BOB'S BITS

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Re: BOB'S BITS

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I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you it will be with a knife. Louise Brooks.
Louise Brooks, 1906-1982
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The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement . . . but on movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation. Louise Brooks.

In P. G. Wodehouse’s ‘Mulliner stories,’ an aging raconteur (‘Mr. Mulliner’) entertains the lounge bar clientele of the Anglers’ Rest with unlikely tales which usually feature one or another of his many relations. At least three of these Mulliners end up in Hollywood as lead actors in stories which, however absurd or unlikely, reveal Wodehouse’s own ambivalent view of America’s ‘Tinseltown.’ The first of these is Mulliner’s cousin Lancelot, who gets there because of his unnatural abilities to narrate whole stories with his facial expressions and body language. His story (“Came the Dawn”, 1927) turns on Hollywood’s desperate need—during the silent era—to find actors whose eloquence was physical, in Lancelot’s case a grimace, a twitching of the ears, a waggle of the eyebrows, the palpable agonies of a young man unsuccessful in love and a dreadful failure in his effort to become poet laureate of London’s pickle industry. To get real for a moment, Hollywood did, before and during its transition from silents to talkies, enjoy remarkable success in producing actors whose bodies spoke volumes and contained epics, from the utterly ungainly Buster Keaton to the voluptuous and sin-soaked Louise Brooks. She was born Mary Louise Brooks on November 14, 1906, and in the quiet Kansas town of Cherryvale. Perhaps predictably, Cherryvale failed to contain her, and by the mid 1920s Brooks was in New York dancing semi-nude for Florenz Ziegfeld and posing entirely nude for photographers. Soon she became an icon for the flapper generation, bobbed hair and all, and moved to Hollywood to tell silent film stories about lost girls and their just deserts. Off-set, she moved in the even more iniquitous circles frequented by the likes of William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Fatty Arbuckle, but Louise soon left California to find her true physical voice in several German films, mostly silents, their titles almost as eloquent as Louise Brooks’ body, including Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl (both in 1929). After that, Brooks fell upon harder times (got her just deserts, as the legionnaires of decency might have put it), but she re-emerged, unrepentant, as her films became recognized as classics. Thus encouraged, and distressingly long-lived, Brooks published her memoir, the scandalous Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. It is, I am told, a very far cry (and a loud one, too) from those chaste Anglers’ Rest tales told by the garrulous old Mr. Mulliner about his far-flung family. But there are some similarities between our Miss Brooks and Lancelot Mulliner, the pickle poet with waggling eyebrows. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Vote for principle, and your vote is never lost.
Mary Emma Byrd, Astronomer
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Vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” ― John Quincy Adams

High and stern moral principle can move a person to the top but then, just as surely, bring her down. Such may have been the case of the astronomer Mary Emma Byrd, who was born in Le Roy, Michigan, on November 15, 1849. It’s likely that she absorbed her sense of purpose from her family, very conscious of its history (her mother was a descendant of stern John Endicott, one of the first settlers of Salem, Massachusetts) and of its present, too. Her father, a Congregational minister, and her maternal uncle moved their families (and thus Mary Emma) to Kansas in 1855 in order to serve the anti-slavery cause. Her father was a station master in the Underground Railway and her uncle (David Lowe) would later resign from Congress because he found politics and conscience “incompatible.” Growing up in frontier Kansas. Mary Emma scraped together what education she could, and then finally graduated from the University of Michigan in 1878. Quickly rising to the principalship of a large Indiana
high school was not high enough, and in 1882 she transferred to Harvard to study astronomy under E. C. Pickering. Pickering hired her as one of his “computers,” women who worked at Pickering’s Harvard Observatory for peanuts while Pickering rose to fame and fortune. Several of these ‘computers’ have over the years featured in these ‘anniversary notes,’ and like them Mary Emma Byrd escaped from Pickering’s exploitative supervision to make her own mark in the science. From 1887 she worked as director of the observatory and professor of astronomy at a women’s college, Smith, in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a position she held for almost two decades, becoming a well-known for calculating the orbital paths of comets and for sending on a number of young women to enter the field. But in 1906, over her dead body as the saying goes, Smith College accepted large gifts from both Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, money she thought tainted by the donors’ moral failures as ‘robber barons’ of America’s industrial revolution. So, rather in the manner of her uncle David, she quit and retired to private life: semi-private really, for you can’t keep a good astronomer away from the stars. Until her death, in her Lawrence, KS, home, in 1934, Mary continued to study radical politics, to write a path-breaking astronomy textbook, and to contribute ‘popular science’ articles to journals and local newspapers. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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My classroom became my own little republic. Mary Peabody Mann.
Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, 1806-1887
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Never be afraid to love . . . even if it tears your earthly life to tatters it will strengthen the heavenly ones. Such love is the only proof of immortality. Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, in The Flower People, a children’s fiction published in 1862 but still, I think, in print.

The Peabody family (of Massachusetts) was one of New England’s oldest, and given George Peabody’s many 19th-century benefactions to Essex County, the town of Salem, the state of Massachusetts, to Yale and Harvard colleges, and even to the cities of Baltimore and London, it’s easy to assume that it was also one of New England’s richest. But by the dawn of the 19thcentury, many of the Peabodys had fallen on hard times. Many Peabody cousins, including George, grew up in the trying circumstance of ‘genteel poverty,’ that status in which one dutifully undertakes a life of high public purpose but is severely handicapped by scarcity of money. George solved the problem by becoming immensely rich and then giving it all away—or not quite all, for he started the Morgans in banking. For George’s cousin Mary Peabody, a woman, that route was closed off, and so she chose faithful service to her husband, Horace Mann, and to his reform causes. Mary Peabody Mann was born one—the middle one—of the three remarkable ‘Peabody sisters of Salem’ on November 16, 1806. The eldest, Elizabeth, never married but became the leader of the American kindergarten movement. The youngest, gentle Sophia, outlived her husband Nathaniel Hawthorne, but while he lived was his muse, his protector, and (no mean painter herself) illustrated several of his stories. As for Mary Peabody, before marrying the widower Horace Mann in 1843 (she 36, he 46) she made a life of her own as a schoolteacher, governess (to rich families in Spanish Cuba), linguist, and author of children’s books. The Manns’ honeymoon was a working tour of Europe to take notes on the best—and worst—of old world schools, hospitals, and prisons. Back in New England, Mary Mann fell in with Horace’s consuming purpose to create a universal system of free, public education. Mary was probably the source of some of Horace’s ideas and certainly his chief writer, reporter, and propagandist. The mother of three of his children, Mary outlived Horace by nearly 30 years and, widowed, gained public notice of her own talents, her own moral energy, and her own life story as a writer, not least with a small book The Moral Culture of Infancy (1863) and then with the posthumous (and semi-autobiographical) novel Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba (1889) Mary’s life of high public purpose ended in 1887, in Boston, just a few miles along the coast from where it had begun, in genteel poverty, in 1806. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"Writing is an essential act of survival for contemporary American Indians." Elizabeth Cook Lynn.
Elizabeth Cook Lynn
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The final responsibility of a writer like me … is to commit something to paper in the modern world which supports this inexhaustible legacy left by our ancestors. Elizabeth Cook Lynn, Santee Sioux, born November 17, 1930.

