Helen Bresee (pictured on the right, in 1938) was a high school teacher from Columbus, Ohio. She led the women’s travel group and wrote extensively about her travels. Additionally, she taught and lived in Chicago for many years and won an award post-retiring for her work with the Hendersonville Humane Society.She wrote most of the diaries in the collection.

Helen Chrysler graduated from Denison University and Gahanna Lincoln High School. She was a high school biology teacher. Helen played the organ for her church and the Clintonville Women’s Club. She creat  the scrapbooks and slides that are featured in the collection. She also wrote some of the diaries.

Harriet Dieter was the principal of Kingsdale Elementary School. She was interested in photography and presented the slides from her travels at her church, school, and the Women’s Club. She received a grant to fund her travels to educate her students through her photos. She passed away on a trip to Tibet with the travel group, although there isn’t any information on the cause.

On July 2nd, 1936, Helen Bresee, her friend Fran Olsen, and Fran’s husband Gilbert, set sail on a 14-month journey around the world. They traveled mostly by ship. They departed on a cruise liner headed from San Francisco to Japan. From Japan they traveled through Korea, China, and then French Indochina. Afterwards they sailed through Indonesia and made their way to India. From India they sailed to Egypt, crossing through the Suez Canal, and visited Italy, Hungary, Germany, France, and Great Britain before returning home to New York.  and sailed home from England once they reached Western Europe. This trip is the feature of the upcoming exhibit based on the collection.

Included in the collection is a video titled “Around the World: 1936”. It is an hour-and-a-half-long black-and-white film video converted to VHS. The film was narrated by Fran Olsen, who began her leg of the journey in New York and joined up Helen in San Francisco for the remainder of the trip. The video summarizes the groups trip and provides footage of their stops captured during the trip.

Their travels came at a turbulent time in world history, a time of political turmoil and economic recession. Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected in the United States to continue fighting the Great Depression. Tensions were high in Europe, and in Asia, Japan was on the precipice of invading China. In Bresee’s accounts, one can feel the impending Second World War. On May 25th, 1937, Bresee wrote, “German [Nazi] troops and a band were marching up and down” at the Kaiser’s Palace, and “outside there was a little garden in which the Kaiser and his chancellor made the decision about the last war.”

At the end of the video, the grainy New York City skyline appears and the Statue of Liberty welcomes them warmly as they return. In a transatlantic drawl, Fran’s last words are, “The world is very round.”

Helen Bresee’s diaries documented her many travels around the world. The photos and diaries are moving to behold; threads peak out from the binding, and the worn covers reveal yellowed paper inside. She wrote in them daily, describing activities like shopping for clothes, collecting her mail, and getting seasick. We learned what she ate and drank and what she liked and disliked: She was fond of pineapple juice but found Italian food too garlicky. In one entry, she says, “For lunch today we stopped in a place selling bakery goods which looked delicious. I had two toasted sandwiches, two glasses of tomato juice, and a chocolate eclair. This cost 70 cents but it was a change from Italian cooking.”

The earliest diary in the collection is from Helen Bresee’s 1931 road trip. Helen and her friend Gladys Stubben, nicknamed"Stubie," drove nearly 5,000 miles from Ohio to neighboring Eastern states and Canadian provinces. They visited 13 states and 5 provinces in total. On the last page of the journal, Helen wrote a list of the countries or states she visited, along with how much she spent. The two spent $161 during their four month journey. That's roughly $3,400 in November 2023!