Eve Adam, a.k.a. Harmonic Eve

Family Memories

Bebe is the grandmother who provided the piano for Sunshine, a.k.a. Phyllis Eve, a.k.a. Harmonic Eve

The "Miss Violet" in the narrative below was Bebe. Her four-year-old child mentioned below had been given Bebe's maiden last name to use as a first name. Violet, as an adult, wrote the story about Balbern, the family home, in which Bebe was able, with the help of her second husband, to provide books, art supplies, study areas, and wonder of wonders, a baby grand piano.

This Bebe became an orphan at the age of nine and married a much older man at the age of sixteen. Together they raised five children, and then when he died, she married again. I played the role of an only child in this second marriage, while my mother was in and out of my life, more like a grandmother than a mother. It seems Bebe and Violet had reversed their roles.

Because of Bebe and her second husband and their respect for music and education, I now am able to identify myself as Harmonic Eve.

Family Memories: Early Days

by Bebe, Mother of Violet and Grandmother of Phyllis Eve Adam October 1966, Dear Marion, I sent a birthday card to you a day or two ago. This is just to say I'm thinking of the day in 1908 when you came to us on King Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. It was in that beautiful double sunny front bedroom. As you arrived around midnight time or about, I was never sure whether it was the seventh or the eighth of October. I recognized the start of labor about noon, as I remember, and called the doctor's office. The doctor arrived at the house about three o'clock and told me that I should "keep walking around."

What a day! There were two little ones; Violet, age four, and Claude, age two, to be watched and kept off the sidewalk. The weather was simply gorgeous! In those days I canned about two-hundred quarts of fruits and vegetables in early October, peaches and tomatoes especially. So I had to "drop the subject" for the time being to take care of more important matters. I was without any companion in the house other than those two little ones aged four and two. They could not help in any way. However, a nurse had been engaged two weeks previously, a beautiful blond woman of sunny disposition. She came when I called her by telephone. She took me in charge for she knew Dr. Inglis, worked for him more than any other "baby bringer."

The leaves were beginning to turn in color. King Avenue was a street of some wealth a previous day than ours. Now when we lived there houses were rented here and there, not owned as when first built. This house had been occupied by a family named Ford, with Eva, Isabel, Lauren, and one more, a young boy. Eva was in my grade in school. We were class competitors, along with a boy named Edwin Schanfarber, whose father owned a clothing store downtown next door to the old Smythe Book Store where your Papa Scott and I first met each other. Papa was manager and I was a Saturday helper. One Saturday Papa Scott, Edwin Schanfarber, and I were all working in adjoining stores on South High Street, Columbus, Ohio. You see, I had been growing up with this boy Edwin for about four years, even attending school in the eighth grade at the same school building. We learned school homework on my Aunt Jennie's back porch. Now without help we were suddenly grown up and the "age of attraction" was interfering with business as usual. I thought only of escape. My older brother asked Aunt Jennie to sell some of our father's property and bring me to Oklahoma with my eleven-year old brother Leland. This took a year to accomplish, but Aunt Jennie and I arrived in Oklahoma City in the summer of 1902. Leland had been sent with a railroad ticket ahead of Aunt Jennie and me. Gone was the book store from my life, with the attractions of that polite, well-tailored manager. Gone was the High Street traffic, opposite the State Capitol Building. When I was there McKinley had been occupying the White House in Washington, D. C. and the Tafts were powerful in Ohio politics. About this time, as a sixteen-year-old girl, I was beginning to see the life about me. I had arrived in this capital city with my younger brother, literally leading him by the hand for safe keeping wherever we walked or traveled. The trip to meet my older brother in the West proved very sad to me. To him, then age nineteen, the West, as Oklahoma was then considered, was so glorious, while to me it was so barren. I had no job, no book store, no high school, no Sunday school friends, and my Hoover cousins were all back in Ohio. I took a part-time job in a store, and when someone in charge re-read my letter of recommendation, it was determined that I could lead them to a manager. I was asked to write to the manager of the book store where I had worked in Columbus, Ohio. I was to give him their address and ask him to write to them, since he had not been interested when they wrote. He arrived very shortly after my letter reached him! Can you imagine what a furor this created in the Columbus store? I was glad I was not there to face it, for teasing did not go well with me. Seldom did I speak with him. One Saturday evening, shortly after he arrived and before closing time, Mr. Scott B. approached me with his kindest manner and head bowed toward me. "I want to speak with you please, Miss Violet," he said quietly. People were closing the store at the front door. He spoke with a concern for privacy and time. "I am going to marry you some day," he said. Imagine my astonishment. Imagine what fright I felt at that moment. We had never spent an evening talking together. Indeed I was almost afraid to acknowledge hearing him, and did not, other than to say, "You frighten me," as my face was turned away. I remember the next day at the store I avoided any meeting with him. As I went out at lunch time I passed the nearby window of a pleasant restaurant. There appeared before me a large glass-front view of a couple having been served food, in a manner to which I had never been invited. I was shocked to see it was Aunt Jennie and Mr. Scott B. They evidently were discussing the situation: would I be permitted to marry the man who had asked me, or rather, announced his intentions?

This all seems strange today, as I have in my hands mail from this man's descendants, from Barbara, and Gay, and Phyllis, and Jeff. We had six other grandchildren to say nothing of six great-grandchildren, and to repeat none of the names of Papa Scott's own children! Now, so many years later, I recall our married life, the sad and the sweet memories. We were married July 9, 1903. He was thirty-eight and I was sixteen. We were about to undertake a family life in a strange city where money was scarce, jobs were only for those who had references and experience. Houses, even the simplest living quarters were rare and relatively expensive. What "innocents abroad" we were! Scott was a man of sorrows, struggling to grow strong enough to claim a normal life after years of suffering and searching for his long missing father. In spite of his anxiety he was becoming handsome, gracious of manner, and capable of active business life, such as being manager of the Smythe Book Store on South High Street in Columbus, Ohio.

Eve's Comments: Bebe's letter to Marion, her third child, ends here, without a signature. I don't know where any more pages are, but I can vouch for the handwriting as being that of my grandmother who raised me. I saw that handwriting many times in my childhood and early adulthood. It is difficult for me to call her by her birth name, Bertha Emma Violet, since by the time I was born all of us called her Bebe. She was orphaned by the age of nine, and was sent to her Aunt Jennie, mentioned in this letter. So now you see why my mother, the first of five children, was named Violet. It was HER mother's maiden name. I have found in my mother Violet's files a well-preserved letter mailed in May of 1904 with only a two-cent stamp. It was sent by Papa Scott's brother Claude to congratulate "old man" Scott on the birth of a baby girl. Two years later a baby boy was born and named after Scott's brother. It was this younger Claude who teased his sister about the Ice-Boy and later inspired me with his violin playing. Phyllis Eve Adam, a.k.a. Harmonic Eve, July 16, 2002.

Eve Adam, a.k.a. Harmonic Eve