Much noise is heard, these days, from the Trumpian right about ‘critical race theory’ (aka ‘CRT’) more particularly about banning it (whatever “it” is, for few seem to know) from school and college curricula. But it’s really old hat in the USA, where history and literature have long been taught from the ‘CRT’ perspective of people of European ancestry. This was the critical race theory confronted by a young Sioux woman when she entered South Dakota State and took a course on the westward expansion of the USA. She was infuriated, puzzled and distressed to find that the syllabus gave no room (other than as obstacles) to the study of the peoples who lived there in the first place. That student was Elizabeth Cook Lynn, born on the Crow Creek reservation on November 17, 1930. Her Santee Sioux family had made early contact with white missionaries, and a succession of her male ancestors had helped American whites to make sense of the Siouxan language and, in the process, had become members of a Siouxan elite, both as translators and as vessels of tribal traditions. Elizabeth’s fury at whites’ willful ignorance—as expressed in that course syllabus—of her family’s past led her into an extraordinary career as an historian and writer—and as a school and college teacher and syllabus-maker—who has sought to add “CRT” to our national understanding of what went on during and after the Euro-American conquest of western peoples who, after all, were Americans, human beings with their own lives, their own lands, their own traditions. Elizabeth’s education and her energy took her all over the west, from South Dakota State to Stanford, thence to Nebraska where she took her PhD, winning prestigious fellowships all the way. Since her PhD (1978) she’s taught in many places and at several levels, always balancing her teaching with writing and with editing. As far as I know she’s still going strong, aged 91 today, at home in the Black Hills. It’s a fitting place for her , once to her people a sacred territory but now, according to the critical theory of the triumphant race, the site of several “national” treasures which pay no or only minimal homage to the native inheritances of Elizabeth Cook Lynn. Her career has helped to ensure that ignorance is no excuse. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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You've got to Ac-cent-Tchu-ate the Positive . . .
Johnny Mercer, 1909-1976
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A woman’s a two-face, a worrisome thing who’ll lead you to sing the blues in the night.
I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you.
That old black magic has me in its spell.
Make it one for my baby and one more for the road.
Four Lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

Johnny Mercer, lyricist and (occasionally) composer, was born in Savannah, GA, on November 18, 1909. His family, historically important, occupied two of Savannah’s finest old houses and had given its name to another, The Mercer House, wherein occurred the bizarre murder that gave rise to John Berendt’s best-selling “fiction novel” Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). The ‘garden’ in question was not a domestic one but the city’s Bonaventure Cemetery, perched atop a bluff and full of Gothic monuments, fitting nicely with the novel’s main plot and mood. Johnny Mercer himself is there now, buried with many of his ancestors; taken together they present the cosmopolitanism and diversity of many southern cities, a family stock-full of immigrants (including Croatians and Irish), patriots and traitors (from both the Revolution and the Civil War) and a clutch of lawyers including Mercer’s father. But there is no one, as far as can be known, of African descent. Young Johnny knew
Savannah’s black people through their music, hopping in the family car and driving down to ‘Brownville’ to absorb their songs and drink their drinks. He never did learn to play any instrument very well, nor to write music, but he sang along, liked the words and their rhythms, and when he moved to New York in 1928 he took both with him and, after a brief fling at brokerage (it was, remember, 1928), moved into Tin Pan Alley, thence to Hollywood, to forge a successful career as a lyricist and finally as a producer at and cofounder of Capitol Records. Along the way, Mercer got to know (inter alia) the Gershwins, Bing Crosby, Hoagy Carmichael, Louis Armstrong, Cole Porter, and Jerome Kern, and to work with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Judy Garland (having an affair with Garland when she was just 19 and engaged to another). You may not have heard of Mercer, but we’re better at remembering composers than lyricists. So we know that Henry Mancini composed “Moon River” and
“Days of Wine and Roses” but forget that the words were Mercer’s. Late in life, perhaps because of drink, Capitol Records, or maybe just weariness, Mercer fell quieter, but he could still make new friendships, including with Emma Kelly, “the Lady of 6,000 songs,” who makes her own appearance in, yes, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Mercer’s own output was marvelously varied between jazz, blues, country & western, and cowboy, almost as odd a mixture as he was himself. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Winter sunlight and grape soda
Gladys Lounsbury Hobby. 1910-1993.
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Gladys L. Hobby and another way to look at “public” health.

In late November 1948, aged 5, I accompanied my parents and a couple of dad’s journalistic friends to cover a Norwegian folk celebration in Decorah, IA. It rained all day, a cold rain which cost my father his new tweed suit and very nearly killed me. In due course, I emerged from hospital, and have always praised those who saved my life, principally Varina DeMarias, my mom’s best friend and the first female doctor in Grundy County, and my uncle Bill, then finishing his residency in Louisville, KY, who flew in to act as my hospital doctor. But another person lurked in the background and should share in the credit (or the blame) for returning me to the land of the living. She was Gladys Lounsbury Hobby, born in New York City on November 19, 1910, who was one of a trio of scientists who, during WWII, labored long and hard to refine penicillin (discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming), make it more suitable for human use, and (more to the point for me), to find a way to manufacture purer
penicillin in greater quantity and at lower costs. Hobby’s main objective was to make more penicillin more available to allied armed forces during WWII, but a side effect was to open it up to civilian medicine. So I got about a zillion doses (overstated, no doubt, but my uncle later told me that they had had to map my butt), pulled through my oxygen-tent phase, and I emerged from hospital into the sunlight, well enough to savor a bottle of ‘O-So Grape’ pop (I have never forgotten the taste) and early enough to enjoy Christmas from a special bed set up, near the Christmas tree in the north parlor of my grandmother’s house. As for Gladys Hobby, she early diverged from her parents’ artistic interests to major in chemistry at Vassar (BSc, 1931) and move on to graduate work at Columbia (bacteriology PhD, 1935). Hobby’s work on penicillin, at Columbia’s hospital and funded by the US government, was carried out in partnership with biochemist Karl Meyer and medical professor Martin Dawson
and led to Hobby’s 15 years working for Pfizer on streptomycin and related antibiotics and then to another 15 as professor of public medicine at Cornell. In her Penicillin: Meeting the Challenge (1985) she likened the importance of her war work on penicillin to that of the Manhattan Project on splitting the atom But I am glad to point out that making penicillin better and cheaper brought civilian benefits, too. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Who reads Thomas Mayne Reid?
Selma Lagerlof, 1858-1940
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This Indian story had a decisive effect on my whole life. It awoke in me a deep, powerful desire to produce something as fine. Thanks to this book, I knew as a child that later I should above all like to write novels. Selma Lagerlof on reading Thomas Reid’s Osceola.

