Grandview Heights Moment in Time

Last week’s Moment in Time featured early Grandview settler and landowner Daniel Thomas and his grandson, James Oscar Thomas.

The latter Thomas assumed ownership of his grandfather’s farm and raised his family in the home on the hill above Goodale Street and Northwest Boulevard. James and his wife, Edith, had five children, including their oldest and only girl, Caroline, who was born a year after their 1901 marriage. They also had an adopted daughter from Italy, according to census records.

Caroline Thomas was interested in music and literature, participating in orchestra and studying English and French at Grandview High School. She acknowledged her father for supporting her interests and said her parents always had classic books in the house and provided time away from work on the farm to read and practice the violin. She said her father had an interest in the life and work of Mark Twain and during her childhood she was introduced Twain. Her interest in him continued throughout her life.

After graduating from high school in 1920, Caroline, a talented violinist, enrolled at Northwestern University, studied at Julliard School of Music in New York for three years and then spent a year at the Conservatoire de Paris to further her violin expertise. She played Carnegie Hall at age 22. While in Paris, she married Audley Harnsberger, an engineer with Pure Oil Company, who she met in Upper Arlington and where the Thomas family moved after selling their farm to the Northwest Boulevard Company. In 1926, she and Audley moved to Winnetka, Illinois, just north of Chicago, where they raised three children and lived until the early 1980s when Audley died. Caroline then moved back to Ohio.

Because of her interest in Twain, Caroline traveled to Hollywood in the early 1940s to meet Twain’s surviving daughter, Clara Clemens Samossoud, and they became friends.

The friendship prompted Clara to provide Caroline access to Twain's unpublished notes, letters and marginal commentaries and also to discuss with her his spoken thoughts and philosophies. Caroline read all of Twain’s books, and as an anthologist became interested in his quotes, including quotes attributed to him that he may not have uttered. She set about compiling his quotes and statements and wrote her first book, Mark Twain at Your Fingertips, published in 1947. Over the next 30 years, she wrote other books about Twain and was a script consultant for TV and stage productions about him. She became the ultimate authority on Twain and often was referenced in stories and articles about him.

Noting her expertise, her publisher asked her to put together a book of Abraham Lincoln quotations. Caroline also wrote "A Man of Courage," the first biography of Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft.

She later spent weeks at the Library of Congress researching American presidents for her "Treasury of Presidential Quotations," which became a Literary Guild bonus book. Caroline also managed to meet George Bernard Shaw, the reclusive 92-year-old playwright, at his English country home. After Shaw’s death, Caroline obtained the rights for a book in which she compiled his quotations, "Bernard Shaw: Selections Of His Wit And Wisdom." In total she wrote 13 books, including the books on Mark Twain (including Mark Twain's Clara, based on her relationship with his daughter published in 1982) and the books on Lincoln, Shaw, and Taft, a book of Greek and Roman mythology, The Life and Times of James Oscar Thomas, and a book on the history of Winnetka, Illinois.

In the mid-1960s, she opened Music in Northfield and she sold stringed instruments and sheet music, repaired violins and guitars and conducted music lessons. She also became a professional musician, playing violin for the Chicago Women's Symphony. And for 37 years she played with the Evanston Symphony, which she helped establish. She was also an avid painter and accomplished golfer.

Audley was a pilot, frequently flying with their two sons, who also became licensed pilots. As Audley became older, his blood pressure was a concern, so at the age of 50, Caroline became one of the first women to get a pilot's license so that she could fly as his copilot. As she studied for her license, and while flying with him, the anthologist again came to the forefront, and she compiled the things she needed to know to pilot the plane should the need arise. She published these observations as "A Pilot's Ready Reference Manual," which sold more than 30,000 copies with 12 editions. Caroline originally published the book under the name C.T. Harnsberger, because the publisher didn't feel that a reference book on flying by a woman would be taken seriously by pilots.

Caroline Thomas Harnsberger lived the last seven years of her life at First Community Village in Upper Arlington, which was seen as a homecoming since her father helped establish First Community Church in Grandview and her mother was a resident at the village when it opened. Caroline continued to focus on painting and writing and died in 1991 at 89 years old.

Portions of this article were excerpted from the Winnetka Historical Society web site and a newsletter of First Community Village.

This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: Grandview Heights Moment in Time