The bicycle had become commonplace and affordable, but the motorcar not yet ubiquitous, so it is a given that roller skating–essentially wheels on your feet–became an overnight sensation in 1905. Granted, there was a brief craze for roller skates when they were first massed produced in 1880s America, but the introduction of the bicycle no doubt stole its thunder. By the following year, roller skating had spread like wildfire across the country, and many newspapers reported its popularity was so great, young people neglected their other forms of amusement!

Roller skating soon reached Europe under the aegis of the American Roller Rink Company, whose managing director, C. P. Crawford, traveled as far as St. Petersburg to lease large plots of land on which to erect American-style roller skating rinks. Soon, in London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, skating was “regarded quite as essential an amusement as theatres and music halls, and the rinks are never closed except in midsummer.” The Parisians loved the fad, hosting fancy dress balls on roller skates, divising new skating tricks, and even adapting popular dances for roller skating. A new costume for roller skating was de riguer, and lady skaters were advised to wear tailored suit and matching shirtwaist for the morning, princess gowns for the afternoon and evening, and Dutch dress (princess style with low neck and shoulder straps) over a chiffon guimpe, or corduroy princess-style frock for the night–all in brilliant colors. Shockingly, young Parisian ladies went without corsets during their morning skating sessions, and Americans fashion writers cautiously championed this.

As with all fads, there were detractors: concerned parents and religious leaders denounced the absorbing craze, and owners of ice skating rinks (and avid ice skaters) sniffed at roller skating as a lesser sibling to ice skating. Hyperbole from newspapers whipped up agitators against the fad, proclaiming how dangerous the sport was and citing the alleged hundreds of people injured or sacrificed by roller skating every week. However, as with all fads, the madness for roller skating died a natural death by 1912, probably because young people realized you couldn’t bunny hug or tango on skates!

Topics in Chronicling America – Roller Skating Craze

In the larger cities that enjoy adequate police protection the impulses of male youth on Halloween are held in check, although mischievous purpose is not wholly defeated.
In smaller towns the evening brings terror to staid citizens. If they are not routed out of doors by fires in their domiciles or by other fearsome haps, they awake in the morning of All Saints’ Day to wonder why the saints had not during the night prevailed over deviltry.

Boys and young men who see fun in such things tip over small barns, dress up cows in unseemly costumes, put barrels over the heads of mild-mannered horses and turn them loose, remove buildings from foundations to unlikely spots of the landscape, change “signs” on buildings so that the public is confused, scare hens and other fowl from their roosts and make them wanderers, release pigs from cozy quarters, remove fences and obliterate property lines, and sometimes even decorate small village churches with articles that bear no relation to religion or even to common sense.

These are but a few of the pranks played on this evening. In fact, the worst has not been told of boys’ “goings on.” It sometimes happens that youth in this employment is punished by outraged owners of property carelessly handled, or apprehended by constables who on this one night are not permitted to rest. But precedent and the effervescent spirit of boyhood cannot be wholly overcome, and Halloween will continue to be a period of chaos in places where local self-government does not include the young in its beneficent scheme.

While Halloween affords boys an opportunity for fun that fits their inspiration to turn things topsy-turvy, it is an occasion to which girls look forward with superstitious awe and hope.
Love and matrimony are never absent, it would seem, from the minds of maids of a certain age, and this night affords them opportunity to test the various sorts of wizardry related to sentiment and Halloween.

Thus, if a girl peels an apple without breaking the peeling, throws it over her shoulder, and it takes as it falls the initial of some young man, she is reasonably assured by this means that he will marry her. Or if she holds a lighted candle while standing before a mirror in an otherwise dark room, and looking over her shoulder sees the image of the youth of her choice, she is made happy in expectation. Or if she and her girl companions place a thimble and a ring in a wad of dough, bake a cake of it, and cut it carefully when done, it is to them as true as gospel that the maiden who gets the ring will be married shortly, while she who gets the thimble will die an old maid. Or if one writes the names of her young men acquaintances on slips of paper, puts them under her pillow, and dreams of one of them, that one she is fated to wed. These are but a few of the love tests of Halloween. What a happy period is youth, after all!