Imaginative literature creates astonishingly commodious worlds—readerships so diverse as to defy explanation. Take the writer Thomas Mayne Reid (1818-1883) who failed at the Presbyterian ministry in Ulster and in 1840 fled to the USA where his varied adventures included a spell as private tutor on a Tennessee plantation and conspicuously courageous service as a volunteer in the Mexican-American war. Along the way he developed a strong yen for writing and a warm, romantic-era sympathy for revolutions and for romantic thinkers like Thomas Carlyle. Reid’s novels—published after his return to Europe in the 1850s—were mostly set in the USA and the Caribbean and are characterized as adventure stories. Many of them show a visceral sympathy with the ‘losers’ in 19th-century America, notably Indians and Africans. And his readership was indeed a commodious community. I’ve never met anyone who has confessed to knowing about Reid, let alone being inspired by him, but then I’ve never met Vladimir Nabokov, Anton Chekhov, or Arthur Conan Doyle either, nor Teddy Roosevelt, all of whom admitted to reading Reid raptly. Another Reid disciple worthy of note was Selma Lagerlof, a Swedish girl who was inspired enough to take up writing herself and to become the literature Nobelist of 1909, the first woman (and the first Swede) to win the award. Selma Lagerlof was born at her father’s country home in Värmland. Hobbled from birth (November 20, 1858) by bad hips, her horizons were at first limited. Like another invalid, Teddy Roosevelt, she found a wider world in Reid’s fictions, notably Osceola the Seminole (1858) and The Maroon: A Tale of Voodoo and Obeah (1862). Young Ms. Lagerlof read Osceola when she was only 7. To become a writer herself took time, some schooling, a couple more languages, a period of school teaching and much practice, but she burst on the scene in 1891 with her first (and perhaps her best) novel, the Gōsta Berlings saga. That seems to have burst the dam, and what followed was a flood of literature, flowing deepest and fastest after the 1909 Nobel and staunched only (and briefly) by Lagerlof’s post World War I depression. Some titles are especially intriguing, notably her Jerusalem (2 vols., 1902, 1903), made into a movie in the 1990s, and her Ring Trilogy (3 vols., 1925, 1928), which has a heroine rather than heroes. Was Tolkien a Lagerlof fan? Who knows? But it’s worth pointing out that Selma Lagerlof was inspired by Carlyle, too. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Whose stomach was this, anyway?
William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin
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My opinions may be doubted, denied, or approved . . . but their worth will be best determined by the foundation on which they rest—the incontrovertible facts. William Beaumont, 1833.

Foundational studies in human anatomy were often based on work that varied from illegal to gruesome. There were grave robbers and bootleg bodies, frowned on for various reasons (at various times) by the authorities, and thus chancy work for pioneer anatomists (and the meat, pardon the pun, for much Gothic and horror literature). But for understanding physiological processes live bodies were even better. Much early knowledge about the brain derives from study of individuals who suffered the most awful head traumas, but somehow survived long enough (and consciously enough) that their brains could be ‘mapped’ and thus better understood. A less well-known case gave medical science much insight into (again, please pardon the pun) the stomach. It involved a French voyageur, one Alexis St. Martin, showing up at a trading post on Mackinac Island in 1825 with a shotgun wound to the stomach. The post’s military surgeon thought nothing could be done, but since Alexis was still conscious Beaumont made a game attempt at removing the detritus and sewing up the remains. Much to everyone’s surprise, Alexis survived, but with an open hole which gave direct access to his stomach. William Beaumont (born in Connecticut on November 21, 1785), the surgeon in question, realized he had a chance to learn something, and so took M. St. Martin with him to his next posting at Fort Niagara and set about determining what St. Martin’s stomach did, and how. The patient didn’t appreciate it, and escaped back home to Quebec, but by then Beaumont knew enough to realize that he was on track to make some medical history. Through some mix (skulduggery and the pulling of strings), the two joined forces again at a Wisconsin trading post (at Green Bay, circa 1831) where further experiments ensued. The nature of their personal relationship can only be imagined, forms the basis of a tragic novel (Dark Matters, 2011) and might I suppose be made into a (very) dark comedy, but in 1833 and 1838 Beaumont published his findings, which, taken together, told us much about the physical and chemical processes by which Alexis St. Martin’s stomach digested the food that, so to speak, fell into it. Beaumont did not take St. Martin to his last posting, at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, but several memorials to him exist (including a St. Louis high school and, oddly, a hill in Antarctica), and Beaumont is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery. Of Alexis St. Martin I could find no trace. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"It's all comics."
Marjane Satrapi, born November 22, 1969.
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People are so afraid to say the word 'comic' . . .It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a pony tail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and all that disappears. No: it's all comics. Marjane Satrapi, 2011.
In Greek, ‘Persepolis’ means ‘the city of the Persians,’ and although ancient Persia had richer and larger cities the Persians themselves gave it much honor by calling it, simply, ‘Persia.’ It was a grand place, though not huge, and archaeologists still debate over what its function was. It seems likely that Xerxes I (circa 480 BCE) ruled his empire from Persepolis, but his successors may have used it mainly or even only for ceremonies wherein their great aristocrats could through gift and gesture proclaim their obedience and reverence. Alexander the Great, Greek manqué that he was, testified to the symbolic importance of Persepolis by making a big detour to lay siege to the city, conquer it, and then allow (or instigate) a great fire that left it a ruin. All that by about 330 BCE. Alexander used Persepolis (what was left of it, anyway) as a provincial capital, but after that the place fell into ruin, which is what it is today, and a grand ruin at that. Its symbolism continues to be of great weight, both for Iran’s current government and Iranian dissent, including serving as the titles (Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2) of hugely successful semi-autobiographical graphic novels by an Iranian radical named Marjane Satrapi, born in Tehran on November 22, 1969. Hers is an interesting surname, to say the least, and her family were indeed famed for their opposition to the Shah, a revolutionary tradition that Marjane (largely educated in western-oriented, French-language schools) was trained in, and accepted. When in 1979 the Shah was upended by the mullahs, the family continued in opposition and continued to suffer (Marjane was chosen to be the one family member to visit her uncle in prison on the eve of his execution). On the whole, she’s remained in exile, mainly in France, as a symbol of resistance—but one not favored by the USA because she, like her family, is of a Marxist bent. After periods of deep hardship, Marjane Satrapi has emerged not only as a symbol of resistance to her nation’s religious, reactionary government, but, as importantly, as a gifted pioneer of the graphics genre, fiction, semi-fiction, and non-fiction (an example of the latter is her graphic biography of Madame Marie Curie, Radioactive, 2019). Her films, too, have won awards, at Cannes and elsewhere, including the USA (although not yet an Oscar). Marjane Satrapi is today a serious player in European culture and in Iranian politics, and it’s a measure of her seriousness that she prefers to see her “graphics” as a “comics” literature. Comic or not, I hope she will have a very happy 52nd birthday. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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How one woman became a Nazi undesirable.

