20. Fanny Crosby Day
20
FANNY CROSBY DAY
Fanny was away as much as she was home. Whenever she was in Bridgeport, she held open house on Thursdays, which meant anyone could come and talk with the celebrated hymn writer. The rest of her time was spent working with the King’s Daughters and at the Christian Union. Even in her eighties, Fanny found little time to rest. Resting was for old people, and she was young, she said.
Fanny had one of the most gratifying experiences of her life in November 1903. She was in Lynn, Massachusetts, speaking at the YMCA, and as usual she recounted stories of how she came to write some of her hymns. On this occasion, she told how “Rescue the Perishing” was inspired by the conversion of a young working man who rejoiced, “Now I can meet my mother in heaven, for now I have found her God!”
After the meeting, several people came to shake hands with her. Among them was a man whose voice did more shaking than his hand. Fanny was dumbfounded when he proclaimed, “Miss Crosby, I was that boy who told you more than thirty-five years ago that I had wandered from my mother’s God. That evening you spoke, I sought and found peace, and I have tried to live a consistent Christian life ever since. If we never meet again on earth, we will meet up yonder.”
He left without giving his name. Fanny was deeply moved by this “nameless friend who touched a deep chord of sympathy in my heart.”
In January, Fanny, accompanied by her niece, Ida Leschon, set out on a grueling speaking tour by train. They journeyed first to Philadelphia, where Fanny held a series of evangelical meetings. Traveling north, they went to Albany, New York, and then to Rochester. Fanny was now a national celebrity at the pinnacle of her fame. A Rochester newspaper observed there was scarcely a religious service in the United States where at least one of her hymns was not sung.
One thing that struck those who saw and heard the blind speaker was her youthful manner. Her face and form betrayed her age, but her voice, mind, and movements were those of a woman in her prime. Reporters claimed “Madame Crosby” could have passed for twenty years younger than her actual age.
“MADAME CROSBY” COULD HAVE PASSED FOR TWENTY YEARS YOUNGER THAN HER ACTUAL AGE.
Fanny and Ida were back in Bridgeport for only a few days before it was time to go to New York. February 2, the fortieth anniversary of her association with Biglow and Main, was to be the occasion of a special celebration in the firm. Many of her old friends and colleagues were present at the banquet prepared by Louise Main and Fanny Sankey. There were Doane, the jolly old “professor” Kirkpatrick, and George Stebbins. Many others assembled to honor the poet who more than anyone else had helped make Biglow and Main one of the leading publishers of church music in the English-speaking world. Fanny was presented with a golden brooch studded with pearls.
Although many complained that the firm had overworked Fanny, she had been glad to do the low-paying work, even at the expense of her talent for writing truly good poetry. It was a work she did for the Lord, and she thanked her friends for “forty years of blessings, peace and tranquillity, like the dew of Hermon and the dew on the mountains of Zion.”
Two of Fanny’s good friends were absent, and one was her hostess in New York. During trips to the Empire City, Fanny apparently was always put up at the Hotel Savoy by Phoebe Knapp. Phoebe was on the outs with Hugh Main because of Carleton’s publications in the late nineties. Now she had made herself all the more persona non grata by continually claiming Fanny was underpaid and by enlisting friends in the higher echelons of the Methodist Church to appeal for money for the hymn writer, implying publicly that Fanny was destitute and poorly housed. But since Ira Sankey paid for Fanny and Carrie’s accommodations in Bridgeport, and Hugh Main had arranged for her to receive all the royalties from Bells at Evening, which was still in print, Fanny’s friends at Biglow and Main had grown exceedingly vexed at the conduct of the rich widow.
While at Phoebe’s, Fanny worked on several new hymns, which were to be published as sheet music. Phoebe wrote to Carrie, who had inquired when Fanny could be expected back in Bridgeport:
I am taking the best care of our dear Fanny—whom we both love. Each time that she comes to me I am so satisfied (and as never before)—that someone in Bridgeport cares for the personal interests of the dear one—and I am happy indeed!…I cannot possibly let her go home until Friday next in the afternoon—just now I need her and she is having a good time. Sincerely hoping that you are well….
Then Phoebe inserted an inexplicable paragraph:
Fanny sends lots of love and says that for just once she is going to try and commence to be good. That is going to be hard work as we all know. For she has been keeping bad company of late and I hear nothing but Mr. Dooly and upon mention of his name she begins a wild dance—and I, awe-stricken, say “shades of night envelope us” and withdraw.
