BOB'S BITS

[PanBiker]

The pub is the "Cross Gaits"

Cross Gaits.JPG

[Big Kev]

They do a nice bit o' dinner in there.

[Stanley]

Yup Ian. My memory plays tricks.... Still a good example and free beer tomorrow.

[Stanley]

The learning of boundaries and capitals, the location of cities and rivers, was the burden imposed upon the memories of helpless children.
Zonia Baber, 1862-1956.
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It is impossible to realize our ideals in teaching so long as the 'factory system' obtains in our schools, No teacher can turn out forty pieces of humanity yearly, each bearing the same stamp, and not do violence to her better self. Zonia Baber, as quoted in Scientific American, March 2013.

It is not clear to me why, on August 24, 1862, in Clark County, Illinois, new parents called their new girl baby Mary Arizona Baber. Certainly the state didn’t yet exist, and President Lincoln, despite the urgency, didn’t get around to naming the territorial government “Arizona” until the next year. In any case, the child was soon called “Zonia,” a nickname that pleasingly echoes the the classical period’s heroine-rebel Zenobia, itself used by Nathaniel Hawthorne to name his feminist protagonist (a stand-in for Margaret Fuller) in The Blithedale Romance (1852). Whatever the origin of her name, Zonia Baber the real person would become her very own feminist protagonist, breaking through barriers for herself and encouraging other people to do the same. One way for independent females of her era to get ahead was to become a teacher, and she went at it purposefully at the Chicago Normal School. While there, or shortly after, she fell prey to a fascination with geology and geography, and soon elbowed her way into becoming the first female to major in geology at the University of Chicago (young women were before excluded from the major because they were thought inappropriate company on geology field trips) getting her bachelors in 1904, aged only 42. There is an 1895 picture of her, repeated on several internet sites, standing ramrod-straight, pickaxe on shoulder, appropriately clad in a sensible hat, black dress, stockings, and (I am sure) stout black shoes, ready to collect fossils at the university’s Mazon Creek site. Zonia’s image exudes her determination to embark on a long career as a geologist and geographer, and, in unpaid labor, as a pioneer agitator for equal rights in Chicago, equal rights not only for women but also for people of color, immigrants, and others wrongfully excluded from enjoying their equal share in American freedoms. That is what she did, as a department head at the University of Chicago, a curriculum designer for Cook County and then Illinois schools, as a founder-member of Chicago’s NAACP chapter, and as a peace campaigner. However, I could not find mention of her ever getting to Arizona. She must have managed that, for she kept on breaking barriers until she died, at 94, in a Chicago nursing home. ©

[Stanley]

I always wanted to be a somebody..
Althea Neale Gibson, 1927-2003.
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I always wanted to be a somebody. If I’ve made it, it’s half because I was game to take a wicked amount of punishment and half because there were an awful lot of people who cared enough to help me. Althea Gibson

Of all major sports, tennis maintained longest the distinction between those who played for love of the game (“amateurs”) and those who played for money (“professionals”). In the USA, along with golf, tennis was associated with membership in private clubs, country clubs everywhere and in the larger cities clubs devoted only or mainly to tennis. As much a private preserve as it was a competitive sport, tennis was, accordingly, the most forbidding bastion of ‘white privilege’ for players of color. She who most famously stormed the ramparts was Althea Neale Gibson, born on August 25, 1927 in Silver, South Carolina. Her parents were sharecroppers who, come the Great Depression, fled rural poverty to settle in Harlem where the opportunities were not much greater than in Silver. Still, there were some, and Althea Gibson honed her talents through street clubs (e.g. the Police Athletic League) and, she always said, street fighting. In tennis, not a sport she initially liked very much,
her instinct to fight got in the way of her ability to win, but her talents were noticed and she gained friends and mentors, notably Walter Johnson, a black doctor anxious to break the color line in tennis. Along the way, she returned to high school (a segregated technical school in Wilmington, NC), got her college degree (at Florida A&M), and continued to win in amateur tournaments around the country. It was hard work. When (age 23) she won the US Nationals (now the Open) at Forest Hills, she was the first black player, man or woman, ever to set foot on the hallowed turf, let alone cop the trophy. From then on Gibson was a news item, competing (and winning) at all the “grand slam” championships, France in 1956 and the next year Wimbledon, Australia, and (again) at Forest Hills. At Wimbledon she received the championship trophy from the Queen, not bad going for a sharecroppers’ daughter. But she was still (necessarily) an amateur and as she later reflected you can’t eat a trophy. There followed a long period, not entirely happy, where she played for pay, not only in tennis but also in golf, as a jazz singer and saxophonist, and even as an actress (where she refused to speak her part in Hollywood’s idea of Ebonics). She also held various athletics posts, notably in New Jersey, but when she suffered a stroke in 1992 she still couldn’t afford it, and her fellow tennis professionals raised $1 million to get her through it. She died in 2003. Today her statues are everywhere, but they cannot tell the full story of her struggles against white privilege in one of the most privileged of all sports. ©.

[Tripps]

That's good to see. I suggested Althea Gibson to Uncle Bob, when he asked for candidates nearly three years ago.
It was worth the wait. I was unaware of most of that.

[Stanley]

Like the mills of God he grinds slow but exceeding small....