I go cheerfully as far as women bishops, archbishops, and popes.” Maude Royden, 1914.

I’ve never seen a complete listing of the 2,800+ Britons who were on Hitler’s. “Black List”: people to be arrested by the Gestapo during the planned invasion of 1940. The discovery of the book in late summer 1945, in the rubble of Berlin, caused a sensation. Lady Astor claimed, unjustifiably, that her presence on the list proved the patriotism of her pre-war “Cliveden set.” Others reacted with grim humor. One listee, Rebecca West, wrote to another, Noel Coward: “My dear—The people we should have been seen dead with.” Paulette and I knew only one person on the list, Fenner Brockway (twice, in his last years, our house guest), but it’s hard to find a common denominator between the likes of Brockway and, say, Lady Astor. The “black list” was probably a work in progress. Among the few women on it was Agnes Maude Royden, born into a Liverpool shipping family on November 23, 1876. She had, in 1940, done Hitler the honor of publicly renouncing her own pacifism, but she was probably on the list because she had a troublemaker’s reputation, the sort of person who (were you a Nazi invader) you would not want to roam freely around the countryside. She came to these tendencies slowly, partly through her education (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) and her post-Oxford work in London settlement houses. But the social work tired her out. In 1902-1905 Maude recuperated in the rural parish of Reverend Hudson Shaw where she found her life’s work as a crusader not only for women’s rights but also as a churchwoman who believed that biblical prohibitions on women in worship were not guidance for today’s spirit but the masculine spoutings of an earlier culture. She also fell in love with the Rev’d Mr. Shaw but platonically for she also loved his frail wife, Effie. With their guidance Maude became a leader of (and public speaker for) the suffragists. A lot of this speaking took place in churches, and soon Maude tied the right to vote with the right to preach, even to hold priestly office, within the church. Anglicans being not yet ready for such non-sense, she detoured through dissenting communions, and never did attain Anglican priesthood. She did, however, receive honorary doctorates (in divinity and then literature), royal recognition as a “Companion of Honour” (in 1930) and official leadership in several national and international organizations. In Berlin, the Nazis did her another honor, as above, and back in London—after Effie’s death—the Reverend Mr. Shaw, entering his 80s, asked Maude for the honor of her hand in marriage. She consented, and lived out her last years, in comparative quiet, as Mrs. Maude Royden-Shaw. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

Post by Tripps »

Fascinating as usual. I'd heard of Fenner Brockway - but it was all a long time ago when detail was hard to come by. I smiled when I saw the title he invented when given a peerage. Baron Brockway of Eton. Seemed a bit out of character with his life. :smile:

My antennae twitch a bit when I see 'found in the rubble' - yeah right. . .Like the passports in the twin towers? :smile: However there is a truth in there somewhere - there cannot not be. Here's a lot more information on the subject for those with time to spare. Make of it what you will. :smile:

"Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. ("Special Search List Great Britain"

Another smile - there was another sort of 'dungsliste when I was in the army - but we didn't use the word 'dung' - usually meant you were 'out of favour 'with the RSM. :laugh5:
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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I've always seen him as a prime example of the 'awkward squad' in political life. We need more of them! See this LINK to a Wikipedia biography.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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In days of old when knights were bold . . .
Charles, duke of Orléans, 1394-1465
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God forgives him who has estranged
Me from you for the whole year.
I am already sick of love.
My very gentle Valentine.
Charles, Duke of Orléans to his wife Isabella, written in the Tower of London, circa 1415.

“In days of old when knights were bold” has become a ‘challenge line’ inviting folk to finish it as a limerick, usually rude and having to do with bodily functions. I fondly thought it might have its origins in Mark Twain’s burlesques on the days of knight-errantry (some of which were very much ruder than Twain’s ‘Connecticut Yankee’ novel), but its actual debut was in a popular London play, first put on in 1889 as The Good Old Times and then revived a few years later as When Knights were Bold. In poking fun at the good old days, the plays missed the fact that some knights errant were indeed gallant, given in their spare time to writing sonnets to love and for the lute, even during the very rude brutalities of the Hundred Years’ War (circa 1337-1453). Often said (not least by Shakespeare) to have been a war between England and France, it was also a bloody inter- and intra-family feud between the brigands and bastards who claimed inherited rights to this or that throne or dukedom. One of these claimants was Charles d’Orléans, born in Paris on November 24, 1394. In 1407 he stepped into his dukedom (as duc d’Orléans) when his father was murdered. This made him an important player in dynastic politics, and so when he was captured by Henry V of England at the battle of Agincourt (1415) it was decided not to kill the young duke but make him a hostage. So he was dug out from beneath a pile of bodies, taken across the channel, where he was installed in the Tower of London, then later at several other castles, to begin a very odd ‘prison’ term of 25 years. Being of the blood royal he was too valuable to release and too valuable to kill, but when he was finally ransomed (for a stupendous sum, in 1440) and returned to his dukedom at Blois, these same assets made him a player (again) in dynastic politics. But in England, as a peripatetic house-guest, he’d made himself very popular as a romantic figure, a knight errant in some better senses of that word, a participant in jousting tournaments but also a poet, player, and singer. Once back in Blois, Charles continued these habits and constructed a court-in-waiting that was also a sort of salon of late medieval (or early Renaissance) art, literature, and piety. No rude limericks, please, for Charles, duc d’Orléans, whose imprisonments had given him a much higher tone that that of the majority of knights-errant. He died at Blois without avenging his father or gaining the throne at Paris, but with his literary works admired on both sides of the channel, even while the English sank into their own dynastic struggles in the Wars of the Roses. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Joltin' Joe has gone and left away, hey, hey, hey.
Joe DiMaggio, 1914-1999
------------------------------------------------------------
I can remember a reporter asking me for a quote, and I didn’t know what a “quote” was. I thought it was some kind of soft drink. Joe DiMaggio.