- The Judge, October 26, 1912

Cowes Week was the last hurrah of the London season. For seven sunny, breezy days during early August, society gathered on the Solent for regattas and royalty. The racing at Cowes began in the 1820s under the auspice of the Prince Regent (later George VI), who was fond of yachting. The first race was held on the 10th August 1826, with the prize of a “Gold Cup of the value of £100.” This royal patronage made Cowes and the Royal Yacht Club (later the Royal Yacht Squadron) a must-see event after the races at Goodwood.

During the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, Cowes was dominated by the bitter rivalry between the Prince of Wales and the German Emperor. Though Kaiser Wilhelm II was somewhat of an Anglophile, he was nonetheless determined to prove the superiority of the German race to his Uncle Bertie. The two men raced one another each year, building bigger, better, and faster boats when necessary. Bertie was not a sore loser, but the Kaiser was so pedantic about his wins, the Prince of Wales gave up yachting altogether after the Kaiser built the largest yacht possible. Another highlight of Cowes Week were the growing number of yachstwomen commanding their own boats in the various races.

On the social side, there were balls, dinners, dances, and parties held either aboard one’s yacht, at Osbourne (until Queen Victoria’s death), or in the snug villas dotting the Isle of Wight coastline. Cowes was also the place to show off one’s summer whites–muslin gowns of dazzling simplicity, airy blouses, and white, rubber-soled shoes–or the smartest blue yachting costume. After this glorious week of boating and sun, the London season came to a close, and society dispersed to all corners of the earth in search of more amusement (and in the case of poorer members, relaxation from expenditure!).

Though Scottish, Irish, and Welsh noblemen mingled within English society on rather equal terms, it must have been a desire for something of their own during the London season, which urged the Duke and Duchess of Atholl to host a private ball for their Scottish friends residing in London. By 1849 it had become a subscription ball for the purpose of collecting funds for various Highland charities and one of the preeminent events of the Season.

In The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes’s volume on dancing, The Countess of Ancaster describes the ball:

One of the best public balls is the Royal Caledonian Ball, which takes place annually in London for the benefit of Scottish charities. The Duke of Atholl has been treasurer now for many years, and with the assistance of the Lady Patronesses, who get up parties for a reel and fancy quadrille, it has become most popular. It is well done in every way, and the tickets are moderate in price. Vouchers are issued for this ball, a circumstance which recalls the days of Almack’s. The Lady Patronesses were so very exclusive when Almack’s was the vogue that many stories are told of the methods employed to obtain the longed-for tickets, and of the heart-burnings that arose from the refusal to grant them to one and their bestowal on another. Nothing of this kind happens now. “Autres temps, autres mœurs” [other times, other customs]. It would be impossible in these days to go back to the small and select society of the past. Neither, happily, is it necessary to do so, as it would be an extraordinary thing now should any real breach of good manners or decorum occur.

This voucher cost one guinea, and revelers dressed in tartan of their families, the men in full Highland dress and the women in white dresses with tartan sashes. The President of the Royal Caledonian Ball was the Duke of Atholl, who “usually brought with him his own private army, The Atholl Highlanders, to play before the ball and to pipe onto the floor everyone taking part in the ceremonial set reel before performing an eightsome reel. This is a dance of Atholl origin and was introduced in 1890, before which it was the practice to arrange quadrilles.” When the Prince of Wales ascended the throne as Edward VII, the ball was honored with his patronage, an arrangement which exists till this day!

The Royal Caledonian Ball – Scotland on Sunday
Official Website of the Royal Caledonian Ball
Illustrated Guide to the National Dances of Scotland (1910)

Now the Henry B. Plant Museum

From The Library of Congress

“Arnold Parker, the author of Ping-Pong, the Game and How to Play It, 1902, and one of the earliest champions, gives 1881 as the first date he had heard in connection with the game. He says that there was a rumour that someone in that year started to play with cigar-box lids for bats, champagne corks (rounded one assumes) for balls and a row of books for a net. This is rather vague but he states more confidently that the game really began about 1891 when a Mr. James Gibb persuaded John Jaques, the sports manufacturers, to register the title ‘Gossima’ for a version of the game which first of all used india-rubber balls until the introduction, about 1900, of celluloid (or xylonite) balls. The much repeated story – which probably originates with Parker – tells how Gibb, a prominent athlete, brought back some toy celluloid halls (sometimes said to be coloured) from the United States. Jaques soon saw how these balls were a huge improvement on the small india-rubber balls previously used” [Source]

