BOB'S BITS

[Tripps]

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Total nonsense. . . .

[Stanley]

"Like the Virgin Birth, religion has all too often supported an Immaculate Deception." Bernard Katz.
Sir Bernard Katz, 1911-2003

An intense and intensely private man who played life like a game of chess, a game that, characteristically, he played fiercely and remarkably well. Obituary for Sir Bernard Katz in The Guardian newspaper, April, 2003.

Luigi Galvini (1737-1798) and Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) established a nearly universal scientific consensus that muscular movement was initiated and governed electrically, but it took a long time to discover the sources, processes, and effects of this electro-physical phenomenon. That was the life work of Bernard Katz, born in Leipzig, Germany on March 26, 1911. Katz’s parents, Russo-Jewish immigrants, wanted him to join the family business, but a combination of factors (not least anti-Semitism) led him into science instead. Motivated by twin compulsions to excel and to do good, Katz did brilliantly at the sciences in his Leipzig gymnasium and then chose medicine for his university studies. He did well there, too, but in the end it was science that won out, specifically an experimental, research approach to the physiology of exercise. As a beginning graduate student, he surveyed the field in a 1930 research paper. It was rejected because the journal would not publish an article whose sole author was Jewish. Katz laid it aside (it would in 1939 be published as a book) and determined to leave Germany. Katz found academic and personal refuge in the London lab and the London home of Professor A. V. Hill, the 1922 Nobelist in physiology. In Hill’s lab, Katz specialized in the mechanics of muscular contraction, which placed him and his work at the borderlines of biology, physics, and chemistry. His discoveries are very complex, but they focused on nerve fibers and their variances in conductivity (for instance between negative cores and positive sheaths). His findings quickly brought him and his colleagues to the forefront of their science (and doubtless helped Katz to rescue his mother and father from Nazi horrors). It also brought Katz to a close acquaintance with squid, mollusks whose peculiarities include unusually thick nerve fibers. Coincident with the outbreak of WWII, it also won Katz a Carnegie grant to study squid in Australia. There he took three years out to become a radar operator for the Australian air force, to find an Australian wife, Rita Penly, and to speculate, as if from a distance, on his research field. All that bore fruit in a long, happy marriage and further, groundbreaking research. Returning to England as professor in Hill’s old department, Katz won just about every prize going, including a knighthood, and culminating in his own Nobel Prize in 1970. After retirement, Katz continued to work in his lab, to improve his chess game, and to cultivate his taste for Wagnerian opera. Bernard Katz died in 2003, his heart broken by Rita’s death (in 1999) and by a deteriorating link between his nerve system and his coronary muscle. ©.

[Stanley]

She passed as black.
Effa Manley, 1897-1981

She loved baseball. Epitaph on the gravestone of Effa Manley, Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, CA, erected in 1981.

In the USA race language has always been bizarre, treating as black any person who has a visible ‘trace’ of African genetic heritage. Accordingly, our history is brim full of folk who decided to ‘pass’ as white. Never mind, as per Lord Russell, that a more accurate depiction of Caucasian skin color is pink-grey, ‘passing white’ meant for many a way to qualify for . . . well, whatever: for better treatment, the right to vote, the chance for a well-paid job, even admission as a corpse to the public cemetery. Clearly color as a measure of quality was fallible, so to clear matters up, the Louisiana state legislature in 1970 defined any person who was more than 1/32nd black as black by law. At the same time they ruled out of the lawbooks all sorts of terminology historically used to define breeds of humanity. All people more than 31/32nd white (or pink-grey) could no longer be called mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, “griff” or, of course, Negro. In other words, if your family line back to your great-great grandparents were white, you were white. You ran into “black” at the great-great-great grandparent level, a patent absurdity that, were it not for our actual history, might be called comic. But here’s a lady who chose to “pass” as black, did so in style, and not only that but, in 2006, she became the first woman (of any 32 shades) to be elected to the national Baseball Hall of Fame. She was Effa Manley, born Effa Brooks in Philadelphia on March 27, 1897, the illegitimate offspring of a domestic servant (an immigrant seamstress) and her employer John Bishop. Bishop, a wealthy businessman, was embarrassed enough to pay a $10,000 settlement to the seamstress and her black husband (another Bishop servant), so Effa had a small head start in life, then improved on it by attending an elite high school. But Effa always thought of herself as black, and black she was when, in 1935, she married Abe Manley, much older than she, much blacker, and who was like Effa a rabid baseball fan. They met at a Dodgers’ game, and then together they founded a black baseball club in Brooklyn, then they moved it, as the Eagles, to Newark NJ. Abe died in 1948 but Effa stayed on to manage the club and to cause all sorts of good trouble in the areas of civil rights, employment rights, and pay. She also agitated, tirelessly, for inclusion of Negro League players in the Cooperstown museum, gaining success (for 11 former Negro Leaguers) in 1971. Others followed, but it was not until 2006 that Effa herself was voted in. Had Effa not been such an impatient woman, we might say she gained admission by waiting for it. ©

[Stanley]

Citizen of the Age of Revolutions
Francisco de Miranda, 1750-1816.

It is impossible to imagine, without seeing it, a more purely democratic gathering. Francisco de Miranda, June 17, 1783, commenting on a celebration of America independence at New Bern, North Carolina. It was, of course, a barbecue.

The American Revolution wasn’t secure until the Battle of Yorktown in the autumn of 1781. The American victory was complete, the British surrender abject, without the trappings of ‘honor’ traditionally accorded to a defeated foe. Legend says that the Brits’ band played “The World Turned Upside Down” as they left the field; more likely they were not able to tootle at all. The British suffered nearly 9000 casualties, the Americans fewer than 400. The Battle of Yorktown had really been a three-weeks long siege, American victory assured by the preceding Battle of the Capes (on September 5) between the Royal Navy and a French fleet commanded by the aristocratic Comte de Grasse. Left unsupplied, Lord Cornwallis’s army was doomed. That de Grasse’s ships were there at all owed to the clever negotiations of a Spanish officer in Havana, who had convinced the royal governor of Cuba to grant supply to de Grasse’s fleet. This was Francisco de Miranda, born in Caracas, Venezuela, on March 28, 1750. A creole from his wig to his toes, indulged by his dad (a rich merchant from the Canary Islands) and Venezuelan-born mom, Francisco’s spirit was to have been curbed by his commission (purchased by his father) in the Spanish army. But Francisco proved incorrigibly insubordinate. His anti-authoritarianism may have been temperamental; if so, it was nourished by his immersion in the literature of the Enlightenment. Francisco admired the courage of the common soldiery and detested the incompetence of the aristocratic officer corps; but for his own impetuous bravery he probably would have been cashiered—or worse. But he survived it all and saw the American Revolution as proof that he did indeed live in an age of democratic revolution. Luckily for him, it proved to be in Spain’s interest to support the North Americans. So,ordered to do what he wanted to do, Francisco played his part, not only in supplying de Grasse in Havana but in battle against the British in the Bahamas, West Florida, and South Carolina. Afterwards, he is found as a gallant officer in the revolutionary army of the French Republic, a co-conspirator in London and Yorkshire with British radicals in the 1790s, and with Simon de Bolivar among South America’s republican revolutionaries. He also wrote two influential books about the democratic wonders of the North American revolution and became an enthusiast for the abolition of slavery. Francisco de Miranda died in a Spanish prison, in 1816, convinced that he was a failure. He’s today recognized as a martyred hero in Venezuela, and gets a good write-up, too, in the Jamestown Settlement and American Revolution Museum in Yorktown, Virginia. He deserves it. ©