Years ago, Penn historian Thomas Cochrane demonstrated beyond doubt that in the 19th-century USA the best way to become rich was to be born rich, or at least be born into very comfortable circumstances. Cochrane, an economic historian then on the board of Chase Manhattan Bank, was no debunker of capitalism, but he was interested in the distance (and difference) between myth and truth, the myth in question being one of America’s favorites, that of the “self-made” man of wealth. But Cochrane’s argument was not “beyond all doubt,” because Cochrane’s analysis was statistical, and there were exceptions (Andrew Carnegie, just to pull one exception out of Cochrane’s hat, was the son of poor Scottish immigrants. To judge by our comic (and tragic) opposition to masking and vaccination, we Americans are not very good at statistics. But there is one statistic that is its own exception and that has, in effect, established its own rule: Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, in 1941. Statistically speaking, no one will ever equal or break that record. Joe DiMaggio, a self-made man born of poor Italian immigrants (they were interned ‘at home’ during WWII as enemy aliens) on November 25, 1914, was an exceptional baseballer in many ways—and we know them all because baseball is a game obsessed with statistics. But when he hit safely in game no. 56, in Cleveland, on July 16, 1941, he notched up a statistic that is its own rule, because no one has ever (before or since) come close to it. The invulnerability of DiMaggio’s streak rests on the concept of range. Most performance records (even Ted Williams’ .406 batting average, also in 1941) are just beyond the top, just above the apogee, of an existing range. But the closest anyone has ever come to DiMaggio’s record was 44 games (achieved by only two players). Of course DiMaggio had some “luck”, but in a way luck, unnatural luck, is the whole point. Joltin’ Joe was unusual in other ways, an enviable lifetime batting average, for instance. When his favorite bat was stolen (during his streak!!) and then returned, he auctioned it off and gave the proceeds to the UFO—and then served three years during WWII—which you can’t say of John Wayne. He also married Marilyn Monroe. But these only make Joe unusual. What makes him impossible is those 56 games, in a row, without interruption, in which he hit safely. Oh, and one other thing—some say Joe’s fisherman father, that old Italian “enemy alien,” was the model for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Now that’s a miracle. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"Come on in. it's COOL inside." (movie theatre ad, Des Moines, IA, circa 1950.
Willis Carrier, 1876-1950.
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Luxuries like air conditioning brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning, their windows were shut, and they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming. Garrison Keillor.

Excessive heat and humidity have caused problems throughout history, and called forth various solutions. For ages, getting away from it seems to have been the favored cure. Finding their capital city too hot for words, a succession of emperors created ‘Romes away from home,’ Augustus and then Tiberius on the isle of Capri. 19th-century American captains of industry found similar solutions in their ‘cottages’ at Newport. RI, and the upper Midwest is peppered with enclave holiday ‘settlements,’ some of them still thriving, where the elites of St. Louis and Chicago—and even Minneapolis—could find cooling breezes. Some took their servants with them, but these were expensive (often rather garish) and individual solutions for those rich enough to move seawards or northwards to find air of a more likeable condition. Bringing conditioned air inside and at home awaited the 20thcentury and engaged interesting entrepreneurial types, perhaps the most successful being Willis Haviland Carrier, born in Angola, New York, on November 26, 1876. “Angola” even sounds hot and humid, but it’s just downwind of Lake Erie and conditioning its air was not a big problem. That awaited Willis’s move to Cornell University, where he studied engineering and learned some interesting stuff about the relationships between dew points, air temperatures, and relative humidities. After graduating MSc in 1901, Willis moved back to Buffalo but then responded to a call from a Brooklyn publisher to solve an air problem, which was not to sooth the sweated brows of its wealthy owners. It was a production problem without a leisure answer. Its highly automated printing processes needed paper in large quantities and consistent quality, and varied climates in the printworks caused paper to expand, then shrink, and to lose tensile strength in the process. This caught Willis Carrier’s fancy, and he won the contract to condition the Sackett-Wilhelm’s company’s air. After several years’ work, he submitted a patent application (U.S. # 808,897) for “an apparatus for treating air.” But Willis Carrier was not one of those patentees who would fail to draw benefit from their cleverness. Further patents followed, all of them owned by a company set up (for $32,600, in 1915) by Willis Carrier and six young engineer friends, The Carrier Engineering Corporation, with Willis as CEO. Carrier still cools the air, even in many working-class homes, but it now faces a new problem: conditioning the air inside corrupts the air outside. Solving that one is going to cost more than $32,600. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"I admit I am 63 years old. But that's only 17 Celsius." George Carlin.
Anders Celsius, 1701-1744.
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If God had wanted us to use the metric system, He would have given us ten fingers and ten toes. Quoted from Judith Stone, Light Elements: Essays in Science from Gravity to Levity. (1991).

Recent studies in animal behavior and psychology have demonstrated beyond doubt that we humans are not the only species to count things, but we are almost certainly alone in our passion to find (or impose) patterns on the things we count, and to standardize or scale these patterns, for instance length or distance into inches, feet, and miles. Quantifications (or scalings) of temperature came in, appropriately perhaps, during the ‘Enlightenment,’ first by a Pole of Dutch extraction, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), and then by a Swede, Anders Celsius, one of a family of scientists that had its origins in the estate of Celses on the landwards side of the old province of Hälsingland, about halfway up Sweden’s Baltic coast. Before the Celsius clan moved to Uppsala, a university town in western Sweden, Hälsingland’s most notable emigrants had been seafarers and freebooters some of whom ‘civilized’ the Finns (and founded Helsinki). But Anders Celsius was born (on November 27, 1701) into
the science and mathematics trades, and was best known during his lifetime (1701-1744) as Uppsala’s professor of Astronomy, a chair his father had held before him. As a counter and measurer of things, Anders had (by actually measuring out degrees of longitude and latitude) confirmed Isaac Newton’s theory that the earth’s sphere was far from perfect (being a bit squashed at the poles), and he published his findings in 1738 (in English, Observations on Determining the Shape of the Earth). Because he thought Fahrenheit’s measure of temperature was based on an illogical first scale (32 for freezing and 212 for boiling), Celsius went ‘decimal’ by reducing that distance to an even 100^o, and so today we have the “centigrade” or “Celsius” scale. Well, we don’t have it but most do. We Americans are an exceptional people, and so we’ve stuck by (or are stuck with) David Fahrenheit’s 180o spread for freezing cold and boiling hot as well as our even more ancient inches, ells, feet, rods, and miles for distance and a really bizarre lingo for measuring volume. By the end of David Fahrenheit’s and Anders Celsius’s century, the French Revolution confirmed that it is, or should be, a decimal world. At the same time, and in our own revolution, we did go for decimal currency but to this day we remain stuck (with a few other eccentrics) with our irrational and arcane scales of heat, cold, and distance. But then it could be argued that we never did really learn how to count with accountability. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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The noblest sport . . .
William Henry Lewis, 1868-1949
------------------------------------------------------------
Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords. Theodore Roosevelt.

