Small Wonder--Hope Emerson

Let me do the math. Were she born a century later, she might have just concluded a stellar basketball career at USD. Why cut her short? Think of her as a Hawkeye. Wherever she played, she scored because even now, a century later, Hope Emerson would still tower over much of the opposition, even here in Sioux County, where she was born, and where six-footers are dime a dozen.

Hope Emerson was born 1897, when the game of basketball was just a five-year-old. It would take another decade to put young women in uniform, even here in Iowa, where girl's basketball went big time decades before it did elsewhere.

Hope Emerson stood 6'2" inches tall and she was no drink of water. It's not nice to talk about anyone's weight, but Ms. Emerson was never shy about it herself--after all, you'd have to look the other way if you met her on the street not to notice. Estimates move the needle between 180 and 220 pounds. Not all that many women walk into a room that formidably.

That's why it's so amazing to think of her as a movie star. She was. I'm not kidding. She died in 1960, but any movie buff worth his or her tickets will remember Hope Emerson's face, even if she hasn't appeared on the big screen for fifty years. I'm trying not to be boerish, but it's fair to say Hope Emerson's face was memorable because it was as formidable as her physique. 

And why on earth am I talking right now about a 6' 2" woman who weighed in at well over 200 pounds? Let's face it, this Hope Emerson was no small wonder. Then again, maybe she was. And she was born here--just up the road in Hawarden. I'm not making this up. The plain fact of the matter is Ms. Emerson simply should not have had a career in motion pictures, had no right to be in Hollywood, should not have played a role in umpteen movies and TV serials. She was, well, too big. What’s more, Hawarden girls didn’t generally do vaudeville either, or take off for Hollywood when they were a hundred pounds heavier than a thousand other actresses busting tables and dreaming of a break.

Hope Emerson did all of that, and she was glamorous in her own way, really, even if her most memorable character was a sadistic prison matron in Caged, a dark, 1950 psycho drama, a role which brought her an Oscar nomination. 

By all reports, Hope Emerson was, however, a kind of gentle giant. In Cry of the City (1948), a film noir NY city crime drama, her role as Rose Given, a masseuse, required her to choke Richard Conte. Conte claimed she hated doing the acting, found it difficult.

There were better roles a'plenty. In Westward the Woman (1952), a Western with a sporty angle, Ms. Emerson played a mail order bride in a wagon train of women headed for the single men of California.

You might say she used her size to greatest advantage when she literally picked up, dead-lifted, Spencer Tracy in a rom com, Adam's Rib (1949). In the forties, she was the voice of Elsie the Cow in radio commercials for Borden Milk, and held a dozen or more supporting roles in TV shows of the fifties.

If you wonder how a Hawarden girl ended up in Hollywood, the answer is easy. Her parents, John and Josie, had three children; two--both boys--died in infancy. That means Hope was an only child, and she was groomed for the stage from age three by a mother who loved it herself. Josie Emerson was a vaudeville act, who determined to bring her daughter into that world. And did. Together, when they weren't performing, they'd drive to Sioux City to watch movies starring men and women Hope would come to know on a dozen and more Hollywood sets. 

Her father died young. But the two of them never let each other alone. Even though she played a woman to-be married on a wagon train full of mail order brides, throughout a long and successful Hollywood career, Hope Emerson never got married or had children. But she always took care of her mom.

That's a wonderful reason to stop by sometime. Next time you're in Hawarden, drive up to the cemetery, take the first little road north, cross another gravel lane, keep watching the edge of the road, and you'll find the pink Emerson stone--father, mother, and daughter. Pull over and pay your respects. There they are, together.