Don't You Dare: Uncovering Lost Love

By Gayla Turner

"Don't You Dare" is a compelling story that weaves together a current-day journey of discovery and a true-life love story between two women that took place over a hundred years ago. Newspaper headlines and stories back then didn't mention LGBTQ people. The LGBTQ community loved and lived in the background of society because it was too dangerous to do otherwise. All were hidden, just like the wedding photos belonging to author Gayla Turner's grandmother – Ruby. This unforgettable book begins with the discovery of these hidden wedding photos dated June 8, 1915. As these photos unveiled an awe-inspiring secret, Gayla Turner embarked on a seven-year journey to find out more about her grandmother and the woman standing next to her dressed as the groom.

Curiosity led to extensive research that uncovered a love story between Ruby and the mystery woman in the photos. The author also uncovered a secret lesbian social club that was formed in the early 1900s by a local businesswoman. Women from as far away as Chicago traveled by train to the little farm town of Amherst, Wisconsin, to attend her exclusive parties. The local town people thought Cora held private tea and card parties so single young ladies could talk about how to find a husband. Little did they know, finding a man was not a subject of their conversations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781098392604

Book preview

cover.jpg

Copyright © 2022 by Gayla Turner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Print ISBN 978-1-09839-259-8

eBook ISBN 978-1-09839-260-4

Dedicated to Ruby (1896 – 1977)

Contents

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

FIFTY-FIVE

FIFTY-SIX

FIFTY-SEVEN

FIFTY-EIGHT

FIFTY-NINE

SIXTY

EPILOGUE

Various Photos

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

I spent years researching my grandma’s life and the clues she left behind. Yes, clues. She left just enough information that only someone who understood her secret life would be able to uncover the hidden story she left behind. It turned out to be a mystery I was uniquely qualified to solve.

As I examined her photos, I noticed how incredibly happy everyone looked. These weren’t the typical stoic pictures taken in the early nineteen-hundreds. They were humorous and loving. However, if any of my grandma’s photos had fallen into the wrong hands, she and everyone else involved could have been put into mental institutions, run out of town, or worse.

During my research it occurred to me that as wonderful as the photos were, the truth was tragic. This was as far as their relationship could ever go: all they could ever have were memories. If they dared to take photos, the pictures would quickly be destroyed to avoid the possibility of discovery. It struck me how brave my grandma was to keep her pictures for so many years; but then I’ve always been a believer that love makes us strong.

I often wonder if Grandma Ruby hoped that someday someone would find out about her secret life. Did she suspect it would be me?

ONE

There they were: the boxes. As soon as we walked into my Aunt Patty’s living room, Mom looked at the two brown, medium-sized cardboard boxes stacked in the corner next to the avocado-green couch. My aunt lived closest to the nursing home, and after Grandma Ruby passed away on April 12, 1977, all of her belongings were transported to Aunt Patty’s one-bedroom apartment in St Louis.

I was sixteen at the time, and I remember traveling with my mom from Los Angeles to St. Louis to attend Grandma’s funeral. Mom told me we needed to stay a couple of extra days so she could sort out some of her mother’s belongings. She claimed it wouldn’t take too long, because Grandma didn’t have anything of great value.

Mom walked across the living room and placed her hand lightly on the top box, as if silently saying hello to an old friend. Then she grimaced and quickly pulled it away. I remember them being bigger. What do you suppose we should do with them? she asked Aunt Patty, as she wiped dust from her fingertips.

My aunt must have expected that question. I don’t know what to do with them. I thought we’d go through Mother’s other things first, and then decide what to do with her boxes.

I watched TV while the two of them negotiated their mother’s belongings. Mom was right; the process was quick.

Then my mom looked in the direction of those boxes, still stacked neatly in the corner of the room. Well? she asked, her hands resting on her hips.

Aunt Patty shot back, You can see I don’t have any room here in this tiny apartment for another box, let alone two of them.

Mom’s rebuttal was swift. I couldn’t possibly take them on the flight back home with us; they’d fall apart before we landed.

After another round of negotiations, Mom agreed to having the boxes shipped back to our home in California, but only if Aunt Patty paid the cost of freight.

Since 1921, Grandma Ruby had quietly moved those two boxes with her wherever she lived. Even after her husband left the family in 1939, she moved the boxes, along with her three children, to various boarding homes and apartments. From Amherst, Wisconsin, to Minneapolis; from Minneapolis to Assumption, Illinois; and a dozen other places after that. The last move for Grandma Ruby and her boxes was to a nursing home in St Louis in 1975. In 1977, at the age of 82, my grandmother passed away, never revealing their secret contents.

TWO

After Mom was diagnosed with dementia in 2009, my sister Janice and I would often drive from Southern California to Mom’s place in Pahrump, Nevada. We tried convincing her to move closer to us and her grandchildren, but after living alone for the last twenty years she had no interest in being anywhere other than in a doublewide trailer in the middle of the desert.

Most people hated driving the long stretch of desert highway between Barstow and Pahrump, but I found the vast emptiness peaceful: no cars or people for almost one hundred miles. However, as Mom’s dementia worsened, it seemed as if the highway stretched longer and longer with every trip. At times, it felt as if my car was on a treadmill and I was looking at the same mounds of sand and tumbleweeds for hours.

