Mead Sisters—Mrs. Carrie M. Wycoff, Mrs. Alice M. Hansbrough and Miss Helen Mead, daughters of Jesse Mead, devoted to Swamiji who became a member of their family. The sisters lived in a modest house (309, Monterey Road Lincoln Park) in South Pasadena in South California. First saw and heard Swamiji at Blanchard Hall in Los Angeles on 8.12.1899. On 13.12 Alice and Helen met Swamiji at Mrs. Blodgett’s and invited him to be their guest. Following an initial visit Swamiji was their guest for about six weeks from 24.12.99 to 3.2.1900, taking classes and giving lectures, and an intimate relationship developed between him and the family. Mrs. Hansbrough, working as his secretary, went to Northern California in connection with his work and for the next three months served him tirelessly, attending to every aspect of his work. “The three sisters are three angels,” said Swamiji. “Aside from being Swamiji’s secretary and, with Mrs. Aspinall, his housekeeper, Mrs. Hansbrough was his press agent, treasurer, book keeper and banker. From flat to lecture hall and back, and also, it would seem, at various other times, she would carry a black case … which held my notebooks, advertising matter, the collection or ticket money, and other things connected with the work” (Swami Vivekananda in the West—New Discoveries, Vol. 6, p. 29). In March 1941 Swami Ashokananda, during his tenure as Minister-in-Charge of San Francisco Vedanta Centre, chanced to meet Mrs. Hansbrough, then aged 75, and in a series of interviews, recorded by A.T. Clifton (later Swami Chidrupananda), gathered valuable information pertaining to Swamiji’s work and personal life during his visit to California in the winter of 1899-1900. Her reminiscences published in the Prabuddha Bharata (Vol. 112, Nos. 2-7) and in the Udbodhan journal (Vol. 109, Nos. 4-12, Vol. 110, Nos. 1-6), being translated into Bengali by Swami Chetanananda. Parts of it used by Marie Louise Burke for Vivekananda in the West; New Discoveries. The sisters received Swami Turiyananda warmly, upon his arrival in California, Carrie and Helen being initiated by him, named Lalita and Shanti respectively. Lalita’s Hollywood residence (1946, Ivar Avenue) and all other property gifted to promote the spread of Vedanta, Swami Prabhavananda set up there the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The house named “Vivekananda Home”. Lalita accompanied Swami Prabhavananda to India (1936) and died at the Hollywood Centre on 23.4.49 at the age of 90. The Monterey Road house was acquired for the Hollywood Centre and named “Vivekananda House”.
Swamiji sometimes would lose his patience and scold Mrs. Hansbrough. Recalling his scoldings, Mrs. Hansbrough said: “Somehow, I never felt hurt. I would get angry and sometimes would walk out of the room, but usually I was able to hear him through…. He used to say, ‘The people I love most, I scold most,’ and I remember thinking he was making a poor kind of apology.”
This short and sweet association came to an end in May 1900, When Mrs. Hansbrough left for South Pasadena to be with her daughter. Swamiji, too, left California on the 30th of May, 1900, on his way back to India. But Mrs. Hansbrough, along with Swamiji’s small band of dedicated admirers, kept the fire of Vedanta alive in South Pasadena, in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, where, too, she had taken the lead in establishing a ‘club’.
Mrs. Hansbrough, neither like her sisters, took formal initiation from Swamiji, nor, unlike her sisters, became a disciple of Swami Turiyananda. “Why can’t you join our Order?” Swamiji had once asked her. She replied that she had her own little world (Dorothy) to take care of. Yet, she served Swamiji with exemplary devotion (a memory she cherished forever) and Swamiji treated her (and her sisters) as his own. “I have known all three of you before,” he once said to them; and in a letter written to Mrs. Hansbrough from New York in the summer of 1900, he declared, “You three sisters have become a part of my mind forever.”
Swamiji had become a part of Mrs. Hansbrough’s mind, too. ‘Mother Moses’, as Swamiji endearingly called her, had been ‘bitten by the cobra, the savant once told her, adding, “Don’t ever think you can escape.” Mrs. Hansbrough never wanted to. (Source: Western Women in the Footsteps of Swami Vivekananda)