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Miriam Hubbard at University of Michigan

Miriam Hubbard was the daughter of Elbert and his second wife Alice. She was at the end of her junior year at the University of Michigan when her parents died on the Lusitania in 1915. Miriam did go on to graduate the next year.

U of M is compiling an historical alumni list. Here is the link of Miriam's data. 

I think it is interesting that Elbert the second (son of Elbert and first wife Bertha) never graduated from high school but ran the Roycroft after his father died while his half-sister went on to receive a Masters degree at a time when women attending college was not very common. 

Come visit the Roycroft Campus where education of all kinds is embraced. No college degrees are offered but GREAT artisan classes are. Check out the latest class offerings at the Roycroft Campus Corporation

Julie

Vaudeville Days of Elbert Hubbard Recalled by daughter Miriam Hubbard Roelofs

  Elbert Hubbard the  vaudevillian:   

          "The most bizarre lecture that he ever did was a vaudeville stint.   An Orpheum circuit asked him to do a two a day appearance on the vaudeville stage. At first he said he couldn't’t possibly but people consider it, the Orpheum people persisted, try it they said, just for a week and offered him a handsome salary. Finally, he said he would try, but he was scared.  Veteran lecturer though he was, to walk on a bare stage just after a performance of trained bears and gymnasts and give a lecture. Ghastly!    Speak for 15 minutes, no warm-up, well he did it and it was a success. The result was a 17 week engagement that went from coast to coast.  One result was that it made excellent copy for the Phil which was later made into a small book called “In the Limelite” but he said it was the most exhausting task he had ever tackled."

          The preceding quote is from an audio tape of a presentation prepared by Miriram Hubbard Roelofs for a Social Studies class at East Aurora High School in 1975.  Miriam was the daughter of Alice Moore and Elbert Hubbard.

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Alice Moore Hubbard's Daughter, Miriam, Remembered her father Elbert Hubbard

     Miriam Hubbard Roelofs speaking of her father's publication, The Philistine   

          "The Philistine was quite different. It was more a journal of Father’s opinion on current events.  Enthusiastic words for some, thundering denunciation for others all sorts of thoughts that came into his head found expression in the Philistine. He had a favorite quotation from Emerson   “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.  He followed that admonition but I think might well have memorable command of Admiral Farragut.  “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”.  So in the Phil, along with remarks of Mr. Bach, then editor of the late Ladies Home Journal, as father said, was a judge Lindsey and his innovation of the juvenile court. The most published was the message to Garcia (Garsha) which was another article that first came out in the Philistine. The reprints of that kept the presses humming." 

       

          These thoughts on her father were recorded on an audiotape presentation Miriam Hubbard Roelofs prepared for a Social Studies class at East Aurora High School in 1975.

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Miriam Hubbard Roelofs, Daughter of Elbert & Alice Hubbard Recalls Yellowstone Park

          The following is taken from an audio recording Miriam Hubbard Roelofs made in 1975, sharing memories of her famous father, Elbert Hubbard.

            "....a date 1914. Father, Mother and I were invited to be the guests of the Northern Pacific Railroad on a trip to Yellowstone Park.  Riding the Pacific Railroad to Yellowstone Park.  Father could write a book all about it.  What a host that Railroad was.  Never were there such meals as the dining car produced.  At the park we were met by a coach, not a coach and four, but a coach and two, with their driver.  He also took us through the Park, no automobiles were allowed at that time, stopping for lunch by tumbling water stream and spending nights at the Inn which the Northern Pacific had built to give every comfort to its guests.  Old Faithful I remember especially, with the geyser that shot up boiling water, high, incredibly high in the air, every hour.  At the Canyons a couple of black bears  wanted handouts, rugged beauty of mountain and forest and finally drove back to the entrance of the park and there we saw the first newspaper we had seen in two weeks. 

          And war had been declared, August 1914."