During our visits, my sister and I would often spend time reminiscing over the family photos Mom had collected through the years. We’d dig into the old department-store boxes with both hands and pull out a group of photos to look at. After she retired, Mom often told us she was going to organize the family photos and put them in albums someday, but we all knew that wasn’t going to happen.

We’d laugh and share pictures and stories with Mom. She’d often laugh along with us, but I wasn’t sure she really knew who or what we were talking about. At the time I thought we were doing it to help Mom recapture her stolen memories, but I now know Janice and I did it to recapture our own.

On one of my visits with Mom, I was looking for more photos to share when I noticed two medium-sized boxes stacked at the far end of her closet, marked ‘Mother’s old photos.’ I was surprised—up to that point I thought I had seen every family picture many times over, but I had never seen these boxes. Or so I thought.

I suddenly felt like a twelve-year-old at Christmas; I couldn’t wait to see what was inside. As I pulled them from the safety of my mother’s closet, I could hear the brittle brown cardboard creaking in protest with every tug. A cloud of dust followed me as I placed them in the middle of my mom’s living room.

When I opened the first box I could tell instantly that the pictures were like nothing I’d seen before. Initially, I thought they were Mom’s from when she was young, but then I noticed that the handwritten dates predated her 1923 birth year.

Then I finally saw a name I recognized: Ruby. Of course. These boxes belonged to Grandma Ruby, I announced to Mom, though she didn’t seem interested in looking at their contents herself.

Overjoyed at finding a family time capsule, I immediately started to carefully unpack them. The photos were dated from 1910 to 1922, and they were well-maintained because of the dry Nevada climate and the cool darkness of my mom’s closet. The loose pages must have been from Grandma Ruby’s photo albums, but there were no binders to keep the pages together. Almost like she—or someone—had intended to throw them away, but just couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

I was thumbing through the pages when I noticed a handwritten caption under a picture which said ‘Our Wedding,’ dated June 8, 1915. I was excited when I realized it was of Grandma Ruby, wearing a wedding dress and holding a bouquet of flowers. Since I had never met or seen my grandfather before, I was curious to see what he looked like.

I showed the photos to my mom, and she confirmed it was her mother, but then quickly looked away. It was almost like she couldn’t bring herself to look at the pictures for too long for fear of getting scolded. For some reason I had a feeling she knew more than she was willing to tell me. And yes, I believe she may have played the ‘dementia card.’ She knew I would never pressure her for information that she couldn’t remember.

The crazy thing about dementia is you just never know what the mind can remember or which memories have been stolen. Besides, Mom had always been an extremely strong-willed and tight-lipped woman, even before the signs of dementia appeared. If she did know more about the photos, clearly there would be no way of getting the information I needed from her. So I kept on going through the old photos, hoping more details would be revealed to me.

I found a newspaper clipping dated August 10, 1921 at the bottom of one of the boxes. It was the formal wedding announcement for my grandparents, which included a wedding photo of the new bride and groom. Except the groom standing next to my grandma was not the same man in the other photos, dated 1915. When I realized the dates on the wedding photos were different, I asked my mom if Grandma had been married before she married Grandpa. She shook her head adamantly, and continued to watch her TV game show.

I questioned my mom several more times about whether the bride in both photos was Grandma Ruby, and was met with the same results. I was amused by the thought that my grandma might have been secretly married to a gentleman prior to my grandfather, and I was determined to find out who this mystery man was. I grabbed Mom’s old magnifying glass from the coffee table—the one she used years ago when she did her daily word puzzles, but which was now covered in dust.

The newspaper announcement from 1921 made it easy for me to identify the groom, because it gave the names of everyone who’d attended the wedding that day. However, identifying the people in the 1915 wedding photos was considerably more difficult. I could tell it was Grandma Ruby wearing the wedding dress and veil, but the caption underneath only said ‘Our Wedding.’ There were no names to identify the groom or the other two people in the picture.

The gentleman standing to the left of my grandma was wearing a dark suit and tie with a boutonniere on his left collar. There was also another man, and a woman in formal dress. The men were wearing bowler hats. All were standing underneath a large shade tree. Clearly it was a traditional wedding photograph, but with such little information I was still confused. However, I’m good at solving complex problems at work, and I was determined to solve this mystery.

I found numerous pictures of the same people dated from 1915 to 1920. I kept staring at the two men, thinking that something didn’t look right. I was examining one of the photos when I noticed that both of the men had unusually small features, and their suits were ill-fitting: the jackets were falling off their shoulders, and the sleeves and pant legs had been rolled underneath because they were too long. Both of the gentlemen were wearing bowler hats, and it looked like their hair was tucked underneath. I thought to myself that men back then wouldn’t have had long hair.

