BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

When you care enough to send the very best.
Joyce Clyde Hall, 1891-1982
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Time is everything. Anything you want, anything you accomplish - pleasure, success, fortune - is measured in time. Joyce Clyde Hall

One reasonably safe prediction to make is that our culture will never starve for holidays; indeed it feeds on them. Check out your local Walgreens (or Costco, or Walmart). Christmas seems always to be with us, but really starts in earnest when they stop selling paper pumpkins and witches’ hats. Now we are in transition from Jolly St. Nick to Loverly St. Valentine, and after that we’ll be assailed by Easter bunnies and then Mother’s Day mush and Memorial Day remembrances. Father’s Day, historically a latecomer, blends nicely with Flag Day and the Glorious Fourth, and then bang!! we’re back with the witches, broomsticks, and tons of treats. I hear some talk of making Uncle Scrooge into a national anti-hero. But among these dyspeptic nay-sayers are not the Hall family of Hallmark Cards, whose founder-progenitor. Joyce Clyde Hall, was born in David City, NE, on December 29, 1891. His Methodist preacher father named him after an eminent Methodist evangelist, Bishop Isaac Joyce, who
providentially happened to be in town that day, and the rest is history. But history is for those who make it, and it took some hard labor to make it, especially from Joyce Hall but also from his brothers Rollie and William, who escaped from the poverty into which they’d been cast by their father’s early death. After Joyce’s brief stint selling soaps and perfumes (as a kind of local Avon lady) they all moved with their invalid mom to a larger town and took up salesmanship seriously, Rollie and William in a stationery store and Joyce as a traveling salesman of picture postcards. They made their own company in Norfolk, Nebraska. When it burned, no doubt set afire by some local Scrooge, Joyce took himself and suitcases to Kansas City, MO, one full of picture postcards. It sounds a bit mythic, but when he opened that suitcase it was the birthing of Hallmark Cards. Hallmark guaranteed itself a steady market by designing cards for birthdays, funerals, weddings, and anniversaries (we all have them, you know, almost like clockwork) but with special attention to what might be called our cultural Saturnalia, Christmases for instance. They also muscled in on Mother’s Day, which had begun life as a religious observance. But their most brilliant advance was to move cards from behind the retail counter to their own racks so we could taste and sample before buying and sending. Along the way, Joyce had some help, notably from one Irving Hockaday (Princeton BA, 1968) but Hallmark cards and its offshoots remain today a family business, and a testament to our preference for saying it with cards, and saying it often. ©

[Stanley]

Alfred Einstein, 1880-1952
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When things get tough, there are two things that make life worth living: Mozart and quantum mechanics. V. F. Weisskopf.

Even during his life (1756-1791) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart strained our stock of comparative and superlative adjectives, so musical illiterates (like myself) whose critical knowledge doesn’t much exceed what can be picked up from album covers are better (or best?) advised to stick to the merely descriptive. Among those, ‘prolific’ stands out as unquestionably apt. In a 30-year career as composer (Mozart started at age 5!!!) he composed almost 700 separate pieces, or about 23 per year, a pace he hit when he was 10 and maintained (or bettered) throughout his short life. Early on they tended to be shorter (and are today less well known); they became weightier, longer and better-known as he aged. So, if anything, he became more prolific. We know so much about Mozart’s works because of the labors of musicologists, beginning in 1862 with Ludwig von Köchel’s chronological ‘catalogue,’ now effectively immortalized because each Mozart composition is labeled with a “K.” So the second piano concerto (when Mozart was 11) is “K.38”. The K’s survive, but modern scholars have found Köchel’s catalogue insufficient in several respects. The first really comprehensive catalogue came in 1937 (revised in 1958) with Alfred Einstein’s monumental (and much more painstakingly accurate) work. Alfred Einstein was born in Munich on December 30, 1880, into a scholarly Jewish family. He was first destined for the law, but music was what moved him. He changed horses midstream and received his doctorate (musicology and composition) in 1903. After that he published widely, and not only scholarly studies. Einstein was founding editor of the German Journal of Musicology, and before that was Munich’s leading classical music reviewer. In 1927 Einstein moved to Berlin as the music critic of the Berliner Tageblatt. Hitler’s rise forced him to flee, first to Italy (from the fire into the frying pan), but then his Mozart Catalog made him a hot enough property to secure a chair (in music, of course) at Smith College and visiting appointments at a string of distinguished campuses, including (in 1947) Princeton. There he received an honorary doctorate and met, for the first time, Albert Einstein. This occasioned a few jokes, of course, for Albert was nothing if not funny, but at the time the two had no idea they were related. Probably they weren’t—but since then the idea has arisen that they were distant cousins, fifth or sixth. I think it’s better, or even best, to say that they were just geniuses with the same surname.

[Stanley]

'Their works do follow them.'
Mary Elizabeth Sumner, 1828-1921.
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Here, saith the Spirit, they may rest from their labors,/ And their works do follow them. Inscription (from Revelation 14) on Mary Elizabeth Sumner’s tomb, Winchester Cathedral.

