Daniel, Cecil, & Gwendolyn Hart

In August 1923, Ada Rusa Hart, who had a history of mental illness and institutionalization, was arrested for physically attacking her husband, Daniel Hart, Sr. In December, Daniel Sr., who ran a soft drink store from his residence in New Orleans, admitted his three children to the Home: Daniel (11), Cecil (8), and Gwendolyn (6).

Over the next nine years, Daniel participated in the Home’s Boy Scout Troop, wrestled in the YMHA’s 135 pound class, and performed in the Home’s anniversary pageants, including a 1931 “Amos and Andy” skit he presented in blackface (a racially derogatory theatrical device that was extremely popular at the time) with his younger brother, Cecil. In 1930, before graduating from Samuel J. Peters Commercial High School for Boys with a certificate in stenography, Daniel was chosen by the Home to participate in student trip to Havana and the Panama Canal, with funds donated by Julian Newman, son of Isidore and Rebecca Keifer Newman. 

On several occasions, after his discharge from the Home, Daniel made news for running afoul of local law enforcement. He and his brother Cecil joined Jack Turansky and other alumni in supporting the local Communist party’s efforts to aid unemployed persons who were being housed in transient relief shelters. See, e.g. “Six ‘Reds’ Released,” New Orleans Item, April 1, 1934; “Hits Arrest For Circulars,” New Orleans Item, Sept. 30, 1936.

By 1940, Daniel had moved to Denver, Colorado where he married and worked for Republic Drugstore Company.

Cecil graduated in 1934 from the printing program of Isaac Delgado Central Trades School. By 1940, according to his draft registration card, Cecil had moved to New York City, where he worked for Julius H. Barnes, the former chair of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, at 19 Rector Street, a 37-story art deco office building today on the national registry of historic places.

In May 1942, Cecil became a merchant seaman and was assigned to the Merchant Ship Wichita. After four months and several different ports, while leaving today’s Ghana en route to St. Thomas and then New York, the ship was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. Cecil was among 40 merchant mariners and 10 U.S. Navy armed guards on board. None survived.

During her time in the Home, Gwendolyn participated in the Home’s Girl Scout Troop and the anniversary pageants, playing a sprite in the 1930 performance of The Nutcracker. As a student of Miss Melba Aaron’s Dance School, Gwendolyn also performed that year at the Junior Hadassah’s Purim Pageant. In 1933, she celebrated her confirmation at Touro Synagogue.

In the late 1930s, Gwendolyn was employed by the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency that provided jobs to young people during the Great Depression. In 1938, she participated in crafting a leather desk for New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri. 

By 1940, while living in New Orleans with her mother and brother, Cecil, Gwendolyn was working as a seamstress for the Works Progress Administration Sewing Room. She married Henry Ford Rowe, whom she later divorced.

Gwendolyn died in 2002 in New Orleans. 

Gwendolyn Hart and other Home girls studied ballet, classical, tap, and acrobatic dancing under the tutelage of Miss Melba Aaron (shown here in 1931), a New York-trained dance instructor. Photo from scrapbook of Bessie Mashinka Rothstein, courtesy of Bessie’s daughter, Debbie Wizig.