Silhouettes Cast Across Time
Galahad’s Browning Twins
Very soon after we met, Guy Harwood told me of his first visit to Galahad College. He hopped the Charlotte Street trolley and struck up a conversation with a young lady. “I’m going to check out Galahad College,” he said. “Oh? That’s where I’m going,” her response, “I work there. I’ll be glad to show you around.”
When the streetcar stopped at the corner of Charlotte and Sunset Parkway, the two disembarked together and walked up the sidewalk to the front door of a substantial red brick building. The young lady opened the door and Guy’s eyes fell on a long table against the wall at the back of the foyer. It was covered with magazines, brochures and pamphlets. His lady friend reached down to retrieve a small gray booklet and handed it to him. The cover read, “Making Contact with the Dead.”
As he reached this point in his story we were standing in his apartment in Asheville’s old Vanderbilt Hotel. He turned from an open filing cabinet and handed me the very same tract this kind lady had given him 60 years before. “That’s yours now. You can keep that,” he told me, in an amazingly personal gesture toward someone he had met maybe 15 minutes before. I spent the next few years trying to repay that kindness with my full attention and then, after his stroke, with occasional visits as he was shifted between nursing homes and his once sharp memory faded.
When I visited with Herma and the Pearsons in Noblesville, I recounted Guy’s story for them. When I mentioned the young lady from the trolley, Herma turned and asked Adelaide, “One of the Browning twins?” Adelaide shrugged, but I got the sense that she had wished Herma hadn’t volunteered that guess out loud… in front of Vance.
Adelaide had learned of my obsessive streak. I had already bloodhounded several Soulcrafters, their children and even grandchildren. It was worrisome to at least one lady, who I gradually befriended but my first phone call had obviously rattled. I made this lady the promise that I would never publicize her family name in any of my writings and I never will. In exchange for this trust, she shared personal stories and a boxful of Pelley’s books and magazines.
Adelaide had asked me to please not bother people unsolicited like that. I tried to honor her wishes, no more cold calls, but I would still set myself up to conveniently encounter Pelleyites whenever possible. Several became friends and won’t mind if I mention them by name in the proper place. Especially since they have all gone on to their reward now.
But Herma had dropped a small clue… the Browning twins. I was intrigued. Obviously she knew they had been in Asheville as early as 1932 and must have been quite active in the Chief’s affairs. There was next to nothing I could do with that hint in 1995, but a couple of decades later the digital age opened up new research possibilities… and I’m devilishly good at it!
The Browning twins, Florence and Carolyn, came to Asheville with their mother Louise when they were going on 23 years old. Louise and the girls were talented silhouette artists. That is, they were scissors experts. They perfected the art of cutting likenesses of people from black paper, a rather quaint skill, old-fashioned even, as photography entered the age of the snapshot and suddenly anyone and everyone could have their picture taken cheaply. But the Browning silhouettes were high art. A few years ago I searched the internet and found several signed examples.
I am quite sure that it was one of the Brownings who cut the silhouette of Pelley used in his publications over the years. It features him in a bowtie, which was characteristic of his Galahad-era wardrobe.
Profiling the Browning twins I discovered that both were still living in 1995, so Adelaide was probably right. If I had found out more I would have looked them up and annoyed them with questions about Pelley and Asheville in the 1930s.
On a parting note of synchronicity, Carolyn Browning had retired to central Florida and was taking art and photography classes at Florida Southern College, my alma mater, likely at the time I was there! What are the chances that I walked by this little old lady on our small campus on my way to class… or on my way to the library to discover, or discover more about, her mentor William Dudley Pelley? What if I had smiled in passing at the same (no longer) young lady who handed my friend that ‘Little Lecture on Life’s Great Mysteries’ in the lobby of Galahad College 60 years earlier? The mind staggers.
-tbc-