Cousin Sister
Like Helen Hemlin, my cousin, George, is one of my favorite humans on earth. He once told me when I was old enough to understand, how he dreaded Christmas and Thanksgiving family visits. There was no one in Portsmouth his age. I was ten years younger and he was much younger than most of his other cousins. Even so, his mother loaded him into the car for the drive from Columbus, Ohio, to our deteriorating old steel town, Portsmouth, Ohio.
Separated from Kentucky by the Grant Bridge over the Ohio River, Portsmouth, was, I agreed, at best, boring. Growing up there, I made up my own fun: kickball in the streets with the Summit Street kids, riding my bike to library and laying on its cool floor reading, sitting on the levy waiting for barges and their waves to make it to the bank below me.
I always looked forward to George’s visits. He taught me to play chess, walked with me around the block, and, in general, paid attention to me. I adore him to this day, even more so because he married Julie.
One year while visiting them in Portland, Julie decided we needed to have a girls day. We did yoga, got our nails painted, and then went shopping. I’d never liked shopping before that day. Or yoga. Or getting my nails done. But Julie was like an older sister I’d longed for. From then on, she has been my Cousin Sister and she pays attention too.
Two Questions
It was Julie’s questions that kicked off Episode 6.
What do you remember about your grandparents [Helen Hemlin Cooke and Charles Cooke] and why are they important to you?
Julie B, Cousin Sister Extraordinaire, Some Time Long Ago
That the questions caught me by surprise, surprised me. Why didn’t I have a ready answer? The questions rummaged through my memories until the answer possibilities formed. I didn’t expect a Tweet-worthy answer for some time.
But, if I had to tweet something, I’d say Helen showed me I could do anything I set my mind to do, regardless of the obstacles in the way.
Letter from Helen – 1985
In between my junior and senior years in high school, I attended Miami University with help of a scholarship and savings from a part-time job. It took about a week to learn how ill prepared I was for a college education. Although I was at the top of my high school class in my hometown, relative to the students I met in Oxford, Ohio, I was a few years behind. They had taken “AP” (Advanced Placement) tests that I had never heard of and Calculus. Algebra II and Geometry, both of which I loved, were the most advanced math classes at my school.
A few days after my Dad left me at my dorm, the floor leader summoned me for an emergency call. Dad shared that a friend, with whom I’d just spent several weeks, had ended her life. I didn’t then and still don’t know what happened. I do remember it consuming me. I was unable to focus on my studies and quickly fell behind, soon dropping Astrophysics and barely passing Political Science.
I must have written to Helen about it and possibly shared my struggle. Her response skimmed over the difficulty and encouraged me to focus on unknown opportunities ahead. She shared her decision to leave Columbia University and accept Lowell Thomas’ invitation to join his staff of writers in 1929. She explained her decision that she could finish university anytime.
While the letter didn’t directly address my grief, it did give me hope that this one setback was not the end of my education. It was also the first time I remember learning she had lupus.
Letter from Lowell Thomas – 1929
I remember Helen mentioning Lowell Thomas often on my visits to Arlington. It’s possible I may have even met him. A lot of people visited and I vaguely recall celebrating one 4th of July at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. Given his prominence in broadcasting, it would not surprise me to know he was there. However, I did not know until decades later of his world travels or of his fame and success as a newscaster.
While I might not have understood in 1985 the significance of her step off of a planned path, her decision made an impression. From then on, I acted on opportunities, albeit without as much awareness in the moment as I have in retrospect. That’s how I ended up with a diverse collection of experiences in the IT industry. I’ve tried everything from programming to leading international strategic initiatives (a fancy word for project).
Helen’s adventurous spirit, potentially influenced by Thomas’ seems to have prodded me at times.
It was not until I started the Another Thousand Letters project, though, that I found Thomas’ 1929 letter inviting “Miss Helen Hemlin” at Apartment No. 9 in Brooklyn Heights to join him. Reading from the letter in Episode 6 was magic. What were the chances I’d find the 1929 letter from him that prompted the decision she shared in her 1985 letter?
Somehow the discovery erased every doubt I had about all the unplanned steps I’d taken in my life. All the changes in majors. The job changes. Divorce from my high school sweetheart who wanted children when I didn’t. Self-funding work sabbaticals. Pursuing dirtbag, ultra-running in mountains instead of trying to get faster and faster on pavement.
Piling on to the “For Later” List
Helen had mentioned in her letter that she joined three other writers. Curious about those with whom she wrote and what they had written for Thomas, I researched. I found the Lowell Thomas Papers archive at Marist College and the Victor Lowell Thomas Museum in Victor, Colorado. Visiting the museum from home in Boulder would be easy after the pandemic restrictions eased.
But it was the archive of boxes of personal and professional correspondence and pictures that called to me. Would there be correspondence between Thomas and Helen Hemlin? Other photos labeled that might identify people or occasions in the photos in my collection?
I was fascinated to learn whether some of my favorite photos of Helen in the collection were taken while working for Thomas. I added both the questions and a visit to the museum to my “For Later” List.
Letter from Lowell Thomas – 1949
I had found a few letters to Helen and Charles from Thomas as late as 1973. But, my favorite was the framed letter accompanied by a photo that he wrote to Helen and Charles, from Llasa, Tibet, in 1949.
He and his son (also Lowell Thomas) became the 7th and 8th westerners to visit the area. They met the fifteen year old Dalai Lama, whose government had hoped that Thomas’ reporting would motivate the world to save Tibet from a Chinese takeover. Their visit was the subject of the documentary film High Adventure with Lowell Thomas, a remake of which appears to be underway, as well as Lowell Thomas Junior’s book, Out of This World.
Thomas’ letter explained that the envelope was made from paper, hand-made from the bark of a tree in Bhutan because there were no trees at that altitude in Tibet. He had hand-carried the Dali Lama’s stamped letter back to Helen and Charles because he believed it would never be delivered if sent through regular mail.
Letter Indexing – Continued
As with my first project with 1,000 letters (Running to Thousand Letters), this second project’s cursive letters slowed progress. Typed letters are easy to import by using optical character recognition to scan text and then search and organize electronically. But cursive writing was still technically challenging. I found a promising artificial intelligence project, Transkribus, that I might be able to train to recognize Helen’s writing. I added it to my “For Later” list.
After sorting letters by date, I read them through 1942. After reading each one, I added an entry to an electronic index.
I opened an unopened letter dated 1925 from Columbia University and was disappointed to learn of Helen’s withdrawal from French mid-semester to “take a job elsewhere.” I added pursuing the reasons she left and where she went to my ‘For Later’ list and also sent emails requesting her transcripts from Columbia and University of New Mexico.
I was particularly excited to find Helen’s Preliminary Certificate from St. Agnes Academic School dated 1914. I later learned that the school having been recently founded could only give preliminary certificates until it was certified by the state of New York.
The 1920’s letters to Helen indicated that she was back and forth between Queens, New York, and Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. But I had no idea why. I found a picture dated February 4th, 1923, placing her in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on that date. It is one of my favorite photos in the collection, but I’ve no idea if she flew in the plane.
Unanswered Questions
This early in the project, I still had more questions than answers. Where did Helen grow up? How and why did she end up in New Mexico? How did she end up working for Lowell Thomas in the late 1920’s and who were the three other writers with whom she worked? Is that where she met Charles? In the bottom right of this photo, is this the three of them? What is the occasion?
The unanswered questions and my curiosity propelled me forward.