Cast your mind back to the days when Amherst and Harvard were football powerhouses, and you’ll run across the name William Henry Lewis, who played for both schools and then coached for a dozen years at Harvard (1895-1906) where he became one of the game’s leading theoreticians and rule-makers (we owe him the ‘line of scrimmage’ as a neutral zone). After Harvard Law, Lewis became counsellor to two presidents (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft), including two years (1911-1913) as Assistant Attorney General. This appointment caused consternation in the South, for William Henry Lewis was an American of African descent, the son of former slaves, born in Berkley, VA, on November 28, 1868. Lewis did well in school and brilliantly at the segregated Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. He thus found his way to Amherst College, where he served as class orator at graduation but also, in his senior year, as captain of the football team. Several people learned of Lewis’s achievements, including W. E. B. Dubois, who traveled to Amherst to be at Lewis’s graduation and brought with him a Miss Elizabeth Baker, from Cambridge. She would become Lewis’s wife after a prolonged courtship and his establishing himself as a Boston attorney. Lewis’s accomplishments recommended him also to Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard ’80). They talked first of Harvard football, then of national politics and law. Lewis was TR’s house guest at Sagamore Hill in 1900 and then, when TR became president, the assistant US Attorney in Boston. This helped Lewis to establish a private practice, to become a member of the American Bar Association (ABA), and eventually to win Taft’s nomination as Assistant Attorney General. It was at this point that other people (other than Roosevelt, Taft, Elizabeth Baker, and the Harvard and Amherst student bodies) became aware that Lewis was black. Southern senators had conniptions, vowing to resist such presumption in a person of color, and in the ABA a national campaign to expel Lewis began. Attorney General George Wickersham sent a withering letter to all members of the ABA, and Lewis’s nomination survived in the Senate. The business of bringing people of color into government was reversed, for a time, by the ‘progressive’ Woodrow Wilson, but William Henry Lewis went on to a successful career as an attorney at law and advocate for civil rights causes. In 1940, Lewis retired from practice and, his wife having predeceased him (in 1943), died quietly at home in 1949. He was buried at Mount Auburn. Lewis was, all in all, a person about whom we should know more than we do. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Concentration camps in America? Surely not!
Michi Weglyn, 1926-1999.
------------------------------------------------------------
We have never had, do not now have, and will not ever have concentration camps here. US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, circa 1968.

Virgins were rare in Greek mythology, which says something about classical Greek culture, but among the few were the seven daughters of Atlas whose maidenly virtue was forever protected when Zeus (not himself famed for this sort of thing) hurled them into the night sky where you can still see them as the brightest stars in the Pleiades. Perhaps the end result of an undergraduate (male?) witticism, they became known in American higher education as the “Seven Sisters,” historically important women’s colleges. Five remain as such (Vassar having gone the way of all flesh and Radcliffe merged with Harvard), and among them is Mount Holyoke, the eldest (in South Hadley, MA, and founded by Mary Lyon in 1837). Mount Holyoke still promises young women a virtuous education (virtue of a worldly sort) and the strength to hold (and vent forth) well-grounded and strongly held opinions. Wikipedia lists 20 who attended the Mount, and these anniversary notes have featured, so far, three of them (Lucy Stone, Helen Pitts Douglass, and Emily Dickinson). Today I’d like to add a fourth (not on the Wikipedia list), Michi Weglyn, born Michiko Nishiura on November 29, 1926, the daughter of a Japanese immigrant farming family in California’s central valley. Michiko excelled at Liberty Union High School, even receiving the school’s American Legion award, but only two years later learned the irony of all that when she, her parents and siblings were interned at the Gila River “Relocation Center” in Arizona. She continued to do very well academically at the camp school, and in 1944 Mount Holyoke College recognized her indomitable virtues (and its own independence of mind and heart) by awarding Michi a full tuition scholarship. There she began a Biology major, but illness required her to take a leave, whence she transferred to another of the Pleiades, Barnard, where tuberculosis—perhaps contracted at Gila River—brought her down again. Michi emerged from all this still strong, resolute, and sharply aware of the ironies of life in the great republic. She married a German Jewish refugee, Walter Weglyn, in 1950, became a leading set and costume designer (for TV), and, still burned by experience, began in the early 60s to write her Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. It caused a sensation when it came out (in the bicentennial year!!), partly by calling a spade a spade, and suggests that, perhaps at Mount Holyoke, Michiko Nishiura learned that in our great republic biology was not fate, or should not be. By 1976 she knew how to say so. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Scotland's Patron Saint.
St. Andrew the first-called.
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St. Andrew “the first-called.” In Greek, that is St. Andrew Prōtoklētos.

November 30 has for centuries been celebrated as St. Andrew’s Day, a feast day in several Christian communions and marked (more soberly, of course) even by Presbyterians. The New Testament says little of Andrew, but he was one of the original twelve disciples, and may (John 1, 35-44) have been the first among them to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Most of Andrew’s story was corroborated (if that’s the right word) centuries ex post facto by documents that assert various details, notably that Andrew became a martyr to the faith, in Achaea, Greece, on a cross decussata (X-shaped), in the year 60 AD. That is why the Scottish national flag appears to have a white X—generally a recumbent one—on a blue background. That flag will be flying all over Scotland today, on government buildings, many churches (including Roman Catholic and Presbyterian ones), and not a few commercial establishments, for today St. Andrew is widely recognized as Scotland’s patron saint. Scotland’s new national parliament, in 2006, bravely declared November 30 to be a Scottish bank holiday. But Andrew’s patronship had been asserted about 1,000 years ago by King Malcolm III (not Shakespeare’s Malcolm, but his grandson), perhaps to give Scottish lairds another way to show their fealty in a realm in which fealty (or not) was a root cause of many a bloody battle. That being the case, November 30, 2021, would be a good time for Russia and the Ukraine to sink their differences, for Andrew is also the patron saint of both those nations, and indeed has been for a long time. That is of particular interest, for Andrew became an important saint in Christendom at about the time when the western and eastern churches were beginning to squabble about the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. As Rome declared Andrew’s brother Peter to be its rock, Andrew became the favorite saint of the Eastern (now Orthodox) churches. It was in the third century when Andrew’s relics became involved in a kind of shuttle diplomacy, moving back and forth across the Adriatic as the schism hardened and loyalties shifted. Now several churches claim to have Andrew’s relics, including Patras (in Greece, near the site of Andrew’s legendary martyrdom), Amalfi in Italy and the Catholic cathedral of Edinburgh, Scotland, where they may have arrived in 597 AD and then, a millennium later, to have escaped the iconoclasm of the Scottish Reformation. Whatever your views on Scotland, patron saints, the Protestant Reformation, or even reliquaries, please do have an excellent St. Andrew’s Day, 2021. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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'Tis better never to be known than to be ill-spoken of.
Susanna Centlivre, playwright.
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Look-ye, ‘tis my opinion, ev’ry man cheats in his way, And he is only honest who is not discover’d. Susanna Centlivre.