Your friend,
Mrs. J. F. Knapp
Who was Mr. Dooly? What did Phoebe mean when she spoke of Fanny beginning a “wild dance” at the mention of his name? Can she literally have been dancing at her age? No letter or document that has come down to us can shed light upon Fanny and the mysterious Mr. Dooly.
Before she left New York, Fanny called upon her second old friend who was not present at the banquet, Ira Sankey. For more than a year, he had been stone blind, sitting quietly in deep depression at his house in Brooklyn, living with his memories, awaiting death. He was suffering from glaucoma. Surgery was unsuccessful. He instructed his family to deny rumors that he had gone blind; he hoped to recover and did not want to alarm his friends unnecessarily. But as the rumors grew more persistent, his sons Allan and Edward called a press conference the first week in March and confirmed their father had lost his sight.
Fanny, devastated to learn her friend was, like her, bereft of sight, succeeded in improving his spirits somewhat. But he no longer tried to compose tunes, and he appeared no more in public. Sankey spent the rest of his days sitting in his bedroom, lost in memories, or sitting at his harmonium, playing over and over the songs of happier days.
Throughout the spring of 1904, Fanny traveled about, preaching, lecturing, recounting the story of her life. Whenever she was in Bridgeport, she busied herself speaking at the Christian Union, working with the King’s Daughters, and receiving the seemingly endless streams of “pilgrims” who descended when she was in town. Although Thursday was her official open house day, she never refused a visitor.
In early June, Fanny and Carrie went west to Buffalo, where she was the major speaker at a Christian Endeavor convention. Despite her advanced years, she spoke three times a day, often to crowds of more than three thousand. She not only gave sermons but lectured on mission work and the methods of hymn writing.
DESPITE HER ADVANCED YEARS, SHE SPOKE THREE TIMES A DAY, OFTEN TO CROWDS OF MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND.
In all her appearances in Buffalo, Fanny deeply moved her hearers, but never as many as on the night when, carried away by an impulse, she rose and joined the soloist. A baritone named Jacobs was singing “Saved by Grace,” which was still immensely popular. Fanny, scheduled to speak later, sat behind him on the platform. When Jacobs came to the third stanza, Fanny leaped to her feet and began to sing, “Some day, when fades the golden sun. Beneath the rosytinted west….” The notes at first seemed “quavering and faltering,” as one might expect of an eighty-year-old, and Jacobs lowered his powerful voice so that hers might be heard by the audience. But her voice became higher and stronger as the chorus progressed: “And I shall see Him face to face….” It filled the hall and held the audience spellbound with its beauty and pathos.
It was spontaneous acts like this one, as much as her prepared talks and sermons, that tended to make hearts captive to the little old lady in ancient garb and to the Gospel she proclaimed.
From Buffalo, stopping to lecture at various places along the way, Fanny made her way to Binghamton. People marveled at her vitality. It amazed even Carrie, more than twenty years her sister’s junior, who remarked, “She can tire out everyone present, then go home fresh!”
Fanny felt that as long as she kept busy, she would always be “young.” She often reiterated that she doubted she would live a year if forced to abandon her work.
FANNY FELT THAT AS LONG AS SHE KEPT BUSY, SHE WOULD ALWAYS BE “YOUNG.”
Fanny apparently did not go to Ocean Grove or Northfield that year. Emma Moody was now dead, and with Whittle gone and Sankey confined to his home in Brooklyn, the Bible conferences had lost their appeal to her. She did go to Tully Lake, however, where she participated in the Round Table. She also made her annual visit to the Indian reservation. This year, she and Eliza Hewitt were accorded the great honor of being adopted into the Eel Clan of the Onondaga tribe. Fanny had always been “deeply interested” in the welfare of American Indians, and the adoption into the Onondagas delighted her. Now that she was a “genuine Indian,” she began to collect Onondaga folk tales, which she often related in her lectures and sermons.
Fanny also journeyed to East Orange, New Jersey, where she and Carrie visited friends for a week. From there she went to visit Sankey, address “her men” at the naval YMCA in Brooklyn, and conduct an evangelical meeting for the Y’s Railroad Branch in the roundhouse of the Lackawanna Railroad in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Returning to Bridgeport “brown and merry,” she was there only long enough to prepare for her autumn travels. Then she was off to New England. At eighty-four, Fanny seemed to have as much energy as Carrie, sixty, and Ida, forty-five. The two younger women had to alternate as her traveling companions.
