The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home

 

The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home by Denise Kiernan told the fascinating story about Biltmore House, the 175000 ft2 mega-mansion in Asheville, North Carolina. I have long been fascinated by this place, ever since I saw it in a 1970’s edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest house. Biltmore was the brainchild of George Washington Vanderbilt. Construction commenced in 1889 and opened (but was not completed) six years later. Some rooms in the mansion, such as the music room, were never completed even decades after.

Kiernan captivated me from page one. Can she ever tell a story! Fifty-five pages of notes and sources documented the author’s drive for meticulous detail. She managed to piece all of these factual tidbits together to tell an engrossing tale of architecture, landscaping and forest management. I never would have thought that a book about the construction of a mansion could be so interesting. Although only 307 pages long with dense solid blocks of text and minimal paragraphs, it took me nine days to get through this, yet I couldn’t put it down. I was often reading it late into the night.

Although some newspaper writers of the time may have thumbed their noses at the audacity of such a private construction, the Vanderbilts were beloved by many for their charitable work and for the gratitude they showed their employees. The infrastructure to create Biltmore House and its surrounding estate had to be developed before a foundation could even be laid, thus the nearby town of Asheville boomed as workers moved in. A spur of the local railway even had to be built to transport all the building materials to Biltmore.

The story did not end once Biltmore was completed (or when most of it was). Kiernan wrote about George Vanderbilt and his family yet spent more time writing about his wife Edith and her extended family. George did not marry until he was 35 (reading between the lines through my pink lenses may have told me why). Edith, from a prominent family herself yet not as rich as the Vanderbilts, seemed surprisingly unimpressed with the Biltmore Estate. After their daughter Cornelia was born, the family spent more time away from Asheville and hobnobbed in New York and throughout Europe. After George died following an appendectomy, Edith took over Biltmore yet didn’t spend much time there, and oversaw its maintenance when she moved to Washington, DC when she remarried eleven years later.

Cornelia Vanderbilt lived a privileged life but did not act like a spoiled child or snooty adult. She was carefree, living a hippie life in the flapper era. Three marriages as well as various changes of name (from Cornelia to Nilcha to Mary) as well as hair colour (she favoured a pink coiffure) marked her extroverted personality for adventure and style. The revelation of her final resting place made my jaw drop: Cornelia Vanderbilt’s ashes are not interred in the Vanderbilt Family Cemetery and Mausoleum on Staten Island, but on another island…South Ronaldsay in the Orkneys! When Cornelia’s widower, William Goodsir, died in 1984, her ashes were taken to his family’s burial plot in St. Peter’s Churchyard on South Ronaldsay.

The upkeep for such an enormous estate cost a fortune, and as rich as the Vanderbilts were, they could not afford to maintain Biltmore to the same degree as they did at the beginning of the twentieth century. Economics changed and fortunes dwindled, so they had to sell off the surrounding lands. The Great Depression took a toll on everyone, the Vanderbilts included, and in order to raise funds the family opened Biltmore to paying guests in 1930. To this day the house is still privately owned and is open to visitors.

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Willie: The Game-Changing Story of the NHL’s First Black Player

Willie: The Game-Changing Story of the NHL’s First Black Player by Willie O’Ree with Michael McKinley was a rapid read that was a pleasure to sit with for hours at a time. O’Ree told his story starting with his ancestor Paris O’Ree, who escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad in the late eighteenth century. He then devoted a paragraph to each succeeding generation until he arrived at his father. The story flowed like a long interview transcription, and whether it was O’Ree’s storytelling ability or McKinley’s skill at piecing interview bits together–likely both–Willie was a can’t-put-down read.

O’Ree loved to play hockey from a young age, and played on outdoor rinks and then in New Brunswick leagues, gradually making his way up the hockey hierarchy, eventually achieving his goal of playing in the NHL. He played for the Boston Bruins starting in 1958 and remained in the NHL until 1961.

What struck me from the start of the book was O’Ree’s sense of optimism and positivity. He acknowledges that while racist taunts from spectators stung his ears, he never let it bring him down or make him question his position in hockey. He had close bonds with his teammates, and over and over O’Ree said that once he was part of a team, race didn’t matter. They were all in the game and had to work together. His friendship with Bruins left winger Johnny Bucyk is told with such heartfelt fondness it nearly brought tears to my eyes.

O’Ree played professionally until 1979 and then embarked on a new career in security. In 1998 the NHL asked him to come aboard as part of their new diversity task force, in an attempt to broaden the appeal of hockey and make it more inclusive. His work in this field over twenty years saw O’Ree inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018.

Willie was full of inspirational passages and quotes that I am reproducing below.