Historians have spilled much ink—rightly so, I hasten to add—on struggles for female emancipation and equality, but less on those who sought to achieve full expression for women in their domestic or “traditional” roles. Such a woman was Mary Elizabeth Sumner, née Heywood, born near Manchester, England, on December 31, 1828. She would devote the last half of her long life (she died in 1921) to the enhancement, nay the ennoblement, of women’s lives in their roles (their ‘proper’ roles, as she might have put it) within the family, the community, and the church. Well educated herself, in literature, languages, and the arts, she ensured the same for her own children, one of whom became a noted painter in the Arts & Crafts movement. But it was her eldest daughter’s difficulties in childbirth (in 1876) that spurred Mary Sumner into action, beginning with meetings (for talk and in prayer) in the parish rectory at Old Alresford in rural Hampshire (husband, the vicar, was the son of the bishop of Winchester). These meetings, daringly extended to include parish husbands and then working-class women, gave Mary local fame, but it blossomed when, at a national Church of England conference in 1885, she was invited to speak to her issues. It is said that she was first embarrassed by such public exposure. Maybe so, but she rose to the occasion and delivered such a spellbinder of a speech that, almost overnight, she became a national figure and the founder (or foundress?) of the Mothers’ Union, still today an activist organization operating as a part of the worldwide Anglican communion. In England, at the time, Mary’s Mothers’ Union gave aristocratic and upper-class women a feminine cause that need not veer into the excesses of the nascent suffrage movement. She, a banker’s daughter and a bishop’s daughter-in-law, was definitely upper class, a rank from which she derived social courage and even royal patronage (from Edward VII’s Queen, Alexandra). Today the Mothers’ Union operates in 85 countries, its chapters open to “women of any faith, or none,” and its causes including some radical expressions of feminism, putting “justice” before “peace.” Whether Mary Sumner would have approved of this mission creep is an interesting question, but surely she would enjoy the coincidence that her Anglican Feast Day, August 9, is the same as that for St. Clare of Assisi, the medieval foundress of the Order of Poor Ladies, known today as the Poor Clares. ©

[Stanley]

Of gold mining, press freedom, and pug dogs.
Alice Ann Cornwell, Princess Midas, 1852-1932
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All over the capitalist world, freedom of the press means the freedom to buy newspapers. Vladimir Lenin.

Until The Sunday Times was merged (under Rupert the Blessèd) with The Times of London, it had many owners and a checkered history. It was founded in 1821 as The New Observer (the ‘real’ Observer having been the queen of the Sundays since 1791). Soon The New Observer became The Sunday Times, thus gaining a shadow of respectability through aping the original (founded 1781) The Times. The Sunday Times staggered through the 19th century under a string of owners until it became the property of George FitzGeorge, the illegitimate great-grandson of King George III. How you can be the illegitimate great-grandson of a king is a mystery unraveled only by those familiar with British laws concerning the royal succession; but this royal ‘bastard’ was still a ‘royal,’ and when the great Queen, Victoria, told him to sell The Sunday Times and go into banking (George’s new wife was a Baring), he sold the paper to a rich Australian gold digger (not a Murdoch) named Alice Ann Cornwell. Born in
London on January 1, 1852, Alice had emigrated (in 1861) to New Zealand and then (1869) to Australia where her father became a railway contractor (he had been a train guard in old England) and gold prospector. George Cornwell was successful enough to give Alice the best education colonial money could buy (at London’s Royal College of Music). When her dad’s luck ran thin, Alice returned to Australia to help. There, legend has it, Alice discovered one of the richest ‘reefs’ in the Australian goldfields. The Cornwell discovery became known as the Midas Mine, and Alice returned to London a millionaire (dubbed ‘Princess Midas’ by the press) and carrying with her one of the largest nuggets ever found, a 35-pound monster called the “Lady Loch” and valued at £2,537 (about $760,000 today). Hers with George FitzGeorge was a meeting of minds. He’d been told by his queenly cousin to sell The Sunday Times, and Alice Cornwell was looking around for a wedding present to give to her then lover
and future husband, war correspondent Phil Robertson. Alice was also floating Australian gold stocks, and thought a newspaper a good vehicle for that. So The Sunday Times got a new owner. Back in Australia, Alice went into coalmining, which didn’t turn out so well. She returned to England to recover her fortunes and became a well-known dog breeder (pugs) under the patronage of Queen Alexandra. George FitzGeorge did well enough at banking to die rich in Lucerne. And The Sunday Times staggered into the 20th century under new ownership. It’s a tale worth pondering. ©

[Stanley]

Europe was darkened at sunset, Cordova shone with public lamps. The Story of Medicine, 1935
The expulsion of the Moors, January 2, 1492
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Spain, under Arab rule, became the most civilized country in the world. Max Dimont , The Amazing Adventures of the Jewish People, 1995.

Eight centuries is a long time, too long to fit the labels of either “Muslim “invasion” or “Christian Reconquista.” But those images—myths—have persisted ever since the “final” expulsion from Iberia of the emir of Granada, which occurred on January 2, 1492, under the auspices of an alliance led by Los Reyes Católicos, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The departing Muslim leader (Muhammed XII, known to his enemies as Boabdil) and his followers left behind a mountain of artifacts that tell a different story. From 711 to 1492 (what we now call the “Common Era”, CE) Iberia was divided between two (or more) cultures. They were often at odds, but not always, and there were lifetime-long periods when Iberian peoples lived in peace and went about their daily businesses, coming into families, conducting their crafts and trades, producing children, and raising new generations according to their own cultural rules. The boundary between these cultures would occasionally shift (with dynastic changes, new trades, and new political alliances as well as open warfare), but in some ways predictive the permeable ‘frontier’ in North America (between Europeans and Native Americans), some new commonalities emerged. One was a politic and practical toleration, not consistent but usual, as Iberian Christians, Jews, and Muslims (not to mention Genoese bankers) did business, rubbed shoulders, and financed kingdoms and armies. Muslim place names emerged and are still accepted today, as in Gibraltar (‘Jabal Tariq’, Tariq’s mountain) and Albuquerque (‘Abul al-Qurq’, the place of cork groves). Islam’s mosques became cathedrals (and sometimes reverted back). Just so, the same (or very similar) music transited this frontier and still survives, sometimes as a sort of lingua franca of the poor, who must have needed to eke out their lives, too, and as pleasingly as possible, just like kings and emirs. Today the Algerian folk music ‘Gharnati’ claims its ancestry from ‘Granada.’ At the time of the ‘final’ treaty between the Catholic Kings and Emir Muhammed XII, toleration seemed such a good idea that it was written in, as a sort of guarantee, and not only to Muslims who stayed behind but also to the Jews of Granada, who’d long enjoyed being free subjects of the emirs. That tolerant heritage of the Muslim ‘invasion,’ as we all know, didn’t last too long. But there remained plenty of Muslim architecture in Catholic Iberia, not least the Alhambra itself (Al-Hamrā), the emir’s palace, which still stands above modern Granada (Garnāta). ©.

