BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Finally brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, t...

Orlando is a Florida city where one can go to revel in odd fantasies, and no one can agree on how the city got its name. It was briefly called Fort Gatlin, then Jernigan, and in 1857 became Orlando, apparently by sleight of hand. It may be named after the Orlando in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, but there are four other possibilities. There would seem to be no doubt, however, about the “Orlando Project” at Cambridge University, devoted entirely to the study of British women writers “from the earliest time to the present.” Surely it’s named for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), itself a gender-bending fiction, a fantasy, whose main character, the long-lived Orlando, may have been inspired by Shakespeare’s Orlando, a young man with some feminine qualities that attracted Rosalind. But at the Orlando Project website one can find the collected criticism and other information about an earlier Orlando, a 3-volume Victorian fiction (1879) by a very remarkable woman, Clementina Maria Black, born in Brighton on July 27, 1853, who might have been an inspiration for Virginia Woolf. A prolific author (novels, polemics, sociological studies), Clementina Black never married but in the 1880s took over the parenting of her niece Gertrude (whose father, the mathematician Arthur Black, had suicided after killing his wife and son). Clementina’s sister was Constance Garnett, the famed translator of many Russian works (71, to be exact, some still in print). Constance herself was a noted suffragist, a friend and confidant of the Marx family, especially Karl’s daughter Eleanor), and a crusader not only for the vote for women (she was editor of The Common Cause) but for trade union rights and higher wages for women in “sweated” industries. Come to think of it, Clementina Black lived in—and she imagined—worlds quite far away from those of Virginia Woolf and of Orlando, Florida. Appropriately, in 1922, Clementina chose as her epitaph the lovely charge from Phillipians 4:8. ©.

[Stanley]

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." From Section I of the 14th Amendment.

In July 1776 the Continental Congress of the American colonies made the “self-evident” truth of equality the astonishingly radical principle of their revolution but, more than that, the source of their notion that equal people had not only the right but the duty to create their own government. Since all of them were patriarchs, many the owners of other human beings, and most of them significantly wealthier than their fellows, arguments began. Some say that the Congress meant only men. Some believe they intended to include only white people among the equal. Some (then and now) simply dismiss them as hypocrites. But there is more than a possibility that these “founding fathers” meant what they said and hoped that they were right—or hoped that history would, in the end, prove them right. It’s good to call the argument unresolved, even better to call the promise unfulfilled. But in the middle of the next century, Abraham Lincoln, born poor white trash, and Frederick Douglass, born a black slave, helped to clarify new definition of equality. This new definition was written in blood (the Civil War) but also on parchment, not least in the form of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution of 1787. The Fourteenth Amendment was proclaimed the fundamental law of the land by Secretary of State William Seward on July 28, 1868. Taking particular aim at the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that Americans of African descent were not only un-equal but were never and could not ever be equal, this amendment established the idea of “birthright citizenship,” regarded today by most scholars as a radical (and still very nearly unique) declaration of civil equality. To borrow from the original Declaration of 1776, this amendment says that all persons born here are equal and have equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Again, as in 1776, it was a radical claim, a mortgage on the future, a promissory note written rather than fulfilled. We’re still paying it off, and the coming election will help determine whether our payments will continue, or not. ©

[Stanley]

Maria Rebeca Latigo de Hernandez the gallant knight of San Antonio.

Our current president’s hostility towards immigrants, especially Mexicans, is nothing new. During the 1920s and the Great Depression, public policy and vigilante raids drove probably a million Hispanics south into Mexico, most of whom (about 60%) were bona fide citizens of the USA. Persecution was particularly intense in southwestern states, but in San Antonio, Texas, bigotry ran into a doughty mother of ten, Maria Rebeca Latigo de Hernández who (together with her husband Pedro Barrera) fought back. Maria Latigo de Hernández was born in Monterrey, Mexico, on July 29, 1896. Well-educated (her father was a university professor), she taught school before, in 1915, marrying Barrera. In 1918 the young couple moved to San Antonio where, on the largely Hispanic West Side, they established a successful grocery and bakery business. It quickly became a neighborhood focus and then, as persecution mounted (the reactionary 1920s saw the rebirth of the KKK and the 1924 ‘quota’ Immigration Act) the business and the Barrera household became Resistance HQ. Maria and Pedro founded and led several organizations, for instance the Orden Caballeros de América, the Asociación Protectora de Madres, and La Liga de Defensa Pro-Escolar, neatly focusing on men, women, and school children (and school curricula). Their “League of United Latin American Citizens” took in everyone. Maria herself, along the way, became the first woman announcer (anchor, one might say) at San Antonio’s Mexican radio station. She focused her considerable energies on women’s rights, not only civil rights but also economic ones, and came to feel that the foundations of true citizenship would indeed be home and family. Come the improved climate of the 1960s, Maria L. Hernández became a leading figure in the Raza Unida party and well known to established political leaders on both sides of the border. Maria died just short of her 90th birthday. A brave knight indeed, she was buried in the cemetery plot of the Orden Caballeros, near San Antonio. Her papers and letters live on, in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas library. ©

[Stanley]

"Adventures in Persia," by Ronald Sinclair, 1988.

