Exploiting Hollywood 1980

   Chapter 557 The Mystery of Life Experience

   Ronald and Jodie Foster went to New Haven for French food, which was good but small.

   "When I read a good novel or watch a good drama, I come here with Jennifer to share the joy." Jodie Foster loves this restaurant.

   "Um..." Ronald listened absent-mindedly, and dipped the bread in olive oil and put it into his mouth.

  Forster was a little discouraged when he saw that Ronald only focused on eating baguettes and didn't pay much attention to himself. She thought again, grabbed Ronald's other hand, and asked, "Why don't we go to my dorm and talk about your views on the movie. I like your narrative in 'The Dragon King' a lot. The rhythm, the role of that Miyagi-sensei is very well done."

   "Hmm... ah?" Ronald was still thinking about the similar bronze key.

   "Don't worry, your great-grandfather may have changed his name or transferred to another university midway through."

  Judy shook Ronald's hand. She thought that the other party was in a bad mood because of her great-grandfather. "I'll show you my audition photos first. Let's exchange phone numbers and keep in touch."

Ronald had no intention of chatting, went to her dormitory to get audition photos and resumes, and after exchanging numbers, he refused Jodie Foster's retention, and hurried back to the hotel in New Haven, from the relic box left by his father. , pulled out the key.

   "Well, this should not be a Yale key. Although it looks similar, the patterns and letters on it do not conform to the Yale tradition. I think it should be used by a similar old school nearby."

  The Yale librarian patiently looked at Ronald's key. The abstract plant pattern on it was obviously different from Yale's ivy, and the "MH" squiggly letters did not belong to any Yale college.

   "MH, you can try Mount Holyoke College. They are also one of the Seven Sisters Schools for Girls. They have as long a history as Yale. It takes about an hour and a half to drive from here."

   "DiDi..." Ronald drove his rented car with a lot of thought and arrived in the small town of South Hadley, Massachusetts in the afternoon. In an old building, found the location of Mount Holyoke College.

  Seven Sisters College of Arts and Sciences, is the seven women's liberal arts colleges (LiberalArts) established at the same time as the Ivy League. Each has a faint connection to one or more Ivy League universities. The relationship between Mount Holyoke College and Yale and Dartmouth is like Harvard and Wesleyan College.

   Students of the Women's College of Arts and Sciences can attend classes at each other's universities and recognize each other's credits. Eligible students can also transfer between schools.

   Even the students on both sides have many married couples. It can be regarded as a shortcut for high-level talents to solve marriage problems. As a result, only a few hundred students are recruited here each year, and the vast majority are women. Teaching history, arithmetic, literature, humanities and other subjects.

  The gate of Mount Holyoke College is a large iron gate installed between the two ancient towers. After entering the school, there are no new buildings in it, all of them are old buildings completed before the last century.

  The teaching building is a neoclassical building with red bricks on the outside, pillars at the gate, and a carriage passage. In the middle is a towering bell tower. On the hill next to it, there is also an ancient observatory. It happened to be the afternoon class time, and there was no one in the school, the grass was growing haphazardly, accompanying the ripples on the lake. Make the campus quieter.

   Ronald was inexplicably nervous, his heart pounding. He felt as if the ancient history of his family was opening its arms to him.

  In the quiet campus, Ronald found the library.

  The Williston Library is also an old building. The steps at the entrance are sunken in the middle of the wear and tear. The sunlight shone diagonally, and on the large glass window at the entrance, it reflected into Ronald's eyes, which was a bit dazzling.

   "Where are you a student? There are neither griffins nor Pegasus on your clothes. It seems that they came from another school?" The library administrator stopped Ronald and asked.

"what……"

"I've seen a lot of college students like you, and they all want to find a girlfriend in Mount Holyoke. We all have passwords here, Griffin and yellow-green for odd-numbered years, and Pegasus and red-blue for even-numbered years. You have nothing on your clothes, is it from Yale or Dartmouth?"

   "Neither, I'm from New York."

"That's not good. The library can't lend books to non-university students and college students who have signed a mutual credit recognition program with this school. New York University..." The old female administrator, with gray hair, spoke very witty. The meaning is that New York University is not part of the Ivy League, don't come to climb the female students here.

   "I'm here to ask if this key is from Mount Holyoke College." Ronald took out his key and handed it over.