[Stanley]

Until he can see what must be or may be, no man can be a politician. Harrington.
James Harrington, 1611-1677
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Utopias are designed by those who are not there, by people who are not allowed in. Toni Morrison.

Despite the rise (and fall?) of realism and modernism. “living happily ever after” remains a common feature of storytelling, the pleasing denouement of traditional fairy stories and modern best-sellers, also of fairy-story-best-sellers like J. R. R. Tolkien’s and J. K. Rowling’s epics. Once Frodo Baggins casts away the Ring That Rules Them All or Neville Longbottom decapitates Lord Voldemort’s Nagini, we feel that all will be well—because it must be. A similar impulse has characterized utopian thought, nowhere more so than in James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). Harrington, the eldest son of Sir Sapcote Harrington and his wife, the Lady Jane Samwell (Samwise?), was born in a Northamptonshire manor house on January 3, 1611. So he grew up a gentleman, his rougher edges polished at Oxford and the Middle Temple. Then, while on his European “Grand Tour,” he developed an admiration for Italian republics fashioned, it seemed to him, to promote the common good (respublica) and to furnish their city states with fine arts and humanistic thought. He thus overlooked the seamier side of, say, the Borgias, the Medicis, and the Sforzas, but then Harrington returned home to find England itself bent thoroughly out of shape by its civil war, the regicide, and then the disorders of Puritan rule. It was traumatic for Harrington, who was gentleman of the bedchamber for Charles I during the king’s imprisonment at Holdenby House, his personal loyalty to the king doing battle with his ideological sympathy for the parliamentary cause. It all set him to musing about ideal balances—social, economic, political—in society and how best to achieve those stable states. Oceana was the result, and in the disorders of Cromwell’s last years and the cynicism of Charles II’s Restoration, it brought Harrington only trouble. But there were some who still longed for balance. John Locke and his patron Lord Shaftesbury were among them, and they used Harrington’s utopian balance to construct their weird “Fundamental Constitutions” of Carolina. Their objective was to set off as equals (in political power and wealth) the eight lords proprietors and their colonists. Their elaborate ‘fundamentals’ all fell to ruin in the realities of Carolina’s swamps and canebrakes, but is said to have had a later version in the “balanced” federal constitution of 1787. However, our founding fathers were not utopian enough, and so they set aside ways and means by which their constitution might, on experience, be amended or even just reinterpreted. Lucky us? Maybe. ©

[Stanley]

The science of time
James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh.
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I judge it indeed difficult but not impossible to attain not only the number of years but even of days from the Creation of the world. James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, The Annals of the World.

It will likely surprise many readers of these notes to know that the “Church of Ireland,” so-called, is a Protestant communion, a ‘province’ of the world-wide Anglican Church and, like its parent, exhibiting the oddities of being Catholic in its episcopal governance (though denying the authority of the Bishop of Rome) and Reformed in its doctrine. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, today continues this ambiguity by being modern Ireland’s ‘national’ cathedral, hosting some of the Republic’s national rituals, having a Protestant (Church of Ireland) bishop, with two canons, one Roman Catholic and the other a Presbyterian. So the Church of Ireland looks rather like a church constructed by a committee, but in truth it owes much of its structure (theological and liturgical) to one man, James Ussher, born in Dublin on January 4, 1581. A brilliant student—especially in languages—at Trinity College, Dublin, Ussher ascended rapidly in the Church of Ireland to become bishop of Meath in 1621 and Archbishop of Armagh in 1625. (Armagh was regarded as the senior cathedral in all of Ireland and is today blessed with two St. Patrick’s cathedrals, one Roman Catholic and the other Church of Ireland.). Ussher, who lived through the Irish Rebellion of 1637-41 and then the English Civil Wars, had his work cut out for him. Gallantly and against the odds, he succeeded. For him, however, there was no talk of reaching any modus vivendi with Catholics. The narrow line he trod was designed to bring peace between king and parliament, cavalier and puritan, and to build a national church which might command the loyalties of all by being both Anglican and Presbyterian, with elements of Calvinism and Catholicism deicately woven in, as it were to strengthen rather than fray the fabric. Whether he would have survived the intolerant Anglicanism of the Restoration is an unanswerable question, for Ussher died in 1656—but it’s worth noting that he was mourned from most points of the spectrum. He deserves fame for that, but today he’s most remembered as the man who, after deep study of the Old Testament and other ancient manuscripts, scientifically dated the origins of the earth (and of all creation) to the evening of October 22, 4004 BC. This monumental achievement was a byproduct of his scholarly life’s work, which was to trace the history of the Irish Church, and to make it continuous and contiguous with the earliest Christian churches in Asia Minor, thus bypassing the whole business of the Bishop of Rome. ©

[Stanley]

freight train, freight train, going so fast . . . .
'Libba' Cotten, 1893-1987
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When I die, oh bury me deep// Down at the end of old Chestnut Street// So I can hear old Number Nine// As she comes rolling by. Elizabeth Cotten, “Freight Train,” circa 1905.