In November 1988 Ronald Sinclair died in a Plymouth (England) nursing home. It might have been unremarked but for several odd things about him. He was quite aged (99 at his death). Although he was a widower (his second wife having died in 1986), he was rejoined in the nursing home by his first wife, an aged Russian lady called Valya, who (then) just barely preceded Ronald in death. And he’d just published Adventures in Persia, about his exploits there and thereabouts during World War I. So Ronald Sinclair got an obituary (November 22, 1988) in the London Times. But then it turned out that he was not Ronald Sinclair. Or, rather, he had become Ronald Sinclair in 1922, and had done so with the connivance of the British government. He was born Reginald Teague-Jones, in Liverpool, on July 30, 1889, a teacher’s son, but strange circumstances moved him first (1902) to Tsarist Russia and then (1910) to British India, where after a brief sojourn with the Indian police, he fetched up in British army intelligence, having picked up (along the way) useful fluencies in Russian, French, German, Persian, Urdu, Ottoman Turk, and Arabic. With the outbreak of World War I Teague-Jones took up a cloak-and-dagger life, based in Basrah (in present-day Iraq) but moving throughout the Middle East and into the Balkans as occasion warranted. In 1917, Teague-Jones was well-placed to play a role in British efforts to contain, subvert, or overthrow the Russian Revolution, moving in 1918 into Transcaspian Russia where, in the midst of a bloody civil war, he supported ‘social revolutionaries’ against ‘Bolshevik revolutionaries.’ When it was discovered that Teague-Jones’s allies had executed, in cold blood, a large number of Bolshevik prisoners, Teague-Jones became a marked man, even though he’d taken no part in the atrocity (he’d been shot and was recuperating in hospital). So he was withdrawn from the scene, awarded an MBE as Teague-Jones, and then (under sentence of death in the Soviet Union) transmuted into Ronald Sinclair, OBE. For the rest of his active life “Sinclair” worked for British intelligence in various places (including New York City). But his real identity was not revealed until November 24, 1988, whereupon the London Times issued a new obituary, thus making Reginald Teague-Jones, once again, official. ©

[Stanley]

"All sorts of things can happen when you are playing around and open to new ideas." Stephanie Kwolek.

Historical reparations might take some account of the descendants of Pittsburgh’s migrant workers of all ethnicities. Not only did they suffer for decades from low wages and the depredations of anti-union goons, but they (and their babies) sickened and died from diseases born downstream by their employers’ untreated sewage. They drank diptheria. Perhaps Jan Chwalek, an aluminum foundry worker born in Poland, was one of them. He certainly died young, leaving in poverty a seamstress widow and two daughters. But he’d left those little girls also with his love of nature, learned in (upstream?) wilderness walks. One of them, Stephanie Louise Kwolek, born on July 31, 1923, went to Carnegie Mellon on sewing money and a scholarship, where she did very well in Chemistry pre-med. Upon graduation she took a lab job with Dupont (then short of male chemists), aiming to earn enough money to get on to her MD degree. But Stephanie Kwolek proved too good at chemistry. Dupont wanted to keep her, and she wanted to stay (she was still on paid work at age 90). Her enthusiasm for the job was demonstrated by her first ‘scholarly’ article, with the odd title of “The Nylon Rope Trick.” It came too late for my high school chemistry class, but it’s now still a favorite classroom experiment, making nylon in an ordinary beaker and at room temperature. Kwolek won a prize for that one, and many awards later in her long life, but she is best known for her discovery, invention really, of Kevlar®, in 1965. The name itself sounds a bit Polish, but apparently it’s only an ersatz trade name. Kwolek’s discovery, accidental in one sense but she immediately saw it as a happy accident, has had a remarkable life and a huge variety of applications, including (it is sometimes said) the ‘invention’ of a whole new field of polymer chemistry. So we have a polymer (Kevlar) canoe. Yachters sail under Kevlar canvas. Others, pessimists no doubt, wear Kevlar bullet-proof vests. Some percussionists make music, or noise, with Kevlar drumheads. And so on, almost ad infinitum. You could say it’s all due to nature walks outside of Pittsburgh and a small child learning the Polish and English names for this tree and that bird. Or to a seamstress putting her kid through college. Either way, or both, it’s a good story. ©

[Stanley]

"The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power!" Maria Mitchell, diary entry, 1854.

America’s earliest women astronomers all came up (by definition) the hard way, many of them through working (for peanuts) as ‘computers’ in Edward Pickering’s Harvard Observatory. A few of those pioneers have figured in these notes, but here’s one who avoided Pickering’s orbit, indeed preceded him, Maria Mitchell, born on Nantucket Island August 1, 1818. Her Quaker parents had the outlandish view that girls should be educated, and Maria took after her schoolteacher father’s interests in astronomy and chronometers, both (one might say) second nature to Nantucket’s whaling community. She also served the Nantucket Athenaeum as its librarian, but the nighttime skies were her main vocation. She first rocketed to public notice in 1847 with her discovery of what became known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” (C1847 T1 to you and me) after a brief kerfuffle establishing precedence (her discovery beat an Italian astronomer’s by a couple of days), That won her the King of Denmark’s Medal and a good deal of attention from all quarters and many sorts, including Frederick Douglass (for Miss Mitchell was also an abolitionist) in America and Caroline Herschel in Britain. She also became the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Science (and a comically edited letter from an Academy totally unfamiliar with writing to a female). But her discovery particularly entranced American women. They banded together to buy Maria a better telescope, but the newly-founded Vassar College had an even better idea, in 1865 persuading Maria Mitchell (against her shyness) to become their Professor of Astronomy. There the shy Miss Mitchell presided for 23 years, meanwhile serving as Scientific American’s chief astronomy correspondent and as a tireless advocate for women’s full access to all fields of higher education. She died in 1889. If you vacation in Nantucket today, you can visit the Mitchell house, see Maria’s first telescope (the rather small one through which she first espied C1847 T1), and visit her grave at Prospect Hill Cemetery. ©.