[Stanley]

The world is not yet redeemed.
Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, 1819-1900

The world is not yet redeemed. Isaac Mayer Wise.

Timothy L. Smith, historian (1924-1997), is best known for his Revivalism and Social Reform (a prizewinner in 1957 and now increasingly provocative), but his best work came in short articles that summarized the state of play in this or that controversy in religious history and then suggested new resolutions An evangelical himself, a sometime pastor in the Church of the Nazarene, Smith’s work demonstrated an inclusive sympathy for religion in general, and not just in American history. Indeed he found little that was ‘uniquely American’ about our religious history. One of Smith’s more memorable parallels was between American Methodist circuit riders and itinerant rabbis in eastern Europe racing to follow their congregants across landscapes transformed by vast social and economic changes, each rendering their faith newly relevant in new environments. Just so, Smith saw Reformed Jewry as a transatlantic phenomenon, not an assimilation to a new (American) culture but an adjustment to the modern world which began in Austro-Hungary and the German states and proved exportable to the US. In the US its most able exponent was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Weis. Born in Hapsburg Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) on March 29, 1819, Isaac Weis may (or may not) have been ordained in the traditional way, but as a rabbi in Radnice, Bohemia, and then in Albany, NY, he found “tradition” to be an obstacle against effective religiosity. Of course for many communicants religion is tradition, and so Wise (he changed his spelling if not his spots) could be a schismatic firebrand. Some changes (notably raising females to an equality) were ecclesiastical, others doctrinal. Some “fit” with trends in American Protestantism, for instance preaching rather than reciting; others (e.g. rejecting the Messianic prophecy) decidedly non-conformist. While laboring away at his new Albany congregation (his first synagogue threw him out), he became chaplain to the New York state legislature (a protégé there of the radical Republican William Seward). Once he’d found his feet (in Ohio) he became a prophet of Jewish unity. He demanded (and got) lifetime tenure at his Cincinnati synagogue, where further reforms were instituted, but the overall effect was not Jewish unity but to make Reform into a ‘denomination,’ with its own sectarian theology and, indeed, its own seminary, the Hebrew Union College, founded by Wise and others in 1875. The best conclusion (as Timothy Smith might put it) is that Rabbi Isaac Wise was Jewish and American, not Jewish-American. ©

[Stanley]

War's horrors on canvas, in oils.
Francisco de Goya, 1746-1828

The sleep of reason produces monsters. Francisco de Goya.

Guernica (1937), the world’s most famed anti-war painting, hangs today in Madrid, Spain. That’s where Pablo Picasso wanted it to end up, although it didn’t get there until both Picasso (the artist) and el Caudillo Francisco Franco (in some sense the subject) were both dead. It’s a collage of abstractions, but its horrors are clear. Much less abstract is Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951) in which a gaggle of humans bereft of clothing and hope stand before a firing squad of science-fiction soldiers. Of the two, Guernica stands alone, but the Massacre is clearly rooted in both theme and composition in the world’s second most famous anti-war painting, Francisco de Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814). Goya’s large canvas shows unarmed civilians being gunned down by another firing squad in another war. As in Massacre, the victims are to the left, los fusilamientos to the right, their guns banked, grouped, anonymously aimed to kill. But in Goya’s rendition light, color, and pose make the victims (not the perpetrators) all too human, stricken by grief, fear, and awareness of their personal martyrdom. In this terrifying instant, we can see the life of the painter himself, born in the sunnier clime of the Spanish Enlightenment, coddled in the court of a humanistic monarch, but then subjected to the disabilities of age and the horrors of a proxy or client war, civilians at home arrayed against visiting armies from abroad, mercenaries with no care in the world other than to get it over with. Francisco de Goya was born a craftsman’s son in Aragon on March 30, 1746. He learned painting from contemporary Spanish masters and then, once he’d entered into his period of court patronage, learned even more from the royal collections that would be (later in Goya’s life) brought together under one roof at the Prado Museum. Thus among Goya’s tutors were the paintings of Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) and other artists of Spain’s ‘golden’ era. Appropriately, the Prado is where you can find many of Goya’s works and follow their progress from court portraiture and country scenes to his war works and then to his even darker musings on common folk, their lives and labors, and their sufferings (in prisons and asylums, for instance). Taken together, they present a personal biography of progressive disillusionment, gradual but one that pivots clearly on Spain’s (and Spaniards’) sufferings during the proxy wars of Napoleonic Europe. It is interesting to speculate on whether the proxy wars of our own time (not only in the Ukraine) will produce their own artistic statements, as eloquent and as terrifying as those of Picasso and Goya. ©

[Stanley]

Nightingales and Sugar Swans in Berkeley Square
Robert Gunter, 1783-1852

I may be right, I may be wrong
But I'm perfectly willing to swear
That when you turned and smiled at me
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square Song, Vera Lynn et als, 1940s.

