Everything is Connected to Easton

OK, the first day of the blog and what can I say that would interest anyone. Believing in serendipity I randomly selected the March 5 online addition of The Hindu, India's second largest newspaper and discovered this picture included in an article on International Women's Day.

The article dealt with the Eternal Question-"What does Woman Want?" Now I'm not touching that question with a 10 foot pole, but the picture does help prove a principle I lived by as a local history teacher-"Everything is connected to Easton." The sketch from The Hindu is an homage to Charles Dana Gibson's "The Eternal Question" from 1905.

The model for this sketch (and the great-grandmother of today's supermodels) was 21 year old Evelyn Nesbit. Five years before, at the beginning of her career,  she had been seduced by the 47 year old architect Stanford White. A quarter century before young Stanny had been working for H. H. Richardson on the Ames Free Library where he designed the fireplace in the Reading Room and, I suspect, the flamboyant sculptures that adorn the Library's cornices. When she posed for Gibson, she was already married to Harry Thaw, a rich and rather crazy 34 year old man. Evelyn shared her "secret" with her husband and on June 26, 1906 Harry gunned down Stanny at the Madison Square Garden's roof theater while the band played "I could love a million girls." The original Madison Square Garden had been designed by Stanford White. The 1955 movie on what became the first "Crime of the Century" was called "The Red Velvet Swing" and starred Joan Collins because first choice Marilyn Monroe refused to do the film! And yes, just to close the circle of connections, JFK did visit Easton for a speaking engagement at Stonehill.

Hopefully, more curiosities tomorrow/