[Stanley]

"And 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' write In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white; Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery." Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I suspect there are many (like me) who think of embroidery as a dying or dead craft, the sort of thing you might see being done only at a living history museum. Of course English churches are full of the stuff, for instance seat cushions on the choir benches where, occasionally, a cathedral’s clerics sit (en masse but only one per cushion). Those cushions are always intricate in design, but often faded too, something done ages ago, perhaps by a Victorian widow for an admired but bygone bishop. If that’s your view, I suggest you take a look at Beryl Dean embroideries, now available in many places online, but you could start at her memorial website, launched a few years ago under the auspices of St. Paul’s, London: http://www.beryldean.org.uk. Next time you’re in St. Paul’s, there will probably be some Dean hangings to look at, or you might see a Dean chasuble hanging off the bishop’s shoulders, but her work was not confined to London or, indeed, to ecclesiastical embroidery. Beryl Dean was born in County Kent, in comfortable circumstances, on August 2, 1911. She early showed great talent. Immediately after high school she went to the Royal School of Needlework (which still exists, by the way, and is now based at Hampton Court Palace) and then to the Royal College of Art. Dean then embarked on a career of teaching (some of her most intricate works were collaborations with several students), commission work, and exhibitions. She also published several academic studies of pioneers in her field. A brief look at Beryl Dean’s needle work, ranging from human figures to geometries to pure abstraction, and often very apparently (as her website claims) “modernist,” raises worthwhile questions about where one might place boundaries between ‘craft,’ ‘design,’ and ‘art.’ Dean married late in life (to a cousin-in-law), a marriage that among other things brought her a private studio where she continued (after her retirement from teaching) to explore those boundaries. She died just short of her 90th birthday, a reproach to anyone who might consider embroidery to be a lost art. ©

[Stanley]

On Mixing Sport and Politics: Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Recently we’ve been reminded that political gestures in sports can acquire symbolic significance. For the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Online) that connection called to mind the anniversary of a previous ‘sporting’ gesture, Adolf Hitler’s snub of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics on the day of Owen’s first (of four) Gold Medals, August 3, 1936. At and after the day, the story spread rapidly, and as years passed and the true horror of Hitler’s racism became more terribly apparent, it gained credibility, so much credibility that Owens himself found it necessary (or easier) to agree with it. But it wasn’t true, not quite. Hitler had wanted to make the Berlin Olympics a showcase of Aryan superiority, and Jesse Owens was the greatest among a number of non-Aryans who spoiled the party. Moreover, on the first day of the Games, August 2, several German (and Finnish) triumphs had given Hitler the opportunity to make much racial hay of their medal ceremonies. But when (in the late afternoon) the American high jumper Cornelius Johnson won his gold, Hitler decamped the stadium. On the good chance that this snub was because Johnson was black, Hitler was warned by the IOC that he would have to physically congratulate all medalists, or none. Hitler chose “none,” presumably to avoid soiling his hands. So when Owens ascended the podium on August 3, Hitler remained seated and (after Owens’ smile and bow) returned a rather half-hearted Nazi salute. That was pretty much what Hitler did at all the rest of the medal ceremonies when he was present. So Hitler’s was, so to speak, a general snub, or (to coin a phrase) a snub of omission. What Owens remembered when he first returned stateside was this (in a Kansas City speech to an all-black crowd): “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was our president who snubbed me.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt never even sent Owens a telegram, nor was Owens (or any other African-American in the Olympic team) invited to the White House reception celebrating American success at the ‘Nazi games.’ Symbolically speaking, in sports as in all other areas of American life, white racism was the gesture of the day in 1936. This American side of the snub story was not told to me when, aged 16, I witnessed Jesse Owens take the reviewing stand at the Drake Relays as Grand Marshall and praised as the “greatest athlete of the Relays’ first 50 years.” By then, 1959, in Des Moines, Iowa, the Nazi snub was the preferred ‘reality.’ ©

[Stanley]

"If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out." Louis Armstrong.

Among my earliest memories are of concerts (summer Saturday nights) at the courthouse bandstand in Grundy Center, Iowa. They played marches, some dance music. I went mainly for the popcorn (a young woman had a mobile popcorn stand moored at the NE corner of the courthouse square) but also because my dad played the trumpet. A dab hand, I thought he was, but he didn’t. Dad’s first full time job (mid-1930s) was in Kansas City, where he edited the Soybean Digest and a farm cooperative weekly, and in his spare time visited the jazz clubs around 18th & Vine in KC’s black district. “I thought I was a pretty good horn player,” he later told me, “but then I went to Kansas City.” I don’t remember whose horn dad heard, but one player certainly could have been Louis Armstrong, who did play KC in those years and was already moderately famous. Armstrong, born into poverty in New Orleans’ “Battlefield” neighborhood on August 4, 1901, came up the hard way, very hard, his mother occasionally reduced to prostitution and his own childhood one of hustling in the streets and trouble with the law. But the boy could sing and he could make music out of street junk. Maybe it was that musicality that brought him refuge and sustenance with a Jewish family, the Karnoffskys. In remembrance and gratitude, Armstrong wore a Star of David pendant for the rest of his life. But “Satchmo” he learned how to blow the horn, in New Orleans honky-tonks, from Bunk Johnson and King Oliver, and soon his prodigious talent won him notice and an escape to Chicago’s somewhat more salubrious clubs. The rest, as they say, is history. Armstrong’s first recordings came in the mid-1920s. Before the end of the decade he was touring (in New York and Los Angeles). I know that Armstrong did play Kansas City occasionally when my father took up his journalistic career—and laid down his silver-plated trumpet. But the only one of my dad’s records I remember from that time (or thereabouts) was the blues song “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.” That was Count Basie’s recording (1942) and I have no idea who played the horn for it. ©

[Tripps]

He appeared on desert Island Discs in 1968 -

Armstrong’s appearance is memorable for a number of reasons, not least because he chose five of his own records to take with him to the desert island, including What A Wonderful World, which had been a number one hit in the UK in 1968. “It’s fairly unusual, and certainly people tend not to do it now,” said Cathy Drysdale, series producer of Desert Island Discs.