Fanny always made an effort to be home for two occasions: her mother’s birthday and Christmas. She, Carrie, Jule, and Ida still celebrated Mercy’s birthday as if she were alive. The sisters and Ida would put a fresh vase of flowers beneath Mercy’s huge photograph and set a place at the table for the deceased matriarch. Fanny would recite the poem she still wrote each year in honor of “Mother Dear.”
Christmas was a happy occasion. There was a family dinner in which Aunt Fanny would enliven the lulls in conversation with humorous poems composed on the spot. In the afternoon, while the children rested, Fanny made little gifts to be put into the “grab bag” that provided the evening’s entertainment. She also made up humorous little poems that were copied and distributed to every family member.
She loved to play with the children. On one occasion, her grandnephew Ralph Booth begged her to go for a ride on his sled. To the absolute horror of the parents, Aunt Fanny seated herself on the conveyance and let him pull her around the backyard in the snow.
In early March 1905, Fanny and Carrie left for a lecture tour of more than two weeks. On the fifth, she spoke at the YMCA at Fitchburg, Massachusetts, to 750 people packed into a hall built for 650. The audience sang several of her hymns before an area clergyman read a passage of scripture and Fanny stepped forth, holding a little book tight in her hands. She gave no sermon or lecture as such but, as she did so often, told about her life, about how God had enabled her to overcome her handicap and how He had inspired her hymns.
Next she traveled to western New York, where she spoke to a mass meeting of the Railroad YMCA. In Rochester she spoke to the YMCA’s Women’s Auxiliary and was given a tribute by Mrs. Caroline Atwater Mason (1853–1939), a well-known author of religious novels. After giving an evangelical sermon in a rescue mission, she and Carrie left to journey farther west, stopping at the School for the Blind in Batavia. Then they started back east, addressing the Railroad YMCA in Albany.
On March 24, Fanny would be eighty-five. To honor her, a group of New York clergymen, with the encouragement of Hugh Main and Allan Sankey, decided to hold a Fanny Crosby Sunday in churches on March 26. Adelbert White served as secretary of the Fanny Crosby Day Committee, and Mrs. Ann Cobham, whom Fanny frequently visited in Warren, Pennsylvania, served as assistant. The celebration was publicized nationwide. Dr. Louis Klopsch, editor of the widely circulated Christian Herald, advocated that all Christian churches honor the aged hymn writer on the designated Sunday. Her hymns would be used exclusively, and ministers and priests of all denominations would preach on her life as an example of Christian witness. A “love offering” would be taken for her in all the churches where her “day” was observed.
Fanny was nonplused when she learned of the honor, but she made no attempt to stop the plans. “Am I pleased?” she asked rhetorically. “Certainly. Who would not be? Just so long as the celebration in honor of my work is by those who have loved my songs, both the celebration and the contemplated offering will be like the crowning blessing at the close of a long and busy life!” She wanted to make certain God, not she, received the glory.
Fanny Crosby Day was observed not only in America but in England and in such unlikely countries as India and Tasmania. She received many tributes, including letters from common folk and places she had never visited. A lady from Mississippi sent flowers she had gathered. Grover Cleveland in Princeton commended her “continuous and disinterested labor in uplifting humanity and pointing out the way to an appreciation of God’s goodness and mercy.”
FANNY CROSBY DAY WAS OBSERVED NOT ONLY IN AMERICA BUT IN ENGLAND.
Fanny attended a reception given by Hugh Main a few days early. On her birthday, she appeared at a reception at the First Methodist Church in Bridgeport. Looking like a “fragile flower,” she was led to a special pew draped with an American flag. Suffering from a bad headache, she spoke briefly of her God, “the sunshine of my soul,” and warmly thanked her audience for their love, blessing them as she turned to sit down. The choir sang a hymn she had written for the occasion, “O Land of Joy Unseen,” set to music by a parishioner, Fred King.
On Sunday, she gave the evening message at the First Baptist Church, Carrie’s congregation. The crowd was so huge, it filled not only the large sanctuary but also the Sunday school rooms.
When the festivities were over throughout the nation, she was the recipient of several thousand dollars in love offerings. This time she did not refuse. She was overwhelmed by the display of a nation’s love, and her heart was “full” as she rejoiced that “yea, I have a goodly heritage!”