[Stanley]

Peggy Guggenheim, 1898-1979.
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I look back on my life with great joy. I think it was a very successful life. I did what I wanted and never cared what anyone thought. Women’s lib? I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it. Peggy Guggenheim.

Peggy Guggenheim was the first (but certainly not the last) woman in her family to prove the common-sense notion that, while you do not need to be a male to become eminent in your chosen field, it certainly helps to be rich, and in your own right, too. She was born (in New York City, on August 26, 1898) Marguerite Guggenheim, soon to be called “Peggy” and the granddaughter of both Meyer Guggenheim and Joseph Seligman, magnates (respectively) in mining and banking. Accordingly, when in 1912 her father (Benjamin Guggenheim) died with legendary insouciance aboard the Titanic, she was in line to assume control of her own fortune quite early in life, which she did on reaching her majority in 1919. Granted, it might have been more had she been male, but then it might have been more if her dad had paid more attention to his (or his wife’s} family business. But Benjamin was more a high liver (he traveled with his mistress on the ill-fated Titanic) than he was a captain of industry or a titan of finance, and so Peggy’s inheritance was relatively small ($2.5 million). She could have lived high on that (in today’s $$, it was about $40 million) and without much effort, but she was well-educated, inquisitive, and ambitious, already unconventional in her views and values, and so she took her money and moved to Europe to become a founder member of the Lost Generation, on the lookout for talent and increasingly intent on making her mark as a cultural leader. After a flirtation with politics (she funded Emma Goldman for a crucial while) Peggy settled down as a matron of the arts, and a patron of artists. Indeed she married two of them, in succession, the Dadaist Lawrence Vail and then the surrealist Max Ernst, but her chief occupation was to buy, sell, and exhibit works that struck her fancy and seemed to have a future. She had much to do with making that future, too, first as a gallery owner and exhibitor, and then by funding artists of promise. Her galleries were in London, then Paris, and then (after WWII) Venice. Today’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection rests mainly in Venice but parts of it are always on display at her uncle Solomon’s Guggenheim Museum in New York. Some would maintain that she was nothing more than an over-rich dilettante, and her vigorous and varied sex life adds to that idea. but in her collecting and in her sponsorships she did much to shape our conceptions of what “modern art” is. In that she was a successful woman. ©

[Stanley]

"I like contradictions."
Man Ray, 1890-1976
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I like contradictions. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society. Man Ray. 1890-1976.

Many immigrants to the USA changed their names to fit in, to conform to a culture that Alexis de Tocqueville and others have called a ‘democratic totalitarianism.’ But when Emmanuel Radnitzky became Man Ray, it’s doubtful that he meant to achieve anything like conformity. The name change came in 1914, or thereabouts, and young Emmanuel had already attended the famous Armory Exhibition (1913), in New York, a show distinguished by its modernist artworks, notably Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.” At the same exhibition, Teddy Roosevelt quipped that the Duchamp looked more like “a staircase descending a nude,” but Emmanuel Radnitzky was inspired by Duchamp and other Armory artists to leave behind his formal training in traditional artistic styles and take up a life in which breaking the rules and escaping from tradition was the main theme—if, indeed, there was any theme at all. In 1916 he mounted his second exhibition as “Man Ray,” and it was a chaotic assemblage of paintings, drawings, photos, and found objects now seen as pre-Dada. For Ray it was a “self-portrait;” that is the title he (defiantly?) gave to the whole show; and it was the way he lived his long life. Man Ray, or Emmanuel Radnitzky, was born into an immigrant family on August 27, 1890, in Philadelphia. His parents were poor and worked hard in the clothing industry, and scholars have since noted that many of Man Ray’s artworks resemble what you might see on a cutting room table in a tailor’s shop. But there is too much variety in Ray’s work, especially his experimental work in photography (much of it learned during his Parisian affair with Lee Miller, an experimenter in photography herself). He changed styles easily, and he’s been classified as a Dadaist, a cubist, a surrealist, and an expressionist. Probably “all of the above” would do him justice. At Paris in the early 1920s he was helped along by Peggy Guggenheim (his portraits of her are now museum pieces) and other
friends, but he became a name unto himself. He died in 1976, in Paris, leaving behind him his third (and last) wife, Juliet Browner who he’d married, in 1946, in a double ceremony with Max Ernst and Ernst’s new love, the painter Dorothea Tanning. Man Ray’s autobiography, published in 1963, is Self-Portrait. The title made a nice book-end with the 1916 exhibition that introduced him to the world, but what else could he have called it? ©.

[Stanley]

[[in writing poetry] nothing is too small. Rita Dove
Rita Dove, poet, born 1952.
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Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry. Rita Dove.