[Stanley]

I remember it David.....

"I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing." Guy de Maupassant, epitaph, Montparnasse Cemetery.

In my senior year French course our theme was “the hero in the modern French novel,” and for our prof ‘modern’ apparently meant 20th century. So we started with Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (1914), and thus leaped over or left out quite a number of “modern” writers, not least Guy de Maupassant, who despite being born on August 5, 1850, never come very close to the 20th century, dying in 1893, a month short of his 43rd birthday. In that short life he proved an astonishingly prolific writer, eight novels and a mountain of short stories. He is known today as a master of the short form, and his stories have inspired many modern writers and, indeed, film makers. John Ford made de Maupassant’s “Boule de suife” (“ball of fat,” 1880) into the classic western Stagecoach (1939), Ford’s prostitute Dallas (played by Claire Trevor) standing in for de Maupassant’s Elisabeth Rousset and, like her, exposing the shallow moralities and/or cravenness of her fellow passengers. Maupassant, the elder son of a loveless marriage, and in his early adulthood the subject of an odd tug of war between his estranged parents, did indeed write about prostitutes and their intersecting circles of friends and clients. In that sense much of his fiction was ‘autobiographical,’ not perhaps in terms of plot but a faithful reflection of lived subject matter. His ability to observe, distil, and draw a realistic, critically honest ‘picture (a moral of a story rather than a story about a moral) made young de Maupassant a favored ‘child’ of several of the greatest writers of his time, notably Gustave Flaubert (to whom he was introduced by his mother) who said of de Maupassant “he’s my disciple and I love him like a son.” His artistry drew Henry James to him, too, but one can imagine James’s reaction when (at a Paris restaurant) de Maupassant asked James to “get” for him a woman at a nearby table. In the end, Guy de Maupassant died of that life, from complications of syphilis, a disease that had killed his younger brother after robbing him of his senses. De Maupassant always refused treatment for his ‘dose,’ not a bad decision given contemporary therapies, but some say that disease’s fateful presence can be found interwoven in his stories. ©

[Stanley]

"For once the voice of prejudice was silenced by the logic of facts. And those of us who had been the champions of an idea enjoyed a triumph greater than the greatest material victory." Daniel Kerr,117th Illinois Volunteers, June 17 , 1864, on the b...

The steps by which the United States government adopted the abolition of slavery as a central aim of the Civil War may be said to have begun on August 6, 1861, when Abraham Lincoln signed the first Confiscation Act. The act itself (like the process it started) is difficult to follow, seemingly (like the US Constitution itself) unable to call a slave a slave and unsure whether to dignify the enslaved as ‘persons’ or identify them as ‘properties.’ But it accomplished the needful, which was to give legal backing to the idea that enslaved persons used by their owners to assist the rebellion were ipso facto free and if then found (for instance, by US commanders in the field) de facto free. This was emancipation by confiscation and not by compensation, and if it was a small, halting step in its language (and its effect) it was a big stride in meaning. Lincoln’s reluctance to sign the thing is perhaps the best measure of its significance. The president himself, after all, was embarked on his own small-step, two-step (back and forward) journey (or, perhaps better, his own ‘dance’) towards “a new birth of freedom.” Frederick Douglass would later, in 1876, dedicating the Lincoln Memorial, state with gimlet-eyed honesty that Abe was, after all, “the white man’s president” and for Lincoln the ‘race’ of white men included those with legal rights over their human properties. Luckily for uncertain whites, enslaved persons themselves had from the very beginning of slavery proved willing to confiscate themselves, and in wartime did so in increasing numbers. Soon they donned the blue and bore arms to speed the process. It was their courage and their numbers, as much as any other force, circumstance or necessity, that led to a signal change of language in the second Confiscation Act (July 1862), that such persons “shall be forever free.” Thus it was by degrees that those who began the Civil War as “contraband” ended it as “citizens”. ©

[Stanley]

"I've been to Canada, and I've always gotten the impression that I could take the country over in about two days." Jon Stewart.

Among the tragedies and sadnesses of the US’s miserable failure to control the Covid-19 pandemic is our pariah status. Some 176 countries have imposed significant restrictions on travelers from the USA. These range from outright prohibition to enforced quarantines, and one of the first countries to adopt such policies was the friendly giant to the north, Canada, the land of steady habits, wondrous public gardens, and comprehensive public health services. But Canada has not always been friendly to us in the US. There have been several reasons for this, but an early and persistent one was that American dreams of a continental empire generally took in Canada, at least large chunks of it. This included military invasions in the wars of 1775-83 and 1812-15, undertaken in the naïve belief that Canadians would welcome Yankee invaders with open arms. Enter Lieutenant-Colonel John By, born in what was then the Thameside suburb of Lambeth on August 7, 1779. By was a military engineer, a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and on his second Canadian tour of duty (his Canadian career had been interrupted by Napoléon Bonaparte) he set about several projects designed to make Canada more defensible. This included the beginnings of what would become the St. Lawrence Seaway, but more significantly the 202-kilometer Rideau Canal, undertaken to make a navigable connection between the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. This was By’s baby, completed in 1832 and (as far as I know) never used in the defense of Canada, American annexation schemes being mainly noise and bluster. Today it’s used almost entirely for pleasure outings. John By built well, and a number of his original locks still serve. Besides his canal, By left his name littering the Canadian landscape (not to mention a fair number of plaques and memorial statues), but one By-name has disappeared. At the far northern end of the canal, the construction village of “Bytown” became “Ottawa” in 1855, and in 1857 Queen Victoria proclaimed this woodland outpost Canada’s new capital city, perfectly located between English and French (‘upper’ and ‘lower’) Canada—and far enough ‘inland’ for defense should Yankee bluster actually turn dangerous. ©

[Stanley]

"I could not be so sure of Spring// Save that it sings in me." Sara Teasdale, "April."

