More Stories of the Rich and Famous

In More Stories of the Rich and Famous: Aiken’s Winter Colony in the Gilded Age, the reader is placed in the action as witness to the high and low events that enmeshed the country’s rich and famous in their winter playground, Aiken, South Carolina. The activities of the Astors, Iselins, and Hitchcocks, among others, are restored to life offering the reader insight into their desires, joys, fears, and regrets. Each chapter delivers a riveting story about the lives and times of those who occupied the highest perches of America’s societal peaks. Beginning with the first chapter in Aiken Remembers the Titanic, Madeleine Astor graphically recalls her reoccurring nightmare of the Titanic tragedy during a visit to Aiken to attend a bridge dedication honoring one of Titanic’s important victims. In Titanic Bill, the story of a pitiable William Carter, a Titanic survivor bearing a coward’s shame, mulls a futile option designed to restore his damaged reputation. In The Highland Park Hotel, the most luxurious hotel of its day where the Vanderbilts of New York, the Dolans of Philadelphia, and the Stackpoles of Boston and others, including international elites, passed the mild Aiken winters, the story of its construction, employees, and the gun violence during its destruction by fire in the early morning hours of February 6, 1898 is remembered. The specter of attempted murder is re-examined in Aiken’s Trial of the Century which reconstructs in as much detail as is known, the attempted murder of wealthy socialite Camilla Havemeyer Beach in the yard of her Aiken home on the night of February 26, 1912. The military exploits of America’s greatest polo player and hero are recounted in Tommy Hitchcock, Jr. - A Soldier’s Story. Hitchcock relives his daring escape from a German POW train, and his experiences defending France in the WW I Lafayette Flying Corps. The Remarkable Iselins recounts C. Oliver Iselin’s 1893 America’s Cup victory hard earned against gale force winds, his marriage to Hope Goddard, and their involvement in bringing Aiken’s first hospital into reality in 1917. The little known story of a lesser known tryst involving U.S. Speaker of the House, Nicholas Longworth’s 1931 visit to Aiken is recounted in The Speaker’s Final Visit to Aiken, which ended in a tragic death, leaving the reader with a desire to pursue more about Longworth and his famous wife, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice. Taking up where its predecessor, Stories of the Rich and Famous: Aiken’s Winter Colony in the Gilded Age ended, this continuation of stories about a unique group of privileged people in their special playground at a time in America’s economic development when robber barons ruled, descriptively delivers more fascinating events in the lives of Aiken’s and America’s rich and famous.