When we first moved to England the best ice cream shops were Italian. Around Lancaster the best of the best was in the charming bayside town of Arnside. It sold gelatos and its owners were Italians, albeit speaking broad Lancashire. I first thought that they were Italian POWs, relicts of WWII. But the Italian confectioner was of a much older British vintage, dating from Britain’s 18th-century ’consumer revolution’ and, before that, from Italy’s earlier experience with sugar. By mid-century one of London’s poshest confectioneries was ‘The Pot and Pineapple’ at 7 Berkeley Square, from 1750 founded, owned, and operated by Domenico Negri. Soon, fashionable ladies arrived in their carriages, acquired this or that delicacy from Negri, and strolled into the square to sup and to enjoy shaded views of the London residences of Beau Brummel, Lord Clive, and Horace Walpole. But Negri did not last forever. In the early 1760s he took on as apprentice confectioner another immigrant, this one from mid-Wales, James Gunter (1745-1819). Gunter (who was perhaps Negri’s nephew) was soon partner, then sole owner of the shop. Besides his store front operation, Gunter catered confections that graced the tables of his rich neighbors, not only gelatos but elaborate constructions like sugar swans and chocolate cows. James branched out into real estate, too, and built a nice house for himself in the less posh Hanover Square where, on March 31, 1783, James’s son Robert Gunter was born. Robert grew up with the Gunter businesses, based on the solid foundations of sugar but also flowering forth in ambitious real estate ventures. As Gunter & Son (Robert married and brought forth a new generation of Gunters) the firm’s public face remained the shop at 7 Berkeley Square (although it expanded to take in #8 as well) for nearly two centuries. Robert Gunter studied confectionery in Paris, wrote classic confectionery cookbooks (in English and French, not in Italian or Welsh), and became London’s most exclusive candy man. And he moved the focus of his father’s real estate speculations to the southwest, where Robert, his two sons, and a Gunter cousin became the reigning barons of Earl’s Court. The sugar shop closed in the 1950s, leaving Berkeley Square to its nightingales and its ancient plane trees. As for the Gunter family’s Earl’s Court neighborhood, by the time we landed it had become the quarter where immigrant Australians slept in B&Bs or small hotels, dreaming not of Italian sweets but of cultural fame at the center of a fading empire. ©

[Stanley]

Who is the fool?
Archie Armstrong, buried on April 1, 1672

If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time . . . Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. The fool in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 5.

Back in the day when I and television were very young, I watched (with my parents) a King Lear. The TV was only a 16” Magnavox, black & white of course, but for me the play’s terrors filled the room. I’ve only dared to see one Lear since, live and in a theatre, and have taken from neither any memory of comedy. But Lear did have a fool, and the fool has some good lines, witty yet prophetic. Lear had done better to hear his fool, but the play’s a tragedy and the king was deafened by his fatal flaws before he was blinded. In Shakespeare’s time, the court fool was almost an official position and the fool already a legend: a man, sometimes maimed or otherwise handicapped, who could get away with murder, verbally at least, by speaking truth to power but by clothing truth in wit and incongruity. It was a difficult art, and the fool would soon pass from the scene. One of the last (at English courts) was Archibald Armstrong, fool to both early Stuarts, James I and then Charles I. We don’t know when or where he was born, but his name makes him a Scot and he did well enough at foolery to die a man of substance, almost a gentleman, and be buried rich and ancient on April 1, 1672. April Fools’ Day, of course. Armstrong’s grave is in Arthuret, a rural parish on the Scottish border, just south of Gretna Green, close to where Armstrong may have begun his foolery (at the country seat of the Earl of Cumberland). He was picked up early by King James (perhaps even on his way south to take Elizabeth I’s throne), was certainly on the payroll by 1606 and in his fool’s niche by 1612. His first recorded joke, about the then Prince of Wales, got him in some trouble, but he mended his ways sufficiently to become chief jester. These were troubled times, very challenging for a fool to be foolish about, and Armstrong made pointed jokes about prominent people, including Charles I’s favorites Buckingham and Archbishop Laud. But he kept his head (and his job) until the outbreak of the Civil Wars, 1641-1642, and the knowledge that he had, after all, lampooned Laud may have helped Armstrong negotiate his retirement northwards, to Arthuret, where he used profits accrued at court to gather a substantial acreage. Unless we count Charles II’s obscene friend Rochester as a court jester (and as an earl Rochester doesn’t really fit), the position disappeared. Arguably, the work was to be taken up, later, by journalists and late-night TV hosts, but never again with the daring, subtle artistry of Archie Armstrong (or of Lear’s fool, who will forever remain nameless). ©

[Stanley]

Who were the original bluestockings?
Catharine Macaulay, 1731-1791

Pope has elegantly said a perfect woman’s but a softer man . . . we must either agree with Mr. Pope or we must reverse the proposition and say that a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold. Catharine Macaulay.

Blue was once was the commonest dye used in the British woolens industry, and so when men wanted to demean Oliver Cromwell’s ‘nominated’ parliament of 1653 they called it the “blue-stocking” parliament, made of upstart tradesmen like Praise-God Barebone, a leather-seller who represented the Second Coming in preference to any particular constituency. That parliament lasted a short time only. So the term ‘bluestocking’ slumbered for a century, next found in the late 1750s to characterize women who went above themselves to discuss public affairs, arts, and letters. These ladies, because of a chance remark by one of them (stressing their informality, not their commonness), became known as the bluestockings, even as the Bluestocking Club. It seems to have begun as a ‘promiscuous’ grouping (it took in men, too), but it soon became more heavily, even purely female. There were no dues, no initiations: nor, at first, did it have a political identity. But over the four or five decades of its existence, it took on a radical hue of blue, owing partly to the Enlightenment and its “age of revolutions,” more certainly to the politics of some bluestockings. Among these was Catharine Macaulay, historian of her own and the previous century. She was born Catharine Sawbridge on April 2, 1731. The Sawbridges were upstarts, yeoman in origin but waxed wealthy on banking and notorious on stock speculations. By wit and wedding, Catharine’s father accumulated much gold, many acres, and a large library wherein Catharine educated herself, particularly in Greek and Roman history. In 1760, Catherine married George Macaulay (1716-1766), an older man who happily encouraged her desire to apply what she had learned about ancient republicanism to England’s recent history. The first volume of Catharine Macaulay’s classic History of England from the Accession of James I appeared in 1763. Its appearance made her an oxymoronic sensation, a female historian. But she was more than that, and different, too. Seven more volumes would follow before Catharine died (in 1791) by which time her republican, radical sympathies had forever associated ‘bluestocking’ with reform-minded females and their social and political enthusiasms. Her critics, and she did arouse many including Edmund Burke, had the long-term (and only partly ironic) effect of associating misogyny with conservatism. These were odd etymological outcomes for the coarse blue stockings of Praise-God Barebone and his fellow MPs. ©

[Stanley]

Like father, like son.
Harry St. John Bridger Philby, 1885-1960

God I’m bored. Reputedly the last words (1960) of Harry St. John Bridger (‘Jack’) Philby.