Jaques of London trademarked the word “ping pong” in 1901, and the name “came to be used for the game played by the rather expensive Jaquesses equipment, with other manufacturers calling it table tennis.” By the following year, fifteen books were published on the topic and the craze had spread to the United States, where, according to The Suburban Citizen, thousands of sets were sold, and one factory even churned out 1000 sets daily.

Ping-pong even infiltrated America’s golf clubs:

“Our indoor putting green in the back of the store has been occupied by a ping-pong table for several weeks. Lots of people who never saw the game come in here and watch a few sets, get fascinated by the play and end by buying racquets and balls and a net to take home and set up on their dining-room or billiard table. There’s a game going on here almost every hour of the day. People can’t seem to get enough of it.”

The activity acquired legitimacy through its recommended health benefits, and Zaza Belasco (surely a pseudonym!) states confidently in Woman’s Physical Development:

Ping pong makes you work hard. Ping pong causes rills and rivulets of perspiration to flow and makes you feel from head to foot that moist glow that only hard exercise can produce. There is no doubt that it is one of the best flesh reducers known to too heavy man—or woman.

According to Dr. F. L. Burt of the Union General Hospital of Boston, and a well-known specialist: ” Proud men and beautiful women spend at least $1,000,000 every year in Boston alone, and nobody knows how many millions of foot pounds of energy, in their frantic efforts to get rid of superfluous tissue. They ride, swim, walk, box, fence, play golf, and do all sorts of leg-swinging and kicking up calisthenics in their anxiety to get thin and stay so. They enrich doctors who have the reputation of being able to cure adiposity. Quacks of all kinds thrive and fatten on these martyrs who drink nauseous waters, hot or lukewarm, and who submit to boiling, steaming, baking and Japanese, Burmese, Swedish or German massage in the hope of achieving and retaining slenderness.”

To my mind, Dr. Burt is right, but, presto! ping pong arrives and the necessity for all these arduous labors and sacrifices vanishes with its advent. Moreover, the game amuses while it reduces, which is more than the laboring fat man can say for his therapeutic horse or walk on baking, boiling and kneading. It may seem idle to introduce here any evidence as to the amusing quality of the game, but let it be recorded for the benefit of the ponderous and pondering type that ping pong is every bit as fascinating as golf and that hardened golf veterans, veritable high priests of the game, have deserted the pastime of the links to burn incense before this new god of sport.

From L'Illustration, 25 May 1901

In Canada, “a first edition of 500 copies of Ping Pong and How to Play It, by the English champion, Mr, E. Arnold, was disposed of within a week or so,” tournaments were devised from Halifax to Stockholm to Vienna, and in Russia, the game was banned because it was believed that playing the game had an adverse effect upon players’ eyesight!

Of course, as with all fads, the wags came out to poke fun at ping-pong, with one clever stanza ribbing shopkeepers:

The craze for ping-pong died out around 1903, but serious enthusiasts kept up with the game, and table tennis associations sprang up in the early 1920s, with London hosting the first official World Championships in 1926.

Further Reading:
Chronicling America – Ping-Pong
Ping-pong (Table Tennis): The Game and How to Play It by Arnold Parker

Interestingly enough, the English word for “Easter” is Saxon, although the Spanish, French, and Scandinavians cling to the Semitic word, derived from the Aramaic pesach, which means “to pass by,” and has been translated into passover. From this, Easter eggs are also called also Pasche, Pash, Pace, or Paste eggs. The earliest known practice of painting and decorating eggs comes from 2,500 years ago, when the ancient Zoroastrians painted eggs for Nowrooz, their New Year celebration, which falls on the Spring equinox. The painting of eggs also derives from the folk traditions of Bulgaria, Russia, Romania, Ukraine, and Poland, and in the 18th century, Italy produced beautifully designed and elaborately painted Easter eggs, which were frequently presented as gifts to ladies of quality.