Elbert Hubbard, with Daughter Miriam, Traveled to Huntingdon PA, Home of Juniata College

            It is unlikely Elbert Hubbard would have visited Huntingdon, PA to lecture at Juniata College, given his opinion of higher education.  He did however stay overnight at Huntingdon's Leister House in December 1907 while on a business trip.  He sent this brief note to his wife Alice.    

     " Select $100 worth of furs for yourself and never say I never gave you nothing!"

          Enclosed was a letter dated December 17 from their 13 year old daughter Miriam, traveling with her father.  It was addressed to "Rev. Alice Hubbard, East Aurora, NY".

          "Mother,

          We saw the iron mills at Emporium and we saw the fire dash up from a kind of iron cage.  We went over there and saw the furnaces where they melt the iron.  They have two machines with immense wheels apiece, 500 horsepower each, just to blow air into the furnaces.

         There were places where they put the pig iron and we were too late to see it put in.

          Where I was (it was) wonderful.  We stopped in Lock Haven in a hotel that would make your hair turn green, blue and yellow.  When we woke up (we had to be called) the man was breaking the door in.  I expected to see his fist come through any minute.  It's beautiful here and oh but that lunch was good!!!  We ate all but part of the cookies and a package of sandwitches (sic).  Tell Mother Grant at that beautiful and magnificent hotel we had for breakfast: 1 dry hot apple apiece, a greasy balony (?) sausage, some potatoes (greasy) some coffee and some pancakes made with some grease in them.  Also a bit of rubber to give them a spicy chewy consistency.

          We are almost at Tyrone so I'll leave the rest to your imagination. 

          Baby (Miss Hubbard and her father)"

             The Leister House in Huntingdon, across the street from the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, later known as the Penn Hunt Hotel, provided part time jobs forJuniata College students in the 1940s and perhaps in 1907 as well.  Note the breakfast Miriam describes was in Loch Haven, not Huntingdon.   

Miriam Hubbard Roelofs Shares Memories of her Father, Elbert Green Hubbard

          Below, continued excerpts from an audiotape of Elbert & Alice Hubbard's daughter Miriam Hubbard Roelofs.

          "The next date in father's life I would put at 1870 that would make him 15.  Until then he had the busy routine of a country boy of that time. Every family had horses, a cow or more, and chickens, a garden, and a wood stove that was voracious.  Bert was a big boy who took care of the livestock, worked the garden, and chopped the wood.  He went to district school, he hired out to neighboring farmers at harvest and seeding time, and he had one job the other boys did not have, he kept his father's saddle bag with the doctor's kit packed and in order.  I have the impression from what my grandmother and my Aunt Mary told me that he was a robust jolly boy with a sense of fun but sometimes too riotous for comfort.  Grandmother remembered rushing to the window with the sound of pounding hoofs and seeing Bert on horseback with the baby of the family under one arm, galloping down the road, the baby's long dress streaming in the wind, both Bert and the baby laughing hilariously, and probably the horse too."

        Taken from an audiotape recorded July 1975 by Miriam Hubbard Roelofs.

Roycroft's Elbert Hubbard Recommended Habits

               Miriam Hubbard Roelofs recalls habits her father, Elbert Hubbard, espoused.  The first of three being the Work Habit (see previous blog).  The next is the Study Habit.

          "On the Study Habit.  What a silly thought that study, the habit of study, stops when schooling stops.  What folly to throw away, or let sloth away, intellectual curiosity.  To keep one's mind active, to grow in judgment, to expand the capacity for sympathy, to make new friends, enemies or enemies for that matter that one meets in the history and literature.  All these should come from the study habit, and new skills.  I was thinking of the story of Hayden who, when the doctor told him he was going to die, said "Why, I can't possibly die, I've only begun to learn the French horn." 

          And the third habit to cultivate was the Health habit.

          The Health Habit, a most valuable possession.  The habit of daily exercise, regular sleep, proper food, and an even temper makes for general comfort for, and as the saying is, self and family.