The foreknowledge that she died a suicide in 1933 weaves a thread of melancholy through the poems of Sara Teasdale, but if one didn’t know that about her, one might read her work differently: thoughtful, simple lyrics; declarations of independent judgment; a poet who takes pleasure in nature’s ability to hold back its riches in winter as well as to gush them forth in spring. Her “Advice to a Girl” begins defiantly: “No one worth possessing// Can be quite possessed,” which she calls a “hard and precious truth.” Sara Trevor Teasdale was born in St. Louis (on August 8, 1884) and grew up only a (longish) stone’s throw from where I write. Frail as a youngster, Teasdale was mainly privately educated and early showed poetic talent, latterly with a group of young women self-conscious enough to call themselves “The Potters,” their literary magazine (of course) The Potter’s Wheel. Her first published poem (outside the auspices of The Potters”) came in 1907. She quickly found her own voice, and was praised for it, but her poetry always has the character of something crafted carefully, a lump of clay coaxed up from the potter’s wheel to be something worth possessing. She married Ernst Filsinger in 1914, moved with him to New York, and continued to write. Her 1917 collection, Love Songs, won the prize that became, in 1918, the Pulitzer, and indeed Sara Teasdale is regarded today as the first winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. From her point of view, but apparently not from Ernst’s, the marriage grew unhappy. Her poem “Alone” may be an expression of this unhappiness, “in spite of love . . . in spite of all your tenderness.” She began divorce proceedings in 1929, in secret. She rekindled an old friendship with Vachel Lindsay (who had courted her 20 years before), but this relationship was cut short by his suicide in 1931. Constantly bothered by physical illness, Sara Teasdale followed him two years later. ©

[Stanley]

"Perfection can be achieved by no one, because perfection is achieved from faults . . ." Mary Golda Ross.

The Cherokee clan system was matrilineal, so it was possible for the nation to make John Ross (1790-1866) its principal chief even though he had a Scots father (and grandfather). His mother and grandmother were of the Bird clan, the Anitsiskwa, messengers between earth and heaven. So it was that he led the nation on its Trail of Tears and in Oklahoma territory from 1828 to 1866. As terrible as that experience was, the Ross family and the Anitsiskwa survived, and on August 9, 1908 welcomed Mary Golda Ross. She was born in ‘white’ Oklahoma, but was sent to Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, for her schooling. There she thrived, emergine in 1928 with a BS in mathematics from Northeastern State Teacher’s College. Ross was employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a teacher and girls’ advisor, got a master’s degree (mathematics, 1938), and seemed set for a lifetime’s work in Indian education. But WWII intervened, opening up opportunities for women, and 1942 found Mary Ross in California working for Lockheed on its P38 fighter project (doing the mathematics of airflow, for the P38 was to be as fast as ‘lightning’). Lockheed thought her promising and in 1946 sent her to UCLA to get an engineering qualification. So Ross not only kept her job (unusual for women in the post-war period), but moved up and on into the Skunk Works project, There, and thereafter, Mary Ross (who’d always been interested in the stars) worked as a senior scientist on various supersonic, orbital, and interplanetary projects. After her retirement in 1973 she worked on projects aimed at encouraging women—Native American Women in particular—into the STEM fields where, she’d proved, they could thrive just as well as men. That notion of equal potential was an old Cherokee view, the child (so to speak) of the nation’s matrilineal structures. So it must have given Ross, the great-great granddaughter of John Ross, great pleasure to take part (wearing tribal gear made by her niece) in the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2005. At her death (aged 99), she willed $400,000 to the museum. Ross is memorialized in a variety of ways, including on the reverse side of the US Mint’s 2019 Sacagawea Dollar. She’s shown working on a math formula, which was, for Mary Golda Ross, not a mundane activity. ©

[plaques]

A few posts back Bob mentioned that Hitler did not shake hands with Jesse Owens. It ran in the back of my mind that Eric (winkle) Brown said he saw them shaking hands.
Hitler.
Extract...
German journalist Siegfried Mischner seemed to back up the claim that there was a handshake by claiming that the athlete showed him a photo of Hitler extending his hand - which he kept in his wallet - in 1960.British fighter pilot Eric Brown subsequently claimed in a 2014 BBC documentary that he was witness to the alleged handshake.Yet, given that Owens never publicly revealed the photo before his death in 1980, we'll never know for sure whether or not such a greeting definitely took place.

Brown.
Also "I've read many stories that said Hitler ignored him (four-time US Olympic gold medallist Jesse Owens)," Mr Brown told the BBC.

"Now this is quite untrue because I actually witnessed Hitler shaking hands with Jesse Owens and congratulating him on what he had achieved."

[Stanley]

Ken. Handshake... Have you emailed Bob?

Mira quaedam in colendis floribus suavitas et delectatio. "The wonderful charm and delight of cultivating flowers." Latin inscription (from Cicero) in Maddock's The Cultivation of Flowers, 1792.