‘Kim’ Philby (1912-1988) embodied and then embellished a literary type: a well-educated mind, an aristocratic temper, and (yet) an absolute disaffection born of a romantic attraction to some ‘Other’ ideal. Thus Kim Philby became the most famous traitor in 20th-century Britain; his shades stalk the pages of the best espionage fiction, notably as John le Carré’s anti-heroes Magnus Pyke and Bill Haydon. Like them, Kim’s success owed to the inability of others of his class even to ask the question, ‘how could one of Us become one of Them?’ One way to answer that question is to look at the career of Kim’s father, Harry St. John Bridger Philby, born in British Ceylon on April 3, 1885. The son of a rich tea planter, ‘Jack’ Philby was sent ‘home’ to be educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge (son Kim would follow that route). Polished yet sociable, Jack studied Oriental languages, became close to a mixed set (his good friends included Jawaharlal Nehru and his distant cousin Bernard Law Montgomery), and in 1915 Jack skipped the trenches to join the colonial service at Baghdad. Given the circumstances, that necessarily became an intelligence post, and under the tutelage of Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell Jack Philby helped redraw the political and dynastic maps of the Arab Middle East. We still live with the consequences. Soon Philby was assigned to plot the “Arab Revolt” against the Ottomans. This complicated business led to promises—probably incompatible—made by the British to both Jews and Arabs. Jack Philby himself, swept off his feet by the romance of Arabia (not to mention its oil), turned against British official policy to support the pan-Arab pretentions of the Wahhābi chieftain Ibn Saud as against the Hashemite Husseins. In this Philby established warm relations with the fledgling US diplomat Allen Dulles and the famed T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia). Philby fancied Ibn Saud as a ‘democrat’ at heart, converted to Islam, and continued to undermine British policy while forwarding an alliance between the Saudis, Standard Oil, and the USA. His first (English) wife having died, Philby married an Arab and, fatefully it turned out, arranged Kim Philby’s first job, reporting to the London Times on the Spanish Civil War. Whatever the son’s sympathies, by now ‘Jack’ was on board with Franco, and negotiating a way to supply Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany with Arabian (ARAMCO) oil should that be needed. Jack did not live long enough to see Kim’s career as double agent fully flower, but he may himself have been a triple agent. Like father, like son. Or was it the other way round? ©

[Stanley]

"Up with your damned nonsense I will put twice, or perhaps once."
Hans Richter, Conductor

Up with your damned nonsense I will put twice, or perhaps once, but always, by God, never. Hans Richter, rebuking a player in London (attribution==and perhaps direct translation).

Along with many, I think that lists (of the ‘best’, the ‘greatest’, or even the grossest, et cetera ad infinitum) are corrosive, limiting, and yet ubiquitous. This morning’s internet tour of lists of the “greatest” classical conductors exposed several biases, notably slanted towards ‘national’ conductors and those maestros who still have recordings on the market. I was looking for information on Hans Richter, but his musical accomplishments were never recorded and have found him no place on any of the lists I found. Hans Richter was born in Hungary (as ‘Johann Baptist Isidor’ Richter) on April 4, 1843. His musical upbringing (at home and in school) gave him a variety of talents, but it was as a 23 year-old horn player that he was sent to Richard Wagner to copy the score of Die Meistersinger, then to play in the pit at the opera’s Vienna premier, and then to substitute on stage for one of the Vienna company’s lead vocalists. His many talents (he admitted only to an infelicity as a harpist) convinced him and the German musical world that he’d do well to become a conductor. Within a few years he was a recognized conductor, one with the distinction of having been sacked by Bavaria’s King Ludwig II (don’t argue with a mad monarch over his staging preferences). From 1875 to 1900, Richter was a dominant figure on Vienna’s music scene: inter alia principal conductor at the Philharmonic and Kappellmeister for the Hapsburg court. Soon he became a conductor to whom composers paid court to premier their works, both established masters like Wagner himself and new talents like Antonin Dvorak. Hans Richter also learned the benefits of touring, back to Bayreuth where he led the first full staging of Wagner’s Ringcycle (1876), also to Paris, and to England where Richter became a hero. In London his late summer “Richter Concerts” (1879-1902) preceded the “Proms” series. At these Richter favored old and new classics (particularly Beethoven and Wagner) but also premiered new works, notably by Edward Elgar, Hubert Parry, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Whether in London, or Paris, or Vienna, Richter’s care, knowledge, and expertises made him a terror and then an inspiration to players and singers alike, while his oddly restrained behavior at the podium struck audiences with awe. Once, during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, he stood quite still for a whole movement (the 2nd) to all appearances leaving its rhythmic complexities to the players. Back home in Vienna, Richter did turn a cold shoulder to Gustav Mahler, but was that sufficient cause to keep Richter off the lists of ‘greatest’ conductors? Or should we just make our own lists? ©

[Stanley]

"There is as much dignity in tilling the field as in writing a poem."
Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. Booker T. Washington.

Booker T. Washington was born enslaved on April 5, 1856, then in freedom became a pioneer educator and the leading spirit of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. Gathering facts about him this morning, I remembered reading a book about him when I was in the grades, and thought it must have been in Random House’s “Landmark” series. I was given many Landmark books, and remember them as inclusive in their subjects, surprisingly for their time (they were published beginning in 1950) including biographies of native Americans, women, and immigrants. Surely Washington’s bio was among them. He was a perfect Landmark subject, brilliantly successful in his own right, always pushing for equality for all, but never too loudly. However, while the Landmark list did include a biography of a Tuskegee man, (George Washington Carver: The Story of a Great American, 1953), it was silent on Booker T. Washington himself. I read the Landmark Carver, but learned of Booker T. Washington by some other route, first in grade school, then in my PhD studies, and later as a college teacher of US history. He was and remains a worthy subject, a brilliant educator, an indefatigable fund-raiser (from the likes of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie) and a leader. Booker T. Washington made achingly true America’s favorite story, that of the “self-made man.” Up From Slavery was the title Washington chose for his 1901 autobiography, and it was a story that the likes of Rockefeller could only palely imitate. And yet his was a tragic, as well as a heroic, story. Slavery ended when Washington was but a nine-year-old boy. It was replaced by the heady hopes of Reconstruction for full citizenship, economic security, and public power. In his teens, Washington aimed for the moon. But then came the bad new days of ‘Redemption’; Reconstruction became Reaction, black folk were hounded out of office, barred from voting, and driven down to the bottom rungs of economic life. Worse, it was done ‘legally,’ and where state law or municipal codes didn’t do the trick violence sufficed. In this bad climate, Washington chose moderation, patience, even to the extent of a public acquiescence in segregation. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” he advised black people. Those who wanted to believe that hard work and patience could solve the ‘race problem’ made Washington their hopeful hero. In the retrospect provided by sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and Black Power (and by Critical Race Theory), Booker T. Washington looks like an Uncle Tom. And that is an American Tragedy. ©

[Stanley]

composer and performer in jazz and the classics
Donald Shirley, 1927-2013.

