, 1946. His grandparents, Edith Grisham and James Cassidy owned the house. They cared for him as his mother was taking nursing classes in New Orleans. He had two strong women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. They both wanted to control the shaping of his character. His grandparents, Edith Grisham and James Eldridge Cassidy owned the house. They cared for him when his mother, Virginia, was away working as a Nurse in New Orleans. She named him William Jefferson Blythe III after his father who died in a car accident before his son’s birth.
When he was eight, his mother married Roger Clinton and the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas where they lived in a small house with no indoor plumbing. Bill’s stepfather was an alcoholic, and the family’s life was often disrupted by domestic violence. Bill said that when he was fifteen, he warned his stepfather never to hit his mother or half brother again. Despite, his rocky relationship with his stepfather, Bill changed his last name to Clinton as a teenager. When Clinton was seventeen, he met then President John F. Kennedy. As a result, Clinton decided that he wanted a career in politics. He entered Georgetown University in 1964. He graduated from Georgetown in 1968 with a degree in International Affairs. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship, which allowed him to continue his studies at Oxford University. In 1970 he entered Yale University, and go into private practice as a lawyer in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He later began to teach at the University Arkansas Law School. We took this picture from across the street where he had lived.
Carl Sandburg
We got a wonderful tour of the home and his library in 2004, as well as the barns where his wife raised her prize-winning goats. This is a beautiful little antebellum home, which the Sandburg
owned for the last twenty years of his life in Asheville, N.C. Carl Sandburg died in 1967.
The Sandburg’s moved here because Mrs. Sandburg needed land on which to raise her prize-winning goats. The descendants of those goats are still located there today.
Mrs. Sandburg sold it to the estate shortly after her husband’s death. The home is as it was when they lived here and-is filled with the actual books, furniture, etc., just as it was when the Sandburg’s were alive.
It’s a wonderful experience to walk through the rooms with a friendly, humorous, and knowledgeable guide– you feel as though the Sandburg’s just stepped out the back door and will be back any moment.
Oh, by the way, you can take pictures inside as long as you don’t use flash. At this writing, kids are free; adults are $5 a head (for the house tour; touring the grounds and seeing the goats is free); we encourage you to go if you get the opportunity.
Benito Grande
Historical info on house from: Travel South Texas site.
We drove by this house and looked at the house but we were more interested in the old battleship, USS Texas, and the Maritime Museum than in the historical homes, which were part of the tour.
This structure was built in 1904 as a residence for the family of Benito Grande (1865-1926). Originally located at 709 Artesian Street (approximately 1 mile southwest), it was moved here in 1982 to preserve it from demolition. Benito Grande moved to Corpus Christi with his parents in the late 1860’s. Upon his father’s death in 1902, Grande took over the family business and became a prominent and very successful leader in Corpus Christi’s Mexican-American community. The Benito Grande family moved to Dallas in 1915. The home was acquired in 1925 for Rebecca Grossman, first matriarch of the Grossman family, who helped her older children emigrate from Russia during the early 1900’s. Mrs. Grossman (b. 1870) lived here until her death in 1952.
Descendants in Corpus Christi were outstanding leaders in business, medicine, law, politics, and religious affairs. Originally built with a two story central hall, the house has some bungalow style features. The Grossmans added the porch, which encircles the house on three sides, in the late 1920’s. Its dominant features are the brick piers and the stick style brackets supporting the eaves. The Grande-Grossman house has been preserved as an expression of part of the heritage of Corpus Christi.
Harry Truman
Harry Truman’s boyhood home in Lamar, Missouri, which the family occupied until Harry was 11 months old, was built between 1880 and 1882. John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Young Truman purchased the 20- by 28-foot house as newlyweds in 1882 for $685.
Visitors today can view its four downstairs rooms and two upstairs rooms, as well as the smokehouse, well and outhouse located in the back. The modest furnishings inside the house and the surrounding landscaping represent a typical home of the time. It had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing.
Harry S. Truman was the eldest of three children; he had a brother and a sister. Harry’s parents could not decide on his middle name, but since both final alternatives began with “S,” the Truman’s adopted the middle initial by itself. When Harry was six years old, his family moved from a 600-acre farm near Grandview, Missouri, to Independence, where Harry entered public school and attended the Baptist church. Young Harry started wearing eyeglasses at age eight. Cautioned by the optometrist against breaking them, Harry shied away from rough play. By 14 years of age, Harry had read all the books in the Independence Public Library, plus the Bible three times.