As religious ‘dissenters’, early British Quakers found many professions closed to them. At the same time, they developed the idea of the “innocent trades,” not in response to these exclusions but corollary to their notion of “witness,” to the idea that the “inner light” of conscience should govern their daily work as well as their ‘go-to-meeting’ souls. Some results were predictable Others were surprising. Banking had long been morally suspect, but Quakers were sure enough of their own consciences (and of the honesty of other Quakers) to render even usury an “innocent trade.” And non-Quakers agreed, preferring to use Friends’ banks for their own assets—and their liabilities. So it is that Britain’s dominant banks have 18th-century Quaker beginnings. A less surprising choice was gardening, a profession perhaps “innocent” prima facie and also requiring considerable attention to detail, hard work, and an open, scientific curiosity. Perfect Quaker stuff. It also required a market, and Britain’s “consumer revolution” provided one. Several Quakers became famed estate gardeners, working for this Duke and that merchant prince, but others went public as commercial ‘nurserymen.’ Among several examples, one of the earliest and most successful was James Maddock, born in Cheshire (of Quaker parents Mordecai and Sarah) on August 10, 1718. Maddock transformed an early interest in botany into a large nursery in neighboring Lancashire, which remained the source of much of his stock, but in about 1770 transferred to Walworth where he built a huge nursery, nearly 20 acres in extent, to serve the burgeoning markets of London and the Home Counties. Although he did not specialize, Maddock became especially known for fruit and flowers. He advertised (for instance) 320 varieties of Gooseberry, and late in his life began work on gardener’s manual based on a Linnaean classification of flowers. The Florist’s Directory was published posthumously (1792) by his son, also James, also a Quaker, and at first also a nurseryman of note. Later, this second James Maddock became a leading pharmacologist, selling up his father’s horticultural operation for a very considerable sum, to be paid by installment. Perhaps the 20-year deal was financed by Quaker bankers—as might befit a truly innocent trade. ©

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"The one way for us to become great, perhaps inimitable, is by imitating the ancients." Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768).

Historians have identified a ‘consumer revolution’ that transformed 18th-century Britain (the colonies, too). They’ve concentrated on how it redefined a growing middle class, but there was a much older tradition (‘conspicuous consumption’ by the rich) that held its own, notably in the production, marketing, and display (public and private) of fine art. One who rode this wave was the younger Joseph Nollekens, born in London on August 11, 1737. His painter father, “Old Nollekens,” died when Joseph was 11, but not before the boy’s talent was noticed, and after a long apprenticeship to a London sculptor, young Joseph set off for Rome where (1762-1770) he learned from the masters living and dead. In Rome he began to recruit a clientele, for the Grand Tour had become a near necessity for young gentlemen, aristocrats, and others (like the actor David Garrick) who visited Nollekens’ studio, liked his work, and bought from him. Mostly he sold portraiture and acknowledged copies of classic sculptures, but Nollekens was not above forgery, selling (for instance) a new head on an ancient Minerva to a visiting Englishman for the stupendous sum of £1000. Having made a reputation, Nollekens returned to London, married, set up a studio and gallery, and spent the next five decades producing what the market wanted in sculpture. This included duplicated political iconography, in marble (including an original bust—and fifty copies, all in marble—of Charles James Fox, acknowledged copies of the classics (more Minervas, more Venuses, more Dianas), some ‘contemporary’ monuments and, of course, portraiture: rich clients done up in Ciceronian style. Joseph Nollekens labored long hours to meet the demands of an expanding market. In 1823, he left behind him over £200,000 but also a legion of friends, not least other artists, for in the market place of fine art he had been more generous to his rivals (and to his apprentices) than he was to himself or to his wife. ©

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"Flying bomb exploded very close . . . shifted star out of field. Star recovered & exposure restarted 21:47 GMT." London Observatory log, Margaret Peachey, August 3, 1944.

“B2FH” might be the name of a robotic character in some new Star Wars film, but it’s used by astrophysicists as a shorthand title for an influential article on “stellar nucleosynthesis,” published in 1957 by two Burbidges, a Fowler, and a Hoyle. One of the Burbidges was E. Margaret Burbidge, born Eleanor Margaret Peachey in NW England on August 12, 1919. Her chemist parents encouraged Margaret’s interests in science, which (from about age 4, she later recalled) had to do mainly with the stars. She pursued this right through a PhD at London, whereupon at age 25, in wartime, she landed a job ordinarily held by men, caretaker at the University College observatory. She also talked a graduate student, Geoffrey Burbidge, into switching from physics to astronomy; they married and, thereafter, often worked as a team. It was a good thing for her because back then, at many observatories, women were not allowed, and indeed at Mount Wilson, in California, circa 1955, Margaret was smuggled in as Geoffrey’s assistant (the price of this concession was that the Burbidges had to live down the hill in a cold-water shack). Apparently the sexes working together at night was thought to render women wanton, or men wanting, or both, but through it all Margaret Burbidge won many firsts: including oversight of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Royal Astronomer, and (later) a Mount Wilson fellowship in her own name). Her specialty, though, was definitely on the physics side of astronomy, and though most of her (very long) working life took place in California (UCSD, Cal Tech, Berkeley) she also held appointments at Chicago, Harvard, and Texas. Burbidge won many awards, too, although in the early 1970s she turned down the Annie Jump Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society. It was an award for women only, and E. Margaret Burbidge was opposed to “any kind of discrimination.” Four years later she was elected President of the AAS, the first woman to hold that post. She died last year, just short of her 101st birthday. “Stellar nucleosynthesis,” by the way, is about how not only hydrogen and helium but also the other elements are created (and recreated) by nuclear reactions taking place (even now) in the heavy hearts of stars. “B2FH” transformed a discipline, as did (in several other ways) Margaret Burbidge. ©

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“To provide access to sport and the arts to people of every grade.” The 'principal aim' of the Much Wenlock Olympian Society, circa 1850.

