DISTRACTIONS OF OLD AGE
Mystery — The Hunt for Viola
Maybe you will provide the next clue to her secret
Viola haunts me. In the darkest days of the Great Depression, 1935, she appeared in Cuba. She appeared in Egypt. She appeared in Ceylon. Seventy years later, she appeared to me.
It was 2005. One of the first jobs I tackled upon retirement was to clean out all Z’s unwanted collectibles from the oversized closet under the stairs. Nineteenth-century travel photos, Hollywood memorabilia, exotic cameras, old postcards — hundreds of orphaned wares winnowed from his collections had to go.
I opened an eBay store. Within a couple of months, a woman named Sophie bought two old postcards signed “Viola,” one from Havana, one from Cairo. I pointed out that I also had a Viola from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Sophie bought it and sent me a note.
I’m so glad you let me know about the Ceylon card! I was captivated by the idea of a woman of that era seeing the world and writing home to tell her family of her adventures. She seemed so at ease and self-assured. This was obviously not her first time abroad. Just from those three little cards, a fascinating life developed in my imagination…
I too was captivated. Hadn’t I longed to be that woman, that bold traveler, striding my way across the globe, open to new languages, new customs, new faces?
And that era! The stamps with their postmarks had been removed from the cards by a prior owner, but the Cuba card was dated — May 16, 1935.
1935 was not an easy time. The collapse of the international financial system had plunged the world into the Great Depression, now in its darkest days. Civil wars raged across the globe, unrest in the colonies threatened the British Empire, and despots like Hitler and Stalin had risen to power.
Yet Viola’s notes were cheerful and chatty.
May 16, 1935. Received your letter also one from Evelyn & LeRoy. Enjoyed them very much. Havana is the same as last spring but am taking included sightseeing just the same. See you soon. Love, Viola [Photo of Morro Castle, from Cuba]
Feb 4 [no year] — Cairo — This is the costume you see on the majority of native women in Cairo — the married women have that little brass piece on nose that joins upper and lower veil, the unmarried don’t have the brass piece. Went to Pyramids this afternoon & rode a camel. Love, Viola [Photo of “Native Woman,” from Cairo]
[no date] Ceylon is really a gem. It is noted for being a place to buy precious stones. But it has luxurious vegetation, quite a contrast to India. This washing scene is common in India & Ceylon. Feeling fine. Love, Viola. [Photo of “Dhobies work at Colombo Lake,” from Ceylon.
Who was this Viola, boldly popping up in Egypt, Asia, and the Caribbean during such a time of turmoil? I had to find out.
An idea! If the cards Sophie found were discards from Z’s collection, did we have more? Z didn’t collect old postcards to recreate stories from their scribbled messages. He didn’t collect them for the stamps. He almost always collected them for their photographic images, organizing them into fat binders, categorized by places or topics such as Transportation, Disasters, and Famous People.
A couple of hours paging through Z’s binders revealed twelve more postcards signed by Viola. All were from 1935. And they were from… everywhere! Viola was traveling around the world. Two of the postcards were “memograms” labeled Canadian Pacific Round the World Cruise.
I was thrilled. I felt a kinship. Was Viola a fan of Nellie Bly, dreaming of packing sundries in a small leather bag and traveling around the world at a pace to beat out Jules Verne’s fictional Eighty Days? Had she read Ella Maillart’s Turkestan Solo, visualizing herself on a camel, exploring the ancient silk routes of Central Asia? Was she a geography nut, staring at old maps and globes? Did she tremble with excitement at the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal, her gateway to the Pacific Ocean? Had she packed Agatha Christie’s latest travel mystery, Murder on the Orient Express?
I was most intrigued by her postcards from Darjeeling, a city in the foothills of the Himalayas, far from the nearest cruise port in Calcutta (now Kolkata).
Feb 19 [no year] — Dear Norma — Arrived at Darjeeling at eleven. It was raining hard but went in rickshaws from train to hotel. I am looking for sunshine tomorrow. Enjoying trip to India so far. Love Viola. [“Real Photo” postcard, hand colored, signed by J Singh & Co. “General View of Darjeeling.”]
Feb 19, 1935 — Dear Evelyn — This is a view I am expecting to see tomorrow. It rained when we arrived at Mt. Everest hotel today but good weather is predicted for tomorrow. Here’s hoping. Love, Viola [“Real Photo” postcard, hand colored, signed by J Singh & Co., Darjeeling, “Sunrise from Tiger Hill.”]
Viola struck me as a real trooper. What fantasies had she nurtured her entire life to get to the foothills of the Himalayas, to get a view of Mounts Everest and Kangchenjunga? Here it was, pouring rain, yet she writes to “Evelyn” and “Norma,” optimistic about tomorrow.
I posted all her postcards, front and back, on my website.