I am not an entertainer. Donald Shirley, quoted in his obituary, 2013.

By many measures, the USA is one of the world’s most diverse societies and is daily becoming more so. That’s something to treasure, a matter of pride, but on the reverse of that shiny coin is our tribalism. “We,” a pronoun of infinite shadings, have not always welcomed “them” (another pronoun of shifting senses), often shoving “them” into urban ghettos. Ironically, those places made it possible for “them” to create their own sense of “us,” for instance on Manhattan Island, with its Black Harlem and its Jewish Lower East Side. Within those places there was safety in sameness. But what if one wanted to get away from it all? One answer was the satellite vacation spot, the Black enclave on Martha’s Vineyard or the Jewish Catskills. But if one wanted to ramble, well, that was another matter. And so arose a new genre of vacation guide, first (circa 1916) ‘The Jewish Vacation Guide’ and then, two decades on, The Negro Motorist Green Book. Where could you find a mechanic to repair your car? At which hotel could you find lodging? Where could you safely eat lunch? If you were Black, Victor Green’s book could answer those questions, and when a gifted musician decided to try a concert tour in the American South, he took along The Negro Motorist Green Book. Just in case, though, he also hired Tony “The Lip” Vallelonga, a burly Italian-American nightclub bouncer as his driver, bodyguard, and general aide de camp. The year was 1962, and the composer-performer was Donald Shirley, born of Jamaican parentage in Pensacola, Florida in 1927. By 1962, Shirley, then only 35, was already a sensation. He’d conquered Carnegie Hall and a variety of concert venues (performing with leading orchestras in Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and New York) but to go abroad, to drive into the American hinterland, was a daunting prospect, the more so because one of Shirley’s motives was to demonstrate personal commitment to the rising civil rights movement. He’d also been advised that (as a “colored” person) there wasn’t a future for him in classical music. So he was in process of crossing another line, away from the classics and into jazz and blues. By all accounts, he was a huge success at almost everything he tried. But it was a great strain. Shirley’s career slumped into the obscurities of night-club playing. His death (at 86, on April 6, 2013) went unreported at first. The New York Times obit didn’t appear until April 29. Perhaps “we” were reluctant to acknowledge the damage done, within living memory and to one of our own contemporaries, by “our” tribalisms. ©

[Stanley]

"I have a great love of the wind," Gabriela Mistral, 1912.
Gabriela Mistral, 1889-1957.

Our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time, his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow.’ His name is today. Gabriela Mistral, “Su Nombre es Hoy.”

Once, camping with our daughter and her best friend, we were assaulted by a katabatic wind. We were in England’s Lake District, late at night. I was up reading a review book, and heard the wind coming, a distant noise, then a rumble, then a catastrophe, collapsing Greta’s tent, shaking our camper van, and depositing our canoe (we later found) on the shore of Derwentwater. We were lucky; the wind tore off the awning, then the roof, of a nearby mobile home. The most famous of all katabatic (or ‘downslope’) winds is the ‘mistral’ of France’s Rhone valley. ‘Mistral’ is an old word (dating from the Greek) and at each etymological stop it has carried the sense of “master,” for that’s what it does, as a constant stiff wind or at hurricane force, sweeping all before it. So one might think it was what the young Chilean poet Lucila Godoy Alcayaga had in mind when she chose Gabriela Mistral as her pen name. There may be something in that, but the more prosaic explanation is that Lucila’s favorite writers were Gabriele D’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral, then internationally known Romance language poets. Frédéric Mistral won the literature Nobel in 1904, and Gabriela would follow him in 1945, becoming the first Latin American literature Nobelist. Gabriela Mistral was born poor, of an erratic schoolteacher and his seamstress wife, on April 7, 1889. Her first paid job (at 15!!) was as schoolteacher in an Andean village, and although her formal education had ended at 12, she continued in the education business for most of her life, becoming (along the way) a university professor and a leader in educational reform, especially for wider and fuller access (for women, for the poor, indeed for every child). So she probably didn’t follow D’Annunzio down his fascist path but stayed pretty firmly on the Chilean left, through times troublous enough to make her, frequently, an exile. Her 1945 Nobel, and her favorite themes of struggle, passionate love and loss, and death, made her a South American icon, one that Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship (ironically) tried to appropriate for its own ends. But she’s better remembered as an inspiration for Langston Hughes and Ursula Le Guin, both of whom translated her works into North American English (in 1957 and 2003, respectively) and an early mentor and lifelong friend of Pablo Neruda, who would follow her as a Chilean Nobelist in 1971. So perhaps Gabriela Mistral was indeed, except for her warmth, a katabatic wind. ©

[Stanley]

A guiding spirit in American medical education.
William Welch, 1850-1934

Dr. Welch is our greatest statesman in the field of public health. President Herbert Hoover, 1930.

The USA is an ‘old’ democracy but a younger country, and in its youth found it as easy to imitate or even steal as it was to invent anew. This was true in industry and commerce (e.g. in exploiting foreign patent rights), also in education, where our magpie natures brought us the four-year baccalaureate (probably from Scotland) and the kindergarten (its name betrays a German parentage). Another 19th-century German import was the institutionalization of post-graduate study. This began in the humanities (e.g. linguistics) but spread to the sciences. Here one of the importers was William Welch, born in Connecticut on April 8, 1850. He first aimed at classical studies, notably Greek, but soon family tradition won out. His father, grandfather, and four uncles were physicians, and so after his Yale AB in Greek (1870) he switched to graduate medicine at Columbia University, already in the grip of German notions about higher education. After his Columbia MD (1875). Welch went to the source, where he worked in graduate research labs, notably at Berlin’s Humboldt University, where he studied under Rudolph Virchow, ‘the father of modern pathology.’ Welch returned to the USA determined to bring the graduate research model into American medical studies. In the process, Welch became a great pathologist in his own right, but more importantly an innovator (or imitator?) in medical education. He began in New York City, but soon moved to a new university which had been founded with the explicit purpose of bringing the German model to the USA. This was the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where in 1884 Welch became one of the four founding professors of the school of medicine. There he continued with his own research (in pathology and epidemiology) but also, blessed with apparently limitless energy, he set about institutionalizing graduate medical studies, with particular specialized branches, research labs, seminar instruction, and clinical residencies. His many students came after him, notably Dr. Walter Reed and a brace of medical Nobelists, but his most notable legacies were institutional. Besides Johns Hopkins’ internal structures, Welch founded or played early, shaping roles in medical libraries, historical studies in science, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and the Rockefeller Institute. Another Welch contribution was the founding (1916) of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, an institutional embodiment of the idea that private health cannot exist independently of public well-being, a lesson that we have yet fully to learn. But we’re young, we may yet mature. And there are many models from which we might borrow. ©

[Stanley]

My country, 'tis of thee
Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial

Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen. Marian Anderson’s encore, April 9, 1939, at the Lincoln Memorial.