The Oxford English Dictionary judges the phrase “Simon Pure” as rarely used, nowadays, and it does have an ancient ring to it, biblical perhaps (Simon Peter?); but it was common usage in the Bliss household where it usually signified an unattractive mix of public righteousness and private sin, and identified one whose public pronouncements could be taken as hypocrisy. It was coined, the OED says, in a 1717 play, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, written by Susanna Centlivre, a woman of humble origins who made herself into a successful playwright. Her date of death was December 1, 1723. Little is known about her birth date or early life, though it’s probable that she took early to strolling (acting) as an escape from that earlier life and as a source of ready money. She reached London in the mid 1680s possessed of acting talent and, mysteriously, a rather good education, for as well as acting she began to write. Poetry at first, and under male or Latinate pen names: but in 1700 she produced a
play (and, soon after, two epistolary novels) under her then married name of Susanna Carroll. Mr. Carroll, if such he was, was already long dead (in a duel?), and Susanna Carroll was on her own until (acting at Windsor Castle in the male role of Alexander the Great) she caught the eye of Joseph Centlivre, Queen Anne’s cook. And it was as Susanna Centlivre, author and playwright, that she achieved her greatest successes and her lasting fame. Indeed she became well enough known to have planted several legends about her early life, some of which read sort of true, including that she gained her education at Cambridge disguised as a boy (a companion of a Cambridge undergraduate) and that she was originally of dissenting stock and parliamentary sympathies. Several of her later plays show a Protestant kind of patriotism (for the Hanoverian succession and against Catholicism and high-church Anglicanism) which did not endear her to Queen Anne but enabled her (and Mr. Centlivre) to live pretty well and in high rent accommodations. One of her plays was given the distinction of being pirated by Colley Cibber, later Poet Laureate, and she also came to the (unfavorable) notice of Alexander Pope. As for Simon Pure, he appeared in Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife as Simon, a devout and rather sanctimonious Quaker whose identity and character were taken over by another man, a man who—perhaps as a comic turn—was decidedly un-devout and un-sanctimonious. Later in the play, the real Quaker turns up again as himself, Simon pure to a fault. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Elementary, my dear Doyle.
Dr. Joseph Bell, surgeon.
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It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes … round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man. Letter, Arthur Conan Doyle to Dr. Joseph Bell.

Diagnosis depends in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state. Dr. Joseph Bell.

Today let’s celebrate the birthday of Dr. Joseph Bell, an eminent Scottish surgeon (b. Edinburgh, December 2, 1837), who also taught at the University of Edinburgh where he and well known for his exciting and often off-beat lectures and theatre demonstrations. Perhaps he could afford to be eccentric, for he was born to his trade: the great-grandson and son of surgeons. His was a long, distinguished career (he died in 1911) during which he won many honors. In due course Bell became a fellow of the Royal (Scottish) College of Surgeons and was a Deputy Lieutenant of his Scottish shire. He also served as Queen Victoria’s personal physician whenever she was in Scotland, a great honor although occasionally (no doubt) a troublesome one. A productive life, indeed, but what makes Joseph Bell particularly memorable is that, in 1877, he took on as a clerk a young gent whose name was Arthur Conan Doyle, and young Doyle was impressed, mightily, by Bell’s forensic skills. In his lectures at
Edinburgh, and in doing his rounds with his medical students, Bell would often pick a strange patient (or a stranger in a crowd) and, simply by observing the subject’s (or perhaps I should have said the suspect’s) manner, carriage, accent, vocabulary, and even his tattoos (if he had any), could deduce a very great deal about him. Bell enjoyed local Edinburgh fame for this knack, and he is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of forensic science, but we should know Bell better as the inspiration for Doyle’s great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” On the centenary of Bell’s death, in 2011, Owen Dudley Edwards, Sherlock Holmes fanatic and Professor of American history at Edinburgh, offered a memorial tribute to Bell at Bell’s graveside in the Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh, where Bell shares a plot, so to speak, with his medical ancestors. I should have liked to have been there. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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A most remarkable lady.
Phoebe Apperson Hearst, 1842-1919
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Mother of the Faithful. Báha-i name for Phoebe Apperson Hearst.

One of the more remarkable women of 19th-century America was Missouri-born (in St. Clair) as Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson, on December 3, 1842. Her father was an ambitious man whose luck was not always good, so Phoebe found her education where she could get it, at one period from a governess and at another in a log-cabin school near St. Clair, somehow picking up a reasonable command of French along the way. She was teaching school in St. Clair when,in 1862, a neighbor returned home to care for his mother, a man whom Phoebe had known since before he’d set off for gold-rush California, but found silver in Nevada, at the Comstock Lode, and he fell for Phoebe like a ton of silver ingots. So at 19 she became Phoebe Apperson Hearst, George Hearst’s wife and soon to birth their only child, William Randolph Hearst. It’s well known that George and William Randolph did well enough, but of the three Hearsts Phoebe did best, starting with when, in her level-headed way, she insisted on a prenuptial contract—just in case George, 21 years her senior, died before she did. Out west, based in San Francisco, she participated in his business life, riding trains to his silver mines in Washoe, and then on horseback to his copper mines in Anaconda, MT, and his gold mines in Dakota’s Black Hills. Along the way, Phoebe took up philanthropy, with a view towards providing his mining camps and her new hometown, San Francisco, with education and religion, typically a school or two—always with a kindergarten, a library, and a Methodist church. Phoebe Hearst became expert in both fields, and carried those interests east with her when, in 1886, George became one of California’s senators. There she was also active (and generous) in the establishment of Mount Vernon as a national museum and of the Parent Teachers’ Association (PTA) as a national organization. When George died in 1891, Phoebe became his executor and used the money to broaden her charitable horizons (not least the University of California, where she became the first woman regent in 1897), deepened her knowledge of fine art and ethnic artifacts, and discovered a more satisfactory religion in Bahá-i, converting to that “ninth way” in 1898. She also set up William at San Simeon, commissioned Julia Morgan to design his “Hearst Castle” there, and in general spoiled him rotten. But that’s another story, entertainingly if inaccurately told by Orson Welles. Well aware of her son’s frailties, Phoebe steamed on ahead, her favorite charities in tow, until the flu virus got her in 1919. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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from Boston to Boston
John Cotton, 1585-1652
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Liberty of conscience is [only?] for those who truly fear the Lord. John Cotton.