In 2007, a Columbia University Ph.D. student found my Viola post and wrote:
Do you still have these postcards?… The reason I am interested… is because they were written by Viola Wertheim Bernard, who was traveling at the time with her husband, Theos Bernard, who is the subject of my dissertation…
Bernard was an early traveler into Tibet, a pioneer of Indian and Tibetan studies. A quick search revealed that Viola Wertheim had tolerated Bernard for four years, divorced him, then pursued a career of her own in psychiatry. A fascinating couple.
But my correspondent told me I had misread the dates. Viola Wertheim Bernard had made the journey along this route in 1936, not 1935.
Oh, for goodness sake. I had posted all the cards. Many were clearly dated or postmarked “1935.” My Viola was not his Viola. I was back to square one on my search. How in the world would I find the story of someone who only signed her first name?
Viola’s ghost must have given me a poke. I looked at the cards again. They were all addressed to members of the Schaefer family on Linwood Avenue in Buffalo, NY.
I dug out the 1940 census. There she was: Viola Schaeffer, age 52, living with her widowed brother Arthur and her unmarried younger sisters Evelyn and Norma. Viola was a public school teacher.
I was thrilled. I loved this schoolteacher Viola, this middle-aged, this single Viola better than the famous wife-of-Bernard, Manhattan-psychiatrist Viola. I could identify with Viola Schaefer, devoted to her unglamorous career serving young people, saving up to take a semester off to see the world at age 47.
According to the Socal Security Administration, Viola lived till 1982 — a good long life, no doubt full of tales about her wonderful adventure till her death at 95.
I love the Viola story because I love the persistence of her spirit. A few of her postcards were sold instead of tossed. Z preserved some and my eBay customer caught the Viola vibe on three others. Discovering her identity was Sherlock-Holmes fun.
And yet, the mystery of Viola has deepened.
As I began to rewrite this simple tale in 2021, I was prodded to see what more I could dig up.
In the Chung Collection at the University of British Columbia Library, I found the 65-page brochure advertising Canadian Pacific’s 1935 cruise on the Empress of Britain steamship: 130 days, 32 ports. This was Viola’s adventure! It described every port with photos and explained all the land excursions, both included and optional. This was no tramp steamer. The base cost was $2,150 — over $44,000 in today’s dollars — plus taxes, incidentals, and add-on land excursions. The #8 “Excursion Across India,” from Bombay to Delhi, Agra, Benares, Calcutta, Siliguri, on to Darjeeling (by special 2-foot gauge Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway), then down to Madras, Madura, and Colombo cost $266 — another $5000 in today’s dollars. And of course, she would have needed a steamer trunk full of fashionable travel togs.
Viola’s teacher’s salary in 1940 was $2,560 (or $48,640 today). Granted, she lived in the family home in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with her brother (a physician) and two single sisters (also teachers), so her expenses were minimal. But a year’s salary? On the very height of luxury cruises during the world’s greatest economic depression? Was she an heiress? Census records show her father was a grocer, but online newspapers show her occasionally on the society page, attending a party or Lutheran charity event as a young woman. Sadly, Buffalo newspapers from the 1920s onward are not available online.
The Chung Collection also had the 13-page “membership” booklet for Viola’s cruise, listing all the passengers on board. True to its advertised promise, Canadian Pacific had booked less than half of the Empress of Britain’s capacity of 1,182 — only 386 people — for its 1935 cruise. The members were mostly couples, some with children, some with servants, sprinkled with noble titles, including Princess Joachim Albrecht of Prussia, a member of the German Kaiser’s family. Viola was one of 29 single women who were not the daughters of other passengers. And, no, she was neither a rich woman’s helper nor a crew member.
This was not Viola’s only steamship adventure. According to the Ancestry database, she began to travel during summer vacations in 1925, at the age of 38. In 1925, 1928, and 1930 there are records of her returning to North America from the port at Cherbourg, France. After the 1935 world tour, I found records of her returning from Valparaiso, Chile (1936); Sydney, Australia (1937); and England (1938). World War II began in 1939, so that was the end of her travels, for a while at least.
Her trail has gone cold for today. Did her mother leave a Gehring family trust fund when she died in 1923? Was there a secret, romantic source of funds for luxury travel? Did she have a forbidden lover whom she could meet for trysts in the privacy of her ship’s cabin and port hotel rooms?
She wasn’t hired as a teacher till 1918, at age 31. What had she done during World War I? Her grandparents were German. Was she a congenial spy underwritten by the U.S. government to mingle with wealthy fascists? Or was she simply good old Viola, who saved every penny of her teacher’s salary to get the hell out of Buffalo and experience the world from within the cocoon of elegant travel?
Maybe another reader of travel posts will have a clue and send me off on the hunt again. Maybe when I discover her secret, Viola‘s lively spirit will rest in peace.
