August 25, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Tante Esther came to see me and brought me a little squab, but when I found out what a squab was I couldn’t eat it. It’s a little pigeon just like the ones we feed in front of City Hall.

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Pulitzer Prize Award winning San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen would have been appalled by people feeding pigeons at City Hall. Hilda would not have agreed with his repeated complaints about the pigeon population here. She would have liked Julie Andrews’ rendition of “Feed the Birds” in the film “Mary Poppins” much more.

August 24, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Miss Comagy came home with me from the hospital. She and Alma like each other very much and they go to church together every morning. While they are gone, Brownie comes up and lies on my bed. Everyone has stopped sending presents. Grandfather says it shows that I am better, but it was a nice experience, and maybe one day I’ll have something else taken out of myself.

August 23, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I am home again. I had a lovely time in the hospital. I had a nice nurse called Miss Comagy. She was so very clever. She took a piece of paper and cut carefully like a pattern and when she was finished there was a whole line of children holding each other’s hands. She let me color them in with crayons and I turned them into boys and girls. Mrs. Adler, who owns the hospital, it really isn’t like a hospital more like a pretty house. Well! She made wonderful ice cream of different flavors that tasted so good, and I could eat as much as I wanted because it cooled my throat.

The operation wasn’t so bad. Dr. Otto stood right next to me and he was dressed in funny white clothes. I didn’t see Dr. Selton at all, but I didn’t want to because I hate him. They put me on a table and held something next to my face, and some very sweet nurse told me to think of sheep in a meadow, and to see if I could count to ten and imagine the ten sheep jumping over a fence. I can’t remember how many I counted. I guess I fell off to sleep, and when I woke up there were a lot of people standing around me telling me what a brave girl I was. After that, every day I got presents. Flowers, books, paper dolls. Only Dr. Otto forgot to send me a present, so I asked him why, and Grandmother said that I had no manners, but he laughed and said I was right to remind him that it was naughty of him to forget and he asked me what I wanted. I said, “A book,” and the next day he brought me a beautiful book called “Black Beauty.” I have not read it yet but I know that it is about a horse.

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It is amazing how similar some of Hilda’s childhood experiences were. Black Beauty was hugely popular when I was a child and is still published today, almost 150 years after it was first published in 1877. Making paper dolls never goes out of fashion.

August 16, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I am in the hospital and tomorrow morning Dr. Selton is going to take my tonsils out. Dr. Otto came to see me a little while ago, and he told me that I am going to have a lovely time here and he would be right in the room with me while my tonsils are coming out. He said that Dr. Selton is a good kind man and he wouldn’t dream of hurting a little girl, and if I am brave and don’t yell he will give me a present when I am better. He will, not Dr. Selton.

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There are no more diary entries while Hilda recovers from her operation. We will hear from her again on August 23.

August 15, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This afternoon Grandmother took me to see a doctor because she said I was getting too many colds. This is not my darling Dr. Otto, this is a man I just hate, and I don’t think that he is a real doctor either, he just takes out people’s tonsils. His name is Dr. Selton, and when he put a lot of mirrors down my throat, he told me to stop squirming like an eel. An eel is a fish that looks just like a snake.

August 14, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Today Aunt Tillie bought me a pretty scrap book and a bottle of paste, and this afternoon I started to paste pictures in it. I have some very pretty ones that the nuns gave me and some beautiful ones sent to me from my Grandparents who live in Germany that have beautiful colors with gold and silver too. I have cut some of the pictures out of magazines and there are some of brides and bride’s maids and pigs and cows and horses and windmills. I put Jesus Christ in the middle of the first page with bride’s maids all around him, then I put cows and pigs in each corner. Aunt Tillie came in and was angry. She said I shouldn’t have put Jesus together with cows and pigs and that I hadn’t pasted the pictures straight. So she did the next page. Little children, walking in a straight row between rows of flowers and it was very pretty and neat, but it wasn’t any fun.

August 13, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Last night in bed, I thought about arithmetic because in two weeks school will be starting and I began to wonder why when you add two even numbers together it makes an even number and when you add two odd numbers together it makes an even number, like 2 and 2 are 4 and 3 and 3 are 6. It is very puzzling.

August 12, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Last night we had company for dinner and as it is vacation, I was allowed to come to the table. These people were not relations, but I don’t like them anyhow. Why do people always ask you if you are a good little girl? Mr. Baker asked me that and then he asked me if I went to Sunday school, and I said, “Oh yes, I do because my Grandfather makes me go” and then he asked me what I learned there and I said, “Not much.” He laughed again, and said that I was a wise little girl to know that I didn’t know much but he didn’t tell me why. Then Mrs. Baker asked me to tell them something I had learned in Sunday school, so I told them the story of “Adam and Eve.” I said that…

Adam and Eve had been very stupid, and had eaten an apple that had been given to them by a very dirty old snake and anyone should know better than to eat a dirty old apple, especially from a dirty old snake and so God of course didn’t want such stupid people in the Garden of Eden, so he had them thrown out.

Mr. Baker asked me if our Sunday school teacher taught us that and I said no, but that it must have been like that.

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Last weekend I attended an outdoor concert by a favorite singer, Paula West. She sang one of her signature songs — “Snake” — Hilda knew the moral of the story without having heard the song.

Paula West and her trio at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival in San Francisco on August 6, 2022.

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August 11, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Aunt Tillie called for me today and brought me home. I told her all about the circus and how I didn’t like it. She was very angry and then she asked me why I couldn’t be like other children. I didn’t know I wasn’t.

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, last month I was given some of Hilda’s photographs and letters. Included was this postcard of Hilda and Brownie that she wrote to her father on August 11, 1912 - the date of today’s diary entry!

August 10, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This afternoon Uncle Bernard took Irving and me to the circus. I don’t like circuses but of course I didn’t say that. I had to pretend that I was having a beautiful time. It was so big, I was so dizzy trying to see everything. I was sorry for all the poor animals in cages and I was so afraid that the people on the trapezes were going to fall down on top of me and I didn’t think that the clowns were very funny. I didn’t even like the pretty pink candy that looked like cotton because it melted as soon as we put our tongues on it so we couldn’t taste it, or maybe it had no taste.

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Hilda was ahead of her time - she would be happy with the changes in circuses in recent years– even Ringling Brothers is coming back without animal acts.

August 9, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

It is such fun here! Only Irving makes fun of everything I do or anything I say. Today he asked me which I liked best, the whites, or the yolks of eggs. I said that I liked the yolks and he said that only cowards liked the yolks. I guess it is true, because everyone says that he is very bright.

August 8, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This afternoon I am going to Aunt Berta Fulda’s house and stay three or four days. She and Uncle Max live way out where there are no sidewalks, only sand all around them. They have a boy named Irving, with red hair. I love to visit there because we can play in the sand all day long, and Aunt Berta never cares how we look or what we eat.

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In addition to giving us a picture of childhood in San Francisco in the early 20th Century, every once in awhile Hilda helps to flesh out my family’s story. Irving (or Erwin) was born in 1892 and would visit my grandmother and her children in Vienna in the late 1920s or early 1930s. His name was mentioned in a number of letters as a somewhat daunting figure called “Uncle Fulda.” On the photo below, my mother wrote “1929?” because she was a child when he visited and could not recall the date. My grandmother’s nephew Paul Zerzawy wrote a letter to him affirming that if my grandparents were allowed to come to the U.S. in 1941, they would not be a burden on the state, listing all of the relatives (including Uncle Fulda) who would contribute to their support. This letter must have helped my grandparents procure the resources and documents that allowed them to get tickets on a ship leaving for the U.S. in July 1941. Unfortunately, the paperwork did not align to satisfy German bureaucracy so they never made it to the ship.

August 7, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Today was awful, Grandfather and I took Brownie for a walk. We left him off the leash for a minute so he could play a little and then we all saw a horrible dead rat on the sidewalk, but Brownie ran right to it and gulped it down before Grandfather could stop him. I was afraid that he would be sick and die but Grandfather said that dogs don’t die so easily, and we should take him home and give him an emetic. An emetic is something that makes you vomit, I just learned this word. I was afraid about Grandfather giving Brownie one and begged him not to because it was bad enough seeing the hideous thing go down, I didn’t want to see it come up again. Grandfather said that it was very selfish of me, because without an emetic Brownie could be very sick. He said that he would give it to him downstairs in the laundry and I wouldn’t have to see it. So he did, and I didn’t and Brownie is all right again.