I am only an occasional poet, or a poet occasionally. So I know little about (and have no mastery of) form; what is worse I make little effort to keep up with contemporary poets or their work. So today up popped Rita Dove, not because she was a poet I’d read but because she was born, in Akron the tire city, on August 28, 1952. She was (in school) a high-flier, went to college as a National Merit Scholar, met a German scholar, Fred Viebahn, when she was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, married him in 1979, and (having begun to write poetry at a young age and a furious rate), became pretty famous in the 1980s. The Pulitzer Prize came her way in 1987, when she was teaching at Arizona State, and that moved her to Virginia. It was a convenient move for soon enough she was U.S. Poet Laureate and also for the state of Virginia. Since then she’s served on many editorial boards, won many awards, and has collected what may be a record number of honorary doctorates. She’s also stirred
controversy, notably for her editorship of The Penquin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry, wherein you will not find, for instance, any poems by Allen Ginsberg or Sylvia Plath. She’s offered an interesting reason for that “bias” (a matter, she has said, of copyrights and costs), but the temperature of the critical exchanges was raised, I am sure, by the fact that Rita Dove is black. Not, perhaps, very very “black” in terms of our modern debates about cultural diversity. Her 2009 collection is called Sonata Mulattica, and she herself is a product of a black meritocracy (her dad, for instance, was a high-up chemist in the tire industry). And although one of her earliest volumes of poetry (Thomas and Beulah, 1986) was based loosely on the hard lives of her maternal grandparents, the Dove poems one finds today on the usual websites (e.g. the Poetry Foundation and the American Academy of Poets) are not noticeably “black” in tone or content or form. Nor are they polemics. Dove’s sensibilities are broad and inclusive, and I am inclined to believe the other part of her defense (of her editorial exclusions from the Penguin anthology), that she was anxious for readers to hear new and different voices. Not incidentally, or at least not entirely incidentally, Rita Dove is also an accomplished ballroom dancer. You can see her on many You Tube videos, in both formation dancing and taking the floor with her husband (still Fred Viebahn) in ballroom dance contests. Those I’ve seen this morning make her out as a Latin American. In short, it’s difficult to pin Rita down; but the poems I’ve read this morning seem to make that a worthwhile task. ©

[Stanley]

It is necessary to decolonize our minds. René Depestre.
René Depestre is 95 today.
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It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner lives, at the same time that we decolonize society. René Depestre, born August 29, 1926, in Haiti.

An interesting charge against the current ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement is that it is “un-American.” But what could be more ‘American’ than a demand for equal treatment before the laws and equal empowerment in politics and society? In truth American civil rights and black power uprisings have for a long time operated within international contexts. Among the longest-lived of these contexts is imperialism, and for several centuries now imperialism has been stoked by racism, more specifically a racism directed against people of color. This idea was put forward by our own W. E. B. Dubois, notably in 1900 at the first Pan-African Congress. Another person of color who has spent his life in struggle against racial imperialism is René Depestre, born in Haiti on August 29, 1926, and still—as far as I know—engaged in the same struggle. Today he should be celebrating his 95th birthday in exile, in France, the latest in a long series of exiles from Haiti, where (since the days of the ill-famed “Papa Doc” Duvalier) the authorities have generally found Depestre persona non grata. Paris was Depestre’s first exile, following the collapse of the Haitian revolution of 1945. But soon enough Depestre was exiled from France (and all French territories) because he took a militant, highly public line against French imperialism, particularly in North Africa. That led to a series of exiles, first in Prague, then in Cuba (pre- and post-Castro) where Depestre found he didn’t like communism very much either. Since his exile from Cuba (1978) he’s lived in France, a residence made possible by his status as a UNESCO employee, then by his growing literary eminence and, since 1991, by formal French citizenship. Perhaps the US intelligence services, a little slow on the uptake, still regard Depestre as a communist threat, but in France (and Europe generally) he’s seen as a poet, a more accurate view shared by the Guggenheim foundation which awarded him a generous fellowship in 1995. He’s won just about every award going in France, even one from the university city of Montpellier (appropriately, the Prix Antigone.). An exile from the age of 19, by now he sees himself as a nomad, and he’s become, since the 1990s, a critic of Négritude, indeed of any idea of racial essentialism. Exploitation, René Depestre seems to think, is where you find it, and he’s found it in a great many places. ©.

[Stanley]

"These people are not aliens."
Luisa Moreno, 1907-1992
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These people are not aliens. They have contributed their sacrifices, youth, and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California’s industrialized agriculture . . . they cannot be uprooted without the destruction of democracy and human liberties for the whole population. Luisa Moreno, “Caravans of Sorrow,” 1940.

Sometimes, things do change, or at least their names do. When in the late 1940s the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched a campaign to deport “illegals”, it was called ‘Operation Wetback.’ Among those deported was Luisa Moreno, on grounds of her (former) membership in the Communist Party, more likely because she’d made a nuisance of herself through her activism as a labor organizer. But she had to transform herself first. Luisa Moreno was born as Bianca Rosa Rodriguez on August 30, 1907, a daughter of the Guatemalan aristocracy. She proved unwilling to adopt traditional female roles in that class, and in her teens organized a movement to open Guatemalan universities to women. She then left for Mexico City, aiming for an independent life as a journalist but marrying an artist. They moved to New York City and for the next two decades Luisa Moreno (as she now called herself) busied herself as an advocate for poor workers. Luisa Moreno began by organizing Latina workers in
New York’s clothing trades, and she did well enough to become a paid organizer for the American Federation of Labor. She declared her independence from her abusive husband and moved to Florida to organize cigar workers, both native blacks and immigrant Hispanics. Moreno herself moved leftwards to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the CIO) and, for a time, to the Communist Party. Then on she went to the western states and their agricultural worker immigrants. Socially confident and bilingual, having finally picked up her university degree, Moreno became a noted speaker (her “Caravan of Sorrow” speech was widely circulated) and a founder member of El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española and the editor of a CIO newspaper that focused on cannery and agricultural workers. Deported to Guatemala in 1950, she again found herself without a country after the US-inspired overthrow of the leftist government of Arbenz Guzmán. After a few years in Cuba, Luisa Moreno moved back to Guatemala, where she died in 1992. She is back in the USA today, the subject of a well-regarded biography and of exhibition on her, and her life, in the National Museum of American History. It is part of the museum’s “American Enterprise” section. Of course. Where else could she be? ©

