March 12, 1912—The first meeting of the Girl Guides—soon to be known as the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.—was held at the home of Savannah hostess Juliette Gordon Low.
In early November 1999, on the same vacation when I toured Savannah and witnessed the filming of The Legend of Bagger Vance there, I visited the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, the first National Historic Landmark in one of my favorite cities. (That's it in this photo, taken from the Web site of the Girl Scouts.) Built in 1821 for James Moore Wayne, later an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the house, located at the corner of Bull Street and Oglethorpe Avenue, was purchased 10 years later by Low’s grandfather. It has been restored to reflect its look at roughly the time of Low’s marriage in 1885, just before significant alterations were made by her parents.
Appropriately enough for the week I was there, as well as for a city that has embraced its dark side in a major way since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I learned that Low was born on Halloween night in1860.
A posthumously published piece of hers, “Memories of My Girlhood,” published in Literary Savannah, related what happened during a visit by Union General William T. Sherman, a prewar friend of her mother’s, had stopped by the house to ask if he could be of any use to her while his army occupied the city.
Young Juliette asked a Union soldier in Sherman’s party how he had lost his arm. Upon being told that it had been shot off by a rebel, Juliette answered naively, “I s’pose my father did it. He shot lots of Yankees.” (Luckily for Juliette, her mother hustled her out of the room.)
As I researched Low’s life, it occurred to me that she might have wished that her aim had been as good as her father’s – at least when it came to handling her wayward husband. A wedding photo upstairs shows the British groom, a handsome charmer named William Mackay Low, towering over his 5-ft.-1-inch bride.
This was not to be the only difference between the two. Already partly deaf in one ear, Juliette experienced additional hearing impairment when her doctor, removing a grain of rice that had lodged there when thrown at the wedding, punctured the remaining good ear. The bride would eventually suffer continuing hearing loss that left her subject to periodic melancholia.
Despite all this, Juliette made the best of life in England, making all kinds of social rounds, but the marriage increasingly came to resemble a southern version of an Edith Wharton novel, with a wife trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage, without even a child to offer a semblance of solace.
The couple spent more and more time apart. By the time William died in 1905, they were not only separated, but he had left his mistress the bulk of his estate. Juliette contested the will and ended up with a large settlement.
Perhaps it was just as well that Juliette did not plunge even more deeply than she had into the English social whirl—all those country estates and afternoon teas would have tried the patience of this spirited woman with a blithe disregard for prevailing norms.
When she first got behind the wheel of an automobile in England, “Daisy” Low was reprimanded for driving on the right side of the road. (Protesting “But I’m an American!” didn’t help her cause.) By the time she learned to drive in the English manner, she had decided, after her husband's death, to return home, where the rules of the road were different—as she discovered when she crashed into someone’s brick wall. When her brother rushed to the scene, she informed him that she hadn’t told the owner of the house of the damage he had just suffered: “Oh, I didn’t want to bother him.”
In a straitlaced time, Low was not averse to shocking onlookers by standing on her head and exposing her bloomers. If she wasn’t fond of you, she’d seat you in the dining room behind a carving she had made of an animal’s rear end.
Low did come away with one significant relationship from her long European sojourn: a friendship with Sir Robert Baden-Powell, a retired general and founder of the Boy Scouts. The crusty general didn’t think much of the idea of girls’ scouting until his sister Agnes turned him around. The two then encouraged Low to establish a similar movement in the United States.
In early November 1999, on the same vacation when I toured Savannah and witnessed the filming of The Legend of Bagger Vance there, I visited the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace, the first National Historic Landmark in one of my favorite cities. (That's it in this photo, taken from the Web site of the Girl Scouts.) Built in 1821 for James Moore Wayne, later an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the house, located at the corner of Bull Street and Oglethorpe Avenue, was purchased 10 years later by Low’s grandfather. It has been restored to reflect its look at roughly the time of Low’s marriage in 1885, just before significant alterations were made by her parents.
Appropriately enough for the week I was there, as well as for a city that has embraced its dark side in a major way since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I learned that Low was born on Halloween night in1860.
A posthumously published piece of hers, “Memories of My Girlhood,” published in Literary Savannah, related what happened during a visit by Union General William T. Sherman, a prewar friend of her mother’s, had stopped by the house to ask if he could be of any use to her while his army occupied the city.
Young Juliette asked a Union soldier in Sherman’s party how he had lost his arm. Upon being told that it had been shot off by a rebel, Juliette answered naively, “I s’pose my father did it. He shot lots of Yankees.” (Luckily for Juliette, her mother hustled her out of the room.)
As I researched Low’s life, it occurred to me that she might have wished that her aim had been as good as her father’s – at least when it came to handling her wayward husband. A wedding photo upstairs shows the British groom, a handsome charmer named William Mackay Low, towering over his 5-ft.-1-inch bride.
This was not to be the only difference between the two. Already partly deaf in one ear, Juliette experienced additional hearing impairment when her doctor, removing a grain of rice that had lodged there when thrown at the wedding, punctured the remaining good ear. The bride would eventually suffer continuing hearing loss that left her subject to periodic melancholia.
Despite all this, Juliette made the best of life in England, making all kinds of social rounds, but the marriage increasingly came to resemble a southern version of an Edith Wharton novel, with a wife trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage, without even a child to offer a semblance of solace.
The couple spent more and more time apart. By the time William died in 1905, they were not only separated, but he had left his mistress the bulk of his estate. Juliette contested the will and ended up with a large settlement.
Perhaps it was just as well that Juliette did not plunge even more deeply than she had into the English social whirl—all those country estates and afternoon teas would have tried the patience of this spirited woman with a blithe disregard for prevailing norms.
When she first got behind the wheel of an automobile in England, “Daisy” Low was reprimanded for driving on the right side of the road. (Protesting “But I’m an American!” didn’t help her cause.) By the time she learned to drive in the English manner, she had decided, after her husband's death, to return home, where the rules of the road were different—as she discovered when she crashed into someone’s brick wall. When her brother rushed to the scene, she informed him that she hadn’t told the owner of the house of the damage he had just suffered: “Oh, I didn’t want to bother him.”
In a straitlaced time, Low was not averse to shocking onlookers by standing on her head and exposing her bloomers. If she wasn’t fond of you, she’d seat you in the dining room behind a carving she had made of an animal’s rear end.
Low did come away with one significant relationship from her long European sojourn: a friendship with Sir Robert Baden-Powell, a retired general and founder of the Boy Scouts. The crusty general didn’t think much of the idea of girls’ scouting until his sister Agnes turned him around. The two then encouraged Low to establish a similar movement in the United States.
Previously desultory in her volunteer efforts, Low now had found her life’s work, demonstrating the truth of the George Eliot observation that "It is never too late to be what you might have been." She took to the task with aplomb, proving to be an irresistible force with her wit and charm: buttonholing family and friends for help, raising funds, and touring the nation on recruitment drives, disregarding social distinctions and physical disabilities alike as she turned her original group of 18 into the largest voluntary association of women and girls in America.
When Low died of breast cancer in 1927, she was buried next to her parents in the family plot in Laurel Green Cemetery. At her request, she was buried in her green serge Scouts uniform. Upstairs, in her birthplace, a painting depicts her in khaki rather than the green color adopted later. (Khaki, it came to be felt, had military overtones that it was better to de-emphasize.)
By the time of my visit, the Girl Scouts’ uniform had been redesigned yet again, by Bill Blass. Somehow, the idea of a fashion maven putting his touches on clothing meant to be functional doesn’t sit well with me. I wonder what Juliette would have done. Maybe stand on her head and think on it?
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