By the Edwardian era, decorating Easter eggs had become a very fine art, being painted, dyed, enameled, bejeweled, and beribboned. Some books of children’s amusements even featured instructions for turning eggs shells into a variety of shapes, such as frogs, or gluing delicate appendages on them to turn them into rabbits or cranes. In Switzerland, craftsmen carved delicate wood eggs, which were painted and highly polished, and held little gifts (a bottle of scent, a tiny vanity bag, or some of the miniature bronze or china animals and birds). French eggs were incredible chic, “covered with every conceivable material, stylishly trimmed with ribbons, artificial flowers, birds, and butterflies.” They usually contained chocolates or bon-bons, and the more sophisticated eggs were used as table decorations. And let us not forget the absolutely amazing and breathtaking eggs created by Carl Fabergé for Russia’s Imperial family and for the wealthy.

Duchess of Marlborough Egg

Chocolate and chocolate cream eggs were also very popular treats. Charles Apell’s Up-to-Date Candy Teacher gives a recipe for chocolate Easter eggs:

Place in a copper kettle and melt down on the fire 50 lbs. of No. 1 fondant cream and heat the cream thin enough to cast, then add 15 lbs. of special nougat fondant and heat the cream thin enough so that it can be casted by runner or funnel dropper. Then add 4 ounces of vanilla flavor, then cast in starch, using the different sizes of egg shape molds, from the 5 cent egg to the $1 size chocolate dipped egg.

Make the eggs with fruit, nuts and cocoanut in the cream, or drop the glazed pineapple or glazed cherries or nuts in the cream. Then leave in starch over night, then dip each half in the 25c and 50c and the $1 size in chocolate. Then, after they are dipped in chocolate, stick the two halves together with chocolate. Then decorate by placing a border around the egg where the two halves are stuck together. In making the large size eggs the cream must be heated good and hot before being casted in starch, or otherwise the cream will not hold its shape when dipped in chocolate.

In making the 10 cent size eggs stick the two halves together before being dipped in chocolate, then have the chocolate dippers make the decoration or splice on the chocolate dipped egg when it is being dipped.

For the traditional Easter egg, the coloring was obtained from inexpensive dyes, or cheap ribbon, which was boiled in a little water and the egg submerged into the bowl until the desired color was obtained. Calico eggs were very popular, and to make them, you would wrap each egg in a piece of chintz, and the pattern would adhere to the egg shell while boiling. Other sources for color included the red skins of onions for rose, logwood dye for blue, Spinach water for green, and onion juice water for a golden yellow. For painted eggs for place cards or caricatures, the boiled egg was washed in powdered pumice to remove the gloss of the shell, then the egg yolk was blown out of the shell through small holes pricked at both ends. After the yolk was gently blown out of the egg, it was rinsed with warm water and dried carefully. The decoration was drawn with a hard pencil and then quickly painted over with watercolors. If the egg was intended to hold a dainty treat, a hole was made on one end, the treat dropped in, and the shell pasted with thin paper.

The most enduring Easter egg event in American history is the annual egg rolling across the White House lawn. Some point to Dolly Madison as the arbiter of this tradition, but it kicked into full swing under the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, and children of every ethnicity arrived from just about every corner of Washington D.C. to roll their eggs on the White Lot (an area located between the South Lawn of the White House and the Washington Monument). By the 1900s, it had become the social event of fashionable Washington, and a Marine Band was added for sprightly music.

Egg rolling on the White House lawn

Further Reading:

Every-day life in Washington by Charles Melville Pepper
“Easter Eggs And What To Do With Them” (Every Woman’s Encyclopedia v4)
“Easter Eggs”, The Living Age, Volume 113 (1872)
“Customs and Traditions of Easter”, Lippincott’s Magazine, Volume 33 (1884)
“Rolling the Easter Egg” by John Nixon, The Strand Magazine, Volume 21 (1901)
“Preparing Easter Eggs,” The New York Times, April 2, 1911

Since Mardi Gras celebrations had begun to distance itself from the Church, it descended into what many longtime residents of the city considered “chaos.” The Mystic Crew, or Crew of Comus was founded in 1857 by six New Orleans businessmen as a secret society which would observe Mardi Gras in a less crude fashion. This society was soon joined by rivals–the Argonauts (1891), Atlanteans (1891), Krewe of Proteus (1881), Momus (1879), and Rex (1880), whose members were also made up of businessmen in high society. With the appearance of these secret societies, and the accompanying exclusive balls, floats and parades, Mardi Gras lost a fair bit of its wildness and openness by the turn of the century.

