Parnassus on Wheels
I hope to maintain a schedule of 2 or 3 posts a week, but will be holding back some fresh material for the book. One nice thing about web publishing is that I can go crazy with as much visual material as I like. Even little things like dust jacket art and snippets from handwritten cards or typewritten letters I hope will bring the project a more organic feel than the cold ones and zeroes of this increasingly dumbed down digital age.
I hope the following tale resonates.
It is something of a follow-up to my previous essay ‘Ye Noble Villains.’
Herma Jefferies, as mentioned, was a very meek and humble figure around Liberation-Soulcraft headquarters for 60 years when I met her in 1995. I knew she would be one of my most valuable contacts in trying to imagine what it was like for the average person on staff in Asheville during the 1930s.
I imagined Pelley’s local social circle must have been rich with interesting individuals. Of course the Chief loomed large but, while he was most often on the road, what was it like for his entourage here in the mountains?
A small insight from Herma helps paint a moving picture.
I had looked up every name I could connect with Pelley in local city directories of the period. I found Herma living in the Kenilworth neighborhood between Asheville and Biltmore Village. I found the old house and took a few pictures about dusk one evening. The exposures were too dark, but the shape and outline of the building were discernible. I sent them to Herma. Her reply:
It recalled a conversation we had while seated around the coffee table in Noblesville a short time before. Herma said that several Pelley Publishers employees lived in Kenilworth and she would round them up in her ’28 Model A Ford, some men standing on the running boards and hanging on for dear life as “Parnassus” coasted down the hill into Biltmore.
It was Adelaide, seated next to her as she described this scene for me, who volunteered that Herma’s old Ford had a name. I assume she was still driving it when she arrived in Noblesville in late 1940, as Adelaide had never spent time in Asheville, only passing through once at night. But how about “Parnassus?”
Only last weekend I finished reading the short book which inspired the name, Christopher Morley’s “Parnassus on Wheels.” It is a delightful little tale which Pelley likely enjoyed and approved of while writing his Paris, Vermont stories. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but suffice to say that the heroine acquires a travelling bookseller’s wagon named… you guessed it. Helen McGill spent $400 on the contraption which she had been saving up to buy a Ford. There are great bits of prose which really mesh with the personality of a Pelley bookworm. I felt right at home with these eccentric characters.
I was pleased to find a copy of this book, first published over a century ago, at the Black Mountain library.
I visited the rooming house in Kenilworth in better daylight the next year and my clever artist friend Lee Brooks took the accompanying photos. Perhaps the most notable figure to stay there during Herma’s time was Marguerite Carmichael, who was charged with harboring H.V. Broenstrup while he was a fugitive from the 1944 Mass Sedition Trial. She would later marry him.
Sometimes I coast down the hill into Biltmore with the car windows down and imagine how it must have felt riding on Parnassus’ running boards on the way to fight our daily war of words with Roosevelt and his cronies.