“I sometimes wonder whether my life would have been different, or somehow felt different, if I’d grown up watching [Rocket] Richard and other NHLers on television. That is, if I saw what they looked like. I never saw the red, white, and blue of the Habs sweaters, but I also never saw black and white–because it wasn’t there for me to see. All I ever imagined as a kid was the game itself. The question of color was never part of it. It’s interesting to think that the tradition of Hockey Night in Canada on the family radio, which was so much a part of Canadians’ lives back then, allowed me to imagine a version of the game that had a place for a player like me.”

O’Ree has often been called the Jackie Robinson of hockey. What I didn’t know was that O’Ree was also a budding baseball player, and played during the hockey off-season. He had the opportunity to meet Robinson, and wrote of their interaction:

“After the game we gathered in the Dodgers’ dugout and met Robinson himself. He could not have been nicer, asking each of us our name and whether we liked baseball. When my turn came, I told him that I liked baseball a lot but that I liked hockey more. He looked surprised and said that hockey didn’t have any black players. I told him he was looking at one, and that he’d see me make my mark on the game the way he’d made his on baseball.”

While O’Ree was playing baseball in the American south, he experienced the worst taunts from racist ball fans and even other players. Throughout the book O’Ree looked back on his life and the discrimination he had faced, and nothing compared to the epithets thrown at him while playing ball in the southern states. His white teammates had his back when his entire team walked out when a segregated establishment refused him entry:

“The next week we played an exhibition game and I got a couple of hits, but what was new to me were the racial jeers from the white players, both in the camp and on outside teams. I let it go in one ear and out the other, but I’d never experienced anything like that from my hockey player teammates in Canada.”

This book was a cherished read for all the wisdom O’Ree imparts. I learned more about resilience, conviction and confidence from this sports hero. In the rough-and-tumble world of professional hockey, trash talking and “chirping” are part of the game–yet racist jabs aren’t. O’Ree knows the difference:

“Trash talking aims to needle an opponent by casting doubt on his strength or his intelligence or his girlfriend, but within the context of the game. Racism aims to diminish the humanity of a person, period. It’s not about a game, it’s about your life. There’s a huge difference, as anyone who’s ever been racially abused will tell you.”

As we celebrate Black History Month I recommend Willie as a must-read.

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Len & Cub: A Queer History

 

Len & Cub: A Queer History by Meredith J. Batt and Dusty Green told the story of Leonard Keith and Joseph “Cub” Coates, two New Brunswickers in a same-sex relationship who lived over a hundred years ago. Len (on the right on the book cover) and Cub lived in rural New Brunswick where life as a queer person must not have been easy. One couldn’t live as an out couple a century ago. This may explain why Len and Cub never lived together, as prying eyes in a small town might have made life uncomfortable or even unbearable. Even so, Len’s gay life was discovered and he was banished from his own town. Cub, on the other hand, escaped scrutiny and later married a woman.

I am glad the authors framed the men’s relationship in the context of their time, revealing what gay life was like over a century ago. Before the concepts of queer identity, pride, and the idea of a ranging spectrum of sexual orientations or expressions, men with same-sex desires lived in the closet, surrounded by shameful descriptors and epithets such as pervert and deviant. Even the term homosexual wouldn’t have been in widespread use back then. Gay people lived in secret. Batt and Green made sure the modern reader didn’t paint their relationship with 21st century rainbow hues. They took great care in using the appropriate language to describe the couple, and I am glad to report that the authors weren’t preachy about it, as I know queer authors tend to be when it comes to labelling and identity.

Len was an avid photographer and documented their time together, and the book was filled with photos. When you look at some of these photos, many of which were taken using an automatic timer, you can see the intimacy they shared. There are self portraits of them embracing and holding hands. Both men served in World War One and soldiers were prohibited from carrying cameras, however some pictures were included when both men were in training in Quebec before being shipped overseas.

The authors noticed that Len and Cub are each wearing rings on their left ring fingers. Len is wearing a ring on the book’s front cover, yet Cub’s left hand is covered by Len’s. Could they have formed their own personal bond with the rings? The authors didn’t elaborate how the men might have explained these rings to other people. I am sure that Batt and Green would have been as curious as I was in knowing how Len and Cub might have answered any questions about their rings.

Judging from some of the photos, however, I can’t help but think that surely Len and Cub’s family and friends knew about their relationship. The authors dealt with the possibility that the men lived an open secret which everyone tolerated, if for no other reason than Len came from a prominent family who owned multiple businesses around town. Thus if any customers raised a disapproving voice, they’d soon find themselves at a loss for service. The authors believe that a business rivalry did Len in, where a competitor outed him, the effect of which was so traumatic that he was forced to leave town–and Cub–forever.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue