The Memory Palace

Nate Dimeo is a longtime radio hero of mine. And praises be, now he has a book out of his stories, calledThe Memory Palace: True Short Stories of The Past https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-memory-palace-true-short-stories-of-the-past-nate-dimeo/21177599?ean=9780593446157. Enjoy this sampler of his audiobook and a favorite episode of mine. And consider supporting both Articles of Interest and The Memory Palace by donating to Radiotopia https://www.radiotopia.fm/donate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Avery Trufelman?

  Thank you so much for listening to Articles of Interest. Let me just pull back the curtain a little bit and explain how this show works. So the way I eat and pay my rent is because I sell ads on this show. And the reason I like to do it this way is because there's no paywall. Articles of Interest is available to anybody who wants to listen to it. And it wouldn't be possible without Radiotopia. Radiotopia, it's so cool. It's a collective of 21 different podcasts. But we basically pool our resources together. And Radiotopia is this nonprofit that helps us all out. It's not devoted to maximum profit or extreme expansion. It's just about helping weird little creative shows survive. I love Radiotopia and I'm so proud to be a member.

• 0:44Avery Trufelman?

  Our annual fundraiser just launched with a goal of 1,500 donors. That's it, 1,500 donors. I think we can do it. Help out Articles of Interest and our entire neighborhood over at Radiotopia by donating today at radiotopia.fm/donate. Thank you so much. It's such a beautiful feeling to open up your closet and know that you have the right clothes for every occasion. The clothes that make you feel comfortable and warm and totally like yourself. But the only thing better than that feeling is giving it to someone else. This holiday season, turn to Quince. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials. We're talking Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton,

• 1:27Avery Trufelman?

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• 2:12Avery Trufelman?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was articles of interest. It's the best way to support the show. The glasses are green, the color of sea glass, you could say. They are exactly my husband's prescription. They have blue light blocking technology for his computer time, and they were $30. I got them at Zenni. Zenni is an online eyewear shop with so many stylish glasses, prescription and sunglasses, and customizable lens options, all starting at under $30. And Zenni's virtual try on lets you preview how a frame is gonna look on you before you buy it, so it doesn't feel like a shot in the dark. I feel like most people trying on glasses take pictures of themselves anyway to see how it'll look from the outside. Zenni's tool will help you figure out the right pair effortlessly. I just got my husband these Zenni glasses,

• 2:57Avery Trufelman?

  and then, lo and behold, they have become his everyday pair, arguably his signature. Give the gift of Zenni this holiday season. Glasses, sunglasses, whatever they need. Go to zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off, plus free shipping over $65. Styles sell out, so don't wait. That's Z E N N I dot com slash podcast, promo code PODCAST15. Zenni dot com slash podcast, code PODCAST15. Hi, it's Avery. Peeking out of hiding, I've been mostly holed up, trying to write this book, banging my head against the keyboard every morning, trying to make words come out. It's been so hard. And I was like, why didn't anyone warn me

• 3:41Avery Trufelman?

  that writing was so hard? And then I remembered that is almost entirely all that writers ever talk about. I just didn't listen. But this process makes me all the more in awe of Nate DeMeo. Nate has been a hero of mine for years now. His podcast, The Memory Palace, tells these little delicious vignettes from obscure parts of history. They are so perfectly written, each one just this little transportative bonbon. The Memory Palace was one of the first podcasts I ever discovered, and it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. The show is really simple. Nate just reads these short stories. Stories. They're like 15 minutes usually. And he's got this warm, elegant voice.

• 4:25Avery Trufelman?

  It's a really easy conceit, right? Just excellent writing, excellent reading. Nate's been doing this for like 15 years. He's a master. His show has been a Peabody finalist. He was the artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I even once, totally by accident, stumbled upon an interpretive modernist dance performance that was made out of one of his stories. And now Nate has finally assembled a book of all of his beloved stories from The Memory Palace. It is called The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past. It is a delight. And not only to finally have his work in solid paper form, accompanied by beautiful photographs and illustrations, the real treat is that Nate has also released a special audiobook version where he asked his various friends

• 5:09Avery Trufelman?

  to essentially cover his stories. So you can hear versions of Memory Palace episodes read by my friends and heroes like Roman Mars from 99% Invisible, Rishi Kesh Hirway from Song Exploder, and even some A-list actors like Keri Kuhn and Ryan Reynolds. So I am so honored that Nate also asked me to read one of his stories. And so I thought I'd give you a little peek into The Memory Palace. First, I'm gonna play an excerpt from the audiobook, the little story that I read, written by Nate DeMeo. Then there'll be a little pause. And then I will play my very favorite episode of The Memory Palace. It's about fashion, but that's not the reason it's my favorite episode. Sound good? Okay, here we go.

• 5:54Avery Trufelman?

  Looking up. A postcard from the Waldorf Astoria. May 19, 1910.

• 6:02Avery Trufelman?

  They started crowding into the express elevator at 10 o'clock, bundled in their top coats, puffed in their furs. Friends who'd been up there earlier in the week had warned them about how cold it gets on the roof. And besides, a little extra protection might be useful on a night when there was a chance they might all die. Astronomers were in heaven. They'd trained their telescopes on Halley's Comet as soon as it rounded the bend on its 76-year circuit of the solar system. They had learned so much about it: its relative velocity, its eccentricity, its aphelion, its perihelion. And they'd discovered two things that had made headlines beyond the Academy. First, the comet's 24-million-mile-long tail

• 6:45Avery Trufelman?

  was composed in part of cyanide gas. And second, for six hours in 1910, when the comet would be at its brightest in the night sky, that tail would envelop the Earth. Those things were in all the papers. That neither the cyanide nor the comet's tail posed any but the very slightest, barely calculable danger to anyone at all was less widely covered. Instead, there were stories of panic in every corner of the soon-to-be-destroyed globe. Many were overblown: supposed mass suicides in Hungary, riots over the exorbitant costs of voodoo protections in Haiti. Others were true: the Florida man selling space on his submarine where people could be safe from the comet's rays;

• 7:29Avery Trufelman?

  the miner in California who crucified himself, convinced that the end times were nigh. But here were well-bred and well-read Manhattanites, stepping off the elevator and into the most exclusive party in the world, knowing that the chances that that world would end were incredibly small, but still, big enough to make the whole thing extra fun. So, onto the roof of the Waldorf Astoria and into the crisp night air, into music and French perfume and cigarette smoke. The women compared their silver comet pins and their gold comet-tail charms and their diamond fireballs. The men fetched them comet cocktails from the bar. They smiled at friends, at people they'd run into now and then at the symphony

• 8:13Avery Trufelman?

  or in the men's lounge after a squash game, smiling at anyone because to be here at all was to be someone worth smiling at. Just before midnight, when the planet first became enwrapped in the comet's tail, they could look out across the rooftops of their city and know there was nowhere else on Earth they would rather be. They could see the lights from other parties on other rooftops, the Plaza and the Gotham and the Knickerbocker and the St. Regis and the Astor and the Belmont and the Majestic. They could make out people standing on the observation decks of steamships churning the Hudson. They could see the construction site of the Woolworth

• 8:53Avery Trufelman?

  Building, which someday soon would rise higher than they were right now, but not tonight. They could look out to New Jersey, where the mayor of Woodbury had ordered the police department to make wake-up calls to make sure no one slept through the big moment. They could look down on tenement roofs, down on the people who lived there, the people who read the rags that sold fear to sell papers, some of whom had bought so-called "comet pills" or sucked on comet inhalers in the hopes that, when morning came, if morning came at all, they'd be the smart ones, left to rebuild the ruined world. They could look out over the whole city, awake and alive, leaning out of windows, craning

• 9:37Avery Trufelman?

  their necks, playing the "this could be our last night on Earth" card on reluctant lovers, passing bottles between neighbors on stoops and fire escapes, dancing like there was no tomorrow, letting the kids stay up late, talking to strangers on the street. They could look out and see the whole world looking up.

• 10:03Avery Trufelman?

  Audio excerpted in courtesy of Random House Audio from The Memory Palace by Nate DeMeo, read by a full cast. Excerpt read by Avery Trufelman, copyright 2024. Nate DeMeo, phonographic copyright 2024, Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. So, I mean, I have to say, with the holidays coming up, this book, again, called The Memory Palace: True Stories From the Past, would make a perfect gift for book lovers on your list or the person who's impossible to shop for. I can also just imagine gathering around on Christmas morning and having the book lying around, just reading little bits from it between snippets of conversation and getting up to help yourself to leftovers. It's a gem. Congratulations, Nate. Tell me all your writing secrets, please. After the break, you'll hear the original, my favorite episode of The Memory Palace, coming right up.

• 10:49Speaker 01

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• 11:19Avery Trufelman?

  The surefire sign of a good podcast episode is that you can remember where you were when you listened to it. I remember I listened to this when I was leaving the Metropolitan Museum because I'd gone to see Nate DeMayo's residency there. And I was like, oh, I'm on this memory palace kick. And I right away queued up this one and was like, whoa, what is this? This is called the House of Lowe.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  This is the memory palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Everything was ruined. It wasn't her fault. She'd done everything right. She finished on schedule with two weeks left to tinker if she needed to, but she didn't even need to. But the water main just burst. Everything was ruined. All the bridesmaid dresses, all that work, the cutting, the sewing, stitching by hand, the consultations with the mother and then the bride, and then the bride with the mother, and on and on, all the drawings and fittings and alterations. Hundreds of yards of fabric just ruined. Two months of work ruined 10 days before the wedding. There was nothing Anne Lowe could do but wipe her tears and get back to work. The family didn't need to know. She would remake the dresses, all of them, pull all-nighters every night.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  She would call in every seamstress she knew, every favor, all hands on deck. She'd overpay them. She'd pay them overtime, whatever it took to get as many hands on deck as possible. She would throw money at the problem, though she didn't really have the money to throw at the problem. She had expected to clear $700 profit on the job. This was the early 50s. But now with the new fabric and all the help and the extra hours, she was gonna wind up two grand in the hole. But the money didn't really matter. She would tell herself as she wrote another check. "These were good clients, they had been good to her, but this wedding, this was the one. The social event of the year, maybe the decade. And the work she'd get from it. You had to spend money to make money, right? Isn't that how all her clients made theirs?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  The publicity, the exposure from this kind of thing. Having her name out there, it would all pay off. The money didn't matter, she would tell herself. But she wouldn't need to tell herself.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  When she would stand up from her stool, sore from sitting for hours, needle between her teeth, and stand back and look at her work, at the dress on the form coming together, coming back to itself now. The ivory silk shimmering peach in the light coming through her studio windows as dawn broke after another all-nighter. The money didn't matter.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  This was what she was meant to do.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Born to do, she would say. Her mother was a dressmaker, and her mother was a dressmaker. And her mother became a dressmaker for the family who owned her. And it kept her out of the fields. So she taught her daughter to make dresses too, hoping it would help save her from some of the worst fates in the plantation. Anne Lowe was born in 1898 and learned to make clothes by playing with the scraps of fabric that fell onto the carpet and her mother's and grandmother's feet as they worked the treadles of their sewing machines in a shop they had built over the course of decades. Little Anne would make dresses for her dolls and for herself. She loved making silk flowers. Camellias, azaleas, magnolias, all from trimmings and remnants and bits and bobs from the gowns and corsets and petticoats

• 14:39Speaker 02

  her mama and grandmama would make for the elite white families of Alabama. And so by the time she was 17, and a full-fledged apprentice in that shop, and her mother died suddenly while in the middle of an order for the governor's family, Anne was able to wipe her tears and finish the job. By the next year, she was married and had a baby son. Her new husband didn't want her to work outside of the home. He thought that making clothes for he and their family should be enough. And she was thinking about that. And how she just couldn't imagine that. Couldn't imagine how she was supposed to live a life without making beautiful things. As she walked through a department store in Montgomery. She had been there many times before, but this time she felt like she was being stared at. There was an older white woman whispering to an older white clerk.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And she knew that they were whispering about her, probably about how she didn't belong. And she was gearing up to give that woman a piece of her mind. When that same woman turned to her and asked her, "Who made that dress she was wearing?" She simply had to know who designed it. So Anne Lowe introduced herself. And when the woman said she would pay her to move to Tampa, to make dresses for her daughter's wedding, for all the women in her family. Anne Lowe thought of her husband waiting at home. Wanting her at home. And she left him there. She wrote this in her diary. "I left my husband today. I packed my belongings, grabbed my young son, and sought my freedom. My great-grandmother was enslaved.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Her every move controlled by others. My grandmother was enslaved. I will not be. It is 1916. I will not be enslaved." For ten years, Anne dressed anyone who was anyone on Florida's Gulf Coast. And she loved it. And Mrs. Lee, the woman who brought her there, loved her work. Loved Anne and her young son Archie. And encouraged her when she wanted to study fashion in New York. Anne sent off an application and dresses and sketches. And was accepted into the most prestigious design program in the city. But when she arrived in the first day of class, the head of the program was dumbfounded. He'd had no idea he'd let a Negro into his school.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  There was no way for him to tell by her portfolio and... He was sorry, but he just never imagined that... Anne Lowe spent what she would remember as the loneliest year of her life as a fashion design student in New York. Her teachers, her fellow students, didn't want her there. Made sure she knew it. And she dropped out of school. But she didn't quit. She opened up her own shop in Harlem. Eventually, after years of work, on Madison Avenue, in the heart of the fashion district. She stitched together a career dress by dress, client by client. Clients who would pass around her name like a secret, lest they lose her to the larger world, lest she become too big and too busy to make them their dresses.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Anne's name seemed to find its way to any American city where its wealthiest citizens debuted their daughters. She dressed Astors, Roosevelts, Lodges, Rockefellers, DuPonts, Rothschilds, and Bouviers. She made Jackie Bouvier's mother's second wedding dress, made she and her sister Lee's debutante dresses. And when it came time for Jackie to marry Jack Kennedy, the young senator, it would have to be Anne Lowe. Jackie's mother loved Anne's work, and Jackie's future father-in-law loved the idea that an African-American would make Jack's bride's dress, and might help him with the black vote down the road. But then the waterman broke. Neither Jackie's nor Jack's family ever found out. They never knew just how exhausted Anne must have been as she drove herself up from

• 18:19Speaker 02

  New York to Newport, or knew how close they'd come to not having dresses for their wedding day. Twice, actually. That thing with the waterman. Then, when she pulled up in the circular driveway in front of the Victorian mansion at the edge of the Atlantic, and she was told she would have to enter through the servants' entrance in the back, and she said the bride wouldn't be getting dressed that day, unless she were allowed to walk through the front door. And they never knew how it must have felt to drive home. Salt air through the open windows. Mid-September in Rhode Island, her job done, and done well. Knowing that all that work had been worth it. It had cost her all those sleepless nights and $2,000 she didn't really have, but people were going to know the name Anne Lowe. Just wait till the world saw her dress.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  The next day, Jackie Kennedy in ivory taffeta was international news. The portrait neckline, the full-flowing skirt, the little wax flowers tucked into the folds. It was a sensation, the dress, appearing in papers all over the world. But Anne Lowe's name did not. Fame never came to Anne Lowe like she'd hoped, like she deserved, let's just say it plain. One afternoon years earlier in 1946, she was sent to Paris by a black-owned newspaper to cover its first fashion week after the war. She wasn't showing herself, but as people raved about the dresses she was wearing, that

• 19:50Speaker 02

  of course she had made, she felt like it was just a matter of time before she would be back, watching her own collection walk the runway. She was at a party with a client, Marjorie Meriwether Post, the glamorous socialite and art collector who made a fortune running the Post Serial Company after her father's death when she was 27. Miss Post brought Christian Dior of the ascendant French House of Dior. She brought him over to meet her favorite designer and introduced her as Anne Lowe, the head of the American House of Lowe. But most of Anne's clients were content to keep her name like a secret. That same year, Olivia de Havilland handpicked one of Anne's dresses to wear to the Oscars.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Wore it onstage when she won Best Actress, a pale-blue-green with hand-painted flowers, the camellias and azaleas of Anne's youth. Olivia de Havilland didn't even know who designed it when she was asked. And in 1961, when Jackie Kennedy was First Lady, and everything she wore seemed to become what every young woman wanted to wear. A reporter asked her about her wedding dress. America wanted to know who'd designed it. Brides-to-be had been wondering for eight years. Jackie replied, "A colored woman, not haute couture."

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Anne wrote a letter to the White House the next day. She said that it wasn't so much that Jackie didn't mention her name that bothered her. She wrote that she was used to that. It was the last part that got to her. Not haute couture. She thought of herself as an esteemed Negro designer. She'd wished the First Lady had said something like that at least. Jackie's personal secretary called her to apologize. Said the First Lady couldn't control how the stories come out, but she was not going to push for the correction or the public statement that Anne was requesting. Some years later, the IRS came after Anne's business. She owed $12,000 in back taxes, which wasn't all that surprising. There wasn't anything untoward going on, her books were just a mess.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  She was an artist, who'd always spring for expensive material if it was the right material. Who'd always rather make the dress she wanted to make, help make that dress what it wanted to be, than cut corners. But she had to liquidate the business, and take jobs as an in-house designer for Saks Fifth Avenue and other department stores to make ends meet. But then one day, the IRS wrote to say that her debt had been paid. And she never knew who did it. She liked to tell herself it was Jackie Kennedy, making amends. But she seemed to have no reason to believe it besides wanting to. Before she died at the age of 83 in 1981, she did an interview looking back on her life and career. She hadn't worked for several years.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Glaucoma had robbed her of her eyesight and one of her eyes. And she missed the work terribly. But she was proud. And said she was so happy to look back on her life spent doing what she loved to do. She said she harbored no grudge against Jackie Kennedy. And it is nice to know that she died contented, having loved the work that defined it, that filled its days and many sleepless nights. And some of her dresses are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, others at the Museum of African-American History and Culture, on the Mall in Washington DC. But now that she is no longer with us, no longer here to harbor a grudge against Jackie or the other wealthy and powerful women who could have made her name, but instead kept it their special secret.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  I will let you know, and I will suggest that you, listening here now, join me, if you're so inclined, in harboring one on her behalf. That she should be a colored woman, when she should have been haute couture. That we should know the House of Lo, like we know Dior. The least we can do is say her name.

• 24:16Avery Trufelman?

  The House of Lo was written and produced by Nate DeMeo, research assistance from Eliza McGraw, engineering assistance by Elizabeth Huber. And by the way, Nate mentioned at the end that Anne Lowe pieces are now displayed in the Museum of African American History and Culture. So it's actually a very interesting story about how her clothes got there. There's a reason why this designer isn't forgotten, and it's mostly because of the dogged work of one woman. My friend Anya Hennings and I actually told that story in an episode of Articles of Interest called "The Black Fashion Museum", if you're curious about it. It's an episode that's super dear to me. But honestly, I first heard about Anne Lowe through The Memory Palace. The Memory Palace and Articles of Interest are both proud members of Radiotopia.

• 25:01Avery Trufelman?

  What is Radiotopia? They are a nonprofit, and they help us sell advertisements on our shows, and all the shows fundraise and pool resources together. They are not our bosses. They do not make our episodes for us. We are all independent shows, and Radiotopia is an organizational cooperative model that prioritizes art over profit. Because, believe me, shows like The Memory Palace and Articles of Interest are not in the profit generating business. Learn more and even donate if you wish at radiotopia.fm. And thank you so much. Radiotopia.

• 25:36Avery Trufelman?

  From PRX.