          All these sound obvious and even trite but living with these habits as the programming of your daily life is neither trite nor common place. Father had the peculiarity, not only of preaching but practicing.  No one could have taken better or more unobtrusive good care of his health than he did.  He was never sick. When one considers the amount of nervous energy that he had, one hundred pounds of pressure per square inch as he used to say. How easy it would have been to have made a wreck of himself if he had not had good sense, intelligence, and self discipline.  Work gave a solid foundation to his character, the habit of study gave an ever flowing spring of interest and mental stimulation, add the habit of health and there are three habits to cherish. 

          Thus ends Hubbard's lesson for the day as remembered by Miriam Hubbard Roelofs, only child of Elbert and Alice Moore Hubbard.

      

Elbert Hubbard's Legacy to His Daughter Miriam Hubbard

         The following is taken from a transcription of an audiotape made of Elbert and Alice Hubbard's only child, Miriam in which she speaks of her father.  The recording was made in 1975.

          Some practical advice.  Make use of the habit which is a great labor saver.  But cultivate only those habits that you are willing to master you. 

          Here is the first of three which stand one in good stead. 

          The Work Habit:  I think father regarded sloth to be as deadly a sin as could any medieval Turk men.  He had quite a bit to say about work.  Carved on the big door of the shop were two mottoes 'Blessed is the man who has found his work'  And another, 'Life without industry is guilt___  Industry without art is brutality' .  And further he had this to say 'Once we thought work was a curse, then it was regarded as a necessary evil and yesterday it dawned upon us that it was a blessed privilege and when you have the habit of work, work ceases to be a curse. 

Elbert and Alice Hubbard's Daughter Miriam Shared Stories Relating to Abraham Lincoln

          "....about my grandfather.  He was born in Mayville in 1821.  That is not very long after the War of 1812, five years after the battle of Waterloo.  He graduated from medical school in 1842.  He had a good practice in Buffalo, but in 1855 he decided to move west, an awesome decision for pioneer life then you can understand it's harder life then to understand easily in these days of comfortable living, but he and grandmother and two small children left, not by oxcart but by train, a long, weary ride.  They settled in Bloomington, IL, with the task ahead of him of establishing a doctor's practice and making a home.  From all accounts it was rough, with cold and privation and discouragement all through that first winter.

          But spring came and here's another date, on June 19, 1856 their son Elbert was born and named after two Baptist ministers.  1856. That is not a peg except as it applies to the man that was born then, but the peg is 1861 when the Civil War began.  Grandfather spent a day in the courtroom in Bloomington where Lincoln was defending a case for a fellow physician.  Lincoln was that near to the generation into which father was born.  The conviction, the loyalty, the fierce enthusiasm, and devotion of those years as well as agony of sorrow upon sorrow of those dreadful years must have been clouded background years of consciousness for a child who was growing up then.  Father used to tell his remembrance of his father coming home from the village with the news that Lincoln had been shot. The family at the kitchen table sat stricken and grandmother who was normally unemotional threw her apron over her head to weep.  1861 and 1865 pegs indeed."

          This is a portion of the talk by Miriam Hubbard Roelofs, only child of Elbert and Alice Moore Hubbard, prepared and delivered to an East Aurora High School Class in 1975.  They were re-recorded by Miriam in the summer of 1975 and only recently transcribed.

Elbert Hubbard's Daughter Recalls Her Father's Love of Horses

                    "It would be trite to say that he loved horses, he did, of course, horses were part of his life.  He understood them and they in turn, understood him.  There seemed to be a kind of communication between them, as there is between some people where language is unnecessary.  This was not a quality inherited from his father who was a ridiculous horseman in spite of the fact that he rode miles and miles to visit his patients.  Father had complete ease around and on a horse and rides he used to take every day, when I knew him, sometimes long, sometimes only a few miles, seemed to renew his strength and poise".

           Miriam Hubbard Roelofs, only child of Elbert and Alice Moore Hubbard speaking of her father's love of horses.  Transcribed from a sound recording by Miriam Hubbard Roelofs in 1975.