‘I once was lost but now I’m found’. . . Peggy Seeger (b. 1935) had that ‘Amazing Grace’ experience when she was just a little girl, in a DC department store. Peggy was found and returned to her mother, Ruth, by a worker in the store. Soon, overrun by kids (Pete, Mike, Peggy, etc.), the Seegers took the worker on as an all-purpose maid. It was a generous, thankful act, and was soon repaid when Peggy Seeger found the maid playing Mike’s guitar like nobody’s business. The maid was Elizabeth (‘Libba’) Cotten, born in rural Chapel Hill, NC, on January 5, 1893. Libba had learned to play (banjo, then guitar) when she was just “little Sis” Neville, and had learned to play in a particular way, for she was left-handed, so she did the bass line with her fingers and the melody with her thumb, and became really good at it. At 12, she composed “Freight Train,” but never made any money from it for life had intervened, first poverty and then, at 15, marriage, more poverty, and traveling to find work. By the time she saved Peggy, Libba had given up her husband, stringed instruments, composition, and playing, but those latter talents stuck and, in a house that was chock full of guitars, banjos, singers, and composers they came back in a rush. When “Freight Train” became a great hit in Britain (1956, as sung by Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey) the Seegers helped Libba recover her copyright, but well before that they’d helped her launch, or re-launch, her music career, singing and playing in clubs and then concerts and making enough money to buy a better guitar than the $3.75 model she’d bought in Chapel Hill , with savings from her $1/month wage as assistant maid of all work. Mike Seeger recorded and released Libba’s first album (“Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitars”), ‘traditional’ and some stuff Libba had composed in her teens. She went on performing and recording (including “Shake Sugaree” featuring her great-granddaughter Joyce) almost forever, winning her first (of two) Grammys in 1984 and winning her place as elder stateswoman of an imperishable musical tradition, a mix of folk and blues as sung by black folk in the deep South’s black belt. But Elizabeth Cotton did die, in 1987, in Syracuse, NY, just months after her last public concert. Her profits and fees had enabled her to buy a house there and make a home for her daughter and grandchildren. Cotten’s songs have been recorded by all sorts, including Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and her plucking style lives on. It’s called, by some, ‘Cotten-picking,’ a pun to remind us that revenge is sometimes sweet. ©.

[Stanley]

Putting up with William, 1838-1898.
Catherine Glynne Gladstone, 1812-1900.
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Oh William, dear, if you weren’t such a great man you would be a terrible bore. Catherine Glynne Gladstone.

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), one of the greatest British prime ministers, grew up in a Liverpool mansion and died in a Welsh castle. He owed the mansion to his family fortunes (based on sugar and slaves) and the castle to his wife, Catherine Glynne, who was born at Hawarden Castle, in Flint, on January 6, 1812. Catherine grew up to be one of the greatest “political wives” in British history, a process that began early for, by birth, she was related to four prime ministers and a clutch of politically important families. Although Catherine’s father, the 8th Baronet Glynne, died when she was just 3, she was raised to wealth and privilege. Taught languages by her mother, she learned her piano (in Paris) from Franz Liszt while on one of her longish Grand Tours. Later, on another tour, she met Gladstone in Rome and married him there (in a double wedding) in June 1839. He was a friend of her brother’s (who had met Gladstone at Christ Church, Oxford) and already an MP of some
reputation. He probably regarded himself as a high Tory, but the parties were in flux, and in a fairly short time he transitioned the spectrum to fetch up as finally as a Liberal. Four times prime minister (and four times chancellor of the exchequer) he would make the party over in his image and devoted to his program, sometimes radical (as on the Irish question) and sometimes not. He was also, perhaps, more successful than his great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, in stamping his image on the Victorian Age, driven by its principles and handicapped by its vices, the latter including a proclivity for extramarital sex. Everything Gladstonian was, however, kept in check by Catherine Glynne Gladstone. She not only developed an odd political style, bore him eight children, and had some late success in making his presence less disturbing to Victoria, but also acted as stepmother to her sister Mary’s 14 (!!!) children (Mary had been the other bride at Rome in 1839). Catherine rode through it all, not unfazed and often exhausted, but throughout William was dependent on her for advice, for political alliance-making, and for making the right rounds at his Downing Street parties. Catherine was also, in effect, William’s press agent. He depended on her, writing her daily when he (or she) was absent, and taking seriously her advices. Indeed when William died (at Hawarden, in 1898) he would consent to burial in Westminster Abbey only if Catherine were (in due course) interred with him. She followed him in 1900, and there they rest today, a stone’s throw from parliament and the seats of public power he had occupied for so many years. ©

[Tizer]

Stanley, it occurred to me today that any `outsider' taking a look at OG and finding Bob's Bits would be at a loss to know who Bob is - they'd probably conclude it must be a nickname for you because your details are at the bottom of each piece. Should Bob's name be at the end, perhaps with a brief biog?

[Tripps]

Seconded. . . .

[Stanley]

Does it matter? If anyone is reading them regularly they will realise that Bob is not me, he talks about his family and childhood quite a lot.
If you feel strongly about it, nothing to stop you adding your own clarifying text....

[Tizer]

Anyone in the world can read this forum - they won't all know the details of your family and childhood. I'm not suggesting that you're trying to claim Bob's Bits as your own stories but I think it would be good to have Bob's credentials at the end. Just a line saying who he is.

[Stanley]

If you want a line put in, simply do it each morning. I don't think it's necessary. We have managed 8 years without it.
Keep things simple.....
Come to think why not change the title to signal who the author is.

[Stanley]

Johann Philipp Reis, 1834-1874
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As I look back upon my life I can indeed say with the Holy Scriptures that it has been "labour and sorrow." Johann Reis, Curriculum Vitae, composed on his death bed, circa January 1874.

