The Weekly Outlook: Boredom, Salmagundi, Wheels, and Weavers

THE WEEKLY OUTLOOK  —  DEVOTED TO HOME & OUTING LIFE, LITERATURE, ART, MUSIC & THE DRAMA (Volume 1  Number 7 —August 22, 1896)

SOCIAL LIFE

It’s been a long, hot summer and it would seem that the folks at The Weekly Outlook are getting a little bored with Davenport. Social Editor Susie Glaspell writes,

“Doesn’t it seem to you that society has been a little slow this week? Don’t you ever wish that something way out of the ordinary would happen?”

Miss Glaspell assures everyone she hasn’t “the slightest desire to see anything unusual take place within the charming circle of our time-honored and strictly conventional tri-city society”. She just wants someone to diverge from the beaten track and “give something other than a reception, a supper party, or a ball”.

Susan K. Glaspell was the Social Editor of The Weekly Outlook, a Davenport newspaper published for two years beginning July 1896.

Enter Mrs. William H. Hicks, Mrs. Henry S. Manning, Mrs. Will E. Warren, and Mrs. Charles Eugene Banks [aka Carrie Wyatt Banks – associate editor of this fine paper]. These courageous women didn’t step out of the box, they leapt out by hosting – a SALMAGUNDI PARTY.  What crazy, outrageous thing is this you ask? Why, it is a card party and five tables of guests, some from as far away as Chicago, Terre Haute, Dubuque and Williamsburg, attended. Each table played a different card game;  whist, cinque, euchre, hearts and fish pond. Mrs. Sheriff won highest honors. Mrs. E. M. White “triumphed in the booby”.

I wonder if Miss Glaspell was invited?

WHEEL LIFE 

Editor Banks states that he thinks there are more “wheels per capita in Davenport than in any other American city”. He suggests a few simple rules of the road:

Keep to the right when wheeling.

Go around to the left when passing.

Go slow at corners and street crossings.

Ring your bell once and then stop it. Continued ringing startles everybody and chaos results.

He would get along just fine on  today’s Quad-Cities bike paths!

 

SOCIALETTES

Mrs. John Weaver celebrated her ninetieth birthday last Sunday. Both she and her husband are hale and hearty and celebrated their golden wedding eight years ago. It hardly need be said the occasion was one of great happiness.

We hope Julia Ann Weaver enjoyed reading this little socialette. When she died on March 1, 1899 she was 92 years old and the second to the last person in the United States whose father was in the Revolutionary War. From her Oakdale Cemetery record we learn she was born in Drummondtown, Virginia and died several years before her husband, John.

RIP, Mrs. Weaver.

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