Nevertheless, the customs of these secret societies became a high point of the celebrations, particularly for women and debutantes, who were selected as maids and Queens for each society’s float. Of most importance was Rex, king of the carnival, who came up the river on his private yacht, which was decked out from stem to stem with many colored flags and was saluted by visiting battleships with twenty-one guns. The local militia would meet “His Majesty” on the landing and a grand military parade would lead Rex to the city hall, where he was presented the keys of the city by the “Duke of Crescent City” (the mayor). In the evening, the Krewe of Comus would throw a ball at the old French Opera house, where “all the kings and their queens, representing all the carnival societies, were in the opening quadrille, all crowned and robed and with their splendid suites.” At midnight, all of the masked men would disappear and return in evening dress, but as they were required to show their invitations, it was impossible to discern whom was masked as who.

Another old custom was the “King Cake” or gâteau du Rois. Though associated with the festival of Epiphany in the Christmas season, the French and Spanish colonists brought their traditions to the New World and it morphed into a Mardi Gras custom, since the King and Queen of krewes were chosen on King’s Day, or Twelfth Night. The King cake is a ring of twisted bread topped with icing or sugar dyed the traditional Mardi Gras colors of purple, gold, and green, and whomever found the trinket baked within its folds was required to provide the cake for the following year’s celebration.

When the clock struck midnight, it marked the end of Mardi Gras and the beginning of Ash Wednesday, the day of repentance. Many of the celebrations and traditions of Mardi Gras of the 19th century remain, so when you get the chance to visit New Orleans during the festivities you will notice the connection between the present and the past remains strong!

Further Reading:
The Picayune’s Guide to New Orleans (1903 edition)
The Picayune Creole cook book (1922)

So said the pseudonymous “Frank Danby” in a 1912 article in an English periodical. By the time this article was published, the mania for bridge had become a major source of entertainment for society on both sides of the Atlantic, though nowhere else did this card game become a point of obsession than deep within the heart of Mayfair. In a previous article, I discussed the emergence and growth of ladies’ clubs. Though they claimed to be patterned after the historic gentlemen’s clubs dotting Pall Mall, many in the beginning were places for ladies to rest and unwind between bouts of shopping or visiting Town, or for ladies of certain social or education sets to reconnect. With the advent of bridge, ladies clubs began to fall in line with their famous counterparts (White’s, Boodles, Marlborough) as places where women convened to gossip, drink tea and cocktails, gamble, and get away from men.

Mrs. C. S. Peel recounted her experience with women and bridge, becoming acquainted with the game: “now that [my] children were away from home and my tea-time hours free, I became an ardent Bridge player.” Bridge players were an impatient lot, not caring to show their irritation or anger with slow learners or sloppy players, and Mrs. Peel “also began to realize that although I was playing for stakes which I could afford to lose, others were not, and in addition to the irritation caused by my mistakes, there was the irritation caused by losing more money than could be spared. I often wondered to what extent the housekeeping in many a home suffered after a run of bad luck at cards.” Her worries echoed “Danby,”: “The danger and the higher stakes of such an illegal den inspire these women to heights of recklessness, and like a flock of brilliant, silly birds they swoop down upon some tiny house where fortunes are quietly staked and lost. London is a silent waste when these gamblers return to their homes to count feverishly the contents of their gold bags.”

Bridge ultimately became an obsession with many women; “by three o’clock they would be waiting patiently to begin to play. They drank their tea while they played, ate a light club dinner, talking Bridge meanwhile, were in the cardroom again directly it opened for the evening’s sitting, and departed only when its doors closed, for which, if they were willing to pay fines, might not be until a late hour.”

“Danby” paints an even more dramatic picture of these women: “They go to lunch, sometimes to a club, sometimes to a restaurant, sometime escorted, sometimes with another woman. During lunch they reconstruct the gambling of the night before, and virtually count the seconds until 3:30, when they present themselves at their clubs for silent, exhausting ‘rubber’ to carry them until dressing time. They swallow their tea when their hand is the ‘dummy,’ or else go out for a fifteen-minute visit with a rich relative. Invariably they rush back to the club, hungry for ‘one more rubber.’ At 9 o’clock they return glistening with spangles and craving for a resumption of the game. Either they have losses to make up or winning to add to…Auction bridge goes on until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning” concluding that “few women have the character and the education to repel this bridge madness once it has fastened itself on the brain and the soul of its victim. Woman is not moderate by nature, and that explains the grave danger of the situation.”

The earliest incarnation of the tournament, then known as the U.S. National Championships, began in Newport in 1881. Players competed on grass courts while musicians performed classical music in a decidedly genteel setting.

The tournament moved to New York, but Newport for years after continued to host some of the sport’s best and, in 1954, became home to the International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum.

That history is chronicled in a new exhibit at the hall of fame, which focuses on the city’s early ties to tennis but also on the rich architectural history of the museum’s wooden-shingled headquarters, the Newport Casino.

The exhibit of photographs and artifacts, which coincides with the casino’s 130th anniversary, is intended to appeal to tennis buffs as well as to those more interested in the social lives of the wealthy industrialists in Newport.

“The Newport Casino is actually the biggest and most valuable collection item that the hall of fame has,” said Mark Stenning, the museum’s CEO.

“Anyone who has an interest in tennis would be interested in the nature of this exhibit,” he added.

The casino opened as a social and recreational club for the wealthy and never was a gambling establishment. It was founded by tennis fan and New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, who, according to the exhibit, became outraged with his rival Newport men’s club in 1879. Bennett didn’t like the club’s reaction after a guest of his brazenly rode his polo pony into the club rooms.

Furious after being chastised by the city’s elite, Bennett bought land on Bellevue Avenue — today home to opulent Gilded Age mansions — for what would become the Newport Casino.

The casino opened in 1880, designed by influential architect Stanford White, who created the Washington Square Arch in New York and in 1906 was famously killed in New York by [Evelyn Nesbit Thaw's] jealous husband.

The casino became an instant hotspot for tennis, still a relatively new sport in America. The casino in 1881 began hosting the U.S. National Championships — a 25-player competition played amid a string quartet’s music. But because Newport was a tough-to-reach destination, the tournament was moved to Queens after the 1914 championships.

Still, other tournaments — including the Davis Cup and a college competition — continued in Newport. Players competed during the day, attended soirees at night and were in some cases hosted by benefactors or a local hotel. Bill Tilden, Don Budge and Bobby Riggs were among those who played at Newport, the exhibit says.

The casino also was a recreational retreat for the affluent railroad and industrial magnates who spent summers in Newport.

Besides grass tennis courts, the casino also featured a 500-seat theater — which recently has been renovated — that offered ballroom dancing and recitals and hosted performers including Will Rogers and Vincent Price. Guests also enjoyed activities such as archery and bowling.

The Hall of Fame & Museum opened at the casino in 1954 and offers a decade-by-decade look at the sport and its top players. Past inductees include Pete Sampras, Ivan Lendl, Chris Evert and Arthur Ashe.

The exhibit will be up through April. It was pulled together from “unearthed treasures” from the museum’s archives, including trophies, original casino club serving pieces, said Nicole Markham, the curator of collections. The exhibit’s emphasis on cultural history is a departure from the museum’s more tennis-oriented displays.

“It was a refreshing change to not have to be looking up tennis stats for every artifact,” said Markham, who designed the exhibit.

If nothing else, the exhibit may help dispel confusion among visitors puzzled by the Newport Casino name and trying in vain to find poker tables, Stenning said.

“We’ll get people who walk in and say, ‘Can you gamble here?’”

Article and photographs courtesy of The Associated Press, with the exception of the first, which is courtesy of New York Social Diary