Exactly when the defeat of the South and the extinction of its ‘Lost Cause’ became inevitable remains, tragically, an interesting question. Recent trends in American conservatism lead one to doubt that the nation has ever come to terms with it, but the fact is that on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S, Grant, and from that surrender came several national redefinitions: not only the end of racial slavery but also the invention of birthright citizenship and the supremacy of national citizenship over the states’ various versions. However, it was to be a long time until “We, the people” became a real—and inclusive--political entity. Some radical progress was made during ‘Reconstruction,’ circa 1865-1877, but it was rolled back during the subsequent period of ‘Reunion and Reaction’ during which ‘we’ became, once again, a white republic. Among the many who perpetuated this restrictive definition were the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization open to “whites only” not only in its membership but also in its public activities. And so the DAR refused to rent out its Washington venue, “Constitution Hall,” to Howard University for a public concert which was to feature Marian Anderson. Anderson had trained up her astonishing contralto to win international fame, but her skin was the wrong color. By then (1939), the concept of “we” had revived enough that there was public outrage at the DAR’s apartheid —in places. At least there was outrage in the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership and, with Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, set about making her fury known. The DAR responded arrogantly and with blatantly racist, classist ‘humor,’ implying that if Ms. Anderson did find a Washington hall to sing in, no one attending would be au fait enough to know what kind of hat to wear. Appropriately, Harold and Eleanor chose a national, public space for Marian to sing in, and arranged that her voice should be broadcast to the nation. Attendance was free and there were no hat requirements. So it was that on April 9, 1939 Marian Anderson sang from the north steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was exactly 74 years since the victory at Appomattox. She began her concert with “My country, ‘tis of thee.” The possessive pronoun was perfect, as was her editing of the second phrase to read “to thee we sing.” I imagine, too, that among the 75,000 attending there were at least some stylish hats. Maybe more than 4,000, which was the total hat capacity of the DAR’s Constitution Hall, and it was, after all, Easter Sunday ©

[Stanley]

The Pleasure Garden and the Amusement Park
Jonathan Tyers, 1702-1767

When I started Disneyland, my wife said ‘why do you want to start an amusement park? They’re so dirty.’ I told her that was just the point—mine wouldn’t be. Walt Disney.

Nowadays amusement parks spend millions to convince us of their uniqueness, but really they are as common as old boots, and now they come in world-wide chains. They also have a long history, stretching back beyond the Gardens of Sallust (which the Emperor Tiberius expropriated and then opened to the Roman public). But a more direct line of descent can be traced back to the ‘pleasure garden.’ This was a manicured naturescape where one could be pleased aesthetically (by well-trimmed shrubberies and nicely laid flowerbeds) and take more fleshly delights in overpriced ‘picnics.’ One of the first in London was Spring Gardens, opened in 1661, perhaps to give Londoners relief from the excessive sobrieties of the Puritan Revolution. The restored king, Charles II, and his courtiers quite liked the place. But Restoration London had its own excesses, and Vauxhall Gardens soon became (according to one sour observer) a “rural Brothel.” Then, in the early 18th century, Spring Gardens was rescued by the Disney of his time, Jonathan Tyers, born in London on April 10, 1702. Tyers had a good start, his father in the woollens trade, but was then diverted into the pleasure business when, in 1728 he began his installment purchase of Spring Gardens. Tyers didn’t complete the deal for 30 years. By 1758, renamed “Vauxhall Gardens,” Spring Gardens had become, once again, a fashionable retreat across the Thames, whether from the harried business of the City or the abiding cares of state at Westminster. Tyler effected the transformation by addressing the Gardens’ cash flow problem. His two-pronged approach consisted of admitting people for a modest fee. This kept the riffraff at the gates and created the expectation of a pleasant yet affordable afternoon or evening outing. Then, within the gates, Tyers gouged those who could afford it with excessively priced food, drink, and (mainly middle-brow) entertainments. It was said that you could read a newpaper through Tyers’ thinly-sliced ham. No roller-coasters or tilt-a-whirls just yet, certainly no gyrating orcas, but small art galleries (featuring, for instance, William Hogarth’s work), ‘impromptu’ street theater, and special concerts (Mozart and Handel both performed at Vauxhall). Some of these fee-special pleasures came after Tyers’ death (in 1767) but he had by then created his own estate and very private park, yet further out in the Surrey countryside, and his own Tyers dynasty. His progeny kept Vauxhall Gardens a going family concern almost to the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. Will Walt’s Disney Worlds last that long? ©.

[Stanley]

Government by the coup, for the coup, and of the coup
Emperor Septimus Severus, 145-211.

Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. Thomas Paine, 1790.

As Tom Paine delighted to point out, in 1776 and several times thereafter, the peaceful transfer of power (by the citizenry’s consent) is one of the virtues of constitutional democracy. In 1776, Paine used Britain as his chief example of how badly things went go wrong with kingships; he might have done better with imperial Rome. There it was common, or ‘traditional,’ for the rise (or fall) of emperors to be accompanied by poisonings, assassinations, and/or civil wars. And this despite the deification of the imperial personage. Accordingly, even the longer reigns (e.g. during the second century A.D.) were marked by spyings, strategems, and murders most foul. Take for instance the reign of Emperor Septimus Severus (193 to 211). Severus was born in the African province (Libya) on April 11, 145, and rose to power during the murderous confusions that followed the assassination of Commodus, an interval now remembered as ‘The Year of the Five Emperors.’ Severus’s reign would be among the most consequential in Roman history, for good and for ill. There were important advances in civil law, and Severus (whose rise to power was made possible by his military command) also reformed the imperial armies. It was during his reign, indeed, that the empire reached its greatest territorial extent, and he contributed directly to that by commanding armies in various places, most notably his north African homeland and then in the north of Britain. There he marched a huge army (some say 50,000 strong) into Scotland, pushing the bounds of the empire to the island’s northern shores. Likeseveral of his predecessors, he had a most capable wife. Julia Domna was another non-Italian, indeed a high priestess of a Syrian sect. She became a power to be reckoned with. She bore him two ambitious sons, perhaps capable but certainly precocious. Late in Severus’ reign he named her and his sons co-emperors and, because of his northern triumphs, christened himself and his sons ‘Britannicus’. But it all came to nothing. Severus himself died, probably of natural causes, in Britain at Eboracum (York), but the empire itself fell into chaos. Severus’ scheme to turn the whole business over to his wife and kids came to naught (one son poisoned the other, and Julia suicided to save others the trouble). The Severan dynasty appeared strong but was short-lived, and Rome fell into the crisis of the third century in which power waned as it was transferred from one god-emperor to another, coup by coup and murder by murder. As Paine might have seen it, the writing was on the wall. We should read it as a warning. ©

[Stanley]

The mistress of the 'stolen picture.'
Imogen Cunningham, 1883-1976.