It took me a few more minutes to wrap my brain around what I was seeing. Then all of a sudden it hit me: it wasn’t a man standing next to my grandmother in the wedding photos! I felt the blood rush to my head, and the back of my neck started to tingle as I fell back into my chair in disbelief. At the same time, I felt an incredible warmth flow over me. It was like being wrapped in a warm blanket after being stuck out in the cold for too long. It was an incredible feeling, and one that I will never forget. To this day I become overwhelmed with emotion thinking about that realization.

I firmly believe Grandma Ruby was with me at that moment, giving me a big hug, thankful that the truth had finally been revealed.

I spent the rest of that evening and into the next day just staring at those photos and crying. I wasn’t sure why I was so emotional about them until I was driving back home to Los Angeles the next day. During the four-hour drive, I cried again, and then I realized that I didn’t feel so different or alone anymore. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel like the family oddball because of who I loved. I was no longer the only one.

THREE

As soon as I got home, I started unpacking the photos, letters, and newspaper articles and putting them in chronological order. There were letters and cards dating back as far as 1910. I was obsessed with the photos, and spent every day of the next couple of years searching the internet looking for clues to find out who the women in them were.

During that time I showed some of the photos to Aunt Patty, hoping her eighty-seven-year-old memory would be slightly better than my eighty-nine-year-old mother’s. As I handed her one of the photos, I told her about the boxes I’d found, and asked if she knew any of the people in the picture. My aunt smiled, and began tracing an invisible circle with her thumb around Grandma Ruby’s face.

I patiently waited for her to collect her memories and share any information that might be helpful. After a couple of minutes she broke the silence. I know that’s my mother, but I don’t know who those other people are.

I thought that might be the end of our visit, until she said, Our mother never talked about when she was a young girl, but she sure did love those old photos.

She had my full attention. What do you mean? I asked.

As Aunt Patty gazed at her mother’s picture, I could tell she was reliving her past. Me and your mother grew up with those boxes. Our mother insisted on dragging those damn things with us everywhere we moved. She never did anything with them except put them in her closet or under the bed, but she made sure they were on the moving truck if it was the last thing she did. In fact, your mom and me often accused her of loving those boxes more than she did us kids. I’m actually surprised your mother agreed to keep them after what happened.

What happened, Aunt Patty? I asked softly, so as not to break her train of thought.

When we were teenagers your mother got it in her head she was going to find out what was so important in those boxes. When she finally mustered the courage to look inside, she found only old photos and newspaper articles that our mother had collected from when she was young in Wisconsin. Your mom asked who the people were, and your grandmother was furious. I still remember that day, because I had never seen either of them so upset before.

The room was silent as I watched her place the photo of her mother on the coffee table in front of us. Then she rubbed her hand across her forehead and eyes. She had grown tired, and I could tell her memory had faded.

It finally occurred to me that the boxes I had found in my mother’s closet were the same two stacked in the corner of my aunt’s living room in 1972—the ones delivered to our home in Los Angeles two weeks after Grandma’s funeral.

I remembered the day they arrived. Mom still didn’t know what to do with them. She’d stared at them where they sat in the living room. The fate of my grandmother’s old photos and letters was in my mother’s hands, and in the end she decided to do what her mother had always done with them—she put them in her closet.

For some reason Mom had no desire to open the boxes, but neither was she willing to discard them. Maybe out of respect for her mother, or maybe just because her mother had spent so many years safeguarding them. That was where the boxes had stayed until she and Dad retired and moved to Pahrump, Nevada in 1982. Then they were safely moved again from one closet to another, where they remained unopened until 2010, patiently waiting for me to discover them.

FOUR

I began researching the pictures, matching the people and events in the photos with those chronicled in the archived local newspapers, familiar names and places started to emerge. I concluded that there were not just one or two different women involved, but rather a larger group of women who had found a way to connect with each other in the middle of farm country. But I kept asking myself, How and why Amherst, Wisconsin?

I started to imagine how difficult it must have been for anyone back then to love someone of the same sex, and couldn’t help comparing my grandma’s life to my own. When I came out in the late 80s, it was difficult to know who to trust because of the stigma associated with being gay, even though coming out in a city like Los Angeles was far less dangerous than in other parts of the country.

Growing up, I didn’t know anyone who was openly gay or lesbian, although the two women who lived across the street were rumored to be more than just friends. People would refer to them as those lesbos or dykes. I’d laugh at the snide comments, but inside I wanted to run and hide from the world. By that time I had already had my share of schoolgirl crushes on female teachers, and I knew I was one too.

Already painfully shy, I became even more withdrawn for fear that some of the negative slurs my friends used would be directed toward me. Keeping people at arm’s length was my way of safeguarding my secret from the world.

Then it happened. When I was nineteen years old, I played guitar in a band in college, and I fell in love with the lead singer, Norma. It was like nothing I had ever felt before. I knew then that that was what falling in love should feel like. Mind you, falling in love with Norma did not change who I was: it simply reaffirmed my sexual orientation. However, as beautiful, natural, and wonderful as it was… I was petrified.

The fear became very real when I found myself looking over the Palos Verdes cliffs and watching the waves crash below. I don’t remember driving there, but I do recall thinking how easy it would be to take those two steps forward and end my fear forever. It was at that point that it occurred to me I did not have a choice about who I loved, but I did have