   "Huh?" The administrator put on his reading glasses and looked carefully.

"I didn't expect that before I retire, I would still be able to see his real owner to retrieve the things he had deposited." She put down her glasses and looked at Ronald, "I'm sorry, if you don't have any special requirements for privacy, May I ask about your relationship with the Jerome family? Their ancestors can be traced back to the Mayflower, the first English immigrants to the New World. They were also the first industrialists to settle in New Haven. They made Jerome Mu clocks are famous."

   "Uh, it's my father's relic. I never knew where it belonged. I recently went to Yale and learned that this key belongs to the depository of the University of New England."

   "Okay", the administrator temporarily dispelled curiosity, "You wait here for me for a while."

   After five minutes, the old lady manager came out with a big tin box on a cart.

"The deposit of the Jerome family was last opened in 1939. The deposit fee was prepaid for fifty years. According to the law, if the fee is not renewed by 1989 after fifty years, Mann The Lotus College has the right to open the box and take it out as a historical relic."

   Ronald's heart moved, 1939, just a few years before his grandfather James died on the battlefield of World War II.

   The tin box was two feet square, and Ronald opened it with a key. Inside were three separate folders, and a smaller wooden box.

   "Most of them are the relics and letters of your grandfathers in your family. If you are lucky, you can even pick up a suicide note and inherit a trust estate." The administrator joked with him and continued to organize the books.

   Holding the contents of the iron box, Ronald returned to the car, where he couldn't wait to open the time capsule that had been sealed for more than 40 years.

   The first folder is the thickest. Ronald opened it and saw that it contained personal portraits of women from the previous century.

   Elizabeth A. Gilbert, with daughter Elizabeth Maud Jerome.

   The portraits are very well drawn, and the demure temperament of women in the last century and the different charms of each person are very well outlined.

   It looks like your old ancestor was in the portrait painting business? It features a portrait of Meg's heady family daughter in New Haven at the time. At that time, young girls had blind dates using portraits like this. The business of these two old ancestors must be very good.

   It seems that these two mothers and daughters were the most famous portrait painters in New Haven at that time. Ronald flipped the names below the portraits. They were either nobles with European titles or daughters of emerging industrialists and bankers.

   Could it be that your talent for taking portraits is also due to the inheritance of your ancestors? Ronald thought to himself.

   The second document is the record of Elizabeth Maude Jerome, the daughter of the two painters.

   A scrapbook of this Elizabeth Maud Jerome's girlhood portraits. Portraits of her friends, portraits of her family, and sketches from her time at Mount Holyoke College and Harvard Girls' School are filled with poems from her teenage years.

   Then comes the Graduation Signature Book, dated 1877-1881, consisting of signatures, good wishes, and advice written by friends, classmates, teachers, and principals from high school and college. The graduation speeches from classmates, together with the sketches of their heads, may be one of the best memories of this girlhood.

Below the    signature book is a letter, which Ronald opened carefully.

   "From Manhattan, New York.

  My dear Elizabeth, I checked the whereabouts of little Gilbert's father according to the name you provided.

  After leaving New Haven, your ex-husband, Mr. Lee, left New York to work in a bank run by his Yale classmate’s family in San Francisco, and then to Tennessee. Please forgive me for not being able to trace his whereabouts further.

   I'm so sorry about Gilbert Jr. I can't get in touch with his father right now. Please let us know when you and Jenny will come to New York in the reply letter, and I will prepare the ferry ticket for you to the hair country in advance. Please grief.

  Your faithful, Frederick Dwight"

At the end of the    folder is an obituary (incomplete) of Gilbert Nelson Jerome, cut from the New Haven Courier.

   Gilbert Nelson Jerome, aka Gilbert Vaille Lee, was born in 1889,

   Graduated from Yale University, with a bachelor's degree in engineering, and later received a doctorate degree. A student of French excellence.

   Participated in the First World War in 1917. He received pilot training and flew Spad 90 aircraft for the French Eighth Army, repeatedly shooting down enemy planes and winning the title of ace. Near Bramont, France, shot down by the Germans in order to rescue the wingman.

   He was buried in a German cemetery near Bramont with military honours by the enemy. His remains were moved to the U.S. Army Cemetery in Argonne in 1919, and then taken back by his mother and sister in 1921 and reburied in New Haven.

