Two young women in their mid-twenties walked arm-in-arm through the Century of Progress Exhibition grounds. Even to casual eyes, the women were intensely interested in each other. Georgia recollected as they crossed a bridge at the Fair, a man disapprovingly approached them and told them to ‘break it up.’ Georgia, a year older, met Jeannie through a gay cousin who studied at the Art Institute with one of Jeannie’s roommates. They met at the Art Institute and were courting at the Fair.
Georgia Cole graduated with honors from Rockford College (alma mater of Jane Addams and Jeannette Howard Foster) and came to Chicago with a scholarship to study History and English at the University of Chicago. Jeannie Begg Dixon had a degree in Journalism and was studying for her Master’s in English at Northwestern. (Some of her writing was published in Harriet Monroe’s legendary Poetry : A Magazine of Verse.) She had come to Evanston when her father, a railroad executive, was transferred to Chicago. He was adamant that she not work, but rather, concentrate on her studies. As an exception, he let her work at the Railroad Hall in the Transportation Building during the 1933-34 Fair. Jeannie got free passes for Georgia; they would meet at the exhibition hall then wander the fairgrounds together.
In 1934 they were in the audience when Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts premiered at the Auditorium Theatre. Gertrude, Alice B. Toklas and Carl Van Vetchen sat in the mezzanine near the stage. ‘We were fairly close to where they were sitting. It was well known, general knowledge, that they were gay.’ After the death of her father in 1936 Jeannie and Georgia drove their little Ford from Chicago to New York, then took a one- class ship to Europe. Returning in late-1937, they moved to Montana for an adventuresome twenty years, then retired to Oregon, where they died in the 1990s.
Copyright 2007 Marie J. Kuda