[Stanley]

Francesc Boix i Campo. 1920-1951.
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See how they conceive evil, and are pregnant with mischief, and bring forth lies. They make a pit, digging it out, and fall into the hole that they have made. Their mischief returns upon their own heads, and on their own heads their violence descends. A translation from Psalms 7, as rendered in publicity for the 2018 film, El fotógrafo de Mauthausen.

The idea of “bearing witness” is older than the Book of Psalms. Much later came a witness-bearer called (in Catalan) Francesc Boix i Campo, who lived through his years at the Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria to bear witness against its cruelties. You can find his testimony on-line, at Yale Law School’s Avalon Project. But in Boix’s case we do not have to take his word for it, for he was also a photographer. He’d developed this skill as a tailor’s son, in Barcelona, where he was born on August 31, 1920. As a teenager, he took his camera with him to the Spanish Civil War, where he fought on the Republican side. Exiled to France, he and thousands of his companions were imprisoned in French concentration camps until the German invasion (1940) forced their liberation to serve the French forces as laborers and construction battalions. At the fall of France, Boix became a prisoner of war; when the Nazis discovered his past, he was sent to Mauthausen (along with about 8,000 other
Spanish republicans) as an “incorrigible” political prisoner. There he joined Jews, gypsies, and other undesirables, and there he might have suffered the fate of most—death by torture, hanging, firing squad, or simple exhaustion—but for his skill as a photographer. The Nazis liked to document their work, and photographs were perfect witness of their devotion to the Fuhrer. So the horrors of Mauthausen were documented by a young Catalan. And so, also, we do not have to take Boix’s word for it, for he bore witness by preserving his pictures, in negative form, hiding them in the camp or smuggling them out. By the time he testified (at the Dachau trials, January 28 and 29, 1946) the allied liberators had found well over 1000 photographs which bore witness, and as we know one picture is worth 1000 words. Liberated, but still stateless (Generalissimo Franco was still in power in Spain) Francesc Boix i Campo took employment—as a photographer—with socialist and communist newspapers in Paris. But he’d contracted tuberculosis at Mauthausen, and died of its complications in 1951, just before his 31st birthday. His witness survives. His photos keep turning up, and in Barcelona you’ll find his memorial at the Francisco Boix Public Library, just around the corner from his birthplace, where he is called “a photographer, fighter against fascism, prisoner at Mauthausen, and the only Spaniard to be called as a witness at the Nuremburg Trials.” As words go, those are accurate enough. ©

[Stanley]

"I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.."
Lily Tomlin, 82 today.
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If we all grew up to be what we wanted to be, the world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas. Lily Tomlin.

Lily Tomlin is, I hope, enjoying her 82nd birthday today, having been born (in Detroit) Mary Jean Tomlin on September 1, 1939. Lily was the daughter of white, Southern Baptist migrants (from Paducah, KY) Lillie Mae, a housewife, and Guy, an alcoholic factory worker, and she loved them both: her mother for a very long time, for Lillie Mae didn’t die until 2005, aged 91. That’s one reason Lily Tomlin never really “came out” as gay even though those in the know knew that she’d been ‘in a relationship’ with the writer Jane Wagner since 1971. That was just when Lily Tomlin was establishing a name for herself (from 1969) as a many-faced regular on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. In that show, several of Tomlin’s characters seem to have come right out of her old Detroit neighborhood. Probably that is the case, because she’d started writing her own material (“from life”) as a stand-up comic in Detroit clubs. You could say, too, that she’d learned to act as a rebellious child, at home. Once, when she contested with her father for ownership of that morning’s newspapers, he’d blown his stack and hit her (with his belt) across her legs, and Lily ran out of their first-floor apartment onto the street yelling for help because her father was beating her. Her dad (“I loved him, really”) reacted well, and the little girl’s rights to the newspapers were established. Lily hit the headlines with Rowan & Martin just before her father died; he was so proud of her that she was as embarrassed as she was pleased. Just so, in her long career, many of her characters have really been caricatures: outrageous people—or people causing outrage—with a comic streak in them that can hardly be beaten. Tomlin, at base a very similar person, brings them alive on screen or on stage in a way that has kept her at the forefront of movies and television actors for, now, 50 years, most recently in the streaming serial Grace and Frankie, in which two old friends (old friends in life, too, for the lead roles are played by Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda) make the disconcertingly comic discovery that their husbands are, in fact, sweethearts. If, as you leaf through your 100s of streaming channels, you see something with Lily Tomlin in it, you should watch it. She’s only 82, and she won’t be around forever. And maybe, some day, they’ll pay her as much as they pay male stars. That would give her one less reason to run out into the street, screaming. ©

[Stanley]

"Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due!‘Athens is saved, thank Pan,’ go shout!”
The First Marathon.
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Unforeseeing one! Yes, he fought on the Marathon day:
So, when Persia was dust, all cried “To Akropolis!
Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due!
‘Athens is saved, thank Pan,’ go shout!” He flung down his shield,
Ran like fire once more: and the space ‘twixt the Fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
Till in he broke: “Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine thro’ clay,
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died–the bliss!
--Elizabeth Barrett, The Battle of Marathon. 1818.

