Blanche Slocum

Slocum was born in Hesperia, Michigan, and raised in Oak Park, Illinois,^[2] the daughter of Eugene Blakesly Slocum and Elizabeth Jane Ferguson Slocum. She was a protegée of Scottish singer Mary Garden, who arranged for her to study voice in Paris.^[3][4]

Slocum taught singing at her older sister Nellie Slocum's Imperial College of Music and Dramatic Art in Chicago in 1903.^[5] She taught in Wisconsin in 1908 and 1909, gave a recital in Wausau, Wisconsin, in 1909.^[6][7] She was a chorus girl with the Chicago-Philadelphia Opera Company when she caught the attention of Mary Garden.^[8] She painted a watercolor portrait of Garden in 1913, in appreciation.^[9]

Slocum was studying and performing in Berlin when the United States entered World War I.^[10] After her passport was seized, she had to remain in Germany.^[11] The American consulate in Zürich eventually resolved her dilemma,^[12] and she was allowed to return to the United States in spring 1918.^[13][14][15] The Chicago Tribune and many other newspapers across the United States carried her "sensational" inside accounts of life in wartime Germany.^[16] "Here I am," she wrote, "The last American out of Germany."^[17]

Slocum was a dramatic contralto.^[18] She gave her first Chicago recital in October 1918. "Miss Slocum's voice is a contralto, inclining toward the mezzo, and is of ample compass and volume," The Musical Monitor reported afterward. "There is much in it that is beautiful and sympathetic."^[19] In the 1920s, Slocum continued performing,^[20] taught at the Chicago Music School,^[21] and painted and exhibited landscapes.^[22]

Slocum married Adolph I. Ferner Jr. in 1906.^[23] He left her three months later, and they divorced in 1907.^[24] She married Anthony V. Pasquale in 1932. She died in 1960, at the age of 74.^[25]