August 6, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This is Grandmother’s birthday. She didn’t have a real party but everyone came to see her. She loves flowers very much, so that is what everyone brought her. The whole house is full of beautiful ones, but there are so many and the trouble is that they don’t look so beautiful anymore, they look crowded. It would be nice to take one flower, and put it in a little vase and just look at it all by itself. Aunt Tillie knows how to arrange flowers, just like they do downtown in the big department stores, but my Grandmother’s arrangements always look like the flowers are wearing corsets. I love to help arrange flowers but everyone says I make too much of a mess.

August 5, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

This afternoon, Tante Hermine came over to have coffee with Grandmother and once we were alone, I asked her about Uncle Samuel’s lady friend, and explained that someone had spilled ink on her face and I thought it was done on purpose. She said that accidents do happen but that she didn’t know who the lady was. I didn’t believe her so I asked Grandfather. He said that he didn’t really want to talk about it, but that she was a nice friend of Uncle Samuel’s, and that to talk of Uncle Samuel makes both he and Grandmother sad. I only know that this uncle died when he was just twenty-one years old and I don’t know why. I don’t understand why nice people should die when they are young, and I feel sad too, because I know it would have been nice to know my mother, and Uncle Samuel too.

August 4, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

In Sunday school today, I asked permission to stand up and talk. I told everyone about the spot on my favorite dress and how God didn’t take it out, and why didn’t he? Miss Coleman, our teacher, said we must never ask God for such things, it is wicked. She said that we must ask for only important things, like watching over everyone in our family and keeping all of them well and helping to forgive our enemies. She said that God had more important things to do than take the spots out of our clothes.

August 3, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

It rained today so I couldn’t go out and Grandmother let me look at the family pictures. We have a big basket of them in the hall closet. I like my own the best. There is one with my nurse when I’m only a few weeks old. She is holding me in her arms and in back of us is a whole, full clothesline of my diapers. Then there is one of me when I was three years old dressed in a beautiful coat and bonnet that my father brought to me from Paris. There is a beautiful one of Aunt Tillie in a big hat with a swan on top of it. The swan is sitting on a nest of roses. Aunt Tillie is holding a parasol and a pair of gloves. There are thousands of pictures of grandmother, one in the backyard shelling peas, one on the front steps, one just sitting in the park, one holding me on a donkey and one on the Seal Rocks. I don’t think they are the real Seal Rocks because the real ones are quite far out in the ocean and grandmother can’t swim. Besides, you can see that her clothes are dry. There are two funny pictures of my father and mother posing in bathing suits. My father’s bathing suit looks just like Grandfather’s long winter underwear. My mother’s suit isn’t pretty either. The picture I wanted to look at longer, only Grandmother pulled it away from me, was one of my dead Uncle Samuel. I barely remember him. Samuel is sitting in the front seat of a buggy. There is a lady sitting next to him, but all you can see is her waist and skirt. Someone spilled ink on her face. I asked Grandmother who the lady was, and she became angry and said that I I ever asked her that again, she would send me to bed without supper.

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Recently I was given a box of Hilda’s photos. Unfortunately, it did not include most of the photos Hilda mentions, but there is a photo postcard of a couple in bathing suits. I assume this is her parents:

Below is a photo probably similar to the one she mentions of Seal Rocks. This photo of Hilda and an unknown woman (Tillie? Alma?) on first glance looks like it was taken in front of the Cliff House, Ocean Beach and Seal Rocks, but upon closer inspection, it appears to be a painting. The photo would have been taken before September 1907 when this version of Cliff House was destroyed by fire.

Below is a recent photo of Seal Rocks:

August 2, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Tante Esther for lunch. Uncle Felix for dinner. Earthquake afterwards.

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(It must have been a small earthquake as I could find nothing about it in the newspaper or on lists of notable quakes.)

August 1, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I couldn’t sleep all night because I couldn’t stop thinking of the little sparrow. I do wish that Tante Esther or Uncle Felix had died instead. I am sure the little sparrow was never mean to anyone. He never made anyone sit straight on the edge of a chair or eat dirty peppermints.

July 31, 1912

From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Today, when I was out with Alma, I saw a little dead sparrow on the sidewalk. I picked it up and carried it till we passed a house that had a lawn in front of it and then I laid it on the grass, so no one would step on it. I said, “Oh! Why couldn’t it have been Tante Esther or Uncle Felix instead of this sweet little sparrow.” Alma was so upset with me and said that it was wicked of me to wish such an awful thing.