Stories about anything that happened 2600 years ago need to be taken with the proverbial grain of solt, or on faith, but the Battle of Marathon (in which a handful of Athenians defeated, then slaughtered, an invading Persian horde probably did happen, more or less as read, on or about September 10, 490 BCE. But the famous run of the Greek messenger Pheidippides, 40 km. from Marathon to Athens, probably did not; it arose from a later legend penned first by the Roman writer Lucian (in the first century CE) and then vastly improved upon in a long poem, The Battle of Marathon, composed by the precocious Elizabeth Barrett, aged 11 or 12. The poem, following Lucian, has the exhausted Pheidippides shouting out the joyous news in rhyming form, and then dying. After all, he had just run 40 km. over rough country, at what can only be called a killing pace. Except that it didn’t happen. But Pheidippides (or someone) almost certainly did, on or about September 2, 490 BCE, run a far longer
course, from Athens to Sparta to request Sparta’s aid in resisting the Persians and, thus, saving Greece. That distance was (and of course still is) 240 Km, and it took Pheidippides the better part of two days. We have that from Herodotus, who was not an eyewitness but probably depended on eye-witness testimony to tell his tale. That this could indeed happen was further tested by four RAF misfits about 40 years ago, three of whom finished the distance (in much less than two days) and lived to tell the tale. Just imagine if the Olympics included a 240-km. “spartathon!” And since Pheidippides was, in fact, a professional runner (elected message-carrier by the demos), it seems plausible. 40 Km is easier to stomach than 240, and that’s one reason that the Olympics committee chose the marathon run instead of the Sparta-slog as one of the classic Olympian events, beginning in 1896. At that time, the Marathon story was more popular, anyway, seeming to Baron de Coubertin (and others
among the organizers of the first modern games) to be all about a famous victory not only of Greeks over Persians but of the “west” over the “east.” Western civilization would rather find its roots in classical Athens than in barbarian Persia. The inclusion of the “marathon” in the modern games was, in this sense, an expression of modern (19th-century) western imperialism. But Elizabeth Barrett’s poem still reads nicely. If you have time to run a marathon, you have time to read it. ©

[Tripps]

The inclusion of the “marathon” in the modern games was, in this sense, an expression of modern (19th-century) western imperialism.

Yeah right. . . . Look hard enough and there'll be a connection.

I found this -

For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor.

That should be enough to get her 'cancelled' in these more enlightened days. Sadly no connection to the 'clmate emergency' though.

[Stanley]

"Trouble is news, and gathering it is my job."
Marguerite Higgins, 1920-1966.
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I wouldn’t be here if there were no trouble. Trouble is news, and gathering it is my job. Marguerite Higgins, journalist.

My dad, when head of Drake University’s journalism program, found it difficult to get good reporting jobs for his female students. That problem produced the shortest letter of recommendation I have ever seen, to the editor of the Kansas City Star: “If you don’t hire this young woman you will have only yourself to blame.” The young woman got the job, and she sent us a copy of that letter when dad died in 1994. In the 1950s, when that letter was written, reporting was then still at the male end of the profession. Good reporting required competitive behavior, toughness of mind, and—often—a level of incivility that were not thought to be ideal female traits. Most emphatically, reporting on war, from a war zone, was still a man’s job. One woman who broke through the barriers was Marguerite Higgins, an American born in Hong Kong on September 3, 1920. With her family she returned to the USA in 1929 and was encouraged to believe that she could make her way, herself. She took that
determination to Berkeley where she majored in French and edited the student newspaper. The French major was an insurance policy, but journalism was her goal; pursuing it, she applied (late) to the graduate program at Columbia, managed to scrape in, and was immediately haunted by the story, spread amongst her male colleagues, that she’d used sex to make the grade. Her sin of being an ambitious woman was made worse by being (also) an attractive woman. Such stories pursued her as she worked her way up the professional ladder, reporting from the European front in WWII, then from Korea, and finally from Viet Nam, and along the way becoming a bureau chief (in various foreign locales) for the New York Herald Tribune. But the “Girl War Correspondent” (as Life magazine called her in a 1951 feature story) won through to the Pulitzer Prize (1951) for being a really good girl war correspondent. First editors, then even generals, learned to put up with her. She accompanied the third wave in
the 1950 Inchon landings and wrote stirring dispatches while under fire. She took her professionalism and her prejudices with her to Vietnam: her distrust of generals, her veneration for the common GI, and her visceral anti-communism. The generals couldn’t convince her (in 1965 she was already calling the Viet Nam war a “tragedy”) nor rid themselves of her, but a tropical parasite got her. She was transferred stateside in late 1965 but died in January 1966. A great many women have followed in her footsteps, which would have pleased her and did surprise my father. ©

[Stanley]

Wherein a chocolate inheritance is put to work.
Ruth Fry, 1878-1962
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. . . exercising goodness towards every living creature . . . being singly attended to, people become tender-hearted and sympathizing; but when rejected, the mind becomes shut up in a contrary disposition. John Woolman, American Quaker.