It was not until the 19th century that the word “science” defined a particular branch of inquiry, and soon “scientist” identified the profession of those who followed that branch. But there was no new word to describe the legions (thousands, perhaps) who followed in their wake, dabblers in “science” who never achieved the status of “scientist.” So let’s use an older word and call them ‘tinkerers.’ Among the best of them was a baker’s son, Johann Philipp Reis, born in Hesse, Germany, on January 7, 1834. Orphaned at an early age, Reis fell under the care of his grandmother, who was intelligent enough to see that the boy had talent and determined enough to badger him into a school in nearby Friedrichsdorf. He did very well in what the school taught, mainly languages, but he used libraries to teach himself what was not on the curriculum. Thus Reis (like many tinkerers) became an auto-didact, in geography for instance but also in mathematics, physics, and electricity. He qualified as a teacher and took up that recognized profession in his first school, but he continued to tinker in the sciences and to mess about with electricity. Being self-taught, he recognized no boundaries, and one of his first scientific papers was about how electricity might be transmitted through the air. That idea has now gained some traction, but in 1859 Reis’s paper was rejected as mere fancy by his local physical society. His next idea was to use electricity to transmit sound. He’d learned a lot about electricity, the physics of sound, and the inner structures of the mammalian ear. So why not transmit sound in a way that used the vibrations of the tympanum to transmit and receive sound as variations in electric current? His “telephon” as he called it was the result. Being a clever chap, Reis constructed a prototype “telephon” and installed a wire from his classroom to his home. This raised imaginative rumors among his pupils, but failed to impress physicists, and Reis’s 1862 paper was rejected as being about mere gadgetry and, worse, a gadget that didn’t work very well, especially on transmitting the irregular tones of the human voice. Reis died of TB in 1874, thinking himself a failure but his gadget was to have a long history in lawsuits and in company mergers. There’s a Reis Museum in Friedrichsdorf where you can see his gadget and learn that he was one of the first inventors of the telephone. Bell and Edison got it right in the end, but we should remember that they were also, in their way, tinkerers. It was that sort of century. ©

[Stanley]

"The life of Charles Young was a Triumph of Tragedy." W. E. B. DuBois, Arlington Cemetery, 1923
Charles Young, 1864-1922
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>From your rich dust and slaughtered will// A tree with tongues shall grow
Countee Cullen, “In Memory of Col. Charles Young.”

History turns up random human connections, some of which, like good marriages, now seem more than merely fortuitous. One such occurred at Fort Duchesne, Utah, in 1899, when a young black enlisted man was mentored by the then only black officer in the whole US Army. The mentee was Benjamin Davis (1877-1970), sergeant-major of the 10th (‘buffalo soldier’) cavalry. Davis would become the first African American to achieve the rank of general and his son, Benjamin Jr, would follow him as only the second, in what was by 1954 a desegregated military. Back in Utah, in 1899, Benjamin Sr.’s mentor was Lt. Charles Young, who would become the first black colonel in the army. Charles Young had been born enslaved, in Kentucky, on January 8, 1864. His father soon escaped to serve in the Union Army’s (‘colored’) heavy artillery unit and, after the war, returned home to take his wife and son into the free state of Ohio. There, in Ripley, Charles (who had also the good fortune of a literate
slave mother) excelled in school and graduated at the top of his (integrated) high school class. For a time afterwards, he taught in the town’s all-black primary school, but greater things beckoned when, in 1884, he was accepted into West Point (although he had the highest score in the 1883 entrance exams, he had been passed over). He was only the ninth black man to be admitted to the academy, and in 1889 became the third to graduate (there would not be another until the 1940s). So in 1889 Young took up his commission (as 2^nd Lieutenant) and had risen to captain when he took young Davis under his wing. By then, Captain Young knew plenty about the steel one needed to make his way in a segregated, racist military, and doubtless passed that knowledge on to Sergeant-Major Davis. Young had learned some of those lessons himself, but picked up some ideas, too, from his friend and Wilberforce University colleague, W. E. B. DuBois—another of those random connections that in retrospect make a whole life. At Wilberforce, Young had (during a brief hiatus in his military career) been professor of military science, commander of the campus’s ROTC unit, and the founding director of its marching band. Later, Col. Young would become the first black director of a national park (Sequoia in California, where he laid out the park’s first road system) and military attaché of the American ambassador to Liberia. It was on that duty that he fell seriously ill and died in Lagos, Nigeria. After a year’s delay his remains were returned to his native land, where they received a hero’s welcome. He and his wife are buried in the oldest section at Arlington, and in January 1921, closer to home, he was posthumously (and belatedly?) promoted to honorary Brigadier General of the Kentucky National Guard. ©

[Stanley]

Diamonds and rust.
Joan Baez, b. 1941.
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If people have to put labels on me, I’d prefer the first to be ‘human being,’ the second label to be ‘pacifist,’ and the third to be ‘folk singer.’ Joan Baez

In late 1962, or maybe early 1963, I saw Joan Baez perform at a Philadelphia folk club, ‘The Second Fret.’ I don’t remember too much about it, because I never saw her again and, anyway, was in the middle of what I was already hoping would be the worst date of my life. At the time, Baez was modestly famous and was the headliner that night. I can summon up from my memory nothing more than the sound of her voice which, you’ll have to admit, was and remains memorable, like a “spool of satin” one critic wrote. But I cannot remember what she sang, or anything else really, except that the Second Fret was a small place in which to have a dreadful date. As for Joan Baez, she was born on Staten Island, New York, on January 9, 1941. She was of mixed Latin and Scottish heritage and her family was multi-talented, including her father. Albert, who was in 1941 on his way to becoming a Stanford PhD and then an MIT professor (physics). At about the time that Albert moved to Massachusetts, his
whole family resolved its mixed religious heritage (mainly Catholic, Methodist, and Anglican) by converting to Quakerism, a change that would affect Joan’s compositions. Further shape and substance came when young Joan (then 13) heard Pete Seeger in concert and resolved to become a better guitarist. Her first big outing, in public, came at the Newport Festival in 1959, where she sang and played with Bob Gibson and Odetta. Favorable notices from that led to her first recording contract, and first album, and by the time I saw her in Philadelphia she had one or two ‘gold’ albums under her belt, stunning success for someone just 21 years old. She also aided in the even more meteoric rise of Bob Dylan, and as they went their somewhat separate ways in the 60s decade they became really famous (and in graduate school I could boast of having seen them both at The Second Fret). Most famed for her support of civil rights and her opposition to the Viet Nam War, she could turn her talents
towards other targets, and because of a dramatic concert in Prague (where Vaclav Havel carried her guitar case like a submachine gun) could claim to have played a role in Czechoslovakia’s ‘velvet revolution’. But it’s her voice that sticks in one’s imagination, a pure tone beautifully modulated to fit its purposes. Since her multiethnic and multitalented family was also long-lived (her dad lived to 95, her mom “Big Joan” to 100) it’s reasonably safe, today, to wish Joan Baez a happy 81st birthday with more to come. ©.