In rural Shropshire there’s a village with a most charming name, Much Wenlock. Once, on our way to Wales, we visited it, largely because of its name and because it wasn’t too far off our beaten path. The name Wenlock derives from the Celtic, and (very roughly) means enclosure by the white rocks (of Wenlock Edge). The “Much” distinguishes the place from Little Wenlock, smaller of course, which lies a few miles to the WSW. Much Wenlock has grown into a bedroom suburb for Telford and Shrewsbury but retains some charm, so we were not disappointed; and further pleased when we looked the place up in Ekwall’s Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names. But little did we know that it has a claim, also, to be the birthplace of the modern Olympics, for in 1850 the village held the Wenlock Olympic Games, a charming affair with sports “open every grade of man” but also artistic contests of various sorts, poetry readings, music recitals, and declamations. The organizer was Dr. William Penny Brookes, born in the village on August 13, 1809. He was, like his father, a medical practitioner (surgeon, apothecary, country medic), and besides picking up his professional expertise in London teaching hospitals he became a polymath, a botanist of note, a classicist, and a fairly fanatical philhellene. His medical circuit was huge; sometimes he traveled 60 miles (horseback or buggy) to see a patient, and his interests were as broad. He was, in short (and he was only 5’2”), the very caricature of a Victorian busybody. His little Olympiad (for “the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants”) proved popular, and his boundless energies helped spread the custom, first in Shropshire then more widely. Dr. Brookes never did see Greece, but he saw Paris, met Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), and the two of them (and, of course, many others) hatched the plan for a ‘real’ Olympiad, if not at Olympus then near as dammit, in Athens, in 1896. Sadly, Dr. Brookes’s batteries ran dry in December 1895, whereupon Coubertin praised him as the father of the games, although “a” father would be more accurate. As they sometimes say, all it takes is a village. But it helps to have a Brookes. ©

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"A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle." Emile Zola

To have the sobriquet “Hellgate” is probably not the character reference one would want if one were in search of an entry-level job, especially if it came from George, Prince of Wales (later George IV). But he who took the nickname regarded it as an honor. He was Richard Barry, 7th earl of Barrymore, born on August 14, 1769, and in 1773 the inheritor not only of the title but also a tidy little estate of 140,000 acres in County Cork, Ireland. Barry, or Barrymore, seems never to have recovered from the honor, dropping out of Eton College twice, the second time to take up horse racing) out of his English stables at Wargrave, Berkshire. He proved an adept judge of horseflesh but not of his opponents’ cards; so he had to borrow heavily to keep up appearances even before he came into full control of his Irish estates. By that time, he’d developed a new enthusiasm, the theatre, and he spent a fortune on it, putting up theatres first at Wargrave and then in London. Of course he insisted upon acting, dragging along his foul-mouthed sister and his club-foot brother (who were christened ‘Billingsgate’ and ‘Cripplegate’ by the Prince of Wales, a veritable fountain of nicknames). Barry was OK as an actor, even better as boon companion of the Prince at play in Brighton and elsewhere, but it all had to end somewhere, and the end came shortly after the 7th earl sold his lands to pay off his debts and (rather gallantly) to settle a generous life income on his new bride, the low-born daughter of a coachman. In 1793 he died inadvertently (accidental discharge of a fowling piece) and so far in debt that his young widow buried him in secret to avoid creditors seizing even his body. He would hardly be worth talking about, really, but six decades later a young actor of promise, Herbert Blyth, saw the “Barrymore” name on a theatre hoarding in London, took it as his own, and then, as Maurice Barrymore, with his new bride Georgiana Drew in tow, sailed on the SS America to Boston whereupon they set about making their theatrical reputations, living their very own wild lives, and withal founding the Barrymore acting dynasty. The current Barrymore doyenne is Drew Barrymore, Maurice’s and Georgiana’s great-granddaughter. But she is not related to the 7th earl of Barrymore—at least not as far as I know. ©

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"I need not tell you that I have my work cut out, being a known suffragette and also a civil servant with a closed mouth." Mary Louisa Gordon, letter, October 10, 1908.

Being a feminist in Edwardian England was not all suffragette marches, breaking streetlamps and shop windows, imprisonment, force-feeding, and getting run down by racehorses. Some labored behind the scenes, having already attained strategic footholds in the world of men. Among these rara aves was Dr. Mary Louisa Gordon who, in 1908, as the suffrage movement radicalized and gained force, was appointed His Majesty’s “English Lady Inspector of Prisons.” As her title’s awkwardness suggests, she was the very first woman to be appointed to the Inspectorate, was terribly underpaid, and almost as a matter of course was assigned (only) to women’s sections of prisons. From this vantage point, Dr. Gordon clandestinely kept leading suffragettes informed about prison conditions and the indignities (and worse) suffered by their sisters-in-gaol. She got there, of course, the hard way. Mary Gordon was born in Seaforth, Lancashire, on August 15, 1861. Her Anglo-Scottish family did not approve of her desire to become a doctor, thinking it too morbid and too risky a career for a woman, so she did it pretty much on her own, first at the London School of Medicine for Women and then in several institutions in Edinburgh and Glasgow, qualifying in surgery, general medicine, and midwifery. Aged 29, she established a private practice in London, successfully enough to move (a little later) into her own quarters in Harley Street. She also moved into Liberal Party reform circles, and so when W. E. Gladstone’s son Herbert became Home Secretary he saw to it that there would be a Lady Inspector and that it would be Mary Gordon. There she worked quietly to improve women’s conditions in HM prisons, but not quite quietly enough. So when she volunteered for war work (in the Balkans) during World War I, her (male) boss acidly remarked that “she will not be missed.” Just in case he did miss her, she came back. Gordon retired from the service in 1921 to write several works on prison reform (essays and a book) and The Chase of the Wild Goose (1936) based on the private journals of a late 18th-century lesbian couple and published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. But throughout her long life (she died in 1941) Mary Gordon kept quiet enough that she is only now being discovered as a pioneer of British feminism. ©

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'There are no cuckoos here, only the raucous chattering of crows." Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, 1920, from her poem on the Amritsar massacre.

Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrine of non-cooperation with the British Raj, announced after the Amritsar Massacre (1919), was a difficult road to follow for his middle and upper-class adherents. For those already poor and ambitious for the sorts of jobs that came under the head of ‘cooperation,’ it brought real privations. Among these poor nationalists was a just-married couple, Lakshman Singh Chauhan, a young lawyer now embarked on a master’s degree in economics, and his wife Subhadra Kumari (Singh) Chauhan, born into a recently impoverished family on August 16, 1904. They also broke with tradition by marrying without parental approval and without visible means of support. Becoming a Gandhian nationalist was risky anyway for such a very young woman, and Subhadra made it riskier by appearing in public places dressed only in white cotton and without any ornamentation that might have marked her off as married. The Raj threw her in jail anyway (she may have been the first woman in the modern independence movement to be jailed). But her poetry mourning the Amritsar killings and celebrating the warrior queen of the Sepoy rebellion, Lakshmi Bai, made her a valuable follower, and Gandhi himself chided her for appearing in public without any ‘married’ ornament. She followed his advice, and so it is that the Indian postage stamp celebrating her life shows her forehead with the wifely vermillion dot, and though she’s dressed in a plain white sari it has a decorative border. Indeed she seems to have regarded married life and motherhood as fulfillment, but it was one she valued alongside her poetry and her nationalist passions. In between imprisonments, childbirths, and mothering five children, she authored five books, three of them poetry collections, two collected short fiction. As in her life, so in her writing, she celebrated the Indian nation’s heroic past and its glorious future, and she attacked its debilitating traditions, notably the caste system and the domestic imprisonment of married women, who, she proclaimed, ought to be regarded as the mothers of the nation. She lived long enough to see that nation born; but worn out by her hard life she died in a very minor car accident in early 1948, just one month after the Mahatma’s assassination. It is thought that the shock (one, or the other, or both) killed her. ©

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" . . . to catch the joy and swing of modern American life." Bessie Potter Vonnoh., circa 1925.

For several young St. Louis women, circa 1900, who aimed to express their identities through art, the process began with learning to admire themselves as females. The private name for their group was “The Self and Mutual Admiration Society,” but to the public they were “The Potters,” their self-produced art magazine The Potter’s Wheel. I would like to think that they were thus emulating, or admiring, an older St. Louis artist, already in 1900 making a name for herself as “a wild western girl” and a sculptor of note. She was Bessie Onahotema Potter (her middle name was conferred on her by a Choctaw tribal leader), born in St. Louis on August 17, 1872. Her own liberation had come when she and other young women studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, found themselves assisting Lorado Taft in organizing and producing sculptures for the great Columbian Exposition (1893). They called themselves “the White Rabbits.” A rabbit or not a rabbit, Bessie Potter was soon producing, and selling, sculptures of her own, usually small bronzes, usually female figures. They appear (in art catalogs today) not particularly “wild” or “western,” but maybe liberated and certainly full of vigor and grace, often in “Gibson Girl” garb, often dancing, sometimes holding an infant. She called them “Potterines,” although that changed in 1899 when she married the American impressionist Robert Vonnoh, 16 years her senior and became Bessie Vonnoh. She modeled for him, charmingly it must be said, and continued to enjoy considerable artistic success herself, now not only with small bronzes, but some monumental commissions including Central Park’s lovely Secret Garden fountain, honoring Frances Hodgson Burnett’s popular children’s book (1911) of the same name. Vonnoh’s productivity slowed considerably after her husband’s death in 1933. In 1955 she was buried with him near their artists’ colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut. It’s a disappointment to me that there appears to be no connection between her surname, her ‘Potterine’ female bronzes, and Sara Teasdale’s feminist art group, the Potters. But their stories present a set of interesting coincidences in the history of American women. ©

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"Since Planes, as Planes, are alike in Geometry, it is most proper to consider them as so , , , leaving the Artist himself to apply them in particular Cases." Brook Taylor, 1715.

The Covid-19 virus has provided all of us with the lesson that mathematics can describe and explain the ways in which the world actually works, as in the statistics of the transmission and social incidence of illness. Clearly, the lesson has not ‘taken’ with everyone, but in human history that basic notion is relatively new. Even mere counting didn’t extend very far beyond the merchant’s ‘counting-house,’ and until about the 16th century the higher mathematics were either unknown (e.g. calculus), or used in the service of magic, or regarded as an abstruse, mysterious game whose rules were open to only a few initiates. All this changed, or should have, with the 17th-century discoveries of the likes of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, so that Brook Taylor, born on August 18, 1685, could spend a goodly part of his short life using the ‘mysteries’ of mathematics to explain even painting and music. Art and music were Taylor’s first loves, more than pastimes in the Taylor households in London and East Anglia where strict Puritanism was tempered by artistic instruction and performance and where domestic routine was often interrupted by visiting painters and players. It was apparently when Taylor went off to Cambridge (1703) to study law that he fell seriously in love with mathematics. And while there is no evidence whatsoever that he ever after practiced any lawyerly arts, there are many proofs that he became a serious mathematician, serious enough to be elected to the Royal Society, to serve as its corresponding secretary, and in 1712 to be appointed to a committee to adjudicate (as between Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton) who deserved credit for the invention of the calculus. Music and art figured central to his own mathematical work (on the mathematics of oscillation and of perspective), but he also extended Newton’s (or Leibniz’s) calculus. He also engaged (perhaps too energetically) in the debates that characterized a discipline whose vigor had been renewed, even born again, by the (re)discovery of its boundless potential. Perhaps worn out by these exercises and certainly devastated by the losses (in childbirth) of his first and then of his second wife, Brook Taylor died “of a decline” in 1731.