   He was also a poet.

   His wife Maloline and son James, mother Elizabeth, and sister Jenny were with him at his burial.

   No wonder Gilbert V. Lee's admissions record is nowhere to be found at Yale. Ronald understood that because of the divorce of his great-grandfather's parents, he lived with his mother, the inheritance from his mother, and the payment of portraits, which provided him with a good education, which eventually allowed him to study at Yale University.

   He later changed his surname to Yale after Gilbert Nelson Jerome. However, his son James restored Li's old surname, which has been passed down.

   Ronald opened a third folder.

   This material is dated from 1914 until around 1921. Includes yearbooks, tributes, and published biographies.

   This biography, titled "Lieutenant Gilbert-Nelson-Jerome," was written by his mother, Elizabeth Maud-Jerome, and was privately printed and published in 1920.

  The book describes his childhood, education, artistic talents, active participation in the Boy Scouts of America and the YMCA, and was a former commander-in-chief of the Connecticut Boy Scouts.

   Military training and service during World War I, and death in combat. The book also includes some of his paintings and poems, and has many photographs as illustrations.

Following are copies of pages from Yale's yearbook describing his college accomplishments and extracurricular activities, a copy of "In Memory of Yale's War Dead" published by the Yale War Memorial Committee, and a copy of Gilbert's A photo with the beloved Spad90 biplane.

   These two documents are attached to a letter from the office of the college secretary, sent to his mother in honor of Jerome's life and war service.

   is followed by photos of various ages sent by his widow and son James. It stopped abruptly when James was about ten years old, and after that, there were only pictures of James playing alone at his grandma's house.

   The last is a note from Gilbert's sister, Jeanne Jerome, in 1939.

"Mother's health is very bad. My brother's son James, left with Miss X in London, is a boy named Charles. I follow my mother's wishes and deposit with me these documents proving the identity of my brother and nephew. And his mother's alma mater, Mount Holyoke College. When James comes back, he can use it to bring little Charles back to the Jerome family."

"Tsk," Ronald thought about his father's lineage, but it was a bit of a romantic gene. Either a portrait painter or a poet, or his father divorced and ran away, or was a pilot who sacrificed for the country and left orphans and widows, or privately seduced celebrities gave birth to an illegitimate child.

   At the bottom is a small wooden box.

  Ronald opened the lid, and the documents inside were also old yellowed objects.

The first was a donation notice saying that the great-grandmother's mother, Elizabeth, had donated to New York a Tiffany & Co. window glass with a Quaker logo and an eight-pointed star pattern for her son who died in World War I. Haven Quaker Church.

   "It's all the thoughts of Elizabeth, the old grandmother in my family." Ronald was shocked and felt the old grandmother's feelings of missing her son for decades.

   Ronald put his hand down again to see if there were any keys below.

The    tentacle is a kind of cloth texture, Ronald took out a look, it is an even more ancient book. Wrapped in cloth, the paper has become yellowed and fragile.

"Huh..." Ronald blew the cover. On the yellowed cloth cover, you could still see the appearance of a child, holding a paper fan in one hand, wearing a melon rind hat on his head, and vaguely lingering on the back of his head. It looks like a braid.

   Next to the child, there is also a rectangular sign in the shape of a water sign commonly used in Chinese restaurants.

   Above is the title of the book, "When Iwasaboy in China".

Below the    water sign, the Chinese name of the book "Tangren Biography" is written in Chinese characters.

   Below is the author's name "YanPhouLee".

   "Could it be that my great-grandfather's father, the ancestor of this lifetime, was a Chinese?"

   Ronald picked up the book to the dim light of dusk, published in Boston in 1887. The whole book is only over a hundred pages, which is very thin.

   Carefully opened the cover, and on the title page was a portrait of the author.

   Sure enough, it was a handsome Chinese. Below the photo is his English name YanPhouLee. At the bottom is a line of gifts written in pen, which is still clear and arguable over the years.

   "To my favorite wife, Elizabeth." Below is a line of Chinese signed names:

   "Li Enfu".

  The light was so dim that Ronald couldn't read the small print in the book. He carefully put the book back into the box, pulled the handbrake, and drove back to New Haven.

   (end of this chapter)