[Stanley]

Dr. Katherine Burr Blodgett
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As clear as glass. The nano science of Katherine Burr Blodgett/.

If you have pictures or paintings framed behind non-reflective or ‘transparent’ glass, chances are good that it’s ‘Blodgett glass,’ named after its inventor Katherine Burr Blodgett. She was born in Schenectady on January 10, 1898 where her father was a patent attorney for General Electric. Katherine spent almost her whole working life at GE, but as a physicist. Given her gender, for in her time leading female scientists were rare birds, she had first to jump through several hoops, including science degrees (BA. 1917. and MS, 1918) at Bryn Mawr and Chicago, and then (1926) she became the first woman to earn a science PhD at Cambridge, where she studied under the Nobelist Ernest Rutherford. Meanwhile, she’d already begun work (as the first woman scientist) at GE Schenectady. The scientists there had taken her under their wings because her father was murdered before she was born, and once fully employed there Katherine developed an interest (and a remarkable expertise) in ‘surface
chemistry,’ learning to lay various films on stable surfaces (water, oil, glass, etc.) where the films imparted peculiar qualities to the basic material. Using as the ‘film’ the complex molecule barium stearate C[36]H[70]BaO[4] (!!!), she produced non-reflective glass, just in time for it to be used as the camera lenses for filming “Gone with the Wind” and the periscope glass in the US Navy’s WWII submarine fleet—as well as for your picture frames. Blodgett refined that process down to films just one molecule thick, and there were other inventions, too, de-icers for airplane wings being maybe my favorite, better light bulbs a close second, and a remarkable life in Schenectady, including a Boston marriage (two really, in succession). All that came along with a remarkable expertise in making popovers, a facility in writing and reciting funny poems, and a beautiful garden for her home overlooking the city. She was also (as an actress) a mainstay of Schenectady’s amateur dramatic
society. For all this Katherine Blodgett was honored, several times, by the publication American Men of Science, which I guess she accepted with the proverbial grain of salt, by the American Chemical Society, several universities, and the City of Schenectady. She died in 1979. ©

[Stanley]

Sir Charles Hastings, 1794-1866.
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But his main interests were to be the betterment of his profession. From a review of a 1959 biography of Sir Charles Hastings.

I call as witness the traditional barber’s pole to assert that in medieval and early modern times surgeons were not highly regarded. Owing to several factors, including a growing scientific interest in human and comparative anatomy, that began to change in the 18thcentury, but it remains something of an irony that, in Britain, medical practice as a whole achieved high professional status largely through the efforts of a surgeon, Charles Hastings. Hastings was born on January 11, 1794, in the village of Bitterly, rural Shropshire. He wasn’t born poor, exactly, for he and his 14 siblings were children of the parish rector, but they certainly weren’t rich. And then life became much more marginal when the good rector was grievously injured, including skull trauma, in a riding accident. The family moved to Worcester where poverty took away five of his siblings and may have imparted to Charles a lasting concern with social status and—as it would work out—public health issues. Meanwhile, he apprenticed with a local apothecary, attended an anatomy school in London, read medicine at Edinburgh but then chose to return home, to Worcester where he served as surgeon in the town’s infirmary and, increasingly, as general practitioner to all and sundry, notably in successive cholera epidemics (1832, 1849, 1853). In attending courageously (person to person) to the stricken, Hastings learned something of the connections between bad water, open sewage, and epidemic death and turned his energy to new public housing projects at the heart of the city. For this he was knighted in 1850. And for something else, too, for along the way Hastings came to envisage the medical profession as a whole as a force for reform, not only for the good lives of the citizenry but also as a focus for scientific activity and the guardian of medical ethics. In these guises, the brave doctor became the founder of provincial societies that, within his lifetime, became national as the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the British Medical Association (BMA). For years he served both, the former as editor and the latter as secretary and then as president. For good measure Hastings was also founder-member of the Worcester Natural History Society and of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. Sir Charles Hastings, doctor, alderman and charity commissioner in and for the city of Worcester, died (of colon cancer) in 1866. ©

[Stanley]

We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley, b. 1952.
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That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years. Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress.

Many, maybe most mystery story authors land themselves with a lead character from whom they—and their reading publics—never escape. This single hero (or, nowadays, heroine) becomes a useful literary crutch, offering up whole paragraphs of text that are nothing more than familiar gossip about a well-known (by author and reader) personage whose eccentricities (e.g. Hercule Poirot’s devotion to his moustaches) can be thrown in as page fillers (rather than, for instance, page turners). So just as Christie had her Hercule, so Margery Allingham had her Albert Campion (in the latter case with happy effect, for Albert’s oddities remained a delight through 17 novels). But in America we have a still-active mystery writer who changed horses in midstream not once but at least three times. I write of the characters Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow, Paris Minton (plus, possibly, Minton’s sidekick Fearless Jones), each and all of whom came to us from the creative mind of Walter Mosley, born
in Los Angeles on January 12, 1952. Mosley is, he says, both African-American and Jewish, the only (and indulged?) child of well-read parents (his black father was probably the inspiration for Socrates Fortlow) who moved marginally up the LA social scale as Walter grew into adulthood and then attended an experimental liberal arts college. Mosley began to write as a child, a fantasy world he said, but became interested in writing as a career only after taking a writing course in faraway Harlem. There he was tutored by Edna O’Brien who, bless her Irish soul, told Walter that there were “riches” in his black and Jewish background, riches enough to sustain a writing career. He began with a bang, “Easy” Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress, sales of which were boosted when Bill Clinton nominated it as a favorite. Since then Mosley has produced about two novels per year, in several genres, his detective heroes (or anti-heroes) named above carrying the bulk of Mosley’s mysteries. Paulette
introduced me to them when there were about four already out, and though I am not an addict (I still prefer Campion’s world as rendered by Allingham’s poisoned pen) I continue with Mosley. His “Easy,” Socrates, and Paris are all worth knowing. If Mosley has several ‘lead’ characters, it must be said they are all Los Angelenos and they all know the seamier sides of that city’s life. Perhaps, if you are going to write that many books, a shared social geography can be as useful a page filler as a recurring hero and his eccentricities. ©.