To worship beauty for its own sake is narrow, and one surely cannot derive from it the aesthetic pleasure which comes from finding beauty in the commonest things. Imogen Cunningham.

In photography’s pre-digital era focal length was crucial to ‘depth of field’—the range within which one could achieve sharp focus: the higher the focal length setting, the deeper the focus. When seven photographers decided to call themselves ‘Group f/64’ they announced their devotion to large-format photographic realism. Ansel Adams was one of the group’s founders, and his pictures of western landscapes, black and white and in miraculously deep clarity, give one a visceral sense of f/64’s aims. In the original f/64 there was only one woman, Imogen Cunningham, and she brought not only her well-developed sense of photographic art but also a deep knowledge of the processes, chemicals, and papers one needed to achieve in print a ‘realer’ reality. Imogen Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon, on April 12, 1883. Her Missouri-born parents were inclined to the artistic (Imogen was born in a commune and named after a Shakespeare heroine) and educated their ten children accordingly. When (1903) Imogen entered the U. of Washington she chose a chemistry major. This was not a vote for practicality. She’d purchased a large format camera in 1901 and was already committed to finding out exactly how to make a good picture, not only before but after clicking the shutter. Imogen was a fine student, clubbable and studious. She wrote an undergraduate dissertation called “Modern Processes of Photography” and earned pin money picturing plants for university botanists—in sharp focus and B&W of course. After graduating she worked as an assistant for a Seattle photographer, and then (armed with a research fellowship) took off for Dresden, Germany, where she continued to study darkroom chemistry. On her return, she established her own studio, making money through portraiture but continuing her quest for reality en plein air, including (outrageously!!) nudes of her husband disporting himself among flowers and seedlings in sharply focused alpine meadows. This desire to show things as they really really were grew more urgent as the feverish 20s became the depressed 30s, and so, having moved south to San Francisco, Imogen Cunningham fell in naturally with the f/64s and became, technically and aesthetically, one of their leading lights. As Cunningham aged she changed subjects (beginning with cityscapes, then finishing with the elderly) but not foci. She died in 1976. To this day, the Imogen Cunningham Trust continues her work, encouraging young picture makers to focus on their world as they see it. ©

[Stanley]

Better late than never?
Peter Faber, 1506-1546.

Seek grace for the smallest things, and you will find grace to accomplish the greatest things. Peter Faber, co-founder of the Jesuit order.

The words ‘jesuitical’ and ‘casuist’ made their first appearance in English at about the same time, in the early 17th century, and some would say that that is no mere coincidence. Even among Catholics, the the Society of Jesus carries with it too much subtlety for comfort. Philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was not the first of the faithful to decide that Jesuits were too clever by half. Nor was he the last. In 1773 Pope Clement XIII declared the order “forever extinguished and suppressed.” That was perhaps the unkindest cut of all, for the society had long considered itself the Pope’s army. It returned to battle, if not to complete favor, in 1814, but it’s still worthy of note that today’s Bishop of Rome is the first-ever Jesuit pope. Interestingly, one of Pope Francis’s first acts was to complete the canonization of Peter Faber, universally acknowledged as one of the three founders of the Society of Jesus, and this long, long after the other two of the Jesuits’ founding trinity, Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, had been sainted. And perhaps Peter Faber, Pierre le Favre, was indeed odd man out. He was born in humility, a peasant’s son, on April 13, 1506, and came (from alpine shepherding) to Paris to train for the priesthood through his natural gifts, notably capacious memory and personal simplicity. In 2013 Pope Francis called it ‘naivete’, and certainly you couldn’t credit Faber with anything approaching fanaticism. Faber may have impressed Loyola, Xavier, and the other first Jesuits with his practical Christianity. Faith was for him a matter of daily discipline, regular observance, and it might be as well to see Peter Faber as the first Catholic “Methodist.” He was among the first small band of ‘Jesuits’ that offered themselves up to the Pope’s service, and his offer was accepted. Indeed he was appointed papal delegate to important “anti-reformation” conclaves in 1540 and 1541, but after that Faber seems to have reverted to shepherding, traveling back and forth across Europe (but never ‘abroad’), always walking, usually alone, and ministering to both princes and paupers. Faber’s counter-reformation reforms were intended for individual believers, case by case, person by person. Since each person’s ‘case’ or context was unique, Faber used varied strategems, and in this sense was Jesuitical, although ‘situational’ might be more to the point (and less pejorative). He enjoyed significant successes, notably in Portugal and Germany, before he died (in 1546, while on the Pope’s service), but it would be a very long time before Peter Faber joined Loyola and Xavier as a Jesuit saint. ©.

[Tripps]

Faber used varied strategems, and in this sense was Jesuitical, although ‘situational’ might be more to the point (and less pejorative). He enjoyed significant successes,

How do you measure the 'success' of a Jesuit?

[Stanley]

Number of conversions?

[Stanley]

From better beer to better iron?
Abraham Darby I, 1677-1717

Though there are many that doubt me foolhardy, they see not the use to which iron could be put. Abraham Darby, ironmaster.

