Hattie Ever After (24 page)

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am a compulsive researcher, working hard to bring the past alive accurately. (That doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes; I ask forgiveness in advance for any glitches you discover.) Favorite investigative techniques include studying old newspapers and atlases, and reading personal journals and accounts. I even browse eBay for photos, letters, and postcards—anything to help me understand a particular era. Like Hattie, I have been known to disappear in dusty archives and newspaper morgues. But this book in your hands is a work of historical
fiction
. In order to give Hattie a compelling story to wander around in, I did juggle some facts.

For example, to my knowledge, the pilot Eddie Hubbard never gave flying demonstrations in San Francisco. Nor does it appear that there were any civilian seaplanes taking off from the Presidio’s Flying Field during Hattie’s time there. But the opera great Luisa Tetrazzini did indeed hire Eddie to give her a flight-seeing tour of the city of Seattle. As described in
Hattie Ever After
, the cool air was deemed harmful to the Florentine Nightingale’s voice, so a woman reporter, Hazel Archibald (writing as Dora Dean), took her place in the passenger compartment of Eddie’s seaplane. The lead of Hattie’s article about her adventure is taken directly from Dora/Hazel’s own words in the
Seattle Times
on January 2, 1920.

President Wilson did undertake a grueling tour around the country to win popular support for the League of Nations, a course of action that exacted a huge physical toll. He collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, 1919, and on October 2 he suffered a terrible stroke. There is no record of his getting stuck in an elevator during his San Francisco stop (he actually stayed at the St. Francis, not the Fairmont). That incident was fabricated to give Hattie a juicy scoop.

It is unlikely that Hattie would have been able to repay Uncle Chester’s four-hundred-dollar IOU as quickly as she did. In 1920, a professional baseball player earned about five thousand dollars a year. The average male office worker’s annual income was about twelve hundred dollars; female office workers made considerably less, around eight or nine hundred. For the sake of the story, I beefed up Hattie’s earning power to pay off the debt sooner.

One of the reasons I am drawn to writing historical fiction is that it can help us understand ourselves in the here and now. To be fair, I should say it helps me understand
myself in
the here and now. It may do the same for you. Young women had limited options in the early nineteen hundreds, yet girls like Hattie not only survived, they thrived. Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known as Nellie Bly, was only eighteen when she took on her first reporting assignment. And for every Nellie Bly who achieved fame and fortune, there were hundreds of plucky unknowns whose stories are equally fascinating. Take Hazel Lagenour, for example, who was the first woman to swim across the Golden Gate channel—a formidable challenge. She did it on August 19, 1911. You can watch a silent movie of the event at
archive.​org/​details/​ssfG​GSWIM
. The very next day, August 20, Nellie Schmidt beat Hazel’s time, swimming the channel
in forty-two minutes. Though men had swum that waterway before, none of the men who attempted to swim across that August day with Nellie succeeded. I have to cheer when “ordinary” females like Hazel and Nellie do something extraordinary. I am fortunate that my work allows me to poke around in the past, uncovering amazing and inspiring anecdotes of strong girls and women, so that I can bring them to my readers’ attention.

Yes, I did a copious amount of research for this book. But my efforts were fueled by the desire to get
this
story—the story of seventeen-year-old orphan Hattie Inez Brooks trying to find her place in the world—absolutely right. Feel free to let me know how I did in that regard.

A snippet of a family story transformed Kirby Larson from history-phobe to history fanatic and led her to write the Newbery Honor–winning novel
Hattie Big Sky
. She now loves nothing better than peering at microfiche, rummaging in archives, and rescuing old letters and postcards in her efforts to poke around in the past. Her most recent book is
The Friendship Doll
.

A
New York Times
bestselling author, Kirby has partnered with her dear friend Mary Nethery to write award-winning nonfiction picture books, including
Two Bobbies: A True Story of Hurricane Katrina, Friendship, and Survival
.

When Kirby is not digging around in history, she is walking on the beach with her husband, Neil, and Winston the Wonder Dog. She loves looking for sea glass, wishing rocks, and pieces of history others pass right on by. Learn more about her at
kirbylarson.com
, or read her blog at
kirbyslane.blogspot.com
.