Many people are vaguely aware of how Quakers came into this world to do good and ended up doing very well, but the story is clarified or crystallized by Sir Edward Fry (1827-1918) and his Quaker brood of 9 children. Fry himself inherited part of the Fry family’s chocolate and confectionary fortune, but the liberation of Quakers from the rigors of the Test Acts enabled him, instead, to spread sweetness and light through the practice of law, notably as a high court judge and then as an active member of the International Court of Justice at the Hague. He was also a fine scientist (an expert on mosses) and wrote a damning report on the extent to which the British mission to “civilize” China depended on maintaining the opium trade. His children, sustained also by chocolate money, moved into similar lines of good works, in art, in science, in social work and penal reform. Among them was Ruth Fry, born Anna Ruth in London on September 4, 1878. Growing up in a large family which chattered all the time (Virginia Woolf complained) about the doing of good, the serving of society, and the equality of souls. Ruth hit her stride during the Boer Wars of 1899-1902. While Winston Churchill was making a name for himself as a dashing reporter on and courageous practitioner of war, Ruth Fry devoted her energies to serving Boer women and children whom the British had forced into concentration camps. She fed and watered not only their bodies but also their souls, preaching through action her pacifist and equalitarian ideals. That holistic view of war relief—nutritional and psychological—stuck with Ruth Fry for the rest of her long life, and was applied by her in her relief work during World War I, the Russian civil wars of 1919-1923 and beyond to the second world war. Ruth Fry worked not only to save individuals but to lay the foundations needed to rebuild shattered societies. Pursuing the goal of “efficiency” in international charity meant, to her, that she and the organizations she ran (notably the Friends War Victims Relief Committee) would aim always for a peaceful, Quaker-like future. Other relief agencies believed that saving lives was the main task, and perhaps the only legitimate one. Ruth continued to see things her way throughout the rest of her life, and her labors did not end until her death in 1962. ©.

[Stanley]

should auld acquaintance be forgot . . . .
Robert Fergusson, 1750-1774
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For nought can cheer the heart sae weil
As can a canty Highland reel,
It even vivifies the heel . . . From “The Daft Days,” by Robert Fergusson.

Scots is a language still spoken as a first tongue by about 1.5 million people. Its closest relative is English, from which it diverged about 900 years ago: and linquists now speak of some English words as “borrowings” from Scots. Of these some are unsurprising, “laddie,” “lassie,” and “links” for instance, but try “Halloween” and you’ll find it’s old Scots: “hallow-e’en” for ‘all hallows evening.’ And we all know, from long ago, how to sing “auld lang syne.” That lyric brings up Rabbie Burns; rightly for Burns’s genius and his popularity were born of a Scots revival, from the time when Scots (and other things Scottish like kilts and sporrans and Gaelic) were with malice aforethought cast into the outer darkness by the conquering English and their mother tongue. Burns is often hailed as the savior of the Scots language, but he knew that he followed in the train of others, notably the poet Robert Fergusson, born on September 5, 1750 in a vennel just off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. “Vennel” is a Scots word, an independent borrowing from the French, and probably Fergusson’s parents spoke Scots (they were poor farmers from Aberdeenshire), but that tongue was not to be his way forward in a Scotland still reeling from the 1745 rebellion. He was educated, instead, in English, in Edinburgh schools and then at university in St. Andrews. He was a rebellious sort, though, one with a sense of humor. An early poem was a comic elegy, written in Scots, on the death of his mathematics professor. That may be why he did not receive a degree; instead he moved back to Edinburgh and kept on writing, in Scots. His ‘auld Reikie’ was popular, and helped to fix Edinburgh itself with that odoriferous nickname. Fergusson’s life was short, towards its end not happy, and he died, possibly a suicide, in an Edinburgh asylum in 1774. He had published, and his poetry—in Scots—gained popularity. His choice of Scots was nationalistic (and anti-English?) and it inspired young Robert Burns (1759-1796) to think that he might find his own voice in the old tongue. There persists a dispute about whether, or to what extent, Burns borrowed actual phrases or subject matter from Fergusson; but it was Burns himself who acknowledged some kind of debt by commissioning, and paying for, a memorial headstone (Fergusson had been buried in an unmarked grave). Thus began the Scottish habit of memorializing Fergusson. You can find him today, in many places, notably a statue in bronze, striding confidently along Canongate Kirk, on his way to immortality. ©

[Stanley]

As liberty and intelligence have increased the people have revolted against theological dogmas that contradict common sense and wound the soul.
Catherine Beecher, 1800-1878
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It is the right and duty of every woman to employ the power of organization and agitation in order to gain advantages which are given to the one sex and unjustly withheld from the other. Catherine Esther Beecher.

Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) transformed himself from a blacksmith’s boy into the most influential Christian clergyman in US history. In the process, he softened American Calvinism, invading God’s sovereignty with self-help and social reform. He’s best-known today for his (contested) leadership in American anti-slavery and his visceral anti-Catholicism, but perhaps we should think of him, too, as an extraordinary father. His belief that people of good will and right faith could reform themselves and their societies helped his children to transform themselves from mewling babies into accomplished adults. There were 13 Beecher kids in all (nine by his first marriage to Roxana Foote and four by his second to Harriet Porter) and 10 of them became famous enough to merit inclusion in Wikipedia. Today the most famed of the two Beecher broods are Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, but give a thought, too, to the eldest of all, Catherine Esther Beecher, born on September 6,
1800. First she become (at only 16) a kind of deputy mother to all the rest (when Roxana Beecher died); therefore she deserves at least honorable mention for distinguished parenting. More importantly, Catherine became a leading advocate for women’s rights, notably the right to a good education. She got one herself, mainly at home through self-study and a grueling reading regime; but she’s better known as an advocate for institutional schooling for girls and women. She founded and taught in two female academies, first in Connecticut and then in Ohio. But that work proved too much for her frail physique and, from 1837, she devoted her life to the cause as a pamphleteer, speaker, and a leader of women’s movements, and not only in education. This call to women to undertake public advocacy for public causes was, in all, Catherine Beecher’s most radical innovation. The root cause of female inequality was the idea, based on custom and framed into law, that the female was a private
person, not a public one. Catherine, at 22, had lost her fiancé (a Yale professor) at sea in a shipwreck. In that same year she founded her first school. Unlike her step-sister Harriet, Catherine never advocated women’s suffrage, but she believed ever so strongly that adult women’s domestic roles—as wives and mothers—were themselves of such profound public importance that they should be fulfilled by women who were, in mind and intellect, the equals of men. ©

[Stanley]

"one whose very name speaks favor divine".
Grace Darling
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A maiden gentle, yet, at duty’s call
Firm and unflinching as the Lighthouse reared
On the island rock, her lonely dwelling-place;
Or like the invincible Rock itself that braves,
Age after age, the hostile elements,
As when it guarded holy Cuthbert’s cell.
William Wordsworth, “Grace Darling”

At dawn on September 7, 1838, Grace Darling awoke in the Longstone Lighthouse, Farne Islands, to spy the wreck of the steamer Forfarshire, which had been driven on the rocks. The mainland lifeboat could not be launched given the onshore gale, so Grace and her father, William, rowed a fishing boat out to the wreck, to take off, first, four men and a woman, Sarah Dawson, to safety on Longstone. Grace remained at Longstone to care for Mrs. Dawson, whose two young children had been lost, while William and three of the men rowed back to pick up four other survivors. Their exploit made William a hero and made Grace Darling into an icon of womanly courage and strength, a true, queenly heroine fit for the new Queen, Victoria. Her Majesty Treasury sent them £50 and a gold coin, a national subscription raised £750 for Grace and £270 for her father (the whole equal to about £125,000 in today’s £££), and the family made more from selling locks of Grace’s hair and fragments of the dress she wore on her saving mission. Her exploit won her also the patronage of the Duke of Northumberland, who (among other gifts) donated the services of his business agent to invest and safeguard her money. Grace Darling’s exploit, somewhat overcooked by the press, became at once a legend and spawned poetry and songs down to the present day. As William Wordsworth had it, in his own memorial poem, “Grace Darling,”
The natural heart is touched, and public way
And crowded street resound with ballad strains,
Inspired by one whose very name bespeaks
Favour divine . . .
Sadly, Grace Darling, only 22 at the time of her brave deed, was perhaps already consumptive. When she became very ill, the Duchess of Northumberland took her in at Alnwick Castle and put her into the care of the duke’s physician. But Grace wanted to die at home, and that she did, in October 1842. In the Farne Islands at St. Cuthbert’s and ashore at St. Aidan’s (those names were already sacred in the islands) there are monuments and a stained-glass window in her memory. More fittingly, perhaps, the inshore lifeboat at RNLI Seahouses is called the “Grace Darling.” It’s due for replacement in 2028, and the Royal Naval Lifeboat Institution, still a charity, is seeking donations. ©.

[PanBiker]

The foreshore on the mainland is littered with fragments of dining service china and pottery from the Forfarshire. We have a few pieces from visits to the area.

[Stanley]

Soldiers are dreamers . . . of firelit homes, clean beds and wives. . .
Siegfried Sassoon, 1886-1967
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Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
Siegfried Sassoon, from “Dreamers”

The British “War Poets” seem today (and ironically) to be an expanding generation. The Imperial War Museum lists nine, and a Google search goes way beyond that to include poets of WWII. Most would limit membership to the poets of the “Great War” as it was called by optimists and pessimists alike. The ruling triumvir consists of Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon, and Sassoon is easy to remember because he survived the war (Owen was killed in battle, exactly one week before the Armistice, and Brooke died of septicemia in 1915). Siegfried Sassoon, born on September 8, 1886, lived on until 1967, spending his later years journaling his life, writing poetry, roaming the countryside, and, until age got the better of him, playing cricket. These were also pastimes of his youth, and he followed them through life not because of income from his poetry but because he was born into wealth, not only the moneyed wealth of his father, a financier, but the artistic and cultural
wealth of his mother, Georgiana Theresa Thornycroft, and her talented family. Indeed, Sassoon called his first attempt at autobiography Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), a title which, given his poetry and his war experiences, combined truth with irony. In his youth, Sassoon attended university but left without a degree. Until the war, he kept on hunting foxes, playing cricket, and versifying. He also had discovered his homosexuality, reasonably safe for a man of his class and his habits. So when war came he was quickly commissioned and sent off to die; instead he lived and displayed courage enough to win him the Military Cross (MC) and to be recommended for the Victoria Cross (VC). His fellow junior officers and his men called him “Mad Jack.” The war made the young versifier into a poet who found moral and intellectual relief in writing, directly and elliptically, about the cruel absurdities that soldiers. Besides poems, he wrote a passionate statement about the war’s folly which was read in the House of Commons; instead of a court-martial it brought him a diagnosis of shell-shock. Apparently one had to be out of one’s mind to protest against war’s insanity. After treatment (during which he met and encouraged Wilfrid Owen) he returned to battle, and—Mad Jack once more—was wounded. He spent the years of his age as described above, but his several post-war volumes of poetry never allowed him to escape his defining work as a “War Poet.” ©.