It is a nice thought that a major cause of Britain’s industrial revolution was that local people, in the English Midlands, didn’t like their beer tasting of rotten eggs. Or, at least, might have been. The argument is contingent and circumstantial, but in their search for more efficient ways of making the stuff (beer, that is), brewers hit upon the notion of quick-roasting their barley (to malt it), and did so, at first, by using charcoal heat. After all, charcoal was also used in smelting brass and iron. So why not beer? But a by-product of charcoal ovens is sulfur, and sulfur produced beer that tasted about as bad as it smelled. Ever inventive, a couple of midland brewers changed to coke ovens, got a cleaner burn, and this faster, hotter method was noticed by a young Quaker apprentice brewer, Abraham Darby, who would change trades and then, pretty quickly, apply superheated coke furnaces to the smelting of metal. A few other tricks had to be added, like using sand for casting, but the result was a stronger, l suppler iron that could be cast more thinly and, thus, used for more things. Even better, it was cheaper than the old iron, cheaper even than brass, and so today we universally credit Darby as a ‘father’ of the industrial revolution. Abraham Darby was indeed a Quaker, born into the Society of Friends while beer was (and was still thought of) as safer than water on April 14, 1677. Though Quaker, his family made much of their descent (on both right and wrong sides of the blanket) from the Dudleys, notable local aristocrats, and this may have made young Abraham more confident and more ambitious than your average Quaker (or your average apprentice). Perhaps. But he was certainly clever, he quickly grasped the advantages of making partnerships with other Quakers, and once he got into the smelting business (taking out his first patent in 1707) he waxed prosperous in several trades including, of course, the smelting and casting of iron. By 1710 he was producing over 60 tons of ironware per year, and by the time he died (only 40, in 1717) the foundations had been laid for a Darby dynasty. Future generations of Darby piglets (pun intended) included Abraham II and Abraham III (as they are now called by historians) and the family itself trickled upwards in Quaker circles (finally in Bristol), continuing to find good Quaker partners. At Coalbrookdale and at Bristol, the Abraham Darbys continued also to experiment in utopian forms of industrialism, growing foodstuffs for their workers, and even perhaps insuring them good English ales, sulfur free of course. ©.

[Stanley]

A life of extraordinary friendships and accomplishments
Dr. May Edward Chinn, pianist and physician

A Healing Hand In Harlem. Title of a 1979 New York Times ‘special’ on Dr. May Edward Chinn, pioneer clinician and researcher in oncology and public health.

On her 82nd birthday, as a present to herself, Dr. May Edward Chinn reopened her clinic where she’d established a reputation for herself as a researcher in, and crusader against, cervical and breast cancers. That story made the next day’s New York Times as a whole-page, banner headline feature. But then she was a very remarkable person. May Edward Chinn was born on April 15, 1896, in Great Barrington, MA. Her father took his surname from the Virginia tidewater plantation where he’d escaped slavery. Her mother, Lula, was a woman of the Chickahominy (Algonquin) nation who became a talented domestic servant, finally housekeeper at the Tiffany estate in New Jersey. Charles Tiffany, family patriarch and founder of the jewelry firm, was interested in Negro education, and delighted to have this precociously bright girl play with his grandchildren and teach them in Spanish, French, and music. May learned all that at a boarding school in New Jersey, tuition paid by her mother’s good wages and, perhaps, Tiffany generosity. Charles Tiffany’s death underlined Lula’s vulnerability. As the estate was parceled out, Lula was cast back into Harlem, where May failed to graduate from high school but used Columbia’s entrance exams to gain admission (1917) to the Teachers College as a music major. She did well enough at that to be (for four years) Paul Robeson’s pianist, but meanwhile May’s scientific talents were noted by her biology professor and encouraged by her friend, the pre-med student (and Robeson’s future wife) Eslanda Goode. As things turned out, Essie Robeson became an anthropologist. But May switched to medicine where, in 1926, she became Columbia’s first female African-American MD. Already 30, May Chinn was unsurprised that racism blocked most roads to medical practice. She could find an internship only at Harlem Hospital, and even there she failed to gain admitting privileges. She was offered a Rockefeller Institute fellowship, then barred from it because of her race. Encouraged by another Great Barrington prodigy, her friend W. E. B. Dubois, May went into private practice in Harlem and made her own way forward. Her early detection cancer clinics spread her fame, provided lifeline help to a radically underserved population, and by 1940 she became a research fellow at a Manhattan clinic. May’s successes ultimately made her a point of pride for many, not least Columbia University, and a public figure. So her return to practice in 1978 was big news, as was her honorary Sc.D. Her life of struggle, success, and extraordinary friendships should endear her to our national memory. ©

[Stanley]

If you are using an adverb, you've got the verb wrong.
Kingsley Amis, 1922-1995

The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them. Kingsley Amis.

I featured Kingsley Amis seven years ago, but on what might have been Amis’s centenary (had he been of sounder health, sunnier temper, and better habits) I feel obliged to offer him up again. It’s his first novel that obliges me, the funniest novel I have yet read. I live in hopes of finding a funnier one, for I do enjoy entering the state of helpless laughter; meanwhile, against that day, I offer here what I wrote about Amis on the 93rd anniversary of his birthing date.
Every so often (or oftener) we are reminded that a sunny disposition does not unfailingly accompany literary talent. Just ask Hilary “Hilly” Bardwell, Lady Kilmarnock, who for a time (1948-1965) was married to Kingsley Amis and then, in a strange twist of fate and forgiveness, sheltered the man in her London residence so he could drink and write undisturbed. Kingsley Amis was, fittingly, a mustard dealer’s son, born in London on April 16, 1922, and even though, in his own mind, he grew up in intellectually reduced circumstances, he grew up smart enough to be admitted to Oxford on a scholarship. There he met and formed a lifelong friendship with Philip Larkin, another devil old before his time but one of greater literary genius. Besides writing miraculous poetry (though at a miserly rate), Larkin was the inspiration for Amis’s second novel, That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Amis had wanted to be a poet, and published some verse, but Larkin’s greater genius may have decided Amis on the lesser (as he saw it) art of fiction. Lesser or not, it’s Amis’s first novel (dedicated to Larkin) that should be read by every academic—or by anyone who feels a need for prolonged, belly-aching laughter. I might especially recommend the book for every incoming fresher who wants to avoid being overawed at entering his or her chosen temple of knowledge. That is because reverence is not conducive to learning. Lucky Jim (1954) follows the short career of Jim Dixon, a young historian in a provincial British university. At a disadvantage because of his class background, Dixon seeks entry to the washed world of tenure. Indeed he works reverently at it (with scholarly research, as I recall the novel, on the significance of woodworms in late medieval shipping). But Jim ultimately finds that world too absurd for words and (as he leaves the campus bound for a good job in London) collapses in laughter at the thought of it. This ending was, in a sense, a presentiment, for Amis himself ultimately collapsed in drink, a habit he controlled for a long time but one that “in the end . . . robbed him of his wit and charm as well as his health.” Felled by a stroke, Amis left Hilly’s house to die in hospital in October 1995. ©