After graduating from high school at Independence, he worked on a variety of jobs before managing his family’s farm from 1906 to 1917. Truman wanted to attend West Point, but was not accepted because of poor eyesight. He did join the Missouri National Guard in 1905. At the outset of World War I, he served in the U.S. Army as an artillery battery commander in France. Following World War I, Truman returned to Kansas City where he married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Virginia (“Bess”) Wallace, on June 28, 1919. He opened a men’s haberdashery, which failed in the postwar depression. Harry and Bess had one daughter, Mary Margaret, born in 1924. Harry lost his temper when a newspaper spoke badly of Margaret’s singing.
Harry S. Truman assumed the POTUS on the death of FDR during the waning time of the WWII. He had many accomplishments during his time as President. When the Soviet Union became the enemy during the Cold War, he oversaw the Berlin Airlift of 1948. He helped in the creation of NATO in 1949.
When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, he gained approval from NATO and entered the U.S. into the War. He started the integration of the U.S. Military and accomplished many other legislative achievements during his time in office.
He faced many problems in his presidency such as following a President who was beloved by many, but failed to inform Truman of anything about the information of his office that he would be passing on after his death. Truman did not know of the development of the Atom Bomb (The Manhattan Project) but he did not hesitate to use it to shorten WWII and to bring home the troops much sooner. Scholars rated his Presidency as “near great” and since then, he has been ranked between 5 for historical rankings of U.S. Presidents. After reading so much about him from several books, I have rated him at ‘number one’.
Jane Addams
This was Barbara’s favorite as she considered it to be the “Home Church for Social Workers” Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860-May 21, 1935) won worldwide recognition in the first third of the twentieth century as a pioneer social worker in America, as a Feminist, and as an Internationalist.
She was born in Cedarville, Illinois, the eighth of nine children. Her father was a prosperous Miller and local political leader who served for sixteen years as a state senator and fought as an officer in the Civil War. He was a friend of Abraham Lincoln whose letters to him began ‘My Dear Double D-‘ed Addams’. Jane had a congenital spinal problem and was not energetic when young nor truly robust even later in life, but her spinal difficulty was remedied by surgery.
In 1881 Jane Addams graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, the Valedictorian of a class of seventeen, but was granted the bachelor’s degree only after the school became accredited the next year as Rockford College for Women. In the course of the next six years she began the study of medicine but left it because of poor health, was hospitalized intermittently, traveled and studied in Europe for twenty-one months, and then spent almost two years in reading and writing and in considering what her future objectives should be.
At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London’s East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being to provide a center for a higher civic and social life, to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.
John Jacob Astor
Among the many mansions that we saw in Newport was the John Jacob Aster home and we got a little glimpse of what the rich in their day must have experienced with all their wealth. Mrs. Astor would spend one day a week driving through downtown Newport so the people could see her and know that she enjoyed her life.
Col. John Jacob Astor, the American head of the Astor family, has held a prominent place in the life of this city for many years. Not alone has he been a conspicuous club member and leader of society, but he has engaged in vast business activities that gave him a place of rank apart from his immense fortune and social attainments. Col. Astor put up and owned more hotels and skyscrapers than other New Yorker. At one time he was a Director of twenty or more large corporations, including railways. His fortune has been estimated at from $100,000,000 to $200,000,000.
What is unusual about the visit to the house is that after you pay the fee for the tour, you are treated as a person who is interested in obtaining a job for the Astor family and the workers are dressed as maids and family employees who take you from room to room and give you all the family gossip as they do so. It gives them a chance to get in a lot of dirt and information on the family and for the visitor to get answers to all of their questions.
Both Colonel John Jacob Astor and his wife boarded the Titanic as it left for the U.S. and were aboard when the ship hit the berg. After the accident Astor left his suite to investigate, he quickly returned and reported to his wife that the ship had struck ice. He reassured her that the damage did not appear serious.
Later, when the first class passengers had begun to congregate on the boat deck, the Astor’s sat on the mechanical horses in the gymnasium. They wore their lifebelts but Colonel Astor had found another and cut the lining with a penknife to show his wife what it was made of.
Even as the boats were loaded Astor appeared unperturbed, he ridiculed the idea of trading the solid decks of the Titanic for a small lifeboat. He had changed his mind later. Astor helped his wife to climb through the windows of the enclosed promenade and then asked if he might join her, being as she was in ‘a delicate condition’. He was told that no men could enter until all the women had been loaded. Astor stood back. Astor stood alone while others tried to free the remaining collapsible boats. Astor’s body was recovered on Monday April 22 by the cable ship Mackay-Bennett.