[Stanley]

"It is always safe to do right."
John Gregg Fee, 1819-1901
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We had then no sufficient precedent to guide, and no theory to maintain, save that it is always safe to do right - follow Christ; and we knew He would not turn away anyone who came seeking knowledge, even if "carved in ebony." We knew that whilst He is a respecter of character, he is not of persons. As His followers, there was to us but the one course to pursue - open the school to all of virtuous habits. John G. Fee, reflecting on the decision to open Berea College to women and to people of color, in An Autobiography, p. 131.

In his Autobiography, published privately in 1891 (and available online) John Gregg Fee assured readers that if they would “hold on with Jacob or stand still with Moses” their journey through life might take them through a desert land, barren and stony, but they would in the end cross the Jordan and find “‘new corn’ in the land of promise.” He had traveled the same road. John G. Fee was born in rural Kentucky on September 9, 1816. His journey never took him very far away in miles, but moved light years away by other criteria. He became an abolitionist before the Civil War, then an advocate for (and missionary to) freedmen during the war, and he was also the founder of Berea: not only the town but also Berea College, where (by his direction) those previously excluded from higher education—white women and all people of color—could acquire the knowledge and the skills needed to make their own journeys. It’s not clear where Fee imbibed his abolitionism, for he was a slaveowner’s son. Likely he picked up his fire as a student at Lane Theological Seminary, across the Ohio River from his birthplace, and it was strengthened by his marriage (in 1844) to Matilda Hamilton, also of Bracken County KY and a childhood friend. At first the two gained some support from wealthy Kentuckians (like the planter Cassius Clay) but as their abolitionist aims became clear that support peeled away, and they found themselves traversing very barren and stony ground, sometimes threatened by night riders and their ilk. But they persisted at Berea and then ran (with their son Burritt) a sort of relief camp (education included) for escaped slaves during the Civil War. Back in Berea after the war, they resumed their work at the college (John as president of the board of trustees) in providing higher education for ex-slaves and white women. In 1866. The 190-strong student body was 50% black. But as “Jim Crow” took over in the American South, the college gradually abandoned integration and by 1904 was a whites-only institution. Even then the trustees shifted part of their budget to the support of a nearby all-black institution. It was not until 1950, when the state rendered integration permissible, that the college returned to an integrationist admissions policy. No doubt that would have pleased John Fee, who died in 1901. ©.

[Stanley]

"Guernica is burning."
Guernica comes home to roost.
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When German soldiers used to come into my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they’d ask ‘Did you do this.’ And I’d say, ‘No, you did.’” Pablo Picasso.

Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the ‘return,’ to Spain, of Picasso’s Guernica. On September 10, 1981, this huge, gray-scale painting was opened to public view in Madrid’s Prado. The purpose, much as the painter had directed, was to mark and celebrate the return, to Spain, of democratic, parliamentary government, which happened after Francisco Franco’s death, in 1976. Of course, it was not a “return.” Guernica was painted in Paris, in a great rush, and after its first display (in Paris, at the 1937 World’s Fair) it became the world’s most-traveled artwork, shown in museums from Europe to South America, and across the USA (though never to Spain), until (to save it from the rigors of travel) it was lodged in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Whether Picasso would have approved of Spain’s new (1976) constitutional monarchy is moot; he died in 1973, leaving his directions subject to interpretation. He wanted it to be permanently in the Prado, but it is now in the Queen Sophia Museum, which specializes in modern and contemporary art. Basque nationalists demand its “return” to the Basque country, for Guernica was and now is again a Basque city. In April 1937 it was leveled by German planes (sent to Spain by Hitler as the air wing of the “Condor” legion) and used deliberately and with malice aforethought as an ‘experiment’ in bombing civilian populations to sap war morale. After the first high explosives raid, the city was hit next by incendiaries. The German commander, Wolfram von Richthofen, entered into his journal “Guernica is burning.” And so it was. Picasso’s painting turns von Richthofen’s laconic report into a scream of terror, and if you haven’t seen it yet you should.



Picasso executed a similar work, Massacre en Corée. in 1950, when he heard of the massacre of Korean civilians, at No Gun Ri, by elements of the US seventh cavalry. That atrocity was finally acknowledged in 1989-1993 by the US government—though without compensation or even an admission of responsibility. Massacre en Corée still resides in Paris at the Picasso Museum. Perhaps we should petition to have it brought “home” and displayed in our own national gallery. ©