The Reverend John Cotton was born in Derby, England, on December 4, 1585. As a student, first in Derby and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, he developed astonishing skills in translation (in ancient and modern languages) and improved that to win a fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, known then and now as a hotbed of Puritanism. Cotton, beset at first by spiritual uncertainty (a state of mind he may well have learned through deep study of the writings of Jean Calvin), developed a winning persona and a reputation as a gifted preacher. He received some assurance as to his soul state in 1611, and in 1612 was installed as minister at St. Botolph’s Church, at Boston in Lincolnshire, a place in the gift of the Boston town corporation. St. Botolph’s, although a mere parish church, possessed one of the tallest church towers in England. Whether Cotton ever climbed to the top is not known, but as minister to a serious congregation he learned much perspective on the care of souls and gained a solid and widespread fame amongst English Puritans. He also had to learn to be accommodating, practicing conformity when he needed to, but still preaching a Puritan message. So he survived and prospered until, in the reign of Charles I, the king and his bishops decided to bring the Puritans to heel or, failing that, to send them away. Thus John Cotton of Boston, Lincolnshire, became John Cotton of Boston, Massachusetts, and played a leading (many would say THE leading) role in shaping American Puritanism, its Calvinism, and its congregational church order. Given his past experience, John Cotton was less tolerant of occasional conformity than he might have been. His treatment of ‘heretics’ like Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and Samuel Gorton made intolerance a way of life in early New England. But in a congregational system orthodoxy was difficult to define and perhaps impossible to maintain; and Cotton’s mediating ways with others among the heterodox gave him considerable influence and won him much love and respect. When he died, one could almost call him the Pope of New England, not a title he would have welcomed. And I don’t think it would sit well with him that, by a trick of fate or the purchase and sale of various church properties over the years, his grave is today to be found in the Episcopal cemetery. But when he was buried there in midwinter 1652-1653 it was still safely Puritan and, therefore, not yet hallowed ground. For, among others of their attributes, the Puritans were in many ways America’s first secularists. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"The wife ought to have the first child and the husband the second; then there would not be any more." Flora Timms, who had 11 siblings.
Flora Thompson, 1876-1947
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Laura looked and looked again. The small scene, so commonplace and yet so lovely, delighted her. Flora Timms Thompson, in Over to Candleford (1941).

Cottisford village is rooted in a far northeastern corner of Oxfordshire, hemmed by Notts (to the north) and Bucks (to the east and south). Its church. St. Mary’s, retains Saxon elements and a Saxon ‘look,’ and is one reason the village is a spot on the tourist trail. Another reason is to be found inside the church, a memorial tablet dedicated to Flora Thompson, a self-taught, self-declared writer whose best work is now a trilogy entitled Lark Rise to Candleford. It’s a semi-autobiographical fiction and readily translatable into the known details of Flora’s life. Flora Thompson was born Flora Jane Timms on December 5, 1876. Her birthing place was Juniper Hill (“Lark Rise”), a tiny hamlet within Cottisford parish. She was baptized at St. Mary’s, and received her formal education at the village school, built and maintained by Eton College as a kind of quid pro quo in return for a parliamentary act which gave Eton (as lord of the manor) the right to enclose Cottisford’s fields, cultivated for centuries on the basis of common fields and communal labor. Flora’s father, a skilled stonemason, may have profited from the new arrangement; in any case, Flora and her favorite siblings Betty and Edwin all became chroniclers of their lives, of their walks to and from Cottisford school, and their observations of nature (flora, fauna, and the lay of the land). Flora did well in school, but there was no question of her continuing; so she did what she could, which was to become an assistant at a series of village post offices, beginning at home and finishing up further afield near Bournemouth, on the south coast, where she learned much of human interest and where in 1903 she married John Thompson, a telegraphist with a school certificate and thus in the post office elite. Flora retained her writing ambitions. sharpened by Betty’s success (1926) with a published children’s story and perhaps also by Edwin’s death in battle at Ypres (1916). By the 1930s her stories were regularly published, and in 1938 Oxford University Press agreed to take a number of her essays and stories. These were published as Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941) and Candleford Green (1942). They sold well; in a country struggling to survive, they perhaps gave readers some sense of what might be worth preserving. There have since been posthumous publications, for instance of Flora Thompson’s nature notes, but for Flora creative life ended with news that her son Peter had been lost at sea, a victim of a U-boat attack in the North Atlantic approaches. Her own health and spirits sank too, and Flora Timms Thompson (in her fictions “Laura Timmins”) died in 1947. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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repaying debts of gratitude
Dr. Theodore Lawless, 1892-1961
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I’m simply trying to repay debts of gratitude. Dr. Theodore Lawless on his many benefactions.

Betsy Graves Reyneau, a portraitist about whom we should all know more, was born in Detroit in 1888, broke with her family about her artistic ambitions (and her campaign for the vote), then spent much of the interwar period in self-conscious exile, in Paris. When war broke out in 1939, she returned stateside but to the American South, where she became deeply involved (re-involved) in the civil rights movement. But what could a white woman do? Well, this one could paint, and she set herself a lifetime task of portraying distinguished African-Americans. Most of her extant portraits are now owned by the Smithsonian, and her subjects included several who have featured in these notes: Ralph Bunche, Mary Church Terrell, Paul Robeson, Mary Mcleod Bethune, and a dozen others. Among them was Theodore Kenneth Lawless, born in rural Louisiana on December 6, 1892, whom Betsy Rayneau painted when, in 1954, he was awarded the NAACP’s Springarn Medal. Educated first at southern, segregated
colleges, he moved north to further his studies, first at Kansas and then at Northwestern’s medical school. There he impressed many with, and after receiving his MD and MSc (1919 and 1920) he went on to do research at Columbia and then Harvard under a Rosenwald scholarship. Lawless became an internationally-known dermatologist who did not try to change skin color (his own or anyone’s) but sought the underlying causes of actual skin problems, including syphilis, leprosy, and various fungi. He studied and worked in Paris and Vienna, publishing along the way, and then returned to black Chicago where he established a skin clinic. He never forgot the Rosenwalds and other Jewish philanthropists, to whom (he felt) he owed his success, and after the establishment of the state of Israel Lawless was active there in setting up dermatology programs and institutions. Back in Chicago, he ran his Southside clinic, invested wisely, and was (perhaps) the first Black MD to become a
millionaire. Lawless lived another seven years after he was painted by Betsy Reyneau (one wonders what they talked about during his sittings), and at his death in 1961 he left his very considerable estate to a variety of good causes in Chicago, Israel, Kansas, and Louisiana where (he remembered) a Jewish peddler in a New Orleans street market was one of the few whites who treated Lawless and his family with respect and consideration, two courtesies which almost everyone deserves. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
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"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
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