[Stanley]

Melba Liston, girl trombonist
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Melba Liston and Her ‘Bones. Title of Liston’s 1959 album which featured, of course, the trombone.

When I think of ‘The Girls in the Band’ it’s the all-female band in Some Like It Hot (1959), Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters, with whom Jack Lemmon (bass) and Tony Curtis (sax) hitch a train ride to a gig in Miami after they witness a gangland killing in Chicago. The boys are in drag, of course, the sax gets the girl (Marilyn Monroe, who played Sugar Kane, the Sweet Sue vocalist) but the bass gets, well, Joe E. Lewis. It’s all great fun, and a fantasy, but there were some realities to it. The killing, for instance, looks an awful lot like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And then there was really an era in which female bands, and female musicians, played well enough to be on tour, in the spotlight, and on records too. That era was highlighted by the award-winning documentary (2012) that was called, really and truly, The Girls in the Band. That film told us about a whole lot of women, vocalists yes but instrumentalists too, arrangers, composers and leaders, who played circuits, cut records, and somehow held their own (or more) in a male-dominated world. Among the musicians featured in the film was one Melba Liston, born in Kansas City, MO, on January 16, 1926. Her family did a lot of music, and so when Melba was 7 she was offered her choice of instruments, and (a bit oddly for a little girl, I think) took away a trombone, at which (at first in her—segregated—school’s band) she became proficient. It was in California, where her family had moved during the Depression, that she broke into music big time, with the likes of Dexter Gordon, Count Basie, and Billie Holliday. She played some solo stuff (Gordon wrote one piece especially for her) but mainly she stood on the bandstand with a brace (or more) of trombonists, a pretty young woman in a very male line. Melba also sang, and in the 50s began to write, mainly for big bands (including the biggest, Duke Ellington’s) but also for smaller combos like those of pianist Randy Weston and trumpeter Quincy Jones, whose interests she shared in being more self-conscious about her music’s African roots. On the other hand she also composed for Tony Bennett and Eddie Fisher so she was no one-note musician. In a tough place for women Melba more than held her own, for decades. She died in Los Angeles in 1999, at the end of a long road from that Kansas City music store. ©.

[Stanley]

I have chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance.
Emily Hahn, 1905-1997
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Nobody said NOT to go. Emily Hahn, explaining some of her travels.

Emily Hahn was born in St. Louis on January 14, 1905. Some hint of the fantastic variety of her adult life might have been predicted from a few facts about her childhood. Her dad’s name was Isaac Newton Hahn. Her mom nicknamed her “Mickey” after a favorite cartoon character (who was NOT a mouse). Then, at the University of Wisconsin, she majored in Mining Engineering after a professor told her that women couldn’t even think scientifically let alone ‘do’ science. Not only did she do pretty well in mining engineering (the first female to graduate from Wisconsin’s program) but, for good measure, her first job (back in St. Louis) was with an oil exploration company. But that wore thin quickly, and after interludes in Hollywood and Africa (in Hollywood as a script writer in the silent era and in Africa living with small folk) Mickey settled in Shanghai as a correspondent (notably for The New Yorker), book author, and (with her pet gibbon Mr. Mills often in tow, in a diaper and a
dinner jacket) society woman. She could not get straight in her mind that city’s lines of segregation between westerners, Chinese, and (‘other’) Asians. Besides a couple of affairs with leading Chinese intellectuals and friendships with Mao and Chiang, Emily married a British diplomat, C. R. Boxer. After the Japanese took over the city and interned Boxer, Emily found it practical to parade as a Eurasian woman while smuggling food parcels to Boxer. All this, and Emily Hahn wasn’t yet 40. After the peace came Emily went back to being “Euro,” and spent most of her time in Dorset, at Boxer’s country estate, raising their two daughters (one of whom became the actress Amanda Boxer), cultivating her eccentricities (among them, opium, gibbons. and grandmothership), and writing books. Her titles make an impressive list, and I think I must read a few: perhaps including her first (1930), Seductio ad Absurdum, her last (1988). Eve and the Apes, and taking in her biography of another woman
who flouted rules and roles, the Restoration playwright Aphra Behn (Purple Passage, 1950). When Emily finally died, in New York, in 1997, with 54 books under her name, the Times obituarist managed to pack it all into a dozen paragraphs which, given the circumstances, was a marvel of concision. The obit was entitled “Chronicler of Her Own Exploits,” but one thinks that Emily Hahn must have been more than that. ©.

[Stanley]

Prout, Protons, and Atomic Weights
William Prout, 1785-1850
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The specific gravities, or absolute weights, of all bodies in a gaseous state must be multiples of the specific gravity or absolute weight of the first matter [hydrogen]. William Prout, “A Correction . . .” (1816)

Although I don’t know much more about physics than what Herman Kirkpatrick managed to drill into my skull in my Junior year in high school, I’ve long been fascinated by its poetry, especially the fanciful names physicists have given to the basic stuff of atoms, energies, particles, speeds, and spins. Even when a nominative makes sense there’s poetry about it, as in “nucleus” which derives from the Latin for ‘little nut.’ But I always thought “proton” (a positively charged particle of—to me—uncertain identity) was pure poetry, with the neat additions that besides carrying a positive charge it’s the Greek term for “first.” Those are indeed two reasons that Ernest Rutherford (in 1920) gave the proton the name it still carries. But there’s another motive, too, whimsical-historical if not poetic, for Rutherford may also have sought to memorialize William Prout. Prout was a tenant farmer’s son, born in Gloucestershire on January 15, 1785, who by a concatenation of circumstances graduated MD from Edinburgh University in 1811 and then became expert in your (and my) gastric juices and the carbohydrates, proteins, and fats that those juices mysteriously converted into tissues and energy and waste. So Prout was a doctor, and we can call him a pioneer biochemist, too. But he was also, tentatively, a physicist, for he liked to speculate about matter, its constituents, and its probable origins. In an anonymous tract, in 1815, he speculated about these mysteries in “On the Relation between the Specific Gravities of Bodies in their Gaseous State” and then, in the next year and in his own name made a “Correction”. He advanced two main hypotheses, first that the elements had atomic weights precisely proportional to the weight of hydrogen, and second that hydrogen was, somehow, the parent element of all the rest. As a corollary, I think, he also confirmed (logically) Avogadro’s theorem that a volume of one gaseous element would contain the same number of atoms as the same volume of any other gas. (Avogadro’s number, by the way, is one of the few things I remember from Mr. K’s physics class). Prout went on to specialize experimentally and clinically in such things as the constituent parts of urine and the causative agents in diabetes, but this precocious bit of physics theory seems (according to some sources) to have led to the name “proton” for a particle that, so far at least, all atoms have in common. ©

[Stanley]

Eric Liddell, 1902-1945
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In the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory there is glory to be found if one has done his best. Eric Liddell.

On a weekend when a leading athlete has made himself into a parable of self-indulgence (and I speak of a Serbian tennis player), it’s good to remember one who did not. That would be Eric Liddell, Olympic sprinter, who was born in Tientsin, China, on January 16, 1902. He was in his prime known to some as ‘the Flying Scotsman,’ after the express train of the same name, and he was both Scots and quick. He took some time to become a Scotsman, though, for his parents sent him to a special school in London (for the sons of missionaries) where he developed an enthusiasm for sports and excelled at the very English game of cricket. He captained his school at both cricket and rugby, and there won a reputation of being “entirely without vanity.” Then he was off to the university of Edinburgh (to study Pure Science) and to continue his sporting career, continuing with rugby (for the Scottish national side) and taking up track. Though in Scotland (by reputation already a Christian country) he continued his parents’ missionary work as a speaker for the Glasgow Students’ Evangelical Union. Thus, if still a stranger to vanity, he became a very public personage, and (famously) in the 1924 Olympics he defended that persona by refusing to take part in Sunday races. That denied him Olympic gold in his best event, the 100 metre, but he set a world record in winning the 400-metre (and a bronze in the 200-metre. There were other races that summer, and a degree to complete at Edinburgh, but in 1925 Liddell returned to missionary work, in China, where he made use of his speed and his science to coach and teach. He also served his father’s pastorate as head of the Sunday School. He also married Florence MacKenzie, a daughter of Canadian missionaries. With the Japanese invasion, Florence returned to Canada (and who can blame her with two kids in tow and another on the way?) but Eric Liddell stayed on, to finish his career as the quiet hero of the Weixien Internment Camp, teaching science and the Bible, instructing in chess, and (yes) coaching in track and field. His pupils and players called him Uncle Eric. He died there, of a brain tumor, a few months before the peace of 1945. Were it not for the films Chariots of Fire (1981) and The Last Race (2016)—and the sharp contrast Eric Liddell continues to offer to eminent sportspersons of our day, he might well be forgotten. The 1981 film gets Liddell’s refusal to run on a Sunday slightly wrong, but then legends are like that. How long will we remember Novak Djokovic’s disgraceful (non-) performance in Australia? ©

[Stanley]

** Catherine Booth, 1829-1890
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There is no improving the future without disturbing the present. Catherine Booth, 1883.

A “ticket” confers rights to admission or to travel, so it was a neat idea of early Methodists—including the great John Wesley—to issue “tickets” to communicants. As Methodism evolved so did the tickets. Tickets might be quarterly or annual, but as printed cards they aided one’s self-identification with a local fellowship and as an aid in travel from one church to another. Many Methodists, being working class, were also perforce travelers on the shifting currents of economic change. So when Catherine Mumford’s ticket was “withdrawn” by her local (London) chapel, it was a big deal. In her case it did not mean a loss of faith but a new channeling, and her local did not approve of her direction towards a more intense evangelism, a more democratic church, and a more positive role for women, publicly and privately. In one William Booth, then a pawnbroker’s assistant, she found a willing accomplice—fiancé in 1852 then husband in 1855. Catherine Mumford Booth was born on January 17, 1829, in Derbyshire. She surmounted the perils of working-class childhood, which included her father falling from grace and then into desertion. With her mother’s help she survived (three siblings did not), though with curvature of the spine and probably consumption, to become William Booth’s bride, the mother of nine children, her family’s general factotum and, in her own right, no ordinary theologian. She read her Bible well enough to contextualize Paul’s advice to the Corinthians to keep their women silent in church as particular counsel to a particular church in particular circumstances, not a universal rule. It was contradicted by other passages, in both Testaments, which made “Holiness” equally the gift of men and women. So when William Booth ‘led boldly with his big bass drum’ Catherine marched right along, and together they need to be seen as cofounders of the Salvation Army. The boldness of their evangelicalism, Catherine’s public preaching and writings, the breadth of their appeal, all raised opposition in various quarters of the Methodist movement, until Salvationists had no choice but to issue their own “tickets” for admission and for spiritual travel. Catherine Booth was never an officer in that army and rested content with the title “Army Mother” until she died (cancer) in 1890. Her example would be followed by many women who would take command posts in an army that was both hers and William’s. In its St. Louis Division, today, the Salvation Army’s officer corps is evenly split (from Lieutenant Colonels to Majors to Captains and Lieutenants) between men and women who are also husbands and wives. Its literature does not suggest who gives the orders. ©